This 1999 supernatural serial-killer movie by Tim Burton, set in the late 18th century, isn’t what it purports to bean adaptation of Washington Irving’s great story The Legend of Sleepy Holloweven if the main setting (a village on the Hudson River in upstate New York) is roughly the same and the major characters have the same names. (For an adaptation halfway worthy of the name, you’d have to check out Walt Disney’s Ichabod and Mr. Toad, a cartoon turned out half a century earlier.) But it’s a visually impressive tribute to the Hammer horror movies Burton saw as a boy, and if that’s all you want you’ll probably have a blast, even if the script by Andrew Kevin Walker (Seven) is fairly formulaic. The castJohnny Depp, Christina Ricci, Miranda Richardson, Michael Gambon, Casper Van Dien, and Jeffrey Jonesis fun to watch, and the pictorialism is often stunning. R, 111 min. (JR) Read more

James Benning’s 1999 feature consists of 35 shots, each two and a half minutes long, filmed in direct sound with a stationary camera in California’s Central Valley. The final credits identify each shot according to its subject, the owner of the land, and the locationa token gesture to politicize a survey whose principal interest is formal. The overall effect is of an arrangement of attractive same-size boxes neatly stacked together but not in any particular order. Some are attractive enough and sufficiently mysterious to suggest Joseph Cornell’s surrealist boxes, and at times Benning creates some formal suspense out of the shots’ duration, but the film suffers from a certain repetitiousness, such as the recurrent use of the same horizon line. (JR) Read more

Raul Ruiz’s adaptation of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past can’t be regarded even remotely as an adequate substitute for the original, even though the director sensibly concentrates on the last of its seven parts. But this 1999 film is still a lot more imaginative and entertaining than one might have thought possible. Ruiz ingeniously tries to convey the transports of Proust’s labyrinthine sentences through camera movement and the displacement of characters and scenery, almost as if he were constructing a theme-park ride. The result isn’t as emotionally potent as one might have wished, but it’s never boring, and its very inadequacy and occasional obscurity are part of its charm. Ruiz and Gilles Taurand wrote the script. With Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Beart, Vincent Perez, Pascal Greggory, Marie-France Pisier, Chiara Mastroianni, Marcello Mazzarella as Proust, and John Malkovich as the eccentric gay artistocrat Charlus. In French with subtitles. 165 min. (JR) Read more

A brisk and breezy if formulaic comedy-thriller from Japan about a shy car-rental employee (Masanobu Ando) and an equally timid nurse (Hikari Ishida) thrown together while fleeing with a lot of yen from yakuza thugs. Most of the thugs are amusingly played by the half-dozen members of a comedy troupe called Jovi Jova, and writer-director Shinobu Yaguchi seems to have as much fun standardizing their bumbling goofiness as he does standardizing the meekness of his hero and heroine. As disposable fun, this 1999 feature is every bit as enjoyable and forgettable as most Hollywood equivalents. In Japanese with subtitles. 112 min. (JR) Read more

Craig Baldwin seems to have been compulsively remaking the same movie over the past decade, an experimental found-footage compilation that dovetails as many technological conspiracy theories as possible. Each time he does a better job; this delirious 1999 feature is better to my mind than either Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1991) or Sonic Outlaws (1995), and it makes extensive use of Baldwin’s own footage, as did O No Coronado! (1992). But whether there’s a corresponding growth in lucidity is another matter. All his movies simultaneously mock and indulge in paranoid ranting, and sorting out the parodic strands isn’t always easy; when I heard Baldwin speak about his new movie recently in Austin, I was happy to discover that he’s a lot more lucid, politically speaking, than both his films and many of his postmodernist champions, so viewers who turn up for this screening should definitely stick around to hear him talk about it afterward. At the very least his extensive use of kinescopes and other campy 50s materials remains fascinatingly suggestive. (JR) Read more

Carmen Maura stars as a housewife in flight from her well-to-do family who convinces a Portuguese video and CD salesman to give her a lift to Portugal before they catch up with her. This 1999 Spanish film teases a lot of intrigue from the family’s involvement in some sort of business corruption, and the mutual enmity and nastiness between family members is as thick as anything in middle-period Claude Chabrol, though not nearly as interesting. On the other hand, director Antonio Hernandez’s ‘Scope compositions are so inventive and engaging that this action thriller held my attention long after I ceased caring about any of the characters. (JR) Read more

