Alexander Mackendrick’s 1963 British film with Edward G. Robinson and Constance Cummings follows the adventures of an orphaned boy travelling alone through Africa on his way to visit his aunt during the 1956 Suez Crisismda 2,000 mile journey. Fergus McClelland plays the boy. Read more
A sometimes brilliant if overloaded pseudodocumentary satire, Tim Robbins’s first feature as writer-director (1992) is an angry catalog of media abuses in the realm of politics. (Properly speaking, there are no real characters here, only types and images, which is part of the point.) Robbins plays a folksinging Pennsylvania conservative running for the U.S. Senate against fuddy-duddy liberal incumbent Brickley Paiste (Gore Vidal) shortly before the Persian Gulf war. The functioning of media itself is Robbins’s true subject, and it’s exciting to see him appropriating some of the ideas of his mentor Robert Altman and giving them more bite than Altman ever has. Robbins is attempting too much here, but the 70 percent or so that he brings off borders on delightful. With Giancarlo Esposito, Alan Rickman, Ray Wise, Brian Murray, and some deadly cameos by John Cusack (in a brutal takeoff on Saturday Night Live), Peter Gallagher, Bob Balaban, Susan Sarandon, Fred Ward, and James Spader. R, 101 min. (JR) Read more
The world of paparazzi and celebrity assault photography sounds like a great topic for a movie, but the risk of simply replicating and extending this world rather than analyzing it is fairly high. This Canadian documentarymost of which centers on photographer Victor Malafronte pursuing Michael J. Fox, Sigourney Weaver, and other stars, though other celebrity photographers are also profiled and intervieweddoesn’t entirely avoid this pitfall. But it does do a pretty good job of explaining how the market value of certain celebrity photos (e.g., of John F. Kennedy Jr. on roller skates) gets defined and redefined, how the photos are marketed and used, and how the hostile relations between many photographers and the celebrities they shoot fuel as well as undercut their mutual dependencies. Directed by Joseph Blasioli, who also wrote the script, and Egidio Coccimiglio. (JR) Read more
This is a disappointing and rather unpleasant, though thoughtfully conceived, first feature by Mark Peploe — cowriter of The Passenger, The Last Emperor, and The Sheltering Sky. A psychological English thriller, it concerns a lonely and disturbed boy (Ben Keyworth) and a slasher who goes after blind people, including the boy’s mother (Fanny Ardant) and a friend of hers (Clare Holman). Nothing is quite what it seems, but without giving away any of the surprises, I can point out that the operative film references — Peeping Tom, The Fallen Idol, Repulsion — are boringly predictable. Coscripted by Frederick Seidel; with James Fox and Paul McGann. (JR) Read more
Not to be confused with the 1949 George Cukor comedy of the same title, this is a tragicomic 1991 Soviet feature by Vyacheslav Krishtofovich, based on Anatole Kourtchatkine’s novel House of Young Women. A family of women live in a small three-room flat: an invalid grandmother (Elena Bogdanova), a mother (Inna Churikova), and the mother’s two daughters from two previous marriages (Svetlana Ryabova and Maria Golubkina). The assortment of problems that characterize their lives is the main bill of fare, building to a birthday party for the grandmother that’s attended by the mother’s current lover and both her former husbands, an awkward and agonizing event of escalating awfulness. Nicely played and measured, and a good indication of some of the confusions that plague contemporary Russian life. (JR) Read more
Clint Eastwood directs his first and most accomplished western in years from a rather elaborate script by David Webb Peoples (who cowrote Blade Runner). Like Bird, this movie seems at times to equate dark cinematography with artistry (albeit with stunning use of locations in Canada and California and beautifully composed results), and as with White Hunter, Black Heart, its view of reality depends almost entirely on countercliches, and their implied critique of the machismo of earlier Eastwood movies. Eastwood plays a reformed alcoholic killer, now a widower, father, and failing hog farmer in Kansas, who gets lured into a bounty hunt by a brash kid (Jaimz Woolvett) and persuades an old partner (Morgan Freeman) to join them. Other important characters include two prostitutes (Frances Fisher and Anna Thomson), a gunman-turned-sheriff (Gene Hackman, rather like Karl Malden in One-Eyed Jacks), an English bounty hunter (Richard Harris), and a dime-novel writer (Saul Rubinek) who mythologizes the west. As a moral reconsideration of the role of violence in previous Eastwood films, this is strong and sure, and characters who play against genre expectations give the film a provocative, smoldering aftertaste. The only limitation, really, is that the picture hasn’t much dramatic urgency apart from its revisionist context. Read more
