Review of The Grim Reaper

It seems cruel to be excessively harsh on the writing / directing debut of a 20-year-old (!!), especially when you are just an armchair amateur critic (like all of us here are). With that said, "La Commare Secca" would probably not have seen the light of day, much less be restored and released on DVD as part of the Criterion Collection, if the name of Bernardo Bertolucci wasn't attached to it. In all fairness, Bertolucci already shows that he is a visually gifted director here. But in terms of telling a story, or even stringing two sequences together coherently, he had absolutely no idea what he was doing, to put it bluntly; the film alienates the viewer in the first 5 minutes and never really wins them back. * out of 4.