Jonathan Rosenbaum

A family of con artists working the European continent (Janet Gaynor, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Billie Burke, Roland Young) are caught and deported to London, where they try to go straight and get taken in by a wealthy, sweet-tempered widow (Minnie Dupree). Like many of the characters, this halfhearted screwball comedy (1938) from producer David O. Selznick can’t decide whether to be soft or cynical and upstages the actors with puppies and penguins. The offbeat cast includes a feisty Paulette Goddard and Richard Carlson in his screen debut, affecting a heavy Scottish burr and wearing trousers that go up to his armpits. Richard Wallace directed. 90 min. (JR) Read more

Can a film be too brilliant for its own good? I wouldn’t think so, but something about the interweaving of disparate lives in this 2005 urban thriller detached me from it, almost as much as the lonely characters seem detached from their New York surroundings. Like writer-director Vladan Nikolic, some of them are refugees from the Balkan warsa hit man (Sergei Trifunovic), a German doctor (Geno Lechner)and whether their actions are deemed criminal or humanitarian seems more a trick of fate than a matter of personal morality. Others seem sad by vocation, like an aging drag queen (Didier Flamand) and a cop who’s dating the doctor (Peter Gevisser). Nikolic assembles all the pieces with dispassionate skill. 93 min. (JR) Read more

Scripted by Samson Raphaelson (Trouble in Paradise), this 1934 remake of a Swedish film takes the odd tack of retaining the Swedish settings in what otherwise looks like a typical Depression-era comedy. Janet Gaynor stars as a debutante who starts working as a maid after her father (Walter Connolly) loses much of his fortune. Some fine if typical gags about the haplessness of the idle rich eventually give way to dull romance once she becomes involved with a chauffeur (Lew Ayres). Frank Lloyd directed, and Walt Disney contributed an animated dream sequence in which Gaynor is serenaded by an egg and various kitchen gadgets. 88 min. (JR) Read more

Bored out of her wits, the title heroine (Janet Gaynor) forsakes her devoted boyfriend (James Stewart) to elope with a drunken playboy (Robert Taylor) who’s forgotten he has a fiancee (Binnie Barnes). The newlyweds keep up a loveless marriage for the sake of appearances, though Gaynor still yearns for her husband’s affection. William A. Wellman directed this MGM soap opera (1936), and while he’s funny ridiculing the banality of small-town life, he seems to lose interest once the action shifts to upper-crust Boston and Taylor’s woodenness asserts itself. With Lewis Stone, Andy Devine, and Edgar Kennedy. 90 min. (JR) Read more

A tall Eurasian man in Chicago’s Chinatown is glimpsed by a lonely Asian-American woman (Angela Chan) and a gay man preparing to return to Hong Kong (Isaac Leung); both immediately develop crushes on him, though none of the three ever meet. This DV feature by Chicago artist Keith Dukavicius (I Am James Mason) favors bittersweet reverie over story; I was struck by its visual textures, feeling for the characters, and musical interplay of images. My only misgiving is that Dukavicius, who also shot the film and composed the music, gives such prominence to the score, asking it to carry more narrative weight than it can bear. In English and subtitled Cantonese and Mandarin. 73 min. (JR) Read more

Documentarian James Marsh (Wisconsin Death Trip) makes his dramatic feature debut with this ambitiously sordid tale about a young man (Gael Garcia Bernal), born in the U.S. to a Mexican prostitute, who travels to Corpus Christi, Texas, in search of his father. Now a born-again Baptist preacher with a wife and two teenagers, the father (William Hurt) cautiously rebuffs the young man, who hires on at a pizzeria and starts a secret affair with the man’s teenage daughter (Pell James). Marsh and cowriter Milo Addica (Monster’s Ball) strive for gothic tragedy as they unbuckle the Bible Belt, but despite some credible performances (Hurt is especially interesting) the effort feels willful. R, 105 min. (JR) Read more

The fairy-tale-kingdom musicals directed by Ernst Lubitsch during the Depression are supposedly inimitable, but this 1933 powder puff is a reasonable and entertaining facsimile. It’s based on a 1931 German comedy partly written by Billy Wilder, whose masquerade theme is already firmly in place. A princess posing as a manicurist (Janet Gaynor) falls for an army captain posing as a delicatessen worker (Henry Garat), and there’s a lot of ambiguity about who’s in charge. William Dieterle directed with a sufficiently light touch, and C. Aubrey Smith (Love Me Tonight) plays the flustered prime minister. 87 min. (JR) Read more

Directed by Frank Borzage, this mawkish, dated love story (1929) was released by Fox in both a silent and a sound version; for years both versions were considered lost, but a silent print turned up in the 90s. An uneducated farm girl (Janet Gaynor, lively as usual) fights with a utility man (Charles Farrell, boring as usual), then becomes romantically devoted to him after he returns from World War I in a wheelchair. The rustic sets appear to have been redressed from F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise; some of the turgid melodrama seems derived from D.W. Griffith, but not at his best. 86 min. (JR) Read more

