This feature-length 1997 video from Russian master Alexander Sokurov is basically a documentary about Umeno Mathuyoshi, an old woman who sews and embroiders kimonos in an old house in the mountains in Nara, Japan, given a narrative and semifictional framework by Sokurov’s own presence as unseen visitor. Like much of Sokurov’s work this is quite slow but has the effect of taking the viewer somewhere and inviting him or her to savor the textures. 76 min. (JR) Read more
William Inge’s play about an Oklahoma family in the 1920s, directed on Broadway by Elia Kazan at his near best, was quintessential Inge psychodrama. But this 1960 film was marred by censorship, and Delbert Mann’s direction is less inspired. Screenwriters Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr. carried out the required cosmetic surgery. With Robert Preston, Dorothy McGuire, Eve Arden, Angela Lansbury, and Shirley Knight. (JR) Read more
There’s little about this likable movie that makes me want to read the Michael Chabon novel it’s adapted from; by all indications, it belongs to the grungy-artist-as-lovable-slob genre, a la The Horse’s Mouth, even if the screenplay (by the underrated Steve Kloves) makes it seem relatively fresh. The casting of Michael Douglas against type as an over-the-hill novelist and writing professor is the sort of clever move that wins undeserved Oscars, yet the realization of at least half a dozen of the other characters is full of unexpected pleasures. This movie about writers and editors hasn’t much of a clue about the processes of either profession, or even much feeling for literary types, but the storytelling is so good-natured and assured I didn’t really care. What’s finally so agreeable about this ambling farce, set over a sordid weekend in snowy Pittsburgh, is all the things it’s uncharacteristically relaxed about, including frumpy middle-aged adultery (between Douglas and Frances McDormand), smoking pot, gay sex between an editor (Robert Downey Jr.) and a much younger writer (Tobey Maguire), an interracial couple, and the laughs that can be derived from a dead dog. Producer-director Curtis Hanson’s follow-up to L.A. Confidential has all the warmth I missed in that movie and then some. Read more
A genuine curiosity, this 1965 horror feature starring William Shatner, written and directed by Leslie Stevens (Private Property, Hero’s Island), and shot by the great Conrad Hall is the only film ever made in Esperanto, a language optimistically invented in the late 19th century to foster world peace. In 1968, after failing to find a distributor, producer Anthony Taylor stored the masters and what he thought were all the copies at an LA lab, which lost them. But in 1996, years after giving up on the project, he learned that the Cinematheque Francaise had a print and had been showing it since the 70s. After a year of negotiations, he obtained a copy, restored it, added English subtitles, and put it out on video, which is how it will be shown here. Not to be confused with John Hough’s 1981 horror film The Incubus. 78 min. (JR) Read more
Short works by the Austrian experimental filmmaker, known for his manipulation of images from Hollywood’s studio period. I’ve seen Piece touchee (1989), which is derived from brief snatches of The Human Jungle (1954); Passage a l’acte (1993), which makes similar use of To Kill a Mockingbird (1963); and Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998), which does extremely creepy things with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. The last is the most impressive; its manipulations simultaneously dehumanize the stars and highlight the repressed subtexts of their actions and interactions. I’m not sure what kind of artistic or technical accomplishment these short works represent, but there’s no question that they’re very scary. (JR) Read more
This 1999 French film by actress Nicole Garcia is striking above all because of its lead performanceCatherine Deneuve as a recovering alcoholic who springs back into action when she discovers seven diamonds squirreled away by her late husband, a big-time jeweler. What transpires after that may have some of the trappings of an exotic thriller, but it’s basically a character study, and Deneuve and her fellow actorsin particular Emmanuelle Seigner and Jean-Pierre Bacri (Same Old Song)shine in these circumstances. 117 min. (JR) Read more
A typically deceitful but fairly absorbing 1953 biopic about the famous magician and escape artist, mainly made bearable by costars Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. George Marshall directed. (JR) Read more
This 1998 Portuguese film is a searing cri de coeur on behalf of Lisbon’s homeless children. Rejected by dysfunctional families, often escaping from heartless institutions, they’re victimized by others (Pedro and Ricardo by pornographers, Andreia by a boyfriend who leaves her pregnant) and not surprisingly victimize one another as well. Director Teresa Villaverde makes their plight come alive with a variety of isolating compositions: a boy arriving home appears framed in the front doorway against the landscape, his family invisible, and more than once a kid riding in a vehicle is shot from above, the character’s head backed by the moving roadway. In one terribly painful sequence a variety of unbalanced compositions show Andreia screaming as she gives birth to her child in a lavatorywhere she then abandons it. These decontextualizations convey the children’s separation from society, making them the pained subjects of our gaze, and the film’s warped visual spaces make that separation seem unnatural, even wrong. (FC) Read more
