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
Carmen Maura (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) and Andres Pajares star as the headlining couple in the Elegant Variety Show, a vaudeville troupe entertaining Spanish Republican soldiers in 1938, shortly before their defeat by the fascists in the Spanish civil war. Traveling with a young deaf-mute assistant (Gabino Diego), they’re arrested in a town recently occupied by the fascists and are eventually compelled to perform a morale-boosting show for the fascist troops — as well as for Polish prisoners who are about to be shot — that an Italian lieutenant (Maurizio di Razza) will direct. Carlos Saura, directing an adaptation of Jose Sanchis Sinisterra’s play Carmela by novelist and veteran screenwriter Rafael Azcona, was the most prominent filmmaker based in Spain during the latter part of Franco’s reign, so the multiple tensions and conflicts expressed in this finely tuned 1990 drama are deeply felt as well as cogently expressed. Maura is quite wonderful as the title heroine, and the period flavor is handled with a great deal of potency; the title tune, a popular song in the Republican zone during the Spanish civil war, is especially stirring. (JR) Read more
Jean Vigo’s only full-length feature (1934, 89 min.), one of the supreme masterpieces of French cinema, was edited and then brutally reedited while Vigo was dying, so a definitive restoration is impossible. (The reassembled version released in France in 1990 is almost certainly the best and most complete we’ll ever be able to seeit’s wondrous to behold.) The simple love-story plot involves the marriage of a provincial woman (Dita Parlo) to the skipper of a barge (Jean Daste), and the only other characters of consequence are the barge’s skeletal crew (Michel Simon and Louis Lefebvre) and a peddler (Gilles Margaritis) who flirts with the wife at a cabaret and describes the wonders of Paris to her. The sensuality of the characters and the settings, indelibly caught in Boris Kaufman’s glistening cinematography, are only part of the film’s remarkable poetry, the conviction of which goes beyond such categories as realism or surrealism, just as the powerful sexuality in the film ultimately transcends such categories as heterosexuality, homosexuality, and even bisexuality. Shot by shot and moment by moment, the film is so fully alive to the world’s possibilities that magic and reality seem to function as opposite sides of the same coin, with neither fully adequate to Vigo’s vision. Read more
At the end of a day when more than 1,000 allied bombing missions had been carried out against Iraq and Kuwait, ABC’s Ted Koppel said, “Since that Scud missile hit Tel Aviv earlier today, it has been a quiet night in the Middle East.” A comparable obliviousness to the fate of nonwhites led to the U.S. delivery of airplanes and 2,4-D herbicide to Burma’s brutally repressive, totalitarian military regime–ostensibly to be used to wipe out opium fields. In fact, the gifts were also used against students and ethnic rebels of the National Democratic Front; food crops, cattle, people, and water supplies were sprayed in an effort to quell the civil war that has been raging in Burma for almost 40 years. The complexity of a situation in which one of the most prominent rebels, commanding about 12,000 troops in his fight for the independence of the Shan state, is also an opium warlord wasn’t lost on Brian Beker, the producer, director, and narrator of this fine hour-long documentary, filmed at great risk in 1989. The film also offers videotape coverage of the 1988 uprising, when around 15,000 civilians were slaughtered by government troops. As an introduction to some of the intricacies of a revolution in the largest country in Southeast Asia–and evidence of what the “noble intentions” of the U.S. Read more
I’m not much of a James Ivory fan, but this adaptation of Evan S. Connell’s novels Mrs. Bridge (1959) and Mr. Bridge (1969) deserves to be seen and cherished for at least a couple of reasons: first for Joanne Woodward’s exquisitely multilayered and nuanced performance as India Bridge, a frustrated, well-to-do WASP Kansas City housewife and mother during the 30s and 40s; and second for screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s retention of much of the episodic, short-chapter form of the original. It’s true that she and Ivory have toned down many of the books’ darker aspects, but as critic Georgia Brown has suggested, Woodward’s humanization of her character actually improves on the original. Connell’s imagination and compassion regarding this character have their limits, and Woodward triumphantly exceeds them. There are other fine performances as well from Paul Newman (as uptight Mr. Bridge), Blythe Danner (as India’s troubled best friend), Simon Callow, and Austin Pendleton. If the Bridges’ three children are realized less acutely than their parents, this period portraiture shows nonetheless a great deal of taste and intelligence. With Kyra Sedgwick and Robert Sean Leonard. (Fine Arts) Read more
