:: FRIDAY, APRIL 25 - THURSDAY, MAY 1 ::

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Věra Chytilová's DAISIES (Czechoslovakia)

Chicago Film Society at the Music Box Theatre – Wednesday, 7pm

Věra Chytilová's films have earned her acolytes and enemies at an equal rate—particularly DAISIES, an anarchic, poetic, visually exhilarating film lacking in any affirmation whatsoever. In more recent years, it has cemented Chytilová's stature as an avant-garde genius, a feminist icon, and a major influence behind films such as CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING and MULHOLLAND DRIVE. In the period immediately following its release, Chytilová was marked as both a dangerous dissident (by the Czechoslovak government, who unofficially blacklisted her) and a political traitor to the Left (by Godard, who made her the central figure of his anti-Soviet/Czechoslovak documentary PRAVDA). During one of the first screenings of her work in France, audience members walked out, complaining that "they shouldn't make that kind of film. It undermines people's faith in socialism. If that is the way it really is, then none of it is worth it at all." DAISIES leads with exactly this kind of "objectionable" nihilism, opening with the two protagonists deciding that "the world is spoiled; we'll be spoiled, too." These two teenage girls, both named Marie, spend the rest of the film on a hedonistic rampage of consumption and destruction, in no particular order, culminating in a banquet scene that merges both tendencies to an apocalyptic conclusion. Marie and Marie do everything that decent women shouldn't (cheat, steal, make messes, advertise casual sex without following through, overeat, etc)—and care about precisely nothing. They speak in nonsensical, non sequitur dialogue that seems like it could have been randomly generated ("Why say 'I love you?' Why not just 'an egg?'"), but was actually carefully curated by Chytilová to serve as "the guardian of meaning" for her "philosophical documentary." During production, the only thing that she insisted remained untouched was the original script; everything else was up for grabs. Her production team took full advantage of this freedom in depicting the Maries' nihilistic spree, resulting in a surreal and stunning display of meaningless excess at every turn. Most notably, Jaroslav Kucera, the film's cinematographer (and Chytilová's husband), shot the film as one of his famous "colour experiments," and Ester Krumbachová, the film's costumer, styled the Maries in trendy mod bikinis and minidresses as often as elaborate sculptural outfits made from newspaper and loose wires. Preceded by Friz Freleng's 1955 cartoon short PESTS FOR GUESTS (7 min, 35mm). (1966, 74 min, 35mm) [Anne Orchier]

Pier Paolo Pasolini's THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW (Italy)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Saturday, 9pm

In 1963, the well-known atheist and Marxist Pier Paolo Pasolini collaborated with several directors on the satire ROGOPAG. Pasolini's segment, "La ricotta," starred Orson Welles directing a film about the life of Jesus Christ. Due to "publicly maligning the religion of the State" in his film, Pasolini received a suspended prison sentence and the film was banned. In a strange turn of events, only a year later he directed the critically acclaimed THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW, winning the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival and the first prize of the International Catholic Office of Cinema. Now considered one of the best cinematic adaptations of Christ's life (played by a young Spanish student of economics named Enrique Irazoqui), the film begins with Christ's birth and continues through his betrayal by Judas and crucifixion at the hands of the Scribes and Pharisees. Most of the film simply concerns Christ sharing his teachings with people, the same beliefs now inculcated into our culture so deeply that they appear secular. Working under the tenets of Italian neorealism, Pasolini shot the film outdoors in the poor Italian district of Basilicata and its capital city Matera, capturing Christ and his disciples in long shots traveling through vast natural landscapes. Pasolini cast non-professional actors (including local shopkeepers, factory workers, and truck drivers) who fully embody their characters and do not rely upon make-up or elaborate costumes; the film and its realist aesthetic benefit most from these people. He also used actual text from the Bible rather than dramatically modifying it, which gives the film a sense of authenticity missing from other pictures. When later asked at a press conference why, as an atheist, he made a film about Christ, Pasolini replied, "If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for belief." THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW is a great, yet atypical, protest film from the 1960s, telling a story about the origin of faith not only in God, but also in humanity and why it continues to exist. Screening as part of the Board Picks series. (1964, 137 min, 35mm) [Candace Wirt]

Takeshi Kitano's FIREWORKS (HANA-BI) (Japan)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm

A joke: What's Takeshi Kitano's preferred type of shot? … The deadpan. Silly, yes, but perhaps appreciable to Kitano, also known as “Beat” Takeshi, a stage name he assumed as one half of the wildly popular Japanese comedy duo Two Beat. (Comedy is just one among his many talents; he’s also an actor, a screenwriter, a television host, and an author.) The pair, consisting of Kitano and his friend Nirō Kaneko, belonged to a genre of Japanese comedy called manzai, involving a straight man—tsukkomi—and a funny man—boke, Kitano’s role in the duo—engaging in humorous banter at great speed. Videos of their act are available on YouTube, and they make for an odd pairing with most any of the films he directed; within minutes, it’s clear that his directorial style, which foregrounds silence over spiel and stillness over frenzy, is vastly different from that of his comedy. FIREWORKS (HANA-BI) is one of many examples of this within his oeuvre, as well as the first of his films to achieve international success, having won the Golden Lion award at the 54th Venice International Film Festival.  Dubbed by renowned Japanese film critic Nagaharu Yodogawa as “the true successor to Kurosawa" and often compared to Buster Keaton (much like Jackie Chan, whose POLICE STORY and POLICE STORY 2 played in town last week, though Kitano’s similarity may be even more personal—a 1994 motorcycle accident left his face partially paralyzed, hence his own stony facade), Kenji Mizoguchi, and even Yasujiro Ozu, Kitano’s style is nonetheless singular, existing on its own scale, with one end being disaffected sentiment, evoked most fully in his 1991 outlier-masterpiece A SCENE AT THE SEA, and the other extreme brutality, exemplified in his 1989 directorial debut, the aptly titled VIOLENT COP. FIREWORKS is among those firmly in the middle, a mix of sober violence and wistful emotion—for every bloody encounter, there’s a lovely scene between the beleaguered protagonist and his sweet, sickly wife. Kitano stars as Nishi, a police detective who abandons the force after a shootout that leaves one of his colleagues dead and two others gravely injured. Things hadn’t been going much better up to that point: his young daughter had previously died, his wife is terminally ill, and he’s borrowing money from the yakuza to keep up with her medical care. After the shootout, Nishi robs a bank to get funds to take his wife on a trip and provide for those affected by the incident, one of whom starts painting. The artwork in the film is actually Kitano’s own, the uncommon auteur having taken up the practice after his own accident. I won’t make a case for Kitano as an especially brilliant painter, but his work possesses a quality much like his films, that of rare stillness and an indelible affectation. A similar sense of ineffable wonder tinges both, displaying a purity of form that defies categorization. Though not always apparent, there is humor in Kitano’s funereal work, but it’s a humor born of unabashed melancholy, maybe similar to that of the proverbial straight man he played against early in his career—his may not be a great stone face, but rather a great stone heart, palpable but impenetrable. Screening as part of the Driving Towards the End: An East Asian Perspective series. (1997, 103 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]

Shinji Sômai’s LOVE HOTEL (Japan)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

