Jonathan Rosenbaum

Set at a Florida retirement community and focusing on a local bereavement club, this funny, nervy, and pointedly unrated geriatric sex comedy is both enhanced and occasionally limited by being targeted at baby boomers. The sound track abounds with golden oldies (Love and Marriage, Papa Loves Mambo), the story culminates in a sock hop, and sometimes the ensemble portrait even recalls teen flicks of the 50s and 60s. So part of the kickalong with seeing Dyan Cannon, Joseph Bologna, Brenda Vaccaro, and Sally Kellerman thrive in this special contextis generational nostalgia. Writer-director Susan Seidelman, who made her name with Desperately Seeking Susan but has been working in TV for more than a decade, based this on the experiences of her mother, Florence (who also coproduced and worked on the script). With Len Cariou and Michael Nouri. 104 min. (JR) Read more

Louise Archambault’s flawed but absorbing and ambitious French-Canadian melodrama (2005) focuses on a divorced aerobics teacher (Sylvie Moreau) with a teenage daughter and an unacknowledged addiction to gambling that repeatedly wreaks disaster on both their lives. The dysfunctional pair become only more unstrung after they’re put up by an old friend (Macha Grenon) in a suburban neighborhood and try to settle down. In French with subtitles. 102 min. (JR) Read more

Set in New York a year after 9/11, this Crash-like tale of crisscrossing destinies among five sets of characters tries way too hard to be clever and shrewd. Danny Leiner (Dude, Where’s My Car?, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle) directed a script by Sam Catlin, and though both have their moments, they’re rarely the same moments. At times the film seems as pushy as some of its characters, among them a prodding shrink (the always interesting Tony Shalhoub), a couple (Judy Greer and Tom McCarthy) with a spoiled ten-year-old son, and two East Asian security professionals (Sharat Saxena and Naseeruddin Shah). The other story lines involve a trendy pastry designer (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and an aging woman (Olympia Dukakis) who reconnects with an old friend. With Will Arnett, Jim Gaffigan, Stephen Colbert, and Edie Falco. In English and subtitled Hindi. R, 88 min. (JR) Read more

Like Andre Techine’s current release, Changing Times, this 2001 feature by the French director is set in Tangier, and though it has a sharper sense of place, its story is less ambitious. A French trucker (Stephane Rideau) who drives between North Africa and western Europe takes a crack at drug smuggling, though most of the plot involves his intense but painfully undefined relationship with a North African Jewish woman (Lubna Azabal ) and his friendship with a former street acrobat (Mohammad Homaidi) who wants to sneak into Europe. There’s also some unfocused material about an actor-director (Gael Morel, playing some version of himself) and an American emigre whose lines are all drawn from the literature of Paul Bowles. Azabel, who plays twins in Changing Times, is wonderfully expressive. The title translates as Far. In English and subtitled Arabic, French, and Spanish. 120 min. (JR) Read more

This benefit screening for Lebanese war relief pairs two remarkable experimental shorts; both are painfully relevant and uncommonly beautiful, though formally and conceptually they’re worlds apart. Jayce Salloum, a multimedia artist who spent 22 years in the U.S. before settling in Vancouver, made Untitled Part 3b: (As if) Beauty Never Ends (2003, 12 min.), whose dazzling and painterly use of color and texture provides a counterpoint to glimpses of Palestinian refugee camps. Wael Noureddine, a Lebanese poet and journalist now based in Paris, explores remote corners of battle-scarred Beirut in Ca Sera Beau (From Beyrouth With Love) (2005, 30 min.), evoking music with his percussive editing and camera movement. The hour-long program will also include video statements and readings of more contemporary written statements by each artist. Suggested donation is $5; for more information call 312-480-1966. Fri 8/18, 7:30 PM, and Sat 8/19, 4 PM, Columbia College Ludington Bldg. Read more

Pedro Almodovar’s tamest, slickest feature (1988) is an entertaining melodramatic farce but a far cry from the kinky irreverence of his earlier work. Pepa (Carmen Maura) gets desperate when her lover and fellow actor, Ivan (Fernando Guillen), deserts her without warning, and her flat quickly fills up with others who are comparably frantic: a friend (Maria Barranco) who has unknowingly become involved with a Shiite terrorist, a former lover of Ivan’s whose son by him (Antonio Banderas) has come to rent Pepa’s apartment, and the police. The results are high-spirited, with nice ensemble work from Almodovar’s team of regulars, but the playlike structure (originally derived from Cocteau’s The Human Voice but drastically reworked) is disappointingly conventional. There are usually at least a dozen French, Italian, and Spanish pictures like this every year, which makes it strange that this one turned out to be such a hit. In Spanish with subtitles. R, 88 min. (JR) Read more

Like Kevin Smith’s Clerks, this freewheeling comedy about goof-off college students in Georgia depends almost entirely on the actors’ charm rather than the plot or direction. The cast is likable and spirited, though writer-director-star Hadjii tends to falter whenever he aims for satire (among his broad targets are clueless whites, born-again church groups, and literacy programs). As long as one isn’t looking for insight, this is good, light fun. 88 min. (JR) Read more

