Gideon58's Reviews

Well said! So glad you enjoyed The Ghost and Mrs Muir. It's one of the movies in the 1940's HoF Part 2. Link
That link goes to the 1st post in the Hof which has other links to the members reviews of The Ghost and Mrs Muir. Everyone is welcomed to comment on the movie, even if you're not a member of an HoF.

I hope you'll watch the Gene Tierney movie that is in my Top 10 favorites on my profile.

a glorious review to a glorious movie. VERY well done, Gideon!!

__________________
What I actually said to win MovieGal's heart:
- I might not be a real King of Kinkiness, but I make good pancakes

~Mr Minio

I want to thank you for recommending it, Citizen...loved every minute of it and Gene Tierney has become a new obsession of mine, along with Ginger Rogers.

SEXY BEAST
The crime drama and the black comedy blend to startling effect in a powerhouse sleeper from 2000 called Sexy Beast, which features stylish direction, some terrific performances, and a squirm-worthy serving of unbearable tension.

Gal is a retired safecracker who is living the high life in a Spanish Villa with his ex-porn star girl friend DeeDee and their best friends Aitch and Jackie. Their idyllic existence is shattered by the arrival of an unhinged former business associate of Gal's named Don Logan who has arrived to convince Gal to do one more job, a job that becomes a complicated mess long before its completion.

Director Jonathan Glazer (Birth) and screenwriters Louis Mellis and David Scinto must be credited for bringing a fresh coat of paint to the former-criminal-being-lured-back-to-crime story by concentrating the majority of the story on the actual lure and the consequences of the job than the actual job itself.

The story opens with a leisurely pacing which initially confuses, but what the filmmakers are doing here is clearly establishing how happy Gal is with his life in retirement and how, unlike so many movie characters in similar situations, has absolutely no desire to return to his old life. Gal's number one priority upon our first meeting with him is getting the perfect tan and its importance to him is so clear, that it's really hard to determine what his former profession might have been, but from the moment he learns of Logan's arrival, this blissful existence turns to one of tension and fear.

The initial confrontation between Gal and Logan is fascinating because no matter how many times Gal says he is not interested, Logan insists that he is. Through his attitude, we can tell that Logan has the juice behind him to drag Gal out of the villa and make him do whatever he wants, but for some reason, it seems vital to Logan that Gal say that he wants to do this...Logan not only will not take no for an answer, but insists on a yes and even though he never gets it, we know he's in when he says goodbye to DeeDee and tells his young pool boy to stay away from the house for awhile.

Another fascinating aspect of this story that comes shining through, primarily through Grazer's direction, is establishing the fear that Gal has about what he's being drawn into, but does his best to conceal his fear from DeeDee and Logan, but every moment in the film where he's alone, the fear comes out in the form of uncontrollable sweat and shakes that provide an additional layer of tension for the viewer.

Glazer employs some dizzying camera work and gets grand assists from his cinematographer and film editor. He also gets dazzling performances from Ray Winstone as Gal, Ben Kingsley, in a dangerous and funny turn as Don Logan, which earned him an Oscar nomination. His scenes on the airplane and with airline security I think probably cinched the nomination for him. Also loved Ian McShane as Logan's boss. A funky music score frames this deliciously intense story that is not for all tastes, though fans of the work of Guy Ritchie will definitely have a head start here.

I love Sexy Beast, a big favorite of mine.

Haven't seen Sexy Beast but very fond of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. Think my first Gene Tierney movie was Heaven Can Wait (which I watched for Don Ameche) and have enjoyed her films ever since. Take CR's advice and watch Leave her to Heaven and if you haven't already seen The Razor's Edge, please watch that too!

On a side note, Jenna Dewan Tatum reminds me of her. Both ladies are beautiful.

Nice reviews Gideon!

Never noticed the resemblance between Tierney and Jenna Dewan Tatum, but you're right, there is a resemblance. And Leave her to Heaven will be my next trip to Tierney world.

THE ACCOUNTANT
Take some Rain Man and put it in a movie bowl with some The Great Santini and add a generous portion of John Wick and you have the basic ingredients for The Accountant, an elaborately mounted 2016 action/adventure that borrows elements from the above referenced films but establishes its own credentials as a solid action thriller.

