Cinema: Shades of Gray

British Director John Boorman is a film maker of stylistic skill and visual flare. He transformed a more or less routine police thriller into Point Blank, a free-for-all exercise in cinematic pyrotechnics. His Hell in the Pacific was a stunningly filmed but intellectually shallow allegory about man's inhumanity to man. His new film, Leo the Last, appears to have been made with a greater degree of directorial freedom than he has ever had; he even shares screen credit for the script. The result is a stunning but simplistic political parable that might have...