Shortly before the outbreak of World War I, a Yorkshire miner (John Lynch) and his wife (Samantha Morton) regretfully sell their beautiful collie to a local duke (Peter O’Toole) who takes it to northern Scotland. This turn of events grieves their young son (Jonathan Mason), but the dog escapes and makes its way home. Like the MGM classic Lassie Come Home, this handsome 2005 English feature was adapted from the novel by Eric Knight, and it’s a welcome throwback to the carefully crafted family films of the studio era. The scenery is lovely, and the cast is entirely worthy of the enterprise (including the regal and athletic star). Writer-director Charles Sturridge overplays the nastiness of a comic villain but more than makes up for it with a wonderful episode involving a traveling puppeteer (Peter Dinklage). PG, 99 min. Crown Village 18, River East 21. Read more
Dan Turgeman’s 2004 Israeli feature is a passable warmhearted middle-class soap opera, though I could have done with less of the comic relief, which reeks of warmed-over Yiddish theater, and more of the music, which is restricted to the weddings in the first and last scenes. Set in a northern farming village where a Jewish-Moroccan family operates a pastry-baking business, the movie makes use of a hokey, grandmotherly shaman but fails to spell out the story’s ethnic and geographical specifics. In Hebrew with subtitles. 97 min. (JR) Read more
In 1910 a fanatical Brazilian settler drags his pregnant wife (Fernanda Torres) and her mother (Fernanda Montenegro) to his new patch of land, a sandy spot in northerly Maranhao, and despite the wife’s serious misgivings, she remains there for six decades. This pretentious 2005 art movie is somewhat interesting for its wide-screen photography of the striking locale, but the storytelling is awkward and confusing. Director Andrucha Waddington cast his own wife and mother-in-law in the leads, and his decision to give Torres a second role as the wife’s daughter proves disastrous, making both characters seem more stereotypical. Only samba star Seu Jorge (The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou), as a descendant of a runaway slave, manages to escape the allegorical typecasting. In Portuguese with subtitles. R, 104 min. (JR) Read more
Set at a Florida retirement community and focusing on a local “bereavement club,” this funny, nervy, and pointedly unrated geriatric sex comedy is both enhanced and occasionally limited by being targeted at baby boomers. The sound track abounds with golden oldies (“Love and Marriage,” “Papa Loves Mambo”), the story culminates in a sock hop, and sometimes the ensemble portrait even recalls teen flicks of the 50s and 60s. So part of the kick–along with seeing Dyan Cannon, Joseph Bologna, Brenda Vaccaro, and Sally Kellerman thrive in this special context–is generational nostalgia. Writer-director Susan Seidelman, who made her name with Desperately Seeking Susan but has been working in TV for more than a decade, based this on the experiences of her mother, Florence (who also coproduced and worked on the script). With Len Cariou and Michael Nouri. 104 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Esquire. Read more
Steven Spielberg’s first film following The Color Purple performs a comparably misplaced act of adapter’s piety: taking a novel whose distinction largely rests on its absence of sentimentality and converting it into a three-handkerchief weepie (1987). The source of this Spielburger is J.G. Ballard’s remarkable autobiographical novel about his experiences as a child in Shanghai during World War II; apart from a few sentimental adjustments, Spielberg and screenwriter Tom Stoppard remain surprisingly faithful to the letter of the book while almost completely betraying its spirit. Turned out with the director’s characteristic craft and slicknesswith able performances from Christian Bale, John Malkovich, Miranda Richardson, and Nigel Haversthe film also has a certain De Mille-like touch of sweeping spectacle. But the pseudomystical vagueness that seems to be Spielberg’s stock-in-trade stifles most of the particularity of the source. PG, 152 min. (JR) Read more
Documentarian Michael Lahey recounts the brief but rocky history of the Tucson pirate station KAVL FM, which was launched in response to the 1996 Telecommunications Act that permitted media monopolies to buy up more local stations. It’s a chilling and instructive tale about the curtailment of free expression, though Lahey’s video (2004, 64 min.) favors crankiness and jokey found footage over polemics. A better reason for attending this program is Paul Chan’s Untitled Video on Lynne Stewart and Her Conviction, the Law, and Poetry (18 min.), an experimental yet plainspoken work in which the radical human-rights lawyer, unjustly convicted in February 2005 of aiding foreign terrorists, reads poems and reflects on her life and prospects while Chan finds original and lyrical ways of depicting her. (JR) Read more
OutKast’s Andre Benjamin (aka Andre 3000) and Antwan A. Patton (Big Boi) star in this black musical set in a prohibition-era nightclub and directed by Bryan Barber, known for his OutKast videos. Purists might object to the anachronistic hip-hop numbers, MTV editing, and razzle-dazzle overkill of the digital effects, mise en scene, and violence; this could be the most show-offy, mannerist period musical since Ken Russell’s The Boy Friend (1971). I wouldn’t call the sound track especially memorable either. But Barber and his cast display so much gusto they broke down my resistance; I wound up enjoying this much more than the Oscar-bestrewn Chicago. With Paula Patton, Terrence Howard, Malinda Williams, Macy Gray, and Ving Rhames. R, 121 min. (JR) Read more
