A 1991 Swedish feature written and directed by Kjell Grede, starring Stellan Skarsgard as Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish businessman who saved the lives of many thousands of Hungarian Jews during World War II and wound up being taken prisoner by the Russians. Well-intentioned in its desire to honor its factual basis and in its grimness about the Holocaust, the film inadvertently illustrates better than most the futility of trying to make such a subject imaginable or believable by conventional means (the enduring lesson of Shoah). Even when this film disturbs, it seldom has much of the sting of reality; it’s a sad irony that even some conventional entertainments render deaths more convincingly. (JR) Read more
Framed by a shady contractor for negligence that resulted in the collapse of a school building, an architect (Helmut Griem) plots his revenge. Hans Geissendorfer (Jonathan) directed this little-seen but watchable 1978 German feature, which was nominated for an Oscar, based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith and photographed by Robby Muller. With Brigitte Fossey and Dieter Laser. (JR) Read more
Surefire mush: Mel Gibson plays a test pilot who volunteers to be frozen circa 1939 after losing the love of his life (Isabelle Glasser) in a car accident; he wakes up in 1992 and finds Jamie Lee Curtis. Steve Miner directed from a script by Jeffrey Abrams. Costarring Elijah Wood. (JR) Read more
Set before, during, and after the Israeli six-day war in 1967, Alexandre Arcady’s well-crafted French film (1992) is not precisely autobiographical, though it draws on his personal experience. The story concerns three 20-year-old men arriving at a kibbutz to visit their former classmate Laura (Sophie Marceau), who has given up a promising career as a violinist to live with Sasha (Richard Berry), a former philosophy professor twice her age. The earlier suicide of another former classmate and the eventual outbreak of war form the two major events of the story; while the attempts to combine personal and historical elements aren’t always convincing, they’re frequently affecting. (JR) Read more
A thoughtful and powerful Canadian documentary about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The filmmaker, Simcha Jacobovici, is the son of Holocaust survivors, but he has tried very hard to make this film a nonpartisan overview of the conflict that shows some of the wisdom as well as some of the unreasoning hatred on both sidesand to an extent he has succeeded. Among the many people interviewed, my favorite is a pacifist, anarchist street performer in Tel Aviv with an Arab father and a Jewish mother who has fought at separate times on both sides. (Jacobovici’s view is wide enough to include other performing artists as well, among them an Israeli dance company and a Palestinian music ensemble.) One might question at times the use of techniques associated with fiction films (e.g., point-of-view shots and flashbacks) and the occasional tendency of the filmmakers to provoke the people they are filming, though the film is sufficiently up-front to suggest that camera crews sometimes help create the violence they record. But the overall portrait that emerges, of a society propelled by suffocating hatred and intolerance on both sides, is disquieting, intelligent, and hard to forget. 115 min. (JR) Read more
What’s best in such compilations is always debatable, but if you haven’t seen any of the International Tournees some pleasant surprises are in store for you. For the record, the 17 shorts from seven countries are: from the UK, Paul Vester’s Sunbeam (1980), Alison Snowden and David Fine’s Second Class Mail (1984), Nick Park’s Creature Comforts (1989), David Anderson’s Door (1990), and John Minnis’s Charade (1984); from the U.S., Bill Kroyer’s Technological Threat (1988), Brett Koth’s Happy Hour, Sally Cruikshank’s Face Like a Frog (1987), Gregory Grant’s Ode to G.I. Joe (1990), John Lasseter and William Reeves’s Tin Toy (1988), and John Kricfalusi’s Big House Blues; from Hungary, Ferenc Rofusz’s The Fly (1980) and Gyula Nagy’s Finger Wave (1988); from the former USSR, Mikhail Aldashin’s The Hunter (1991); from the Netherlands, Paul Driessen’s The Killing of an Egg (1977); from Germany, Wolfgang and Christoph Lauenstein’s Balance (1989); and from Canada, Cordell Barker’s The Cat Came Back (1988). (JR) Read more
An excellent documentary made in 1983 by Tunisian critic and filmmaker Ferid Boughedir (HalfaouineBoy of the Terraces, Arabian Camera) that offers an intelligent and useful survey of African cinema. All the major figures are interviewedincluding Ousmane Sembene, Souleymane Cisse, Djibril Diop Mambety, Med Hondo, Gaston Kabore, Dikongue Pipa, Safi Faye, Oumarou Ganda, and Ola Balogun. (JR) Read more
The third feature by Hal Hartley (The Unbelievble Truth, Trust) stars Robert Burke as a small-time computer criminal who’s just been betrayed by his girlfriend. He teams up with his younger brother (William Sage) to look for their runaway father, a radical activist, and in the course of their search they meet a couple of unusual women, the proprietress of an oyster bar (Karen Sillas) and an epileptic Romanian (Elina Lowensohn). Closer in spirit to the Godardian mannerism of Hartley’s shorts than to his more naturalistic previous features–though with the same impulse toward the manic (and mantric) repetitions of both–this has his best and funniest dialogue to date. It’s not entirely clear where this movie winds up, but it’s a provocative journey. With Martin Donovan and Mark Chandler Bailey. (Music Box, Friday through Thursday, November 27 through December 3) Read more
