Jonathan Rosenbaum

Vasily Pichul’s Soviet film Malinkaia Vera, starring newcomer Natalya Negoda, never was quite the soft-core sizzler the publicity seemed to promise, but it’s a good movie about the dreariness of cramped family life in an industrial Ukrainian seaport, its family spats and volatile performances actually evocative of certain Italian pictures. The main characters are Vera, her alcoholic truck-driver father (Yuri Nazarov), her disapproving mother (Ludmila Zaitzeva), her somewhat sympathetic older brother, and a university student named Sergei (Andrei Sokolov), who moves into the family’s flat. (JR) Read more

Made in 1965, this black-and-white Warhol feature was one of the first of his films to use sound, as well as some erratic camera movements. Scripted by Ronald Tavel, one of the stars, the film also features Marie Menken as Juanita Castro and Elektrah as Raoul. On the same program, the earlier half-hour silent and black-and-white short Blow Job (1963), which focuses for all of its running time, and in slow motion, on the face of a young man who is presumably being serviced offscreen. (JR) Read more

Like the earlier versions of this annual animation anthology, this is a worldwide selection, including shorts from Canada, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, France, Japan, the Netherlands, the USSR, Yugoslavia, and the U.S. (especially prominent this time). Once again, the work is lively and varied, although if you’ve seen any of the previous collections, you may find yourself a little worn out by the requisite cuteness and/or nastiness that seem standard by now in most animated shorts, as well as by having to see so many works in a row. I was especially taken by Karen Aqua’s jazzy and angular Kakania, featuring a dance of hieroglyphiclike figures, and Nedjeljko Dragic’s extremely varied and imaginative Pictures From Memory (the longest short included), which follows a life in eastern Europe between 1940 and 1960; among the ones that irritated me the most were the slew of grotesque (but by now familiar) Bill Plympton blackout gags and Jan Kounen’s abrasively pixilated Gisele Kerozene. (JR) Read more

Softheaded and silly vampire farce, for undiscriminating audiences only. Roddy McDowall and William Ragsdale are back as the vampire killers; costars include Traci Lin, Julie Carmen, Russell Clark, Brian Thompson, and Jonathan Gries; Tommy Lee Wallace directed from a script he authored along with Miguel Tejada-Flores and Tim Metcalfe. For my money, it’s not a patch on Vampire’s Kiss, but it’s certainly closer to the usual cliches of the genre. 104 min. (JR) Read more

Peter Weir (Witness) directs Robin Williams as a popular, freethinking English teacher in a strict boys’ prep school who inspires his students to think for themselves. The major problem with this 1989 male weepie is Tom Schulman’s script, which falters on several counts: the story is supposed to be taking place in 1959, but apart from a couple of rock songs there’s not even an attempt to capture the period; the moral divisions set up between characters are childishly overdrawn; and, worst of all, the behavior shown by the boys and adults frequently reeks of falsity and contrivance, despite a generally able cast that includes Robert Sean Leonard, Ethan Hawke, Josh Charles, Gale Hansen, and Dylan Kussman. (To cite one instance out of many, what teenage boy of your acquaintance would invite all his buddies to surround him while he telephones the girl of his dreams?) Sometimes Weir’s directorial craft makes one overlook some of the wobbles of this teetering vehicle, but at other times he makes things worse by stretching out some of the dramatic climaxes interminably. Williams is as good as ever, but as in Good Morning, Vietnam, the concerted effort to soften his rough edges doesn’t really enhance his talent. Read more

The most celebrated Andy Warhol feature (1966), and for many the best, is made up of a dozen 33-minute reels that are projected two at a time, side by side. The sound varies according to chance and the projectionist, as only one sound track is played at a time. The people shown include such Warhol superstars as Nico, Ondine, Gerard Malanga, Marie Menken, Mary Woronov (who later costarred in Eating Raoul), Ingrid Superstar, Brigid Polk, and International Velvet. All apparently residents of Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel, they engage in a number of activities and dialogues for 210 minutes, and the results are often spellbinding; the juxtaposition of two film images at once gives the spectator an unusual amount of freedom in what to concentrate on and what to make of these variously whacked-out performers. (JR) Read more

