Jonathan Rosenbaum

An exquisite enigma by Krzysztof Kieslowski (Decalogue) following the parallel lives of two 20-year-old women, one in Poland and one in France, both played by the beautiful Irene Jacob. The Polish Veronika is a talented singer with a heart condition; the French Veronique quits her voice lessons and gets involved with a puppeteer who writes children’s books. Masterfully directed, this rather dreamlike 1991 French-Polish production explores a dual nature that seems to grow uncannily out of the coproduction situation itselfalmost as if Kieslowski were dreaming of a resurrected artistic identity for himself as Polish state financing went the route of Polish communism. With Philippe Volter, Halina Gryglaszewska, Kalina Jedrusik, and Aleksander Bardini. In French and Polish with subtitles. 98 min. (JR) Read more

Not surprisingly, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, the directors of this 1991 postapocalyptic French comedy about a tenement and butcher’s shop, come from experimental video and animation, and Gilles Adrien, who helped them write the macabre script, comes from comic books. Some pale echoes here of French poetic realism (mainly Clair and Carne), Gilliam, Lynch, and the Coen brothers, but despite the singular appearance of the hero (Diva’s Dominique Pinon), there are no characters to care about or remember afterwardjust a lot of flashy technique involving decor, some glib allegorical flourishes, and the obligatory studied film-school weirdness. With Marie-Laure Dougnac, Karen Viard, and Jean-Claude Dreyfus. In French with subtitles. 95 min. (JR) Read more

Larry Fishburne plays a cop who poses as a Hollywood drug dealer to infiltrate and destroy a cocaine cartel, but gradually discovers that the U.S. State Department has another agenda. Amply fulfilling the promise shown in A Rage in Harlem, director Bill Duke does a terrific job in spelling out the grim implications of this exceptionally violent 1992 picture, scripted by Henry Bean and Michael Tolkin (The Rapture). What emerges is a powerhouse thriller full of surprises, original touches, and rare political lucidity, including an impressive performance by Jeff Goldblum as a Jewish yuppie gangster. With Victoria Dillard, Charles Martin Smith, Sydney Lassick, Clarence Williams III, Gregory Sierra, and Roger Guenveur Smith. 92 min. (JR) Read more

Patrick Swayze stars in a Christian parable of sorts about a disgruntled American doctor who reluctantly resumes practicing at a combination school, clinic, and dispensary run by a middle-aged woman (Pauline Collins) in one of the poorest sections of Calcutta. This story alternates with and eventually joins that of a poor laborer (Om Puri) who brings his family to Calcutta, where he gets a job pulling a ricksha for the local godfather-extortionist (Shyamanand Jalan) while his wife works as the doctor’s assistant. Both characters wind up in violent conflict with the godfather and his son (Art Malik) after the clinic decides to treat lepers. Adapted by Mark Medoff from a book by Dominique Lapierre, this is a bit lumpy as narrative, as director Roland Joffe’s movies often turn out to be, but at times sincerity helps to make up for the long-windedness. With Shabana Azmi and Nabil Shaban. (JR) Read more

This 1978 feature about a slick Los Angeles coke dealer (Bob Glaudini), winner of the best of the festival award at the U.S. Film Festival, represents Jon Jost’s earliest effort to make a fairly straight commercial narrative film. For this reason, some viewers prefer it to his more experimental works, but I find it relatively familiar and literary in its existential conceitsthough nothing Jost does is wholly without interest. (JR) Read more

If macabre one-liners are your poison, you should probably make a beeline for this 1991 big-budget adaptation of the Charles Addams cartoons and the TV sitcom derived from them. Otherwise there’s not much to flesh out the slender sitcom plot, and little attempt to make up for the lack of character development in the original material. Anjelica Huston and Raul Julia certainly make a sporting effort by being as charming as possible, and the director (Barry Sonnenfeld) and screenwriters (Caroline Thompson and Larry Wilson) seem to have worked overtime trying to come up with fresh ideas. But it’s still an extended collection of one-liners and not much more. With Christopher Lloyd, Christina Ricci, Jimmy Workman, and Judith Malina. PG-13, 102 min. (JR) Read more

Completing a loose trilogy that began with Red Sorghum and Ju Dou, Zhang Yimou’s grim adaptation of a novel by Su Tong once again stars Gong Li as a young woman who marries a much older man, and once again tells a story that explicitly critiques Chinese feudalism and indirectly critiques contemporary China. This time, however, the style is quite different (despite another key use of the color red) and the vision is much bleaker. The heroine, a less sympathetic figure than her predecessors, is a university student in the 1920s who becomes the fourth and youngest wife of a powerful man in northern China after her stepmother can no longer afford to pay for her education. She quickly becomes involved in the various intrigues and rivalries between wives that rule her husband’s world and family tradition: each wife has her own house and courtyard, and whoever the husband chooses to sleep with on a given night receives a foot massage, several lighted red lanterns, and the right to select the menu for the following day. The film confines us throughout to this claustrophobic universe of boxes within boxes, where wives and female servants virtually devote their lives to scheming against one another; the action is filmed mainly in frontal long shots. Read more

The biggest hit of Hong Kong comedy star and director Michael Hui is also considered his best movie, or his next best (after Security Unlimited), by many fans and critics. Having seen an unsubtitled print of this episodic comedy, I can only say that I still laughed a lot at the frenetic slapstick and rapid-fire bursts of rhythmic invention. Hui plays the mean-spirited head of a private detective agency, and among his employees are Hui’s likable brothers Sam and Ricky (1977). (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Saturday, March 21, 6:00, and Sunday, March 22, 2:00, 443-3737) Read more

