The fourth feature (1995) by this country’s most gifted black filmmaker, Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep), is his first with a directly political edgea heartfelt and persuasive look at the racism and corruption of the Los Angeles police force, based on a true story and calculated to burn its hard lessons straight into your skull. The plot concerns the adjustments made by a sincere black rookie cop (Michael Boatman) who joins an all-white precinct and wants to be accepted by his fellow officers; his only real ally turns out to be the one woman in the precinct (Lori Petty, in a singular performance), a Jew who gets plenty of abuse herself. When a murder case arises involving a black suspect (Ice Cube), the hero’s decision to perjure himself in order to support his white partner opens a Pandora’s box of ironies and ambiguities that the movie squarely faces. The distributor forced him to tone down the anger and despair of his original ending, but this still packs a mighty punch. With Elliott Gould and M. Emmet Walsh. 108 min. (JR) Read more
Jefferson In Paris
For many of its historical details, I found this James Ivory-Ruth Prawer Jhabvala account of Thomas Jefferson’s five-year stint as ambassador to France (1784-’89) a lot more absorbing and interesting than their usual brand of Classics Illustratedeven if the Gourmet-style consumerist spreads remain pretty much the same. But by the time they get around to articulating a story, the inhibitions imposed by their good taste begin to seem more like gutlessness, and what initially promises to be an exposure of American liberal doublethink about slavery winds up as a querulous wimp out on a subject that the underrated Mandingo is better equipped to deal with. I don’t feel qualified to comment on the accuracy of this portrait of Jefferson, but Nick Nolte does what he can to suggest unplumbed depths, and the other actorsincluding Greta Scacchi, Gwyneth Paltrow, Thandie Newton, Seth Gilliam, Simon Callow, Nancy Marchand, Charlotte de Turckheim, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Michael Lonsdale, and James Earl Jonesvie with the varied decor in holding one’s respectful attention (1995). (JR) Read more
The Bridges Of Madison County
Clint Eastwood resurrects the star system, the Hollywood love story, and middle-aged romance, but despite all his craft and sincerity, he and screenwriter Richard LaGravenese can’t quite turn Robert James Waller’s cardboard best-seller into flesh and bone. The one big exception is Meryl Streep’s beautiful and fresh performance as an Iowa housewife resigned to a disappointing life. Eastwood plays a National Geographic photographer who happens along while her family is gone, a fantasy figure who seldom adds up to anything more than his sketchy profile. As long as these two are on-screen one can forget the treacle that brought them theretheir first moment of physical contact is exquisite and unforgettableand the film makes a plausible conservative argument for adultery as a preserver of marriage. This self-styled relic (1995) only fitfully transcends the Reader’s Digest aura it seems so eager to honor and justify, but it’s earnest and it has the unfashionable courage to be slow. With Annie Corley, Victor Slezak, Jim Haynie, and a wonderful jazz sound track featuring singer Johnny Hartman. 135 min. (JR) Read more
Beyond Rangoon
This 1995 film works so well as storytelling and action adventure that you may want to overlook the dubious if well-intentioned premise: the slaughter of the Burmese populace becomes significant only to the degree that an American tourist (Patricia Arquette), seeking to overcome a tragedy in her own life, becomes personally involved with it. Ace director John Boorman took over this project from other hands, and he shows his customary flair with ‘Scope compositions, gorgeous sunsets, and suspenseful, exotic spectacle. What left me a little uneasy is epitomized by Hans Zimmer’s hack score, which aims at sounding vaguely Southeast Asian (wooden-sounding flutes and the like) rather than specifically Burmese to get us all in the right paternalistic frame of mind. But if you don’t mind such casual insults, you’re likely to be glued to your seat. Alex Lasker and Bill Rubenstein wrote the script; with Frances McDormand, Spalding Gray, and U Aung Ko. 99 min. (JR) Read more
On F FOR FAKE (1995 essay)
Commissioned and published for the Voyager laserdisc of F for Fake in 1995. My thanks to Marcio Sattin in São Paulo for giving me a printout of this untitled “lost” essay in Spring 2015, which I’ve slightly re-edited.-– J.R.
Orson Welles’ two major documentary forays stand roughly at opposite ends of his film career: It’s All True (1942) and F for Fake (1973), and together the two projects’ very titles express a dialectical relationship to the documentary. Both belong to a form of documentary known as the essay film that interested Welles throughout his career. Notwithstanding some Wellesian hyperbole, it seems safe to say that both titles accurately convey the overall essence of their respectiive projects: Most of the never-completed It’s All True, as Welles conceived and shot it, was true; most of F for Fake is fake -– a fake documentary about fakery, with particular attention devoted to art forger Elmyr de Hory, to author Clifford Irving, and to Welles himself. As Welles put it in a 1983 interview, “In F for Fake I said I was a charlatan and didn’t mean it . . . because I didn’t want to sound superior to Elmyr, so I emphasized that I was a magician and called it a charlatan, which isn’t the same thing. Read more
Hollywood Strikes Out (The Best Movies of 1995)
From the Chicago Reader (January 5, 1996). — J.R.
