A wise, aging Italian peasant (Pierrino Mascarino) who knows barely any English comes to America for the first time to visit his grown nephew (Joe Mantegna), bringing light and life into the man’s humdrum suburban family and restoring their best impulses. I know how mawkish this sounds, but writer-director Robert Shallcross believes in it so passionately that he came close to convincing me too. I even enjoyed the rock number that Uncle Nino plays on the fiddle with his nephew’s garage band. With Anne Archer, Trevor Morgan, and Gina Mantegna. G, 93 min. (JR) Read more
While it didn’t convince me to give up corn dogs, Ron Mann’s celebration of actor Woody Harrelson’s Simple Organic Living tour (a bus-and-bicycle caravan spreading the gospel of holistic living along the Pacific coast) is a highly entertaining form of ecological agitprop–radical but accessible. Mann’s shrewdest ploy is to shift his focus from Harrelson to Steve Clark, his junk-food-addicted production assistant, whose comic encounters with strangers along the way look staged but purportedly weren’t. Great music and animation plus a pivotal cameo by Ken Kesey helped make this an audience favorite at the 2003 Toronto film festival. 100 min. Facets Cinematheque. Read more
Tim Burton directs Michael Keaton in the title role (1989). Production designer Anton Furst takes a good stab at making Gotham City seem corroded and oppressive, but all the best scenic and story ideas here come from other films (Blade Runner, A Clockwork Orange, Dunenot to mention Louis Feuillade’s serials and Fritz Lang’s Mabuse films). The film is watchable enough, and Jack Nicholson has a field day as the sinister Joker. But Keaton and Kim Basinger (as reporter Vicki Vale) register as washouts, and both the narrative line and the action sequences tend to be cumbersome. Still, the conceptual side of the movietwo rather sick two-sided antagonists having it out in a black and sordid contextlingers. PG-13, 126 min. (JR) Read more
A more unabashed art movie than any of Takeshi Kitano’s other films, this exquisitely composed 2002 feature (made between Brother and The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi) begins with a traditional form of Japanese puppet theater called Bunraku before it segues into three overlapping, highly stylized, but otherwise unrelated contemporary tales. In each the protagonist (a businessman, an aging yakuza, and a female pop singer disfigured in a traffic accident, as Kitano was several years ago) tries to compensate for having chosen work over love and winds up with a mate who has sacrificed everything for it. The overall mood is stately and melancholy, the selective use of color is ravishing, and some of the natural views are breathtaking. In Japanese with subtitles. 113 min. (JR) Read more
This painfully unfunny mockumentary, scripted by Dallas hopefuls Eric Jewell, Jeff Hays, and Dean Lewis, suggests that Christopher Guest has a lot to answer for. An unskilled comedian (Lewis) teaches a course in stand-up to even more unskilled locals, while an unskilled filmmaker (Jewell) and his crew document their fumblings; meanwhile another comic (David Wilk), who’s notorious for stealing material, lands his own TV series. Though Guest bases his humor on incompetence, his ensemble players know how to make the characters funny; this crew mainly tries to coast along on its amiable intentions, but it doesn’t wash. Jewell and Hays directed. 86 min. (JR) Read more
A more unabashed art movie than any of Takeshi Kitano’s other films, this exquisitely composed 2002 feature (made between Brother and The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi) begins with a traditional form of Japanese puppet theater called Bunraku before it segues into three overlapping, highly stylized, but otherwise unrelated contemporary tales. In each the protagonist (a businessman, an aging yakuza, and a female pop singer disfigured in a traffic accident, as Kitano was several years ago) tries to compensate for having chosen work over love and winds up with a mate who has sacrificed everything for it. The overall mood is stately and melancholy, the selective use of color is ravishing, and some of the natural views are breathtaking. In Japanese with subtitles. 113 min. Music Box. Read more
Upon learning that her promiscuous folksinger mother has died, an 18-year-old dropout (Scarlett Johansson) leaves the Florida panhandle for New Orleans and moves into her mother’s house, which has been willed equally to her and a couple of alcoholic deadbeatsa former English professor (John Travolta) and his teaching assistant (Gabriel Macht). This is mainly the girl’s story, though the numerous southern archetypes out of Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers (who’s explicitly referenced) keep threatening to overwhelm her. Travolta in particular chews the scenery as the pontificating (and sometimes folksinging) Bobby Long, commanding attention despite his shopworn character. First-time director Shainee Gabel adapted a novel by Ronald Everett Capps called Off Magazine Street. With Deborah Kara Unger. R, 119 min. (JR) Read more
