Three videos, including the Chicago premieres of Maria Beatty’s Sphinxes Without Secrets (1990), an hour-long documentary about women performance artists (among them Diamanda Galas, Holly Hughes, Joan Jonas, Robbie McCauley, Annie Sprinkle, Rachel Rosenthal, and Adrian Piper), and Laurie Anderson’s 20-minute What You Mean We? (1986). Receiving its world premiere is Suzie Silver’s subversive, gender-bending four-minute A Spy (Hester Reeves Does the Doors), a wild and inventive music video featuring Hester Reeves lip-synching the Doors’ “The Spy.” (Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, Friday and Saturday, May 15 and 16, 7:30 and 9:15, and Sunday, May 17, 6:00 and 7:45, 281-4114) Read more
Orson Welles’s 1952 independent feature is finally back in circulation, looking better than ever thanks to restoration work, but also sounding quite different because of the restorers’ debatable decision to redo the brilliant score and sound effects in stereo. For all the liberties taken with the play, this may well be the greatest of all Shakespeare films (Welles’s later Chimes at Midnight is the only other contender)–a brooding expressionist dream of the play shot in eerie Moorish locations in Morocco and Italy over nearly three years, yet held together by a remarkably cohesive style and atmosphere (and beautifully shot by Anchisi Brizzi, G.R. Aldo, and George Fanto). Welles, despite his misleading reputation in the U.S. as a Hollywood filmmaker, made about 75 percent of his films as a fly-by-night independent in order to regain the artistic control he’d had on Citizen Kane; Othello, the first of these features, is, arguably, an even more important film in his career than Kane, since it inaugurated the more fragmented shooting style that dominates his subsequent work. The most impressive performance here is that of Micheal MacLiammoir as Iago; Welles’s own underplaying of the title role meshes well with the somnambulistic mood, but apart from some magnificent line readings makes less of a dramatic impression. Read more
My candidate for the best Derek Jarman movie to date is this politically potent and deliberately shocking and anachronistic adaptation of the Christopher Marlowe play that rethinks it in terms of contemporary English homophobia and just about everything else that might be summed up as the Thatcher-Reagan legacy. Shooting his spare settings in crisp 35-millimeter images, Jarman gives the tragedy a seriousness and potency that puts Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books to shame. Coscripted by Stephen McBride and Ken Butler; with Steve Waddington, Andrew Tiernan, Tilda Swinton, Nigel Terry, and Jerome Flynn, and music performed by the Elektra Quartet. (At one climactic juncture, Annie Lennox of the Eurythmics performs Cole Porter’s “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye.”) (Broadway) Read more
Writer-director Keith Gordon sustains rather than fulfills the interesting promise of his first feature (The Chocolate War, 1988) in another taut novel adaptation that shows the influence of Stanley Kubrick. The novel this time is by William Wharton, who also wrote the source novels for Birdy and Dad; it’s a semiautobiographical account of the members of a young World War II infantry squad, stuck in a deserted French chateau during the Christmas season in 1944, who form a sort of perverse family (two of the soldiers are nicknamed “Father” and “Mother”) and make uncertain contact with a small German squad that may or may not want to surrender. This fable about the futility of the war benefits not only from fine performances but an intelligent and literate offscreen narration that enhances the movie’s conceptual integrity. With Peter Berg, Kevin Dillon, Arye Gross, Ethan Hawke, Gary Sinise, Frank Whaley, and John C. McGinley. (Water Tower, Evanston) Read more
A charming but fairly lightweight Italian comedy-drama by Sergio Rubini, who stars as a shy stationmaster taking care of his mother every day and working at the railway station every night. The plot concerns his nightlong encounter with a wealthy and beautiful young woman (Margherita Buy) fleeing from a weekend party and an exploitative and abusive boyfriend (Ennio Fantastichini). Apart from some efforts to goose up the story’s climax with American-style suspense, this is basically a chamber piece whose dimensions seem ideally suited for TV: not bad for a first feature, though not likely to linger long in one’s memory (1990). (JR) Read more
Simpleminded, slapdash fare (1992) about a two-bit Reno lounge singer (Whoopi Goldberg), the girlfriend of a ruthless mobster (Harvey Keitel), who accidentally witnesses a murder and flees for her life. With the help of the police’s witness protection program, she winds up posing as a nun in a convent, and comes into her own when she starts conducting the convent choir. If you’re one of those people who think that nuns behaving slightly irreverently is hysterically funny, then this is the movie for you, and it must be admitted that Goldberg shines in her part. Directed by Emile Ardolino (Dirty Dancing, Chances Are) from a script credited to Joseph Howard (though apparently the work of many hands); with Maggie Smith, Kathy Najimy, Wendy Makkena, and Bill Nunn, and a likable turn by Hollywood character actress Mary Wickes, who was doing comparable work in movies over 40 years ago. (JR) Read more
Jim Jarmusch creates a comic sketch film (1991) out of five taxi rides and existential encounters occurring at the same time: a teenager (Winona Ryder) driving a Hollywood casting agent (Gena Rowlands) in Los Angeles at dusk; a former circus clown from Dresden (Armin Mueller-Stahl) chauffeuringor being chauffeured bya streetwise hipster (Giancarlo Esposito) from Manhattan to Brooklyn, with the hipster’s sister-in-law (Rosie Perez) getting corralled en route; an angry driver from the Ivory Coast (Isaach de Bankole) picking up a self-reliant blind woman (Beatrice Dalle) in Paris; a speedy cabbie (Roberto Benigni) in Rome delivering an obscene confession to an ailing priest; and a morose driver in Helsinki recounting a hard-luck story to three drunken passengers at dawn. There’s a fair amount of craft and subtlety in the results, though a certain sense that Jarmusch is replaying his own golden oldies (Tom Waits is in charge of the score) is never very far away. R, 129 min. (JR) Read more
