Julie Dash’s first feature (1991), set in the islands along the south Atlantic coast of the U.S. sometime around 1900. A group of black women, carrying on ancient African traditions and beliefs as part of an extended family preparing to migrate north, confront the issue of what to bring with them and what to leave behind. Lyrically distended in its folkloric meditations, with striking use of slow and slurred motion in certain interludes, this doesn’t make much use of drama or narrative, and the musical score and performances occasionally seem at war with the period ambience. But the resources of the beautiful locations are exploited to the utmost, and Dash can be credited with an original, daring, and sincere conception. With Cora Lee Day, Alva Rogers, Adisa Anderson, Kaycee Moore, and Barbara-O. 114 min. (JR) Read more
Apart from James Garner, who always seems to shine more in writer-director Blake Edwards’s contraptions than anywhere else, everyone from Bruce Willis, Mariel Hemingway, and Malcolm McDowell (with an indeterminate accent) to Kathleen Quinlan, Jennifer Edwards, and Joe Dallesandro seems to be at sea in this curious movie set in Hollywood in the late 20s. Garner plays Wyatt Earp, hired as a technical adviser on a film in which Tom Mix (Willis) stars; the two of them get involved in uncovering the murderer of a prostitute in a tale that is not quite a comedy, or a murder mystery, or a crime thriller, or an expose of Hollywood slime, but manages to make half-hearted stabs in all these directions. Period flavor and authenticity seem almost nonexistent, and whatever Edwards had in mind, he appears to have kept it mainly to himself; Rod Amateau wrote the original story, so maybe he knows. (JR) Read more
Canadian director Cynthia Scott’s 1990 first feature about the adventures and interactions that ensue when seven elderly women find themselves stranded in the Quebec countryside after their bus breaks down. Largely improvised by the nonprofessional cast, this is mainly quirky and good-natured fun with occasional cute interludes. (JR) Read more
Despite some signs of muddle and uncertainty (Ulu Grosbard replaced Dustin Hoffman as director during the shooting), this is a surprisingly strong picture about a convict (Hoffman) on parole in LA learning what the supposedly normal world is all about. Based on Edward Bunker’s novel No Beast So Fierce and adapted by several hands, this gains one’s respect largely through its secondary castTheresa Russell, Gary Busey, Harry Dean Stanton, M. Emmet Walsh, and Rita Taggartalthough Hoffman has his moments as well (1978). (JR) Read more
Tiresome mumbo jumbo about the apocalypse brought on by biblical signs, reversible only if the heroine (Demi Moore), a pregnant woman, gives up her life for her baby. The real blasphemy of this plodding horror tale is that, no matter how flat-footed the script (W.W. Wichet and George Kaplan) and direction (Carl Schultz) are, they make God out to be an auteur who could take lessons from, say, Edward D. Wood Jr. Do yourself a favor and avoid this one like the plague. With Michael Biehn, Peter Friedman, and Jurgen Prochnow. (JR) Read more
For my money, this is funnier than all the Naked Guns combined, even down to the final joke-strewn credits. Putatively a parody of Top Gun, it also includes send-ups of Dances With Wolves, Full Metal Jacket, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Superman, and even Gone With the Wind. Directed and cowritten (with Pat Proft) by Jim Abrahams, one of the three writer-directors who launched Airplane!, this shares more with that 1980 laugh getter than an exclamation point and Lloyd Bridges; there’s also much of the same pleasure in milking cliches and ridiculing poker-faced straight men with their own compliance (Charlie Sheen is every bit as well cast here as Leslie Nielsen is in the Naked Gun movies), and the airborne antics are realized with a lovely sense of craft. With Cary Elwes, a very sexy Valeria Golino, Kevin Dunn, Jon Cryer, William O’Leary, Kristy Swanson, and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. (1991). (JR) Read more
A strictly standard-issue private-eye caper based on Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski novels set in Chicago; the plot (script by Edward Taylor, David Aaron Cohen, and Nick Thiel) is simplified Raymond Chandler by way of simplified Ross Macdonald, complete with so-so imitations of some of the former’s wisecracks salted with a feminist twist. The whole thing benefits from spunky Kathleen Turner as the lead and suffers from patchy direction by Revenge of the Nerds’s Jeff Kanew; Jay O. Sanders (as the heroine’s sometime boyfriend), Charles Durning (as a police lieutenant ally), and Angela Goethals (as a 13-year-old Warshawski winds up representing and protecting) manage pretty well under the circumstances, especially considering Randy Edelman’s awful music. (JR) Read more
The last film of F.W. Murnau (1931, 82 min.), probably the greatest of all silent directors (he didn’t live long enough to make sound films, dying in an auto accident only a few days after work on the synchronized musical score for this masterpiece was completed). Filmed entirely in the South Seas in 1929 with a nonprofessional cast and gorgeous cinematography by Floyd Crosby, this began as a collaboration with documentarist Robert Flaherty, who still shares credit for the story, though clearly the German romanticism of Murnau predominates, above all in the heroic poses of the islanders and the fateful diagonals in the compositions. The simple plot is an erotic love story involving a young woman who becomes sexually taboo when she is selected by an elder to replace a sacred maiden who has just died; an additional theme is the corrupting power of civilization. The exquisite tragic endingconceived musically and rhythmically as a gradually decelerating diminuendois one of the pinnacles of silent cinema. 82 min. (JR) Read more
