Jonathan Rosenbaum

Just as she’s about to start a job with room service at a luxury hotel in Paris, a young woman (Virginie Ledoyen) tells her boyfriend that she’s pregnant and wants to keep their child. They quarrel but arrange to meet an hour later; the film then follows her at work for that hour in real time. This segment of Benoit Jacquot’s compelling 1995 feature, written with Jerome Beaujour, is a stunning demonstration of moral and existential suspense in relation to duration, much like Agnes Varda’s 1961 Cleo From 5 to 7. Later the excitement dissipates somewhat, and when the film abandons real time to make room for an epilogue it becomes ordinary. But until then it’s an essential piece of filmmakingnot simply as a stylistic exercise, but as a fascinating look at a hotel in operation. (JR) Read more

This squalid little noir by writer-director Matthew Bright (who scripted Guncrazy) about an abused teenager on the run (Reese Witherspoon) trips over itself whenever it tries to persuade us it’s retelling the story of Little Red Riding Hoodan effort that begins with cartoons behind the credits. But in spirit, if not in letter, it often resembles a gritty Warners crime movie of the 30s, and it held my interest in spite of its excesses. The secondary cast is reasonably flavorsome: Kiefer Sutherland, Amanda Plummer, Dan Hedaya, Michael Weiss, and Brooke Shields. (JR) Read more

Someone should try to persuade Paul Schrader to stay away from comedy; he has no flair for it whatsoever. Still, this curious piece of satire about a faith healer (Skeet Ulrich), based on an Elmore Leonard novel, isn’t devoid of interest; it’s both sexy and unpredictable, and the eclectic cast aloneBridget Fonda, Lolita Davidovich, Tom Arnold, Paul Mazursky, Christopher Walkenmakes it worth checking out. (JR) Read more

A technically adroit but aesthetically offensive and philosophically dubious look at the world of insects by French biologists Claude Nuridsany and Marie Perennou, given an intolerable wall-to-wall score by Bruno Coulais and a minimal English voice-over by Kristin Scott Thomas to match the French narration. Making this 1996 film purportedly took 15 years of research, 2 years of designing the camera and lighting equipment, 3 years of shooting, and half a year of editing; how much time the filmmakers spent thinking about what they were doing isn’t noted. The footage is often fascinating, but when it comes to anthropomorphism I prefer the Disney live-action adventures. Made in the 70s and never exported, Michel Fano’s French nature documentary La Territoire des Autreswith its sure sense of soundputs this film to shame. 77 min. (JR) Read more

This radical experiment in film form by director Alain Resnais and screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet was a surprising commercial success in 1961, even in the U.S., and it’s been a rallying point for the possibilities of formal filmmaking ever since. A highly seductive parable about seduction, it’s set in and around a baroque European chateau/hotel, where the nameless hero (Giorgio Albertazzi) tries to persuade the nameless heroine (Delphine Seyrig) that they met the previous year. Shot by Sacha Vierny in otherworldly black-and-white ‘Scope, it oscillates ambiguously between past, present, and various conditional tenses, mixing memory and fantasy, fear and desire. The overall tone is poker-faced parody of lush Hollywood melodrama, yet the film’s dreamlike cadences, frozen tableaux, and distilled surrealist poetry are too eerie, too terrifying even, to be shaken off as camp. For all its notoriety, this masterpiece among masterpieces has never really received its due. In French with subtitles. 93 min. (JR) Read more

Michael Hoffman (Restoration, Soapdish) directs Michelle Pfeiffer and George Clooney in a beautifully contrived romantic comedy with a Manhattan setting that’s exploited to the utmost. A veritable anthology of the perils of single parenting–demanding jobs, cellular phones, busy schedules, transportation hassles–this works a lot better than most Hollywood fluff because the leads are so good (and so well-defined, in Terrel Seltzer and Ellen Simon’s deft script), and because Hoffman is a pro at keeping everything in motion. With Mae Whitman, Alex D. Linz, Ellen Greene, and Charles Durning. Biograph, Esquire, Ford City, Gardens, Golf Mill, Lake, Lincoln Village.

