If we agree that Rear Window, Blowup, The Conversation, and A Short Film About Love belong to the same erotic-thriller subgenre, then this adroit, sexually explicit Glasgow-based tale (2006) of an obsessive surveillance guard (Kate Dickie) tracking and stalking a locksmith and former convict (Tony Curran) qualifies as a minor entry, at least until it becomes an elusive psychological study. Despite the thick Scottish accents, filmmaker Andrea Arnold kept me intrigued, but beyond a certain point the movie’s ambiguity fades into indifference. 113 min. (JR) Read more
Short films made between 1934 and ’53 by the pioneering abstract animator Mary Ellen Bute (who years later created the daring James Joyce adaptation Passages From Finnegans Wake): Rhythm in Light, Dada, Spook Sport, Tarantella, Polka Graph, Abstronic, and Mood Contrasts. 70 min. (JR) Read more
A comedy thriller without many laughs or thrills, this 2005 French feature by Costa-Gavras (Z, Missing), adapted from a Donald E. Westlake novel, follows the machinations of a middle-aged engineer downsized from the paper industry who proceeds to murder all of his likeliest competitors in the job market. Jos Garcia, known for roles more comic than this one, brings a certain intensity to the part, but the story’s satirical possibilities remain largely untapped. Given the overall slickness, I was surprised to see Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (L’Enfant) credited among the coproducers; their signature actor Olivier Gourmet turns up in an effective cameo. In French with subtitles. 122 min. (JR) Read more
Alan Conway, a gay con artist in England who successfully impersonated Stanley Kubrick in the 90s, died in 1998, only a few months before Kubrick. His exploits are fascinating because the people he fooled, seduced, and/or exploited knew even less about the filmmaker than he did when he brandished Kubrick’s name and promised to hire or help them. This 2005 British feature by writer Anthony Frewin and director Brian Cook, both former Kubrick assistants, uses Conway’s unlikely saga to mount an appreciative send-up of a certain style of gay extravagance, with John Malkovich having a field day as Conway. 86 min. (JR) Read more
A dozen years after Seven, director David Fincher again treats a serial killer, only this time it’s a true story (adapted by James Vanderbilt from Robert Graysmith’s autobiographical best seller) and not at all metaphysical. In some ways, for better and for worse, this is even more about Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal)who became obsessed with solving the Zodiac killings that terrorized northern California in the late 60sthan about the murderer. I’m not convinced this had to be 158 minutes long, so it’s all the more annoying when essential material gets elided (as in a sequence featuring an uncredited Ione Skye). But Fincher does keep this bubbling along, ably assisted by a cast that includes Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr., Chloe Sevigny, Elias Koteas, and Philip Baker Hall. R. (JR) Read more
Wisit Sasanatieng’s self-consciously campy Thai western (2000) opens in the U.S. seven years late and six minutes shorter, but it’s still an enjoyably energetic genre romp. Staged in both open spaces and painted expressionist sets, it’s a classic doomed romance between a wealthy young woman and a peasant boy who becomes an outlaw (the Black Tiger of the title). Its giddy stylistics include extravagant use of color and rapid montage, said to be a direct homage to legendary Thai independent Ratana Pestonji. In Thai with subtitles. 97 min. (JR) Read more
The underrated Richard Fleischer (The Vikings, Compulsion) directed this better-than-average 1955 bank robbery thriller in color and CinemaScope. Adapting a novel by William L. Heath, screenwriter Sydney Boehm complicates the crime story with a portmanteau plot about dirty little secrets in an Arizona copper-mining town. Victor Mature is the nominal hero, and the good cast includes Richard Egan, Stephen McNally, Virginia Leith, Tommy Noonan, Lee Marvin, Margaret Hayes, Sylvia Sidney, J. Carroll Naish, and Ernest Borgnine as an Amish farmer. 90 min. (JR) Read more
Written and directed by Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow), this provocative parable suffers from far-fetched premises, bad montage sequences, and facile symbolism. But any movie that can make Samuel L. Jackson convincing as a great Memphis bluesman must be doing something right. Christina Ricci, barely recognizable, plays a drug-addled nymphomaniac Jackson finds passed out in the road, chains like a dog in his shack, and sets out to cure. Brewer knows how to guide his leads through this improbable story, and he kept me interested in spite of everything. John Singleton served as coproducer. R, 116 min. (JR) Read more
