One can pick plenty of bones with Laurence Olivier’s direction of the Shakespeare play, but this 1945 film is still a powerful production from many standpoints, including Olivier’s performance and his detailed re-creation of what a play at the Globe in Shakespeare’s day might have been like. As cinema this isn’t within hailing distance of any of Orson Welles’s Shakespeare films, but it’s certainly Shakespeare. With Robert Newton, Leslie Banks, and Ernest Thesiger. (JR) Read more
Douglas Fairbanks plays a quixotic and wealthy easterner who goes out west to Bitter Creek, Arizona, where the citizenry attempt to honor his preconceptions about what the wild west is like. This 1917 comedy, scripted by Anita Loos and directed by her husband, John Emerson, is witty, sophisticated, and loads of fun. 47 min. (JR) Read more
An apocalyptic fantasy produced by George Pal in 1951, adapted from a novel by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer, this probably looks about as stodgy now as it did back then, although the Oscar-winning special effects include the flooding of Manhattan. Rudolph Mate directed, and Richard Derr, Barbara Rush, and John Hoyt all make a game try at sounding like real peoplewhich is not always easy, given Sidney Boehm’s script. (JR) Read more
Playboy centerfold Anulka and Marianne Morris star as fangless bisexual vampires whose victims are mainly men in this 1975 British sex-and-gore fest. Directed by Joseph Larraz, scripted by D. Daubeney; with Murray Brown. 84 min. Read more
Nancy Savoca’s ironically titled first feature (1989) covers the last stages of a two-year engagement and wedding of a Brooklyn couple (Annabella Sciorra and Ron Eldard) who don’t even like each other very much. (The groom continually neglects the bride because he wants to hang out with his male friends; the bride won’t back out of the engagement because of her concern for appearances.) Scripted by Savoca and Richard Guay, the film tries to make this semisatire into something of a social critique, but the characters are so unremittingly repulsive that it’s hard to care very much what happens to them, and Savoca is so steeped in the milieu she purports to criticize that her observations about it are superficial at best. Uninteresting as filmmaking and not very successful as comedy, the film claims superiority to its hapless characters without doing enough to earn it. (JR) Read more
If Juzo Itami’s wonderful first two features, The Funeral and Tampopo, suggested the work of a Japanese Frank Tashlin at his funniest and brightest, A Taxing Woman and now its even slicker sequel suggest that he has settled for being, at best, the Japanese Blake Edwards. His second feature about the machinations of tax inspector Ryoko Itakura (Nobuko Miyamoto, Itami’s wife) as she takes off after gangsters and corrupt politicians was an enormous box-office draw in Japanwhich has a certain sociological interest but doesn’t make this movie any more than what it is: a conventional and not very exciting or interesting comedy-thriller. If you’re not expecting much you’ll probably be diverted (1988). (JR) Read more
A remarkable achievement on an artisanal level, Chris Sullivan’s low-budget, homemade feature uses a cluttered environment of sets, marionettes, actors, painted backdrops, and a storehouse of props to create a grisly, surreal fantasy about a soap salesman trying to make his way to a class reunion. Full of dense, ingeniously constructed pictorial effects ranging from intricate split-screen compositions to toylike scale models, the filmmainly black and white, with occasional patches of coloris much more successful in generating an overall environment than it is in telling a story, pursuing a theme, or generating much dramatic interest. The choppy continuity, drifting dialogue, and mainly indifferent acting often give a feeling of randomness to the proceedings that interferes with the intermittent dreamlike moods and fairy-tale humor. But spectators looking for something genuinely different are likely to find this intriguing (1988). (JR) Read more
Although it only runs for half an hour, Angelo Restivo’s cunningly ordered and well-crafted locally made adaptation of a Julio Cortazar story makes use of so many free-floating narrative signifiersincluding an adept use of sound and musicthat it comes across as an outline for a novel. Circling around an ambiguous murder mystery that isn’t so much solved as multiplied and varied like a musical theme, this tantalizing short provides a kind of do-it-yourself fiction kit; what you bring to it is what you get. With Marika Turano, Celia Lipinski, and Mark Dember (1988). (JR) Read more
Jon Jost’s ninth feature focuses rather elliptically on the everyday lives of a group of friends in San Franciscochiefly Claire (Barbara Hammes), who works in an architect’s office, two of her former lovers (Jon A. English and Nathaniel Dorsky), who are close friends, and a recent boyfriend (Jim Nisbet). Masterfully shot and for the most part very persuasively acted, mainly by nonprofessionals (the film’s use of locals is one reason it captures the San Francisco milieu so perfectly), Rembrandt Laughing is a good deal more ambitious than it might first appear. A sense of the timeless and the cosmic hovers over the seemingly casual scenes, and the use of a Rembrandt self-portrait and Beethoven’s opus 132 string quartet is integral to the film’s overall projectto discover the universe in a bowl of miso soup. Part of Jost’s method, like Godard’s in A Married Woman, is to convert the dramatic into the graphic, and his various means of carrying that out are unexpected and frequently beautiful (1988). (JR) Read more
