Jonathan Rosenbaum

British documentarist Nick Broomfield (Soldier Girls, Lily Tomlin) was hired to document the preparations for an all-black stage musical, Body and Soul. Between its New York casting and its Munich opening, Broomfield encountered and precipitated a number of disasters and decided to make a stupefying film about themeveryone involved comes off rather badly, Broomfield included. If there’s any entertainment or edification to be gleaned from this masochistic navel gazing, I managed to miss it. (JR) Read more

Insofar as director Tom McLoughlin triesand abjectly failsto do with a nubile angel (Emmanuelle Beart) what Ron Howard did with a nubile mermaid in Splash, a more appropriate title for this dumb, cloddish movie might be Flap. Michael Knight receives a visit from the angel, causing jealous consternation in his girlfriend (Phoebe Cates) and other sundry complications, which are spun out endlessly. Some would-be satire about the efforts of the hero’s buddies and his girlfriend’s father to commercialize the angel is a good example of the pot calling the kettle black. Grossly overplayed and underproduced (the special effects and ethereal lighting aren’t even bargain basement Spielberg), this shaky vehicle doesn’t even begin to fly. (JR) Read more

Lou Diamond Phillips stars in this ineptly told and rather bathetic 1988 tale of a runaway teen who gets a job at a Texas horse ranch, renovates a 1911 Oldsmobile for a cross-country race, and gradually becomes involved in the lives of the family he lives witha crippled boy (Jordan Burton), his older sister (DeeDee Norton), and their father (Eli Cummins). (JR) Read more

Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd go on their third journey through time, this one winding up in the wild west, where Lloyd falls in love with schoolteacher Mary Steenburgen. Once again, Robert Zemeckis directed from a script he did with Bob Gale, and again Lea Thompson and Thomas F. Wilson costar. This is a good deal more likable than part two because the product plugs have been held back, and Zemeckis is clearly having fun alluding to his favorite westerns; there’s also a certain sweetness and charm in the Lloyd-Steenburgen romance, although, like most elements in this trilogy, these qualities tend to be more conceptual and programmed than felt. (JR) Read more

The first feature of Canadian filmmaker Ron Mann (Poetry in Motion, Comic Book Confidential) may be the best documentary on free jazz that we have. Produced with Bill Smith, editor of Coda magazine, the film consists mainly of interviews with and performances by four key musicians: solo pianists Cecil Taylor and Paul Bley, trumpet player Bill Dixon (performing with a trio), and tenor saxophone player Archie Shepp (playing with a quartet); Taylor and Shepp also read some of their poetry. Mann is attentive to the visual impact of the music (Taylor’s piano playing, for instance, virtually qualifies as a form of dancing) and its diverse biographical, musical, and ideological underpinnings (the musicians are all highly articulate). Essential viewing and listening for free-jazz devotees (1981). (Southend Musicworks, 1313 S. Wabash, Sunday, April 8, 7:00, 939-2848) Read more

Richard Brooks’s 1958 adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was somewhat bowdlerized, but at least it’s intelligent and entertaining within its chosen limits. His second Williams adaptation (1962) is literally a form of emasculation that offers little indication of what made the original play interesting (especially in Elia Kazan’s stage production), despite the fact that Paul Newman and Geraldine Page are called on to reprise their original roles — as a hustler returning to his southern hometown and a Hollywood has-been — and do a fair job with Brooks’s hopeless script. With Rip Torn and Ed Begley (both encouraged to overact stridently), as well as Shirley Knight and Mildred Dunnock. 120 min. (JR) Read more

Soviet filmmaker V.I. Pudovkin’s last silent film (1928, 144 min.) focuses on a Mongolian uprising against British occupation forces. Like most of the other Pudovkin silents, this shows much more narrative flow and sweep than the contemporary films of Dovzhenko and Eisenstein, but it tends to look a bit more rickety today. One has to turn to Pudovkin’s first sound film, the relatively scarce (but much more interesting) Deserter, to encounter experimentation and poetry that still look radical. (JR) Read more

A fascinating documentary portrait of the remarkable Philippine filmmaker Lino Brocka by Christian Blackwood. Considering how articulate Brocka is about his own lifehis impoverished background, his work as a Mormon in a Hawaiian leper colony, his homosexuality, his growing activism as an opponent of the Marcos regimeand his films, Blackwood has wisely chosen to make the most of this a self-portrait, with Brocka describing his life and work, and lucidly commenting on (and often translating) clips from his films (1987). (JR) Read more

Dabney Coleman plays a Seattle cop on the verge of retirement who, because his urine sample gets switched with that of a black bus driver, believes that he has only two weeks to live. Hiding this from his family (Teri Garr and Kaj-Erik Erikson), he is determined to die in the line of duty so that they can collect on his hefty life insurance, but naturally he keeps failing to get killed. This tacky premise, which encourages us to be indifferent to the fate of the dying bus driver, is actually just an excuse for a couple of fair chases and some unfelt stretches of Capracorna thoroughly soulless romp that is distinguished neither by its script (John Blumenthal and Michael Berry) nor its direction (Gregg Champion). With Matt Frewer and Barry Corbin. (JR) Read more