Lasting only 65 minutes, The Little Thief, Erick Zonca’s lean and purposeful 1999 second feature (after The Dreamlife of Angels), confirms his talent while pointing it in a somewhat different direction. He continues to focus on the lower economic strata, but this time he explores the progress of a baker’s assistant who decides to join a band of thieves. The results are gripping. (JR) Read more

Werner Herzog’s surprisingly slim and relatively impersonal 1999 feature charts his relationship with the mad actor Klaus Kinski on the five features they made together. Though Herzog has plenty to say about Kinski’s tantrums on the Peru locations of Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo and even interviews other witnesses on the same subject, he says next to nothing about his own involvementsuch as why he hired Kinski in the first place or how the overreaching heroes Kinski played for Herzog were clearly modeled after the director, metaphorically speaking. Like many other Herzog features, this carries a certain morbid fascination but provides little edification; Kinski’s extensive career apart from Herzog is barely acknowledged. 95 min. (JR) Read more

Wim Wenders’s ambitious and audacious feature (1988) focuses mainly on what’s seen and heard by two angels (Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander) as they fly over and walk through contemporary Berlin. These are the angels of the poet Rilke rather than the usual blessed or fallen angels of Christianity, and Wenders and coscreenwriter Peter Handke use them partially to present an astonishing poetic documentary about the life of this city, concentrating on an American movie star on location (Peter Falk playing himself), a French trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin), and a retired German professor who remembers what Berlin used to be like (Curt Bois). The conceit gets a little out of hand after one of the angels falls in love with the trapeze artist and decides to become human; but prior to this, Wings of Desire is one of Wenders’s most stunning achievements, certainly in no way replaceable by City of Angels, the ludicrous 1998 Hollywood remake. In English and subtitled French and German. PG-13, 128 min. (JR) Read more

Weighing in at 173 minutes, this visually expansive but intellectually and formally simplified adaptation of Milan Kundera’s fine novel holds one’s interestthanks in large part to the talented and attractive leads (Daniel Day-Lewis, Juliette Binoche, and Lena Olin) and the polish that cinematographer Sven Nykvist and coscreenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere bring to the occasion. But Philip Kaufman’s effort to create a romantic epic around a Czech menage a trois before, during, and after the Russian invasion of 1968 shortchanges the original by making virtually all of the action strictly linear and eliminating most of the essayistic material that is essential to the story’s meaning. Arguably, most of the participants make the best of a bad bargainDay-Lewis does what he can with an underscripted character, and he and the two female stars cope honorably with the unenviable task of speaking English with Czech accents, while Kaufman does a good job of matching his own re-creation of the Russian invasion with newsreel footage. But these achievements and othersincluding an undeniable erotic charge to some of the scenesadd up to less than the sum of their parts without a strong enough overall vision to shape them. When Kaufman reaches beyond the novel to flesh things outwith the old-fashioned musical taste of Russian officials, the sexual exploits of the hero, or the expanded part of a pet pighe usually flattens rather than enhances what’s left of the material (1988). Read more

If you thought you might be spared yet another replay of Bambi Meets Godzilla in this international assortment of nearly two dozen irreverent cartoons, collectively R-rated, think again (1988). By rough estimate, eight of these shorts are concerned with sex and eight more with extreme violence (including torture and dismemberment), leaving five devoted to bathroom jokes, and a couple more that might be described as eastern European variations of Saul Steinberg concepts. Nearly half of them coast along on their determination to be scuzzy and/or nasty, but my own favorites in the bunch are good simply because they’re inventive and funny: Bruno Bozzetto’s Strip Tease and Guido Manuli’s Erection (both Italian and raunchy), Wes Archer’s punky Jac Mac and Rad Boy . . . Go! and Bill Plympton’s original and oddball One of These Days (both American and violent), and Michel Ocelot’s French, pithy, and scabrous religious parable Four Wishes. (JR) Read more

