Jonathan Rosenbaum

To the best of my knowledge, this 1985 feature is writer-director Mike Leigh’s only foray beyond the confines of Englanda look at two Irish couples in Belfast, one Catholic and one Protestant, both about to have their first children. Aficionados of Leigh’s work for British TV consider this one of his finest works. With Brid Brennan, Des McAcleer, and Stephen Rea. (JR) Read more

Richard Elfman directed this 1980 collection of flaky fun and games, vaudeville style. Herve Villechaize and Susan Tyrrell rule the underground Sixth Dimension, which is mainly a campy black-and-white concoction of old Betty Boop cartoons and grade-Z musicals. Marie-Pascale Elfman and Viva are also around to perform their expected cult duties. More fun to think about than to watch. 76 min. (JR) Read more

Paul Robeson gives one of his greatest film performances in this arty, dated, but interesting 1933 adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s play about a former Pullman porter who escapes from a chain gang to become king of a Caribbean island. The underrated Dudley Murphy directed; with Dudley Digges, Frank Wilson, and Fredi Washington. 72 min. (JR) Read more

Mike Leigh’s auspicious first feature focuses on the painful gaps in communication between a lonely accountant’s clerk (Anne Raitt) and an uptight schoolteacher she halfheartedly tries to seduce. Kitchen-sink realism with a vengeance, punctuated by painful and awkward silences, this was made before Leigh formed a fully coherent social and political view of his material, but his feeling for the characters never falters. One can find a glancing relationship with Cassavetes’s first feature, Shadows, but the style and milieu is English to the core. This might seem overlong, and the drabness and emotional constipation may drive you slightly batty, but the film leaves a powerful aftertaste. (JR) Read more

Giuseppe De Santis’s belated neorealist effort about the exploitation of women working in the Po Valley rice fields (1948) was sold to the American public using shots of a nubile Silvana Mangano wading in the water with her skirt hiked up. The movie went on to make Mangano a star, and if memory serves, it’s a lot more substantial than the cheesecake ads made it appear. With Vittorio Gassman, Raf Vallone, Doris Dowling, and Lia Corelli. 108 min. (JR) Read more

A videotaped version of a Mike Leigh stage play (1977) that is one of his most scathing and extreme works, aptly described by one commentator as a cocktail party from hell. A highly insensitive, aggressive, and garish housewife (Alison Steadman) entertains three neighbors (Janine Duvitsky, John Salthouse, Harriet Reynolds) while bickering with her uptight husband (Tim Stern). (The title party isn’t her own but that of the teenage daughter of one of the guests; we hear it off-stage but never see it.) A ferocious portrayal of the English middle class, this might be termed Leigh’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; it provides an interesting contrast to his other TV films by showing how his dramaturgy works onstage. Highly recommended, but you should go prepared to squirm along with the host, hostess, and guests. (JR) Read more

This 1991 first feature by writer-director John Singleton, then 23, about growing up black in South Central LA, shows some genuine talent in handling character and action, and equal amounts of confusion and attitude when it comes to matters of gender and ghetto politics. (Black women seem to bear the brunt of his anger about problems in the ghetto, and the white power structure is accorded a relatively free and guiltless ride.) With Ice Cube, Cuba Gooding Jr., Morris Chestnut, and Larry Fishburne. Stanley Clarke composed the score. Could the widespread popularity of this movie among whites be partially connected to the implicit acceptance of ghettos as an unchangeable fact of life? R, 107 min. Read more

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 French-Polish coproduction explores a dual nature that seems uncannily to grow out of the coproduction situation itself almost as if Kieslowski were dreaming of a resurrected artistic identity for himself now that Polish state financing has gone the same route as Polish communism. With Philippe Volter, Halina Gryglaszewska, Kalina Jedrusik, and Aleksander Bardini. (Fine Arts) Read more

This is British writer-director Mike Leigh at his near best–that is, not quite as good as High Hopes, but still a must-see. Most of the focus here is on a dysfunctional family consisting of a compulsively cheerful mother (Alison Steadman), a pipe-dreaming father (Jim Broadbent) who works as a chef, and twin daughters, one a well-adjusted plumber (Claire Skinner), the other an anorexic-bulimic malcontent (Jane Horrocks) in a perpetual state of agitation. To round out the thematic concern with food, there’s also family friend Aubrey (Timothy Spall), a rather pathetic entrepreneur who attempts to open a gourmet restaurant. As in High Hopes, Leigh boldly accords different kinds and levels of stylization to his characters–Aubrey is handled much more parodically than the others–and the volatile mixture works. What starts off as sitcom material gradually widens to encompass a tragicomic story of complex characters and subtle interactions. (Music Box, Wednesday through Thursday, December 25 through January 2) Read more

