Set on the south shore of Long Island in 1976, around the time of the Ford-Carter presidential debates (which are glimpsed on TV), this smart and sensitive 2006 feature focuses on the social milieu of young clam diggers whose profession is getting phased out by a corporation. Director Katherine Dieckmann, a former film critic at the Village Voice, has also made music videos and one earlier feature (A Good Baby), and she has a good feeling for the period and the characters’ sexual attitudes and interactions. Ken Marino, who plays the silliest of the diggers, wrote the script, and when it isn’t straining after elegiac moments, it’s fresh and unpredictable. With Paul Rudd, Lauren Ambrose, Ron Eldard, Josh Hamilton, Sarah Paulson, and Maura Tierney. R, 90 min. (JR) Read more
A gifted young breakdancer (Jamie Kennedy) cracks his head during a competition and goes into a 20-year coma; after coming to, he has to catch up with the times and reclaim his former sweetheart (Maria Menounos) from her scuzzball fiance (Michael Rosenbaum). Joining forces with his old pals (Miguel A. Nunez Jr., Bobby Lee, Aris Alvarado), he enters another competition. About eight minutes of this comedy is devoted to some terrific breakdancing; the rest consists of wall-to-wall product placement and politically incorrect bad-taste comedy (a homeless geezer pissing on himself and others, the hero vomiting Mexican food on another dancer). PG-13, 108 min. (JR) Read more
A troubled teenage punk (Margarita Levieva) believes she’s killed a classmate (Justin Chatwin) and hides his body in the woods. But the victim’s still not dead, and while he’s unconscious his spirit roams around, visible only to animals. Adapted from a 2002 Swedish film that was based in turn on a novel by Mats Wahl, this feature by David S. Goyer wasn’t screened for the press, perhaps because its poetic fantasy premise is so hard to understand. (The inconsistencies don’t help; another character almost dies but doesn’t become a ghost.) Yet originality and even a certain amount of obscurity are more appealing than formula. This doesn’t work, but I was never bored. With Marcia Gay Harden. PG-13, 97 min. (JR) Read more
I have nothing against regional folklore, magical realism, or masculine rites of passagemuch less Kris Kristofferson, Gary Farmer, or Genevieve Bujoldso this 2006 tale of a Vermont farmer crossing the Canadian border with his 15-year-old son in 1936 to steal some bootleg whiskey sounded inviting. But Jay Craven’s stilted adaptation of a novel by Howard Frank Mosher lacks the urgency, the poetry, or the feeling for period that might have brought the material to life, while the cast seems to be largely squandered. Nice props and scenery, though. With Charlie McDermott, Lothaire Bluteau, and Luis Guzman. 103 min. (JR) Read more
Robert Altman returned to the anthology mode of Nashville and A Wedding to offer 22 crisscrossing characters and nine loosely related plots set in Los Angeles over a breezy 189 minutes (1993). Inevitably it’s a mixed bag, though the film’s assurance in keeping it all coherent is at times exhilarating. The script, authored by Altman and Frank Barhydt, claims to be based on the writings of Raymond Carver, but apart from a few characters and situations that have been borrowed as launching pads, the connections to Carver are pretty tenuous. Some of the best actorly turns here are furnished by Bruce Davison, Jack Lemmon, Madeleine Stowe, Lily Tomlin, Tom Waits, Frances McDormand, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Lili Taylor, and Robert Downey Jr., while most of the other playersAndie MacDowell, Julianne Moore, Matthew Modine, Anne Archer, Fred Ward, Chris Penn, Tim Robbins, Annie Ross, Lori Singer, Buck Henrydo the best they can with relatively skimpy material. (JR) Read more
Thanks to a malfunctioning DVD I only saw the first half, but Diego Yaker’s well-acted Argentinean drama (2006) about people employed in Mar del Plata’s fishing industry and their labor disputes looked promising. It concentrates on a 20-year-old planning to move to Barcelona, where his grandfather used to live. 106 min. (JR) Read more
An engineer (Anthony Hopkins) goes on trial in Los Angeles for trying to murder his wife (Embeth Davidtz), and the prosecutor (Ryan Gosling) attempts to push through what appears to be an open-and-shut case but isn’t. With its lavish architecture and Spielbergian lighting, this absorbing thriller has a high-toned look, but director Gregory Hoblit and writers Daniel Pyne and Glenn Gers got much of their training in TV cop shows, which shows in the adroit way they semaphorically abbreviate certain characters and plot developments to slide us past various incongruities. The main interest here is the juxtaposing of Gosling’s Method acting with Hopkins’s more classical style, a spectacle even more mesmerizing than the settings. With David Strathairn and Rosamund Pike. R, 112 min. (JR) Read more
In this first feature by writer-director Jon Kasdan (son of Lawrence Kasdan), a TV writer (Adam Brody) breaks up with a famous actress, runs off to stay with his slightly senile grandmother (Olympia Dukakis) in a Detroit suburb, and finds redemption through the three females of a neighboring familyan unhappy housewife (Meg Ryan) and her two daughters (Makenzie Vega, Kristen Stewart). This comedy drama is capably acted and undeniably touching in spots, although less than two weeks after seeing it, I could remember having been undeniably touched but not much else. PG-13, 97 min. (JR) Read more
