A comfortable Bel Air couple (Adam Sandler, Tea Leoni) hire a young Mexican woman (Paz Vega) as housekeeper for their family, and when they move to Malibu for the summer, she brings along her 12-year-old daughter, setting off a string of familial, interfamilial, and cultural crises. James L. Brooks (Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News), who wrote and directed this gripping, sometimes provocative comedy drama, is usually either scorned or applauded for his adept juggling of sitcom techniques. This movie may not change anyone’s mind, but I was impressed by Brooks’s flair in carrying much of the story with unsubtitled Spanish dialogue, and Sandler gives his most finely detailed performance to date as a committed parent and successful restaurateur-chef. He and Vega help to compensate for Leoni as one of Brooks’s self-destructive neurotics, an overdirected and overplayed character who functions mainly as a sitting duck. With Cloris Leachman. PG-13, 128 min. (JR) Read more
This masterwork by Ousmane Sembene, the 81-year-old father of African cinema and one of Senegal’s greatest novelists, is the second film in a trilogy celebrating African women (after Faat Kin Read more
Two disturbed young siblings return home from the hospital and resume an acrimonious life with their father and stepmother in writer-director Kim Jee-woon’s horror movie, the third-largest-grossing South Korean film of 2003. In theory it’s an ambiguous ghost story, like The Turn of the Screw, that deliberately obscures the distinction between the supernatural and the imaginary, but in practice the awkward storytelling and spotty exposition reduce it to a string of rude shocksnot even the eventual denouement provides a lucid enough account of where this is all coming from. It’s roughly three parts Brian De Palma to one part Val Lewton; I would have preferred the reverse. In Korean with subtitles. 115 min. (JR) Read more
Adapted from a novel by Barbara Gowdy, this 2003 Canadian feature centers on three adolescent sisters growing up with alcoholic, hyperbolically dysfunctional parents in the shadow of a secret family tragedy. This is set in a small town during the 60s, and initially I was bugged by the implicit assumption that the times were every bit as crazy as the depressive mother (Miranda Richardson) and tyrannical soldier father (Callum Keith Rennie). But after a while the sisters’ stories become more substantial; I was especially touched by the everyday reality of Mont Read more
Written, produced, and directed by Kent Mackenzie, this low-budget independent feature (1961) deserves to be ranked with John Cassavetes’s Shadows, but it languished unseen for nearly four decades until Thom Andersen celebrated it in his 2003 video essay Los Angeles Plays Itself. Pitched somewhere between fiction and documentary, with nonprofessional actors improvising postsynced dialogue and internal monologues, it follows a few uprooted Native Americans from Friday night to Saturday morning in the Bunker Hill district of Los Angeles. Its moving portraiture is refreshingly free of cliches and moralizing platitudes, and the high-contrast black-and-white photography and dense, highly creative sound track are equally impressive (even the occasional imprecise lip sync seems justified). Mackenzie lived only long enough to make one other feature–Saturday Morning (1971), which I haven’t seen–but this film’s lower-case urban poetry suggests a major talent. 72 min. Saturday 12/11, 3:30 PM, and Thursday 12/16, 8 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more
This masterwork by Ousmane Sembene, the 81-year-old father of African cinema and one of Senegal’s greatest novelists, is the second film in a trilogy celebrating African women (after Faat Kine, a 2000 comedy about a sassy, self-made city woman). It focuses on the defiant second wife of an elder in a West African village who refuses to allow four little girls to undergo the traditional circumcision ceremony. Among Sembene’s strengths as a storyteller are deceptive simplicity and apparent looseness, which allow his drama to steadily gather momentum and political force. His ambiguous, multilayered treatment of a flirtatious local merchant who partially represents the world outside the village is emblematic of his virtuosity. In Bambara with subtitles. 120 min. Music Box. Read more