–Jonathan Rosenbaum

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

Writer-director Andre Techine appears to be on a roll; after the revelations of My Favorite Season (1993) and Wild Reeds, here’s a picture that’s in some ways even more exciting and serious. Jumping between characters in order to see the same events from different vantage points, as in a Faulkner novel, the story involves a family of thieves based in the French Alps. The plot centers on an abortive car heist, but the thriller elements are secondary to the explorations of character. The younger brother (Daniel Auteuil), in rebellion against both his older brother (Didier Bezace) and his father, has become a cop in Lyons; there he gets sexually involved with the troubled sister (Laurence Cote) of a thief (Benoit Magimel) in league with his brother. To complicate matters further, the sister is a former mistress of the older brother and is currently also involved with a philosophy teacher (Catherine Deneuve). Auteuil and Deneuve costarred as brother and sister in My Favorite Season, and it’s remarkable how different they are here. Cote, best known in this country for her work with Rivette (The Gang of Four, Up Down Fragile) and Godard (Nouvelle vague), is equally sensational. An exquisite, haunting movie for grown-ups about love and family ties. Read more

I walked out halfway through Alan Parker’s bombastic 1996 version of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1978 musical about Argentina’s national heroine Eva Peroncoscripted by Oliver Stone, who also teamed up with Parker on the lurid fantasies of Midnight Express. I figured if I stayed longer I’d only become angrier, which wouldn’t do anybody any good. In what I saw, Madonna in the title role tries bravely not to buckle under the weight of Stone and Parker’s sense of Stalinist monumentality and fails honorably, while the Lloyd Webber music goes on being nonmusical. Antonio Banderas plays a character serving as chorus and emcee, Jonathan Pryce is the heroine’s totalitarian husband, and Jimmy Nail is on hand as the tango-singer lover who enabled her to move to Buenos Aires. Parker’s Argentina between the 30s and 50s bears a close resemblance to his Midnight Express Turkey and his Mississippi Burning Mississippi. I’ve rarely felt so liberated as I did when I escaped from this torture engine, and I’m eagerly waiting for all the critics who called Nixon Shakespearean to explain why this equally inflated companion piece is Brechtian. (JR) Read more

John Travolta plays an angel who smokes, guzzles beer, romances women, and (no doubt because it’s Travolta) dances. Two washed-up reporters from a Chicago-based tabloid (William Hurt and Robert Pastorelli) are sent off to Iowa by their boss (Bob Hoskins) to write a story about him with the help of a dog trainer posing as an angel expert (Andie MacDowell). Before this turns to total mush, it’s a quirky, fitfully effective fantasy (1996) periodically enlivened by the cast. Producer-director-cowriter Nora Ephron is still learning how to make moviesafter proving in Sleepless in Seattle that she could hit pay dirt without knowingbut by now she’s at least able to slide her players over the weak parts of her scripts. Her cowriters this time around are her sister Delia, Pete Dexter, and Jim Quinlan. (JR) Read more

A bracing corrective to the provigilante stances and crude caricatures of Mississippi Burning and A Time to Kill, this conscientious and moving 1996 docudrama about the struggle three decades later to convict the assassin of NAACP activist Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi, may err at times by overidealizing its principal heroes (Alec Baldwin and Whoopi Goldberg). But as directed by Rob Reiner from a script by Lewis Colick, it offers the most decent and convincing portrait of the contemporary south I’ve seen in ages (apart from Sling Blade). A first-rate secondary cast ranging from James Woods as the assassin to Bill Cobbs as Evers’s disc jockey brotherand also including Craig T. Nelson and William H. Macy as well as some Jackson localscontributes to the ring of truth, and the story held me throughout. (JR) Read more

