This is the first feature by the great Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist, cowritten with Lasse Summanen, and it’s a worthy and assured debut. Based on an actual event during a severe drought in Sweden in the 1860s, the story calls to mind Victor Hugo’s Les miserables, which was published in the same decade: a desperate farmhand (Stellan Skarsgard), afraid that his wife (Ewa Froling) and baby daughter will starve, steals and slaughters an ox belonging to the farmer he works for (Lennart Hjulstrom); after he confesses his crime to the local pastor (Max von Sydow), he’s sentenced to a harsh flogging and life imprisonment. Not surprisingly, what’s most impressive here is the way this film looksespecially the unforced and lovely handling of landscape and periodand the purity of the performances, including those of Ingmar Bergman veterans Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson, who appear in smaller parts (1991). (JR) Read more
John Goodman stars as the screen’s number one shock expert and ballyhoo specialist, Lawrence Woolsey (affectionately based on William Castle), who turns up in Key West in 1962 to present a preview of his latest horror B-film, Mant, about a man transformed by radiation into a giant ant. This highly enjoyable and provocative teenage comedy, set during the Cuban missile crisis, was directed by Joe Dante (Gremlins, Innerspace) and written by Dante regular Charlie Haas and Jerico, who all have a lot of fun cooking up the black-and-white Mant and other period absurdities, especially those provoked by war fever. They’re also pretty adroit in suggesting some of the absurdities of the early 90s (Woolsey’s scare tactics are a somewhat more benign version of the government’s, and the movie cleverly exploits the parallels for all they’re worth). With Cathy Moriarty, Simon Fenton (an English teenager who does an astonishing job of sounding American), Omri Katz, Kellie Martin, Lisa Jakub, and a number of enjoyable character actors including Jesse White, John Sayles, and Dick Miller. (JR) Read more
It’s hard to make a docudrama with this subjecta couple (Nick Nolte and Susan Sarandon) with a five-year-old son who has a rare and mysterious degenerative disease called adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD)sound good, but in its own quiet way this is astonishing, both as a medical detective story that sustains taut interest over an extended running time and as a piece of cinema combining unusually resourceful acting and direction (by Australian George Miller, best known for his radically different Mad Max pictures and The Witches of Eastwick). Trained as a doctor, Miller, who wrote the script with Nick Enright, brings to this material an infectious political passion to make difficult concepts lucid to everyone and to place medical science in the hands of people who can do something about itwhich means that this movie winds up having a great deal to say about AIDS as well as ALD, not to mention medical bureaucracies and power structures in general. Both Nolte, as an Italian economist, and Sarandon, as an Irish-American linguist, are in top form, and the secondary castwhich includes half a dozen actors as Lorenzo as well as Peter Ustinov, Kathleen Wilhoite, Gerry Bamman, and Margo Martindalenever let them down. If any movie deserves to be called inspirationala much-abused term that I hesitate to applythis one certainly does. Read more
One of the first independent American features to gain an international reputation, this 1953 effort by Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin, and Ray Ashley, about a little boy running away to Coney Island mistakenly believing he’s killed his brother, won the top prize at the Venice film festival and paved the way for many subsequent low-budget features; today it’s probably most interesting as a fragrant period piece. With Richie Andrusco, Rickie Brewster, Winifred Cushing, and Will Lee. (JR) Read more
The main reason to see Alexandre Rockwell’s flaky, independent black-and-white comedy (1992) about an aspiring filmmaker (Steve Buscemi) on New York’s Lower East Sidea movie one feels was made every few months during the late 60s is John Cassavetes veteran Seymour Cassel, playing a petty crook with a heart of gold who suddenly appears to the hero like a fairy godfather (no pun intended, despite his compulsive displays of physical affection) to serve as his producer. The movie seems conceived according to the joint emblems of Jim Jarmusch (who appears in a cameo, along with Carol Kane) and Cassavetes rather like the first episode in Jarmusch’s Night on Earth, which used Gena Rowlands as an emissary from Cassavetes’s world. Here Cassel seems to be a variation on the noble/foolish hero played by Ben Gazzara in Cassavetes’s The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, but you certainly don’t have to know this source to respond to Cassel’s enormous funds of charm and charisma. (There’s also a wonderful performance by Sully Boyer as one of the crook’s incidental victims.) With Jennifer Beals, Pat Moya, and Will Patton. R, 90 min. (
Upscale, decadent, obsessional sex between a member of the British parliament (Jeremy Irons) and the fiancee (Juliette Binoche) of his journalist son (Rupert Graves) heads the bill of fare in this lugubrious and rather contrived 1992 adaptation of Josephine Hart’s novel. Though the actors are intermittently interesting to watchand Miranda Richardson (as the hero’s wife) and Leslie Caron (as the heroine’s mother) are even better than thatthe story eventually capsizes into cheap melodrama. Because this whole project seems detached at times to the point of indifferenceno one ever seems to be having any fun, including the filmmakerseven one’s clinical interest eventually begins to evaporate. Louis Malle directed a script by David Hare; with Ian Bannen and Peter Stormare. R, 111 min. (JR) Read more
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
