Jonathan Rosenbaum

Another adaptation of a John Grisham best-seller (after The Firm and The Pelican Brief), this one involving an 11-year-old boy who unwittingly learns from a Mafia lawyer the whereabouts of a missing U.S. senator’s body just before the lawyer shoots himself, which sends both the crime syndicate and the federal government after the boy. Figuring in are the boy’s younger brother (who’s traumatized by the suicide), their single mother (Mary-Louise Parker), a lawyer (Susan Sarandon) who seeks to protect the boy, and a federal prosecutor (Tommy Lee Jones, of course). Joel Schumacher directed from a script by Akiva Goldsman and Robert Getchell. This isn’t much of a thrillerthe villains are all straight from central casting, and most of the suspense sequences aren’t very suspensefulbut a certain amount of goodwill is stirred up by the gradual bonding between the working-class boy and the lawyer, despite some directorial overemphasis; Sarandon is good as always, though an underscripted Jones just walks through his part. With Anthony LaPaglia, Anthony Edwards, Ossie Davis, and Brad Renfro. (JR) Read more

Enjoyable thriller hokum in the form of a theme-park ride (1994) from first-time director Jan De Bont (a Dutch-born cinematographer best known for his work with Paul Verhoeven), with a script from Graham Yost, also making his feature debut. All the action derives from the untiring efforts of a standard-issue mad bomber (Dennis Hopper), who demands enormous ransoms in order to avert planned disasters but, like John Malkovich in In the Line of Fire, seems principally motivated by Hollywood script conferences. His main scheme, taking up most of the movie’s running time, involves planting a bomb under an LA bus, which will blow up if the bus is driven any slower than 50 miles an hour. Keanu Reeves is the courageous cop who comes to the rescue, assisted by gutsy civilian Sandra Bullock. The deft arabesques of cinematographer Andrzej Bartkowiak juice up the suspense, and if you’re not too put off by the sheer ridiculousness of the story you won’t be bored. With Joe Morton and Jeff Daniels. (JR) Read more

This 1993 black comedy is the least effective work in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy. A Polish hairdresser (Zbigniew Zamachowski) living in Paris, whose French wife (Julie Delpy) divorces him because he’s impotent, is stripped of his job, his money, his passport, and his dignity, and winds up returning to Poland incognito inside a trunk. But taking advantage of the new everything-for-sale economy, he becomes wealthy and hatches a perverse revenge plot. As good as Zamachowski is in the part, his character, like the others in this mordant Polish allegory about equality, seems tailored to fit the message. Moreover, the message, which appears to be that capitalism gives you a hard-on (and that working in a foreign culture, even Paris, leads to impotence), is rather glibly and cursorily spelled out by the slender plot; if we accept it at all, we have to do so mainly on faith. With Janusz Gajos and Jerzy Stuhr, who turn in very able performances. In French and Polish with subtitles. 92 min. (JR) Read more

The best of the so-called Generation X movies I’ve seen so far, this charming first feature by Rory Kelly about a circle of friends in their 30s, and the various complications that ensue when one of the bunch falls helplessly in love with a friend’s wife, owes much of its spark to collective effort, in the script as well as the performances. The film was written by Kelly and five of his own friends–Duane Dell’Amico, Roger Hedden (author of Bodies, Rest & Motion), Neal Jimenez (writer and codirector of The Waterdance), Joe Keenan, and Michael Steinberg (director of Bodies, Rest & Motion and codirector of The Waterdance)–with each of the six scripting a separate scene organized around a specific gathering. A limitation of the collective social portrait drawn is that one never learns what most of the characters do for a living, but the behavioral interplay is often funny and observant. The able cast includes Craig Sheffer (A River Runs Through It), coproducer Eric Stoltz (who starred in both The Waterdance and Bodies, Rest & Motion), and Meg Tilly (Valmont, The Body Snatchers); the striking and effective score is by David Lawrence. Watch for a funny cameo by Quentin Tarantino in a party scene; he claims to be offering a theory about Top Gun, but seems in fact to be describing his own films. Read more

