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
Though it loses some of its steam before the end, this is an uncommonly affecting and unhackneyed story about a friendship between two alienated 11-year-old boys from neighboring middle-class, single-parent homes, one of whom has AIDS. Working from an original script by Robert Kuhn that mixes comedy and tragedy as if they were kissing cousins, actor Peter Horton makes an impressive directorial debut. Though the story is provisionally about intolerance of and ignorance about AIDS, it focuses on the boys’ friendship and adventures–including a Huckleberry Finn-like escape down the river in search of the cure of the title–and the actors do an exceptional job with it, especially Brad Renfro (The Client) and Annabella Sciorra. With Joseph Mazzello, Diana Scarwid, and, in a part that seems to have been severely trimmed, Bruce Davison. Ford City, Norridge, Gardens, Golf Glen, Lincoln Village, Water Tower. Read more
Apart from its plot structure, there are scarcely any traces left of the Henry Hathaway noir thriller scripted by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer that this supposedly reprises; but even though it proceeds in fits and starts, it’s still a pretty good crime thriller on its own terms. Director Barbet Schroeder (Reversal of Fortune, Single White Female), a onetime French New Wave producer who’s done a better job of adapting to the Hollywood mainstream than any of his former colleagues, does an able job with Richard Price’s script about an ex-con (David Caruso) who gets pulled back into crime by both the mob and the police, the latter forcing him to become a police spy. The movie never quite discovers a style of its own, but it manages to tell a pretty good story about contemporary corruption inside the law as well as outside, and even if Nicolas Cage’s edgy portrait of a psycho criminal can’t hold a candle to Richard Widmark’s in the original, the secondary castincluding Samuel L. Jackson, Stanley Tucci, Michael Rapaport, Ving Rhames, Helen Hunt, and Kathryn Erbedoes a nice job of filling out the canvas. (JR) Read more
A sensationalist grunge festival spiked with dollops of poetry on the sound track, provisionally derived (by Bryan Goluboff) from Jim Carroll’s autobiographical book of the same title. Leonardo DiCaprio does an impressive job as the hero-narrator, but the parade of horrors offered by the script and Scott Kalvert’s direction sheds a lot more heat than light on the problems of a Catholic teenager in New York City who plays basketball, becomes hooked on drugs, and enters a life of crime and degradation. Significantly, the movie keeps the hero’s reformation offscreen as well as unexplained; it’s more interested in shock effects than in candor or elucidation. With Bruno Kirby, Lorraine Bracco, Ernie Hudson, Patrick McGaw, James Madio, and Mark Wahlberg (1995, 102 min.). (JR) Read more
Though it loses some of its steam before the end, this is an uncommonly affecting and unhackneyed story about a friendship between two alienated 11-year-old boys from neighboring middle-class, single-parent homes, one of whom has AIDS. Working from an original script by Robert Kuhn that mixes comedy and tragedy as if they were kissing cousins, actor Peter Horton makes an impressive directorial debut. Though the story is provisionally about intolerance of and ignorance about AIDS, it focuses on the boys’ friendship and adventuresincluding a Huckleberry Finn-like escape down a river in search of the cure of the titleand the actors do an exceptional job with it, especially Brad Renfro (The Client) and Annabella Sciorra. With Joseph Mazzello, Diana Scarwid, and, in a part that seems to have been severely trimmed, Bruce Davison. (JR) Read more
This 94-minute Imax documentary by Stephen Low (1991) has the same nonaesthetic features of other films in this format–most notably a TV-like lack of precise composition necessitated by the curved screen–but its subject, the risky Canadian-American-Russian expedition to pick over the wreckage of the Titanic, has an inherent fascination and haunted poetry that triumphs over the sometimes hokey, often trumped-up presentation; at times the film becomes a kind of undersea 2001. Oddly, the crew participants are encouraged to relate to the camera like actors and some of the camera angles suggest those of a fiction film (significantly, storyboards are alluded to in the final credits). But a judicious combination of period photographs (some genuine, some composites), a contemporary interview with one of the few living survivors, and views of the ship’s remnants two and a half miles below the ocean’s surface give this the curious, paradoxical feel of a scientific ghost film. There will be a 15-minute intermission. Museum of Science and Industry, 57th Street at Lake Shore Drive, Friday and Saturday, April 14 and 15, 6:30 and 8:30; Sunday, April 16, 6:30; and Thursday, April 20, 6:30 and 8:30; 684-1414. Read more
People who have Beverly Hills Cop and Miami Vice encoded in their nervous systems and are looking for restimulation may be amused by this formulaic sass machine and police procedural, but I was writhing in my seat. Martin Lawrence and Will Smith play undercover Miami buddy cops who briefly exchange identities while holding a witness (Tea Leoni) in a drug murder under wraps, and the banter is so heavy that the movie seems to be doing all your laughing for you. The cops never seem to know what they’re doing, but then neither do the filmmakers, though I can’t imagine that casual audiences will care since there are plenty of big explosions at the end to reward them. Directed by Michael Bay from a script by several hacks; with Tcheky Karyo and Theresa Randle. (JR) Read more
