Peter Murmann

I knew nothing about the plot of Boys Don’t Cry. But somehow the title was so familiar. It must be a famous movie. For the past year or so I have been participating in a video rental service that sends me in a new film from my wish list whenever I send the previous one [Read More]

Lord of the Flies is not entertainment in the popular sense of the word. It places high demands on the viewer. Think of it as going to a museum whose paintings are challenging for the senses;  or going to the theater to see a modern piece like Waiting for Godod.  A group of British children [Read More]

Think back to the terrifying moment when you gave your first public speech. You may be a great storyteller when surrounded but friends and family. But now you step onto the podium looking out to an audience of strangers who are all focused on you starting your speech. Your mouth is getting dry, your tongue [Read More]

Do novelists and poets change the world or do simply please and entertain us? I suspect that the best novelists sense the early signs of a new mood and outlook. If truly gifted, they are able to put in words and stories such a new outlook, infect the rest of us with it, and thereby [Read More]

George Cukor, the director of this extraordinarily fun film, admitted:  Give me a good script, and I’ll be a hundred times better as a director. My Fair Lady is based on the play Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts by the Irish writer George Bernard Shaw.  The writer won the Nobel Prize in literature (1925) [Read More]

Madame Bovary is a masterpiece. I mean both the BBC film adaptation of Flaubert’s famous novel as well as the story itself. First a few words about the film and then about the story. Especially in the first half, the director moves us quickly through the life of Emma Bovary. The 19th century setting is [Read More]

The first 10 minutes of Apocalypse Now are magnificent. My eyes were glued to every pixel on the screen. But following Captain Willard on his long journey from Saigon up a river to Cambodia where he is supposed to assassinate a U.S. general gone mad becomes tiring. The Redux version of the 1979 film [Read More]

This is Wes Anderson’s best film to date. It reaches the same depth of Rushmore, but instead of staying in the same Chicago suburb, the director takes us on a wonderful road trip to India. Unlike Life Aquatic, which also wanted to be an adventure film, The Darjeling Limited is never boring because even when [Read More]

When historians sit down to write the history of first decade of the 20th century, they would have likely used a few years ago labels such as the Rise of the Internet or Googlemania.  If Facebook continues to grow and add functions at its current pace (email will soon be integrated with its message [Read More]

Wes Anderson’s 2nd film, released in 1998,  is an even bigger surprise than Bottle Rocket. The 15-year old hero, Max Fisher, loves his elite prep boarding school but he faces a pressing problem. Although he leads almost every extra-curricula club in the school and although he is a genius on many fronts, he is [Read More]