Jonathan Rosenbaum

A frigid kleptomaniac who faints a lot (Sandrine Kiberlain) seeks therapy from a mysterious hypnotist (Francois Berleaud); he begins to cure her using feng shui, but as she recovers, her surgeon husband (Vincent Lindon) starts to lose his own bearings. This curious, unsatisfying 1997 French comedy-drama by Benoit Jacquot (A Single Girl) initially calls to mind Otto Preminger’s 1949 thriller Whirlpool but winds up in New Age territory I can barely fathom. The notion of one spouse suffering from the other’s recovery is provocative, but neither the characters nor the therapeutic particulars seem adequately developed. Read more

Two films by the young French writer-director Francois Ozon, both in similar seaside settings. The 52-minute See the Sea (1997) is a gripping and extremely creepy tale of an encounter between two young women, a new mother, and a mysterious backpacker who asks to camp out on her lawn; this is very accomplished work, but I didn’t much care for it, mainly because its dark pessimism seems to have been adopted like a clothing style rather than arrived at existentially. More lighthearted (and much more lightweight) is the 15-minute A Summer Dress (1996), a comedy about gender bending and cross-dressing. (JR) Read more

Formerly an enterprising producer (Point Blank, Raging Bull) but nowadays a not very good director (The Net), Irwin Winkler has the annoying habit of taking on potent materialsuch as the Hollywood blacklist in Guilty by Suspicion and Jules Dassin’s Night and the City in a remake of the same nameand draining it of practically everything that makes it matter. Here he comes dangerously close to doing the same with Oliver Sacks’s nonfiction story To See and Not See, about a blind man whose sight was restored. He glamorizes, romanticizes, and simplifies the material to an insulting degree, but despite his worst efforts fragments of what made the original story arresting manage to leak through. Val Kilmer, clearly pleased to be entering the Oscar disability sweepstakes, does what he can as the hunk who learns how to see, and Mira Sorvino plays the architect who falls for him; with Kelly McGillis, Bruce Davison, and Nathan Lane. (JR) Read more

A multifaceted misfire from writer-director Steven Zaillian that is especially disappointing as a follow-up to his first feature, Searching for Bobby Fischer, made with many members of that film’s production team. In retrospect, the conceptual coherence of the underrated earlier feature may have been protected by the relative absence of big-name stars. Here one has to contend with both the miscasting of John Travolta as a determined personal-injury attorney and an uneven script that appears to have been mangled by the sort of studio interference that superstars often impose or provoke. This project, based on a best-selling nonfiction book by Jonathan Harr about an attorney locking horns with two corporations over the contaminated water supply of a New England town where several children have died, demands the focus of something like Anatomy of a Murder or The Rainmaker. Instead it suffers from a scattershot approach. An excellent secondary castincluding Robert Duvall, Stephen Fry, Dan Hedaya, and Sydney Pollackisn’t allowed to build momentum, and Travolta’s character is established so poorly that he never functions properly as a through line. The theme remains strong, but the storytelling doesn’t do it justice. With Tony Shalhoub, William H. Macy, and Kathleen Quinlan. (JR) Read more

Four essential documentaries: Ivens’s Rain (1929) and New Earth (1934), Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), and Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955), with a text by Jean Cayrolstill possibly the best film ever made about the Holocaust, and the essential forerunner of Shoah. (JR) Read more

John Boorman’s 1998 docudrama about the contemporary Irish gangster Martin Cahill was critically acclaimed at Cannes as a return to form, though it flopped in London, allegedly because English teenagers couldn’t countenance a black-and-white film. It’s extremely competent, shot in ‘Scope (Boorman’s best screen format), and though it kept me absorbed it failed to win me over. I can no longer stomach the premise in so many Anglo-American crime pictures that mavericks are admirable simply because they’re mavericks. Cahill’s proud defiance of any authority, the basis of his legendary reputation, is proffered like an axiom for our uneasy awe. Boorman fills out this design with wit and polish, grandly assisted by Brendan Gleeson as Cahill, Jon Voight as his favorite adversary, and Maria Doyle Kennedy and Angeline Ball as his wife and sister-in-law (whom Cahill managed to romance simultaneously), but I still felt I was buying a very old suit of clothes. I’m told that Boorman objected to the jokey violence of GoodFellas; perhaps he undertook this project to express greater moral ambiguity about the underworld. But the same lesson is delivered far more effectively in pictures like The Public Enemy (1931) and Scarface (1932)not to mention Boorman’s own Point Blank (1967), which gives a surreal spin to the ambivalence. Read more

This is a video premiere of Alex Cox’s latest featurewhich was made on filmabout an innocent gambler (Vincent D’Onofrio) with a winning streak; others in the cast include Rebecca De Mornay, Michael Madsen, and Billy Bob Thornton. Assuming that Cox has approved this unorthodox premiere, it seems a fitting gesture of defiance from a talented anarchist filmmaker who is unjustly marginalized. (JR) Read more

One of the best essay films ever made on a cinematic subject, Thom Andersen’s remarkable and sadly neglected hour-long documentary (1974) adroitly combines biography, history, film theory, and philosophical reflection. Muybridge’s photographic studies of animal locomotion in the 1870s were a major forerunner of movies; even more interesting are his subsequent studies of diverse people, photographed against neutral backgrounds. Andersen’s perspectives on Muybridge are multifaceted and often surprising (characteristically, the film’s opening quotation is from Mao), and he presents Muybridge’s photographic sequences in various ways to spell out the many meanings of this fascinating precinematic work. Dean Stockwell narrates. On the same program, a 1927 Pathé documentary short in color, Hawaii. Univ. of Chicago Doc Films, 1212 E. 59th St., Monday, January 4, 7:00, 773-702-8575.

