This romantic comedy-drama by Mark Decena promises more than it delivers. A computer programmer (John Livingston) who’s helping to develop an artificially intelligent life form falls for a kindergarten teacher (Sabrina Lloyd). Decena intermittently suggests that relationships are programmed, but there isn’t enough to connect the increasingly conventional love story with the scientific speculation. 79 min. (JR) Read more
Broadly speaking, this is Richard Linklater’s French Cancanthat is to say, a humanist’s joyful exploration of the musical in which the actors’ personalities resonate as much as the characters they play. Or maybe it’s what Jean Renoir might have come up with if he’d remade Don’t Knock the Rock and cast fifth-graders as the musicians. Though this seems like a personal film, Linklater was hired to direct a cannily commercial script by Mike White, about a rock ‘n’ roll loser (Jack Black) who, fired from his job and his band, impersonates his wimpy substitute-teacher roommate (White) to land a teaching position at an upscale elementary school. This infantile character hasn’t got a thought in his head except for rock music, but somehow he becomes a model teacher, and through stealth and sheer perseverance he turns his class into an inspired gang of rockers. The kids, all real musicians performing, are wonderful, and so is Black; Joan Cusack is both charming and funny as the principal. PG-13, 108 min. (JR) Read more
For the most part, this is a faithful transposition of Peter Hall’s London stage version of one of Harold Pinter’s best plays, done for the American Film Theatre series in 1973. Two of the cast members are different, but far more consequential are the formal losses from stage to screen: the theater curtain that signaled the play’s division into two acts and the spectator’s fixed distance from the action, which occurs in a hyperrealistically oversize living room. Both acts end with Max (Paul Rogers), a retired butcher and the presiding patriarch of a North London family, demanding a kiss from someone, and after the first act masterfully seduces an audience into accepting the characters’ behavior on a quasi-naturalistic level, the second elucidates the moral implications of that acceptance in a devastating manner. As in middle-period Ibsen, Pinter discloses facts about his characters at precise junctures so that events and identities click into place simultaneously. With Cyril Cusack, Ian Holm, Michael Jayston, Vivien Merchant, and Terence Rigby. 111 min. (JR) Read more
Brisk and polished in the best 30s Paramount manner, this mounting of Rudyard Kipling’s first novel is limited mainly by its Classics Illustrated impulse to synopsize the story even as it preserves extended chunks of literary dialogue. As an English painter and former colonial soldier in the Sudan who’s losing his eyesight, Ronald Colman is so stiffly decorous that he sometimes seems to have been painted onto William Wellman’s artfully composed frames. Ida Lupino, as Colman’s brash cockney model, and Walter Huston, as his faithful friend, are particular standouts; Robert Carson scripted this 1939 feature. 97 min. (JR) Read more
Joseph Losey’s 1974 film of the great Bertolt Brecht play (which Losey directed onstage with Charles Laughton in 1947) isn’t everything it might have been, if only because Topol, who plays the title role, is clearly no Laughton. But this is still the best film version of a Brecht play that I’m aware of, and the secondary castEdward Fox, Michael Lonsdale, John Gielgud, Patrick Magee, Margaret Leighton, John McEnery, and Tom Contiis fine. 145 min. (JR) Read more