A FILM CRITIC OF INTERSTELLAR
Abstract
"Interstellar" is a movie directed by Christopher Nolan. ChristophherNorlan is one of
my favorite directors and his movie "inception" left a deep impression on me. The "interstellar" did not make me disappointed.
Key Words
family bond, the real human nature, impasse, wormhole,"Mechanical drop God", Albert Einstein's theories.
Introduction
Interstellar is a 2014 epic science fiction film directed by Christopher Nolan and
starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Matt Damon and Michael Caine. The film features a crew of astronauts who travel through a
wormhole in search of a new home for humanity. Brothers Christopher and Jonathan
Nolan wrote the screenplay, which has its origins in a script Jonathan developed in
2007. Christopher Nolan produced the film with his wife Emma Thomas through
their production company Syncopy and with Lynda Obst through Lynda Obst Productions. Caltech theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, whose work inspired the film,
was an executive producer and acted as scientific consultant. Warner Bros.,
Paramount Pictures, and Legendary Pictures co-financed the film.
The movie showed the scene of the earth's end and human beings' trying to surviving
by moving to other planets. This is the first thing we need to think about. If we
human beings not to save our motherland now, the end of the earth won't be so far. But the most thought-provoking thing in this movie is time.
In this movie, the hero Dr. Cooper gone through the wormhole and landed in a high-mass planet which led to a
chaos of time. Then he witnessed the
growing and becoming old of his
daughter. His promise to his
daughter that he would come back
has disillusioned. The hero, who is
going to save the human beings can
not just save his own family.
I personally think the main line of this movie is family bond. In the atmosphere of earth not suitable for human habitation, the
family bond became more thought-
provoking. The parted of father and
daughter means another way of farewell.
Being in different time is the farthest
distance of human beings. But they choose
to wait. Daughter chose to wait for his
father and to believe in him. In fact, the
same theme of time chaos was used in
many novels and movies, but in this movie, the true feelings' revealing were the highlights of this movie.
Besides the family bond, the real
human nature in an impasse in
this movie also sets people
thinking. Dr. Mann, who was
dispatched to survey an unknown
planet, could not suffer endless
loneliness, chose to leave the planet by deception and nearly killed everyone. This character was defined as a villain. But It is worth mentioning that he was put to the planet nearly a hundred years, no one responded him and died alone would be his only ending. I really can't imagine how could a real normal person stand this. Maybe dying for human beings' future is admirable, but what if he did not prepare for this tragic ending? How many people were made to sacrifice for "justice" or "Bright future"etc?
At the end of this movie, human beings were saved by formula provided by "four dimensional creatures". Dr. Cooper met them by fallen in a black hole and transmitted the formula to his daughter. This kind of "Mechanical drop God"1 make
out a good case of
many doubts in this
movie, but I don't
think it's a brilliant
way to end this story.
The movie described
"four dimensional
creatures" as human
beings in the future
and the universe, found the way to leap the time and finally got full understand of the whole universe. So in fact, who saved human beings were human beings themselves.
1The term has evolved to mean a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem is suddenly and abruptly resolved by the inspired and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability or object.
*The Black Hole In This Movie
There are many mysteries about the universe and the future, the Albert Einstein's theories left more possibility of time. This movie really called back my curiosity and the desire of exploring more about the universe.
