Daily Archives: September 29, 1989

The Girl in a Swing

Alan (Rupert Frazer), a wealthy English antique ceramics dealer, becomes smitten with a German secretary named Karin (Meg Tilly) during a business trip in Copenhagen, proposes to her, and marries her after she joins him in England. Although they’re passionately in love, a number of unsettling and seemingly supernatural events–including dreams and apparent hallucinations–begin to raise the question of Karin’s mysterious past, which continues to trouble her. Writer-director Gordon Hessler’s erotic psychological thriller, adapted from Richard Adams’s novel, isn’t an unqualified success (some choppy editing and miscalculated slow-motion occasionally interfere with the trancelike rhythms), but it shares with the memorable horror films of Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur a preference for suggestion and understatement over explicitness, developing a gripping narrative and some disquieting and evocative moods in the process, along with some fairly steamy sex. (Fine Arts) Read more

Home Remedy

A likable if minor low-budget comedy, written and directed by Maggie Greenwald, which focuses on two eccentrics who live in the same neighborhood in Paramus, New Jersey: a frustrated housewife and mother (Maxine Albert) and a narcissistic recluse (Seth Barrish) who cultivates boredom. The editing and dialogue have their moments of wit as this unlikely pair gradually get acquainted. With Richard Kidney (1987). (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Friday, September 29, 6:00 and 7:45, 443-3737) Read more