It’s been suggested by the editor of the Budapest Daily News that one reason this 1993 Hungarian comedy, set during the 60s, was the most popular local movie ever released in Hungary is that Hungarian audiences are tired of films that are forever digging up the policies and social issues of the past. There’s clearly no threat of that happening here. This is a jaunty account of a wooden-hanger salesman (played by director and cowriter Robert Koltai, his first feature) taking along his awkward teenage nephew on trips to various trade fairs and the racetrack, and cluing him in to the facts of life, sexual and otherwise. The uncle has been compared to a life force like Zorba the Greek and Auntie Mame, and if you love those characters I guess you’ll enjoy this too; I was much more intrigued by the ambiguous nature of the character’s ethnic background. (JR) Read more
By reputation at least, this is a seminal early work (1978) by Peter Greenaway45 minutes long, involving the jokey reconstruction of an imaginary film. (JR) Read more
Perhaps the most intriguing fact about this clever, touching, and well-directed independent feature is that the script was written by the late Endre Bohem in 1935 and revised by his son Leslie only a few years agoa form of generational continuity reflected in one of the delayed revelations of the plot as well. The storyset in the present, though one can imagine it set during the Depressionconcerns the fate of a single $20 bill that’s dropped on a city street, picked up, spent, given away, lost, and pursued by many people for multiple reasons, always gaining new significance with each new setting. Most of the resulting miniplots are self-contained, but the script also gracefully brings back characters, making a roundelay exercise like the 1993 Chain of Desire look fairly crude by comparison. Documentary filmmaker Keva Rosenfeld has switched to fiction with a great deal of craft and assurance, never allowing the large number of characters to seem top-heavy or confusing. The able cast includes Linda Hunt, Elisabeth Shue, Christopher Lloyd, Steve Buscemi, Brendan Fraser, Gladys Knight, Melora Walters, and Kamal Holloway. (JR) Read more
A pointless second film version of Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel. Done in English and with a miscast American movie star as hero, just like its 1962 predecessor (by Orson Welles), this is shot on locationi.e., in Prague, a much more concrete location than the one in the bookand, as pedantically written by Harold Pinter, sticks superficially closer than Welles’s version to the original novel in terms of events. But under the unimaginative hand of English director David Jones, far from offering a true conceptual alternative to Welles, this film often plagiarizes Welles’s work, and, worse still, tends to plagiarize the less interesting shots. Twin Peaks’s Kyle MacLachlan makes a rather unconvincing Josef K (most of his actorly energy seems taken up in pronouncing clerk as clark to make him sound English), but the remainder of the cast is much betterAnthony Hopkins, Jason Robards, Polly Walker, Juliet Stevenson, and Alfred Molinaand Phil Meheux’ black-and-white cinematography is at least serviceable. If you don’t find the notion of a Masterpiece Theatre edition of Kafka as offensive as I do, you might actually enjoy this. (JR) Read more
Lara Flynn Boyle, Stephen Baldwin, and Josh Charles play college roommates who fight against their sexual attractions for one another (heterosexual as well as homosexual) to preserve their friendship, in a charming romantic comedy written and directed by Andrew Fleming. The movie’s clear reference point is Truffaut’s Jules and Jim of over 30 years ago, and despite a few false moments, its sweetness occasionally approximates some of the charm of the earlier picture. (JR) Read more
If you know much about pianist and musical visionary Gould, this intelligent Canadian feature (1993) by Francois Girard may leave you feeling somewhat dissatisfied, and if you know much about avant-garde film, you’ll recognize this as a popularized simplification and dilution of the much better work of conceptual artists like Michael Snow, not as anything especially new. But if you fit neither category, this is a fascinating and easy-to-take set of musings on a fascinating artist. Whether the sequences actually number 32 is a moot point, but the frequent shifting of stylistic gears between various fictional and documentary formats, a performance by Colm Feore as Gould that doesn’t try to re-create any of his keyboard behavior, and a lot of good music on the sound track all help to make up for the middle-class and middlebrow pitches about the inscrutable genius of eccentric artists. Don McKellar collaborated on the script. (JR) Read more
A savage indictment of the greed and materialism overtaking postwar Vietnam, this 1988 adaptation of Nguyen Huy Thiep’s controversial short story of the same title, directed by Nguyen Khac Loi, is a grim satire laced with black humor that recalls some of the Mexican comedies of Luis Bu Read more
A pretty funny satire (1994) about a dysfunctional, argumentative American family, headed by Judy Davis and Kevin Spacey, going ballistic at Christmastime. A jewel thief played by Denis Leary kidnaps the quarreling couple and winds up functioning as a combined family therapist and comrade-in-arms when the horrid in-laws turn up for dinner. What makes most of this work is the brio of the acting, though the direction by Ted Demme and the script by Richard LaGravenese and Marie Weiss certainly don’t hurt. With Glynis Johns, Robert J. Steinmiller Jr., and Raymond J. Barry. R, 93 min. (JR) Read more