A 15-year-old girl (Emily Rios) in the Echo Park district of Los Angeles gets pregnant and, despite her conviction that she’s technically a virgin, is kicked out of the house by her religious father. Taken in by her kindly great-great uncle (Chalo Gonzalez), a street peddler, she becomes part of another family with him and her cousin (Jesse Garcia), who was thrown out by his parents for being gay. Despite some awkwardness, this feature by writer-directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland is a fascinating look at the area’s Mexican-American milieu and other local subcultures, full of feeling, insight, and touching performances. In English and subtitled Spanish. R, 90 min. (JR) Read more

A Cleveland executive (Parker Posey) finally achieves orgasm after acquiring a vibrator, which drives her already disgruntled husband (Paul Rudd), a high school biology teacher, into the arms of an A student (Mischa Barton). Director Billy Kent seems to have instructed most of his actors to behave like robotic sitcom characters; the principal exception is Danny DeVito, who simply behaves like Danny DeVito. I couldn’t predict where this unrated comedy was going but didn’t much care. With Miranda Bailey and (in an embarrassing cameo) Liza Minnelli. 88 min. (JR) Read more

Oliver Stone’s effective if hokey 9/11 docudrama focuses on the two Port Authority policemen (played by Nicolas Cage and Michael Peña) who were rescued from the rubble of the Twin Towers, their families as they wait for news, and a former marine (Michael Shannon) who winds up on one of the rescue teams. An exercise in flag-waving, it evokes nostalgia for World War II epics and the camaraderie of Stone’s Platoon, stroking Americans’ egos about their innate generosity but overlooking, except for a brief end title, all the citizens of 86 other countries who died in the attacks. Able newcomer Andrea Berloff wrote the script. With Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal. PG-13, 125 min. Read more

Chicago filmmaker Usama Alshaibi grew up in Iraq and the U.S., and although he recently became an American citizen, his personal video documentary has plenty to say about the day-to-day existence of his Baghdad relatives, whom he visited in 2004. Distance tends to simplify our view of anything, and this video humanizes the situation on the ground mostly by complicating it: in a voice-over Alshaibi says he’s often asked what “the Iraqis” think, but by the end this question has become as meaningless as asking what “the Americans” think. Much of his previous work has been experimental, but this becomes formally adventurous only near the end, as he converses by phone with a cousin who tells him how much worse the situation has grown this year. 92 min. Alshaibi, executive producer Studs Terkel, and Christie Hefner of Playboy, whose foundation helped fund the film, will answer questions after the screening, which kicks off the Chicago Underground Film Festival. See next week’s issue for a complete festival schedule. Thu 8/17, 8 PM, Music Box. Read more

After peaking with My Favorite Season (1993), Wild Reeds (1994), and Thieves (1996), French director Andre Techine went into decline with Alice and Martin (1998), Far (2001), and Strayed (2003), often biting off more than he could chew. This 2004 feature also overreaches, especially in its metaphorical moments (a mud slide at a construction site that frames the action), but it’s his strongest film since Thieves, a characteristic effort to juxtapose various cultures, generations, and sexualities as people converge and diverge in Tangier. Volatile and sometimes daring performances by Catherine Deneuve, Gerard Depardieu, Gilbert Melki, Malik Zidi, and Lubna Azabal (as twins) contribute to the highly charged and novelistic experience. In French with subtitles. 90 min. Music Box. Read more

Robin Givens plays an unhappy, self-centered housewife who gets her husband to move out without giving him a reason, then slaps a restraining order on him and slowly drives him mad. Usually there are two sides to every failed marriage, yet the wife here is so detestable one wonders whether writer-director Reggie Gaskins (who costars as the couple’s lawyer friend) is working off some sort of grudge. The lack of perspective makes this 2005 drama depressing and not especially edifying. With Sean Blakemore. 106 min. (JR) Read more

As Joel and Ethan Coen demonstrated with their fraudulent based on a true story caption in Fargo, the supposed veracity of a movie’s plot can obscure the truth more than reveal it. The same caption appears in this thriller adapted from an Armistead Maupin novel, in which a radio personality (Robin Williams) who’s recently broken up with his male lover becomes obsessed with a young fan (Rory Culkin) who’s been calling him but who may be the invention of a blind woman (Toni Collette) claiming to be his mother. It’s a relief to see Williams underplaying for a change and letting us fill in the blanks, but the movie’s suggestiveness gives way to a certain thinness and lassitude. Patrick Stettner directed; with Joe Morton, Bobby Cannavale, and Sandra Oh. R, 82 min. (JR) Read more

Adapted by Tony Grisoni from a novel by Brian Aldiss, this arty UK mockumentary charts the musical career of incestuous twins (played by Harry and Luke Treadaway) born conjoined at the chest in a remote corner of England and recruited by a promoter in 1974 as lead singer and lead guitarist for a band called the Bang Bang. Directors Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe (Lost in La Mancha) are too preoccupied with hip cleverness to have much else on their minds, and the music is so-so. Among the phony talking heads are Aldiss and director Ken Russell. R, 93 min. (JR) Read more