Jonathan Rosenbaum

An impressive if uneven first feature (1994), strong on atmospherics and weak on certain family links and ethnic details, by young New York writer-director James Gray. Tim Roth plays a hit man for Brooklyn’s Russian Mafia; Vanessa Redgrave and Maximilian Schell play his elderly parents (quite impressively), and Edward Furlong is his kid brother. Up to a point, this is yet another crime picture; beyond that point are some style and feeling that make you remember it longer than most of the others. Moira Kelly costars. (JR) Read more

The best Algerian film I’ve seen, Merzak Allouache’s feature contains one of the clearest and most persuasive depictions of the recent rise of Islamic fundamentalism. Shot in 1993 and completed in 1994, it offers an exciting, comprehensive cross section of contemporary urban Algerian life, with particular emphasis on the youth culture. The plot focuses on what happens after a young baker trashes a loudspeaker that’s blaring propaganda from the roof of his apartment house. With Nadia Kaci, Mohamed Ourdache, Hassan Abou, and Nadia Samir. (JR) Read more

A fascinating and at times exciting one-hour video by Robert Frank, made in 1990 for French television and consisting of only one shot. It begins with the camera inside a van moving through lower Manhattanmainly Tribecca and environswith actor Kevin J. O’Connor and others. The camera emerges at various points to take in the street life, often passing in a matter of seconds from public to private in what it observes and capturing the experience of New York pedestrians like few other films or videos; eventually it proceeds down into the subway. Among those who turn up in this mild adventure are Peter Orlovsky and Taylor Mead. (JR) Read more

Robert Frank’s controversial, troubling 1968 feature is provisionally a documentary about Julius Orlovsky, the catatonic brother of Allen Ginsberg’s lover, but it also employs actors to depict both his subject (Joseph Chaikin) and Frank himself (Christopher Walken). Not an easy film to watch, but certainly an interesting one. (JR) Read more

Another Michael Crichton spin-off, reportedly budgeted at a cool $75 million, features a mysterious massacre, a climactic earthquake, a live volcano, rare diamonds, a lost African city, and lots of actors in gorilla suits; the recognizable cast includes Dylan Walsh, Laura Linney, Grant Heslov, and Joe Don Baker. I don’t know the novel, but judging from the script by Crichton and John Patrick Shanley, this must be scraping the bottom of the Crichton barrel. At first this moves along with a certain primitive charm by suggesting the naive African adventure pictures of the 30s; Ernie Hudson as the urbane tour guide conjures up memories of Clark Gable, David Niven, and Howard Keel, and Tim Curry seems at home here as a Romanian entrepreneur, but the script and the flat-footed direction by Frank Marshall repeatedly let them down, and none of the action sequences is as thrilling as it could be. Symptomatically, the 30s ingredient that seems most missing here is romanceunless one discounts the mutual admiration between a scientist and an ape. (JR) Read more

For long stretches Alexander Sokurov’s fever dream about 19th-century Russia (1994) doesn’t register as a narrative at all, though its layered visual textures and immense cavernous spaces are so enthralling you can lose yourself in the meditative drift, Dantean visions, and endless urban catacombs. There are passages where you can’t even be sure what you’re watching, whether it’s an interior or an exterior, in color or black and white; then gradually slow dissolves, light changes, or other transitions reveal the details of the awesome grottolike images. Despite these experimental aspects, there is a plot of sorts, consisting mainly of undigested chunks of Crime and Punishment, served up with Sokurov’s customary humorless reactionary pretensions. Happily these function mainly as passing interludes. (The film is purportedly derived from other Russian literature classics as well, including works by Gogol, but I couldn’t detect them.) It’s the only film I’ve seen by this lugubrious Tarkovsky disciple that profits from second viewing, thanks to its kaleidoscopic, painterly pleasures. (JR) Read more

Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay, Mississippi Masala) directs an adaptation by Robin Swicord of a novel by Christine Bell, yielding a comedy about Cuban immigrants in Miami that is consistently pleasurable for its lead performances by Marisa Tomei, Alfred Molina, Chazz Palminteri, and Anjelica Huston. The story concerns a former political prisoner (Molina) who hasn’t seen his wife (Huston) and daughter (Trini Alvarado) in two decades. Though the circumstances delaying their reunion seem a little contrived in spots, the details about what Cuban immigrants have to contend with and the spirited riffs of the actors keep this busy and bubbling. With Celia Cruz and Lazaro Perez. Ford City, Lake, Webster Place, Evanston, Norridge, Chestnut Station, Plaza. Read more

Also known as For Fun, a title I prefer, this is a delightful comedy from mainland China (1992) about grumbly old men, directed and cowritten by a young woman, Ning Ying, who studied film in both Beijing and Italy, was assistant director on The Last Emperor, and is currently director of the Beijing Film Studio. An old man is obliged to retire from his job as house manager for a local Peking Opera troupe, and after he finds a few opera buffs around his age in a park he organizes a club that meets in an abandoned hall. Working mainly with nonprofessionals, Ning shows a genuine flair for documentary-style shooting and humorous observation, though this is only her second feature. She’s clearly someone to watch. Adapted with Ning Dal from a novella by Chen Jiangong; with Huang Zongluo and Huang Wenjie. To be screened as part of the Silver Images Film Festival. Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, Saturday, May 20, 1:15, 281-4114 or 881-8491. Read more

A sturdily made and beautifully acted comedy-drama about aging from Bob Balaban, whose Parents showed him to be an imaginative director who knows what to do with a set and how to enter the worlds of lonely people. The story here, adapted by Balaban and John McLaughlin from a Richard Bausch novel, concerns a retired violinist (Armin Mueller-Stahl) living in Brooklyn who puts up a homeless former neighbor in her early 20s (Olivia d’Abo) and develops an unexpected relationship with her. His only friend–another former neighbor, now dying in a rest home–is played by the late Lionel Stander, one of the juiciest Hollywood character actors who ever lived. His fabulous swan song is reason enough to see this picture, though Balaban’s taste and intelligence and the warmth of the other cast members (including Maureen Stapleton, Adrian Pasdar, and Kevin Corrigan) provide further incentive. This is one of those rare American movies that know what they’re doing and where they’re going every step of the way. Esquire.

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

French Kiss

Rating * Has redeeming facet

Directed by Lawrence Kasdan

Written by Adam Brooks

With Meg Ryan, Kevin Kline, Timothy Hutton, Jean Reno, Francois Cluzet, Susan Anbeh, and Renee Humphrey.

The great Hollywood director Ernst Lubitsch once remarked during the heyday of the studios, “There is Paramount Paris and Metro Paris, and of course the real Paris. Paramount’s is the most Parisian of all.” French Kiss offers a movie Paris of its own, but it isn’t one that belongs to any studio or director–or one that any Parisian would recognize. It belongs to this country, and it represents about two decades of bad faith–a copy of a copy of a stereotype, bred out of so much defensiveness and attitude that today anything approximating the real Paris has to be discarded for fear of disorienting the viewer.

After all, French Kiss is a standard-issue romantic comedy starring Meg Ryan and Kevin Kline, the success of which depends on an audience feeling immediately comfortable wherever it happens to be taken. I can’t vouch for the writer, a Canadian named Adam Brooks, but I suspect that the director, acclaimed hack Lawrence Kasdan, is at least partially aware of the deception involved in making an audience comfortable. Read more

