Chosen to represent the Czech Republic at the Oscars, this Altman-esque fresco by Jan Hrebejk (Divided We Fall) offers a provocative and entertaining satirical account of intersecting lives, classes, and subcultures in contemporary Prague. At first it seems to be about immigration, but eventually it becomes a wry commentary on racism and xenophobia as manifested in every reach of society, from the violence of soccer hooligans to the more genteel prejudice of intellectuals. Along the way Hrebejk delivers caustic ironies about the postcommunist world, though his movie is limited by the rather dubious suggestion that race hatred is a specifically Czech problem. The large cast of characters allows for many strong performances, especially Jiri Machacek as a security guard and Petr Forman (son of director Milos) as a young man estranged from his professor father. In Czech with subtitles. R, 108 min. Music Box. Read more
Fresh, likable, and stylishly low-key, this wistful and sexy romantic comedy marks the feature-directing debut of conceptual artist Miranda July. There are a lot of strong performances by relative unknowns, but what really holds things together is a certain sustained pitch of feeling about loneliness. July plays a shy video artist, supporting herself as a cabdriver for the elderly, who becomes interested in a recently separated shoe clerk (John Hawkes) with two sons. The movie’s flirtatious roundelay also includes the clerk’s coworker, an art curator, and a couple of teenage girls. R, 90 min. (JR) Read more
Carl Dreyer’s last silent, the greatest of all Joan of Arc films. (Lost for half a century, the 1928 original was rediscovered in a Norwegian mental asylum in the 80s; other prints had perished in a warehouse fire, and the two versions subsequently circulated consisted of outtakes.) Joan is played by stage actress Renee Falconetti, and though hers is one of the key performances in the history of movies, she never made another film. (Antonin Artaud also appears in a memorable cameo.) Dreyer’s radical approach to constructing space and the slow intensity of his mobile style make this difficult in the sense that, like all the greatest films, it reinvents the world from the ground up. It’s also painful in a way that all Dreyer’s tragedies are, but it will continue to live long after most commercial movies have vanished from memory. In French with subtitles. 114 min. (JR) Read more
Sandra Bullock returns as klutzy FBI agent Gracie Hart and as producer in this sequel to Miss Congeniality, though with all her grotesque disguises, this often suggests a sequel to Mrs. Doubtfire. Screenwriter Marc Lawrence (Miss Congeniality, Two Weeks Notice) delivers plenty of gender humor, including attitude from a black agent named Sam Fuller (Regina King), wisecracks from a gay personal stylist (Diedrich Bader), and a grand climax at a Las Vegas drag show. Among the casino-size product placements are such familiar faces as Ernie Hudson, Treat Williams, William Shatner, and Eileen Brennan in a cameo. John Pasquin directed. PG-13, 115 min. (JR) Read more
Though not entirely satisfying, Manthia Diawara’s 1995 video documentary about innovative French anthropological filmmaker Jean Rouchwhich intermittently attempts to practice a reverse anthropology on Rouch himselfis an invaluable introduction to the great late filmmaker. Diawara, a critic and film professor at New York University who hails from Mali, knew Rouch for years and struggles admirably to balance the filmmaker’s unquestionable achievements (including his role as a precursor of and guru to the French New Wave) with his paternalism toward Africansan attitude that was arguably progressive 20, 30, or 40 years ago, when most of Rouch’s masterpieces were made, but is harder to rationalize today. Diawara fails to resolve the conflict, but he articulates it as honestly as possible. 52 min. (JR) Read more
Two theater people in lower Manhattan (Wallace Shawn and Larry Pine) argue about whether the story of a troubled single woman named Melinda (Radha Mitchell) qualifies as tragedy or comedy, and writer-director Woody Allen cuts between the tragic and comic versions, with different locales, characters, and plot details. But the tragic version isn’t very painful and the comic version, aside from a few one-liners, isn’t very funny. This is mainly a narrative brainteaser like Memento or The Jacket; merely keeping up with the game requires so much energy that the thinness of the material becomes fully apparent only toward the end. With Will Ferrell, Chloe Sevigny, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jonny Lee Miller, Amanda Peet, and Brooke Smith. PG-13, 100 min. (JR) Read more
The title of this brainlessly efficient action thriller should be plural: one family is held hostage by hoods in its deluxe southern California home, while another, belonging to the local police chief (Bruce Willis), is kidnapped to force him to retrieve incriminating evidence from the site of the standoff. (I’m not even counting another hostage in the prologue.) Director Florent Emilio Siri increases the bombast with a particularly pretentious use of slow motion, and Willis, who doubled as executive producer, seems at pains to underline his character’s sanity and sensitivity in contrast to the subhuman demeanor of most of the villains. (The worst wear black masks and headdresses, faintly suggesting Arabs once the action reaches war-movie proportions.) Doug Richardson adapted a novel by Robert Crais; with Kevin Pollak, Jonathan Tucker, Ben Foster, Michelle Horn, and Willis’s daughter Rumer playing the cop’s daughter. R, 113 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 castGene Tierney, Charles Coburn, Marjorie Main, Eugene Pallette, and Spring Byingtonis wonderful. In many respects, this is Lubitsch’s testament, full of grace, wisdom, and romance. 112 min. (JR) Read more
