:: FRIDAY, DECEMBER 12 - THURSDAY, DECEMBER 18 ::

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Jack Conway’s THE UNHOLY THREE (US)

Chicago Film Society at the Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6pm

A ventriloquist, a strongman, and a performer of short stature flee the police after starting a riot at the circus where they work and form a burglary team they dub the Unholy Three fronted by a pet store known for its talking parrots that mysteriously stop talking when their owners get them home. Oh, and the ringleader has a pet gorilla. This ludicrous screenplay, adapted from his own novel by American horror and mystery writer Tod Robbins, formed the breakout 1925 hit THE UNHOLY THREE, directed by Tod Browning and starring Lon Chaney, “the man of a thousand faces.” When sound came to Hollywood, MGM hoped to help Chaney, one of its leading stars, through a safe transition by remaking this proven moneymaker. Chaney and Harry Earles, who gave such a memorable performance in the Robbins/Browning classic FREAKS (1932), reprised their roles of Echo and Tweedledee, with Ivan Linow, Lila Lee, and Elliott Nugent joining the cast as strongman Hercules, pickpocket/love interest Rosie, and clueless pet store clerk Hector. Chaney and Earles are terrific in their disguises, “Grandma” O’Grady and “her” infant grandson, the latter of whom revels in his amoral savagery when out of costume. Much of the drama centers on a burglary by the Unholy Three that results in murder. When hapless Hector is left to take the fall, Conway gins up the suspense by leaving us to wonder if Rosie can persuade Echo to do the right thing before it’s too late. The dénouement was a bit disappointing for me, but was undoubtedly a crowd pleaser at the time. Preceded by the 1949 short film LET’S ALL GO TO THE CIRCUS (8 min, 16mm). (1930, 72 min, 35mm) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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[Ed. note]: This piece discusses a historical film and originally used terminology that is now outdated and rightfully considered offensive. We have updated the language to reflect current, respectful usage and apologize for the original version. 

Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS: TERMS & CONDITIONS (US)

Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 2:30pm

“I know what you’re thinking… But this is not a documentary.” With this bit of cheeky onscreen text—hilariously presented with accompanying memes of a smiling Denzel Washington and a relieved Vivica A. Fox—Kahlil Joseph interrupts himself practically mid-sentence to extend an olive branch to his audience, letting us know that we are not, in fact, about to be subjected to two hours of droll, academic analysis. There are still hints of that sprinkled throughout Joseph’s expansive and purposely uncategorizable BLKNWS: TERMS & CONDITIONS, a film that dares to live and luxuriate in what acclaimed art curator Okwui Enwezor called "the space between the spectator and the work of art." Joseph’s imagery and artistry has been viewed by millions around the world, even if they don’t know his name, as he's collaborated on music videos and visual albums with the likes of Beyoncé, Travis Scott, and Kendrick Lamar, cementing his bona fides as an artist in direct conversation with some of the most influential Black performers of the day. Here, Joseph’s interests have led him to a grander project, using the Africana Encyclopedia—a massive text birthed from the ambitions of W.E.B. DuBois—as a jumping off point to interrogate Black history in four dimensions. Past, present, future, and even alternate realities are extrapolated and interrogated, “BLKNWS” itself popping up as a fictional in-universe news source and Tumblr page, an artistic corrective to re-center and reclaim Black and African culture in the larger diaspora. Joseph intentionally blurs and remixes the lines between reality and fiction, even evoking a charming quotation from Agnes Varda, “What is bad for cinema is the categories; this is real fiction, fake fiction, real documentary, fake documentary. This is a film.” Varda’s not alone as inspiration here, as Joseph’s work, with its intense montage spanning millennia and onscreen text both supporting and contrasting the images presented—recalls Chris Marker’s SANS SOLEIL (1983) and especially the late-career essay films of Jean-Luc Godard, all filtered through an unabashed contemporary Black lens, ancient artifacts and sculptures and cinema positioned alongside memes and TikToks and reality television. The barrage of montage is interspersed with fictional reenactments of the lives of DuBois and Marcus Garvey, alongside beautifully textured explorations of the Nautica, an epic, futuristic ocean vessel looking to retrace the Transatlantic Slave Route but in reverse (a homecoming-turned-luxury liner). Here, a young journalist explores the onboard TransAtlantic Biennale, a place for Black art to be reimagined and recontextualized, perhaps a direct reference to Joseph’s own presence in the art gallery space, where BLKNWS was seen in its early forms. There is certainly something of a museum quality to Joseph’s work; the film warrants intense dissection and analysis, but it could also be easily consumed in short bites by wandering travelers, something to be both memed and studied. This bold attempt at reconfiguring cinematic language and form positions Joseph as a talent to reckon with and watch; his eye for our current moment and what may come next makes him as exciting as any filmmaker out there. (2025, 113 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Stanley Kubrick's EYES WIDE SHUT (UK/US)

