Jonathan Rosenbaum

The plot of the film delivers a number of satisfying twists and turns, claims Columbia Pictures in a press handout for this crime story set in the Florida Everglades. To ensure that audiences can fully enjoy these surprises, we ask that you please not disclose the events and ending. So let me concentrate, rather, on disclosing the philosophy of the movie, which John McNaughton directed from a screenplay by Stephen Peters. What I’m supposed to find satisfying is predicated on the idea that almost everyone in the world is trash. Unfortunately, when one goes along with this premise, who does what and to whom doesn’t matter a whole lot. Maybe the film will keep you amusedand maybe not. Despite the castKevin Bacon, Matt Dillon, Neve Campbell, Denise Richards, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Theresa Russell, Robert Wagner, and Bill MurrayI found it preposterous. (JR) Read more

Maybe I’m just a sucker for backstage stories about theater people as well as for Thandie Newton (Flirting, Gridlock’d), but this English picture kept me absorbed, happy, and occasionally amused despite its dubious details. Lambert Wilson plays a celebrated London playwright having an affair with an emerging actress (Newton) who’s cast in his latest play. As he tries (with little success) to cope with the rage of his wife (Anna Galiena) and the ambivalence of his three children, the play’s lead actor (Jon Bon Jovi), a notorious womanizer from the States, offers to seduce the neglected wife. Eventually the playwright is brought face-to-face with his double standard. The dubious details include the play itselfwhich seems awful, but apparently isn’t supposed to beand some trumped-up melodramatics toward the end. The uneven John Duigan (The Year My Voice Broke, Flirting, Wide Sargasso Sea, Sirens) directed from a screenplay by his sister Virginia; with Barry Humphries and David Warner. (JR) Read more

The only other adaptations I’ve seen of the Alexandre Dumas novel (which I haven’t read) are the Classics Illustrated comic book and the 1939 James Whale potboiler, both of which I prefer to this vulgar and overwrought 1998 free-for-all, which makes you wait interminably for the story’s central narrative premise. (The Whale version spills the beans right away.) Written and directed by Randall Wallace (best known as the screenwriter of Braveheart), this starts off as a Three Musketeers sequel, trusting that its hefty cast and fart jokes will keep you interested. But to be fair, the story is close to foolproof once it finally gets going. With Leonardo DiCaprio, Jeremy Irons, John Malkovich, Gerard Depardieu, Gabriel Byrne, Anne Parillaud, and Judith Godreche. 132 min. (JR) Read more

I’ve only skimmed the best-selling novel that this is based on, so I can’t say precisely how much Elaine May’s screenplayproduced and directed by Mike Nicholstakes from it. But something resembling a Brechtian comedy about the Clintons and scandal-ridden politics in general has emerged from the adaptationsomething witty, thoughtful, timely, grandly entertaining, and ultimately very serious about the way presidential campaigns are run. It’s no surprise to learn that outside the movie the filmmakers support the Clintons over their enemies; what is surprising for a mainstream movie is that final moral judgments are basically left up to the viewer. (By comparison, Wag the Dog seems like a bit of flip arrogance.) John Travolta is wonderful as Clinton stand-in Jack Stanton, a southern governor running for president, and Emma Thompson as his wife is only a shade less convincing; Adrian Lester adeptly plays the idealistic black political strategist who goes to work for them and leads us into their world. Matching up the others with their real-life (and sometimes not-so-real-life) counterparts is part of the game this movie invites one to play, but whether one recognizes their characters or not, Billy Bob Thornton, Kathy Bates, and Larry Hagman give May’s dialogue all the color and nuance it deserves. Read more

Not so much a sequel to The Fugitive as a lazy spin-off that imitates only what was boring and artificially frenetic about that earlier thriller; the little that kept it interestingTommy Lee Jones’s Oscar-winning inflections, better-than-average directionis nowhere in evidence. Once again Jones plays a marshal bent on capturing a wrongly accused fugitive from justice (Wesley Snipes this time around), though why we’re supposed to be interested in or diverted by this fascist bully terrorizing whole sections of Chicago and New York in order to track down his innocent prey escapes me entirely; the character is equally dull as hero and villain, and it’s not clear much of the time which he’s supposed to be. The usually interesting Robert Downey Jr. is miscast as another government agent, and Irene Jacob as Snipes’s lover isn’t around long enough to ameliorate the motion sickness. Written (very badly) by John Pogue and directed (if that’s the word) by Stuart Baird; with Joe Pantoliano, Daniel Roebuck, and Tom Wood (deputy marshals back from The Fugitive), LaTanya Richardson, and Kate Nelligan. (JR) Read more