Inspired partly by King Vidor’s The Champ, this silent 1933 masterpiece by Yasujiro Ozu takes place in a Tokyo slum, where a slow-witted, good-hearted, heavy-drinking day laborer (Takeshi Sakamoto) tries to deal with his rebellious son (Tokkan Kozo). It opens with one of the funniest stretches of slapstick Ozu ever filmed, though the remainder is colored by Chaplinesque pathos. As the loving and lovable father, Sakamoto creates one of the most complex characters in Japanese cinema, and Kozo (who played the younger brother in I Was Born, But…) isn’t far behind. The milieu they inhabit is perfectly realized, making this a pinnacle in Ozu’s career. In Japanese with subtitles. 103 min. (JR) Read more
Does this mean a second rebirth? Whatever. Kunio Miyoshi directed this 1997 Japanese feature, also known as Mothra 2: The Undersea Battle. 97 min. (JR) Read more
Some key works of the British Free Cinema movement of the mid-1950s, which combined elements of cinema verite and naturalism: Lindsay Anderson’s O Dreamland (1953), Karel Reisz’s Momma Don’t Allow (1956), Lorenza Mazzetti and Denis Home’s Together (1956), and Claude Goretta and Alain Tanner’s Nice Time (1957). 102 min. (JR) Read more
Perhaps the most delightful of Yasujiro Ozu’s late comedies (1959), this very loose remake of his earlier I Was Born, But . . . (1932) pivots around the rebellion of two brothers whose father refuses to buy a TV set. The layered compositions of the suburban topography are extraordinary, as are the intricate interweavings of the various characters and miniplots. The title is Japanese for “good morning,” and the film’s profound and gentle depiction of social exchanges extends to the farting games of schoolboys. The color photography is vibrant and exquisite. In Japanese with subtitles. 93 min. Sat 1/29, 3 PM, and Thu 2/3, 6 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more
Jean-Luc Godard isn’t being as hard on his audience this time around, and it seems to have paid off: I’ve yet to encounter any hostile critical response to this feature, a mellow and meditative reflection on the ravages of war. Set in Sarajevo and structured in three parts after Dante’s Divine Comedy, this beautiful film centers on a young French-Jewish journalist based in Israel who’s attending the same literary conference as Godard. The wars it contemplates through a montage of documentary and archival footage include those waged in Algeria, Vietnam, Bosnia, and the Middle East; Native American victims also make an appearance in Sarajevo, alongside certain others. In French with subtitles. 80 min. (Reviewed this week in Section 1.) Music Box. Read more
Though it didn’t turn a profit, Joseph H. Lewis’s low-budget masterpiece Gun Crazy (1949) won him an MGM contract, and his first assignment there was a documentary about illegal immigration that quickly turned into this routine actioner (1950) once someone decided that Hedy Lamarr should star in it. Lewis called the movie a stinker when he was interviewed by Peter Bogdanovich; it’s less than inspired, but it’s better than Lewis implied. His flair for foggy atmospherics and location shooting (in Havana and the Florida Everglades) is intermittently evident, and there’s a very convincing overhead view of a plane crash. John Hodiak plays an immigration inspector who goes underground to catch smugglers like George Macready but falls for the title lady (Lamarr), a Hungarian refugee trying to sneak into the U.S. 72 min. (JR) Read more
Suffocatingly corrosive and misanthropic, this 1943 thriller was shot in occupied France by Henri-Georges Clouzot (The Wages of Fear), and its story of a small town terrorized by anonymous poison-pen letters so effectively captures the national paranoia that after the war Clouzot was unjustly persecuted as anti-French. The outstanding cast includes Pierre Fresnay and Ginette Leclerc. Otto Preminger remade this effectively in 1951 as The Thirteenth Letter, though his Quebec locations lack the earlier film’s period interest. In French with subtitles. 92 min. (JR) Read more
To enjoy this mediocre John Grisham drama (1996), you’ll have to accept a cartoonish version of the deep south taken intact from Hurry Sundown and Mississippi Burning and believe passionately rather than reluctantly in justifiable homicide. Samuel L. Jackson plays a Mississippi factory worker who kills the racist rednecks who drunkenly rape and maul his little girl, and young lawyer-hunk Matthew McConaughey, sweating like Michael Caine in Hurry Sundown, is eager to prove how right he is. Sandra Bullock is a liberal law student along for the ride, Kevin Spacey is the mean prosecutor, and Donald Sutherland plays the Arthur O’Connell part from Anatomy of a Murderwhich you should see, or see again, instead of this silly overblown movie. Joel Schumacher directed a script by Akiva Goldsman; with Brenda Fricker, Oliver Platt, Charles S. Dutton, Ashley Judd, Patrick McGoohan, and an uncredited, as well as wasted, M. Emmet Walsh. R, 149 min. (JR) Read more
