Jonathan Rosenbaum

The title heroine (Georgina Spelvin) goes to limbo for committing suicide but strikes a bargain to return to earth and indulge in all the sins of the flesh she passed up during her life. This notoriously hyperbolic and almost encyclopedic hard-core porn item (1973) was Gerard Damiano’s follow-up to Deep Throat; using the psuedonym Albert Gork, he also plays a character who winds up locked in a cell with Spelvin. I can’t vouch for how much this has dated since its release, but I would suspect a lot. X, 67 min. (JR) Read more

South Korean writer-director Bong Joon-ho (The Host) made his feature debut with the grisly black comedy Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000), but this one (2003) is far more ambitious and nuanced. A police procedural, it’s based on the unsolved murders of ten women between 1986 and 1991 in the rustic Gyeonggi province, reputedly the first recorded serial killings in Korean history. Bong concentrates on the friction between a local yokel cop and a big-city gumshoe with more sophisticated techniques, but his larger context is the military dictatorship of the period and the public paranoia it inspired. At 129 minutes, this takes a while to get started but gains momentum. In Korean with subtitles. (JR) Read more

A triumph of affectionate and even passionate portraiture, this debut feature by cowriters Ryan Fleck and Ann Boden focuses on three complex characters: a politically radical junior high history teacher (Ryan Gosling) who’s devoted to his work but also addicted to crack, a fearless 13-year-old student (Shareeka Epps) who stumbles onto his secret and forms an emotional bond with him, and a smooth local dealer (Anthony Mackie) who employed her brother before he went to jail and now wants to take her under his wing. Their story is unpredictable, beautifully acted, and revelatory in its moral quandaries. Gosling’s character is the most believable protagonist in any American movie I’ve seen this year–an immature mess, but charismatic, multifaceted, and sincere, the sort we can’t really dismiss without dismissing some part of ourselves. Fleck directed. R, 106 min. Reviewed this week in Section 1. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Music Box. Read more

Scripted by novelist Vladimir Sorokin, this 2004 debut feature by Russian director Ilya Khrzanovsky is puzzling, intriguing, and often compelling, apparently set in the present but magical and futuristic in tone. Three strangers–a prostitute, a meat vendor, and a piano tuner–meet in a bar and bullshit at great length about who they are and what they do before going their separate ways; like them, the film then veers off into different directions, growing increasingly strange and phantasmagorical. A highly original blend of observation and imagination, this remains as unpredictable as its characters (some of whom are stray dogs). In Russian with subtitles. 128 min. Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more

A self-absorbed and not especially likable gay fashion photographer (Melvil Poupaud) discovers he’s about to die from cancer in this 2005 French feature by the highly uneven Francois Ozon (Swimming Pool, Under the Sand), who doesn’t have much to say about his subject that’s fresh. The French title, Le Temps Qui Reste, translates as the time that remains, which at least has some relation to the film’s attempt at lyricism. Jeanne Moreau is around for a touching cameo as the hero’s beloved grandmother, and there’s also a striking three-way sex scene. With Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi. In French with subtitles. 85 min. (JR) Read more

This allegorical thriller has already inspired plans for an English-language remake, perhaps because the story, for all its seeming novelty, is comfortably shopworn. A Georgian laborer in a French coastal town learns that his elderly neighbor plans to earn a fortune through some obscure agreement. After the neighbor dies of an overdose, the Georgian intercepts a letter meant for the deceased, and its instructions lead him to a Parisian gambling den where the patrons wager on elaborate games of Russian roulette. Shot in black-and-white ‘Scope, this first feature by Georgian writer-director Gela Babluani is mechanical in both its suspense and its pessimism. In French and Georgian with subtitles. 86 min. (JR) Read more

Helena Bonham Carter and Aaron Eckhart play a former couple who meet at a Manhattan wedding and wind up having a one-night stand in her hotel room. Gabrielle Zevin’s script borders on the pedestrian, but it’s made to seem unorthodox because of director Hans Canosa’s split-screen technique, which usually features adjacent or overlapping simultaneous views of the two characters and occasionally flashbacks or subjective imaginings alongside the present action. Oddly theatrical, this method seems a poor cousin of staging in the theater, which offers the audience a wider range of things to observe; despite the resourcefulness of the two leads, the movie finally registers as much ado about very little. R, 84 min. (JR) Read more

Shortly before the outbreak of World War I, a Yorkshire miner (John Lynch) and his wife (Samantha Morton) regretfully sell their beautiful collie to a local duke (Peter O’Toole) who takes it to northern Scotland. This turn of events grieves their young son (Jonathan Mason), but the dog escapes and makes its way home. Like the MGM classic Lassie Come Home, this handsome 2005 English feature was adapted from the novel by Eric Knight, and it’s a welcome throwback to the carefully crafted family films of the studio era. The scenery is lovely, and the cast is entirely worthy of the enterprise (including the regal and athletic star). Writer-director Charles Sturridge overplays the nastiness of a comic villain but more than makes up for it with a wonderful episode involving a traveling puppeteer (Peter Dinklage). PG, 99 min. Crown Village 18, River East 21. Read more

