Jonathan Rosenbaum

The surprising and entertaining life of renowned film critic and social commentator Roger Ebert (1942-2013): his early days as a freewheeling bachelor and Pulitzer Prize winner, his famously contentious partnership with Gene Siskel, his life-altering marriage, and his brave and transcendent battle with cancer.

The extraordinary life of Orson Welles (1915-85), an enigma of Hollywood, an irreducible independent creator: a musical prodigy, an excellent painter, a master of theater and radio, a modern Shakespeare, a magician who was always searching for a new trick to surprise his audience, a romantic and legendary figure who lived only for cinema.

As his life comes to its end, famous Hollywood director Orson Welles puts it all on the line at the chance for renewed success with the film The Other Side of the Wind.

From 1970-1977, six low budget films shown at midnight transformed the way we make and watch films.

A comedy about New York and its eccentric inhabitants. A French filmmaker comes to New York to show her film at MOMA. Fascinated by the city, she decides to stay.

Since the early days, Jerry Lewis—in the line of Chaplin, Keaton and Laurel—had the masses laughing with his visual gags, pantomime sketches and signature slapstick humor. Yet Lewis was far more than just a clown. He was also a groundbreaking filmmaker whose unquenchable curiosity led him to write, produce, stage and direct many of the films he appeared in, resulting in such adored classics as The Bellboy, The Ladies Man, The Errand Boy, and The Nutty Professor.

This film discusses the effect on how major American films in Hollywood were influenced by the Eastern European Jewish culture that most of the major movie moguls who controlled the studios shared. Through clips of various films, the filmmakers illustrate the dominant themes like that of the outsider, the outspoken American patriotism, and rooting for the underdog in society.

In Sarajevo, in a cinema’s projection booth, lives Sena; a woman who in daily solitude repeats the projection of the few Yugoslavian films of which there are copies. Through a combination of silence, the everyday gestures of this woman and the films that are projected from her living room, comes a film built like a day in Sena’s life. Through the films that Sena projects, we are taken on a journey in both collective and personal memory. The film offers a portrait of intimacy crossed with a history witnessed by cinema; a history which Sena has conserved.

Constel·lació Portabella traces the exciting life of the great Catalan film director and artist Pere Portabella , which traverses the cultural and political history of the country and the last seventy years, letting us be carried away by the passion, the intellect intelligence and curiosity.

"This intimate saga links the filmmaker's long-lost family home in Tehran, a historic Frank Lloyd Wright house in Alabama, and the formative years of renowned film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. Rosenbaum, son of a family of movie-theatre owners, grew up in the Wright house, now a museum. Documenting the home over a period of years, Saeed-Vafa finds parallels between Wright's design eccentricities and the twisting course of dysfunctional family histories." —Barbara Scharres

A “Cinéma, de notre temps” series episode directed by french filmmaker Jackie Raynal, originally aired 29 May 2016.

An experimental short film that finds film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum playing himself, being interviewed about a film that doesn’t exist. Director Peter Bull proceeds to create the film that Rosenbaum describes. The alternating footage provides insight into these two different modes of representation.

A portrait of the influential American film critic.

A video essay collaboration on Jacques Rivette's Out 1, produced by Kevin B. Lee using messages received by film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum.