Jonathan Rosenbaum

Harry Kumel’s stylish Belgian vampire film with a cult reputation (1971) is worth seeing for several reasons, not least of which is Delphine Seyrig’s elegant lead performance as a lesbian vampire who operates a luxury hotel. The baroque mise en scene is also loads of fun; with Daniele Ouimet and Andrea Rau. (JR) Read more

Along with Alice in Wonderland (1951), arguably the last of the great Disney animated features. This 1950 effort shows Disney at the tail end of his best period, when his backgrounds were still luminous with depth and detail and his incidental characters still had range and bite. The opulent palace settings are somewhere between Ernst Lubitsch and Leni Riefenstahl in their monumentality. The serviceable songs include Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo. (JR) Read more

Brian De Palma’s Vietnam drama (1989), based on a true incident about the kidnapping, gang rape, and murder of a Vietnamese civilian (Thuy Thu Lee) by a squad of American soldiers. One of the five soldiers, a new recruit (Michael J. Fox), protests the kidnapping, refuses to participate in the rape, and subsequently gets the other four members of his squad court-martialed, despite official resistance. The story is basically told in flashback from his viewpoint, with particular emphasis on his own feelings of remorse for not having saved the woman’s life. The results are obviously sincere and relatively serious for De Palma (with a fresh handling of wide-screen composition that plays on some of the moral conflicts and ambiguities), but the entire film is predicated on a fairly unquestioning acceptance of the morality of the U.S. involvement in Vietnamthe issue of whether the highly principled hero enlisted or was drafted isn’t even brought upas well as a refusal to link this war with other U.S. involvements in the third world. So the feeling of helplessness that the film honors and provokes amounts to a moral cop-out rather than a genuine confrontation with what the war meant and continues to mean. Sean Penn, as the sergeant in the squad, chews up a lot of scenery, and Ennio Morricone pours on the tragic music to make sure that we get the point (and don’t linger on the wider issues that the film avoids); with Don Harvey, John C. Read more

Andrei Tarkovsky’s first major film (1966, though banned and unseen until 1971), 185 minutes long, cowritten by Andrei Konchalovsky, about a 15th-century icon painter. This medieval epic announced the birth of a major talent; it also stuns with the sort of unexpected poetic explosions we’ve come to expect from Tarkovsky: an early flying episode suggesting Gogol, a stirring climax in color. Not to be missed. In Russian and Italian with subtitles. (JR) Read more

Pairing of two goofy comics with independent styles might seem like a recipe for disaster, but the wacky plot premise of this hilarious Carl Reiner comedy makes it work, and Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin are seen pretty much at their peak (1984). A sick and self-indulgent heiress facing death (Tomlin) plans to have her soul transplanted into a healthy female body, but after a mix-up she winds up inhabiting the right-hand side of a male lawyer (Martin), which leads to some of Martin’s wildest spastic effects. All in all, an unusually amiable and well-made comedy; with Victoria Tennant and Madolyn Smith. PG, 93 min. (JR) Read more

The third collaboration of writer-director James Cameron and producer Gale Anne Hurd (Aliens, the Terminator movies) is a big-budget action thriller about a group of underwater oil diggers who go looking for a lost nuclear submarine and wind up encountering extraterrestrials. Shot largely underwater and with direct sound, this has a visceral kick to it that enhances Cameron’s flair for high-tech special effects and streamlined storytelling, but the attempt to extract the essences of several genres (cold-war submarine thriller, love story, Disney fantasy, pseudomystical SF in the Spielberg mode) and mix them together ultimately leads to giddy incoherence. Before the movie collapses, however, there are several highly effective suspense sequences, and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio is especially fine as the feisty, volatile heroine. With Ed Harris, Michael Biehn, Todd Graff, and John Bedford Lloyd. 140 min. (JR) Read more

Jose Alvaro Morais’s first feature, O bobo, winner of first prize at the Locarno film festival, is set during the onset of the right-wing backlash against the Portuguese revolution in 1978. A group of friends are staging a play adapted from Alexandre Herculano’s novel The Jester–a mythic romance built around scenes from Portuguese history–in the abandoned film studio Lisboa Filmes. The film alternates between scenes from the play and the intrigues among the friends who are putting it on–including the murder of the instigator of the project, whose body is discovered in the studio during the rehearsal of the final scene. Six years in the making, the film presupposes a certain knowledge of Portuguese culture and recent history that I don’t have; but though I occasionally found myself at sea in following all the significations, the beauty of the mise en scene and Mario de Carvalho’s photography, and the grace with which Morais negotiates between different time frames and modes of narration kept me entranced. Combining the meditative offscreen dialogue of a film like India Song with the use of a historical play to investigate national identity (as in Raul Ruiz’s Life Is a Dream), The Jester offers a complex, multilayered view of revolutionary retrenchment that is worthy of standing alongside some of the best films of Manoel de Oliveira. Read more

