Shot in July 2003, this collectively made video documentary is by far the most comprehensive account I’ve seen of how Iraqis view the U.S. war and occupation. The main interlocutor, a poet and novelist with an Iraqi father and an American mother, doesn’t conceal his opposition to President Bush, but the spectrum of positions is unusually broad, from plenty of pro-American people to Iraqis who’ve never forgiven the U.S. for its support of Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war. Most of the credited filmmakers have both Middle Eastern and American roots, which may help to explain why this national portrait shows a country as divided as the U.S. is. In Arabic with subtitles. 89 min. (JR) Read more
Pierce Brosnan isn’t playing James Bond this time around, but the setting (Paradise Island in the Caribbean) and the Playboy-like sensuality (concentrated on Salma Hayek and Naomie Harris) seem drawn from the same commercial/colonial fantasy. Brosnan’s a jewel thief resting up from his last score, Hayek’s his girlfriend and sometime assistant, Harris and Woody Harrelson are a cop and an FBI agent trying to snare him, and Don Cheadle is a suave local gangster. It’s silly adolescent stuff, but director Brett Ratner and screenwriters Paul Zbyszewski and Craig Rosenberg serve it up gracefully. PG-13, 100 min. (JR) Read more
Shot in July 2003, this collectively made video documentary is by far the most comprehensive account I’ve seen of how Iraqis view the U.S. war and occupation. The main interlocutor, a poet and novelist with an Iraqi father and an American mother, doesn’t conceal his opposition to President Bush, but the spectrum of positions is unusually broad, from plenty of pro-American people to Iraqis who’ve never forgiven the U.S. for its support of Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war. Most of the credited filmmakers have both Middle Eastern and American roots, which may help to explain why this national portrait shows a country as divided as the U.S. is. In Arabic with subtitles. 89 min. Sat 11/13, 5 PM, and Mon 11/15, 6 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more
The experimental filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul (who got his MFA from the School of the Art Institute) has proved himself a real original with films like Mysterious Object at Noon and Blissfully Yours. This 2003 video, codirected by Michael Shaowanasai, is a campy action adventure about a shy nobody who doubles as a butt-kicking government spy. Indefatigably cheerful about its own silliness, enlivened by muscial numbers and asides about Thai politics, it often feels like it’s about to collapse into giggles. It’s worthy of its title, if not its celebrated director. In Thai with subtitles. 90 min. (JR) Read more
For me the calling cards of the 1966 film were Michael Caine as the title character, a working-class chauffeur and ladies’ man, and the music of Sonny Rollins. Jude Law and the team of Mick Jagger and Dave Stewart may sound like viable replacements, but this new adaptation of Bill Naughton’s play is more concerned with attitude than character and too moralistic to be much fun. Hollywood hack Charles Shyer (Father of the Bride) has discarded the London setting and cockney milieu, moving the action to New York City (though, perversely, this was shot in London). He seems less interested in storytelling than in TV-commercial fast cutting, though Alfie’s ladiesMarisa Tomei, Nia Long, Jane Krakowski, Sienna Miller, and Susan Sarandonprovide some minimal interest and continuity; with Omar Epps. R, 105 min. (JR) Read more
Chicagoan Deborah Stratman, who specializes in experimental documentaries, spent four months with tightrope walker Adil Hoxur–cited in the Guinness Book of World Records and the latest descendant of a family of tightrope performers over many centuries–as he and his troupe toured Chinese Turkestan and performed nightly in small villages. Among his biggest fans are fellow Uyghurs, a Turkic Muslim people seeking religious and political autonomy. Stratman emphasizes the everyday over the exotic, a consistently fresh and personal way of relating to the material; she trusts viewers to make many of the right connections but never comes across as esoteric. Her sense of rhythm in this digital video, particularly evident in the way she edits and lingers over certain kinds of movement, is especially impressive. 68 min. Stratman will attend the screenings; this is a U.S. premiere. Fri-Sat 11/5-11/6, 8:30 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800. Read more
I can’t go along with my colleagues who regard Alexander Payne’s entertaining but familiar comedy as one of 2004’s best movies: it lacks the insolence of his Election and the freshness of his work with Kathy Bates in About Schmidt. A depressive, divorced unpublished novelist (American Splendor’s Paul Giamatti) and a cheerful, horny former TV star (Thomas Haden Church) who’s about to be married embark on a tour of the California wine country that includes sexual adventures. The performances of both leads (especially Church), Virginia Madsen, and Sandra Oh are effective, and Payne does know how to capture two kinds of male menopause. But I can’t say he ever surprised me. R, 123 min. (JR) Read more
