阿甘正传Forrest Gump
"Stupid is as stupid does," says Forrest Gump.
Gump, gifted with a low IQ which lets him be adorably childlike even as he grows up, leads a very charmed life: a mother who loves him immensely and who sleeps with the school principal in order to make sure her child has the best education, a miraculous incident that eliminates the need for him to have braces for his legs, a childhood girlfriend who remains faithful to him till the end, surviving Vietnam with a medal, and, in general, a propensity for turning everything that happens to him into good.
I wonder what the movie is trying to say. From one perspective, it implies that intelligence is a very unnecessary trait特点，品质. But I think one can look beyond that and say that childlike innocence, which can be considered stupid, has its rewards. Throughout the movie, Gump is in situations where he is harassed by other people but he never takes offense (except, of course, when his girl Jenny is being abused) at any of the insults thrown at him. He is indeed not completely stupid, even though he is portrayed as such, since he can re-assemble guns at high speed, run like crazy, play ping-pong like a maniac, and so on.
Gump is contrasted to the famous males, who are idols (in some cases) in today's society, and it appears as though he is better off in comparison: Gump's choices in life seem to determine his niceness (he goes to Vietnam, keeps his promises ("a promise is a promise"), harbours no ill-feelings or grudges, and is not greedy with fame or money) and successes. Contrast this to the choices his lifetime girl friend Jenny makes: she wants to be famous and rich, but ends up being a druggie.
The traditional male heroes that we have had are all dysfunctional不正常的in some respect or another and we are lost without heroes, as Bloom points out. Gump is a new kind of a role-model; he's A Nice Boy and everyone knows they're hard to find. As one reviewer said: "Today the last American hero is a Tom Hanks character with a small IQ".
律政俏佳人legally blonde
Elle Woods is a big hit on the campus of her sun-drenched Los Angeles college. She's also got the perfect boyfriend in Warner Huntington , a wealthy East Coast blue blood. Fearing that his snooty friends and family will never accept the bubble-headed Elle, however, Warner dumps her before heading off to graduate law school at Harvard University. Determined to win back her man, Elle enrolls（选课，参加）in the same imposing（壮观的，给人印象深刻的）institution（学校，机构）, quickly becoming an object of scorn（轻蔑）and ridicule（嘲笑）, especially to Warner's old prep school flame. Despite her penchant（嗜好，倾向）for malls, makeup, and tanning, Elle is no dummy and is soon showing elite（精英）, self-confidence, and courtroom（法庭）victory.
Legally Blonde combines three plot情节staples主要原料或产物: the triumph over获胜adversity逆境, the romantic comedy, and the courtroom comedy. The resulting uneven 不均匀的confection糖果is sporadically偶尔地affable友善的, but the movie suffers because it never attempts to push the envelope外壳or challenge its boundaries边界. The production targets teenagers (girls more than boys) who are content to watch a motion picture with a few laughs and a happy ending. For every sly or barbed comment, there are a dozen missed opportunities. Legally Blonde wants so desperately to be liked by everyone (even lawyers, whom it jokingly calls "people who are boring, ugly, and serious") that it takes pains to neuter its insults.
I think elle’s success attribute to her confidence,brave,hard-working. We should learn from her. First we should rebult our confidence. No one can make you feel inferior without your our accomplishments when we win. With these abilities, a confident person can succeed easily at school or work.Second, when we locate a goal. We should try our best to make it. Hard-working is necessary in the road to success. Third, we should trust other people. Believe is mutural. Only when we trust others, they will tell us the truth.
后天Sci-fi Films: The Day after Tomorrow This movie's strength is its visual onslaught猛攻，突击of destruction破坏，摧毁and disaster on a global scale--from tornadoes龙卷风ravaging Los Angeles to three cataclysmic "blizzard hurricanes" that devour毁灭，吞噬，凝视the Northern Hemisphere. The special effects are well-done, and jarring; seeing a huge tidal wave overtake the Statue of Liberty and then sweep relentlessly into Manhattan (Why didn't Brooklyn and Queens get equal time?) is bone-chilling. Throw in a pack of hungry wolves escaped from the zoo and an eye of each storm that plunges the temperature minus 150 degrees in a matter of seconds, and you've got a virtual kitchen sink of gloom and doom. Our fearless government reluctantly acts; in a huge twist of irony, the U.S. is evacuated, with its citizens streaming into Mexico, and the northern states take on a popsicle effect. It's all great fun to watch.
