Jonathan Rosenbaum

This delightful 1989 pop-fantasy musical about Valley girls and extraterrestrials gives the talented English director Julien Temple an opportunity to show his stuff in an all-American context. The results are less ambitious and dazzling than his Absolute Beginners, but loads of fun nevertheless: his satirical yet affectionate view of southern California glitz is full of grace and energy. Nicely scripted by costar Julie Brown, Charlie Coffey, and Terrence E. McNally; with Geena Davis, Jeff Goldblum, Jim Carrey, and Damon Wayans. 100 min. (JR) Read more

The Disney people in France offer the first Uncle Scrooge McDuck animated feature, produced and directed by Bob Hathcock from a script by Alan Burnett. While the animation isn’t top drawer, the plot and characters are fairly diverting. Scrooge with his niece, three nephews, and an apparent derivation of Gyro Gearloose named Launchpad fly to North Africa and uncover a lost treasure, including a magic lamp containing a genie (a subdued version of Daffy Duck) who grants them three wishes apiecewhile villain Merlock and his Arab servant Dijon plot to get the goodies back. Ideologically speaking, this seems a lot more self-aware than the Disney cartoon features of the 40s and 50s; the plot’s charting of the Arab takeover of Scottish-American wealth makes the story seem more up-to-date than the Indiana Jones epics, and Scrooge’s miserliness is also a bit kinder and gentler (a la Bush) than it used to be, perhaps in keeping with the same overall strategy. With the voices of Alan Young, Richard Libertini, Christopher Lloyd, and Rip Taylor. (JR) Read more

Although it’s based on a disturbing true storythe so-called cleft-chin murder case that swept the English press in 1944this period drama, written by David A. Yallop and directed by Bernard Rose, is served up in the form of fanciful and stylish nostalgia (evocative at times of both The Singing Detective and Bonnie and Clyde), perhaps because the power of fantasy is mainly what it’s about. Emily Lloyd and Kiefer Sutherland star as an aspiring 18-year-old movie star and a 22-year-old American serviceman who claims to have Chicago gangster connections. They meet during the London bombings and spur on each other’s fantasies until they’ve embarked on a life of crime. The results aren’t uniformly successful, but the film’s production design (by Gemma Jackson) is a knockout, and Lloyd and Sutherland make a pretty steamy couple. With Patsy Kensit and Keith Allen. (JR) Read more

A middle-aged Chicago architect (Brian Dennehy) goes to Rome with his much younger wife (Chloe Webb) to mount an exhibition of the work of 18th-century French architect Etienne-Louis Boullee. He suffers a midlife crisis that includes a psychosomatic intestinal disorder and paranoia about his wife, which pushes her into an affair with a younger architect (Lambert Wilson), even after she discovers she’s pregnant with her husband’s child. All the characters are uniformly obnoxious, and director Peter Greenaway (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover) lingers over suffering even more than in his other features. There’s less physical mutilation this timeapart from a witty minor subplot about an Italian who removes the noses from statuesbut plenty of Greenaway’s preoccupation with art patronage, as well as his usual symmetrical framing and plotting and lots of educated lecturing on architecture, bellies, and Isaac Newton. Shot by the impeccable Sacha Vierny (1987). R, 118 min. (JR) Read more

This feature by the talented Mexican director Paul Leduc (Reed: Insurgent Mexico and Frida) was apparently inspired by more than adapted from Concierto barroco, a novel by the celebrated Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier. A musical pageant without dialogue that recounts the history of Latin America, it includes elements of magical realism and the converging influences (musical and otherwise) of Native Americans, Spanish conquistadores, and African slaves. As in Frida, the impulse to work without dialogue leads to broad strokes and a certain amount of simplicity; there are certainly moments of interest, but often it’s as easy to be lulled by the camera movements, settings, and music as to be captivated by them. The actors and performers include Angela Molina, Francisco Rabal, Silvio Rodriguez, Pablo Milanes, and Van Van (1989). (JR) Read more

