Love and Death

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Stephen C Funny in 1 hour and 25 minutes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Rated 5/5 Stars •  Rated 5 out of 5 stars 10/15/25 Full Review alan g Tolstoy send up. Prokofiev music essential. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 10/11/25 Full Review john h Woody Allen's detached, full-of-fun film Love and Death is unlike the rest of his pictures. Still having existential slants like many of his works, they feel more free and enjoyable by both the director, actors and watchers. Rated 5/5 Stars •  Rated 5 out of 5 stars 06/05/25 Full Review Alain E Frankly, impressive that one person imagined everything that happens and said in this movie. Extremely entertaining. Although we see many faces of love, death remains obscure. I guess Woody Allen wants us to have something to look forward to. Rated 4.5/5 Stars •  Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 04/22/25 Full Review Lanfranco C Not bad, but overrated. Rated 2/5 Stars •  Rated 2 out of 5 stars 12/06/24 Full Review David H I saw this movie when it first came out. I had just moved to Fresno, California, and I was the new kid at school. Some kind individual from the church I attended, whose name was Steve, invited me to see it with him. *** I knew virtually nothing about Woody Allen at that time, and it wasn’t a film I would have chosen to see. All those years since, I’ve had the impression it was a deep, philosophical film that I would really have needed to have studied Dostoevsky or Tolstoy to have adequately grasped. In the intervening years, I’ve learned a lot more about the world so, when I got the chance to see the film again recently, I jumped at the opportunity because I wondered how my older, better educated self would respond to it. *** The film was mildly entertaining. I was surprised to learn that the plot wasn't actually very complicated at all, and that it had little or nothing to do with Russian literature. So I'm sure that my 16-year-old self grasped the plot just fine. Sometimes we think we remember something perfectly but then, when we revisit it, it turns out we didn't remember it all that well after all. Chalk this up to just another instance of that. *** A couple of things surprised me about the film. First, Woody's character makes some comment in a conversation with Sonja (or possibly another character) about how the love between two women is his very favorite kind. I don't think I would have had any idea what he was talking about at that time, so the comment probably just sailed right over my head back then. This time, I was a little shocked or, at the very least, surprised. *** Even more shocking, however, was another scene where a rabbi, if I remember right, makes a comment about how good it can be to have two 12-year-old girls. I don't remember exactly how he expressed it, but the meaning was clear. You certainly couldn't get away with a comment like that in a movie today, and I'm actually surprised that they were able to get away with it then. (In his next film, Annie Hall, the reference was to two sixteen-year-old twins. Slightly less unacceptable perhaps, but certainly not anywhere near tolerable in today’s climate.) *** In any case, this was Allen’s last movie before Annie Hall and a string of other hits that came in the late ‘70s and into the ‘80s. And it wasn’t a great film, so it's not surprising that it's not widely available. The only way I could get it was to rent a VHS copy from the university library in my town, whereas his better known films are available on DVD, BlueRay and several different streaming services. Rated 2.5/5 Stars •  Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars 10/06/24 Full Review Read all reviews

Love and Death

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