Jeanne Moreau, Joan Plowright, Julie Walters, and newcomer Lena Headey star in an enjoyable English comedy directed by Waris Hussein and set in Croydon, a straitlaced London suburb, in 1959. The story, adapted by Martin Sherman from Alice Thomas Ellis’s novel The Clothes in the Wardrobe, concerns a young woman (Headey) who finds herself engaged to a self-absorbed and insensitive local (David Threlfall) she couldn’t care less about. Her mother (Walters), prospective mother-in-law (Plowright), and everyone else in the vicinity somehow manage to dissuade her from backing out, and her only confidant proves to be Lili (Moreau), an unconventional, half-Egyptian friend of the family who turns up for the wedding and slowly but surely, using an arsenal of wiles, does what she can to set things right. Apart from offering a juicy star turn to Moreau, the movie has a lot of mordantly funny things to say about the conventionality of suburban English life, and all the actors shine; with Maggie Steed and John Wood. Starts Saturday, December 25, Fine Arts. Read more
A middle-class Irish couple living in London with their two young sons are at the center of Les Blair’s fresh, lively, and utterly convincing comedy-drama about contemporary urban life. He’s a town planner (The Crying Game’s Stephen Rea) and she’s a housewife who works part-time at a bookstore (Waterland’s Sinead Cusack). The film carries no script credit and was essentially generated by the actors in collaboration with Blair. As a consequence, the minimal plot, involving such matters as a refurbished bathroom and the couple’s friends and coworkers, rambles a bit, but the focus is almost entirely on character, especially the lead couple and their marriage, and the film’s surface glitters with moments of actorly and behavioral truth. With Saira Todd, Clare Higgins, Philip Jackson, and Phil Daniels, who does a swell job of playing identical twins (1992). Music Box, Friday, December 24, through Thursday, January 6. Read more
Based on a play by John Galsworthy, this 1933 British feature about anti-Semitism stars Basil Rathbone as a wealthy Jewish businessman sued for slander after he accuses an army officer (Miles Mander) of stealing 100 pounds from his wallet during a weekend house party for aristocrats. It might be argued that the film itself isn’t entirely free of anti-Semitism; as Frank S. Nugent wrote in the New York Times at the time, Rathbone’s “Shylock in modern dress . . . gets his pound of flesh in this drama, but finds his triumph empty,” which correctly implies that the character is something of a stereotype from the outset. Yet Galsworthy’s study in tribal loyalties has some less-than-obvious points to make, and Basil Dean’s direction shows some flair and genuine cinematic panache. A new 35-millimeter print of this fascinating relic, recently uncovered and restored by the British Film Institute’s National Film Archive, will be shown; cosponsored by the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies. Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Saturday, December 18, 6:30, and Sunday, December 19, 2:00, 443-3737. Read more
A pleasantly unpretentious low-budget musical from Zimbabwe (1990), written and directed by Michael Raeburn, author of a well-known nonfiction book about Zimbabwe, We Are Everywhere. The plot concerns a sort of working-class rural Candide called UK (Dominic Makuvachuma), who is knocked unconscious when he falls out of a taxicab and then falls in love with the woman, Sofi (Sibongile Nene), he gazes up at when he comes to. He’s determined to marry her, but her father insists on a “bride price,” an expensive stereo and a lot of cash. UK sets out to obtain these things, but has to contend with both his traditional “guiding spirit” (Winnie Ndemera), who wants him to earn money for his parents in the countryside and keep her floating in beer, and Sofi’s vindictive boyfriend (Farai Sevenzo). The prerecorded music is by Oliver Mtukudzi and other Zimbabwe pop stars. Music Box, Friday through Tuesday, December 17 through 21. Read more
A 1990 collection of six fictional shorts, made in diverse corners of the globe and addressing the international rights of children, here having its U.S. premiere. It’s an uneven package, but the filmmakers include the team of Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Mieville, the late Lino Brocka, and Euzhan Palcy (A Dry White Season). The jewel of the bunch is Boy, an odd, moving fable about racism, without dialogue, written and directed by Jerry Lewis and scored by Georges Delerue. Lewis’s filmmaking gifts — he initially patterned his work after that of his mentor Frank Tashlin, but substituted an invented, free-form universe for a social and satirical one — have been almost totally obscured in this country by debates about his qualities as a comic performer, but here they can be seen in almost pristine form (albeit with an unmistakable social dimension). The other shorts are by Rolan Bykov (from the former USSR) and Ciro Duran (from Colombia). Also showing are four award-winning French Canadian animated shorts from the collection Rights From the Heart (1992). Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, Friday and Saturday, December 10 and 11, 7:00 and 9:00; Sunday, December 12, 5:30 and 7:30; and Monday through Thursday, December 13 through 16, 7:00 and 9:00; 281-4114. Read more