A watchable and interesting documentary by Janis Cole and Holly Dale about women who make moviesmainly directors, but also a few screenwriters, producers, and actresses. Among the women interviewed are Lee Grant, Susan Seidelman, Lizzie Borden, Joyce Chopra, Joan Micklin Silver, Martha Coolidge, Joan Tewkesbury, Amy Heckerling, Claudia Weill, Sandy Wilson, Jeanne Moreau, Sherry Lansing, Agnes Varda, Penelope Spheeris, and, more briefly, Chantal Akerman and Lea Pool; some filmmakers, such as Coolidge and Wilson, are also shown at work. The main limitation of this intelligent if somewhat breezy survey is its overall slant toward the contemporary North American mainstream; while a few pioneers are evoked, figures as important as Maya Deren, Leni Riefenstahl, Vera Chytilova, and such contemporary experimental filmmakers as Yvonne Rainer, Leslie Thornton, and Trinh T. Minh-ha go unmentioned. Still, the exploration of contemporary attitudes towards women making movies is broad and informative (1988). (JR) Read more

One of the liveliest and most conceptually interesting of Andy Warhol’s early sound featurettes, this 66-minute movie made from a single camera setup features Edie Sedgwick and Gino Piserchio on a bed, mainly in their underwear, and the voices of Gerard Malanga and Chuck Wein offscreen, Wein supposedly directing the film (1965). On the same program, Warhol’s 39-minute Eat (1963), a beautiful silent work that features painter Robert Indiana eating mushrooms meditatively while looking at everything but the camera, and a friendly cat that occasionally joins him in the frame. Despite the evident minimalism of this portrait, the fact that Indiana’s sitting in a swiveling rocking chair introduces a lot of variations in the camera’s relative positionthe equivalents, in fact, of pans, tilts, and tracking shots. (JR) Read more

A shy London hairdresser (Jesse Birdsall), still a virgin at 31, finds himself getting involved with three very different women (Lynn Redgrave, Helena Bonham Carter, and Jane Horrocks) in a very pleasant romantic comedy directed by Randal Kleiser. Adapted by Elizabeth Jane Howard from her own novel, the film seems modeled in part on such 60s “swinging London” films as Georgy Girl and Morgan!–as is suggested by the use of several actors associated with that period (Shirley Anne Field, Brian Pringle, Pat Heywood, and Nan Munro) and an overall ebullience in plot and performances. With Peter Cook and John Gielgud. (Golf Glen, Water Tower, Ridge, Oakbrook) Read more

Directed by Hugh Hudson (Chariots of Fire, Greystoke), this film about a troubled youth (Adam Horovitz) who is sent to a psychiatric hospital for middle-class teenagers, where he gradually grows to trust a caring doctor (Donald Sutherland), contains many echoes of liberal, socially conscious movies of the 50s and early 60s, such as Rebel Without a Cause and The Mark. Written (by Michael Weller), directed, and acted with some tenderness and sensitivity, it doesn’t always live up to its models, but is an intelligent and thoughtful treatment of its subject on many levels–in its grasp of adolescent confusions, troubled family situations, institutional cynicism and expediency, and the fallibility of even exceptional doctors. With Dan Bloomfield, Amy Locane, Kevin Tighe, and Celia Weston. (Ford City East, Golf Glen, Orland Square, Chicago Ridge, Oakbrook Center, Ridge, Water Tower, Woodfield, Forest Park, Webster Place, Norridge, Hyde Park, Old Orchard) Read more

