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9/10
A joy to watch!
4 October 2005
"Don't Come Knocking" is undoubtedly the best fiction film made by Wim Wenders since "Wings of Desire". Wenders joins forces with playwright/actor Sam Shepard and the result is a wonderful journey, in Wenders' best style, of a man who flees his life to search for himself. Howard is an over-the-hill western movie star who's had his share of sex, booze and arrests in the past. He never settled down and prefers the lush life. Until, one day, he decides to flee a movie set, apparently for no reason apart from an existential crisis. He searches for anonymity in his small home town, visiting his mother for the first time in 30 years and discovers he might have had a child with one of his on-the-road conquests. This realization sends the middle-aged man on a search which confronts him with his own past, the way he has lived his life and what he could have done with it, had he decided to live it another way. But don't expect a morality tale: Wenders and Shepard are too intelligent for that. True to his instincts, Howard will persist in his erratic behavior till the very end. In short, in an age of comic book movies, "Don't Come Knocking" holds you onto your seat with a story that lets us breathe a bit of humanity. Wonderful performances, with kudos to Jessica Lange, maybe in her best performance ever. And we still get a homage to John Ford with images of Monument Valley and the large expenses of the West. Truly, a gem of a movie!
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7/10
Short attention span...
28 June 2000
"Eye of the Beholder" is no masterpiece. I almost didn't rent it after hearing other peoples comments. But it served me right to trust people who have an attention span suited for the "Star Wars" razzle-dazzle age of lots of action and no brains. I went along with the rest of the crowd in the beginning when I met up with the "little lost daughter" subplot, which could easily have been left out, for subtlety's sake. But as the movie unfolds, it becomes a very interesting story, full of subtle twists and turns. Not my idea of a perfect movie, but a perfectly well contrived crime drama (which reminded me incredibly of the french film "La Mortelle Randonée", by Claude Miller, which stars Isabelle Adjani and Michel Serrault). And it works especially because of the fine performances of the two leads. As I said before, if you have little attention span, rent something which has an explosion every couple of seconds and leave this one on the shelf.
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