On the run from the Texas Rangers in 1963, an escaped convict (Kevin Costner) develops a close friendship with the seven-year-old boy (T.J. Lowther) he takes hostage. A good two-part character study with a terrific performance by Lowther and fine work by Costner, which should help resuscitate his image after too many Boy Scout projects, this film bogs down when it aims for too much psychology and pathos, and it arrives at a few false moments and more than a few overextended ones; John Lee Hancock’s script has too many good guy/bad guy setups, and the suave period handling doesn’t always extend to the characters’ behavior. But director Clint Eastwood (who also plays the leader of the Rangers) is generally so good at handling narrative, savoring Texas panhandle settings, and molding performances that you aren’t likely to mind much. The critique of macho and flawed father figures that he’s been preoccupied with at least since White Hunter, Black Heart continues to be pungent and thoughtful. With Laura Dern. Ford City, Biograph, Burnham Plaza, Golf Glen, Lincoln Village, Esquire, Evanston, Norridge. Read more
All three features by Florida-based independent Victor Nunez (Gal Young ‘Un, A Flash of Green) are good, but this one’s a beauty: his first original script, it details the everyday adventures and encounters of a woman in her early 20s (Ashley Judd) who flees the Tennessee mountains for a Florida resort town, Panama City Beach, along the “Redneck Riviera,” where she finds work in a souvenir shop. Like Eric Rohmer (another older filmmaker who favors attractive young heroines), Nunez has an untiring, subtly novelistic fascination with ordinary people and events and the special feel of particular places. Thanks to a natural and highly charismatic performance by Judd, Ruby in Paradise has a graceful lyricism–as well as a complex sense of what living in today’s world is like–that will stay with you; the tempo is slow and dreamy, but the flavor is rich, and it lasts. With Todd Field, Bentley Mitchum, Allison Dean, and Dorothy Lyman. Pipers Alley. Read more
The first of Orson Welles’s two essay films to be completed and released (the lesser-known 1979 Filming “Othello” was the second), this breezy, low-budget 1973 montage–put together from discarded documentary footage by Francois Reichenbach as well as new material filmed by Welles–forms a kind of dialectic with Welles’s never-completed It’s All True; as Welles himself implied, an equally accurate title for this playful cat-and-mouse game might have been It’s All Lies. The main subjects here are art forger Elmyr de Hory, Clifford Irving, Howard Hughes, Pablo Picasso, and Welles himself; and the name of the game is the practice and meaning of deception. Some commentators have speculated that this film was Welles’s indirect reply to Pauline Kael’s subsequently disproven contention that he didn’t write a word of the Citizen Kane script; his sly commentary here–seconded by some of the trickiest editing anywhere–implies that authorship is a pretty dubious notion anyway, a function of the even more dubious art market and its team of “experts.” Alternately superficial and profound, hollow and moving, simple and complex, this film also enlists the services of Oja Kodar, Welles’s principal collaborator after the late 60s, as actor, erotic spectacle, and cowriter. Joseph Cotten, Richard Wilson, and other Welles cronies put in brief appearances; Michel Legrand wrote the wonderful score. Read more
American independent Jon Jost at his most personal and mordantthe film is dedicated ironically to his father. It’s a bleak tale about crumbling patriarchy and male hysteria in a remote part of Utah, where a failed entrepreneurbrilliantly played with compulsive, all-American cheeriness by Tom Blair, who also starred in Jost’s Last Chants for a Slow Dance and The Bed You Sleep Ingoes hunting with his son. Visually inventive and striking, as Jost’s films always are, this is as good as his All the Vermeers in New York, and given the landscapes and manias on display here, perhaps even more authentic (1991). (JR) Read more