I can’t recall a worse year for Hollywood than 1995. This suggests that either my memory or the studio system is disintegrating. My guess is it’s the latter. I don’t mean to say the business is coming apart; sadly, Hollywood has often found it easy to make money with junk, especially if the public is willing — as it still apparently is — to go along with the film industry’s manipulations. (However, given the scant means available to most people to make themselves heard on such matters in this “free” society, I don’t want to jump to too many conclusions about this.) Rather I believe that what’s coming apart is the social contract between the industry and filmgoers, which allows some form of customer satisfaction that isn’t predicated on deception and a fundamental contempt for the audience.
A symptom of the problem could be found in an article by Peter Bart in Variety late last October bemoaning the poor box-office returns for “such pricy projects” as Jade, The Scarlet Letter, Strange Days, and Assassins. “Rubbing salt into the wound,” added Bart, “is a new Yankelovich opinion survey…which indicates that 43 percent of filmgoers interviewed say they would attend more films all year round if a ‘better selection’ of movies were available. Read more
Cannes, 1995
Adapted from “Journal de Cannes,” translated by Jean-Luc Mengus, Trafic, no. 15, été [summer] 1995. — .J.R.
From 1970 to 1973, when I was living in Paris, it was still possible to write Cannes coverage for two magazines, stay in a cheap hotel, and not lose too much money, and last year I was able to start attending again thanks to being on the selection committee of the New York Film Festival. Despite the opening of a new Palais des Festivals in 1983 and the closing or remodeling of various cinemas, the most significant changes to be found here after two decades could arguably be summed up in a single phrase: what we mean when we say “contemporary cinema,” entailing not only what we include but what we leave out. In theory, all the beauty and horrors, the contradictions and paradoxes of world cinema are crammed in two weeks over a few city blocks. But in practice, how can we say with any confidence that Cannes is an accurate précis of anything except the international film business (which includes the press)?
Perhaps the biggest difference between the seventies and nineties in Cannes is the matter of whose opinions count the most. Read more
The Aesthetics and Politics of Fear
Commissioned by the Portuguese quarterly Electra for its fall 2025 issue, devoted to Fear.
In their original forms as novels, Mary Shelley’s sophisticated novel of ideas, Frankenstein (1818) and Bram Stoker’s simpler and pulpier Dracula (1897) were published almost eighty years apart. Although only the second of these appeared during the Victorian era (1837-1901), it doesn’t seem like a stretch to associate both novels with the repressions and displacements of what we regard today as Victorian.
By contrast, the releases of the movie adaptations of these novels made at Universal studios in 1931 were only a little over eight months apart. An earlier, unauthorized film adaptation of Dracula called Nosferatu (1922) is also worth mentioning, as are other early silent German features that belong to the horror genre (e.g., The Golem in 1915 and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in 1920). But the commercial successes of Dracula and Frankenstein, both of which drew on elements from silent German films, were arguably what established horror as an ongoing international genre, working with both repression and its subsequent unleashing and/or explosive consequences. At least since the 1950s in the U.S., when teenagers were first identified as a social class and a market, horror movies have been commonly viewed as the ideal “date” movies for teenagers, largely because the fear they provoke can draw couples closer together for mutual comfort and assurance. Read more
Robert Frank’s ONE HOUR (1990)
Commissioned by and published in Frank Films: The Film and Video Work of Robert Frank, a 2009 German retrospective catalogue published in English. You can see a few brief glimpses of the video in the fascinating recent documentary Don’t Blink — Robert Frank. It was produced by Philippe Grandrieux for French television. — J.R.
“I’ve seen La chouette aveugle seven times,” Luc Moullet once wrote of Raúl Ruiz’s intractable masterpiece, “and I know a little less about the film with each viewing.” Apart from being both intractable and a masterpiece, I can’t say Robert Frank’s One Hour [also sometimes known as Sixty Minutes) has anything in common with the Ruiz film, yet what makes it a masterpiece and intractable is the same paradox: the closer I come to understanding it, the more mysterious it gets.
My first look at this single-take account of Frank and actor Kevin O’Connor either walking or riding in the back of a mini-van through a few blocks of Manhattan”s Lower East Side — shot between 3:45 and 4:45 pm on July 26, 1990 — led me to interpret it as a spatial event capturing the somewhat uncanny coziness and intimacy of New York street life, the curious experience of eavesdropping involuntarily on strangers that seems an essential part of being in Manhattan, an island where so many people are crammed together that the existential challenge of everyday coexistence between them seems central to the city’s energy and excitement. Read more
Werner Herzog Takes Us All On the Bad Faith Express: Reflections on FAMILY ROMANCE, LLC
Commissioned by The Chiseler, and posted there on July 4, 2020. — J.R.
My first encounter with Werner Herzog was at the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes in 1973, where I first saw Aguirre, the Wrath of God in an English-dubbed version that included, if memory serves, a few Brooklyn accents in 16th century Peru. (This is why it took some rethinking and retooling before the film could be successfully exhibited in the U.S., in German with subtitles.) But what flummoxed me the most — in spite of the film’s awesome visual splendor and its crazed poetic conceits — was what Herzog revealed about the opening intertitle when I asked him about it during the Q & A.
