Jonathan Rosenbaum

Written for Found Footage during the pandemic.

What does it mean to be, as Stanley Kwan’s title has it, Center Stage (1992)? Insofar as it’s possible to deal with the present moment — that is to say, the present pandemic moment — historically, I think that one of the most dubious and objectionable words repeatedly intoned with gravity by TV news commentators and pundits is in fact the word historic. Given an extra spin in some cases by American exceptionalism, even during a period when our President Donald Trump has opted out of many of our accords and treaties, it is used smugly and even narcissistically yet also quite vaguely to describe us and our current experience, as if to distinguish both as being somehow superior to or on a higher plain than those who preceded us or those who will come afterwards — our supposedly ahistoric (and therefore less important) grandparents and grandchildren and what they had or will have to deal with. This is arguably little more than a futile effort to legitimize and glamorize our inertia and helplessness by asserting that the mere fact that we’re alive during an awful period automatically makes us historical. Simply put, it’s our mute suffering that allegedly brings significance to our troubled times, not our existential decisions. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (March 1, 1991), slightly revised November 30, 2021. — J.R.

Conceivably the second best picture Sam Goldwyn ever produced (after The Best Years of Our Lives), this 1955 blockbuster musical has an undeservedly bad rep, largely because the two leads — Marlon Brando as professional gambler Sky Masterson and Jean Simmons as Salvation Army recruiter Sarah Brown — aren’t professional singers. In fact, they both do wonders with Frank Loesser’s dynamite score because they perform their numbers with feeling and sincerity, and their efforts to live up to their material are perfectly in tune with the aspirations of their characters (as well as the songs themselves). In short, this may be the only Method musical. Joseph L. Mankiewicz does a creditable job with the stylized, stagy sets and the pungent vernacular of the original Damon Runyon material (which he also adapted). Also on hand, and at their very best, are Frank Sinatra (as Nathan Detroit), Vivian Blaine (as Adelaide), Stubby Kaye, B.S. Pully, Veda Ann Borg, and Johnny Silver. 150 min. (JR)

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This ran in the May 1, 1992 issue of Chicago Reader. Criterion brought out a new Blu-Ray edition of this film yesterday, with many extras, so I’ve just looked at it again, and enjoyed it somewhat better this time, particularly for its pacing. My piece strikes me now as unduly peevish in spots, in part because I was reviewing the hype as much as the movie (I especially regret my swipe at Terrence Rafferty), although I still agree with much of it — and am pleased that Sam Wasson’s essay for the Criterion release agrees with one of my major arguments when he writes, “Far from making the trenchant, bitter satire so many critics would describe even after they saw the movie, Altman bypassed The Day of the Locust for Our Town and actually made a charmed, even gleeful movie about his so-called nemesis. That’s why so many people in Hollywood love The Player.” — J.R.

THE PLAYER

* (Has redeeming facet)

Directed by Robert Altman

Written by Michael Tolkin

With Tim Robbins, Greta Scacchi, Fred Ward, Whoopi Goldberg, Peter Gallagher, Brion James, Cynthia Stevenson, and Dean Stockwell.

Movies-about-moviemaking tend to come in two flavors: the celebratory (Day for Night, Singin’ in the Rain) and the sardonic (Sunset Boulevard, The Bad and the Beautiful, Barton Fink). Read more

Jonathan Rosenbaum

Written for MUBI in 2026.

We live in this fucking world now where empathy is supposed to be a weakness, right? So for me, I hope there’s something empathetic in everything I do.

—Jim Jarmusch

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Set in three countries across three parts, Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother (2025) is geographically expansive but dramatically concentrated. The plot of each section—from “Father” to “Mother” to “Sister Brother”—is minimal, recording families’ efforts to become reacquainted over coffee or tea. Thanks to generational gaps and prolonged periods of absence, attempts at reconnection between parents and their grown children are often faltering, and not always successful. The effect is both tragic and comic—at least until the third section, when the restless editing between isolated characters gives way to longer, relaxed takes and meditative pans, opening up to heartfelt rather than dutiful forms of affection.

Various actors from previous Jarmusch films appear in Father Mother Sister Brother. Father, for instance, is played by Tom Waits, who has worked with Jarmusch on five other features. Here, his elusive and eccentric character lives in a house beside a placid lake in rural New Jersey, and he deliberately disarranges his living room ahead of an afternoon visit from his daughter, Emily (Mayim Bialik), and his son, Jeff (Adam Driver). Read more