Jeanne Moreau, Joan Plowright, Julie Walters, and newcomer Lena Headey star in an enjoyable 1993 English comedy directed by Waris Hussein and set in Croydon, a straitlaced London suburb, in 1959. The story, adapted by Martin Sherman from Alice Thomas Ellis’s novel The Clothes in the Wardrobe, concerns a young woman (Headey) who finds herself engaged to a self-absorbed and insensitive local (David Threlfall) she couldn’t care less about. Her mother (Walters), prospective mother-in-law (Plowright), and everyone else in the vicinity somehow manage to dissuade her from backing out, and her only confidant proves to be Lili (Moreau), an unconventional, half-Egyptian friend of the family who turns up for the wedding and slowly but surely, using an arsenal of wiles, does what she can to set things right. Apart from offering a juicy star turn to Moreau, the movie has a lot of mordantly funny things to say about the conventionality of suburban English life, and all the actors shine; with Maggie Steed and John Wood. (JR) Read more
This 1993 film, the second adapted from Irish novelist Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy (following The Commitments) follows the moral progress of Dessie Curley (Colm Meaney) when he discovers that his 20-year-old daughter Sharon (Tina Kellegher) is pregnant and won’t identify the father. Better-than-average sitcom stuff, enhanced by the lively performances, Doyle’s own adaptation, and the able direction of Stephen Frears (My Beautiful Laundrette, Hero). With Ruth McCabe and Pat Laffan. (JR) Read more
A young hustler (Will Smith) claiming to be the son of Sidney Poitier cons his way into the upper-class Manhattan household and affections of a middle-aged couple (Stockard Channing and Donald Sutherland), with disquieting and soul-searching consequences once his fraud is discovered. John Guare adapted this 1993 film from his own play, transplanting the action from a bare stage to a variety of realistic locations, most in Manhattan. Fortunately (and daringly) he’s retained the play’s highly theatrical language, and Fred Schepisi’s razor-sharp direction makes it both sing and soar as it explores some of the social gulfs and philosophical crevasses that define contemporary urban life. The movie basically belongs to Channing, who gives it both moral force and heat, but Schepisi delivers an audacious lesson in making the theatrical cinematic. (JR) Read more
Whoopi Goldberg plays a nightclub singer who happily gives up a lucrative Las Vegas engagement in order to teach music to recalcitrant inner-city teenagers at her Catholic alma mater in San Francisco (1993). The talented director Bill Duke (A Rage in Harlem, Deep Cover), who brought distinction even to The Cemetery Club, his previous outing, goes to sleep here, and it’s hard to blame him; why stay awake for insulting hackwork like this? James Orr and Jim Cruickshank wrote this malarkey, and some of the cute, jiving nuns from Sister ActKathy Najimy, Mary Wickes, Wendy Makkena, Maggie Smithare back again, joined this time by James Coburn in a semivillainous part. I hope what they all got paid made it worth the bother. (JR) Read more
Richard Attenborough has never been a very interesting director, but working here with a fairly foolproof packagetwo terrific actors (Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger) and an adaptation by author William Nicholson of his highly successful BBC telefilm and stage playhe does a respectable job (1993). Based on the real-life friendship and marriage of New York City writer Joy Gresham (Winger) and Oxford writer and professor C.S. Lewis (Hopkins), this is an understated love story shot in ‘Scope by Roger Pratt that makes the most of its lead players and lush English countryside, including the Oxford campus; with Edward Hardwicke, John Wood, Michael Denison, Joseph Mazzello, and Peter Firth. (JR) Read more
S’en fout la mort is the French title of this grim little feature (1990) by Claire Denis (Chocolat). It’s the name given to one of the fighting cocks owned by two men; one (Alex Descas), from the West Indies, trains them, the other (Isaach de Bankole), from Africa, takes care of business and narrates this story about their deal with a restaurant owner (Jean-Claude Brialy) outside Paris to stage a series of pit duels. We follow the training, the matches, and the trainer’s despondency and drinking after the restaurant owner insists on giving the birds metal spurs. This is basically a noirish B-film with fine, underplayed performances by the two leads (Bankole, who played in Chocolat and Night on Earth, is especially good) and a sordid, depressing milieu; Solveig Dommartin (Wings of Desire) costars. (JR) Read more