Music Box Theatre – Wednesday, 4pm and 7:30pm

It took more than a decade for audiences to begin to appreciate Kubrick's final film, which is set in a facsimile of contemporary New York but heeding closely to the psychology and sexual mores of the 1924 Arthur Schnitzler novella on which it is based. This discrepancy sparked incurious outrage in 1999—particularly among writers in the New York Times, who actually seemed offended by the lack of realism—but it's come to resonate as one of the deepest mysteries of the director's monumental career. For Martin Scorsese, who placed the film in his top five for the entire decade, it's about New York as it appears in a dream. "And as with all dreams," he wrote, "you never know precisely when you've entered it. Everything seems real and lifelike, but different, a little exaggerated, a little off. Things appear to happen as if they were preordained, sometimes in a strange rhythm from which it's impossible to escape. Audiences really had no preparation for a dream movie that didn't announce itself as such, without the usual signals—hovering mists, people appearing and disappearing at will or floating off the ground. Like Rossellini's VOYAGE IN ITALY, another film severely misunderstood in its time, EYES WIDE SHUT takes a couple on a harrowing journey, at the end of which they're left clinging to each other. Both are films of terrifying self-exposure. They both ask the question: How much trust and faith can you really place in another human being? And they both end tentatively, yet hopefully. Honestly." Kubrick arrived at this combination of mystery and exposure through singular working methods unlikely to be repeated in a major film. Reportedly the longest shoot in movie history, Kubrick spent weeks on individual scenes, running actors through conversations until they were no longer conscious of performing. He had pursued this sort of marathon process before—most notably on THE SHINING and FULL METAL JACKET—but never on material so explicitly psychological. As a result, even superstars like Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman (giving their finest performances as a wealthy married couple) seem unfamiliar and strangely vulnerable. But EYES WIDE SHUT is only truly unsettling on contemplation: on the surface, it's one of Kubrick's funniest (with some of the most eccentric supporting performances in anything he made after THE KILLING) and most luminous, capturing the allure of Manhattan in winter with remarkably simple lighting arrangements. Screening as part of the Alternative Christmas Features series. (1999, 159 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Animation Mixtape

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

Independent animation hero Don Hertzfeldt has crafted a compilation of animated shorts that—in our current moment of generative AI slop—offers a glimpse into the beauty, chaos, and humanity that come from truthful human ingenuity and craft. This Animation Mixtape program (bookended by new Hertzfeldt bumpers that unabashedly lambast the depravity of the gen-AI craze) features shorts showcasing the limitless nature of the form, including stop-motion work, hand-drawn work, computer-animated work, and everything in between, with the shorts (some from as early as 1985, others premiering this year) spanning as long as twenty minutes and as short as sixty seconds. Some of the shortest films featured here are often some of the most profound, exploring dense visual ideas in limited amounts of time; the shortest film of the bunch, I AM ALONE AND MY HEAD IS ON FIRE (2013, 1 min) really needs no explanation, but the “how” of the short—the almost Early Internet style of its quirky 2D animation—is an endless delight, a great companion to pieces like the buoyant and luminescent ZOON (2022, 4 min); the trippy, experimental LARRY (2023, 3 min), where a computer-generated dog folds and melts with hypnotic fervor; and the mind-melding, newly discovered SELECTED LINE ANIMATION (2025, 2 min) of the late, great Bruce Bickford. Alongside these more experimental shorts are films exploring animation’s narrative possibilities, from PINEAPPLE CALAMARI (2014, 9 min), where a woman tries to replace her deceased friend with a race horse in drag, to MARTYR’S GUIDEBOOK (2024, 9 min), where a young man becomes tethered to acts of kindness thanks to a Riverdale-obsessed guardian angel, to the colorful multi-textured WEDNESDAY WITH GODDARD (2016, 5 min), where the quest to find God results in potentially calamitous results. Some films here attempt to meld narrative with experimentation, like the true story-turned-Malickian visual poem THE FLYING SAILOR (2022, 8 min) or the pastoral disaster tale of THE HILL FARM (1988, 18 min), though none are as successful as JESUS 2 (2025, 8 min), a Lisa Frank painting filtered through the lens of adult animation, its tale of attempted deicide both uproariously funny and terribly tragic. If there’s any kind of unifying theme holding this bevy of films together, it’s the potential for animation’s inherent irreality to tap into something truthful within all of us. It’s only right, then, that the program ends with THE BIG SNIT (1985, 10 min), a story about connecting with each other amidst apocalyptic surroundings, a story cartoonishly rendered in two dimensions that feels as true to life as anything these days. [Ben Kaye]

Jess Franco’s SHINING SEX (Italy/France/Belgium/Switzerland)

The Davis Theater – Sunday, 7pm

The title of Jess Franco’s SHINING SEX, while provocative on its own, refers diegetically to the erotic dance performance staged by protagonist Cynthia (Franco’s partner and frequent collaborator Lina Romay). When a strange, quiet, yet seemingly wealthy couple (Evelyne Scott and a sunglasses-clad Raymond Hardy) approach her after her performance for a threesome back at their place, the bubbly Cynthia is eager to oblige. Her choice has dire consequences, however, as the two are otherworldly beings, who, through their seduction, turn Cynthia into a mindless minion with a new deadly ability. She’s forced to kill the couple’s enemies, also in turn through sexual encounters. The film’s themes of voyeurism and control are made clear in its first few moments, as we watch Cynthia happily put on makeup and get ready for her performance. This sense of her autonomy is denied, as Franco’s frenzied, titillating, extreme closeups of Cynthia’s body implicate the audience in her predicament as much as the couple—the reflective sunglasses-wearing male alien also acts to literally mirror the viewer. Cynthia does struggle internally with her irrepressible actions, and ultimately, she reclaims her sexual power even as the couple attempts to use it against her. SHINING SEX, with all its familiar Franco eroticism, presents fully complex themes, perhaps in part due to the genre melding of science fiction and fantasy. This is something not lost on British filmmaker Jonathan Glazer, whose modern cult classic UNDER THE SKIN (2013) is clearly inspired by Franco’s film. While adapted from a 2002 novel by Michael Faber, the film nevertheless shares a similar plot and themes; most markedly, star Scarlett Johansson’s distinctive hair and makeup in the film is undoubtedly a reference to Romay’s in SHINING SEX. (1976, 106 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Jafar Panahi’s IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT (Iran/France/Luxembourg)

