Now I’m a big fan of the gray lady, and I’m also a big fan of long, complicated sentences, but Manohla Dargis should be taken aside and given a strict talking-to for this doozy in today’s review of Baz Luhrmann’s Australia:

Though “Australia” is narrated by a young boy of mixed race, Nullah (the newcomer Brandon Walters), the illegitimate son of an Aboriginal mother and a white father, who is trying to escape the authorities, and while it opens in 1939, shortly before World War II blasted Australian shores, the film isn’t a bummer.

My mother always taught me that, while complexity can be a good thing, the most critical aspect of writing is to not jar the reader out of their flow and make them back up to reread a sentence. I was quite happily zipping along this review until I hit that number, and though I can parse it quite clearly now, I had to reread it twice to figure it out. Yeesh.