A successful 35-year-old lesbian stand-up comic who’s been happily living for five years with an artist and gallery owner is thrown for a loop when a former close friend from high school and college turns up, husband in tow, and offers her a contract for a TV sitcom. The characters in Mindy Kaplan’s independent feature are quirky enough to seem real at first, and the generous samplings of the heroine’s stand-up routines make an interesting blend of fiction and performance. But the storytelling turns lugubrious, an arty flashback to what broke up the friendship seems mannered and contrived, and the limitations of this 123-minute feature become more apparent than the intelligence of certain details. With Jan Derbyshire, Kate Twa, Cindy Girling, Eileen Barrett, and Steve Adams. (JR) Read more
A visually striking if dramatically somewhat oblique look at a visionary girl’s struggle (ostensibly spiritual, but also clearly sexual and sensual) against the ruling powers in a 14th-century English villagea first feature directed by Chris Newby from a script by Judith Stanley-Smith and Christine Watkins (1993). The high-contrast black-and-white cinematography (by Michel Baudour) is stunning throughout, the acting is all competent or better, and the period ambience seems flawless, though a certain academic distance tends to limit our emotional involvement; what emerges is thoughtful, arresting, and interesting rather than gripping. (This was produced by the British Film Institute, and at times a theoretical rigor, suggestive of that organization’s education department, seems to hover over the proceedings.) Yet it’s an intelligent take on the Middle Ages, a far cry from the usual treatment, and well worth checking out. With Natalie Morse, Eugene Bervoets, Toyah Willcox, Peter Postlethwaite, and Christopher Eccleston. (JR) Read more
A kitschy if sincere Chicano family saga by Gregory Nava (El Norte), nicely shot by Ed Lachman, covering three generations in Los Angeles. Francis Ford Coppola is one of the executive producers, and the colorful sweep and the likable schmaltz both bear his stampthough an uncredited appropriation of Satyajit Ray’s The World of Apu in one of the major plot strands is also apparent. With Jimmy Smits, Esai Morales, Eduardo Lopez Rojas, Jenny Gago, Elpidia Carrillo, Constance Marie, and Edward James Olmos, who serves as narrator; producer Anna Thomas collaborated with Nava on the script. (JR) Read more
It’s not clear why Steven Spielberg’s Amblin decided to make a live-action entertainment starring the least interesting and most saccharine of all 50s cartoon characters, the friendly ghost who can’t help scaring people, but here’s your chance to shell out in search of an answer. Brad Silberling directed this 1993 feature from a script by Sherri Stoner and Deanna Oliver; the cast includes Christina Ricci, Bill Pullman, Cathy Moriarty, and Eric Idle. 100 min. (JR) Read more
Elvis Presley in 1961, just after the onset of his artistic slaveryonly three years before he’d wanted to star in The Defiant Ones with Sammy Davis Jr., but Colonel Parker signed him up to appear in stuff like this instead. This is supposed to be somewhat better than most Elvis films of the period because he sings Can’t Help Falling in Love. Angela Lansbury plays his mother; Norman Taurog directed. 101 min. (JR) Read more
Director John Carpenter takes a nosedive in this remake of the 1960 English chiller, itself adapted from John Wyndham’s novel The Midwich Cuckoo. Much of the problem devolves from David Himmelstein’s script, not because it transplants Wyndham’s story of a group of children born with supernatural and telepathic powers to a small coastal village in California but because it represents both a considerable dumbing down and a hokey inflation of material that originally depended on mood and subtle suggestion for its effectiveness. Apart from a few shocks near the beginning, this version comes across as more harebrained than suggestive. With Christopher Reeve, Kirstie Alley, Linda Kozlowski, Michael Pare, Mark Hamill, and Meredith Salenger. (JR) Read more
Mario Van Peebles directs a script adapted by his father Melvin from the latter’s novel about the Black Panther movement, from its formation in Oakland in 1966 to its eventual destruction by the FBI in collaboration with organized crime; father and son coproduced (1995). The information here, much of it corresponding closely to the account of South Central Los Angeles in the 1994 video documentary The Fire This Time, is persuasive and compelling, though the drama and storytelling only intermittently do justice to it; MTV aesthetics tend to predominate, so that even grandiloquent crane shots for funerals are made to whiz by like fleeting attractions. But the sincerity of the project can’t be questioned, and much of the message gets across. With Kadeem Hardison, Marcus Chong (as Huey Newton), Courtney B. Vance (as Bobby Seale), Bokeem Woodbine, Joe Don Baker, Nefertiti, and Tyrin Turner. 124 min. (JR) Read more