Alejandro Jodorowsky’s big-budget 1973 follow-up to El Topo, again starring himself, is a lot more imaginative and watchable, though no less highfalutin. More overtly religious and New Agey than Jodorowsky’s other pictures, it describes a spiritual quest and slings in outrageous shocks at every opportunity, yielding many eyefuls and some occasional food for thought. On the whole, enjoyable nonsense. R, 120 min. (JR) Read more
Though hardly Nicholas Ray’s sturdiest effort, this 1957 ‘Scope western began as one of his more ambitious conceptions, with an unorthodox narrative structure and deliberately theatrical sets. Both ideas were rejected by 20th-Century Fox in favor of genre conventions, and the experience helped to precipitate Ray’s departure for Europe (he left even before the editing was completed, to embark on the much superior Bitter Victory). Ray’s special feeling for young mavericksin this case Frank and Jesse James (Jeffrey Hunter and Robert Wagner)is still apparent, and one brief sequence offers a brilliantly compact lesson in anarchist economics. With Hope Lange, Agnes Moorehead, and John Carradine; the script is mainly by Walter Newman. 92 min. (JR) Read more
Charles Burnett’s brilliant 2003 TV documentary about Nat Turner, the black slave in Virginia’s Southhampton County who led an 1831 revolt that resulted in the slaughter of 57 white men, women, and children and then, in retribution, the slaughter and mutilation of 60 to 80 slaves. Interviewing two dozen historians and theorists, half of them black, Burnett treats all their interpretations, many of which he dramatizes, as equally crediblea radical but plausible approach given how little is known about Turner. He’s most interested in charting how the interpretations were arrived at and why those of white and black commentators often differ, and that allows him to offer an exemplary history lesson on why, for a nation unable to come to terms with the legacy of slavery, Nat Turner remains a troublesome property. 57 min. (JR) Read more
The most intellectually heroic of Jean-Luc Godard’s early features (1966) was inspired by his reading an article about suburban housewives day-tripping into Paris to turn tricks for spending money. Marina Vlady plays one such woman, followed over a single day in a slender narrative with many documentary and documentarylike digressions. But the central figure is Godard himself, who whispers his poetic and provocative ruminations over monumentally composed color ‘Scope images and, like James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, continually interrogates his own methods and responses. Among the more memorable images are extreme close-ups of a cup of coffee, while another remarkable sequence deconstructs the operations of a car wash. Few features of the period capture the world with as much passion and insight. In French with subtitles. 95 min. (JR) Read more
In his characteristically dreamy Young Werther fashion, Werner Herzog generates a lot of bombastic and beautiful documentary footage out of the post-gulf war oil fires and other forms of devastation in Kuwait, gilds his own high-flown rhetoric by falsely ascribing it to Pascal, and in general treats war as abstractly as CNN, but with classical music on the soundtrack to make sure we know it’s art. This 1992 documentary may be the closest contemporary equivalent to Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, both aesthetically and morally; I found it disgusting, but if you’re able to forget about humanity as readily as Herzog there are loads of pretty pictures to contemplate. 54 min. (JR) Read more
Unrelievedly grim, this searing second feature by TV actress Karen Moncrieff (Blue Car) guides an unusually able cast through a five-part feature that’s closer to a collection of interconnected short stories than to a novel. The episodes all revolve around the brutal murder of a young woman, and Moncrieff’s psychological and sociological perspective on the characters–and on the sickness and unhappiness that seem to bind them together–is almost always acute and never merely sensational. With Toni Collette, Rose Byrne, Mary Beth Hurt, Marcia Gay Harden, Brittany Murphy, Kerry Washington, Giovanni Ribisi, Piper Laurie, Mary Steenburgen, and Josh Brolin. R, 93 min. (JR) Read more
Scripted and photographed by Charles Burnett and directed by his former film-school classmate Bill Woodbury, this wonderful neorealist look at a working-class black family in South Central LA (1984) is worthy of being placed alongside Burnett’s Killer of Sheep. Passionately recommended. 80 min. (JR) Read more