Taylor Hackford’s epic biography of Ray Charles differs from other authorized Hollywood musical biopics in one striking detail: its subject, still alive when most of this was made, is almost never shown as a likable person (though reportedly this was even more true of the director’s cut, now available on DVD). The script, by Hackford and James L. White, follows roughly the first half of Charles’s 56-year careeruntil he got off heroin in the mid-60sand then abruptly signs off, apart from a couple of pro forma nods to his virtue. We also get some flashbacks to a childhood trauma and his early struggle with blindness that are supposed to explain something or other. Jamie Foxx expertly captures the singer’s mannerisms, and there are some knowing asides on the corruption of the music business. With Kerry Washington, Regina King, and Clifton Powell. PG-13, 152 min. (JR) Read more
A photographer in Copenhagen (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) betrays his girlfriend (Maria Bonnevie) to pursue an adulterous fling with a Swedish woman (Bonnevie again) who’s visiting with her novelist husband. This arresting brain twister is narrated by the husband, and the shifting of certain particulars implies that either the whole tryst or some aspects of it may be occurring in his jealous imagination. The ambiguities suggest Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad and Providence, but the show-offy, high-tech visual style couldn’t be further from Resnais’ aesthetics and sensibility. Christoffer Boe makes his directing debut with this feature, and Bonnevie does a fine job of making her double role something more than a gimmick. In Danish and Swedish with subtitles. 90 min. (JR) Read more
Known for his work on gay subjects and for his neo-Brechtian strategies, Canadian filmmaker John Greyson teamed up with South African video activist Jack Lewis for this eclectic period narrative, based on a 1735 sodomy trial that led to the execution of a Dutch sailor (Neil Sandilands) and a Hottentot (Rouxnet Brown). The original trial transcript was translated from Middle Dutch to Afrikaans and then into English; the translation process is part of a distancing strategy that also includes deliberate anachronisms and, for better and for worse, periodically recalls some of the archness of Peter Greenaway. Greyson directed a script he cowrote with Lewis, who also produced. In Afrikaans and Nama with subtitles. 97 min. (JR) Read more
Although the great director F.W. Murnau shifted his style from film to film, he’s often better known for his expressionism and use of sets (as in The Last Laugh, Faust, and Sunrise) than for shooting on locations (as in Nosferatu and Tabu). Released in 1922, just after Nosferatu, and long believed to be lost, this tale about two rural brothers is often discussed as a major early work of the second type, and the extracts I’ve seen are impressive. In German with subtitles. 110 min. (JR) Read more
Mike Leigh paints a warm and tragic portrait of the title character (Imelda Staunton), a good-hearted wife and mother in 1950 London who works as a cleaning lady but also as an unpaid abortionist. Much of the film’s potency derives from its personal edge–the passion for precise period decor, the title dedicating the film to Leigh’s parents (a doctor and midwife), and even the childlike classification of many characters as either good souls or villains. Leigh evokes British director Terence Davies in a brief cinemagoing scene, and the same innocence Davies brought to his stories of postwar Britain informs this parable of a person whose good works land her in prison (also the great theme of Roberto Rossellini’s Europa 51). The detailing of Vera’s family is close to perfection. With Richard Graham, Eddie Marsan, Anna Keaveney, and Alex Kelly. R, 125 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Landmark’s Century Centre. Read more
In all three of his features to date–George Washington, All the Real Girls, and now Undertow–David Gordon Green, who’s still under 30, brings a poetic sensibility to portraits of working-class southerners in which storytelling generally plays second fiddle to character and ambience. This time he’s experimenting with a fairy-tale thriller that only superficially resembles the work of Terrence Malick (the film’s coproducer) and The Night of the Hunter (two kids flee across the wilderness from a murderous adult), two references frequently cited by critics. To these one might add Huckleberry Finn–but the absence of any clearly defined place or period makes Undertow more fanciful than any of them. Despite a few narrative confusions, I found it pure magic. 107 min. Esquire, Landmark’s Century Centre. Read more
One should know as little as possible in advance about the plot of cinematographer Shona Auerbach’s subtle and graceful directorial debut, written by Andrea Gibb. So let’s just say that the main characters are a single mother (Emily Mortimer), her deaf nine-year-old son (Jack McElhone), his mysteriously absent father, a sailor hired by the mother to briefly impersonate the man, and the Scottish port setting. Considering this film and David Mackenzie’s Young Adam, an exciting new Scottish cinema may be taking shape. PG-13, 105 min. (JR) Read more
Danielle Arbid’s first feature is set in 1983 Beirut, where the isolated 12-year-old heroine and her dysfunctional, middle-class Christian-Arab family periodically rush off to bomb shelters. I have a hard time relating to narrative films shot largely in close-ups, even when they’re directed by Carl Dreyer or Sergio Leone; Arbid’s picture is so claustrophobic I couldn’t process all the emotional interchanges. In Arabic with subtitles. 90 min. (JR) Read more
