Piglet’s Big Movie (2003) – DVD

August 5, 2003Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Musical, Mystery

*½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C-
screenplay by Brian Hohlfeld, from stories by A.A. Milne
directed by Francis Glebas

by Bill Chambers To its credit, Piglet's Big Movie, unlike so many Disney franchise pictures, is inoffensive (unless being monotonous is offensive), but it was hamstrung (har-har) from the outset by the departure through death or firing of original Pooh voice actors Sterling Holloway (Pooh), Paul Winchell (Tigger), Ralph Wright (Eeyore), Junius Matthews (Rabbit), and Hal Smith (Owl). Only the inveterate John Fiedler returns to lend his pipes to the eponymous Piglet, and while Jim Cummings technically sounds like Holloway and Winchell in replacing them, he lacks the mischievous twinkle that both brought to their respective roles. Meanwhile, the character-sprung songs, a major ingredient of the series' charm, are too attached this time around to Carly Simon, who appears in an inexplicably live-action closing-credits sequence singing solo in the Hundred-Acre Wood like she's a real "get" for an audience that hasn't learned to tie their shoes yet. (There are no tunes to get kids in touch with their melancholy side early like Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day's depressing "The Rain Rain Rain Came Down, Down, Down," only stuff to teach them how most songs are sub-folk music until you replace your Fisher-Price radio with a ghetto blaster.) And while it makes more sense here, given that Pooh's first feature film The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh was a compilation of short subjects, did we really need another Disney flick with an anthology structure on the heels of Cinderella II, Atlantis: Milo's Return, and Tarzan & Jane? It's starting to feel like an injection mold.

Copacabana (1947) – DVD

July 24, 2003Posted in1940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Musical, Mystery, Romance

*½/**** Image B Sound B
starring Groucho Marx, Carmen Miranda, Steve Cochran, Andy Russell
screenplay by Alan Boretz, Howard Harris, Laslo Vadnay, Sydney R. Zelinka
directed by Alfred E. Green

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Like many great comedians, Groucho Marx was punished for being too good. One can't actually make movies like Horse Feathers, Animal Crackers and the great Duck Soup and not expect to pay a price, so the studio, in its infinite wisdom, decided to impose normalcy onto The Marx Brothers' films in an attempt to restore public order. This, of course, marked the beginning of his team's decline, so that by 1947 he was reduced to making unsalted soda crackers like Copacabana just to pay the rent. And what a reduction it is: Groucho and hapless co-star Carmen Miranda are the only things worth watching in this limp backstage musical, and while they work all the wonders they can with limited material, it's not enough to keep it from seeming more than a woeful desecration of a great comic's talent.

Phone Booth (2003) – DVD

June 22, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

**½/**** Image B+ Sound A Commentary A
starring Colin Farrell, Kiefer Sutherland, Forest Whitaker, Radha Mitchell
screenplay by Larry Cohen
directed by Joel Schumacher

by Walter Chaw Responsible for some of my favourite weirdo low-tech cult films (Q, God Told Me To, It’s Alive!), underground auteur Larry Cohen’s output is a lollapalooza of high-concept hokum invested equally in the Catholic and the apocalyptic. Joining forces with master hack Joel Schumacher (who’s made a mean schlock classic or two himself–Flatliners, The Lost Boys, The Incredible Shrinking Woman) on the unfortunately-timed sniper fantasy Phone Booth, Cohen’s script reveals the man up to his old tricks: a barely feature-length product (about seventy-five minutes without credits) set inside a confessional-cum-8th Avenue phone booth that mires an anti-hero in an old-school oasis amidst our sterile technological wasteland. What should have been an agreeable bit of nonsense, however, gets tangled up in Cohen’s desire to proselytize, transforming the potential for a paranoid piece of B-sociology into something empty and pretentious–a tale directed by an idiot, full of some admittedly innovative sound design and a surplus of Method fury.