References
Wikipedia(https://www.doczj.com/doc/7a10751095.html,)
星际穿越观后感作文 导读：本文星际穿越观后感作文，仅供参考，如果觉得很不错，欢迎点评和分享。 星际穿越观后感作文（一）：唯一温暖的家——地球 仰望夜空，天上的星星越来越少，月亮也显得没以前那么明亮了…… 所谓的“天上繁星时刻”都去哪儿了…… 带着一颗好奇的心，我走进了影厅…… 看罢，思绪万千，不知从何说起…… 其实，虽说这是一个科幻片，但里面的许多情形现在地球上是的的确确存在的。人们大肆砍伐树木,大量开发工厂，导致空气没以前那么洁净，氧气越来越少，空气含碳量越来越多，沙尘暴越来越频繁出现……这难道就是我们口中所说的“科技发达，国家越来越繁荣”?! 曾经天然的地球去哪了？ 真的，别以为地球的资源是无限循环的，别以为地球的大气层是不会被破坏的，别以为人类文明能永远流传下去。是我们自己毁了我们唯一的家，而倒头来才去后悔。或许我们要做了宇航员才能体会库帕在踏上地球的时候那温暖踏实的感觉。别总是以为地球能保护我们很久，或许我们不久以后真的要像电影里面一样去探索新的星球,寻找适合我们人类居住的新的星球……但我们的本身条件就没有电影里面的好了，土星旁边真的有虫洞吗？我们穿越黑洞的时候能像电影里
面不被撕裂成碎片吗？我们能休眠吗？世界上真的有五维空间这个东西吗？即使我们真的能做到，爱因斯坦的相对论也足以让我们望而却步…… 现在，我们唯一温暖的家，真的只有地球了。它给予了我们许多东西，它保护我们，而我们却又亲手毁了它！难道我们就不知道“千里井不反唾”这个道理吗？！我们总是为了眼前利益而去无止境地摧毁我们的家。温室效应、沙尘暴、空气污染……一个个问题出现在我们眼前，我们能挽回？ 写罢，看了看窗外，曾经风华正茂的地球，你去哪里了？ ——初一（7）班谢婧莹36号 星际穿越观后感作文（二） 今天爸爸妈妈带我去看电影了。这次我们看的电影的名字叫《星际穿越》。他讲了人们不爱护环境，地球被破坏，到处都是沙尘暴。人们要找到新的居住的星球，所以一些航天员就找新的星球了。他们去了好几个星球。这几个星球都不适合人类居住。最后他们还是没有找到，于是就在木星上建立了一个空间站。人们就在那个空间站里生活繁殖下去。 看完这个电影我觉得在那个地球上的人们生活都很痛苦。每天生活在黄沙之中呼吸着肮脏的空气。每天脸上都落满了黄沙。所以我们一定要爱护环境。不要让空气变脏，一定要多种树，多栽花，做到不砍伐树木。 星际穿越观后感作文（三）
Journey to the Center of the Earth（地心游记）2008 There is a part of me that will always have affection for a movie like "Journey to the Center of the Earth." It is a small part and steadily shrinking, but once I put on the 3-D glasses and settled in my seat, it started perking up. This is a fairly bad movie, and yet at the same time maybe about as good as it could be. There may not be an 8-year-old alive who would not love it. If I had seen it when I was 8, I would have remembered it with deep affection for all these years, until I saw it again and realized how little I really knew at that age. You are already familiar with the premise, that there is another land inside of our globe. You are familiar because the Jules Verne novel has inspired more than a dozen movies and countless TV productions, including a series, and has been ripped off by such as Edgar Rice Burroughs, who called it Pellucidar, and imagined that the Earth was hollow and there was another world on the inside surface. (You didn't ask, but yes, I own a copy of Tarzan at the Earth's Core with the original dust jacket.) In this version, Brendan Fraser stars as a geologist named Trevor, who defends the memory of his late brother, Max, who believed the center of the Earth could be reached through "volcanic tubes." Max disappeared on a mysterious expedition, which, if it involved volcanic tubes, should have been no surprise to him. Now Trevor has been asked to spend some time with his nephew, Max's son, who is named Sean (Josh Hutcherson). What with one thing and another, wouldn't you know they find themselves in Iceland, and peering down a volcanic tube. They are joined in this enterprise by Hannah (Anita Briem), who they find living in Max's former research headquarters near the volcano he was investigating. Now begins a series of adventures, in which the operative principle is: No matter how frequently or how far they fall, they will land without injury. They fall very frequently, and very far. The first drop lands them at the bottom of a deep cave, from which they cannot possibly climb, but they remain remarkably optimistic: "There must be a way out of here!" Sure enough, they find an abandoned mine shaft and climb aboard three cars of its miniature railway for a scene that will make you swear the filmmakers must have seen "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom." Just like in that movie, they hurtle down the tracks at breakneck speeds; they're in three cars, on three more or less parallel tracks, leading you to wonder why three parallel tracks were constructed at great expense and bother, but just when such questions are forming, they have to (1) leap a chasm, (2) jump from one car to another, and (3) crash. It's a funny thing about that little railway: After all these years, it still has lamps hanging over the rails, and the electricity is still on. The problem of lighting an unlit world is solved in the next cave they enter, which is inhabited by cute little birds that glow in the dark. One of them makes friends with Sean, and leads them on to the big attraction -- a world bounded by a great interior