Fernando Sarinana’s slick and show-offy Mexican comedy (1999, 102 min.) starts out as fun, but the laughs have drained away by the end. A recently divorced filmmaker (Demian Bichir) making a documentary about urban crime borrows his ex-wife’s car while she’s on holiday, then he and his young daughter are robbed by a masked gang who make off with the car. The ensuing mystery-thriller plot features a goofy crook who appears to be playing Nicolas Cage playing Elvis (Luis Felipe Tovar), a love interest (Cecilia Suarez), and an attack on police corruption; it all adds up to more than the movie can handle, especially when much of the cinematography looks like it was printed on sandpaper. In Spanish with subtitles. (JR) Read more
The first of two sequels to The Matrix released in 2003, courtesy of the original writer-directors, the Wachowski brothers, who have amplified the camp elements of the originalincluding the ultrasolemn performances of Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, and Carrie-Anne Mosswhile retreading the same metaphysical conceits. Lines like We’re all here to do what we’re here to do reverberate more than long enough for us to ponder their full profundity, and the martial arts choreography is neither graceful nor excitingit’s worthy of a video game. Only after cars, trucks, and a motorcycle join the actioneasily outclassing all the actorsdoes the movie take on a modicum of vitality. But if you’re 14 or younger in age or sensibility, you may giggle at some of the bons mots. 138 min. (JR) Read more
The 16-year-old title heroine (Oksana Akinshina), living in the former Soviet Union, is abandoned when her mother leaves for the States, befriended by an equally desperate 14-year-old boy, and ultimately forced into white slavery in Sweden after being promised a job and furnished with a fake passport. For all the social realism of this 2002 feature, it still seems rather dubious; writer-director Lukas Moodysson lays on the misery and the tear-jerking dream sequences (complete with angel feathers), not to mention the techno tunes, seldom bothering with character nuance or social analysis. The production company was the one behind Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark, and one finds here a similar kind of sadism posing as humanism, albeit without von Trier’s flair for melodrama. The result is grimly effective, but it made me long for Hollywood junk. In Russian and Swedish with subtitles. 109 min. (JR) Read more
This first feature by writer-director Terry Green begins a bit archly and ends with numerous loose ends tied in Hollywood bows, but in the middle section, when what we know about the central characters isn’t nailed down, I was moved by the economy of the writing and ensemble playing and the sweet mysteries they generated. Near the spot where James Dean had his fatal road accident, a remote diner gets taken over for a few days by a movie crew shooting a Dean biopic, and all the localsthe owner (John Mahoney), the cook (Ian Gomez), a couple of waitresses (Virginia Madsen and Amanda Pitera), and a tourist guide (Nathan Davis)are affected. Lindsay Crouse has a wonderful cameo as the owner’s ex-wife, and Linda Emond isn’t bad as a visiting journalist. 94 min. (JR) Read more
Matt Dillon’s directing debut (2002) has been getting a bad rep among some critics, but it kept me intrigued and entertained. Cowritten by Dillon and noir novelist Barry Gifford, it’s a sort of bargain-basement Graham Greene story about an insurance scam artist (Dillon) who travels to Cambodia in search of his seedy mentor (James Caan), and the players–among them Stellan Skarsgard, Natascha McElhone, and Gerard Depardieu at his hammiest–keep things bubbling. This is very much the work of a cinephile, calling to mind such middle-period Orson Welles jumbles as The Lady From Shanghai and Mr. Arkadin as well as dozens of other movies I only half remember, a familiarity that’s essential to its charm. 117 min. Century 12 and CineArts6, Landmark’s Century Centre, Water Tower. Read more
Easy to take but even easier to leave alone, this 1995 instant spin-off of Smoke was shot in less than a week, shortly after the earlier film wrapped. Wayne Wang and Paul Auster (director and writer of Smoke, respectively) concocted a series of improvs set in and around the same Brooklyn cigar store, featuring a few of the same actors (chiefly Harvey Keitel, who served as executive producer) and numerous guest stars. Madonna turns up to deliver a singing telegram, Jim Jarmusch ruminates on what he claims will be his last cigarette, Lily Tomlin impersonates a street person, Keith David plays the ghost of Jackie Robinson, John Lurie jams with a couple of percussionists, Michael J. Fox does nothing much at all, and so on. The clubhouse atmosphere is a major drawback: the actors seem to be having more fun than the audience, though if you aren’t expecting much you might be diverted. 84 min. (JR) Read more
To my taste, L. Ron Hubbard peaked as an imaginative writer in 1940, with yarns like Fear and Typewriter in the Skya full decade before Dianetics turned his imagination in another direction and several decades before his best-selling novels flattened it into thousands of pages of clodhopping prose. This 117-minute adaptation of an 800-page SF adventure for teenagers (2000) seems like a miscalculation on multiple levels. Coproducer John Travolta is buried under what appear to be tons of makeup and padding to create a parody of one-dimensional villainy, and as his flunky, Forest Whitaker fares only slightly better by virtue of retaining his belly laugh. These aliens enslave and exploit earthlings on the charred remnants of earth in the year 3000 while insulting them with various rat-related epithets. The atmosphere is pretty depressing, but I wouldn’t describe the distance between this and The Phantom Menace as a yawning gulf. PG-13, 117 min. (JR) Read more
