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Little Chiyoko in Actress attire.
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BALSEROS
Runs Fri., Oct. 17-Sun., Oct. 19, at Little Theatre
This 2002 Spanish documentary was filmed over a period of eight years, beginning in Havana in the summer of 1994one of the most economically devastating periods in postrevolutionary Cuban history. Absent the support of the collapsed Soviet Union, suffering under the U.S. trade embargo, food and medical supplies become scarce and rolling blackouts a daily reality. Thousands of people leave by raft for Miami expecting a warm welcome from the U.S. The balseros (boat people) who don't die at sea are picked up by the U.S. Coast Guard and held for up to one and a half years at Guantᮡmo until being granted U.S. visas. Over the next five years, the film documents their struggle to attain better lives in America. Two balseros are able to find a relatively happy working-class existence. There are grimmer outcomes, too: one immigrant is jailed after involvement in the New York City mafia; others resort to religious fanaticism and prostitution. All left Cuba with the intention of sending money home to their families. Some renege on their promiseor don't have money to share. In the end, depressingly, one wonders if the balseros wouldn't have been better off remaining in Cuba, where most were better equipped to cope with a different set of hardships. (NR) KATIE MILLBAUER
MILLENIUM ACTRESS
Opens Fri., Oct. 10, at Varsity
A documentary filmmaker and his cameraman head into the Japanese countryside to collect some footage for a profile of a once-famous film actress. Before much time passes, we learn that the director's interest in his subject is dangerously personal, and that the actress herself has been living in an emotional limbo since her abrupt retirement from the screen nearly 40 years before. About enough material for a Twilight Zone episode, you'd think; but Actress is the long-awaited follow-up to one of the last decade's most successful and highly praised anime features, 1997's Perfect Blue, and fans of that trippy thriller won't be disappointed with what writer-director Satoshi Kon and collaborator Sadayuki Murai have come up with this time. Simultaneously a tongue-in-cheek history of 20th-century Japanese cinema, a virtuosic hall-of-mirrors essay in reality-versus-film rivaling 81/2 in complexity, and a full-bore, flat-out, three-hanky romance, Actress is definitely not for action junkies. Clocking in at only 87 minutes, it manages to seem a tad over-leisurely, but anyone who delights in sheer visual wit and grace will not find the film a minute too long. And if you like movies that wear their craft on one sleeve and their heart on the other (like Far From Heaven and The Man Who Cried), you are going to love this one. (PG) ROGER DOWNEY
RETURNER
Opens Fri., Oct. 17, at Varsity
Jet planes descend into underground hangars, then suddenly morph into lethal, extraterrestrial-controlled robots? Have the acne-ridden, dorky children of the '80s finally been rewarded with a live- action Transformers? Well, if you count Returner's additional 120-odd minutes of laughably atrocious Terminator/ Matrix/The Professional/E.T. "homage," um, the answer is still a resounding no. Scruffy, feral brat Milly (Anne Suzuki) warps back from war-ravaged 2084 Tibet to enlist the help of trench-coat-clad freelance gunman Miyamoto (Takeshi Kaneshiro) in a last-ditch effort to prevent the future apocalypse. Even if director/ co-screenwriter Takashi Yamazaki has Rip Van Winkled through the last 20 years of influential action cinema, he's still crafted a histrionic disaster laden with cheesy, cheap Predator-look-alike aliens and as pathetically literal a script ("That's Mizoguchithe man I swore to kill!") as the most incompetent domestic hack jobs. The sheer dearth of originality here is exhausting. (R) ANDREW BONAZELLI
THE RUNAWAY JURY
Opens Fri., Oct. 17, at Metro and others
At one point in Jury, as the evil henchmen employed by evil lawyer Gene Hackman ransack the New Orleans apartment of hero John Cusack, they actually rip up the floorboards to find a precious MP3 device with damning data on it. Who hides digital-age gizmos in their floorboards these days? Edgar Allan Poe? This adaptation of John Grisham's jury-tampering thriller manages to come off as both au courant and bizarrely out of time. The villain, Hackman's client, has been changed from the tobacco industry to the gun industry, yet the inescapable subtext is that of Karl Rove and his Republican truth-manipulation machine. It doesn't matter that the 1996 Grisham book predates the Florida 2000 election debacle; the filmmakers are clearly playing on the parallels. As Hackman says, "Trials are too important to be left up to juries." Or elections to voters. You get the idea.
Rovesorry, I mean Hackman!is the jury-selection consultant for the gunlords who are paying millions to illegally sway the humble jurors, crafty Cusack hidden among them. Hackman's methods go far beyond whispering instructions into the earphone of the courtroom attorney during voir dire. From a NASA-style control room staffed with computer nerds and Gucci Gulch lobbyists, he directs a campaign of blackmail, threats, extortion, violence, and arson. Yet the one wild card in his stacked deck is "this confidence man," Cusack, who's abetted by his grifter girlfriend Rachel Weisz in what seems a simple shakedown scheme. Their note to both sides in the case reads, "Jury for sale."