An hour-long 1995 video documentary by Chicagoans Kate Kirtz and Nell Lundy about the women’s health collective Jane, whose members performed 12,000 safe but illegal abortions within the University of Chicago community between 1969 and 1973. The oral history that emergeswhich links this work to other political activities of the period even as it distinguishes it from themis a fascinating and important chronicle. The video is limited at times by the difficult task of representing events recounted in the interviews when appropriate footage isn’t available, but the overall story is indelible. (JR) Read more
Not John Ford at his best, but still full of interest, this somewhat dry-cleaned version of Jack Kirkland’s play adaptation of the famous Erskine Caldwell novel, scripted by Nunnally Johnson, offers a bittersweet view of Georgia hillbillies that doesn’t register fully as either comedy or drama (1941). Reportedly the same thing was true of the original play, which became a comedy only after audiences started laughing at it, but Ford benefits from this ambiguity by putting a wry spin on the populist humanism of The Grapes of Wrath, which he’d recently made for the same studio, Fox. With Charley Grapewin (repeating his stage role as Jeeter Lester), Marjorie Rambeau, Gene Tierney, William Tracy, Elizabeth Patterson, Dana Andrews, and Ward Bond. (JR) Read more
Peter Brook’s 1966 filming of one of his greatest stage productionsa Peter Weiss play based on the premise of the Marquis de Sade staging a play about the French Revolution in the Charenton asylumdoesn’t translate too well to the screen, especially when close-ups are expected to take the place of Brook’s multifaceted original mise en scene. The castincluding Ian Richardson, Patrick Magee, and Glenda Jackson (in her screen debut)is certainly skillful, but the compexity and originality of the work as originally conceived is basically missing. (JR) Read more
The title of Bertrand Tavernier’s well-turned 146-minute French thriller refers to the article from the French Code of Public Health that forbids all offenses linked to the possession, traffic, and consumption of narcotics. Cowritten by former narcotics officer Michel Alexandre, this 1992 film takes a realistic approach, following the everyday routines and bureaucratic frustrations of a Parisian narc (well played by Didier Bezace). The character never quite says It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it, but this is the general idea, and with an able if not very well known cast Tavernier has made an absorbing and authentic-looking movie. More to the point, he implicates the audience in the sliminess of certain police operations in a way that has challenging political ramificationswhich is probably why this movie was assailed by both the left and the right in France. (JR) Read more
Stage director Nicholas Hytner adapts his own National Theatre production of Alan Bennett’s play about England’s George III’s growing insanity in the 1780s and the intricate power play set in motion in his court to contain all the possible damage. Despite a mainly good castwith Nigel Hawthorne a standout as Georgeand some good, brittle dialogue, this has much of the lumbering overextension of most movies about royalty, even some of the better ones (Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII seems especially relevant), and Hawthorne hasn’t done much to inject any cinematic pep into his theatrical pomp. But the story, which takes place several years after the American Revolution, has some historical interest, and George Fenton’s adaptations of several works by Handel are pleasant to listen to. One imagines this might have been a lot of fun on the stage. With Helen Mirren (not at her customary best), Rupert Everett, Amanda Donohoe, Rupert Graves, and Ian Holm. (JR) Read more
A so-so movie about five third-year medical studentsAdrian Pasdar, Diane Lane, Jack Gwaltney, Tim Ransom, and Jane Adamsworking in a hospital. Directed by Marisa Silver (Permament Record), with snappy dialogue by screenwriters Larry Ketron and Jeb Stuart, the film aims for the moral tension and jabber under pressure of Howard Hawks’s Only Angels Have Wings, but achieves this only occasionally. The cast is likable enough, filled out by Laura San Giacomo (sex, lies, and videotape), Bradley Whitford, William Devane (Family Plot), Norma Aleandro, Lisa Jane Persky, and Jimmy Smits, but the many interconnected miniplots tend to give the film’s rhythms a mechanical quality. Despite some three-tone Spielberg lighting behind the credits, this is basically better-than-average TV, nothing more. (JR) Read more
One of Mike Nichols’s better films, though one suspects that the gargantuan commercial success it had back in 1967 had at least as much to do with the zeitgeist as with Nichols’s talent in popularizing certain French New Wave tropes and adapting the satiric manner of his old stand-up routines with Elaine May. Dustin Hoffman, in the performance that made his career, plays the disaffected title youth, coerced into an affair with a middle-aged woman (Anne Bancroft) while remaining smitten with her daughter (Katharine Ross). The light ribbing of conspicuous consumption in southern California and the Simon and Garfunkel songs on the sound track both play considerable roles in giving this depthless comedy some bounce. With Murray Hamilton, William Daniels, and Elizabeth Wilson. (JR) Read more