Despite a hokey prologue and ending (the latter imposed by producer Charles Evans), this 1988 feature is one of George Romero’s most effective and interesting horror thrillersnot as profound as his remarkable Living Dead trilogy, but unusually gripping and provocative. Based on Michael Stewart’s novel of the same title, the plot concerns Allan (Jason Beghe), a law student who becomes a quadriplegic. His best friend (John Pankow), a scientist who has been experimentally injecting human brain tissue into a monkey named Ella, decides to have the monkey trained by a professional (Kate McNeil) to take care of Allan. But Allan, who becomes involved with the monkey trainer, gradually discovers that Ella is both tapping into and acting upon his repressed ragewith dire consequences for his overbearing mother, shrewish nurse, and former fiancee among others, climaxing in a highly suspenseful confrontation. Like other Romero films, this is both crude and powerful on the level of genre and sophisticated and subtle in its social and psychological implications (which, in this case, mainly have to do with sexual undertonesthe competition of various females, including the monkey, for the hero’s care and affection). Certain characters, like the nurse and the mother, are crudely drawn, but their functions in the overall scheme are shrewdly orchestrated, and what emerges represents an interesting variation on themes from Val Lewton (mainly Cat People) and Alfred Hitchcock (mainly Rear Window). Read more

Throwing caution to the wind, producer-director-cowriter-star Warren Beatty sounds off about politics, delivering his funniest and liveliest film to date (1998). Beatty plays a senator up for reelection who suffers a nervous breakdown, takes out a contract on himself, and with nothing to lose finds himself blurting out what he actually believesmostly in the style of street rap. He addresses the lies of the government in general and the Democratic Party in particular, especially regarding black people, and once he starts hanging out with the daughter of Black Panthers (Halle Berry), whether the two of them will have sex becomes more of an issue than whether he’ll get reelected. This lacks the craft of Preston Sturges or Frank Capra, but it offers a personal statement that may be just as important, and some of it equals Richard Pryor’s concert films in farcical candor and reckless energy. Coscripted by Jeremy Pikser; with Oliver Platt, Jack Warden, Paul Sorvino, Don Cheadle, Amiri Baraka, and lots of enjoyable cameos. R, 108 min. (JR) Read more

Yet another comedy about a boy occupying a man’s body, this one produced by James L. Brooks and Robert Greenhut, written by Anne Spielberg (sister of Steven) and Gary Ross, and directed by Penny Marshall (1988). A teenager attends a carnival, makes a wish about growing up to a fortune-telling machine, and promptly turns into Tom Hanks. While this is marginally better and more serious than most of the other movies in the cycle, the psychological ramifications of the change still aren’t very convincing. The hero in this case becomes an ace executive at a toy company and wins the heart of Elizabeth Perkins (acquitting herself rather well here), but ultimately decides to become a Norman Rockwell teenager again. Once again, the overall premise is milked for some mild titillation involving the hero’s sexual innocence, making one wonder if the genre’s popularity might involve some deeply sublimated form of kiddie pornarguably the distilled ideological essence of squeaky-clean Reaganism. In keeping with the overall Spielbergian metaphysics, even skid row has a scrubbed look here; but as far as the movie’s message is consideredif only grown-ups could be more like kidsJerry Lewis did an infinitely better job of plugging it in the 50s. Read more

Set in Paris in 1926 among American expatriates, this Alan Rudoph feature (1988) isn’t everything one might hope for; Rudolph had wanted to film his and Jon Bradshaw’s script since the mid-70s, and it probably stewed in his consciousness too long. But for the first hour it’s very nearly as good as Choose Me and Remember My Name, and even when it isn’t working it remains fascinating. Set in a claustrophobic world of cafes, studios, and other cluttered interiors, with a great many smoky close-ups and drifting camera movements, the film is about the public profile of modernism more than its inner workings. Rudolph treats all his characters as contemporaries rather than historical figures, and as usual in his work the cover stories of the characters count for more than anything else, even when slipping away. The cast is by and large superb: Keith Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Linda Fiorentino, Genevieve Bujold, Kevin J. O’Connor (as Ernest Hemingway), Wallace Shawn, and John Lone. 128 min. (JR) Read more