Maurice Pialat’s last feature (1995) was cowritten by him and his wife, Sylvie Danton, and features a performance by their four-year-old son, Antoine; starring Gerard Depardieu again, it’s a brutal self-portrait of a troubled and violent man. In French with subtitles. 102 min. (JR) Read more
The beginning of this 2004 Brazilian drama anticipates a paranoid thriller like Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window or Suspicion: a 65-year-old divorcee (Fernanda Montenegro), living alone in Rio’s Copacabana and participating in a neighborhood watch, witnesses what appears to be a murder in a flat across the street. Once she gets involved with the suspect, a retired judge, the movie fails to generate much suspense, but that emerges as the real point: writer-director Marcos Bernstein is more interested in how a melodramatic imagination can distort reality, a concept he explores with charm and tact. In Portuguese with subtitles. 98 min. (JR) Read more
Based on Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind’s nonfiction book The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, this absorbing and intelligent documentary by Alex Gibney presents the chronology and major characters of one of the greatest corporate swindles in U.S. history. Those who suspect that gangsters are taking over the country will find this a pretty lucid account of the methodologies employed. The only serious distraction and ethical lapse is Gibney’s sarcastic, cheap-shot use of popular songs like That Old Black Magic, Love for Sale, and God Bless the Child to underscore certain points; it seems almost to celebrate the shamelessness of the creeps being exposed. 110 min. (JR) Read more
This sequel to X X X (2002) brings back Samuel L. Jackson as a U.S. intelligence chief, though Ice Cube replaces Vin Diesel as the ex-con action hero. This time the skulduggery involves Willem Dafoe as the U.S. secretary of defense, who’s planning to assassinate his way to the presidency, but with more stuntpeople than characters, this borders on a free-for-all. Of course the movie’s real raison d’etre is watching Ice Cube tear up government facilities and blockades with a tank, spout Schwarzenegger-style kiss-off lines, and commandeer the kind of babes and high-tech cars that James Bond usually plays with. The silly script is by Simon Kinberg, the spotty direction by Lee Tamahori. PG-13, 101 min. (JR) Read more
The work of director Maurice Pialat (1925-2003) is sufficiently celebrated in France to have generated an exhaustive Web site (www.maurice-pialat.net) and two DVD boxed sets. But his name is far from familiar here, and this complete retrospective of his features–continuing Friday through Tuesday, April 29 through May 3, at Facets Cinematheque–is long overdue. All films are in French with subtitles; for more information and a complete schedule visit www.facets.org.
I’m partial to Pialat’s 70s output, but all of his movies are worth seeing, and some fans prefer the more mannerist late work screening this week. Police (1985, 113 min.) stars Gerard Depardieu as a cop chasing after drug traffickers; as Pat Graham wrote, his “sense of legality roughly mirrors that of the criminals he hounds, and Pialat follows him around with unflappable resolve.” Pialat’s next two features departed somewhat from his usual volatile realism: The dark, spiritual Under Satan’s Sun (1987, 97 min.), named best film at Cannes, adapts a novel by Catholic writer Georges Bernanos and features high-powered performances by Depardieu, Sandrine Bonnaire, and Pialat himself. Van Gogh (1992, 160 min.), with Jacques Dutronc in the title role, is Pialat’s longest, oddest, and most painterly feature, taking a revisionist and highly personal look at the artist’s last 67 days. Read more