Douglas Day Stewart (Thief of Hearts) wrote and directed this rather unexceptional and at times corny movie about three ambitious college studentsan Oklahoma farm boy (Kirk Cameron) whose debating skill has won him a scholarship, another scholarship student and debater (Jami Gertz) who is haunted by a youthful trauma, and a wealthy senior (Tim Quill) who is expected to follow in his father’s footsteps and go into politics but would rather be a writer. Roy Scheider plays the debate coach, and other costars include Amanda Peterson, George Wyner, and Anthony Zerbe. (JR) Read more
A 1988 adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s controversial novel. Neither the best nor the worst of Martin Scorsese’s films, but possibly the most ambitious, it more or less inverts the principles of his religiously informed New York films by being a religious film informed by some of the cadences, intonations, and attitudes of New York. The efforts to plant this story in a contemporary vernacular are not always successful but the performances are uniformly fine in their adherence to the material, and consistently avoid any vulgarity or showboating. Concentrating on the humanity and fallibility of Jesus in continual conflict with his divinity, the film falters as a contemporary statement mainly in its primitive view of women, who are allowed to signify nothing beyond sexual temptation and maternity. Filmed in Marrakech; with Willem Dafoe (as Jesus), Harvey Keitel, Barbara Hershey, Verna Bloom, Andre Gregory, Randy Danson, David Bowie, Barry Miller, and Harry Dean Stanton. Paul Schrader wrote the screenplay. R, 163 min. (JR) Read more
Steven Spielberg’s mechanical, soulless 1989 follow-up to Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The fast pace and force-fed wisecracks are as seamless as ever, but rarely has audience laughter sounded as hollow. Jeffrey Boam wrote the script, based on an original story by executive producer George Lucas and Menno Meyjes, which concentrates on the relationship between Indiana (Harrison Ford) and his medievalist father (Sean Connery) as they search for the Holy Grail. (The action occurs both before and after the events of the two earlier Indiana Jones pictures.) Christianity, Nazism, Arthurian legend, antiquity, the third world, and women in general all serve as ballast and backdrop to the uneasy affection between a grown boy and his neglectful dad. Also on hand are River Phoenix as the young Indy, John Rhys-Davies, Alison Doody, Julian Glover, Denholm Elliott, and a lot of actors dressed up as Nazis. 127 min. (JR) Read more
A shy London hairdresser (Jesse Birdsall), still a virgin at 31, finds himself getting involved with three very different women (Lynn Redgrave, Helena Bonham Carter, and Jane Horrocks) in a very pleasant romantic comedy directed by Randal Kleiser. Adapted by Elizabeth Jane Howard from her own novel, the film seems modeled in part on such 60s swinging London films as Georgy Girl and Morgan!as is suggested by the use of several actors associated with that period (Redgrave, Shirley Anne Field, Brian Pringle, Pat Heywood, and Nan Munro) and an overall ebullience in plot and performances. With Peter Cook and John Gielgud. (JR) Read more
Paul Leduc (Reed: Insurgent Mexico) gives us fragments from the life of painter and left-wing activist Frida Kahlo, presented in achronological flashbacks from her deathbed that eventually become more orderly. As with most biopics about artists, this 1985 film treats Kahlo’s life and work as almost interchangeable; it’s meditative, mainly visual (dialogue is kept to a minimum, and the striking, rich colors do full justice to Kahlo’s palette), and only intermittently dramatized. The overall effect is rather static, and Leduc supplies too little information for a comprehensive reading of Kahlo’s life and work, though her husband Diego Rivera and her association with Leon Trotsky are treated in some detail. Ofelia Medina is impressive and persuasive in the title role, and Juan Jose Gurrola and Max Kerlow offer believable versions of Rivera and Trotsky. In Spanish with subtitles. 108 min. (JR) Read more
One of Anna Magnani’s most celebrated early film parts, which won her a best-actress prize at the Venice film festival, was as a working-class woman who organizes her neighbors in Rome to fight for their rights in postwar Italy. Luigi Zampa directed this neorealist comedy-drama; Nando Bruno and Ave Ninchi also star (1947). (JR) Read more
Keith Carradine, Sally Kirkland, and Tom Waits star as three contemporary western criminals in Mexico and Montana in an offbeat comedy scripted by novelists Tom McGuane and Jim Harrison and directed by Robert Dornhelm (Echo Park); other actors include Bill Pullman, Kathleen York, and Rip Torn, and Jeff Bridges in an uncredited cameo. Despite the distinguished cast and flavorsome dialogue, the film never manages to establish a rhythm of its ownthe fatuous music is well-nigh ruinous in this respectand the choppy narrative becomes increasingly stalled and sluggish as a consequence. But Waits, Kirkland, and Carradine all have their moments, and the grotesqueries of the plot (which involve hiding emeralds in the innards of a horse called Infidel in order to sneak them over the Mexican border) and characters (such as Waits’s cantankerous notions about health, individuality, and killing) are fitfully amusing. (JR) Read more
A mixture of colonialist nostalgia and revisionist attitudes about same, this semiautobiographical first feature (1988) by Claire Denis, former assistant to Rivette, Makavejev, Jarmusch, and Wenders (among others), is set and shot in Cameroon. A young Frenchwoman named France (Mireille Perrier) recalls her childhood in the late 50s as the daughter of a district officer (Francois Cluzet). The little girl (Cecile Ducasse) is mainly brought up by a kind and sensitive black servant (Isaach de Bankole) significantly named Protee after the many-sided god Proteus. Denis has some success in establishing the lazy, contemplative rhythms of life in such a place, which are partially upset when a group of travelers who are waiting for their plane to be repaired move in — an intrusion that brings diverse sexual, racial, and political undertones to the surface — although the episodic flow tends to set up an occasional self-consciousness and air of portent about the film’s apparent lack of pretension. As a first feature, this is respectable enough work, though the intelligence here seems at times closer to Louis Malle (for better and for worse) than to any of Denis’ former employers. With Giulia Boschi, Kenneth Cranham, Jean-Claude Adelin, and Emmet Judson Williamson; coscripted by Jean-Pol Fargeau. Read more
The film that, along with Open City, gave international prominence to Italian neorealism, this drama directed by Alberto Lattuada suggests a bleaker Italian equivalent to The Best Years of Our Livesa film about returning soldiers and their trouble readjusting at the end of World War II. Amedeo Nazzari plays a poor and unhappy veteran returning to Turin from a German POW camp; Anna Magnani plays a ruthless prostitute who seduces him into crime (1946). (JR) Read more
Two justly celebrated short features by the great Roberto Rossellini, The Human Voice and The Miracle, both starring Anna Magnani, were combined into this 1948 feature, devoted, according to Rossellini, to earthly love and the beginning of divine love respectively. The first is an innovative adaptation of a one-act play by Jean Cocteau with only one on-screen character, recorded in direct sound; the second is a controversial tale (coscripted by Federico Fellini) about the seduction of a naive shepherdess by a man she believes is Saint Joseph. (JR) Read more
The second of Michael Powell’s two films made in Australia, this is a lovely erotic and idyllic comedy about a New York painter (James Mason) who has moved to a remote barrier reef island, which he shares with a drunken eccentric (Neva Carr-Glynn) and her beautiful teenage granddaughter (Helen Mirren), whom he paints and sleeps with. James Mason coproduced; Jack McGowran and Frank Thring costar; Peter Yeldham wrote the script, adapted from a novel by Norman Lindsay (1969). (JR) Read more
The unusual thing about this pleasant (if at times formulaic) shaggy-dog road movie set in Montana, South Dakota, New Mexico, and environs is that it’s all about contemporary Cheyenne Indians. The story of a huge traditionalist Cheyenne named Philbert (Gary Farmer) and his beat-up wreck of a car (purchased with pot), which he regards as his “pony,” the movie follows the wayward adventures that ensue when Philbert’s political friend Buddy (A Martinez) gets him to drive the two of them from Montana’s Lame Deer reservation to Santa Fe, to get Buddy’s sister Bonnie (Joanelle Romero) out of jail. Directed by Jonathan Wacks from a script by Janet Heaney and Jean Stawarz based on David Seals’s book, there’s more pleasure to be found here in character and incident than in plot per se, but in addition to offering an interesting cross section of Cheyenne life and attitudes, there’s a fair amount of fun to be had along the way–including attractive scenery and some good laughs. With Amanda Wyss. (Fine Arts) Read more
