While it lacks the controlled energy of She’s Gotta Have It, Spike Lee’s second feature (1988) is much more innovative, ambitious, and exciting, tackling class warfare at a mainly black college in Atlanta. Lee takes care not to stack the deck against either the light-skinned, upwardly mobile Wannabees, who belong to fraternities, or the dark-skinned Jigaboos, who feel more racial pride, and the issues dividing them range from the college’s investment in South Africa to straight versus nappy hair (the latter highlighted in a gaudy, Bye Bye Birdie-style musical number). Definitely raggedthe musical numbers are variable, and the overall continuity is fairly choppybut with this film Lee began to create a black cinema of his own. With Laurence Fishburne, Giancarlo Esposito, Tisha Campbell, Kyme, Joe Seneca, Art Evans, Ellen Holly, Ossie Davis, and Lee himself as the frat pledge Half-Pint, literally torn between the two warring factions. R, 114 min. (JR) Read more
Bernardo Bertolucci’s visually ravishing spectacle (1987) about the life of Pu Yi (1905-’67) is a genuine rarity: a blockbuster that manages to be historically instructive and intensely personal at the same time. Pu Yi (played by three children at ages 3, 8, and 15, and by John Lone as an adult) remained an outsider to contemporary Chinese history for most of his life, and Bertolucci uses his remoteness from China as an objective correlative of our own cultural distance as Westerners (virtually all of the dialogue is rendered in English). Working with visual and thematic rhymes, Bertolucci is interested in charting the gradual substitution of the state for the familythough two key agents in this process are the father figures of his Scottish tutor (Peter O’Toole) and a governor at a Chinese prison. 159 min. (JR) Read more
Michele Smith’s video is her first completed work and runs for a full two hours, which may explain why it’s both intractable and fascinating. Painstakingly handcrafted over 15 months and teeming with ministructures, it’s a silent montage and collage of diverse junk items, and though her found footage includes stag reels, home movies, and various educational films (including Themes From the Odyssey, which occasions her Joycean title), she never allows one to linger on anything long enough to become absorbed in it. Usually her rapid crosscutting and intercutting begins rather mechanically before taking off into delirium, and there are fleeting visual rhymes that keep recurring. (I especially enjoyed the gestural links between sea creatures, which are deftly used in musical patterns, and Homeric characters.) Inevitably one drifts in and out of Smith’s intricate arabesques; as she herself puts it, Form becomes amorphous as time is spun within the individual viewer’s attentions. (JR) Read more
The best work to date (2004) by screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation), this was developed from a story by director Michel Gondry and artist Pierre Bismuth. It has as much challenging originality as its predecessors, as well as a more satisfying ending and a keener sense of lived experience. The SF premise has a ring of contemporary truth: emerging from a failed romantic relationship, the hero (a subdued Jim Carrey) discovers that his ex (an aggressive Kate Winslet) has hired a company to erase all her memories of him. He enlists their services too, but technical screwups send him into a kind of temporal free fall in which past and present consciousness bleed together. Brilliantly constructed and engagingly executed, this has quite a few tricks up its sleevethe most impressive being that all concerned trim their talents to the particular needs of the movie. With Tom Wilkinson, Mark Ruffalo, and Elijah Wood. R, 108 min. (JR) Read more
An American who speaks only English (David Wissak) and an eastern European woman who speaks only French (Katia Golubeva) travel to Twentynine Palms, California, and the neighboring Joshua Tree National Park, barely communicating apart from their sexual encounters. Considering how much Bruno Dumont’s first two features (The Life of Jesus and L’humanite) were geared to his French hometown, I worried that he would lose his bearings for this foray to the U.S. Like many a European filmmaker before him, he seems transfixed by the landscape, deserts in particular, and his minimal story held me as long as the scenery was allowed to speak more than the characters. Alas, the plot eventually takes over, and it’s exceptionally ugly and unpleasant. 119 min. (JR) Read more
Peter Perry directed this 1967 exploitation documentary about youth culture (apparently defined as broadly as possible), whose main claim to fame is that it was shot by Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond, two of the best cinematographers of the period. 147 min. (JR) Read more
Set in the early 50s, when Swedish home researchstudies aimed at streamlining household kitchen activitieswas all the rage, this Norwegian minimalist comedy follows the poker-faced relationship between a Norwegian bachelor farmer (Joachim Calmeyer) and the Swedish researcher (Tomas Norstrom) assigned to study him. Much of the comedy derives from the researchers’ being forbidden to converse with their subjects, though these two become friendly in spite of themselves. The humor is a bit dry for my taste, but director Bent Hamer and his actors know what they’re doing every step of the way. In Norwegian with subtitles. 91 min. (JR) Read more
