This fascinating documentary by Sam Green and Bill Siegel (2002) looks at the Weathermen, whose radical antiwar activism during the late 60s and early 70s culminated in acts of domestic terrorism. By far the most provocative commentary comes from former Weathermen Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Brian Flanagan, David Gilbert, and Mark Rudd; some of them, like Dohrn, remain proud of what they did, while others, notably Rudd, are now somewhat ashamed. Unfortunately, the closer the filmmakers get to the present, the less politically adventurous they are. They’re graphic and powerful on this country’s slaughter of innocent Vietnamese (which, rightly or wrongly, motivated the Weathermen’s terrorism) but are completely silent about the recent and ongoing slaughter of innocents in the Middle East and Afghanistan, so that Rudd’s pivotal comparison of Weathermen terrorism with 9/11 is denied any wider context. 92 min. (JR) Read more
Darezhan Omirbaev, who’s made four features to date in Kazakhstan, is one of the most talented filmmakers currently working anywhere, but his nationality seems to have doomed him to the margins. He made his feature debut with this remarkable 1991 black-and-white film about a dreamy-eyed youth from the steppes arriving in the city by train, staying at a youth hostel, riding on buses, and obsessing over movies and girls. Less a story than a series of seemingly disconnected yet overlapping sketches, it suggests Bresson in both its performances and its remarkable attention to sound, but its manner of interfacing realism with dreams is wholly original. In Kazakh with subtitles; a 35-millimeter print will be shown. 72 min. Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more
A stiff. I don’t know the comic book series, but it could hardly be as lifeless as this leaden adaptation, in which the weapons have more personality than the characters and the nonstop action often feels like no action at all. The estimable Sean Connery stars as H. Rider Haggard’s adventure hero Allan Quatermain, who joins forces with Verne’s Captain Nemo, Stoker’s Mina Harker, Wells’s Invisible Man, Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll, Wilde’s Dorian Gray, and Twain’s Tom Sawyer (grown up to become a U.S. Secret Service agent) to defeat a nefarious global plot hatched by Sherlock Holmes’s old nemesis Professor Moriarty (who also calls himself Fantom, proving he doesn’t know how to spell). But in fact none of those characters appear; these are just fast-food-franchise toys with familiar names slapped on them (Hyde, for instance, is a clumsy mix of Schwarzenegger and the Hulk). Stephen Norrington directed a witless script by James Dale Robinson. 111 min. (JR) Read more
Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Edward Norton, Seth Green, Jason Statham, Mos Def, and Donald Sutherland join forces in this remake of a 1969 comic heist movie that starred Michael Caine. I haven’t seen the original, but this one offers some agreeably mindless fun in which the villains (including Norton) are truly villainous, the payback is satisfying in a purely infantile way, and the familiarity of everything is oddly comforting. And in terms of action, this makes The Matrix Reloaded look like a clodhopper’s jamboree. The settings are Los Angeles as well as Venice and other parts of Italy; F. Gary Gray directed a script by Donna and Wayne Powers. 102 min. (JR) Read more
Bruce (Jim Carrey) is a Buffalo TV news reporter prone to cursing God for his bad luck. God (Morgan Freeman), a janitor who hangs around an empty office building saying things like A teenager who says no to drugs and yes to education: that’s a miracle, temporarily delegates his responsibilities to Carrey, with predictably chaotic results. The most talented of Jerry Lewis’s recent epigones, Carrey knows plenty about physical shtick, and the movie works best when it sticks closest to its skeletal sketch-comedy premise. But without a decent script, he can’t create much of a character, and the farce loses its edge the moment it starts trying to tell a coherent story. Director Tom Shadyac (Patch Adams) can’t fill in the blanks, but some of the secondary cast (Jennifer Aniston, Philip Baker Hall, Catherine Bell) offer decent company. PG-13, 101 min. (JR) Read more
The title character is an over-the-hill hood played by aging French pop star Johnny Hallyday, who arrives in a small town to rob a local bank one Saturday. A retired poetry teacher (Jean Rochefort) about to undergo open-heart surgery offers to put him up, and the men unexpectedly bond. Patrice Leconte directed Claude Klotz’s mainly serviceable script, which falters only when it gets too fancy toward the end. It’s a classic setup for a star vehicle, and notwithstanding able support from Jean-Francois Stevenin and Edith Scob, among others, this movie belongs to the two leads. Their calm assurance — Hallyday as a grizzled icon, Rochefort as a melancholy mensch — is a pleasure to behold (2002). In French with subtitles. 90 min. (JR) Read more
Back in 1959 some teenagers took this opulent story of adultery and teenage love seriously, though I wasn’t one of them. Richard Egan, Dorothy McGuire, Sandra Dee, Arthur Kennedy, and Troy Donahue compete with the lush scenery (it’s supposed to be the east coast, though much of it was shot in California) and the hyperbole provided by Sloan Wilson’s source novel, Max Steiner’s highly successful score, and Delmer Daves’s characteristically giddy direction. 130 min. (JR) Read more