Derek Jarman’s kaleidoscopic experimental film–a dark, poetic meditation on Thatcher England–is visionary cinema at its best. A work that manages to combine more than a half century of home movies of Jarman’s family, a documentary record of industrial and ecological ruin, and sustained looks at Jarman regulars Tilda Swinton and Spencer Leigh, the film was shot in Super-8, transferred to video for additional touches and processing, and then transferred to 35-millimeter. The results are often astonishing and spellbinding. Over an evocative narration by Jarman (which includes apocalyptic quotes from such poets as T.S. Eliot and Allen Ginsberg) and stirring uses of music and sound effects, images in black and white, sepia, and color explode and merge with mesmerizing intensity and build toward a powerful personal statement (1987). (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Saturday and Sunday, July 15 and 16, 6:00, 443-3737) Read more

Directed by Jack Arnold and scripted by Ray Bradbury (though his hand isn’t readily apparent), this scary black-and-white SF effort from 1953 was shot in 3-D, and on occasion it’s shown that way. Richard Carlson and Barbara Rush star, and there’s a chilling cameo by an oversize extraterrestrial eye. 81 min. (JR) Read more

George Roy Hill’s very professional, very entertaining 1972 adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s time-traveling novel, with the pseudoprofundities nicely tucked into place as peppy one-liners and narrative tricks. With Michael Sacks and Valerie Perrine. R, 104 min. (JR) Read more

Two male servants (Robert Beltran and Ray Sharkey) at adjoining Beverly Hills households make a bet to see who can seduce the other’s female employer first; the ladies involved are Jacqueline Bisset and Mary Woronov, and friends and relatives in the two households include Wallace Shawn, Ed Begley Jr., Arnetia Walker, and directors Paul Bartel and Paul Mazursky (the latter as a ghost). Despite a partially amusing script by Bruce Wagner (from a story by Bartel and Wagner) and some nice moments from the cast (particularly Bisset and Walker), this campy, irreverent 1989 farce is essentially defeated by Bartel’s awkward and unnuanced direction, which manages to crush most of the gags underfoot before they can blossom. On the other hand, viewers who weren’t troubled by this problem in Eating Raoul may be amused. R, 102 min. (JR) Read more

Viva, Taylor Mead, Alan Midgette, Ingrid Superstar, and other Warhol regulars talk a lot as they circulate in G-strings, as either waiters or customers, in a New York restaurant. This 1967 feature is one of the more enjoyable of Warhol’s voyeuristic gabfests, punctuated, or fractured, by strobe cuts in which the camera is shut off for reasons that are sometimes arbitrary. 100 min. (JR) Read more

A trio of short films, all set in New York, by Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Woody Allen, who launched this 1989 feature. Whether it happened by chance or design, the sketches have more than just New York in common: all three have something to do with middle age, as well as with romantic relationships. Scorsese’s sectionrelatively weak in plot, but very strong in style and characterstars Nick Nolte and Rosanna Arquette, both at their best, as a painter and his disaffected mistress and apprentice; Richard Price wrote the script. Coppola’s epsiode, scripted by Coppola and daughter Sofia (then 17), stars Heather McComb as the precocious daughter of a well-to-do flute player (Giancarlo Giannini) who tries to reunite him with her mother (Talia Shire). The most experimental of the three segments but also the most arch, the film contrives, though set in the present, to give us a fairy-tale Manhattan out of the 40s and the world of Noel Coward populated mainly by children. Allen’s episode, which he wrote and stars in, is a welcome throwback to the purely comic, pre-art-house Woody, following the psychoanalytical history of a lawyer (Allen) menaced by his aggressive mother (Mae Questel); Mia Farrow and Julie Kavner also star. Read more

Art Carney stars as Harry, a septuagenarian sitcom version of Lear who sets out on a cross-country journey with his aging cat Tonto, in this sentimental and reflective comedy of Paul Mazursky. Carney won an Oscar for his work here, and the secondary castincluding Ellen Burstyn, Larry Hagman, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Josh Mostel, and Arthur Hunnicuttis unusually fine, but you may find much of this, despite the apparent sincerity, too cutesy and self-satisfied for its own good (1974). (JR) Read more

Writer-director Istvan Szabo and actor Klaus-Maria Brandauer, who previously joined forces on Mephisto and Colonel Redl, reunite in a muddled allegory about an Austrian sergeant in World War I who becomes a magically endowed clairvoyant and hypnotist in Austria and Germany during the rise of Nazism. As in Mephisto, Szabo’s handling of period detail is often sloppy (some scat singing heard at a decadent party is a good two decades ahead of its time) or silly (there’s a rather unconvincing character based on Leni Riefenstahl named Henni Stahl), and the dubbing of some of the secondary roles is clumsy. But Brandauer’s command as a performer and the movie’s incidental glimpses of European high life in the late teens and 20swhich apparently had something to do with this film getting an Oscar nominationmake it intermittently watchable. Erland Josephson, Walter Schmidinger, and Grazyna Szapolowska also star; it was cowritten by Peter Dobai. (JR) Read more