Jonathan Rosenbaum

Dated and bowdlerized but nonetheless sincere, Vincente Minnelli’s 1956 ‘Scope version of a Robert Anderson playadapted by the author, with Hays Office censorshipwas originally about a persecuted gay schoolboy taken under the wing of an older woman. Now it’s about a persecuted effeminate heterosexual schoolboy taken under the wing of an older woman, with John Kerr and Deborah Kerr (no relation) re-creating their stage roles. The result may be less memorable or celebrated than Minnelli’s other ‘Scope melodramas (e.g., The Cobweb, Home From the Hill, Some Came Running), but it’s still probably better than most contemporary movies. With Leif Erickson, Edward Andrews, and Darryl Hickman. (JR) Read more

San Francisco independent Jay Rosenblatt will present a program of his quirky and interesting films, including his ten-minute Short of Breath (1990). Most of this masterpiece belongs to that currently overworked and underthought experimental genre the found-footage film, but Rosenblattemulating Bruce Connor, the master of the genre, in a fresh and psychoanalytical manner that is at once sad, frightening, and lyricalmakes it the stuff of high drama. He’ll also be showing Blood Test (1985), Paris X2 (1988), and Brain in the Desert (1990). (JR) Read more

Back to the Future Hong Kong style, with Stephen Chow as the time traveler visiting his unmarried grandfather and grandmother (Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern’s Gong Li) in Shanghai in the 30s. Poon Man Kit directed this madcap 1991 action comedy. (JR) Read more

Soviet filmmaker Mikhail Belikov’s docudrama about Chernobyl views the 1986 power-plant disaster as a sort of objective correlative of national moral decay and as a tragedy that served to throw this decay into relief. It’s more interesting and persuasive in what it has to say about the accident than in the somewhat awkward thrust of its fiction (1990). (JR) Read more

While this delightful and charming Irish comedy, set in 1957, is quite different in plot from John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952), it frequently evokes the earlier film in its beautiful village settings, its fiercely independent heroine (Robin Wright), and its climactic slugfest between the outsider hero (Aidan Quinn) and a drunken local bully (Albert Finney); it also may come a lot closer to the reality of an Irish village. The unmarried heroine in this case causes a scandal by becoming pregnant and refusing to name the father; the hero is an actor in a traveling troupe, and the bully is a local cop. Shane Connaughton and Kerry Crabbe wrote the script, Gillies MacKinnon directed, Milo O’Shea and Alan Devlin costar, and it seems like everyone had a ball; I know I did. (JR) Read more

A reluctant family reunion brought about by the death of a patriarch (Jack Warden) is the point of departure for this mildly engaging and fairly fresh comedy written and directed by Charlie Petersa screenwriter on such pictures as Three Men and a Little Lady and Blame It on Rio, here making his directorial debut. The capable and offbeat cast includes Bob Hoskins, Blair Brown, Tim Curry, Frances McDormand, William Petersen, Pamela Reed, Peter Riegert, Maureen Stapleton, and (especially good) Nancy Travis. (JR) Read more

For all the liberties taken with the play, Orson Welles’s 1952 independent feature may well be the greatest Shakespeare film (Welles’s later Chimes at Midnight is the only other contender)a brooding expressionist dream made in eerie Moorish locations over nearly three years, yet held together by a remarkably cohesive style and atmosphere. (The film looks better than ever in its 1992 restored version, though it sounds quite different thanks to the restorers’ debatable decision to redo the brilliant score and sound effects in stereo, altering them considerably in the process.) The most impressive performance here is Micheal MacLiammoir’s Iago; Welles’s own underplaying of the title role meshes well with the somnambulistic mood, but apart from some magnificent line readings he makes less of a dramatic impression. With Suzanne Cloutier (as Desdemona), Robert Coote, Fay Compton, Doris Dowling, and Michael Laurence. 92 min. (JR) Read more

Writer-director Keith Gordon sustains rather than fulfills the interesting promise of his first feature (The Chocolate War) in another taut novel adaptation that shows the influence of Stanley Kubrick. The novel this time is by William Wharton, who also wrote the source novels for Birdy and Dad; it’s a semiautobiographical account of the members of a young World War II infantry squad, stuck in a deserted French chateau during the Christmas season in 1944, who form a sort of perverse family (two of the soldiers are nicknamed Father and Mother) and make uncertain contact with a small German squad that may or may not want to surrender. This fable about the futility of the war benefits not only from fine performances but an intelligent and literate offscreen narration that enhances the movie’s conceptual integrity (for my money, it’s a much better model of what literary cinema should be than Howards End). With Peter Berg, Kevin Dillon, Arye Gross, Ethan Hawke, Gary Sinise, Frank Whaley, and John C. McGinley. (JR) Read more