Basic (2003) – DVD

June 12, 2003Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

*½/**** Image B Sound A Extras B-
starring John Travolta, Connie Nielsen, Samuel L. Jackson, Brian Van Holt
screenplay by James Vanderbilt
directed by John McTiernan

by Walter Chaw It occurred to me about midway through Basic that director John McTiernan, having nowhere to go but up after last year’s amusingly noxious Rollerball, was taking a page from the Michael Bay book of filmmaking before realizing that Bay had the McTiernan school (the McTiernan of Die Hard and Predator) to thank for the whole of his austere career. The Hollywood shooting match is an incestual Moebius strip, it seems, and for who was once the best action director in the United States to find himself a hollow shade of not only his past glory, but also Bay, is depressing beyond words. Which is not to say that Basic doesn’t start out extremely well: For a full minute, the picture provides a brief history of the French attempt at digging a canal in Panama in the 1880s scored to Bizet’s Carmen; the problem is that by the end of Basic, the only justification for the Carmen cue is that it’s also packed to the gills with bull.

Man on the Train (2002); Chaos (2001); And Now… Ladies and Gentlemen… (2002); The Son (2002)

June 5, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Drama, France, Germany, Japan, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

L’Homme du train
***/****
starring Jean Rochefort, Johnny Hallyday, Jean-François Stévenin, Charlie Nelson
screenplay by Claude Klotz
directed by Patrice Leconte

CHAOS
*/****
starring Catherine Frot, Vincent Lindon, Rachida Brakni, Line Renaud
written and directed by Coline Serreau

AND NOW… LADIES AND GENTLEMEN…
***½/****
starring Jeremy Irons, Patricia Kaas, Thierry Lhermitte, Alessandra Martines
screenplay by Claude Lelouch, Pierre Leroux & Pierre Uytterhoeven
directed by Claude Lelouch

Le fils
****/****
starring Olivier Gourmet, Morgan Marinne, Isabella Soupart, Nassim Hassaïni
written and directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne

by Walter Chaw After a brief period where French cinema seemed exclusively interested in the ugliness and violence festering in its anti-Semitic margins, what with pictures as variegated as Baise-moi, Trouble Every Day, My Wife is an Actress, and indeed, Gasper Noé’s sensationalistic Irréversible (which demonstrates a continuing fascination with a tumultuous French cinema in extremis), the old guard begins to reassert itself with its own tales of the underbelly of life displacing the façade of the comfortable upper class. Patrice Leconte’s new film Man on the Train (L’Homme du train) is reserved and slight while Chaos by Coline Serreau (who was born the same year as Leconte, as it happens) tries to soften the cruelty of much of modern French cinema by overlaying it with a patina of feminist uplift and misplaced social satire. Films like Rohmer’s The Lady and the Duke and Godard’s In Praise of Love attempt to draw a line between the nouvelle and the digital age (and Chaos is shot in ugly DV), and pictures like Rivette’s wonderful Va Savoir and now Claude Lelouch’s And Now... Ladies and Gentlemen… act as surveys and auto-critique of the medium itself. With these three pictures, the meta-critical instinct–something of a hallmark of French culture in general and cinema in particular–finds a new voice in, ironically, its older generation of directors. Somewhat apart from all of that is the Dardenne Brothers’ The Son (Le Fils), which is on its own stylistically but looks thematically for common ground in its own tale of obsession and reconciliation.

The Mothman Prophecies (2002) [Special Edition] – DVD

May 10, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Richard Gere, Laura Linney, Will Patton, Debra Messing
screenplay by Richard Hatem, based on the novel by John A. Keel
directed by Mark Pellington

by Walter Chaw Inviting comparisons to “The X-Files” (comparisons the series made inevitable by setting several of its episodes in rural West Virginia and making mention of the “Mothman” in an excellent fifth season episode called “Detour”), Mark Pellington’s The Mothman Prophecies has a peculiarly muted quality to it that suggests the entire piece is best seen as shrouded in a caul. Allied with that idea, The Mothman Prophecies is about knowing certain things of the future and exorcising the past, about accepting that there are things in life that can’t be prevented. It’s got heady messages for a film based on a cultish bit of crypto-zoology reportage by John Keel (documenting eerie events in Point Pleasant, WV that stretched thirteen months from November 15, 1966 to December 15, 1967), and ultimately the relatively lightweight genre bedrock of the piece is not strong enough to support its broad philosophizing.