This film may be a modern blockbuster轰动but in almost everyway it is a 1970's disaster movie where an event happens after some build up and we then spend the rest of the film watching the survivors trying to, well, survive. In that regard the film carries all the usual problems that the genre carries but happily benefits from the fact that the effects are much better than 1970's movies could manage. For this reason the first hour is great – it has dramatic pace, is involving and looks fantastic even if we have seen it before in different variations (how many times has New York been destroyed now?). However after the sheer global terror is pretty much finished we suddenly become much more small scale and the film looses much of it's impact and it's pace. After the initial danger has passed the film uses illogical and silly plot devices to put the survivors at risk – a cold eye of a storm, blood infections, creeping ice and wolves are among the problems. While this is OK on a genre level it doesn't compare to the first hour and it gets a little dull and plodding at times.
The film tries to deliver an environmental message but in a way this film will not help the environmental movement because it is too exaggerated夸张to be taken seriously, however it does include several surprisingly barbed讽刺的attacks on the US administration.
Animated Films: The Lion King II: Simba's Pride 狮子王II
King Simba and Queen Nala have a daughter named Kiara, who is presented by Rafiki to a gathering of animals below. When Kiara is older, she runs off to play and encounters Kovu, a cub from a pride of lions exiled by Simba for remaining loyal to Scar. After nearly being eaten by crocodiles, the two quickly become friends, but as they begin to play, Simba and Zira appear. Zira, Kovu's mother, is desperate to avenge Scar's death, and so she trains Kovu to be an assassin. Her plan is to have Kovu befriend Kiara so that he can get close enough to Simba to kill him. Meanwhile, Kiara expresses her disinterest in becoming queen, to which Simba states "we are one."
When Kovu and Kiara are adults, Zira undertakes an elaborate plan involving setting the Pride Lands ablaze while Kiara is out on her first hunt. Kovu saves Kiara from the ensuing fire and asks to join Simba's pride, stating that he is a rogue, separate from the other Outsiders. Simba allows him to join the pride as Mufasa's law states that he is in debt to Kovu, as Kovu has saved his daughter's life. Kiara introduces the otherwise stone-faced Kovu to the concept of fun while Rafiki's matchmaking plans take effect and the two begin to fall in love. It is Kovu's love for Kiara that keeps him from assassinating Simba as he was sent to the Pride Lands to do.
Kovu eventually resolves to confess承认，坦白his true intentions to Kiara, but before he can do so Simba takes him aside for a private conversation. While out walking the Outlanders ambush Simba and injure him. Kovu's older brother, Nuka, dies in an attempt to kill Simba. Zira blames Nuka's death on Kovu and slashes him across the face, scarring Kovu in an identical manner to Scar's. Kovu defies his mother for the first time and runs away, only to be blamed for the Outlanders' ambush and exiled from the Pride Lands. Kiara, distraught, secretly leaves Pride Rock to find him and the two are reunited. When Kovu and Kiara get reunited Zira and her pride comes to take over. In the End Kiara proved a point leaving Zira alone to fight. Zira tries to kill Kiara, but Kiara offers to help her. Instead of Zira taking her paw, she drowns.
Romance Films: Titanic 泰坦尼克号The ship was thought to be unsinkable, and so a compromise was made on the number of lifeboats aboard. When the ship did sink, it is the richest that got first priority on the lifeboats. While they waited in half-full lifeboats, they were exposed to the cries of people freezing to their deaths and didn't do a thing to help them. If a similar tragedy were to happen today, would the result be any different?
The acting is excellent by all concerned, but I was most impressed by Zane. The nice thing about a ship sinking is that it is a relatively slow event, and Cameron takes every advantage of it. The depiction of the mighty ship going under is so much larger than life and I feel this is the most magnificent part of the movie. Just for that reason alone, Titanic is a movie not just to be seen, but to be experienced. So make sure you see it on the big screen. It goes to show that the concept of the disaster movie is far from dead.
