Maurice Pialat’s last feature (1995) was cowritten by him and his wife, Sylvie Danton, and features a performance by their four-year-old son, Antoine; starring Gerard Depardieu again, it’s a brutal self-portrait of a troubled and violent man. In French with subtitles. 102 min. (JR)
The beginning of this 2004 Brazilian drama anticipates a paranoid thriller like Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window or Suspicion: a 65-year-old divorcee (Fernanda Montenegro), living alone in Rio’s Copacabana and participating in a neighborhood watch, witnesses what appears to be a murder in a flat across the street. Once she gets involved with the suspect, a retired judge, the movie fails to generate much suspense, but that emerges as the real point: writer-director Marcos Bernstein is more interested in how a melodramatic imagination can distort reality, a concept he explores with charm and tact. In Portuguese with subtitles. 98 min. (JR)
Based on Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind’s nonfiction book The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, this absorbing and intelligent documentary by Alex Gibney presents the chronology and major characters of one of the greatest corporate swindles in U.S. history. Those who suspect that gangsters are taking over the country will find this a pretty lucid account of the methodologies employed. The only serious distraction and ethical lapse is Gibney’s sarcastic, cheap-shot use of popular songs like That Old Black Magic, Love for Sale, and God Bless the Child to underscore certain points; it seems almost to celebrate the shamelessness of the creeps being exposed. 110 min. (JR)
This sequel to X X X (2002) brings back Samuel L. Jackson as a U.S. intelligence chief, though Ice Cube replaces Vin Diesel as the ex-con action hero. This time the skulduggery involves Willem Dafoe as the U.S. secretary of defense, who’s planning to assassinate his way to the presidency, but with more stuntpeople than characters, this borders on a free-for-all. Of course the movie’s real raison d’etre is watching Ice Cube tear up government facilities and blockades with a tank, spout Schwarzenegger-style kiss-off lines, and commandeer the kind of babes and high-tech cars that James Bond usually plays with. The silly script is by Simon Kinberg, the spotty direction by Lee Tamahori. PG-13, 101 min. (JR)
Michael Cimino’s 1980 epic, about immigrant settlers clashing with native capitalists in 19th-century Wyoming, suffered a disastrous opening and was subsequently cut by 70 minutes; it became a legendary flop in the U.S., though the original 219-minute cut was widely applauded as a masterpiece in Europe. The longer version is impressive as long as the characters and settings remain in long shot; only when the camera gets closer do the problems start. The story is both slow moving and hard to follow, but the locations and period details offer plenty to ponder. Cimino’s handling of class issues is ambitious and unusually blunt, though it’s debatable whether this adds up to any sort of Marxist statement, except perhaps as a belated response to the (Oscar-winning) racism and xenophobia of his previous feature, The Deer Hunter. There’s no question that the same homoeroticand arguably sexistvision runs through both movies. With Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, Isabelle Huppert, Jeff Bridges, Sam Waterston, John Hurt, Joseph Cotten, and Brad Dourif. R. (JR)
