Ludwig van Beethoven never had a woman copyist, much less the gifted and attractive 23-year-old student and aspiring composer played by Diane Kruger, which might tempt one to scoff at this romantic biopic as eyewash. But Agnieszka Holland (Europa Europa, The Secret Garden) directs with obvious feeling rather than cynicism, and I was swept away by it despite the story’s anachronisms. Ed Harris, offering another mad-genius portrait after playing Jackson Pollock, goes to town with his hokey part, and one gets to hear a sizable chunk of the Ninth Symphony at its 1824 premiere. Writer-producers Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson won’t win over any purists, but if they introduce a few people to the excitements of Beethoven, they can hardly be accused of wasting their time. PG-13, 104 min. (JR) Read more
A 1996 feature by the talented Tunisian filmmmaker and film critic Ferid Boughedir (Halfaouine) focusing on teenage girls during the summer of 1967. In French, Arabic, and Italian with subtitles. 100 min. (JR) Read more
The second word in the title of Pere Portabella’s ravishing 1970 underground masterpiece, made in Spain while General Francisco Franco was still in power and shown clandestinely, means both worm’s tail and the unexposed footage at the end of film reels. The film is a silent black-and-white documentary about the shooting of Jesus Franco’s Count Dracula, with Christopher Lee, that becomes much more: the lush, high-contrast cinematography evokes deteriorating prints of Nosferatu and Vampyr, and the extraordinary soundtrack by composer Carles Santos intersperses the sounds of jet planes, drills, syrupy Muzak, and sinister electronic music, all of which ingeniously locate Dracula and our perceptions of him in the contemporary world. Moving back and forth between Franco’s film (with Dracula as an implicit stand-in for the generalissimo) and poetic production details, Portabella offers witty reflections on the powerful monopolies of both dictators and commercial cinema. The only words heard are in English, spoken by Lee and written by Bram Stoker. 75 min. (JR) Read more
Like The Ceremony (1995), Claude Chabrol’s previous adaptation of a Ruth Rendell novel, this 2004 French feature seems concerned not so much with the psychopathology of everyday life as with psychopaths who lurk behind the everyday. On a more obvious level the hero (Benoit Magimel) falls in love with his sister’s bridesmaid (Laura Smet) but gradually discovers how weird she is; on a more subtle and in some ways more interesting level he lives in denial of how weird his own supposedly normal family is. Chabrol develops both stories with a great deal of finesse. With Aurore Clement. In French with subtitles. 111 min. (JR) Read more
Documentary filmmaker James Longley (Gaza Strip) has a flair for cinematography and editing and a poetic sensibility that informs both these talents. He’s also responsible for this film’s music. But the most significant credits for this examination of Iraqi Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds may be the dozen translators listed. (“The future of Iraq will be in three parts,” says one Kurd. “How can you cut a country into three parts?” asks another.) Much as Emile de Antonio’s neglected In the Year of the Pig (1968) may be the only major documentary about Vietnam that actually considers the Vietnamese, this film allows the people of Iraq to speak, and what they say is fascinating throughout. In Kurdish and Arabic with subtitles. 94 min. a Landmark’s Century Centre. Read more
The first word in the title of Pere Portabella’s ravishing 1970 underground masterpiece, made in Spain while General Francisco Franco was still in power and shown clandestinely, means both “worm’s tail” and the unexposed footage at the end of film reels. The film is a silent black-and-white documentary about the shooting of Jesus Franco’s Count Dracula, with Christopher Lee, that becomes much more: the lush, high-contrast cinematography evokes deteriorating prints of Nosferatu and Vampyr, and the extraordinary sound track by composer Carles Santos intersperses the sounds of jet planes, drills, syrupy Muzak, and sinister electronic music, all of which ingeniously locate Dracula and our perceptions of him in the contemporary world. Moving back and forth between Franco’s film (with Dracula as an implicit stand-in for the generalissimo) and poetic production details, Portabella offers witty reflections on the powerful monopolies of both dictators and commercial cinema. The only words heard are in English, spoken by Lee and written by Bram Stoker. 75 min. Reviewed this week in Section 1. a Sat 11/11, 5 PM, and Wed 11/15, 8 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center. I will introduce the Wednesday screening and lecture on Portabella afterward. Read more
Directed by Thomas Fitzgerald (The Hanging Garden), this sprawling and ambitious three-part Canadian film (2005) traces the spread of AIDS on three continents, but it gets off to a confusing start: its South African story of infected teenage boys being treated by three nuns (Chloe Sevigny, Olympia Dukakis, Sandra Oh) is interrupted to recount how an entire Chinese village is stricken after farmers sell their blood to a naive government worker (Lucy Liu). Then a Canadian porn actor (Shawn Ashmore), eager to keep working, tries to hide his condition by stealing his father’s blood, while his mother (Stockard Channing) devises even more baroque ways of coping with the problem. By the time the movie returned to Africa, it had lost me despite its talented cast and its noble intentions. In English and various subtitled languages. 124 min. (JR) Read more
Documentary filmmaker Doug Block was still mourning the death of his beloved mother when his father, a relatively remote figure, startled him and his sister by marrying the woman who’d been his secretary 40 years earlier. After learning that his parents’ 54-year marriage hadn’t been nearly as happy as he’d assumed, Block started reading his mother’s voluminous diaries, and this film charts his discoveries during that period, when his father was packing up his belongings and preparing to move from Long Island to Florida with his new wife. This isn’t always adept as storytelling, and Block’s coming to terms with his own denseness occasionally tries one’s patience, but he manages to make the overall process of his reeducation fascinating and compelling. 90 min. (JR) Read more