Indescribably awfula serving up of Beatles tunes by Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees with the ugliest visuals imaginable, directed with more glitz than good sense by Michael Schultz. It also features such hands as George Burns, Donald Pleasence, Steve Martin, and Earth, Wind & Fire. If you like the Beatles and you like movies, do yourself a favor and stay away (1978). (JR) Read more

An energetic, silent World War I comedy-drama by Raoul Walsh that focuses on the rivalry between officers Victor McLaglen and Edmund Lowe in France, adapted from a popular play by Laurence Stallings and Maxwell Anderson. A lot better than John Ford’s 1952 remake, this is Walsh at his spunkiest. With Dolores Del Rio, William V. Mong, and Phyllis Haver (1926). (JR) Read more

Your Schubert is a pain in the ass! Gerard Depardieu declares at the end of Bertrand Blier’s latest comedy drama about amour fou, remorse, and jealousy, meaning that the sadness of the music is more than he can bear. The problem is, in spite of all the stylishness that makes this one of Blier’s most accomplished films, the fundamentally antiartistic attitude underlying it makes his Schubert a pain in the ass too, if only because this reading of the composer is so mechanical. Car dealer and garage owner Depardieu, married to a beauty (Carole Bouquet), falls madly in love with his plain-looking temporary secretary (Josiane Balasko), and, as in Blier’s Get Out Your Handkerchiefs and Menage, the pain and irrationality of passionate love is the main bill of fare. What’s different this time is that Blier tells the story in a highly fragmented, partially achronological and subjective mannera bit like early Resnais, but without the radical implications, the beauty, or the accomplished writing that made Resnais’ early features so remarkable. Flashbacks dovetail into fantasy sequences and flash-forwards function like reveries, with the camera gliding past dinner tables like a busy bee. It’s not always easy to tell which scenes are real and and which ones imagined, but none of this matters very much in the long run. Read more

Raul Ruiz’s first completed Chilean feature (1968) is not one of his best works, but it does showcase his peculiar trait of elaborating a plot that is flattened into incoherence or irrelevance for the sake of a labyrinthine formal structure. Filmed in Santiago almost exclusively with a handheld camera following a number of not very interesting characters, it was inspired in part by Mexican melodramas — demonstrating that Ruiz saw himself working in relation to a B-film tradition from the beginning. (JR) Read more

Like Percy Adlon’s previous Marianne Sagebrecht vehicle Bagdad Cafe, this is a fanciful, gentle satire about American life seen from a Bavarian angle. This time Sagebrecht plays Rosalie, a Bavarian-born housewife in Stuttgart, Arkansas, who has a slew of kids and is married to a pilot (Brad Davis) whose faltering eyesight is used as a rather heavy-handed metaphor for what this movie is basically aboutthe sweet naivete of American consumer society in the 80s. The possessor of 37 credit cards, numerous bank accounts and fake IDs, and a computer, Rosalie keeps her family happy through diverse scams straight out of Reaganomics. And they all delightedly watch TV commercials together, simultaneously reciting the familiar patter verbatim. Full of bizarre camera angles and lighting schemes, the movie is rather weak from a narrative standpoint, and a running gag about Rosalie’s confessions to a priest (Judge Reinhold) grows mechanical and tiresome, but if you liked Bagdad Cafe, you’ll probably be charmed. Scripted by Adlon with his wife and coproducer Eleonore Adlon and Christopher Doherty; with Alex Winter, Patricia Zehentmayr, John Hawkes, and Erika Blumberger (1989). (JR) Read more

Sidney Lumet returns to his special stomping groundthe workings of the New York Police Department and justice system, and how they’re affected by racial antagonisms and ethnic loyaltiesin a richly detailed, caustic thriller, adapted by Lumet himself from a novel by Hispanic judge Edwin Torres. The plot centers on the investigation of the killing of a Hispanic hood by a respected police lieutenant (Nick Nolte) that is carried out by an idealistic assistant district attorney (Timothy Hutton), himself the son of a highly respected policeman; a major witness to the killing (Armand Assante) is involved with the investigator’s former girlfriend (Jenny Lumet), a mulatto who left him years earlier because of his own unconscious racism. The film runs for 134 minutes, but Lumet keeps things moving with his sharp eye (and ear) for New York detail and his escalating sense of liberal outrage. Hutton seems miscast in the lead part, and the villains (Nolte and Patrick O’Neal) are rather two-dimensional, but the other characters are persuasively delineated; Assante, Lee Richardson, Luis Guzman, Charles Dutton, and Paul Calderon are especially effective. (JR) Read more