Jonathan Rosenbaum

This fruitful collaboration (1994) between Chicago independent Joseph Ramirez and Illinois poet Paul Hoover is a major advance over Ramirez’s attempt to yoke cinema with poetry in his first feature, Descent. Shot with a Chicago cast and crew in rural Iowa, Viridian follows the painful adjustments of a divorced young woman and her little boy as they move from one rented farmhouse to another, focusing on her dreams as well as her waking thoughts. Though the plot is minimal, the gorgeous cinematography (by Sean Culver, who also served as editor) and Hoover’s writing, most of which figures as the woman’s offscreen narration, mesh with each other in arresting and mysterious ways. The marriage of lonely figures and landscapes occasionally recalls some of the best features of Jon Jost, and the functional performances by Diane Weyerman, Mathew Brennan, and James Larkin allow Ramirez to weave meditative moods around the evocative words and images. (JR) Read more

Anne Rice adapted the first volume of her Vampire Chronicles for this 1994 feature. A vampire (Brad Pitt) recounts his life story to a reporter (Christian Slater) in contemporary San Francisco. The film seems pitched mainly to people familiar with the book, and you may be perplexed about some background detailssuch as the identity of the interviewer and even who the vampire is at the beginning of his tale, when he’s still a mortal and encounters the vampire Lestat (Tom Cruise) in late-18th-century New Orleans. But if you can get swept up in the story, the movie is imaginative and compelling. After the story moves to France, the superb visualization of catacombs may put you in mind of Poe. Directed by Neil Jordan (The Crying Game), this is an ambitious, florid epic with some fine, eerie moments tied to a little girl played by Kirsten Dunst. But a more explicit spelling out of the story’s gay subtext would have helped. With Stephen Rea and Antonio Banderas. R, 122 min. (JR) Read more

This unforgettable two-part Canadian TV docudrama (1992) deals forcefully though not exploitatively with a very delicate subjectthe sexual abuse and sadistic treatment of boys at a Catholic orphanage in Newfoundland by some of the religious brothers assigned to take care of them. Suggested by real-life events (and consequently held back from public broadcast while an investigation was under way), this work consists of two 95-minute features, both sensitively directed by John N. Smith and cogently written by Smith, Des Walsh, and Sam Grana. The first part focuses on the relationship between a key offender and a ten-year-old who’s been singled out as his boy, leading to a complaint lodged by a janitor, a police investigation, and a hasty cover-up. The second part charts the reopening of the case 15 years later, when the offender, who’s long since left the orphanage to become a respectable family man, is summoned to a hearing along with his victim and a key witness, both now young men. Neither homophobic nor psychologically pat in its approach, the film doesn’t make the mistake of pretending to offer the last word on the subject and is most striking for the nuanced performance of Henry Czerny as the main offender, though all the acting is first-rate. Read more

Joseph Green’s low-budget feature (1963) about a surgeon trying to find a body to attach to the decapitated but still-living head of his fiancee. Legendary for its sheer awfulness, the film was shot in Tarrytown, New York, and wasn’t released until several years later, which automatically makes it ripe for canonization today. With Herb (Jason) Evers and Virginia Leith. 81 min. (JR) Read more

The title of this 1994 would-be spin-off of Bram Stoker’s Dracula is something of a misnomer, and the film itself provides further proof of Kenneth Branagh’s faltering skill as a filmmaker whenever he tries to move beyond Shakespeare. Though Steph Lady and Frank Darabont’s script certainly comes closer to Mary Shelley’s novel than do either of James Whale’s Frankenstein moviesrestoring the framing story that takes place in the arctic circle and giving the monster more of a human intelligence and sensibilitymost of the feminist implications of the novel seem lost on Branagh and his writers, who’ve replaced them with homoerotic overtones and other distortions. Robert De Niro does a fine job of impersonating the monster, but the choppy storytelling deprives his performance of the resonance it deserves, and Branagh himself as Frankenstein emerges as muddled and ill defined. With Tom Hulce, Helena Bonham Carter, Aidan Quinn, Ian Holm, Richard Briers, and John Cleese. R, 128 min. (JR) Read more