FACETS – Saturday, 7pm

There’s a scene in this film, where the group of Iranians who have kidnapped their supposed torturer in hopes to identify him beyond a shadow of a doubt so that they may enact their own justice and ruin his life as he had theirs, are pushing the van that contains the man’s prostrate body—tranquilized but not yet dead, and in a wooden box that foreshadows his intended fate—after it has run out of gas. It’s a humorous scene, ironic but also openly laughable because one of the “kidnappers” is a bride wearing her wedding gown. But as the group pushes the van, one or two others, strangers, rush to help them. As much as it’s a film about a torturer, it’s also a film about helpers; there’s no clear connection between Panahi and Mister Rogers, but this thought brought to mind his famous statement that, “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’” The overall narrative of helping pertains to the central drama. A family pulls over after their car breaks down; at the place where they stop and are helped by a random person also works Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) who, upon hearing the squeak of what sounds like a prosthetic leg, suspects that the father might be Iqbal, or Peg Leg, the man who tortured him and countless others while detained as political prisoners several years prior. He meets some of those others when referred to another victim by his friend, also a victim but who doesn’t want to be involved; ultimately a ragtag group is assembled, which includes a photographer, her troubled ex-boyfriend, and a bride and her groom (they'd been taking pre-wedding photos with the photographer), all one-time political prisoners who are first eager to confirm the torturer is in fact who they think he is and then to decide what to do with him. Ambiguity is inherent to Iranian cinema, as much of it embodies a sense of irresoluteness. But while I wouldn’t go so far as to say this is a bait and switch, it at first seems more enigmatic than it ends up being. Eventually it becomes about retribution and whether it will ease their trauma; it’s a consideration on the prolongation of violence, not really about if the torturer is who they think he is, and if that violence will ever end if they exact revenge. This is obviously personal for Panahi, who has been imprisoned twice for dissent, most recently in 2022; he had been previously unable to leave the country and made this film, as well as many others, without permission from the Iranian government. The film’s meditation on the futility of revenge finds a real-world parallel: just as the characters confront the limits of retribution, Panahi receives support from a global network of artists and audiences, proving that solidarity, not violence, is what carries lasting power. (2025, 103 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Roger Spotiswoode’s TERROR TRAIN (Canada)

Music Box Theatre – Friday, 11:45pm

TERROR TRAIN is less a slasher cash-in than a sleeper art-house heist. Shot in a snow-blown Montréal rail yard with Canada’s tax credits and frequent Stanley Kubrick DP John Alcott, Roger Spottiswoode’s debut smuggles Kubrickian rigor into what the screenwriter sold as “HALLOWEEN on a train.” Alcott and Spottiswoode gutted the cars, rewired the train’s lighting with dimmers, used lenses from BARRY LYNDON (1975) to capture low-light, and laid custom-sized dolly tracks. Charcoal smoke, Steadicam, and multi-camera setups turn a carnival of masks and magicians into a gliding technical marvel. Spottiswoode, between editing Sam Peckinpah’s STRAW DOGS (1971) and eventually directing TOMORROW NEVER DIES (1997), inspired creative collaboration with his first film. He enlisted Peckinpah stalwart Ben Johnson as Carne the conductor; Johnson asked for his dialogue to be cut down, as he learned from John Ford that "words get in the way." The rookie director listened. That respect to the cast and crew shows in the film’s handling of slasher architecture with its past-transgression prologue, holiday setting, masked killer, revenge logic, and a whodunit narrative all squeezed into one New Year’s Eve train ride. A group of pre-med students execute a Hell Week prank involving forced necrophilia that leaves pledge Kenny Hampson institutionalized. Due to their wealth and elite status, none of them are expelled. Before their final semester begins, they decide to have a costumed New Years gala aboard a rented train. The train becomes a literal bourgeois capsule racing through the dark, and Kenny is back... to eat the rich. With each kill, Kenny wears his victim’s costume, from Groucho Marx to a lizard man. His final disguise—a sequined gown—unsettles the final victims because it collapses the hierarchy they trust. If identity can be slipped on and off like a costume, so can the confidence, normalcy, and social power they treat as birthrights. The camera lingers on Kenny with an empathic gaze it never grants the sanctioned hetero couples, hinting that the true horror is not gender confusion but the revelation that everybody performs their way through life with a mask. The killer in drag is problematic as, again in horror, queer-coded characters are portrayed as villains. Making it worse to occur on the eve of the DSM-III codifying “transsexualism.” At the film’s center, Jamie Lee Curtis plays Alana with grounded guilt that deepens the psychological undertow. Opposite her, David Copperfield performs his illusions live, no edits or alternate camera angles, turning the whole film into a magic trick. The killer survives by stepping into the literal clothes of his victims. When the last mask peels away, vengeance is less frightening than the recklessness of wealth which is embodied by the corpse-loving prankster Doc (Hart Bochner). Derek MacKinnon, who plays Kenny, was a drag artist who landed the role while escorting a date to the audition—a plot point of the recent JAY KELLY (2025). He filmed every “female” scene before picking up the knife, to ensure character continuity. MacKinnon has famously said, “I was the only killer who ever played eleven parts.” His unmasking shivers with slow-motion tension, in an image so indelible that future Canadian killer Luka Magnotta, once MacKinnon’s neighbor, is thought to have studied it. The single-location, class-war structure even prefigures SNOWPIERCER's cannibalization of class. Box office never reached the heights of other 1980 slashers like FRIDAY THE 13TH or PROM NIGHT, but TERROR TRAIN preferred its Hitchcockian tightening to episodic gore. Spottiswoode and Alcott's technical artistry transforms the train into a speeding, luminous vehicle of reckoning, proving the most horrifying mask worn was the privileged face of the students who drove Kenny Hampson to madness. This is a profound, suffocating achievement. The final girl's survival is not a release, but a condemnation, forcing her to carry the entire train of memory and guilt. (1980, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]
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Screening presented by SUPER-HORROR-RAMA! as part of a weekend of train-themed horror programming; Eugenio Martín's 1972 film HORROR EXPRESS (88 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday at 11:45pm.