It’s representative of Shinji Sômai’s singular intelligence that the strangest thing about his second feature, SAILOR SUIT AND MACHINE GUN (1981), isn’t that it’s about a 14-year-old girl who assumes control of a small-time yakuza outfit after her mob boss father dies, but that the film is, for the most part, a poignant drama that respects the feelings of its major characters at nearly every turn. LOVE HOTEL, Sômai’s sole feature-length foray into softcore, or “pink,” cinema, is no less strange, subversive, or empathetic, delivering on the demands of the genre while also presenting a stark rumination on the role sex plays in our lives. The film comes from an extraordinary year in the director’s career, when he released three masterpieces; it arrived between TYPHOON CLUB, a devastating film about junior high students that might be described as a mix of John Hughes and Albert Camus, and LOST CHAPTER OF SNOW: PASSION, a movie that attained instant classic status in Japan for its first 15 minutes alone, which comprise just two shots and span a couple decades in the main character’s life. There are plenty of bravura long takes in LOVE HOTEL too, with at least one that calls upon the actors to play multiple complicated emotional states over several uninterrupted minutes. But what’s most remarkable about them—and indeed Sômai’s work in general—is that the formal mastery is regularly at the service of revealing or complicating something about the characters. It seems to stem from a bottomless curiosity about human beings and what they’re capable of. Encountering this outlook in pornography must have been bracing in 1985—it’s bracing now. LOVE HOTEL effectively turns the pornographic movie inside out; where most entries in the genre reduce characters to bodies, here is a film that advances an almost Borzagean concern with souls. Please be advised that this concern isn’t yet apparent in the opening scene, which lasts about 15 minutes and contains graphic depictions of sexual violence. Sômai renders the material particularly discomforting through his characteristic long takes, which trap the two main characters (and us) in the present moment, and his commitment to medium shots, which keep both victim and vicitimizer in the same frame and inhibit viewer identification with either. And then, when you least expect, the story jumps two years into the future. It’s only now that LOVE HOTEL begins to explain who these two people are, after their lives have been shaped by the brutal sexual encounter of the first scene. This shocking turn is characteristic of Sômai, and there are more where that came from; it would be unfair to give anything else away. Suffice it to say that the central characters continue to evolve until the very last shot and that sex remains a critical part of their evolution; however, it becomes clear early on that Sômai isn’t interested in titillation. The director avoids many of the formal tropes of pornography, eschewing editing and closeups during sex scenes and at one point even moving the camera away from the people having sex to consider the environment they’re having sex in. While his approach still allows for explicit content, the gaze upon that content never feels lecherous or even particularly erotic, which makes LOVE HOTEL as much an outlier in the world of pornographic films as it is in Sômai’s career. (1985, 88 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub's TOO EARLY, TOO LATE (France/Egypt/West Germany)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Wednesday, 7pm

Inspired by a letter from Friedrich Engels to future socialist German theoretician Karl Kautsky, along with Mahmoud Hussein’s then-recently-published Class Conflict in Egypt, filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet set off to Egypt during the months following the Camp David Accords, which sought to signal peace between Arab and Israeli nations but instead resulted in the assassination of Egypt’s president, and also arguably created the continuing discord and violence between many of the countries in the Middle East today. Straub and Huillet however, create a diptych of air, wind, and the ghosts of revolution waiting to burst forth in modern Egypt, with the film’s first section shot in modern day France, where the film journeys off in search of locations mentioned in Engel’s letters to Kautsky (purportedly very hard to locate, so much so that Huillet had to draw an extremely detailed itinerary for the crew). The filmmakers sought landscapes of the French countryside that Straub described as having a “science fiction, deserted-planet aspect,” landscapes that carried the seeds and blood of revolution in 1789, that remain devoid of human figures in the frame, despite many living in farmhouses nearby. This section in France features Huillet narrating Engels’ text over the images, while the Egyptian section features the voices of two Middle Eastern men reading from Hussein’s book. The jump between the two sections is astounding, given the lack of human bodies populating the frame in the first segment, juxtaposed with the wealth of bodies in the second. Ideas and texts aside (of which their importance is incredibly vital) the real wonder of the movie stems from its constructing a pastoral and ethically situated series of images that recall Griffith, Sjostrom, or specifically in one scene, the Lumière brothers’ WORKERS LEAVING THE FACTORY. The stillness and otherworldly hypnosis of the silent era looms large in TOO EARLY, TOO LATE, allowing the filmmakers to return the sounds of nature back to cinema, lost (or maybe never really found) with the creation of a sound cinema that for decades relied on canned sounds to capture wind, birds, and other natural phenomena; or as Bresson once put it, “the sound film invented silence.” Cinema needed the creation of the Nagra and small sync-sound cameras brought forth with the New Wave to return the eternal presence of nature to the movies. Even then, it took nearly two decades for such intoxicatingly natural sound designs to emerge in this manner. Straub and Huillet create a film that is unlike any other before, laying the template for many modernist filmmakers to follow. Hypnotic and complex, it is nothing short of breathless if you let its sounds and images overwhelm you. Screening as part of the History Lessons of Straub and Huillet series. (1981, 100 min, DCP Digital) [John Dickson]

Patricia Mazuy’s PEAUX DE VACHES (France)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Monday, 7pm

French filmmaker Patricia Mazuy’s feature debut, which screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival, had as an admirer in Jacques Rivette, who in Claire Denis’ feature-length interview with the filmmaker, JACQUES RIVETTE, LE VEILLEUR (1990), describes going to see it twice in two weeks. He says of the evocative final scene that the “first time [he saw it he] almost had that feeling of those scenes that you dream, I often do that. I dream I’m in a cinema, watching a film and seeing wonderful things, but then I wake up and it’s gone. But here, it was on screen, I hadn’t dreamed it!” High praise indeed, Rivette capturing the film’s hazy, mesmerizing quality, though there’s also something minacious about it—a corollary that came to mind are the contemporary films of Alain Guiraudie as it’s simultaneously lowering and fragile, glass easily broken but quick to cut. During some drunken revelry, two brothers accidentally (or so it would seem) set their family farm ablaze; unknowingly a vagrant had taken refuge in the barn, and he’s killed during the incident. The film then jumps ten years later, when the older brother, pastry chef Roland (Jean-François Stévenin), is released from prison and unceremoniously returns home, where the younger brother, Gérard (Jacques Spiesser), appears to live a successful life, with a new farm, a beautiful wife named Annie (Sandrine Bonnaire) and a small daughter. Roland and Gérard hadn’t spoken during the former’s time away, accounting for some of the tension among the trio, Annie also unknowing of the pair’s situation. Gérard has also become close friends with the local veterinarian, leading Roland to uncover the truth behind the blaze, Gérard having intended to burn his sickly cows for the insurance payout. (The film’s title literally means cowhides but was released under the English title THICK SKINNED.) Annie may not factor heavily into a summarization of the film, but she’s caught in the middle of the two brothers’ mulish dynamic; in her performance, Bonnaire mirrors the viewer’s bewilderment, soon becoming entangled in the fracas herself. Mazuy began her film career in earnest when she was hired by Agnes Varda to work on VAGABOND (where she met Bonnaire), for which she eventually received a co-editing credit with Varda. PEAUX DE VACHES, set in the rural French countryside, would seem to center on one of the places where Bonnaire’s Mona may have temporarily resided in Varda’s film, though instead rather than focusing on the vagabond, that figure is literally “killed off” and instead it’s the otherwise innominate characters who become the protagonists of the film. But despite being so closely linked with Varda, this isn’t a mentee’s pastiche; Mazuy is an assured first-time director, immediately establishing an idiosyncratic vision at once in line with her peers and forebears but still singularly her own. The film was beautifully and ominously shot by frequent Godard collaborator Raoul Coutard; the atmosphere is as much a character as the people, enveloping them in a premonitory fog. Screening as part of the After '75: Women Filmmakers in France series. (1989, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

