A lion cub from a New York zoo gets shipped off to Africa accidentally, and his dad sets out to rescue him, accompanied by some animal pals. This computer-animated Disney feature shares the same premise as the Dreamworks hit Madagascar (2005), and the macho-colonialist message comes through even louder and clearer: the American animals may be stupid innocents, but they still triumph over the savage jungle beasts, with their primitive religion. The CGI characters seem less like artwork than humans wearing animal suits, but despite the overall ugliness and sitcom timing, this has enough action, violence, and invention to keep kids amused. Steve Spaz Williams directed. G, 94 min. (JR) Read more
The slickest work to date by French director Luc Moullet, perhaps because he ceded the producer’s chores to the resourceful Portuguese independent Paulo Branco. This 2002 feature isn’t my favorite Moullet comedy, but it provides a good introduction to his subtle humor. Set in 1991 during the gulf war, it shuttles back and forth among a champion racer whose car has broken down on a nearly abandoned highway, his randy female assistant, a couple of astronomers (including Mathieu Amalric of Kings and Queen), a clueless French army unit searching for Saddam Hussein, and various local rustics. In French with subtitles. 82 min. (JR) Read more
An engrossing two-hour video documentary portrait (1995) by Chicago filmmaker Dennis Mueller. A hatchet job, though a convincing one, this compilation of intelligent talking heads and fascinating archival footage documents Hoover’s behind-the-scenes involvement in major historical events and wisely eschews such personal matters as his closet homosexuality to concentrate on the illegality of many of his investigative methods and proceduresa litany of abuses ranging from blackmail to embezzlement and beyond. Little of the indictment is new, but as a lucid survey and historical refresher course this is essential viewing. (JR) Read more
Few contemporary filmmakers can tell a story as well as Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, whose gripping features all take place among marginal people in a nondescript French-Belgian industrial city. In La Promesse (1996), Rosetta (1999), The Son (2002), and now this volatile 2005 drama, the camera sticks close to the protagonists but neither the plot nor the characterization is ever simpleminded. Jeremie Renier (La Promesse) plays a petty thief who sells his newborn son, then struggles to buy him back after the mother recoils from the deed. Whether the title refers to the baby or the thief remains an open question, and the viewer is left to decide whether the theme of redemption should be perceived in Christian terms. This builds to a suspenseful climax, and as in Hitchcock’s best work, that suspense is morally inflected. In French with subtitles. R, 100 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Music Box. Read more
The Gene Siskel Film Center’s monthlong retrospective on French director Luc Moullet peaks this week with screenings of some of Moullet’s best work. Both parts of his career are represented–his neoprimitive beginnings, when he shamelessly flaunted his lack of money and technique while alluding to Hollywood genres (The Smugglers, A Girl Is a Gun), and his mature mastery as a comic performer and a director, when he pushed situations to hilarious extremes (The Comedy of Work, Opening Tries).
Shot in black and white, The Smugglers (1967, 81 min.) is the closest thing to a testament in Moullet’s oeuvre; despite some derisive allusions to adventure thrillers, the tone is closer to sweet-tempered absurdism, with throwaway gags about backpackers and imaginary borders in the French Alps. It screens with the miniature epic Opening Tries (1988, 15 min.), which shows Moullet’s baroque ingenuity at trying to remove a twist-off cap from a large bottle of Coke. (Sat 4/15, 5 PM, and Mon 4/17, 6 PM) The delirious and erotic color “western” A Girl Is a Gun (1971, 77 min.) is Moullet’s feature Une Aventure de Billy le Kid with funny English dubbing. Jean-Pierre Leaud and Rachel Kesterber costar with some scene-stealing landscapes. (Sat 4/15, 3 PM, and Wed 4/19, 6 PM)
The Comedy of Work (1987, 90 min.) Read more
A baker (Robert Carlyle) mourning the death of his wife happens upon a serious freeway accident, and as he and the injured man (John Goodman) wait for a rescue team and ride together in the ambulance, the latter relates (in awkward flashbacks) his attachment to a fellow student at the title school 40 years earlier and the much-delayed appointment he was hoping to keep with her. Writer-director Randall Miller adapted this 2005 feature from a half-hour short he made in 1990; I haven’t seen the original, but this expanded version registers as an obscure allegory, with unconvincing period detail and distracting elements like Carlyle’s unexplained Scottish accent. This has its moments, but most of these are engulfed by the overall murk. The largely squandered cast includes Marisa Tomei, Mary Steenburgen, Ernie Hudson, David Paymer, and an unbilled Danny DeVito. PG-13, 103 min. (JR) Read more
A Manhattan ballroom dancer (Antonio Banderas) offers to instruct inner-city high school kids, and proceeds to teach them trust, respect, teamwork, tolerance, and hope. This inspirational vehicle, based on a true story, is as hokey as it sounds, and it sometimes cuts too fast to allow us to see the dancing properly. But as in Saturday Night Fever, the sense of reality giving way to fantasy on a dance floor is potent, and writer Dianne Houston and director Liz Friedlander are so sincere that they make much of it work. With Alfre Woodard, Rob Brown, and Yaya DaCosta. PG-13, 108 min. (JR) Read more
