Jonathan Rosenbaum

One of the best of all prison pictures, thanks not only to Don Siegel’s sharp direction and a good script (by Richard Collins), but also to the creative input of producer Walter Wanger, who had been an inmate himself and was concerned about making this as authentic and as commercially uncompromised as possible. (The picture was shot on location in California’s Folsom state prison, with many inmates cast in secondary parts.) The care taken with this grim 1954 drama paid off; it was Siegel’s first major hit. With Neville Brand, Frank Faylen, Leo Gordon, and Emile Meyer. (JR) Read more

Jennie Livingston’s exuberant and loving 1990 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. 78 min. (JR) Read more

Yves Robert’s adaptation of the first volume of Marcel Pagnol’s autobiography may be relatively academic and unexceptional as filmmaking, but the material itselfgrowing up in Provence at the turn of the centuryis so wonderful that the film is full of satisfying and unexpected pleasures. Although the nostalgic texture often verges on sentimentality, the wit and intelligence of Pagnolif not the loose directorial style that he employed in his own moviestriumphantly shine through. With Philippe Caubere, Nathalie Roussel, Didier Pain, Therese Liotard, and Julien Ciamaca (1990). (JR) Read more

Shot in black-and-white 16-millimeter for only $10,000, this delightfully deadpan comedy about unrequited romantic obsession scores through a combination of behavioral charm and compositional rigor. It was written and directed by UCLA film students Caveh Zahedi and Greg Watkinswho also play themselves in restaged real-life eventsand focuses on Zahedi’s nerdish and awkward but indefatigable campaign to gain the romantic interest of an art student. The camera keeps its distance, and the limited number of locations and situations only intensifies the tight focus of the plot and the single-mindedness of the hero (1990). (JR) Read more

One of Chris Marker’s earliest documentaries (1957) and probably one of his best, the hour-long Letter From Siberia mixes new and found footage with inventive commentary, and is especially memorable for a passage in which footage is repeated while the offscreen commentary transforms its meaning with a different ideological interpretation. It is perhaps the earliest example we have of Marker’s inimitable essayistic manner, hence an indispensable work. (JR) Read more

A cabaret performer (Krystyna Janda) in 1951 Poland is arrested without explanation and interrogated about her relationship with an army officer in Ryszard Bugajski’s formerly banned 1982 feature about the nightmare of Stalinism, produced when the Solidarity movement was at its height. Well crafted and solidly actedJanda won a best-actress prize at Cannes, and her cohorts (who include Adama Ferencego, Janusz Gajos, and director Agnieszka Holland) are equally up to their partsthis is too thoughtful to qualify as simple propaganda (some attempt is made to humanize the torturers as well as their victims), yet it’s so relentless and unvarying in its portrait of suffering that its dramatic importance seems to lie mainly in its determination to bear witness to some grim historical facts. The results are certainly accomplished and intelligent, but clearly not for everyone. 116 min. (JR) Read more

A young widow dares to reject the West African practice of wife inheritance when her brother-in-law claims her as his third wife. Cheick Oumar Sissoko’s 1990 Malian feature has been highly recommended to me by colleagues. (JR) Read more

Martin Campbell (Criminal Law) directs a watchable but instantly forgettable mystery thriller, written by James Hicks and Jeff Burkhart, about a successful lawyer (Barbara Hershey) who discovers that her client and lover (J.T. Walsh) is married to a former friend (Mary Beth Hurt), shortly before he is mysteriously murdered. Sam Shepard does his usual poker-faced bit as the police detective assigned to catch the killer, and Sheree North turns up in a smaller part. (JR) Read more

Kenneth Branagh (Henry V) directs and plays two roles in a show-offy American thriller scripted by Scott Frank that is loads of fun even if it’s ultimately strangled by its excesses. A Los Angeles private eye (Branagh) sets out to learn the identity of a beautiful amnesiac (Emma Thompson) who suffers from nightmares; he’s aided by an antique dealer (Derek Jacobi) with a flair for hypnosis. With his help the woman produces tales set in LA in the 40s about a European composer and his wife (Branagh and Thompson again), shot in black and white. As the twists come thick and fast and the plot gets progressively more and more baroque, Branagh shows himself to be at least as intelligent as Brian De Palma in delivering over-the-top stylistic filigree and every bit as willing to take his own two-dimensional postmodernism too seriously; with Andy Garcia, Hanna Schygulla, and an enjoyable turn by an uncredited Robin Williams (1991). (JR) Read more

