As a writer-director with a well-honed sense of paranoia a la Fritz Lang, Alan J. Pakula (Klute, The Parallax View, All the President’s Men, Presumed Innocent) does a good job of adapting and directing this John Grisham thriller about a New Orleans law student (Julia Roberts) fleeing for her life, with a Washington reporter (Denzel Washington) as her only ally, after her speculative legal brief about the murder of two Supreme Court justices leads to another murderof her lover and law professor (Sam Shepard). It’s too bad that Pakula allows this 1993 movie to dawdle after its climax, but prior to that he’s adept at suggesting unseen menace and keeping things in motion. With John Heard, Tony Goldwyn, James B. Sikking, William Atherton, Robert Culp, Stanley Tucci, and, in cameos, Hume Cronyn and John Lithgow. (JR) Read more
The very notion of an experimental arty documentary about the great German writer Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) seems rather comic, so one may well wonder why Australian filmmaker John Hughes made this hour-long film (1992), complete with dramatized events from Benjamin’s life, interviews with intellectuals, clips from Rene Clair’s Entr’acte and Dziga Vertov’s The Man With a Movie Camera, contemporary globe-trotting that takes in the Eiffel Tower as well as the small town where Benjamin committed suicide, and loads of fabulous sound bites and printed or spoken aphorisms delivered like slogans. The fact that Hughes’s spelling is occasionally faulty seems symptomatic: there’s something faintly absurd about a film about Benjamin made for semiliterates. One can learn a little here, and I enjoyed hearing the intelligent talk of Elizabeth Young-Bruehl and Susan Buck-Morss, among others. But some of this is tacky beyond words (e.g., an Australian actor who looks like Groucho Marx reenacting Benjamin’s morphine overdose on camera). You might consider your time better spent reading or rereading Benjamin. (JR) Read more
One of the major essays of Chris Markerwhich automatically makes this one of the key works of our timethis remarkable 1993 video is provisionally about his friend and mentor, the late Soviet filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin (1900-’89), in the form of six video letters sent to him posthumously. More profoundly, this 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). Not to be missed. 116 min. (JR) Read more
An unedifying, pretentious remake of Claude Sautet’s Les choses de la vie, upper-crust naturalism and all, this tale of a Vancouver architect (Richard Gere) torn between his mistress (Lolita Davidovich) and his wife (Sharon Stone) and teenage daughter seems put together on the popular assumption that conspicuous consumption is the very soul of drama. (The fancy flashback structure, which generates whatever narrative interest the movie can claim for itself, seems 25 years out of date.) Stone deserves some points for playing a recognizable human being while Davidovich fares less well in an underscripted part, but what sabotages the story altogether is Gere’s boundless narcissism; it overwhelms every emotion in the plot. Mark Rydell directed from a script by David Rayfiel and Marshall Brickman. (JR) Read more
Clearly conceived as a companion piece to Broadcast News, another portrait of a few intense individuals in a one-company town, writer-director-coproducer James L. Brooks’s comedy about Hollywood — initially an eccentric musical until the responses of preview audiences led Brooks to eliminate all but one of the musical numbers — is a fascinating if fairly discontinuous collection of fragments. It’s maddening that Brooks uncritically embraces some of the worst aspects of status quo capitalism (such as ideological manipulation and crippling short-term strategies like test marketing) while turning moral crusader over small local infractions (newscaster William Hurt faking tears in Broadcast News, or here studio executive Joely Richardson caving in to group pressure during a casting decision and trashing her own lover, character actor Nick Nolte). Maybe he should hand out the Irving G. Thalberg Award on Oscar night, though it must be admitted that his feeling for neurotic quirks and their interactions — observable in his comic portraits of a grasping mother (Tracey Ullman), a boorish producer (Albert Brooks), and a blunt audience-opinion researcher (Julie Kavner), among others– is often exhilarating. More uneven is the charting of the character actor’s bonding with his bratty six-year-old daughter (Whittni Wright), which reportedly reflects Brooks’s own adventures in parenting. Read more
A fascinating (and fascinatingly dated) 1925 silent documentary by Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, the codirectors of King Kong, about a U.S. travel expedition through the mountains of Turkey and Persiamore specifically, about the annual migration of more than 50,000 Bakhtiari tribesmen with their cattle in search of fresh pastures. Topographically beautiful and historically potent. 64 min. (JR) Read more