A fascinating German documentary by Sybille Schonemann about her return to the East German penitentiary where she spent a year as a political prisoner before Germany’s reunification. In addition to restaging portions of her own arrest and incarceration, she films her confrontations with the officials who brought unspecified charges against her, the secret police who arrested her, and the prison matrons and warden. It’s as if Kafka’s Joseph K. went back and tried to conduct rational and even-tempered interviews with the bureaucrats who condemned himmost of the people she speaks to are friendly, vague, evasive, and forgetful, and something about the state apparatus they were a part of courses through the film like a chilly draft (1991). (JR) Read more

Although I’m a sucker for just about everything Christine Lahti does, not even she can save this messy, incoherent movie about an abused housewife (Meg Tilly) and a hardened cocktail waitress (Lahti) who decide to start a new life together in Alaska after leaving the town of Normal, Wyoming. It’s possible that Edward Solomon’s script originally may have had something going for it, but in its present form, as directed by Edward Zwick (Glory), it’s a movie that seems less authored than deauthored by someone hacking at random into the original material. With Lenny Von Dohlen, Maury Chaykin, Patrika Darbo, and Eve Gordon. (JR) Read more

My own favorite among Jon Jost’s experimental narratives, this chilling portrait of an embittered, misogynistic lumpen proletarian (Tom Blair) driving through western Montana consists mainly of a series of virtuoso long takes. Jost’s highly original technique and Blair’s searing performance combine to create one of the most powerful and provocative psychological profiles of a motiveless killer to be found on film (1977). (JR) Read more

A black-and-white 1990 biopic about the last years of Henryk Goldszmit, aka Jan Korczak (Wojciech Pszoniak), the celebrated Polish Jewish saint — a children’s doctor and author of children’s books who accompanied 200 Jewish orphans to the gas ovens of Treblinka. It’s directed by Andrzej Wajda from a script by Agnieszka Holland, and shot by Robby Muller, but despite the talented people involved, the problems of dealing unsentimentally with a Polish national hero are not always solved, and the film has also been understandably criticized abroad (by Shoah‘s Claude Lanzmann, among others) for whitewashing the role played by Poland in facilitating the Nazis’ work. Apart from these serious caveats, the handling of locations and period detail is carefully done, and the film’s sincerity makes up at times for its oversimplifications. (JR)

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Not a prequel to K-9, but still a dog in every other sense. The story, adapted by Patrick Meyers and Scott Roberts from Meyers’s play, is basically an exercise in mawkish pretension with some pretty scenery, about two Americans (Michael Biehn and Matt Craven) who join an expedition to climb K2, the treacherous northern Pakistan peak. Franc Roddam directed, and Raymond J. Barry, Hiroshi Fujioka, Patricia Charbonneau, and Luca Bercovici costar. (JR) Read more

This may be the most enjoyable animated feature I’ve seen since Walt Disney dieda passionate ecological fable that combines more wit and wonder than the entire output of some animation studios. Basically a collaborative effort between Australians and Americans, directed by Bill Kroyer (a Disney-trained animator) from a script by Jim Cox based on the FernGully stories by Australian writer Diana Young, it benefits greatly from the voices of Robin Williams, Tim Curry, Samantha Mathis, Christian Slater, Grace Zabriskie, Cheech Marin, and Tommy Chong, as well as from a canny sense of how to use them. The simple story involves the multiple creatures of an enormous rain forest and the grim encroachments of humans, one of whom gets shrunk to insect size and learns what toxic love (as one of the songs calls it) is all about. The rain forest itself is invested with an imaginative depth and variety and a sense of immensity that hark back to the best early Disney features, and the expressionist depiction of deforestation and pollution is equally rich and potent. The score (by several hands) isn’t as memorable as Beauty and the Beast’s, but the dialogue is arguably even funnier. In other words, you should see this (1992). Read more

John Cassavetes’s galvanic 1968 drama about one long night in the lives of an estranged well-to-do married couple (John Marley and Lynn Carlin) and their temporary lovers (Gena Rowlands and Seymour Cassel) was the first of his independent features to become a hit, and it’s not hard to see why. It remains one of the only American films to take the middle class seriously, depicting the compulsive, embarrassed laughter of people facing their own sexual longing and some of the emotional devastation brought about by the so-called sexual revolution. (Interestingly, Cassavetes set out to make a trenchant critique of the middle class, but his characteristic empathy for all of his characters makes this a far cry from simple satire.) Shot in 16-millimeter black and white with a good many close-ups, this often takes an unsparing yet compassionate documentary look at emotions most movies prefer to gloss over or cover up. Adroitly written and directed, and superbly actedthe leads and Val Avery are all uncommonly good (and the astonishing Lynn Carlin was a nonprofessional discovered by Cassavetes, working at the time as Robert Altman’s secretary)this is one of the most powerful and influential American films of the 60s. 129 min. (JR) Read more