Jonathan Rosenbaum's Blog: jonathanrosenbaum.com, page 44

Money Changes Everything [HYENAS]

From the Chicago Reader (July 7, 1995). — J.R.

Hyenas
Rating *** A must see
Directed and written by Djibril Diop Mambety, adapted from Friedrich Durrenmatt’s The Visit
With Mansour Diouf, Ami Diakhate, Mahouredia Gueye, Issa Ramagelissa Samb, Kaoru Egushi, and Mambety.

“The plot by now must be well known; a flamboyant, much-married millionairess returns to the [...]

Course File on Experimental Film (Part 1) (1982)

From AFI Education Newsletter (January-February 1982). Because of the length of this, I’ll be running it in two installments. — J.R.

EXPERIMENTAL FILM:
FROM UN CHIEN ANDALOU TO CHANTAL AKERMAN (Part 1)








UNIT l: lntroduction

One distinct advantage to teaching a course in experimental film as opposed to avant-garde film is that it automatically gives one much more leeway [...]

Kiss Me Kate

From the Chicago Reader (July 22, 1990). — J.R.

One of the classiest and most experimental 3-D efforts from Hollywood — as well as one of the best MGM musicals of the 1950s that didn’t come from the Arthur Freed unit. Adapted by Dorothy Kingsley from the successful 1948 Cole Porter stage musical and directed by [...]

The Arabian Nights

From Oui (February 1975). The word “coyness” was misprinted as “boyness,” and I wondered at the time if this might have been an editor’s Freudian slip. –- J.R.




The Arabian Nights. In his treatment of The Arabian Nights, Pier Paolo Pasolini
has created what might be considered his first pagan film — a work in [...]

Lie Lady Lie [HOUSESITTER]

From the Chicago Reader (June 12, 1992). — J.R.


HOUSESITTER
** (Worth seeing)
Directed by Frank Oz
Written by Mark Stein and Brian Grazer
With Steve Martin, Goldie Hawn, Dana Delany, Julie Harris, Donald Moffat, Peter MacNicol, Richard B. Shull, Laurel Cronin, Roy Cooper, and Christopher Durang.

I’ve seen previews of two summer comedies so far — Sister Act and [...]

Man on a Shoestring: An On-Location Report on Mark Rappaport’s IMPOSTORS

From American Film (October 1979). -– J.R.






The actors playing Chuckie and Mikey, a sinister vaudeville team dressed in matching tuxedos, top hats, and capes, are pretending to walk toward the camera. They move their feet without advancing anywhere. Behind them, a gigantic black-and-white blowup of a garden at Versailles, mounted on a platform, is slowly [...]

House of Games

From the Chicago Reader (October 16, 1987). — J.R.

Hitchcock lives! David Mamet’s first time out as a director is a thriller about compulsive behavior and con games, done with a sureness of touch and taste that shows a better understanding of Hitchcockian obsessions than the complete works of Brian De Palma. The viewer has to [...]

Spanish Master

From Sight and Sound (June 2011). Portabella continues to be the most flagrantly unseen and overlooked of major contemporary filmmakers, for reasons suggested in this sketch; his DVD box set is still slated to appear “soon”. — J.R.



Jonathan Rosenbaum voyages into the elusive and intriguing worlds created by Spanish filmmaker Pere Portabella


Among the lost continents [...]

The Wind Will Carry Us

From the Chicago Reader (December 1, 2000). — J.R.



This ambiguous comic masterpiece (1999, 118 min.) could be Abbas Kiarostami’s greatest film to date; it’s undoubtedly his richest and most challenging. A media engineer from Tehran (Behzad Dourani) arrives in a remote mountain village in Iranian Kurdistan, where he and his three-person camera crew secretly wait [...]

Mark Rappaport [from FILM: THE FRONT LINE 1983]

The following is a chapter from my book Film: The Front Line 1983 (Denver, CO: Arden Press) — which is still in print, although it probably remains the least well known of my books. I’m immensely grateful to Jed Rapfogel and Stephanie Gray at New York’s Anthology Film Archives for furnishing me with a document [...]