Peter Murmann

Many of the comedies staring Reese Witherspoone are quite fun.This Means War, however, is painful to watch. Reese plays a marketing manager who has fallen on romantic dry land.  A friend put her profile on dating site. So far so good as hook. But then it becomes painful. Two guys who are working as James [Read More]

Recently a friend watched a film that I had seen before. I did not see it but only heard the dialogue through the speakers in an adjacent room. It quickly became obvious that without the pictures films don’t work. The Artist, however, shows that even decades after sound movies (talkies) displaced silent films, it is [Read More]

Mark Zuckerberg allegedly is spending is honey moon in Rome right now. If you are thinking you can can follow in his footsteps by watching Roman Holiday, you will be disappointed. The film did not age well. Our eyes need more than a princess who wants to break out her cage for a day by [Read More]

Breakfast at Tiffany has receive higher ratings than in my mind it deserved. It is a love story with a cute cat and an always beautiful-to-watch Audrey Hepburn. But that is about it. Watch the wonderful My Fair Lady if you want to see Hepburn and experience a much deeper story. My Review of My [Read More]

Watching this exquisite crime movie, I wondered:  Who wrote the story for the script. So I did some research and discovered that it was indeed a Swede to wrote the story. Frequently, writers live rather boring lives. Not so in the case of   Stieg Larsson.  According to his partner of 20 years, Larsson’s witnessed [Read More]

Four short year after the Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937, this detective flick was produced in San Francisco. Humphrey Bogart plays a private detective. He is retained by a beautiful women, who under false pretenses has Bogart’s partner shadow a man, who allegedly has let her sister to run away with him to San [Read More]

When I saw Women on a Verge of a Nervous Breakdown almost twenty year ago, I did not find it very funny. In fact, I was bored by it. Perhaps I was simply too tired. But the film (or I) aged well. Almadovar in 1988 build into his film a refernce to Islamic terrorist. After [Read More]

The decor and the language of the film reminded me so much of other films of this era that I erroneously thought the film was written by Riginald Rose or directed by Sidney Lumet. A mafia boss who wants to get back into major deals descents with his entourage on a small hotel in Key [Read More]

In a recent New Yorker article Adam Gopnik has provided a detailed portrait just how much more people are incarcerated in the United States compared to other countries. The murder rate in the US is higher than any other Western country. For this reason America is perfect background for a celebrity, crime, and corruption film [Read More]

Alexander Payne is one of my favorite living directors.  I finally had a chance to see his new film, The Descendants. His early films all took place in his home state, Nebraska. In Sideways he ventured all the way to California. In the new film, Payne takes us to Hawaii, deploying the natural beauty of [Read More]