F.W. Murnau made this feature the same year (1922) as his much better known Nosferatu, but it isn’t a fantasy or horror picture, as the title might suggest. Coadapted by Thea von Harbou (M) from a novel by Gerhart Hauptmann, it moves into high gear and becomes downright dazzling at a few privileged expressionist moments that convey the hero’s slightly deranged sensibility, as when surrounding buildings seem to collapse on him or a camera cranes over his head in a nightclub to reveal a motorcyclist. Otherwise somewhat stodgy in its seriousness, Phantom remains a secondary work by a great filmmaker. With Alfred Abel, Lil Dagover, and Lya De Putti. In German with subtitles. 125 min. (JR) Read more
Three early shorts by experimental filmmaker and School of the Art Institute graduate Louis Hock, who went on to make the remarkable video documentary The Mexican Tapes. All three shorts are structural in orientation: Elements (1972), Silent Reversal (1973), and Zebra (1974). Recommended. (JR) Read more
A professional Yankee gambler (Robert Redford) falls for the politically committed wife (Lena Olin) of a wealthy Cuban radical (Raul Julia) on the eve of the Cuban revolution (Christmas 1958), and finds himself, like Casablanca’s Rick, getting sucked into politics in spite of himself. The plot’s a lot skimpier than Casablanca’s, but the running time is 40-odd minutes longer, thanks to the film’s efforts (mainly successful) to re-create the place and period in some detailalthough Castro’s rebels don’t put in much of an appearance, and the movie’s determination to slip as many Sinatra tunes as possible into the sound track occasionally seems labored. (David Grusin’s score also features other period hits, romantic schmaltz, and the umpteenth rip-off of Sketches of Spain.) In fact, elaborate visual mounting and iconographic placement of the romantic leads are the movie’s preoccupation, with the overthrow of Batista merely providing local color; American fence-sitting may be part of what the liberal filmmakersscreenwriters Judith Rascoe and David Rayfiel and director Sydney Pollackhave in mind, but the revolution itself is scaled to the hero’s narrow vision, and consequently remains in the wings throughout. What emerges is watchable enough in terms of spectacle, with a good secondary castincluding Alan Arkin, Tomas Milian, Richard Farnsworth, Mark Rydell, and Fred Asparagus (the latter essaying a sort of Cuban Sydney Greenstreet)but is nonetheless thematically limited (1990). Read more
Described as a Godardian semidocumentary, Bruno Moll’s Swiss film about a 50-year-old lesbian with a rocky past features both the woman herself and an actress (Serena Wey) portraying her. Read more
A better-than-average compilation of animated shorts from Czechoslovakia, England, France, Hungary, Italy, Switzerland, the USSR, and the U.S., which predominates (12 shorts out of 20). Among the highlights are some excellent examples of Claymation from England (Peter Lord’s War Story) and Czechoslovakia (Jan Svankmajer’s Darkness, Light, Darkness), two striking animal fables from the Soviet Union (Alexei Karaev’s Welcome and Mikhail Aldashin’s Poumse), and some funny and imaginative American efforts (Michael A. Kory’s Bonehead, Sylvie Fefer’s Personality Software, George Griffin’s New Fangled, Lidia Przyluska and J. Otto Siebold’s Istanbul (Not Constantinople), and John Kricfalusi’s Big House Blues). One has to put up with inevitable and relatively routine spin-offs from previous animation collections, but otherwise the level of achievement is quite high (1990). (JR) Read more
An eccentric, promiscuous single Jewish mother (Cher) with daughters aged 15 (Winona Ryder) and 9 (Christina Ricci) keeps pulling up stakes and moving whenever her relationships with men go bad. Finally resettling with her girls in a small coastal town in Massachusetts, she becomes acquainted with the kindhearted proprietor of a shoe store (Bob Hoskins), while her older daughter, set on becoming a nun, becomes infatuated with the caretaker of the nearby convent (Michael Schoeffling). Adapted by June Roberts from Patty Dann’s novel and directed by Richard Benjamin, this comedy-drama set in 1963 is amiable enough and capably acted, but it never becomes as singular or as memorable as it wants to be. However, the interplay between Ryder and Cher is certainly well handled (1990). (JR) Read more
Virginia Woolf meets the German camp underground in this 126-minute extravaganza of performance art and oddity by Ulrike Ottinger. Actually, the political focus is closer to that of Tod Browning’s Freaks than to Woolf’s Orlando, though Ottinger has taken from Woolf the notion of an ideal protagonist [who] represents all the social possibilitiesman and womanwhich we normally do not have. The five episodes situate the hero/heroine in the Freak City department store (along with her seven dwarf shoemakers), in the Middle Ages, toward the end of the Spanish Inquisition, in a circus (where he falls in love with Delphine Seyrig, one of a pair of Siamese twins), and on a grand European tour with four bunnies (during which she appears at an annual festival of ugliness). The whole movie is as variable as a circus, but there are some priceless bits, including a virtuoso solo performance of Christ on the cross (1981). (JR) Read more
