Martin Lawrence plays the title hero of this slapstick farce, the black sheep of a Georgia-based family who’s worked his way up to become a sort of male Oprah Winfrey on TV. Accompanied by his glamorous fiancee (Joy Bryant) and his son from a former marriage, he reluctantly goes home for the 50th wedding anniversary of his parents (James Earl Jones and Margaret Avery) and has to work through old grudges involving his older brother (Michael Clarke Duncan), the orphaned cousin his parents raised (Cedric the Entertainer), and other relatives. A few laughs and a lot of hyperbolic shtick make this a little better than formulaic before the standard-issue resolution. Malcolm D. Lee (Undercover Brother) wrote and directed. PG-13, 114 min. (JR) Read more
A good concert film might have been culled from Vaughn’s 30-date LA-to-Chicago tour in September 2005, which showcased stand-up comedians Ahmed Ahmed, John Caparulo, Bret Ernst, and Sebastian Maniscalco and included bits with Vaughn, Jon Favreau, Dwight Yoakam, Justin Long, and Keir O’Donnell. But this is more like a DVD extra for that film, with family visits, interviews, a few sound bites from the show, and the news that Hurricane Katrina occasioned a few cancellations and benefits en route. Ari Sandel directed. R, 115 min. (JR) Read more
Billy Bob Thornton stars as the fictional Charles Farmer, a former NASA astronaut trainee from rural Texas who missed his chance to go into space when his father’s death forced him return to the family farm and settle some debts. He’s now bent on launching himself into orbit inside his own rocket, which he’s built in his barnwith the full support of his family, if not government bureaucrats. This ode to harebrained dreaming by brothers Michael Polish (writer-director) and Mark Polish (writer), who also brought us Twin Falls Idaho and Jackpot, is supposed to be inspiring, but I found it a terrifying illustration of innocent American lunacy at its most self-infatuated. Thornton and his costarsVirginia Madsen, Bruce Dern, Tim Blake Nelson, Richard Edson, and Bruce Willis in an uncredited cameodo what they can with this questionable enterprise. PG, 104 min. (JR) Read more
Joan Allen plays a mother of four teenage girls in suburban Detroit who’s suddenly abandoned by her husband, takes to the bottle, and winds up involved with a neighbor (Kevin Costner), an over-the-hill baseball player and radio personality who drinks too. Writer-director Mike Binder, who plays the least sympathetic character in the movie, has a nice way of handling actors, and Costner is a particular revelation, though Allen is fine as well and the four daughters (Erika Christensen, Keri Russell, Alicia Witt, Evan Rachel Wood) are never less than believable. This loses focus and begins to get a little soggy and moralistic toward the end, but on the whole it’s a sensitive and well-observed comedy that’s especially adept at handling the characters’ rage. R, 116 min. (JR) Read more
Like its predecessors, the concluding and entirely self-sufficient feature in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s trilogy about 20th century Taiwan focuses on a specific period (in this case 1949 to the present) and specific art form (cinema itself). In the present, an actress prepares to play a real-life anti-Japanese guerrilla in 40s China arrested as a subversive after returning to Taiwan in the 50s. Images evoked by her past as a drug-addicted barmaid alternate with her imaginative projections of the film about to be shot. Despite the complexity of the haunting structure, which suggests three interwoven tensespresent, past, and a curious blend of future conditional and speculative pastthis is the shortest (108 minutes) and most direct film of the trilogy, and the visual mastery is stunning. Reproaching contemporary Taiwan politically by praising the courage of an earlier generation, this film has been controversial in its home country, but it’s probably the most artistically accomplished feature I saw in 1995. In Mandarin with subtitles. (JR) Read more
Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman’s 2007 documentary has all the makings of a valuable and important history lesson but lacks a viable form for combining its diverse elements. Its subject is the horrific Japanese attack on the Chinese capital in 1937 and ’38; the elements include newsreel footage, interviews with Chinese survivors, and selections from the diaries and letters of Westerners who witnessed the events and tried to intervene (performed by such actors as Woody Harrelson, Mariel Hemingway, and J Read more
I probably could enjoy Susan Sarandon and Ralph Fiennes performing the Manhattan phone directory—which might be almost as edifying as this partly fictionalized HBO movie about Doris Duke, the socialite and philanthropist who died in 1993, and Bernard Lafferty, the gay Irishman who became her butler and best friend. Director Bob Balaban, known mainly as an actor, performed wonders with his features Parents (1989) and The Last Good Time (1994); he’s been directing TV ever since, and he does what he can with Hugh Costello’s arch script. 102 min. (JR) Read more