Martha Plimpton stars as the title heroine–a classical musician who discovers on her 21st birthday that she’s adopted and undergoes an extreme identity crisis. It’s a quirky enough premise to build a whimsical comedy on, and first-time director Stephen La Rocque, who wrote this with John Golden, sees the situation and the unstereotypical characters with such freshness that he keeps one interested and amused. The other cast members certainly help–Hector Elizondo and Mary Kay Place as the adoptive parents, Dermot Mulroney as a childhood friend and fellow musician, Ione Skye as his huffy girlfriend–and the integral use of chamber music, with Mulroney actually playing his own cello parts, is often delightful. (Pipers Alley) Read more
Part two of Australian writer-director John Duigan’s trilogy about teenage life in the 60s (which commenced with 1987’s The Year My Voice Broke) follows Danny Embling (Noah Taylor) to a ritzy boarding school, where he becomes involved with Thandiwe Adjewa (Thandie Newton), a beautiful and precocious black girl from Uganda, at a nearby girls’ school. Not only worthy of its fine predecessor, this tender, perceptive, and gorgeously acted memory piece may even surpass subtlety, feeling, and depth of characterization. (Nicole Kidman is also very fine as one of Thandiwe’s classmates.) A winner of many prizes in Australia, this lovely feature probably deserves them all. (Fine Arts) Read more
The highly skilled documentarist Marcel Ophuls (The Sorrow and the Pity, Hotel Terminus) turns his sights on the reunification of Germany in this 1990 BBC program, 129 minutes long, to be shown on video. Much of this becomes in effect a critical reassessment of East Germany, with Ophuls skeptically interviewing such former officials as Communist Party chief Egon Krenz and secret police strategist Markus Wolf, and such figureheads as Bertolt Brecht’s daughter Barbara, as well as ordinary East Germans who have crossed into West Germany for the first time. He also punctuates his material with film clips and pop songs, often to make satiric points, and if these whimsical intrusions don’t always work, the nature and subtlety of his inquiry remain fascinating throughout. (Facets Multimedia Center, 1617 W. Fullerton, Friday and Saturday, November 6 and 7, 6:30 and 9:00; Sunday, November 8, 5:00 and 7:30; and Monday through Thursday, November 9 through 12, 6:30 and 9:00; 281-4114) Read more
John Woo’s violent crime thriller and last Hong Kong production to date (1992) stars Chow Yun-fat as a tough Hong Kong cop who loses his best friend and partner in a teahouse shoot-out and joins forces with a hired killer (Tony Leung) who appears to operate on both sides of the law. Choreographically stunning like most of Woo’s work, especially before he headed West. 132 min. (JR) Read more
The third feature by Hal Hartley (The Unbelievable Truth, Trust) stars Robert Burke as a small-time computer criminal who’s just been betrayed by his girlfriend. He teams up with his younger brother (William Sage) to look for their runaway father, a radical activist, and in the course of their search they meet a couple of unusual women, the proprietress of an oyster bar (Karen Sillas) and an epileptic Romanian (Elina Lowensohn). Closer in spirit to the Godardian mannerism of Hartley’s shorts than to his more naturalistic previous featuresthough with the same impulse toward manic (and mantric) repetitionsthis has the best and funniest dialogue of any of his films. It’s not entirely clear where this 1992 movie winds up, but the journey is provocative. With Martin Donovan and Mark Chandler Bailey. R, 105 min. (JR) Read more
Martha Plimpton stars as the title heroinea classical musician who discovers on her 21st birthday that she’s adopted and undergoes an extreme identity crisis. It’s a quirky enough premise to build a whimsical comedy on, and first-time director Stephen La Rocque, who wrote this with John Golden, sees the situation and the unstereotypical characters with such freshness that he keeps one interested and amused. The other cast members certainly helpHector Elizondo and Mary Kay Place as the adoptive parents, Dermot Mulroney as a childhood friend and fellow musician, Ione Skye as his huffy girlfriendand the integral use of chamber music, with Mulroney actually playing his own cello parts, is often delightful. (JR) Read more
A strikingly shot and edited 1992 black-and-white documentary feature by experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer, about the effacing of gay experience from official histories, beginning with the life of novelist Willa Cather. Setting offscreen commentaries and conversations against various kinds of archival and new footage (including bold images of lovemaking between women in the 70s), this far-ranging and compelling essay seems limited only by the sound-bite and image-bite format, which gives it a slightly rushed feeling. 67 min. (JR) Read more