MUBI Fest 2025

See Venues and showtimes below

Elaine May's ISHTAR (US)

Music Box Theatre – Saturday, 4:30pm
ISHTAR is a film that was initially more famous for the rumors around its making than the film itself, to its detriment, although it has since attained a cult status that reclaims some ground lost by the hubbub surrounding it back in the 1980s. Directed by Elaine May, a brilliant iconoclast who notoriously battled the studios and managed to write and/or direct more studio films than any other woman filmmaker of her era, the film remains a somewhat muddled but utterly glorious farce that showcases the comedic talents of Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, and Charles Grodin in fantastic settings and with delightful improvisation. May was one of the originators of improvisational theater as we know it today, and her practice of encouraging spontaneity and excess mostly meets it moment in ISHTAR, a film with a plot so over-the-top that one doesn't even need to follow it to enjoy the film, much like THE BIG SLEEP (1946) or WHAT'S UP, DOC? (1972). Suffice it to say that Hoffman and Beatty play two bumbling and talentless characters very much against their type; their laughable costumes and horrific songwriting are worth the watch as the two friends stumble through the Sahara Desert. Isabelle Adjani, who was dating Beatty at the time, plays a small and underused role as Shirra, a freedom fighter who spends much of the film disguised as a man; one senses that May didn't quite know what to do with Adjani and that Adjani wasn't quite as comfortable with improvisation as with perfectly scripted lines à la SUBWAY (1985). ISHTAR follows a string of successful but mostly uncredited screenplays May wrote or rewrote, including HEAVEN CAN WAIT (where Beatty became an ally), REDS, TOOTSIE, and LABYRINTH. May had also directed three films before ISHTAR, and tragically, ISHTAR became her last until she directed a documentary about her longtime collaborator, Mike Nichols, in 2016. Though it is enjoyable on its own merit without interpolating extratextual elements (see: Hoffman as Clark pretending to speak Berber as an auctioneer of smuggled military weapons in the middle of the desert or Beatty as Rogers sensitively navigating a blind camel through a marketplace), the film does become more fascinating and, I would argue, satisfying in light of Elaine's previous and much darker films. Despite their ineptitude, Rogers and Clark maintain a loving and lasting friendship, bonded by their shared passion for songwriting; they cannot even be split apart by their shared love for Shirra. This loving and lasting male friendship contrasts starkly against MIKEY AND NICKY (1976), a gritty and brooding drama about the impossibility of male friendship set against the backdrop of organized crime. To our detriment, May was subject to much more gendered criticism of her as a "difficult" director who shot too much footage than fellow filmmakers Cassavetes (co-star of MIKEY AND NICKY), Kubrick, or even Beatty, and abandoned further attempts to direct, although she did grace us with subsequently sharp screenplays in THE BIRDCAGE (1996) and PRIMARY COLORS (1998). Like those films, ISHTAR deftly skewers contemporary American politics and social mores, this time through the CIA's fear of "the Reds" taking over the Middle East. Rogers and Clark become an accidental catalyst for radical social change, no matter how aggressively shadow governments from all sides try to thwart them. Through its series of shenanigans, ISHTAR manages to be both a merciless political critique and endearing buddy comedy... and certainly not "the worst movie ever made." Followed by a conversation with Chloe Lizotte, Deputy Editor of MUBI Notebook, and Cine-File co-managing editor Kat Sachs. (1987, 107 min, 35mm) [Alex Ensign]
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Paul Thomas Anderson's INHERENT VICE (US)
Music Box Theatre – Saturday, 6pm
No bones about it: INHERENT VICE is one divisive movie. Going by the annotated ballots of anonymous Academy Awards voters published by The Hollywood Reporter, INHERENT VICE was the worst movie of the 2014, or maybe just the most arrogant: an object of grand-standing, head-scratching mediocrity, like some chuckling, elitist finger poking you in the cornea. Meanwhile, VICE's champions have largely described it as a laugh-a-minute ride, the best head picture since HEAD, prophesying an imminent critical rehabilitation along the casual light-up lines of THE BIG LEBOWSKI. Uh-huh. I admire the acid sunshine optimism of the VICE Squad, but the thing that makes this movie distinctive is its melancholy, earnest and earned. Set in the fictional enclave of Gordita Beach, INHERENT VICE excavates a historicized ennui that's disarmingly real, namely the morning-after realization that the '60s were only a mirage, or perhaps a conspiratorial diversion. Say it ain't so, Country Joe. As Joanna Newsom's Sortilège speculates in a voice-over midway through the film, "Was it possible that at every gathering, concert, peace rally, love-in, be-in, freak-in, here up north, back east, whereever, some dark crews had been busy all along reclaiming the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to everyday?" That hippie shit could be tolerated up to a point--until Straight America asserted its natural will to power. But VICE isn't quite a nostalgic wail for freakdom's last stand--it's a memory-film of a finer, more obtuse pedigree. Like Terence Davies' DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES, it's essentially a speculative conjecture about the shape of the world just prior to its author's birth. (Writer-director Anderson was born in 1970, the unrecoverable, present-tense moment of VICE.) How did we get here?, this movie fruitlessly, savagely asks, knowing full well that the answer might kill us. We move through a druggy stupor, characters coming and going, plotlines maddeningly opaque, nearly every shot a dawdling close-up. It's a total conjuring, a seance with spirits not yet dead. (2014, 148 min, 70mm) [K.A. Westphal]
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Brian De Palma's BLOW OUT (US)
Music Box Theatre – Saturday, 9:15pm
The tides of auteurist reputation seem to be turning away from BLOW OUT and toward CARLITO’S WAY as De Palma’s finest achievement. Not, as they say, that there’s anything wrong with that; CARLITO is an undersung triumph and is held in special esteem by the director himself. But BLOW OUT remains De Palma’s signature moment, the nexus of so many strains of his directorial temperament: the longstanding fascination with technology blooming into fullest mastery of the filmmaker’s toolkit, the use of lens and angle to force the viewer into a way of seeing; the political bent of his young career metastasizing into a vision of macro- versus micropolitics no less despairing for their couching in pop thriller verities. John Travolta’s Jack Terri, a sound man reduced to working on T&A bloodbath B’s who finds himself front and center in an assassination conspiracy, seems like Keith Gordon’s whiz kid from DRESSED TO KILL now grown up, ostensibly wised up, but marinating in cynicism. He’s too young to be this beaten up, but beaten he is, phoning it in at the job, taking weakish jabs at the political operative who wants him to disappear after fishing escort Nancy Allen out of a river-sunk Presidential candidate’s car. Travolta is marvelous, by turns giving and withdrawn, petty and playful—a wounded romantic if ever there was one. (Vilmos Zsigmond’s cinematography is rightly renowned for its inky blacks, split diopters, and bravura 360-degree moves, but the cherry on the sundae is his lighting of his star’s eyes, which reaches Golden Age heights of expressiveness.) Travolta here embodies an underreported trait of De Palma’s—his deeply felt political sense, a foursquare sense of right and wrong that runs through his career from HI, MOM! to BLOW OUT, the furious CASUALTIES OF WAR, and REDACTED. Travolta processes every deception as a personal affront, and proceeds as such, bringing his technical prowess and sheer cussedness to bear, to the point of finally using Allen as bait to expose the conspiracy. The movie was originally to be called PERSONAL EFFECTS, and it never strays far from that title’s resonance. Travolta and Allen’s give and take, their flirts and terrors, their romance that dies aborning, is among the sweetest and saddest things you’ll ever see. (Allen is every bit the screen presence as Travolta, or at least as nearly beloved of the camera. Her comic timing is impeccable, and her character’s upshot heartbreaking.) BLOW OUT is, along with THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, the finest of modern American romantic tragedies, released at point in time when the moviegoing public had no inclination to buy tickets for such bitter pills, no matter how expert and tantalizing their coating. But what remains is that De Palma-ness: the whiz-bang and the mourning, the fetish and the hard truth, the sex and the lie. With Dennis Franz, John McMartin, and a scarifying John Lithgow. (1981, 108 min, DCP Digital) [Jim Gabriel]
