This batty New Age “bedtime story” is all about a “narf” (Bryce Dallas Howard), a mythological water nymph from the Blue World who’s discovered in the pool of an apartment complex by its sad-sack super-intendent (Paul Giamatti). Beasts called scrunts are out to kill her, and the super must enlist everyone in the complex–none of whom, oddly, bats an eye–to help her return to her world. Unfortunately, this narf’s a drag: she talks like a fortune cookie and doesn’t really do anything. Still, the multicultural cast is fun, the images have a painterly beauty and there are some beguiling comic touches before the story sinks into a swamp of solemn metaphysical glop.
Brothers of the Head Directed by Louis Pepe and Keith Fulton
A pair of conjoined twins are turned into ’70s punk-rock stars in this bizarre, edgy and haunting tale of anguished identities and music-world exploitation. The twins are played by 19-year-old real-life brothers Luke and Harry Treadaway. They’re sexy, touching and macabre, and you can’t keep your eyes off them. Pepe and Fulton employ a faux documentary style (but not played for laughs), which gives the film its uncanny sense of verisimilitude but also limits its emotional range–one wishes it would plunge deeper into the boys’ psyches.
Time to Leave Directed by François Ozon
Romain (Melvil Poupaud), a chic Parisian fashion photographer, learns he has terminal cancer, and only a short time to live. He doesn’t go gently or with stiff-upper-lip heroism, but raging at his sister, breaking up cruelly with his younger boyfriend and sharing his secret only with his beloved, equally solipsistic, bohemian grandmother (Jeanne Moreau). This is the most personal, deeply felt film from the gifted director of “Under the Sand” and “Swimming Pool.” Ozon leaches his melodrama of all sentimentality, and moves us all the more. -David Ansen
title: “Snap Judgment Movies” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-30” author: “Tara Stewart”
Directed by Todd Field
Field’s haunting follow-up to “In the Bedroom” takes us to a leafy Massachusetts suburb where an unhappy housewife (Kate Winslet) drifts into an affair with a hapless stay-at-home dad (Patrick Wilson), while their clucking neighbors panic about the ex-con pederast (Jackie Earle Haley) living with his mom down the street. The Madame Bovary-in-suburbia motif may sound familiar, yet the unusual mix of satire and melodrama feels fresh. Not everything works (beware the football scenes), but this adaptation of Tom Perrotta’s novel is hard to shake off. Wilson’s overgrown adolescent, Winslet’s bored, discontented wife and Haley’s creepy, self-loathing sex offender are complex, deeply flawed characters– they’re the “little children.” Field artfully keeps our feelings about them in a constant state of flux.
title: “Snap Judgment Movies” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-16” author: “Oscar Sawyer”
Directed by Steven Zaillian
Despite Sean Penn’s meaty, lip-smacking performance as the populist demagogue Willie Stark–novelist Robert Penn Warren’s fictional version of Louisiana Governor Huey P. Long–this tale of corruption, compromise and betrayal never gets under the skin of its subject. How does Stark turn from idealist to thug? That’s the question you want answered, and Zaillian doesn’t tell you. His focus, true to the novel, is on Jude Law’s journalist Jack Burden, who gets sucked into Stark’s orbit and loses his moral bearings. But we don’t care about Burden or his mopey pursuit of his childhood sweetheart (Kate Winslet). This stiff-in-the-joints movie has little feel for its setting or period, and crucial chunks seem to have been left on the cutting-room floor. Robert Rossen’s Oscar-winning 1949 version has nothing to fear. –David Ansen
The Last King of Scotland
Directed by Kevin Macdonald
Forest Whitaker, uncorking the power that he usually holds in check, gives a chilling, bravura performance as Ugandan tyrant Idi Amin, whose bloody regime slaughtered more than 300,000 people. This intelligent, sometimes gruesome thriller, based on a novel by Giles Foden, pairs this real-life dictator with the fictional Nick Garrigan (James McAvoy), a boyish, idealistic but deluded Scottish doctor who serves Amin as personal physician and close adviser, realizing too late how much blood stains his own hands. Macdonald (“Touching the Void”) has no trouble keeping the audience on the edge of its seat, but the merger of fact with sexed-up fiction can be too Hollywood for its own good: Garrigan’s affair with one of Amin’s wives (Kerry Washington) is a dubious contrivance, as is the insertion of the famous Entebbe hijacking (which is not in Foden’s book). Still, there’s not a dull moment in it.
