The first screen outing for a post-collegiate comedy team calling themselves Broken Lizard, Super Troopers is a spoof knockabout farce concerning clownish highway patrolmen in small-town Vermont. With Brian Cox as the indulgent police chief presiding over the goofy jokes and motorist-baffling stunts, writer-director-star Jay Chandrasekhar's feature debut is slight but sporadically hilarious.
Released in 1972, Federico Fellini's extended love letter to his adopted home city is less of a linear drama than an impressionistic anthology of autobiographical memories, sketchy anecdotes and documentary-style snippets. With sumptuous cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno and a lush Nino Rota score, Roma is a minor Fellini work but a ravishing and innovative visual symphony.
Collecting all four Python movies. And Now For Something Completely Different was a 'greatest hits' retread of sketches from the early TV shows, Holy Grail is worth seeing for Cleese's French knight alone, the wry and occasionally profound Life Of Brian was the best of the bunch, and The Meaning Of Life had some truly wonderful tunes. Did I say "indispensable". yet?
Richard Linklater's emotionally ambivalent high school homage is a cutting riposte to the rosy teen nostalgia of both American Graffiti and the entire John Hughes canon. Set in Nowhere, Middle America, 1976, during the first day of summer break, it lazily and amiably follows Hollywood freshmen, including Ben Affleck and Matthew McConaughey, as they drink beer, smoke grass, and cultivate the slacker apathy of future generations.
Though it didn't burn up the box office during its theatrical release, Danny Boyle's jittery zombie flick is actually a far more satisfying small-screen experience. Gone is the distracting texture of large-scale digital video, and gone too is the weight of expectation (will it be better than The Beach?). Instead, the movie simply plays as it is—a brashly original post-apocalyptic B-movie.
When Fed Debra Winger goes undercover in the rural Midwest to investigate a bunch of white supremacists, she makes the mistake of falling in love with vicious, family-loving klansman Tom Berenger. Director Costa-Gavras has made some coruscating political masterpieces, but this overwrought mess is close to idiocy. It defuses its own explosive subject matter. Worth seeing, though, for Berenger's committedly-crazed scenery-chewing.
A double header, featuring two of David Lean's finest directorial efforts. Hobson's Choice (1954) sees Charles Laughton's magnificently overbearing Lancastrian patriarch butt heads with his equally stubborn daughter Brenda de Banzie, while John Mills is splendid as her husband, the worm who turns. The Sound Barrier (1952), in which Ralph Richardson attempts to devise the first faster-than-sound plane, sees stiff upper lips wobble as his efforts come to grief. It's also notable for some fine aerial sequences. Bravo, chaps!
South African director Oliver Schmitz revisits the same territory as his angry anti-apartheid classic from 1988, Mapantsula, delivering a wry but equally scathing account of his post-Mandela homeland. Researching a role as a street hoodlum, a middle-class black actor (Tony Kgoroge) returns to his childhood township near Johannesburg to learn street cred from his former friend, a car-jacking gangster (Rapulana Seiphemo). A gripping, funny, darkly satirical thriller.
John Andrew Gallagher's shambling 1997 comedy about an Italian-American storekeeper (Mike Starr) with gambling problems, unwanted mob buddies and endless eccentric customers is a fun idea which never quite takes off. There's shades of Blue In The Face, while various future Sopranos regulars—notably Michael Imperioli—cameo.