George Roy Hill’s THE STING (US)

Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 12pm

The ‘con’ part of con artist stands for confidence, that the confident person might be so sure of themselves they pass off their con confidently. It’s a bit like acting, really, with we the viewers, their marks, convinced (another ‘con’) of them becoming someone else in the context of a story. It’d be easy to intellectualize George Roy Hill’s THE STING as an allegory about acting, but that would be a con in and of itself—to over intellectualize THE STING would be to atrophy its effectiveness as sheer entertainment. The film marks a reunion of Robert Redford and Paul Newman after their collaboration with Hill on BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID, the inferior film, in my opinion; though Redford and Newman are great together in it, like Clooney and Pitt in the OCEAN’S movies, they benefit greatly from a supporting cast of character actors whose idiosyncrasies add interest to the proceedings. In THE STING the two play partners, again, this time as a big-time con (Newman) and an up-and-comer (Redford) who team up to take down an Irish crime boss (Robert Shaw, who alone is worth watching for) who’s had a mutual friend of the duo murdered. The film’s real gusto is the planning of the con, necessitating all sorts of costumes and sets; it’s like the act of filmmaking itself, a collaborative effort going toward one cohesive outcome, their planning the essence of mise en scène. Shaw’s crime boss may be getting conned, as perhaps maybe are us viewers, but at least it all seems to be in good fun. The film’s set largely in Chicago, and though it was largely shot on the Universal Studios backlot, there are some location shots at Union Station and the former LaSalle Street Station. (1973, 129 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Kat Sachs]

Jia Zhang-ke's CAUGHT BY THE TIDES (China)

Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 8:30pm

Jia Zhang-ke reflects on the last two and a half decades of Chinese history through the filter of his own work—the title seems to be referring to the tides of time itself. CAUGHT BY THE TIDES was assembled from mostly unseen footage that Jia shot for three of his earlier films: UNKNOWN PLEASURES (2002), STILL LIFE (2006), and ASH IS PUREST WHITE (2018). Using this material, Jia constructs a story about a woman (Zhao Tao, naturally) who spends much of the 21st century in search of her missing lover. Her journey takes her across the country and permits her to bear witness to various changes that modern China has experienced. The film hinges on her visit to the region that would become the Three Gorges Dam in the mid-2000s. As Jia showed in STILL LIFE, the area was completely demolished and the denizens were forcibly relocated to make way for the project; the filmmaker clearly sees the event as a telling moment in China’s history insofar as it marked the triumph of “progress” over concern for the citizenry. In this regard, Zhao’s quest represents an attempt to locate humanity amidst state concerns that threaten to overwhelm it entirely; she also suggests a tenacity that Jia seems to be saying is necessary to survive in this ever-shifting landscape. In one of the film’s most memorable shots, Zhao contends with a man determined to keep her on a parked bus, pushing her down every time she attempts to leave. The pattern repeats several times until the man finally lets her go, signaling a reprieve in Zhao’s torment and a rare occasion where the proverbial tide breaks for a determined swimmer. Screening as part of the Be Kind, Rewind! series. (2024, 111 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Apichatpong Weerasethakul's UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES (Thailand)

Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 12pm

A hushed and floating aureole of a film, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's UNCLE BOONMEE captivates and holds us firm in some timeless stupor. The northern Thai jungle throbs patiently—with past lives and past events, monkey ghosts and ethereality—while Boonmee comes full circle, or doesn't. The film centers on an elderly Thai farmer, Uncle Boonmee, who is dying of kidney disease. Fading in his farm home, his son and wife appear as spirits (in easily one of the most affecting family dinner scenes on film) to ease Boonmee into non-being. As in SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY and TROPICAL MALADY, Weerasethakul's Buddhism informs the fluidity of time and body, though here he forgoes the formal duality of those films for something like a drifting continuum. Boonmee laments his karma, having killed in the past either too many communists or bugs on his tamarind farm, and later dreams of a stunted future where images of one's past are projected until they arrive. Are we some Baudrillard-like copy of a copy, reborn and born again—or perhaps a continual permutation of events and memories? As in his past work, Weerasethakul lets us linger just long enough in dense but controlled compositions. The distance of his subjects in the frame methodically draws us deeper into his hypnotic world where the sound of our breathing heightens anticipation. It amplifies the pulse and hum of the darkened, textured jungle on screen. But the frame here is also Weerasethakul's most purposeful one, leading us gently into fabled recollection, and cunningly deep inside a haunting cave-womb. History and spirit have a composite curiosity that envelops both Boonmee and the viewer. It offers as much as one is willing to ask. Screening as part of the Interiority on Screen lecture series. (2010, 114 min, DCP Digital) [Brian Welesko]

Alan J. Pakula's ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN (US)

Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 5:30pm

Although it may be coming to an end with the threatened collapse of the newspaper industry, the newspaper movie has had a long run in motion pictures, chronicling both the cynicism that characterized the early years of yellow journalism in CHICAGO (1927) as well as Fourth Estate crusading, both helpful (DEADLINE, U.S.A., 1952) and harmful (TRY AND GET ME!, aka THE SOUND OF FURY, 1950). The inherent drama of headline news provides filmmakers with a constant supply of riveting material that offers audiences more bang for their buck for being at least partially true. Arguably the most acclaimed and influential newspaper movie is Alan J. Pakula’s ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN, based on the best-selling book by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, then reporters for the Washington Post, whose investigative reporting on the 1972 burglary of Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C., revealed a vast dirty-tricks conspiracy that eventually ended the presidency of Richard M. Nixon. Pakula and screenwriter William Goldman avoid histrionics, but amp up the tension of the film, borrowing from Antonioni’s urban alienation and George Romero’s paranoia to paint a portrait of ultimate power as both dangerous and deeply stupid. There are numerous shots of Woodward (Robert Redford) and Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) driving past the White House, the endpoint of their inquiry, though they didn’t know it from the start. Cinematographer Gordon Willis favors high overhead shots to emphasize the informational maze through which the heroes must travel. One famous shot shows the pair in the mandala that is the Library of Congress, rifling through stacks of library slips. Willis also likes long shots of the wide-open city room, as though to emphasize the egalitarian and transparent nature of news reporting. Pakula uses a sort of Shakespearean construction of deep drama alternating with comic moments to keep the audience on a roller coaster of tension and release, an effective strategy for a story whose momentous outcome was known years before. Foremost is the character of Deep Throat (Hal Holbrook), now known to be W. Mark Felt, associate director of the FBI at the time of the break-in. The archetype of the oracle is an ancient one, and Willis’ shadowy underlair—a parking garage where he met with Woodward—suggests a plot born from Hell, pulling the film out of the everyday and marking it with mythic dimensions. Of particular note is the movie’s Oscar-winning sound design, which emphasizes a strong, muscular, determined group of professionals plying their trade with machines whose metal keys punch ink onto paper. It’s a distinctive and percussive sound, and emphasizes why I find so annoying the anemic, plastic clicking of the computer keyboards that have taken over from the typewriters and teletype machines in life—and especially in the movies. Coins ring into pay phones, telephone dials spin and click, stereo knobs click on and off—there are a whole range of sounds that are nearly lost to us today that make a more direct connection between the characters and their actions. Hoffman and Redford are iconic in these roles. Scrappy, energetic Hoffman channels just a bit of his Ratso Rizzo sleaze from MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969), marrying it to ambition and the good sense to let Woodward take the high ground when needed. Redford has us on his side all the way, his blond good looks and low-pressure style encouraging people to volunteer information they initially refuse to divulge. A vast supporting cast keeps the film moving in a dizzying, but never incoherent way. Screening as part of Golden Boy: A Robert Redford Retrospective. (1976, 138 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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This film has also been written about by Cine-File Contribute Kian Bergstrom. Read it here.

Spike Lee’s HIGHEST 2 LOWEST (US/Japan)

Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

HIGHEST 2 LOWEST marks Spike Lee and Denzel Washington’s fifth collaboration together, beginning with MO’ BETTER BLUES (1990). Washington plays David King, legendary record producer and owner of Stackin’ Hits records; he's sold a portion of his company and looks to retake control by putting everything on the line. His plan is upended when kidnappers apprehend his son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) and his friend Kyle, the son of his friend and chauffeur Paul Christopher (Jeffrey Wright). When the kidnapper releases Trey by mistake, David is faced with the choice to buy back power or risk it all for Kyle’s ransom. The film follows the outline of Kurosawa’s HIGH AND LOW (1963), but the insecurities of the collaborators saturate the story. For a majority of the runtime, this feels less like a crime thriller and more like a Bergmanesque meditation. Living in his ivory tower of pop culture relics, King lives fully aware his prime has passed. While his home decor fills the frame with images of James Brown, George Foreman, Muhammad Ali, and Michael Jackson, he feels restless. Washington, a surrogate for Lee, tries to keep up in an unrecognizable world after experiencing the greatest success in his field. Some have argued the film is a metaphor for Lee’s pivot towards conservative politics, glorifying ownership of production; but the character’s motivation lies in pursuit of mojo rather than salivating over exploitation. HIGHEST 2 LOWEST feels like two separate genre films colliding head on at 90 miles an hour. The first half presents a day in the life with sprinkled uneasiness by way of New Wave-ish editing style. As father and son enter the gym, the camera trucks along on Steadicam. As family talks to the coach, Lee cuts between parallel shots slightly punched in for coverage, a big no-no according to most accredited film schools yet a choice made by the artistic director of NYU Tisch’s film program. During one of Washington’s greatest monologues, Lee’s editing interrupts the actor to communicate the character’s frustration past the abilities of skilled oration. Lee’s intervals keep us on our toes, shocking us awake in case we were sleeping. An actor’s brilliance comes from his spontaneity; a good actor prepares, but a great actor prepares not knowing what will come out. Every frame of Denzel Washington exudes truth and vulnerability. In interviews, Lee appears quietly apprehensive sitting next to Washington, quietly observing a force of nature. The film pairs his chops with other heavy hitters such as Wendell Pierce and delightfully surprising A$AP Rocky. The final confrontation between rhyming foes deserves a seat next to the coffeeshop scene from HEAT (1995). For a film about an artist ruminating on the past, we witness the best images of the auteur’s career. HIGHEST 2 LOWEST is not OLDBOY (2013). Instead of remaking, this Spike Lee Joint riffs in its own direction, using the classic as a launchpad into the final phase of his career. Screening as part of the Be Kind, Rewind! series.(2025, 133 min, DCP Digital) [Ray Ebarb]

