Though I admired Anthony Minghella’s 1991 feature debut, Truly Madly Deeply, I thought The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley were strenuously overrated. But the director’s riveting adaptation of Charles Frazier’s epic novel has turned me around again. A wounded Confederate deserter (Jude Law) slowly makes his way back to his North Carolina home and the sweetheart he barely knows (Nicole Kidman). Back on the farm, meanwhile, she strives to cope with the help of a new partner (Renee Zellweger). Some have compared the story to the Odyssey, but I was reminded of medieval romances (the distended treatment of time, the chivalric ethos, the witchlike crone who restores the hero’s health), Mark Twain (Philip Seymour Hoffman’s rascally preacher evokes Huckleberry Finn), and even Gone With the Wind. Kidman and Zellweger are uncommonly good, and I especially liked the timely treatment of war as universally brutalizing: even the outcomes of battles are ignored, as are the motives behind the conflict. With Donald Sutherland, Kathy Baker, Brendan Gleeson, Eileen Atkins, and Giovanni Ribisi, and a cameo by Jack White, who also contributed songs to the sound track. 155 min. Ford City, Lake, Lawndale, River East 21, 62nd & Western, Village North, Wilmette. Read more
Czech director Vaclav Vorlicek’s black-and-white slapstick fantasy is from 1966, the same year as Vera Chytilova’s Daisies, and it’s hard to think of two more gleefully anarchic comedies made under a communist regime. This one is slighter and more conventional, but its premise is still pretty outrageous. A scientist develops a formula that transforms bad dreams into good. She tests it on a sleeping cow, whose nightmare of being attacked by flies (viewed on a TV monitor) gives way to an idyll of lounging in a hammock. But things go awry when she tries the serum out on her wimpy husband, who, under the influence of a comic book, is dreaming of being rescued from the clutches of an overweight Superman clone and an ornery Wild West gunslinger by a sexy sci-fi heroine a la Barbarella. All three fantasy characters materialize in the real world, bringing their dialogue bubbles with them. The ensuing pandemonium is exceptionally silly and mostly delightful. For the record, the mistranslated title should have been “Who Wants to Kill Jessie?” In Czech with subtitles. 80 min. Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more
Played with pizzazz by Jessica Alba (TV’s Dark Angel), 22-year-old Honey struggles to teach hip-hop and break dancing to the kids in her inner-city neighborhood in an energetic musical that’s like Flashdance with a social conscience, or Saturday Night Fever with an expanded one. It’s a hokey heart-warmer that works, not just because the dancing is great but because first-time director Bille Woodruff (a music-video veteran) and first-time writers Alonzo Brown and Kim Watson clearly believe in what they’re doing. The secondary cast, which includes 8 Mile’s Mekhi Phifer, Joy Bryant, and a raft of hip-hop stars doing cameo turns, brims with charisma. PG-13, 95 min. (JR) Read more
An interesting companion piece to Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn, this 2002 French feature is also set entirely inside a movie theater, though here it’s a Pigalle fleapit that shows heterosexual porn mainly to bisexual, transsexual, and transvestite men cruising for sex with straight men. Written and directed by Jacques Nolot (who has scripted and acted in films by Paul Vecchiali and Andre Techine), the story gradually homes in on the theater’s middle-aged cashier (Vittoria Scognamiglio), a wry 50-year-old writer who’s asymptomatic HIV positive (Nolot), and a young projectionist (Sebastien Viala) who attracts the other two. Too preoccupied with personality and emotion to qualify as porn, but still very much concerned with the kind of interaction that goes on in such a place, this is a touching if relatively specialized chamber piece. The French title, La Chatte a Deux Tetes, is a reference to Cocteau meaning literally The Two-Headed Pussy. In French with subtitles. 90 min. (JR) Read more
A greeting card disguised as a historical drama about Jan Vermeer and his 17th-century Dutch milieu. Scarlett Johansson plays Grete, a 16-year-old domestic in the household of the dashing young painter (Colin Firth), who sublimates his feelings for her into his painting. The maid is lit like a Vermeer portrait even when she isn’t posing or mixing his paints, which reduces his art to photo-realism and undercuts the reverence accorded to him as a sacred visionary. The period detail is more vibrant than the minimal story (adapted by Olivia Hetreed from Tracy Chevalier’s novel), which includes Grete’s romance with a butcher’s assistant. Tom Wilkinson plays Vermeer’s patron as a lascivious ogre. Peter Webber, a first-timer, directed. PG-13, 99 min. (JR) Read more
Jacques Tourneur’s first and best film in CinemaScope (1955) is also one of his strangest westerns, though the basic materialsfrom the Tex Ritter theme song to the Daniel B. Ullman script, in which Wyatt Earp (Joel McCrea) becomes the reluctant marshal of Wichitaare pretty standard, as is the secondary cast. What Tourneur brings to the story is both visual and metaphysical: distinctive compositions, sets, and interplay between background and foreground; shockingly abrupt and arbitrary violence from raucous cattlemen; an eerie sense of Earp as an angel of death who, like the villains he sets out to disarm, can’t act otherwise or escape his destiny; and an interesting commentary on capitalism whereby the hero upsets the town’s leaders by outlawing all firearms except his own, which is bad for business. With Vera Miles, Lloyd Bridges, Edgar Buchanan, Peter Graves, Walter Coy, Wallace Ford, Jack Elam, and other familiar faces. 81 min. (JR) Read more