With the character Rose, a first class passenger you are exposed to the arrogance high society had. Rose also opened your eyes to the luxuries high society had and how woman were truly trapped and were seen as second-class citizens. Rose almost committing suicide helps hit home how truly horrible it must have been for woman during this time period. The dynamics between Rose and her mother also show the dynamics between how woman had to behave and in a sense how they survived in this society.
With the character Jack, a third class passenger you are exposed to how large the gab between the rich and poor was. How first class dogs went down to be walked on the lower decks, how it was the poor who actually built Titanic and how it was the poor who were treated truly unfair on Titanic just because of social status, which helped express the mentality of the time.
疯狂动物城英文影评 Document serial number【KK89K-LLS98YT-SS8CB-SSUT-SST108】
D re am in th e fo rm er,gr owt h in t he po st -Z oo to pia PART1：This is a great family film that everyone needs to watch because of all the teaching moments within the film. Let me phrase that: the entire movie is a teaching moment. Zootopia is a film that is all about inclusion, about putting away the stereotypes and prejudices aside to live in a better society and how negative they are, how much they blind someone to see something but hatred and anger. Dickens said it was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.In "zootopia", animals are also experiencing the best and worst of times.Their city has been modernized. They have been separated from the savage state, there is no carnivores and herbivores of chasing and killing.Courts, police, shops and all kinds of advertisements make up the the world.But the world is not perfect,and there is a variety of injustice and discrimination,while full of civilization and order.Fortunately,there are still dare to challenge the courage of the unfair. A modern urban animals, each animal in here have their own homes, Plaza Sahara desert climate, year-round cold glacier town and so on, it is like a big melting pot, the animals here Peaceful Coexistence -- whether it was an elephant or a little mouse, as long as you work hard can break some tricks. Rabbit Judy grew up on the dream can become animal city police, despite all the people around feel rabbit impossible when the police, but she still through their own efforts, among the to the whole is bigger animal town police station, became the first officer for rabbits. In order to prove himself, she decided to solve a mystery case. Follow the truth on the road, Judy forced in animal town to swindling fox Nick to help himself, but found behind the pile cases hidden an intended to subvert the huge conspiracy Town animal, and Judy and Nick is in jeopardy of investigative process become a good partner. PART2：The story is just amazing as it follows Judy Hopps (voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin) a small town bunny who wants to be a part of the big leagues as an officer with all the other large big animals that work together to solve crime in the big city. But she's a bunny, what the heck can a bunny do as a crime? It's a stereotype the resonates so strongly with the audience, with anyone who was thought of as being too weak to do what the "big boys" do. Judy is breaking those
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