John Wayne directed and starred in this interminable 1960 western epic (originally 199 minutes, later reduced to 161), which has a much better supporting cast (Richard Widmark, Laurence Harvey, Richard Boone, Carlos Arruza, and Chill Willsnot to mention Frankie Avalon and Pat Wayne) than The Green Berets, his subsequent film as a director. John Ford reportedly lent a hand in the direction, but it’s still a long way to the final attack. (JR) Read more

Director Renny Harlin’s second summer 1990 releaseafter Die Hard 2features notorious hate comedian Andrew Dice Clay as a detective looking into the death of a heavy-metal singer (Motley Crue’s Vince Neil). Stylish trash given Harlin’s usual efficient (if soulless) polish, this makes Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer seem like a feminist; as Gary Giddins has suggested, it’s Jerry Lewis’s Buddy Love from The Nutty Professor without a shred of irony or shading, aimed pretty squarely at sexually insecure male adolescents and no one else. It’s especially doomed by a strained script (by Daniel Waters, James Cappe, and David Arnott) that recalls certain bottom-of-the-barrel Bob Hope vehicles of the 50s in its attempts to be brittle and self-mocking in its humor. (As far as I can tell, there isn’t one laugh in sight.) With Wayne Newton, Priscilla Presley, Morris Day, and Robert Englund, and a music score by Yello. (JR) Read more

A shocking and powerful documentary by Nina Rosenblum–narrated by Susan Sarandon and shot by Haskell Wexler-about the recent “experimental” torture and attempted brainwashing of three women prisoners in a federal prison in Lexington, Kentucky. Each woman was arrested for political activity, given an unusually long prison sentence, and then isolated in a basement cell for almost two years, kept under 24-hour surveillance, periodically awakened several times a night, and strip searched daily. Though this horrific unit was eventually shut down by court order after the protests of human-rights groups, the ruling was overturned last fall. Many more such prison units are now under construction. The three prisoners who underwent this ordeal because of their radical political involvement (in support of civil rights, Puerto Rican nationalism, and the antiwar movement) show a great deal of lucidity and resilience about their ordeal, in spite of the severely debilitating psychological and physical effects of the torture. One regrets the use of “simulations,” even though they’re identified as such, to demonstrate some of the prisoners’ treatment, because their use shows so little trust in the imagination of the audience. But this is still a remarkable look at part of what Bush’s “kinder, gentler” nation is up to, and something you aren’t likely to hear about elsewhere. Read more

An American doctor (Blair Brown) living and working in London meets a mysterious and romantic stranger (Bruno Ganz) while vacationing on the Continent, and he proceeds to woo her back in London. Eventually she discovers he’s not everything he seems to be, and under the additional pressures of Thatcher cutbacks in national health and a faltering relationship with her younger sister (Bridget Fonda) who lives with her, her life gradually spins out of control. Written and directed by David Hare (Plenty), this is the sort of so-called woman’s picture that could only have been conceived by a man; although it remains sincere, fairly watchable, well acted, and otherwise competent throughoutat least up to a somewhat muddled conclusionit proves to have more windup than delivery. With Alan Howard and Hugh Laurie (1989). (JR) Read more

Hit-or-miss is Mel Brooks’s middle name, and this set of period sketches runs the gamut from wonderful to awful, as is usual with his work. But the wonderful stuff is so funny that it makes most of the awful stuff tolerable; the big production number called The Inquisition, for instance, goes beyond The Producers‘s Springtime for Hitler in outrageousness. Keep in mind that Brooks is more verbal than visual in orientation and you’ll be amply rewarded. With Brooks, Dom DeLuise, Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, Harvey Korman, Ron Carey, Sid Caesar, Pamela Stephenson, Henny Youngman, and Orson Welles (as narrator). (JR) Read more

