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Wall Street Journal
23-05-2025
- Wall Street Journal
Summer Books: The Best Reading for the Season
Fortune-seekers and former soldiers arrived in the small towns of the Old West, carrying pistols and a taste for violence. Review by Richard Snow Read the review
Wall Street Journal
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘The Damned' Review: Stasis in the Civil War
War is boring as hell in 'The Damned,' an austere western drama set far from the battlefields on the 1862 frontier. It seeks not to tell a story but to capture a set of feelings. None of them are pleasant. Beginning with a less-than-subtle image of wolves tearing apart a carcass, Italian writer-director Roberto Minervini all but announces his intent to add an entry to the already voluminous antiwar cinema. Evocatively naturalistic, his film painstakingly captures the largely uneventful existence of a small troop of Union Army volunteers somewhere out in the borderlands of the West. We don't learn the name of the state or territory where the film takes place, just as we are not told the names of any of the men. Instead, we observe their daily rituals—drinking bad coffee, playing ball games, standing guard around the perimeter. Among their most vital activities is peering at a ridge to see if any minute detail ever changes, which might as well be a metaphor for this type of film.