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Michael Schultz's COOLEY HIGH (US)
Music Box Theatre – Sunday, 11:45am
“I grew up in the Cabrini–Green housing project,” said the Chicago-born writer Eric Monte, “and I had one of the best times of my life, the most fun you can have while inhaling and exhaling.” Monte’s assertion is, of course, antithetical to the general conception of the storied public housing projects as being a terrifying place out of which it would seem joy is unlikely to emanate. COOLEY HIGH, which Monte wrote and Michael Schultz (CAR WASH, WHICH WAY IS UP?) directed, revels in the elation of youth, apolitical inasmuch as children and young adults themselves usually are but still evincing a message similar to Monte’s above, resisting any kind of bourgeois pity. It’s the final weeks of high school for Preach (Glynn Turman) and Cochise (Lawrence Hilton Jacobs) at Cooley High (the film was inspired by Monte’s childhood and his time at Cooley Vocational High School, near Cabrini–Green); the story takes place over the course of several days, during which Preach (a bad student but one who nevertheless reads poetry and history books for fun) falls in love and Cochise finds out he received a full basketball scholarship. All of this is seemingly incidental as the boys and their friends hang out at the local dive, go to a party, take a joy ride in a stolen car (where they partake in an impressive car chase through warehouses on Navy Pier), and see a movie (GODZILLA VS. MOTHRA, though it’s the fight in the theater that really grabs the audience’s—both in the film and out— attention), normal things young people do, the memories of which are often bright spots among the relative dimness of subsequent adulthood. Preach and Cochice eventually find themselves in trouble for the joy ride, though an encouraging teacher (played by Saturday Night Live cast member Garrett Morris) helps get them out of trouble with the cops. That, however, sets into motion the events that lead to the film’s heartbreaking conclusion. It’s been compared to George Lucas’ AMERICAN GRAFFITI, which was released the year prior, but, as Keith Corson notes in Trying to Get Over: African American Directors after Blaxploitation, 1977-1986, “While Lucas’s portrait of high school graduates in the San Fernando Valley relies heavily on on feelings of nostalgia, COOLEY HIGH remains grounded in the realities of urban transformation and decline.” Though not political in nature, the stakes in Schultz’s film are naturally higher than that of any predominantly white corollary, as is evidenced by the dramatic climax and sobering aftermath. The film has gone on to inspire many a Black filmmaker (e.g., Spike Lee, John Singleton) yet still stands on its own as an auspicious entry into the coming-of-age subgenre and a necessary corrective to pervasive assumptions. (1975, 107 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]
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Amalia Ulman’s MAGIC FARM (US/Argentina)
Music Box Theatre – Sunday, 2:15pm
Amalia Ulman’s sophomore feature follows a group of documentary filmmakers in search of a story that causes them to hopelessly spiral out of control before they land right back where they started, unsure what they’ve learned on their journey. Well, as Stephen Sondheim once said, “content dictates form,” and thus Ulman lets her cinematic wheels spin faster and faster to the point of whimsical disorientation, the motley crew’s initial impetus for heading to San Cristóbal, Argentina, getting washed away in favor of a sea of relationship drama and anxiety. Exploring these new Argentine environs, the camera slinks through shots, scenes morph into each other, and establishing moments often find a camera affixed with a fisheye lens attached to a dog or a skateboard or something to distort the scenes around us. The world becomes outsized and stylized and abrasive to the point where the sadness of the characters feels almost quaint by comparison, each of our protagonists dwelling in tangled relationships, unrequited loves, and deep insecurity about how life has ended up this way (in a jam-packed ensemble filled with indie favorites like Chloë Sevigny and Simon Rex, Alex Wolff, all puppy-dog eyes, is maybe the most enjoyable to follow throughout). Ultimately, the team’s efforts at documentary work shatter unceremoniously, resulting in them faking a “crazy new fad” in Argentina to cover just for the sake of clicks and likes. For Ulman, it seems, sometimes all you need to do is capture something flashy and fun and bizarre, artificial or otherwise. (2025, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
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Tarsem Singh’s THE FALL (US)
The Salt Shed (1357 N. Elston Ave.)  – Sunday, 4:30pm
Escape into fantasy is so often a result of harsh, unjust, and violent realities. In Tarsem Singh’s ambitious film THE FALL, the clash of fantasy and reality is explored throughout. This tension could also be connected to the film’s production and release. With shooting locations in multiple continents, THE FALL contains fantasy sequences, all of them breathtaking set pieces, in places and structures that do in fact exist, which blurs the lines between fiction and reality. These scenes are stunningly color saturated, shot with graphic precision, and beautiful expansive vistas; its visuals are consistently astounding. Its ambition, however, was considered a self-indulgence of director Tarsem Singh (THE CELL), and its fragmented and loose storytelling was criticized. In considering its themes, as well as the real-world response to the film, the narrative is quite smart in its self-awareness. In 1915, movie stuntman Roy Walker (a dreamy Lee Pace) has the job of creating fantasy on film, yet is severely injured on set. Bedridden and depressed in the hospital, he befriends a little girl with a broken arm, Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), with whom he begins to share an epic tale of heroes and villains. The story comes alive in her mind, the characters built from the real-life figures within the Los Angeles hospital. She also humorously interrupts Roy with the curiosity and distraction of a typical child, and Untaru’s performance is captured with heartbreaking earnestness. As the confined Roy realizes he can use Alexandria’s trust and innocence to his advantage, both characters' own harrowing stories become entwined with the fantasy. THE FALL is also noteworthy for the costume design by Japanese artist Eiko Ishioka, who worked with Singh on all of his films until her passing in 2012. Costumes from this film are truly masterpieces, shocking in their beauty, form, and storytelling. The costumes especially, but the film as a whole inspires such a desire to see more, and, like Alexandria, to reside in the fantasy. But, as she laments to Roy, “You always stop at the same part when it’s very beautiful… and interesting.” (2006, 119 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Megan Fariello]
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Also screening as part of MUBI Fest 2025 at the Salt Shed (1357 N. Elston Ave.) are a sneak peak of Alex Ross Perry’s 2024 film PAVEMENTS (128 min, Digital Projection) on Saturday, 1pm, followed by a conversation between the director and The MUBI Podcast’s Rico Gagliano and Perry. More info here.

