Cannery Row

Nearly all the faults of this ill-made film can be blamed on its directing.

All of this is photographed and written in such a mixture of the wistful, the whimsical, the eccentric, and the romantic that the characters don't even seem to be living; they seem to be auditioning.

Cannery Row leans heavily into the artifice and the whimsy -- it's a strategy that's occasionally charming but more often distancing.

Cannery Row falls a long way short of being a great movie -- but it does just fine as a pretty good one.