Ben Affleck plays Christian Wolff, an autistic savant with a gift for numbers who eventually uses said gift to make a profitable living cooking and un-cooking the books for some of the most dangerous people on the planet. The specialized military training he and his brother received from his father have also helped him to become one of the world's most deadly assassins. This story finds Christian's two lives blurring as he is hired to fix the books at a software company called Living Robotics, where he discovers a multi-million dollar discrepancy that has an FBI and Treasury Agent hot on his tail.

Director Gavin O'Connor takes a great deal of care in mounting Bill Dubuque's extremely intricate screenplay that might take a little too much time in setting up Christian's childhood as an autistic savant and how it affected his relationship with his family, but once the story gets going, the viewer is given very little time to breathe or try to figure out what appears to be red herrings and plot holes at every turn; however, I was delighted to learn that by the time the final reel commences, all questions and plot holes that had been nagging at me were tied up in an effective little cinematic bow that left this reviewer a little spent, but satisfied.

I was impressed by the set up of Christian as an autistic savant and how this remained a through line for the character throughout the story. Christian's connection with the childhood poem "Solomon Grundy" reminded me of Raymond Babbit''s constant recitation of "Who's on First?" in Rain Man. I was also impressed during the halfway point when a damsel in distress (Anna Kendrick) is trying to connect with Christian by explaining how she learned to count cards as a teen (another nod to Rain Man), the connection just doesn't happen because Christian's lack of socialization skills don't allow it and he even explains it to her in efficient detail, one of my favorite scenes in the film.

I haven't seen any of Affleck's work as Jack Ryan, so I was pleasantly surprised by what a solid action hero with a twist that he made. Solid support is also provided by JK Simmons, John Lithgow, and Jon Bernthal as key players in this riveting story. Production values are first rate with special bouquets to film and sound editing. Action purists, belly up.

THE MAJOR AND THE MINOR
Yes, the story requires a major suspension of disbelief, but it's pretty easy to do with the 1942 classic The Major and the Minor, thanks to the genius of Billy Wilder behind the camera and a sparkling performance from Ginger Rogers in front of it.

Rogers plays Susan Applegate, a former New York career gal who decides to return to her hometown of Stevenson, Iowa but learns the train fare to her hometown has increased and the only way she can get home is to disguise herself as a 12 year old girl, allowing her to buy a half fare ticket. Unfortunately, the conductors on the train catch on almost immediately and Susan ends up hiding in the sleeping car of a charming military man named Major Phillip Kirby (Ray Milland) who actually believes Susan is 12 years old.

Things get sticky when Phillip's flighty fiancee, Pamela (Rita Johnson) meets him and Susan at the train and after getting a phony story from Susan about why she's travelling alone, Kirby and Pamela decide that Susan should return to the military school where Kirby is on staff and Pamela's father (Edward Fielding) is Kirby's commanding officer.

This film features an intelligent and witty screenplay by Wilder and Charles Brackett, which offers consistent laughs that are motivated by the characters' actions, thereby requiring complete attention from the viewer. Of course, the other thing required from the viewer here is complete suspension of disbelief, because we are asked to accept a pretty bizarre premise here. This grown woman pretends to be 12 years old and a couple of conductors on the train catch on almost immediately but our leading man never suspects for a second that this 12 year old girl is a grown woman, not to mention his fiancee and a whole military academy of cadets, yet Pamela's younger sister, Lucy (Diana Lynn) not only catches on to Susan immediately but becomes her closest ally in pulling off this charade?

If you can just roll with all this, this movie is a comic joy, thanks to Wilder's energetic direction and the effervescent performance from Ginger Rogers, which not only requires her to pretend to be 12 years old, but requires her to take on a couple of other personas as well and Rogers nails it all, making a totally improbable story completely winning and hard to resist. I was also impressed with Ray Milland, who I only have exposure to as a dramatic actor, showing a winning touch with light comedy that was an unexpected pleasure. Johnson and Lynn also impressed as the villain and the sidekick in this goofy and often hard to believe story. The film was re-imagined in 1955 as You're Never Too Young with Jerry Lewis in Ginger's role, but I would be hard pressed to believe that film is anywhere near as entertaining as this one...a triumph for Billy Wilder and Ginger Rogers.

CLOSER
The exquisitely polished direction of the late Mike Nichols makes 2004's Closer, the often ugly and uncompromising deconstruction of two relationships, seem like a lot better film than it really is.

