Arts+ Selects
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Wondering what else is in theaters this weekend? Here are two films recommended by The New York Sun’s critics that you can still catch around town.
BORDER POST
Unrated, 94 minutes
As “Border Post” opens, it’s 1987 on the Yugoslavian-Albanian frontier. Civil War is still four years away and in the soon-to-be-former Social Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, it’s Cold War business as usual. At a small mountainside garrison, a group of bored and horny Yugoslav troops serve out their mandatory military service by doing as little work as they can get away with without running afoul of their careerist superiors. By day the soldiers mark time in unenthusiastic drills, by surreptitiously smoking hashish “courtesy of our unaligned Afghan brothers.” By night they empty any bottles and chase any skirts that they can find in a nearby town.
Adapted from a novel by the Croatian journalist Ante Tomic, the film nimbly walks the line between farce and drama. Director and co-writer Rajko Grlic smartly uses period background broadcasts to color his portrait of a nation sputtering toward civil war on ideological fumes.
Bruce Bennett (March 7)
ZODIAC
R, 160 minutes
The new film from “Fight Club” and “Se7en” director David Fincher dramatically reactivates — or at least re-enacts — the Zodiac Killer case that paralyzed San Francisco in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. Based on a pair of books by San Francisco Chronicle political cartoonist-turned-amateur sleuth Robert Greysmith, the film painstakingly portrays the murders, the fruitless police investigation, and the accompanying press frenzy. Mr. Fincher creates a gorgeously grimy and lived-in 1970s look, with livery skin tones and green-brown shadows that are a far cry from the department store window perfection of Oliver Stone generation period films.
During the course of its 160-minute running time, “Zodiac” succeeds at doing something much subtler and than merely breathing new digital life into yesteryear’s atrocities. It is not a film about a murderer; it’s a film about a community — one that briefly awakens in fear and then quietly slips back to sleep, forgetting both the monsters that threatened it and the guardians who sought to protect it.
B.B. (March 2)
