Jonathan Rosenbaum

It’s our old friends the big city serial killer and the cop team of hard-nosed New York veteran (James Woods) and unlikely buddy partner (Michael J. Fox). The twist this time is that Fox is a movie star who specializes in Indiana Jones-type roles, wants to do something serious, and figures he can land a cop part he covets by studying Woods as a role model. There’s a halfhearted effort to satirize both characters in Daniel Pyne and Lem Dobbs’s screenplay, from a story by Dobbs and Michael Kozoll, but any contrast between reality and fantasy gets jettisoned immediately for the sort of slam-bang assault on the senses that director John Badham specializes in; despite the obvious influence of Sullivan’s Travels, this movie doesn’t have the insight or backbone to come within light-years of the Sturges classic. Annabella Sciorra is appealing as Woods’s girlfriend, the two leads do their best with the frenetic material, and the movie’s nonstop aggressiveness helps to glide one over the excess, but the glut of product plugs and cornball, derivative ideasculminating in a forced set piece inspired by the tacky climax of the Marx Brothers’ Love Happyinduces nausea as well. With Stephen Lang, Delroy Lindo, Luis Guzman, and a cameo by Penny Marshall. Read more

A fascinating relic of the French cinema in the mid-30sa semimusical starring the great black dancer Josephine Baker in all her glory that remains very interesting for the racial attitudes it reveals. As in the subsequent Princess Tam Tam, Baker is paired with a white male starthis time Jean Gabin as a brother by adoption and sailor-turned-electricianwho is set up as a potential lover, but who eventually passes her over for a white woman. (Baker and Gabin grow up together in the circus and wind up working at the same Paris music hall.) One of the biggest French box-office hits of its year (1934), scripted by Baker’s real-life manager and lover, Pepito Abatino, and directed by Marc Allegret, this is a vehicle designed to show off Baker as the ultimate in exotic chic, and it concludes with a delirious production number inspired by Busby Berkeley that shouldn’t be missed. In French with subtitles. 92 min. (JR) Read more

After driving nonstop from San Francisco to Denver, a silent macho type (Barry Newman) accepts a bet that he can make it back again in 15 hours; a blind DJ named Super Soul (Cleavon Little) cheers him on while the cops doggedly chase him. While Richard Sarafian’s direction of this action thriller and drive-in favorite isn’t especially distinguished, the script by Cuban author Guillermo Cabrera Infante (writing here under the pseudonym he adopted as a film critic, G. Cain) takes full advantage of the subject’s existential and mythical undertones without being pretentious, and you certainly get a run for your money, along with a lot of rock music. With Dean Jagger and Victoria Medlin (1971). (JR) Read more

It might make an interesting study to determine why the only martial-arts movies to make major inroads in the American market are those with Muppet spin-offs as heroes. While pondering this question, one can have a reasonably amusing time with this predictable sequel, which is a bit longer on action and shorter on wit and character than the original (hence less good, in my opinion), but still diverting and harmless enough. Although the cast and director are different this timePaige Turco now plays April O’Neil, TV reporter and den mother to the turtles, and Michael Pressman is the directorTodd W. Langen, who collaborated on the script of the original, supplies the same sort of teen patter, and the late Jim Henson’s creature shop is back to provide a couple of drooling beasties. With David Warner and Ernie Reyes Jr. (JR) Read more

What’s fascinating about this Soviet film at the outseta character study focusing on a lonely cab driver (Piotr Zaitchenko) and an alcoholic, bohemian jazz saxophonist (Piotr Mamonov) who becomes his roommateis that it shows us a whole seedy cross section of Moscow life that we haven’t seen before. A first feature by Pavel Lounguine that won him the best director’s prize at Cannes, the film clearly knows something about both its characters and its milieu. But on reflection it seems that this film’s popularityat least in relation to other glasnost filmsrests in large part on its success in aping the American cinema (Lounguine acknowledges the direct influence of such films as The Last Detail, Scarecrow, and Taxi Driver), so that its appeal isn’t so much in what it teaches us about Russians as in the implication that they’re really just like us (1990). (JR) Read more

