Tian Zhuangzhuang (The Horse Thief), one of China’s greatest living filmmakers, has had a difficult career because of his political outspokenness, and this 2002 feature was his first since The Blue Kite in 1993. It’s a remake of the 1948 masterpiece Spring in a Small City by Fei Mu, widely considered the nation’s greatest film by Mandarin speakers but tragically neglected by almost everyone else. A young doctor visits an ailing aristocrat, who’s an old friend, and the man’s alienated wife, who was the doctor’s first sweetheart years earlier. The only other characters are the aristocrat’s sister and aging male servant, and the concentration gives Tian’s magisterial mise en scene enormous potency. This erotically charged drama may not be quite as great as the original, but it’s an amazing and beautiful work just the same. In Mandarin with subtitles. 116 min. A 35-millimeter print will be shown. Reviewed this week in Section One. Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more
Rene Clair’s 1931 satire on industrialization was overshadowed for many years by Chaplin’s Modern Times and then forgotten, though its recent release on DVD has given it a secondand well-deservedlease on life. Like Clair’s lesser known and somewhat better Under the Roofs of Paris (1930), it experiments with the new sound process, and its proletarian plot (two convicts go free, one becoming a tramp, the other acquiring a phonograph factory) makes it a period piece in the best sense. In French with subtitles. 97 min. (JR) Read more
Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy), the young American man and French woman who met on a train and spent the day together in Vienna in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995), run into each other again nine years later, this time in Paris. What we see of their reunion unfolds in real time and lasts only 80 minutes, but it’s so concentrated that the film is about the previous nine years as much as the breathless present. You won’t need to have seen the earlier film to enjoy this to the utmost; in its performances, direction, and script (by Linklater, Kim Krizan, and the two actors), it’s so perfectly conceived and executed that you may be hanging on every word and gesture. Just as romantic and compelling as the first film, this is a beautiful commentary on what might be described as nostalgia for the present. Reviewed this week in Section One. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Landmark’s Century Centre. Read more
Many critics are calling this an improvement over the first movie, and they’re probably right. But both are fairly routine minor variations on superhero tropes that have been around for over half a century, and as such I find them blending together into one ultimately forgettable (if agreeable) four-hour romp. As Dr. Octopus, Alfred Molina makes a more baroque supervillain than Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin, but the other starsTobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Rosemary Harris, J.K. Simmonsseem happy to be giving us more of the same. Sam Raimi’s direction, on the other hand, is even more fluent and well paced, integrating the hero’s spectacular acrobatics with the grueling horrors of being a working-class teen. PG-13, 127 min. (JR) Read more
Traumatized by the recent death of his mother, a maladjusted 14-year-old farm boy (Emile Hirsch) undergoes a brutal initiation into masculinity at the hands of other local teenage boys, some of whom displace their own uncertainties about sex and gender onto him. Michael Burke wrote and directed this painfully well-observed and disturbing first feature (2003); it’s especially good in its handling of actors and its sharp feeling for characters who can’t even describe their own problems, much less analyze them. 94 min. (JR) Read more
Shot in 1968, this abstruse and fascinating film by Jean-Luc Godard juxtaposes scenes of the Rolling Stones rehearsing and recording their satanic anthem with various protorevolutionary vignettes staged in and around London, among them an interview in which Eve Democracy (Anne Wiazemsky, Godard’s wife at the time) perfunctorily answers every question yes or no. Godard’s original cut, released in 1969 as One Plus One, never allowed the full and finished song to be heard; here it plays out over a freeze-frame that was tacked onto the final sequence, a version Godard disowned, punching out the producer when it first appeared. 99 min. (JR) Read more
I’m not sure I fully understand the title of 14-year-old Hana Makhmalbaf’s documentary account of the casting of her sister Samira’s At Five in the Afternoon (see separate listing), but it’s not inappropriate. The Makhmalbafs, an Iranian family of filmmakers, trek through Kabul a bit like an invading army, trying to acquire actors from a reluctant populace for a progressive film about a young Afghan woman. Mutual misunderstandings and suspicions proliferate, often to telling and comic effect, with Samira and her father, Mohsen, sometimes playing bad cop and good cop to their prospective actors. In Farsi and Dari with subtitles. 73 min. (JR) Read more
Ernst Lubitsch’s only completed film in Technicolor (1943), the greatest of his late films, offers a rosy, meditative, and often very funny view of an irrepressible ladies’ man (Don Ameche in his prime) presenting his life in retrospect to the devil (Laird Cregar). Like a good deal of Lubitsch from The Merry Widow on, it’s about death as well as personal style, but rarely has the subject been treated with such affection for the human condition. Samson Raphaelson’s script is very close to perfection, the sumptuous period sets are a delight, and the secondary cast–Gene Tierney, Charles Coburn, Marjorie Main, Eugene Pallette, and Spring Byington–is wonderful. In many respects, this is Lubitsch’s testament, full of grace, wisdom, and romance. 112 min. A 35-millimeter print will be shown. Also on the program: When Hell Froze Over (1926), a Mutt and Jeff cartoon by Budd Fisher. LaSalle Theatre. Read more
