Andrew Niccol, who wrote The Truman Show and directed Gattaca and Simone, works both sides of the street with this outspoken satire about a Ukrainian arms merchant (Nicolas Cage, who also produced). The movie aims for the action-adventure market with its sex and violence, but the adroit script also exposes the rationalizations and outright denials of international armament dealers. It’s unstable but effective, mixing harsh truths and entertaining lies. With Ethan Hawke, Bridget Moynahan, Jared Leto, and Ian Holm. R, 122 min. Reviewed this week in Section 1. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Chatham 14, Ford City, Gardens 7-13, Golf Glen, Lake, Lawndale, Norridge, River East 21, 62nd & Western, Village North, Webster Place. Read more
The original title of this Flemish police proceduralThe Alzheimer Caserefers to the fact that its vengeful hit man, like the hero of Memento, suffers from periodic bouts of amnesia and struggles to plan his moves in relation to them. This may sound gimmicky, but director Erik Van Looy skillfully profiles both the assassin (Jan Decleir, suggesting a tougher, over-the-hill version of Michel Piccoli) and the Antwerp detectives investigating his crimes. Van Looy and Carl Joos adapted a novel by Jef Geeraerts to produce this violent, sleazy story (2003). In Dutch and French with subtitles. R, 120 min. (JR) Read more
When in doubt, go for the fart jokes. Better yet, team the ultimate nerd (Eugene Levy, as a dental equipment salesman) with the ultimate hardass (Samuel L. Jackson, as a grouchy federal agent). Have them meet accidentally, take turns calling the other my bitch, and go after some killers. The only characters in this formulaic crime comedy that I halfway liked were a couple of barely glimpsed wives, but the two leads keep it going through sheer determination. Les Mayfield (Flubber) directed. PG-13, 84 min. (JR) Read more
In more humanistic eras like the 1930s, movies sometimes wore their sentimentality on their sleeve, but today they’re more apt to announce their flakiness. This unpleasant 2003 feature by first-time indie director Allan Mindel concerns a naive young man (Troy Garity) who’s won some money as a champion ice fisherman. Left alone after the death of his bossy mother, he attracts various predators, including an oily salesman (Randy Quaid) and a flirtatious drifter (Alison Folland) with a kid brother. Not bad to look at, but consistently unedifying. With Bruce Dern. R, 95 min. (JR) Read more
Bertrand Tavernier based this fascinating 2001 drama of the French Occupation on the memories of two of his friendsJean Aurenche, an apolitical screenwriter, and Jean Devaivre, an assistant director who served as a member of the Resistance. It’s the most textured portrait of the period I know, exploring the complex moral choices each man faced in working for a German film production company. In French with subtitles. 163 min. (JR) Read more
This program inaugurates a weekly film-and-lecture series by Jeffrey Skolar, associate professor at the School of the Art Institute, to last through mid-December. The first three works are classic 16-millimeter experimental shorts: Bruce Baillie’s All My Life (1966), Bruce Conner’s Valse Triste (1979), and Will Hindle’s Watersmith (1968). The fourth, La ricotta, is one of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s greatest films but also one of his least known. Shot in 35-millimeter for the anthology feature RoGoPaG (1963), it’s a hilarious, irreverent satire about a big-budget film shoot depicting the Crucifixion, with Orson Welles (dubbed into Italian) as the director. (JR) Read more
Five years in the making, Wong Kar-wai’s first ‘Scope feature is his longest, most ambitious, and most expensive yet. It begins in 2046–almost 50 years after Hong Kong has been returned to China–yet most of the action takes place in the 1960s, and Wong uses his brief evocations of the future mainly as a way of poetically lamenting the past. Tony Leung returns as the journalist from In the Mood for Love, but this time he’s more in the mood for sex and seedy intrigue (the title also refers to the number of a hotel room), and the romantic fatalism is so lush that you’re invited to get lost in it. With Carina Lau, Gong Li, Faye Wong, and Zhang Ziyi; Maggie Cheung is around too, but only for a cameo. In Mandarin, Cantonese, and Japanese with subtitles. R, 129 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Music Box. Read more
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
Steve Carell plays the title role in this sloppy sitcom-in-the-making, the feature directorial debut of TV veteran Judd Apatow. The hero works at an electronics superstore, and various wacky coworkers serve as running gags, helping him along as he tries to lose his cherry. Catherine Keener shines the most in this prefab atmosphere, as the kooky middle-aged love interest. Carell and Apatow collaborated on the script; it does manage a few laughs, but the characters seldom progress beyond the two-dimensional. R, 116 min. (JR) Read more
This first feature by TV veteran Marcos Siega, with an ambitious script by another newcomer, Skander Halim, tries to be an audacious, irreverent satire about youth culture like Lord Love a Duck, but most of the laughs get strangled at birth by the uncertainty of Siega’s tone. A conniving 15-year-old (Evan Rachel Wood) concocts a sexual harassment charge against her drama teacher (Ron Livingston) and gets two of her female classmates to back her up. What initially seems like a social critique skewering everyone from lesbians to anti-Semites winds up scattered and confused, with strident performances and unconvincing characters. With James Woods, Jane Krakowski, and Selma Blair. 104 min. (JR) Read more
Novalyne Price Ellis’s memoir, One Who Walked Alone, about her friendship and abortive romance in the 1930s with Robert E. Howardthe Texas recluse and misfit with a morbid attachment to his mother who wrote the Conan stories and other pulp fantasies for Weird Talessounds like an interesting subject for a movie. Unfortunately, despite the undeniable skills of Vincent D’Onofrio as Howard and Renee Zellweger as Price, this sentimental washout (1996) never begins to be believable; the Hollywoodization is so complete that Howard has virtually been transformed into a thundering extrovert, and neither the script (Michael Scott Myers) nor the direction (Dan Ireland) can transcend the glop of Hans Zimmer’s music. With Ann Wedgeworth, Harve Presnell, and Benjamin Mouton. PG, 105 min. (JR) Read more
David Mackenzie, who directed the remarkable Scottish drama Young Adam (2003), delivers another masterful, disturbing tale of illicit passion, erotic obsession, and sudden death set in the 1950s. Natasha Richardson plays a woman whose psychiatrist husband (Hugh Bonneville) works in a hospital for the criminally insane; she falls for one of the inmates, a young sculptor (Marton Csokas) who’s killed his wife, and after the man escapes, she follows him to London. Adapted from a novel by Patrick McGrath (Spider), this has the same aggressive but nuanced sensibility as Mackenzie’s previous feature, and the same sure grasp of both actors and camera. With Ian McKellen and Joss Ackland. 90 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Landmark’s Century Centre.
Read more
