Like some of Joan Crawford’s and Bette Davis’s studio vehicles, this soapy romance exists only for what Gong Li can bring to it: a certain amount of soul and nuance. What it brings to her, by contrast, is dubious. She plays a ceramic painter who travels by train every weekend to visit her retiring poet boyfriend (Tony Leung Ka Fai) and on one trip meets a veterinarian who tries to woo her. Writer-director Sun Zhou costarred with Gong in The Emperor and the Assassin and directed her in Breaking the Silence; his achronological narrative is daring, but his execution is too reminiscent of arty TV commercials, and casting Gong in a smaller second role only confuses matters. In Mandarin with subtitles. 106 min. (JR) Read more
The highly resourceful low-budget director Edgar G. Ulmer directed this 1949 adventure film in Italy. With Louis Hayward and Binnie Barnes. 94 min. (JR) Read more
How does one perpetuate the longest-running samurai action series–which yielded 26 films and over a hundred TV episodes starring the late Shintaro Katsu as a blind, sword-wielding masseur–without belaboring it? Comic writer-director-star Takeshi Kitano does it by playing stylistic games with the material, until his apparent boredom with the genre is overtaken by his art-movie sensibility. There are geysers of blood, ESP, infantile gags, weird formal ideas about sound and editing, and half-jeering references to Akira Kurosawa. By the end, when Kitano closes with a tap-dancing musical number, the genre has been ridiculed nearly out of existence, but the sense of childlike exhilaration transcends irony. In Japanese with subtitles. 116 min. Reviewed this week in Section One. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Landmark’s Century Centre. Read more
Transpiring over a ten-hour nocturnal stretch in diverse Los Angeles locations, this engaging crime thriller by Michael Mann often suggests a low-budget 40s noir blown up to blockbuster proportions, an enlargement carried out with relative ease. An efficient if dreamy cabdriver (Jamie Foxx) picks up a hit man (Tom Cruise) who forces the cabbie to chauffeur him on his rounds to bump off five key witnesses in a drug case. Stuart Beattie’s script never strays far from genre expectations, but the ensuing picaresque adventures are lively, and there’s an undeniable grace and comfort in the way Mann puts the actors through their paces. With Mark Ruffalo, Jada Pinkett Smith, Peter Berg, and Irma P. Hall. R. Reviewed this week in Section One. Burnham Plaza, Century 12 and CineArts 6, Chatham 14, Crown Village 18, Davis, Ford City, Gardens 1-6, Golf Glen, Lake, Lawndale, Lincoln Village, Norridge, River East 21, 62nd & Western, Village North, Webster Place, Wilmette. Read more
Margarethe von Trotta’s disappointing 2003 period drama focuses on the little-known protests of Aryan German women married to Jewish men who were held by the gestapo in a building on Berlin’s Rosenstrasse in 1943. The personal story told in flashbacks is of a little Jewish girl who’s briefly adopted by one of these women (Katja Riemann), a musician. A lot of effort appears to have gone into the glitzy period re-creation, but this is mainly a tearjerker. In German with subtitles. PG-13, 136 min. (JR) Read more
Orson Welles’s underrated 1973 essay filmmade from discarded documentary footage by Francois Reichenbach and new material from Wellesforms a kind of dialectic with Welles’s never-completed It’s All True. The main subjects are art forger Elmyr de Hory, Clifford Irving, Howard Hughes, Pablo Picasso, Welles himself, and the practice and meaning of deception. Despite some speculation that this film was Welles’s indirect reply to Pauline Kael’s bogus contention that he didn’t write a word of Citizen Kane, his sly commentaryseconded by some of the trickiest editing anywhereimplies that authorship is a pretty dubious notion anyway, a function of the even more dubious art market and its team of experts. Alternately superficial and profound, the film also enlists the services of Oja Kodar, Welles’s principal collaborator after the late 60s, as actor, erotic spectacle, and cowriter, and briefer appearances by many other Welles cohorts. Michel Legrand supplies the wonderful score. 85 min. (JR) Read more
Northwestern professor Scott Curtis will present a program of films from the first decade of the 20th century, including The Dancing Pig (1907), The Acrobatic Fly (1908), D.W. Griffith’s early masterpiece A Corner in Wheat (1909), and Teddy Roosevelt in Africa (1909). (JR)
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This watchable and well-made feature debut by American independent writer-director Joshua Marston is also very much a showcase for Catalina Sadino Moreno, who plays the eponymous lead with grit and energy. Maria is a fearless and attractive 17-year-old Colombian who leaves her job on a rose plantation to work as a drug mule. For $5,000 she swallows more than 60 rubber pellets of heroin, to be reclaimed from her stool after flying to New Jersey; should a pellet break internally, death will quickly ensue. The depiction of her risky voyage and what happens afterward is highly suspenseful and entirely believable. R, 101 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Pipers Alley. Read more