sea. This world must be a terrible place to inhabit; it has man-eating and man-strangling plants, its waters harbor giant-fanged fish and fearsome sea snakes that eat them, and on the further shore is a Tyrannosaurus rex. So do the characters despair? Would you despair, if you were trapped miles below the surface in a cave and being chased by its hungry inhabitants? Of course not. There isn't a moment in the movie when anyone seems frightened, not even during a fall straight down for thousands of feet, during which they link hands like sky-divers and carry on a conversation. Trevor gets the ball rolling: "We're still falling!" I mentioned 3-D glasses earlier in the review. Yes, the movie is available in 3-D in "selected theaters." Select those theaters to avoid. With a few exceptions (such as the authentic IMAX process), 3-D remains underwhelming to me -- a distraction, a disappointment and more often than not offering a dingy picture. I guess setting your story inside the Earth is one way to explain why it always seems to need more lighting. The movie is being shown in 2-D in most theaters, and that's how I wish I had seen it. Since there's that part of me with a certain weakness for movies like this, it's possible I would have liked it more. It would have looked brighter and clearer, and the photography wouldn't have been cluttered up with all the leaping and gnashing of teeth. Then I could have appreciated the work of the plucky actors, who do a lot of things right in this movie, of which the most heroic is keeping a straight face. 1
Director: Gabriele Muccino Title: The Pursuit of Happiness Press: Columbia Pictures Year: 2006.12.15 Shining words or sentences: 1. You got a dream, you gotta protect it. People can't do something themselves, they wanna tell you you can't do it. If you want something, go get it. 2. I'm the type of person, if you ask me a question, and I don't know the answer, I'm gonna to tell you that I don't know. But I bet you what: I know how to find the answer, and I'll find the answer. 3. There is an I in "happiness", There is no Y in "happiness", It's an I 4. Martin Frohm: What would you say if man walked in here with no shirt, and I hired him? What would you say? Chris Gardner: He must have had on some really nice pants. 5. You want something. Go get it! Summary: The film "The Pursuit of Happiness" is based on a true story. Chris Gardner, the lead of this story, is on the edge of bankruptcy. As the result of poor, his wife leaves him. In order to raise his son, he works hard and becomes a stock trader. In the end, he becomes a famous financial investor. Comment: Today is cruel, tomorrow is crueler, the day after tomorrow is beautiful, but most people have died in tomorrow night. The reason why they die is that they give up. So, they can't see the beautiful sunshine in the day after tomorrow morning. Never give up, and you will succeed. In the film, we can see the leading man work hard and he never abandon any chance to get a good job. And because of his good quality-optimistic, he gets the chance to practice for a job. Even he faces so many difficulties, he does not give up. As the result, he succeeds. "Anything is possible". We all know that this sentence is the slogan of Lining. Nothing is difficult to a man who wills. If people give up, he will lose all opportunities. But if he doesn't give up, everything will become better. There will be no worse. So, never give up and just do it.
星际穿越观后感、影评 当你想描写一个触手可及的未来，然而却…… 图书管理员又在历史上留下了可歌可泣的一页。 五星只代表力荐，不代表满分。嫌这部电影不够硬的同学，不管你是文科生、理科生，还是特别特别厉害的、无处不在无孔不入的宇宙级科幻小说《三体》粉，KipThorne会出一本解释片中科学设定的书，你们可以等书面世，另外在reddit讨论的学神们要不要再去看遍电影啊？ 事实是，这部电影尽管有Kip Thorne这样的物理学巨擘保驾护航，却意外的好懂亲民，我就算想写高哔格影评分析剧情都不知道哪里入手，简单地说，就是地球快咽气的时候，NASA 发现土星附近出现了一个虫洞，虫洞只能人为制造，尽管不清楚到底谁干的，但是虫洞可以大大缩短宇宙旅行距离，因此人类有了寻找新家园的可能性。第一批派出的探索者有三个反馈了积极信号，于是主角团就穿越虫洞找这三颗星球。在前两个星球历险后，燃料不足以支撑回程，所以Cooper利用黑洞引力让Brand去找第三颗，自己则随着脱离的舱体进入黑洞。后来发现黑洞内部的世界由五维度生物（未来人类）制造，而就是他们引导着过去的人类拯救自己，Cooper领悟后开始当图书管理员引导自己并传给女儿信号，最终解决重力难题，拯救了大家。 本片在理念上没有硬伤，乔纳森诺兰对情节中一些“bug”的解释我翻译好后会放在影评结束的部分，下面是一些大家可能感兴趣的细节： 1、交通工具 不断旋转的环状结构飞船是母舰Endurance，在拉撒路任务的第一阶段相当于一个空间站，不断传回虫洞那头的消息。它有12个（3组）太空舱，包括4个引擎、4个永久舱室（比如实验室和科学家的居住舱）、4个携带殖民物资可脱离母舰的舱室。 Ranger飞船不止一艘，主角们搭乘Ranger1号登上了Endurance，以后也一直用的1号。在Mann博士的星球，Mann用计把主角们引离1号，抢夺1号后强行和Endurance对接未果，1号报销。而在黑洞附近，Cooper搭乘了Ranger2号把自己推射进黑洞，得以让Endurance 继续前行。 Lander是用于运载携带殖民物资太空舱的登陆船，体型庞大宛若运输机，就是Brand开去救Cooper的那艘。后来这个庞然大物愣是赶上了Endurance的旋转节奏，和其达到相对静止后
