Jonathan Rosenbaum

Director Jimmy Murakami and screenwriter Raymond Briggs’s English 1986 animated feature gets us to think the unthinkableto imagine the aftereffects of a nuclear holocaustby creating a very funny and believable elderly English couple, still mired in memories of World War II. Rather than stretch this fable out to a global scale, the filmmakers make all their essential points by sticking to the isolated couple in their country cottage, aided by a realistic style of animation that incorporates some live action, by occasional stylistic changes that allow for more abstraction in some fantasy interludes, and by the speaking voices of John Mills and Peggy Ashcroft. It’s rare that a cartoon carries the impact of a live-action feature without sacrificing the imaginative freedom of the pen and brush. Comedy and horror intertwine in this domestic, kitchen-sink version of Dr. Strangelove, and our involvement in the two characters keeps us helplessly glued to the screen. 80 min. (JR) Read more

For all its implicit misogyny, the original 1966 film version of Bill Naughton’s play remains durable because of Michael Caine’s career-defining performance as the cockney ladies’ man, not to mention the memorable title tune (sung by Cher) and driving jazz score (written and performed by Sonny Rollins). The secondary performancesby Shelley Winters, Jane Asher, Shirley Anne Field, and Vivien Merchant, among othersaren’t bad either. Lewis Gilbert directed. 114 min. (JR) Read more

The talented Jean-Francois Richet, who grew up in a housing project outside Paris, made news in France when his radical feature Ma 6-T va crack-er (1997) was banned from French screens as a danger to public safety. With his remake of John Carpenter’s 1976 feature, he again turns a crime thriller into a corrosive war movie, less suspenseful than the original but more ethically nuanced, politically pointed, and violent. It retains the core story of a besieged city cop in a semiabandoned station house (Ethan Hawke at his jumpiest) who joins forces with a hard-nosed prisoner (Laurence Fishburne at his coolest) after the precinct is attacked by a mob. But most of the trappings are quite differentfor starters, the street gang in Carpenter’s movie has become an entire force of crooked cops. With John Leguizamo (more hysterical than he needs to be), Gabriel Byrne, Maria Bello, Brian Dennehy, Drea de Matteo, and Ja Rule. R, 109 min. (JR) Read more

Jennifer Garner, who played the Marvel Comics superhero Elektra in Daredevil (2003), returns to the role for this sleek action adventure, protecting a father (Goran Visnjic) and daughter (Kirsten Prout) from the nefarious schemes and ninjitsu techniques of the Hand. This doesn’t exactly set the world on fire, but I was charmed by its old-fashioned storytelling, which is refreshingly free of archness, self-consciousness, or Kill Bill-style wisecracks. Some of the effects recall vintage Ray Harryhausen, the villains all perish in puffs of green smoke, and Garner’s sincere glumness suggests Buster Crabbe in Flash Gordon. Rob Bowman directed; with Terence Stamp as Elektra’s blind guru. PG-13, 85 min. (JR) Read more

Based on the true story of Samuel Byck, who tried to assassinate President Nixon in 1974, this first feature by Niels Mueller is powerful, haunting, but ultimately disappointing. Few American movies address abject failure as forcefully as this one, and Sean Penn delivers an intense performance as the would-be assassin. Yet casting a glamorous star as a terminal misfit undermines the character’s reality (as in Taxi Driver), and despite fine performances by Naomi Watts as his ex-wife and Don Cheadle as his best friend, one can’t help but wonder why these people would become involved with someone like him. Mueller and Kevin Kennedy wrote the script; with Jack Thompson. R, 95 min. (JR) Read more

Anthony Balch, a London film distributor who collaborated with William S. Burroughs on a few interesting experimental shorts, also made a couple of jokey exploitation features: Secrets of Sex (1970) and this mad-scientist item from 1973, also known as Dr. Bloodbath and Computer Killers. With Michael Gough, Robert Askwith, and Dennis Price. R, 85 min. (JR) Read more

Yasujiro Ozu followed his first talkie, The Only Son, with this nuanced 1937 comedy about a henpecked medical school professor who makes up a story for his wife so he can sneak off with his freethinking niece for a holiday. The professor’s subterfuge is discovered, which has complex emotional consequences; few critics have noted the rage and rebellion that crop up in Ozu’s work, and he’s masterful in showing how such feelings are worked out in the context of family. More conventional and commercial than its predecessor, this feature is also uncharacteristic of Ozu in its sharp satire of the rich (its trendy banter and lighthearted boozing suggest The Thin Man as a possible influence). In Japanese with subtitles. 71 min. (JR) Read more

Superior in every respect to the PBS documentary The Murder of Emmett Till, this 2003 video by Keith Beauchamp uses archival footage and plainspoken eyewitnesses to investigate the 1955 murder of 14-year-old Till, a black boy from Chicago who had whistled at a white woman in rural Mississippi. The most memorable and forceful testimony comes from Mamie Till, the victim’s mother, whose decision to hold an open-casket funeral for her severely mutilated son galvanized the civil rights movement. Though the perpetrators have never been punished, Beauchamp turned up new evidence and got the case reopeneda fitting tribute to Mamie, who died shortly before the video was completed. 70 min. (JR) Read more