Ebrahim Hatamikia directed this mordant 2002 Iranian comedy drama about a man driven by poverty to plan a skyjacking. In Farsi with subtitles. 115 min. (JR) Read more
What gives Chantal Akerman’s video documentary about illegal Mexican aliens in the U.S. so much bite as well as poignancy is her personal investment in the material. It’s felt in her haunted and highly evocative lingering over landscapes (an Akerman specialty), as well as in her subtitled interviews with Mexicans in Spanish and a few Americans in English. These are capped by her own highly moving monologue in French. A major work that creeps up on you gradually (2002). 99 min. (JR) Read more
This compelling 2002 documentary by Mark Moskowitz, an avid fiction reader who makes a living shooting political commercials, is a kind of literary detective story, though paradoxically the piece of literature at its center remains elusive and opaque to the end. In his late teens Moskowitz bought a copy of Dow Mossman’s novel, The Stones of Summer (1972), after seeing an enthusiastic review in the New York Times Book Review; when he finally got around to reading it 25 years later he was blown away but frustrated to discover that Mossman had never been heard from again. This launched him on a lengthy quest to find the author and learn why some ambitious novelists produce only one book, a question pondered in interviews with critic Leslie Fiedler, editor Robert Gottlieb, author and teacher Frank Conroy, Mossman’s former agent, and many others. We finally learn much more about Moskowitz than about Mossman, and more about Mossman than about his novel, but Moskowitz’s passion for books is irresistible. 128 min. Facets Cinematheque. Read more
The highly gifted Winnipeg independent Guy Maddin takes on his first commissioned feature–an adaptation of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s production of Dracula–and succeeds brilliantly, making it his own while offering what may be the most faithful screen version to date of Bram Stoker’s novel. Shot mainly as a black-and-white silent, with music by Mahler, selected sound effects, and expressive use of red for blood and green for dollar bills, this kinetic fever dream is every bit as enticing as Maddin’s Archangel, Careful, and The Heart of the World. Don’t let the high-toned elements scare you off: this 2002 feature is a sensual delight, a highly erotic bacchanal with hilarious asides about male sexual paranoia in relation to race and ethnicity. 75 min. Music Box. Read more
In the summer of 1995, French documentarist Nicolas Philibert shot the rehearsals for an outdoor performance of Witold Gombrowicz’s Operetta at a psychiatric clinic in La Bord; the film that resulted was released the following year. As in Philibert’s other documentaries, his uncoercive respect for the participants registers almost immediately; he wants us to get to know these performers as people rather than as patients, even though the mood is periodically one of amiable chaos. A couple of the most interesting moments arise when patients address the filmmaker directly; the second time this happens, he’s identified as a representative of societymeaning us. In French with subtitles. 104 min. (JR) Read more
In terms of plot, this postapocalyptic horror tale about an epidemic that decimates most of England is pretty familiar stuff, the most obvious referents being Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, its various movie spin-offs, and George Romero’s zombie pictures. But Danny Boyle’s purposeful direction and Mark Tildesley’s imaginative and resourceful production design keep this fresh and edgy; the images of a wasted London and the details of a paramilitary organization in the countryside are both creepy and persuasive. Alex Garland wrote the script, and the effective cast includes Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Christopher Eccleston, Megan Burns, and Brendan Gleeson. 108 min. (JR) Read more
As a big fan of Under the Sand (2001), the previous collaboration between Charlotte Rampling and writer-director Francois Ozon, I was prepared to follow them pretty far into the ambiguities and nuances of this tale, about a celebrated British mystery novelist (Rampling) who arrives at her publisher’s country house in the south of France to work on a book but finds her space invaded by his promiscuous daughter (Ludivine Sagnier of Ozon’s 8 Women and Water Drops on Burning Rocks). Unfortunately, after the well-honed psychological melodrama of its first half, this wanders off into the metaphysical territory of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (a much better film). In English and subtitled French. 102 min. (JR) Read more
Through a series of mishaps, a beautician headed for Acapulco (Juliette Binoche) and a chef en route to Munich (Jean Reno) find themselves sharing a hotel room near Charles de Gaulle International Airport, and in spite of many temperamental differences they fall in love. Director Daniele Thompson collaborated with her son Christopher on the script for this 2002 romantic comedy in ‘Scope, and as concocted as it may sound, she and her two leads bring it off (Binoche is especially effective playing a character that seems to have as many layers as her makeup). One should note that, for better or for worse, Miramax has cut ten minutes from the French release. In French with subtitles. 81 min. Pipers Alley. Read more
