Jonathan Rosenbaum

Peng Xiaolian’s aptly titled feminist feature from the People’s Republic of China follows the adventures of three peasant women who leave their oppressive village to sell wool in Beijing and a provincial city before returning to their ambiguous fates in the village. Peng sticks exclusively to the viewpoints of her three heroines, revealing herself to be a remarkable director of actors, and her incisive feeling for the options of her charactersboth as women and as peasantsgives this melodrama a cumulative force and authority (1988). (JR) Read more

Samuel Fuller’s 1982 masterpiece about American racismhis last work shot in this countryfocuses on the efforts of a black animal trainer (Paul Winfield) to deprogram a dog that has been trained to attack blacks. Very loosely adapted by Fuller and Curtis Hanson from a memoir by Romain Gary, and set in southern California on the fringes of the film industry, this heartbreakingly pessimistic yet tender story largely concentrates on tragic human fallibility from the vantage point of an animal; in this respect it’s like Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, and Fuller’s brilliantly eclectic direction gives it a nearly comparable intensity. Through a series of grotesque misunderstandings, this unambiguously antiracist movie was yanked from U.S. distribution partly because of charges of racism made by individuals and organizations who had never seen it. But it’s one of the key American films of the 80s. With Kristy McNichol, Burl Ives, Jameson Parker, and, in cameo roles, Dick Miller, Paul Bartel, Christa Lang, and Fuller himself. PG, 89 min. (JR) Read more

Patsy Kensit addresses the camera as a young girl recounting her recent life, in an English comedy partially set in New York that’s directed by Don Boyd (the producer of Aria), who wrote the script with Zoe Heller. The results show some improvement over Boyd’s first feature (Intimate Reflections, made in 1975 and never released here), but his dotty determination to opt for odd camera angles at arbitrary junctures reveals an overall uncertainty about his material that not even Kensit’s cheekiness can override. The various subplots, which never quite seem to come together, include the heroine’s adulterous affair with a twit she doesn’t much like (Patrick Ryecart), and her more serious relationships with a Scottish junkie (Rufus Sewell), her two best friends (Sophie Thompson and Maynard Eziashi), and her father (Jack Shepherd). What Boyd seems to have in mind is a kind of updating of trendy 60s British movies like Darling and A Taste of Honey, but the strategy doesn’t pay off. (JR) Read more

A turkey by reputation, this 144-minute epic (1970) contrives to reconstruct the events leading up to Pearl Harbor from the Japanese as well as American viewpoint, with four directors (Richard Fleischer, Ray Kellogg, Toshio Masuda, Kinji Fukasuku) and three writers (Larry Forrester, Hideo Oguni, Ryuzo Kikushima). Among the actors are Martin Balsam, Joseph Cotten, James Whitmore, Jason Robards, Edward Andrews, George Macready, and Leon Ames. (JR) Read more

Voted best feature by gay and lesbian film festival audiences in San Francisco and Los Angeles, this 16-millimeter black-and-white U.S. independent feature by P.J. Castellaneta chronicles the talk and interaction between two young men (Todd Stites and Terry Curry) who get together for a one-night stand. The writing and performances are mainly fluid, in spite of a few self-consciously theatrical or expositional stretches, and it’s a pity that Castellaneta doesn’t trust his material enough to let it play without music, which often proves intrusive. The frank conversation moves from AIDS to sexual etiquette to homosexuality versus bisexuality to lengthy accounts of former relationships, and the writer-director and actors generally do a fine job of keeping us interested (1990). (JR) Read more