Though writer-director Yim Ho (Homecoming) disowned this film after producer Tsui Hark took over the direction, it is still one of the most interesting and original Hong Kong pictures I’ve seen. Adapted from two different novels called King of Chess, by Chung Ah Shing and Cheung Hay Kwok, the story alternates between a rather bitter satire of capitalism centered on the Taipei TV industry and an equally critical look at the Cultural Revolution on the mainland many years earlier. Both stories involve the exploitation of chess masters–a boy with psychic powers in the Taiwanese story, a poor man in the mainland flashbacks–and they are connected in terms of plot by the memories a character from Hong Kong in the Taipei story has about visiting a cousin in a reeducation camp. The powerful and talented Yim directed the mainland sections with a highly emotional lyricism that reminds me at times of Bertolucci; the slicker and more action-oriented Tsui handled the brittle Taipei sections. The results may not be what Yim wanted, but it’s still a singular and fascinating work, with a great deal of intelligence and feeling (1991). (Univ. of Chicago, 1212 E. 59th St., Sunday, March 15, 6:00, 702-8575; also Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Thursday, March 19, 6:00, 443-3737) Read more

Josef von Sternberg’s first encounter with Emil Jannings, which led to their collaboration on The Blue Angel two years later, was in this late silent Hollywood masterpiece about a Russian general (Jannings) reduced to the status of a Hollywood extra in a film about the Russian Revolution. Lajos Biros wrote the story, Jannings’s performance here and in The Way of All Flesh won him an Oscar, and Sternberg’s direction makes this second only to The Docks of New York as the most accomplished of his silent films. With Evelyn Brent and William Powell (1928). A new score by Chicago Symphony Orchestra violinist Arnold Brostoff will be conducted by Brostoff and performed by members of the CSO at this special screening. (Orchestra Hall, 220 S. Michigan, Saturday, March 7, 8:00, 435-6666) Read more

Not even the talents of Dolly Parton and James Woods can save the shaky premise of this Disney comedy with a Chicago setting, directed by Barnet Kellman from a script by Craig Bolotin and Patricia Resnick. Fired from a dance instructor job, Parton leaves her fiance and her small town for Chicago, where she accidentally winds up on the radio as a talk-show psychologist dispensing advice to callers; her show is such a runaway hit that Chicago Sun- Times reporter James Wood decides to investigate her credentials. This starts off brightly enough, but the fatal mistake of the filmmakers is to assume that the profound common sense and populist appeal of the heroine can be inferred from Parton’s natural charms rather than actually demonstrated. The movie never manages to paper over this gaping hole, but some agreeable secondary performancesby Griffin Dunne, Michael Madsen, Deirdre O’Connell, John Sayles, Spalding Gray, Jerry Orbach, and Philip Bosco, among othersprovide partial compensation. (JR) Read more

Duane Clark’s independent feature (1990), shot in Chicagoa conventional buddy movie about a quartet of longtime (if dissimilar) chums, set at Christmas 1989 and sparked intermittently by decent acting. If you’ve nothing else to do, it goes down easily, but don’t expect much more. With Arye Gross, Gale Hansen, Doug Savant, Steven Wilde (who scripted the movie with Clark), and Courteney Cox. (JR) Read more

Michael Hui directs and stars with his brothers Ricky and Sam in a typically broad and frenetic but hilarious Hong Kong farce about the misadventures of three security guards. The plot is rather episodic, but some of the piecessuch as a bank robbery and an attempt to burglarize an exhibition of Chinese antiquitiesare classics of their kind. Hui’s exquisite sense of rhythm, often accompanied by short bursts of music, and his antiheroic sense of character keep this hopping (1981). (JR) Read more

It’s a toss-up between this 1989 essay film and Until the End of the World (in the abbreviated U.S. version) for Wim Wenders’s worst movie. Until the End of the World is silly and boring, but it has a few redeeming moments; this has a few moments too, but it’s ideologically much more offensive. Wenders interviews and philosophizes about chic fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto, whose clothes he wears (in exchange for making this movie?), films female models, blithely decapitating them, and ruminates about the meaning of video, himself, life in generalthat sort of thing. A rich boy’s movie made by a talented artist whose view of the social world has shrunk to the dimensions of his hotel room. (JR) Read more

After the disappointing Blaze, writer-director Ron Shelton got back on track with the same mixture of sports action, sexual sparring, and comic, slangy dialogue that sparked Bull Durham. Like that earlier comedy, this is enough of a structural mess to lose itself somewhere before the end, but the jazzy surface action is even more lively and seductive. Basically the movie is a string of episodes involving two basketball hustlers (Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes) in Los Angeles, with racial differences serving both to help their hustles along and to define the limits of their friendship; Do the Right Thing’s feisty Rosie Perez plays Harrelson’s girlfriend, who longs to be a contestant on Jeopardy, while Tyra Ferrell is accorded the less interesting and less prominent part of Snipes’s wife. Shelton’s flair for fancy dialogue and his preoccupation with scoring often make him seem like the Preston Sturges of southern jive; unfortunately he doesn’t have a matching sense of plot and continuity. This picture is packed with fun, but it doesn’t really go anywhere, and elements that summon up memories of The Hustler don’t work in its favor (1992). (JR) Read more