Yet Wiseman comes down in favor of the former: his film is above all a paean to New York, which is a splendid visual presence throughout.
The set dressing is often remarkable, proving that the medium is a splendid visual storyteller, even as it fumbles with narrative.
The hero, Andrea Sperelli, is a worldweary young libertine about Rome. Henry James admired its "splendid visual sense" and "ample and exquisite style" (one of the reasons it seems rather dated now).
The decision to shoot on 16mm rather than digital pays splendid visual dividends, lending richly colourful texture to the proceedings as they slip effortlessly between grainy realism and fantasy.
It makes a splendid visual and olfactory spectacle, the pieces glowing like bits of amber or burnished old gold and giving off a smell so tantalizingly sweet that I thought Betsey would dive right in.
My one serious criticism of this splendid book concerns the running visual motif: image after image of Mao Zedong and the Little Red Book.
The movie elides Rick with the power of the landscape, whether splendid or squalid, and with the film's visual impact, which is hardly negligible.
With a score less splendid or a cast lacking confidence, Mr. Strassberger's visual antics might have proved fatally overwhelming.
Last year, in the magazine, I reviewed the splendid Criterion DVD of "Red Desert" and there, too, discussed Antonioni's visual attraction to industrial creations and his depiction of characters — in particular, Giuliana, played by Monica Vitti — as inseparable from them.
And for sheer visual pleasure you won't do better than this splendid volume of close-up color photographs of patterning in Mughal art from the 16th to 19th centuries.
