Along with Boyz N The Hood, this marks the film world's awakening to a dark period of gang violence in early-'90s LA. The story of Caine Lawson (Tyrin Turner), a young black man looking to escape the daily treadmill of bloodshed, isn't particularly original, but the Hughes brothers pull few punches. It's not a pretty sight, but the film now stands as a curious period piece.
Left limbless, deaf, dumb and blind by a WWI landmine, US GI Timothy Bottoms is locked away in a hospital. Considered beyond medical help, he drifts in memories and fantasies, until, years later, he finally finds a way to communicate—to little avail. Based on his 1939 novel, this 1971 anti-war parable was the only film directed by blacklisted scriptwriter Dalton Trumbo. At times awkward, it's nonetheless driven by an acute, angry intelligence. Hard to forget.
Gus Van Sant's Palme d'Or-winning take on the Columbine massacre makes for understandably difficult viewing. Van Sant deliberately shoots the movie flat and spare, looping the story, Rashômon-style, through numerous viewpoints. The Groundhog Day tedium of school life and the blank-eyed stares of the killers are chilling.
In 1968, Raybert productions—a Hollywood hotbed of drugged-out '60s fornication—saw fit to hand would-be-Fellini Bob Rafelson The Monkees as a vehicle for his auteurist debut. This was the result.
Part of the BFI's intriguing "A History Of The Avant-Garde" series, this is 66 minutes of decaying, nitrate-film archive footage, an artful collage in which figures deteriorate as we watch. Obviously, it's heavily symbolic: nuns, children, boxers go about their endeavours unaware (or are they?) of the oblivion that looms. The dissonant score's a drag, but this is nothing if not haunting.
In 1980, one year before Anthony Burgess composed a whole new language for Quest For Fire, the producers of this dumbass Neanderthal comedy achieved much the same effect by just having actors go "oog". Insanely, Ringo Starr plays a horny caveman who forms his own tribe of losers (a young Dennis Quaid among them) and gets into scrapes. A must-have for Beatles completists; for everyone else, the animated dinosaurs are sweet. (DL)
DVD EXTRAS: None.
Based on the Kurt Vonnegut novel and featuring an amazing central performance from Nick Nolte as an American spy living in pre-WWII Berlin, broadcasting military secrets in code under the guise of anti-Semitic, Nazi propaganda. Once the war is over, though, he's arrested for war crimes and put on trial. Will the truth out? A mixture of the disturbing and the bizarre, it's both haunting and thought-provoking. John Goodman co-stars.
Directed at mercilessly cool, wickedly tense pace by René Clément, the original 1960 French adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley pisses from on high all over the Anthony Minghella remake. As Ripley, the ambiguous sociophobe planning to steal dissolute playboy Maurice Ronet's life in a blazing Mediterranean, Alain Delon has never looked so much like a saint made of ice. Delon versus Matt Damon? Where's the contest?
Given short shrift by most cinema critics, Robert Benton's flawed adaptation of Philip Roth's novel is wonderfully acted by two stars who've been praised for far inferior performances. Anthony Hopkins is the professor sacked for alleged political incorrectness; Nicole Kidman the damaged younger woman with whom he enjoys "not my first love, not my great love, but my last love." Both risky and tender.
