A pretty but not very distinctive singer-composer (Heather Graham) moves to LA from Cleveland to find fame and fortune. She winds up getting involved with an unbalanced drug addict (Jeremy Sisto) and leaves him to wait tables. Most of this dreary downer, directed by Alan White from a Drew Pillsbury script, is as banal as it sounds, and needlessly complicated rather than enhanced by a fractured chronology. Things are only minimally enlivened by the customers who frequent the graveyard shift at the diner where the heroine worksthe dregs of the music industry and related fringe groups. With Tess Harper, Linda Hamilton, and Jake Busey. R, 97 min. (JR) Read more
John Dahl’s previous neonoirs have been too cynical for me, but this crime comedy has such a goofy script (by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely) and such an eccentric cast that it kept me curious about what would happen next. An alcoholic Polish-American hit man in Buffalo (Ben Kingsley) gets sent to San Francisco by his uncle and boss (Philip Baker Hall) to dry out. Thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous and the funeral home where he gets a job, he winds up with a strange assortment of company, including a gay man (Luke Wilson), a real-estate broker (Bill Pullman), and a well-to-do lover (Tea Leoni). Even if you can’t accept all the movie’s curveballs, you might still be amused. With Dennis Farina and Alison Sealy-Smith. R, 92 min. (JR) Read more
Expanded from a half-hour comedy sketch, Zhenya Kiperman’s over-the-top knockabout farce (2005) about an opera star playing Iago (Larry Pine), his wife (Michi Barall), a psychotic audience member (Keith Nobbs), a burglar (Kate Hodge), and various others might have made me laugh if the characters were sufficiently compelling or believable to transcend their plot functions. But it’s typical of Kiperman that the moment the Empire State Building appears to establish the New York setting, we also hear a snatch of Rhapsody in Blue on the soundtrack; the occasional patches of Dixieland are no less Woody Allenish, at least in aspiration. 95 min. (JR) Read more
If you’ve ever wondered about the backstory behind all the fine print on containers of E.H. Bronner’s peppermint soap, Sara Lamm’s 2006 documentary tells you everything you’d want to know and then some. And the story being told is certainly a singular one. Bronner, a German Jewish immigrant and onetime mental patient, abandoned his children to produce and sell his soap and spread his ideas about humanitarianism. Today his son Ralph qualifies as one of his most ardent disciples. For better and for worse, this is a movie that raises almost as many questions as it answers. 88 min. (JR) Read more
The first (1918) and by most accounts best of the three Hollywood versions of the Maurice Maeterlinck fantasy play, directed by the great Maurice Tourneur. Generally considered a masterpiece, it tells the story of two poor children taught by a fairy on Christmas Eve how to see the world through the eyes of God. 75 min. (JR) Read more
In this farcical sequel to Bruce Almighty (2003), God is still a janitor played by Morgan Freeman, but the Buffalo newscaster played by Jim Carrey is now a Buffalo newscaster-turned-congressman played by The 40-Year-Old Virgin’s Steve Carell. As soon as the hero arrives with his family in a Virginia suburb to change the world, God orders him to build an ark, and then sends loads of animals in pairs after him until he obeys. Freeman’s God is a mix of Old and New Testament, with a dash of both sexism and sitcom; Carell’s Noah is a political fool, but that only proves he’s honest and sincere. This is idiotic, but it’s so good-natured I didn’t mind. Directed by Tom Shadyac from a script by Steve Oedekerk; with Lauren Graham, John Goodman, John Michael Higgins, and Wanda Sykes. PG, 88 min. (JR) Read more
Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1961 follow-up to L’Avventuraand middle feature in a loose trilogy ending with Eclipserepeats many of the melancholic themes of its predecessor, with particular emphasis on the boredom and atrophied emotions of the rich. The results are somewhat more mixed, though on the whole the performances are betterwhich may not matter so much in an Antonioni context. The minimal plot, restricted to less than 24 hours, involves the death of passion between a successful novelist (Marcello Mastroianni) and his frustrated wife (Jeanne Moreau). The best parts of this movie tend to cluster around the beginning and end, and include the novelist’s brief encounter with a nymphomaniac patient at a hospital and his longer encounter with the daughter (Monica Vitti) of an industrialist at a party; one of the worst is a walk taken by the wife around Milan, full of symbolic and pretentious details. In Italian with subtitles. 122 min. (JR) Read more
A good half century has passed since I’ve read any Nancy Drew mysteries, an endless series that’s been appearing since 1930, and frankly I wasn’t expecting Andrew Fleming’s ‘Scope movie, written with Tiffany Paulsen, to stir up many memories of them. But this is a loving, uncondescending tribute to the novels’ sweetness and hokeyness and an excellent piece of genre filmmaking. Nancy (Emma Roberts) accompanies her geeky dad (Tate Donovan) to Hollywood, where they rent the former mansion of a late movie star who’s died mysteriously and the girl sleuth solves the case. The postmodernist evocations of the past (roughly the 50s through the 80s) are a charming mishmash, delivered with wit and style. With Josh Flitter and Barry Bostwick. PG, 99 min. (JR) Read more
Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard tears up all the available scenery in this overblown, achronological biopic of French pop singer Edith Piaf. Whether sincere or cynical, the movie is a near parody of the Je ne regrette rien/This is Mrs. Norman Maine school of female suffering and camp mortification: the heroine grows up in grandma’s brothel, sings on the streets, gets discovered by an entrepreneur (Gerard Depardieu no less), loses or gets snatched away from loved ones, becomes dependent on drink and drugs. Director-cowriter Olivier Dahan lamentably leapfrogs past most of the German occupation, when Piaf was a courageous member of the resistance. With Sylvie Testud and Emmanuelle Seigner. In French with subtitles. 140 min. (JR) Read more
This savage early talkie (1932), with John Gilbert as a chauffeur seducing and blackmailing the married woman he works for as well as two other servants, was a commercial miscalculation for MGM, but it’s too interesting to dismiss. Derived from a story Gilbert wrote, and directed by the once-prominent Monta Bell (a Chaplin protege who guided Garbo through her first Hollywood feature), it seems inspired partly by Erich von Stroheim (who directed Gilbert in The Merry Widow). But Gilbert’s former profile as a silent matinee idol seems to preclude his playing a man you love to hate, and because a more sympathetic butler character (Paul Lukas) defends traditional class divisions, the morality of this Depression-era melodrama seems both complex and confused. With Virginia Bruce (shortly to become the fourth Mrs. Gilbert). 77 min. (JR) Read more
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
