Manuel Gutierrez Aragon’s 1980 feature, which won second prize at the Chicago International Film Festival the following year, follows a 15-year-old girl (Cristina Marcos) who lives with her father and spends much of her time with a group of elderly Sephardic Jews. Much of the plot revolves around the parallels between a play directed by one of these Jews about a bandit and the real-life underworld of crime. Read more
For people like me who often feel oppressed by minority-film categories such as gay films, black films, Jewish films, independent films, and so on, calling this really well-done, low-budget, personal effortdirected and adapted by Gus Van Sant from a Walt Curtis novel, and shot in Portland, Oregona gay film isn’t very helpful. Far better to say that the film’s working-class hero (extremely well played by Tim Streeter), who works as a grocery-store clerk in Portland’s skid row, happens to be gay, has an unrequited crush on an illegal Mexican immigrant named Juancito (Doug Cooeyate), and ultimately has a brief affair with Juancito’s friend, another illegal alien. Strikingly shot in high-contrast black and white, with offscreen narration and postsynchronized dialogue, the film suffers in spots from its austere budget; the short-take editing style is persuasively handled, but gets a mite monotonous in spots. Still, this 1985 film’s absolute freedom from cliches is genuinely refreshing; looking at it again after Van Sant’s subsequent Drugstore Cowboy, I found it every bit as good and in some ways even more impressive than the later film. It shouldn’t be missed. With Ray Monge. 78 min. Read more
This is the original general-release version, not the more recent restoration, of Orson Welles’s 1948 cheapie, expressionist adaptation of the Shakespeare tragedy, shot in three weeks at Republic Studio on converted western sets. (Both versions are edited by Welles, but this one is two reels shorter and has a redubbed sound track to make the cast’s Scottish accents more subdued.) Whatever the version, this remains the most problematic of Welles’s Shakespeare adaptationsparticularly because of the inadequacies of the two lead performers (Welles and Jeanette Nolan) and the violence done to the textbut it has its compensations and moments of raw power. With Dan O’Herlihy and Roddy McDowall. (JR) Read more
Set in 1917, and based on a true story, this Australian war film follows the eponymous four-man regiment of mounted soldiers who have been together since the Gallipoli campaign, with one of the wounded members replaced by a younger recruit, slugging it out with Germans and Turks in Palestine. With Anthony Andrews, Peter Phelps, Bill Kerr, and Nick Waters; written by Ian Jones, directed by Simon Wincer, and shot in its entirety in South Australia. Read more
Could you believe that Martin Sheen, Sam Wanamaker, and Sean Penn are all hijackers from East Berlin? Apparently this movie expects us to. Based on a true story, the movie follows the hijackers to West Germany, where communist officials demand that they be tried. Leo Penn directs a script by himself and Joshua Sinclair, based on a book by Herbert G. Stern. Read more
This first film of Japanese writer-director and former actor Juzo Itami (1984) lacks the freewheeling episodic form and comic exhilaration of his second, Tampopo; but as a sustained social satire, it succeeds more than either that film or his third, A Taxing Woman. Itami’s subject is a family funeral that lasts three days and the elaborate preparations, considerations, and rituals that accompany itfrom expenses to the videotape advising both the family and the guests what to say to one another. The results are perhaps a mite overlong, but Itami’s vigorous filmmaking keeps things lively, and Ozu veteran Chishu Ryu is especially welcome in a cameo as the officiating priest. One also gets some early indications of Itami’s handling of food and sex, which reaches full flower in Tampopo. With Nabuko Miyamoto (Itami’s wife) and Tsutomu Yamazaki. (JR) Read more
John Carl Buechler directed the latest installment in this unstoppable series. In this episode, Jason (Kane Hodder) encounters a teenager named Tina (Lar Park Lincoln) who has telekinetic powers and the capacity to destroy him. Daryl Haney and Manuel Fidello wrote the script. Read more
Francisco Betriu’s 1982 Catalan feature, adapted from a popular novel by Merce Rodoreda, follows the life of a Catalan woman (Silvia Munt) from the 1920s through the early years of Franco. Made for Spanish television; with Lluis Homar and Joaquim Cardona. Read more
Yoshitaka Asama’s film unfolds during the spring of 1928, when a replacement teacher takes over at a small primary school on Shodo Island in Japan’s Inland Sea. With Yuko Tanaka and Tetsuya Takeda. Read more
An erotic thriller that proceeds from the premise of what happens when a woman doesn’t hang up on an obscene phone call, which indirectly leads to her witnessing a police drug murder. Scripted by associate producer Karyn Kay and directed by Sollace Mitchell, both making their debuts here, this Hitchcockian exercise has its share of problemsan indifferently scripted and acted boyfriend (Sam Freed), some stock villains, occasional dawdling in the action and direction. But many of the Hitchcockian ideassexual obsession, female desire, point-of-view shots, and ambiguous identitiesare good ones, a lot more interesting than the standard De Palma rip-offs, and the New York locations and milieu are nicely handled. Kay’s background as a feminist film critic seems to stand her in good stead here, and one wishes that she’d had a hand in the direction as well; Mitchell’s work is earnest but uneven, lacking the drive often found in the script. Patricia Charbonneau is rather good as the ambivalent heroine, and a lengthy phone-sex sequence involving 360-degree pans manages to get pretty steamy as well as suspenseful. With Patti D’Arbanville, Stephen McHattie, and Boyd Gaines. (JR) Read more
Antoni Ribas’s 1976 La ciutat cremada, a film shot in the Catalan language the year after Franco’s death, represented a big step forward for regional Spanish cinema. Depicting the rise of Catalan nationalism from the viewpoint of a left-wing militant, the film covers events from the loss of Cuba in 1898 to the anarchist uprising of 1909. With Angela Molina. (JR) Read more
Frank Capra’s very atypical drama about an American missionary (Barbara Stanwyck) taken prisoner by a Chinese warlord (Nils Asther) is not only his masterpiece but also one of the great love stories to come out of Hollywood in the 30ssubtle, delicate, moody, mystical, and passionate. Joseph Walker shot it through filters and with textured shadows that suggest Sternberg; Edward Paramore wrote the script, adapted from a story by Grace Zaring Stone. Oddly enough, this perverse and beautiful film was chosen to open Radio City Music Hall in 1933; it was not one of Capra’s commercial successes, but it beats the rest of his oeuvre by miles, and both Stanwyck and Asther are extraordinary. With Walter Connolly and Lucien Littlefield. 89 min. (JR) Read more
It sounds like the killer tomatoes in days of yore have turned into flying women, although who knows? Maybe screenwriter Ted Nicolau and director Anita Rosenberg have something else in mind. With Christina Whitaker, Elizabeth Kaitan, Tammara Souza, Jamie Bozian, Griffin O’Neal, and Nick Cassavetes. Read more
This may not be Ralph Bakshi’s best known animated feature, but it is conceivably his best. An ambitious history of popular American music that traces its story through key characters of four generations, it can be criticized from multiple angles, but its energetic graphics and bold conceptions place it several cuts above most of Bakshi’s earlier efforts (1981). (JR) Read more
Jacques Rozier is perhaps the least known of the most talented French New Wave directors, if only because his output is so limitedabout one feature per decade. His subject is teenagers, and his method owes a lot to cinema verite. This first feature, made toward the beginning of the 1960s, is also probably his best; it concerns a young TV worker who is dating two 18-year-old girlfriends and can’t choose between them. Rozier’s graceful style is a mixture of sweetness and light, devoid of pretension and open to youthful energies. Recommended. (JR) Read more