A documentary by the great Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep, My Brother’s Wedding, To Sleep With Anger) that focuses on immigrants from Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and South America in half a dozen communities in the U.S., including Chicago, Houston, Miami, and Philadelphia. Considering that it comes from Burnett, this is far from being as distinctive as it could be, but it remains both sympathetic and interesting. The narration is by CBS news correspondent Meredith Vieira. (Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, Friday and Saturday, December 13 and 14, 7:00 and 9:00, and Sunday, December 15, 5:30 and 7:30, 281-4114) Read more

Steven Spielberg’s $70 million post-Freudian, revisionist sequel (1994) to J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, with Wendy now 80 years old (played by Maggie Smith) and Peter (Robin Williams) married to her granddaughter (Caroline Goodall) and working as a Wall Street lawyera character, one suspects, who is rather like Spielberg himself. Tinkerbell (a miniature, matted-in Julia Roberts) carries him back to Neverland to confront Captain Hook (Dustin Hoffman) and his sidekick Smee (Bob Hoskins) after his kids (Charlie Korsmo and Amber Scott) are kidnapped. The drama centers on Peter’s efforts to remember his past and, with the help of the Lost Boys (now a gang of ghetto urchins), win his son back from Hook, who has usurped his paternal role. (Perhaps the biggest failure of imagination here concerns what little girls are supposed to do in Neverland.) In overall narrative sweep and directorial confidence it’s a decisive return to form for Spielberg, who borrows liberally from his own 1941 as well as Altman’s Popeye to get some of his best comic and pictorial effects. But conceptually speaking, the amount of mental machinery required to get Peter flying again yields an overall self-consciousness that the movie never quite recovers from, and the moment-to-moment inventiveness never fully compensates for the thinness of the characters. Read more

The plot of Pedro Almodovar’s goofy 1991 melodrama has more twists than a rattlesnake, but whether it’s meant mainly for laughs or for more serious engagement isn’t always clear, because it keeps shifting back and forth between modes. The story centers on the reunion of an aging pop star (Marisa Paredes) and her grown daughter (Victoria Abril), a TV anchorwoman, after a 15-year separation. The daughter’s husband, who owns the TV station where she works, turns out to be the mother’s former lover, and after he’s found murdered a number of bizarre facts are brought to light, including the diverse involvements of a female impersonator (Miguel Bose) who specializes in tributes to the mother. The results oscillate between Almodovar’s characteristically flaky irreverence and a more solemn treatment of the relationship between mother and daughter that intermittently suggests Douglas Sirk without his ironies. It’s a lot more fun to watch than Almodovar’s previous Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, but those who miss the wildness of his premainstream work will probably be only partially appeased. In Spanish with subtitles. 112 min. (JR) Read more

A knockout thriller that succeeds brilliantly at just about everything Scorsese’s Cape Fear didn’t. It’s another revenge plot in which the villain (Rebecca De Mornay) attempts to destroy a family (Annabella Sciorra, Matt McCoy, Madeline Zima) from within, but there’s no pretentious art agenda on the filmmakers’ minds; they merely work the genre for all it’s worth, which proves in this case to be plenty: the suspense is masterfully controlled, and the story, which makes effective use of Seattle locations, builds to a terrifying climax. Curtis Hanson’s direction and Amanda Silver’s screenplay are both models of no-flab craft and intelligence, and all the actors (who also include Ernie Hudson and Julianne Moore) are believable from the first frame to the last (1991). (JR) Read more

Perhaps the most neglected of all the major French directors, at least in the U.S., Jean Gremillon (1901-’59) was a figure of such versatility that it’s difficult to make generalizations about his work. (One can, however, speak about its close attention to sound and rhythmhe started out as a musicianand its frequent focus on class divisions.) Pattes blanches (aka White Shanks), made in 1949, is not one of his very best effortsI prefer Lumiere d’ete (1943) and Le ciel est a vous (1944). But this moody melodrama of adultery set on the Normandy coast is still full of punch and fascination, and shouldn’t be missed by anyone with a taste for the classic French cinema. Coscripted by Jean Anouilh (who originally intended to direct), it’s a noirish tale about a promiscuous flirt from the city (Suzy Delair) who marries a local tavern keeper and becomes involved with a plotting local malcontent (Michel Bouquet) and a faded aristocrat (Paul Bernard), nicknamed White Shanks because of his spats, who is the target of a revenge plot. A sensitive maid with a hunchback who loves the aristocrat rounds out this odd quintet, who are regarded with a caustic compassion that recalls Stroheim. The lovelycamera work is by Philippe Agostini, and the great Leon Barsacq is in charge of the sets. Read more

Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jason Patric (After Dark, My Sweet) star as undercover narcotics agents, in a first feature directed by Lili Fini Zanuck from a script by Peter Dexter adapted from a book by Kim Wozencraft. The film addresses a serious subjectundercover agents who become implicated in the drug traffic they’re trying to stopbut while competent, it’s too routine to generate much interest. Leigh is effective as always, but has little to chew on; Patric has even less. With Sam Elliott, Max Perlich, Gregg Allman, Tony Frank, and William Sadler (1991). (JR) Read more