The Best Old Movies On a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, July 29-August 4
Reversal of Fortune (1990)
Directed by Barbet Schroeder
The dream factory’s treatment of the Claus von Bülow case is a high point among Hollywood true stories, a sordid tabloid melodrama played as a black comedy of realpolitik. Ron Silver’s Alan Dershowitz, caustic and briny, scours Jeremy Irons’s mousse-smooth aristocrat, while Glenn Close’s ill-fated Sunny is what’s meant by the expression “toxic person.” A seasoned vet of the French New Wave, Schroeder evokes in equal measure the rowdy camaraderie of Howard Hawks and the impassive objectivity of Otto Preminger, without ever downplaying the sensationalism of the material. Whether rubbernecking or sermonizing, he conducts the action with acute irony and an inscrutable poker face, like a grinning Cheshire cat. Eli Goldfarb (August 4, 12:30pm, 5:10pm, 9:50pm at Film Forum’s “True Crime,” double-featured with Peter Medak’s The Krays)