Nicolas Roeg’s tenth feature–rather freely adapted by Allan Scott (who also produced) from a novel by Brian Moore–is characteristically portentous and provocative, beautifully edited and lyrically enigmatic. Roeg’s wife, Theresa Russell, who has starred in four other Roeg films, plays the adulterous wife of a doctor (Mark Harmon) having an affair with another doctor (James Russo) while they’re attending a conference in Mexico. Her husband apparently dies in a boat accident, but his body mysteriously disappears from a local hospital; back in California she travels to Carmel, reencounters her husband, and investigates a vision that may be connected with her husband’s apparent death and resurrection. If you like thrillers with tidy denouements, this may not be your cup of tea. But Roeg’s grasp of his material never ceases to be serious and suggestive, and it carries echoes of such transcendental art movies as Stromboli and Vertigo. With Talia Shire, Richard Bradford, and Will Patton (1991). A Chicago premiere. (Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, Friday and Saturday, August 21 and 22, 7:00 and 9:00; Sunday, August 23, 5:30 and 7:30; and Monday through Thursday, August 24 through 27, 7:00 and 9:00; 281-4114) Read more
Shot with camera equipment and film stock furnished by Jon Jost, the third feature from radical independent writer-director-cinematographer-editor Gregg Araki–after the award-winning Three Bewildered People in the Night and The Long Weekend (O’Despair)–is a talky but potent doomed-couple-on-the-run picture in which both leads are desperate young men who recently tested HIV positive. Jon (Craig Gilmore) is a sometime film critic who lives in LA, and Luke (Mike Dytri) is a cop killer on the run; in a rough parallel to Godard’s Breathless, Gilmore plays Jean Seberg to Dytri’s Jean-Paul Belmondo. After beginning with episodes involving Luke in flight from murderous women (including Mary Woronov) that seem more misogynistic than satirical, the film settles down to something more serious and affecting, though not always more lucid. The main postmodernist references Araki has in mind are plainly Godard and Antonioni, and the sincerity and purity of his rage often gives this film more bite than its verbose and raw dialogue; a sharp sense of camera and editing rhythm helps (1991). (Music Box, Friday through Thursday, August 14 through 20) Read more
Andrei Tarkovsky’s first major film, cowritten by Andrei Konchalovsky, about a 15th-century icon painter. This medieval epic announced the birth of a major talent; it also stuns with the sort of unexpected poetic explosions we’ve come to expect from Tarkovsky: an early flying episode suggesting Gogol, a stirring climax in color. Not to be missed (1965). (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Saturday, August 15, 7:00, and Sunday, August 16, 6:00, 443-3737) Read more
Like Monsieur Hire, Patrice Leconte’s subsequent feature (1990), written with Claude Klotz, is a claustrophobic, bittersweet tale of middle-aged sexual obsession filmed in ‘Scope. But I enjoyed this film more, perhaps because the colors and moods tend to be brighter, with more of a sense of comedy. After 40 years of dreams about marrying a hairdresser, the hero (Jean Rochefort) finally meets the manager of a salon (Anna Galiena) who happens to be married to the owner. Peter Greenaway regular Michael Nyman composed the music; with Roland Bertin and Maurice Chevit. (Fine Arts) 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. (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Sunday, August 9, 4:30, 443-3737) Read more
Writer-director-producer Darryl Roberts’s second Chicago-made feature (1992), a vast technical advancement over The Perfect Model (1989), still shows that he has a lot to learnin particular, how to tell a story and how to prune a script. But his flair for dialogue and his spirited cast (which includes Darnell Williams, Salli Richardson, Daniel Gardner, Raymond Whitfield, Debra Crable, Jonelle Kennedy, and Charnele Brown, as well as himself) keep one of the talkiest movies within memory going. A comedy about relationships among young blacks, it bristles with enough issues and personalities to compensate for much of the shapelessness. (JR) Read more
Nicolas Cage loses his fiancee (Sarah Jessica Parker) to James Caan in a poker game and a flock of Elvis impersonators go skydiving over Las Vegas, in an enjoyable though distinctly second-degree comedy by writer-director Andrew Bergman. Full of fun around the edges, it’s rather flat and unfelt at the center. (The three leading characters would make more sense in an Esther Williams musical than in a character comedy like this one.) It’s not on the level of Bergman’s So Fine and The Freshman, but you might have some fun with it. With Johnny Williams, John Capodice, Robert Costanzo, Anne Bancroft, Pat Morita, Peter Boyle, and Seymour Cassel. 95 min. (JR) Read more
It seems a pity that the controversial black film pioneer Oscar Micheaux is known nowadays mainly for his technically rough and transgressive sound films, when films such as Body and Soul (1924) indicate that he was a highly skilled silent director. Within Our Gates (1919) premiered in Chicago in early 1920 and was then banned for its treatment of a southern lynching. 79 min. (JR) Read more
A highly realistic and convincing treatment of homeless runaway teenagers on Hollywood Boulevard, this feature was directed by Marc Rocco, who collaborated on the script with Michael Hitchcock and Kurt Voss. The strong cast includes Dermot Mulroney, Balthazar Getty, Sean Astin, Ricki Lake, James LeGros, and Lara Flynn Boyle as the runaways; an uncredited Kyle MacLachlan and Laura San Giacomo in smaller parts; and Peter Dobson, Adam Baldwin, Nancy McKeon, and Stephen Tobolowsky. Aside from one slow-motion sequence, the film treats its subject with few commercial concessions, so one hopes that the horrible and decidedly unmemorable title won’t keep people away; this may be the best movie to look at disaffected youth since River’s Edge and Pump Up the Volume. (JR) Read more