Lightning Over Water

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.