Arthur Miller adapts his own early 50s play about witchcraft trials in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, and he, director Nicholas Hytner, and a superb cast headed by Daniel Day-Lewis, Winona Ryder, Paul Scofield, Joan Allen, and Bruce Davison do a fine job of making it work (1996). Praised as well as attacked (in its own time as well as ours) as an allegory about the cold-war witch hunts, the work can’t be reduced to that dimension alone; it has plenty to say about sexual repression and puritanical hysteriatwo constants in American history over the past three centuriesand how these intersect with personal as well as public politics. Though Hytner remains essentially a stage director, he makes fine use of Massachusetts locations and period interiors; some of the visual details recall Dreyer’s Day of Wrath, a film that likely had an influence on Miller’s play. Then as now, Miller’s liberal vision is limited by certain historical and psychological simplifications, but never to the point of losing the disturbing ambiguities that give this work much of its primal power; The Crucible continues to be performed almost constantly across the globe, and this intelligent mounting shows why. PG-13, 123 min. (JR) Read more

Helen Mirren and Fionnula Flanagan play two of the 21 mothers of IRA prisoners who went on a hunger strike against Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1981. Effective and well acted, this 1996 British feature was directed by Terry George (Hotel Rwanda), who collaborated on the script with Jim Sheridan (In America). Most of the characters are fictional, but the film is nevertheless stirring as agitprop. With Aidan Gillen, David O’Hara, John Lynch, Tom Hollander, and Tim Woodward. R, 112 min. (JR) Read more

A good argument for the abolition of the star system. Writer-director Cameron Crowe (Say Anything . . . ) might have given even Ron Shelton a run for his money with this irreverent look at the world of sports agents, but the film is all but crushed by Tom Cruise’s screen-hogging demand that everything collapse and swoon around him. Mission: Impossible periodically stopped dead in its tracks to show us how adept Cruise was at performing magic tricks; here he’s so bent on displaying his kinetic energy and the depth of his feelings that Crowe’s accomplishments are shoved into the marginsincluding better-than-average performances from Cuba Gooding Jr. and Bonnie Hunt, and some lively narration and dialogue (often cut off in midstream). There’s also a lot of mugging from a little boy (Jonathan Lipnicki) that seems to have been tolerated only because he’s doing it with Cruise. If the star gave us more of a rest, we might have more of a movie. With Renee Zellweger, Kelly Preston, Jerry O’Connell, Jay Mohr, and Regina King. (JR) Read more

Directed by Scott Hicks from a script by Jan Sardi, this hyperbolic but undeniably effective Australian feature recounts the unorthodox career of classical pianist David Helfgott–a gifted musician driven to succeed so fanatically by his ambitious Polish-Jewish emigre father (Armin Mueller-Stahl) that he wound up insane. (It’s a story that sometimes recalls Fear Strikes Out, the 1956 biopic about baseball star Jim Piersall.) Even if the film’s closing act seems too hasty to be fully believable (a common failing in biopics about living people), the high-powered drive of both the storytelling and the music is riveting. Helfgott is played at separate ages by Geoffrey Rush, Noah Taylor, and Alex Rafalowicz; others in the cast include Lynn Redgrave, John Gielgud, and Googie Withers. Among the highlighted composers are Chopin, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff, whose works are performed offscreen by Helfgott himself. 600 N. Michigan.

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Sylvester Stalloneplaying Hercules as usual, but this time acting heroically out of a guilt complextries to save the survivors of a Holland Tunnel explosion that traps a dozen drivers under the Hudson River between Manhattan and New Jersey (1996). Written by Leslie Bohem and directed by Rob Cohen, this is one of those Grand Hotel-style disaster thrillers, with a lot of little stories shoehorned into the hysterical action, none of them very interesting. But at least the nonstop ordeals of Stallone and the other trapped individuals, decked out with impressive effects, kept me fairly attentive. With Amy Brenneman, Viggo Mortensen, Dan Hedaya, Karen Young, Claire Bloom, Vanessa Bell Calloway, Barry Newman, and Stan Shaw. (JR) Read more