Jonathan Rosenbaum

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Chicago Reader
For 1,935 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 42% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 56% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 4.1 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Jonathan Rosenbaum's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 62
Highest review score: 100 Breathless
Lowest review score: 0 Bad Boys
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 961 out of 1935
  2. Mixed: 744 out of 1935
  3. Negative: 230 out of 1935
1935 movie reviews
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    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    The Nightmare Before Christmas
    As adapted by Michael McDowell and scripted by Caroline Thompson, this 1993 release is at worst a macabre Muppet movie, at best an inspired jaunt. The set designs are ingenious and the songs (music and lyrics by Danny Elfman) are fairly good.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Paris Is Burning
    One emerges from this film not only with a new vocabulary and a fresh way of viewing the straight world but with a bracing object lesson in understanding what society “role models” are all about.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Breaking the Waves
    You won't come out of it indifferent, and even if it winds up enraging you (I could have done without most of the ending myself), it nonetheless commands attention.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    The Squid and the Whale
    The implied critique of progressive, bohemian parenting is devastating--wise and nuanced, with the painful hilarity of truth.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    School of Rock
    The kids, all real musicians performing, are wonderful, and so is Black; Joan Cusack is both charming and funny as the principal.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Devil in a Blue Dress
    What's most memorable about it is the period flavor, including a detailed and precise account of the jim crow complications blacks had to contend with.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Howl's Moving Castle
    The movie's dreamlike spaces and characters are sometimes worthy of Lewis Carroll.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Cold Comfort Farm
    I've never read Stella Gibbons's popular English novel of 1932--a parody of the romantic rural novels that Mary Webb wrote during the 20s--but director John Schlesinger and adapter Malcolm Bradbury have gotten plenty of enjoyable mileage out of it.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Crimson Gold
    Kiarostami's brilliantly suggestive script, which is quite unlike anything else he's written and is marred only slightly by one of his obligatory sages turning up gratuitously near the beginning.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Marty
    This 1955 example of kitchen-sink realism about the awakening love life of a Bronx butcher (Ernest Borgnine) and his shy girlfriend (Betsy Blair), directed by Delbert Mann, has never been popular with auteurists, but Paddy Chayevsky’s script, adapted from his own TV play, shows his flair for dialogue at its best, and the film manages to be touching, if minor.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Dolores Claiborne
    Although most of the elements are familiar and virtually all of the characters are unpleasant, this is a better than average melodrama--mainly because of the volcanic power of Kathy Bates in the title role.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Face/Off
    Woo's third Hollywood movie, Face/Off, is the first to balance his visual imagination with the emotional intensity of his Hong Kong films.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Night Moves
    One of Penn's best features; his direction of actors is sensitive and purposeful throughout.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Touching the Void
    Something of a tour de force, this adaptation of Joe Simpson's nonfiction book about his climbing the 21,000-foot Siula Grande mountain in Peru, breaking a leg, and eventually making it back alive is remarkable simply because the story seems unfilmable.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    The Sundowners
    A touching Fred Zinnemann movie (1960) about an Australian sheepherding family.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 20 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Intact
    The film's a swell way of torturing yourself for 108 minutes.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    The Return
    Beautifully structured and emotionally wrenching.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Drugstore Cowboy
    Adapted by Van Sant and Daniel Yost from an unpublished autobiographical novel by James Fogle, this 1989 feature has the kind of stylistic conviction that immediately wins one over.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Blow-Up
    This is so ravishing to look at (the colors all seem newly minted) and pleasurable to follow (the enigmas are usually more teasing than worrying) that you're likely to excuse the metaphysical pretensions—which become prevalent only at the very end—and go with the 60s flow, just as the original audiences did.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Dream of Light
    Like the painter, it's painstakingly serious about what it's up to.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 50 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Dazed and Confused
    Disappointingly conventional though well-made...An OK teen movie, but not a whole lot more.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    The Killer
    A lot of claims have been made for this campy bloodbath concerto (1989) by Hong Kong director John Woo, and I must admit that he's even better than Brian De Palma at delivering emotional and visceral excess with staccato relentlessness.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    The Filth and the Fury
    The period ambience (call it funk) is irresistible, but the main points of interest here are sociological rather than musical.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Cowards Bend the Knee or The Blue Hands
    The overall feel is phantasmagoric--pitched, like most of Maddin's work, in the style of a half-remembered late silent feature or early talkie.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    George Washington
    Has memorable characters and images. Yet the story is elusive and occasionally puzzling, and some of the ideas are amorphous and self-conscious.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Mr. & Mrs. Bridge
    This deserves to be seen and cherished for at least a couple of reasons: first for Joanne Woodward's exquisitely multilayered and nuanced performance as India Bridge, a frustrated, well-to-do WASP Kansas City housewife and mother during the 30s and 40s; and second for screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's retention of much of the episodic, short-chapter form of the books.
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