title: “Snap Judgment Movies” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-08” author: “Ollie Phillips”
Directed by Tony Scott
This flashy Jerry Bruckheimer thriller, which starts with the terrorist bombing of a New Orleans ferry, asks that perennial sci-fi question: if you go back in time, can you change the future? Denzel Washington’s ATF investigator, with the help of “top secret” technology, time-travels back to save the life of (and fall in love with) Paula Patton, who holds the key to the terrorist’s identity. It’s preposterous, but never dull: Scott whips the action into a taut, tasty lather.
On the Day Bobby Kennedy Died
Bobby," Emilio Estevez’s heartfelt and softheaded tribute to Robert F. Ken-nedy, follows 22 fiction-al characters at the Ambassador Hotel on June 4, 1968, the day of Kennedy’s assassination. Estevez was 6 that day, and his concept of the politician (who’s glimpsed in newsreel footage) is unabashedly starry-eyed. The figure who presides over this film is purely mythic: he’s the great What-Might-Have-Been, a convenient symbol for all our liberal dreams.
In other words, “Bobby” isn’t really about Bobby. Owing a conceptual debt to both “Grand Hotel” and “Nashville,” it’s a star-studded, sentimental panorama that earnestly attempts to encapsulate that traumatic, idealistic time through its “representative” fictional characters. They include Demi Moore as an alcoholic singer; Sharon Stone as a hairdresser; William H. Macy as her unfaith-ful husband, the hotel manager; Lindsay Lohan as a girl marrying Elijah Wood to keep him from going to Vietnam. Laurence Fishburne is an erudite chef; Ashton Kutcher, an acid dealer, and Martin Sheen, Emilio’s dad, a depressive businessman. Etc. All the actors get their Big Moments, but verisimilitude goes out the window.
Finally, we get the assassination. The director pulls out all the stops, showing us the horror and chaos in slow motion as we hear RFK’s eloquent pleas for national healing and an end to violence. You don’t have to have lived through the period to find this wrenching. And you don’t have to doubt Estevez’s sincerity to find it emotionally opportunistic.
title: “Snap Judgment Movies” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-22” author: “Jonathan Lisby”
Directed by Phillip Noyce
Filmmakers have been documenting the horrors of apartheid for decades. Noyce (“Rabbit-Proof Fence”) encourages us to feel the echo of current events. “Catch a Fire” tells the true story of Patrick Chamusso (Derek Luke), an apolitical oil-refinery foreman in 1980s South Africa whose false arrest and torture transformed him into a gun-wielding freedom fighter. This is how terrorists are created. We root for Chamusso, of course, but the training-camp scenes, in which he prepares to fight his oppressors to the death, create uneasy associations. Luke has real movie-star power. He’s enormously sympathetic, but this moving, well-crafted movie, written by Shawn Slovo, mercifully doesn’t turn him into a plaster saint. Nor is his soft-spoken interrogator and nemesis, Nic Vos (Tim Robbins), for all his monstrous deeds, a standard villain.
Flushed Away
Directed by David Bowers and Sam Fell
A clever collaboration between Aardman Features–the folks behind “Wallace and Gromit”–and DreamWorks Animation, this computer-animated romp tells the story of Roddy St. James (Hugh Jackman), a posh London pet mouse who is flushed down a toilet into a bustling sewer world where his fellow rodents are threatened with extinction by the evil Toad (Ian McKellen) and his nefarious henchmen. Crammed with visual and verbal puns (glimpsed on a bookshelf is “A Brief History of Slime”), hilarious singing slugs and a spunky working-class rat (Kate Winslet) as the love interest, this adventure is very English in its mix of potty humor and literate wit and very Hollywood in its action-packed pace. Though it lacks “Wallace and Gromit”’s charm, its mile-a-minute inventiveness is impressive.