Contemporary London is the setting for this complex quadrangle where we meet two separate couples whose relationships become permanently mangled. Dan (Jude Law) is an obituary writer who falls for Alice (Natalie Portman), a waitress he meets after watching her get hit by a car. Larry (Clive Owen) is a doctor who meets Anna (Julia Roberts) at an aquarium after mistakenly thinking he communicated with her online the night before. These are not terribly healthy relationships to begin with, but are forever altered when Dan writes a book and Anna is hired to shoot his picture for the book jacket.

Mike Nichols deserves the lion's share of the credit for making this extremely unpleasant story appointment viewing. The reason Nichols gets the credit is because the meat of this story is told through his directorial eye...Patrick Marber's screenplay (adapted from his own stage play) doesn't reveal too much about what makes these characters tick, except for the fact that pretty much nothing that comes out of their mouths is the truth. Nichols' direction almost allows you to forgive the small flaws in the screenplay. The truth that these characters so conveniently dodge in the dialogue is revealed in their eyes and their actions, evidenced in an exceptional use of the closeup...the camera lets us inside these characters so effectively that we are able to almost completely forget to watch that we are watching a photographed stage play. The story is revealed through the camera and the actors, not the dialogue.

Nichols lets us inside these characters' head because their outer behavior is often unpleasant and not concerned with political correctness. Dan and Larry are alpha males in the truest sense who want what they want when they want it and once they get it, they don't want it anymore. It was fascinating to watch these men who felt their infidelity was always justified but when they felt betrayed, they simultaneously couldn't deal with it but wanted every detail about what happened. Anna is an icy and emotionally detached enigma whose romantic desires change from scene to scene. Alice is a sexually charged creature who seems completely in charge of her life and what she wants until it appears that she may have lost Dan.

As he always does, Nichols pulls superb performances from his quartet of actors who actually make you forget that they are pretty much the only actors onscreen for the majority of the running time. Jude Law gives us a broken and vulnerable Dan, a character so emotionally raw that he actually cries in front of his romantic rival. Julia Roberts does some of her strongest work here as an ice queen who actually manages to elicit sympathy from the viewer though she's not always worthy. Clive Owen is at times chilling losing himself in a character who is, for my money, a disgusting human being and Natalie Portman's sexually charged performance as Alice lights up the screen. Owen and Portman won Golden Globes and received Oscar nominations and Portman should have won for this eye-opening performance that rivets the viewer to the screen.

The film is beautifully photographed with some effective London backgrounds and kudos to the sophisticated musical score as well, but more than anything, this film is a tribute to the genius that was Mike Nichols.

Glad to see you liked The Major and the Minor. I seen that for the second time recently, Ginger is hilarious as a 12 year old!

LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN
1945'S Leave Her to Heaven is a lushly mounted soap opera that will rivet the viewer to the screen thanks primarily to one of the most duplicitous and manipulative movie heroines since Scarlett O' Hara.

In flashback, we are told the story of a writer named Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde) who meets wealthy and glamorous socialite Ellen Berent (Gene Tierney) on a train while she just happens to be reading Richard's latest book, en route to meet her family in order to spread the ashes of her late father. The attraction is swift and immediate and they are married just days later, but once they are married, Ellen's obsession with Richard and desire to have him completely to herself threatens everyone else in their orbit.

Based on a novel by Ben Ames Williams, screenwriter Jo Swerling has fashioned a stylish melodrama that introduces a seemingly conventional movie heroine but then peels away her layers like an onion to reveal a woman with an almost toxic effect on the people around her and that's one of the story's greatest appeals...like a lot of great movie characters, we learn what is most important about her through limited backstory and by the way other characters react to her. The first hint is when Ellen and Richard first meet and she can't stop staring at him...we think it's because she's recognized his face from the dust jacket on the book, but it's because she claims he bears an uncanny resemblance to her late father. We see Ellen's pain as she spreads the ashes, callously disposes of the urn, and doesn't return to the house for hours. The big reveal for this reviewer that Ellen was not all she seemed to be was when her fiancee arrives to see her and she dumps him by informing him that Richard, who she has only known for hours, is now her fiancee.

Director John M. Stahl is to be applauded for one of the very rare times where allowing a story to unfold slowly is an asset instead of a detriment. Richard and Ellen initially appear to be established as star-crossed lovers and we are actually kind of excited when she lies to her fiancee to get rid of him, but when Ellen's self-absorbed and obsessive behavior quietly bubbles to the surface, we then want to slap Richard and tell him to wake up because he is the only person in the story who really doesn't see who Ellen really is. Even Ellen's own mother doesn't champion her own daughter. I love when Ellen hasn't returned from spreading the ashes and Richard is concerned and her mother dryly replies, "Nothing ever happens to Ellen."

