Robert Towne, screenwriter of Chinatown, reaches further back into Los Angeles history for this dreamy adaptation of John Fante’s autobiographical novel about his early years as a struggling writer. Set in the Bunker Hill neighborhood during the Depression, it focuses mainly on the hero’s troubled affair with a Mexican waitress, played out as a kind of erotic grudge match between Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek. Towne, who also directed, romanticizes the material yet preserves Fante’s critique of his own anti-Mexican bias–an attempt to cover his sensitivity about being Italian-American. The period ambience is wonderful, and the story is even sexier than Personal Best (1982), Towne’s directorial debut. With Eileen Atkins, Idina Menzel, and Donald Sutherland. R, 117 min. Reviewed this week in Section 1. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Landmark’s Century Centre. Read more
I’m not sure the world needs a Jewish/Palestinian remake of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner reconfigured as farce, though the relative novelty of the ethnic mix lends a mild exoticism to this 2004 Spanish feature. A young Jewish woman brings her Palestinian fiance (Guillermo Toledo of El Crimen Perfecto) home to meet her family; to make matters worse, he accidentally injures a passing pedestrian who may be the father, and the son’s pet duckling breaks loose. Dominic Harari and Teresa Pelegri wrote and directed, and the results are lively but also shamelessly overbearing. In Spanish with subtitles. 85 min. (JR) Read more
Jean-Luc Godard’s eight-part, 264-minute video Histoire(s) du Cinema (1998) has rarely been seen outside France, occasioning this feature-length reworking of many elements in his magnum opus that’s neither an anthology nor a digest. The selected moments have been transferred to 35-millimeter, and at 84 minutes this reconfiguration is more accessible (if less celebratory) than the original. Both versions portray cinema as a 19th-century invention that recorded the history of the 20th century, though the pessimism here about cinema’s failure to bear adequate witness to the Holocaust is even more pronounced. The beauty and power of this ambitious, dreamlike work are incontestable in any version; as in Finnegans Wake, the meanings are more easily felt than understood. The English subtitles are sparse but work better that way. (JR) Read more
French, German, and Scottish soldiers, stuck in the trenches during World War I, decide to unite briefly for a Christmas celebration in this touching if simple parable (2005) by French writer-director Christian Carion. Based on a true story, the movie was nominated for an Oscar as best foreign film; some might castigate its unabashed sentimentality, but I found myself moved, especially when I recalled that this was supposedly the war to end all wars. In English and subtitled French, German, and Latin. R, 116 min. (JR) Read more
An unhappy young New York actress (Zooey Deschanel) is offered a small fortune if she can secure publication rights to the love letters her recently deceased mother received from her reclusive novelist father (Ed Harris). After traveling home to Michigan she finds him living with one of his former students (Amelia Warner) and a born-again musician (Will Ferrell). Playwright Adam Rapp, making his feature debut as writer-director, details the family dysfunction to the point of hyperbole, but over the long haul he rewards one’s observation and intelligence and a more interesting story emerges. With Sam Bottoms and Amy Madigan. R, 98 min. (JR) Read more
A film Hollywood dared not to do is how writer-director Leslie Harris described her lively 1992 moviea brave independent quickie with only a 17-day shooting schedule, about an ambitious and angry black teenage girl (Ariyan Johnson) living in one of the Brooklyn projects who goes into denial (with catastrophic results) when her boyfriend (Kevin Thigpen) gets her pregnant. What’s both refreshing and off-putting is that Harris’s sense of urgency isn’t accompanied by any clear or consistent analysis; her heroine’s denial eventually overwhelms the movie. Yet Harris’s refusal to treat her heroine strictly as role model or bad example makes her portrait a lot livelier and less predictableas well as more confusingthan the standard genre exercises most reviewers seem to prefer. What’s exciting about this movie is a lot of loose details: frank girl talk about AIDS and birth control, glancing observations about welfare lines and the advantages of a boy with a car over one with subway tokens. R, 92 min. (JR) Read more
Like many other films by the gifted and original Claire Denis, this ambitious and mysterious 2004 French feature is something I admire without especially liking. Michel Subor (Beau Travail) plays a man who gets a black-market heart transplant and goes to Tahiti in search of his long-lost son; the difficult story, inspired by philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s book about his own transplant, might be called French to a fault, though I’m not convinced that the most fruitful approach to this brooding and provocative work is through its narrative. The impressive ‘Scope cinematography is by Denis’ frequent collaborator Agnes Godard. With Gregoire Colin. In French with subtitles. 130 min. (JR) Read more