Two fascinating relics of the French cinema in the mid-30s, both semimusicals starring the great black dancer Josephine Baker in all her glory, and both very interesting for the racial attitudes they reveal. In each feature Baker is paired with a white male star–Jean Gabin as a brother-by-adoption and sailor-turned-electrician in Marc Allegret’s Zou Zou (1934), and Albert Prejean as an aristocratic novelist in Edmond Greville’s Princess Tam Tam (1935)–who is set up as a potential lover, but who eventually passes her up for a white woman. (Even with these supposed safeguards, these movies were deemed virtually unexportable to the U.S. at the time, when big-budget movies starring blacks were unheard of; Princess Tam Tam, the more racist of the two, had a brief American run during the 40s, but only in a highly censored version.) In Zou Zou, which has the somewhat more plausible plot of the two (and was one of the biggest French box-office hits of its year), Baker and Gabin grow up together in the circus and wind up working at the same Paris music hall; in Princess Tam Tam she’s a Tunisian native–almost a Rousseau-like noble savage–discovered by Prejean, a Parisian abroad who uses her as the raw material for his novel, in which he imagines her taking Paris by storm (as Baker herself did in the 20s) and making his wife jealous. Read more
Jeff Bridges gives one of his best performances to date in an absorbing romantic comedy-drama written and directed by Alan J. Pakula about the emotional confusions and adjustments that take place when a divorced psychiatrist (Bridges) and a widow/photographer (Alice Krige), both of whom have two children from their previous spouses, decide to get married. The New York setting and the economic bracket and well-educated veneer of the characters (as well as the effective use of familiar songs) suggest the world of Woody Allen, but this is incomparably better in its insights and density than any of Allen’s efforts; the characters steadily grow in interest and complexity as the plot unfolds, and although the two-hour movie may be slightly longer than it has to be, it does a surprisingly deft job of acquainting us with about a dozen major characters, not one of whom is a stock figure. With Farrah Fawcett (as the psychiatrist’s former wife), Drew Barrymore, Lukas Haas, David Dukes, Frances Sternhagen, George Hearn, Theodore Bikel, and Linda Lavin. All these actors are very fine, but the always able Bridges surpasses himself–his performance is a series of inventive and unexpected grace notes throughout. (Ford City East, Edens, McClurg Court, Orland Square, Woodfield, Forest Park, Burnham Plaza, Oakbrook, Golf Mill, Lincoln Village, Evanston, Norridge, Webster Place) Read more
Any new film by experimental filmmaker and artist Michael Snow is a major event, and this 41-minute “road” movie of shifting landscapes shot from the bottom of a truck, and accompanied by the sounds of a film audience, is no exception. The title apparently stems from the common identity of Snow, who drove the truck, and the audience watching the film. Judging from a first viewing, Seated Figures lacks the pristine excitement of Snow’s monumental camera movement trilogy of the late 60s and early 70s (Wavelength, Back and Forth, and La region centrale), but it is full of different kinds of suspense and surprises for spectators who are prepared to experience a painterly film without a story line but with a great deal of luscious Canadian landscape, seen at close range and in motion. Snow himself will be present to answer questions, and he’ll also be showing his wonderful So Is This (1982), a remarkable film consisting of words flashed on a screen that manages to extend that minimal conceit into complex and entertaining strategies for addressing an audience. (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Monday, April 17, 7:00, 443-3737) Read more