The sixth feature of experimental intellectual filmmaker Yvonne Rainer, this 1990 work is perhaps her most accessible, staging a kind of shotgun marriage between two volatile issues, menopause and racism. A black filmmaker decides to make a movie about her menopause and interviews a white friend who recounts a long story involving her unconscious racism when she was in her 20s. Rainer interweaves many other elementsarchival footage (including a Lenny Bruce routine), interviews with women about menopause, quotations from diverse sources, and fantasy interludesand the film is more multifaceted essay than straightforward narrative. Cantankerous, witty, caustic, and often deliberately unsettling in its modernist structure, it mounts a complex argument about how the privileges of being white, male, young, and well-to-do affect people’s minds and lives. 100 min. (JR) Read more

The movie that made Robert Altman famous (1970)a somewhat adolescent if stylish antiauthoritarian romp about an irreverent U.S. medical unit during the Korean war (the TV sitcom it spawned practically reversed the spirit of the original). The film also helped launch the careers of Elliott Gould, Donald Sutherland, Sally Kellerman, Robert Duvall, and subsequent Altman regulars Rene Auberjonois and John Schuck, and won screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. an Oscar. But the misogyny and cruelty behind many of the gags are as striking as the black comedy and the original use of overlapping dialogue. This is still watchable for the verve of the ensemble acting and dovetailing direction, but some of the crassness leaves a sour aftertaste. With Tom Skerritt, Fred Williamson, and Bud Cort. PG, 116 min. (JR) Read more

This ‘Scope western directed by the underrated Delmer Daves has been compared to Othello because of its handling of jealousy: rancher Ernest Borgnine takes in outcast Glenn Ford, and the villainous Rod Steiger makes Borgnine think that Ford is fooling around with his wife (Valerie French). Actually the parallels are fairly loose and hardly necessary for appreciating this taut, neurotic melodrama. Adapted by Russell S. Hughes and Daves from Paul Wellman’s novel Jubal Troop; with Charles Bronson and Noah Beery Jr. (1956). (JR) Read more

A classically masochistic women’s picture, with Susan Hayward putting on a spectacular display as the alcoholic, perpetually victimized Broadway star Lillian Roth. Richard Conte is the caddish husband who slaps her down; Eddie Albert is the pious A.A. volunteer who lifts her up. As directed by Daniel Mann, it’s a truly dreadful film but an intriguing pop culture myth. With Jo Van Fleet, Ray Danton, and Don Taylor (1955). (JR) Read more

Robert De Niro stars as a film director during the Hollywood blacklist of the early 50s who refuses to testify against his friends before the House Un-American Activities Committee, thereby bringing his own career to a halt, in a film written and directed by Irwin Winkler (the producer of Rocky, Raging Bull, Round Midnight, and GoodFellas, among other films). As a screenwriting and directing debut, this picture is not especially auspicious, and De Niro’s performance, while charming, remains fairly lightweight. This picture was originally developed by screenwriter Abraham Polonsky and director Bertrand Tavernier before Winkler, who was set to produce it, decided to sign on as director and writer instead, and one regrets Winkler’s softening of the material, which implies that the blacklist was awful mainly because apolitical liberals lost their careers; the radical filmmakers who were forced into silence and/or exile are given no voice at all. But if one accepts these limitations, along with some liberties taken with period details, the subject remains gripping and fascinatingnot really much of an improvement on The Front (which dealt with the TV blacklist, and had the benefits of Zero Mostel), but compelling and watchable all the same. With Annette Bening, George Wendt, Patricia Wettig, Sam Wanamaker, Martin Scorsese (as another blacklisted director), Ben Piazza, and Adam Baldwin. Read more

Four years after his hilarious satire Hollywood Shuffle, writer-director-actor Robert Townsend gave us this impossibly ambitious 1991 movie following a fictional African-American R & B singing group (Townsend, Michael Wright, Leon, Harry J. Lennix, and Tico Wells) from 1965 to the 90s, scripted with Keenen Ivory Wayans (I’m Gonna Git You Sucka). The result is a long and unevenly realized chronicle of friendship, teeming with subplots, packed with energy, and unusually candid about the harshness of the music business. The women in the cast (Troy Beyer, Theresa Randle, Tressa Thomas, Deborah Lacey, and the commanding Diahann Carroll) unfortunately aren’t given much to do, but there are striking performances by John Canada Terrell as a singer who replaces one of the original Heartbeats, Chuck Patterson as the group’s manager, Harold Nicholas (one of the celebrated Nicholas Brothers) as their choreographer, and Hawthorne James as the villainous record executive Big Red. (JR) Read more