Carl Dreyer’s last silent, the greatest of all Joan of Arc films. Lost for half a century, the 1928 original was rediscovered in a Norwegian mental asylum in the 80s (other prints had perished in a warehouse fire, and the two versions subsequently circulated consisted of outtakes). Joan is played by stage actress Renee Falconetti, and though hers is one of the key performances in the history of movies, she never made another film. (Antonin Artaud also appears in a memorable cameo.) Dreyer’s radical approach to constructing space and the slow intensity of his mobile style make this “difficult” in the sense that, like all the greatest films, it reinvents the world from the ground up. It’s also painful in a way that all Dreyer’s tragedies are, but it will continue to live long after most commercial movies have vanished from memory. With subtitled French intertitles. 114 min. The choral group Jubilate, accompanied by a full orchestra, will perform Richard Einhorn’s Voices of Light, a powerful piece written for the film. Tickets are $18 and $22. Fri 3/18, 6:30 and 8:30 PM, Music Institute of Chicago, 1490 Chicago, Evanston, 847-535-9873. Read more
This 2003 Portuguese feature by Jose Carlos de Oliveira begins as a no-frills war film set in 1972 Mozambique, then evolves (or devolves) into a fairly good action adventure flick as a black prisoner and a white soldier trek across the bush, joined eventually by a white military nurse. From that point it becomes a fairly thin if irony-laden study of the endlessly bickering characters, which ultimately capsizes with fatuous American Graffiti-style texts explaining their respective fates. Oliveira is never sure-footed enough to stick with a single genre, and the music, which ranges from African to Portuguese pop and rock, only adds to the distraction. In Portuguese with subtitles. 110 min. (JR) Read more
Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker’s documentary about U.S. soldiers of the 2/3 Field Artillery, stationed at a luxurious palace built by Saddam Hussein, is the first comprehensive film account I’ve seen of the Iraq occupation from the perspective of the soldiers; essentially this is their film. Most of the bullshit comes from Donald Rumsfeld, and no commentary is needed to clarify its inadequacy. I’m uncomfortable with how some of the narrative and musical strategies contrive to evoke Apocalypse Now, especially considering the filmmakers’ relative lack of illusions about the war. There are many rap performances, and the occasional editorializing includes one soldier’s ridicule of their flimsy Humvee armor. The film records many raids of Iraqi houses to find weapons and weapon makers; few of them are successful, though we’re offhandedly informed that several suspects were arrested and sent to Abu Ghraib anyway. No wonder some of the locals throw rocks. PG-13, 86 min. Reviewed this week in Section 1. Century 12 and CineArts 6, 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, 102 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Landmark’s Century Centre. Read more
A young native of southern California (Alex Weed), who’s both a classical pianist and a club DJ, flies to Budapest with his Hungarian father to attend his grandfather’s funeral. While there he gets caught up in two local subculturesthe porn industry and the technopop rave sceneuntil those worlds disastrously collide. Hungarian writer-director Steven Lovy favors flashy jump cuts and a wildly roving camera, but eventually this settles down into a fairly entertaining youth movie with plenty of music. In English and subtitled Hungarian. 97 min. (JR) Read more
I barely remember Get Shorty (1995), in which Miami loan shark Chili Palmer (John Travolta) breaks into the criminal side of the movie business courtesy of Elmore Leonard, but it’s got to be better than this dumbass sequel that has him crashing the LA music scene. Travolta’s teamed up with an equally out of place Uma Thurman, and they’re the only ones the movie doesn’t ridicule. Director F. Gary Gray doesn’t have a clue about how to film this couple dancing, and Peter Steinfeld’s crude script confuses character with shtick while racing us through a story where loyalties and motivations turn on a dime. I was really glad when it was over. With Vince Vaughn, Cedric the Entertainer, Andre Benjamin, Steven Tyler, Christina Milian, Harvey Keitel, Danny DeVito, and an uncredited James Woods. PG-13, 113 min. (JR) Read more
Film and video artist Jem Cohen (whose other work includes impressionistic documentaries on Fugazi and Elliott Smith) spent six years shooting this striking and potent 16-millimeter experimental feature in and around hundreds of malls, from Dallas to Berlin to Melbourne, and the fact that none of them can be placed or individuated is part of his point. A subtle mix of documentary and fiction, the film tells two separate stories about solitary women tied to these spaces: a 31-year-old Japanese executive (Hal Hartley regular Miho Nikaido) who’s studying the international theme-park industry for a corporation, and a young drifter (Mira Billotte of the New York band White Magic) who’s run away from home and is living and working illegally on the fringes of a mall. Both stories are interesting, though the latter is much more convincing; what makes the strongest impact is the superb documentary photography and the found audio segmentstelemarketing ads left as voice messages. 99 min. (JR) Read more
