Jonathan Rosenbaum

This quirky and watchable but disappointingly overproduced and undernourished period epic from Gillian Armstrong, set mainly in early colonial Australia, is adapted from Peter Carey’s novel about the singular bond between an English minister (Ralph Fiennes) and the owner of a Sydney glassworks (Cate Blanchett), both of whom have a passion for gambling. One reason why it disappoints is that it comes across as more the work of screenwriter Laura Jones (An Angel at My Table, The Portrait of a Lady, A Thousand Acres), who’s lately been specializing in high-minded literary adaptations, than of Armstrong, who tends to do better and more nuanced work with more intimate and domestic material (e.g., The Last Days of Chez Nous, Little Women). With Ciaran Hinds, Tom Wilkinson, and Richard Roxburgh. (JR) Read more

Writer-director Alan Rudolph has been remaking his own romantic comedy-dramas for so long now that even when he gives us two couples instead of one or substitutes Montreal for Seattleboth of which he does herethe film still comes out feeling the same. Working with actors as likable as Nick Nolte and Julie Christie, he makes us a bit more tolerant of Lara Flynn Boyle and Jonny Lee Miller (whose parts are much less nuanced) and oscillates between two cases of marital discord and amorous yearning with a fair amount of grace. For genuine freshness, however, go back to Remember My Name and Choose Me, or check them out for the first time. (JR) Read more

East Side Story

The words “communist musical” may call to mind tractors and factories–both of which are certainly in evidence here–but this fascinating and enjoyable documentary by Romanian-born filmmaker Dana Ranga and American-born independent Andrew Horn presents the singular genre as a conflict between capitalist glitz and socialist poetry, revealing both the Marxists’ tragicomic efforts to beat the West at its own game and the homegrown folksiness of their efforts. Reportedly only 40-odd musical features were produced in the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Poland, and Romania prior to the collapse of communism, and roughly half of them are excerpted here. Ranga and Horn interview writers, directors, stars, and ordinary viewers of communist musicals, as well as one prestigious film historian (Maya Turorskaya, best known here for her book on Andrei Tarkovsky). The selection of clips isn’t everything it might have been–I regret the absence of any examples by Alexander Medvedkin, some of which are glimpsed in Chris Marker’s The Last Bolshevik, and eastern European critics have cited other omissions. But Ranga and Horn’s insights into communist film production and their story of how the communist musical triumphed or withered in its various settings offer plenty of food for thought. Read more

Konrad Wolf’s 1964 East German feature was reportedly influenced by Hiroshima, mon amour in both its form and its juxtaposition of a female search for identity with an important historical eventin this case the building of the Berlin Wall. Criticized prior to its release for being too experimental, the film went on to become a popular and critical success, though it’s seldom screened in these parts. In German with subtitles; the running time is about 110 minutes. (JR) Read more

Recounting the life of the 14th Dalai Lama prior to his departure from Tibet, this highly uncharacteristic feature by Martin Scorsese (1997) is still his best since The King of Comedy, but you can’t profitably approach it expecting either the violence or the stylistic punchiness of something like GoodFellas. Scripted by Melissa Mathison (in close consultation with the Dalai Lama and his family) and cast almost exclusively with Tibetan exiles, this nonreligious movie about a religious leader is beautiful, abstract, charged with mystery, but never pretentious. Far from dictating a position on the Dalai Lama, the film doesn’t even define a particular point at which the spoiled toddler is transformed into a holy man; a good deal of the historical, political, and religious context is implied rather than explained, and most of the major events occur offscreen. Despite the questionable wallpaper score by Philip Glass, Scorsese’s delicate, inquisitive style has an inevitability and a rightness all its own. 134 min. (JR) Read more

Jacques Tati’s first feature, a euphoric comedy set in a sleepy village, was meant to be the first French feature in color; it was shot in 1947 using two cameras, one color and one black and white. But the new Thomson-Color process failed to yield results that could be printed, so in 1949 the film was released in black and white. Fifteen years later, Tati released a recut version in which a few details were colored by means of stencils, the version generally available ever sinceat least until Tati’s daughter Sophie, a professional film editor, and film technician Francois Ede decided to restore the original color in 1994. Their meticulous work took well over a year, and what emerges is truly precious: a color print that looks like 1947 itself. As in all of Tati’s features, the plot is minimal: during Bastille Day festivities, Francois (Tati), the local postman, encounters a newsreel about streamlined postal delivery in America and attempts to clean up his act accordingly. But the exquisite charm of this masterpiece has less to do with individual gags (funny though many of them are) than with Tati’s portrait of a highly interactive French village after the wara view of paradise suffused with affection and poetry. Read more

Hildegard Knefdescribed as the thinking man’s Marlene Dietrich back when machocentric definitions were more acceptablewon her first starring role in this 1946 feature, playing a concentration-camp survivor who tries to bring a Nazi war criminal to justice. Wolfgang Staudte Read more

