Jonathan Rosenbaum

An early experimental feature by Chantal Akerman (1976, 85 min.) that juxtaposes images of New York City with the texts of letters written to Akerman by her mother in Belgium and read aloud offscreen by Akerman. This is one of the best depictions of the alienation of exile that I know. (JR) Read more

This striking and ambitious 1994 Macedonian feature by Milcho Manchevski, a filmmaker trained at Southern Illinois University, won the best-film prize at Venice and gained a big reputation at other festivalsmore, it seems, for the timely issues of ethnic and religious warfare it deals with than for overall dramatic or thematic coherence (though it certainly has its strong moments). Telling three interconnected stories set in Macedonia and London, the film begins with a girl hiding out in a Macedonian monastery and then shifts to the emotional conflicts of a woman in London (Naked’s Katrin Cartlidge) leaving her husband and coming back into contact with a former lover, a Macedonian war photographer just back from Bosnia. The final story deals with the photographer’s return to his native country. With Rade Serbedzija, Gregoire Colin, and Labina Mitevska. In English and subtitled Albanian and Macedonian. 115 min. (JR) Read more

In her first feature as a director, former Second City performer Betty Thomas mounts a big-screen version of the TV show. It’s set in suburban Los Angeles in 1994, though the 70s still reign at home, and the movie is every bit as one-dimensional about the present as the original show was about the past. (Satire here mainly consists of ridiculing the Bradys for not keeping up with fashion and purchasing the right products.) A curiously sour movie in its amused contempt for this fatuous family laced with affectionate nostalgia for its unshakable slickness and insularity, but also an undeniably strange one in its adoption of TV formats and cliches, as if these were the only indexes of contemporary reality that we have left. If you’re 30 or under, chances are the movie will be charged with significance; if you’re older, it won’t seem very different from the recent movie versions of The Flintstones and The Beverly Hillbillies. Shelley Long and Gary Cole are the parents, and their six kids are played by unknowns; written by Laurice Elehwany, Rick Copp, and Bonnie and Terry Turner. (JR) Read more

A stylistically graceful period piece (1994) by Romanian filmmmaker Lucian Pintilie (The Oak), based on a short story by Petru Dumitriu and set in 1925. When the aristocratic wife of an army captain resists the advances of a general, her husband’s superior angrily transfers the captain and his family to a remote garrison in a border town, where he’s ordered to shoot randomly selected Bulgarian villagers. The interface of class and military positions in a context of ethnic diversity is the overall theme, and Pintilie treats it with some sensitivity. With Kristin Scott Thomas, Claudiu Bleont, and Marcel Iures. (JR) Read more

A broad satirical farce (1992) by Juzo Itami (The Funeral, Tampopo, A Taxing Woman) about the efforts of a luxury hotel in Tokyo to rid itself of yakuza who are using the place as a hangout. These efforts prove ineffectual, thanks to the gangsters’ not-so-gentle art of intimidation, until the hotel hires a lawyer (Nobuku Miyamoto, Itami’s wife and frequent leading lady) who’s well versed in the problems involved and who plans various counterattacks. Eventually this picture turns solemn and serious in order to hammer home points that are made more effectively through comedy, and there’s a corny Western-elevator-music score (broken only occasionally by sinister patches of percussion) that may set your teeth on edge. But one sign of the relevance of this movie is that Itami was brutally attacked by three gangsters less than a week after it opened in Japan, leaving him with permanent scars he now wears as badges of honor. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, February 3 through 9.

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

This difficult-to-categorize masterpiece by Tony Gatlif (1993) is many things at once: a Gypsy “docu-musical” (actually an adroit mixture of documentary and fiction) in ‘Scope and stereo featuring musicians, singers, and dancers from India, Egypt, Turkey, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, France, and Spain; an epic account of Gypsy migrations over the past thousand years; a political statement about Gypsy persecution that never descends into bitterness; a poetic evocation of the passing seasons; and a gorgeously filmed and edited compilation of some of the most joyous, soulful, and energizing music and dancing you’re likely to encounter, taking on the musical forms and styles of each successive country (including Django Reinhardt-style jazz in France and flamenco in Spain). All this is threaded together so subtly and expressively by Gatlif (himself a Gypsy), with a minimum of speech and narration, that the music and filmmaking often seem indissoluble. When dogs bark or the camera cranes up exuberantly into the treetops, it’s every bit as musical and rhythmic as the performances, and the pulse is so infectious that you may feel like dancing. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, February 3 through 9. Read more

Shot on the cheap in Chicago locations with postsync sound, this flaky, black-and-white absurdist beatnik comedy (1963) by Benjamin Manaster and Philip Kaufman is interesting today mainly as a period piece. The cast includes Second City veterans (Severn Darden, Anthony Holland, Tom Erhard), novelist Nelson Algren (as himself) delivering a wry, characteristic monologue, and one of the stars of John Cassavetes’s Shadows (Ben Carruthers). I found a lot of the humor resistibleand it certainly isn’t helped by the ribs-nudging scorebut the freewheeling camera style is attractive and inventive. Adolfas Mekas was in charge of the hit-and-miss editing. (JR) Read more