Stahl must also be credited with his choice of leading lady and the sizzling performance he gets from gorgeous Gene Tierney, whose complete investment in this unsympathetic character earned her an Oscar nomination. My only exposure to Cornel Wilde prior to this film was the rather conventional The Greatest Show on Earth, so the surprisingly sensitive leading man he brought to this story was a pleasant surprise. Jeanne Crain also offers one of her strongest performances as Ellen's adopted sister, Ruth and Tierney is also briefly reunited with her Laura co-star Vincent Price, who figures prominently into the film's riveting climax.

The production values here are nothing short of superb. Lush color photography made a perfect background for the story. Leon Shamroy's cinematography won an Oscar and I also loved Alfred Newman's music and Kay Nelson's costumes for Tierney, which were breathtaking. If you're looking for good old fashioned 1940's melodrama, this is the place. .

MY LIFE AS A ZUCCHINI
A 2016 Oscar nominee for Outstanding Animated Film, My Life as a Zucchini is a slightly edgy and challenging piece of cinema that definitely goes places where no animated film has gone before (at least in my experience), but I have to wonder at what demographic this film was aimed.

The French film (it's apparently available with subtitles or dubbed in English) is the story of a lonely little boy named Courgette, who is brought to a foster home for all kinds of displaced children by his only friend in the world, a lonely policeman. It is at this home where Courgette learns to let go of his anger toward his mother and learns about things like truth, loyalty, and even romance.

Director Claude Barras and screenwriter Celine Sciamma have crafted a lovely little story that has some surprisingly adult touches that, as an animated film, you have to wonder who the intended audience was for this, at times, disturbing tale. I haven't seen a lot of animated films with abusive alcoholics as mothers of the central character and I found it equally disturbing that Courgette felt responsible for his mother's death. The opening scenes that convey Courgette's fear of his mother are diametrically opposed to his reverence to her memory after she's gone...he has a beer can that he has kept as a souvenir of her and in one scene goes ballistic when one of the other kids finds it and won't give it back.

On the other hand, the story does take some more conventional turns at the foster home as well. The other kids are a disparate breakdown of what we expect...Simon is the spiritual leader of the kids and bully who uses toughness to hide his anger at his predicament; Beatrice is a lonely little girl who thinks her being here is all a big mistake and every time a car pulls up, she thinks it's her mom, and then there's Camille...a little girl who finds a soulmate in Courgette, but is panicked when her nasty Aunt wants to take her home with her in order to receive additional financial assistance.

The stop motion animation is visually arresting and there are some incredible pictures painted here...I loved this one shot where the camera slowly backs up to a reveal an above ground train passing or the sight of the rain pelting the roof of Courgette's home with his Mom. As stated, this is pretty sophisticated cinema and I can't believe children were the intended demographic here, but then I watched a scene near the climax where an employee of the home returns after having a baby and she is rocked when the kids are shocked that she is planning to keep her child no matter what he does...that scene stopped me cold and motivated a half bag popcorn bump up in my rating. If animation with a little substance sounds appealing, you might want to give this one a look.

I liked The Accountant, but I didn't think it was good enough to justify a sequel coming. At least that's what I heard.

Leave Her to Heaven was very good and I should probably see Closer.

WEEKEND AT THE WALDORF
Despite a solid all-star cast and some handsome production values, the 1945 spectacle Weekend at the Waldorf is not quite the classic it should have been, but provides sporadic entertainment value for lovers of classic melodrama.

This film is a re-imagining of the 1932 classic Grand Hotel (which is actually referenced here) and follows the events that happen on a particular weekend at the iconic Manhattan hotel. The story is one of those soap opera type tales where several different stories are told concurrently, though some are more interesting than others.

The primary stories presented revolve around a burnt out actress (Ginger Rogers), who finds herself drawn to a burnt out war correspondent (Walter Pidgeon), who is initially pretending to be someone else. The other story revolves around Bunny (Lana Turner), the ambitious hotel stenographer who finds herself torn between a slimy businessman (Edward Arnold) who can provide Bunny with the kind of life she has always dreamed and a young soldier (Van Johnson), who might be dying but all he can provide Bunny with is true love,

If this brief synopsis of the story has a spoiler-like quality, it is not only because this is really a remake of another film, but because the screenplay by Sam and Bella Spewack really offers no surprises. We know exactly where these stories are going from the moment these characters face off, so we're hoping that some surprises will be provided along the way in order to make a rather overlong journey not as tedious; however, these surprises never really come.