–Jonathan Rosenbaum

Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): film still. Read more

There’s less sense of period here and more feeling for terrain than in any other World War II movie that comes to mind. Terrence Malick’s strongest suits in his two previous features, Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978)a painterly sense of composition and a bold and original use of offscreen narrationare enhanced here, first by a successful wedding of ecology and narrative (which never quite happened in Days of Heaven) and second by the notion of a collective hero, which permits the internal monologues of many characters in turn. I haven’t read the James Jones novel this is based on, which some feel is his best, but Malick clearly is distancing the material philosophically and poetically, muting the drama periodically and turning it into reverie. This may have its occasional dull stretches, but in contrast to Saving Private Ryan it’s the work of a grown-up with something to say about the meaning and consequences of war. The fine cast includes Sean Penn, Adrien Brody, Jim Caviezel, Ben Chaplin, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Elias Koteas, Nick Nolte, John C. Reilly, and, in tiny parts, John Travolta and George Clooney. 170 min. (JR) Read more

My idea of hell is to be stuck in a David Rabe play, but this stagy adaptation of one that’s especially repulsive, glib, and misogynist (1998)about pals adrift in the world of Hollywood hype, and running a full two hoursis made minimally bearable by its all-star cast: Sean Penn, Kevin Spacey, Chazz Palminteri, Garry Shandling, Meg Ryan, Robin Wright Penn, and Anna Paquin. The endless male-bonding dialogues are directed (by Anthony Drazan) as if the woman trashing were good clean fun. At least Spacey has the wit to suggest the homoeroticism that hovers over the proceedings; everyone else seems bent on denying it. (JR) Read more

A remarkable Polish feature, expanded by Krzysztof Kieslowski from an episode in his Decalogue, in which each segment illustrates one of the Ten Commandments; the complete series is one of the key works in contemporary world cinema. A Short Film About Love (1988), located centrally in the housing complex that recurrently appears throughout The Decalogue, is about the voyeuristic relationship between a troubled 19-year-old postal worker and a woman he spies on every night through his telescopea relationship that becomes more complex and takes on certain overtones recalling Rear Window once the woman becomes aware of his gaze and eventually decides to seduce him. In Polish with subtitles. 86 min. (JR) Read more

A remarkable Polish feature, expanded by Krzysztof Kieslowski from an episode in his Decalogue, in which each segment illustrates one of the Ten Commandments; the complete series is one of the key works in contemporary world cinema. A Short Film About Killing (1987) might be called terminally Polish in its bleak handling of a brutal murder and the public execution of the murderer; winner of the jury prize at Cannes, it’s possibly the most powerful movie ever made about the death penalty. In Polish with subtitles. 84 min. (JR) Read more

One of the best essay films ever made on a cinematic subject, Thom Andersen’s remarkable and sadly neglected hour-long documentary (1974) adroitly combines biography, history, film theory, and philosophical reflection. Muybridge’s photographic studies of animal locomotion in the 1870s were a major forerunner of movies; even more interesting are his subsequent studies of diverse people, photographed against neutral backgrounds. Andersen’s perspectives on Muybridge are multifaceted and often surprising (characteristically, the film’s opening quotation is from Mao), and he presents Muybridge’s photographic sequences in various ways to spell out the many meanings of this fascinating precinematic work. Dean Stockwell narrates. (JR) Read more

An embittered middle-aged woman (Fernanda Montenegro) who lives alone in Rio de Janeiro and works in the central railway station writing letters for the illiterate poor (whom she generally despises) gets a new lease on life when she meets a nine-year-old boy whose mother has been run over by a bus. It’s difficult to write or even think about such a movie without falling into sentimental cliches, and that gives me pausethough this 1998 film held my interest for two hours, even taking on an epic feel when it turns into a road movie. It’s not bad by any means, but it also happens to resemble a lot of other movies. Walter Salles directed with a good sense of wide-screen open spaces. In Portuguese with subtitles. 113 min. (JR) Read more

Howard Hawks’s last feature, released in 1970. If it were better and more substantial, one might call it his King Learan expression of rage at the frustrations and humiliations of agingrather than the lighthearted western it’s supposed to be. But while no Hawks movie can be considered a total loss, this reductive replay of Rio Bravo and El Dorado is too peevish to qualify as tragic, and only occasionally funny; the fact that its best action sequence, the first, was directed by the second unit is emblematic of Hawks’s relative lack of engagement with the material. The best thing about this effort is its likable cast, headed by John Wayne and including Jorge Rivero, Jennifer O’Neill, Jack Elam, and Chris Mitchum. (JR) Read more