Black Swan (2002) – DVD

May 3, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Disability, Drama, DVD, Mystery

½*/**** Image D Sound C Extras B
starring Melanie Doane, Janet Monid, Michael Riley, Ted Dykstra
screenplay by Wendy Ord and Matt John Evans
directed by Wendy Ord

by Walter Chaw Wendy Ord’s Black Swan had me at “I’m tellin’ you, there were traces of blood on that feather.” The film is a dedicatedly stupid murder-mystery/small-town hick opera featuring your standard collection of comely waitresses bound for better things, saucy diner matrons, scumbags with sidekicks, stolid policemen, preternaturally bright children, and literal idiot savants. Set in a tiny hamlet in the Great White North (“Hopeville,” natch), the picture opens with an indecipherable prologue that cuts between three separate storylines: a bunch of teens in a car; the titular black swan doing whatever it is that large waterfowl do at night; and a pair of scumbags going through their nocturnal rituals. The rest of the film follows suit by stuttering between two children playing hooky, a cute waitress (Melanie Doane) flirting with a drifter while dreaming, Steve Earle-like, of getting out of Dodge, and of an investigation of a possible serial killer who leaves black swan feathers at the scenes of his crimes.

Darkness Falls (2003) [Special Edition] – DVD

April 9, 2003Posted in2000s, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

**/**** Image B- Sound A Extras B-
starring Chaney Kley, Emma Caulfield, Joshua Anderson, Andrew Bayly
screenplay by John Fasano and James Vanderbilt and Joe Harris
directed by Jonathan Liebesman

by Walter Chaw Two years removed from Victor Salva’s Jeepers Creepers (and on the eve of a sequel to that film), Darkness Falls whets cult appetites by being nearly a scene-for-scene recreation of that film’s inferior second half. Essentially a series of “I don’t believe your story–hey, why did the lights go out?” scenarios and unearned jump scares, the picture opens with a nice fairytale prologue and a nifty “12 years ago” introduction that hints at the promise of a murderous Tooth Fairy. As soon as the action jumps to the present day with a warbling youngster, her hot sister, and our troubled hero, however, any pretense of a creepy, coherent mythology flies out the window as the flick devolves into an inexorable killer flick amped-up to “11.”

Bushwhacked (1995) – DVD

March 19, 2003Posted in1990s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Family, Mystery

*/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Daniel Stern, Jon Polito, Brad Sullivan, Ann Dowd
screenplay by John Jordan & Danny Byers and Tom Swerdlow & Michael Goldberg
directed by Greg Beeman

by Walter Chaw The Yang to the distaff Yin of Troop Beverly Hills, Bushwhacked, Greg Beeman’s endlessly irritating slapstick take on High Sierra, finds the bird-faced actor Daniel Stern doing his best to milk the hysterical simpleton shtick of his hapless Home Alone villain. Nicknaming Stern’s character “Spider” for no real reason but to, eight years after its release and just now finding its way to DVD, connect it in a disturbing way to David Cronenberg’s thirteenth film by way of arrested Freudian developmental phases and fixations on body function, Bushwhacked, as it happens, is also about as funny as Spider–not a particularly shining endorsement of something that’s ostensibly a comedy.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) [VISTA Series] – DVD

March 17, 2003Posted inAdventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Robert Zemeckis, DVD, Esoterica, Family, Mystery, Spielberg

