Jonathan Rosenbaum's Blog: jonathanrosenbaum.com, page 58

Watch for BERNIE (upgraded)

I guess I must have been simply naïve when I concluded, after seeing and flipping out over Richard Linklater’s The Newton Boys 14 years ago, that everyone else would like it as much as I did. But frankly, I’m even more bewildered by the critical coolness being shown now in some quarters towards Bernie, a [...]

Cannes, 1997

Adapted from “Cannes, tour de Babel critique,” translated by Jean-Luc Mengus, in Trafic no. 23, automne 1997. –- J.R.




By common agreement, the fiftieth anniversary of the Cannes
Film Festival, prefigured as a cause for celebration, wound up serving
more often as an occasion for complaint. Disappointment in the over-
all quality of the films ran high, [...]

Lost In Their Parts [THE ANNIVERSARY PARTY]

From the Chicago Reader (June 22, 2001). — J.R.

The Anniversary Party
Rating *** A must see
Directed and written by Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming
With Leigh, Cumming, John Benjamin Hickey, Parker Posey, Phoebe Cates, Kevin Kline, Denis O’Hare, Mina Badie, Jane Adams, John C. Reilly, Jennifer Beals, Matt Malloy, Michael Panes, and Gwyneth Paltrow.

The Anniversary [...]

Paris Journal (January-February 1974)

From Film Comment. — J.R.









JULIEN: Have you ever thought that the true reverse angle, as one says in cinematography, of [Magritte’s] Madame Récamier, is the public much more than the painter at work?
– From the script of L’AUTOMNE














All but the last eight minutes or so of Marcel Hanoun’s L’AUTOMNE (AUTUMN) is [...]

Watch for BERNIE

I guess I must have been simply naive when I concluded, after seeing and flipping out over Richard Linklater’s The Newton Boys 14 years ago, that everyone else would like it as much as I did. But frankly, I’m even more bewildered by the critical coolness being shown now in some quarters towards Bernie, a [...]

Imitation Flavors

From the Chicago Reader (July 20, 2001). — J.R.


America’s Sweethearts
Rating * Has redeeming facet
Directed by Joe Roth
Written by Billy Crystal and Peter Tolan
With Julia Roberts, Crystal, Catherine Zeta-Jones, John Cusack, Hank Azaria, Stanley Tucci, and Christopher Walken.
The Score
Rating ** Worth seeing
Directed by Frank Oz
Written by Kario Salem, Lem Dobbs, Scott Marshall Smith, and Daniel E. [...]

Review of Richard Brody’s EVERYTHING IS CINEMA: THE WORKING LIFE OF JEAN-LUC GODARD

From The Village Voice (May 13, 2008). — J.R.


Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard
By Richard Brody
Metropolitan Books, 701 pp., $40
Will we ever get a critical biography of Welles, Kubrick, or Eastwood as good as Brian Boyd’s two volumes on Vladimir Nabokov? Probably not. Novelists basically have friends, relatives, and editors to be [...]

Reinventing the Present [10]

From the Chicago Reader (April 11, 2003). — J.R.

10
*** (A must-see)
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
With Mania Akbari, Amin Maher, Roya Arabshahi, Katayoun Taleidzadeh, Mandana Sharbaf, Amene Moradi, and Kamran Adl.
In my mind, there isn’t as much of a distinction between documentary and fiction as there is between a good movie and a bad one. — [...]

THE TENANT

From Sight and Sound (Autumn 1976). — J.R.

Behind the credits, a face peering out through a window; a downward pan revealing a vertiginous drop to the courtyard below; a pan back to the window and round the court to another face, a girl’s, which quickly turns into Roman Polanski’s; a continuing movement past a chimney, [...]

Reply to an article by Lucy Fischer about PLAYTIME

This appeared in the Autumn 1976 Sight and Sound, and I hope I can be excused for omitting the article that occasioned it, Lucy Fischer’s “’Beyond Freedom and Dignity’: an analysis of Jacques Tati’s Playtime,” that was included in the same issue. (In her subsequent book-length bibliography of writings about Tati, Fischer omitted this Afterword, [...]