A 1976 Italian feature by Francesco Rosi adapted from Leonardo Sciascia’s novel Il contesto. Like most of Rosi’s films during this period, it’s a political expose in the form of a detective thriller. With Lino Ventura, Tino Carraro, Alain Cuny, Tina Aumont, Fernanado Rey, and Max von Sydow. (JR) Read more
Francesco Rosi adapts Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel about twin brothers plotting to kill a man with the complicity of their small town. This 1987 film, shot on location in Colombia, uses a mosaic flashback structure common to both the novel and many of Rosi’s previous features. (JR) Read more
Try not to leave a mess when you die, intones Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman) in this loud, uninspired, and interminable third sequel; but the movie doesn’t take her advice. There’s a lot of designer leather and designer heavy metal and one designer disco set after another, plenty of tacky camp references to Marlene Dietrich and Mae West, plus Star Wars beasties, AIDS metaphors, computer details, stupid cold puns from Arnold Schwarzenegger (playing villain Mr. Freeze), and dollops of insincere sentimentality involving the heroes’ butler (Michael Gough). But it’s clear that writer Akiva Goldsman and director Joel Schumacher are bereft of ideas and using the MTV clutter as a cover-up. A few nice moments are offered by spunky Alicia Silverstone, but the standard for humor and ingenuity is set by Robin (Chris O’Donnell) calling Batman (George Clooney this time around) a dick. With Pat Hingle and Elle Macpherson. (JR) Read more
Speed made millions on mindless, empty thrills; this laborious sequel is just as mindless and empty but lacks the thrills. Peter Bogdanovich discovery Sandra Bullock is back, her low-key lifelikeness all but defeated by a script (courtesy of Randall McCormick, Jeff Nathanson, and producer-director Jan De Bont) that flounders interminably. In place of Keanu Reeves we get Jason Patric, at his dullest yet as the cop; in place of the bus we get a luxury liner in the Caribbean; and in place of mad bomber Dennis Hopper we get disgruntled computer whiz Willem Dafoe, who’s really a good actor when he’s actually given a character to play. But there’s nary a character to speak of herejust one good explosion and one spectacular and extended disaster, badly directed. Both come too late in the game to carry much of a wallop. Even Andrzej Bartkowiak’s deft cinematography, which gave Speed much of its spark, is replaced by the shaky, semiunwatchable work of Jack N. Green. Do yourself a favor and see a movie instead. (JR) Read more
Lots of Italians, or actors playing Italians, scream in English and wildly gesticulate for the benefit of the American tourists (meaning us) in this mainstream comedy about a villager (Jean Reno) trying to secure a plot for his terminally ill wife (Mercedes Ruehl) in an overcrowded local cemetery. The ambience here is amiable enough, though the plot also manages to get playful chuckles out of such complications as a character shooting himself. Paul Weiland directed from a script by Saul Turteltaub; with Polly Walker and Mark Frankel. (JR) Read more
A pared-down crime thriller set mainly in Reno, this first feature by writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson is impressive for its lean and unblemished storytelling, but even more so for its performances. Especially good is Philip Baker Hall, a familiar character actor best known for his impersonation of Richard Nixon in Secret Honor, who’s never had a chance to shine on-screen as he does here. In his role as a smooth professional gambler who befriends a younger man (John C. Reilly), Hall gives a solidity and moral weight to his performance that evokes Spencer Tracy, even though he plays it with enough nuance to keep the character volatile and unpredictable. Samuel L. Jackson and Gwyneth Paltrow, both of whom have meaty parts, are nearly as good, and when Hall and Jackson get a couple of good long scenes together the sparks really fly. (JR) Read more
Katzelmacher
Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s second feature (1969) is something like the decanted essence of his work. There’s less plot than usual, but the portraiture already seems firmly in place. Based on his own play, the film consists largely of a lot of deadbeats standing around on the street in a Munich suburb, abusing women and showing one another how macho they are. (The title is Bavarian slang for “stud.”) Eventually a Greek immigrant (played by Fassbinder himself) turns up and becomes the target of their xenophobia. Hanna Schygulla is also present in one of her earliest roles. Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Saturday, May 31, 7:45, 312-443-3737. –Jonathan Rosenbaum
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): film still. Read more
Children of the Revolution
