Jonathan Rosenbaum

Another noirish heist movie stained by drippings from The Killing, The Asphalt Jungle, and, yes, Reservoir Dogs. Written by newcomer Eddie Richey and directed by English-born Danny Cannon (Judge Dredd), this boasts occasional signs of intelligence , atmosphere, and style as well as some nicely lit ‘Scope cinematography around Phoenix, Arizona, by James L. Carter (One False Move). But, alas, there’s very little forward motion. Coproducer Ray Liotta, playing a cop with gambling debts who organizes the heist, is asked to carry the whole picture on his back; he can’t be blamed if periodically it slides off. Despite some able work by Anjelica Huston, Tom Noonan, and Giancarlo Esposito, among others, the material and its inflection seem entirely too familiar. With Anthony LaPaglia, Daniel Baldwin, Jeremy Piven, and Brittany Murphy. (JR) Read more

This 1959 Doris Day vehicle, costarring Rock Hudson and Tony Randall, launched a cycle of romantic comedies predicated on her character’s chastity; Mark Rappaport unpacked its extended gay-baiting innuendo in his 1992 film Rock Hudson’s Home Movies. Compulsively mainstream as only 50s Hollywood could be, and never very funny, Pillow Talk won Day an Oscar nomination, and the story and screenplay, by Stanley Shapiro, Russell Rouse, and others, actually copped an award. Directed by Michael Gordon; with Thelma Ritter, Nick Adams, Julia Meade, Allen Jenkins, Lee Patrick, and William Schallert. 108 min. (JR) Read more

The title of Tony Gatlif’s 1997 French feature is Romany for crazy stranger; the stranger, our main point of identification, is a young scholar and music buff from France who scours the Romanian countryside looking for a legendary singer until a direct and extended encounter with Gypsy culture throws him for a loop. The third part of Gatlif’s Gypsy Trilogyafter Latcho Drom (which I revere) and The Princes (which I haven’t seen)this is a pretty good romantic comedy with neither the formal originality nor the musical excitement of Latcho Drom, though it’s certainly watchable and entertaining throughout. In French with subtitles. 121 min. (JR) Read more

The seventh Halloween film has been marketed as the last, which may actually turn out to be the case, as there’s an earnest and successful attempt to give the series a satisfying closure. Jamie Lee Curtiswho made her reputation on the first Halloween but dropped out of the series after the secondis now, 20 years later, teaching at an exclusive private school in northern California, raising a son as a single mother, and once again trying to fend off her murderously insane brother, who won’t stay dead. If you can accept the flouting of logic and credibility that usually goes with this kind of horror picture, this scary and suspenseful genre exercise, chock-full of false alarms and brutal shocks, really delivers, and Curtis approaches the assignment without a trace of condescension. Directed by Steve Miner from a script by Robert Zappia and others; with Michelle Williams, Josh Hartnett, LL Cool J, and Adam Arkin, and an amusing cameo by Curtis’s mother, Janet Leigh. (JR) Read more

Jonathan Stack and Elizabeth Garbus’s powerful documentary, winner of the grand jury prize at Sundance, focuses on six long-term inmates at the Louisiana state penitentiaryan 18,000-acre complex on the grounds of a former slave plantation, with 5,000 inmates, 77 percent of them black. It Read more

A tale of moral regeneration from Shohei Imamura, adapted from Akira Yoshimura’s novel Sparkles in the Darkness. A white-collar worker spends eight years in prison after brutally murdering his wife and her lover; released to the supervision of a Buddhist priest in a small coastal town, he becomes a barber and relates almost exclusively to a pet eel he adopted while incarcerated. After saving the life of a suicidal woman who resembles his late wife, the barber makes her his assistant, yet the growing bond between them is complicated by her crazed mother and her ex-lover. The film brims over with various eccentrics (the barber’s ufologist neighbor and a former prison mate who harasses the hero and delivers drunken tirades), and Imamura views them all with amusement and curiosity; he also does striking things with dream sequences and visual and aural flashbacks. At Cannes this shared the 1997 Palme d’Or with Taste of Cherry, and though I don’t consider it on the same level, it’s absorbing throughout. In Japanese with subtitles. 116 min. (JR) Read more

Troy Beyera seven-year veteran of Sesame Street who went on to play the female lead in Robert Wise’s Rooftops and script B.A.P.S.wrote, directed, and appears in this low-budget independent feature. She plays a Miami advice columnist trying to launch a TV talk show in which young women talk about sex; Paget Brewster and Randi Ingerman play her two best friends, who help her shoot her pilot and talk a lot about their own sex lives. The sound bites of real interviews that punctuate this romantic comedy-drama give it some flavor and raunchy directness, but the movie turns phony every time a big emotional scene is called for and fatuous elevator music (its volume turned way up) chimes in. With Joseph C. Phillips, Michaline Babich, and Tina Nguyen. (JR) Read more

Halloween: H20

The seventh Halloween film is being described as the last, and that may actually turn out to be the case because there’s an earnest and successful attempt to give the series a satisfying closure. Jamie Lee Curtis–who made her reputation on the first Halloween but hasn’t been part of the series since the second–is now, 20 years later, teaching at an exclusive private school in northern California, raising a son as a single mother, and once again trying to fend off her murderously insane brother, who won’t stay dead. If you can accept the flouting of logic and credibility that usually goes with this kind of horror picture, this scary and suspenseful genre exercise, chock-full of false alarms and brutal shocks, really delivers, and Curtis approaches the assignment without a trace of condescension. Directed by Steve Miner from a script by Robert Zappia and others; with Michelle Williams, Josh Hartnett, LL Cool J, and Adam Arkin, and an amusing cameo by Curtis’s mother, Janet Leigh. Bel-Air Drive-In, Bricktown Square, Chatham 14, Ford City, Golf Glen, Lawndale, North Riverside, Plaza, 62nd & Western, Village North, Webster Place. –Jonathan Rosenbaum

