Jonathan Rosenbaum's Blog: jonathanrosenbaum.com, page 22

Greedy Speculations

From The Guardian (August 31, 2002). Having recently attended a 35-millimeter screening of Greed (not the longer version put together by Rick Schmidlin) at the St. Louis Humanities Festival, on April 6, 2013, I was delighted to see all 240 seats in the auditorium filled (another twenty were turned away); most of the audience remained [...]

Mélo

From the Chicago Reader (April 8, 1988). — J.R.



Alain Resnais’ masterpiece, easily his best film in years, is bound to baffle spectators who insist on regarding him as an intellectual rather than an emotional director, simply because he shares the conviction of Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson that form is the surest [...]

Moving (July-August 1977)

From Film Comment (July-August 1977). After I returned to the U.S. early that year after seven and a half years of living in Europe (Paris and London), my “Paris Journal” and “London Journal” column in Film Comment became “Moving,” a preoccupation that eventually yielded the title of my first book, Moving Places.

Note: the 35 mm [...]

Moving (July-August 1977)

From Film Comment (July-August 1977). After I returned to the U.S. early that year after seven and a half years of living in Europe (Paris and London), my “Paris Journal” and “London Journal” column in Film Comment became “Moving,” a preoccupation that eventually yielded the title of my first book, Moving Places.

Note: [...]

Art of Darkness Jacques Tourneur’s WICHITA

From the Chicago Reader (December 5, 2003). I’m delighted to report that Wichita became available on DVD, and in the correct CinemaScope format, in 2009. — J.R.





Wichita
**** (Masterpiece)
Directed by Jacques Tourneur
Written by Daniel B. Ullman
With Joel McCrea, Vera Miles, Lloyd Bridges, Walter Coy, Wallace Ford, Edgar Buchanan, Peter Graves, Jack Elam, and Mae [...]

Art of Darkness [Jacques Tourneur’s WICHITA]

From the Chicago Reader (December 5, 2003). I’m delighted to report that Wichita became available on DVD, and in the correct CinemaScope format, in 2009. — J.R.





Wichita
**** (Masterpiece)
Directed by Jacques Tourneur
Written by Daniel B. Ullman
With Joel McCrea, Vera Miles, Lloyd Bridges, Walter Coy, Wallace Ford, Edgar Buchanan, Peter Graves, Jack Elam, and Mae [...]

Process of Illumination [RADIUM CITY]

From the February 5, 1988 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

RADIUM CITY
Directed by Carole Langer
Thanks largely to the influence of auteur criticism, most of our aesthetically oriented writing about film since the 60s has been concerned with style. But one could argue that such an emphasis has tended to divert attention from what might be considered even [...]

Moving (May-June 1977)

Written as a column for the May-June 1977 Film Comment. Some of the details here are dated, I think, in an interesting manner — especially the discussion of “Disco-Vision”. I should add that the only version of MIKEY AND NICKY that had been released in the mid-70s was an unfinished edit by Elaine May that [...]

The Peacemaker

From the Chicago Reader (September 27, 1997). — J.R.

A celebration of paranoia and arrogant thuggery, this is about America (in the person of George Clooney, resembling Oliver North by way of John Wayne in his Green Berets mode) slapping everyone and everything in its path in order to make the world (i.e., the U.S.) safe [...]

Directions for Use

I am reprinting the entirety of my first and most ambitious book (Moving Places: A Life at the Movies, New York: Harper & Row, 1980) in its second edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) on this site in eleven installments. [...]