A tedious if mainly well-acted drama (2002, 93 min.) about the forced gaiety that ensues when a young man who’s been living in Canada briefly returns to his family and former girlfriend in Argentina. Writer-director Ana Katz (who plays one of the young man’s sisters) must have had more on her mind than the threadbare plot indicates, but whatever it was, it’s obscured by her stagy direction and Diego De Paula’s opaque performance as the hero. (JR) Read more
In his first film as writer-director-actor since The Apostle, Robert Duvall effectively conveys his admiration for both the tango and his Argentinean girlfriend, Luciana Pedraza, whom he got to study the dance. He’s less effective in creating a story about an aging New York hit man (played by himself) sent to Buenos Aires on an assignment, a premise he apparently thought up as a commercial pretext for displaying his enthusiasms. (Pedraza, who’s never acted before, ironically plays the hit man’s tango instructor.) The thriller plot, while serviceable, registers as somewhat gratuitous, but the Buenos Aires locations are nicely used. With Ruben Blades and Kathy Baker. 114 min. (JR) Read more
An original movie (1990), though not Tim Burton’s best; Johnny Depp’s inert performance in the title role can’t compare with the over-the-top eruptions of Michael Keaton in Beetlejuice and Jack Nicholson in Batman. The imaginative if arch plot by Burton and Caroline Thompson is couched in the form of a Disneyish fairy tale, though it’s also part allegory, part parable, part punk tearjerker, and part suburban sex comedy. Both Bo Welch’s arresting production design and the cast (which includes Vincent Price, Dianne Wiest, Winona Ryder, Kathy Baker, Alan Arkin, Robert Oliveri, and Anthony Michael Hall) help it along. But the Spielbergian attempt at sweetnessheralded by references in Danny Elfman’s score to the Nutcracker Suitenever fully convinces. PG-13, 100 min. (JR) Read more
Ashley Judd and Morgan Freeman star as ace lawyers in a stylish and effective, if slightly overlong, thriller about a military trial. She’s the wife of a former marine (Jim Caviezel) who’s accused of having massacred civilians in El Salvador during a clandestine operation years earlier; Freeman is a former military attorney and a reformed alcoholic (in the terms of Anatomy of a Murder, the definitive trial movie, he plays Arthur O’Connell to Judd’s James Stewart). Carl Franklin directs Yuri Zeltser and Cary Bickley’s adaptation of Joseph Finder’s novel with flair, and Amanda Peet and Adam Scott do good jobs as emotional and professional backup for Judd. With Bruce Davison and Tom Bower. 100 min. (JR) Read more
Directed by Warners regular Roy Del Ruth in 1954, this pedestrian reworking of the Poe story is of minor interest mainly because it’s in 3-D, which is fortunately the way it’s being shown. With Karl Malden, Claude Dauphin, Steve Forrest, and Patricia Medina. (JR) Read more
A movie about what’s generally known as white trash—and not to be confused with John Boorman’s quirky 1990 comedy about yuppies, which bears the same title. Dumped by her musician boyfriend (Dylan Bruno) at an Oklahoma Wal-Mart, Novalee Nation (Natalie Portman), who’s 17 and pregnant, camps out and makes new friends, some of them played by Ashley Judd, Stockard Channing, and James Frain. Moving in fits and starts, mawkish in its sincerity, and at times disjointed in its lumpy structure, this drama about the plight of unmarried mothers, adapted by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel from a novel by Billie Letts, probably would have fared much better as a Warners second feature of the 30s, about half as long and twice as gritty. This has agreeable sentiments but lousy reflexes, such as its way of signaling tragic events well in advance through the hokey score. TV producer Matt Williams directed. 120 min. (JR) Read more
In 1978, Robb Moss filmed a river trip he took with his hippie friends in the Grand Canyon; 20 years later he visited five of them to see how they’ve changed and to reflect on the old footage. It’s a natural subject for a documentary, but this is far more than an evocative chronicle of a generation. Moss has an acute feeling for structure and juxtaposition and for the quality and sensibility of his friends, each of whom seems to have preserved his or her love of nature in a different way. 78 min. (JR) Read more