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

The Governess

Like Jane Campion’s The Piano, this first feature by writer-director Sandra Goldbacher is less a story about the 19th century than a fantasy about the 19th century, and as such even more erotic. The singular Minnie Driver (Circle of Friends, Good Will Hunting) plays a stagestruck Sephardic Jew in London in the 1840s. After her father is murdered she has to support her surviving family and, concealing her Jewish identity, secures a job as a governess on a remote Scottish island. The man of the house (Tom Wilkinson) is an inventor experimenting with photography, and after serving as his lab assistant she becomes romantically involved with him, though she’s also pursued by his troubled adolescent son (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). Goldbacher’s story is not always convincing as history, but it’s absorbing as a sort of gothic romance and sensually quite potent, and Driver carries it all with grace and authority. With Florence Hoath, Harriet Walter, and Bruce Myers. Evanston, Pipers Alley. –Jonathan Rosenbaum

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Return to Paradise

Compared to the self-righteous xenophobia and hypocritical pornography of Oliver Stone and Alan Parker’s Midnight Express, this drama about a Malaysian drug bust and its consequences for three young Americans is serious, intelligent, and powerful. Three buddies (Vince Vaughn, David Conrad, and Joaquin Phoenix) do some adolescent carousing in Malaysia, then the first two leave the third behind. Two years later a lawyer (Anne Heche) notifies them that their friend has been arrested for possession of hashish, has been serving a prison term, and will be hung unless they go back to share the blame. If they both go back, each will have to serve three years, but if only one goes back, he’ll have to serve six. None of the moral ramifications of this dilemma is avoided, and to the film’s credit the behavior of the American press seems more questionable than the machinations of third-world justice. Directed by the talented Joseph Ruben (The Stepfather, Sleeping With the Enemy) and sharply written by Wesley Strick and Bruce Robinson, who adapted a 1989 fact-based French feature by Pierre Jolivet, Force majeure. With Jada Pinkett Smith. Broadway, Evanston, Lake, McClurg Court. –Jonathan Rosenbaum

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Skirt Power

From Malian director Adama Drabo comes this exuberant magical-realist comedy (1997) in which an 18th-century village’s war between the sexes casts a distinctly modern light on the role of women in Mali’s 1991 revolution. An abused young wife of the Dogon people steals a tribal mask ordinarily worn by men, demanding that they exchange roles with the women and take over the household chores; the men prove so inept that they’re exhausted by the end of the day, and some of them pretend to be asleep when their wives make sexual demands. Drabo’s relatively low-tech special effects are beautiful and charming, and his fascination with tribal rituals is balanced by a sharp sense of the contemporary (the film opens with a group of present-day city dwellers watching a Depression-era Hollywood musical on TV; a woman who insists on sitting in the “men’s section” inspires a traditional griot to recount the story of the Dogons). As in Souleymane Cisse’s remarkable Brightness, mythology and the politics of everyday life are intimately intertwined, and the film captures the wonder of a world where magic still lives. Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Friday, August 7, 6:00, and Sunday, August 9, 4:00, 312-443-3737. Read more

A piece of whimsy, set in Providence, involving two terrible singers (Sam Rockwell and Steve Zahn) who are mistaken for safecrackers and become entangled with rival Jewish gangsters (Michael Lerner and Harvey Fierstein). Writer-director John Hamburg’s American indie comedy is no great shakes as a movie, but it carries a distinct goofball charm. The crosscutting’s awkward (most obtrusively at the beginning and end) and motivations are barely sketched out, but the actors seem to be having a pretty good time. How amused you’ll be, though, will have a lot to do with how long you can remain tickled by such conceits as a bar mitzvah in which father and son are dressed in sweat suits. With Paul Giamatti, Christina Kirk, and Michael Schmidt. (JR) Read more

Like Jane Campion’s The Piano, this 1998 first feature by writer-director Sandra Goldbacher is less a story about the 19th century than a fantasy about it, and as such even more erotic. The singular Minnie Driver plays a stagestruck Sephardic Jew in London in the 1840s. After her father is murdered she has to support her surviving family and, concealing her Jewish identity, secures a job as a governess on a remote Scottish island. The man of the house (Tom Wilkinson) is an inventor experimenting with photography, and after serving as his lab assistant she becomes romantically involved with him, though she’s also pursued by his troubled adolescent son (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). Goldbacher’s story is not always convincing as history, but it’s absorbing as a sort of gothic romance and sensually quite potent, and Driver carries it all with grace and authority. With Florence Hoath, Harriet Walter, and Bruce Myers. 112 min. (JR) Read more

A rare example of independent cinema from mainland Chinaprivately financed, shot without authorization in Beijing, credited pseudonymously to Wu Ming (which means nobody in Chinese), and smuggled out of the countrythis odd and disturbing 1997 feature follows the morose tale of a performance artist who stages his own suicide. On the longest day of the year he plans to kill himself by melting a large block of ice with his own body warmth, a performance he calls Funeral in Ice. Given the importance of this film as a provocation and an act of courage, I wish I liked it more, but I can’t deny that there’s nothing else like it. (JR) Read more

A program of jazz-related films, showing in conjunction with the Chicago Jazz Festival. John Coney directed the 1974 film Space Is the Place, starring and cowritten by avant-garde composer, musician, and bandleader Sun Ra. In The Spitball Story, Jean Bach, director of the remarkable A Great Day in Harlem, uses the same techniques of oral history and thumbnail jazz portraiture to tell the story of why Dizzy Gillespie was fired from the Cab Calloway band and how this transformed his career; the film isn Read more