Jonathan Rosenbaum

A 1987 feature from Paul Cox (Lonely Hearts, Man of Flowers), a Dutch filmmaker based in Australia, combining John Hurt’s offscreen readings of Vincent van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo from 1872 until his suicide in 1890 with shots of his works and the places he lived in and painted, as well as occasional period re-creations of his milieu, using actors but no dialogue. (Most of the visuals are depicted from the artist’s viewpoint, and van Gogh himself is seen only through his self-portraits.) This is certainly more than an illustrated slide lecture, but often comes across as something less than a fully articulated filmalthough Cox’s reticence about certain matters (such as van Gogh’s celebrated severing of his ear) is arguably defensible. The film doesn’t ignore van Gogh’s bouts with madness, but its overall emphasis is on his sensibility as a conscious artist. It is to the film’s credit that a wide range of his work is shown, including many pieces that are not readily available, and that some of the letters are newly translated by Cox. On the other hand, the perennial problem of how to show paintings in a film is not wholly solved here: Cox’s conventional use of details and a panning camera has a somewhat touristic effect, and we’re seldom allowed to linger on any single work. Read more

Nick Nolte plays a bank robber in Tacoma who has just been paroled when he finds himself taken hostage by an inept amateur (Martin Short), desperate to raise money to care for his disturbed little girl (Sarah Rowland Doroff). These are the three fugitives in Francis Veber’s literal (apparently shot-by-shot) remake of his own French comedy Les fugitifs, which starred Gerard Depardieu and Pierre Richard. I haven’t seen the original, but nothing in this crude, mainly unfunny farce makes me want to. Short’s usually effective comic persona is lamentably milked here for Chaplinesque pathos, while Nolte looks like he’d rather be somewhere else (a sentiment easy to share); Doroff, on the other hand, is effectively nonsentimental in her mainly silent part, although the film manages to maul her talents as well. The gags veer from Three Stooges head knocking to dressing Short in women’s clothes; James Earl Jones, as Detective Dugan, starts out as an important character and then is absentmindedly forgotten; Alan Ruck and the late Ken McMillan also put in appearances. Haskell Wexler (of all people) is the cinematographer, and David McHugh provided the awful Muzak score. (JR) Read more

Jackie Chan directs a lavish comedy set at the turn of the century that involves pirates and the British navy (1983). Chan stars as a marine cadet who eventually quits his job to attack the pirates, and his frequent comic sidekick Samo Hung plays a criminal boss who helps him out. As usual, Chan performs many spectacular and death-defying stunts, one of which (screened under the film’s final credits) nearly finished him off. With Maggie Cheung. (JR) Read more

Set in Hong Kong in 1914, Tsui Hark’s highly energetic and quickly paced comedy-thriller (1987) pits three daughtersof a housemaid and the warlord owner of the Peking Operaagainst a group of powerful warlords. The lighting and nonstop pacing smack of Spielbergfor better and for worse. In Cantonese with subtitles. 104 min. (JR) Read more

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s disappointing 1970 version of the Greek tragedyshot in Syria, Turkey, and Italyoffers soprano Maria Callas in her only film role, playing the lead part but not singing it. Pasolini’s Marxist, Catholic, and pagan impulses infuse the film with some life, but it’s a step backward after Oedipus Rex (1967). It’s worth seeing nevertheless. (JR) Read more

John Ford’s lifelong disaffection for Boston may have something to do with the peculiar detachment of his 1958 adaptation of Edwin O’Connor’s novel about the final campaign of a political boss of the old school (Spencer Tracy). The results are recognizably Fordian, but not as energetic as his best work, despite the interesting secondary cast: Pat O’Brien, Jeffrey Hunter, Basil Rathbone, Edward Brophy, James Gleason, Dianne Foster, John Carradine, Ricardo Cortez, Frank McHugh, and Jane Darwell. 121 min. (JR) Read more

This piece of whimsy from Philippe De Broca has become a perennial cult favorite since its release in 1967. It’s about a World War I soldier (Alan Bates) and an abandoned French village taken over by lunatics from an asylum after the institution’s staff has departed. To swallow it at all, you have to accept a totally false view of insanity and an outrageous anachronism or two. It’s the kind of comic allegory about war that depends on muddleheadedness in order to make much sense, but if you’re feeling muddleheaded, you might find yourself charmed and enchanted by the conceit. With Genevieve Bujold, Pierre Brasseur, and Philippe Noiret. (JR) Read more