​​Joe Dante's GREMLINS (US)

Music Box Theatre – Tuesday, 9:30pm
The Davis Theater – Thursday, 9pm

Filmed on backlots in homage to IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE and styled after Norman Rockwell illustrations, GREMLINS creates a memorable nightmare of the wholesale destruction of its settings by the titular monsters. The movie can be genuinely scary, but it’s also a laugh riot, thanks in part to the adolescent glee that Dante and company take from laying waste to such cherished American institutions as Christmastime, Walt Disney, and suburban architecture. A product of ’60s counterculture and ’70s exploitation cinema, Dante has always maintained his outsider bona fides no matter how mainstream his productions have gotten, and one of the wonderful things about GREMLINS is how it feels like a bunch of weirdos successfully crashing the ultra-square party that was Reagan-era Hollywood. The movie’s subversive humor reaches its strongest expression in Phoebe Cates’ sickly funny Santa Claus monologue (which would have been cut from the finished film had not executive producer Steven Spielberg intervened with Warner Bros. studio bosses), but the sentiment can be found even in the premise—that inside every cuddly Spielbergian creation is a destructive monster dying to come out. Both Dave Kehr and Jonathan Rosenbaum have likened Dante to Frank Tashlin, the Warner Bros. cartoonist who carried over the rubbery reality of Looney Tunes into his work as a director of live-action satires. And like Tashlin, Dante makes fun of his subjects with an air of gee-whiz affection. But Dante’s electrifying shifts between comedy and horror show the influence of other directors, namely James Whale, who was mixing the two genres in the early 1930s, as well as the pop-obsessed auteurs of the French New Wave. Indeed, GREMLINS is so rich in knowledge of film history that it requires several viewings to catch all the references Dante hides around the frames, which are as visually packed in their way as Vincente Minnelli’s. Presented at the Music Box by Rated Q and Ramona Slick! - A Celebration of Queer, Camp, & Cult Cinema with preshow drinks and DJ in Music Box Lounge at 8:45pm and a dragshow performance in the Main Theater at 9:30pm, with the screening to follow. (1984, 106 min, 35mm [at Music Box] and DCP Digital [at The Davis]) [Ben Sachs]

Todd Haynes' CAROL (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Friday, 6:30pm
The Davis Theater – Tuesday, 7pm

Todd Haynes’ film was nominated for six Oscars and was jobbed out of every last one, including a few that it wasn’t up for. It might seem in questionable taste to bring up awards when talking about a film as rigorous and lavishly emotional as CAROL, but it’s one of those pictures that makes you notice all its artisans’ work, from propmasters to painters, from the masterly concision of the writing to the costumers’ precision, on down the line, every last bit of it, the care taken to recreate this womb-world where people played 78s and drove drunk with their kids in the back seat. You appreciate it so—love it so—that your back tends to get up when you run into someone who doesn’t feel similarly. The leads are pitched just right; Rooney Mara’s lightly tremulous Therese, with her increasing inability to abide men’s demands on her, so much so that she’s nearly jumping out of her skin at their insinuations, is “flung out of space” into the path of Cate Blanchett’s Carol, whose martini-lunch bearing is being shredded by a divorce and a legal fight for her daughter. (Blanchett’s line readings as haunting as a smoke eddy, and when she loses it, never tips over into divadom; when asked if she knows what she’s doing regarding Therese, her quiet response of “I never did” seems the fulcrum of the film’s prevailing mood.) The director’s attunement to the women even extends to the blocking; his keen stratagem of constantly placing figures (mostly men) in Therese and Carol’s way subliminally works on you, and his little visual detours, such as a set of closeups giving way to a montage made of lovely, positively avant-garde out-of-focus dissolves, are plainly beautiful. He’s the perfect director for this material. Time will tell if CAROL has the resonances of a classic, much less a masterpiece, though I suspect it will. In the meantime, any day we can see it in a theater is a happy one, as we await the day Chicagoans will be able to see the single 35mm print Haynes and cinematographer Ed Lachman paid for out of pocket. (2015, 118 min, DCP) [Jim Gabriel]

Robert Zemeckis’ THE POLAR EXPRESS (US/Animated)

Alamo Drafthouse – Sunday, 12:15pm

Now a Christmas classic, THE POLAR EXPRESS gained fame on its somewhat underperforming release for its revolutionary approach to animation. The brainchild of Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks, this story of a boy who regains his belief in Santa Claus through a trip to the North Pole was the first feature film to be created entirely through the use of motion-capture animation. In this adaptation of 1985 children’s book of the same name by the film’s co-screenwriter, William Broyles Jr., Hanks plays six disparate roles (hero boy, hero boy’s father, hobo, conductor, Santa Claus, and Scrooge puppet), providing facial movements and voices that are remarkably distinct. The film, a musical that includes traditional Christmas tunes and original material written by Alan Silvestri, lacks truly memorable songs, but a recurring instrumental theme that laces through the film is both beautiful and heroic. One dance number, “Hot Chocolate,” is quite cleverly choreographed given the constraints of the train car aisle marked on a soundstage for motion capture that the dancing waiters must negotiate. Santa’s world shows great imagination that fully exploits the possibilities of animation to make the impossible possible and populate the workshop with the massive elf workforce needed to service all the Christian children in the world. It was refreshing to have a Black hero girl (Nona Gray) take the lead in many scenes, but the film still revolves around the hero boy and is overwhelmingly white and male. I found the film’s action sequences in keeping with the hyperactive filmmaking techniques that have been overtaxing kids’ adrenal glands for far too long; in fairness, however, they are very well rendered and should look great in stereoscopic digital 3D. (2004, 100 min, 3D DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Tim Burton’s BATMAN RETURNS (US)

