Jonathan Rosenbaum

An interesting, if somewhat class-bound, documentary (1994) by Jyll Johnstone and Barbara Ettinger about two nannies, one of them an exile from Nazi Germany, the other a black woman from the rural south. Intelligent, searching, and often touching, the film still suffers from a certain distance from and condescension toward its subjects, though it remains fascinating in spite of these limitations. As critic Georgia Brown points out, the film can be read as a scathing critique of the mothers the nannies replaced. (JR) Read more

This begins promisingly as A Nightmare on Elm Street meets Pirandello, as Heather Langenkamp, star of the original Nightmare, begins to notice various sorts of domestic disturbances involving her family that seem provoked by the plans of writer-director Wes Craven and actor Robert Englund (both also playing themselves) to attempt yet another sequel in the series. Unfortunately, without even the most cursory effort to establish some notion of normality, the movie progressively gets duller and duller as its mechanical horror fancies spin themselves out; unlike Renny Harlin’s masterful and imaginative A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, which used the series’s baggage only as an excuse for its own fun and games, this one’s defeated by the rigid formula (1994). With Miko Hughes and John Saxon. 112 min. (JR) Read more

In its latest act of trail blazing, the Film Center is offering the first U.S. retrospective devoted to Jacques Doillon, a post-New Wave French director whose singular movies have received next to no attention here. Emotionally unbridled and extreme in their depictions of passion and familial tensions, they are not for every taste, but it’s hard to think of many other films like them. La pirate (1984), probably the wildest in the bunch, centers on the amour fou of an anguished lesbian couple (Jane Birkin and Maruschka Detmers) reigniting their affair, with the former’s husband (perversely played by Birkin’s brother), a mysterious little girl, and an eccentric friend named Number Five (Philippe Leotard) all in tow. Family Life (1985), which begins with a comparable amount of screaming and thrashing around, eventually settles down into a quieter studythis time of a broken family and the efforts of an estranged father (Sami Frey) to establish rapport with his ten-year-old daughter (Maro Goyet) during an extended car trip to Spain. Aiming for the intensity of a Racinian tragedy, La pirate sticks so closely to the hothouse atmosphere generated by its five characters that we’re made to feel like intruders on a cryptic, brutal psychodrama; the more naturalistic Family Life allows us and the characters to breathe more freely, but a sense of emotional impasse is equally present. Read more

A narrative of life cycles by Alan Berliner, composed from home movies and family conversations on the sound track (1986). To be shown with Barbara Hammer’s Optic Nerve (1985), which uses an optical printer to represent the approaching death of the filmmaker’s 97-year-old grandmother. Read more

I didn’t make it to the end of this unthrilling thriller about an American photographer in Brazil (Peter Coyote) pursuing the villain who murdered his prostitute friend (Giulia Gam); it may have got better, but I wouldn’t stake money on it. Dozens of Eurotrash thrillers like this get released overseas every year and almost never reach American shores; why this one did is anyone’s guess. Directed by Walter Salles Jr., a Dutchman, from a script by Rubem Fonseca based on his own novel High Art; Tcheky Karyo, Amanda Pays, and Raul Cortez costar. (JR) Read more

France’s foremost contemporary novelist, Marguerite Duras, wrote and directed (with the help of Jean-Marc Turine and Jean Mascolo) this philosophical fable about a ten-year-old boy (played with a Keaton-like innocence by 40-year-old Axel Bougousslavski) who refuses to go to school because he doesn’t want to learn what he doesn’t know. The child’s attitude poses a threat not only to the educational system but, as the film’s issues wittily expand, to the basis of Western civilization itself; he is examined by a teacher (Andre Dussolier) and a journalist (Pierre Arditi) but neither is able to refute his reasoning. If you’ve never seen a Duras film, this graceful, calmly subversive work is a wonderful place to start: though it doesn’t have the formal complexity of her most ambitious films, it does reflect the qualities of mindan implacable honesty, a cutting skepticism, a deep concern for human freedomthat make her such a significant figure. With Daniel Gelin, in a gruff, funny turn as the boy’s accepting father, and Tatiana Moukhine. (JR) Read more

Japan’s most compulsively commercial avant-gardist, Nagisa Oshima (Boy, The Ceremony), makes a companion piece to his In the Realm of the Senses. A rendition of the Double Indemnity plot told as a ghost story, it’s said to be a lush, formal exercise. Read more

It’s hard to know who, if anyone, is borrowing from whom, but it seems singularly odd that the theme of older and younger male blood relations switching bodies should occur three times in the history of cinema, all within the space of about six months. The main distinction of this entry in the body-swapping sweepstakes is that this time it’s a grandfather (George Burns) and grandson (Charlie Schlatter) rather than father and son (Like Father Like Son, Vice Versa), and the grandson with his grandfather’s body spends most of the movie in a coma. Otherwise, Schlatter does his best to mimic Burns’s cigar-chomping manner, but Josh Goldstein and Jonathan Prince’s script is only fair, and Paul Flaherty’s direction is downright feeble. Both of the female leads (Anita Morris and Jennifer Runyon) are treated like bimbos, and Red Buttons has little to do in a secondary part. (JR) Read more