George Kuchar’s newest film, receiving its Chicago premiere, concerns UFOs and alien presences; a sequel to his Cattle Mutilations. To be shown with two other new films, Stephen Kirkly’s Playing With Blocks and Tony Venezia’s Revelation, along with a bunch of oldies: Bruce Torbet’s Super Artist Andy Warhol, Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo, Bruce Conner’s Mongoloid and America Is Waiting, Charles Braverman’s The Sixties, and Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising. In short, a monster extravaganza to kick off the Experimental Film Coalition’s fall season. Read more
I’ve never been much of a Paul Cox fan, but this 1991 feature about a fiercely independent and passionate 79-year-old woman in Melbourne, Australia, is rather special, largely because Cox regular Sheila Florancewho, like the character she plays, was dying of cancer over the course of the filmis magnificent. Affirmative without being sentimental, this is a deeply absorbing movie with no false notes or wasted motion. With Gosia Dobrowolska, Norman Kaye, and Chris Haywood. (JR) Read more
Don’t let the subjectthe interactions of three men (Eric Stoltz, Wesley Snipes, and William Forsythe) at a physical rehabilitation centerscare you away from one of the most intelligent, sensitive, serious, subtle, and gripping American movies of 1992. Directed by Neal Jimenez and Michael Steinberg from an excellent script by Jimenez (who wrote River’s Edge and cowrote For the Boys), this eschews the usual sentimental tactics for an honest look at what paraplegics have to deal with practically, sexually, and emotionally. Stoltz plays a novelist with a devoted girlfriend (Helen Hunt) married to someone else; Snipes is a hard-living teller of tales with a disintegrating marriage; Forsythe is a racist biker. All three actors are uncommonly good at keeping their characters unpredictable and lifelike. Elizabeth Pe Read more
An adaptation by director Volker Schlondorff and American novelist Rudy Wurlitzer (Nog, Slow Fade) of Max Frisch’s existential Swiss novel Homo Faber, about a middle-aged engineer (Sam Shepard) in the 1950s who finds himself having an affair with a young woman (Julie Delpy) who may or may not be his daughter; the settings include Latin America, Switzerland, Greece, France, and Italy. It could have used a lot more of Wurlitzer’s humor (he’s very good on airline-hostess protocol) and a lot less of Shepard’s Marlboro Man inexpressiveness, which is indulged at great length and to relatively little purpose. Delpy (Europa Europa) is attractive but not especially resourceful in holding up her end of the screen; Barbara Sukowa does a better job in the smaller part of her mother. With Dieter Kirchlechner and Traci Lind (1991). (JR) Read more
Mamie Van Doren (the girl built like a platinum powerhouse, said the ads) sings no less than four songs and Eddie Cochran and the Hollywood Rock ‘n’ Rollers do another in this 1957 film about life on a juvenile prison work farm, where Van Doren and her sister (Lori Nelson) are sent after they’re picked up for hitchhiking. John Russell and Lurene Tuttle play the sinister villains who run the farm; Howard W. Koch directed. Read more
This poetic masterpiece (1988) is the crowning work of Joris Ivens, the great Dutch documentarian and leftist, who made it in collaboration with his companion, Marceline Loridan, shortly before his death at age 90. (In fact there’s reason to believe the film was mainly written by Loridan, though this makes it no less Ivens’s own testament.) Neither a documentary nor a fantasy but a sublime fusion of the two, it deals in multiple ways with the wind, with Ivens’s asthma, with China, with the 20th century (and, more implicitly, the 19th and the 21st), with magic, and with the cinema. Ivens was born only two years after Georges Melies screened his first work, and this imaginative, freewheeling, and often comic film reflects on that fact, and on the near century of intertwining film, political, and personal history that made up Ivens’s life. For all its cosmic dimensions, it’s funny and lighthearted rather than pretentious and ponderous; it may even renew your faith in life on this planet. In French with subtitles. 78 min. (JR) Read more
Jocelyn Moorhouse’s sensitive and well-acted chamber drama focuses on a young man, blind since birth, who’s obsessed with taking photographs. Cared for by a frustrated young housekeeper who both loves and despises him, he strikes up a friendship with another young man, and the story turns into a subtly nuanced romantic triangle and power struggle that gains resonance as we learn more about the hero’s childhood. Thematically (if not stylistically) suggestive at times of Peeping Tom, this impressive first feature from Australia shows a remarkable amount of assurance in writing as well as direction, clearly marking Moorhouse as someone to watch. With Hugo Weaving, Genevieve Picot, and Russell Crowe (1991, 86 min.). (JR) Read more
Drew Barrymore stars in a melodrama that borders on high-class kiddie porn, playing an orphan named Ivy who befriends an unhappy schoolmate (Sara Gilbert) and winds up moving into her troubled household, where she becomes indispensable to the ailing mother (Cheryl Ladd) and seduces the father (Tom Skerritt). Directed by Katt Shea Ruben from a script she wrote with producer Andy Ruben, this starts off with some spark and drive, in part because of the writing and playing of Gilbert’s character, but gradually sinks into cliche and contrivance as the familiar genre moves take over, dragging down the characters, plot, and style. (JR) Read more