曾经和ing《经典英文电影赏析》由10个章节组成。每一章节包括电影背景、故事简介、主要演员阵容及导演介绍、精彩部分节选、对影片的评论及注释五大部分。相信许多读者会在观赏优美电影或阅读《经典英文电影赏析》的过程中重温自己过去的电影体验，获得新的感悟和理解。 英汉对照是《经典英文电影赏析》的一大特点。《经典英文电影赏析》既有英文原文，也提供了中文翻译，有助于英语爱好者能更好地理解书中的内容。同时，《经典英文电影赏析》还提供了注释，为读者的自学提供了参考。 ·查看全部>> 前言 在“信息爆炸”的今天，随着国际文化交流的不断深入和推进，英语作为世界通行语的优势越来越显示出她的“英语帝国”风貌。一方面中国正逐步地同世界接轨，日益频繁的国际交往，使国家和社会对大学生的英语综合应用能力尤其是听说技能提出了更高的要求。另一方面，目前全国大学英语教学改革正在各高校尝试并推广，基于计算机／网络+课堂教学的教学模式日渐普遍。 教育部2007年颁布了《大学英语课程教学要求》。为贯彻其原则和方针，遵循其提出的“加强听说能力，提倡自主型的个性化学习”要求，大学英语教学课时数在一定程度上进行了缩减，包括听力课课时。而全国大学英语四、六级考试在这一改革的背景下进行了很大程度的调整，加强了应用能力的考查，听力所占的比例也由原来的20％提高到了35％。大学英语教学也面临着新的挑战。 因此，如何在学时减少、对听说能力要求提高的情况下，加强对学生学习能力的训练，培养学生自主学习的新模式，也是大学教师应该探讨的新问题。 电影一直以来就是人类漫漫旅途中的精神伴侣。在电影中，人们可以获得心灵的安慰，得到情感的滋润，寻求生活的力量，体验人生的快乐。而英语电影不仅能把学习者带入到一个非常好的语境中培养语感，而且有利于学生熟悉国外的社会、文化、生活方式以及异国风情，为他们了解西方提供了一种影像解读的窗口。中国著名英语语言学教育专家刘润清曾说过，“电影是社会文化的浓缩，看一部电影胜似在国外生活一天”。 借此我们编写了《经典英文电影赏析》这部书。在对近几年英美国家上演的大片精挑细选的基础上，我们选择了既适合英语学习，又集知识性、趣味性、观赏性、时尚性、体验性为一体的10部电影。目的是通过提供真实的英语语言环境，让英语学习者和爱好者能直接了解英美人的思维方式、文化和生活习俗，锻炼和提高英语视、听、说、读、写、译的综合应用能力。这10部电影涉及不同的类型：爱情片、励志片、喜剧片、动作片、友情片、动画片等。
第一篇：100部英文电影 100 部超级好看的英文电影 1,魔法灰姑娘〔超级推荐〕（安妮海瑟薇主演） 2,贱女孩〔超级推荐〕（林赛罗汉主演） 3,灰姑娘的玻璃手机〔超级推荐〕 4,美人鱼〔超级推荐〕（里面音乐也很好听） 5,舞出我人生〔超级推荐〕（励志的！刚出了第二部） 6,录取通知书 7,水瓶座女孩 8,倒霉爱神（林赛罗汉主演） 9,儿女一箩筐 10,冰雪公主〔超级推荐〕 11,我的朋友是明星〔超级推荐〕 12,辣妈辣妹〔超级推荐〕（林赛罗汉主演） 13,物质女孩〔超级推荐〕 14,疯狂金龟车（林赛罗汉主演） 15,平民天后〔超级推荐〕 16,公主日记(不用说勒)〔超级推荐〕（还有第二部哟！） 17,歌舞青春〔超级推荐〕[很热的电影！（ⅰ和ⅱ都喜欢） 18,律政俏佳人 19,麻辣宝贝〔超级推荐〕 20,恋爱刺客 21,美少女啦啦队〔超级推荐〕 22,12月男孩〔超级推荐〕（哈利波特演的哟）
23,足球尤物 24,魔法双星 25,超完美男人〔超级推荐〕 25,劲歌飞扬〔超级推荐〕 26,纽约时刻 27,奶牛美女 28,穿prada的恶魔〔超级推荐〕 29,天生一对 30,高校天后〔超级推荐〕 31,像乔丹一样 32,牛仔裤的夏天〔超级推荐超感人～〕 33,初恋的回忆〔超级推荐欣慰～〕 34,甜心辣舞〔超级推荐〕 35,花豹美眉 36,女兵报道 37,女生向前翻〔超级推荐很立志！〕 38,小姐好辣 39,欧洲任我行 40,留级之王 41,风云才女(希尔顿酒店继承人之一尼克?希尔顿首部主打影片！这是一部有关大学女生校园生活的喜剧，影片描述大学校园里一群正处于青春叛逆期、蠢蠢欲动的特权阶层少男少女平日里生活的点点滴滴……有点点sex)〔超级推荐i love hilton sisters〕 42,谁领风骚〔超级推荐女生的可怕和可爱〕
看英语电影观后感英文版 电影大家看过许多了，观后感大家也写过许多，那么偶尔看一 看写一写英语的观后感也是不错的。下面是的关于英语电影观后感， 希望对您有所帮助 ! Avatar is directed by James Cameron.The two main characters are Jake Sully,played by Sam Worthington,and Neytiri,played by Zoe Saldana. Clones named Avatars are sent to Pandora Pla to persuade people there to leave the pla so that human beings can exploit a rare mineral.Jake is sent there to control his Avatar.However,he es across Neytiri and they fall in love with each other.Jake begins to see that nature and the pla should be protected.At last he and the people there work together to defeat human beings and send them back to the earth. 3D technology and the beautiful natural scenery are the two highlights of the film.The message of the film is simple — human beings should protect nature and live in harmony with it. am honored today watched the United States ， 3D cartoon animated film The story is the old manCarl and his wife Eliza has always been thought of children in South America
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
功夫熊猫 Or the dream factory has always been the high standard, the screen exquisite detail, vivid characters vivid, touching story twists and turns, the most important thing is it in the most simple and easy to understand that the way of a token, that is - there is no shortcut to the world and Cheats, the only winning Famen is believe in themselves.? 