Roberto Benigni (Life Is Beautiful) wrote, directed, and stars in this live-action adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s late-19th-century novel, with his partner Nicoletta Braschi cast as the Blue Fairy. The recut American version is truly awful, but a good 75 percent of the awfulness is attributable to Miramax, the film’s distributor. Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio is so quintessentially Italian that it loses much of its meaning and most of its flavor when its Italianness is removedwhich is precisely what’s accomplished by the slipshod and badly lip-synched dubbing here, leaving the remainder of the film a wreck. The 1940 Walt Disney animated feature also took away many of the Italian elements, but at least that film had a vision of its own. This one seems bent only on reducing and confusing Benigni’s eccentric vision with poorly matched American and English accents (from Breckin Meyer, Glenn Close, John Cleese, Cheech Marin, and Queen Latifah, among others) and reediting that ironically slows the brisk pace of the original. I found the latter overly sentimental, like much of Benigni, but still an honest effort to approximate Collodi’s story, which is a good deal rougher and creepier than the Disney version. 108 min. (JR) Read more
Paul Reubens’s colorful and nightmarish TV kiddie show, with talking appliances and lots of manic giggling. (JR) Read more
Steven Spielberg’s portrait of a 60s teenage con artist (a nimble performance by Leonardo DiCaprio) is based on the real-life exploits of Frank W. Abagnale but played more for myth than believability. Spielberg’s gripping patriarchal obsessionsseen in Abagnale’s relationship with his father (Christopher Walken) and the stolid FBI agent (Tom Hanks) pursuing himcarry this jaunty picture for its entire 140 minutes, and it’s nice to see him returning to a relatively light mode. In fact, the pacing is so agreeable you might not notice the blatant contempt for the women charactersall of whom turn out to be betrayers, whores, bimbos, or combinations of sameuntil after you leave the theater. Jeff Nathanson wrote the screenplay; with Nathalie Baye and Martin Sheen (2002). (JR) Read more
The sound on the preview tape was so defective that I gave up watching, but I caught enough of this Polish feature’s striking visuals and wacky humor (both somewhat Felliniesque) to regret the loss. The goofy plot concerns an angel named Giordano (Krzysztof Globisz) who loves rock so much and spends so much time in purgatory with singers like Elvis that he gets banished to earth with instructions to perform one kind deed per day. In Krakow, where he remains in phone contact with the folks upstairs, he meets a single mother and street sausage vendor (Ewa Kaim). Artur Wiecek Baron directed and cowrote this feature, in Polish with subtitles. 89 min. (JR) Read more
It’s hard to think of another movie named after its screenwriterAntwone Fisher giving us a version of his real-life story. Denzel Washington’s directorial debut reminds me of a 60s British movie called The Mark: it’s liberal minded, heartwarming, sincere, and consequently somewhat old-fashioned and stodgy. It’s the story of a black sailor (Derek Luke) with a violent temper who plumbs the depths of his bleak and abusive past aided by a sensitive psychiatrist (Washington). The sincerity and seeming authenticity of this effort carried and even moved me, though I’m not sure whether it taught me anything I didn’t already know. With Joy Bryant. 113 min. (JR) Read more
It’s the early 50s, and an apolitical Hollywood screenwriter (Jim Carrey) who’s just been blacklisted suffers a car accident and forgets who he is. He finds himself in a small northern California town, where he’s mistaken for a long-lost World War II hero whose father (Martin Landau) used to operate the local movie palace. When nostalgia, hypocrisy, and indifference to history converge in the kind of shameless Capracorn manufactured here, one can either be stupefied by the filmmakers’ cynicism or fall for the package hook, line, and sinker. If you’re able to conclude, like the hero, that movies aren’t a part of life anywaywhich is why he can remember The Life of Emile Zola but not who he isyou might take a tumble. I didn’t. Michael Sloane scripted this drama, and Frank Darabont produced and directed; with Laurie Holden, David Ogden Stiers, and James Whitmore. 150 min. (JR) Read more
John Ford’s only feature with a Civil War setting (1959), starring John Wayne as a Union colonel leading the cavalry behind Confederate lines and William Holden as the doctor who accompanies him. This isn’t considered one of Ford’s major workspartly, I suspect, because Holden isn’t a very Fordian presence and partly because stories told from the Union perspective rarely come off. The secondary cast includes Constance Towers, Hoot Gibson, and Strother Martin; John Lee Mahin and Martin Rackin signed the script. 119 min. (JR) Read more
A murky, pretentious, unpleasant macho parable (2001) from Spanish filmmaker Juan Carlos Fresnadillo about a holocaust survivor (Max von Sydow) who runs a casino and is obsessed with other people’s luck, especially people who, like himself, have survived disasters. These he obliges to play a form of Russian roulette. The film’s a swell way of torturing yourself for 108 minutes. With Eusebio Poncela, Leonardo Sbaraglia, and Monica Lopez. In Spanish with subtitles. (JR) Read more
One of the most ambitious and accomplished works by Portugal’s premier filmmaker, Manoel de Oliveirawho turns 94 this month and is still fully active. Made in 1990, it contrives to tell the entire history of Portugal through a series of stories a Portuguese lieutenant uses to distract his colonial troops in Angola in 1973. This being Oliveira, you should expect the unexpected; the wordless opening sequence focuses on a massive tree. In Portuguese with subtitles. 110 min. (JR) Read more