For a notion of how cockeyed the cold war and its aftermath look to an Australian, this bubbly comedy, written and directed by newcomer Peter Duncan, is a good place to start. Judy Davis plays a fervent Australian communist who writes passionate letters to Stalin in the early 50s, is invited to the Soviet Union to see him, and appears to go to bed with him just before he dies. Back in Australia she gives birth to a son she names Joe, who grows up to become a radical labor organizer. A spy (Sam Neill) who may also be Joe’s father turns out to be the father of the Latvian policewoman who repeatedly arrests Joe for being a subversive and winds up marrying him. If all this sounds silly, it’s also highly suggestive as an Australian myth of origins–and Duncan puts it together with a stylish flair that occasionally evokes Ernst Lubitsch. With F. Murray Abraham, Shine’s Geoffrey Rush, Richard Roxburgh, and Rachel Griffiths. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, May 30 through June 5. –Jonathan Rosenbaum
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): film still. Read more
Recently nominated for an Academy Award, this portrait of the great Broadway caricaturist by Susan Dryfoos is absorbing not only because of his work and milieu, but also because he’s been around so long, from his early career in Hollywood to a period working for New Masses to a long tenure at the New York Times. Still working at 94, he’s seen a lot, and this decade-by-decade account is a very entertaining history lesson. On the same program, Jessica Yu’s Better Late and Martin Murphy’s Adventures of Handyman. Film Center, 4:00. –Jonathan Rosenbaum Read more
My candidate for the most disgusting feature at Cannes in 1996, this French-Belgian film by Jaco van Dormael is shameless. The obvious precedent is Rain Man, but that film’s opportunism hinged on the decision of a famous star, Dustin Hoffman, to play an idiot savant alongside Tom Cruise. Here the recipe consists of casting a star, Daniel Auteuil, alongside a person who really has Down’s syndrome, Pascal Duquenne. The danger of such calculation is that the pseudoreality of the star and the hyperreality of his costar might clash, a possibility cleverly avoided through the use of an expanding magical realism that turns both characters into animated cartoon figures, so that the best reference may be neither Rain Man nor the lachrymose Zorba the Greek but the overblown child’s landscape of the tear-jerking Dumbo. In awarding the actor’s prize jointly to both leads, the Cannes jury took the bait, and the tearful standing ovation in the Palais seemed to express a self-congratulatory recognition that a handicapped person is just as lovable as a movie star, that a movie star is just as real as a handicapped person, and that genuine innocence can’t survive in the worldexcept it does, because this film exploits it. Read more
The girlfriend of a small-town astronomer runs off to New York and shacks up with a French restaurant owner (Tcheky Karyo); her obsessed ex-boyfriend (Matthew Broderick) sets up shop in a nearby condemned building to spy on the couple with astronomical equipmentshortly to be joined by the Frenchman’s jilted lover (Meg Ryan), who decides to bug their conversation as well. There’s too much pain in this light 1997 romantic comedy, physical as well as emotional, for it to come across as funny, though it certainly has its share of offbeat premises, and Ryan’s abrasive and rather creepy character is something of a departure for her. Griffin Dunne directed the script by Robert Gordon; with Kelly Preston and Maureen Stapleton. (JR) Read more
Francesco Rosi’s 1965 feature is widely (and plausibly) considered the best movie about bullfighting, in part because of its irony and finesse in capturing how the sport springs from and plays against the social reality of Spain. The young hero is played by Miguel Mateo Miguelin, Spain’s third-ranking matador at the time. (JR) Read more
This 1963 Italian film by Francesco Rosi features Rod Steiger as a real estate developer in Naples, one of whose tenement buildings collapses. Like many of Rosi’s films, this is an intricate political and social analysis, and Rosi actually managed to cast some real-life Neapolitan town councillors as deputies. (JR) Read more
To my taste, Robert Breer is the greatest living experimental filmmaker working in animation, and this program of 11 short films spanning his careerfrom A Man and His Dog Out for Air (1957) to Sparkill Ave! (1992)is essential viewing. I’ve seen everything here but Sparkill and the 1986 Bang!; the brilliant LMNO (1978) is probably my favorite, but all the others66 (1966), Gulls and Buoys (1972), Fuji (1974), Rubber Cement (1976), 77 (1977), Swiss Army Knife With Rats and Pigeons (1981), and Trial Balloons (1983)are well worth seeing and reseeing. (JR) Read more
Director Sidney Lumet and the New York legal system seem to go together like ham and eggs, and in one way or another Lumet has been periodically remaking and refining his own Serpico, about police corruption, over the past quarter of a century, in pictures like Prince of the City and Q & A. Night Falls on Manhattan, which he adapted from Robert Daley’s novel Tainted Evidence, may well be his best effort yet in this direction. Even if Andy Garcia as an honest rookie cop turned DA is no Al Pacino, the overall New York ambience and the street-smart grasp of the way this world operates keep this movie potent throughout. And some of the performancesespecially by Ron Leibman and James Gandolfinivirtually knock you out of your seat. With Ian Holm, Lena Olin, Richard Dreyfuss, and Shiek Mahmud-Bey. (JR) Read more