Peter Murmann

If you have thought deeply about the role of fate in life, Just My Luck is not going to offer you any new insights. If you are looking for a nice little romance movie that you can let your kids watch, this is just the right movie for you. I suspect that kids don’t mind [Read More]

For most of its history, the United States has existed in the minds of people from all around the world as the place of freedom and unparalleled economic opportunities. Real as they always were, these opportunities never fell into everyone’s hands in equal amounts. Nonetheless, America has produced millions of success stories that coalesced into [Read More]

While the dialogues in Chinatown are well crafted, the drama of this detective story falls a bit flat after 30 years. Roman Polanski has a penchant for psychological stories, but his art is at a much higher level in The Pianist and Death and the Maiden. If you want a little history lesson of [Read More]

Growing older has its pleasures. I was bit nervous about renting Fitzcarraldo (1982) with Klaus Kinski in the lead role. I remember seeing Kinski as a teenager in a film depicting a strange riverboat trip.  At the time I thought the film was boring and Kinski crazy. In my memory the action took place on [Read More]

If I had grown up in Nashville listening to country music, it would have been easier to appreciate Walk the Line, a chronicle of the first 30 something years of Johnny Cash’s career. Raised on Rock, Pop and Soul and Classical Music, I could not connect very well with Cash’s music, except for the occasional [Read More]

Two sisters, Maggie (Cameron Diaz) and Rose (Toni Collette), could not be more different. Maggie gets any man she wants but is not able to hold a steady job and support herself financially. Rose has no success with men and is climbing up the corporate ladder in a high prestige law firm. When Rose finally [Read More]

It is customary at many opera productions to hand out notes to the audience about what is happening in the different acts of the musical work, often because the opera is sung in a foreign language. Most critics and moviegoers have remarked the plot of Syriana is jumping to so many places and to so [Read More]

Just as in The Sound of Music the most impressive character in the Ang Lee’s cowboy movie are beautiful mountains. Whenever the camera shows pictures of the arresting Wyoming landscape, one’s soul takes in a deep breath. As a piece of drama the film falls flat: forty years ago a story of two cowboys in [Read More]

For all you fans of Oscar Wilde, here is a movie that you will enjoy. Wilde’s successful play “Lady’s Windermere’s Fan” (1892) was recently turned into a motion picture with Scarlet Johansson and Helen Hunt in the leading role. Not having read Wilde for over a decade, I ravished listening to witty dialogs about marriage [Read More]

A few years after the Second World War, a young writer moves from Virginia to New York. Rents are too high in Manhattan. (Doesn’t this sound familiar?). So he settles in Brooklyn, renting a room from an elderly lady in a pink Victorian house that seems to attract eccentric people like a light pulp attracts [Read More]