The intertitle: “After the conquest and sack of the Incan empire by Spain, the Indians invented the legend of El Dorado, a land of gold, located in the swamps of the Amazon tributaries. A large expedition of Spanish adventurers led by Pizarro sets off from the Peruvian sierras in late 1560. The only document to survive from this lost expedition is the diary of the monk Gaspar de Carvajal.” Herzog’s cheerful admission: the bit about the document and the diary was a total lie, invented by him because he reasoned that people wouldn’t accept the film’s premises otherwise. Read more
…as in a dream
Blade Runner: The Director’s Cut
Far and away the best SF movie of the 80s, Ridley Scott’s visionary look at Los Angeles in the year 2019a singular blend of grime and glitter that captures both the horror and the allure of Reagan-era capitalism with the claustrophobic textures of a Sternberg filmwas a critical and commercial flop when it first appeared (1982). Loosely adapted from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the film follows the hero (Harrison Ford) as he tracks down and kills replicants, or androids. Much of the film’s erotic charge and moral and ideological ambiguity stems from the fact that these characters are very nearly the only ones we care about. (We never know for sure whether the hero is a replicant himself; in the director’s cut version that uncertainty is even greater.) The grafting of 40s hard-boiled detective story with SF thriller creates some dysfunctional overlaps, and the movie loses some force whenever violence takes over, yet this remains a truly extraordinary, densely imagined version of both the future and the present, with a look and taste all its own. With Rutger Hauer, Edward James Olmos, Joe Turkel, and William J. Sanderson. R, 112 min. (JR) Read more
Eyes Wide Shut
From the Chicago Reader (July 30, 1999). — J.R.
Initial viewings of Stanley Kubrick’s movies can be deceptive because his films all tend to be emotionally convoluted in some way; one has to follow them as if through a maze. A character that Kubrick might seem to treat cruelly the first time around (e.g., Elisha Cook Jr.’s fall guy in The Killing) can appear the object of tender compassion on a subsequent viewing. The director’s desire to avoid sentimentality at all costs doesn’t preclude feeling, as some critics have claimed, but it does create ambiguity and a distanced relationship to the central characters. Kubrick’s final feature very skillfully portrays the dark side of desire in a successful marriage; since the 60s he’d been thinking about filming Arthur Schnitzler’s brilliant novella “Traumnovelle,” and working with Frederic Raphael, he’s adapted it faithfully — at least if one allows for all the differences between Viennese Jews in the 20s and New York WASPs in the 90s. Schnitzler’s tale, about a young doctor contemplating various forms of adultery and debauchery after discovering that his wife has entertained comparable fantasies, has a somewhat Kafkaesque ambiguity, wavering between dream and waking fantasy (hence Kubrick’s title), and all the actors do a fine job of traversing this delicate territory. Read more
A Note on “Welles’ Career: A Chronology”
When This is Orson Welles, which I edited, was originally published in 1992, the section of the book which elicited the most comments was the 131-page summery of Welles’ career, an attempt at an exhaustive account that I had taken over and expanded from Welles and Peter Bogdanovich’s original manuscript. People were awed by the size of this section, but ever since the book’s publication, I’ve been periodically reminded of how incomplete it actually was and is.
My latest reminder was coming across Welles’ 19-minute radio adaptation/performance of Alexander Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades,” introduced by Laurence Olivier and available for free at
I have no idea when this was recorded or broadcast, but Audible has posted it alongside other audio adaptations of other Russian literary works performed by Olivier, Michael Redgrave, Trevor Howard, and an apparently unidentified actress in the same series, which aren’t free. [4/25/2022]
Three Seats For The 26th
From the Chicago Reader (June 1, 1990). — J.R.
For viewers like me who harbor passionately fond memories of Jacques Demy’s 1967 tribute to the American musical, The Young Girls of Rochefort, Demy’s 1988 musical (his last film) is clearly worth seeing, even if the recommendation has to come with reservations. While Michel Legrand’s score for The Young Girls of Rochefort is one of the greatest for any musical, his comparably jazzy and airy work for the this one is only a pale reflection of his best. Similarly, the references to touchstones such as Silk Stockings, Singin’ in the Rain, and The Band Wagon are all too fleeting, in striking contrast to the full-scale tributes in the earlier film to West Side Story, An American in Paris, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The difference between the two is partly a matter of scale and budget, and partly that the more recent film centers on Yves Montand, an eminence grise who looks more and more like Milton Berle. Playing himself, Montand arrives in Marseilles to launch an autobiographical musical revue that he plans to take on a world tour. He spends his spare time looking for an old lover, a onetime prostitute now a baroness (Francoise Fabian), whose husband is in jail for theft and whose 22-year-old daughter (Mathilda May), who knows nothing of her mother’s past, has a burning desire to make it in show biz. Read more