Maurice Pialat’s high-powered adaptation of Georges Bernanos (whose fiction has previously provided the basis for two Bresson films) won the best film award at the Cannes film festival in 1987, which occasioned a great deal of controversy. A dark film both literally and figuratively, it follows the spiritual crisis of Father Donissan (Gerard Depardieu) and his curious relation to a young woman named Mouchette (Sandrine Bonnaire); Pialat himself plays the father superior. Uncompromisingly rigorous and harsh, Pialat’s remarkable film isn’t for every tasteacceptance of Bernanos’ world isn’t an easy matterbut it is certainly a major work by a major filmmaker, with one of Depardieu’s strongest performances. (JR) Read more
A mawkish and fairly ludicrous drama set during World War II and its immediate aftermath, scripted by producer Anna Thomas and director Gregory Nava (who teamed up on El Norte). It has the novelty of allowing us to see William Hurt do his damnedest at playing a psychothe rejected son of an Italian immigrant family with a lot of grudges on his mind; Timothy Hutton plays the fellow soldier he’s after (who had the temerity to marry his sister). Nava’s direction strains after fancy effects without ever suspending our sense of incredulity at these contrived goings-on; the photography is nice, but can’t really do much more than gild a rather desiccated lily. With Stockard Channing, Francisco Rabal, and Melissa Leo. (JR) Read more
Made for the unthinkable sum of $7,000, Paul E. Garstki’s independent black-and-white Chicago-based feature both profits and suffers from its impoverished budget. On the plus side, a largely postdubbed sound track allows the filmmakers to tell parts of the story through the ingenious economical device of using answering-machine messages and imaginary phone conversations offscreen. A thoughtful use of local talent (stage actors John Ellerton, Warren Davis, and Diana Zimmer as the three leads and lots of local independent filmmakers in secondary parts) and locations also makes the best use of William Holst’s somewhat minimalist script, adapted from a story by Garstki. A reclusive art critic hires a young protege, who moonlights as a surveillance photographer, to go to work on a young woman (an odd plot with faint echoes of The Draughtsman’s Contract and Paul Bartel’s The Secret Cinema, without much of the humor connected to either). The main budgetary drawback is the nearly nonexistent social context; the stilted art-world talk generally fails to convince because there isn’t enough of a world in the film to establish it as either parody or the genuine article, and the characters themselves seem at times excessively limited by the exigencies of the plot. The result, then, is uneven but singulara quirky, rather disturbing little film about voyeurism and loneliness. Read more
Despite a hilarious early sequence, Michael Snow’s 1981 feature isn’t quite the revelation it hopes to beat least in relation to his three previous films about camera movement, Wavelength, Back and Forth, and La Region Centrale. But all of Snow’s films are packed with interesting ideas, and this one is no exception. 90 min. (JR) Read more
Long before Henry Jaglom ever dreamed of such a thing, Paul and Danielle Gegauff scripted a movie about the breakup of their own marriage and decided to play the roles themselves; Claude Chabrol, the director for whom Paul Gegauff wrote all of his major scriptsin which sexism and boorishness were often a kind of specialityagreed to direct. The results are nasty, shocking, and singular: the tyrannical husband begins by insisting on an open marriage, is appalled after his wife starts taking advantage of this opportunity, and winds up being imprisoned for nearly killing her; and, as often happens in Chabrol films, it is the offspringin this case the couple’s little girlwho winds up bearing the brunt of the tragedy. Chabrol and the late Gegauff always made a rather interesting teamthe former’s ironic distance on the latter’s cultivation of megalomania and swinishness always gave their collaborations a fascinatingly ambiguous edge in such films as Les cousins and This Man Must Dieand this film represents in some ways the apotheosis of their work together, for better and for worse. Rarely has such unpleasantness been so compulsively watchable (1976). Read more
Following on the heels of his 1972 masterpiece The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Luis Buñuel’s penultimate feature, made two years later, struck many critics at the time as a disappointing tapering off for the old master. But time has treated this puzzling provocation well, and today Buñuel’s episodic procession of mini plots may seem even more daring—less immediately accessible to be sure, yet perhaps closer in its radicalism to L’age d’or than any other of Buñuel’s late works. The challenging lack of a narrative center doesn’t prevent this film from having a great deal to say about the modern world and its ambivalent grasp of freedom. With an all-star cast featuring, among many others, Monica Vitti, Jean-Claude Brialy, Adolfo Celi, and Michel Piccoli. In French with subtitles. 104 min. Read more