Dan Turgeman’s 2004 Israeli feature is a passable warmhearted middle-class soap opera, though I could have done with less of the comic relief, which reeks of warmed-over Yiddish theater, and more of the music, which is restricted to the weddings in the first and last scenes. Set in a northern farming village where a Jewish-Moroccan family operates a pastry-baking business, the movie makes use of a hokey, grandmotherly shaman but fails to spell out the story’s ethnic and geographical specifics. In Hebrew with subtitles. 97 min. (JR) Read more

In 1910 a fanatical Brazilian settler drags his pregnant wife (Fernanda Torres) and her mother (Fernanda Montenegro) to his new patch of land, a sandy spot in northerly Maranhao, and despite the wife’s serious misgivings, she remains there for six decades. This pretentious 2005 art movie is somewhat interesting for its wide-screen photography of the striking locale, but the storytelling is awkward and confusing. Director Andrucha Waddington cast his own wife and mother-in-law in the leads, and his decision to give Torres a second role as the wife’s daughter proves disastrous, making both characters seem more stereotypical. Only samba star Seu Jorge (The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou), as a descendant of a runaway slave, manages to escape the allegorical typecasting. In Portuguese with subtitles. R, 104 min. (JR) Read more

Set at a Florida retirement community and focusing on a local “bereavement club,” this funny, nervy, and pointedly unrated geriatric sex comedy is both enhanced and occasionally limited by being targeted at baby boomers. The sound track abounds with golden oldies (“Love and Marriage,” “Papa Loves Mambo”), the story culminates in a sock hop, and sometimes the ensemble portrait even recalls teen flicks of the 50s and 60s. So part of the kick–along with seeing Dyan Cannon, Joseph Bologna, Brenda Vaccaro, and Sally Kellerman thrive in this special context–is generational nostalgia. Writer-director Susan Seidelman, who made her name with Desperately Seeking Susan but has been working in TV for more than a decade, based this on the experiences of her mother, Florence (who also coproduced and worked on the script). With Len Cariou and Michael Nouri. 104 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Esquire. Read more

Steven Spielberg’s first film following The Color Purple performs a comparably misplaced act of adapter’s piety: taking a novel whose distinction largely rests on its absence of sentimentality and converting it into a three-handkerchief weepie (1987). The source of this Spielburger is J.G. Ballard’s remarkable autobiographical novel about his experiences as a child in Shanghai during World War II; apart from a few sentimental adjustments, Spielberg and screenwriter Tom Stoppard remain surprisingly faithful to the letter of the book while almost completely betraying its spirit. Turned out with the director’s characteristic craft and slicknesswith able performances from Christian Bale, John Malkovich, Miranda Richardson, and Nigel Haversthe film also has a certain De Mille-like touch of sweeping spectacle. But the pseudomystical vagueness that seems to be Spielberg’s stock-in-trade stifles most of the particularity of the source. PG, 152 min. (JR) Read more

Documentarian Michael Lahey recounts the brief but rocky history of the Tucson pirate station KAVL FM, which was launched in response to the 1996 Telecommunications Act that permitted media monopolies to buy up more local stations. It’s a chilling and instructive tale about the curtailment of free expression, though Lahey’s video (2004, 64 min.) favors crankiness and jokey found footage over polemics. A better reason for attending this program is Paul Chan’s Untitled Video on Lynne Stewart and Her Conviction, the Law, and Poetry (18 min.), an experimental yet plainspoken work in which the radical human-rights lawyer, unjustly convicted in February 2005 of aiding foreign terrorists, reads poems and reflects on her life and prospects while Chan finds original and lyrical ways of depicting her. (JR) Read more

OutKast’s Andre Benjamin (aka Andre 3000) and Antwan A. Patton (Big Boi) star in this black musical set in a prohibition-era nightclub and directed by Bryan Barber, known for his OutKast videos. Purists might object to the anachronistic hip-hop numbers, MTV editing, and razzle-dazzle overkill of the digital effects, mise en scene, and violence; this could be the most show-offy, mannerist period musical since Ken Russell’s The Boy Friend (1971). I wouldn’t call the sound track especially memorable either. But Barber and his cast display so much gusto they broke down my resistance; I wound up enjoying this much more than the Oscar-bestrewn Chicago. With Paula Patton, Terrence Howard, Malinda Williams, Macy Gray, and Ving Rhames. R, 121 min. (JR) Read more

Hilary and Haylie Duff are sister heiresses of a cosmetics company who lose and regain their fortune in this painfully unfunny comedy. Director Martha Coolidge is known for her satirical bent (Valley Girl), but any attempt to satirize these spoiled brats would have been doomed by the movie’s view that most classes, races, and sexual persuasions are equally grotesque. Under the circumstances, Anjelica Huston and Lukas Haas manage not to embarrass themselves, but only because they’re pretending to be in a different movie. PG, 97 min. (JR) Read more