Gregory Peck plays a traumatized Canadian who crash-lands in Burma during World War II and recovers his strength while traveling cross-country. Adapted by Eric Ambler from an H.E. Bates novel, directed by the otherwise unnotable Robert Parrish, and shot in color by Geoffrey Unsworth, this British war drama (1954) has achieved something of an underground reputation in the U.S. (it’s been favorably compared to The Thin Red Line) but appears mainly to have been forgotten in the UK. With Win Min Than and Maurice Denham. 102 min. (JR) Read more
After losing her job as a network TV president, a spindly Nicole Kidman suffers a nervous collapse; she heads to a Connecticut suburb to recuperate with her hubby (Matthew Broderick) and kids, but finds the housewives there too perfect and bimbolike. If this satirical SF comedy has an auteur, it’s screenwriter Paul Rudnick, whose cheerful contempt for American wholesomeness animated In & Out and Addams Family Values. Glenn Close and Bette Midler get some comic mileage out of the premise, which originated in a novel by Ira Levin (Rosemary’s Baby) but also suggests Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Unfortunately this is much tamer than it had to beRudnick Lite, meaning on the edge of evaporation. Frank Oz (In & Out) directed; with Christopher Walken and Roger Bart. PG-13, 93 min. (JR) Read more
Jehane Noujaim, an Egyptian-American woman who graduated from Harvard, directed this documentary about the independent Arab news channel Al Jazeera, a network boasting 40 million viewers. Some Westerners seem to regard Al Jazeera as a mouthpiece for Osama bin Ladenin part because it reports Iraqi casualties with the same attention our media give U.S. onesbut Noujaim is fair-minded enough to include sympathetic interviews with a U.S. Army press officer and American journalists as well as many Al Jazeera staffers (one of whom hopes to send his kids to college in the U.S.). Shot during the March 2003 invasion and the early stages of the American occupation, it tells us more about how the channel decides what to report than we probably know about most American newscasts. In English and subtitled Arabic. 84 min. (JR) Read more
Not to be confused with The Weather Underground (2003), this is Emile de Antonio’s 1976 documentary about the radical antiwar group the Weather Underground, made with cinematographer Haskell Wexler and editor Mary Lampson. Back then Billy Ayers, Kathy Boudin, Bernardine Dohrn, Jeff Jones, and Cathy Wilkerson were still on the run and had to appear partly incognito. It’s been years since I’ve seen this, but at the time I found it provocative as well as informative. 88 min. (JR) Read more
A young Palestinian immigrant in New York divides his time among his painting, his job at a pet shop, and his affair with a married woman, but his comfortable life is complicated by a visit from his cousin, an angry radical. Directed by Muhammad Rum, this ambitious DV feature oscillates between dreams and reality while addressing its cultural issues in a talky and somewhat didactic fashion. But the difficulty of the dramaturgy is counterbalanced by Rum’s compelling use of music and the lively and effective ‘Scope camerawork by producer Nara Garber. In English and subtitled Arabic. 110 min. (JR) Read more
Heartbreakingly compassionate, this 2003 Israeli documentary by Danniel Danniel and Juliano Mer Khamis starkly juxtaposes a Jewish woman’s founding of a theater workshop for Palestinian refugee kids in 1989 and her actor son’s quest to discover what happened to these kids over a decade later and why. In contrast to the clueless media cliches about suicide bombers, this offers a comprehensive and comprehending portrait of what helps to produce them. In Arabic and Hebrew with subtitles. 84 min. (JR) Read more
Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai (who speaks the credits over the opening footage) loosely adapts Yehoshua Knaz’s novel Returning Lost Loves into a mosaic of about 40 scenes, each an extended take photographed by the masterful Renata Berta. This 2003 drama follows the messy lives of a few characters in a Tel Aviv apartment complex, and Gitai deserves credit for emphasizing the illegal immigrants, because the multiculturalism of the Middle East tends to be overlooked. More generally, the movie is notable for the authentic unpleasantness of its milieu; at one point an 18-year-old army deserter tells his father, Fuck this country!, which may be the closest we get to an epiphany. In Hebrew with subtitles. 123 min. (JR) Read more
Among the many parodic James Bond spin-offs that sprouted like mushrooms in the 60s was this jaunty item (1966) featuring James Coburn as the man from Z.O.W.I.E., filmed in ‘Scope and directed impersonally by Daniel Mann; it eventually spawned two sequels, one of them made for TV. With Gila Golan, Lee J. Cobb, and lots of gadgets. 107 min. (JR) Read more
