Jonathan Rosenbaum

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). (JR) Read more

Two brothers in a small Nebraska towna gentle, well-adjusted cop (David Morse) with a Mexican wife (Valeria Golino) and a child, and a ne’er-do-well (Viggo Mortensen) who enlisted in the army to fight in Vietnamare reunited in 1968. Before long, the veteran impregnates his girlfriend (Patricia Arquette) and starts getting involved in drunken brawls. Sean Penn’s first film as writer-director, steeped in sullen Method acting, pretentious symbolism, and mannered slow motion, is obviously a sincere and considered effort, but I found it insufferably tedious, self-indulgent, and reeking with self-pity. A few sparks of interest are contributed in all-too-brief cameos by Charles Bronson and Sandy Dennis as the brothers’ parents and Dennis Hopper as a bartender. (JR) Read more

Raul Ruiz’s first American feature is characteristic in terms of visual style (bargain-basement Welles), shaggy-dog plot, irreverent humor, and metaphysical themes (mainly oriented around random violence in New York’s Lower East Side), but it’s still a far cry from his best work. Hampered in part by the outsize cast and crew (reflecting the eagerness of Ruiz’s New York fans to play some part in the proceedings), this mordant comedy, shot over two or three long weekends, is hindered as much as helped by the jokey cameos (Jim Jarmusch, Vito Acconci, and Kathy Acker, among others)the self-conscious local color tends to distract from the witty yet monotonous gratuitousness of Ruiz’s run-on dialogue. In effect, New York’s downtown punk coalition meets Ruiz’s dreamy doodling, and a certain amount of querulousness on both sides grows out of the brief encounter (1990). (JR) Read more

An arrogant New York disc jockey (Jeff Bridges) loses his soul after a brash remark of his to a phone-in listener triggers a mass murder. He meets a visionary street bum (Robin Williams), a former professor of medieval history traumatized by the same tragedy, and the two lost spirits manage to save each other, with help from their girlfriends (Mercedes Ruehl and Amanda Plummer). Directed by Terry Gilliam (Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen) from an original script by newcomer Richard LaGravenese, this enormously entertaining and wonderfully acted but compromised New Age comedy spectacular represents Gilliam’s bid to prove his commercial mettle, and the results are simultaneously highly personal and extremely corrupta shameless attempt to give the public what it wants that is shot full of brilliance. If you check your brain at the concessions counter, you won’t have any problems; if you treasure Gilliam at his best and take his ideas seriously, you’ll probably be infuriated as well as delighted. Powerhouse performances by Bridges, Williams, and Ruehl help disguise the crassness of the commercial manipulations by intermittently suggesting real people (Plummer, on the other hand, is hamstrung by a cartoon part), and Michael Jeter and an uncredited Tom Waits enliven the street life. Read more

Paradoxically, this would be a pretty good little thriller if it didn’t have any charactersor, rather, if it did have some characters who weren’t strictly slaves to the thriller mechanics. Instead, it starts off with characters and winds up with some rather effective jolts that make them evaporate. We begin with Goldie Hawn happily married to John Heard; what happens after that is best left to screenwriters Mary Agnes Donoghue and Derek Saunders; Damian Harris directed, and Ashley Peldon, Robin Bartlett, Tom Irwin, and Amy Wright costar. (JR) Read more

David Leland’s The Big Mansubstantially recut, as is their wont, by Miramax, who always know what’s best for us. Not having seen the original, I can’t vouch for what this violent British thrillerabout an unemployed Scottish miner who is recruited by a gangster and exploited as an illegal bare-knuckle boxerwas originally like. In its present form, it comes across as a rather unpleasant and only fitfully absorbing film of social protest. Don McPherson wrote the script; with Liam Neeson, Joanne Whalley-Kilmer, Ian Bannen, and Billy Connolly (1990). (JR) Read more

When a repressed criminal psychologist (Jeff Fahey) loses his right arm in a car accident and it’s replaced by the arm of a mass murderer, he discovers to his horror that his new limb seems to have a will and personality of its own. This provocative and effective thriller, directed by Eric Red (who coscripted and coproduced Near Dark), loses some steam, focus, and coherence in its final reels because of what appears to be clumsy studio recutting, but it’s full of directorial savvy and sharp performances. (The always-interesting Brad Dourif is especially good as a painter who winds up with the mass murderer’s left arm, and the fact that Fahey’s hero is more creepy than charismatic at the outset makes for some interesting ambiguities throughout that aren’t lost on the filmmakers.) Based on the novel Choice Cuts by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, the same writing team that provided the source novels for Vertigo and Diabolique, and intelligently written for the most part by Red, Norman Snider, Patricia Herskovic, and Joyce Taylor. It’s a pity that Paramount shoved thi’s one out without benefit of press screenings or other tokens of studio confidence; it deserves much better. With Lindsay Duncan, Kim Delaney, Zakes Mokae, and Paul Benvictor. Read more