An honorable failure, this Vietnam-war drama and action film tries to do something that, to the best of my knowledge, none of its commercial predecessors had attempted: represent the point of view of the Vietcong as well as of American soldiers. Given this ambition, it’s regrettable that director and cowriter Eric Weston leans as heavily as he does on previous Vietnam films: acerbic offscreen commentary (as in Apocalypse Now), choral music over action (as in Platoon), and a division between pure good and pure evil to describe soldiers in the same platoon (American sergeants in Platoon, Vietcong fighters here). The film also gets into some trouble by conveying all of the dialogue in English, despite the fact that the American officer who narrates the story (Beau Bridges), and who eventually comes upon the diary of his Vietcong counterpart (Liem Whatley)based on the actual diary of an unknown Vietcong fighterspeaks and reads Vietnamese. But the film has unmistakable virtues as well, including a good handling of the action sequences and a beautiful use of landscape. With Haing S. Ngor (The Killing Fields), Johnny Hallyday, James Ishida, Ping Wu, and Iilana B’tiste; coscripted by John Bushelman and Larry Hilbrand. (JR) Read more

Sammo Hung’s 1986 feature is often referred to as the movie that introduced Hollywood to the new Hong Kong cinema. Shot in Panavision, it concerns military convicts joining up with Cambodian guerrillas to destroy an abandoned ammo dump in Vietnam before the Vietcong can get to it, and features a lot of rapid action, bone-crunching violence, and spectacular stunts. The results are kinetically alive and pictorially striking, but plot interest tends to be relatively minimal. With Hung, Yuen Biao, and Haing S. Ngor. (JR) Read more

A submarine with a coed crew encounters an obscure sea monster in a lousy, cliche-ridden thriller, scripted by Lewis Abernathy and Geof Miller in an apparent effort to emulate Alien and the original version of The Thing, and directed with dutiful clunkiness by Friday the 13th’s Sean S. Cunningham. Among the actors who repeatedly get wet are Nancy Everhard and Miguel Ferrer. (JR) Read more

The lifelong friendship between two dissimilar womena brassy singer from the Bronx (Bette Midler) and an upper-class lawyer from San Francisco (Barbara Hershey)is the focus of this glossy, emotional picture, adapted by Mary Agnes Donoghue from Iris Rainer Dart’s novel and directed by Garry Marshall. The film’s oily overdefinition of various class and cultural categories (ranging from poor and well-to-do to avant-garde and vulgar) is strident enough to betray a condescending attitude toward the audience. Midler and Hershey (as well as costars John Heard, Spalding Gray, and Lainie Kazan) work nobly to flesh out the simpleminded conceits, which are omnipresentnot only in the script and direction but in most of Midler’s songs (1989). (JR) Read more

This 1933 Barbara Stanwyck vehicle about a small-town woman who sleeps her way up the corporate ladder, directed by the underrated Alfred E. Green, remains one of the raciest movies of the 30s, even after massive cuts by the censor; it’s also one of the most cynical about being female and getting ahead during the Depression. With George Brent and John Wayne in an early, highly uncharacteristic part. Well worth looking at. 70 min. (JR) Read more

Burt Lancaster plays a pacifist Indian who winds up fighting a one-man war for the rights of his tribe in this early (1954) Robert Aldrich western, based on a true story. Not an unqualified success by any means, but an interesting effort; with Jean Peters, John McIntire, and Charles Bronson. (JR) Read more

Czech animator Jan Svankmajer’s feature-length 1987 adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, made in Switzerland. Not necessarily for young kids, this is a surrealist version with a great deal of attention accorded to objects. 91 min. (JR) Read more

Conceivably the best and most serious Dickens adaptation ever filmed, Christine Edzard’s two-part, six-hour English movie tells the story as the novel does, from two consecutive points of view. Perhaps the greatest strength of the picture is its remarkably dense rendering of 19th-century England; no single art director or production designer is credited, but the use of sets is especially fine. Derek Jacobi, Alec Guinness, Joan Greenwood, Roshan Seth, Cyril Cusack, and Sarah Pickering in the title role head a uniformly distinguished cast. This is a far cry from the polished competence of Masterpiece Theatre; Edzard’s Dickensian universe is one that sweats as well as breathes. (Fine Arts) Read more