As with the director’s cut of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, this is no restoration but a revision; roughly five minutes of the original have been cut and roughly four of previously unused footage have been added. If there’s a difference in overall quality, I’m unaware of it. Dave Kehr calls this 1979 feature an empty-headed horror movie with nothing to recommend it beyond the disco-inspired art direction and some handsome if gimmicky cinematography. The science fiction trappings add little to the primitive conception, which features a rubber monster running amok in a spaceship. Scott relies on suspense techniques that looked tired in The Perils of Pauline: for the most part, things simply jump out and go ‘boo!’ Under the circumstances, the allusions to Joseph Conrad (Nostromo) and Howard Hawks (The Thing) seem unforgivably presumptuous. Instead of characters, the film has bodies; some of them are lent by Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, and Yaphet Kotto. 116 min. (JR) Read more
Lee Marvin was great in his own right, but he’s disastrously miscast as the high-rolling Theodore Hickey in this 1973 film of one of Eugene O’Neill’s greatest plays, adapted by John Frankenheimer for the American Film Theatre series. Robert Ryan, Jeff Bridges, Bradford Dillman, and Moses Gunn are worth seeing as the hapless dreamers awaiting Hickey’s arrival at Harry Hope’s Last Chance Saloon, and though the running time is 239 minutes plus a ten-minute intermission, O’Neill needs the sprawl to capture the characters’ desperation. (JR) Read more
If you don’t know Jean Genet’s extraordinary first play, this misguided production by Christopher Miles, adapted from his own stage version for the American Film Theatre series in 1975, is likely to pack a wallop. Otherwise, I’d avoid this like the plague. With Glenda Jackson, Susannah York, and Vivian Merchant. 94 min. (JR) Read more
Broadly speaking, the popular literary biopic is a hopeless subgenre, but this account of the relationship between Sylvia Plath and husband and fellow poet Ted Hughes manages to test the rule thanks to its unusual seriousness and first-rate performances by Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig. Director Christine Jeffs and writer John Brownlow scrupulously avoid taking sides in the volatile marriage–a delicate task given the four decades of verbal and legal warfare between the couple’s partisans, not to mention the aura of myth that surrounds Plath’s suicide at 30, which brought her a level of recognition she never achieved in life. Though constrained from quoting Plath’s work at length, the film manages to convey that the sexiness of poetry itself was the honey that drew the couple together and made them, at least initially, inseparable. Paltrow’s mother, Blythe Danner, plays Plath’s mother with such insight that I was sorry the role wasn’t made bigger, proportionate to the importance she had in Plath’s life. Jared Harris and Amira Casar fare much better in their respective roles as poet Al Alvarez and Hughes’s lover, Assia Wevill. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Pipers Alley. Read more
I haven’t seen the original (or wanted to) in 29 years, but this remake by Marcus Nispel revives its crudely effective variation on the hatred and fear of hillbillies in Deliverance, as teenagers stumble upon a family of mad butchers in rural Texas. The new version, with Blair Witch Project pseudodocumentary updates, carries more of a jolt, as well as fancier sets, more sadism (courtesy of R. Lee Ermey, virtually reprising his drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket), and more pretension (a teenager crucified on a meat hook). Inspired by a true story presumably adds to the sordid thrills; maybe we should look forward to entertainments about Nazis torturing children. With Jessica Biel, Jonathan Tucker, Erica Leerhsen, Mike Vogel, Eric Balfour, and Andrew Bryniarski as lovable Leatherface. R, 98 min. (JR) Read more
Two classic experimental works with pronounced visceral effectsquite aggressive in the case of Tony Conrad’s 30-minute The Flicker (1965), which rapidly alternates black frames and white frames, and relatively soft and subtle in Anthony McCall’s 1973 projection piece Line Describing a Cone, which the audience is invited to circle and inspect. (JR) Read more
Agnes Varda’s wonderful documentary The Gleaners and I (2000) considered all kinds of gleaners, starting with people who gather leftovers from harvesting and proceeding to related activities in both the arts and day-to-day life. Probably the most popular film Varda ever made, it brought her correspondence and gifts from around the world, and in this 60-minute epilogue she shows off and catalogs her bounty and tells what happened to most of the people she interviewed earlier. On a French DVD combining the two films (both subtitled in English) she’s in effect created an interactive feature that allows viewers to leap back and forth between the works and follow the fates of these characters. In French with subtitles. (JR) Read more
