Focusing on the interactions of two men (Tim Roth and Eric Stoltz) and two women (Bridget Fonda and Phoebe Cates) in an Arizona mall city over a single weekend, this is an adaptation by Roger Hedden of his own play, directed by Michael Steinberg (codirector of The Waterdance) in his first solo effort. Nicely written and beautifully shot (by Bagdad Cafe’s Bernd Heinl), the film squeaks in its joints whenever it tries too hard to make a generational statement, and may annoy you with its glibness, but it manages to hold one’s interestsurprisingly at times, given the lightweight characters. (JR) Read more
Brazilian filmmaker Tereza Trautman’s second feature is an ambitious account of a family reunion held at the family’s opulent mansion just before their estate is sold off, interweaving the activities of all three generations. The results are a little bit like Altman’s A Wedding without the sarcasm, well crafted but lacking much of an edge. As a multifaceted reflection of Brazilian upper-class history, the film has pretty much to say, particularly about the women in the family, yet the viewer may emerge at the end wishing the various strands in the plot had been wound together a bit more tightly. With Tonia Carrero, Louise Cardosa, Marieta Severo, Zeze Motta, and Xuxa Lopes. (JR) Read more
Liliana Cavani’s Italian/West German production is set in 1938 Berlin and concerns an affair between the wife of a German diplomat and the daughter of the Japanese ambassador, threatened by blackmail and the involvement of the diplomat in the menage. Featuring Gudrun Landgrebe (Woman in Flames) as the diplomat’s wife. Read more
A romantic and whimsically poetic treatment of mental illness, apparently designed for teenagers and young adults, that tries very hard to be both offbeat and sincere but succeeds only intermittently (1993). Scripted by circus clown Barry Berman in collaboration with Leslie McNeil and unevenly directed by Jeremiah Chechik, it pairs Johnny Depp as Sam, an eccentric and illiterate mime, with Mary Stuart Masterson as the disturbed and artistic Joon, whose auto mechanic brother Benny (Aidan Quinn) takes devoted care of her. The necessity for this close monitoring is never spelled out to my satisfaction, and Samwho spends most of his time offering terrible imitations of all-too-familiar Chaplin and Keaton routines as if these were the very stuff of lifeis allowed to run loose. But an overall vagueness about the characters seems necessary to keep the movie in motion. With Julianne Moore, Oliver Platt, and Dan Hedaya. PG, 98 min. (JR) Read more
Stanley Kwan’s 1991 masterpiece (also known as Ruan Ling-yu and Center Stage) is still the greatest Hong Kong film I’ve seen, though shortening the original running time of 146 minutes by around half an hour has been harmful. (Adding insult to injury, the Hong Kong producers have destroyed the original negative; apparently the uncut version survives only on Australian TV.) The story of silent film actress Ruan Ling-yu (1910-’35), known as the Garbo of Chinese cinema, it combines documentary with period re-creation, biopic glamour with profound curiosity, and ravishing historical clips with color simulations of the same sequences being shotall to explore a past that seems more complex, sexy, and mysterious than the present. Maggie Cheung won a well-deserved best actress prize at Berlin for her classy performance in the title role, and much of Kwan’s work as a director goes into creating a kind of nimbus around her poise and grace. (George Cukor comes to mind as a Hollywood equivalent.) Kwan also creates a labyrinth of questions around who Ruan was and why she committed suicidea labyrinth both physical (with beautifully ambiguous uses of black-and-white movie sets) and metaphysical. Highlights include the stylish beauty of an imagined Shanghai film world of the 30s and the flat abrasiveness of Kwan chatting with Cheung on video about what all this means and coming up with damn little. Read more
A potent and highly engrossing documentary by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky about a 1990 murder trial in New York State that attracted national media attention. The case involved the death of one of the four illiterate Ward brothers, all reclusive and eccentric bachelors who inhabited a two-room shack without running water on their dairy farm. Bill was found dead in the bed he shared with Delbert, who confessed the same day to suffocating his ailing brother in a mercy killing, but later retracted his confession and implied he was being framed. It’s amazing how many primal issues are engaged in this real-life mystery story, and Berlinger and Sinofsky, who contrived to follow the story from start to finish, do a superb job of keeping us on the edge of our seats (1992). Music Box, Friday through Thursday, March 26 through April 1. Read more
Ken Loach, perhaps the last unreconstructed English realist (Kes, Family Life), takes a funky, intermittently comic, but generally uncompromisingly grim look at a group of men on a London building crew, placing particular emphasis on a young man from Glasgow (Robert Carlyle) and his affair with an aspiring singer (Emer McCourt). Shot on an actual building site complete with rats, with actors experienced in construction, and written by the late Bill Jesse, a former laborer himself, this film has a gritty authenticity about English working-class life that makes even Mike Leigh seem like a bit of an artificer (1991). Music Box, Friday through Thursday, March 19 through 25. Read more
