One of the best pictures by former blacklisted director John Berry, this bright, underrated 1974 romantic comedy and social satire picks up a theme from his first important picture, From This Day Forward (1946)the thwarting of a young couple’s lives by government bureaucracyand really runs with it. (If you believe the neoconservative claim that radical leftists never criticize the abuses of big government, this is bound to be an eye-opener.) Here the romance is between a garbage man (James Earl Jones) and a young ghetto mother on welfare (Diahann Carroll), and Berry’s handling of the topic manages to be pointed without being condescending. On its own terms, the film is a revelation and a delight. 92 min. (JR) Read more
By my count the fourth Hollywood film of that title, this one stars Charlie Sheen as a falsely accused bank robber in flight from prison toward the Mexican border; Kristy Swanson plays the heiress whose car he takes. Written and directed by Adam Rifkin; with Henry Rollins, Josh Mostel, and Ray Wise. (JR) Read more
This 1916 comedy, the first long film directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin, is a slapstick parody of a now-forgotten Cecil B. De Mille feature of the same title that came out the previous year. As might be expected, it’s rudely irreverent and very funny. 67 min. (JR) Read more
The problem with this film’s earnest script about corruption in college basketball is that the usually witty Ron Shelton (Bull Durham, White Men Can’t Jump) wrote it long before he developed his familiar jivey style. Not even an unsentimental basketball fan like director William Friedkin can wash away all the corn syrup. The plot concerns a dedicated coach (Nick Nolte) whose declining power to attract blue chips to his team drives him to allow a wealthy alumnus (J.T. Walsh) to resort to bribery. Just about the only novelty in what transpires is Friedkin’s use of real basketball players in the cast; the abortive love story between the coach and a grammar-school teacher (Mary McDonnell)potentially one of Shelton’s sassy neo-Hawksian heroinesis strictly half-baked. With Ed O’Neill, Alfre Woodard, and basketball player Shaquille O’Neal (who projects a lot of charm). (JR) Read more
Part one (1993, 100 min.) of a loosely connected trilogy by Krzysztof Kieslowski related to the colors of and abstract qualities associated with the French flagin this case libertythis is a tale of a woman (Juliette Binoche) reassembling and reinventing her life in Paris after her composer husband and daughter die in an auto accident. Working with his regular writing collaborator Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Kieslowski had become a master at conveying raw emotional states with a pristine economy of means; as the dialogue here is all in subtitled French, which he barely knew, these means have little to do with language. He was less adept in working out a dreamy allegory about European unification. (An unfinished concerto left by the heroine’s husband that she and a colleague eventually decide to complete is meant to be played in all the EU capitals at once.) But the film’s grasp of the fluctuations of moment-to-moment experience, including consciousness itself, is extraordinary, and Binoche’s powerful performance never falters. (JR) Read more
It’s a sign of how wonderful Geena Davis is hereand how adept director Martha Coolidge continues to be in tackling women’s subjectsthat this movie manages to score much of the time in spite of a feeble script by Todd Graff (Used People), based on Avra Wing’s novel Angie, I Says. Davis plays a hard-nosed single woman from Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst who becomes pregnant and decides to have the baby; plagued by never having known her own mother, she makes a journey into her family’s past. Among the secondary cast, Aida Turturro (cousin of John) and Jenny O’Hara, as the heroine’s best friend and stepmother, are especially good; James Gandolfini and Stephen Rea, who play respectively her longtime boyfriend and her lover, are relatively predictable; with Philip Bosco. (JR) Read more
One of the major essays of Chris Marker–which automatically makes this one of the key works of our time–this remarkable video is provisionally about his friend and mentor, the late Soviet filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin (1900-1989), in the form of six video “letters” sent to him posthumously. More profoundly, it is about the history of Soviet cinema and the Soviet Union itself, about what it meant to be a communist, about what these things mean now. In the process of redefining these issues, Marker produces a guarded self-portrait and autocritique, implicitly asking himself what his own leftism has meant and continues to mean. Eloquent and mordantly witty in its poetic writing, beautiful and often painterly in its images, this is as moving and as provocative in many respects as Marker’s Sans soleil (1982), which places it very high indeed. Not to be missed. Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Sunday, January 30, 2:15, 443-3737. Read more
Daniel Day-Lewis plays Gerry Conlon, a real-life Irishman wrongly sentenced to life in prison for the IRA bombing of a London pub in the mid-70s, and Peter Postlethwaite plays his father, who was also jailed. Adapted by director Jim Sheridan and Terry George from Conlon’s book, the movie falls over backward trying to avoid taking a political position and seems a few years off in its depiction of hippie London. But the acting’s so good it frequently transcends the simplicities of the script, and whenever Day-Lewis or Posthlethwaite are on screen the movie crackles. Emma Thompson is on hand as a lawyer who becomes interested in the Conlons’ case after they’re convicted. Evanston, Webster Place, McClurg Court.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jonathan Hession. Read more