Henk Kleinman’s gritty 1930 drama in seven acts was meant to be the first Dutch talkie, but technical difficulties made it the last Dutch silent film. In 2003 composer Henny Vrienten did a postmodernist reconstruction of the original, adding music, sound effects, and synced dialogueand creating an obvious disjunct between the 30s visuals and the modern stereo sound. It’s a fascinating experiment, and not bad as a period melodrama: the realistic working-class details of waterfront life in Amsterdam occasionally evoke Stroheim’s Greed, and there are some hallucinatory split-screen effects toward the end. In Dutch with subtitles. 85 min. (JR) Read more
A dysfunctional family drama to end all dysfunctional family dramas, Tod Williams’s adaptation of the John Irving novel A Widow for One Year depends a lot on delayed exposition to explain why a writer of children’s books (Jeff Bridges) and his wife (Kim Basinger), who have a four-year-old daughter but have lost their grown son in an accident, are so estranged. The dramatic catalyst is a teenager from the city (Jon Foster) who’s hired as the writer’s assistant and becomes the wife’s lover, and I wish some of Williams’s critical view of the family had extended to that character as well. The cast, which also includes Mimi Rogers, is strong, and by the end the story is more satisfying than you might expect. R, 111 min. (JR) Read more
This rarely seen and recently restored Dutch feature was directed by Douglas Sirk in 1939, when he was still calling himself Detlef Sierckhe’d recently fled Germany and would soon depart for the U.S. Adapted by Carl Zuckmayer from a popular play about a thieving ragamuffin in Rotterdam, it’s one of Sirk’s least personal efforts, most notable for having the 12-year-old boy hero played by the 45-year-old actress who had the part onstage, Annie van Ees. The prominent role played by a priest in the story may call to mind The First Legion, one of Sirk’s most interesting early features in the U.S., but the mise en scene is far more routine. Also known as Wilton’s Zoo. In Dutch with subtitles. 94 min. (JR) Read more
A reasonably plucky spin-off of Little Caesar made three years later (1933), with Edward G. Robinson playing a bootlegger who tries to improve himself and crash high society. With Mary Astor and Helen Vinson; the reliable Roy Del Ruth directed. 75 min. (JR) Read more
Absorbing and instructive, this 2003 Canadian documentary tackles no less a subject than the geopolitical impact of the corporation, forcing us to reexamine an institution that may regulate our lives more than any other. Directors Mark Achbar (Manufacturing Consent) and Jennifer Abbott and writer Joel Bakan cogently summarize the history of the chartered corporation, showing how it accumulated the legal privileges of a person even as it shed the responsibilities. This conceit allows the filmmakers to catalog all manner of corporate malfeasance as they argue, wittily and persuasively, that corporations are clinically psychotic. The talking heads include not only political commentators like Noam Chomsky, Milton Friedman, Naomi Klein, Michael Moore, and Howard Zinn, but CEOs such as Ray Anderson, Sam Gibara, Robert Keyes, Jonathon Ressler, and Clay Timon, whose insights vary enormously. This runs 165 minutes, but it’s so packed with ideas that I wasn’t bored for a second. Landmark’s Century Centre. Read more
French director Maurice Tourneur, father of cult director Jacques, was a commanding figure during the silent era and a very talented visual stylist in his own right, known for his taste and subtlety. This was especially evident during the teens and early 20s, when he was working in the U.S. on many prestigious projects, including this lovely 1920 adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper’s novel about the French-Indian War. After Tourneur was incapacitated by an accident, Clarence Brown took over the direction, setting the stage for his own distinguished career. 73 min. (JR) Read more
English postnoir specialist Mike Hodges follows up his successful Croupier with this moody, stylistically assured 2003 feature, written by Trevor Preston. Superficially it’s a standard-issue revenge story set among gangsters (rather like Hodges’s first film, the 1971 version of Get Carter), but upon closer inspection its story and characters grow more mysterious, ultimately bordering on the unfathomable. After being raped by a respectable businessman (Malcolm McDowell), a small-time London drug dealer (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) kills himself, and his older brother (Clive Owen), a dour and solitary ex-gangster enduring some inexplicable depressive penance, returns to the city to get even. Charlotte Rampling seems to know more about what’s going on than anyone else, but she doesn’t say much. R, 102 min. (JR) Read more
