The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

While this movie is well made and has the feel of a literary work He spends a lot of the film just brooding and glaring. There was one problem with the casting and that is the fact that Vanessa Redgrave is a over a decade older than Keith Carradine. ... Full Review

Ballad of the Sad Cafe" is certainly beautiful in the Merchant-Ivory manner; the film can be seen as a painterly tableau vivant of the Deep South. But the film lacks McCullers's unique storytelling voice ... Full Review

Mannered and slow-moving, "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe" is mostly an irritating exercise in mystification; it's murky nonsense, but Redgrave's presence is a guarantee that the nonsense is shot through with genius. To attempt an intelligible synopsis of the film's story line would be foolhardy; it works more through a bumper-car collision of symbol and metaphor than by narrative. ... Full Review