Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow

Though he's foggy on the specifics, Angelopoulos makes the tides of history felt through each painterly frame.

In his fourth outing with the director, cinematographer Andreas Sinanos produces stunning scene after stunning scene, almost as if each frame were a small painting.

It's a typically poetic film, rich in powerful imagery, which sees a bitter personal tragedy unfold against the major events of 20th century Greece. Although the director doesn't mine any new ground here, either in terms of style or content, it's still a pleasure to sit through nearly three hours of perfectly controlled, visually evocative filmmaking.

Certainly has the look and feel of a masterpiece, but it's missing the emotional core that most moviegoers need.

The Weeping Meadow shares the awed sense of solemn apocalypse with his (Angelopoulos) signature films, but it's lighter, more musical and folktale-ish.

Unfortunately, instead of the usual larger-than-life male figures--Marcello Mastroianni, Harvey Keitel, Bruno Ganz--of Angelopoulos's recent films, we get a distractingly vapid couple who tend to drain the emotional resonance of these extraordinary, ever-shifting tableaux.

The movie plays like a career summation in which the 68-year-old writer-director has simply run out new ideas.