Moderately watchable but awfully predictable, this 2003 documentary chronicles the efforts of one of its three directors, Brian Herzlinger, to score a date with Drew Barrymorewho ever since E.T. has been the girl of his dreams. As quickly becomes obvious, his real passion isn’t to go on a date but to make a movie about it, which results in our distrusting the authenticity of the feelings of everyone involved in this project, including Barrymore. While constantly bemoaning his shrinking budget, Herzlinger at one point pays $75 for a psychic’s advice. Is he sincere, or does he just think it will make a good sequence? Jon Gunn and Brett Winn codirected. PG, 90 min. (JR) Read more
Apart from the even more obscure silent film Second Youth, this early talkie (1931) is the only time the famous acting couple Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne starred in a moviea Molnar comedy about a jealous husband testing his wife, later remade as The Chocolate Soldier and Lily in Love. Sidney Franklin directed; with Roland Young, ZaSu Pitts, and Herman Bing. 89 min. (JR) Read more
Suggesting at different moments a backstage musical, a failed love story, a surreal comedy, and even a cartoon fantasy, this beautiful, corrosive, visionary masterpiece by Jia Zhang-ke (2004) is a frighteningly persuasive account of the current state of the planet. Set in an eerie Beijing theme parka kind of Chinese Las Vegas, with scaled-down duplicates of the most famous global landmarksit follows a bunch of workers as they labor, carouse, couple, and uncouple, but it’s really about propping up extravagant illusions through alienated labor. Though Jia is one of the most respected directors in mainland China, this film was his first to get an official release there. In Mandarin and Shanxi dialect with subtitles. 139 min. (JR) Read more
By now Ingmar Bergman has concocted many a postscript to his illustrious career. What makes this masterful if sprawling 2003 sequel to Scenes From a Marriage (1973) remarkable is that at the director’s insistence it was shot and is being shown on digital video. This matters because, in spite of Bergman’s consummate skill with his actors (chiefly Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson), he makes no attempt whatever to hide his contempt for the medium apart from its usefulness as a recording device. The lack of stylistic finesse that results, whether deliberate or inadvertent, becomes a kind of shocking honesty about the creepiness of Bergman’s sensibility: solipsistically self-pitying, spiritually constipated, and utterly without interest in overcoming these flaws. R, 120 min. In Swedish with subtitles. Reviewed this week in Section 1. Music Box. Read more
Bill Murray’s minimalism as an actor combines with Jim Jarmusch’s as a writer-director to yield a certain redundancy, making this comedy Jarmusch’s starkest feature to date. The tragedy of Dead Man and Ghost Dog is missing, but there’s genuine poignancy in the attempts of Murray, who plays a wealthy retiree in perpetual denial, to discover which of his former girlfriends (played by Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange, and Tilda Swinton) is the mother of the 19-year-old son who he’s been told may be looking for him. The sadness of his life (and theirs) is palpable; still, there’s an undeniable sweetness to Murray’s friendship with his next-door neighbor (Jeffrey Wright), a working-class Ethiopian who facilitates his quest. R, 105 min. Reviewed this week in Section 1. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Pipers Alley, River East 21. Read more
