Carl Franklin (One False Move) directs his own adaptation of a Walter Mosley mystery novel set in Los Angeles in 1948, and what’s most memorable about it is the period flavor, including a detailed and precise account of the jim crow complications blacks had to contend with. Denzel Washington is hired to track down a white woman (Jennifer Beals) who hangs out with blacks and finds himself pulled into a complicated intrigue; with Tom Sizemore and Don Cheadle. Ford City, Biograph, Bricktown Square, Broadway, Golf Glen, Esquire, Old Orchard. Read more
A very funny 1994 comedy by New York writer-director Tom DiCillo, the cinematographer who shot Stranger Than Paradise, about the nightmares of shooting an American independent feature. The story comes in three acts, and even though the first is funnier than the second and the second funnier than the third, the whole thing is still pretty entertaining. The comedy here recalls at times Truffaut’s Day for Night, though the characters are much thinner. With Steve Buscemi, James LeGros, Catherine Keener, Dermot Mulroney, and Danielle von Zernick. Fine Arts. Read more
Albert Finney and director Peter Yates, who worked together on The Dresser, team again in this adaptation by Shane Connaughton (My Left Foot) of his own novel, an intelligently nuanced coming-of-age story about an 18-year-old Irish lad (newcomer Matt Keeslar) adjusting to the death of his mother, learning to communicate with his demanding father (Finney), falling in with a disreputable local worker (Anthony Brophy), and impregnating a young woman (Victoria Smurfit) on the other side of the northern Irish border. What keeps this watchable are the performancesFinney and Brophy are especially goodbut the story is a routine one we’ve all seen before. (JR) Read more
Some reviewers euphemistically described this as America’s answer to The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desertwhich only makes sense if you consider that better-than-average Australian movie a question. This horrifically ugly and witless middle-American comedy (1995), seemingly designed for small-town homophobes who want to feel tolerant, is basically just an excuse to show Wesley Snipes, Patrick Swayze, and John Leguizamo in dressesnever mind giving them a plausible reason for wearing themand send them on a cross-country journey to teach stupid straights in Nebraska how to be outrageous and improve their love lives. Douglas Carter Beane is credited with the script and Beeban Kidron with the direction, though whether this is either written or directed is a matter of debate; sadly, the able secondary castStockard Channing, Blythe Danner, Arliss Howard, Jason London, and Chris Pennis disabled, like the leads, by the extenuating circumstances. 108 min. (JR) Read more
After the striking originality of her documentary Heaven, Diane Keaton’s first fiction feature as a director is disappointingly conventionala comedy written by Richard LaGravenese (The Fisher King) about a Jewish boy in New York during the 60s who goes to live with his two highly eccentric and paranoid leftist uncles. Thanks to the performers (including Andie MacDowell and John Turturro), this has a certain amount of charm and warmth, but the period ambience feels both remote and uncertain and the story as a whole is familiara cross between Woody Allen and Neil Simon. With Michael Richards, Maury Chaykin, Nathan Watt, and Kendra Krull. (JR) Read more
Carl Franklin (One False Move) directs his own adaptation of a Walter Mosley mystery novel set in Los Angeles in 1948. What’s most memorable about it is the period flavor, including a detailed and precise account of the jim crow complications blacks had to contend with. Denzel Washington is hired to track down a white woman (Jennifer Beals) who hangs out with blacks and finds himself pulled into a complicated intrigue; with Tom Sizemore and Don Cheadle (1995, 102 min.). (JR) Read more
Though it’s no disgrace, Spike Lee’s 1995 reworking of Richard Price’s adaptation of his own novel (a project originally developed for Martin Scorsese) comes across as neither fish nor fowlunsatisfying as a Price script, but not entirely a Lee movie either. The story involves a Brooklyn crack dealer (Mekhi Phifer) caught between his boss (Delroy Lindo) and a police detective investigating a local murder (Harvey Keitel). The film is ambitious in exploring an ambiguous and complex situation that also involves the dealer’s respectable brother (Isaiah Washington), who unpersuasively confesses to the crime, and Keitel’s sidekick (John Turturro), but the sheer unpleasantness of the story isn’t always justified by its insights. The performances are strong, but the spectator often feels adrift in an overly busy intrigue. With Keith David. R, 128 min. (JR) Read more
American sexual ideology circa Christmas 1948, which was when RKO released this comedy and raked in lots of loot. It stars Betsy Drake (her screen debut) as a department-store clerk who goes after Cary Grant, a pediatrician; the two actually got married soon after the movie was released, making it all look like a publicity stunt. Don Hartman directed and collaborated on the script; with Franchot Tone and Alan Mowbray. (JR) Read more
A major film (1989, 86 min.) by the greatest of all Iranian filmmakers, Abbas Kiarostami, this is an idiosyncratic though mainly straightforward 16-millimeter documentary about the homework done by boys in primary school, with the interviews carried out by Kiarostami himself. For all the simplicity of its approach, this film has a great deal to impart about Iran during its war with Iraq, and some of the unorthodox formal procedures carried out by Kiarostami are as provocative as in his subsequent documentary masterpiece, Close-up; moreover, the director seems every bit as adept as Truffaut at handling children with respect. In Farsi with subtitles. (JR) Read more