It won’t make gun lobbyists happy and certainly has traces of liberal hokum, but this bracing courtroom thriller is the most entertaining and satisfying John Grisham adaptation I’ve seen. A young widow in New Orleans brings a civil suit against a gun manufacturer after her husband perishes in an indiscriminate massacre, and an old-fashioned local lawyer (Dustin Hoffman) takes the case while a slick corporate hit man (Gene Hackman) flies in to set up a high-tech command center that monitors and manipulates the ongoing trial. Meanwhile, one of the jurors (John Cusack) and a mysterious woman (Rachel Weisz) with resources of their own conspire to sell the verdict to the highest bidder. Director Gary Fleder and four screenwriters make an extremely complicated plot easy to follow and absorbing to watch. Burnham Plaza, Century 12 and CineArts 6, Chatham 14, City North 14, Crown Village 18, Davis, Ford City, Gardens 1-6, Golf Glen, Lake, Lawndale, Lincoln Village, Norridge, 600 N. Michigan, 62nd & Western, Village. Read more
Clouds of May, the second feature of Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan, struck some viewers as belonging to the school of Kiarostami, a mistake they wouldn’t make with his masterful third feature. An industrial photographer in Istanbul (Muzaffer Ozdemir) who hasn’t recovered from his busted marriage finds himself the reluctant host of a country cousin (Mehmet Emin Toprak) looking for work. Ceylan uses this slim premise to build a psychologically nuanced relationship between the men, as an uncomfortable domestic arrangement leads to irrational spats. The narrative, capped by a brief bad dream and the capture of a mouse, isn’t always legible, but it feeds into a monumental, luminous visual style like no other. The nonprofessional leads won top honors at Cannes; shortly afterward Toprak died in an auto accident. In Turkish with subtitles. 110 min. (JR) Read more
Clint Eastwood’s grimly deterministic view of human nature is never more apparent than in his masterful tragedies: Bird, White Hunter, Black Heart, Unforgiven, and this dark police procedural, adapted by Brian Helgeland from a novel by Dennis Lehane. Three childhood chums in working-class Boston grow up to become a family man who has never fully recovered from childhood sexual abuse (Tim Robbins), an ex-con and convenience-store owner whose 19-year-old daughter has been brutally murdered (Sean Penn), and a police detective (Kevin Bacon) investigating that crime with his partner (Laurence Fishburne). The performances, especially of Penn and Robbins, are so powerful and detailed (down to the Boston accents) that they often persuade one to overlook the narrative contrivances (particularly the incessant crosscutting), the arty trimmings (including Eastwood’s own score), and the dubious social philosophy. With Marcia Gay Harden and Laura Linney. R, 140 min. (JR) Read more
Zinn, the straight-talking Jewish leftist from working-class Brooklyn who wrote A People’s History of the United States, participated in the first use of napalm while helping to bomb a French village near the end of World War II, an experience that partly motivated his protests against the Vietnam war, and in the mid-50s he became an inspirational figure in the civil rights movement while chairing the history department at a black college in Atlanta. This video profile by Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller allows his significance to register and his charisma to shine despite a pedestrian approach that’s especially awkward in its use of archival footage. 68 min. (JR) Read more
I missed The Last Party, a 1993 documentary by Donovan Leitch and others that charts the progress of Robert Downey Jr. from apathy to active interest as he interviews other celebrities about the 1992 presidential election. This sequel by Leitch and Rebecca Chaiklin sets out to do something similar with Philip Seymour Hoffman and the 2000 election: seeking to become politically engaged, Hoffman travels across the U.S. collecting sound bites from Noam Chomsky, Newt Gingrich, Jesse Jackson, Bill Maher, Michael Moore, Willie Nelson, Rosie O’Donnell, Susan Sarandon, and many lesser-known activists; he also stands thoughtfully in front of the Jefferson Memorial for 15 seconds, accompanied by a snippet of a gospel tune. I realize this insulting film is supposed to coax young people into serious political involvement, but if they aren’t already involved, why would they want to see this in the first place? All the participants, including the audience, deserve much betterfor starters, time enough to connect three sentences. 90 min. (JR) Read more
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
