Reviews

Contrary to what you might expect from a 1943 movie about nuns in a convent, Les Anges du Peche is fast, intense and gripping. The writing (by a Dominican priest, Raymond Bruckberger) is awe-inspiring; nearly every line of dialogue is a cluster of moral and emotional insights. Explored with great wisdom are themes of conformity and nonconformity, selfishness and selflessness, sin and redemption, love, jealousy and bitter resentment, pride and shame.

I am not sure if I have ever seen as forceful a feature debut as Bresson's. Don't overlook it - it is arguably better than his more well-regarded works.

Laughably fake, brimming with inexcusable factual errata and poorly written dialog. Case in point - Spielberg expects us to believe a ragtag, inept, guilt-ridden group of Mossad agents who rely only on a third party informer. In real life the agents were well-organized professionals who used no outside information, were more than willing to do their assignment and never regretted it.

The film's morals are as lacking as its historic and dramatic integrity. It refuses to make any distinction between the violence of terrorists and the violence by which justice is enforced. It completely disregards the preventative, defensive end of terrorist-hunting and portrays it as mindless vengefulness. This film makes one wonder if Spielberg would rather see murderers left to their devices.

In 1982, Israel was forced to invade southern Lebanon in self defense after repeated attacks. But after holding a buffer zone for 18 years, with increasing casualties caused by a strengthening Hezbollah, the army's presence there began to seem pointless.

This is a story about soldiers stationed at an outpost in Lebanon just before the eventual withdrawal in 2000. It manages to raise many valid moral and existential questions without getting preachy or politically partisan. Beaufort is a strong film that really sticks in your mind afterwards. The dialogues spoken by the soldiers is very true to life and the movie is highly authentic in every respect. It is well directed, the cast is good across the board, and the visuals are persuasive and gripping. But most of all, Beaufort succeeds in giving you a real sense of the fear and suspense of being a sitting duck for Hezbollah rocket-launchers to fire at. It is utterly nerve-wrecking.

Minor flaws include the customary setting-up of a character's personality just before he gets killed, to make you mourn his loss more, but such obvious manipulations are few and don't significantly hurt the movie.

I can't see how in the world this thing came to be so overrated. First and foremost, everything about it seems hackneyed and recycled, it has an air of cheap 80s teeny thrillers about it. The plot is plain silly - a mishmash of tacky themes including UFOs, time-warp, bogeyman, and expectedly, teen angst. Now, supposedly, some such incredibly over-the-top plots may have made for some classic B-movies in the past. But even in terms of camp or trash value, this film is too square and has too large a budget to offer any entertainment. There's nothing genuinely funny or frightening in it, despite noticeable attempts. About a half way through I ended up yawning myself senseless and reaching for "stop". Perhaps the (fortunate) neglect of the themes involved during the 90s is accountable for this film's popularity amongst its generation of teens, to whom this may seem a novelty. It is possible that the poor quality of the story and dialogue is thus overlooked.