Just as Woody Allen now omits the early What’s Up, Tiger Lily? from his filmography, Japanese director Shohei Imamura might have been insulted by the idea that anyone could prefer this modest farce (1958) to his vastly more ambitious comedy The Profound Desire of the Gods, made a decade later. But its story about the dream life of a henpecked nerd who works at his wife’s Tokyo pharmacy is perfectly suited to the director’s high-spirited vulgarity. The performances of the title pop tune, with its borrowings from the Western alphabet, are especially giddy. Also known as Nishi Ginza Station. In Japanese with subtitles. 52 min. (JR) Read more
One of the best and most ambitious features by Shohei Imamura, this farcical fable (1968), set on a tropical island, probably won Read more
Turkish filmmaker Reha Erdem has a feel for the light, shade, colors, and textures of a scenic mountain village, which he shoots gracefully in ‘Scope, often following people along various passageways. He also has a leisurely and not always convincing way of dealing with the troubled lives of three village kids, and his taste for pretentious music and portentous section headings suggest he doesn’t always know when to leave well enough alone. This 2006 feature works better in terms of mood than storytelling. In Turkish with subtitles. 110 min. (JR) Read more
After making his best and smoothest drama (Match Point) in England, Woody Allen returns there for one of his most clueless and awkward, outfitted with a standard-issue Philip Glass score. In both cases Allen’s usual hang-ups about class and money lead to conventionally complicated murder plots. Two economically challenged cockney brothers in south Londona garage mechanic and compulsive gambler (Colin Farrell) and a more settled sort who runs the family restaurant (Ewan McGregor)get pushed into killing a businessman who’s threatening to expose their rich uncle (Tom Wilkinson). With Hayley Atwell and Sally Hawkins. PG-13, 108 min. (JR) Read more
Shohei Imamura’s fourth feature (1959) was his last assigned project before the more personal Pigs and Battleships. Based on the diary of a ten-year-old Korean girl, which became a best seller in Japan, it focuses on her and her three siblings’ impoverished life in a coal-mining town. Imamura shot in black-and-white ‘Scope, doing a great deal with the scenic mountain and seaside settings, but he also lays it on rather thick at times with melodramatic overacting, especially among the adults. A former assistant to Yasujiro Ozu who often tried to be as unlike his former master as possible, Imamura tended to revel in excess of this kind even with relatively impersonal projects. I might have appreciated the social nuances more if I Read more
As the title suggests, this video documentary about Elias Syriani, a North Carolina man who stabbed his wife to death in 1990, and his four children, who forgave him years later and appealed his death sentence, has all the makings of a real-life soap opera. Yet despite its force as a polemic against capital punishment, and for all the public displays of emotion, I came away feeling that parts of this potent story weren’t being told. Syriani, a devout Catholic from Jordan, isn’t among the storytellers, so his emotional problems and religious awakening are left to others to explain (or not). And on two occasions video maker Linda Booker employs piano music when one daughter starts to cry, which suggests she isn’t sure when or how to let the story speak for itself. 83 min. (JR) Read more
After reading a news story about the death of another woman filmmaker, Revital Ohayon, during a terrorist attack on an Israeli kibbutz, experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs made this 2005 documentary, in which she exchanges thoughts about Ohayon with an Israeli friend, interviews members of the woman’s family, incorporates excerpts from Ohayon’s films, and shows her own children and home in the U.S. The film has many strengthsbeautiful shots, poetic insights, moving details, original modes of expressionbut with no unifying strategy, these elements often compete with or undermine one another. In English and subtitled Hebrew. 63 min. (JR) Read more
Two European documentaries from 2005 about the construction of two large, innovative, and controversial buildings. Fredrik Gertten’s 59-minute The Socialist, the Architect, and the Twisted Tower, in English and subtitled Swedish, concerns the Turning Torso, a residential high-rise by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava in Malmo; it has the more interesting subjectconflicts between class and aesthetic issuesbut the filmmaking is dull. Dutch director Mirjam von Arx’s 52-minute Building the Gherkinin English, about Norman Foster’s pickle-shaped office tower on the site of an IRA bombingis something of an industrial, but it’s an adept and entertaining one. (JR) Read more