Seven(七宗罪)1995 David Fincher's classic tale of inventive serial killing and urban degredation, with Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman on excellent form Who'd have thought? An absurd-sounding tale of a serial killer basing his crimes around the seven deadly sins, directed by the man behind the mess that was Alien3, turning out to be one of the most chilling and original thrillers of the 1990s. From the outset, through the film's brilliantly designed deliberate under-lighting - we see very little blood and guts - and muffled sound, the audience is encouraged to lean towards the screen, immerse itself in the film's unbearably grim world. Pitt is in career-making form as Mills, a simple cop moving with his sweet young wife (Paltrow) to a grim, anonymous city, determined to make a difference, to do some good. He is assigned to track down a vengeful killer, and works alongside Somerset (Freeman), a jaded, wise policeman on the verge of retirement. The two are that modern movie cliché -the mismatched pair thrown together by circumstance, who gradually learn mutual respect. But Fincher and Walker take these hackneyed ingredients, play with them in the context of a brilliantly cohesive plot, and present something consistently fresh - the police finding themselves with too much evidence, the premature unmasking of the killer - and very, very dark. 1
The Pursuit of Happiness（当幸福来敲门）2006 With a title like The Pursuit of Happiness, you expect the characters to get to the promised land. They do, but if the journey matters more than the destination, this is a movie to skip. The Pursuit of Happyness is long, dull, and depressing. It expands into two hours a story that could have been told more effectively in one. This is not the feel-good movie of the season unless you believe that a few moments of good cheer can redeem 110 minutes of gloom. Sitting through The Pursuit of Happiness is a chore. Downbeat movies aren't inherently bad (in fact, many are powerful), but this one provides artificial characters in contrived circumstances. How is it that movies "inspired by a real story" often feel more fake than those fully embedded in the realm of fiction? Will Smith has generated Oscar buzz for his portrayal of Chris Gardner, the real-life guy whose rags-to-riches story forms the basis of the movie. (Impoverished guy becomes capitalist poster boy.) While it's fair to say that this is one of the best straight performances of Smith's career, it didn't blow me away. In and of itself, the acting, while effective, is not Best Actor material, but it wouldn't surprise me if the movie's prestige factor and Smith's popularity earn him a nod. Meanwhile, his female co-star, Thandie Newton, isn't going to be considered for any award. Newton spends about 90% of her screen time doing an impersonation of a harpy: screeching, bitching, and contorting her face into unpleasant expressions. Smith's son, Jaden, is okay as the movie's child protagonist; it's unclear whether his occasional deficiencies are the result of his acting, Steven Conrad's writing, or Gabriele Muccino's direction, but there's not much personality behind the cute features and curly hair. Chris Gardner (Will Smith) is down on his luck. It's 1981 San Francisco and his self-employed business of selling portable bone density scanners isn't doing well. His wife, Linda (Thandie Newton), does nothing but yell at him and give him a cold shoulder, and the lack of domestic harmony is impacting the disposition of his beloved son, Christopher (Jaden Christopher Syre Smith). That's when Chris' life turns into a country song. His wife leaves. He is evicted from his home. He goes to jail, neither passing GO nor collecting a much-needed $200. He gets hit by a car. He is robbed. He makes his son cry. He alienates a friend over $14. He gets to spend a night in the cleanest public restroom in the history of public restrooms. But there's a bright spot, although you need a dark-adapted eye