Tim Roth, the disturbed offspring of a well-to-do Charleston family, is a prime suspect in the brutal murder of a prostitute (Renee Zellweger), and two detectives (Chris Penn and Michael Rooker) hope that a series of polygraph interrogations will pin him down. This is a fair-to-middling psychological thriller by the writing-directing team of Jonas and Josh Pate, relatively easy to watch and even easier to forget. Watch for cameos by Ellen Burstyn, Rosanna Arquette, and Mark Damon. (JR) Read more

Woody Allen diehards won’t care, but for me this runs a close second to September as his worst feature to datemarginally more bearable only because it’s a comedy and a couple of gags are reasonably funny. Otherwise it’s a cluttered, unstructured Fellini-derived tale of a bitter New York-Jewish autobiographical novelist (played by guess who) reassessing his life and loves while hiring hookers and planning a trip back to his upstate alma mater. Given the limitations of the material, the all-star castincluding Kirstie Alley, Bob Balaban, Richard Benjamin, Eric Bogosian, Billy Crystal, Judy Davis, Hazelle Goodman, Mariel Hemingway, Amy Irving, Demi Moore, Elisabeth Shue, Stanley Tucci, and Robin Williamsproves more distracting than edifying. (JR) Read more

Goodwill, in fact, is mainly what this muted drama has, along with premises that suggest a therapeutic fairy tale and the warmth of Gus Van Sant’s laid-back direction. Young mathematics genius Will Hunting (cowriter Matt Damon) works as a janitor at MIT, where a math professor (Stellan Skarsgard) discovers him and makes him see a therapist (a subdued Robin Williams). Scripted with Ben Affleck (who plays the hero’s best friend), and assisted by a charismatic performance by Minnie Driver, this is good, solid work that never achieves either the art or poignance of Van Sant’s earlier and more personal projects (Mala Noche, Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho), though it’s clearly superior to something like Dead Poets Society. 126 min. (JR) Read more

The 18th James Bond movie features the usual saturation bombardment. There are a few amusing stunts, lots of explosions and one-liners, and a mad news baron (Jonathan Pryce) made up of equal parts Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch, and Dr. No. But apart from the welcome grace and pluck of Asian action star Michelle Yeohwho all but steals the movie away from Pierce Brosnan’s Bond and single-handedly makes this a better wedding of Hong Kong and Hollywood than either Rumble in the Bronx or Face/Offthis film has no personality whatsoever. (As usual, the credits show more imagination than the narrative proper.) With Teri Hatcher, Joe Don Baker, and Ricky Jay. Roger Spottiswoode directed the computer-generated script credited to Bruce Feirstein. (JR) Read more

If you really hate your kids, pack them off to this slapdash farce, whose only funny moment is the PC disclaimer at the end about the Disney company’s humanist concern for blind people (which even literate toddlers will have trouble understanding anyway). Leslie Nielsen seems a good two feet too tall for the unlamented UPA cartoon character of the 50s (who had a barely seen cartoon feature of his own back in 1964), but the real problems go beyond that. Director Stanley Tong (Supercop, Rumble in the Bronx, Jackie Chan’s First Strike) gets to recapture his Hong Kong action routines only in the abbreviated kickboxing assigned to Kelly Lynch or her stunt double; everything else is torturous formula. Written by Pat Proft and Tom Sherohman; with Malcolm McDowell, Ernie Hudson, Stephen Tobolowsky, and Miguel Ferrer (looking and sounding a great deal like his father Jose). (JR) Read more

Steven Spielberg’s skillful if stodgy 1997 feature, about the 1841 Supreme Court hearings that determined the fate of African slaves who’d broken free on a Spanish ship near Cuba, recalls some of the better Stanley Kramer productions of the 50s (even if the iconography of noble African males evokes certain Paul Robeson films). There’s some excellent comedy early on involving the mutual incomprehension of Africans and Americans, though this eventually gives way to solemn, ethnocentric mush about one African’s reading of the story of Jesus, demonstrating as usual that sustained subtlety is hardly Spielberg’s forte. The script is credited to David Franzoni, though other hands were involved; it seems to stick reasonably close to the historical record and doesn’t add any romantic subplots. With Anthony Hopkins (able if miscast as John Quincy Adams), Morgan Freeman, Matthew McConaughey, and Willie Amakye. 152 min. (JR) Read more

Robert De Niro plays a presidential spin doctor spurred into action after a sex scandal threatens to destroy his boss Read more

Adapting a beautiful novel by Russell Banks, Atom Egoyan (Exotica) may finally have bitten off more than he can chew, but the power and reach of this undertaking are still formidable. At the tragic center of the story are the deaths of many children in a small town when a school bus spins out of control and sinks into a frozen lake (depicted in an extraordinary single shot that calls to mind a Brueghel landscape) and what this threatens to do to the community, especially after a big-city lawyer (a miscast, albeit effective, Ian Holm) turns up and tries to initiate litigation. Egoyan restructures Banks’s novel (which is narrated by several characters in turn and proceeds chronologically) into a kind of mosaic narrative used in his other features, and one that has potent things to say about communal ties and the repressive machinations of capitalism that can sever them. R, 110 min. (JR) Read more