Though it’s ridiculous on many levels, especially as a story that purports to be set in the Mississippi backwoods in 1970, this movie about a Vietnam vet (Kevin Costner) suffering from posttraumatic stress who tries to rebuild his life and establish a home for his family manages to succeed at times in spite of itself. The main emphasis here is on the feuds and friendships formed by his kids with other local children, some of them black, in relation to a tree house that serves as a fort, which ultimately leads to a rather overblown climax. Directed by Jon Avnet (Fried Green Tomatoes) from a script by Kathy McWorter, the movie often shows more heart than head (the implied parallels of the kids’ skirmishes with the war in Vietnam, glimpsed in a few flashbacks, are never clearly worked out), but the force of some of the performancesby LaToya Chisholm, Elijah Wood, and Mare Winningham as well as Costnerhave a lingering impact. With Lexi Randall, Christine Baranski, Bruce A. Young, and Charlette Julius. (JR) Read more

Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 story of a lonely hit man (Alain Delon) is stylish and elegant, though not really the holy writ that Quentin Tarantino and John Woo have claimed. Though Melville sustained himself with American-style thrillers in the last decade of his life, his best versions of American noir arguably remain the earlier ones in black and white (my own favorite is 1966’s Le deuxieme souffle). This one certainly has its moments (particularly the coordinated police chase through the Paris metro), but its women characters are faintly ridiculous, while the men are mainly suave icons. Henri Decae’s brilliant color cinematography finds something metallic blue gray in virtually every shot, and the film is alluring as long as one remains captivated by its mannerist and slightly monotonous style. Despite a hefty (and fabricated) quote from The Book of Bushido about the loneliness of the samurai, this is all about attitude and machismo rather than soul, which is why it winds up feeling somewhat flat. Based on Joan McLeod’s novel The Ronin; in French with subtitles. 101 min. (JR) Read more

Adapted from a 1980 novel by Cees Nooteboom that has been through 11 editions in Holland and translated into eight languages, Herbert Curiel’s Dutch feature describes the gradual re-education of an upper-class womanizer and art dealer (Derek De Lint) who loses most of his money in the stock market and meets the relatively impoverished rejected son of a family friend (Thom Hoffman) who teaches him another way of looking at life’s everyday rituals. Accompanied by a dry and occasionally witty offscreen, first-person narration, the plot is largely a series of philosophical monologues and dialogues, but Curiel’s actors and his effective use of Amsterdam settings give it more than an abstract, cerebral interest. Nothing earthshaking, but a respectable and watchable piece of work, made with craft and intelligence. (JR) Read more

The form and the material couldn’t be more familiar: a bachelor party in Queens that brings together several working-class childhood friends, very much in the manner of something like Diner. What makes it sparkle is the cornucopia of actors’ shtick provided by the talented cast: Joe Mantegna, John Malkovich, Kevin Bacon, Linda Fiorentino, Tom Waits, Ken Olin, Chloe Webb, and Jamie Lee Curtis. Steve Rash directed Tony Spiridakis’s script as if we haven’t already received its gist countless times before, and the actors somehow managed to follow suit. (JR) Read more

Conceptually one of the most interesting of Jacques Doillon’s features, this 1986 film is set almost entirely inside a theater. While awaiting the return of his estranged daughter Manon (Sandrine Bonnaire), a stage director (Michel Piccoli) asks his young mistress (Sabine Azema) to act out various versions of the anticipated reunion, then summons several young actresses to embody different aspects or portions of Manonher eyes, voice, hands, ears, and so on. Manon herself makes an appearance during these improvisations, yet the theatrical games continue, until a heated confrontation between father and daughter finally takes place. While the puritan of the title is supposed to be Manon, whose estrangement from her father is related to her puritanism, the Bergman-esque guilt and sexual angst that seem so much a part of Doillon’s world appear to rebound on the filmmaker as well. Using theater as an indirect metaphor for his own activity as a director, Doillon is well served by William Lubtchansky’s camera work and the powerful talents of his three leads; even though the plot seems at times strangely external to his main concerns, the mise en scene and psychodrama that he enacts carry considerable dramatic voltage. (JR) Read more

