Short 16-millimeter films by the great experimental dancer-performer-filmmaker-theorist Maya Deren, perhaps the first major figure in the American avant-garde cinema: Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), codirected by Alexander Hammid; At Land (1944), possibly her greatest film; A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945); Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946); her unjustly neglected Meditation of Violence (1948); and The Very Eye of Night (1959). 86 min. (JR) Read more
The most independent and resourcefully frugal of American underground filmmakers, Jon Jost thrives in isolation, but his work often suffers from his lack of connection, particularly his disinclination to remain in any one place for long. This experimental documentary (2003, 116 min.) about Jost’s first encounter with Paris is a notable exception; with a minimal narrative, it pays sensitive tribute to such Parisian art as Eugene Atget’s photography, impressionist-era paintings, music by Satie and Debussy, and the youthful romance of Godard’s early films, played out here by Helene Fillieres and James Thierree. Shot in ‘Scope and partially composed in diptychs, it does a much better job than Jost’s London Brief (1997) of celebrating his shift from film to video, and the shooting and editing both sing with lyrical invention. In French with subtitles. Jost will attend the screening. Thu 10/13, 8 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more
Heaven knows what possessed the Chicago International Film Festival to adopt “Film capital of the world” as its slogan this year, but considering some of the movies that played in New York and Los Angeles recently and never made it here, it’s more than a stretch. Among the remarkable films they could see and we couldn’t were the subtitled, not the dubbed, version of Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), Abbas Kiarostami’s Five (2003), Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Cafe Lumiere (2003), and several 2005 films, including Tickets (with 40-minute episodes by Kiarostami, Ken Loach, and Ermanno Olmi), Hou’s Three Times, Alexander Sokurov’s The Sun, and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s L’enfant. Of course even if you lived in New York or LA you might not have heard about them, because the industry, which assumes no one’s interested in such films, kept their profiles so low.
Plenty of what the industry thinks we should be interested in was on display a month ago at the 30th Toronto International Film Festival. More than ever before the industry reps casually took over the city as they previewed their latest “indie” and “art”–as opposed to mainstream–product.
American journalists these days are showing more compassion for ordinary people in dire straits, but the main headline on the Toronto-based National Post on September 15–“Ottawa’s Afghan Warning: Bill Graham expected to tell nation troops will die”–was overshadowed by a huge glamour shot captioned “Cameron Diaz Snaps at Photographers.” Read more
Clean, Shaven (1993), the debut feature of independent filmmaker Lodge Kerrigan, follows a schizophrenic back to his hometown, where he hopes to see his daughter. After a disappointing second feature (1998’s Claire Dolan), Kerrigan returns with his best work to date, at least in terms of narrative drive and suspense. It focuses on a man (Damian Lewis), who may or may not be schizophrenic, searching the New York Port Authority bus terminal and its immediate vicinity for his six-year-old daughter, who’s allegedly been abducted but may not even exist. When he eventually befriends a desperate young woman (Amy Ryan) with a six-year-old girl, our uncertainty naturally escalates. R, 90 min. (JR) Read more
Two fascinating 16-millimeter experimental films, both involving history. El dia que me quieras (1997, 30 min.), which translates as The Day You’ll Love Me, is by Argentinean-American Leandro Katz and mixes color with black and white in a poetic meditation on the famous 1967 photograph of Che Guevara’s corpse surrounded by his Bolivian captors. Its investigation is threaded through an extended contemporary interview with the photographer, Freddy Alborta, and a Jorge Luis Borges text adapted and read by Katz. Ernie Gehr’s Eureka (1974, 30 min.) unpacks and illuminates footage of San Francisco’s Market Street taken about a century ago. (JR) Read more
After her husband falls to his death in Berlin, a propulsion engineer (Jodie Foster) takes a commercial flight back to the U.S. with her six-year-old daughter and awakes from a nap to find that the girl is missing and no one on board remembers seeing her. This thriller is effective if you can accept thatas with some of John Dickson Carr’s locked-room mysteriesthe trickiness counts more than any plausibility. There’s also some pointed if unstressed social commentary, and pitting Foster’s engineer, with her knowledge of planes, against everyone else makes for some lively moments. Robert Schwentke directed a script by Peter A. Dowling and Billy Ray; with Peter Sarsgaard and Sean Bean. PG-13, 98 min. (JR) Read more
