A 1994 film, Intersection, seems like a modern French picture, does it not? That’s because it is an American remake of a modern French picture, and I would respect it more if it was an original product. It is, even so, a handsome-looking item put together by some talented people. Mark Rydell directed well enough, though he ought to have kept the film from getting soap-operaish. But the scene with a car crash at an intersection is pretty strong, and a couple of other scenes are too.

Richard Gere is exactly right as an architect separated from his wife because of his love for another woman. Sharon Stone gives the wife, Sally, a cool sensitivity and a certain fortitude. Lolita Davidovich is precisely what we would expect to see in an amiable, secular-minded woman, the architect’s mistress. Martin Landau is also absolutely fine.

Intersection shows us the breakthrough of romantic love, whether or not it should break through. Too, it is about death and the personal illusions that sometimes follow. It is a touching version of Les choices de la vie.

A film by Scott Teems, The Quarry (2020) tells a flimsy story about a lawbreaking man (Shea Whigham) who inadvertently kills an alcoholic preacher and then assumes his identity.

Finely, sensitively directed and terrifically acted, the picture summons to the mind the question: Does one person’s forgiveness of another (for something evil) make actual sense? Then again, one of the themes here is the human need for divine or cosmic forgiveness. It seems necessary. Another explored theme is the soul’s clinging (the Bible would call it the flesh’s clinging) to what is wrong, no matter who or what is ruined.

Whigham’s performance is impeccable, and Michael Shannon is a knowing thespian par excellence. Catalina Sandino Moreno‘s acting is an understated pleasure, and Bobby Soto is compelling. Adapted from a novel, The Quarry is fundamentally religious, but in need of a better screenplay,

A film by Scott Teems, The Quarry (2020) tells a flimsy story about a lawbreaking man (Shea Whigham) who inadvertently kills an alcoholic preacher and then assumes his identity.

Finely, sensitively directed and terrifically acted, the picture summons to the mind the question: Does one person’s forgiveness of another (for something evil) make actual sense? Then again, one of the themes here is the human need for divine or cosmic forgiveness. It seems necessary. Another explored theme is the soul’s clinging (the Bible would call it the flesh’s clinging) to what is wrong, no matter who or what is ruined.

Whigham’s performance is impeccable, and Michael Shannon is a knowing thespian par excellence. Catalina Sandino Moreno‘s acting is an understated pleasure, and Bobby Soto is compelling. Adapted from a novel, The Quarry is fundamentally religious, but in need of a better screenplay,

Cover of Love Comes Lately

In the 2008 Love Comes Lately, three Isaac Singer stories merge to make one humorous but dark movie, an English-language concoction written and directed by Germany’s Jan Schutte.

The film centers on an elderly Jewish fiction writer, Max (Otto Tausig), whose longtime girlfriend (Rhea Perlman) neurotically fails him with her jealousy, while he fails her by going to bed with Barbara Hershey‘s Rosalie.  Through such vignettes Schutte exhibits human beings as a race of lonely sinners, and in fact two of the movie’s Jews, Max and Rosalie, are said by Rosalie to “belong to the same tribe—the one that’s destroying itself” (a Singer line?).  The film doesn’t wholly work because it intermittently dramatizes Max’s writing—with Elizabeth Pena playing a complete creature of imagination—thus giving it the same pictorial weight that the story of the old writer has.  Still, it is meaningful, thought-provoking, and engaging.

The horrifying withdrawal from Afghanistan is the biggest proof that the U.S. is now a lamentable nuthouse. Americans and Afghan friends were left in a country ruled not by men but devils. This and other facts—flabbergasting influxes of illegal immigrants among them—will be used against President Biden in the 2024 election. It won’t be pretty.