This innovative 2002 feature by Hany Abu-Assad (Rana’s Wedding), a unique mix of documentary and fiction, follows a minibus driver transporting diverse cargoes of passengers in Ramallah and Jerusalem. Sometimes the film interviews Palestinian and Israeli artist/intellectual passengers about the ongoing conflicts and sometimes it constructs mininarratives about the bus’s progress and adventures between various checkpoints. Almost everything we hear sounds intelligent and reasonable, and the presentation, which resembles at times a variety show, keeps the proceedings absorbing and unpredictable throughout. In Arabic and Hebrew with subtitles. 80 min. To be projected from DigiBeta video. Also on the program: Dominique Dubosc’s The Illness Called Hope (37 min.), a quirky, attractively shot Palestinian travel diary. In French, Arabic, and Hebrew with subtitles. Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more
Park Jin-pyo’s semifictional love story (2002) about a man and woman in their early 70s, played by a real-life couple who reenact some of their own experiences, was banned in Korea until late last year because of its explicit sex scenes. I admire this feature more than I like it, partly because I resent the hokey music and wonder if the filmmakers aren’t a little too pushy in advancing their noble intentions. Still, this is a serious look at the potential joys and sorrows of growing old, and Park Chi-gyu and Lee Sun-ye are certainly affecting in the lead roles. In Korean with subtitles. 77 min. (JR) Read more
Brian Dannelly’s first feature is audacious and likable not only for its satirical treatment of fundamentalist Christian teenagers (Jena Malone, Mandy Moore, Macaulay Culkin, Patrick Fugit, Eva Amurri) and a couple of their elders (Martin Donovan, Mary-Louise Parker) but also for its sympathy toward them. Dannelly and cowriter Michael Urban seem to have firsthand knowledge of how religious vocabulary can deteriorate into a rhetoric that serves any agenda. Even more important, they balance their ridicule with a sharp sense of how difficult being a teenager is. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a teen movie as lively, as unpredictable, as generous, and as tough-minded as this one. PG-13, 92 min. Pipers Alley, River East 21. Read more
Basque abstract artist Jose Antonio Sistiaga painted directly onto film with homemade inks to create this silent 1970 feature. But Sistiaga’s strangely titled work, which has recently been restored, is different from the films of Stan Brakhage, who didn’t come to film from painting and had his own rhythm. Among the predominant patterns in this abstract extravaganza are dancing drops and specks that alternately suggest satellites, flying saucers, or rushing bodies of water, and its combination of color and 35-millimeter ‘Scope (with about half an hour in black and white) yields the kind of spectacle one associates with musicals and SF epics. This gets richer as it develops, recapitulating and developing its motifs of shape and color, which inevitably suggest representational forms (pebbles and bubbles, bats and insects, stained glass and latticework), only to move beyond them, as music does. That’s why the silence here is absolutely necessary–it allows the images to sing. 75 min. Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more
The only Jim Jarmusch feature that qualifies as apprentice work is his first (1980), shot in 16-millimeter for a master’s thesis at NYU. Sixteen-year-old drifter Chris Parker plays a version of himself as he walks the decrepit streets of lower Manhattan (the best scene shows him dancing to an Earl Bostic record). Jarmusch has already discovered his milieu, and his interest in both minimalist form and character as plot are already in evidence. But this lacks his characteristic charm, stylistic focus, and feeling for interactions between people, and the slowed-down Javanese gamelan music on the sound track only makes this seem more stodgy and intractable. 80 min. (JR) Read more
Also known as White Threads of the Waterfall, this 1933 film by the sublime Kenji Mizoguchi is one of his two silent features to have survived intact. The plot concerns a female entertainer, whose act involves juggling jets of water, and her romantic relationship with a shy young man; years later the man has become a judge and presides over her trial for murder. A major reason why sound films came later to Japan than almost everywhere else was the figure of the benshithe explainer who acted out all the parts and added commentary of his own, and whose popularity was such that audiences often went to hear and see their favorite benshi rather than the film stars. 110 min. (JR) Read more
Much as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind can be traced back to Alain Resnais’ Je t’aime, je t’aime, this poetic South Korean SF feature by Moon Seung-wook (2001)set in the present and including the same theme of characters who seek memory lossis one of the many stepchildren of Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville. As in the earlier film, the sound periodically drops off, with a similarly chilling effect, but the sources of melancholy here seem less technological than ecological and psychological. It’s interesting that the movie’s butterfly tours, which expose patrons to the oblivion virus, are closely associated with the U.S. (all the TV ads are in American English), while the forced abortions of teenagers suffering from lead poisoning seem tied to the acid rainthe American legacy of the greenhouse effect. More impressionistic than scientific, this sad poem lingers. In English and subtitled Korean. 116 min. (JR) Read more