Made for the BBC, this travelogue of America’s southern backwoods is both blessed and cursed by its fascination with the colorfullively alt-country sounds and fancy word spinners like novelist Harry Crews. As a native of the deep south, I was pleased but also troubled by the locals’ eagerness to put on a folksy act for director Andrew Douglas; the camera makes awed touristic pans of the various locales, and guides offer an uncredited swipe from Faulkner’s The Wild Palms and charge $100 a day to rent a 1970 Chevy. This plays like a documentary but also credits a writer, Steve Haisman. 84 min. (JR) Read more
Alas, the thing most illuminated here is how blotchy digital video can look in the wrong hands. Actor Liev Schreiber makes his writing and directing debut with this adaptation of a novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, about a young American Jew (Elijah Wood) traveling to a remote Ukrainian village in search of the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Alternately mawkish and strident, with lots of fades to white and dog reaction shots, this can be recommended only for its good intentions. With Eugene Hutz and Boris Leskin. In English and subtitled Ukrainian. PG-13, 104 min. (JR) Read more
American teens in a depressed mining town form a secret club based on the twin tenets of pacifism and gun ownership; predictably, they wind up in a shootout with police. This Danish allegory (in English) was directed by Thomas Vinterberg (The Celebration) but written and produced by Lars von Trier (Dogville), whose hypocrisy and facile anti-Americanism are much in evidence. Vinterberg and von Trier may consider themselves pacifists, but they don’t seem to mind using violence to attract an audience. Well acted and directed, yet outlandish in some details, this 2004 feature is basically watchable tripe. 101 min. (JR) Read more
The directorial debut of Wong Kar-wai (1989), described as a reconfiguring of Mean Streets in terms of the Hong Kong underworld. By most accounts a far cry from Wong’s second feature, Days of Being Wild (my own favorite), but it’s probably still worth seeing. In Cantonese with subtitles. 102 min. (JR) Read more
Though he avoids platitudes, David Cronenberg is a troubled moralist who lingers over cherished mythologies to find their dark residue: this masterpiece, an art film deftly masquerading as a thriller, seems to celebrate small-town pastoralism and critique big-city violence, but this position turns out to be double-edged. Josh Olson adapted his script from a graphic novel, yet the story develops with a subtlety that’s entirely cinematic; two contrasting sex scenes between the hero (Viggo Mortensen) and his wife (Maria Bello), added by Cronenberg, are especially masterful. With Ed Harris, William Hurt, and Ashton Holmes. R, 96 min. River East 21. Read more
A lot of talent and energy have gone into this adaptation of David Auburn’s play about the charged relationship between a troubled young woman (Gwyneth Paltrow) and her father (Anthony Hopkins), a brilliant but mad mathematician. As in many Miramax pictures, the source material has undergone some sentimental softening, though Hope Davis, as the heroine’s sister, does a swell job of making sanity seem obnoxious. It’s set and partly filmed around the University of Chicago, and John Madden directs the actors with sensitivity. Auburn and Rebecca Miller collaborated on the script. With Jake Gyllenhaal. PG-13, 99 min. (JR) Read more
Peter Falk stars as a Jewish carpet salesman whose wife (Olympia Dukakis) has just left him; accompanied by his middle-aged son (Paul Reiser, who also wrote and produced), he leaves for what proves to be an extended trip to upstate New York in autumn. Falk throws himself into the part and almost single-handedly enables this comedy drama to transcend some of its sitcom limitations. Raymond De Felitta directed; with Elizabeth Perkins. PG-13, 96 min. (JR) Read more
Credited to a collective of 19 individuals–including filmmaker Barbara Kopple–this record of testimony given during the 1971 Winter Soldier Investigation in Detroit is more document than documentary, but it may be the most important account we have of America’s tragic encounter with Vietnam. The hearings, organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, allowed combat veterans to report, with honesty and unforced eloquence, their observations, experiences, and war crimes (and those crimes’ relation to government policy). Deeply upsetting and long unavailable, this remains essential viewing. 96 min. Reviewed this week in Section 1. Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more
Phil Karlson’s noirish 1955 docudrama about organized crime is authentically seedy, shot in Alabama with adept use of many locals and an unusual candor about racist violence. Phenix City lawyer Albert Patterson (John McIntire) vows to clean up the corrupt gambling town as state attorney general, but he’s assassinated before he can take office, leaving his son (Richard Kiley) to pursue a local mobster (Edward Andrews, who makes a wonderful villain). The corrosive script was coauthored by Daniel Mainwaring (Invasion of the Body Snatchers), a kind of specialist in 50s paranoia, and though the movie’s politics are liberal, its moral outrage is so intense you may come out of it wanting to join a lynch mob. 100 min. Also on the program: Crime Control (1941), a Robert Benchley short directed by Leslie Roush. Sat 9/17, 8 PM, LaSalle Bank Cinema. Read more