Jonathan Rosenbaum

A rebellious working-class teenager in southern California (Evan Rachel Wood) gets involved with an emotionally disturbed if charismatic young man who fancies himself a cowboy (Edward Norton). Both actors work hard to give this disturbing crime story some flavor and substance, but the narrative is overextended and poorly organized. Writer-director David Jacobson (Dahmer) has reportedly recut the movie since its Cannes premiere; it still feels too long. With David Morse and Bruce Dern. R, 114 min. (JR) Read more

Chuck Kleinhans, professor of film at Northwestern University, will screen and discuss two essential structural films, both in 16-millimeter, that challenge the viewer’s sense of equilibrium: Michael Snow’s 52-minute Back and Forth (1969) and Ernie Gehr’s 41-minute Side/Walk/Shuttle (1991). (JR) Read more

A program of 16-millimeter experimental films, including at least two essential itemsHollis Frampton’s Nostalgia (1973) and Paul Sharits’s T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1968)and two films by the neglected English filmmaker John Smith, Associations (1975) and The Girl Chewing Gum (1976). 67 min. (JR) Read more

The last day and night in the life of a cranky, ailing 63-year-old widower in the Bucharest suburbs, with an ambulance carting him from one overtaxed hospital to another, may sound like an ordeal, but this 154-minute Romanian odyssey is anything but. Both sad and darkly funny, the film is so sharply conceived and richly populated that it often registers like a Frederick Wiseman documentary, even though everything is scripted and every part played by a professional. This is only the second feature of Cristi Puiu, who claims to have been inspired by his own hypochondria, but he’s already clearly a master. In Romanian with subtitles. Music Box. Read more

Screenwriter John Patrick Shanley (Moonstruck) made his directorial debut with this whimsical contemporary fairy tale (1990). Tom Hanks plays a former fireman who’s told by his doctor (Robert Stack) that he has only a short time to live. A wealthy businessman (Lloyd Bridges) offers him red-carpet treatment if Hanks will sail to a remote Pacific island (where the businessman wants to gain mineral rights) and dive into a volcano to appease the natives. Meg Ryan plays all three leading ladies, and Abe Vigoda, Amanda Plummer, Barry McGovern, and Ossie Davis are around for other offbeat parts. Borrowing liberally from Delmer Daves’s Bird of Paradise, Shanley manages to achieve some striking pictorial effects and a few goofy gags and plot turns; he also tries for some uplift that’s less convincing but easy enough to take. PG, 102 min. (JR) Read more

This unscripted British feature by Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross uses documentary interviews and dramatizations to tell the story of the Tipton Three, British Muslims en route to a wedding who were arrested by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan and held for more than two years at the U.S. Naval Detention Center at Guantanamo Bay. The problem with making a docudrama out of this material is that blurring the lines between the real and the simulated only confuses the considerable issues surrounding the U.S. treatment of detainees. The film is compelling to the extent that the subject is, but also unimaginative and unsurprising. R, 95 min. (JR) Read more

I haven’t seen Fire (1996) or Earth (1998), the first two installments of Deepa Mehta’s elemental trilogy. But this heartbreaking 2005 feature about the plight of Hindu widows is a potent feminist protestall the more so because some of the laws depicted are still in force. (In fact production had to be suspended after the sets were damaged by arson.) Set in the 1930s near the banks of the Ganges, it focuses on an eight-year-old bride (Sarala) who’s taken to an ashram after her husband dies, then shifts to an older girl (Lisa Ray) who falls for a young follower of Gandhi. The agitprop aspects may be simplistic, but the story’s realization is effective. In Hindi with subtitles. 114 min. (JR) Read more

Poker-faced, often hilarious, and endlessly inventive, this minimalist mockumentary by Chicago filmmaker Jim Finn uses a few established facts to invent a wild narrative about an international communist project to establish colonies on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Finn gets some of his giddiest effects filming his own animals and SF miniatures, imagining a letter written by an Indian astronaut on holiday to a colleague (“P.S. I have bought a hammock that smells of goat and Mexico”), and creating a solemn radio communication about “The Trolley Song.” In short, this is very special. Colleen Burke and Jim Becker wrote the delightful percussive score. In English and subtitled German. 71 min. Finn and members of the cast and crew will attend the screenings. Sun 5/7, 5 PM, and Thu 5/11, 8:15 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more

To the credit of British writer-director Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday), this taut, partly speculative account of the 9/11 flight that crashed in a Pennsylvania field has practically none of the exploitative melodrama one would expect from a major studio release. The film cuts between the delayed Newark-to-San Francisco flight, a military air-defense facility, and air-traffic-control centers in Boston and New York (with some of the real-life participants playing themselves), then switches to real time once the plane takes off. Greengrass takes pains to keep events believable and relatively unrhetorical, rejecting entertainment for the sake of sober reflection, though one has to ask how edifying this is apart from its reduction of the standard myths. (One myth it perpetuates is that the passengers succeeded in storming the cockpit before the plane crashed.) R, 111 min. (JR) Read more