***½/**** Image A Sound B Extras A+
starring Bob Hoskins, Christopher Lloyd, Joanna Cassidy, Charles Fleischer
screenplay by Peter S. Seaman & Jeffrey Price, based on the novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit by Gary K. Wolf
directed by Robert Zemeckis

by Bill Chambers Who Framed Roger Rabbit opens with an animated short (“Somethin’s Cookin'”) starring Roger Rabbit (voice of Charles Fleischer) and Baby Herman (Lou Hirsch) in which Roger, sitting for the lady of the house, is thwarted in his attempts to keep his young charge from climbing the refrigerator. You’d hardly know it, but we’re seeing these characters for the first time–and the ineffable period authenticity of “Somethin’s Cookin’,” a cartoon commissioned specifically for Who Framed Roger Rabbit, betrays the scrupulous eye of director Robert Zemeckis almost immediately. Animated by the legendary Richard Williams, “Somethin’s Cookin'” is fashioned in Tex Avery’s mix of elegance and elasticity; later, when Bugs Bunny makes an appearance in the movie proper, he still has the slopey head of yore. (Warner actually insisted on the modern versions of Looney Tunes appearing in the film, so Zemeckis had dummy footage mocked up to get their approval that he had no intention of using in the finished product.) The prologue ends prematurely when Roger sees bluebirds instead of stars–in the picture, cartoons are shot on soundstages: Roger Rabbit exists for real, as do Mickey Mouse, Bugs, et. al, and they hail from a Hollywood subdivision called Toontown. They are invincible, but they are also actors who bring their personal lives to work, so sometimes they just can’t generate stars on command.

Ghost Ship (2002) – DVD

March 13, 2003Posted in2000s, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C+
starring Julianna Margulies, Desmond Harrington, Isaiah Washington, Gabriel Byrne
screenplay by Mark Hanlon and John Pogue
directed by Steve Beck

by Bill Chambers Ghost Ship is better than its director Steve Beck’s previous film for Robert Zemeckis and Joel Silver’s “Dark Castle,” the repugnant Thir13en Ghosts–but we’re talking incrementally. Somewhere in between the two pictures, Beck learned that even though the AVID editing machine makes an infinite number of cuts possible, he shouldn’t take that as a dare, and in Ghost Ship, he embraces the démodé in a way that he ironically didn’t in Thir13en Ghosts, the one of them that’s a remake. Ghost Ship opens with large, dissolving titles drawn in pink cursive script that would be at home in a Fifties movie with Vic Damone on the soundtrack. It’s a striking touch (if not entirely appropriate for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre aboard a sinking, possessed ocean liner), and it precedes a dazzling, disgusting prologue wherein the passengers on the deck of the Antonia Graza are slaughtered like so much cattle.

Irreversible (2002)

March 7, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, Esoterica, France, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller

Irréversible
**½/****
starring Monica Bellucci, Vincent Cassel, Albert Dupontel, Philippe Nahon
written and directed by Gaspar Noé

“You know what? Time destroys all things.”

Irreversibleby Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. That’s the opening line of dialogue in Irréversible, meaning it comes after the closing titles, which scroll down the screen backwards and are followed by back-to-front names in block letters. Each word lands with a percussive thud (“Bellucci!” “Noé!”) echoed in the sound produced by a fire extinguisher in one of the two scenes everybody’s talking about: Director Gaspar Noé’s secondary conceit (the primary we’ll discuss momentarily) is a kind of reverse foreshadowing, with disturbing noises and gestures recontextualized elsewhere, invoking the standby “Hindsight is 20/20.” A film that appeals to the pessimist in us, Irréversible may make you think of Memento, but where Memento was about destiny, Irréversible is cynicially hopeful (if there is such a thing), illustrating the human impulse to look to the past for happy endings–Bogey’s bogus reassurance that “we’ll always have Paris.”