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Michael Gordon’s PILLOW TALK (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Thursday, 7pm

Bright, exuberant, and a big enough hit to inspire two more Rock Hudson-Doris Day vehicles, PILLOW TALK will always be of historical interest because it was about as open as a Hollywood movie could be about sex in 1959. As such, it tells us a lot about the sexual mores of that time—people’s turn-ons and hang-ups, what general audiences did and didn’t consider permissible. The essay-filmmaker Mark Rappaport cites it as a key text in his ROCK HUDSON’S HOME MOVIES (1992), which advances the argument that the closeted gay movie star dropped hints about his sexual orientation in many of his Hollywood films. Consider a critical narrative digression in PILLOW TALK. Hudson’s character, a New York songwriter and serial seducer named Brad Allen, is pretending to be a Texas gentleman named Rex Stetson to get even with/seduce the schoolmarmish single professional who shares his party line, Jan Morrow (Day). After a few happy dates between Jan and the fictional Rex, Brad instills homophobic panic in his victim when talking to her over the phone as himself, suggesting that Rex hasn’t made a move on Jan yet because he’s gay. The next time Brad-as-Rex meets Jan, “Rex” drops the very hints that Brad told her to look out for (asking people for recipes, mentioning his close relationship with his mother). Hudson plays the farce so expertly that the developments seem all in good fun, even though (knowing what we know now about the actor’s history) he represents here a complex web of act upon act upon act. It speaks to the quality of Michael Gordon’s sharp direction that PILLOW TALK survives as more than a socio-historical document. Gordon (who directed the underrated Abraham Polonsky-scripted drama I CAN GET IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE [1951]) makes clever use of CinemaScope and split-screen effects, generates plenty of power between his stars, and maintains an agreeably brisk pace. Between the inventive visuals and hyperbolic color schemes, the film suggests the work of a more debonair Frank Tashlin. Where Tashlin generally limited his social inquiry to America’s sexual neuroses, Gordon and company also show interest in how people attain pleasure. Screening as part of the Something in Your Eye: Early Meet Cutes series. (1959, 102 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Charles Burnett's KILLER OF SHEEP (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Critic J. Hoberman proposed two types of film debuts that can perhaps unfairly overshadow a director’s entire career: First, debuts that are radically new and arrive seemingly fully-formed—think CITIZEN KANE and BREATHLESS—and second, works that have an innocence and rawness born of circumstances that can never be replicated, for which he cites Satyajit Ray’s PATHER PANCHALI, Jack Smith’s FLAMING CREATURES, and Charles Burnett’s 1978 masterpiece KILLER OF SHEEP. In Burnett’s case those lightning-in-a-bottle circumstances involved a shoestring budget and weekend-only shooting with mostly non-professional actors over the course of several years beginning in 1972, all in service of what was to be the young director’s MFA thesis at UCLA. Because Burnett initially had academic, not theatrical, aspirations for the work he never secured the rights to the 22 classic R&B, jazz, and soul songs on the soundtrack. For this reason, the film never saw a wide release until 2007. The film takes place in post-riot Watts, Los Angeles and involves the day-to-day lives of families in the neighborhood. The main protagonist is Stan, an amiable slaughterhouse worker who toils mightily to support his wife and two children while maintaining his integrity. The rhyming of Stan’s lot in life—a powerless man conveyed from scene to scene by an overwhelming sense of inevitability—with his own methodical killing and processing at the slaughterhouse transcends the political. The depiction of black family life solely for the purposes of overt polemic is the type of cliché Burnett fought throughout his career. Ultimately, the film is too warm to be scathing. Instead, much like Stan, KILLER OF SHEEP feels innocent and unassuming. It’s a sincere statement by a young director that earns its comparisons to the classics of Italian neorealism. And like those classics, Burnett’s sense of realism is universal: The characters’ victories and defeats are all small—a stroke of the knee and a smirk, a flat tire, a scraped elbow—but feel earth shattering in the moment. We sense out of narrative habit redemption is coming in the end, but when art imitates life and it doesn’t, we accept it like fate. Dinah Washington’s “The Bitter Earth,” which is played multiple times to increasingly devastating effect, perfectly encapsulates KILLER OF SHEEP. At once beautiful, fatalistic, despairing, in the end it leaves us only with hope: “I’m sure someone may answer my call, and this bitter earth may not be so bitter after all.” (1978, 81 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [James Stroble]