Two decades after Paris, Texas, Wim Wenders directs another Sam Shepard script, this time with the writer starring, and at times the deja vu is overwhelming. Shepard plays yet another Marlboro man with a fractured past, a dissolute western star who walks out on an expensive movie shoot, visits his mother (Eva Marie Saint), learns he may have an illegitimate child, and sets off for Montana to find him, dogged by another illegitimate child (Sarah Polley). Shooting in ‘Scope, Wenders still has a handsome eye for landscapes, and he works wonders with Butte. But the theatrical monologues come close to defeating him, and only Jessica Lange, as one of Shepard’s abandoned girlfriends, manages to avoid cliche. With Gabriel Mann and Tim Roth. R, 122 min. (JR) Read more
Jennifer Aniston comes into her own with this funny and sensitive comedy about four lifelong friends. The ones with money–Joan Cusack, Frances McDormand, and Catherine Keener–all have husbands and careers; Aniston works as a maid, smokes dope, and can’t sustain a relationship. In her third feature Nicole Holofcener (Walking and Talking, Lovely & Amazing) leapfrogs between characters with wit and grace, gathering them in various clusters and adroitly showing how money or the lack thereof really does inflect their lives and interactions. With Greg Germann, Simon McBurney, Jason Isaacs, and Scott Caan. R, 88 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Landmark’s Century Centre. Read more
When it opened, this 1988 Oscar winner sounded like a worst-case scenario for the most lachrymose movie of the year: Tom Cruise attends the funeral of his long-estranged father and discovers that the entire estate has been left to an older brother (Dustin Hoffman) whose existence he’s never known aboutan autistic, institutionalized idiot savant with a photographic memory for numbers. He abducts his brother in an attempt to claim half of the inheritance, but in the course of a cross-country journey gradually learns to care for his sibling. Fortunately, the script by Ronald Bass and Barry Morrow isn’t half bad, and both Barry Levinson’s direction and the performances are agreeably restrained. Valeria Golino is appealing as Cruise’s girlfriend; Hoffman makes his character pretty believable without milking the part for pathos and tears, and it’s nice to see Cruise working for a change in a context that isn’t determined by hard sell and hype. R, 133 min. (JR) Read more
This gripping, old-fashioned tale of poker hustlers conning one another, (2003) sharply written by director Damian Nieman, suggests The Hustler more than House of Games, though it lacks the metaphysical conceits of either. Instead it offers flashy performances by Gabriel Byrne, Stuart Townsend, Thandie Newton, Sylvester Stallone, Melanie Griffith, Jamie Foxx, Bo Hopkins, and Roger Guenveur Smith as an exceptionally creepy villain. (There are also cameos by Hal Holbrook, Dina Merrill, and Patrick Bauchau.) Nieman overplays his hand once or twice in an effort to startle, but for the most part he kept me fooled and primed for more developments. In ‘Scope. R, 101 min. (JR) Read more
French film critic Luc Moullet made his feature directing debut with this 1966 black-and-white comedy, and like his other big commercial success, The Comedy of Work (showing next week), it’s sweet and tender and focuses on conditions and bureaucracies peculiar to his native land. Two teenage girls with the same name, clothes, and bags meet by chance, become roommates in Paris, and try to survive their first year at the Sorbonne; despite their superficial similarities, one is right-wing and the other communist. The small-scale gags and episodic narrative easily accomodate guest-star appearances by Claude Chabrol, Michel Delahaye, Samuel Fuller, Eric Rohmer, Andre Techine, and Moullet, as well as the director’s own parents. In French with subtitles. 75 min. (JR) Read more
Adapted from Shawn Wong’s 1995 novel American Knees, this intriguing, well-acted feature by writer-director Eric Byler (Charlotte Sometimes) has the merit of not fully explaining its multilayered characters and asking viewers to take the initiative in figuring them out. A middle-aged Chinese-American professor (Chris Tashima) in southern California, still adjusting to his recent separation from a much younger woman (Allison Sie), gets involved with another teacher (Joan Chen), a traumatized Vietnamese refugee, and no one behaves according to expectations. 107 min. (JR) Read more
The 1991 original was silly and campy, but director Paul Verhoeven and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas had a stylishly hokey way of recycling Hitchcock tropes and an appreciation for Sharon Stone as superwoman/dominatrix that made her a star. She’s still magnificent as novelist Catherine Tramell, who has moved to London and finds herself a shrink (David Morrissey) to play Emil Jannings to her Dietrich. But like many sequels this is actually a remake, and it suffers from the law of diminishing returns. Screenwriters Leora Barish and Henry Bean are hip enough to reference cultural theorists Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Zizek, though director Michael Caton-Jones, no stranger to kinkiness in Scandal, seems bemused by the more formulaic elements. With David Thewlis and Charlotte Rampling. R, 114 min. (JR) Read more
A meteor lands in the sticks, and a slimy tentacled creature enters a local’s body (Michael Rooker), turning him into a squishy monster with a hunger for meat that drives him to devour most of the people and animals around him. Gross-out horror comedy is my least favorite genre, but this movie’s so skillful I have to take my hat off to it. Writer-director James Gunn, who worked on the script of the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead, relies too much on George A. Romero’s imagery without trying for any of his or Joe Dante’s satire. But he’s so adept at laughs, thrills, and repulsive effects that even the product placements are inspired, and he gets the most out of Nathan Fillion, Elizabeth Banks, and Gregg Henry. R, 95 min. (JR) Read more
