As the Reader’s senior staff writer covering movies, Jonathan Rosenbaum gets first pick of the city’s offerings, and as any sane man would, he tends to choose titles that promise to be good or at least interesting. But there are too many good movies showing in Chicago for even two people to cover–last year alone the Reader reviewed 1,122 features and shorts programs, employing the talents of 28 writers (including longtime contributor Ted Shen, a perceptive and enthusiastic critic who passed away in October). I reviewed 285 programs in 2003 and saw at least another 40 movies on my own time; following are my ten favorites.
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Owning Mahowny. A quiet, focused performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman (reminiscent of Gene Hackman’s in The Conversation) anchors this drama about a young assistant manager at a Toronto bank whose gambling addiction sweeps him into a vortex of lies, embezzlement, and high-stakes casino betting in the U.S. Directed by Richard Kwietniowski (Love and Death on Long Island), this is most fascinating when it tracks the competition between two casino managers–one in Las Vegas and another in Atlantic City (a crusty John Hurt)–to cultivate Hoffman as a profitable client.
Dracula: Pages From a Virgin’s Diary. I’ve always been a horror fan, but I was disappointed by most of the big scare flicks this year (Willard, May, Cabin Fever, House of 1,000 Corpses). Much stranger and more arresting is this Canadian feature by Guy Maddin, adapting the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s production of Dracula. Maddin has spent his career exploring the visual vocabulary of silent film, which enhances the story’s epistolary form and sense of sexual nightmare; he joins a distinguished list of directors (F.W. Murnau, Tod Browning, Francis Ford Coppola) moved to florid personal expression by one of the great tales of the supernatural.
Manic. Thirteen got all the press with its tale of a young girl’s corruption, but I was more convinced by this DV drama about a handful of teens committed to a private mental hospital (it kicked around the festival circuit for two years before getting a limited release last June). Jordan Melamed, making his feature debut, carefully rehearsed a fine ensemble cast that includes Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel, Elden Henson, and Don Cheadle, and their work pays off in a brutally honest look at adolescent rage and despair.
