When this started, I really thought I was going to love it. I mean the whole late '90s aesthetic, the Brechtian style of addressing the audience, the idea of combining all this with biting racial satire, it sounded great. The final product, I feel, is a very strange experience, and one that doesn't really leave you with any particularly enlightening tidbits of information. This film has a very important message: that under the monied interests of the entertainment industry, the…

If the rest of Sternberg's films are at least this level of quality, I'm in for a good month (I'm watching through a bunch of his films in April). "Underworld" has a plethora of well-delivered silent performances, moody visuals, and plenty of ideosyncracies. This is low-key one of the great early crime films, and I'd say it's a fairly unknown one. My biggest problem with this is that the romance was a bit underdeveloped. If this movie was longer, it…