For once the hype is true: Michael Moore outdoes himself as a polemicist, surveying the presidency of George W. Bush as if our lives depended on it. He’s grown in ambition both as a documentary filmmaker and as a tactician, showing restraint and using other voices when necessary. (His depiction of the World Trade Center attacks of September 2001 is especially powerful.) To expect this eloquent and multifaceted statement of rage to be any more “objective” than our evening news would be naive–especially when Moore uses so many selected nuggets from the evening news to make his points. More generally, however, this Cannes prizewinner delivers a wealth of information that the U.S. major media have been skirting, and it registers with a good deal of common sense and simple humanity. There are plenty of laughs whenever Moore wants to twist the knife, but the bottom line is that he respects and trusts his fellow Americans a lot more than Bush does. 116 min. Reviewed this week in Section One. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Crown Village 18, Davis, Esquire, Gardens 7-13, Lake, Landmark’s Century Centre. Read more
Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz wrote and directed this 1973 zombie movie several years before they attained universal infamy with Howard the Duck. Michael Greer and Marianna Hill costar, backed up by such reliables as Royal Dano, Elisha Cook Jr., and the sadly forgotten Joy Bang (Pretty Maids All in a Row, Cisco Pike). Also known as Dead People. 90 min. (JR) Read more
Can a film be a tour de force and still basically uninteresting? This 2003 Hungarian feature by Tamas Sas focuses on a young woman (Patricia Kovacs) who has been having an affair with her stepfather since childhood; living on his calls and visits, delivering monologues to herself as she putters around her flat, she waits desperately for him to end his marriage, which he keeps promising to do. Kovacs, an undeniably talented actress in her mid-20s, makes this a highly theatrical performance piece about female victimization, like Jean Cocteau’s play The Human Voice. All the other characters, including the stepfather, are glimpsed only elliptically, and Sas frequently fades to red to make the whole thing look even artier. In Hungarian with subtitles. 90 min. (JR) Read more
Commenting on this remarkable 1957 feature in the Reader, Dave Kehr wrote, “Nicholas Ray’s direction of black-and-white CinemaScope, that freak child of the 50s, is consistently brilliant in this raw, confused masterpiece about two commando officers (Richard Burton and Curt Jurgens) lost in the North African desert after a dangerous raid. The moral parable fades into metaphysical speculation, as the desert is always there to lend an eternal perspective to the personality conflict. Extensively recut, the film barely makes sense on the narrative level, but Ray, as always, is able to illustrate what he cannot articulate.” Now a beautifully restored print with 21 minutes of added footage is showing at the Gene Siskel Film Center as part of a series on the war film, and while the long version is still a masterpiece, it also remains confused in some respects because of the producer’s perverse casting decisions. Jurgens, who had been earmarked for a smaller part as a captured German soldier, was instead given the role that Ray intended for Burton, and Ruth Roman was brought in as the apex of a love triangle involving the two soldiers. But the radical conception remains, and the movie is all the more pertinent during the agony of another desert war. Read more
Recently rediscovered and restored, this silent version of Lewis Milestone’s 1930 feature, with a synchronized score, is evidently the version that was begun first. The better-known sound version, which originally ran 140 minutes, is now only a minute shorter than this one, which doesn’t necessarily imply that the same footage has been used throughout. I haven’t seen this, but if its impact compares with the talking version’s, it should be well worth checking out. With Lew Ayres and Louis Wolheim. 133 min. (JR) Read more
Tom Hanks hams it up in this Steven Spielberg comedy, as a sort of grown-up E.T. visiting the U.S. from a fictional eastern European country. After landing at JFK airport he learns that his native land has been torn asunder by civil war; able neither to return nor acquire a visa, he winds up living at the airport for a spell, becoming the pal of other disenfranchised little people who work there. Early reports suggested this might owe something to Jacques Tati’s Playtime, which proves to be true mainly in the product placement and a few bits of physical comedy. As usual Spielberg is too bored by everyday life to use his premise for anything but a fairy tale, whose cheap pathos suggests a bad Chaplin imitation. This grows progressively phonier and eventually devolves into Mr. Roberts, with Stanley Tucci filling in for James Cagney as an airport bureaucrat. With Catherine Zeta-Jones; written by Sacha Gervasi, Andrew Niccol, and Jeff Nathanson. PG-13, 128 min. (JR) Read more
Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish recruited eight writers from around the worldincluding China, Europe, the U.S. (Russell Banks), and South Africa (Breyten Breytenbach)to tour various high places of spirituality that have also been sites of Israeli aggression, and Samir Abdallah and Jose Reynes record their statements and discussions as well as their travels. This 2003 French documentary is more effective as a collective and sometimes eloquent act of witness than as a source of fresh information. In English and subtitled Arabic, Hebrew, French, Spanish, and Mandarin. 80 min. Read more