Jessica Bendinger, author of the cheerleader comedy Bring It On, wrote and directed this inspirational Disney tale about a 17-year-old with attitude (Missy Peregrym) who has a brush with the law and gets sent to an exclusive gymnastics academy for girls. The always capable Jeff Bridges plays her tough-love coach, and by the end her diffident alienation has given way to group spirit and achievement. Despite the familiar story arc and MTV visuals, Bendinger puts this across with a certain amount of pizzazz, and the competitive gymnastics are often spectacular. Rap and black slang abound, though the movie doesn’t have a single black character. PG-13, 105 min. (JR) Read more

Edward Yang’s most accessible movie is also his best since A Brighter Summer Day, displaying a comparable mastery that won him the prize for best direction in Cannes. In keeping with the musical connotation of the English title, the thematic counterpoint between generations is as adroit as the focus on a single generation was in his earlier masterpiece. Beginning with a wedding and ending with a funeral in the same contemporary Taipei family, the film takes almost three hours to unfold, and not a moment seems gratuitous or squandered. Working again with nonprofessional actors, Yang coaxes a standpout lead performance from Wu Nienjen (a major screenwriter and director in his own right) as a middle-aged partner in a failing computer company who has a secret Tokyo rendez-vous with a former girlfriend he jilted 30 years ago, now living in Chicago, while trying to team up professionally with a Japanese games designer. (The chats between the latter two are all in English, and Yang’s own background in American computers serves him well.) Other major characters include the hero’s spiritually traumatized wife, her comatose mother, his pregnant sister and her debt-ridden husband, his teenage daughter, and his eight-year-old son. The lattera comic and unsentimental marvel named Yang-Yangmay come closest to serving as Yang’s own mouthpiece; the kid becomes obsessed with photographing what people can’t see, such as the backs of their own heads, which comprises for him the half of reality that’s missed. Read more

This 1999 feature by former actress Nicole Garcia is striking above all because of its lead performanceCatherine Deneuve as the widow of a big-time jeweler, a former alcoholic whose life suddenly springs back to action when she discovers seven diamonds squirreled away by her late husband. What transpires after that may have some of the trappings of an exotic thriller, but it’s basically a character study, and Deneuve and her fellow actorsin particular Emmanuelle Seigner and Jean-Pierre Bacri (Same Old Song)shine in these circumstances. This is the first film in the Film Center’s European Union film festival, a welcome event that over the next couple of weeks brings about two dozen new European features to town. (JR) Read more

This 2005 farce about a hellish Passover seder panders to middle-class Jews as gleefully as Tyler Perry’s movies pander to middle-class African-Americans, though there’s less religiosity and a greater degree of self-hatred in the vulgar stereotypes. The dysfunctional family includes a father (Michael Lerner) who manufactures Christmas tree ornaments, a Hasidic son, a lesbian daughter, another daughter who makes a living as a sexual surrogate, and a druggy son who slips dad some ecstasy (his psychedelic trip is accompanied on the sound track by Jewish folk tunes). Salvador Litvak directed a script he cowrote with Nina Davidovich; among the old pros gamely attempting to navigate the strident humor are Mili Avital, Jack Klugman, and Lesley Ann Warren. R, 93 min. (JR) Read more

If memory serves, this is a slightly better than average black-and-white western (1956), directed by Russell Rouse, with a pacifist theme recalling the much superior The Gunfighter (1950). Rouse, a writer-director who started off ambitiously with such projects as The Well (1951) and The Thief (1952) and would later direct the ingenious House of Numbers (1957), eventually won an Academy Award for writing Pillow Talk (1959), then wound up making The Oscar (1966); this Glenn Ford effort comes just before the decline. With Broderick Crawford, Jeanne Crain, and Russ Tamblyn. 92 min. (JR) Read more

Writer-director Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol) and cowriter Guinevere Turner (Go Fish) offer a refreshingly open-minded take on the 50s pinup/porn queen, effectively played by Gretchen Mol as a good-natured airhead. The film captures the garish colors and wispy black and white of home movies and lurid magazines of that period, and there’s something provocative about making Page–who dropped out of modeling after she found religion half a century ago–an almost blank slate on which we’re invited to write various feminist and queer theories. Which, as it turns out, objectifies her almost as much as porn did. With Chris Bauer, Jared Harris, David Strathairn, and Lili Taylor. R, 91 min. Reviewed this week in Section 1. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Esquire, Landmark’s Century Centre. Read more