The Unloved, Part 125: Mother Night | MZS


Like Carl Franklin, John Dahl, and Daniel Minahan, Keith Gordon is a director who seems to only work in TV despite having made 5-star films. Gordon’s got nothing like the reputation he deserves after becoming one of the most sensitive, sensuous adapters of great novels and a fierce stylist to boot. He created these gorgeously fraught worlds of melancholy born of bad decisions and regrets. “Mother Night” is the best (only good?) Kurt Vonnegut adaptation we’ve ever been given, and that alone ought to have kept in our conversations, but, alas, the director of five of the best films of the last 40 years has been shunted off to the side like so many other immense talents. I should like to see many more Keith Gordon films in my lifetime.