A wealthy Jewish family in 1938 Ferrara blithely ignore the encroachment of fascism until it’s too late in one of Vittorio De Sica’s many postneorealist comebacks, this one strong and popular enough to have won an Oscar. Based on a novel of the same title by Giorgio Bassani and attractively shot, this 1970 film catapulted Dominique Sanda to stardom and probably helped Helmut Berger along as well. With Lino Capolicchio, Fabio Testi, and Romolo Valli. In Italian with subtitles. 94 min. (JR) Read more

Swiftian satirespecifically, A Modest Proposalseems to be the model for this grim farce by Monty Python’s Michael Palin and Terry Jones about the accidental discovery at a chocolate factory that human bodies in the vats make for better sales. Squarely aimed at Thatcherism in general and cynical business greed in particular, this project sorely needs a talent on the order of Terry Gilliam in order to register its political point with the proper clarity and bite. What it gets instead is limp and unfocused direction from Giles Foster that can’t distinguish between overarching concepts and incidental slapstick details: everything gets the same coarse inflection, and alas, practically nothing works. With Tyler Butterworth, Vanessa Redgrave (the funniest actor on board, as a sexually voracious Maltese widow), Jonathan Pryce, Freddie Jones, and Sammi Davis. (JR) Read more

An illegal immigrant from Hong Kong (Jeff Lau), struggling to speak English and desperate for a green card, goes to work at a Chinese restaurant in Queens in this independent first feature (1993) by Tony Chan, written with Edwin Baker. I was won over from the beginning by its engaging artlessness, its unpolished acting and less-than-action-packed story. If you’ve ever wondered how Chinese restaurants operate, this modest, bilingual (English and Chinese, with various characters speaking both Cantonese and Mandarin dialects) comedy-drama gives you a comprehensive idea, and the cast of charactersincluding a Chinese American clerk who doesn’t speak Chinese, a waiter beleaguered by gambling debts, and a shy Caucasian woman the hero is talked into datingkeeps things hopping. (JR) Read more

This 1993 film by the eclectic and talented Iranian Mohsen Makhmalbaf (The Peddler, Marriage of the Blessed) is a contemporary, semitragic farce about a burly film actor who wants to play only in art films but is forced by his family’s economic demands to act in a string of trashy commercial movies. His tormented wife, infertile and obsessed with having a baby, insists that her husband marry and impregnate a second wife, a deaf-mute Gypsy, to provide them with a child. What keeps this picture frenetic, apart from the hysterical action and the satirical treatment of Iranian media, is the couple’s surreal, high-tech home and Makhmalbaf’s hyperbolic, eccentric mise en scene, which fit together hand in glove (as they were undoubtedly designed to do). The three lead actors–Akbar Abdi (playing some version of himself), Fatemeh Motamed Aria, and Mahaya Petrossian–were all in Once Upon a Time, Cinema, Makhmalbaf’s previous feature, and there appear to be some cross-references (such as the hero’s Chaplin worship), but here the tone is more caustic, the inventiveness more pointed. The meanings of both films are less than entirely clear, but my hunch is that each is a comic allegory about the rift between traditional and contemporary Iran, in which class differences and cultural differences are equally pertinent. Read more

A conventionally made documentary about the Mississippi Voter Registration Project, which existed from 1961 to 1964, this is special because of the precise sense of time and place it manages to impart through archival footage and recent interviews, as well as for the exemplary history lesson it offers about a key branch of the civil rights struggle. Produced and directed by Connie Field (The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter) and Marilyn Mulford and written and edited by Michael Chandler, it not only offers a welcome corrective to the multiple obfuscations of Mississippi Burning; it also furnishes the viewer with enough solid information to reevaluate the subject intelligently. (Whether you regard the civil rights movement as a whole as a success or as a failure, chances are you’ll have a more complicated view after seeing this.) Among the interview subjects are many Mississippi activists (including Victoria Gray, Endesha Ida Mae Holland, L.C. Dorsey, and Curtis Hayes) as well as those who came to the scene from other states (including Bob Moses, Marshall Ganz, and Pam Chude Allen), and the story they have to tell remains an essential part of our history. This won the grand jury prize for best documentary at the 1994 Sundance film festival. Read more