The daughter of a lighthouse keeper on a remote island dreams up an imaginary male companion in this 1997 Brazilian feature by Walter Lima Jr. It’s supposed to register like a fairy taleyet in fact it’s fairly dull. The movie tries for the magic of a Raul Ruiz fantasy and doesn’t make itbut the colors are pretty. (JR) Read more
Six-inch twin princesses who sing and talk in unison are kidnapped from an island by an evil showman, only to be pursued all the way to Tokyo by a giant caterpillar that smashes buildings, spins a cocoon, and becomes a moth. Ishiro Honda whipped this up in 1961; originally it went under the name Mosura. 100 min. (JR) Read more
This exciting existentialist road movie by Monte Hellman, with a swell script by Rudolph Wurlitzer and Will Corry and my favorite Warren Oates performance, looks even better now than it did in 1971, although it was pretty interesting back then as well. James Taylor and Dennis Wilson are the drivers of a supercharged ’55 Chevy, and Oates is the owner of a new GTO (these nameless characters are in fact identified only by the cars they drive); they meet and agree to race from New Mexico to the east coast, though an assortment of side interests periodically distracts them, including various hitchhikers (among them Laurie Bird). (GTO hilariously assumes a new persona every time he picks up a new passenger, rather like the amorphous narrator in Wurlitzer’s novel Nog.) The movie starts off as a narrative but gradually grows into something much more abstractit’s unsettling but also beautiful. 101 min. (JR) Read more
Made in 1960, on the heels of Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard’s second feature (and his first starring Anna Karina) is more typical of the intellectual rumination that would characterize his later work. Michel Subor plays a secret agent in Geneva who winds up being tortured by Algeria’s FLNarguably more as a kind of macho testing, like the protracted beating of the hero in The Glass Key, than as a consequence of Sartrean position taking. For years Le petit soldat was banned in France for its treatment of torture and terrorism in the Algerian war; in fact Godard was closer to the right when he made it, but like his protagonist he was full of doubts. Subor’s contemplative voice-over and Raoul Coutard’s somber cinematography make this seem severe compared to the jazzy exuberance of Breathless. 88 min. (JR) Read more
As demonstrated by My Favorite Season, Wild Reeds, and above all Thieves, Andre Techine has become the most accomplished novelistic filmmaker in contemporary French cinema. This feature may not be on the same level as those films, but it has much the same tragic and melodramatic view of family, desire, and destiny. The talented (and Oscar-winning) Juliette Binoche plays a violinist who lives with a gay actor in Paris (Mathieu Amalric) and becomes romantically involved with his illegitimate half brother (Alexis Loret), a professional model, after he moves into their flat. Loret’s relative lack of acting experience is the film’s biggest flaw, but it doesn’t pose any fatal problems: the sheer neurotic intensity of Techine’s main characters, which stretches both backward and forward in time, as in a Faulkner novel, holds one throughout, as do Techine’s masterful direction and many of the other performances (including Carmen Maura as Loret’s mother). 123 min. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, September 1 through 7. –Jonathan Rosenbaum Read more