An abused wife (Pretty Woman’s Julia Roberts) escapes from her psychopathic investment-counselor husband (Patrick Bergin) by faking her death, changing her name, and moving from Cape Cod to a university town in Iowa, only to find that he’s still hot on her trail. Although it’s directed by the at times estimable Joseph Ruben (The Stepfather), who does what he can with the script, the script itselfcredited to Ronald Bass, and adapted from Nancy Price’s novelis a tissue of so many stupid and implausible contrivances that the only possible way of enjoying it is by taking your brain out to lunch. It’s the sort of movie where all of the characters and plot moves (if one wants to call them that) are tailored to the thriller mechanics and have no existence apart from their crude functionality. Kevin Anderson costars as a young drama teacher who provides the alternative love interest. (JR) Read more
A black comedy about a mind reader, this new feature, directed by Philip Saville, with Antony Sher, Katherine Helmond, and Patrick Macnee, is being presented as a special sneak preview. Read more
If you can put up with the tinny drone of the theme music (why do so many sensitive east European films have scores that belong on ski lifts?), there’s a lot to recommend this beautifully shot and tactile feminist love story by Hungarian filmmaker Marta Meszaros. The camera takes possession of unexceptional industrial landscapes so that we remember them afterward like places we know firsthand, and the characters — including the strong-willed, independent heroine (well played by Lili Monori) — tend to improve with familiarity as well. With Jan Nowicki (1976). (JR) Read more
The 1985 first feature of Canadian writer-director Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter) is probably his least-known work. But thanks to its dynamic camera style and bizarre premise, it’s in some ways his most immediately engaging. In the course of undergoing family therapy with his parents, a young Canadian WASP (Patrick Tierney) comes across a video of an Armenian family (Berge Fazlian, Sirvart Fazlian, and Egoyan regular Arsinee Khanjian) who put their son up for adoption 20 years before. Flying to the city where this family lives, the hero poses as the missing son and becomes much better integrated into their family than his own. As in most of Egoyan’s subsequent films, video not only has an important function in the plot but is also employed metaphorically. Egoyan’s use of realistic details often proves deceptive; just as we’ve settled into accepting his plot on a literal level, he starts unhinging our expectations with ambiguities and details that don’t fit comfortably within a realistic scenario. (One particular ambiguity that is never resolved is the young man’s relationship with his sister.) The result is a very impressive debut, beautifully acted by all the leads and engaging and provocative in its treatment of the differences (as well as the similarities) between role-playing and pretending. Read more
Try to imagine Siskel and Ebert not as Chicago film critics but as a heterosexual couple in Baltimore, both of them general interest reporters whose combative instincts and political and temperamental differences become the focus of a TV show, and you more or less have the premise of this romantic comedy. Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth Perkins play the leads, and a real-life couple (Ken Kwapis and Marisa Silver) direct the separate versions of their story (both scripted by Brian Hohlfeld). The attempt to tell the same story twice from separate viewpoints a la Rashomon or Les Girls doesn’t always yield as much ambiguity or complexity as one might wish. But on the whole this is an honorable attempt to revive the feeling and ambience of a Hollywood comedy of the 50s, complete with sumptuous romantic music (score by Miles Goodman), ‘Scope framing, and a magical last-minute resolution; as such, it’s pretty pleasurable to watch. With Sharon Stone. (JR) Read more