Doc10 Film Festival

The Davis Theatre – See below for showtimes

Rodney Ascher’s GHOST BOY (US/Documentary)
Thursday, 8:15pm
Martin Pistorius came home from school in 1986 with nothing more than a sore throat. He was twelve years old. Over the span of several harrowing months, Martin began to lose control over his body—his ability to walk, move, and finally to speak. Doctors, unable to offer a diagnosis, treated him for cryptococcal meningitis and tuberculosis of the brain. They didn’t expect him to survive. He fell into a coma that lasted three years. Exhausted by the constant care needed, his parents placed him in the Alfa and Omega Special Care Centre. When he awoke, he had no memory, no mobility, and no way to communicate. Trapped in his own body—conscious but invisible—Martin was presumed lost. At the hands of the Alfa and Omega staff, he endured years of neglect, physical harm, and sexual abuse by workers. He remained in this shadowed existence until the age of nineteen. Then came Virna. The new staff member spoke to him, performed aromatherapy massages, and—most crucially—believed in his presence. She insisted Martin be tested for signs of cognition. Her persistence led him to the Centre for Augmentative and Alternative Communication at the University of Pretoria. There, against all odds, Martin proved with the movement of his head that he could identify symbols. This launched his slow, arduous road to recovery. Director Rodney Ascher, best known for genre-bending documentaries, adapts Martin’s 2011 memoir Ghost Boy: The Miraculous Escape of a Misdiagnosed Boy Trapped Inside His Own Body with tenderness and restraint. Ascher lets Martin tell his own story through text-to-voice narration. The result is a haunting, lyrical portrait of survival. Though GHOST BOY may seem like a departure for Ascher—whose prior work delves into conspiracy theories, sleep paralysis, and simulation—it’s his most horrific yet. Here, the horror isn’t theoretical. It’s real, human, and systematic. Yet GHOST BOY resists despair. Martin reflects on his time lost in the void with startling grace, describing himself as “lost in the infinity of time,” and even quipping that he once resembled a potted plant—only needing water and sunlight. He has no recollection of the boy he was. What he knows of his childhood comes from photographs and secondhand stories. Ascher recreates Martin’s past using actors at various stages of his life, crafting a mosaic of the boy he might have been and providing Martin the gift of seeing his childhood as one would view home movies. Martin describes his awakening as, “a grey, out-of-focus image that over time becomes clearer.” His first coherent memories are fragmented—snippets of light—culminating in the surreal image of a large purple dinosaur endlessly singing the same grating tune. Barney & Friends, played ad infinitum by the neglectful staff, became both torture and a turning point. His hatred for the show pushed him to signal his awareness—if only to change the channel. Interwoven with dramatizations are present-day interviews with Martin, now a husband and father. Ascher employs Errol Morris’ Interrotron to strip the artifice from the frame. We see the studio setup, the camera gear, the bare reality of production—reminders that the story we’re watching is not fiction. Taking this a step further, Ascher employs real-time to ask Martin questions that must be tediously typed out to answer. These moments slow the film to a crawl but emotionally allow the audience to come to a deeper understanding of patience. We silently wait for Martin’s answers, which always prove to be astounding and lyrical. Ascher has created a work that cannot be viewed without empathy. If you don’t know Martain Pistorius from his TEDx talk, his memoir, or his NPR episode of “Invisibilia,” you will be astounded by the South African boy who transformed into a ghost before he could become a man. Followed by a Q&A with Ascher and producer Ryan Bartecki moderated by film critic Scott Tobias. (2025, 95 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]
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Elegance Bratton’s MOVE YA BODY: THE BIRTH OF HOUSE (US/Documentary)
Wednesday, 7pm
This is a heartfelt and informative introduction to house music, and it’s also a must-see if you’re looking for a dose of Chicago pride. As the title implies, MOVE YA BODY: THE BIRTH OF HOUSE focuses on the origins of the musical genre, which can be traced to our own South Side. The film argues that house as well as hip-hop grew out of the ashes of disco as new styles of dance music created by and for people of color. But before getting to the development of these forms, Elegance Bratton grants solemn consideration to the death of disco, noting that the reaction against the genre was essentially racist and homophobic. Chicago, sadly, also played a role in the “disco sucks” movement, as MOVE YA BODY relates in a passage about the notorious “Disco Demolition Night” at Comiskey Park in 1979. Given the antagonism toward disco and the people who enjoyed it, house emerges as a form of rebellion in its open embrace of Black and queer culture. (As some interviewees note, this distinction kept away white racists and Black gangbangers from early house parties.) From here, MOVE YA BODY looks at the rise of Chicago’s house scene in the 1980s, with sections devoted to influential DJs, popular clubs, and the music’s cultural impact. The film concludes on a somewhat sour note when it addresses how house music was appropriated by mainstream culture and how many of the pioneering artists never got a fair shake financially—phenomena common to too many underground movements. Regardless, this succeeds in inspiring admiration for house and conveying the excitement (and inclusivity) it’s generated over the years. Followed by a Q&A with producer Chester Algerian Gordon and subject Vince Lawrence. (2025, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Also screening as part of the Doc10 Film Festival are a Shorts Program at the Gene Siskel Film Center on Sunday at 5pm and Jon Shenk and Bonni Cohen’s 2024 documentary IN WAVES AND WAR (108 min, DCP Digital) at the Davis Theatre on Thursday, 5:45pm, followed by a Q&A with special guests. The free events screening as part of the 2025 Docs Across Chicago lineup are Stanley Nelson and Nicole London’s 2025 documentary WE WANT THE FUNK! (90 min, Digital Projection) at the Chicago Cultural Center’s Claudia Cassidy Theater on Friday, 6:30pm, followed by a g Q&A with Lloyd Brodnax King and Julio Davis; Alexandra Vasquez and Sam Osborn’s 2023 documentary GOING VARSITY IN MARIACHI (105 min, Digital Projection) at the National Museum of Mexican American Art on Saturday, 3pm, followed by a Q&A with the film subject Abby Garcia; Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson’s 2023 documentary GOING TO MARS: THE NIKKI GIOVANNI PROJECT (102 min, Digital Projection) at Sisters in Cinema (2310 E. 75th St.) on Monday, 6pm, followed by a Q&A with Erika Dilday (POV and AmDoc) and filmmaker Naeema Jamihil Torres moderated by Yvonne Welbon; and Cristina Ibarra and Alex Rivera’s 2019 documentary THE INFILTRATORS (95 min, Digital Projection) at the Gene Siskel Film Center on Tuesday, 6pm, followed by a Q&A with Rivera and Fred Tsao (Senior Policy Counsel, Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights). 

Louis Malle's ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS (France)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Sunday, 4pm

Considered one of the very first films of the French New Wave, Louis Malle’s directorial debut ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS follows two lovers, Florence (Jeanne Moreau) and Julien (Maurice Ronet), who plan to kill her wealthy husband Simon and take his money. Their meticulously plotted perfect murder goes awry when Julien becomes trapped in an elevator after being forced to reenter the building to retrieve evidence he stupidly left behind after shooting Simon and staging the crime to look like a suicide. When Julien fails to meet at their rendezvous, Florence gloomily wanders the Parisian streets at night searching for her beau at every place she can think of. Meanwhile, a subplot involving a young couple stealing Julien’s car while he’s trapped feels a spiritual precursor to the protagonists of Jean-Luc Godard’s BREATHLESS. Malle’s film is so successful thanks in part to the spectacular talents involved. Miles Davis’ wholly improvised jazz score adds a melancholic tone while also sprinkling in both franticness and serenity. Cinematographer Henri Decaë, who had recently worked on another French noir, Jean-Pierre Melville’s BOB LE FLAMBEUR, manipulates superb tracking shots with thoughtful, interesting lighting to enhance the film’s overall mood, including some remarkable sequences of Florence navigating the streets. Intended as an homage of sorts to Robert Bresson, with whom Malle had worked on A MAN ESCAPED, with a touch of thriller thrown in, ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS is a perfect storm of a film where all fronts involved combine to create something most impressive. (1958, 91 min, DCP Digital) [Kyle Cubr]

Michael Mann’s THE KEEP (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Wednesday, 6:45pm

