Woody Allen’s streamlined erotic thriller (2005) is similar to his Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) but with more clever and intricate plotting, less rhetorical flab, and no distracting one-liners. An Irish upstart (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) marries into the London aristocracy but betrays his new wife (Emily Mortimer) by having an affair with an American expatriate (Scarlett Johansson) who was previously engaged to his brother-in-law (Matthew Goode); threatened with exposure, he begins entertaining thoughts of murder. An efficient genre piece with a few provocative metaphysical trimmings; the mainly English cast is effective. R, 124 min. (JR) Read more
This week the Gene Siskel Film Center launches a two-month retrospective on Japanese filmmaker Mikio Naruse (1905-’69) with two features: the 1952 melodrama Mother (see listings) and this late masterpiece (1964) about a war widow whose beverage store is being supplanted by a supermarket. The film clarifies why Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Yasujiro Ozu are all better known than Naruse: his turf is the lower middle class, and his chronically unfulfilled characters are typically unexceptional. Yet one can’t predict what any of them will do from one moment to the next, and despite the seeming simplicity of this tragic story, its psychological complexity is bottomless. No less remarkable are the abrupt, unsentimental editing and the remarkable mise en scene (in black-and-white ‘Scope), which shows the characters’ increasing entrapment even as it moves from claustrophobic interiors to scenic wide-open spaces. In Japanese with subtitles. 97 min. (JR) Read more
Released in 1960, as the French New Wave was getting started, this terse and fatalistic (if conventional) noir about a gangster on the run from Milan to Nice to Paris was hastily swept aside, though Jean-Pierre Melville defended it passionately and wound up appropriating its star (Lino Ventura), actor Jean-Paul Belmondo (costarring here immediately after Breathless), source novelist (Jose Giovanni), and some of its male-bonding manner in various projects. The aesthetically conservative director, Claude Sautet, went on to make chamber pieces like Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud (1995); among the other notable contributors are composer Georges Delerue, cinematographer Ghislain Cloquet, and actors Sandra Milo, Marcel Dalio, and Betty Schneider. In French with subtitles. 103 min. (JR) Read more
This week the Gene Siskel Film Center launches a two-month retrospective on Japanese filmmaker Mikio Naruse (1905-’69) with two features: the 1952 melodrama Mother (see listings) and this late masterpiece (1964) about a war widow whose beverage store is being supplanted by a supermarket. The film clarifies why Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Yasujiro Ozu are all better known than Naruse: his turf is the lower middle class, and his chronically unfulfilled characters are typically unexceptional. Yet one can’t predict what any of them will do from one moment to the next, and despite the seeming simplicity of this tragic story, its psychological complexity is bottomless. No less remarkable are the abrupt, unsentimental editing and the remarkable mise en scene (in black-and-white ‘Scope), which shows the characters’ increasing entrapment even as it moves from claustrophobic interiors to scenic wide-open spaces. In Japanese with subtitles. 97 min. Sat 1/7, 5 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more
