Fritz Lang’s third thriller with Joan Bennett (after Scarlet Street and The Woman in the Window), a Freudian version of the Bluebeard story, is probably the most psychoanalytically oriented of his features, and because it’s Lang, the murkiness is mainly a strength. Silvia Richards, who later worked on both Lang’s Rancho Notorious and King Vidor’s Ruby Gentry, is credited with the script, adapting a story by Rufus King. With Michael Redgrave and Ann Revere. 99 min. (JR) Read more
As a publicity stunt, a pop superstar (Emmanuelle Seigner) turns up at the small-town home of an obsessive teenage fan (Isild Le Besco) and the girl responds by fleeing to her room. Soon afterward she runs away from home and manages to get taken in by her idol as a kind of resident groupie and gofer sent to reclaim the star’s clothes from her estranged boyfriend. But what starts out as a kind of edgy variant of The King of Comedy devolves into something closer to All About Eve in cowriter and director Emanuelle Bercot’s hands. The limiting factor, despite serious performances by the two leads, is that neither character is entirely believable; the star’s imagined as a standard-issue diva, while the fan oscillates a bit too neatly for my taste between hysteric and conniver. In French with subtitles. 115 min. (JR) Read more
Michael Snow’s two early masterpieces of inexorable camera movements, metaphysical speculation, and painterly meditations. Wavelength (1967) is a stuttering 45-minute forward zoom across a Manhattan loft in which a man’s death and the subsequent discovery of his corpse, both presented in sync sound, provide two of the on-screen events; an electronic sine wave moving steadily up a musical scale accompanies the camera’s journey. In Back and Forth (1969), also titled as arrows pointing in opposite directions, a camera pans right to left and left to right across a classroom at varying speeds over 52 minutes while various events intervene and a clapping sound marks the start and end of each trajectory. A great Canadian conceptual artist who works in several media, Snow has achieved perhaps his greatest international fame with these films and his subsequent three-hour epic of camera movement, La Region Centrale (1971). (JR) Read more
Maurice Tourneur (The Blue Bird, The Last of the Mohicans), onetime student of Auguste Rodin and father of the better-known Jacques Tourneur, was one of the most talented and cultivated directors of the silent era, and like his son made films in both Europe and the U.S. This 1917 American feature with Mary Pickford was an enormous commercial success when it came out, and is reputed to be one of his most visually inventive as well. 99 min. (JR) Read more
I saw this 1957 interview with the architect when it was originally broadcast, and it’s the most indelible portrait of Wright’s crusty personality that I know. (At one point, goaded by Wallace’s baiting, he makes a crack about the cigarette Wallace is smoking — the brand of which happened to be the show’s sponsor.) Well worth checking out. 53 min. (JR) Read more
This dazzling program, the first devoted to Michigan artist Kyle Canterbury, features two dozen experimental videos, all but one silent, ranging in length from 34 seconds to 11 minutes. Most feature some play between representation and abstraction, with subjects encompassing nature, domestic and public spaces, and politics–A Video depicts George W. Bush’s features decomposing. I don’t feel fully qualified to evaluate Reader critic Fred Camper’s claim that Canterbury has already “done for video something like what [Stan] Brakhage has done for film.” But such pieces as Color Shifts, Building in Detroit #2, 7 New Videos #3, 7 New Videos #7, and LX evoke for me some of the graphic power of the very different Oskar Fischinger, which goes to show the diversity of Canterbury’s work. And he does some things with rhythm and texture I haven’t seen before in film or video. What’s all the more astonishing is that he was only 16 when he made most of these pieces–he’s 17 now. a Sat 2/3, 8 PM, Chicago Filmmakers. Read more
Made by the couple Avi Lewis (director) and Naomi Klein (writer), this 2004 documentary chronicles how laid-off workers in Argentina took over some 200 closed factories and started them up again as leaderless co-ops, with every worker receiving the same salary. The filmmakers aren’t blind to some of the contradictions and anomalies of this movement–they interview one co-op worker who’d recently voted for the neoconservative Carlos Menem, which is a bit like an American union worker supporting Bush–but they’re primarily interested in the story’s potential as an inspirational object lesson for the rest of the world. (Klein’s best-selling account of the antiglobalization movement, No Logo, has a similarly positive and almost festive air in spots.) In English and subtitled Spanish. (JR) Read more
A Las Vegas entertainer (Jeremy Piven) decides to snitch on the mob and as a result lots of people try to kill him. Based on this outing, writer-director Joe Carnahan (Narc) can’t tell a story worth a damnespecially not a complicated mishmash like this one. But given the advanced case of Quentin Tarantino syndrome on display, he’s obviously hoping that a sufficient number of baroque mutilations, tortures, and corpse disposals with lots of fancy-tough dialogue and elaborate deaths that we’re encouraged to applaud will carry us over the rough and empty spots. He even has the chutzpah to claim some sort of moral agenda at the end, but designer butchery is what dominates throughout. With Ben Affleck, Andy Garcia, Jason Bateman, Ray Liotta, and Alicia Keys. R, 108 min. (JR) Read more
