Jonathan Rosenbaum

From the looks of it, screenwriter and costar James McManus based his story and its details on a sizable reading list of novelists: not only Malcolm Lowry and Graham Greene (both cited in the dialogue), but also James M. Cain and probably David Goodis to boot. The story involves a would-be American novelist (Eric Roberts) who finds himself broke and stranded in a Mexican village. He falls in love with a 17-year-old local (newcomer Tara Crespo) he’s never met, and gets hired by another gringo (McManus), who’s working for a local philanthropist (Joaquim de Almeida), to settle a grudge match by killing another wealthy local (Victor Rivers). The dialogue tends to be wordy and pretentious, but the actors are resourceful enough to keep this watchable and the plot has a reasonable number of twists; Jack Perez is the director. (JR) Read more

Funny as well as poignant, this 1999 comedy stars Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence as New York bootleggers sentenced to life in a Mississippi prison after being framed for murder in 1932. This might be better than anything either comedian has done before; at least it made me laugh more. A movie about black men in prison comes dangerously close to being a movie about contemporary reality, and part of what I like about Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone’s episodic screenplay and Ted Demme’s mainly self-effacing direction is how many real-life issues it manages to broach without ever threatening to become pompous. Character humor growing out of adversity has a long and venerable tradition, and if this in part suggests a street-smart Forrest Gump, it also recalls the euphoric gusto of W.C. Handy’s song Long Gone as performed by Louis Armstrong. As is expected by now in a Murphy movie, the makeup effects (handled by the ace Rick Baker) are elaborate, but little of this is asked to replace performance; Murphy and Lawrence and the secondary cast, which includes Obba Babatunde, Bokeem Woodbine, Ned Beatty, and R. Lee Ermey, all do a fine job. (JR) Read more

Developed from a screenplay by Anne Rapp, best known as a script supervisor, this is an uncharacteristically subdued as well as (mainly) good-natured effort by Robert Altman, set in the new south but without the more bogus trimmings of Nashville and Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. At the center of the doings in Holly Springs, Mississippi, is the friendship between an oddball matriarchal widow (Patricia Neal) and a middle-aged black man (Charles S. Dutton); other important characters include the widow’s two estranged nieces (Glenn Close and Julianne Moore), the daughter of one of the nieces (Liv Tyler), a catfish supplier (Lyle Lovett), and a sheriff’s deputy (Chris O’Donnell). Most of what transpires is low-key, affectionate comedy and a fair amount of fun. (JR) Read more

A Man Escaped

Based on a French lieutenant’s account of his 1942 escape from a gestapo fortress in Lyons, this stately yet uncommonly gripping 1956 feature is my choice as the greatest achievement of our greatest living filmmaker, Robert Bresson (rivaled only by his more corrosive and metaphysical Au hasard Balthazar a decade later). The best of all prison-escape movies, it reconstructs the very notion of freedom through offscreen sounds and defines salvation in terms of painstakingly patient and meticulous effort. Bresson himself spent part of the war in an internment camp and subsequently lived through the German occupation of France, experiences that inform his magisterial grasp of what concentrated use of sound and image can reveal about souls in hiding. Thanks to the untiring efforts of the Cinematheque Ontario’s James Quandt, the Film Center is presenting a nearly complete retrospective of Bresson’s work in new 35-millimeter prints this spring (missing only his 1934 short Affaires publiques); it offers a unique opportunity to experience this awesome talent, whose artistry is severely compromised on video. If you follow only one film series this year, you couldn’t do much better than this one. Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Thursday, April 8, 8:00, 312-443-3737. Read more

Comic film essayist Nanni Moretti may be an acquired tastea taste acquired by a good many viewers in Italy and France, where he’s a major cult figurebut I can’t think of a better introduction to his work than this 1998 feature about his struggles with fatherhood and Italian politics and how they interface. I don’t know if this means Aprile is his best film, but either because familiarity breeds affection or because his style is becoming fleeter, this is the Moretti feature I’ve found easiest to enjoy. The month of April is when his son is born and when Italy’s first left-wing government is elected; it’s also when Moretti decides to delay his favorite film projecta musical centered on a Trotskyite pastry chefto make a documentary about the upcoming election. Neither movie gets made, but we wind up getting tantalizing glimpses of both and learning a lot about contemporary Italyand Moretti’s special blend of the personal and the politicalin the process. 78 min. (JR) Read more

This first feature by Erick Zonca (1998) is more typical than exceptional as an example of French cinema Read more

I’ve seen five of the seven short films in this touring program, reportedly culled from a thousand entries representing 32 countries (though except for Canadian and Belgian entries and a Spanish-language film shot by an American student in Ecuador, everything here is from the U.S.). Most of them are pretty good, even if the categories under which they are listed (and presumably were submitted) can be enough to drive you bonkers. Bill Cote’s cutesy time-lapse account of his wife’s entire pregnancy, 17 Seconds to Sophie, is inexplicably termed experimental, while a genuinely experimental found-footage itemJay Rosenblatt’s Human Remains, a funny, creepy, and obviously speculative film on the lives of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Mao, and Stalinis perversely labeled documentary. The best direction is found in Enrique Chediak’s El rio, the funniest sensibility in Debra Solomon’s animated and satirical Everybody’s Pregnant. Also included: Sylvie Rosenthal’s Canadian film La bombe au chocolat ( a quirky look at information overload), Martine Doyen’s Belgian film Christmas in the Air, and Scott and Adam Fields’s The Script Doctor. (JR) Read more

