The resourceful Bill Duke, best known in the past as an actor (Car Wash, American Gigolo) and as a director of black pictures (A Rage in Harlem, Deep Cover), turns his directorial hand toward Broadway-matinee white materiala comedy adapted by Ivan Menchell from his play about three Jewish widows in Pittsburgh (Ellen Burstyn, Olympia Dukakis, and Diane Ladd) who meet at their husbands’ graves. Duke’s sensitive handling of actors remains so acute that he and his able cast (which also includes Danny Aiello, Lainie Kazan, and Christina Ricci) periodically transcend their humdrum material. (Burstyn in particular is very strong, and when she embarks on a romance with a Jewish widower played by Aiello the movie moves into high gear.) It’s also worth noting that the Jewish milieu is adroitly and persuasively sketched in without being overplayed in the customary Broadway-matinee manner. (JR) Read more
A remarkable noir effort by the neglected but formidable writer-director Cyril Endfield (Try and Get Me!, Zulu), shot on a B-minus budget in six days and running just over an hour, crams so much hallucinatory plot into one 24-hour period that the results have some of the hysteria as well as the dreamy drift of subsequent apocalyptic thrillers like Kiss Me Deadly. William Gargan plays a reporter who goes chasing after an album with an argyle cover that implicates Americans who collaborated with Nazis during the war, and all sorts of gruff types go chasing after him as a result. Most impressive here, apart from Endfield’s signature pessimism about human weaknesses, are the ingenious visual and temporal strategies used to condense the narrative materialeverything from a dripping faucet to signify the death of one character to the parsimonious use of voice-over imagery. (JR) Read more
Amos Gutman’s Israeli feature about the unconsummated love between two men (Sharon Alexander and Gal Hoyberger) from Tel Aviv, one of whom is HIV-positive. Serious and thoughtful, if not very energetic, it won first prize at the 1992 Jerusalem film festival. (JR) Read more
Directed by Frank Marshall (Arachnophobia) from a script by John Patrick Shanley (Joe Versus the Volcano), this adventure movie is based on the true story of the ten-week ordeal of survivors of a 1972 plane crash in the Andes. (Ultimately they survived by eating their dead companions.) There are a few good action sequences here, but one has to endure the long stretches between them, and the picture’s sense of character is so thin that one’s interest in the eventual outcome remains mainly academic. John Malkovich appears briefly and uncredited in a prologue and epilogue; the principal actors are Ethan Hawke, Vincent Spano, and Josh Hamilton. (JR) Read more
