Jonathan Rosenbaum

A beautiful reminder from octogenarian Akira Kurosawa that he’s still the master, despite the mixed evidence of his two previous films. The plot centers on four children spending the summer with their grandmother (Sachiko Murase) in the countryside outside Nagasaki while their parents visit wealthy relatives in Hawaii. Gradually the children learn from their grandmother about the atomic bomb dropped in 1945, which killed their grandfather and made an indelible mark on all the survivors. Learning that his uncle died because of the bomb, one of the Hawaiian relatives, a Japanese American (Richard Gere), comes to visit. The pastoral mood and performances of this film are both reminiscent of late John Ford, and Kurosawa’s mise en scene and editing have seldom been more poetically apt (1991). (JR) Read more

An early masterpiece by Ernst Lubitscha hilarious farce introduced by Lubitsch himself, who appears as stage manager with a miniature of the opening set. The plot involves a spoiled young man persuaded to marry a life-size doll by greedy monks who want his fortune; things get a lot more interesting once the doll maker’s beautiful daughter starts impersonating the mechanical bride. With Ossi Oswalda and Victor Janson; not to be missed (1919). (JR) Read more

Ernst Lubitsch’s first feature-length comedy (1919), about an American millionaire trying to acquire a noble title for his daughter by marrying her off to a Prussian prince, is an unalloyed delighta perfect rejoinder to those critics who maintain that the director only found the Lubitsch touch after moving to Hollywood in the 1920s. The satire is sharp, and the visual settings are sumptuous and gracefully handled. With Ossi Owalda, Harry Liedtke, and Victor Janson. 60 min. (JR) Read more

Director John Carpenter (Halloween, They Live) meets Chevy Chase in an action comedy and both lose something in the encounterCarpenter his usual personality and freedom, Chase his usual ease with light comedy. Chase’s own production company made this movie, which seems to deal obliquely with Chase’s real-life estrangement from his standard comic persona; the alienation comes across, but not a genre context that meshes with the comedy or the suspense, both of which are somewhat strained rather than enhanced by the personal element. The setting is San Francisco, where Chase, a stock analyst, becomes invisible and the object of a manhunt after an industrial accident; he’s more depressed than liberated by the experience, and the audience may feel the same way. Inspired by a novel with the same title by H.F. Saint and scripted by Robert Collector, Dana Olsen, and William Goldman; Daryl Hannah is the love interest. With Sam Neill, Michael McKean, and Stephen Tobolowsky. (JR) Read more

Im Kwon-taek ‘s 1990 gangster film, set in Seoul during the Japanese occupation of Korea, is loosely based on the life of Korean statesman Du-han; apparently it’s more an action picture than a standard biopic. In Korean with subtitles. 130 min. (JR) Read more

Adapting the Patricia Highsmith thriller of the same title while transferring the action from an American small town to Vichy, Claude Chabrol returns to the mannerif not quite the distinctionof his late 60s work (e.g., La femme infidele, Le boucher). The plot concerns a solitary figure (Christophe Malavoy) fleeing a vengeful wife (Virginie Thevenet). He spies on a young woman (Mathilda May) from afar until she discovers and is drawn to him, which destroys her own relationship with her fiance (Jacques Penot). Things get much more complicated after that; Jean-Pierre Kalfon (L’amour fou) plays the police detective who eventually steps in. For viewers who enjoy the grim moral ironies of Highsmith, this can be highly recommended; those like myself who find her work gratuitously unpleasant won’t see any reason here to revise their opinion (1987). (JR) Read more

A remarkably accomplished and beautiful second feature by English playwright Stephen Poliakoff (Hidden City), this lyrical drama might be described as a period film about the present. The plot concerns an incestuous affair that suddenly develops between a grown brother (Clive Owen) and sister (Saskia Reeves) who grew up with separate parents; the sister, now married to a wealthy entrepreneur (Alan Rickman), insists on ending the affair after the brother becomes hopelessly smitten with her. There’s nothing prurient about Poliakoff’s handling of this subject, though the movie certainly has its erotic moments. The focus is rather on how we live our livesincluding the complications of sex and the chaos of real estate development, in which the brother is professionally involved: Poliakoff uses the incest theme as a pivot for an elegiac, quasi-apocalyptic, and ineffably sad reflection on life in the early 90s. (Though settings and tone are different, this film may remind one in spots of Richard Lester’s underrated Petulia.) Most of the story takes place during an unusually hot English summer, and the settings are almost surreally radiant; the acting of the three leads is edgy, powerful, and wholly convincing, with Rickman a particular standout. The haunting music is by Michael Gibbs (1991). Read more

Standard-issue trashthe sort of smirky horror exercise where the acting is supposed to be bad, which doesn’t necessarily mean it would have been good if the filmmakers had something other than facetiousness on their minds. In a small town in California, Auntie Lee (Karen Black) and her five sexy nieces have a thriving meat-pie business that depends on the nieces luring men (most of them young and handsome) to their gruesome deaths; most sequences take the form of lengthy seductions followed by decapitation, impalement, and devouring accompanied by ecstatic giggles. Director Joseph F. Robertson, who coscripted this with producer Gerald M. Steiner, is so bent on reminding us that this is meant to be camp that he doesn’t bother to make his film acceptable on any other level. Pat Morita plays the local police chief, and the Bowery Boys’ Huntz Hall turns up as a local farmer. (JR) Read more