These films and videos are as all over the map as China itself, and not just because curator Li Zhenhua has drawn works from Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. In contrast to the mainly propagandistic hymns to industrialization of early Soviet cinema, these chronicles of disorienting changes are full of ambivalence and skepticism. From the musical deconstruction of TV newscasters in 8GG’s News Dance to the kinky surrealism of Cao Fei’s Burners, and the eclectic inventiveness of Yang Fudong’s Backyard-Hey! Sun Is Rising to the weird, unattractive puppet animation of Zhou Xiaohu’s Beautiful Cloud, the sole common trait here seems to be aggressiveness. The only things resembling tone poems are a few stray intervals in the otherwise frenetic San Yuan Li, a 40-minute documentary in black-and-white ‘Scope by a dozen artists about the rapid urban development around Guangzhou. In Mandarin with subtitles. 88 min. (JR) Read more
Mark Becker’s 2005 documentary focuses on Carmelo Muñiz Sanchez, a 57-year-old mariachi player who returns to his family in Salvatierra, Mexico, after struggling as an undocumented immigrant in San Francisco. It’s old-fashioned in many respects: Becker shot it in 16-millimeter and Super-16 over three and a half years, and Muñiz Sanchez tells much of the story himself in voice-over. Regrettably Becker seems more interested in what’s typical about his protagonist than in what’s exceptional, so this proves to be fairly dull. I was amused by the fact that Muñiz Sanchez and his musical partner call themselves a trio because it’s more commercial, but when the film follows his other jobs (working at a car wash in the U.S., running a pushcart in Mexico) it seems to aim for the generic. 80 min. Read more
Erich von Stroheim was the director for the first five weeks of shooting on this opulent Universal production (1923), set in a studio-built Vienna, until Irving Thalberg replaced him with the more docile and relatively unmemorable Rupert Julian. Reportedly only about 600 feet of Stroheim’s footage remains, but at least portions of his story and production design persist in the rest. With Norman Kerry and Mary Philbin; George Siegmann replaced Wallace Beery, who resigned in protest when Stroheim was fired. 110 min. (JR) Read more
This freakish 1938 melodrama by African-American film pioneer Oscar Micheaux, about a light-skinned child (Jacqueline Lewis) and woman (Gloria Press) hoping to pass for white, has often been cited as an indication of Micheaux’s own alleged racism on the matter of skin color. It’s also a prime instance of how this skillful silent director never seemed to find the budgets or the wherewithal to adapt fully to sound, sometimes with disorienting and even deconstructive results, as when actors are seen clearly reading their lines from cue cards. 65 min. (JR) Read more
Teenage drug dealers in swank southern California, determined to collect from a stubborn client, kidnap his 15-year-old brother (Anton Yelchin), but the kid has the time of his life being a hostage. Apart from the grim forebodings of tragedy, writer-director Nick Cassavetes seems to have modeled this ambitious, fictionalized account of a true story on Larry Clark’s kiddie-porn shockers, but he doesn’t know what to leave out, and the movie becomes excessively complicated with ancillary agendas. The actorsincluding Emile Hirsch, Ben Foster, Bruce Willis, Sharon Stone, and Harry Dean Stantonham it up even as Cassavetes keeps swerving away from them for new distractions. With Justin Timberlake. R, 117 min. (JR) Read more
Clint Eastwood’s powerful companion film to Flags of Our Fathers looks at the fighting on Iwo Jima in World War II from the viewpoint of the Japanese soldiers. I prefer it to Flags because the story is less familiar, even if it’s told more conventionally, and because an American war film in which Americans become the enemy, emotionally if not intellectually, is a nervy undertaking. Inspired by letters written to his family by the pro-American general Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), who was sent to Iwo Jima as punishment for his views, Iris Yamashita’s screenplay sketches out as many impossible moral dilemmas as Flags did. Eastwood is boldly implying in both films that distinguishing between meaningful and senseless wars may be a civilian luxury. In Japanese with subtitles. R, 142 min. (JR) Read more
An enterprising ten-year-old (Freddie Highmore), hoping to save his granny (Mia Farrow) from a foreclosure on her house, shrinks himself and enters the land of the tiny Minimoys in her backyard to recover some rubies buried by his grandfather. Luc Besson (La Femme Nikita, The Fifth Element) has never been one of my favorite filmmakers, but he seems to have found his metier in children’s fantasy, and this semianimated adventure is enjoyable and imaginative despite its formulaic qualities. U.S. distributor Harvey Weinstein, who mistrusts anything that lacks his fingerprints, had already cut 18 minutes from the French original when this was screened for the press, and since then he’s added some music cues and narration. Among the voice talents in this English version are Madonna, Robert De Niro, and Harvey Keitel. PG, 94 min. (JR) Read more
