03 | December | 2024 | Jonathan Rosenbaum

Index of long reviews from the Chicago Reader, by film (or book) title or subject

Note: items followed by “(i)” have been reformatted and are also illustrated. (There are a few long reviews that appear on this site twice, once with illustrations and once without, although I’ve started to delete the non-illustrated duplications whenever I spot them.) For some strange reason, one of my long reviews, of both Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace and Trekkies, which appeared in the May 21, 1999 issue of the Chicago Reader under the title “Summer Camp,” didn’t make it onto either the Reader’s web site or my own until I recently copied it here. (I’ve also added another text missing from both sites, from the same year, on the four-hour Greed, which I already had in digital form because it was reprinted in my collection Essential Cinema.) Still missing from both sites is my brief ten best piece (actually, 20 best) for 2006, which appeared at some point in December 2006 or January 2007. If readers spot any errors here, I would welcome hearing about them, at jonathanrosenbaum at earthlink dot net.

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Abigail’s Party, 1/10/92 (i)

The Abyss, 8/11/89 (i)

The Accidental Tourist, 1/13/89 (i)

The Accompanist, 1/28/94 (i)

Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, 3/4/94 (i)

The Actor, 4/11/97 (i)

An Actor’s Revenge, 6/3/88 (i)

The Adopted Son, 4/2/99 (i)

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, 3/17/89 (i)

The Adventures of Sharkboy & Lavagirl in 3-D, 6/10/05 (i)

Aerograd, 6/7/02 (i)

The Affair of the Necklace, 12/21/01 (i)

After the Sunset, 11/18/04 (i)

Against the Day (novel), 12/1/06 (i)

The Age of Innocence, 9/17/93 (i)

A.I. Read more

All the Pretty Carnage [NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN]

If memory serves, this review provoked more hate mail than anything else I ever wrote for the Reader, very little of which engaged with my actual argument — a response I tend to correlate with this country’s unreasoning and irrepressible infatuation with and worship of serial killers as virtual religious icons (roughly akin to rock musicians who die of drug overdoses). But according to the Reader, it is also one of my most widely read Reader pieces. It ran in the November 8, 2007 issue, a little less than four months before I retired from the paper. — J.R.

No Country for Old Men | Written and Directed by Ethan and Joel Coen

The first thing we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. —George Orwell

I tend to get flustered when people ask me what I look for in movies, so I’m wary of theorizing too much about what other people want from them. Moviegoers generally seem to fall into one of two categories: those looking for experiences similar to ones they’ve already had and those looking for experiences that are new. Read more

The Market Value of a Missing Movie

Posted on the Chicago Reader‘s blog, February 16, 2007. It’s nice to report that both Pete Kelly’s Blues and Too Late Blues are now readily available, on both DVD and Blu-Ray. — J.R.

The market value of a missing movie

Posted By Jonathan Rosenbaum on 02.16.07 at 09:31 AM

Don’t ask me how, but I recently had a chance to resee Jack Webb’s Pete Kelly’s Blues (1955), a terrific, atmospheric, period noir in Cinemascope and WarnerColor about a cornet player (Webb) in a Dixieland band in 1927 Kansas City (after an evocative prologue in 1915 New Orleans and 1919 Jersey City showing us where and how Pete Kelly came by his cornet). It’s got an amazing cast: Edmond O’Brien, Janet Leigh, Peggy Lee, Lee Marvin, Andy Devine (in a rare and very effective noncomic role), Ella Fitzgerald, and even a bit by Jayne Mansfield as a cigarette girl in a speakeasy. The screenplay, which deservedly gets star billing in the opening credits, is by Richard L. Breen, onetime president of the Screen Writers Guild and a key writer on Webb’s Dragnet, and it’s full of wonderful and hilarious hardboiled dialogue and offscreen narration by Webb. (When a flapper played by Leigh says to Kelly that April is her favorite month, he replies, “If you like it so much, I’ll buy it for you.”)

Jonathan Rosenbaum

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