A major washout. One might think that a campy, 50s-style showbiz biopic about best-selling sleaze novelist Jacqueline Susann written by Paul Rudnick, directed by Andrew Bergman, and starring Bette Midler couldn’t miss, but in fact this misses on just about every level. Maybe it’s because camp is defined by lack of self-consciousness, or because coherent comedies of any kind have to be built on consistent premises, or because biopics that lie or evade the truth about their subjects have to come up with some other story to tell. This seems at times to be trying to emulate John Waters’s Female Trouble (with Midler standing in for Divine), and it periodically comes up with bouts of WASP bashing (David Hyde Pierce, as Susann’s editor, is the butt of most of these jokes), but without much passion or unity of purpose; the signs of studio committeethink are everywhere. Everyone must have been afraid of a lawsuit, because genuine irreverence and vulgarity are ultimately avoided like the plague — which is not to say that we get reverence or good taste either — and nothing of substance from Susann’s work is ever really evoked. Check out the 1975 movie Jacqueline Susann’s Once Is Not Enough for a few clues about what this could and should have been like. Read more
A laughless, brainless, styleless, and clueless comedy about a hairdresser from Glasgow (cowriter Craig Ferguson) who winds up in Los Angeles to compete in an international competition. (Guess who wins.) But it has at least two limited virtues: it’s good-natured, and it has a cameo by Russ Meyer axiom Charles Napier. Somebody must have had some other reason in mind for making it. Directed by Kevin Allen, cowritten by Sacha Gervasi; with Frances Fisher and Mary McCormack. (JR) Read more
Set in the Kingston ghetto, this 1997 reggae crime musical is reportedly the highest grossing movie in Jamaican history and the first to be shot on digital video. Its heroine, a street vendor and single mother, comes into her own after entering a dance-hall contest in hopes of keeping various thugs and potential protectors from controlling her life. The narrative isn Read more
D.W. Harper directed this 1996 feature about the infamous Charles Whitman, who climbed a Texas tower in the mid-60s and shot people at random. Screenwriter Stephen Grant (who also plays the crazed killer) updates the story to the present and tries to milk it for absurdist humor, telling it from the bemused viewpoint of the killer’s nerdish roommate. Ambitious and inventive, but unevenly acted and overextended, this will certainly hold one’s interest, despite its hit-or-miss qualities. (JR) Read more
A penniless musician wins a lottery in a 45-minute film by the late, highly talented Djibril Diop Mambety. This 1994 release isn’t up to the level of his extraordinary Touki Bouki or Hyenas, but it’s highly distinctive and creditable all the same. (JR) Read more
John Frankenheimer does an excellent job of directing an extremely dubious thriller script by Ehren Kruger, about an ex-con (Ben Affleck) forced by a group of gun smugglers (including Gary Sinise and Clarence Williams III) into helping in the heist of a roadside casino on Christmas Eve. What’s dubious about this is the contribution of the usual studio thinking: the plot has more twists than a rattlesnake, at least three twists too many if one is supposed to accept any of the characters as human. (As two who couldn’t possibly be, Charlize Theron and James Frain prove as malleable as they come.) I had a pretty good time with this until the end, when I felt so soiled by the filmmakers’ cynicism and the characters’ gratuitous viciousness that I wanted to take a bath. 105 min. (JR) Read more
It takes spectacularly bad judgment to make Jeff Bridges, Albert Finney, Nick Nolte, and Sharon Stone all look clunky and adrift. (Catherine Keener, a relative newcomer, emerges relatively unscathed, but then again she’s given much less to do.) Such misjudgment is usually the work of a committee, and even though this film was allegedly directed by one individual (Matthew Warchus), adapting with David Nicholls the work of another individual (a Sam Shepard play about a horse-racing scam), I can’t tell how much Warchus and/or Shepard can be blamed for the terminally awkward flashbacks, the unconvincing characters, the heavy-handed dramaturgy, and the overall dullness of what’s on-screen. Insofar as they’re allowed to be members of the committee, I assume they’re at least partially to blame, but it’s the whole contemporary system of picture making that probably has to be faulted for such an extravagant waste of resources. (JR) Read more