It’s hard to imagine a more uncharacteristic David Mamet project: an adaptation of a genteel Terence Rattigan play from the mid-1940s about family affection and loyalty (previously adapted for a 1948 film directed by Anthony Asquith), which is based in turn on the 1910 trial of English naval cadet George Archer-Shee for a minor theftan event that became a national scandal due to the intransigence of both the government and the boy’s father. But this may be the most accomplished Mamet movie since House of Games, not only because he works so fruitfully with his excellent cast (Nigel Hawthorne, Jeremy Northam, Rebecca Pidgeon, Gemma Jones, Guy Edwards, and Matthew Pidgeon), but also because he offers a sturdy object lesson in how to attack period material of this kind without self-serving irony or condescension. 110 min. (JR) Read more

Czech filmmaker Gustav Machaty’s erotic 1929 silent feature is less impressive than his subsequent and most famous film, Ecstasy (1933), but it remains a striking mannerist work with affecting poetic touches. Chronicling a Prague playboy’s one-night stand with a provincial stationmaster’s daughter and the aftermath when she becomes pregnant, the film is somewhat dated in its conventional morality, yet its camera work is fluid and free, and overall the film vibrates with sensuality. (Credited as scene designer is Alexander Hackenschmied, who years later collaborated with Maya Deren on her early films under the name Alexander Hammid.) Machaty, a former assistant to Griffith and Stroheim, never fulfilled the promise of his early work and wound up making classy commercials for European TV, but he’s still a key figure in early Czech cinema, and the richer sections of this picture show why. (JR) Read more

Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s passionate 1975 account of the nonviolent efforts of Gerrard Winstanley (Miles Halliwell) to form a commune in Surrey, England, in 1649 is a quixotic yet hardy attempt to change the way we think about history. Made independently between the late 60s and early 70s and shot in black and white, the film strives for a period verisimilitude so uncompromising and multifaceted that the filmmakers made strenuous efforts to use species of birds, cows, and pigs similar to those that populated 17th-century Surrey. The style is deliberately patterned after silent cinema (Brownlow’s specialty as a film historian), though the script is partly derived from a contemporary novel about Winstanley, David Caute’s Comrade Jacob. Refusing to make facile links between Winstanley’s religious sect, the Diggers, and the English hippies of the 70s, Brownlow and Mollo regard the past with the same sort of awe that SF writers and directors commonly show regarding the future, and the results, while frequently dedramatized, are hauntingly mysterious and often beautiful. This may not be sufficiently achieved to deserve the label masterpiece, but it’s stayed with me longer than most period masterpieces have; in some ways, despite its meager budget, its only peer is Stanley Kubrick’s similarly underrated Barry Lyndon, made during the same period. Read more

This speculative 1966 feature by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo exemplifies English independent filmmaking at its most resourceful and intransigent. Paralleling Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, which imagined what North America might have become had Hitler won, the film portrays what England might have been like in 1944 had it been invaded and occupied by Germany four years earlier. Fanatically dedicated to period detail and refusing to fall back on stock footage, Brownlow started the film in 1956 at age 18, some time before enlisting military scholar Mollo as a full collaborator and a full decade before the film was finally released. Their decision to use real English fascists and proto-Nazis to express the views of their 1944 counterparts on Jews and euthanasia led to the film’s most interesting sequence being suppressed in the 60s, and it took Brownlow over 30 years to regain the rights to the film so he could restore it, making this the Chicago premiere of the film’s full and original version. As narrative it can be dry and unemphatic (most of the actors are nonprofessionals), but as speculation it’s highly convincing and endlessly fascinating. The beautiful black-and-white cinematography is by Peter Suschitzky, who went on to work for John Boorman, Ken Russell, George Lucas, Tim Burton, and most recently David Cronenberg. Read more

A striking first feature (1998) from Kyrgyzstanin fact, the first independent feature ever made in that countryabout everyday life in a rural village, including the pastimes of little boys. The young hero discovers that he’s adopted, following a local tradition of large families giving babies to childless couples. The beautiful cinematography is mainly in black and white, but every shift to color feels like a small miracle, and filmmaker Aktan Abdikalikov is equally adept at building his nuanced sound track piece by piece. (JR) Read more

An interesting, offbeat 1997 French road movie by Manuel Poirier, about a Spanish lady-killer (Sergi Lopez) and a Russian immigrant (Sacha Bourdo) traveling and quarreling their way through Brittany. A rambling but ultimately rather affecting comedy-drama by a talented filmmaker who’s almost completely unknown here, this has a deft feel for lower-middle-class life in rural France that registered strongly on its home front. (JR) Read more

Another Russian gangster film, you may groan at first, as I did at the onset of this 1997 feature by writer-director Alexei Balabanov (who made the remarkable 1995 short Trofilm). But the further this movie develops, the better it gets — not only as a hard-edged look at Russian life today but also as a finely nuanced psychological study. Starring Sergei Bodrov Jr. (Prisoner of the Mountains), this follows the ups and downs of a young man who returns to Saint Petersburg after leaving the army and discovers that his brother is a hit man. In Russian with subtitles. 99 min. (JR) Read more

Mel Gibson plays a state’s witness in hiding who runs into his college girlfriend (Goldie Hawn), now a prominent lawyer, who thought he died in the 60s. They wind up fleeing cross-country together from two murderous corrupt DEA agents (Bill Duke and David Carradine), who are using the government’s computer technology to track them down. John Badham directed this romantic comedy-adventure romp from a script by David Seltzer, Louis Venosta, and Eric Lerner; it isn’t exactly art but it works pretty well as entertainmentat least until the overproduced and undernourished conclusion, where formulaic predictability sets in, along with certain gaps in logic and continuity (e.g., escaping from the deadly killers, the couple write them a note explaining where they’re going). Hawn and Gibson work well together, and both are encouraged to show a lot of leg; with Stephen Tobolowsky and Joan Severance, who manages to shine in a small part despite some far-fetched dialogue. (JR) Read more