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
Not quite top-grade John Waters (1994), but with Kathleen Turner offering the first top-grade star turn in a Waters picture since the death of Divine there’s little cause for complaintjust a bit of awkwardness around the edges of this satire about the American worship and domestication of serial killers, plus several other Waters hobbyhorses. Turner plays a happy, wholesome mom in suburban Baltimore who happens to bump off everyone she gets irritated withand given that this is a Waters picture, that’s a lot of folks. Sam Waterston is her husband and Ricki Lake and Matthew Lillard play their kids, while the many walk-ons include Mink Stole, Patricia Hearst, Traci Lords, and Suzanne Somers. There’s a lot of ribbing of both police procedurals and Hitchcock productions, and, though it isn’t fashionable to say so, the movie’s comedy is also assisted by its libertarian-humanist politics (for gory movies and against capital punishment). The results are nothing momentous, but still loads of fun. R, 93 min. (JR) Read more
Alain Resnais’ 2006 adaptation of a British play by Alan Ayckbourn is a world apart from his earlier Ayckbourn adaptation, Smoking/No Smoking (1993). That film tried to be as “English” as possible, but this time Resnais looks for precise French equivalents to British qualities, and what emerges is one of his most personal works, intermittently recalling the melancholy Muriel (1963) and Providence (1977). A bittersweet comedy of loneliness, shyness, and repression, it was shot entirely on cozy sets, with a continual snowfall outside, and its interwoven plots feature Resnais standbys Sabine Azema, Pierre Arditi, Andre Dussollier, and Lambert Wilson. At 85, the director is not only a consummate master but arguably the last great embodiment of the craft, style, and feeling of classical Hollywood. In French with subtitles. 120 min. Reviewed this week in Section 1. a Music Box. Read more
Screening as the opening-night program of the 19th annual Onion City festival, these eight shorts might seem to be all over the place–Manoel de Oliveira’s The Improbable Is Not Impossible (2006), an eclectic tribute to Portugal’s Gulbenkian Foundation, isn’t even experimental. But many of them share the same alienated fascination with history: Jean-Luc Godard’s archival, corpse-laden Origin of the 21st Century (2000), Guy Ben-Ner’s Moby Dick (2000), which comically restages Melville’s novel in the filmmaker’s kitchen, and Bill Morrison’s Outerborough (2005) and Ken Jacobs’s The Surging Sea of Humanity (2006), which both use footage from the 1890s, all seem to poeticize the weight of the past. Also showing are Kyle Canterbury’s Man (2006), a world premiere; Olivo Barbieri’s Sevilla –(_) 06 (2006), with abstract aerial views of Spain; and Michael Robinson’s The General Returns From One Place to Another (2006), derived from a Frank O’Hara play. 94 min. The festival continues June 15 through 17 at Chicago Filmmakers; for a schedule visit www.chicagofilmmakers.org. a Thu 6/14, 8 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more
A small-time crook (Jamel Debbouze of Days of Glory), about to be rubbed out in Paris for an unpaid debt, decides to jump into the Seine, but when a leggy blond (Rie Rasmussen of Femme Fatale) jumps first, he promptly saves her. She turns out to be the title angel and accompanies him around the city, showing him how to clean up his act. Given my antipathy toward Luc Besson’s glib and nihilistic early features, I didn’t expect to like this 2005 mix of romantic fantasy and screwball comedy. But his attractive black-and-white ‘Scope compositions, strong Paris locations, and effective handling of the actors makes this captivating throughout, and wholly undeserving of the drubbing it’s received from many critics. In French with subtitles. R, 91 min. (JR) Read more
The title hero (Kevin Costner), a successful and beloved executive, husband, and father, is secretly addicted to committing gratuitous murders and voices his inner doubts to an alter ego (William Hurt) while being tracked by a similarly compulsive millionaire cop (Demi Moore). When he forgets to close the blinds before killing a couple, a voyeur (Dane Cook) spots him and blackmails him, demanding to be brought along on the next caper. This is one of those slick, violent, ridiculous Hollywood jobs that make little sense as a story, a comment on life, or a depiction of characters, but are moderately enjoyable in their spinning of movie conventions. There’s even a good De Palma-style fake shock ending. Bruce A. Evans directed a script he wrote with Raynold Gideon. R, 120 min. (JR) Read more
Hilary Brougher follows up her highly original debut feature The Sticky Fingers of Time (1997) with this grim, intensely realized psychological thriller (2006) about an alienated 16-year-old (Amber Tamblyn) in denial about both her secret pregnancy and having murdered the baby after delivering it alone in a public restroom. That’s a pretty loaded premise, but the pregnant forensic psychologist (Tilda Swinton) hired to question the teenager has issues as well, her first pregnancy having ended with a stillbirth. Apart from Swinton’s fine performance, what largely distinguishes this is Brougher’s sharp narrative focus. With Timothy Hutton, Denis O’Hare, and Melissa Leo. R, 92 min. (JR) Read more
Sergei Bondarchuk’s epic 1967 adaptation of the Tolstoy novel, screening in four parts, is the most expensive movie ever made, and though it can be bombastic and mind-numbing, it’s often lively and eye filling. The balls and battle scenes are monumental, and Bondarchuk (who plays the bumbling Pierre, as Orson Welles would have in the 40s if he’d realized his own version with Alexander Korda) moves his camera a lot, incorporating some expressive 60s-style flourishes. Even at 415 minutes (over an hour shorter than the Soviet release) this rarely suggests the vision behind Tolstoy’s set pieces or populist polemics; his feeling for incidental detail is more evident in (non-Tolstoyan) films like The Leopard and The Magnificent Ambersons. This is a landmark in the history of commerce and post-Stalinist Russia, but not cinema. If you’d like to merely sample it, try parts one and three. With Lyudmila Savelyeva (graceful as Natasha), Vyacheslav Tikhonov (suitably morose as Andrei), and more than 100,000 extras. In Russian and French with subtitles. Part one: 147 min. Part two: 86 min. Part three: 83 min. Part four: 98 min. a Part one: Fri 6/1, 6 PM, Sat 6/2, 2:30 PM, and Mon 6/4, 6:30 PM; part two: Fri 6/1, 8:45 PM, Sat 6/2, 5:15 PM, and Tue 6/5, 6:15 PM; part three: Sun 6/3, 2:30 PM, Tue 6/5, 8 PM, and Wed 6/6, 6:15 PM; part four: Sun 6/3, 4:15 PM, Wed 6/6, 8 PM, and Thu 6/7, 6:15 PM; $9 per part or $30 for all four; Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more
