20th Century Women

Review by Pamela Zoslov

In his 2010 film BEGINNERS, writer-director Mike Mills reflected on the life of his father, who came out as gay at the age of 75. With 20th CENTURY WOMEN, he turns his attention to his mother, Jan, a strong, independent woman with a pilot's license and a bohemian sense of style. In the movie she is called Dorothea, and she is played by Annette Bening, with a cigarette — Salem, “because it's healthier” — perennially balanced between her fingers.

The film is set in Santa Barbara, California in 1979, when Jamie (Lucas Jade Zuman), Dorothea's only child and the director's alter ego, is 15. The movie opens with a gambit similar to the one in Beginners, where Mills compiles vintage photos and stock footage and re-creations of the period in which his mother grew up. These are accompanied by narration about Dorothea's life as a child of the Depression, along these lines: “Dorothea Fields was born in 1924. People drove sad cars to sad homes. But the people were real.”

Jackie (opens December 16th at the Cedar Lee Theatre)

[JACKIE opens in Cleveland on Friday December 16th exclusively at the Cedar Lee Theatre.]

Review by Pamela Zoslov

I was two years old when President Kennedy was shot. Even though I have no memory of it, the assassination occupies a large part of my consciousness. I first encountered the images — the smiling president's motorcade, the defiant Lee Harvey Oswald, the grieving Jackie, little Caroline and and brave toddler John Jr. saluting his father's casket, Jack Ruby leaning in to shoot Oswald — in Four Days, a white-covered commemorative book sold in our city by the Cleveland Press. As a curly-haired tot, I scribbled with a crayon on its pages. As an adult, I amassed an impressive collection of books on the assassination. Of course, I am not alone in having that permanent mental photo album, and thinking still, more than fifty years later, about the assassination and its mysteries.

The Stanford Prison Experiment (opens July 31st at the Cedar Lee Theatre in Cleveland and the Nightlight Cinema in Akron)

[THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT opens Friday July 31st at the Cedar Lee Theatre in Cleveland and the Nightlight Cinema in Akron.]

Review by Milan Paurich

The first thing you notice in THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT is the butt-ugly early-'70s coiffures and facial hair adorning nearly every cast member. That and the incessant smoking, both of which are a lazy director's shorthand for, "Psst: this is a period movie, folks." For awhile that's pretty much all I noticed. Oh, yeah. And trying to identify the familiar faces underneath all of that mangy hair.

Truth be told, the film's basic set-up--based on a controversial real-life 1971 study conducted by Stanford professor Philip Zimbardo--did little to grab me. Certainly not the ham-fisted way it was playing out courtesy of Tim Talbott's glib, facile script (based on Zimbardo's book, "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil") and Kyle Patrick Alvarez's equally unsubtle direction. To put it in academic terms, STANFORD PRI was flunking out as both psychology and sociology.