Film
Movie theaters, reviews and showtimes in New York, plus articles, trailers and more
- Home
- Box Office
- Listings
- Trailers
- Features
Bookmark this page- Edition:
Lightning Over Water (1980)
Director: Nicholas Ray, Wim Wenders
Movie review
From Time Out Film Guide
Fittingly made on very dangerous ground as a celebratory last testament to an idea(l) of cinema that died along with Nicholas Ray. Developed haphazardly over the last two months of Ray's life, as a roughly improvised collaboration between the maverick Hollywood veteran and his German Friend Wim Wenders, it documents rawly but honestly the paradoxes of lives devoted to conjuring the sort of privileged moments the title alludes to. Ray, degenerating physically day by day, sustained by an irrepressible imaginative vitality; daily striving to reinvent cinema as Godard long ago predicted he would. Wenders, at an interim impasse on the protracted production of Hammett, constantly doubting his own methods and motives, unsettled by his own gestures of tribute. Two exiles trying to help each other find their ways back home, like Robert Mitchum in The Lusty Men. You needn't be steeped in film lore to appreciate the extraordinary emotions on which all this is strung. Even with its painful contradictions and discomfitures, it's that current rarity: one for the heart.Author: PT
Cast & crew
Director: Nicholas Ray, Wim Wenders
Producer: Chris Sievernich, Pierre Cottrell
Cast: Nicholas Ray, Wim Wenders, Susan Ray, Tim Ray, Gerry Bamman, Ronee Blakley full cast
Duration: 91 mins
Most popular on this site
Features
To the letter
Forty years later, Costa-Gavras's Z still brims with fury.
Mind over matter
David Cronenberg reflects on a most bizarre body: his own corpus of work.
Fool's gold
Can an Oscar win lead to a cursed career? Here are five stories of postaward professional meltdowns.
We are the championed
Terrorists and teens abound in this year's "Film Comment Selects."
A history of violence
Matteo Garrone's kaleidoscopic Gomorrah wallops you with Italy's crime crisis.
True romantic
James Gray exchanges urban amorality for amour in Two Lovers.
Playing in the dark
MoMA salutes pianist Stuart Oderman's 50 years as the one-man sound of silents.
Junk bonds
Cast and crew recall the making of the classic NYC drug drama The Panic in Needle Park.
What do you think?
Post your review now