Widely and perhaps justly regarded as a comeback film for Marco Bellochio (China Is Near, Devil in the Flesh), this somber docudrama (2003) reflecting on the kidnapping and killing of Italian prime minister and Christian Democrat party head Aldo Moro in 1978 concentrates mainly on the four Red Brigade members who sequestered Moro, in particular the woman in the group. Lacking the historical background that would enable me to judge Bellochio’s treatment of this event politically as well as factuallyit has been called both detached and loaded, unfairly slanted as well as balanced by some of its criticsI can only testify that I found the film both troubling and absorbing over two separate viewings. In Italian with subtitles. 105 min. (JR) Read more
Two Asian women who are best friends and a little boy, all realistically established characters, travel by train at night, disembarking at each stop to encounter enigmatic and highly unrealistic events. This feature by Trinh T. Minh-ha (A Tale of Love, Naked SpacesLiving Is Round) and Jean-Paul Bourdier unfolds as an avant-garde picaresque, though unlike other examples that spring to mind (Cocteau’s Testament of Orpheus, Pasolini’s Hawks and Sparrows), it seems neither autobiographical nor ethnocentric, and tends to emphasize theatrical elements (including forthright use of music, choreography, and spoken text). Such seemingly unanchored work is obliged to entertain on some level, and this succeeds pretty well, aided by Bourdier’s lighting and production design. The credited inspiration is Kenji Miyazawa’s novel Milky Way Railroad, and the effective music is by the Construction of Ruins. 98 min. (JR) Read more
This striking and poetic experimental feature (2003) was shot in Morocco, but its maker, Hakim Belabbes, is a former graduate student at Columbia College who did much of the pre- and postproduction work in Chicago. This seems appropriate, because the film is constructed as an urgent dialogue between Moroccan traditionalism and Western modernityor should we say, given the current state of the world, between Moroccan modernity and Western traditionalism? This conversation is expressed formally as well as thematically through several interwoven stories. Beautifully shot in vibrant colors, the film shifts between characters, story lines, and perspectives with the prismatic grace of a kaleidoscope. In French and Arabic with subtitles. 92 min. (JR) Read more
The best work to date by screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation), this was developed from a story by director Michel Gondry and artist Pierre Bismuth. It has as much challenging originality as its predecessors as well as a more satisfying ending and a keener sense of lived experience. The SF premise has a ring of contemporary truth: emerging from a failed romantic relationship, the hero (a subdued Jim Carrey) discovers that his ex (an aggressive Kate Winslet) has hired a company to erase all her memories of him. He enlists their services too, but technical screwups send him into a kind of temporal free fall in which past and present consciousness bleed together. Brilliantly constructed and engagingly executed, this has quite a few tricks up its sleeve–the most impressive being that all concerned trim their talents to the particular needs of the movie. With Tom Wilkinson, Mark Ruffalo, and Elijah Wood. R, 108 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Crown Village 18, Davis, Gardens 7-13, Lake, Pipers Alley, River East 21. (Reviewed this week in Section One.) Read more
Directed by Barbara Albert, this 2003 Austrian feature tracks the fate of a woman after she survives a plane crash, weaving together numerous miniplots. At first I thought this was a Michael Haneke knockoff, but it’s more depressing and less edifying than most of those narrative experiments, which is why I eventually tuned it out. In German with subtitles. 120 min. (JR) Read more
D.J. Caruso (The Salton Sea) directed this competent but ultimately egregious thriller about an eccentric FBI profiler (Angelina Jolie) tracking a serial killer in Montreal. On the plus side, it isn’t boring, and Jolie and Ethan Hawke, who plays an art dealer and key witness, generate a certain amount of edgy chemistry. But eventually the filmmakers’ desire to shock and tease overtakes any feeling for character or common sense. Adapted by Jon Bokenkamp from a novel by Michael Pye; with Kiefer Sutherland, Gena Rowlands, Olivier Martinez, Tcheky Karyo, and Jean-Hughes Anglade. R, 100 min. (JR) Read more
A military officer (Val Kilmer) working in a top-secret special operations force is sent to find the missing teenage daughter of a big-time government official and uncovers a white slavery ring. It’s impossible to describe this story, government corruption and all, without producing a flood of cliches, yet writer-director David Mamet seems to regard it as mere fodder for another of his closed-universe genre exerciseseither that or he’s trying to lure Arnold Schwarzenegger back to Hollywood. The heroes (Kilmer, Derek Luke) are all totally good, the villains (Ed O’Neill, William H. Macy) are all totally bad, and the macho one-liners are sufficiently adolescent to produce the desired snickers. I tried very hard to imagine I was somewhere else. R, 106 min. (JR) Read more
David Koepp, much better and more experienced as a writer (Apartment Zero, Snake Eyes, Jurassic Park, Spider-Man) than as a director, adapted this psychological thriller from a Stephen King novella. It’s one more King story about an isolated writerin this case a popular novelist (Johnny Depp) in the middle of a messy divorce who, tucked away in a remote Mississippi cabin, is accused of plagiarism and stalked by a crazed hick (John Turturro). The tricky plot has an interesting payoff, but it’s a slow and bumpy ride getting there, and Koepp fares better with special effects than with generating either suspense or interest in the characters. With Maria Bello, Timothy Hutton, and Charles S. Dutton; the ubiquitous Philip Glass churned out the anxious score, and Fred Murphy is the able cinematographer. PG-13, 106 min. (JR) Read more