There are only a few great jazz documentaries, and each has a style all its own. This one-hour 1994 dissection of a 1958 group photograph of 57 key jazz musicians, one of the opening attractions of the four-day Silver Images Film Festival, is special both as oral history and as a survey of the art. If you wanted to introduce someone to what jazz is all about, this would be an ideal place to start, a labor of love by jazz enthusiast and former Chicago journalist Jean Bach, who did an awesome job of tracking down the surviving participants in and witnesses to the picture taking, even locating some silent home-movie footage by bassist Milt Hinton and his wife. Included are elegant thumbnail profiles of such musicians as Lester Young, Jo Jones, Count Basie, Charles Mingus, Pee Wee Russell, Red Allen, Roy Eldridge, Horace Silver, Jimmy Rushing, Coleman Hawkins, Dicky Wells, and Stuff Smith, most of them offered by fellow musicians, along with samples of their music and comments on their placement in the photograph. On the same program, Kevin Segalla’s Notes (1994), Natalie Cash’s Blues in C (1994), and one of the other great jazz documentaries, Gjon Mili’s arty but exciting Jammin’ the Blues (1950), which includes prime performances by Lester Young and Jo Jones. Read more

A sturdily made and beautifully acted comedy-drama about aging from Bob Balaban, whose Parents showed him to be an imaginative director who knows what to do with a set and how to enter the worlds of lonely people. The story here, adapted by Balaban and John McLaughlin from a Richard Bausch novel, concerns a retired violinist (Armin Mueller-Stahl) living in Brooklyn who puts up a homeless former neighbor in her early 20s (Olivia d’Abo) and develops an unexpected relationship with her. His only friendanother former neighbor, now dying in a rest homeis played by the late Lionel Stander, one of the juiciest Hollywood character actors who ever lived. His fabulous swan song is reason enough to see this picture, though Balaban’s taste and intelligence and the warmth of the other cast members (including Maureen Stapleton, Adrian Pasdar, and Kevin Corrigan) provide further incentive. This is one of those rare American movies that know what they’re doing and where they’re going every step of the way. (JR) Read more

Drawing upon a legend in his own Welsh family history, writer-director Christopher Monger (Waiting for the Light) comes up with a quaint little comic tale about the interactions between two English mapmakers (Hugh Grant and Ian McNeice) and the prideful Welsh village of Ffynnon Garw in 1917. The results are self-amused and pitched to tourists (rather like John Ford’s The Quiet Man in respect to Ireland), but the scenery is lovely and the folksy period ambience is tolerable if you can put up with the vats of malarkey. With Tara Fitzgerald, Colm Meaney, Ian Hart, Kenneth Griffith, and Tudor and Hugh Vaughn. (JR) Read more

Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay, Mississippi Masala) directed this 1995 adaptation of Christine Bell’s novel about Cuban immigrants in Miami. Consistently pleasurable for its lead performances (by Marisa Tomei, Alfred Molina, Chazz Palminteri, and Anjelica Huston) it concerns a former political prisoner (Molina) who hasn’t seen his wife (Huston) and daughter (Trini Alvarado) in two decades. The circumstances delaying their reunion seem a little contrived in spots, but the details about what Cuban immigrants have to contend with and the actors’ spirited riffs keep this busy and bubbling. With Celia Cruz and Lazaro Perez. 112 min. (JR) Read more

Quentin Tarantino did an uncredited polish of the dialogue of this very silly submarine thrillera bit of cold-war nostalgia set in the present, seemingly derived from The Bedford Incident of 1965, with Gene Hackman taking over the Richard Widmark part as dictatorial captain and Denzel Washington replacing Sidney Poitier as the desperate liberal. One hopes it wasn’t Tarantino (or the similarly uncredited Robert Towne and Steven Zaillian) who dreamed up the phrase a violation of nuclear launch protocol, which sounds like a line from Dr. Strangelove and is actually used here at a military hearing without a trace of irony. Behind all the macho bluster stand (or, it would appear, sit) director Tony Scott, writers Michael Schiffer and Richard P. Henrick, and producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, trying (and failing) to get all the characters to behave like grown-ups. With George Dzundza, Viggo Mortensen, James Gandolfini, and an uncredited Jason Robards. (JR) Read more