Begun by the stylish Hong Kong director King Hu (who also did the production design), completed by producer Tsui Hark, and worked on intermittently by four other directors (Ann Hui, Ching Siu-tung, Lee Wai-man, and Kam Yeung-wah), this fast-paced action fantasy, set during the Ming dynasty, features an agile swordsman (Sam Hui) with a young female sidekick in male disguise (Cecilia Yip); Jackie Cheung costars (1990). (JR) Read more
Harmless nonsense from Lucas Reiner, the son of Carl and the younger brother of Rob (both of whom put in brief appearances). Three time travelers from the year 2176 (David Cassidy, Olivia d’Abo, and Geoff Hoyle) en route to 1776 accidentally find themselves in the year 1976, where they discover that they have only 12 hours to locate the documents, tools, and artifacts needed to save the nation’s future (in 2176 all history and memory have been wiped out by a magnetic war, and they need a copy of the U.S. Constitution to make a fresh start). A lot of this comes across like Earth Girls Are Easy without Julien Temple’s sense of style, but the mood is amiable enough, as long as one can put up with some hyperbolic mugging. Reiner directed this comedy from a script that he wrote with executive producer Roman Coppola; Leif Garrett, Jeff and Steve McDonald, and Liam O’Brien costar, and among the other celebrities who appear in cameos are Julie Brown, Tommy Chong, Devo, and Moon Zappa. (JR) Read more
Conducting us on a tour of her own life in Bavaria, Sonja (Lena Stolze) recounts how her prizewinning high school essay, Freedom in Europe, won her a free trip to Paris, and how her next attempt in an essay contest, My Hometown in the Third Reich, landed her in big trouble. Michael Verhoeven’s crowd-pleasing 1990 comedy begins hilariously and develops entertainingly: he makes jokey use of the heroine’s narration as a kind of ersatz TV reporting, and there’s a certain stylistic flair in the artificial moving backgrounds. But by the time this serious comedy about Germany’s Nazi past is over, a certain moral as well as stylistic monotony has set in; Verhoeven has something to say and an engaging way of saying it, but he winds up glutting us as well as himself on his discoveriesrather as if he were a fly that landed in a pot of honey and invited us to dive in as well. Before he hits overdrive, however, this is a good movie, and the cast is adept and sprightly. In German with subtitles. PG-13, 92 min. (JR) Read more
It’s our old friends the big city serial killer and the cop team of hard-nosed New York veteran (James Woods) and unlikely buddy partner (Michael J. Fox). The twist this time is that Fox is a movie star who specializes in Indiana Jones-type roles, wants to do something serious, and figures he can land a cop part he covets by studying Woods as a role model. There’s a halfhearted effort to satirize both characters in Daniel Pyne and Lem Dobbs’s screenplay, from a story by Dobbs and Michael Kozoll, but any contrast between reality and fantasy gets jettisoned immediately for the sort of slam-bang assault on the senses that director John Badham specializes in; despite the obvious influence of Sullivan’s Travels, this movie doesn’t have the insight or backbone to come within light-years of the Sturges classic. Annabella Sciorra is appealing as Woods’s girlfriend, the two leads do their best with the frenetic material, and the movie’s nonstop aggressiveness helps to glide one over the excess, but the glut of product plugs and cornball, derivative ideasculminating in a forced set piece inspired by the tacky climax of the Marx Brothers’ Love Happyinduces nausea as well. With Stephen Lang, Delroy Lindo, Luis Guzman, and a cameo by Penny Marshall. Read more
A fascinating relic of the French cinema in the mid-30sa semimusical starring the great black dancer Josephine Baker in all her glory that remains very interesting for the racial attitudes it reveals. As in the subsequent Princess Tam Tam, Baker is paired with a white male starthis time Jean Gabin as a brother by adoption and sailor-turned-electricianwho is set up as a potential lover, but who eventually passes her over for a white woman. (Baker and Gabin grow up together in the circus and wind up working at the same Paris music hall.) One of the biggest French box-office hits of its year (1934), scripted by Baker’s real-life manager and lover, Pepito Abatino, and directed by Marc Allegret, this is a vehicle designed to show off Baker as the ultimate in exotic chic, and it concludes with a delirious production number inspired by Busby Berkeley that shouldn’t be missed. In French with subtitles. 92 min. (JR) Read more