Bloody Murder II: Closing Camp (2003) – DVD

March 6, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

Bloody Murder 2: Closing Camp
**/**** Image D Sound C-
starring Katy Woodruff, Kelly Gunning, Amanda Magarian, Tiffany Shepis
screenplay by John Stevenson
directed by Rob Spera

by Walter Chaw Amateurish, awkward, and bordering on genuinely offensive, Bloody Murder II: Closing Camp surprises by actually being a nice walk down ’80s slasher flick memory lane. Shot on a zero-budget by Rob Spera (the man behind the infamous Leprechaun in the Hood), the picture is packed with some nice gore, a great deal of nudity, and almost no aspirations towards cleverness. Save one Scream-influenced exchange about the dangers of flashing skin and being African-American in this genre, Bloody Murder II is a mindless series of sadistic stalking/slashing sequences that pick on the nerd, the slut, and the jock while a virginal heroine (with a blood tie to the masked murderer, natch) tries to unravel the mystery in time to save herself.

Russian Ark (2003)

February 21, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Denmark, Drama, Esoterica, Finland, Germany, Japan, Mystery, Russia, Theatrical

****/****
starring Sergei Dontsov, Mariya Kuznetsova, Leonid Mozgovoy, David Giorgobiani
screenplay by Boris Khaimsky & Anatoli Nikiforov & Svetlana Proskurina & Alexander Sokurov
directed by Alexander Sokurov

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Russian Ark is a film that hoists its middle finger high against the cultural practices of nearly a hundred years. Implicitly appalled by the twin forgettings of communist and free-market logic, director Alexander Sokurov retaliates by erecting a monument to the proceeding three centuries of image-making–one that marks the entrance to a crypt perhaps, as Sokurov knows that time is running out on its preservation. Surely there’s a heaping dose of snobbery in his approach, and a whole lot of wilful obscurity as well, but his expression of his thesis is so passionate, and his technical execution is so seamless and beautiful, that I could have forgiven him almost anything.

The Life of David Gale (2003)

February 21, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Germany, Mystery, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Kevin Spacey, Kate Winslet, Laura Linney, Gabriel Mann
screenplay by Charles Randolph
directed by Alan Parker

Lifeofdavidgaleby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. One wonders if there isn’t, after all, a subtle right-wing conspiracy at work in the entertainment industry, where ultra-liberal stumps are turned into the sort of ostensibly pro-leftist propaganda reel that does serious harm to the pro-leftist agenda. If it’s not the reprehensible The Contender, with its Ayn Rand-ian hypothetical, it’s I Am Sam and its bizarre vilification of the child welfare system–or worse, John Q, with its curiously misdirected lament against our obviously broken health-care state. Trumping them all in terms of muddle and melodrama, however, is The Life of David Gale, an anti-death penalty tirade that, by the end, feels like a life sentence the audience wishes hadn’t been commuted. The only way to make any sense of the film is to suspect it of darker motives: Its ultimate message–and it’s not a bad one–seems to be that the criminal justice system the film so actively vilifies is, in fact, the only honest (though imperfect) force in the entire mess.

The Bourne Identity (2002) – DVD

January 15, 2003Posted in****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Czech Republic, DVD, FFC Must-Own, France, Germany, Mystery, Thriller

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Matt Damon, Franka Potente, Clive Owen, Chris Cooper
screenplay by Tony Gilroy and William Blake Herron, based on the novel by Robert Ludlum
directed by Doug Liman

Mustownby Walter Chaw The Bourne Identity is a composition of gestures stripped of romance and presented in their barest forms. It is the most cannily cinematic film of the year and one that, during its first half-hour, boasts blissfully of but one minute of dialogue. The picture recognizes that Matt Damon is best as an everyman with potential by presenting him as a character born at the age of thirty-three. And the Oedipal detective story that forms the centre of the tale (“Who am I?”) is so ripe for examination that it may flower in time to be as debated and revered a fantasy as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (which likewise features the murder of The Father prior to a kind of manhood and subsequent mate choice). Very loosely based on Robert Ludlum’s novel of the same name, indie punk Doug Liman (director of Swingers) has constructed a parable of self-discovery that can as easily be read as a subversion of the conventions of the thriller genre, a discussion of the ways in which the audience participates in the process of genre fiction, or as a science-fiction piece in which strangely robotic über menschen run amuck in a technocratic world metropolis.