这个杀手不太冷 This film was absolutely amazing. I have spent hours re-watching various scenes and noticing all the perfection with which they are acted and directed. It's not the violence or action sequences that make this movie so great (although they are well done...), but rather moments like where Mathilda knocks on Leon's door. It would be so easy to just film the door opening, but instead we see light illuminating Natalie Portman's face, symbolizing something angelic. And the moment has so much more meaning.? I know a lot of people who have seen this film because they are action fans. I'm not. But I'm glad I finally found it, because it's a wonderful film in so many other ways. 哈利波特 Harry Potter is a series of seven fantasy novels written by British author J. K. Rowling. The books chronicle the adventures of the eponymous adolescent wizard Harry Potter, together with Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, his best friends. The central story arc concerns Harry's struggle against the evil wizard Lord Voldemort, who killed Harry's parents in his quest to conquer the wizarding world, after which he seeks to subjugate the Muggle (non-magical) world to his rule. 动画喜剧海底总动员 Somewhere, under the sea, weak-finned clown fish Nemo (Alexander Gould) lives with his fretful father, Marlin (Albert Brooks). Smothered by pop's paranoia, he ventures away from the reef, but his dad's dread is justified when a passing diver whisks him away.? Taken to a tank in a Sydney dentists, Nemo meets Gill (Willem Dafoe) and co - friendly fish who dream of escaping to the ocean. Meanwhile, Marlin bumps into a blue tang named Dory (Ellen DeGeneres), and sets out to save his son...? The splendour of natural history hit The Blue Planet is matched by the wit of the script and stars. Barry Humphries has a terrific cameo as a great white shark who's sworn off killing (Remember, fish are friends, not food!), while DeGeneres provides perfect timing and tone as Dory, whose short-term memory loss is a gag that never stops running? 世界末日 There are so many amazing things in the world.这个世界上有太多不可思议的事情.If tomorrow is the end of the world,what can we do?如果明天是世界末日,我们可以做什么?So now,i think we should keep smile everyday.所以现在,我觉得我们应该每天都微笑.After i finish the movie of "2012The end of the world",I feel very upset about that.我看完“2012世界末日”这电影之后,我感到很悲伤.When I saw the people die in the movie,I thought about if this event will happen to us,will we die very helpless?当我看到人类在这个电影里死了,我想到了如果这件事情发生在我们身上,我们会死得很无助吗?If we have to die,I'll choose the one happy ending,like we
小王子电影观后感英文版 本文为小王子电影观后感英文版范文，让我们通过以下的文章来了解。 Recently, I read a fairy story book, Little Prince. This book tells the adventurous experiences of little prince from his planet to the earth. Little prince comes from the outer space and he is hurt by a rose. So he leaves there and travels into space. He comes to the earth and be the friend of a fox. The fox tells his secret to little prince and he helps a pilot in the desert. In the end, he dies under the help of a snake and his soul goes back to his planet. This book is very interesting and teaches me a lot. I like little price adventures. He teaches me to be honest and love others. All of us should never loss the pureness of childhood. This is a fairytale whose distribution volume is only second to The Bible. It’s been translated to versions of many other languages. And I gather there must be something special, something really great about it. It’s this conviction that drove me to read it at the first beginning. Well, with due respect to the author, I failed to see how this fairytale be worthy
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