Jonathan Rosenbaum

One of Elia Kazan’s weakest filmsconceivably his very worst, apart from The Sea of Grassthis 1953 anticommunist adventure about a circus troupe trying to escape from Czechoslovakia has a decent enough cast (Fredric March, Cameron Mitchell, Adolphe Menjou, Gloria Grahame, Terry Moore, and Richard Boone), which Kazan knows how to use effectively. But a pretty dated and uninteresting script by Robert Sherwood ultimately defeats their best efforts. (JR) Read more

Considering that this English-language adaptation of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera was written for the screen and directed by executive producer Menahem Golanwhose previous and highly uneven directorial credits include a Sylvester Stallone weepie (Over the Top) and such action pictures as The Delta Force and Enter the Ninjait’s surprising how inoffensive it turns out to be. Not inspired, mind you, and not terribly memorable if you’ve seen other versions, but a respectable enough reading of a classic pop opera. Raul Julia is MacHeath, Richard Harris and Julie Walters are Mr. and Mrs. Peachum, Julia Migenes is Jenny, and Roger Daltrey is the Street Singer; others in the mainly English cast include Clive Revill, Erin Donovan, and Rachel Robertson. (JR) Read more

This rarely shown early film by Roberto Rossellini (1948), one of his few comedies, anticipates with remarkable prescience the conceits of Godard and others about photography in the 60s. A professional small-town photographer finds that he has the power to kill his subjects by taking their picture, turning them into statues of themselves. Rossellini left this project before it was finished, and it was edited and released a few years later without his approvalbut it still comes across as a remarkably suggestive fable. (JR) Read more

This is the last of Ingrid Bergman’s Swedish films before she came to the U.S. in the early 40s; by many accounts it’s the best of the lot. Directed by the celebrated but relatively unknown Per Lindberg, it charts the difficulties of a young woman who shoots her lover in a quarrel, changes her name, and moves to Stockholm to begin a new life (oddly anticipating the scandalmongering media that subsequently persecuted Bergman, there’s even a reporter who won’t let her be). Attractively photographed, well acted, and at times subtly nuanced, this isn’t anything extraordinary, but Bergman’s beauty and passion and Lindberg’s direction make it shine in spots (1940). (JR) Read more

Conceivably the most neglected of James Whale’s better works, this hilarious period farce (1937) imagines a hoax perpetrated by the Comedie-Francaise to teach the conceited English actor David Garrick (Brian Aherne) a lesson in acting. The only problem is, Garrick is in on the gag, which leads to a variety of comic complications at a country inn. This boisterous movie helps to justify critic Tom Milne’s claims that Whale was a kind of premodernist Jean-Luc Godard. Rarely have the art and pleasure of acting, demonstrated here in countless varieties of ham, been expressed with as much self-reflexive energy, and Whale’s enjoyable cast (including Olivia de Havilland, Edward Everett Horton, Melville Cooper, Lionel Atwill, Lana Turner, Marie Wilson, Albert Dekker, Fritz Leiber, and the wonderfully manic Luis Alberni) takes full advantage of the opportunity. 91 min. (JR) Read more

For my taste, this is somewhat funnier and less politically offensive than the original, although it’s just as lightweight. Writer-director Jamie Uys plots out a new set of comic adventures for bushman Xixo (N!xau) in the Kalahari Desert, this time involving his two youngest children, Xisa and Xiri, who disappear when they accidentally fall into a poacher’s truck, as well as a stranded New York attorney (Lena Farugia) and a research zoologist (Hans Strydom) who eventually become an unlikely romantic couple, and a Cuban soldier (Erick Bowen) and an isolated Unita scout (Treasure Tshabalala) who keep taking each other prisoner. The gentle, whimsical satire of civilization is again pointed up by the use of Xixo as a sort of wise noble savage providing a shining example with his good sense. Uys’s juggling of the separate yet interlocking plotlines is fairly adroit, and his whimsy continues to be good humored, although once again it’s purchased with a sentimental and complacent view of African life designed to flatter the viewer. (JR) Read more

A historically fascinating 1990 picture about the Civil War’s 54th Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, made up of black enlisted men and headed by a white colonel (Matthew Broderick). Directed by TV award winner Edward Zwick (Thirtysomething) from a script by Kevin Jarre (Rambo: First Blood Part II), the film suffers from some of the war- and liberal-movie cliches one might expect from filmmakers with these credits, but the castwhich also includes Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, and Cary Elwesis strong, and the training and battle scenes seem carefully researched. Lurking somewhere in the background of this true-life tale is some caustic irony about the outcome of the black soldiers’ desire to fight that the movie never confronts directly enough. But this is still a pretty watchable and always interesting period film, well photographed by English cinematographer Freddie Francis. 122 min. (JR) Read more

Who would have thought that Paul Mazursky (An Unmarried Woman, Down and Out in Beverly Hills), defender of middle-class mediocrity, could have brought off this sensitive 1989 adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s slyly subversive and emotionally complex novel? It’s an erotic love story and comedy-drama about Holocaust survivors living in New York City in 1949-’50, with Ron Silver as a ghostwriter for a rabbi (Alan King) who winds up married to three women at oncehis original wife (Anjelica Huston), thought to have perished in a concentration camp; a non-Jewish former servant (Margaret Sophie Stein) who saved his life by hiding him in a hayloft and lives with him now in Coney Island; and a volatile Jewish woman (Lena Olin), who lives with her mother (Judith Malina) in the Bronx. Part of the fascination of this lovely and sexy movie, scripted by Roger L. Simon and Mazursky, is that one can never be sure where it’s going, although it proceeds with disarming and impeccable logic. The period flavor is beautifully caught, and the performancesincluding an effective cameo by Mazursky himself as Masha’s estranged first husbandare full of unexpected depths and surprises. All the actors are impressive, but it’s the female leads who really shine. Read more

Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis play two southern escaped convicts who are chained together as they flee from the police. This 1958 tale about racism won an Oscar for its screenplay (by Harold Jacob Smith and Nathan E. Douglas) and additional kudos for its director, Stanley Kramer. As James Baldwin pointed out, it’s a fable informed by a certain amount of white liberal wish fulfillment. Kramer was never much of a director, but there’s still power in some of the performances, especially Poitier’s. (Sammy Davis Jr. once revealed that he and Elvis Presley wanted to play the two leads; if they had, the results would undoubtedly have been a good deal more interesting.) With Cara Williams, Theodore Bikel, Charles McGraw, and Lon Chaney Jr. 97 min. (JR) Read more

I haven’t seen this striking independent feature by Shirley Clarke since it came out in 1964, so I’m wary of evaluating it on the basis of my memories. Adapted by Clarke and Carl Lee from a novel by Warren Miller and a play by Miller and Robert Rossen, and shot mainly on location in Harlem, it certainly had a visceral impact when it first appeared, helped enormously by Baird Bryant’s cinematography and Dizzy Gillespie’s score. But critics were divided at the time about the film’s meaning and impact as social protest. As a trip by a white woman filmmaker into what amounted to a third-world country, it was and probably is something of a shocker; the plot concerns the efforts of a 14-year-old boy (Hampton Clanton) to get a gun from a racketeer (Lee) so he can be the leader of his gang. Frederick Wiseman produced the picture, and Gloria Foster and Clarence Williams III also figure in the cast. This was Shirley Clarke’s second feature (The Connection was her first), and some critics still consider it her best. (JR) Read more

Giuseppe Tornatore directed this simplistic, nostalgic 1989 Italian film about a small-town movie theater in Sicily as experienced by a little boy (Salvatore Cascio) who hangs out with the projectionist (Philippe Noiret) and collects footage cut out of movies by the local censor. Eventually the boy takes over as projectionist and grows up to become a filmmaker (Jacques Perrin). Originally a two-part, three-hour film, this treacle has been reduced by almost a third, though it still seems to run on forevera bit like life but less interesting. The film is rife with outrageous continuity errors and unexplained anomalies, but people who want to have a good cry probably won’t mindthere’s more than enough bathos to drown in, or to win an Oscar for. With Marco Leonardi and Agnese Nano. PG, 123 min. (JR) Read more

Isabelle Adjani stars as Camille Claudel, the sister of Paul Claudel and lover of Auguste Rodin (Gerard Depardieu), and a troubled sculptor who spent the last 30 years of her life in psychiatric asylums. This project was launched by Adjani herself, evidently in an attempt to return to material resembling The Story of Adele H, her first film. The script, adapted from a book that’s said to whitewash certain aspects of Claudel’s life, is by Marilyn Goldin. Longtime cinematographer Bruno Nuytten makes his directorial debut here, and the cinematography is by the distinguished Pierre Lhomme. With Alain Cuny and Madeleine Robinson. (JR) Read more

One of the revelations of this 1924 feature by pioneer black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux is that, in contrast to the faltering technique and garbled film syntax of his sound pictures, he was stylistically assured as a silent director. The great Paul Robeson gives a memorable performance as a duplicitous preacher. 104 min. (JR) Read more

In 2002, 20 black seventh graders from Baltimore’s inner city, many of them from troubled homes, were sent to Baraka, an experimental boarding school in Kenya. Filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady spent three years following four of them, and the resulting documentary is sensitive, intelligent, enlightening, and sometimes surprising. Ewing and Grady give us a nuanced sense of these boys’ options, and it’s typical of their attention to detail that during a long-distance phone call, cameras in Baraka and Baltimore record both sides of the conversation. R, 85 min. (JR) Read more

If the Philip K. Dick story this was based on made sense, director John Woo and screenwriter Dean Geogaris have reduced it to gibberish in their eagerness to cut to the chase as frequently as possible. The eminently forgettable Ben Affleck plays a consultant who gets his memory erased periodically in order to protect the secrets of his employers; Uma Thurman plays his forgotten (yet paradoxically cherished) girlfriend. Armed with an esoteric collection of objects he bequeathed himself before his mind was wiped, the professional amnesiac must piece his past together while dodging a boardroom’s worth of corporate villains, led by a glowering Aaron Eckhart. The silliness only slows down for a few hokey romantic interludes. But if you like to see stuff crash or blow up, this is your movie. PG-13, 110 min. (JR) Read more