A successful novelist in suburban Paris (Sandrine Kiberlain) loses her young son in an accident, so her disturbed mother (Nicole Garcia), who suffers from the blood imbalance porphyria, steals the unwanted son of a hooker from the projects as a replacement. Writer-director Claude Miller is a capable storyteller, and this 2001 semithriller, adapted from Ruth Rendell’s Tree of Hands, held me through its intricate plotting and often fascinating notations of class difference. As long as Miller simply crosscuts between the machinations of the three mothers, the sociological and psychological parallels are intriguing, but when they’re forced to share the same story line, the contrivances and coincidences begin to seem fussily elaborate. In French with subtitles; the original and more descriptive title is Betty Fisher et autres histoires. 101 min. (JR) Read more
Derived from Christopher Hitchens’s book-length indictment of Kissinger for war crimes, this BBC documentary by Alex Gibney and Eugene Jarecki is easy to like from the moment you hear the strains of Lush Life at the beginning, and it provides a valuable refresher course in our less-acknowledged methods of meddling in the affairs of other countries, killing many innocent people in the process. But I soon began to wonder why the filmmakers insist on personalizingand thereby mystifyingthe institutional policies implementing this mischief, and whether Hitchens’s own brand of Vanity Fair star politics (which apparently focuses on Kissinger because he attends some of the same parties) led to his recent swerve to the right and his endorsement of Bush’s preemptive war tactics. In any event, Gibney and Jarecki deserve credit for opening this can of worms. 80 min. (JR) Read more
I haven’t read Michael Cunningham’s novel, which presumably tries to capture the postmodernist essence of Virginia Woolf and her novel Mrs. Dalloway in three interwoven stories about three characters in different periods: Woolf in the 20s, an LA housewife in the 50s, and a woman in contemporary Manhattan. But David Hare’s screen adaptation, directed by Stephen Daldryclearly conceived as a showcase for three talented actresses (Nicole Kidman as Woolf, Julianne Moore as the housewife, and Meryl Streep as the New Yorker)reduces Woolf and her art to a set of feminist stances and a few plot points, without reference to style or form. Kidman manages something closer to impersonation than performance (for which she won an Oscar), and Moore gets beyond mannerism only when she reappears in the present; only Streep, in a less demanding part, comes out clearly ahead. With Ed Harris, Claire Danes, Jeff Daniels (especially good), John C. Reilly, and Toni Collette. 114 min. (JR) Read more
This is the second E-mail movie by writer-director Shunji Iwai that I’ve seen. The first was Love Letters (1995), his debut feature, and there as well as here we’re shown a lot of E-mails and then invited to note the discontinuities and incongruities arising when they’re juxtaposed with the interactions of the writers in real-life encounters. The concept was interesting and charming in Love Letters, up to a point, but here it quickly becomes repetitive, obvious, and dull. It doesn’t help that the film, which runs 146 minutes, is about cruel, violent, repressed, and uninteresting high school students who all happen to be rabid fans of a pop singer named Lily Chou-Chou. I didn’t believe in any of these kids for a second; they all come across as the projections of someone roughly twice their age, which is what Iwai is. In Japanese with subtitles. (JR) Read more
Though it’s unacknowledged as such in the credits, Steven Soderbergh’s SF movieabout a psychiatrist (George Clooney) who’s sent to an abandoned space station to rescue an apparently insane crew and discovers that the planet materializes human forms based on the visitor’s troubled memories, including his own of his dead wife (Natascha McElhone)is a synopsized remake of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 masterpiece of the same title. (Both are derived from a Stanislaw Lem novel, a source that’s acknowledged here.) Missing is most of Tarkovsky’s contemplative and mystical poetry (which is why it’s 90 minutes shorter), and added are some unfortunate Hollywood-style designer flashbacks featuring Clooney and McElhone. The story is still strong and haunting, but I’d recommend seeing this, if at all, only after the Tarkovsky (out in an excellent DVD edition). With Viola Davis and Jeremy Davies (Spanking the Monkey, Saving Private Ryan), whose space-cadet intonations provide the only light moments. 99 min. (JR) Read more
Christopher Munch, one of America’s most gifted independent filmmakers, follows his features The Hours and Times (1991) and Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day (1996) with this lovely and moving 2001 drama, a speculative account of his late mother’s early life in which a woman (Jacqueline Bisset) and her long-lost illegitimate daughter (Martha Plimpton) pursue each other without ever meeting. By all rights it should have put Munch on the map, yet it wound up premiering only on the Sundance Channel last spring (when I wrote about it in Section One) and consequently hasn’t attracted the buzz it deserves. A multifaceted look at a varied life, it has wonderful performances not only by Bisset and Plimpton but also by its secondary cast, including Nick Stahl as the woman’s gay son, Amy Madigan as the nurse who cares for Bisset after she becomes ill, Seymour Cassel as a former lover, Peggy Gormley as his wife, and Frankie R. Faison as a radio station manager. Months after seeing this, I still feel I know most of these people as if they were old friends. 94 min. (JR) Read more