A so-so student film (1991), tacky and pretentious if somewhat unpredictable, that catapulted into national prominence simply because it takes some of the tenets of fundamentalist Christianity seriously and seriously questions certain othersproving yet again that all it takes to get some critics worked up is novelty, not accomplishment: there are no insights here that you couldn’t find on most street corners. A telephone operator in Los Angeles (Mimi Rogers) who indulges in freewheeling mate swapping with her boyfriend (Patrick Bauchau) has a religious experience, transforms her life, and fervently awaits the apocalypse, which the movie delivers in solemn, drive-in exploitation style, complete with low-budget special effects and strained acting. Written and directed by former Village Voice writer Michael Tolkin, this clunky exercise goes the standard puritanical route of aiming to be as tawdry as possible before the heroine starts to see the light, then turning solemn and pristine in order to cash in on the conversion, which is questioned (and flaunted) as glumly as the carousing was. I was mildly interested and mildly bored, occasionally intrigued but never convinced. With David Duchovny, Kimberly Cullum, and Will Patton. (JR) Read more

Barbra Streisand stars in her second feature as a director (after Yentl), an adaptation of Pat Conroy’s best-selling novel about the adulterous relationship that develops between the twin brother (Nick Nolte) and the New York psychiatrist (Streisand) of a tortured southern poet who attempts suicide (Melinda Dillon); Conroy and Becky Johnston collaborated on the script, and Blythe Danner, Kate Nelligan, Jeroen Krabbe, and Jason Gould (Streisand’s real-life son, here playing her movie son) costar. For better and for worse, Streisand’s directorial style calls to mind Delmer Daves in the 60s (Spencer’s Mountain, Youngblood Hawke), both in her delirious crane shots and in her willingness to place most of the emotional climaxes into the filmic equivalent of italics (which often means overproduced magazine-cover settings and soaring music). The results may seem overripe and dated in spots, but she coaxes a fine performance out of Nolte, and the other actors (herself included) acquit themselves honorably (1991). (JR) Read more

A horror film by writer-director Wes Craven about a 13-year-old ghetto boy (Brandon Adams), whose family is about to be evicted by an evil slumlord (Twin Peaks’s Everett McGill), stumbling into a group of brutalized kids held captive in the slumlord’s house, which the demented fellow shares with his equally deranged sister (Twin Peaks’s Wendy Robie) posing as his wife. Most of this works pretty well in terms of shocks, suspense, and cartoonlike violence, but less well as social metaphor. With A.J. Langer, Ving Rhames, Bill Cobbs, Kelly Jo Minter, Sean Whalen, and Jeremy Roberts (1991). (JR) Read more

For those like myself who basically enjoyed Mike Figgis’s first feature, Stormy Monday, his third (he made Internal Affairs in between) begins promisingly as a thriller with the same hard-edged look, high-contrast lighting, and skeptical English view of American culture. An architecture professor (Kevin Anderson), adopted as a child then orphaned, is sent for by his real mother (Kim Novak), who’s dying. He encounters an old college friend (Bill Pullman) who’s supervising the demolition of a cast-iron department store that has been closed since an adulterous couple were murdered there in the early 50s. The hero starts to become involved with his friend’s wife (Pamela Gidley), who shares his architectural enthusiasms, and eventually the two plot strands come together. Unfortunately, by that time the sheer pretentiousness of the proceedingsreplete with brooding pauses, studied dialogue, and hothouse eroticism a la Two Moon Junctionand the occasional incoherence of the narrative (which appears to have lost at least one subplot, perhaps to studio recutting) have turned this whole farrago into borderline camp. And even though any appearance by Kim Novak is welcome, the story regrettably entails the use in flashbacks of a younger self who looks nothing like the Novak we know. (JR) Read more

The sober, relatively uninspired account of a real-life crime that shook postwar London, when a retarded epileptic of 17 was sentenced to death for his indirect role in the shooting of a policeman by a 16-year-old hoodlum. Directed by Peter Medak (The Krays) from a script by Neal Purvis and Robert Wade; with Christopher Eccleston, Paul Reynolds, Tom Bell, Eileen Atkins, Clare Holman, Michael Gough, and Tom Courtenay (1991). (JR) Read more

