A good half century has passed since I’ve read any Nancy Drew mysteries, an endless series that’s been appearing since 1930, and frankly I wasn’t expecting Andrew Fleming’s ‘Scope movie, written with Tiffany Paulsen, to stir up many memories of them. But this is a loving, uncondescending tribute to the novels’ sweetness and hokeyness and an excellent piece of genre filmmaking. Nancy (Emma Roberts) accompanies her geeky dad (Tate Donovan) to Hollywood, where they rent the former mansion of a late movie star who’s died mysteriously and the girl sleuth solves the case. The postmodernist evocations of the past (roughly the 50s through the 80s) are a charming mishmash, delivered with wit and style. With Josh Flitter and Barry Bostwick. PG, 99 min. (JR) Read more
Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard tears up all the available scenery in this overblown, achronological biopic of French pop singer Edith Piaf. Whether sincere or cynical, the movie is a near parody of the Je ne regrette rien/This is Mrs. Norman Maine school of female suffering and camp mortification: the heroine grows up in grandma’s brothel, sings on the streets, gets discovered by an entrepreneur (Gerard Depardieu no less), loses or gets snatched away from loved ones, becomes dependent on drink and drugs. Director-cowriter Olivier Dahan lamentably leapfrogs past most of the German occupation, when Piaf was a courageous member of the resistance. With Sylvie Testud and Emmanuelle Seigner. In French with subtitles. 140 min. (JR) Read more
This savage early talkie (1932), with John Gilbert as a chauffeur seducing and blackmailing the married woman he works for as well as two other servants, was a commercial miscalculation for MGM, but it’s too interesting to dismiss. Derived from a story Gilbert wrote, and directed by the once-prominent Monta Bell (a Chaplin protege who guided Garbo through her first Hollywood feature), it seems inspired partly by Erich von Stroheim (who directed Gilbert in The Merry Widow). But Gilbert’s former profile as a silent matinee idol seems to preclude his playing a man you love to hate, and because a more sympathetic butler character (Paul Lukas) defends traditional class divisions, the morality of this Depression-era melodrama seems both complex and confused. With Virginia Bruce (shortly to become the fourth Mrs. Gilbert). 77 min. (JR) Read more
English documentarian Phil Grabsky (In Search of Mozart, The Boy Who Plays on the Buddhas of Bamiyan) presents a chronology of Ali’s life and career, told mainly through interviews with friends, relatives, and boxing associates. This 2001 film is gripping for its glimpses of Ali’s politics, generosity, charismatic vanity, and fleet, almost Chaplinesque footwork. Curiously, as the story progresses, Grabsky seems less and less engaged with his subject, and the film gradually fades out into apathy. 74 min. (JR) Read more
Narrative incoherence continues to reign supreme in this flashy sequel to the 2004 Russian blockbuster Night Watch, despite an opening summary of the first movie that resembles a trailer. With its Manichaean blather about forces of darkness and light, the series aspires to the dehumanized protofascism of George Lucas or Zhang Yimou, but this time around some of the extravagant action and fantasy conceits seem closer to farce than metaphysics (a car racing up the side of a Moscow skyscraper and then barreling through a window into a hallway, a stretch of gender-bending in which a man assumes a woman’s body). I wasn’t exactly engaged, but this time boredom never took over. Sergei Lukyanenko adapted his best-selling fantasy novel in collaboration with Kazakh director Timur Bekmambetov. In Russian with subtitles. R, 139 min. (JR) Read more
This remarkable 2004 film by English documentarian Phil Grabsky (In Search of Mozart) chronicles a year in the life of an impoverished Afghan family whose home, a cave in the side of a mountain, is surrounded by the ruins of the two giant Buddha sculptures demolished by the Taliban. Without minimizing the harshness of their existence or idealizing their capacity to cope with it, Grabsky challenges us to concentrate on the story’s more inspiring aspects, such as the natural beauty of the setting and the cheerful resilience of his eight-year-old protagonist. I suspect James Agee, who celebrated Depression sharecroppers in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, would have loved this film. If I have one complaint it’s about the off-putting atmospheric score, by Dimitri Tchamouroff, which manages to sound both indigenous and Hollywoodish at the same time. In Dari with subtitles. 95 min. a Sun 6/17, 3 PM, Tue 6/19, 6 PM, and Thu 6/21, 7:45 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more
