The movies have in the past found it profitable to cater for almost every kind of paranoia there is. The California fantasy factories must be getting a lot of business out of even the survivalist types—who, you would think, must live many miles from the nearest Multiplex—since they managed to get some black helicopters into…
I tried very hard to like Henry Fool by Hal Hartley and was intermittently successful, but I found it in the end unsatisfying. The film tells the story of two friends, the rogue Henry Fool (“there used to be an ‘e’ on the end of it in the 17th century, but it dropped off”), played…
The American distributors who refused an American market to Adrian Lyne’s new film version of Lolita until it was already booked for its first run on Showtime, the cable network (beginning on August 2), said that they did so on the grounds that the film was no good. Of course, these are the same people…
Marie Baie Des Anges by Manual Pradal stars Vahina Giocante as 15 year old Marie and Frederic Malgras as her juvenile delinquent boyfriend Orso. It is a sort of French Kids, that egregious film of a couple of years ago which enjoyed a brief renown as the very latest in “reality” cinema. This is a…
Safe Men written and directed by John Hamburg is that rare thing, a Tarantino-clone that nevertheless manages to be rather witty and charming. Sam (Sam Rockwell) and Eddie (Steve Zahn) are a couple of absolutely awful itinerant singers in Providence, Rhode Island who are but dimly aware of how bad they are. Sam, in particular,…
Regeneration directed by Gillies Mackinnon from a screenplay by Allan Scott and based on the novel by Pat Barker is another retelling of the great left wing myth to come out of the Great War: that it was all the generals’ fault. “Half the seed of Europe,” to use Wilfred Owen’s angry poetic formulation, were…
People who are obsessed, as so many people are these days, with racial, ethnic, or sexual identity must lead very dull lives, for it is ridiculously easy to entertain them. In Whatever, for instance, I heard be-sandaled feminists burst into hoots of laughter when one woman told another that she wishes her scruffy-looking daughter would…
The Thief directed by Pavel Chukhrai is a deeply moving meditation on family and fatherhood told from the point of view of Sanya (Misha Philipchuk) the six year old son of the beautiful Katya (Yekaterina Rednikova). His father having died of wounds shortly after the end of the Second World War, Sanya was born in…
It is not a particularly original or even, necessarily, interesting observation that marriage, like other symbiotic relationships, is often a matter of complementary pathologies. Or what would be pathologies if they were found in an individual. Benoit Jacquot (A Single Girl, The Disenchanted) has given us a portrait of such a marriage—and not much hope…
Next Stop, Wonderland, written and directed by Brad Anderson, is a charming romantic comedy with a great many funny moments, though it doesn’t quite pull everything together in its rather unsatisfactory ending. But it has an excellent beginning. Erin (Hope Davis) comes home one day to find her live-in boyfriend, Sean (Phil Hoffman), moving out…
Polish Wedding, written and directed by Theresa Connolly is a relentlessly life-affirming story about a Polish family in Hamtramck, Michigan, which undergoes in its own lovably ethnic way several family crises of a sort that sometimes happen to non-Poles too. The incongruously Irish-looking Gabriel Byrne plays Bolek, the paterfamilias, who is being cuckolded by Jadzia…
Whatever by Susan Skoog stars Liza Weil as Anna Stockard and Chad Morgan as her slutty friend Brenda, two high school girls in 1981 who do the standard “survivors” turn on behalf of the I-am-womanism of Ms Skoog. It follows the by-now familiar path of mythologizing and romanticising the sufferings of women, particularly young, post-pubertal…