The Davis Theater – Wednesday, 7pm

No one else captures the nostalgic kitsch and dark melancholy of Christmastime with perfect balance like Tim Burton. His first feature after one of his other Christmas classics, EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (1990), BATMAN RETURNS shifts the gloomy holiday cheer from the suburbs to Gotham City. The constructed sets and detailed production design have produced some of the most iconic images in a career filled with memorable visuals. The story involves Gotham industrial businessman Max Shreck (Christopher Walken) teaming up with twisted crime lord Penguin (Danny DeVito), who’s searching for his origins. Superhero vigilante Batman (Michael Keaton) is out to stop them, but everyone’s plans are complicated by Selina Kyle (Michelle Pfeiffer), Shreck’s meek secretary who seeks revenge against her boss as the formidable, whip-brandishing, latex-wearing Catwoman. It's hard to argue that this isn’t Pfeiffer’s movie, as the submissive cat lady violently transforms into the dominant Catwoman, one of the great cinematic femme fatales. Her early scenes, set in her baby pink apartment, where Selina talks to herself to cope with the loneliness of her life are unexpectedly moving, so much so that her story looms over the other character’s. Through her, the film presents complex themes about duality and female sexuality. She also helps to make the film more noir than anything else, despite its titular superhero; like its conflicted approach to the holiday season, BATMAN RETURNS is funny and morbid, beautiful and grotesque, ridiculous and sincere—one of Burton’s best. (1992, 126 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Elizabeth Lo's MISTRESS DISPELLER (China/US/Documentary)

FACETS – Sunday, 2pm and Thursday, 7pm

A shockingly intimate documentary, MISTRESS DISPELLER highlights a new industry on the rise in China. With the goal of keeping couples together, a "mistress dispeller" can be hired to infiltrate family dynamics and bring harmony back to marriages flailing due to infidelity. Featuring the challenges of modern relationships, dating, marriage, family, and loneliness, the film creates space for everyone involved, demonstrating sincere empathy for all sides of the love triangle. MISTRESS DISPELLER follows a couple, Mr. and Mrs. Li, as the wife reaches out to Teacher Wang, a mistress dispeller who skillfully inserts herself into their dynamic, discovering the innermost details of the relationships involved to save the marriage; her purpose, however, expands to helping everyone, including the mistress. The film insightfully draws connections between personal relationships and larger cultural norms and expectations. Frank conversations, shot with arresting stillness, many featuring close-ups, are juxtaposed with lingering shots of Chinese art, landscapes, and cityscapes. Throughout, as well, there are interludes with images of new brides, lonely hearts ads, dating seminars, and matchmaking services, illuminating the cultural pressures that exist in finding and maintaining successful relationships—so much so that industries spring up to fill the need. What is most surprising is how director Elizabeth Lo got everyone involved to agree to willingly participate; a fact she is clear to emphasize with text at the beginning of MISTRESS DISPELLER. The result is true cinematic melodrama in documentary form. (2024, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Brian Henson's THE MUPPET CHRISTMAS CAROL (US)

Music Box Theatre – Tuesday, 4:30pm and 7pm

Along with bearing the emotional weight of being the first theatrically released Muppet film made after the untimely passing of creative visionary Jim Henson, THE MUPPET CHRISTMAS CAROL carries the mighty task of representing two of the most beloved staples of American culture: The Muppets, a troupe of felt and fur vaudevillian puppets initially created and pioneered in the mid-to-late 1970s by the late, great Henson, and Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, a mid-19th-century novella warning against the perils of greed that has inexplicably become the signature cash-cow stage adaptation for regional theaters nationwide. Under the direction of Brian Henson, one of Jim’s children devoted to carrying on the Henson legacy, this high-concept literary adaptation is far from the contemporary comic antics that had previously been seen in Muppet Cinema. Rather than playing versions of themselves, Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, and the rest of the delightful squad of weirdos are tasked with acting out classics of canonized literature (cemented by their next film, MUPPET TREASURE ISLAND), here playing the roles of various Dickensian characters, anchored by a lead human actor (the irreplaceable Michael Caine) as Ebenezer Scrooge. As tricky of a task as this could have been, the undeniable success comes in this being less so a Muppet-ized spin on A Christmas Carol, but rather a supremely well-crafted cinematic Dickens adaptation that just happens to star Muppets in prominent roles. Each Muppet brings their well-defined characteristics to their respective roles in ways that are comically potent, but never getting in the way of their assigned role (Miss Piggy’s Emily Cratchit is still a diva, and Statler and Waldorf’s Marley Brothers still heckle up a storm). It’s the central performance from Caine that really cements the tone here, exchanging dialogue with talking frogs and pigs as if he were performing on the National Theatre stage. His journey of personal redemption is treated with utmost sincerity and grave seriousness, with the primary moments of comic deviation coming from the narration of Charles Dickens, here portrayed with gusto by The Great Gonzo, alongside his trusty sidekick Rizzo the Rat (as himself, natch) providing ribald Mystery Science Theater-esque commentary. As with any successful Muppet film, earnestness wins out, with the comic foibles at hand balanced out by Paul Williams’ tuneful and tearful earworms, plus Henson’s keen sense of magic and horror that has been key to Dickens’ tale for generations. Even with his passing, the spirit of Jim Henson’s artistry—that inimitable balance of laughter and heart—finds itself ever alive in this now-well-established holiday classic. And so, as we observed, Henson bless us, every one! Screening as part of the Alternative Christmas Features series. (1992, 85 min, Unconfirmed Format) [Ben Kaye]