From the March 18, 1994 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

The anarchistic and unpredictable English director Alex Cox (Repo Man, Sid & Nancy, Walker) goes bilingual in this 1992 Mexican picture, spoken in Spanish throughout. In some ways it’s his best work to date — a beautifully realized tale about the life of a Mexican highway patrolman who’s neither sentimentalized nor treated like a villain: he takes bribes, but has a sense of ethics. Wonderfully played by Mexican star Roberto Sosa, he’s a more believable cop than any Hollywood counterparts that come to mind. Starting off as a sadsack comedy with black overtones, the film gravitates into grim neorealism, but Cox also displays a flair for surrealist filigree (worthy of Bunuel in spots) and straight-ahead action, and does some marvelous things with actors and the Mexican landscape. In some respects, this is a return to the funky, witty pleasures of Repo Man, but the virtuoso long-take camera style — there are only 187 cuts in the entire movie — and emotional depth show a more mature Cox. (I hope the other Mexican feature he made around the same time — a masterful, baroque black-and-white adaptation of Jorge Luis Borges’s “Death and the Compass” done for the BBC, with a camera style suggesting Touch of Evil — will eventually be imported as well.) Read more

From the Chicago Reader.

A wounded Irish revolutionary (James Mason at his near best) on the run in Belfast encounters a cross section of human responses — self-interest, indifference, empathy, and charity — in this arty 1946 English thriller directed by Carol Reed and adapted by F.L. Green and R.C. Sherriff from Green’s novel. This may be Reed’s most pretentious film, but it also happens to be one of his very best, beautifully capturing the poetry of a city at night (with black-and-white cinematography by Robert Krasker that’s within hailing distance of Gregg Toland and Stanley Cortez’s work with Orson Welles). It also has a splendid cast — including Robert Newton, Kathleen Ryan, F.J. McCormick, Cyril Cusack, and Dan O’Herlihy — that wrings the utmost, and then some, out of the quasi-allegorical material. 115 min. (JR)

A column for Caiman Cuadernos de Cine, submitted March 19, 2022. — J.R.

While preparing a book that collects some of my film criticism, jazz criticism, and literary criticism and tries to correlate certain shared formal attributes of the three corresponding arts, I’ve been lamenting the absence of recordings of the very jazzy and literary lectures on film that Manny Farber gave at the University of California, San Diego in the 1970s, some of which I attended. They seemed improvised, even though he spent a long time preparing them.

Sometimes he delivered portions in voiceovers while the film was still running, as if having an argument with the filmmaker. For those who can now read Farber In Spanish, his breezy, blustery style also seems Influenced both by jazz and the writers he read, although the fact that he hung out with East Coast action painters also left a mark. In short, his writing and his lectures were both performative events full of suspenseful moments and humorous surprises.

So is Jean-Pierre Gorin’s A “Pierrot” Primer, a DVD extra on the 2008 Criterion edition of Godard’s Pierrot le fou, which quotes Farber but converts the Farber delivery into a style entirely Gorin’s own. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (September 17, 1999). Thanks to the courtesy of Tom Colley at the Video Data Bank, I’ve finally been able to see this strange film again, almost 23 years later, and have added a few second impressions and second thoughts. — J.R.

This 1998 Caspar Stracke feature is one of the rare experimental films in 35-millimeter, and though I could preview it only on video, it kept me fascinated even in that format. Stracke describes it as moving in a circle with neither a beginning nor an end; in the version I saw, the credits come in the middle. A lecture on the philosophical and psychoanalytic implications of the invention of the telephone by theorist Avital Ronell eventually turns into a story in black and white about a woman who has a lotus blossom growing in her left lung; at different times this film comes across as documentary, essay, performance art, and silent throwback (complete with intertitles and irises), and the capabilities and rhetoric associated with both computers and VCRs play a part in the continuously shifting and evolving discourse. Stracke will be present at the screening. Kino-Eye Cinema at Cinema Borealis, 1550 N. Milwaukee, Friday, September 17, 8:00, 773-293-1447. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (July 2, 1999). — J.R.

Run Lola Run

Rating ** Worth seeing

Directed and written by Tom Tykwer

With Franka Potente, Moritz Bleibtreu,

Herbert Knaup, Armin Rohde, and Joachim Krol.

A low-budget no-brainer, Run Lola Run is a lot more fun than Speed, a big-budget no-brainer from five years ago. It’s just as fast moving, the music is better, and though the characters are almost as hackneyed and predictable, the conceptual side has a lot more punch. If Run Lola Run had opened as widely as Speed and it too had been allowed to function as everyday mall fodder, its release could have been read as an indication that Americans were finally catching up with people in other countries when it comes to the pursuit of mindless pleasures. Instead it’s opening at the Music Box as an art movie.

Why try to sell an edgy youth thriller with nothing but kicks on its mind as an art movie? After all, it’s only a movie — a rationale that was trotted out for Speed more times than I care to remember. The dialogue of Run Lola Run is certainly simple and cursory, but it happens to be in subtitled German — which in business terms means that it has to be marketed as a film, not a movie. Read more