Sincere, interminable treacle about a high school rock musician and composer (Alan Boyce) who commits suicide for obscure reasons, and the problems of his best friend (Keanu Reeves) and others in his crowd in carrying on afterward. A lot of talented people, ranging from Eraserhead’s cinematographer (Frederick Elmes) to Choose Me’s costume designer (Tracy Tynan), contributed to this muck, and the saddest thing about it is the fact that a film directed and partially written by women should be so unabashedly sexist in its uncritical treatment of all the major female characters as groupies and dutiful camp followers (played by Michelle Meyrink, Jennifer Rubin, and Pamela Gidley, among others), who need validation from the lead louts (Boyce and Reeves) simply in order to exist. Marisa Silver directed, Joe Strummer (formerly of the Clash) supplied the ho-hum score, and Jarre Fees, Alice Liddle, and Larry Ketron are credited with the lugubrious script. (JR) Read more
While far from being Wim Wenders’s best film, this 1984 collaboration with Sam Shepard, about a speechless wanderer (Harry Dean Stanton) returning from the desert and trying to resume relationships with his abandoned and scattered family, has an epic sweep (with superb color photography by Robby M Read more
George Romero’s 1978 quasi-comic movie about a teenage vampire (John Amplas) remains his artiest effort, and in some respects his most accomplished work. To some extent, the film is as much about the boredom of living in a Pittsburgh suburb as it is about anything else. It is also about the death of magic that this banal existence brings about. Despite the usual amounts of gore, this is a surprisingly tender, ambiguous, and sexy film in which Romero’s penchant for social satire is for once restricted to local and modest proportions. With Lincoln Maazel, Tom Savini, and Sarah Venable. (JR) Read more
A peculiar SF allegory about a mental patient in Buenos Aires who claims to be from another planet, this probably has the second best use of the climax from Beethoven’s Ninth in a film (after Tarkovsky’s Stalker). Not for every taste, and perhaps a bit deja vu for spectators who’ve encountered too many versions of this visionary Christian parable elsewhere, but otherwise odd enough to warrant a look. Directed by Eliseo Subiela, with Lorenzo Quinteros, Hugo Soto, and Ines Vernego (1988). (JR) Read more
Juan Antonio Bardem’s 1956 adaptation of a popular Spanish play, La senorita de Trevelez, with Betsy Blair, constitutes a grim critique of Spanish machismo and sexism, and is considered by many to be Bardem’s best film. Read more
Ray Bradbury appears to be the presiding influence over this nostalgic fantasy-thriller about childhood and ghosts, written, directed, produced, and scored by Frank LaLoggia (Fear No Evil). Set in a small town in the early 60s, the plot centers on the apparition of a little girl to the ten-year-old hero (Lukas Haas) while he’s locked in the school cloakroom during Halloween. Although a bit overextended, the results are something rare: an evocative, poetic horror film without a trace of gore (and in this respect closer to a Val Lewton 40s B, like The Curse of the Cat People, than to contemporary models). The Italian-American family detail is nicely handled, and much of Russell Carpenter’s photography is exquisite. With Len Cariou, Alex Rocco, and Katherine Helmond. (JR) Read more
Mickey Spillane, in an extreme act of self-aggrandizement, played his own hero Mike Hammer in this 1963 adaptation of his own penny-dreadful mystery, shot in England. Costarring Lloyd Nolan, and directed by Roy Rowland. Read more
Frank Capra comes to the Ozarks might serve as a loose description of this quirky and watchable comedy, whose heart and accents are in the right place; it’s a first feature by Arkansan Jay Russell. The Southland Railroad is shifting over to air freight, and a couple of old-time railroaders in Clifford, Arkansas (Wilford Brimley and Levon Helm), decide to steal a train and take it to Chicago to discuss the matter with Southland’s chairman of the board (Henderson Forsythe). Bob Balaban is the company’s president; Barbara Barrie, Mary Steenburgen (who doubles as executive producer), and Holly Hunter are the womenfolk back in Clifford; and Kevin Bacon and Michael Beach are younger railroad workers who double as bookiesall of whom help to keep this pleasant, despite Andy Summers’s terrible music score and a rosy-eyed finale that even beats Capra at wishful thinking (1988). (JR) Read more
When it was first shown back in the mid-60s, this experimental feature with a prelude and four sections was widely regarded as Stan Brakhage’s magnum opus, although it has surely been superseded by many major works since then. Following a cycle of seasons as well as the stretch of a single day as a man slowly makes his way up a mountain, the film features multiple superimpositions and includes traces of splice marks, painting, and scratches on the film emulsion as some of its densely woven textures. Mythological, cosmological, and physiological, like much of Brakhage’s work during this period, it can be seen as one of the most ambitious lyrical films ever madeand also one of the most pretentious, for those who are inclined to view Brakhage’s macho poetics as a trifle self-regarding. Whatever one thinks, and however much the film may seem dated now in relation to Brakhage’s subsequent output, it is an achievement to be reckoned with. 79 min. (JR) Read more