An architect (Michael Keaton) who loses his novelist wife (Chandra West) in an apparent accident is contacted by a stranger (Ian McNeice) who claims to have heard her through something called Electronic Voice Phenomenonthe means by which the dead allegedly communicate with us via radios, TVs, and computers. The widower becomes as obsessed as the stranger with receiving messages and images from beyond. Though I’m well disposed toward elliptical spook stories that depend on the audience’s imagination for their jolts and effects, it takes art as well as craft to put them across, and Geoffrey Sax’s direction of a Niall Johnson script has neither. Muddled and boring. With Deborah Kara Unger. PG-13, 101 min. (JR) Read more

A convicted child molester returns home after a dozen years in prison and tries to go straight. If this has a familiar ring, that may be because the British drama The Mark (1961) explored the same subject (its lead actor, Stuart Whitman, received an Oscar nomination). The differences between the two movies are telling: the earlier one concentrated on the man’s therapy and encouraged compassionate understanding, while this one seems less interested in psychology than in challenging the audience’s sense of its own tolerance. (First-time director Nicole Kassell, who collaborated with Steven Fechter on this adaptation of his play, also seems intermittently influenced by Mystic River, which proves distracting.) Kevin Bacon is good as the pedophile, but as written his character is mainly a cipher; edgier performances come from Kyra Sedgwick (Bacon’s real-life spouse) as the man’s girlfriend and Mos Def as a cop keeping an eye on him. R, 87 min. (JR) Read more

Irrepressible Spanish schlockmeister Jess Franco, one of the worst (and most prolific) filmmakers of all time, launched a protracted series with this 1961 feature about a crazy surgeon carving up various women to secure spare parts for his disfigured daughter — apparently a rip-off of Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1959). With Howard Vernon. 95 min. (JR) Read more

Kevin Spacey spent more than a decade trying to build a biopic around reptilian pop singer Bobby Darin, and his determination paid off in this glorious mess of a movie (2004). The production numbers and nightclub showstoppers are impressive not only for Spacey’s impersonation of Darin but for their skillful evocation of musical moments from the golden age of Hollywood, which are a world apart from postmodern exercises like Chicago and The Phantom of the Opera. Spacey also directed and cowrote the disjointed script, which adopts the self-referential mode of All That Jazz as it puzzles over Darin’s confused parentage, loyal entourage, and marriage to Sandra Dee. This sags in the middle, and Spacey overlooks some of Darin’s more interesting films (John Cassavetes’s Too Late Blues, Hubert Cornfield’s Pressure Point). But as long as Spacey is singing, the movie soars. With John Goodman, Bob Hoskins, Kate Bosworth, and Brenda Blethyn. PG-13, 121 min. (JR) Read more

For all his grace and precision as a director, Clint Eastwood (like Martin Scorsese) operates at the mercy of his scripts. But this time he’s got a terrific one, an unorthodox love story and religious parable adapted by Paul Haggis from stories in F.X. Toole’s Rope Burns. Eastwood plays a gym owner who reluctantly agrees to train and manage a 31-year-old hillbilly woman (Hilary Swank) who wants to box, while Morgan Freeman, as an ex-fighter who helps him out, supplies the voice-over narration. Eventually this leads to a few awkward point-of-view issues, but the past-tense narration enhances the sense of fatality. Haggis’s dialogue is worthy of Hemingway, and the three leads border on perfection. As grim as The Set-Up (1948) and Fat City (1972), as dark and moody as The Hustler and Bird, this may break your heart. PG-13, 132 min. (JR) Read more

This thoughtful, sometimes beautiful feature by Alejandro Amenabar (Thesis, Open Your Eyes, The Others) is loosely based on the true story of Spanish poet Ramon Sampedro, a quadriplegic who fought a 30-year legal battle for his right to die. Amenabar addresses the theme of euthanasia by providing a sharp, almost novelistic sense of what the hero (Javier Bardem) means to his family and his friends (Lola Due Read more

If you’re a fan of professional bad boy and Spanish gender bender Pedro Almodovar, far be it from me to dissuade you from enjoying this elaborate Chinese-box narrative, which boasts an especially resourceful performance by Gael Garcia Bernal in a triple role and a script full of twists designed to accommodate all three parts. It’s about a young filmmaker (Fele Martinez), his former boarding-school squeeze (Bernal), a headmaster-priest who expelled the former in order to abuse the latter, the blackmail and a film-within-the-film that ultimately grew out of these events, and much more. But all the fancy complications, including noir trimmings and notations on the Franco period, left me unengaged. In Spanish with subtitles. NC-17, 109 min. (JR) Read more