Peter Murmann

Many people claim that it is harder to make good friends when you are an adult. I am not sure if this is true.  Adults, perhaps having been disappointed more than once, may be less open than the average child to let a new person into their lives. The film celebrates the power of [Read More]

The film starts out slow and seems predictable. But after thirty minutes it takes unexpected turns. Beautiful landscape photos of China and a novel approach to fixing relationship problems give this movie considerable charm. This is the second film version of W. Somerset Maugham novel by the same name. Naomi Watt now has [Read More]

Two ladies (Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet) suffer romantic disappointments and feel they need to go away for the holidays. The swap their homes (LA and the British countryside) and want to chill out without men. Well, easier said than done… The trailer for this romantic comedy turned me off, but I was pleasantly [Read More]

The film reminded me that good art is not artificial. Great art heightens our awareness of reality. Heaven fails because it feels contrived and artificial. Cate Blanchett has one scene in which she unleashes her full acting ability. But she cannot make up for a week script written by Krzysztof Kieslowski, who I [Read More]

Miss Potter portrays the life of the best-selling British children’s book author Beatrix Potter. Many authors invent fantastic stories while leading relatively boring lives. Mrs. Potter falls into this category. A film about her life has very little drama to work with. Not much happens on the screen. This is the [Read More]

The film tells the true-life story of Erin Gruwell, a magnificent teacher in Long Beach, California, who turns a class of violent teenagers into successful students, who leave their gang background behind to become published authors. The film has moments that are truly inspiring and moving.  But too often banal or cheesy lines creep into [Read More]

  i]Good Bye Lenin[/i] turned the collapse of the German “Democratic” Republic into a comedy. There is not a single moment in The Lives of Others you feel like laughing. The film chronicles how an estimated 91,000 full-time employees and 300,000 informants recruited by Ministry for State Security (Stasi) helped the communist party to keep [Read More]

In search of one Cate Blanchett’s great performances, I rented the historical drama Elizabeth. Blanchett received an Oscar nomination for the role but lost out to Gweneth Paltrow who played the object of William Shakespeare’s desire in Shakespeare in Love. I suspect that Paltrow won not because she was more in love than Elizabeth. [Read More]

War movies fall into three categories. Government-funded propaganda that is designed to rally the civilian population, summer action movies that hope to thrill youngsters with exhilarating battle scenes in which good in the end triumphs over evil, and finally critical films that want to undermine the very premise that war is something anyone should desire. [Read More]