Apart from some apocalyptic violence at the end, next to nothing happens in this eighth feature (2005) by Sarunas Bartas, Lithuania’s most prestigious filmmaker, but that’s nothing new. The title characters are small-time criminals, outcasts, and idlers (their backgrounds remain vague) who wind up in a run-down farm near the Crimean Sea along with a few wives or girlfriends, hanging out with the locals and drinking and smoking. As frequently happens in his work, Bartas is largely concerned with somber moods and dark visual textures (the cinematography is exquisite), brooding landscapes and quiet desperation. In Russian with subtitles. 110 min. (JR) Read more
Popular during the silent and early sound eras, German actor-director Harry Piel specialized in action thrillers, nearly all of which were destroyed during World War II. In this nocturnal mystery, restored from a tinted nitrate print recently discovered in Italy, he plays a debonair Douglas Fairbanks type named Harry Piel who Read more
I prefer Sidney Lumet’s previous feature, the neglected Find Me Guilty. But this ambitious and well-directed crime thriller, with an intricate flashback structure redolent of Reservoir Dogs, gives Philip Seymour Hoffman a fascinatingly ambiguous character (a passive-aggressive corporate executive and drug addict) to work with, and he does wonders with the part. Marisa Tomei’s character, on the other hand, the executive’s wife and the lover of his softer loser brother (Ethan Hawke), is strictly standard-issue. This tale of buried family resentments rising to the surface as the brothers plot to rob their parents’ jewelry store is concerned only with the guys, and it’s marred by an uncharacteristically mannered performance by Albert Finney as the father. R, 123 min. (JR) Read more
According to the press notes, Jerry Seinfeld finally agreed to make a movievoicing the central character in an animated feature as well as cowriting and producingafter pitching just the title to Dreamworks’ Steven Spielberg over dinner. If part of the premise is that zillions of bees can collectively run a honey factory or land an airplane, another part seems to be that zillions of one-liners can add up to a narrative that works as an ecological parable while equating reality with brand-name recognition. (My sweater’s Ralph Lauren and I have no pants, the bratty hero proudly explains at one point.) The whole thing’s pretty cute and breezy, but don’t expect logic or coherence. Other voices include those of Renee Zellwegger, Matthew Broderick, John Goodman, and Chris Rock. PG, 88 min. (JR) Read more
Not to be confused with the mislabeled director’s cut that’s been around for 15 years, this seventh edition of Ridley Scott’s SF masterpiece (1982) is arguably the first to get it all right, finally telling the whole story comprehensibly. This visionary look at Los Angeles in 2019a singular blend of grime and glitter that captures both the horror and the allure of Reagan-era capitalismwas a commercial flop when it first appeared. Loosely adapted from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, it follows the hero (Harrison Ford) as he tracks down and kills replicants, or androids. Much of the film’s erotic charge and moral and ideological ambiguity stem from the fact that these characters are very nearly the only ones we care about. (We never know for sure whether Ford is a replicant himself.) With Sean Young, Rutger Hauer, Daryl Hannah, Edward James Olmos, Joe Turkel, and William J. Sanderson. R, 117 min. (JR) Read more
Jonathan Demme’s documentary on Carter promoting his controversial book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid is as much about the American press as it is about the former president. It even helps to show why, among free presses, the U.S. press ranks only 48th in the world, according to the annual study by Reporters Without Borders. The portrait of Carter has been described as hagiography, but it isn’t a stretch to view his quiet integrity as saintly next to the track records of his successors. It’s interesting to see, when he’s interviewed successively for Israeli TV and for Al Jazeera, that he comes across as more sympathetic to the Israelis in the interview with the Arabs. My favorite moment shows Alan Dershowitz overcome by his own virtue once he decides, after checking out another Carter interview clip, not to label him an anti-Semite and a Holocaust denier. PG, 125 min. (JJ) Read more
Made between 1979 and 2005, this 96-minute documentary about Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Gates installation in Manhattan’s Central Park was the sixth time the environmental artists commissioned David and Albert Maysles to document one of their massive urban projects (the best known of which may have been wrapping Paris’s Pont-Neuf). The married couple financed their own construction of 23 miles of framed orange fabric threaded through the park but failed to get the city’s permission to proceed in 1979; Mayor Michael Bloomberg gave them the go-ahead 25 years later, and the project went up for two weeks in February 2005. The arguments for and against it often seem equally arcane. Raised in communist Bulgaria, Christo insisted on pursuing the project to please himself, denying any social aim, yet this engaging account arguably focuses more on New York as a complex social organism than on the artwork. (JR) Read more
Eight early Czech shorts: Jan Krizenecky’s Rendezvous at the Mill (1898), Alexander Hackenschmied’s Aimless Walk (1930) and Prague Castle (1932), Svatopluk Innemann’s Prague Shining in the Lights (1928), Martin Fric’s Black-and-White Rhapsody (1936), Elmar Klos’s The Highway Sings (1937), and Jiri Lehovec’s The Magic Eye (1939) and Rhythm (1941). For fans of Maya Deren, it might be worth knowing that Alexander Hammid, her husband and codirector on Meshes of the Afternoon, is the same person as Alexander Hackenschmied, whose own early Czech films are well worth seeing. (JR) Read more