to find it. Despite having no experience, Chris applies to enter an internship program at Dean Witter. He would appear to have no chance to get in until he amazes the head of the program (Brian Howe) by solving the Rubik's Cube puzzle in the back of a taxi cab. It's a blessing that the movie doesn't use a stock villain to impede Chris' herky-jerky trip to the top, because that would have tipped the movie into the empire of the unwatchable. However, the lack of a strong conflict makes the two-hour running length seem very long. Thankfully, there's also not much in the way of overt melodrama, but that could be a byproduct of having characters who are not deeply realized and have narrow emotional ranges. It's tough to connect with Chris and his son. Although they are played by a real-life father and son, there's no chemistry between them. We're constantly told how desperately Chris loves Christopher, but it takes a long time before we begin to buy it. Most of the time, Christopher seems like an annoying piece of baggage that Chris drops off at daycare when he has other things to do. The film's most compelling scenes are those that show Chris struggling to enter the rat race. Granted, this is no Glengarry Glen Ross, but it shows the pressure these salesmen are under and how important the contact lists are. In the overall scheme of things, however, these sequences are background noise. They are neither plentiful nor lengthy. The movie spends more time following Chris on his futile sales rounds for the bone density scanner than it does accompanying him during his broker training. The moral of the story is as trite as they come: don't let anyone convince you to give up on your dreams. Disney animated films have been doing this better for decades. The Pursuit of Happyness concludes with a caption that tells us what happens to Chris after the end of the movie; it promises a better story than the one we have just watched. The film is also marred by a persistent (although not verbose) voiceover that adds nothing to the story while frequently jerking us out of the experience of watching it. I don't need Will Smith telling me: "This part of the story is called 'riding the bus.'" This is the English-language debut of Gabriele Muccino, who has made a name for himself in Italian cinema. The Pursuit of Happiness has the kind of slow, drab tone one occasionally associates with a director raised outside of the Hollywood system. What can be an asset in some circumstances is a detriment in this one. The Pursuit of Happiness isn't enjoyable, and its meager pleasures, including the eventual "payoff," aren't enough to justify the unrelenting misery. The Pursuit of Happiness is competently made and gets lots of the details right, but when it comes to the emotional core of the story, it loses the pursuit and misses the "happiness."
星际穿越读后感 本片由克里斯托弗·诺兰执导，于2014年在国内上映是一部科幻片。 未来的地球资源消耗殆尽自然环境也遭到严重破坏沙尘暴肆虐严重影响地球上的人类生命受到严重威胁，人们生活在一个仿佛没有希望的世界，比如电影开头的一个长镜头街上的灰尘像雪一样，人们落魄的走在街上。 看这部电影的时候是在初中,当时我觉得那是我的科幻巅峰时期那时候看了很多科幻神作比如刘慈欣的《三体》三部曲，还有他的<乡村教师>但是诺兰指导的这部《星际穿越》给我留下了很深刻的映像，当然在看这部电影之前我是不太了解诺兰这位导演的当时看完电影之后还去百度了下发现蝙蝠侠是他执导的还是有些惊讶的。 电影前部分主角库珀和他的女儿墨菲还有他的哥哥在去学校的路上可以看出她更偏向年纪较小的墨菲这里哥哥给我的感觉像是对这个世界感到失望无助的状态而墨菲则恰恰相反当然这在她后面爸爸库帕离开后变得更加强烈，在他们后面拦截了一架美国的无人机就表明了库珀是一个有着强烈冒险欲望的人这里也表明了当时的国家应该是没有军队的应该是太穷了估计也没有战争了
墨菲屋子里的幽灵来作为电影后半部的铺垫这点真的用的很巧妙先是让我感到摸不着头脑我试着推理了一下后面是不是会来个外星人什么的这部电影最好的点就是从开始就让你不停的猜测制造各种悬念， 本片最重要的就是以库珀和女儿墨菲的爱来作为支架当父亲库珀决定为了解救地球上的人们离开自己女儿的时候感动到哭了，爱真的很伟大，应为它可以拯救人类，就算是隔着时空也不能阻挡爱的力量，就是因为墨菲对父亲的想念才会给远在另一个时空的联系 我个人还比较喜欢这部影片里的交响音乐他是由音乐家汉斯·李默创作的有本片的声音设计师Richard king进行混音还有就是很多观看者发现电影很多桥段演员们的台词有些分不清楚说是电影的一个漏洞，但后面的官方回答是专门这样设置的在这里不得不佩服诺兰导演的全能和追求极致的态度·再来说说电影的拍摄手法他也是电影大部分是用传统的胶卷机拍摄的还有库珀两次驾驶的飞船是专门制作了一个实体的很奇怪这种科幻大制作没用3D拍摄吧那是应为导演觉得他的这部电影风格并不适用于3D这样会让电影失去味道还有库珀一家的玉米的是在诺兰的指示下在一片本不适应种植农作物土地上种植的。