This is probably Alan Parker’s best film, in part because it’s one of his most modest (1991). Following the brief career of a young white soul band in Dublin, it harks back in some ways to the youthful energies of Parker’s Fame, happily without the melodrama. The interactions of the ten-member group — including three female backup singers and an older sax player who romances them in turn while serving as the group’s guru — and the numbers themselves form the main bill of fare. Parker == working with a script by Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais, and Roddy Doyle, based on Doyle’s novel — keeps it all lively and watchable. If he can’t resist the occasional fancy or cutesy flourishes (e.g., a pair of twins who speak all their lines in unison) that tend to compromise his work, he still allows his material to exist on its own level and makes it fun to watch. With Robert Arkins, Michael Aherne, Angeline Ball, Maria Doyle, Johnny Murphy, and Dave Finnegan — a very appealing cast. (JR) Read more

Not surprisingly, this 1961 epic about the Spanish national hero, the Castilian warrior Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, is often static as drama (with Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren used mainly as icons) and pretty dubious as history. But thanks to Anthony Mann’s splendid eye for landscape, composition, and spectaclein particular his striking use of the edges of the ‘Scope frame, a facet (among others) that is totally lost on TV and videothis is a rousing and often stirring show. Scripted by Frederic M. Frank and Philip Yordan and scored by Miklos Rozsa; Raf Vallone, Genevieve Page, and Herbert Lom costar. (JR) Read more

Best known for his work as an actor (he played the young Roy Scheider in All That Jazz and the lead in Home Movies), Keith Gordon made his directorial debut in and wrote the screenplay for this odd, cold stylistic exercise set at a Catholic school and based on a novel of the same title by Robert Cormier. The plot involves the school’s drive to sell twice as many boxes of chocolates as in the year previous, and the intervention of a sadistic hazing club known as the Vigils. Some reviewers have been bothered by the relative absence of backgrounds and motivations to the characters, but for Gordon’s arty purposes the stripped-down story and cast of characters are modeled to fit, and the insistent use of pop music on the sound track is equally effective. Thematically, the film recalls Calder Willingham’s End as a Man and the film version made of it (The Strange One, 1957); the presiding influence here seems to be Kubrick, and while the viewer may remain relatively uninvolved, the film’s address commands attention. With John Glover, Ilan Mitchell-Smith, Wally Ward, Doug Hutchinson, Jenny Wright, and Bud Cort, all of them quite serviceable. (JR) Read more

A special event in the Onion City Film Festival, this program of ten shorts by independent filmmakers in Frankfurt, West Germany, grew out of the ongoing student exchange program between the School of the Art Institute and the Staedelschule, Frankfurt; a matching program of Chicago independent films will be shown in Frankfurt next month. Among the works to be shown here are two by former exchange students, Ines Sommer’s O, A (composed out of small image and sound events, creating something which is close to a child’s vision) and Roland Krueger’s single-frame Chicago 1986/87, as well as Karin Hoerler’s animated Frisch, Eva Heldmann’s ironic version of a Brecht/Weill song, Regine Steenbock’s demystifying treatment of prostitution, and Thomas Feldmann’s depiction of his sexual fantasies in Discovery. Christine Noll Brinckmann’s The Primal Scene, the only one of these films I’ve been able to see, combines an exploration of diverse Frankfurt bedrooms with both Kay Starr’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Waltz and silence to provoke some of our own sexual fantasies. Read more

A relentlessly unfunny comedy about hypochondria that cries out for a Blake Edwards and receives instead clunky direction (by David Leland) that yields overwrought and strident performances. Jeff Daniels stars as an airline executive who starts to get anxiety attacks after his best friend dies. Joe Eszterhas (Betrayed) wrote the painful script, which features two awkward and extended dream sequences; Melanie Mayron, Michael Tucker, and Kathleen York costar. (JR) Read more

The second feature of John McNaughton (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer)for my money, more interesting and enjoyable (if also somewhat more scattershot in its focus) than the firstis an SF horror comedy about an exiled extraterrestrial killer in a makeshift human body who needs to borrow the heads of others to survive. Happily, this permits most of the members of the cast to play the alien at one point or another; more generally, it serves to illustrate a highly jaundiced view of urban lifewith the implication that even the nihilistic extraterrestrial is preferable in some ways to many of the self-absorbed creeps who cross his path. McNaughton keeps things moving with humor, gore, and intelligence. With Rae Dawn Chong and Tom Towles (1989). (JR) Read more