Paul Yule’s simple talking-head documentary, made for England’s Channel Four in 1991, was attacked in court by the Reverend Donald Wildmon, who called it “blasphemous and obscene”; Wildmon unsuccessfully tried to get it barred from the U.S. and sued the film’s producers for $8 million, which is why it’s a little late reaching us. The film is supposedly lethal because it presents both sides of the recent art-censorship debates and actually lets us see the contested Robert Mapplethorpe photographs and Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, hear the 2 Live Crew music, and then make up our own minds. What it doesn’t do, alas, is present both sides of the debate on federal arts funding–an understandable omission considering the English audience the film was originally made for, like most audiences in the world, values art and education enough to dismiss out of hand the “con” position as it’s routinely expressed in this country, which usually defines federal support of business as “freedom” and federal support of art as “enslavement,” without worrying about who’s being freed and who’s being enslaved. (Only in America, it seems, can such a debate happily ignore what the rest of the world thinks about the subject.) Without being especially brilliant or original, this film remains compulsively watchable simply because it clarifies what people are attempting to do to limit some of our cultural choices. Read more
Mikael Salomon, the cinematographer on The Abyss and Far and Away, directs his first feature (for Disney), and it’s a creditable job–an effective adventure story about two recently orphaned teenagers (Reese Witherspoon and Ethan Randall) fleeing from the ivory poachers who killed their parents and crossing the Kalahari Desert with the help of a young bushman (Sarel Bok). Adapted by Robert Caswell, Jonathan Hensleigh, and Sally Robinson from two books by Laurens van der Post, the film has a nice feeling for the terrain (shooting was done in Zimbabwe) as well as for the (mainly unstereotypical) characters. With Jack Thompson and Maximilian Schell. On the same program, a formulaic and predictably hysterical Roger Rabbit and Baby Herman cartoon, Trail Mix-Up. (Lincoln Village, Water Tower, Ford City, Evanston, Norridge, Webster Place) Read more
After a long and successful career in day care, Ruby L. Oliver made this, her first feature, originally known as Leola, in her late 40s. It’s a remarkable debut: assured, tightly focused, surprisingly upbeat considering the number of problems it addresses without flinching–and the best low-budget Chicago independent feature I’ve seen. Set in contemporary Chicago, it concerns a 17-year-old girl from the ghetto whose plans for the future are jeopardized when she finds herself pregnant. In addition, her brothers are gradually drifting into a life of crime, her mother is having difficulty maintaining a day care center without a license, and her stepfather is an alcoholic and philanderer. The plot line is concentrated and purposeful, and the cast–including Carol E. Hall, Audrey Morgan (particularly impressive as the mother), Earnest Rayford, Andre Robinson, and Kearo Johnsonis uniformly fine. In addition to writing, directing, producing, and financing the film, Oliver is also credited with casting, served as set decorator and location manager, and sang as well as wrote the lyrics to the film’s theme song (1989). (Chestnut Station) Read more
Michael Cunningham (The Hours) adapts his own novel about boys growing up as intimate friends in a suburb of Cleveland and sharing their lives with a free-spirited woman in New York and elsewhere. The sweetness of these very post-60s characters and their interactions periodically suggests the bohemian euphoria of Jules and Jim, albeit with more pronounced homoeroticism. The cast (Colin Farrell, Robin Wright Penn, Dallas Roberts) is good and the story affecting, though at times Michael Mayer’s direction makes the production seem a little choked up over its own enlightenment. Sissy Spacek is memorable in a secondary role. R, 95 min. (JR) Read more
This watchable and well-made feature debut by American independent writer-director Joshua Marston is also very much a showcase for Catalina Sadino Moreno, who plays the eponymous lead with grit and energy. Maria is a fearless and attractive 17-year-old Colombian who leaves her job on a rose plantation to work as a drug mule. For $5,000 she swallows more than 60 rubber pellets of heroin, to be reclaimed from her stool after flying to New Jersey; should a pellet break internally, death will quickly ensue. The depiction of her risky voyage and what happens afterward is highly suspenseful and entirely believable. R, 101 min. (JR) Read more
Robert Greenwald’s documentary charges the Fox News television network with biased and politicized news coverage, and presents some strong evidence for its position. Unfortunately, it also periodically stoops to the same sort of crass insults used by Fox, and doesn’t spend as much time tweaking its competitors as it might have. Still, its methodical unpacking of routine media abuses is long overdue, and one sign of its effectivenessfollowing a couple of weeks as the best-selling DVD on Amazonwas the sudden politeness of Bill O’Reilly to guests who disagreed with him. 77 min. (JR) Read more
Film scholar Tom Gunning hosts a program of early shorts by D.W. Griffith, including Rose O’Salem Town (1910) and The Massacre (1912). Gunning knows a great deal about Griffith and always has interesting things to say about him, so this should be a lively program. (JR) Read more
A whopping case of the greenhouse effect (or what I prefer to call Bush weather) melts the ice cores in Antarctica and floods Manhattan, which then freezes over; before long the disaster has nearly wiped out humanity as we know it (in other words, the U.S. and environs, though Canada is barely mentioned). Schlockmeister Roland Emmerich (Independence Day) has his usual field day with synthetic but enjoyable special effects and crosscutting between subplots (far fewer than usual). There are some fine ironic plot turns (Americans wind up in Mexican refugee camps, and the U.S. president declares, We were wrongI was wrong), but the story mainly hinges on whether ace climatologist Dennis Quaid can make up for his negligence as a father and get from Washington, D.C., to the New York Public Library before his son (Jake Gyllenhaal) and a few others run out of books to burn. All in all, good silly fun. With Ian Holm, Emmy Rossum, and Sela Ward. PG-13, 124 min. (JR) Read more
