Jonathan Rosenbaum

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical version of the Gaston Leroux novel and movie standby has grossed more than $3 billion worldwide since it opened in London in 1986, but I doubt that I’ve missed much. Teen romance and operetta-style singing replace the horror elements familiar to moviegoers, and director Joel Schumacher obscures any remnants of classy stage spectacle with the same disco overkill he brought to Batman Forever. Arty trappings like black-and-white framing segments and floating candelabras (like the ones in Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast) don’t help, though the spirited playersGerard Butler, Patrick Wilson, Miranda Richardson, Minnie Driver, Simon Callow, Ciaran Hinds, and Emmy Rossum (Sean Penn’s daughter in Mystic River)do what they can. PG-13, 143 min. (JR) Read more

A plane carrying 14 people from Mongolia to China gets caught in a sandstorm and crash-lands in the Gobi Desert, where the chances of rescue or survival are slim. When Robert Aldrich made the 1965 original, it was set in the Sahara, ran 147 minutes, and had a star-studded cast including James Stewart, Ernest Borgnine, and Richard Attenborough. This absorbing remake by John Moore, scripted by Scott Frank and Edward Burns, is shorter and more modestly cast (Dennis Quaid, Miranda Otto, Giovanni Ribisi), but in contrast to Steven Soderbergh’s recent recyclings, it proves that you can revisit a good movie without cynicism or disrespect. I could have done without the superfluous Mongolian heavies, and the cliff-hanging climax may be a mite overdone, but the old-fashioned theme of disaster as an existential test of character still works. With Tyrese Gibson and Jacob Vargas. PG-13, 93 min. (JR) Read more

Leonardo DiCaprio plays the obsessive billionaire, aviator, and filmmaker Howard Hughes in this enjoyably opulent biopic by Martin Scorsesea grand entertainment that may provoke curiosity about Hughes but doesn’t supply much original thought. With its stylish direction and John Logan’s clever but shallow script, the film totes up a good many Citizen Kane references to little effect. Yet Cate Blanchett delivers a witty and nuanced impersonation of Katharine Hepburn (one of Hughes’s many paramours), and there are colorful and glittering re-creations of the Cocoanut Grove and Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Best of all is a heart-stopping sequence in which Hughes crashes his XF-11 plane in Beverly Hills, though characteristically the movie doesn’t note whether anyone else was hurt. With Kate Beckinsale, Alec Baldwin, Ian Holm, Alan Alda, Danny Huston, and John C. Reilly. PG-13, 169 min. (JR) Read more

This watchable and provocative documentary by Robert Stone (Radio Bikini) was originally titled Neverland: The Rise and Fall of the Symbionese Liberation Army, which gives some idea of Stone’s approach to the west-coast radicals who kidnapped newspaper heiress and Berkeley undergrad Patricia Hearst in 1974. He’s especially interested in how effectively the SLA manipulated the media with its rhetoric when its political strategies, articulated by two former members in recent interviews, were both muddled and makeshift. (Hearst, who shocked America by declaring herself a member of the SLA and participating in one of its bank holdups, is rather scornfully viewed as going with the flow.) There are some instructive lessons here, but ironically few of them are political. 90 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 Duenas is a standout as one of them). The treatment of the sea, where Sampedro was crippled in a diving accident but to which he still feels a connection, is particularly lyrical. A film about freedom as well as death, this won’t suit every taste, but it rewards close attention and has moments of saving humor. In Spanish with subtitles. PG-13, 125 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Pipers Alley. 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. River East 21. Read more

A comfortable Bel Air couple (Adam Sandler, Tea Leoni) hire a young Mexican woman (Paz Vega) as housekeeper for their family, and when they move to Malibu for the summer, she brings along her 12-year-old daughter, setting off a string of familial, interfamilial, and cultural crises. James L. Brooks (Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News), who wrote and directed this gripping, sometimes provocative comedy drama, is usually either scorned or applauded for his adept juggling of sitcom techniques. This movie may not change anyone’s mind, but I was impressed by Brooks’s flair in carrying much of the story with unsubtitled Spanish dialogue, and Sandler gives his most finely detailed performance to date as a committed parent and successful restaurateur-chef. He and Vega help to compensate for Leoni as one of Brooks’s self-destructive neurotics, an overdirected and overplayed character who functions mainly as a sitting duck. With Cloris Leachman. PG-13, 128 min. (JR) Read more

This masterwork by Ousmane Sembene, the 81-year-old father of African cinema and one of Senegal’s greatest novelists, is the second film in a trilogy celebrating African women (after Faat Kin Read more

