This remake of Billy Wilder’s weak 50s romantic comedy minimizes the jaded, dirty-old-man aspect of the sub-Lubitsch original (a flaw it shares with Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon) with better casting. Humphrey Bogart certainly had his gifts, but Harrison Ford makes a better romantic lead as a tycoon opposite a gamine chauffeur’s daughter; and if Julia Ormond initially seems to be playing Audrey Hepburn rather than Sabrina, she eventually takes over the part for herself. Sydney Pollack directs with the sort of polish that was easy to take for granted two decades ago but almost looked like classicism in 1995. With Greg Kinnear (in the William Holden part), Nancy Marchand, and John Wood, in a script by Barbara Benedek and David Rayfiel. This is basically Hollywood nonsense with all the usual dishonesty, but it goes down easily. PG, 127 min. (JR) Read more
Some of the most exhilarating camera movements and most luscious black-and-white cinematography you’ll ever see inhabit this singular, delirious 141-minute communist propaganda epic of 1964, a Cuban-Russian production poorly received in both countries at the time (in Cuba it was often referred to as I Am Not Cuba). Directed by Mikhail Kalatozovbest known in the West for his 1957 The Cranes Are Flyingfrom a screenplay by Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Enrique Pineda Barnet, this multipart hymn to the Cuban communist revolution may be dated to the point of campiness in much of its rhetoric, but it stands alongside the unfinished masterworks of Sergei Eisenstein and Orson Welles about Latin America, Que Viva Mexico and It’s All True, two parallel celebrations from foreign perspectives. (The constructivist shack occupied by a Havana prostitute in the first episode is one example of stylization run amok here.) In Spanish and Russian with subtitles. 141 min. (JR) Read more
Jeff Bridges stars as Wild Bill Hickok in an ambitious and flavorsome picture by writer-director Walter Hill–based on Thomas Babe’s play Fathers and Sons and Peter Dexter’s novel Deadwood–that’s not only a western but also a western saga and an art picture of sorts. Very striking to look at it in terms of Joseph Nemec III’s production design and Lloyd Ahern’s cinematography (with varying uses of black and white as well as color), the film ultimately comes up short when it has to deal with Hickok as something other than a legend; Hill is hampered as usual by his fixation on iconography over everything else. Ellen Barkin seems a bit uncomfortable with her underwritten part as Calamity Jane, but the remainder of the cast–including John Hurt, Diane Lane, David Arquette, Christina Applegate, Bruce Dern, James Gammon, and Marjoe Gortner–does a pretty good job of playing scenery, and Keith Carradine turns in a nice bit as Buffalo Bill. You may feel a little let down by the end of this movie because it hasn’t managed to marshal all its virtues, but there’s plenty of grit and atmosphere along the way. Water Tower. Read more
