This adaptation of the John Le Carre best seller by Jeffrey Caine plays like Graham Greene redux. Ralph Fiennes stars as a mild-mannered member of the British High Commission in Kenya whose radical activist wife (Rachel Weisz) is brutally slain; investigating her murder, he gradually pieces together a tale of corruption involving the pharmaceutical industry that’s every bit as horrific as (and much more timely than) Harry Lime’s killing of babies with diluted penicillin in The Third Man. Fernando Meirelles, codirector of City of God, stresses old-fashioned storytelling and takes full advantage of his cast, including Danny Huston. R, 129 min. (JR) Read more
I’ve never been a fan of Larry Clark’s pornographic features about fornicating teenagers. But this scuzz-and-skateboard fest (2002) is probably his best work, if only because it seems to have the greatest number of characters and outrages (besides the usual share of screwed-up parents). Clark shares director and cinematographer credits with the skillful Ed Lachman (who shot Far From Heaven); Clark’s sleazemeister-in-arms Harmony Korine (Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy) based his script on Clark’s stories, and it has plenty of melodrama and disturbing southern California folkways. 96 min. (JR) Read more
This brisk, free-falling fantasy about the famous collators of German fairy tales, played here as a kind of comedy act by Matt Damon and Heath Ledger, is Terry Gilliam’s most entertaining work since the glory days of Time Bandits, Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and The Fisher King. Screenwriter Ehren Kruger (Reindeer Games, The Ring and its sequel) is completely indifferent to the true story of the real-life brothers; he doesn’t so much adapt their tales as use them to inspire Gilliam’s goofy and/or creepy-crawly period adventures. With Lena Headey, Monica Bellucci, Peter Stormare, and Jonathan Pryce, the latter two giving some of their broadest turns as comic grotesques. PG-13, 118 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Chatham 14, Crown Village 18, Davis, Ford City, Gardens 7-13, Lawndale, Lincoln Village, Norridge, North Riverside, River East 21, 62nd & Western, Webster Place. Read more
This week the Film Center will screen all three parts of Indian director Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy, derived from the novels of Bibhutibhusan Banerjee. This second installment (1956), fully comprehensible on its own terms, suffers at times from its episodic plot, which follows Apu from the age of ten in the holy city of Benares (now Varanasi) to his early adulthood in Calcutta. But it’s my favorite of the three, and the reported favorite of Ray’s fellow Bengali directors Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen. Its treatment of death–Apu’s father dies toward the beginning of the film and his mother dies near the end–is among the most beautiful, mystical, and precise handlings of that subject in all of cinema, worthy of Mizoguchi; in a way the film is little more than a careful contextualizing of these two astonishing sequences. Like the rest of the trilogy, Aparajito benefits from the ravishing “commentary” of Ravi Shankar’s music. It’s a masterpiece for which terms like simplicity and profundity seem inadequate. In Bengali with subtitles. 113 min. Sat 8/27, 5:15 PM, and Tue 8/30, 6 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more