THE KEEP is an oddity among the works of Michael Mann. As stylish as any of Mann’s sleek dramas of crime and business intrigue, THE KEEP marches in lockstep with the glut of fantasy films that filled movie theaters during the reality-challenged 1980s. Adapted by the director from the book by genre novelist F. Paul Wilson, the severely cut film has long been written off as a failure. Certainly cutting the running time in half has largely denatured the plot, sometimes to the point of incoherence, but there is still enough meat on the bones to make a viewing worthwhile. THE KEEP plunges us into a land that time forgot—a Romanian village full of superstitious peasants who are bewildered by the heavy artillery trucks of Nazis making their way to an ancient fortress they have been told to occupy while awaiting further orders. Wehrmacht Sonderführer Woermann (Jürgen Prochnow) observes that the keep is built backwards, with the heaviest fortifications inside the structure’s shell. The caretaker of the keep warns the troops not to spend the night there, but orders are orders. The ancient, protective crosses made of nickel that ring the inner walls tempt two soldiers, who believe they are actually made of silver and hiding a treasure trove. When they manage to breach an inner wall, an entity is unleashed that will doom the German unit and lead to its confrontation with an ancient foe. The story, essentially one of good versus evil, with a Jewish scholar (Ian McKellen) rescued from a transport to Auschwitz at its center, couldn’t be more ’80s. The scholar’s daughter (Alberta Watson) sports classic poodle hair, with clothes that seem a little too modern, and a sex scene between her and a mysterious demon slayer (Scott Glenn) employs so many camera angles that I got a bit dizzy. Of course, a maniacal SS officer (Gabriel Byrne) must enter the scene to disrupt the careful investigation Woermann has been conducting and kill some innocent Romanians he is sure are partisans. The abruptness of the actions and deeply shallow characterizations might destroy most films, but somehow Mann finds a way to make these abstractions work as uncanny archetypes. His choice to enhance the film with a score by Tangerine Dream, perhaps the ultimate in ’80s electronica, tended to date the film badly for me, as did the cut-rate special effects. For others, however, this choice might be the cherry on top of a film that tries to wrestle with its monsters, both human and otherworldly. Most poignant are scenes of the scholar pushing though the ruins of the keep in an attempt to help the demon who has promised to destroy the enemies of the Jews, only to see this longed-for promise broken through deceit. (1983, 96 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Noah Baumbach's FRANCES HA (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 9:30pm

The most financially and critically successful of the mumblecore films, FRANCES HA is also Noah Baumbach at his finest and firmly pushed the genre into the wider public eye. Heavily influenced by Woody Allen films (ANNIE HALL and MANHATTAN) as well as the French New Wave, Baumbach's magnum opus showcases the straightforward side to filmmaking and demonstrates how a strong director can make one hell of a film from a simple screenplay. The script is full of sharp, candid dialogue that feels honest and natural. This character study relies heavily on the emotional and disenfranchised power that conversation has in daily life. Greta Gerwig plays the titular Frances, a 27-year-old dancer whose life is crumbling around her with no end in sight. Like a drummer behind the punchline of a joke, Frances is often a beat late in her conversations, her finances, and most importantly, her livelihood. Gerwig's performance serves an apt metaphor for the millennial generation and the obstacles that they face. It's refreshing to see a film provide an authentic look at how a character's life isn't always going to work out in that special, feel-good way. Despite all this, FRANCES HA is inspiring for its views on the influence of personal growth and the highly personal definition of success that exists when people finally find their own little slice of heaven. Frances just wants to find happiness, and it's fascinating to watch her take that intimate journey towards it. (2013, 86 min, 35mm) [Kyle Cubr]

Gakuryu Ishii’s BURST CITY (Japan)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Thursday, 9:30pm

I would be lying if I said that BURST CITY was a film that I had an easy time following. Some words to describe what I witnessed: punks, pigs, and pompadours. Thankfully, the film's clash of rioting gangs, police and cyborgs hits a sweet spot that is infinitely cool and constantly intriguing. Where narrative coherence gets fumbled, a language of speed maintains control as Gakuryu’s camera falls into abstraction with fast paced, blurred movement and a frenetic montage that keeps the pacing electric. My best attempt at summary would be that multiple factions are fighting in a city which, as the title suggests, seems primed to burst. Holding all this together is a handful of rock ballad musical scenes. Some of them, like one near the beginning where we are first introduced to the dystopian city in full, are more intricate and fun than others that take place on a stage and feel like they exude a pent-up and angry energy. These performances by real Japanese punk musicians—The Stalin, Machizo Machida, and The Roosters and the Rockers—gives the film its necessary backbone and provide Gakuryu Ishii ample opportunity to flex his experimental muscles and keep the viewer entranced throughout the 115-minute run time. The first sequence alone will certainly stick in my head for a long while, and any filmmaker this proficient in their craft deserves further scrutiny and reevaluation. Screening as part of the Doc and Roll: Rockstars of the Silver Screen series. (1982, 115 minutes, DCP Digital) [Drew Van Weelden]

Paul Schrader's CAT PEOPLE (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Tuesday, 9:30pm

Amidst the suffocating humidity and Southern gothic allure of New Orleans, Cat People roam. Paul Schrader's CAT PEOPLE stars Nastassja Kinski as Irena, a young woman who reunites with her estranged brother, Paul (Malcolm McDowell), only to learn the terrifying truth of their shared DNA. Irena and Paul are descendants of feline shapeshifters—they turn into black panthers when overcome with sexual desire and are only able to return to human form when they have killed. A loose remake of Jacques Tourneur's CAT PEOPLE (1942), Schrader's film dials the kinkiness up ten notches. Immediately upon the siblings’ reunion, there is an incestuous tension between Irena and Paul, priming the viewer for the strange, titillating carnality on display. Skin and fur, sweat and blood; it's a sumptuous, lurid film, swollen with unsettling eroticism. McDowell gives an expectedly exaggerated performance—he's so wide-eyed, if he strained much more his eyes might pop right out of his head. He is grotesque opposite Kinski's almost comical naivete, perky and pouty as a young woman on the cusp of self-discovery. Both actors turn in effectively animalistic performances when the time comes, a strange channeling of feline agility and human cumbersomeness. Each transformation is accompanied by grisly, sensational practical special effects. With a synth score by Giorgio Moroder and a theme song by David Bowie, there's a funky gloom penetrating every interaction, every glance. The camera often glides, surveying as if on the prowl. Supernatural suspense claws at the surface of the picture and, in the end, when it is finally ripped open, the viewer is left with a dark sense of grief and despair. CAT PEOPLE functions as a deeply sad, metaphorical tale of sexual repression transforming one from human into animal. Screening as part of the Terror Tuesday series. (1982, 118 min, DCP Digital) [Olivia Hunter Willke]

Mike Leigh's HARD TRUTHS (UK)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Saturday, 7pm

Mike Leigh has long shown a liking for dyspeptic characters, exploiting both the thrill and pathos of individuals taking out their anger on the world. In his gallery of ornery malcontents, only David Thewlis’s Johnny in NAKED (1993) comes close to the voluble, angsty belligerence of Leigh’s newest creation, Pansy. As played by a blistering Marianne Jean-Baptiste, reuniting with Leigh for the first time since SECRETS & LIES (1996), Pansy is a walking stick of dynamite ready to explode at whomever is unlucky enough to be in her vicinity. This is mostly her husband Curtley (David Webber, superb) and adult son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), whose sullen, passive demeanors suggest they’ve become numb to her incessant tirades. At first, Pansy’s grumpiness is quite funny, and even relatable, as in a dinnertime rant in which she goes from decrying sidewalk charity workers to pockets on baby clothes (“What’s it gonna keep in its pocket? A knife?”). But as HARD TRUTHS goes on, Pansy’s sour mood and all-encompassing contempt grow more untenable and, finally, tragic. Arguably one of the most profound humanists in contemporary cinema, Leigh demonstrates a patience and empathy toward Pansy that is hugely disproportionate to the patience and empathy she extends to others; in the process, he allows us to see the wounded human being beneath the bitterness that is her armor, to understand how the hurt she’s endured is transferred into hurt she perpetuates. HARD TRUTHS hints at reasons for Pansy’s behavior (some expository dialogue with her much happier sister, Chantelle, indicates a traumatic relationship with her late mother), but the film declines to diagnose her, or give her a trite arc of redemption. She remains as severe as Dick Pope’s starkly lit digital images, among the least inviting in Leigh’s oeuvre, and as willfully hemmed-in as the little backyard of her row house that even she fears to venture into. There is no catharsis in HARD TRUTHS, just a prolonged impasse in which honest, mutually productive communication feels like one of the hardest things in the world. Screening as part of the New Releases and Restorations series. (97 min, 2024, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]