Tess(苔丝)1979 Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, which Roman Polanski has turned into a lovely, lyrical, unexpectedly delicate movie, might at first seem to be the wrong project for Mr. Polanski in every way. As a new biography of the director reports, when Tess was shown at the Cannes Film Festival, the press pointed nastily and repeatedly to the coincidence of Mr. Polanski's having made a film about a young girl's seduction by an older man, while he himself faced criminal charges for a similar offense. This would certainly seem to cast a pall over the project. So would the fact that Hardy's novel is so very deeply rooted in English landscapes, geographical and sociological, while Mr. Polanski was brought up in Poland. Finally, Tess of the D'Urbervilles is so quintessentially Victorian a story that a believable version might seem well out of any contemporary director's reach. But if an elegant, plausible, affecting Tess sounds like more than might have been expected of Mr. Polanski, let's just say he has achieved the impossible. In fact, in the process of adapting his style to suit such a sweeping and vivid novel, he has achieved something very unlike his other work. Without Mr. Polanski's name in the credits, this lush and scenic Tess could even be mistaken for the work of David Lean. In a preface to the later editions of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Mr. Hardy described the work as "an impression, not an argument." Mr. Polanski has taken a similar approach, removing the sting from both the story's morality and its melodrama. Tess Durbeyfield, the hearty country lass whose downfall begins when her father learns he had noble forebears, is sent to charm her rich D'Urberville relations. She learns that they aren't D'Urbervilles after all; instead, they have used their new money to purchase an old name. Tess charms them anyhow, so much that Alec D'Urberville, her imposter cousin, seduces and impregnates her. The seduction, like many of the film's key scenes, is presented in a manner both earthy and discreet. In this case, the action is set in a forest, where a gentle mist arises from the ground and envelops Tess just around the time when she is enveloped by Alec. Alec, as played by Leigh Lawson, is a slightly wooden character, unlike Angel Clare, Tess's later and truer lover, played with supreme radiance by Peter Firth. Long after Tess has borne and buried her illegitimate child, she finds and falls in love with this spirited soul mate. But when she marries Angel Clare and is at last ready to reveal the secret of her past, the story begins hurtling toward its final tragedy. When Tess becomes a murderer, the film offers its one distinctly Polanski-like moment—but even that scene has its fidelity to the novel. A housemaid listening at a door hears a "drip, drip, drip" sound, according to Hardy. Mr. Polanski has simply interpreted this with a typically mischievous flourish. Of all the unlikely strong points of Tess, which opens today for a weeklong engagement at the Baronet and which will reopen next year, the unlikeliest is Nastassja Kinski, who plays the title role. Miss Kinski powerfully resembles the young Ingrid Bergman, and she is altogether ravishing. But she's an odd choice for Tess: not quite vigorous enough, and maybe even too beautiful. She's an actress who can lose her magnetism and mystery if she's given a great deal to do (that was the case in an earlier film called Stay As You Are). But here, Mr. Polanski makes perfect use of her. Instead of a driving force, she becomes an echo of the land and the society around her, more passive than Hardy's Tess but linked just as unmistakably with natural forces. Miss Kinski's Tess has no inner life to speak of. But Mr. Polanski makes her surroundings so expressive that her placidity and reserve work very beautifully. Even at its nearly three-hour running time, Mr. Polanski's Tess cannot hope for anything approaching the range of the novel. But the deletions have been made wisely, and though the story loses some of its resonance it maintains its momentum. There are episodes—like one involving Tess's shabby boots and Mercy Chant, the more respectable girl who expects to marry Angel—that don't make the sense they should, and the action is fragmented at times. That's a small price to pay for the movie's essential rightness, for its congruence with the mood and manner of the novel. Mr. Polanski had to go to Normandy and rebuild Stonehenge to stage his last scene, according to this same biography. As is the case throughout his Tess, the results were worth the trouble. 1