Matt Dillon plays an FBI agent who gets assigned in 1952 to San Francisco’s Chinatown, where he drives a suspected communist agent to suicide, and many years later becomes romantically involved with the dead man’s daughter (Joan Chen). This very PC feature, made for TV’s American Playhouse, is dead on arrival. John Madden directs a script by David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly), and Bruno Kirby costars; with Teri Polo, Jack Shearer, Tzi Ma, and Stan Egi. (JR) Read more
The first feature (1991) of Russian critic and filmmaker Oleg Kovalov, who specializes in eccentric found-footage films, this is a wild compilation feature spanning at least half a century and suggesting at times a Soviet equivalent to The Atomic Cafe and That’s Entertainment! Playfully experimental and irreverent in sound and image, the film gets some of its eeriest effects from excerpts of a mid-50s melodrama of cold-war paranoia called The Case of Corporal Kotschetkov, in which the young hero’s beloved and her grandmother turn out to be capitalist spies. There are plenty of times when one might emerge from this skillful postmodernist frenzy wishing one knew more about the original clips, but there’s no doubt that what Kovalov has brought together is fascinating. (JR) Read more
Not to be confused with the John Grisham cream puff, this 1988 TV film by British director Alan Clarke is a powerful, 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. (JR) Read more
It may sound churlish to say so, but sometimes movies get lost for a reason. This oneadapted by coproducer Roman Polanski from a short story by Dutch writer Heere Heresma in 1969, after the success of Rosemary’s Baby, and directed by Simon [SP???]Hesera, one of Polanski’s best friendswas shot in Copenhagen, chiefly with English actors, and reportedly lost by Paramount Pictures after a single screening the following year. It recounts a depressing, meandering day spent at a drizzly seashore by an alcoholic father (Mark Burns) and his six-year-old daughter (Beatrice Edney), whom he periodically neglects and loses track of. Apart from an uncredited cameo by Peter Sellers as a gay shopkeeper, this is a grim mood piece whose potential effectivenessas Polanski noted in his autobiographyis mainly crushed by the inappropriateness of Burns in the lead part. (The secondary castwhich includes Jack MacGowran, Maurice Roeves, Fiona Lewis, Eva Dahlbeck, and Sissie Reingardis a lot easier to take.) Apart from the nastiness of the lead character, it’s hard to see what Polanski had in mind with the script, and [SP???]Heresa’s workhis first and last feature before he settled into script development and TV commercialsdoesn’t provide many clues. (JR) Read more
A nice little thriller that would be even nicer if it were half an hour shorter. Madeleine Stowe plays a blind violinist in an alternative band who regains her sight through a corneal transplant only to become an eyewitness to a murder. Aidan Quinn is the detective she becomes involved with. Directed by Michael Apted from a witty script by Dana Stevens, this movie has a lot of things going for it: lively cinematography by Dante Spinotti that contrives to suggest the peculiarities of the heroine’s regained sight and makes the most of some Hopper-esque lighting schemes; a good use of Chicago locations (Stowe lives with her seeing-eye dog at Milwaukee and Damen); charismatic and inventive performances by the two leads, with Stowe feisty and energetic and Quinn intermittently recalling Montgomery Clift; and good backup work by others in the cast (James Remar, Peter Friedman, Bruce A. Young, Paul Dillon, Matt Roth, and Laurie Metcalf). There’s also pleasant music by the Drovers, the Chicago band that Stowe’s character plays in. (JR) Read more
The most obnoxious case of masculine swagger since Andrew Dice Clay, with just a tad of Paul Lynde thrown in for spice, Jim Carrey defies you not to bolt for the exit while playing the title hero in this 1994 comic mystery, apparently concocted with the idea of giving the world another The Adventures of Ford Fairlane. I find Clay peaches and cream next to this guy. With Sean Young, Courteney Cox, Tone Loc, Dan Marino, and lots of dick jokes for boys under 11. Written by Carrey, Jack Bernstein, and director Tom Shadyac. 86 min. (JR) Read more
In Paris during the German occupation an impoverished 20-year-old pianist (Romane Bohringer) goes to work as an accompanist and all-around servant for a famous classical singer (Elena Safonova) who, along with her businessman husband (Richard Bohringer, Romane’s father), is a known collaborationist. The pianist’s love/hatred for her employer goes through further changes when she finds herself delivering a letter to the singer’s lover (Samuel Labarthe) and when the husband decides to break with the Germans and seek political asylum in England. Director Claude Miller’s free adaptation (1992, 111 min.) of a best-selling novel by Nina Berberova (much better known abroad than here), cowritten with Luc Beraud, isn’t very fresh in its story or period ambience, but Romane Bohringer proved to be someone to watch, and we’re given another opportunity to listen to classical music (producer Jean-Louis Livi also produced Tous les matins du monde and Un coeur en hiver). (JR) Read more
