Though this watchable and moody English thrillerabout an American (Lloyd Bridges) visiting a former lover (Moira Lister) in London and becoming involved in a murder caseis signed by one Charles De Lautour, it’s actually the first English feature of the black-listed American director Cy Endfield, who had to work anonymously or pseudonymously even in England during this period. (De Lautour was in fact a real director whom Endfield paid to front for him.) Despite an unsatisfying denouement that suggests hasty script work (the credited writers are Ian Stuart and Reginald Long), this manages to pack a lot into its tidy 74 minutes; with Helene Cordet, Bruce Beeby, Alan Wheatley, and Leslie Phillips (1953). (JR) Read more
The usually adept Daniel Day-Lewis, employed here more as an icon than as an actor, stars as Hawkeye, frontiersman and adopted son of a Mohican (Indian activist Russell Means), who becomes romantically involved with the daughter (Madeleine Stowe) of a British officer in 1757, during the French and Indian War, in a visually handsome but dramatically attenuated 1992 adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper’s classic American novel. The North Carolina locations, framed in ‘Scope, are certainly pretty, but the period ambience is undermined by a tacky wallpaper score by Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman; all things considered, I still prefer Maurice Tourneur’s 1920 adaptation of the tale (I haven’t seen George B. Seitz’s 1936 version, but Philip Dunne’s script from that film is credited here as a source). Michael Mann, the director, collaborated on the screenplay with Christopher Crowe; with Wes Studi and Jodhi May. R, 114 min. (JR) Read more
Richard Attenborough plays the deranged father of a little girl killed by a hit-and-run driver. An explosives expert, he boards the same flight from London to New York as the guilty driver and plots to blow the plane up. Cy Endfield directed and cowrote (with Sigmund Miller) this hard-edged, almost entirely airborne English thriller with his characteristic sense of how people show their true colors, for better and for worse, during a collective crisis. Stanley Baker is the pilot and Mai Zetterling plays Attenborough’s second wife; the capable cast also includes George Rose, Hermione Baddeley, Diane Cilento, and Sybil Thorndike. Also known as Killing Urge and Jetstream (1959). (JR) Read more
A singularly unpleasant and unedifying 1991 documentary by David Van Taylor about the young survivor of a suicide pact in Reno who blew half his face off with a shotgun, and the subsequent suit brought against the heavy-metal band Judas Priest for inspiring his friend (consciously and subliminally) to pull the trigger on himself. To make art or even sense out of this horrific storywhich also involves a lot of family abuse, drugs, violence, and fundamentalismwould require an H.L. Mencken or a Nathanael West. All it gets here is a barely competent documentarist more interested in exploiting his subjects’ misery than in attempting anything that resembles serious analysis. The sheer cheapness, crassness, and inhumanity of what emerges certainly makes an impression, but don’t expect any intelligence or insight. (JR) Read more
Working with the two writers responsible for Apartment Zero (Martin Donovan and David Koepp), two of the best screen comediennes around (Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn), Bruce Willis under pounds of makeup, and Isabella Rossellini in the raw, Robert Zemeckis sustains both the nastiness of Used Cars and the animated cartoon aesthetics of Who Framed Roger Rabbit in a violent and macabre farce about female vanity and aging, featuring the mutilation of women’s bodies as its chief source of amusement. If there were something resembling genuine satire of human behavior beyond the simple pretexts for fancy special effects and relentless sadism, I might have found some of this funny. (JR) Read more
Buffy (Kristy Swanson) is a high school cheerleader who discovers from an ancient guru (Donald Sutherland) that she’s the latest in a series of girls fated to slay vampires, with the aid of acrobatic kicks, pirouettes, and wooden stakes (1992). In the middle 60s this would have been a beach-blanket comedy. The direction of Fran Rubel Kuzui (Tokyo Pop) suggests that she’s more comfortable with character than action, and Joss Whedon’s script has some fun with Valley talk (both genuine and ersatz) but strains to sell the story. Paul Reubens (the former Pee-wee Herman) and Rutger Hauer camp it up as vampires, Luke Perry provides romantic interest, and Michele Abrams, Hilary Swank, and Paris Vaughan provide the teenage backup. 86 min. (JR) Read more
A fascinating documentary by Madeleine Ali, an American black woman who has converted to Judaism, about a group of black teenagers from a high school for problem kids in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant who spent ten weeks living and working on an Israeli kibbutz. Ali carefully and, to all appearances, quite objectively chronicles the entire experience, from anticipation in Brooklyn to initial alienation and frustration at the kibbutz to passionate commitment to disappointment about leaving. Branford Marsalis provides an effective jazz score. (JR) Read more
Russ Meyer’s most deliriously mannerist and frenetically edited feature (1978); it’s helped along by an extremely arch script written by Meyer and, pseudonymously, Roger Ebert. Set in Small Town, USAa curious place peopled exclusively by hapless males (including Ken Kerr) and voracious amazonian women with abnormally swollen breasts (including Francesca Kitten Natividad, Anne-Marie, and June Mack)this is basically a parody of Meyer’s already parodic style of porn comedy; Meyer himself makes an appearance. (JR) Read more
All of Stanley Kubrick’s features look better now than when they were first released, but Barry Lyndon, which fared poorly at the box office in 1975, remains his most underrated. It may also be his greatest. This personal, idiosyncratic, melancholy, and long (three hours) adaptation of the Thackeray novel is exquisitely shot in natural light (or, in night scenes, candlelight) by John Alcott, with frequent use of slow backward zooms that distance us, both historically and emotionally, from its rambling picaresque narrative about an 18th-century Irish upstart (Ryan O’Neal). Despite its ponderous, funereal moods and pacing, the film is a highly accomplished piece of storytelling, building to one of the most suspenseful duels ever staged. It also repays close attention as a complex and fascinating historical meditation, as enigmatic in its way as 2001: A Space Odyssey. With Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Hardy Kruger, and Leonard Rossiter; narrated by Michael Hordern. PG, 183 min. (JR) Read more
Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan’s fourth feature (1991), attractively shot in ‘Scope by Paul Sarossy, is a lot closer in style and form to his third, Speaking Parts, than to his first or second, Next of Kin and Family Viewingwhich is to say that the story line seems to be only secondary. Principally the film consists of steady crosscutting between underlighted depictions of sexual perversity and spiritual deprivation that might be called Capitalism and Its Discontents. The narrative consists of several interlocking, highly didactic metaphors involving displacement: an insurance adjuster (Elias Koteas) has sex with several clients who have lost all their belongings in fires, his estranged wife (Egoyan regular Arsinee Khanjian) works as a government censor and sneaks videos of the porn films she sees to her sister (Rose Sarkisyan), and a former football player (Maury Chaykin) and his wife (Gabrielle Rose) devote their lives to playing out elaborate and expensive sex fantasies. Despite some dark and suggestive poetry in all the arty murk, the movie seems too caught up in the puritanical illnesses of its characters to provide any commentary but the most obvious. (JR) Read more
