Peter Murmann

Girl Power comes to Texas. Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut is weak.  But I enjoyed learning about the sport Roller Dirby. I had never seen it before. The sport is a bit rough yet fun to watch. Hey, what do you expect of Texas!

The skill of con artists is not specialized to particular types of people. The best of them such as Bernie Madoff in recent times fool almost everyone. That is what makes them so dangerous. Teenage girls falling for the bad guy is not news. But parents falling for the bad guy is an underexplored theme [Read More]

The Informant (played by Matt Damon) is about a shady corporate whistle-blower. The trailer promised much more than the full product delivered. The big mistake was to try to turn the film into something of a comedy. This attempt fell flat. Thumbs down.

My first reaction to Atonement was: I have seen this film before. Aristocratic daughter and son of servant fall in love.  The differences in social class make it impossible for them to be together. The romance shatters. But before long, the film takes an unexpected turn and my second reaction became: This is a marvelous [Read More]

Boy, you have to be a true romantic to enjoy this film. A few weeks ago I wrote about John Keats in my diary. He is a magnificent poet. But this film about his love for Fanny Brawne is tough to sit through unless you are able to be deeply moved by true romance and [Read More]

This film is a like a glass of wine that you first don’t like because the taste is so foreign (British dry humor). But after you continue to drink you warm up to the taste. And towards the end it becomes a quite magnificent comedy. Rock n’ Roll in the eyes of the autorities had [Read More]

Think back to a past relationship. If you have kept a diary, read the entry for every day for as long as the relationship lasted. At the end of each day, decide whether you felt good or bad because of the person you were with. This will allow you to do a brutally honest accounting [Read More]

The film takes a look behind the scenes of how Gore and Bush fought out their electoral battle for five weeks after the election.  Even for someone who read the newspaper every day during this period, the writer and director manage put on a gripping drama. Clearly, the movie is written from the Democratic (loosing) [Read More]

The idea of making a film about sexual desires of seniors is brilliant. Such a film was overdue. But Andreas Dresen, the 46-year-old director of Cloud 9 constructed a film about his own desires rather than exploring how seniors cope with society’s predilection to see them as sexless creatures. Dresen’s drama is not about the [Read More]

Clint Eastwood is now 78 years old.  He has directed 29 movies. Some of them are very good (e.g. Letters from Iwo Jima) some of the very bad (e.g. Bridges of Madison County). He works quickly. Yet in contrast to Woody Allen who also makes one film a year, Eastwood is not repeating himself. The [Read More]