Cherish (2002) – DVD

January 10, 2003Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Robin Tunney, Tim Blake Nelson, Brad Hunt, Liz Phair
written and directed by Finn Taylor

by Walter Chaw A marked improvement over his sporadically interesting but ultimately flat Dream with the Fishes, indie wunderkind Finn Taylor’s Cherish is one-half a fantastic film tied to one-half a terrible film. It leaves plot threads hanging, has a great deal of uncertain character motivation, and transforms into a Tom Tykwer film near the end for no good reason. But Cherish is also home to what is easily Robin Tunney’s best performance to date, another smart and quirky turn by Tim Blake Nelson, a disabled person in a heroic and human role, and a premise that is sharp, intriguing, and original. That it features two Hall & Oates songs on the soundtrack only helps its cause.

Wendigo (2002) – DVD

December 21, 2002Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Patricia Clarkson, Jake Weber, Erik Per Sullivan, John Speredakos
written and directed by Larry Fessenden

mustown-1059860by Walter Chaw Larry Fessenden’s Wendigo plays like a chthonic rite: it’s terrifying in its brutal purity and delicious in its ability to pull domestic trauma into the well of archetype where it festers. The film is a further examination of what William Blake cajoles in his “Marriage of Heaven and Hell”–that “men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast,” and it justifies itself beautifully in a Romanticist discussion, a Jungian explication, even a socio-political and historical examination. Wendigo is an extraordinarily thorny film, no question; that it manages to be so without pretension while providing an experience that is terrifying and gorgeous is a remarkable achievement. It’s why we go to the cinema: to be fed through the eye, the heart, the mind.

Narc (2002)

December 20, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Ray Liotta, Jason Patric, Chi McBride, Busta Rhymes
written and directed by Joe Carnahan

Narcby Walter Chaw Anchored by a powerhouse performance from Ray Liotta, Joe Carnahan’s Narc is a police procedural buddy psychodrama that reminds a great deal of Sidney Lumet’s underappreciated Q&A. The first film mounted in part by Liotta’s new production company, the film is fond of the kind of fluid tracking shots popularized by Martin Scorsese (and Goodfellas, as it happens) and has a crackling ear for dialogue that sadly doesn’t translate into a gift for monologue. Still, there’s a rough intelligence and visceral edge to the film–hewn from its tough-talking vernacular and graphic violence–that feels great in an era where both sides of the ratings divide: PG and R, are hell-bent on edging into the grey PG-13 arena where mental adolescents and the easily-diverted play. Narc works largely because it’s a mature film for adults, smoothing over some of the rough spots where the film begins to lose itself in a labyrinth of flashbacks and surprise revelations.

Solaris (2002)

November 27, 2002Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, Esoterica, Mystery, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

****/****
starring George Clooney, Natascha McElhone, Jeremy Davies, Viola Davis
screenplay by Steven Soderbergh, based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Walter Chaw Steven Soderbergh's best film since sex, lies, and videotape (and the film most like it in theme and execution), Solaris is a moving, hypnotic adaptation of the classic Stanislaw Lem novel, which was first made into a film in 1972 by Andrei Tarkovsky. Co-produced by James Cameron's company Lightstorm, Solaris fits loosely into Ridley Scott's Alien future with its monolithic "Company" and the need for a specialist to infiltrate a corrupted interstellar outpost–a future Cameron plumbed in 1986 with his modern genre classic Aliens. But Solaris is less a science-fiction film than it is an existentialist melodrama that, by winnowing itself down to the fierce romanticism at the heart of Lem's novel (and Tarkovsky's trance-like adaptation), locates the core issues of identity and love that plague the dark hours.