Providence

Pros: Powerful ending, profound themes, exceptional performances, highly effective surrealist elements
Cons: Hard to absorb in one viewing, unclear where it's headed for first 75 minutes

Alais Resnais, a great, intellectual French director, teamed with British scriptwriter David Mercer in 1977 for his first English language film, Providence. The result was an extraordinarily inventive movie combining Resnais’s French ...

Pros: Acting, superb script, vivid images.
Cons: Non-linear and surreal storyline may confuse thick people.

Deep in the bowels of a derelict mansion, a dying writer tries to stave off his agonies with a constant stream of Chablis. He's trying to complete his final novel before he dies, but the boundaries between his fiction and his reality are blurred from the...