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Amelie (2001, 122 min, PG13) ***1/2 – Directed by Jean-Pierre Jenuet, starring Audrey Tautou and Matthieu Kassovitz. The world is filled with magic in this surreal and difficult to describe romantic comedy about coincidences and destiny. A lonely Parisian uses charm, cunning, and sleight-of-hand to bring couples together, but is herself to terrified of the man she loves. Director Jenuet’s (“City of Lost Children”) visual style is deliciously stream-of-consciousness.
American Splendor (2003, 101 min, R) ***1/2 – Directed by Sherri Berman and Robert Pulcini, starring Paul Giamatti and Hope Davis. Funny-and-sad tale of a man who is both larger-than-life and mired in the mundane: Harvey Pekar, the real-life creator of the “American Splendor” comics, is a scowling pessimist and all-around terrific grump. Real-life interviews and animation inspired by the comics are combined with a dramatization featuring a wonderful performance by Giamatti as Pekar.
Andrei Roublev (1962, B&W, 205 min, NR) **** - Directed & co-written by Andrei Tarkovsky, starring Andrei Solonitsyn. Formerly of “Sight & Sound’s Ten Best Movies of All Time,” filmmaker Tarkovsky’s epic is an impossibly ambitious treatise on the duty of the artist: to bring his audience into a closer relationship with God, not through reason and logic, but through great images and sincerity. To this end, Tarkovsky shows medieval Russia through the eyes of a conflicted iconographer during a time when violence was distributed casually and passionlessly. Unreasonably long, yet unreasonably beautiful, the movie is paced like a Latin mass and packed with opportunities for meditation.
Antony and Cleopatra (1974, 162 min, NR) *** - Directed by Jon Scoffield, starring Richard Johnson, Janet Suzman, and Patrick Stewart. A filmed BBC version of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s theatrical production is of course too stage-y to be considered great cinema (some of the editing and direction runs the gamut from awkward to heavy-handed). But the performances are more than engaging and the whole thing barrels along quite nicely. Sent to conquer Egypt for Rome, Antony (Johnson) instead becomes enamored with slobbing around, drunk and laid, with Cleopatra (Suzman); in short, he likes the idea of a well-deserved, early retirement. Caesar (Corin Redgrave, in a fine performance that combines the conqueror with the child-like ascetic) thinks otherwise, and Antony’s downfall is his inability to commit to the man’s world of loyalty and violence or the woman’s world of relaxation and pleasure. His attempt at combining these two paradigms is disastrous. The leads play the aged lovers as having been around the block a couple of times; towards the end they forget that they’re on camera and start yelling. (Watch for Antony’s reaction to the news of his wife’s death.) Scene after scene is stolen by Patrick Stewart (once again proving that “Star Trek: The Next Generation” was probably the least interesting of his work) as Antony’s right hand, first an eye-rolling, pleasure-seeking buffoon, then a tragic hero equal to the great man himself. The sets are delightfully minimalist; day and night are determined by the color of the background, hillsides and shores are denoted by inclinations of the stage and faint sound effects, and everything looks as if it’s taking place in a void.
Apocalypse Now Redux (2001, 202 min, R) **** - Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, starring Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen, and Robert Duvall. Revamped and re-edited version of Coppola’s 1979 classic, often considered the finest film about the Vietnam War, offers a different vision of the same film, with 53 additional minutes of footage. The assassin’s (Sheen) journey into the jungle is now not as direct, including tangents into a French plantation and trading fuel for an evening with stranded Playboy Bunnies, and the mad colonel (Brando) is seen in the light. Whether these additions strengthen or weaken the picture is debatable, but seeing the film on the big screen, remastered and with a freshly-dyed print—yes, dye, with the blackest shadows you’ve ever seen and almost Technicolor flames—is an experience not to be missed.
Auto-Focus (2002, 105 min, R) ***1/2 – Directed by Paul Shrader, starring Greg Kinnear and Willem Dafoe. The rise-and-fall of sex-obsessed TV star Bob Crane is a stirring morality tale of little temptations turning into big sins. Kinnear is perfectly cast as Crane, a man who is charismatic but morally empty, as is Dafoe as his favorite sycophant Carpy, who is equally, if not more debauched, but somehow more pitiable.