A sturdily made and beautifully acted comedy-drama about aging from Bob Balaban, whose Parents showed him to be an imaginative director who knows what to do with a set and how to enter the worlds of lonely people. The story here, adapted by Balaban and John McLaughlin from a Richard Bausch novel, concerns a retired violinist (Armin Mueller-Stahl) living in Brooklyn who puts up a homeless former neighbor in her early 20s (Olivia d’Abo) and develops an unexpected relationship with her. His only friendanother former neighbor, now dying in a rest homeis played by the late Lionel Stander, one of the juiciest Hollywood character actors who ever lived. His fabulous swan song is reason enough to see this picture, though Balaban’s taste and intelligence and the warmth of the other cast members (including Maureen Stapleton, Adrian Pasdar, and Kevin Corrigan) provide further incentive. This is one of those rare American movies that know what they’re doing and where they’re going every step of the way. (JR) Read more
Drawing upon a legend in his own Welsh family history, writer-director Christopher Monger (Waiting for the Light) comes up with a quaint little comic tale about the interactions between two English mapmakers (Hugh Grant and Ian McNeice) and the prideful Welsh village of Ffynnon Garw in 1917. The results are self-amused and pitched to tourists (rather like John Ford’s The Quiet Man in respect to Ireland), but the scenery is lovely and the folksy period ambience is tolerable if you can put up with the vats of malarkey. With Tara Fitzgerald, Colm Meaney, Ian Hart, Kenneth Griffith, and Tudor and Hugh Vaughn. (JR) Read more
Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay, Mississippi Masala) directed this 1995 adaptation of Christine Bell’s novel about Cuban immigrants in Miami. Consistently pleasurable for its lead performances (by Marisa Tomei, Alfred Molina, Chazz Palminteri, and Anjelica Huston) it concerns a former political prisoner (Molina) who hasn’t seen his wife (Huston) and daughter (Trini Alvarado) in two decades. The circumstances delaying their reunion seem a little contrived in spots, but the details about what Cuban immigrants have to contend with and the actors’ spirited riffs keep this busy and bubbling. With Celia Cruz and Lazaro Perez. 112 min. (JR) Read more
Quentin Tarantino did an uncredited polish of the dialogue of this very silly submarine thrillera bit of cold-war nostalgia set in the present, seemingly derived from The Bedford Incident of 1965, with Gene Hackman taking over the Richard Widmark part as dictatorial captain and Denzel Washington replacing Sidney Poitier as the desperate liberal. One hopes it wasn’t Tarantino (or the similarly uncredited Robert Towne and Steven Zaillian) who dreamed up the phrase a violation of nuclear launch protocol, which sounds like a line from Dr. Strangelove and is actually used here at a military hearing without a trace of irony. Behind all the macho bluster stand (or, it would appear, sit) director Tony Scott, writers Michael Schiffer and Richard P. Henrick, and producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, trying (and failing) to get all the characters to behave like grown-ups. With George Dzundza, Viggo Mortensen, James Gandolfini, and an uncredited Jason Robards. (JR) Read more
Originally known as The Buddy Factor, writer-director George Huang’s repulsive low-budget first feature purports to tell us something about the movie business, but all that it actually has on its mind is a plodding S and M scenario about a cruel and crass producer (Kevin Spacey) berating and humiliating his young executive assistant (Frank Whaley) until the latter decides to take brutal revenge. None of the characters is believable or interesting, and despite the imposture that one is being offered an infotainment special a la The Player full of inside smarts, this is too bereft of imagination, detail, and wit to offer much edification to any but the extremely gullible (and aficionados of humiliation). With Michelle Forbes (1994, 101 min.). (JR) Read more