In her first feature, High Art (1998), writer-director Lisa Cholodenko created a convincing milieu of media professionals who were both sexy and unpredictable. This sophomore effort is even better, confronting two uptight lovers (Christian Bale and Kate Beckinsale) with the rock music scene when they graduate from Harvard Medical School and head west to complete their studies. Bale’s mother (Frances McDormand), a famous record producer, is sleeping with the lead singer (Alessandro Nivola) of the British band she’s recording at her Laurel Canyon home, and after she invites her son and his fiancee to move in, all sorts of unexpected things happen. McDormand has never been better, but all the performances are interestingly nuanced, including Natascha McElhone’s as one of Bale’s fellow psychiatric interns. I was put off by the inconclusive ending, but the rest of this movie more than makes up for it. 103 min. (JR) Read more
This effective, well-paced antimilitary thriller has more conflicting flashbacks than you can shake a stick at. On New Year’s Eve 1999 a sadistic drill sergeant (Samuel L. Jackson) at a U.S. army base near the Panama Canal leads a squad of trainees on jungle maneuvers during a hurricane, and only two men survive (Giovanni Ribisi and Brian Van Holt). The irritated captain (Connie Nielsen) calls in a cantankerous ex-army ranger (John Travolta, terrific) to help question the survivors about what happened. Director John McTiernan does a swell job with James Vanderbilt’s sneaky script in keeping us guessing. 98 min. (JR) Read more
Coline Serreau’s feminist comedy-drama (2001), about an exploited middle-aged housewife and mother nursing back to health a severely beaten Algerian prostitute, zips along with exemplary anger. Yet she’s created a world in which all the bad guysvirtually every male in sightget their comeuppance and all the women reap their just rewards, which may be another form of whoring: catering to the audience’s baser desires. With Catherine Frot, Rachida Brakni, and Vincent Lindon. In French with subtitles. 109 min. (JR) Read more
A 2001 video about shopping malls by Harun Farocki, probably the most important living essayistic filmmaker working in Germany, who has made over 90 works since 1966. In German with subtitles. 72 min. (JR) Read more
William Cameron Menzies, the production designer for Gone With the Wind, was also a director specializing in SF and paranoia (Things to Come, Invaders From Mars). In this low-budget anti-Nazi effort (1944, 72 min.) a German art dealer (Paul Lukas) gets his comeuppance after severing ties with his Jewish-American partner (Morris Carnovsky) and refusing to help the man’s actress daughter (K.T. Stevens), who’s being persecuted in Germany. This tale by Kressmann Taylor and Herbert Dalmas is clever at times but awkwardly told; it’s hardly a match for the anti-Nazi agitprop of Jean Renoir or Douglas Sirk (strangely, one never sees a swastika), but cinematographer Rudolph Mat Read more
Self-styled goofy filmmaker George Kuchar tours festivals with some of his 60s work and pays mocking tribute both to himself and these events, with frequent allusions to the surrounding picturesque settings (2002). Fun but slight. 12 min. (JR) Read more
Peter Wintonick, codirector of Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media does a pretty good job of surveying the direct cinema movement of the 50s and 60s promulgated by filmmakers and filmmaking units in France, Canada, the U.S. and elsewhere, such as Jean Rouch, Leacock-Pennebaker, and the Maysyles brothers. Most of what the filmmakers themselves have to say is interesting, and Kirwan Cox’s script for this 1999 documentary seems well researched. 103 min. (JR) Read more
The main pretext for this German TV documentary (2002, 55 min.) was the recent discovery of color home movies shot during the production of Charlie Chaplin’s black-and-white feature The Great Dictator (1940), the biggest commercial success of his career. Documentarians Kevin Brownlow and Michael Kloft are able to cut back and forth between the film and the home movies to show the same actions and sets from different angles, always to fascinating effect. There’s a lot to be said about Chaplin’s complex relation to Hitler: the Tramp’s resemblance to the fuhrer and the fact that he was loved by millions made Chaplin something of a rival as well as an ideological opponent, and though widespread rumors of his Judaism were false, he let them stand to express his solidarity with the Jews. Kloft and Brownlow never get past the more obvious parallels and differences between the two men, but this is still well worth checking out. In English and subtitled German. (JR) Read more