Robert Redford plays a CIA officer on the edge of retirement in 1991 who sets out to free a former protege (Brad Pitt) from prison in China, where he’s being detained as a spy. The reasonably entertaining spy-versus-spy shenanigans are partially undercut by the hypocritical pretense that the CIA and its various forms of mischief are somehow being ridiculed. Yet the CIA-caused casualties, mainly non-American, count for next to nothing alongside the noble efforts of a sly American father figure to save his handsome American surrogate son; the rest of the world can go blow itself up for all the filmmakers care. To cover up the shallowness, director Tony Scott gives us a whirlwind of gratuitous camera movement and staccato freeze-frames to furnish us with a semblance of stylishness (as opposed to style). The script by Michael Frost Beckner and David Arata seems to depend mainly on distant memories of Le Carre and Greene; Catherine McCormack costars as the putative love interest, but the real romance, of course, is between the boy leads. 127 min. (JR) Read more
When I spent a day in Brisbane four years ago, it struck me in terms of climate as well as social ambience as being the Mississippi or Louisiana of Australia. That’s only one of the reasons why this grim, passionate, and graphic love story about two highly dysfunctional young individualsa chain-smoking asthmatic (Peter Fenton) and an irritable, promiscuous, and possibly crazy victim of eczema (Sacha Horler), both unemployedreminds me of the tale about a doomed couple that forms half of William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms. Another reason is the uncanny way that Andrew McGahan, adapting his own best-selling novel, director John Curran, and cinematographer Dion Beebe have of making their story paradoxically superromantic by keeping it so doggedly antiromantic. With its honesty about sexual inadequacies (his rather than hers), drugs, squalor, and compulsive behavior, this obviously isn’t a film for everyone. But you can’t accuse it of toeing the Hollywood line, and parts of it remind me of Gus Van Sant’s first three movies, before he was swallowed whole by the studios. If you’re looking for something other than the usual cheering up, check this sick puppy out (1999, 98 min.). Read more
Probably the best of all the film versions of Richard Connell’s creepy story about a crazy count who hunts humans on a remote island for sport, adapted by James Creelman. This 1932 movie was made by many of the same people involved in King Kong the following year, including producer Merian C. Cooper, director Ernest B. Schoedsack (codirecting here with Irving Pichel), composer Max Steiner, and actors Fay Wray and Robert Armstrong. If memory serves, this is dated but wonderful, and it lasts only 63 minutes. With Joel McCrea and Leslie Banks. (JR) Read more
A screenwriter on deadline (writer-director-composer Anthony Hopkins) appears to be losing his mind and his life to his characters. But neither the screenwriter nor the characters compel much interest and the jokes are lame, so the only sustained point here is the aggressively eclectic filmmaking style, an anything-goes affair in which even the more striking moves tend to work against one another. (The ‘Scope framing undermines the effects of the rapid-fire montages, and even Hopkins’s most memorable ditty is a throwaway played over the final credits.) Not so much ill conceived and misdirected as unconceived and undirected, this is folly on a grand scale. With Stella Arroyave (Hopkins’s wife and producer, playing some version of herself), and, among the more recognizable names, Christian Slater, John Turturro, Michael Lerner, and Kevin McCarthy. R, 96 min. (JR) Read more
Winner of the audience prize at the 2006 Toronto film festival, Alejandro Gomez Monteverde’s first feature may have more heart than head, but it’s as interesting for what it leaves out of the romantic story as for what it retains. A waitress (Tammy Blanchard) at a Manhattan Mexican restaurant gets fired for coming in late after discovering that she’s pregnant. The manager’s brother (Eduardo Verastegui), who works there as chef, is so angry that he quits on the spot and spends the rest of the day with his new friend, taking her to meet his parents. We never learn who’s the father of the waitress’s child, but we do get some backstories about both characters, especially the chef (who used to be a soccer star and, unlike the waitress, is part Mexican), and these peopleactors as well as charactersare engaging enough to suspend most of our questions. PG-13, 91 min. (JR) Read more
What’s reportedly the first on-screen kiss in Korean cinema appears in this potent and grim 1958 melodrama by Shin Sang-ok, set in Seoul after the Korean war. A country rube turns up looking for his older brother, who by now has entered a life of crime, stealing from U.S. army warehouses and pimping for a prostitute (Choi Eun-heedescribed as the Korean Mary Pickford and therefore shockingly cast against type) who services American soldiers. Frank about other forms of corruption, such as bribery of the police, this sordid tale is limited only by its simplistic characters. (The prostitute is a standard-issue femme fatale, seducing the innocent brother and snitching on her lover.) It culminates in an impressively staged action sequence involving a train heist, followed by a showdown in a muddy wasteland that reflects the probable influence of The Wages of Fear. In Korean with subtitles. 87 min. (JR) Read more
In this tedious 2006 Canadian road movie, a Mexican woman (Vanessa Bauche) in Montreal accepts the help of a smitten grocery clerk (Jesse Aaron Dwyre) to hunt down a man whom she initially refers to as her brother but who turns out to be the husband who left her in Mexico. This development and the backstory behind it is as unengaging as her budding relationship with the clerk, but cowriter-director Federico Hidalgo, without bringing much urgency to these and related matters, still spends 87 minutes spelling them out. In English and subtitled Spanish. (JR) Read more