This promising first feature by writer-director-producer Michael Corrente is based on Corrente’s somewhat autobiographical one-act play about young petty criminals in a working-class Italian neighborhood in Providence known as Federal Hill. Shot in black and white, and undoubtedly more realistic as a result, the movie grapples with several familiar themesblood ties, close friendships, and macho posesbut Corrente’s handling of class divisions (one of the heroes starts seeing a Brown University senior he sells cocaine to) and the body language of the performances keep things fresh. With Nicholas Turturro (brother of John), Anthony De Sando, Libby Langdon, Michael Raynor, Jason Andrews, Robert Turano, and Frank Vincent. (JR) Read more

By reputation, this glorious 1934 feature by Marcel Pagnol is his very best, though it’s atypical in that it adapts the work of another writer, a novel by Jean Giono. Set in Provence, like most Pagnol works, and filmed exclusively on location and in direct sound, it recounts the story of a farmer’s daughter seduced by a pimp from Marseilles; she follows him to the city, has an illegitimate child, and becomes a prostitute, which leads to serious conflict with her father when she returns to the farm. With Orane Demazis, Fernandel, and Jean Servais. (JR) Read more

In addition to being a good many other things, Francoise Romand’s first three feature-length films are poetic and highly original meditations about personal identity. Neither as dense nor as inventive as Mix-up (1985), the film that preceded it, and without the degree of experimentation and lyricism that makes Past Imperfect (1994) such a haunting experience, Call Me Madame (1986) is nonetheless a provocative and memorable work. It’s a multifaceted portrait of Ovida Delecta communist poet and novelist living near Rouen who’s published close to 40 books. Tortured by the Gestapo at 17 as a member of the French underground and honored by Paul Eluard, she’s a 60-year-old who had a sex-change operation at the age of 55. Formerly known as Jean-Pierre Voidies, she continues to live with her former wife and 20-year-old son, both of whom reveal some of the difficulties they’ve encountered living with such a singular and egocentric individual. As with Mix-up, Romand labels this film a fictional documentary because its subject and style relate to Delect’s self-image as well as her objective reality. Indeed Delect controls Call Me Madame just as she controls her own persona, depriving the film of the free-ranging imagination of Romand’s other two features. Read more

Experimental animator Lewis Klahr’s most impressive workan eerie, suggestive 43-minute assemblage of advertising and consumer images from the 50s and earlier that slides across the screen like emanations from the American dream, or perhaps the American nightmare (1994). (JR) Read more

This 1994 film may be the best of writer-director Atom Egoyan’s slick, Canadian carriage-trade productions (the other two are Speaking Parts and The Adjuster), though it’s also a regression, both formally and thematically, compared to his previous film, Calendar. The central locationa triumph of lush, imaginative set designis a sort of strip club where young female dancers sit at male customers’ tables and verbally cater to their psychic needs; at the center of this faux-tropical establishment is an odd little house where the club’s pregnant owner hangs out with the jaundiced announcer (Egoyan regulars Arsinee Khanjian and Elias Koteas), voyeuristically overseeing the voyeuristic clientele. The main customer is still mourning the death of his young daughter, and other significant characters include a dancer who sits at his table, a baby-sitter, and an eccentric smuggler whose path briefly crosses that of the bereaved father. As a narrative this is something of a tease, building toward a denouement straight out of Freud; its structure both benefits and suffers from Egoyan’s customary splintered focus and repetition compulsion, and there’s an unmistakable sadness in its pornographic luster. But as mise en scene it’s rich and accomplishedfor better and for worse, a place to get lost in. Read more

Filmed in Glasgow and Edinburgh, this dark Scottish comedy follows the misadventures of two men and a woman who advertise for a roommate and wind up with a guy who dies of a drug overdose, leaving behind a suitcase of money. What ensues after they decide to keep the money and get rid of the body determines the rest of the plot, in which the sexual and psychological ambiguity of this heartless trio gets run through a good many changes. Directed by TV veteran Danny Boyle from a script by one Dr. John Hodge, this is a fairly accomplished first featureperky, visually inventive, and unusually nasty, though I suppose a humanist message of some sort lies vaguely at its core. With Christopher Eccleston, Ewan McGregor, Kerry Fox, and Keith Allen. (JR) Read more

Not a horror movie, at least in the usual sense, but a disappointing feature by writer-director Preston A. Whitmore II about four black marines dropped into a combat zone in Vietnam in 1972. Even if one accepts the absence of Vietnamese in the storya standard omission in Hollywood movies about Vietnam, ratified by Forrest Gump and sadly indicative of a continuing blind spot in this country’s post-60s imaginationthe flashbacks to what the four marines did back in the States are especially perfunctory and feeble. And after a promising early stretch that offers some lively, raunchy dialogue, the movie quickly settles down to formulaic speeches and music-video pacing. With Joe Morton, Eddie Griffin, Allen Payne, Vonte Sweet, and Roger Floyd. (JR) Read more

The second remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s silent classic, directed by John Brahm in 1944. A Jack the Ripper tale, it’s something of a spin-off of Brahm’s Hangover Square, made the same year and also starring Laird Cregar as a demented villain. Effective in terms of atmospherics, the film also features Merle Oberon, George Sanders, Cedric Hardwicke, and Sara Allgood; Lucien Ballard is in charge of the impressive cinematography. 84 min. (JR) Read more