Playing a widow devoted to the grown son (Johnathon Schaech) who brings his fiancee (Gwyneth Paltrow) back to his family’s Kentucky estate, Jessica Lange establishes a spark of interest in this psychological thriller with her giggly demonic performance. But the film never adds up to anything more than an elaborate tease; the writing and directing of Jonathan Darby, a British TV veteran and Hollywood executive, make the proceedings neither believable nor compelling, so what might have been another Rosemary’s Baby isn’t even a halfway decent genre exercise. With Nina Foch, Debi Mazar, and Hal Holbrook; cowritten by Jane Rusconi. (JR) Read more

A touching and pungent contemporary noir by the same basic team that yielded Nobody’s Foolwriter-director Robert Benton, cowriter Richard Russo (this time with an original script rather than an adaptation of his own novel), and septuagenarian actor Paul Newman, glowering with underplayed intensity. Though this movie is as much about aging as the late westerns of Howard Hawks (and evokes in particular the wizened melancholy humor of El Dorado), it also forms a kind of dialectic with Nobody’s Fool by focusing on upper-class ties in LA (as opposed to working-class ties in a small town in New York), as well as offering an extended gloss on the novels of Raymond Chandler. Playing a former cop and retired private detective who now occupies the garage apartment of his best friends (Gene Hackman and Susan Sarandon), both former movie stars, Newman gets sucked into a mystery that ultimately tests his various loyalties as well as his own identity. The remainder of the stellar castespecially James Garner, Stockard Channing, Giancarlo Esposito, and Reese Witherspoonplays a significant role in the process. Sturdily constructed and gracefully written, this is a movie that shines. (JR) Read more

Charles Burnett’s first foray into digital video, released in 1997 and running 55 minutes, is a fictional story about a homeless middle-aged man (Ayuko Babu of When It Rains) interspersed with a lot of documentary footage about the homeless, including several interviews. Both blocks of material have their own strength and validity, but they seldom mesh comfortably, and their juxtaposition tends to distract one from the subject at hand. (JR) Read more

Palestinian independent Elia Suleiman returned to Nazareth after many years in New York to make this 1996 first feature, an intriguing, highly sophisticated, and often very funny combination of fiction, documentary, diary, essay, and home movie. Armed with irony, absurdist humor, and a handsome visual style, Suleiman offers a surprisingly comprehensive portrait of middle-class Palestinian life in Israel and a complex understanding of Arab identity within that world that encompasses both family and friends. In Hebrew and Arabic with subtitles. 88 min. (JR) Read more

Two half-hour films by the Argentine-American artist. El dia que me quieras (The Day You’ll Love Me, 1997) mixes color with black and white in a poetic meditation on the famous 1967 photograph of Ernesto Che Guevera’s corpse surrounded by his Bolivian captors; the film Read more

One of the most beautiful and difficult of Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet’s features, this 1972 filming of portions of Bertolt Brecht’s novel The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar is a major early summary of this masterful filmmaking couple’s grasp of history and the material world. A young man in contemporary dress drives through contemporary Rome and interviews characters from ancient Romea poet, a jurist, a peasant, and a banker. Straub-Huillet’s unorthodox handling of space through editing is like no one else’s, and the duo’s passionate adherence to direct-sound recording is comparably powerful. (JR) Read more

Standard Bud Abbott and Lou Costello farce, made in 1944 while Universal was loaning the team out to MGM; as a result, it’s a bit more opulent than most of their efforts. With Marilyn Maxwell (as a harem wife), Douglas Dumbrille (as a sultan), and the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra; Charles Reisner directed. (JR) Read more

A lumbering SF thriller built around the perennial theme of the Return of the Repressed (cf Forbidden Planet and Solaris, among others); appropriately enough, the film itself regresses, starting in the present and winding up with a cautionary ending that evokes the hokiest SF movies of the 50s. In between, the star power of Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone, and Samuel L. Jackson carries one past some of the confused and confusing storytellingthe plot has something to do with finding an alien vessel a thousand feet down in the middle of the Pacificbut the lazy script and sprawling direction ultimately defeat everyone and everything. There are shocks and thrills along the way, but not many. Adapted from a Michael Crichton novel by Kurt Wimmer, Stephen Hauser, and Paul Attanasio, and directed by Barry Levinson (with a mid-film break to shoot Wag the Dog); with Peter Coyote and Liev Schreiber. (JR) Read more

Jivey all-black musical, some of it enjoyable and some of it fascinatingly dated, directed by William Forest Crouch in 1947 and featuring Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five, June Richmond, and Valerie Smythe. (JR) Read more

Partly because I love the style and grace of Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness novel, set over one day in 1923, and partly because I’ve had it up to here with classic English novels reduced to consumerist set-decoration jamborees, I walked out of this adaptation after 15 minutes at Cannes, and I’d be wasting your time as well as mine if I ever went back. True, Vanessa Redgrave plays Clarissa Dalloway, and maybe that’s justification enough to submit to the rest. Marleen Gorris (Antonia’s Line) directed the screenplay by Eileen Atkins (creator of the TV series Upstairs Downstairs); with Natascha McElhone, Rupert Graves, Michael Kitchen, and John Standing. (JR) Read more