After driving nonstop from San Francisco to Denver, a silent macho type (Barry Newman) accepts a bet that he can make it back again in 15 hours; a blind DJ named Super Soul (Cleavon Little) cheers him on while the cops doggedly chase him. While Richard Sarafian’s direction of this action thriller and drive-in favorite isn’t especially distinguished, the script by Cuban author Guillermo Cabrera Infante (writing here under the pseudonym he adopted as a film critic, G. Cain) takes full advantage of the subject’s existential and mythical undertones without being pretentious, and you certainly get a run for your money, along with a lot of rock music. With Dean Jagger and Victoria Medlin (1971). (JR) Read more
It might make an interesting study to determine why the only martial-arts movies to make major inroads in the American market are those with Muppet spin-offs as heroes. While pondering this question, one can have a reasonably amusing time with this predictable sequel, which is a bit longer on action and shorter on wit and character than the original (hence less good, in my opinion), but still diverting and harmless enough. Although the cast and director are different this timePaige Turco now plays April O’Neil, TV reporter and den mother to the turtles, and Michael Pressman is the directorTodd W. Langen, who collaborated on the script of the original, supplies the same sort of teen patter, and the late Jim Henson’s creature shop is back to provide a couple of drooling beasties. With David Warner and Ernie Reyes Jr. (JR) Read more
What’s fascinating about this Soviet film at the outseta character study focusing on a lonely cab driver (Piotr Zaitchenko) and an alcoholic, bohemian jazz saxophonist (Piotr Mamonov) who becomes his roommateis that it shows us a whole seedy cross section of Moscow life that we haven’t seen before. A first feature by Pavel Lounguine that won him the best director’s prize at Cannes, the film clearly knows something about both its characters and its milieu. But on reflection it seems that this film’s popularityat least in relation to other glasnost filmsrests in large part on its success in aping the American cinema (Lounguine acknowledges the direct influence of such films as The Last Detail, Scarecrow, and Taxi Driver), so that its appeal isn’t so much in what it teaches us about Russians as in the implication that they’re really just like us (1990). (JR) Read more
The sixth feature of experimental intellectual filmmaker Yvonne Rainer, this 1990 work is perhaps her most accessible, staging a kind of shotgun marriage between two volatile issues, menopause and racism. A black filmmaker decides to make a movie about her menopause and interviews a white friend who recounts a long story involving her unconscious racism when she was in her 20s. Rainer interweaves many other elementsarchival footage (including a Lenny Bruce routine), interviews with women about menopause, quotations from diverse sources, and fantasy interludesand the film is more multifaceted essay than straightforward narrative. Cantankerous, witty, caustic, and often deliberately unsettling in its modernist structure, it mounts a complex argument about how the privileges of being white, male, young, and well-to-do affect people’s minds and lives. 100 min. (JR) Read more
The movie that made Robert Altman famous (1970)a somewhat adolescent if stylish antiauthoritarian romp about an irreverent U.S. medical unit during the Korean war (the TV sitcom it spawned practically reversed the spirit of the original). The film also helped launch the careers of Elliott Gould, Donald Sutherland, Sally Kellerman, Robert Duvall, and subsequent Altman regulars Rene Auberjonois and John Schuck, and won screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. an Oscar. But the misogyny and cruelty behind many of the gags are as striking as the black comedy and the original use of overlapping dialogue. This is still watchable for the verve of the ensemble acting and dovetailing direction, but some of the crassness leaves a sour aftertaste. With Tom Skerritt, Fred Williamson, and Bud Cort. PG, 116 min. (JR) Read more
