Formulaic but fairly well-done, this scare show for teenagers is only nominally a remake of the old Vincent Price movieit’s more a combination of Psycho, The Blair Witch Project, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (with some additional cribs from Brian De Palma’s Sisters). The setting has been changed from Victorian London to present-day rural America, with a heavy dose of TCM’s antihillbilly paranoia, and the murders are even more gruesome than in the original. Paris Hilton, in her first extended big-screen role, isn’t required to act so much as scream and strip. Joel Silver and Robert Zemeckis coproduced, and Jaume Collet-Serra directed; with Elisha Cuthbert, Chad Michael Murray, and Brian Van Holt. R, 88 min. (JR) Read more
Wrestler Roddy Piper plays the only remaining fertile male on earth, who sets out to rescue women held captive by froglike mutants. R.J. Kizer and Donald G. Jackson codirected this 1987 feature, which, believe it or not, had a sequelcalled not Heaven Comes to Frogtown but the more prosaic Return to Frogtown. R, 88 min. (JR) Read more
Kira Muratova’s justly celebrated 1971 feature tells the story of a divorced technical translator (Zinaida Sharko) who’s reluctant to let go of her grown son even as she avoids an opportunity to pursue a serious romantic relationship. A potent provincial melodrama (Muratova’s term) with striking black-and-white cinematography, this isn’t as obviously transgressive as her later films, though it was banned in the Soviet Union (apparently because the characters are so unhappy) and Muratova didn’t work again for seven years. One of her outstanding traits that shines through here is her ability to direct both professional and nonprofessional actors. In Russian with subtitles. 95 min. (JR) Read more
One of Sidney Lumet’s best jobs of directing (1975) and one of Al Pacino’s best performances (as a bisexual bank robber) come together in a populist thriller with lots of New York juice. Its details are stronger than its structurethe film loses some of its energy before the endbut it’s an astonishing fusion of suspense and character, powered by superior ensemble acting. With John Cazale, Charles Durning, Sully Boyar, James Broderick, Chris Sarandon, and Carol Kane. R, 124 min. (JR) Read more
Not to be confused with David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996), this ensemble drama is the directorial debut of Paul Haggis, who wrote Million Dollar Baby. It’s annoying to see titles recycled so quickly, but Haggis and cowriter Bobby Moresco use the metaphor of collision as well as the earlier film did: their script, a complex of interfacing story lines set in Los Angeles, pivots on the characters’ racism and xenophobia, playing tricks with our own biases and ultimately justifying an extravagant array of coincidences and surprises. The actors, especially Chris Bridges (aka rapper Ludacris), Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Michael Pena, and Larenz Tate, are adroit at conveying Haggis’s candid observations about the crazy ways we live and think. With Sandra Bullock, Brendan Fraser, and Thandie Newton. R, 100 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Chatham 14, Crown Village 18, Davis, Ford City, Gardens 7-13, Lake, Lawndale, Pipers Alley, River East 21, 62nd & Western. Read more
A grim reminder of what commercial success can do to a talented director. I don’t want to overrate Tom Tykwer, the writer-director of Run Lola Run (1999), but that film showed a certain flair for expanding on some of the tricks and conceits of music videos, and it seemed an improvement on Tykwer’s heavier, more querulous Winter Sleepers (1997). This feature (2000) tries to combine the racy appeal of Run Lola Run with the more mystical ambitions of Winter Sleepers, and to my taste it fails. An obscure tale about a psychiatric nurse (Lola’s Franka Potente) trying to track down a failed robber who saved her life, it lasts 130 minutes, most of them relatively forgettable. With a better idea of what Tykwer had in mind, maybe I would have stayed interested. In German with subtitles. (JR) Read more
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
This 1979 film by Maurice Pialat treats youthful sex as the only activity worth pursuing in the provinces, and the major obstacle to escaping from them. 85 min. In French with subtitles. (JR) Read more
The Mouth Agape (1974, 82 min.), my favorite film by Maurice Pialat, concerns a middle-aged woman dying of cancer and how her illness affects her husband and son; its details about sex as well as death are recognizable, embarrassing, moving, and occasionally funny. In French with subtitles. (JR) Read more
Maurice Pialat adapted his own autobiographical novel for We Will Not Grow Old Together (1972, 107 min.), a devastating chronicle of a long-term affair that can neither survive nor end, powerfully played by Jean Yanne and Marlene Jobert. In French with subtitles. (JR) Read more
A volatile realist who’s often been compared to John Cassavetes, Maurice Pialat started out as a painter and a documentary filmmaker, though in contrast to most realist works (as well as most paintings) his movies are too intimate to date very much. He was 43 when he made his first feature, Naked Childhood (1968, 82 min.), a nonjudgmental and unsentimental look at a troubled, abandoned ten-year-old boy who’s shuttled between foster parents. (Francois Truffaut served as coproducer, though Pialat was a sworn enemy of the New Wave.) In French with subtitles. (JR) Read more