Lothar Lambert stars in his own 1984 West German comedy about an uptight office worker who yearns to sing in a nightclub in glamorous drag. Read more

Like most of his work, Stanley Kubrick’s deadly black satirical comedy-thriller on cold war madness and its possible effects (1964) has aged well: the manic, cartoonish performances of George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, and Peter Sellers (in three separate roles, including the title part) look as brilliant as ever, and Kubrick’s icy contempt for 20th-century humanity may find its purest expression in the figure of Strangelove himself, a savage extrapolation of a then-obscure Henry Kissinger conflated with Wernher von Braun and Dr. Mabuse to suggest a flawed, spastic machine with Nazi reflexes that ultimately turns on itself. With Peter Bull, Keenan Wynn, Slim Pickens, and James Earl Jones. 93 min. (JR) Read more

The title of Bertrand Tavernier’s well-turned 146-minute French thriller (1992) refers to the article from the French Code of Public Health that forbids “all offenses linked to the possession, traffic, and consumption of narcotics.” Cowritten by former narcotics officer Michel Alexandre, this film takes a realistic approach, following the everyday routines and bureaucratic frustrations of a Parisian narc, well played by Didier Bezace. The character never quite says “It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it,” but this is the general idea, and with an able if not very well-known cast Tavernier makes an absorbing and authentic-looking movie out of it. More to the point, he implicates the audience in the sliminess of certain police operations in a way that has challenging and potent political ramifications–which is probably why this movie has been assailed by both the left and the right in France. See it and make up your own mind. Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Friday, January 27, 7:45; Saturday, January 28, 6:00 and 8:30; and Sunday, January 29, 6:00; 443-3737.

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Richard Linklater goes Hollywood–triumphantly and with an overall intelligence, sweetness, and romantic simplicity that reminds me of wartime weepies like The Clock (1945). After meeting on a train out of Budapest, a young American (Ethan Hawke) and a French student (Julie Delpy) casually explore Vienna for 14 hours. What emerges from their impromptu date has neither the flakiness of Linklater’s Slacker nor the generational smarts of his Dazed and Confused (though it’s closer in its picaresque form and lyricism to the former), but it does manage to say a few things about the fragility and uncertainty of contemporary relationships. Linklater’s tact and sincerity in handling such potentially mawkish material are as evident in what he leaves out as in what he includes, and if Hawke sometimes seems a mite doltish and preening, Delpy is a consistent delight. Kim Krizan collaborated with Linklater on the script, which abounds in lively dialogue and imaginative digressions. Don’t expect too much and you might be inordinately charmed. 900 N. Michigan, Evanston, Norridge, Golf Glen.

–Jonathan Rosenbaum

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Written and directed by Cuban exiles Nestor Almendros and Orlando Jimenez-Leal, this documentary amasses a lot of talking-heads testimony to human rights violations by the Castro government. The chief target of oppression seems to be Cuba’s gay population, which proves—if any proof were needed—that Marxism doesn’t cancel out machismo. Though the film is more than enough to shake whatever romantic notions of Cuba you may be harboring, the filmmakers’ reliance on unsupported interview material and the rather awkward, undramatic structure of their argument severely compromise the project. Neither extreme enough to make good propaganda (if such a thing exists), nor reasoned enough to qualify as good reportage, the film barely seems to have earned the storm of controversy that surrounded it. (JR) Read more

Even though it stars Albert Finney, this is a picture of no importance, undone mainly by its self-ingratiated cuteness. (The English have the perfect adjective to describe the tone, twee, which is somewhere between quaint and smarmy.) Finney plays a Dublin bus conductor in the early 60s who’s devoted to Oscar Wilde and to using his job to recruit actors for his amateur productions of Wilde plays; he’s also a repressed homosexual going through a middle-aged sexual awakening, which provokes the disapproving suspicions of his sister and a local butcher. This movie has heart all right, but seems much too pleased and facile about it. Written by Barry Devlin and directed by Suri Krishnamma; with Brenda Fricker, Michael Gambon, and Tara Fitzgerald. (JR) Read more

Based on a true story, Ken Loach’s powerful and disturbing British drama about a single working-class mother with four children from four different fathers is made unforgettable both by stand-up comedian Crissy Rock’s lead performance and by the filmmakers’ determination to make the story as messy and as complex as life itself. After many abusive relationships, Maggie, the heroine, settles down with a gentle Paraguayan refugee (beautifully played by Vladimir Vega), but then has to contend repeatedly with the state taking away her children. This sounds like a simple antiwelfare polemic, but Loach doesn’t allow us to walk away from the movie with any settled or monolithic message. As written by Rona Munro and played by Rock, Maggie is a volcanic conundrum, and the deeper we become involved in her fate, the less sure we become about anything. Highly recommended. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, January 20 through 26. Read more