Made in 1969, only three years after his Oscar-winning Closely Watched Trains, Jiri Menzel’s lovely, sensual Czech satire waited 21 years to pass the censors, then went on to win the top prize at the Berlin film festival. Cowritten by Menzel and Bohumil Hrabal from a collection of Hrabal’s stories and set in the early 50s, the comic plot centers on a group of bourgeois dissidentsincluding a philosophy professor, a librarian who promoted Western literature, a Seventh-Day Adventist cook (Vaclav Neckar), a saxophonist, and a public prosecutorassigned to work on a scrap heap in the town of Kladno. Male and female political prisoners work in adjacent yards, and the flirtations between the two groups comprise much of the action of this surprisingly cheerful picture, which treats party officials and guards as hapless victims of the system along with the prisoners. The bureaucratic absurdities reach a sort of climax when the cook falls in love with a female prisoner (Jitka Zelenohorska); they wind up getting married, but the bride’s grandmother has to serve as her proxy. (JR) Read more

It’s become clear over the years that John Huston’s failed but fitfully interesting 1962 biopic about Freud’s early career (up to the point when he formulated the Oedipus complex) was scripted mainly by Jean-Paul Sartre — who withdrew his name from the project after his second draft, which would have made a much longer film, was radically condensed — rather than by Charles Kaufman and producer Wolfgang Reinhardt, who apparently received screen credit for their whittling. With a strained and somewhat ill Montgomery Clift trudging through the lead part, the film benefits from Douglas Slocombe’s black-and-white photography and an excellent secondary cast (Larry Parks, Susannah York, Susan Kohner); it suffers from Sartre’s dogged and fundamentally anticinematic literalism. Huston works hard on the dream sequences, but one feels the effort more than the results. (JR) Read more

This one took me completely by surprise. An epic musical about two USO entertainers (Bette Midler and James Caan) who form a nonromantic show-biz team and perform together over three wars and half a century, it has the sort of scope, pizzazz, and feeling we used to expect from Hollywood but haven’t seen in a good while. Caan plays an entertainer very much like Bob Hope (politically he supports the status quo, and his signature tune, I Remember You, recalls Thanks for the Memories); Midler’s character, who specializes in Mae West-style double entendres, is a more rambunctious sort with a gutsy liberal conscience. Both of them are quite effective, as are George Segal, as the acerbic wit who writes Caan’s jokes and winds up getting blacklisted, and Christopher Rydell, who plays Midler’s son. This is one of the corniest movies imaginable, and I’m not even sure it qualifies as art, but it’s a solid piece of entertainment that had me weeping buckets by the end. Mark Rydell (The Rose) directed from an uncommonly good script by Marshall Brickman, Neal Jimenez, and Lindy Laub. Not all of the dialogue is period perfect, but the production design (Assheton Gorton) and the makeup and score (both by many hands) deserve special thanks. Read more

Agnieszka Holland’s slightly fictionalized 1990 account of the remarkable true story of Solomon Perel, a Jewish teenager who survived World War II first by hiding in a Soviet orphanage, then by impersonating a Hitler youth at the most prestigious and elite boys’ school in Germany. His circumcised penis was the only thing that gave away his true identity; Holland uses this fact, among others, to turn the tale into a picaresque tragicomedy about Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union during the war years, full of dark but compassionate ironies about Jewish and European identities. Masterful in her handling of actors as well as in her sense of narrative sweep, she makes this a suspenseful and exhilarating parable. With Marco and Rene Hofschneider, Delphine Forest, Andre Wilms, Julie Delpy, Halina Labonarska, and Solomon Perel himself in the film’s closing shots. 112 min. (JR) Read more

A dopey Spanish comedy by Antonio Mercero about the ghost of Don Juan (Juan Luis Galiardo) emerging from his grave in contemporary Seville to replace a temperamental and arrogant stage actor (Galiardo again) who happens to be playing Don Juan and smuggling cocaine in his spare time. Full of whimsical conceitsopening credits that are sung, a choreographer (Loles Leon) who speaks only with her castanets (which are duly subtitled), numerous gags predicated on the fact that the ghost can’t be photographed and can walk through wallsthis is basically silly stuff, redeemed in part by a good-natured lack of pretension. (JR) Read more