A young woman (Madeleine Stowe) who writes children’s books gets arrested without warning in the dead of night because her work is deemed subversive, and a male interrogator (Alan Rickman) tries without success to break down her defenses with various forms of physical and psychological coercion. There are some very striking uses of animation (by Sheila M. Sofian and David Fain) to illustrate the heroine’s consciousness. This two-character piece, a first film written and directed by Radha Bharadwaj and confined to a single set (designed, along with the costumes, by Eiko Ishioka), has most of the drawbacks of film allegorynameless characters in a nameless country that we are asked to accept as universal, and a certain conceptual pretentiousness that can work against the obvious seriousness of the subject. But if one can accept certain givenswhich include torture of one kind or another occurring for most of the film’s running timeit’s hard to fault the execution of the material, which is crisp, taut, and purposeful. (JR) Read more

Carmen Maura (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) and Andres Pajares star as the headlining couple in the Elegant Variety Show, a vaudeville troupe entertaining Spanish Republican soldiers in 1938, shortly before their defeat by the fascists in the Spanish civil war. Traveling with a young deaf-mute assistant (Gabino Diego), they’re arrested in a town recently occupied by the fascists and are eventually compelled to perform a morale-boosting show for the fascist troops — as well as for Polish prisoners who are about to be shot — that an Italian lieutenant (Maurizio di Razza) will direct. Carlos Saura, directing an adaptation of Jose Sanchis Sinisterra’s play Carmela by novelist and veteran screenwriter Rafael Azcona, was the most prominent filmmaker based in Spain during the latter part of Franco’s reign, so the multiple tensions and conflicts expressed in this finely tuned 1990 drama are deeply felt as well as cogently expressed. Maura is quite wonderful as the title heroine, and the period flavor is handled with a great deal of potency; the title tune, a popular song in the Republican zone during the Spanish civil war, is especially stirring. (JR) Read more

Jean Vigo’s only full-length feature (1934, 89 min.), one of the supreme masterpieces of French cinema, was edited and then brutally reedited while Vigo was dying, so a definitive restoration is impossible. (The reassembled version released in France in 1990 is almost certainly the best and most complete we’ll ever be able to seeit’s wondrous to behold.) The simple love-story plot involves the marriage of a provincial woman (Dita Parlo) to the skipper of a barge (Jean Daste), and the only other characters of consequence are the barge’s skeletal crew (Michel Simon and Louis Lefebvre) and a peddler (Gilles Margaritis) who flirts with the wife at a cabaret and describes the wonders of Paris to her. The sensuality of the characters and the settings, indelibly caught in Boris Kaufman’s glistening cinematography, are only part of the film’s remarkable poetry, the conviction of which goes beyond such categories as realism or surrealism, just as the powerful sexuality in the film ultimately transcends such categories as heterosexuality, homosexuality, and even bisexuality. Shot by shot and moment by moment, the film is so fully alive to the world’s possibilities that magic and reality seem to function as opposite sides of the same coin, with neither fully adequate to Vigo’s vision. Read more

At the end of a day when more than 1,000 allied bombing missions had been carried out against Iraq and Kuwait, ABC’s Ted Koppel said, “Since that Scud missile hit Tel Aviv earlier today, it has been a quiet night in the Middle East.” A comparable obliviousness to the fate of nonwhites led to the U.S. delivery of airplanes and 2,4-D herbicide to Burma’s brutally repressive, totalitarian military regime–ostensibly to be used to wipe out opium fields. In fact, the gifts were also used against students and ethnic rebels of the National Democratic Front; food crops, cattle, people, and water supplies were sprayed in an effort to quell the civil war that has been raging in Burma for almost 40 years. The complexity of a situation in which one of the most prominent rebels, commanding about 12,000 troops in his fight for the independence of the Shan state, is also an opium warlord wasn’t lost on Brian Beker, the producer, director, and narrator of this fine hour-long documentary, filmed at great risk in 1989. The film also offers videotape coverage of the 1988 uprising, when around 15,000 civilians were slaughtered by government troops. As an introduction to some of the intricacies of a revolution in the largest country in Southeast Asia–and evidence of what the “noble intentions” of the U.S. Read more