A creepy, interesting, and visually striking 1963 feature by Kaneto Shindo, set in the 16th century in the midst of a civil war, about two poor women who live in the marshes and support themselves by luring wounded samurai to their deaths and then selling their possessions. Things get more complicated when the partnership is threatened by the younger of the two women becoming romantically involved with a neighbor, and the film builds to a macabre and eerie climax. With Nobuko Otowa and Jitsuko Yoshimura. (JR) Read more
This is the 202-minute version of David Lean’s 1962 classic, 14 minutes shorter than the restored 70-millimeter versionstill a good movie, though you may want to hold out for another chance to see it bigger and longer. Peter O’Toole plays the enigmatic T.E. Lawrence; Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, and Omar Sharif are among the Arabs he lords it over, and Jose Ferrer plays a nasty Turk. There’s also a lot of sand, spectacle, and homoeroticism. (JR) Read more
Mickey Rourke plays a disfigured convict who gets a new face from plastic surgeon Forest Whitaker so he can settle down in New Orleans and get even with Ellen Barkin and Lance Henriksen, who were responsible for his going to prison. Walter Hill directed this 1989 feature from a pulpy script by Ken Friedman (based on John Godey’s novel The Three Worlds of Johnny Handsome), and its nasty, predictable plot and unpleasant characters aren’t made any more bearable by Hill’s customary smoke, sweat, funk, and neon. Practically everyone registers as a silly central-casting gargoyle; even the talented Barkin is twisted out of shape by her grotesque character, and while Elizabeth McGovern fares somewhat better, the only standouts are Morgan Freeman and the imperturbable Whitaker. 94 min. (JR) Read more
Alan (Rupert Frazer), a wealthy English antique ceramics dealer, becomes smitten with a German secretary named Karin (Meg Tilly) during a business trip in Copenhagen, proposes to her, and marries her after she joins him in England. Although they’re passionately in love, a number of unsettling and seemingly supernatural eventsincluding dreams and apparent hallucinationsbegin to raise the question of Karin’s mysterious past, which continues to trouble her. Writer-director Gordon Hessler’s erotic psychological thriller, adapted from Richard Adams’s novel, isn’t an unqualified success (some choppy editing and miscalculated slow-motion occasionally interfere with the trancelike rhythms), but it shares with the memorable horror films of Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur a preference for suggestion and understatement over explicitness, developing a gripping narrative and some disquieting and evocative moods in the process, along with some fairly steamy sex. (JR) Read more
A highly distinctive pseudodocumentary by Eric Saks, an environmentalist based in Los Angeles. At once novelistic and poetic, this achronological collage of diary entries between the 1940s and 1990s by a fictional toxic-waste dumper named Isaac Hudakthe different stages of his life are played by three actors, including Sakscreates a haunting portrait of an alienated drifter’s existence that comprises the underside of our national heritage. Behind the dry recitation of ecological facts in the narration, there is a powerful overall sense of the poetics of waste (a register that recalls Thomas Pynchon), with writers as diverse as E.M. Cioran and Peter Handke used to flesh out some of the diary entries. Highly original in its form, its subject, its funereal tone, and its ghostly sensibility, this is a remarkable and memorable first feature, full of haunting ideas and eerie aftereffects. (JR) Read more
Atom Egoyan’s striking and haunting Canadian feature (1987) concerns family ties and video technology, and the strange relationships between them. The plot concerns an alienated young man (Aidan Tierney) who lives with his father (David Hemblin) and his father’s mistress in a fancy high rise full of video equipment. The young man becomes increasingly worried about the fate of his grandmother, whom the father has shunted off to a convalescent home. At the institution he becomes acquainted with an ailing woman and her daughter (Arsinee Khanjian), an equally alienated individual who works as a purveyor of phone sex, which his father uses as a stimulus for his lovemaking. The use of video as a tool of voyeurism and as a means of sustaining distance punctuates the narrative with an eerie persistence; Egoyan’s measured style makes the most of it, while constructing a spellbinding plot that weaves a curious web of complicity and deceit around the major characters. (JR) Read more