What we get instead is a story padded with minor stories and characters that have very little to do with the primary stories presented and instead of providing their own layer of entertainment to the proceedings, all they do is pad the running time, making the film a lot longer than it needs to be. There's even an elaborate musical production number featuring Xavier Cugat and his orchestra that really slows the film down, though Cugat does have a funny scene with Johnson earlier in the film. Sadly, they should have left it at that.

What the film does have going for it and made it worth sitting through was another wonderful performance from Ginger Rogers that lights up the screen. Walter Pidgeon works hard at being funny and charming, but that seemed to be the problem, he seemed to be working too hard at it...every moment he was onscreen, I kept picturing other actors of the period in the role, Cary Grant in particular. Van Johnson's wide-eyed soldier was absolutely charming and Arnold made a terrific greasy villain, and though I found her performance a little wooden, Lana Turner seemed appropriate in the role of Bunny. Leon Ames, Keenan Wynn, and Robert Benchley also made the most of supporting roles. The film was lavishly filmed (wished it had been in color) and featured impressive art/set direction, gorgeous costumes for the leading ladies, and a terrific score by Johnny Green. There are definite slow spots, but for fans of the genre, or Grand Hotel, it's worth a look.

I've never seen WEEKEND AT THE WALDORF, but I'm sold! It sounds like my kind of film, I love soapy melodramas and like you I'm a big fan of Ginger Rogers and Van Johnson too. I'm not so much a fan of Lana Turner but that's OK, she seems to be in pretty decent films. I'll watch this one based on your review.

Ginger's great and makes it worth watching all by herself...you'll love it Citizen.

THE HUMAN STAIN
Despite some stylish direction and some powerhouse performances, the 2003 drama The Human Stain ultimately doesn't work thanks to problems with story, casting, and characterizations.

The film recounts the toxic affair between a disgraced, widowed college professor named Coleman Silk, played by Anthony Hopkins, who begins an affair with a much younger, slightly trashy cleaning woman (Nicole Kidman), who is revealed to be a prisoner of a very troubled past which she tries to shield Coleman from, but he is ultimately up to his neck in. Just as the relationship begins to reach a truly dangerous level, thanks primarily to the woman's psycho ex (Ed Harris), the story then flashes back to reveal a backstory for Coleman and this is where the film begins to lose me.

Oscar winner Robert Benton (Kramer vs Kramer) has a proven record of documenting human emotion and flawed characters onscreen, but he's got a really odd screenplay to work with, not to mention some odd casting choices. Nicholas Meyer's screenplay, based on a novel by Philip Roth (Goodbye Columbus) is all over the place as it tries to convince us that the problems that Coleman has had all his life, including the reason for losing his job at the college, all stem from the fact that he is a light skinned black man who has been passing for white all his life.

This is not new cinematic territory, but the casting here makes it hard to swallow a lot of this...first of all, we're supposed to accept English Anthony Hopkins (who makes no attempt to hide his accent) as Coleman from East Orange, New Jersey. Now that's OK until we meet Coleman as a young man (well played by Wentworth Miller) who is charming and educated, but definitely an American and then we're supposed to accept the whitest looking actor in Hollywood playing a light skinned black guy? That's when they lost me.

Not to mention the fact, that the way the relationship between Hopkins and Kidman is established, Kidman's character is way more damaged than Hopkins and this is the character whose backstory would have been a lot more compelling than Coleman's but the closest we get to her backstory is meeting her nutso ex, played with bone-chilling intensity by Harris. I have to say that I also loved the relationship initially set up between Coleman and a troubled writer (Gary Sinise) that also get shoved to the back burner in favor of Coleman's hard to swallow backstory told in endless flashback.

I managed to stay with it thanks to some extraordinary performances from Hopkins, Kidman, Harris, Sinise, and Harry Lennix and Anna Deveare Smith as Coleman's parents, but the overly complex and hard to believe story and its execution don't really work.

CLUE
A perfect cast and the movie making skills of a gentleman named Jonathan Lynn combine to make the 1985 film comedy Clue a minor classic that has gained almost a cult following over the years.

