The shining movie poster shadow of a doubt movie poster

Ultimately, the film is an incantation to survive into the future.

Etched in dark glow, pulled this way and that by psychic digressions, the film seems a group exorcism, a conjuration of the past through an invocation of an ill present. He is not special amongst the other inmates or patients, his is just one sepulchral tale of many. Ventura’s body, aged beyond his years, trembles, and the sound is a shuddering rustle like fluttering moth wings there are also others like him, given brief, vividly sculptural portraits, the old and the injured. So, too, the expansive and receding mind and soul of this beleaguered once-working, once-fathering man, still haunted by and haunting the Portuguese's treatment of those from Cape Verde, of the poor, of the workers, and still capable of sin after all these years of regret. Metallic lighting creates holy pools of visible beings and spaces of work and institution at times claustrophobic, at others cavernous. The expressionist shroud in which he wanders confounds time, merges events, and splays out, making a deadweight existence otherworldly.

(“Blood drips on the floor but you don’t see the razor,” a widow in the film mourning, angrily remarks.) Standing tall as ever and poised with attempted self-control, nonetheless you see Ventura's long fingers tremble, in the darkness a nosferatu wandering a prison-hospital of memories and sins, psychic and bodily pain. Seeing this man, this actor, this figure in Horse Money was like happily visiting an aging relative only to discover that across the span of missed time you can see the creeping effects of dementia. The steadfastness of friends through this world and in this industry is for me always a surprise, and always touching, especially in light of the mutability of life and cinema.įamiliar faces.Ventura's: that's another story. Indeed, it is so very good to see yours, one year later.

The shining movie poster shadow of a doubt movie poster