The social status of filmmaking among ordinary people, central to Abbas Kiarostami’s wonderful Close-up and Life and Nothing More, is equally operative in this entertaining and sometimes beautiful film. Through the Olive Trees (1994) concludes a trilogy begun with Where Is the Friend’s House?, which focused on the adventures of a poor schoolboy in a mountainous region of northern Iran. Life and Nothing More, the second and best film of the three, fictionally re-created Kiarostami and his son’s return to the area, which had recently been devastated by an earthquake, to look for two child actors from the earlier film. Through the Olive Trees is a comedy about the making of a film, mostly emphasizing the persistent efforts of a young actor to woo an actress who won’t even speak to him. Like Kiarostami’s more recent Taste of Cherry, all three films strategically elide certain information about the characters, inviting audiences to fill in the blanks and in this case yielding a mysteriously beautiful and open-ended conclusion. If you’re unfamiliar with Kiarostamione of our greatest living filmmakers and certainly the greatest in Iranthis is an excellent introduction. (JR) Read more
Who would have guessed that a grisly and upsetting serial-killer police procedural (1995, 127 min.) costarring Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman as detectives, written by a Tower Records cashier (Andrew Kevin Walker), and directed by David Fincher (Alien) would bear a startling resemblance to a serious work of art? One can already tell that this film is on to something special during the opening credits, which formally echo several classic American experimental films and thematically point to the eerie kinship between the serial killer and the policenot to mention the kinship between murder and art making that the movie is equally concerned with. The detectives are trying to solve a series of hideous murders based on the seven deadly sins, and the sheer foulness and decay of the nameless city that surrounds them, which makes those of Taxi Driver and Blade Runner seem almost like children’s theme parks, conjures up a metaphysical mood that isn’t broken even when the film moves to the countryside for its climax. Admittedly, designer unpleasantness is a hallmark of our era, and this movie may be more concerned with wallowing in it than with illuminating what it means politically. Yet the filmmakers stick to their vision with such dedication and persistence that something indelible comes acrosssomething ethically and artistically superior to The Silence of the Lambs that refuses to exploit suffering for fun or entertainment and leaves you wondering about the world we’re living in. Read more
The subject of this feature by former Japanese producer Kazuyoshi Okuyama is promising: the life and times of the famous Japanese mystery writer Edogawa Rampo. The film mixes Rampo’s biography with one of his stories in a way that initially suggests Hammett and Naked Lunch, but it ultimately gives in to the scattershot sleaze of Mishimait’s a sort of Lifestyles of the Rich and Decadent that bypasses early references to Vertigo and Last Year at Marienbad to become a tale of obsessive love that ultimately drowns in its mannerist self-infatuation. We’re treated to one effect after another rather than a coherent story, and the resulting spectacle is striking but tacky. With Naoto Takenaka, Michiko Hada, and Mikijiro Hira; Yuhei Enoki collaborated on the script. (JR) Read more
For better and for worse, the plot resembles a guilty-liberal wet dream: a solitary and reluctant bounty hunter (Tom Berenger) and an equally solitary ethnographer (Barbara Hershey) discover a lost tribe of Cheyenne warriors still subsisting in the Montana wilderness, and wind up joining them. Writer-director Tab Murphy obviously means well, and intermittently charms with his pie-eyed conceit, but even the loveliness of the landscape and the talent of a well-trained dog that figures centrally in the action can’t quite make up for the sheer clunkiness of this miserably paced ‘Scope adventure story, which becomes downright unbearable whenever it resorts to a folksy narration. With Kurtwood Smith, Steve Reevis, and Andrew Miller. (JR) Read more
Given my unqualified admiration for Jean Genet’s The Maids, I’m not very sympathetic to the notion of another playwright going back to the crime in provincial France in the 30s that inspired Genet’s play and trying to wring something more out of it. The story concerns incestuous sisters who work for a tyrannical matron and wind up murdering her. The main contribution of Wendy Kesselman, adapting her play My Sister in the House, is to delve into the unhealthy relationship between the matron and her grown daughter. The actors impart a great deal of neurotic intensity to their roles, but the combination of an American writer, an American director (Nancy Meckler, whose main background is the English stage), and English actors all tackling a very French crime of passion failed to convince me. By and large, this is a stunt, and far too obvious in its telegraphed class contrasts (1994). With Joely Richardson, Jodhi May, Julie Waters, and Sophie Thursfield. (JR) Read more
Subtitled The Unlimited Readings, this 1981 Marguerite Duras feature is one of her most strongly minimalist, consisting mainly of an offscreen poetic dialogue between a sister and brother about their memories and their incestuous feelings for each other (spoken by Duras and her companion Yann Andrea) and shots of empty beaches and a virtually deserted hotel lobby where one occasionally glimpses Bulle Ogier (and, less often, Andrea). The results are not devoid of interest, but far less absorbing and resonant than Duras’ India Song and Le camion. (JR) Read more