If memory serves, the only film based on a Parker Brothers board game, Lynn has taken the characters and game pieces from this well-known game and fashioned a credible and hilarious live action murder mystery around them. It is a stormy New England night in 1954 at a gothic mansion where Mrs. White (Madeline Kahn), Professor Plum (Christopher Lloyd), Mrs. Peacock (Eileen Brennan), Colonel Mustard (Martin Mull), Mr. Green (Michael McKean) and Miss Scarlett (Lesley Ann Warren) all receive invitations to the mansion for dinner and agree to appear, despite the fact they don't know who their host is, what the occasion is, or why the host makes them agree to use aliases instead of their real names.

The guests are greeted by the butler, Wadsworth (Tim Curry) who reveals that all of the guest are being blackmailed and that their blackmailer is their host for the evening. The guests are all given lovely gift wrapped boxes with the famous weapons from the game (gun, lead pipe, rope, knife, candlestick, wrench) and before you can say "Whodunnit", the blackmailer and two more people wind up dead and that is just the beginning of the insanity to come.

The lion's share of the credit for why this silliness works has to go to director Lynn and his co-screewriter John Landis, who have crafted a story that moves at breakneck speed and doesn't allow the viewer time to figure out exactly what is going on. They have also presented a story where, despite it being stupid with outrageous physical comedy, finds large portions of the story told through the eye of the camera...asides, furtive looks, telling nods, badly hidden facial reactions to secrets that are much more effective than 40 pages of dialogue.

During the film's original theatrical release, Lynn and company had the inspired idea to film three different endings for the movie and tack them on randomly to copies during distribution so that most people who saw it in theaters did not see the same ending, a gimmick which spiked ticket sales because people would go see it multiple times in order to see all three endings. With the advent of video, this gimmick is a distant memory as the DVD features all three endings shown back to back. The movie is still a comedic joy and thee is a real Mel Brooks influence to Lynn's work here. The performances are uniformly superb, with standout work from Brennan and Curry. Treat yourself to a cult classic that still holds up almost 30 years later.

ALLIED
Director Robert Zemeckis has once again combined action, romance, and adventure to maximum effect with Allied, an elaborate 2016 WWII epic that brought to mind what a prequel to the 1942 classic Casablanca might have been like.

As a matter of fact, the film opens in French Morocco in 1942 (the year Casablanca was released BTW) where a Canadian Intelligence officer named Max (Brad Pitt) has been sent to Casablanca to team with a French Resistance Officer named Marianne (Marian Cotillard) on an assignment to assassinate a Nazi ambassador. After the mission, they move to London, marry, have a baby, and start a new life that is a dream for Max but suddenly begins crashing around him when information comes to light indicating that his new bride might be a double agent, still working for Germany. A trap is set for her and Max is informed that if it turns out to be true, military law demands that he kill her himself.

Robert Zemeckis has taken the best elements of classics like Casablanca and combined with his own skill at blending genres so effortlessly, like he did so beautifully in 1987's Romancing the Stone and, of course, Forrest Gump, both films that featured a star-crossed romance laid out on a canvas of action and adventure and Zemeckis takes that skill set to another level.

Steven Knight's intricate if slightly padded screenplay does a credible job of establishing the fact that Max and Marianne are two very different kinds of soldiers. Max is serious about his duties as an Intelligence officer but it is not his passion and he has a life plan for when the war is over. The same can't be said for Marianne, whose entire life seems to be centered around being the very best soldier she can. It was not the least bit surprising when Max asked about her plans after the war that Marianne didn't have a clue. This is also why it is not a huge shock when it's revealed that Marianne may not be who she says she is.

This sets up the most interesting part of the movie for me. In total denial about what he's been told we watch as Max refuses to believe what he's been told about his bride and attempts to resume a normal life with her while simultaneously trying to block certain things she said during their time in Casablanca that give his suspicions ground and trying to prove her innocence at the same time. Ironically, it is while he's having sex with Marianne that she senses a change in him. Speaking of sex, I did love the highly erotic scene where the leads make love for the first time...in a car in the desert while a massive sandstorm was in progress shot with a revolving circular camera...artsy, sexy, and terribly stylish.

Obviously a director of Zemeckis' calibre was able to secure all the money he needed for this production and every penny is up there on the screen. Special nods to film editing, sound, art and set direction, and costumes. Zemeckis proves he still has the chops to provide action and romance with uncanny wizardry that's hard to resist.