A meticulous reconstruction of the meeting of 14 top German officials in a Berlin suburb on January 20, 1942, that set the Final Solution in motion. (Among those present were Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann.) Directed by Heinz Schirk from a screenplay by Paul Mommertz, this docudrama was financed largely by German and Austrian TV and shown overseas in 1984. Convincingly done and predictably chilling, though it isn’t clear from the credits how much of the meeting is drawn from existing records and how much comes from the filmmakers’ imaginations. But it doesn’t teach us anything we haven’t already learned from much better films on the subject, such as Shoah. In German with subtitles. (JR) Read more
Alan J. Pakula’s spellbinding 1987 film of Lyle Kessler’s play, adapted by the playwright himself from a Steppenwolf production, focuses on three powerhouse performancesby Matthew Modine and Kevin Anderson as orphaned brothers holed up in a decrepit house in Newark, and Albert Finney as a big-time gangster who enters their world and transforms it. While the material never fully sheds its stage origins, Pakula and the actors play this all-male family romance for all it’s worth, and the tantalizing sense of unreality that hovers around the edges of the plot works as a kind of compression device for concentrating on the hermetically sealed world conjured up by the actors and decor, which begins in Algren-esque squalor and winds up as something resembling a middle-class household. Pakula works at his peak, and Finney has seldom been better. (JR) Read more
Diane Kurys’s first English-language film concerns an adulterous love affair between a young American actor (Peter Coyote, resembling a young J.D. Salinger with Henry Fonda’s voice), playing the novelist Cesare Pavese in an Italian biopic, and an Italian-American actress (Greta Scacchi), whom he picks to play the last woman Pavese was involved with. Simultaneously romantic and silly, sincere and campy, the movie coasts along on the attractiveness of its leads and the flavor of its milieu, until it gets derailed by an oddball conclusion that conveniently sidesteps all the preceding dramatic conflicts. With Jamie Lee Curtis as the actor’s wife, Claudia Cardinale and director John Berry as the actress’s parents, and occasional weird echoes of Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful and Two Weeks in Another Town, as well as Truffaut’s The Last Metro. Israel Horowitz assisted Kurys on the script. (JR) Read more