This 1933 film focuses on life in a huge department store from the vantage point of the employees, whose lives are made miserable by a heartless, amoral manager (Warren William). As an attack on ruthless capitalism, it goes a lot further than more recent efforts such as Wall Street, and it’s amazing how much plot and character are gracefully shoehorned into 75 minutes. Adapted by Robert Presnell from a play by David Boehm, and directed by the reliable Roy Del Ruth; with Loretta Young, Wallace Ford, Alice White, and Allen Jenkins. To be screened as part of a zippy double feature with Baby Face, which launches a series of Warner double and triple features–two dozen movies in all–that demonstrates how much you could expect from a night at the movies in the early 30s. Music Box, Friday, September 23. Read more

A 21-year friendship between a lifer (Morgan Freeman) and a New England banker convicted of murder (Tim Robbins) is the focus of this gripping 1994 prison drama, capably directed and adapted by Frank Darabont from Stephen King’s short novel Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. A passing reference to The Count of Monte Cristo offers a partial clue to what makes this movie compelling: though its events occur between the late 40s and late 60s, the film’s 19th-century storytelling mode shows how lives, personalities, and personal agendas develop over years, and how various individuals cope with the dynamics of prison life and totalitarian systems in general. Robbins and Freeman both shine; with Bob Gunton, William Sadler, Clancy Brown, Gil Bellows, and James Whitmore. R, 142 min. (JR) Read more

In an effort to save their marriage, a couple (Meryl Streep and David Strathairn) leave with their son on a white-water raft trip and encounter trouble from a pair of strangers (Kevin Bacon and John C. Reilly). Curtis Hanson (The Hand That Rocks the Cradle) directed this 1994 thriller effectively from a fairly routine script by Denis O’Neill; what really makes this movie worth seeing are the stunning Oregon and Montana locations (filmed in ‘Scope), as well as Streep’s sexy pluck in playing the most capable and resourceful character around. (JR) Read more

A rather unfunny pseudodocumentary in the manner of This is Spinal Tap, Bob Roberts, and Fear of a Black Hat about two American independents setting out to make a big-budget biblical spectacular. If you haven’t seen as many movies of this ilk as I have, it’s possible you might be amused. Directed by Arthur Borman from a script he wrote with Chicagoan Mark Borman, Gregory S. Malins, and Michael Curtis; with Michael Riley and Stephen Rappaport, as well as cameos by Lou Ferrigno, Eve Plumb, and, in the part of Moses, Soupy Sales. (JR) Read more

American TV watchers, eat your hearts out! It isn’t always easy to trace the connections in these selections from “Ten to Eleven”–a series of short, experimental “essay” films made for German television by the remarkable German filmmaker Alexander Kluge–but they’re the liveliest and most imaginative European TV shows I’ve seen since those of Ruiz and Godard. Densely constructed out of a very diverse selection of archival materials, which are manipulated (electronically and otherwise) in a number of unexpected ways, these historical meditations often suggest Max Ernst collages using the cultural flotsam of the last 100 years. I’ve seen four of the programs: Why Are You Crying, Antonio? relates fascism, opera, and domesticity; Antiques & Advertising historicizes ads in a number of novel ways; Madame Butterfly Waits offers a compressed history of opera and its kitschy pop-culture successors; and the self-explanatory The Eiffel Tower, King Kong, and the White Women makes use of comics, 1890s movies, a quote from Heidegger, and multiple images of the famous ape and tower. The first part of this program features Madame Butterfly Waits, The Eiffel Tower, King Kong, and the White Women, Antiques & Advertising, and The African Lady, or Love With a Fatal Outcome; the second includes Blue Hour Tango Time, Why Are You Crying, Antonio?, Read more

A witty British courtroom comedy-drama, set circa 1450, in which a Parisian lawyer (played by Colin Firth), accompanied by his clerk, tries his hand in the French provinces, meanwhile becoming involved with a beautiful Gypsy outcast. In a misguided effort to cash in on the fanfare accompanying The Crying Game, also distributed by Miramax, viewers are urged not to reveal a “surprise” that this picture virtually gives away in its opening sequence, one predicated on the medieval practice of treating animals as “equals” under the law. What’s actually surprising is that most of this sexy, nicely acted, and humorously detailed picture works on its own modest terms, without hype or gimmicks, even after some stupid censorious cuts. Written and directed by the able TV documentarist Leslie Megahey, whose best earlier work includes a wonderful three-hour interview with Orson Welles; with Amina Annabi, Jim Carter, Donald Pleasence, Ian Holm, and Nicol Williamson. Pipers Alley. Read more