A feature by Hiroshi Teshigahara (Woman in the Dunes) about the relationship between the famous 16th-century tea master Sen-no Rikyu (Rentaro Mikuni) and an ambitious warlord named Hideyoshi Toyotomi (Tsutomu Yamazaki). Adapted by the director with painter-novelist Genpei Akasegawa from the novel of the same title by Yaeki Nogami, this lavish period drama is said to raise questions about contemporary Japanese values, though the parallels were less than obvious to me. Despite the beautiful colors, it comes across as a rather static period drama, almost at times a kind of Japanese counterpart to Masterpiece Theatre. It is Teshigahara’s first feature in 17 years, and the fact that he’s mainly been involved with flower arrangement in the interim may help account for the tendency to be decorative; occasional odd and striking camera angles, while effective in themselves, often seem indulged in for their own sake rather than dramatically motivated (1990). (JR) Read more
After being shot in a holdup, a heartless but successful New York lawyer (Harrison Ford) loses his memory of everything, including his wife (Annette Bening) and daughter (Mikki Allen), in an upscale weepie directed by Mike Nichols from an original script by Jeffrey Abrams. Nichols is so astute at directing the actors (who also include Bill Nunn, Donald Moffat, and Nancy Marchand) that it’s relatively easy to overlook the yuppie complacency, shameless devices (starting with an adorable puppy), and product plugs (especially Ritz crackers) that undermine the seriousness of the whole project. The existential drama of the hero rediscovering and redefining his identity is couched in the form of a fairy tale upholstered by glossy Vanity Fair ads, making this movie a genuine contradiction in terms in classic Hollywood style. Whether you’re won over or simply appalled is purely a matter of temperament (1991). (JR) Read more
This 1991 avant-garde shocker by Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven) freely cuts between three supposedly separate stories, each in a different style and set in a different period: a 40s tale of homoerotic passion in a prison that’s loosely derived from Jean Genet, a black-and-white 50s SF-horror melodrama about a leprous sex criminal, and an 80s TV expos Read more
Keanu Reeves plays an FBI recruit sent to southern California to assist an older agent (Gary Busey) investigating a series of well-coordinated bank robberies carried out by a quartet of young men wearing masks representing former presidents Reagan, Nixon, Carter, and Johnson. After discovering that the criminals are surfers, Reeves infiltrates a surfer-skydiving group that includes Patrick Swayze and Lori Petty and finds himself getting involved in their lives and lifestyle beyond his professional duties. Kathryn Bigelow (Near Dark, Blue Steel) directed this 1991 actioner and manages to bring an impressive amount of visual splendor to the proceedings, including two first-rate chase sequences (one by car, another on foot), spectacular surfing and skydiving footage (cinematography in ‘Scope by Donald Peterman), and some taut editing in the robberies. But once the characters open their mouths, we might as well be watching a blissed-out Bill and Ted caper — the awesomeness of the New Age philosophizing gets much too thick and screenwriters W. Peter Iliff and Rick King haven’t succeeded in creating characters substantial enough to justify the pontifications. (JR) Read more
Festooned with European prizes and an Academy Award nomination, this solid, well-acted humanist period dramaadapted by director Gianni Amelio and Vincenzo Cerami from a novel by Leonardo Sciasciamakes its points quietly but firmly (1990). In 1937 in Palermo, Sicily, a recently fired accountant (Ennio Fantastichini) cold-bloodedly murders his former boss, the accountant who replaced him, and his own wife (after raping her). He makes no effort to resist arrest or defend himself and expects to be executed by a firing squad. But one of the judges (Gian Maria Volonte), a pensive widower opposed to the death penalty, insists on drawing out the trial and finding a way to save the killer, despite the opposition of the chief magistrate and all the other judges but one, a farmer (Renato Carpentieri). There are few fireworks in this courtroom drama, but the film acquires a genuine sense of mass and moral weight as it develops. (JR) Read more
This ambitious but mainly unsuccessful 1959 black-and-white heist thrillera loose adaptation of a John P. McGivern novel that is credited to John O. Killens and Nelson Gidding but partly written by blacklisted writer Abraham Polonskyfounders on allegorical positioning, although the location photography of Manhattan and upstate New York has its moments. Three desperate individuals (producer Harry Belafonte, Robert Ryan, Ed Begley) plan to rob a small-town bank, and the racial conflict between the first two threatens to gum up the operations. Begley, in some ways the most interesting member of the trio, is sadly the least explored, and the jazz score by John Lewis and the roles played by Shelley Winters and Gloria Grahame mainly represent other missed opportunities. Jean-Pierre Melville worshipped this film, though I’m not clear why. Robert Wise directed. 95 min. (JR) Read more
High concept, sleek stylishness, low content. The basic idea is Young Guns remade with Lucky Luciano (Christian Slater), Frank Costello (Costas Mandylor), Bugsy Siegel (Richard Grieco), and Meyer Lansky (Patrick Dempsey) in New York in the 20s. Some attempt is made to compensate for the overfamiliarity of all the elements (read: cliches) with fancy production design (Richard Sylbert), spiffy costumes (Ellen Mirojnick), lots of gore, 30s-style montage sequences (which seem to owe more to The Cotton Club than to the 30s), and the charisma of the actors, who also include F. Murray Abraham, Lara Flynn Boyle, Anthony Quinn, and a rather sinister Nicholas Sadler. Slater, who narrates the story and gets the most screen time, does a pretty good job of making some of this seem less stale than it is, but that’s ultimately a rather hopeless endeavor. Written by Michael Mahern and Nicholas Kazan, and directed, fairly ably, by newcomer Michael Karbelnikoff. (JR) Read more