A distinctive adaptation of Sandra Bernhard’s off-Broadway show, directed and coscripted by John Boskovich. Bernhard’s acta mixture of comic monologues and songs that parody such figures as Nina Simone, Diana Ross, and Patti Smithis planted in a black nightclub in Los Angeles similar to the places she played at the beginning of her career, where she performs for a totally unenthusiastic audience. A parody of show-biz mannerisms and phoniness that at times seems as slick and fabricated as what’s being attacked, this is certainly entertaining and provocative. It’s a matter of debate how deep this movie digs, but you won’t be bored for an instantand it’s entirely possible that your hair will be raised (1990). (JR) Read more

A shocking and powerful documentary (1990) by Nina Rosenblum about the experimental torture and attempted brainwashing of three women prisoners in a federal prison in Lexington, Kentucky. Each woman was arrested for political activity, given an unusually long prison sentence, and then isolated in a basement cell for almost two years, kept under 24-hour surveillance, periodically awakened several times a night, and strip-searched daily. Though this horrific unit was eventually shut down by court order after the protests of human-rights groups, the ruling was then overturned. The three prisoners who underwent this ordeal because of their radical political involvement (in support of civil rights, Puerto Rican nationalism, and the antiwar movement) show a great deal of lucidity and resilience about their ordeal, in spite of the severely debilitating psychological and physical effects of the torture. One regrets the use of simulations, even though they’re identified as such, to demonstrate some of the prisoners’ treatment, because their use shows so little trust in the imagination of the audience. But this is still a remarkable look at part of what Bush the elder’s kinder, gentler nation was (and still is) up to, and something you aren’t likely to hear about elsewhere. Narrated by Susan Sarandon; the cinematographer is Haskell Wexler. Read more

The remarkable Daniel Day-Lewis plays the remarkable Christy Brown, an Irishman born with a severe case of cerebral palsy who eventually taught himself to paint and write with his left foot. Director Jim Sheridan and Shane Connaughton adapted this 1990 film from Brown’s autobiography, but far from milking the subject for conventional sentimentality, they use it as the basis for an engaging and idiosyncratic character study. Day-Lewis’s performance is necessarily a bit showyone has to strain at times to understand all his dialogue because of the character’s contorted featuresbut he puts on a terrific drunk scene, and for all his character’s travails the film as a whole winds up surprisingly upbeat. With Alison Whelan, Kirsten Sheridan, Declan Croghan, Fiona Shaw, Cyril Cusack, and Brenda Fricker, also fine as Brown’s mother. (JR) Read more

This very bawdy 1989 collaboration between cartoonist Roland Topor and director Henri Xhonneux gives us human actors in elaborate animal masks (designed by Topor) enacting a story rather similar to that of the Marquis de Sade during the French Revolution. (The marquis is a dog who carries on long philosophical dialogues with his equally talkative penis; his principal adversaries are a rooster prison governor and a Jesuit camel.) I’ve only seen portions of this odd, poker-faced Belgian-French production, but it’s unique, intelligent, and often funny. (JR) Read more

Bulle Ogier runs an all-female acting school, many of whose students (newcomers Laurence Cote, Fejria Deliba, Bernadette Giraud, and Ines de Medeiros) share a suburban house and get involved with the same creepy guy (Benoit Regent), who’s either a cop or a criminal. In short, it’s conspiracy time once again in Jacques Rivette’s highly charged and scary world, where a fanatical devotion to theater and paranoia are often viewed as the only viable alternatives in a tightly closeted universe. This 1988 feature was the best Rivette to reach the U.S. in at least a decade, full of the sexual tensions and female cameraderie found in his Celine and Julie Go Boating (though without much of the comedy), as well as the kind of haunting and chilling aftereffects that are common to his work. More classical and less experimental than his previous features, it’s almost a summary and compilation of his major themes and preoccupationsan ideal introduction to his work. In French with subtitles. 160 min. (JR) Read more