Two disturbed young siblings return home from the hospital and resume an acrimonious life with their father and stepmother in writer-director Kim Jee-woon’s horror movie, the third-largest-grossing South Korean film of 2003. In theory it’s an ambiguous ghost story, like The Turn of the Screw, that deliberately obscures the distinction between the supernatural and the imaginary, but in practice the awkward storytelling and spotty exposition reduce it to a string of rude shocksnot even the eventual denouement provides a lucid enough account of where this is all coming from. It’s roughly three parts Brian De Palma to one part Val Lewton; I would have preferred the reverse. In Korean with subtitles. 115 min. (JR) Read more

Adapted from a novel by Barbara Gowdy, this 2003 Canadian feature centers on three adolescent sisters growing up with alcoholic, hyperbolically dysfunctional parents in the shadow of a secret family tragedy. This is set in a small town during the 60s, and initially I was bugged by the implicit assumption that the times were every bit as crazy as the depressive mother (Miranda Richardson) and tyrannical soldier father (Callum Keith Rennie). But after a while the sisters’ stories become more substantial; I was especially touched by the everyday reality of Mont Read more

Written, produced, and directed by Kent Mackenzie, this low-budget independent feature (1961) deserves to be ranked with John Cassavetes’s Shadows, but it languished unseen for nearly four decades until Thom Andersen celebrated it in his 2003 video essay Los Angeles Plays Itself. Pitched somewhere between fiction and documentary, with nonprofessional actors improvising postsynced dialogue and internal monologues, it follows a few uprooted Native Americans from Friday night to Saturday morning in the Bunker Hill district of Los Angeles. Its moving portraiture is refreshingly free of cliches and moralizing platitudes, and the high-contrast black-and-white photography and dense, highly creative sound track are equally impressive (even the occasional imprecise lip sync seems justified). Mackenzie lived only long enough to make one other feature–Saturday Morning (1971), which I haven’t seen–but this film’s lower-case urban poetry suggests a major talent. 72 min. Saturday 12/11, 3:30 PM, and Thursday 12/16, 8 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center. Read more

This masterwork by Ousmane Sembene, the 81-year-old father of African cinema and one of Senegal’s greatest novelists, is the second film in a trilogy celebrating African women (after Faat Kine, a 2000 comedy about a sassy, self-made city woman). It focuses on the defiant second wife of an elder in a West African village who refuses to allow four little girls to undergo the traditional circumcision ceremony. Among Sembene’s strengths as a storyteller are deceptive simplicity and apparent looseness, which allow his drama to steadily gather momentum and political force. His ambiguous, multilayered treatment of a flirtatious local merchant who partially represents the world outside the village is emblematic of his virtuosity. In Bambara with subtitles. 120 min. Music Box. Read more

Wesley Snipes returns for a third go-round as Blade, a half vampire, half human trying to prevent bloodsuckers from taking over the world. The only one who seems to be having much fun, though, is Parker Posey, camping it up as one of the vampires. Blade teams up with a couple of other vampire hunters (Jessica Biel and Ryan Reynolds), and Kris Kristofferson, his cohort in the two previous chapters, turns up again. But the true costar here is Dominic Purcell as a vampire who’s said to be even older than Dracula (though he looks like conventional beefcake) and breaks as much glass and kicks as much butt as Snipes. David S. Goyer, who scripted the first Blade movie, directed. R, 105 min. Read more

Writer-director Eugene Green was born in the U.S. but is currently an academic based in France, and this 2003 oddity, his second feature, seems more classically French than many French releases. A charming medieval fairy tale (in partially modern dress) about two knights trying to rescue children from an ogre, it periodically suggests the work of Robert Bresson, though largely stripped of its materiality and violence. The handling of animalsmost notably a dog playing a lionis especially sweet and gentle, and for all its mannerist tics, this has its share of enchantments. In French with subtitles. 75 min. (JR) Read more

Renee Zellweger adopts a plausible English accent to play the title character of Helen Fielding’s popular novel, a lovable nebbish who gets involved with her boss (Hugh Grant) at a London publishing house. As likable as Zellweger is, I could have done without all the pushy tactics of this 2001 romantic comedy, which guarantees at least one complete character reversal every half hour and a golden oldie blasting on the sound track every time your attention threatens to wander. It’s so aggressive you don’t even have to like it; the movie likes itself well enough for the both of you. Sharon Maguire directed a script by Fielding, Andrew Davies, and Richard Curtis. Colin Firth costars; with Gemma Jones and Jim Broadbent. R, 92 min. (JR) Read more