A low-budget exploitation item (1973) about an escaped lunatic menacing a small New England town. Its main point of interest appears to be its secondary cast, which includes John Carradine, Mary Woronov, Walter Abel, and Candy Darling. Patrick O’Neal stars and Theodore Gershuny directed. 87 min. (JR) Read more
Mira Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow play best friends who decide with some trepidation to attend their high school reunion. Despite the aggressive silliness of this enjoyable comedy, the emotional focus on the painful social experience of high school makes the film real and immediate, and the flavorsome dialogue in Robin Schiff’s script gives the leads a lot to work (as well as play) with. Directed fairly well by David Mirkin, though this movie really belongs to the actresses and screenwriter. With Janeane Garofalo. (JR) Read more
Played with pizzazz by Jessica Alba (TV’s Dark Angel), 22-year-old Honey struggles to teach hip-hop and break dancing to the kids in her inner-city neighborhood in an energetic musical that’s like Flashdance with a social conscience, or Saturday Night Fever with an expanded one. It’s a hokey heart-warmer that works–not just because the dancing is great but because first-time director Bille Woodruff (a music-video veteran) and first-time writers Alonzo Brown and Kim Watson clearly believe in what they’re doing. The secondary cast, which includes 8 Mile’s Mekhi Phifer, Joy Bryant, and a raft of hip-hop stars doing cameo turns, brims with charisma. 95 min. Burnham Plaza, Century 12 and CineArts 6, Chatham 14, Crown Village 18, Ford City, Gardens 7-13, Golf Glen, Lawndale, Lincoln Village, Norridge, North Riverside, River East 21, 62nd & Western, Webster Place. Read more
Though I admired Anthony Minghella’s 1991 feature debut, Truly Madly Deeply, I thought The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley were strenuously overrated. But the director’s riveting adaptation of Charles Frazier’s epic novel has turned me around again. A wounded Confederate deserter (Jude Law) slowly makes his way back to his North Carolina home and the sweetheart he barely knows (Nicole Kidman). Back on the farm, meanwhile, she strives to cope with the help of a new partner (Renee Zellweger). Some have compared the story to the Odyssey, but I was reminded more of medieval romances: the distended treatment of time, the chivalric ethos, the witchlike crone who restores the hero’s health. Kidman and Zellweger are uncommonly good, and I especially liked the timely treatment of war as universally brutalizing: even the outcomes of battles are ignored. With Donald Sutherland, Kathy Baker, Brendan Gleeson, Eileen Atkins, and Giovanni Ribisi. R, 155 min. (JR) Read more
Inspired by a true story, this slight but charming and nicely balanced comedy tells the tale of a group of middle-aged women in a Yorkshire village who decide to pose nude for the dozen photographs in a fund-raising calendar. Working from a script by Juliette Towhidi and Tim Firth, director Nigel Cole keeps this from getting too cute or too broad. With Helen Mirren, Julie Walters, and Linda Bassett. PG-13, 108 min. (JR) Read more
Amos Poe’s documentary about leftist singer-songwriter Steve Earle provides an interesting introduction to a compelling figure in contemporary pop music, but in all honesty I can’t say I’ve seen the whole film: at a preview screening, the masking of the 16-millimeter image cut off the bottom of the image, making most of the explanatory titles partially or completely unreadable. As long as I didn’t have to worry about these titles (some of which seemed important), I was held by Poe’s flashy style of processing and editing his material and by the plainspoken eloquence of Earle’s social and political commentarynot to mention the music. At 95 minutes, this clocks in at about the same length as the two-CD audio documentary of the same title. (JR) Read more
Shot on 24-frame video but looking none the worse for it, this satirical comedy about Hollywood deal making trades on an Emperor’s New Clothes theme. A 24-year-old screenwriter and script editor (Jordan Bridges, son of Beau), irritated by the glibness of his studio-commissary lunch pals, invents an imaginary script (New Suit) and an author named Jordan Strawberry; before long the buzz about it has become so frantic that the hero’s former girlfriend (Marisa Coughlan), a rising agent, claims to be Strawberry’s representative and launches a bidding war. Though the premise seems obvious and facile, the execution and the delineation of the various characters (all recognizable Hollywood types) are likable and funny, and the cast is great. Francois Velle directed a first script by Craig Sherman; with Heather Donahue, Mark Setlock, Benito Martinez, Dan Hedaya, Paul McCrane, and Charles Rocket. 92 min. (JR) Read more
A doctor in communist Poland learns that one of his patients plans to rob a bank and defect to the West in this Polish feature by Wojciech Wojcik. 96 min. Read more
A young woman in a nomadic family in post-Taliban Kabul, grudgingly permitted by her father to attend a religious school, sneaks off instead to a secular school, where she expresses her dream of becoming president of Afghanistan and inspires a poet trying to woo her to print up her campaign posters. This is 23-year-old Samira Makhmalbaf’s third feature; it won the jury prize at Cannes, but it’s far less exciting than her first, The Apple. Attractively shot, it has moments of wit and poetry (the title comes from Lorca) but arguably adds less to what we know about contemporary Afghanistan than her 14-year-old sibling Hana Makhmalbaf’s documentary about its casting, Joy of Madness. In Farsi and Dari with subtitles. 106 min. (JR) Read more