In point of fact, the only real signs of life to be found in this top-heavy American Playhouse theatrical production, at once overloaded and undernourished, come from Arthur Kennedy’s performance as Owen Coughlin, an aging, cantankerous New England shipbuilder. All the other characters and intersecting miniplots seem to come straight from the American Playhouse pork barrel: a pathetically retarded adolescent (Michael Lewis) modeled loosely after Lennie in Of Mice and Men, a family man desperate for cash (Beau Bridges), two young workers who dream of salvage diving in Florida (Vincent D’Onofrio and Kevin J. O’Connor), the latter’s frustrated girlfriend (Mary Louise Parker), Coughlin’s practical-minded housekeeper (Kate Reid), and a gaggle of picturesque Portuguese fishermen. John David Coles directed this dusty material, scripted by Mark Malone, with the strained piety one expects in this sort of movie. (JR) Read more

Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder are back together, playing respectively a blind man and a deaf man who join forces to catch some murderous spies. This tasteless, formulaic, mainly unfunny, but otherwise harmless romp was scripted by five people (Earl Barret, Arne Sultan, Andrew Kurtzman, Eliot Wald, and Wilder) and is served up like meat and potatoes by hack director Arthur Hiller (Silver Streak), apparently following the surefire principle of scanning the market and concluding that the combination of disability (e.g., Rain Man), a buddy-movie plot, and Pryor plus Wilder gives us everything that we could possibly want. With Joan Severance, Kirsten Childs, and Anthony Zerbe. (JR) Read more

A breezy yet serious docudrama about the notorious John Profumo-Christine Keeler sexual scandal of 1963 that shook England’s Conservative government, written by Michael Thomas and directed by Michael Caton-Jones. At the center of this complex but deftly conveyed intrigue is the ambiguous figure of Dr. Stephen Ward (John Hurt), a society osteopath, portrait artist, and hedonist whose discovery and cultivation of Keeler, coupled with his friendly liaison with British intelligence, set all the essential wheels in motion. Hurt is at his best in suggesting the contradictory layers of this man, who proved to be the establishment’s scapegoat in the affair, but another part of what makes this movie so absorbing is its heady celebration of London during this period, as well as a healthy enjoyment of the erotic elementsdemonstrating overall that good, trashy fun doesn’t necessarily entail dumbness or irresponsibility. With Joanne Whalley-Kilmer as Keeler, Bridget Fonda as her friend and fellow playgirl Mandy Rice-Davies, Ian McKellen as Profumo, Leslie Phillips as Lord Astor, and Britt Ekland as the orgiastic party thrower Mariella Novotny. (JR) Read more

With his second feature as a director (after Withnail and I), Bruce Robinson, who previously scripted The Killing Fields, offers a genuine oddity. A successful English advertising executive named Dennis Bagley (Richard E. Grant) has a crise de conscience while suffering a creative block about how to launch a new pimple cream. A boil grows on the side of his neck and assumes the identity of an alter ego, speaking with its own glibly proadvertising voice and gradually overtaking his life, until Bagley’s own head is reduced to the size and status of a boil. What’s even odder than this story concept is the Kafkaesque literalism with which Robinson treats it, so that what emerges is not exactly (or purely) comedy or satire or allegory or horror-fantasy, but a daffy and at times wordy story with hints of all these elements that proceeds on its own terms. It’s hard to know whether to recommend this or not, but it must be conceded that nothing else is remotely like it, and Richard E. Grant certainly attacks his part with brio. With Rachel Ward, Richard Wilson, and Jacqueline Tong. (JR) Read more

John Savage, Rachel Ward, Massimo Troisi, and Robert Duvall on a slow road to hell paved with the best of intentionscourtesy of director Cinzia TH Torrini, and writers Enzo Monteleone and Robert Katz, who collaborated with her on the script. Savage flies to Colombia when he hears about the alleged suicide there of his brother, a former Red Brigades terrorist; from there he proceeds into the wilds on a sort of meandering Heart of Darkness quest, half-travelogue and half-polemic, regarding man’s inhumanity to man. Neither Savage nor the confused script is up to the task of expressing the moral outrage that this movie has in mind; the polyglot cast seems discombobulated, and not even Fellini cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno or Welles associate Alessandro Tasca (executive in charge of production) can bring much distinction to a project so helplessly adrift. (JR) Read more