Jonathan Rosenbaum's Blog: jonathanrosenbaum.com, page 32

Elia Kazan, Seen from 1973

I wrote the Preface to this 1973 article in 2009 for its eventual reprinting in Kazan Revisited, edited by Lisa Dombrowski (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011). Note ( early 2013): My favorite Kazan film, Wild River, has just been released on Blu-Ray, and it looks better than ever. — J.R.



Preface (2009): Rereading this essay [...]

The Constant Compromise (GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK & CAPOTE)

From the October 21, 2005 Chicago Reader. — J.R.


Good Night, and Good Luck
** (Worth seeing)
Directed by George Clooney
Written by Clooney and Grant Heslov
With David Straithairn, Clooney, Robert Downey Jr., Patricia Clarkson, Frank Langella, Ray Wise, Heslov, Jeff Daniels, and Dianne Reeves
Capote
*** (A must see)
Directed by Bennett Miller
Written by Dan Futterman
With Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine [...]

The Sun Also Sets (in memory of Nagisa Oshima, March 31, 1932 — January 15, 2013)

From the October 2008 issue of Artforum. (This is also reprinted in my 2010 collection, Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia.) — J.R.

No major figure in postwar Japanese cinema eludes classification more thoroughly than Nagisa Oshima. The director of twenty-three stylistically diverse feature films since his directorial debut in 1958, at the age of twenty-six, Oshima is, arguably, [...]

Arsenal

From the Chicago Reader (June 1, 2002). — J.R.



Earth (1930) is the most famous of Alexander Dovzhenko’s masterpieces, but this white-hot war film, made the previous year and screening only once in the Gene Siskel Film Center’s invaluable Dovzhenko retrospective, is in many ways his most dazzling silent picture. Though it was commissioned to glorify [...]

Review of AMERICAN DIRECTORS

From Film Quarterly, Spring 1984. -– J.R.


AMERICAN DIRECTORS

Two volumes.  Edited by Jean-Pierre Coursodon, with Pierre Sauvage. New York: McGraw Hill, 1983. $21.95 per volume cloth, $11.95 per volume paper.


On the whole, Jean-Pierre Coursodon’s 874-page, two-volume American Directors is closer in genre to Richard Roud’s Cinema: A Critical Dictionary than it is to [...]

Farewell, America!

From the Chicago Reader (June 1, 2002). — J.R.


Around 1950, after seeing his own ideas rejected time and again, the great Soviet director Alexander Dovzhenko undertook this grotesque piece of kitsch, which was inspired by the defection of U.S. journalist Annabelle Bucard after she discovered that the U.S. embassy in Moscow, where she worked, was [...]

Ishtar

From the Chicago Reader (July 1, 1988). — J.R.

Treated as a debacle upon release, partially as payback for producer-star Warren Beatty’s high-handed treatment of the press, this Elaine May comedy was the most underappreciated commercial movie of 1987. It isn’t quite as good as May’s previous features, but it’s still a very funny work by [...]

Review of Barry Salt’s FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY

From Wide Angle, vol. 8, no. 3-4, 1986. –- J.R.



FILM STYLE AND TECHNOLOGY: HISTORY AND ANALYSIS by Barry Salt, Starword, 3 Minford Gardens, London W14 0AN, England, 1983: paper, $ 15.00, 408 pages, lllustrations

Review by Jonathan Rosenbaum



It is a sad commentary on the narrowness and inflexibility of current academic publishing
in film studies that this major [...]

Recommended Reading: Thomas Frank on Spielberg’s LINCOLN

I’m immensely grateful to Thomas Frank in the February 2013 issue of Harper’s — an article you can’t access online, so please, run out an buy this issue if you don’t already have it, and turn to “Team America” on pp. 6-9) — for clarifying how the celebration of corruption that has American media and [...]

The Screed We Need [FAHRENHEIT 9/11]

Fahrenheit 9/11
*** (A must-see)
Directed and written by Michael Moore.

It’s bracing to see the documentary coming into its own these days, generating some of the excitement and interest that accompanied foreign (mainly European) pictures back in the 60s, when there were far more independent theaters to show them. But the New Wave and its many tributaries [...]