David Cronenberg's CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (Canada)

Alamo Drafthouse – Wednesday, 9:30pm

David Cronenberg is the most phenomenological of directors. I never feel more aware of being human, more embodied than while watching his films. This is certainly spurred on by his visual body horror, but it’s also found in his fascinating themes about what it means to exist—about consciousness being firmly grounded in the corporeal and whether technology amplifies or obstructs that experience. CRIMES OF THE FUTURE is this Cronenberg at his best, with themes from his previous films coalescing and evolving into something new. Particularly reminiscent of his last true body horror, eXistenZ (1999), where video game consoles are essentially external organs, CRIMES OF THE FUTURE imagines technology as textured and tangible, beautiful and grotesque; with a lot to admire in the film, the viscerally stunning design of the futuristic technologies stands out. It's set in a dystopian future where humans are mutating so they no longer feel pain, surgeries are performed on the streets and new government agencies like the National Organ Registry are founded. Kristen Stewart’s Timlin, an enthusiastic and awkward assistant at that agency, is the highlight in a film of striking and funny performances. But the protagonist here is Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen). He and his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) are well-known performance artists, sensually using Saul’s body— primarily the unique organs he can grow—as their canvas. They find themselves at the center of a secretive conflict about humanity’s future—will these strange new mutations be stopped or is there a leaning into the evolution? The plot draws heavily on neo-noir, as Saul covertly slinks through the city, trying to uncover secret factions at work. CRIMES OF THE FUTURE is overall claustrophobic; this dilapidated future is rich with dark corners, shadows, and crumbling structures. At one point a character speaks of the interior of the body as "outer space," suggesting the external world is empty compared to what’s going on inside. The science-fiction world of CRIMES OF THE FUTURE is completely realized, but expertly reveals only so much of its secrets, leaving one with the disappointment that it must end and an eagerness to revisit all of Cronenberg’s work. Screening as part of the Weird Wednesday series. (2022, 107 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

📽️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Alamo Drafthouse
The Cartoons of Max Flesicher, new restorations from the iconic cartoonist of Betty Boop and Popeye, screens Tuesday at 7pm. More info here.

⚫ Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
James Benning’s 2022 film THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (98 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday, 7pm, with Benning in person for a post-screening discussion and Q&A.

Lulu Men’s 2025 documentary VOICES OF DEOLI (84 min, Digital Projection) screens Thursday, 7pm, followed by a conversation with Men and executive producer Joy Ma. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Chicago Public Library
View all screenings taking place at Chicago Public Library branches here.

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Peter Watkins’ 2000 film LA COMMUNE (PARIS, 1871) (345 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday at noon.

Nathaniel Dorsky’s short films EMBER DAYS (2021, 10 min, 16mm); CALYX (2018, 13 min, 16mm); SPRING (2013, 23 min, 16mm); FEBRUARY (2014, 17 min, 16mm); and TEMPLE SLEEP (2020, 19 min, 16mm); and Jerome Hiler’s 2018 short film BAGATELLE I (2018, 13 min, 16mm) screen Sunday, 7pm, as part of the Encounters in the Cinema series.

Viktor Kubal’s 1980 animated film THE BLOODY LADY (72 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 7pm, as part of the State and Revolution: Film Under the Boot series. More info about all screenings here.

⚫ FACETS
CineYouth, Cinema/Chicago’s annual film festival celebrating filmmakers 22 and younger from around the world, takes place Friday through Sunday. More info here.

Devin Shears’ 2024 film CHERUB (74 min, Digital Projection) and Marco De Luca’s 2024 short film PARK LIFE (15 min, Digital Projection) screen Tuesday, 7pm, as part of the Open Space Arts / Queer Expression Film and Theater Fest. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St.) 
The Changeover System, a live projection performance with Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder, takes place Friday, 7pm, as part of the Falling Media conference. Free admission. More info here.

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Anthony Schatteman’s 2024 film YOUNG HEARTS (99 min, DCP Digital) begins screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes. 

Screening this week in the Chicago Palestine Film Festival are: Mahdi Fleifel’s 2024 film TO A LAND UNKNOWN (105 min, DCP Digital) on Friday, 8pm, followed by a Q&A with Fleifel; Mohammad Bakri’s 2024 documentary JANIN, JENIN (60 min, DCP Digital) on Saturday, 7pm, followed by a Q&A with Bakri (note that this screening is sold out) with an encore screening on Thursday at 8:30pm; and an encore screening of Pacific Newsreel’s 1972 film REVOLUTION UNTIL VICTORY AKA WE ARE THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE (45 min, Digital Projection). 

The National Theatre Live’s 2024 production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, directed by Max Webster, screens Saturday and Sunday at 2pm. 

Conversations at the Edge presents Mary Patten: AT THE RISK OF SEEMING RIDICULOUS,  a selection of readings and videos spanning from the mid-1990s to the present, (75 min, Digital Projection) on Thursday, 6pm, followed by a conversation with the artist. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Goethe-Institut Chicago (150. Michigan Ave.)
Sebastian Schipper’s 2015 film VICTORIA (138 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday, 6pm, as part of the Berlin Nights series. Free admission with advanced registration. More info here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
David Cronenberg’s 2024 film THE SHROUDS (119 min, DCP Digital) and François Ozon’s 2024 film WHEN FALL IS COMING (102 min, DCP Digital) begin screening this week. Cronenberg in person for post-screening Q&As after the Friday, 8pm and Saturday, 2:30pm screenings, though note that both screenings are sold out.

The Music Box of Horrors presents Frank Henenlotter’s 1982 film BASKET CASE (91 min, DCP Digital) on Friday at 11:30pm.

Jim Sharman’s 1975 cult classic THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (100 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday at midnight. Every screening has a shadowcast of the film (actors acting in front of the screen during the film) performed by Midnight Madness.

Tomm Jacobsen, Michael Rousselet and Jon Salmon’s 2015 film DUDE BRO PARTY MASSACRE III (91 min, DCP Digital) screens Monday, 9pm, with Rousselet in person for a post-screening Q&A. There will be a preshow before the film celebrating the Best of 5 Second Films.

The Music Box of Horrors presents Eli Craig’s 2025 film CLOWN IN A CORNFIELD (96 min, DCP Digital) on Thursday, 7pm, followed by a Q&A with Craig and author Adam Cesare. More information on all screenings and events here.

⚫ VDB TV (Virtual)
Selections from the Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive, in conjunction with the announcement of the Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive Collection, streams free on VDB TV. More info here.

CINE-LIST: April 25, 2025 - May 1, 2025

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Kyle Cubr, John Dickson, Alex Ensign, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jim Gabriel, Shaun Huhn, Ben Kaye, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Anne Orchier, James Stroble, Drew Van Weelden, K.A. Westphal, Olivia Hunter Willke, Candace Wirt