Jennie Livingston’s exuberant and loving documentary about “voguing” and the drag balls of Harlem is both a celebration and a canny commentary. Delving into the dance poses and acrobatic moves of black and Latino gay men, she enters this highly ritualized subculture with a genuine sense of curiosity and discovery, and is wise enough to let the participants themselves do most of the explaining. One emerges from this film not only with a new vocabulary and a fresh way of viewing the straight world, but with a bracing object lesson in understanding what society “role models” are all about. See it (1990). (Fine Arts) Read more

Richard Linklater’s delightfully different and immensely enjoyable second feature (1991, 97 min.) takes us on a 24-hour tour of the flaky dropout culture of Austin, Texas; it doesn’t have a continuous plot, but it’s brimming with weird characters and wonderful talk (which often seems improvised, though it’s all scripted by Linklater, apparently with the input of some of the participants, as in his later Waking Life). The structure of dovetailing dialogues calls to mind an extremely laid-back variation of The Phantom of Liberty or Playtime. Every thought you have fractions off and becomes its own reality, remarks Linklater himself to a poker-faced cabdriver in the first (and in some ways funniest) scene, and the remainder of the movie amply illustrates this notion with its diverse paranoid conspiracy and assassination theorists, serial-killer buffs, musicians, cultists, college students, pontificators, petty criminals, street people, and layabouts (around 90 in all). Even if the movie goes nowhere in terms of narrative and winds up with a somewhat arch conclusion, the highly evocative scenes give an often hilarious sense of the surviving dregs of 60s culture and a superbly realized sense of a specific community. (JR) Read more

Sigmund Freud refused to have anything to do with this early (1926) silent attempt to deal with psychoanalysis via German expressionism, directed by G.W. Pabst. The results are dated, but this is still an intriguing period piece. 97 min. (JR) Read more

Perhaps the first movie ever to incorporate two product plugs in its title (apparently without the approval of either company in question), not to mention two additional ones in the cast (Virginia Slim and Jack Daniels), this egregious collection of cock-waving cliches is the silliest piece of macho camp since Roadhouse. Mickey Rourke and Don Johnson play the shit-kicking bikers of the title; Simon Wincer directed the Don Michael Paul script. (JR) Read more

Apart from featuring a bit more weirdness than usual (Chel White’s Photocopy Cha Cha, Henry Selick’s Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions, and David Fain’s Oral Hygiene are among the best), this is pretty much like previous editions of the International Tournee, so how you respond may depend on how many of these annual collections you’ve seen. (I’ve had enough of Bill Plympton’s poker-faced anatomical black comedynot to mention John Lasseter’s cutesy Luxo Jr.to last me several lifetimes.) But the last and longest of the shorts hereGarri Bardin’s Grey Wolf and Little Red Riding Hood, a macabre Soviet Claymation musical with familiar Western melodies and gruff asides on Walt Disney and Edith Piafis a special treat. Long on humor and short on beauty (with the exception of Daniel Suter’s Les saisons quatre a quatre), this package is otherwise easy to watch but not likely to be remembered. (JR) Read more

Hal Hartley’s second feature (1990), a decided improvement over his first (The Unbelievable Truth), returns to the same turf (a Long Island commuter town) and features the same lead actress (Adrienne Shelly) as an alienated teenager. This time around, Shelly plays a high school student who finds herself pregnant, provokes her father’s fatal heart attack, gets unceremoniously dumped by her boyfriend and kicked out of the house by her mother (Merritt Nelson), is assaulted, witnesses a kidnapping, and meets an angry and disgruntled electronics whiz (Martin Donovan) all in the same day. It’s a credit to the film that this overflow of incident neither strains credibility nor becomes exploited for facile comedy; in fact the real story only begins once she and the electronics whiz become involved and their mutual adjustments (including the strains represented by their difficult parents) gradually transform both of them. Unpredictable while remaining honest to both its characters and its milieu, this flaky comedy-drama improves as it proceeds; with John MacKay and Edie Falco. (JR) Read more

British comic Lenny Henry stars in this feature by Charles Lane (Sidewalk Stories) about an aspiring black actor who discovers that a supposedly dead Mafia boss is alive, disguised by plastic surgery; complications ensue when the actor has to pretend to be his own white executionera hit man from Las Vegasto uncover the boss. This starts off as an agreeably goofy farce, enlivened by Henry’s impersonations, and then gradually runs out of fun and energy as Andy Breckman’s script becomes increasingly gimmicky and contrived; by the end, not even the lively castwhich also includes Anne-Marie Johnson, Lane, Frank Langella, and J.T. Walshcan keep it propped up. (JR) Read more

A first-rate British fantasy-adventure distinguished by the special effects of Ray Harryhausen, as well as a Bernard Herrmann score. Directed by Jack Sher; with Kerwin Mathews, Jo Morrow, and June Thorburn (1960). (JR) Read more