Hilary and Haylie Duff are sister heiresses of a cosmetics company who lose and regain their fortune in this painfully unfunny comedy. Director Martha Coolidge is known for her satirical bent (Valley Girl), but any attempt to satirize these spoiled brats would have been doomed by the movie’s view that most classes, races, and sexual persuasions are equally grotesque. Under the circumstances, Anjelica Huston and Lukas Haas manage not to embarrass themselves, but only because they’re pretending to be in a different movie. PG, 97 min. (JR) Read more
Set at a Florida retirement community and focusing on a local bereavement club, this funny, nervy, and pointedly unrated geriatric sex comedy is both enhanced and occasionally limited by being targeted at baby boomers. The sound track abounds with golden oldies (Love and Marriage, Papa Loves Mambo), the story culminates in a sock hop, and sometimes the ensemble portrait even recalls teen flicks of the 50s and 60s. So part of the kickalong with seeing Dyan Cannon, Joseph Bologna, Brenda Vaccaro, and Sally Kellerman thrive in this special contextis generational nostalgia. Writer-director Susan Seidelman, who made her name with Desperately Seeking Susan but has been working in TV for more than a decade, based this on the experiences of her mother, Florence (who also coproduced and worked on the script). With Len Cariou and Michael Nouri. 104 min. (JR) Read more
Louise Archambault’s flawed but absorbing and ambitious French-Canadian melodrama (2005) focuses on a divorced aerobics teacher (Sylvie Moreau) with a teenage daughter and an unacknowledged addiction to gambling that repeatedly wreaks disaster on both their lives. The dysfunctional pair become only more unstrung after they’re put up by an old friend (Macha Grenon) in a suburban neighborhood and try to settle down. In French with subtitles. 102 min. (JR) Read more
Set in New York a year after 9/11, this Crash-like tale of crisscrossing destinies among five sets of characters tries way too hard to be clever and shrewd. Danny Leiner (Dude, Where’s My Car?, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle) directed a script by Sam Catlin, and though both have their moments, they’re rarely the same moments. At times the film seems as pushy as some of its characters, among them a prodding shrink (the always interesting Tony Shalhoub), a couple (Judy Greer and Tom McCarthy) with a spoiled ten-year-old son, and two East Asian security professionals (Sharat Saxena and Naseeruddin Shah). The other story lines involve a trendy pastry designer (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and an aging woman (Olympia Dukakis) who reconnects with an old friend. With Will Arnett, Jim Gaffigan, Stephen Colbert, and Edie Falco. In English and subtitled Hindi. R, 88 min. (JR) Read more
Like Andre Techine’s current release, Changing Times, this 2001 feature by the French director is set in Tangier, and though it has a sharper sense of place, its story is less ambitious. A French trucker (Stephane Rideau) who drives between North Africa and western Europe takes a crack at drug smuggling, though most of the plot involves his intense but painfully undefined relationship with a North African Jewish woman (Lubna Azabal ) and his friendship with a former street acrobat (Mohammad Homaidi) who wants to sneak into Europe. There’s also some unfocused material about an actor-director (Gael Morel, playing some version of himself) and an American emigre whose lines are all drawn from the literature of Paul Bowles. Azabel, who plays twins in Changing Times, is wonderfully expressive. The title translates as Far. In English and subtitled Arabic, French, and Spanish. 120 min. (JR) Read more
This benefit screening for Lebanese war relief pairs two remarkable experimental shorts; both are painfully relevant and uncommonly beautiful, though formally and conceptually they’re worlds apart. Jayce Salloum, a multimedia artist who spent 22 years in the U.S. before settling in Vancouver, made Untitled Part 3b: (As if) Beauty Never Ends (2003, 12 min.), whose dazzling and painterly use of color and texture provides a counterpoint to glimpses of Palestinian refugee camps. Wael Noureddine, a Lebanese poet and journalist now based in Paris, explores remote corners of battle-scarred Beirut in Ca Sera Beau (From Beyrouth With Love) (2005, 30 min.), evoking music with his percussive editing and camera movement. The hour-long program will also include video statements and readings of more contemporary written statements by each artist. Suggested donation is $5; for more information call 312-480-1966. Fri 8/18, 7:30 PM, and Sat 8/19, 4 PM, Columbia College Ludington Bldg. Read more
Pedro Almodovar’s tamest, slickest feature (1988) is an entertaining melodramatic farce but a far cry from the kinky irreverence of his earlier work. Pepa (Carmen Maura) gets desperate when her lover and fellow actor, Ivan (Fernando Guillen), deserts her without warning, and her flat quickly fills up with others who are comparably frantic: a friend (Maria Barranco) who has unknowingly become involved with a Shiite terrorist, a former lover of Ivan’s whose son by him (Antonio Banderas) has come to rent Pepa’s apartment, and the police. The results are high-spirited, with nice ensemble work from Almodovar’s team of regulars, but the playlike structure (originally derived from Cocteau’s The Human Voice but drastically reworked) is disappointingly conventional. There are usually at least a dozen French, Italian, and Spanish pictures like this every year, which makes it strange that this one turned out to be such a hit. In Spanish with subtitles. R, 88 min. (JR) Read more
Like Kevin Smith’s Clerks, this freewheeling comedy about goof-off college students in Georgia depends almost entirely on the actors’ charm rather than the plot or direction. The cast is likable and spirited, though writer-director-star Hadjii tends to falter whenever he aims for satire (among his broad targets are clueless whites, born-again church groups, and literacy programs). As long as one isn’t looking for insight, this is good, light fun. 88 min. (JR) Read more