This ‘Scope western directed by the underrated Delmer Daves has been compared to Othello because of its handling of jealousy: rancher Ernest Borgnine takes in outcast Glenn Ford, and the villainous Rod Steiger makes Borgnine think that Ford is fooling around with his wife (Valerie French). Actually the parallels are fairly loose and hardly necessary for appreciating this taut, neurotic melodrama. Adapted by Russell S. Hughes and Daves from Paul Wellman’s novel Jubal Troop; with Charles Bronson and Noah Beery Jr. (1956). (JR) Read more
A classically masochistic women’s picture, with Susan Hayward putting on a spectacular display as the alcoholic, perpetually victimized Broadway star Lillian Roth. Richard Conte is the caddish husband who slaps her down; Eddie Albert is the pious A.A. volunteer who lifts her up. As directed by Daniel Mann, it’s a truly dreadful film but an intriguing pop culture myth. With Jo Van Fleet, Ray Danton, and Don Taylor (1955). (JR) Read more
Robert De Niro stars as a film director during the Hollywood blacklist of the early 50s who refuses to testify against his friends before the House Un-American Activities Committee, thereby bringing his own career to a halt, in a film written and directed by Irwin Winkler (the producer of Rocky, Raging Bull, Round Midnight, and GoodFellas, among other films). As a screenwriting and directing debut, this picture is not especially auspicious, and De Niro’s performance, while charming, remains fairly lightweight. This picture was originally developed by screenwriter Abraham Polonsky and director Bertrand Tavernier before Winkler, who was set to produce it, decided to sign on as director and writer instead, and one regrets Winkler’s softening of the material, which implies that the blacklist was awful mainly because apolitical liberals lost their careers; the radical filmmakers who were forced into silence and/or exile are given no voice at all. But if one accepts these limitations, along with some liberties taken with period details, the subject remains gripping and fascinatingnot really much of an improvement on The Front (which dealt with the TV blacklist, and had the benefits of Zero Mostel), but compelling and watchable all the same. With Annette Bening, George Wendt, Patricia Wettig, Sam Wanamaker, Martin Scorsese (as another blacklisted director), Ben Piazza, and Adam Baldwin. Read more
Four years after his hilarious satire Hollywood Shuffle, writer-director-actor Robert Townsend gave us this impossibly ambitious 1991 movie following a fictional African-American R & B singing group (Townsend, Michael Wright, Leon, Harry J. Lennix, and Tico Wells) from 1965 to the 90s, scripted with Keenen Ivory Wayans (I’m Gonna Git You Sucka). The result is a long and unevenly realized chronicle of friendship, teeming with subplots, packed with energy, and unusually candid about the harshness of the music business. The women in the cast (Troy Beyer, Theresa Randle, Tressa Thomas, Deborah Lacey, and the commanding Diahann Carroll) unfortunately aren’t given much to do, but there are striking performances by John Canada Terrell as a singer who replaces one of the original Heartbeats, Chuck Patterson as the group’s manager, Harold Nicholas (one of the celebrated Nicholas Brothers) as their choreographer, and Hawthorne James as the villainous record executive Big Red. (JR) Read more
A young woman (Madeleine Stowe) who writes children’s books gets arrested without warning in the dead of night because her work is deemed subversive, and a male interrogator (Alan Rickman) tries without success to break down her defenses with various forms of physical and psychological coercion. There are some very striking uses of animation (by Sheila M. Sofian and David Fain) to illustrate the heroine’s consciousness. This two-character piece, a first film written and directed by Radha Bharadwaj and confined to a single set (designed, along with the costumes, by Eiko Ishioka), has most of the drawbacks of film allegorynameless characters in a nameless country that we are asked to accept as universal, and a certain conceptual pretentiousness that can work against the obvious seriousness of the subject. But if one can accept certain givenswhich include torture of one kind or another occurring for most of the film’s running timeit’s hard to fault the execution of the material, which is crisp, taut, and purposeful. (JR) Read more