You’d never guess it, but the title heroine is actually a refurbished bus, and this nicely made 1994 comedy-drama could be described as an Australian Easy Rider, with Sydney drag queens instead of bikers and no apocalyptic ending. Terence Stamp brings a certain suave integrity to his role as a transsexual who takes two queens cross-country in a drag show. Hugo Weaving (Agent Smith in The Matrix and the blind photographer in Proof) and Guy Pearce are almost as good, with Bob Hunter doing a fine job in a smaller role. Not everything works equally well in this road movieI could have done without Hunter’s disgruntled Japanese wife, a poorly conceived and crudely executed characterbut writer-director Stephan Elliott keeps things watchable. 104 min. (JR) Read more

The exciting thing about Haile Gerima’s lush, wide-screen folkloric feature about black slavery–independently made and distributed–is its poetic conviction, backed up by a great deal of filmmaking savvy. Born in Ethiopia but based in the U.S., Gerima attended UCLA’s film school around the same time as Charles Burnett, Larry Clark, Julie Dash, and Billy Woodbury. I haven’t seen his previous films–which include Harvest 3000 Years, Bush Mama, and Ashes and Embers–but Sankofa (1993) shows that he has a camera style and political vision all his own. A glamorous black model (Oyafunmike Ogunlano) posing for pictures outside an ancient castle in Ghana where slaves were once bought and sold provokes the ire of a self-appointed tribal guardian of this tourist spot, who hurls a curse at her that magically transports her into the role of a slave on a Jamaican plantation, where most of the remainder of the film is set. Beautifully shot and powerfully acted, the depiction of slavery from the vantage point of the slaves as they move toward revolt is rendered mainly in English dialogue, with an interesting score by David J. White that manages to encompass American jazz and blues as well as African elements. It stands to reason that if anything could bridge the radically disparate experiences of being an American black and being an African slave it’s poetry, and Gerima puts it to stirring use. Read more

SF specialist Peter Hyams, doubling as usual as director and cinematographer, leaves his record for mediocrity (Outland, 2010) unblemished in this silly time-travel tale, set in 2004, that has Jean-Claude Van Damme going after a corrupt senator (Ron Silver) who seeks to buy his way to the presidency by making select raids on the past (e.g., gold bullion from 1863, crafty investments on Wall Street in 1929), thereby manipulating the present. But fans of the humorless Van Damme’s brutal footwork probably won’t be disappointed. The script is by Mark Verheiden and executive producer Mike Richardson; with Mia Sara, Gloria Reuben, and Bruce McGill. (JR) Read more

A dotty and disheveled but fairly watchable comedy of errors set in Africa, adapted by William Boyd from his own novel, directed by Bruce Beresford, and probably suffering from nervous studio recutting. Colin Friels plays the not-so-likable hero, an English diplomat posted to the newly independent state of Kinjanja, where he has to contend with a pompous boss (John Lithgow doing a mildly funny if predictable turn), a possible venereal disease, and his own as well as his boss’s indifference to the local customs. Sean Connery plays a serene local doctor who is understandably dubious about this fellow, and Louis Gossett Jr. plays a rising local politician; romantic interest is provided by Diana Rigg and Joanne Whalley-Kilmer. (JR) Read more

An intermittently engaging first feature by writer-director Boaz Yakin, who previously scripted The Rookie, about a 12-year-old boy living in a Brooklyn slum who manages to extricate himself from drug running by applying lessons learned in speed chess from his estranged father (Samuel L. Jackson). Poised somewhere between a movie-familiar (i.e., semiscurrilous) look at inner-city life as trench warfare and a farfetched Hollywood revenge fantasy, this is kept alive largely through its first-rate performances, beginning with Sean Nelson’s as the boy; Giancarlo Esposito is also a standout. With Cheryl Freeman, and N’Bushe Wright. (JR) Read more