The main message of this interesting program of 16 short films and videos selected by Chicagoan Elisabeth Subrin–nearly all of them by artists under 30 from around the country–seems to be that minimalism is finally over. An exception may be Sadie Benning’s black-and-white German Song, a rarity in that it’s a music video that breathes, but my two favorites among the seven I’ve seen–Cauleen Smith’s Chronicles of a Lying Spirit and Tran T. Kim-Trang’s Aletheia–are busy works that bombard the viewer with material and information. Smith’s film recycles cacophonous combinations of sound, images, and words as it sketches the history of blacks in America as if it all happened to a single individual; Kim-Trang’s work, even more experimental, begins by exploring the cosmetic surgery undergone by some Asian women to alter their eyelids and proceeds to broader reflections about westernization, blindness, race, and sexuality through the use of clips, quotations, maps, and different kinds of raw footage. The other artists in the show, eight of whom are Chicagoans, are Nancy Andrews, Tammy Rae Carland, Amanda Cole, Shari Frilot, Leah Gilliam, Sean Kryston, Laura Nix, Helen Mirra, Jeanine Oleson, Jennifer Reeves, Jon Schluenz, Kirsten Stoltman, and Kristen Thiele. Randolph St. Gallery, 756 N. Read more
My favorite Douglas Sirk film–made in Germany in 1936, when he was still known as Detlef Sierck–is a dazzlingly cinematic, fast-moving melodrama built around classical music; it’s alternately perverse, exalted, and delirious. Shuttling back and forth between New York and Berlin with an ease that suggests those cities were in closer proximity to each other in the 30s than they are today, the opening sequences present a destitute widow (Maria von Tasnady) recovering her will to live by listening to Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” on the radio, broadcast live from Germany, where the conductor (Willy Birgel) is coincidentally in the process of adopting her little boy. When she returns to Berlin she goes to work as the boy’s nanny, concealing the fact that she’s his mother, while the conductor’s less musically inclined wife (Lil Dagover) tries to break free from an astrologer-blackmailer who’s threatening to expose her adultery with him. There’s also a creepy and seemingly malevolent maid, a climactic trial, and several sequences involving music and duplicity that produce some astonishing visual cadenzas and editing rhyme effects. (This is the film that inspired Sirk to note that camera angles “are a director’s thoughts” and “lighting is his philosophy.”) The movie was an enormous success in Germany when it came out, and it isn’t hard to understand why; it’s the finest Nazi-era fiction feature I’ve seen. Read more
Meg Ryan and Kevin Kline costar in a genuine odditya Francophobic romantic comedy set in France (1995). Ryan stays behind in Toronto when her fiance (Timothy Hutton) goes off to a medical conference in Paris, but when he phones to tell her he’s fallen in love with a Frenchwoman, she becomes so unhinged that she flies directly to Paris to win him back. Kline plays a French petty criminal sitting next to her on the plane who dupes her into getting involved with his smuggling scheme, and by the time they’ve visited his family’s vineyard and followed the fiance and his new girlfriend to Cannes, their own romance has started to blossom. The film’s almost systematic misrepresentations of France and the French, ranging from Kline’s accent to the geography of Paris and Cannes to the ways French people talk to one another, seem based less on stupidity than on cynical calculationthe realization that Americans are more comfortable with stereotypes than with real-life places and people. Ryan’s most winning quality, her sensuality, seems defeated by the project; but she’s one of the producers, so who’s to blame? Hollywood hack Lawrence Kasdan directed a script by Adam Brooks; with Jean Reno, Francois Cluzet, and Susan Anbeh. Read more
Laura San Giacomo cut off two feet of her hair to star in this first feature by writer-director Alan Jacobs, a serious movie about adultery set in San Francisco. It’s a lovely, nuanced performance, even if it’s ultimately handicapped, like the rest of the film, by a belatedly revealed narrative gimmick that you may find as hard to accept as I did. As a romantic story, this benefits from the fact that Jacobs and his three coproducers are all first-timers, which means that whatever mistakes they make are their own, not somebody else’s; there’s a lot of honest feeling in this movie, as well as some searching thoughts about what keeps or doesn’t keep certain long-term relationships going. With Paul Rhys (Vincent & Theo), Michael O’Keefe, Cristi Conaway, and Fisher Stevens. (JR) Read more
A genuine oddity from 1935 Germanya musical-comedy version of a play by Plautus. Reinhold Sch Read more
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