The third feature of the wild and weird Guy Maddin, the brilliant independent Canadian filmmaker (Tales From the Gimli Hospital, Archangel) based in Winnipeg whose poker-faced period extravaganzas all suggest early, scratchy talkies. This 1992 film is his first in color, but that means various subdued pastels in some spots, lush tinting of black-and-white footage in others. The typically outrageous plot–set in a remote alpine village where everyone has to speak in whispers to avoid setting off avalanches and where other forms of everyday repression result in diverse cases of deranged incestual lust–seems characteristic of Maddin in its dual nature: in part a hilarious satire about Canadian timidity, it also comes across periodically as a formalist gem about nothing at all. The ably somnambulistic cast includes Australian director Paul Cox and Canadian character actor Jackie Burroughs, along with Sarah Neville, Brent Neale, and Victor Cowie in prominent parts; film academic George Toles (who also worked on Archangel) assisted Maddin on the script. If you like the early work of David Lynch you should definitely check this out; Maddin’s work is every bit as beautiful and in certain respects a lot more sophisticated. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, January 14 through 20. Read more
These two recent short features for British television by the late Alan Clarke (1935-1990), each running a little over an hour, are separate entries but should be seen back to back. They’re not only strong examples of Clarke’s corrosive social vision and his skill in directing actors but also impressive demonstrations of his stylistic range. Road (1987), written by playwright Jim Cartwright, offers a potent look at poverty and alcoholism in Lancashire, with impressive on-location camera work and dialogue that exults in its own theatricality and musicality (rather like that of Alan Bowne in Forty Deuce and John Guare in Six Degrees of Separation). The energetic cast includes Life Is Sweet’s Jane Horrocks, Naked’s David Thewlis, and Lesley Sharpe. The Firm (1988), not to be confused with the John Grisham cream puff, is a horrifying look at middle-class thugs who start fights at soccer games. Filmed naturalistically, it was written. by Al Hunter; the cast includes Gary Oldman, Lesley Manville, and Philip Davis. Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Friday, January 7, Road: 6:00, The Firm: 7:15, 443-3737. Read more
A Jewish smorgasbord from the former Soviet Union, a fantasy on Isaak Babel’s story of the same title, directed by Alexander Zeldovitch. This freewheeling 1990 feature interweaves erotic pageantry, illustrated tales from the Old Testament, and diverse stylistic exercises around the central story of a son of a Jewish laborer who becomes involved with the decadent Odessa underworld in the 20s. Sergei Eisenstein planned his own film version of this story with Babel himself in 1925, and while this is undoubtedly another kettle of gefilte fish, some over-the-top acting and lively mise en scene keep it watchable. (JR) Read more
Some colleagues trashed this powerful look at friendship among the New York homeless(1993)directed by Tim Hunter from a script by Lyle Kessler and starring Danny Glover and Matt Dillonsimply because of its subject matter; apparently, contemporary man-made tragedies are inappropriate topics for the big screen, unlike ghosts, dinosaurs, mythical serial killers, and former holocausts. But this movie gives you glimpses of the Fort Washington Armory (sheltering 700 people nightly) that recall the famous shot of the Confederate wounded in Gone With the Wind in its epic grandeur; and it tells you things about New York’s potter’s field that easily might have found their way into Pickup on South Street. This may occasionally err on the side of Dickensian sentiment, but it has so much to say about the world we live in, and says it with such grace, wit, and raw feeling, that I recommend it without qualification. With Rick Aviles, Ving Rhames, and Nina Siemaszko. R, 108 min. (JR) Read more
If Ken Russell invented the postmodernist biopic, Slobodan D. Pesic has taken the form to delirious extremes. Pesic directed this daffy tragicomedy about the late Russian literary visionary Danil Harms in Yugoslavia in 1988. Apart from a prologue and epilogue in color, the picture is in black and white with occasional dabs of yellow; several characters (both male and female) are played arbitrarily in drag; and among the anachronistic elements is post-50s elevator music that accompanies scenes from the 30s and 40s. Harms sounds like a fascinating figure, though something tells me this picture isn’t the best way to find out about him. Still, it can be recommended as an intriguing novelty, bursting with irreverence and eclecticism. (JR) Read more
An entertaining if humdrum 1993 documentary by D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus that follows Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign, with particular emphasis on master strategists James Carville and George Stephanopoulos, shot on video and transferred to film. Seeing the actual deliberations behind image making has a certain built-in interest, but I expected more surprises. 96 min. (JR) Read more
This corrosive short feature, directed by the late Alan Clarke for British television and adapted by Jim Cartwright from his play of the same title, offers a potent look at poverty and alcoholism in Lancashire, with impressive on-location camera work and dialogue that exults in its own theatricality and musicality (rather like that of Alan Bowne in Forty Deuce and John Guare in Six Degrees of Separation). The energetic cast includes Life Is Sweet’s Jane Horrocks and Naked’s David Thewlis and Lesley Sharpe. (JR) Read more