I welcomed the prospect of a documentary about Edward Said, the Palestinian-American critic, theorist, activist, and pianist, and this 2005 tribute by Makoto Sato addresses most facets of his career. But I was put off by the video’s fetishistic attachment to places where Said lived and worked, ranging from a family summer home outside Beirut to his former office at Columbia University, which have few secrets to reveal. The interviews with Said’s family, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances are a bit haphazard and unfocused, suggesting at times that Sato is more interested in Said’s life than his work. (Passages from his writing are read as voice-over, but most of them are autobiographical.) Gradually, however, the movie begins to generate a kind of thumbnail sketch of the contemporary West Bank and other concerns of Said. In English and subtitled Arabic and Hebrew. 138 min. (JR) Read more
This is the first feature of Pere Portabella, the remarkable Barcelona-based Catalan filmmaker. He started out as a producer of art films by Carlos Saura, Marco Ferreri, and Luis Buñuel, and Buñuel’s first Spanish feature, Viridiana, so angered the Spanish government that it took away Portabella’s passport for many years. Nocturno 29 is a narrative film that refuses to tell a story and an underground anti-Franco film that was most often shown clandestinely (its title refers to the number of years Franco had then been in power), and it evokes both European art films of this period (its star is Lucia Bosé, an actress associated with Antonioni and Bardem) and the bolder experimental cinema Portabella would embark on soon afterward. Coscripted by poet Joan Brossa, it has the kind of moody provocation that captures its period indelibly. In Spanish with subtitles. 83 min. (JR) Read more
I’m not a fan of photographer Diane Arbus, but I suspect the basis of her talent was a capacity to turn all her camera subjects into freaks and not a simple interest in freaks per se. This arty and moody account of her formation as an artist, as its subtitle declares, is basically invented. Its nerviness only pays off in a few details and in Nicole Kidman’s resourcefulnessmainly a way of suggesting morbid curiosity as erotic stimulation, though the script manages to find diverse excuses for undressing her. Directed by Steven Shainberg, and written by Erin Cressida Wilson (who also wrote Shainberg’s previous feature, Secretary), this traces Arbus’s artistic roots as an oppressed 50s housewife and vicarious mother to an upstairs neighbor who looks like the beast in Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, sounds and acts like Robert Downey Jr., and introduces her to countless other freaks. With Ty Burrell, Harris Yulin, and Jane Alexander. R, 122 min. (JR) Read more
Based on a true story and written by Shawn Slovo (A World Apart), this Philip Noyce feature shows how a relatively apolitical young man in South Africa (Derek Luke) becomes a dedicated terrorist in the early 80s after he and his wife (Bonnie Henna) are wrongly arrested for a bombing and he’s tortured extensively. Todd McCarthy wrote in Variety, The question nags as to what pressing need there is, 25 years after the fact, for a thriller that hinges on apartheid in South Africa when there are so many new pressing and pertinent political and cultural issues. The answer is that torture may now be radicalizing Iraqi citizens. That said, the film never strays much beyond the obvious, despite a conscientious effort by Tim Robbins to humanize a white security officer. PG-13, 101 min. (JR) Read more
Based on a memoir by Augusten Burroughs, this first feature by writer-director Ryan Murphy clearly aims to outdo other comedy dramas about dysfunctional families through sheer hyperbole. The young hero (Joseph Cross) boasts an alcoholic father (Alec Baldwin) and an unglued mother (Annette Bening), who deposits him in the no less dysfunctional household of her therapist (a satirically funny Brian Cox). Maybe all this really happened, but I didn’t believe a second of it as portrayed. Bening (whose Oscar nomination for American Beauty seems to have turned her toward playing monsters) tries very hard, as do Joseph Fiennes, Evan Rachel Wood, Jill Clayburgh, and Gwyneth Paltrow. But Murphy seems either incapable of or uninterested in creating a recognizable world, so local comic effects count for everything. R, 121 min. (JR) Read more
God speaking through Neale Donald Walsch (Henry Czerny) seems to be a secondary and not especially memorable part of this story; the primary part is Putnam paying $1.5 million for world rights to Walsch’s first inspirational book, Conversations With God. Not a bad deal for someone who was once a jobless and homeless wretch with a broken neck, and writer Eric DelaBarre and director Stephen Simon deliver Walsch’s apotheosis without any trace of irony. But their treatment of his misfortunes has some of the ring of truth, even though the movie lingers far too long over its own epiphanies. With Ingrid Boulting. PG, 109 min. (JR) Read more
One of Clint Eastwood’s most accomplished westerns, based on a rather elaborate script by David Webb Peoples (who cowrote Blade Runner). Like Bird, this 1992 film seems at times to equate dark cinematography with artistry (albeit with stunning locations in Canada and California and beautifully composed results), and as with White Hunter, Black Heart its view of reality depends almost entirely on countercliches and their implied critique of the machismo of earlier Eastwood movies. Consequently, there’s not much dramatic urgency apart from the revisionist context. Eastwood plays a reformed alcoholic killer, now a widower, father, and failing hog farmer in Kansas, who’s lured into a bounty hunt by a brash kid (Jaimz Woolvett) and persuades an old partner (Morgan Freeman) to join them. With Frances Fisher, Anna Thomson, Gene Hackman, Richard Harris, and Saul Rubinek. R, 127 min. (JR) Read more
