Tetro

Directed by Francis Ford Coppola

(R)

***

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Two brothers deal with their family’s troubled past.

Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro “feels like a transitional work but also an inspired one,” said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. The second recent small-scale, self-financed film by the veteran director finds him “stretching beyond the mainstream conventions that have alternately liberated and constrained him for more than four decades.” Photographed in lustrous black-and-white, the film tells how two long-estranged brothers (Vincent Gallo and Alden Ehrenreich) are haunted by the shadow of their domineering father, a world-renowned conductor. “Fraught with Greek and Freudian weight,” the plot requires much from its audience, said Todd McCarthy in Variety. Coppola himself wrote the clumsy screenplay—his first in more than 30 years—in which minor events are “inflated to immodest proportions.” Rather than focus on intimate moments among the family members, he smothers them in storytelling tricks and extravagantly staged production. Tetro certainly isn’t the 70-year-old’s finest film, said Andrew O’Hehir in Salon.com. But it has a “verve and vitality that’s been missing from his pictures for 25 years.”