A far-ranging and innovative essay film about technology and seeingintricate, beautiful, dense, and provocativeby the highly original Marxist German independent Harun Farocki. Despite the wealth of material covered, the film is closely structured, rather like a narrative or a musical composition, with themes, images, and sounds recurring in fresh contexts to develop the meanings. A particular point of interest is the examination of some of the directions not taken by mainstream technologies, though vestiges of alternative routes taken by others are also investigated in fascinating detail (1986). (JR) Read more

A comedy-drama that actually tries to be political before incoherently copping out, this is about a veterans’ hospital so plagued with economic cutbacks and bureaucratic red taperepresented by villain John Mahoney, with no mention of Reagan or Bushthat the doctors have to break rules and risk suspension to save people’s lives. Directed by Howard Deutch from a screenplay by Ron Cutler, it has a certain energy and sense of outrage, although the sentimentality and casual sexism occasionally thrown into the mixture don’t exactly help. The fairly lively cast includes Ray Liotta, Kiefer Sutherland (unfortunately saddled with a yuppie-makes-good part that no one could play), Forest Whitaker, Lea Thompson, John C. McGinley, Eli Wallach, and Kathy Baker. (JR) Read more

The U.S. premiere of a Chicago-made feature by Daniel Currana rather studied film about obsession, attractively shot in black and white by Janusz Kaminski, that goes absolutely nowhere. The tiresome narrator-hero (Tom Blanton) roams about searching for love in the abstract after witnessing the murder of two lovers; eventually he finds love, concretely and instantaneously, when he meets a novelist (Lauren Campedelli), but only after killing at least a couple of people at random, presumably in order to demonstrate how much of a depressive existentialist he is. One can certainly respect Curran’s interest in doing something nonrealistic and provocative, but his patchwork of referencesBreton’s Nadja and Murnau’s Sunrise, intertwining bodies from Hiroshima, mon amour and floating heads from Eraserhead, motiveless killings a la Dostoyevski and Camusnever fuse into anything solid. Though there’s clearly some film savvy and style in the overall drift, the rawness and flatness of the dialogue tend to undermine the images (1991). Read more

A rerelease of the 1986 Disney cartoon feature The Great Mouse Detective with a slight title change. It’s a mystery adventure set in Victorian England, directed by John Musker, Ron Clements, Dave Michener, and Burny Mattinson, with the voices of Vincent Price, Barrie Ingham, Val Bettin, and Susanne Pollatschek. When the film first opened, Patrick Gourley described it in a review in the Reader as easily the best of the animated features since the early 1960s, offering several clear reminders of 30s-style joy of animation and the triumph of skill and imagination over physical reality, while Pat Graham, reviewing it in a capsule, called it new generation Disney, bland generation Disney and a stylistic retreat from the previous year’s more ambitious if less evenly toned The Black Cauldron, although he praised the imaginative sparkle in the crackling Big Ben finale. Decide for yourself. (JR) Read more

What produces a skinhead is the subtle subject of Mike Leigh’s powerful and mysterious feature for British TV, though it may take you most of the film to realize it. We’re treated to the bitter inertia of a family on the dole in a cramped high rise in London’s East End, with particular emphasis on a raspy layabout (Phil Daniels) who berates and undermines his nearly catatonic kid brother (Tim Roth, who played van Gogh in Vincent and Me); a street punk; a young woman in the neighborhood; and the boys’ aunt, who has married into the middle class. Watch for an interesting early performance by Gary Oldman, as well as contributions from Marion Bailey and Alfred Molina (1983). (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Friday, January 24, 6:00, 443-3737) Read more

Jacques Rivette’s greatest film since the 70s is one of the most penetrating examinations of the process of art making on film. It concerns the highly charged work of a figurative painter (Michel Piccoli, giving the performance of his career) with his beautiful and mainly nude model (Manon of the Spring’s Emmanuelle Beart), but also the complex input and pressures of the painter’s wife and former model (Jane Birkin), the model’s boyfriend (David Bursztein), and an art dealer who used to be involved with the painter’s wife (Gilles Arbona). The complex forces that produce art are the film’s obsessive focus, and rarely has Rivette’s use of duration to look at process been as spellbinding as it is here. The film runs for four hours, but the overall effect is mesmerizing and perpetually mysterious (as Rivette always is at his best), and not a moment is wasted. Rivette’s superb sense of rhythm and mise en scene never falters, and the plot has plenty of twists. Freely adapted from Balzac’s novella The Unknown Masterpiece by Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent, and Rivette, with exquisite cinematography by William Lubtchansky, beautiful location work in the south of France (mainly a 19th-century chateau), and drawings and paintings executed by Bernard Dufour. Read more

A fascinating if numbing feature-length narrative video by David Blair with remarkable computer graphics and other special effects. The intricate science-fantasy plot, which is narrated in an offscreen monotone by Blair, involves, among many other things, a beekeeper and cinematographer (represented by a photo of William S. Burroughs) who films “the moving spirits of the dead” circa 1914; his grandson (played by Blair), half sister, and brother-in-law; the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, including the Trinity nuclear test site; the moon; the “planet of television”; the Tower of Babel; the “Garden of Eden Cave” (“a town the size of Manhattan beneath the New Mexican desert”); and the gulf war. The images obliquely illustrate the narrative, and the constant visual flux often suggests a graphic novel translated into MTV, which helps to account for the numbing effect. The results are highly watchable, though more intellectually than emotionally involving (1990). Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, Friday and Saturday, January 17 and 18, 7:00 and 9:00, and Sunday, January 19, 5:30 and 7:30, 281-4114. Read more