A bickering couple (Kate Beckinsale and Luke Wilson) are forced to check into a seedy motel after their car breaks down, and they discover that someone is making snuff videos there, with the occasional guests as victims. How or even whether these videos are marketed is never spelled out, but guess what? The crisis brings the couple back together. Kontroll, the first movie by director Nimrod Antal, has some reputation; I wouldn’t have guessed this on the basis of his second. Then again, 80 minutes of formulaic unpleasantness isn’t even close to my idea of a good time, and I doubt that Hitchcock himself could have done very much with Mark L. Smith’s script. With Frank Whaley. R, 80 min. (JR) Read more
Adrienne Shelly, best known for her roles in Sleep With Me and Hal Hartley’s Trust and The Unbelievable Truth, wrote and directed half a dozen films, three of them features, but this tangy, resourceful comedy drama is the first I’ve seen. Keri Russell plays a gifted pie baker and abused housewife who waits tables at a diner along with two romantically frustrated coworkers (Cheryl Hines and Shelly) and unexpectedly finds herself pregnant. The film isn’t averse to reaching for Hollywood fantasies, but there’s a lot of what seems to be hard-earned wisdom here about women in bad marriages. The men tend to be either idealized (hunky Nathan Fillion, patriarchal Andy Griffith) or monstrously geeky (Jeremy Sisto and Eddie Jemison), and Shelly clearly had fun with all of these caricatures. PG-13, 104 min. (JR) Read more
The fifth feature from Iranian master Jafar Panahi (The White Balloon, Crimson Gold) is in many ways his most entertaining and accessible–a comedy about a group of girls in Tehran who get busted posing as boys so they can watch a World Cup qualifying soccer match between Iran and Bahrain. To some extent it’s a happier and less arty version of The Circle, which also deals with female oppression and concludes inside a police van, but here Panahi treats the guards who must enforce the law, as well as the girls, as comic victims. The director shoots largely on location–parts were filmed at Azadi Stadium during an actual match–and mixes fiction and documentary so deftly we can’t tell which is which. In Farsi with subtitles. PG, 93 min. Reviewed this week in Section 1. a Music Box. Read more
All of Pedro Costa’s films reside in a netherworld between documentary and fiction, and many of them are awesome. Where Lies Your Hidden Smile? (2001), an account of Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet editing one of their films, feels very intimate, though the subjects were also being observed by students (whose presence is elided by Costa). And the exquisitely composed, naturally lit chiaroscuro of Colossal Youth (2006), shot in the surviving ruins of one Lisbon slum and around a high-rise in another, combines realism and expressionism, Louis Lumiere and Jacques Tourneur. It was cowritten by the nonprofessional, marginal, mainly nonwhite cast; rehearsed and shot in multiple takes; then edited down from 320 hours to 155 minutes over a period of 15 months. It’s unlike anything else I’ve seenmysterious, exalted, demanding, leisurely paced, and very beautifuland you’re bound to either love it or hate it. In Portuguese with subtitles. (JR) Read more
Though awkwardly assembled and occasionally obscure, this 2005 Spanish documentary by Carlos Benpar is an eye-opener, showing how filmmakers in Europe try to protect their work from censorship, colorizing, dubbing, pan and scan, and other defacements. Benpar explains the differences between artists’ legal rights in the U.S. and overseas: for instance, director Jean-Pierre Marchand successfully sued a French TV channel for placing a logo on his film, and though Sydney Pollack lost a suit against a Danish TV channel for panning and scanning his wide-screen Three Days of the Condor, the court issued a stern rebuke to the U.S. laws that permitted the practice. Among the other interviewees are Woody Allen, Bernardo Bertolucci, John Boorman, Arthur Penn, Martin Scorsese, Claude Chabrol, Salvador Dali, Bigas Luna, Pere Portabella, and a 91-year-old Jules Dassin. 106 min. (JR) Read more
The pitch must have sounded like a no-brainer: a teenage, suburban remake of Rear Window, updated with digital technology. This time the bored voyeuristic hero (Shia LaBeouf) who’s spying on his suspicious neighbor (David Morse) is under monitored house arrest for slugging his Spanish teacher. And this did keep me alert for a while, thanks partly to Sarah Roemer (who has some of Cybill Shepherd’s insolence) in the Grace Kelly part and Carrie-Anne Moss as the hero’s hot mother. If you’re happy to watch a thriller about a tenth as good as Alfred Hitchcock’s, director D.J. Caruso and screenwriters Christopher B. Landon and Carl Ellsworth hold up their end of the deal, at least until the proceedings devolve into standard horror-movie effects and minimal motivations. But of course Hitchcock’s original never had to resort to thunder and lightning to goose up the suspense. PG-13, 104 min. (JR) Read more
A tabloid journalist (Halle Berry), assisted by a computer geek (Giovanni Ribisi), goes undercover to pin the murder of her old friend on a tyrannical tycoon (Bruce Willis). This stupidly contrived thriller is all the more disappointing if you admire previous work by Berry and director James Foley (After Dark, My Sweet). Did they cynically opt for a lame and unpleasant script (by Todd Komarnicki), or did this make more sense before the suits got to it? Either way, they must have known how scuzzy all the characters are, and the plot twists only make the whole thing seem more phony. R, 109 min. (JR) Read more