Bret Wood, an enterprising film scholar and DVD producer, wrote and directed this illustrated video version of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s 1886 medical catalog of sexual perversions, and it manages to revel in kinkiness while bypassing eroticism completely. Wood was interested in showing Krafft-Ebing’s scientific objectivity as well as his Victorian moralism, even when they’re in conflict (which is often). The director’s familiarity with silent cinema enhances the prudish pornographic footage, but when he starts cutting between separate perversions, I began to wonder if he was getting as bored with the material as I was. 102 min. (JR) Read more

A comprehensive notion of what turned American soldiers against the Vietnam war has taken some time to reach us, and this affecting documentary by David Zieger collects many potent testimonies evoking veterans’ activism from 1966 to ’71 (a period when the Pentagon recorded 503,926 “incidents of desertion”). Zieger interviews about a dozen vets from all branches of the service and finds that the war’s injustice, particularly the systematic killing of innocent civilians, was a galvanizing factor. (John Kerry was excluded as a possible distraction, but Jane Fonda speaks eloquently about her “Fuck the Army” tour of U.S. military bases with Donald Sutherland.) I expected to emerge depressed by how long these stories have gone untold, but the speakers’ courage and humanity are a shot in the arm. 84 min. Landmark’s Century Centre. Read more

Even as commercial moviemaking becomes more geared to teens and preteens, this crackerjack survey, the opening-night program of the 18th Onion City festival, shows how some contemporary experimental work approaches and interacts with the mainstream. Among the shorts screening are Soul Dancing (2004), a weird video by Japanese cult horror director Kiyoshi Kurosawa; Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (2005), a 35-millimeter ‘Scope reworking of a Sergio Leone western by Austrian filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky; Here (2005), in which Fred Worden shuffles images from Georges Melies and the Laurence Olivier Henry V; and Andy Warhol’s 1966 screen tests featuring Bob Dylan. Best of all is Roads of Kiarostami (2005, 32 min.), in which Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami introduces his black-and-white landscape photography but also includes a startling and topical finale in color. The program’s running time is 95 minutes. The festival continues Friday through Sunday, June 16 through 18, at Chicago Filmmakers; for more information see next week’s issue or visit www.chicagofilmmakers.org. Roads of Kiarostami is reviewed in Section 1. Thu 6/15, 8 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more

Luc Besson (La Femme Nikita) produced and cowrote this kick-ass 2004 thriller, which takes place in and around some strangely depopulated ghetto high-rises outside Paris in the year 2010 and involves drug-dealing gangs, corrupt cops, and a nuclear device. This is every bit as silly and adolescent as you’d expect from Besson, and about as contemporary as The Perils of Pauline. But I was delighted by the balletic and acrobatic stunts, some of which evoke Tarzan. Pierre Morel directed; with Cyril Raffaelli, David Belle, Tony D’Amario, and Bibi Naceri. In French with subtitles. R, 85 min. (JR) Read more

Vince Vaughn (who collaborated on the story) plays a Chicago tour guide who’s into sports; Jennifer Aniston’s character works in an art gallery. The unlikely couple meet at Wrigley Field; by the time the opening credits are over they’re sharing a condo but she’s ready to call it quits. This strange comedy is nothing but curveballs after that; like director Peyton Reed’s previous Down With Love, it has to do with real estate and the way we live. It’s full of pain and quirky characters standing at oblique angles to one another, and while it doesn’t add up it held me throughout. With Jon Favreau, Joey Lauren Adams, Judy Davis, Vincent D’Onofrio, Ann-Margret, John Michael Higgins, and Jason Bateman. PG-13, 105 min. (JR) Read more

Solving crossword puzzles isn’t exactly a sport, but documentarian Patrick Creadon makes it one by focusing on the 500-odd enthusiasts who compete at the 28th American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in Stamford, Connecticut. Will Shortz, puzzle master for the New York Times, hosts the event, and among the crossword fans interviewed are Ken Burns, Mike Mussina, Jon Stewart, Bob Dole, and Bill Clinton, who’s especially interesting on the subject. This is mildly entertaining, though like the puzzles themselves, it favors diversion over wisdom. PG, 90 min. (JR) Read more

The first movie scored by George and Ira Gershwin, this 1931 musical may seem dated, but its subject matterillegal immigrationcouldn’t be more timely. A Scottish lass in steerage (Janet Gaynor) charms a millionaire jock in first class (Charles Farrell) before skirting U.S. customs and hiding out with a Russian family; Virginia Cherrill plays the heartless, wealthy villainess. If you can make it through the unmemorable songs and stale ethnic humor (dominated by El Brendel as a Swede), there’s a remarkable sequence toward the end in which Gaynor wanders through an expressionistic Manhattan, contemplating suicide to the strains of Second Rhapsody (a sequel to Rhapsody in Blue that was truncated by the studio). 106 min. (JR) Read more