A sibling thing, self-importantly mythological, and purportedly semi-autobiographical, about two uncharismatic brothers (Vincent Gallo, Alden Ehrenreich) estranged from their domineering father, a world-famous opera maestro, withdrawn from him all the way to Buenos Aires. Its writer and director, Francis Ford Coppola, has by this time far fallen off the pace of contemporaries like Scorsese and Spielberg, to such extent that the maker of The Godfather and The Conversation might seem to the unfledged filmgoer a figure almost as remote as the maker of The Asphalt Jungle and The Maltese Falcon. As if to underline the point, he has shot this film largely in dark glossy glamorous black-and-white, with stretches of soggily saturated color — oh, that green dress! — reserved for flashbacks and illustrations of the elder brother’s autobiographical novel. (The color clip of the Coppélia segment from the Powell-Pressburger Tales of Hoffman, later restaged as a fantasy scene by Coppola himself, was surely chosen as much for the palette as for the echo of the director’s surname.) And when the novelist brother likens his Argentine lover to Ava Gardner, the younger brother, voice of the younger generation, has to ask, “Who’s Ava Gardner?” Older filmgoers, who do not glaze over at the sight of black-and-white, may find their collective eye caught by some of the baroqueries of the imagery, but they should be in the best position to judge the overall weight loss and compensating pileup of cosmetics. Maribel Verdú, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Carmen Maura. (2009) — Duncan Shepherd
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