If you’re looking for an inviolable law of cinema, one that you can more or less can take to the bank, the Venice Film Festival just confirmed an ironically delightful one.
It is this: Murder agrees with Woody Allen.
We already knew that, of course.
We knew it from “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” a drama that was shocking when it came out in 1989 — and if you see it today, it’s still shocking, because the theme of the movie isn’t just that ordinary people commit murder (we see that in movies every day).
It’s that they seem disturbingly ordinary even as they’re doing it, which is a bit frightening.
Martin Landau, as a mild bourgeois ophthalmologist who hires someone to kill off his mistress, seemed to be playing the squirmy essence of every amateur criminal, and the fact that he got away with it was the unsettling part.
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