Four factory workers who’ve lost their jobs try to find new livelihoods while coping with families or girlfriends in this 2005 comedy with tragic undertones, a coproduction of Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Director Martin Sulik has an unfortunate taste for stuttering zooms and bargain-basement rock, but what he gets from his actors is so fine and textured that this gradually won me over. Also known as Working Class Heroes. In Czech and Slovak with subtitles. 99 min. (JR) Read more
Adapted from a children’s book by Alice Hoffman, this first feature by Elizabeth Allen can be read as an allegory about teenage girls navigating puberty. Two best friends (Emma Roberts and Joanna Jojo Levesque), both smitten with a hunky local lifeguard (Jake McDorman) in their Florida hometown, discover a mermaid named Aquamarine (Sara Paxton) who’s been washed ashore during a storm. She’s trying to escape from an arranged marriage and has three days to prove that true love exists, so the friends try to nurture a romance between her and the lifeguard. The story has its hokey moments (There’s something very fishy about that girl), but the sincerity and focus of the storytelling compensate. PG, 109 min. (JR) Read more
Robert Wiene (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the underrated Raskolnikow) directed this silent 1925 Austrian adaptation of the Richard Strauss opera. The composer, librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and many other contributors to the opera’s original 1911 Dresden production worked on this film, which is being shown with Strauss’s orchestral sound track. 88 min. (JR) Read more
Powerful and haunting, this upsetting documentary by Andrew Jarecki examines the scandals enveloping an upper-middle-class Jewish family in suburban Long Island, as the father and a teenage son are accused of sexually abusing countless boys. The story unfolds over many years, with as many carefully delayed revelations as in a well-plotted fiction film, and though Jarecki raises a good many questions about the Friedmans that he doesn’t entirely resolve, his exploration of the larger issuespolice investigations, community hysteria, and the family members’ obsession with filming themselvesis much more revealing. 107 min. (JR) Read more
In 2002, 20 black seventh graders from Baltimore’s inner city, many of them from troubled homes, were sent to Baraka, an experimental boarding school in Kenya. Filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady spent three years following four of them, and the resulting documentary is sensitive, intelligent, enlightening, and sometimes surprising. Ewing and Grady give us a nuanced sense of these boys’ options, and it’s typical of their attention to detail that during a long-distance phone call, cameras in Baraka and Baltimore record both sides of the conversation. 85 min. Music Box. Read more
Adapted from Sergei Lukyanenko’s best-selling fantasy novel, this $4 million feature (2004) grossed four times that amount in its native Russia. Kazakhstan-born director Timur Bekmambetov claims in press notes that there were no fantasy movies shot in Russia before this one, a statement thatlike the movie, with its Moscow rubble and abundant goreindicates an exclusive diet of postapocalyptic vampire flicks from Hollywood. The plot involves forces of good and evil that have maintained an uneasy truce since the Middle Ages, though the punchy, nonstop visual effects (including an animation segment and stylized subtitles that sometimes suggest an online chat) crowd out coherent storytelling. R, 116 min. (JR) Read more
Japanese director Mikio Naruse cited this funny 1940 farce as one of his favorites among his own films, and though it’s uncharacteristic of his work, the overriding sense of class deprivation is typically Narusean. Performing in the boondocks, two Kabuki actors who play a horse learn that they may be replaced onstage by the real thing; the older of them proclaims his pride in his craft, but that doesn’t deter him from mangling the horse costume while he’s drunk. Also known as Actors Who Play the Horse. In Japanese with subtitles. 70 min. (JR) Read more
Also known as A Couple, this 1953 Japanese feature is another of Mikio Naruse’s dramas about unhappy marriages, the tension exacerbated in this case by the fact that the spouses (Ken Uehara, Yoko Sugi) share living space with a quirky landlord (Rentaro Mikuni). The ending is uncharacteristically hopeful, and the film is notable for its references to abortion and its dashes of Anglo-American culture (a performance by a Chaplin impersonator, renditions of Jingle Bells and Silent Night). In Japanese with subtitles. 87 min. (JR) Read more
