Mad Monster Party

This 1967 spoof features stop-motion animation and the voices of, among others, Boris Karloff and Phyllis Diller; Jules Bass directed. 94 min. Read more

Finger Of Guilt

The fourth feature directed in England by American Joseph Losey (1956), credited pseudonymously to Joseph Walton due to the Hollywood blacklist, this serviceable but rarely screened thriller was released overseas in a version ten minutes longer as The Intimate Stranger. Scripted by Casablanca’s Howard Koch (another blacklisted expatriate at the time, signing himself Peter Howard) and shot on a shoestring in a dozen days, it concerns an American film producer (Richard Basehart) working in London whose job and marriage are threatened by an American actress (The Wild One’s Mary Murphy) claiming to be his mistress. It’s less effective than the English thrillers made during the same period by the similarly blacklisted Cy Endfield, though the uses made of an English filmmaking milieu are both convincing and fascinating, and it’s interesting to see Roger Livesey, a Michael Powell regular, turning up in a central part. It seems a Losey specialty to make almost all of his characters unpleasant, but the assured engagement of his best American work and subsequent English films like The Damned is only fitfully apparent here. With Mervyn Johns and Constance Cummings. (JR) Read more

Late August, Early September

What’s unexpected as well as moving about this 1998 film by Olivier Assayas, at least in relation to his other recent features (Cold Water, Irma Vep), is how sweet tempered most of it is. Split into six chapters, with several weeks or months separating one section and the next, it follows a group of close friendsmainly a novelist who’s just turned 40 (Francois Cluzet) and is becoming ill, a writer-editor in his 30s (Mathieu Amalric), and their current and former lovers (Virginie Ledoyen, Jeanne Balibar, Arsinee Khanjian, and Mia Hansen-Love). What we don’t know about these charactersand what we don’t see in certain scenesis often as interesting and as important as what we know and see, and Assayas’s sense of how relationships evolve between people over time is conveyed with a rich and vivid novelistic density. With Nathalie Richard and Alex Descas. In French with subtitles. 112 min. (JR) Read more

Hoodlum Soldier

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Blue Streak

For me, a slightly better than average Martin Lawrence action comedy isn’t cause for celebration, just an occasion for yawning a little less strenuouslybut fans who think he’s the cat’s pajamas may be dancing in the streets. This time he’s playing a jewel thief who impersonates a cop in order to recover a diamond he once hid in the police station’s ventilation system. This occasions lots of gags about the innocence and gullibility of copsnot to mention the usual valorizing of guns and vigilante justice and tedious action sequences to begin and end the picture. Les Mayfield directs, while the script, predictably, is by several hands; with Luke Wilson, Peter Greene, and Dave Chappelle. (JR) Read more

Romance

French filmmaker and novelist Catherine Breillat is already a disputed figure for the frankness about sex and sexual desire and the lack of political correctness in many of her previous features (e.g., 36 fillette). Inspired in part by Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses, this story about a young grammar-school teacher (Caroline Ducey) who starts sleeping around when her lover and flatmate (Sagamore Stevinen) loses interest in having sex with her is Breillat’s most explicit and controversial film to date (if not necessarily her best). The heroine’s voice-over, conventionally poetic and fairly constant, provides a kind of counterpoint to the sex. The story isn’t always believable, and some protracted bondage sequences may stretch your patience if you don’t pick up on their poker-faced comedy (the prosaic man tying the knots, who claims to have made love to 10,000 women, is the heroine’s boss). There’s also some hokey essentialism about motherhood that I could have done without, and when the film drifts off into fantasy at the end, Breillat’s tone becomes less confident. But the eroticism is powerful, and the documentary candor and directness of the sex scenes make this well worth seeing. (JR) Read more

The Haunting

A stinker. If a scare is what you’re after, hunt down the 1963 black-and-white ‘Scope version, directed by Robert Wise, which had more chills in its first ten minutes than this can manage from beginning to end. Maybe that’s because it had a storyderived, however loosely, from Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. This has director Jan De Bont, who as we know from Speed, Twister, and Speed 2 does theme park rides better than stories or characters. This has a few cheap thrills, all thanks to special effects, but not much to string them together besides some distracting, disconnected leftovers from the Wise version. But at the screening I attended, the numerous awkward and hokey moments did provoke plenty of laughs. With Liam Neeson, Lili Taylor, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Owen Wilson, and bits by Bruce Dern and Marian Seldes. The script was written by David Self. (JR) Read more

To Have (or Not)

Laetitia Masson Read more

Dick

Two teenage girls (Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams) touring the White House in the mid-70s stumble upon some secrets of Richard Nixon (Dan Hedaya) without realizing what they are, and when things snowball they wind up as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s “Deep Throat” informant. This is silly and shameless stuff that made me laugh quite a lot, in part because it provides the perfect antidote to the neo-Stalinist pomposity of Oliver Stone’s Nixon and the glib self-importance of Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men. Andrew Fleming (Threesome, The Craft), who directed from a script he wrote with Sheryl Longin, lacks the polish and pizzazz of Stone or Pakula, but arguably his notions about American politics are healthier and more earthbound than theirs; in his book, Nixon and Kissinger and Woodward and Bernstein are all deserving of ridicule. In some ways this is like Forrest Gump without the neocon trimmings, which for me makes it bracing and energizing, though younger viewers may not catch all the historical references. With Harry Shearer as G. Gordon Liddy, Saul Rubinek as Kissinger, and Teri Garr. Biograph, Evanston, Lake. –Jonathan Rosenbaum Read more

Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl

The impressive directorial debut of actress Joan Chen, who’s appeared in everything from Twin Peaks to The Last Emperor to Heaven and Earth. Adapted from the novella “Tian Yu” by Yan Geling, who collaborated with Chen on the screenplay, and filmed in Tibet, this feature has enraged mainland Chinese government officials–not only because it was shot without an official permit but apparently also because its tragic plot gives such a dark portrait of the effects of the Cultural Revolution. The young title heroine, who like many others in her generation travels from a city to a remote part of China, winds up working with a horse trainer in Tibet, a solitary and stoic figure whose quiet love for her is the main focus of the story. Desperate after a spell to return to her native Chengdu, Xiu Xiu winds up sleeping with a series of men who she believes have influence on such state decisions. Exquisitely acted, and shot by Zhang Yimou cinematographer Lu Yue–an impressive director in his own right–with a sharp feeling for landscape, this is a powerful piece of filmmaking. Village. –Jonathan Rosenbaum

Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): film still. Read more

Trick

An aspiring composer of musicals (Christian Campbell) encounters protracted difficulties trying to have sex with a go-go boy he’s picked up (J.P. Pitoc) in this comedy directed by Jim Fall. I don’t want to oversell its merits, but what’s relatively refreshing about this is that it isn’t another movie about gay men–it’s a movie about these gay men. The other Greenwich Village characters who weave in and out of the action–the hero’s ditsy actress friend (Tori Spelling), his straight and horny roommate, the latter’s eccentric girlfriend, an estranged gay couple, and an outrageous drag queen named Miss Coco Peru (Clinton Leupp)–are comparably singular, and Fall gives certain bits of the story the feel of an old-fashioned musical. Jason Schafer wrote the clever script. Pipers Alley.

–Jonathan Rosenbaum

Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): film still. Read more

Free Enterprise

Though not much more than lightly charming, this romantic comedy about Star Trek fanatics trying to cope in the contemporary world is everything the recent documentary Trekkies failed to be. Written by coproducer Mark A. Altman and director Robert Meyer Burnett, it’s mainly a boys’ movie, and it’s helped as well as hampered by the participation of Star Trek icon William Shatner playing himself. For self-mockeryShatner is seen hawking a musical version of Julius Caesar in which he plays all the partshe’s at least as weird as Dean Martin in Kiss Me, Stupid but not nearly as funny. With Rafer Weigel, Erik McCormack, Audie England, Patrick Van Horn, Deborah Van Valkenberg, and Phil LaMarr. (JR) Read more

Best Laid Plans

Another neo-noir about the intersection of various scams in a small American town. This one stars Alessandro Nivola, Reese Witherspoon, and Josh Brolin, and it’s directed by England’s Mike Barker from a script by Ted Griffin. The movie makes a great show of parsing moral issues, but it’s clear from the outset that the stylish interiors and the fancy colors in Ben Seresin’s cinematography are what really count, along with a couple of predictably unpredictable twists. It’s vacuous but diverting in a seedy sort of way. (JR) Read more

All The Little Animals

The impressive directorial debut of Jeremy Thomasproducer of major films by Bernardo Bertolucci, David Cronenberg, Nagisa Oshima, and Nicolas Roeg, among othersis a compelling throwback to the emotional purity and directness of 19th-century melodrama and its various offshoots; though it isn’t as good as D.W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms or Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, these are the sort of pictures it calls to mind. The somewhat Dickensian plot, adapted by Eski Thomas (the producer-director’s wife) from a novel by the late Walker Hamilton, involves an intellectually challenged animal lover (Christian Bale) who flees from his evil stepfather (Daniel Benzali) in London after his mother’s death and an eccentric former bank clerk (John Hurt) he links up with on the road who devotes his life to burying animals killed by motorists. The unabashed depiction of characters so purely good or evil that their behavior virtually defies motivation demands a certain innocence from the viewer that is rarely solicited nowadays, but the film fully rewards it: Thomas has a wonderful feeling for landscape and a keen sense of storytelling that falters (and not by much) only when he overextends the plot’s suspenseful finale. This isn’t for everyone, but can be emphatically recommended to anyone suffering from a surfeit of cynicism at the movies. Read more

Chill Factor

A military secret weapon that can obliterate everything in its path is intercepted by a couple of working-class stiffs (Skeet Ulrich and Cuba Gooding Jr.) in Montana and pursued by a disgruntled and scapegoated major (Peter Firth) who wants to make a zillion dollars by holding the world at ransom. This action-adventure movie shows the usual contempt for life, humanity, art, the audience, intelligence, characterization, and plot, and the usual affection for stunts, minor star turns, and cliches. The stunt work is pretty good, the brain work close to nonexistent. Directed by Hugh Johnson from a script by Drew Gitlin and Mike Cheda; with David Paymer and Kevin J. O’Connor. (JR) Read more