Warmly recommended to viewers who like their romantic comedies small-scale but life-size, this charming debut feature by Peter Sollett, set in a Dominican milieu on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, follows the stumbling exploits of the title character (Victor Rasuk), a small-time teenage Romeo trying to upgrade his street image after being caught in the act with a chubby neighbor. Victor plots his way into the good graces of Juicy Judy (Judy Marte), a wary local beauty with agendas of her own; the hero’s sister, his younger brother, his cantankerous grandmother (Altagracia Guzman), and Judy’s brother and best friend all play significant parts in the developing intrigue. The nonprofessional cast contributed a lot to the script, and it benefits from their input. 88 min. (JR) Read more
This second feature by Samira Makhmalbaf (2000, 85 min.), made before she turned 20, shares many of the qualities found in other productions by Makhmalbaf Film House (The Day I Became a Woman, Kandahar) by boldly mixing documentary elements with allegory and fantasy in a way that’s both fascinating and disconcerting. Set in the rocky wilds of Kurdistan in northern Iran near the Iraqi border, the plot shuttles between a group of teachers who look for pupils while carrying blackboards on their backs, some boy smugglers, and a group of old men searching for their homes. The scenery is beautiful, and the feeling for community recalls not only Makhmalbaf’s debut feature, The Apple, but also, oddly enough, John Ford’s Wagon Master. In Farsi with subtitles. (JR) Read more
A convict (Billy Bob Thornton) who killed a boy in an attempted holdup is unexpectedly released from prison; still obsessed with redemption, he moves into a community house presided over by a mysterious preacher (Morgan Freeman), befriends the dead boy’s sister (Holly Hunter) without her knowing his crime, and attempts to counsel her troubled son. Haven’t we seen this already? Well, not exactly, but writer-director Ed Solomon, shooting in the midwestern dead of winter (actually in Canada), makes it more familiar than unfamiliar, despite good performances by Freeman and Kirsten Dunst (as another troubled youth). Thornton and Hunter are good too, albeit less memorable when required to do retreads. 100 min. (JR) Read more
I couldn’t make heads or tails out of this avant-garde version of the Adam and Eve story when I saw it umpteen years ago (it was made in 1970), but Vera Chytilova’s wild, extravagant, and ravishing romp was certainly intoxicating on a sensual level. It came at the end of her rebellious period as the great hope and holy terror of the new Czech cinema, after her even better About Something Else and Daisies, and before she buckled down to the relatively staid efforts of The Apple Game and Prague. A Czech-Belgian coproduction, set in a Czech resort, with a great deal of technical razzle-dazzle: double exposures, slow motion, step printing, and so on. In Czech with subtitles. (JR)
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If I thought these Oscar-nominated shorts were the best made in 2002, I’d probably want to give up reviewing movies. Three of the four live-action itemsDirk Belien’s Belgian Gridlock, Philippe Orreindy’s French I’ll Wait for the Next One, and Steve Pasvolsky’s Australian Dogcombine cuteness and cruelty in a way I find particularly repellent, so the cuteness without cruelty of Martin Strange-Hansen’s The Charming Man, the Danish romantic farce that won the Oscar, seems downright virtuous by comparison. Among the animated shorts, neither Eric Armstrong’s Oscar-winning The Chubbchubbs! nor Roger Gould’s Mike’s New Car, both American, was available for preview; the other threeTomek Baginski’s Polish The Cathedral, Chris Stenner and Heidi Wittlinger’s German Rocks, and Koji Yamamura’s Japanese Mt. Headheld my interest without being especially attractive. 91 min. (JR) Read more
Novelist Vinod Shukla collaborated with director Mani Kaul on this 1999 adaptation of Shukla’s book about a young clerk in a small-town government office and his bride during the late 60s. The story focuses on class hierarchy and domestic as well as work spaces (a key early stretch of dialogue compares the space in the couple’s cramped bed to the space in their hearts). This is beautifully short, and the influence of Robert Bresson on Kaul’s subtle inflections of editing and muting of the actors’ styles remains strong and beneficial throughout. 104 min. (JR) Read more
One of James Benning’s very best early experimental films (1976, 83 min.) is also one of the few with a narrative, although it’s one that gets swallowed up by the form of the film, as Benning puts it, and much of it consists of teasing fragments of implied stories. The individual shots, nearly always elegant (and a few running as long as 11 minutes), often come across as enigmatic, graphic, poignant, tricky, unreal, mesmerizingly slow, and/or evocative. (JR) Read more
A sober and dutiful black-and-white biopic (1952) starring Robert Taylor as the pilot who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Directed by Melvin Frank and Norman Panama, the same dynamic duo who collaborated on several Bob Hope and Bing Crosby Road pictures; with Eleanor Powell, James Whitmore, and other fun-loving members of the MGM back lot. 122 min. (JR) Read more