The best Ken Loach movie I’ve seen, this energizing and subversive 1993 English tragicomedy about an unemployed Catholic man on the dole in a Manchester suburba scam-meister who, along with an unemployed friend, specializes in petty thefts and small jobs such as cleaning drains to support his familydeservedly won a special jury prize at Cannes and was an audience favorite at Locarno. Inspired by the real-life experiences of screenwriter Jim Allen, the plot hinges on the hero’s desperate efforts to retain his self-respect against all odds after his partner’s van is stolen. He’s supposed to somehow get his daughter the traditional white dress, shoes, veil, and gloves for her upcoming first communion, and complications and emotions escalate. The movie has a terrific payoff. With Bruce Jones, Julie Brown, Ricky Tomlinson, Tom Hickey, and Gemma Phoenix. (JR) Read more
This college gross-out comedy (1994) is good, amusing, disreputable fununtil it starts getting solemn and preachy. In keeping with the usual checks and balances of Hollywood exploitation, the ribbing of various campus protest groups is eventually balanced by the obnoxiousness of the neocons, and the hero’s closing (and rather class-blind) sermon on the virtues of democracy is immediately, cheerfully illustrated by the entire student body virtually turning into a lynch mob (which is OK as long as the lynch victim is a neocon villain). Directed by actor Hart Bochner (not badly) from a script by Zak Penn and Adam Leff; with Jeremy Piven, Chris Young, and David Spade. 79 min. (JR) Read more
A fascinating documentary (1992) that’s much easier to watch than you’d think. Filmmaker Frank Perry (David and Lisa, Mommie Dearest) charts his own determined fight against inoperable cancer, and the amazing thing is how cheerful it makes him seem. Part of his philosophy (and the film’s) is that state of mind influences state of body, which means that he tries out all sorts of alternative healing methods, many of which seem to work; perhaps even more important is the attitude he takes toward his search and his joyful sense of discovery. The film is as interesting for what it leaves out as for what it includes (we learn nothing about his family or his closest friends, apart from his cameraman and sound person), but what it includes seems like very strong medicine. (JR) Read more
With the possible exception of Kurosawa, Nagisa Oshima (In the Realm of the Senses, Empire of Passion, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence) is the greatest living Japanese filmmaker. Unfortunately, most Americans’ knowledge of the modernist Japanese cinema doesn’t include Death by Hanging, Boy, The Man Who Left His Will on Film, The Ceremony, and many other Oshima masterworks. Max Mon Amour (1986) isn’t as good as those movies, but then what else is? This dry drawing-room comedy about an English diplomat’s wife (Charlotte Rampling) who has a serious affair with a chimpanzee was produced by Serge Silberman, producer of Bunuel’s last films, and written by Bunuel’s cowriter on the same films, Jean-Claude Carriere. Much of this film’s ongoing humor derives from the human couple’s sense of decorum; in a game effort to preserve his marriage, the diplomat (Anthony Higgins), who has a mistress of his own, arranges to have the chimp moved into their flat. Even for a filmmaker who essentially changes style with each pictureand has a reputation as a taboo breakerthis is uncharacteristic: the poker-faced surrealism of civilized people attempting to be mature about a woman’s passion for a chimp seems, not surprisingly, more like Bunuel than Oshima. (JR) Read more
Perhaps the most amazing thing about Hai Ninh’s 1974 Vietnamese propaganda feature, partly filmed during the U.S. bombing of Hanoi in 1972, is how strong and accomplished and beautiful it is, given the almost impossible circumstances under which it was made. The simple but powerful story centers on a little girl wandering through the rubble of the city looking for her parents, until a soldier takes her under his wing. Told partially through flashbacks and incorporating everything from animation to documentary footage to studio rear projection, the film is remarkable not only for its sincerity and emotional directness but for its accomplished visual style. And though it was clearly designed to boost morale, its anti-American feeling is remarkably mild given what we were doing to Vietnam at the time, especially compared to the anti-Vietnamese sentiments expressed in The Green Berets and The Deer Hunter; there’s even a sympathetic American character, a nurse shown caring for wounded Vietnamese. (JR) Read more
A 1976 experimental narrative feature by former dancer Yvonne Rainerwitty, word happy, and at her most Godardian (as well as abstruse) as she traces the relationship between a middle-class female artist and her lover through fragmented (and fragmentary) texts, postcard collages, various actors (including Rainer) playing the same roles, and vintage Rainer wisecracks. 90 min. (JR) Read more
Adapted from a successful play, this tense Venezuelan political thriller (1992), directed with craft and discretion by Alejandro Saderman, follows the principled decision of a nun to shelter a fugitive from armed rebels during a civil war, the ambivalent cooperation she elicits from a fellow nun, and the price they both have to pay for their courage. Saderman sticks to the claustrophobic feeling I assume the original play had, while still conveying a detailed sense of the surrounding community, from mayor to bishop to shopkeeper. Wisely, he tends to veer away from close-ups when he wants certain dramatic points to register; indeed, many of this film’s finest momentsmost of them related to the performance of Veronica Oddo, who plays the more committed nuntranspire in long shot. (JR) Read more
