Chéri
Stephen Frears and Christopher Hampton have adapted the Colette novels about a courtesan (Michelle Pfeiffer) who falls in love with her very young protegé (Rupert Friend). Although the film has difficulty modulating its tone, it is a generally buoyant and entertaining adaptation.
by Chris Knipp
FLICKS
by Chris Dashiell
STATE OF THE UNION
(Frank Capra, 1948).
Spencer Tracy plays a businessman who runs for President, and Katharine Hepburn plays his estranged wife, in a mild political satire that has some good dialogue and acting but tries too hard to make a big statement.SUCH IS LIFE (Arturo Ripstein, 2000).
A woman (Arcelia Ramírez) living in a Mexican barrio goes mad with grief when the father of her two children decides to leave her and marry a much younger woman. The character development is thin, but the film has an intense atmosphere of confinement, and Ramirez is quite good.SÁTÁNTANGÓ (Béla Tarr, 1994).
Tarr's seven-and-a-half hour masterpiece depicts a group of villagers in rural Hungary trapped in sordid lives and aimless rituals, surprised by the reappearance of a menacing quasi-messiah figure they had thought dead. The film employs huge chunks of real time to take the viewer's mind to a place beyond expectation.
RIO BRAVO (Howard Hawks, 1959).
John Wayne plays a sheriff who has to keep outlaws from breaking out one of their own from jail, and with only an alcoholic deputy (Dean Martin) and an old crippled jailer (Walter Brennan) to help him. Angie Dickinson is the love interest. The film is somewhat overrated, but its mellow, self-reflective quality makes it enjoyable.THE LONG GOODBYE
(Robert Altman, 1973).
Altman's revisionist private eye flick turns Raymond Chandler's tough guy Philip Marlowe into a wisecracking slob in 1970s Los Angeles. Elliot Gould gives probably his career-high performance as Marlowe, and the twist-filled story deftly satirizes the loss of old-fashioned codes of honor.
Ghost Sonatas
In the Oscar-winning Departures, an unemployed cellist takes a job dressing corpses for an undertaker, while Atom Egoyan's Adoration explores the no-man's-land between fact and fiction.
by Howard Schumann
Let's Stop
Congratulaing Pixar
Up punctures the balloon of the Pixar studio's perfection. Despite clever visuals and a world of charm, it's a thorough disappointment.
by Chris Knipp
Control Issues
Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control, starring Isaach de Bankolé as an emotionally frozen hit man, is a film of mystery and silence and unexpected twists; a parable about the power of imagination and poetry to operate without arbitrarily imposed limits.
Also reviewed: The Brothers Bloom
by Howard Schumann
Love for Sale
The Girlfriend Experience, another one of Steven Soderbergh's forays into low-budget DV filmmaking, features porn star Sasha Grey as a Manhattan call girl. It's a cold and soulless movie about a cold and soulless young woman.
by Chris Knipp
The Cyclist
Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s 1987 film The Cyclist, about a man trying to win a cruel bet to pedal his bicycle for a week, just to pay his wife's medical bills, strikes us deeply, not so much for any brilliance of polish or skill, but just for the strength of its plunge, and the sharpness of its edge.
by Dan Schneider
ADULT EDUCATION
Damien Chazelle's Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, about the growing attraction between a trumpet player and a shy waitress, is a charming musical romance that gets by on the lowest of low budgets. Last year's underrated Elegy, from Isabel Coixet, features a marvelous star performance by Ben Kingsley as an aging professor of literature who takes up with a student.
by Les Phillips
Adrift in Tokyo
A charming, at times surreal, and often very touching film, Satoshi Miki’s Adrift in Tokyo provides the viewer with a rare glimpse of some of the lovely back streets, shops, and shrines of Tokyo that tourists never see, while creating characters that are believable and have the capacity for growth.
by Howard Schumann
Deep Rapport
Tyson, James Toback's portrait of the controversial ex-heavyweight, is a film that is both vivid and subtle, achieving maximum sympathy but also maximum honesty.
by Chris Knipp
BARRIERS
In his explosive film Hunger, British first-time director Steve McQueen depicts the 1981 hunger strike by IRA prisoner Bobby Sands. It stands as a solemn reminder of the inhumanity that occurs when democratic rights are flouted.
by Howard Schumann
Also reviewed: The Pool.
The Soloist
Joe Wright's The Soloist tells of a newspaper columnist (Robert Downey Jr.) who discovers a homeless schizophrenic cellist (Jamie Foxx) with a passion for Beethoven. The story is sometimes uplifting, but Wright's manipulative style drags the picture down.
by Chris Knipp
STROSZEK
There has never been a filmmaker remotely like Werner Herzog, and his 1977 film Stroszek, in which Bruno S. plays a mentally ill German ex-con seeking an elusive happiness in America, is like no other movie ever made.
by Dan Schneider
SIN NOMBRE
In Sin Nombre, first-time writer-director Cary Joji Fukanaga has crafted a uniquely moving film experience that dramatizes with authenticity the drive among the poor in Latin America to pull up roots and seek a better life in the U.S.
by Howard Schumann
Bringing It All
Back Home
Goodbye Solo, Rahmin Bahrani's third feature, takes takes a theme from Abbas Kiarostami's A Taste of Cherry, of a man seeking a driver to help him commit suicide, and makes it as American and Edward Hopper as night movie ticket windows, sleazy motel rooms, road houses, cabs on call, and fractured families.
by Chris Knipp