Way back in 1976, Alan Parker had the clever idea of making use of the venerable satirical form of the mock heroic and applying it to gangster movies. This he did by making, in Bugsy Malone, a basic gangster flick in which children were cast in all the roles, from tough-guy killers to hard-eyed hookers….
Hélas! The good-humored detachment and optimism that François Truffaut brought to the French cinema seems to have died with him. Barring the rare exception, like last year’s Un Air de Famille by Cédric Klappisch, each new French film that manages to get itself released in this country seems to try to outdo the last in…
10 Things I Hate About You, which was directed by Gil Junger and adapted from Shakespeare by Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith, attempts (again) to make Shakespeare hip by translating a version of the story of The Taming of the Shrew into — guess what! — a 1990s high school, this one in Seattle…
There are two problems with Forces of Nature, which was written by Marc Lawrence and directed by Bronwen Hughes: the script and the stars. The script, in turn, has two problems: not enough jokes (though several of the jokes there are are good ones) and a moral tendency that pulls away from its dramatic tendency—something…
Devil’s Island, directed by Fridrik Thor Fridriksson and written by Einar Karason is set in the 1950s in a former American army base in Iceland called Camp Thule. Into the army’s wartime Quonset huts there have now moved a collection of poor Icelanders who can afford no better place to live and who are looked…
Beshkempir: The Adopted Son by Aktan Abdykalykov from Kyrgyzstan is written in Kyrgyzstani and stars the director’s son (Mirlan Abdykalykov) as Beshkempir, a name which literally means “five grandmothers.” It is a name sometimes given to adopted children to signify the role played by a sort of council of old women of the village in…
The Harmonists, directed by Joseph Vilsmaier, is the “based-on-a-true story” story of The Comedian Harmonists, an immensely popular singing group in pre-war Germany that eventually had to break up, as three of its six members were Jewish. Like nearly every other film set in its time and place, this one is ultimately sucked into the…
Nettoyage à Sec (Dry Cleaning) by Anne Fontaine presents us with a French version of that now familiar Hollywood trope, merely gestured towards in 8mm, the capacity for sexual adventurism and even perversion in all of us. Nicole (Miou-Miou) and Jean-Marie (Charles Berling) have been married for 15 years and run a dry-cleaning establishment in…
Nettoyage à Sec (Dry Cleaning) by Anne Fontaine presents us with a French version of that now familiar Hollywood trope, merely gestured towards in 8mm, the capacity for sexual adventurism and even perversion in all of us. Nicole (Miou-Miou) and Jean-Marie (Charles Berling) have been married for 15 years and run a dry-cleaning establishment in…
The Apple was directed by a 17 year old girl, Samira Makhmalbaf, the daughter of the Iranian filmmaker, Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Gabbeh). It tells the true story of twin 12 year old girls, Massoumeh and Zahra Naderi, who were locked up behind iron bars by their father for their entire lives until the neighbors complained and…
Hands on a Hard Body by S.R. Bindler is a documentary about a contest, held annually in Longview, Texas, by the Jack Long Nissan dealership, which gives away a $15,000 pickup truck to the contestant who can keep at least one hand on the truck longer than anyone else, given five minute breaks every hour…
The Winners, a documentary by Paul Cohen, tells the story of four former winners and one third place finisher in the Queen Elizabeth Competition for violinists and pianists in Belgium and what has happened to them since. It is an absorbing but disorganized film that doesn’t quite know what it wants to say, though it…
