Jonathan Rosenbaum

A contemporary western with political overtones and acerbic gallows humor, Tommy Lee Jones’s first theatrical feature as director (2005) is impressive. Inspired by the unpunished 1997 killing of 18-year-old Ezequiel Hernandez Jr., the script by Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros) concerns the accidental and unpunished shooting of the title character, a Mexican ranch hand (Julio Cesar Cedillo) working in west Texas. Jones plays the ranch hand’s foreman and friend, who kidnaps the border patrolman responsible (Barry Pepper) and drags him and Estrada’s corpse across the border, determined to fulfill his friend’s wish to be buried in his remote hometown. A very capable piece of storytelling, clearly showing the influence of Sam Peckinpah and beautifully shot in ‘Scope by Chris Menges, this recaptures some of the grandeur of the classic western while adding modernist and absurdist ironies. With Dwight Yoakam, January Jones, and Melissa Leo. R, 121 min. Reviewed this week in Section 1. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Landmark’s Century Centre, River East 21. Read more

Pretty Woman proved that the Disney peopleor Julia Roberts’s smilecould sell just about anything, including a misogynistic celebration of big business and prostitution. This romantic comedy from Paramount (1999, 116 min.), which reunites Roberts and Richard Gere with director Garry Marshall, presumes we’re so ready to love them all over again that we’ll accept the characters’ sudden shift from loathing to doting when Marshall says abracadabra. But I wonder. Gere plays a male-chauvinist New York newspaper columnist who ridicules Roberts’s character for her habit of backing out of weddings at the last minute; when he’s fired for flubbing some facts he hunts her down in rural Maryland to write one more story. And guess what? Maybe writers Josann McGibbon and Sara Parriott were thinking of Tracy and Hepburnassuming they were thinking of anythingbut not even Roberts’s smile can put this one over. With Hector Elizondo, Joan Cusack, Rita Wilson, and Paul Dooley. (JR) Read more

From the April 1, 1993 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

A conclusive demonstration that it’s possible to speak French, be obsessed with excretion, vomit, masturbation, obesity, and broken noses, treat the viewer to glimpses of a dead dog, dead flies, and an abused cat, and still not have an ounce of poetry in your soul. But if you’re sufficiently cowed by the relentless will to poetry of French Canadian filmmaker Jean-Claude Lauzon (Night Zoo), you may wind up acceding to his self-definition if only through exhaustion; once you’ve learned to expect the unexpected and unpleasant you won’t find much to keep you interested in this 1992 look at the fantasies of a 12-year-old boy (Maxime Collin) as recalled by his offscreen narrating adult counterpart (Gilbert Sicotte). The fantasies include the boy and his grandfather trying to murder each other and the boy’s descent from a Sicilian tomato sprayed with sperm. Maybe if you’re in the right frame of mind you’ll find the spirited ugliness and cruelty enjoyable for its audacity; I couldn’t wait for the damn thing to be over. (JR)

A surprising consequence of my posting “My 25 Favorite Films of the 2000s (so far)” on this site on June 21 was that visits to my site suddenly quadrupled, going from about a thousand per day to well over 4,000. This was encouraging — and for me a good response to Robert Koehler’s charge that such list-making was pointless (because the need for viewing suggestions in a context where there are too many choices strikes me — and apparently many others — as self-evident).

Yet the haste with which I put together my original list also led to some subsequent second thoughts and demurrals. So with this in mind, I’ve come up with a new list of 50 instead of 25, substituting one title in the original list after my friend Janet Bergstrom persuaded me that Chantal Akerman’s From the Other Side was a much worthier example of Akerman’s work than Down There (which I’d listed partially as a provocation, without a sufficient amount of reflection). As with my original list of titles, I’ve stuck to the same rule of including only one film by each filmmaker, and the order is alphabetical. And again, with very few exceptions (e.g., Read more

An Iranian tearjerker about an eight-year-old blind boy whose father, a widowed coal worker, belatedly collects him from a school for the blind in Tehran, takes him to the family farm, and then tries to send him to become an apprentice. I haven’t seen any earlier films by Majid Majidi, director of the Oscar-nominated Children of Heaven, but if this 1999 drama is any indication, he’s an utterly conventional sentimental humanist, providing better-than-average storytelling skills, an eye for landscapes that would make him a pretty good calendar artist, but none of the challenges offered by Kiarostami or Makhmalbaf. If you aren’t looking for anything of artistic or social interest but are nonetheless attracted by Iranian cinema’s relative lack of obvious cynicism, this may be just what the doctor ordereda Middle Eastern counterpart to Disney or Spielberg. In Farsi with subtitles. 90 min. (JR) Read more

From the August 2, 1991 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

For my money, this is funnier than both Naked Guns combined, even down to the final joke-strewn credits. Putatively a parody of Top Gun, it also includes send-ups of Dances With Wolves, Full Metal Jacket, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Superman, and even Gone With the Wind. Directed and cowritten (with Pat Proft) by Jim Abrahams, one of the three writer-directors who launched Airplane!, this shares more with that 1980 laugh getter than an exclamation point and Lloyd Bridges; there’s also much of the same pleasure in milking cliches and ridiculing poker-faced straight men with their own compliance (Charlie Sheen is every bit as well cast here as Leslie Nielsen is in the Naked Gun movies), and the airborne antics are realized with a lovely sense of craft. With Cary Elwes, a very sexy Valeria Golino, Kevin Dunn, Jon Cryer, William O’Leary, Kristy Swanson, and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. (Webster Place, Ford City, Bricktown Square, Burnham Plaza, Golf Mill, Lincoln Village, Water Tower)

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According to most of the American mainstream press at the 1999 Cannes film festival, this consciousness-raising transsexual soap opera by aging Spanish enfant terrible Pedro Almodovar should have walked off with all the prizes. I guess it represents a significant advance in his career, giving us a kinder, gentler, more soulful Almodovar who makes a lot more references than usual to other movies: All About Eve and A Streetcar Named Desire especially, but also (in terms of the story’s point of departure) John Cassavetes’s Opening Night. For me it felt like a good many weeks at a politically correct summer camp, though the talented actorsincluding Cecilia Roth, Eloy Azorin, Marisa Paredes, Toni Canto, Antonia San Juan, and Penelope Cruzseem to enjoy the taste of the characters they’re playing. In Spanish with subtitles. R, 101 min. (JR) Read more

Though the writer-director is Neil Jordan, not Anthony Minghella, and the source novel is by Graham Greene, not Michael Ondaatje, the male lead is Ralph Fiennes and this 1999 feature is clearly designed to be another The English Patient. In that endeavor the film succeeds pretty well, but whether it does full justice to Greene is another matter. The book is my favorite of this author’s, and one aspect that the movie captures quite nicely is romantic nostalgia for the London blitz–a curious emotion also evoked by Gravity’s Rainbow, which learned a great deal from Greene. The underrated 1954 movie version of Greene’s novel, which Van Johnson and Deborah Kerr starred in, Edward Dmytryk directed, and Greene gave grudging approval to, had some of the same quality. This new version is a misty, highly emotional Catholic mystery story with dreamy flashbacks and evocative performances by Julianne Moore and Stephen Rea, and if you’re looking to be romantically captivated, this movie just might do the job. Michael Nyman composed the music. 109 min. (JR) Read more

From its opening seconds, this feature from Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (La promesse), winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1999 Cannes film festival, has to be the most visceral filmgoing experience of the past year, including all of Hollywood’s explosions and special-effects extravaganzas. It concerns the desperate efforts of the 18-year-old title heroine (played by Emilie Dequenne, a remarkable nonprofessional), who lives in a trailer park with her alcoholic mother and suffers from stomach cramps, to find a steady job; she particularly hopes to work at a waffle stand whose current employee has romantic designs on her. This may sound like the grimmest sort of neorealism, but the Dardennes keep the story so ruthlessly unsentimental and physical it would be a disservice to describe it as neo anything. You feel it in your nervous system before you get a chance to reflect on its meaningit’s almost as if the Dardennes were intent on converting an immediate experience of the contemporary world into a breathless theme-park rideand it makes just about every other form of movie realism look like trivial escapism. It’s certainly not devoid of psychological nuance either, and it’s had such an impact in Belgium that a wage law for teenagers, which passed in November 1999, is known as the Rosetta plan. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (January 7, 2000). — J.R.

I find critics’ near unanimity about hits and favorites a bit of a bore, even when I agree with some of their choices. Disputes are far more interesting, because they make artistic and political differences clearer and more meaningful. Perhaps because I’m drawn to cinema that can theoretically change the world — and me — I can’t see much purpose in commemorating movies whose prime aim seems to be to make me forget the world outside the theater. The remake of The Thomas Crown Affair and an evening of channel surfing, no matter how enjoyable either might be, are of roughly equal irrelevance.

Nineteen ninety-nine was a pivotal year in movies, clarifying where a lot of people stood and who they were. This kind of definition was encouraged by the existential stocktaking that came with the end of the millennium — the compiling of more best-film lists than usual (of the 90s, of the century) and more generalized meditating on the state of the art and the medium. (After finishing my own best-of-the-90s list for the last issue of the year, I discovered that all but one of the movies had an interesting trait in common: they hadn’t been reviewed in the New Yorker. Read more