The 42nd Annual Music Box Sing-a-Long & Double Feature

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

Frank Capra's IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE (US)
Frank Capra was associated more with reassuring, patriotic sentiment than with actually making movies; but just beneath the Americana, his films contain a near-schizophrenic mix of idealism and resentment. In this quality, as well as his tendency to drag charismatic heroes through grueling tests of faith, it wouldn't be a stretch to compare Capra with Lars von Trier. There's plenty to merit the comparison in IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE alone: The film is a two-hour tour of an honest man's failure and bottled-up resentment, softened only intermittently by scenes of domestic contentment. Even before the nightmarish Pottersville episode (shot in foreboding shadows more reminiscent of film noir than Americana), Bedford Falls is shown as vulnerable to the plagues of recession, family dysfunction, and alcoholism. All of these ills weigh heavy on the soul of George Bailey, a small-town Everyman given tragic complexity by James Stewart, who considered the performance his best. Drawing on the unacknowledged rage within ordinary people that he would later exploit for Alfred Hitchcock, Stewart renders Bailey as complicated as Capra himself—a child and ultimate victim of the American Dream. It's because the film's despair feels so authentic that its iconic ending feels as cathartic as it does: After being saved from his suicide attempt (which frames the entire film), Stewart is returned to the simple pleasures of family and friends, made to seem a warm oasis in a great metaphysical void. (1946, 130 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Michael Curtiz's WHITE CHRISTMAS (US)
Critics agree that Mark Sandrich's HOLIDAY INN (1942), the first musical comedy to feature Bing Crosby, an inn, and Irving Berlin's "White Christmas," is a better film than this partial remake. Yet it turns out that it's the revivals of this Technicolor, VistaVision version that people look forward to this time of year. WHITE CHRISTMAS incorporates the history of its own title song, which, while it would go on to become perhaps history's largest-seller, actually seemed a flop at first. Music historians Dave Marsh and Steve Propes note, "What saved 'White Christmas' were requests made by GIs to Armed Forces Radio around the world. Soldiers away from home, many of them in the South Pacific or North Africa, uncertain of whether they'd ever again see family and friends, let alone a snowfall, responded passionately to Berlin's understated evocation of the mythic romance of Christmas Past." This history is folded into the opening scene: it's Christmas Eve, 1944, somewhere on a World War II battlefield, and Crosby sings the song to fellow troops amidst some very fake rubble, as bombs explode in the background. The movie's got Crosby and Danny Kaye as music-and-lyrics team Wallace and Davis, and Vera-Ellen and Rosemary Clooney as sister act the Haynes. They're a treat to watch even just sitting around a railroad passenger car singing "Snow," bound for Pine Tree, Vermont, where the inn turns out to be run by ex-General Waverly (Dean Jagger). When people gather for a screening of this movie, I doubt they worry that it may not rank with Michael Curtiz's best work (CASABLANCA, YANKEE DOODLE DANDY, MILDRED PIERCE). They come to mark the change of years together. If there's a season for nestling in the warmth of nostalgia, it's this one. Plus, there's the camp appeal of Crosby and Kaye doing "Sisters." (1954, 120 min, DCP Digital) [Scott Pfeiffer]

📽️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Alamo Drafthouse
Joachim Trier’s 2025 film SENTIMENTAL VALUE (133 min, DCP Digital) continues screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

Jim Makichuk’s 1980 film GHOSTKEEPER (117 min, Digital Projection) screens with Kier-La Janisse’s short film THE OCCUPANT OF THE ROOM on Tuesday, 9:30pm, as part of the Terror Tuesday series.

Edmund Purdom’s 1984 film DON’T OPEN TILL CHRISTMAS (86 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday, 9:30pm, as part of the Weird Wednesday series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Cinema/Chicago
A members’ screening of Craig Brewer’s 2025 film SONG SUNG BLUE (131 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 7pm, at AMC NEWCITY 14. More info here.

⚫ Elevated Films
Sam Hayes’ 2025 film POOLS (99 min, Digital Projection) screens Thursday, 7pm, at Camera Ambassador (1414 S. Western Ave., Floor 3 at CineCity). Sponsored by Malört with 3 shots of Malört and 1 Malört cocktail provided free. There will be a post-screening DJ set. More info here.

⚫ FACETS
Robby Rackleff and Alan Resnick’s 2025 film DANCE FREAK (90 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday, 6:30pm and 8:45pm, followed by a Q&A with the directors.

Pascal Bonitzer’s 2024 film AUCTION (91 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday at 3pm and 5pm and Sunday at 4pm and 6pm.

Jonathan Bellé’s 2024 documentary ISHIRO HONDA: MEMOIRS OF A FILM DIRECTOR screens Sunday, 10:30am, presented by the Chicago Japan Film Collective.

FACETS Film Trivia takes place on Thursday, 7pm, followed by the Chicago premiere of the director’s cut of Shu Lea Cheang’s 2000 film I.K.U. (90 min, DCP Digital) at 9pm, preceded by a new short film by alterotics. Please note that this screening is SOLD OUT; however, a second screening has been added on Saturday, December 20 at 9:15pm. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Joachim Trier’s 2025 film SENTIMENTAL VALUE (133 min, DCP Digital) continues screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

Doris Wishman’s 2002 film DILDO HEAVEN (89 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday at 6:45pm  and Thursday at 9:30pm. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Siskel Film Center
Julie Jackman's 2025 film 100 NIGHTS OF HERO (90 min, DCP Digital) continues and Paolo Sorrentino’s 2025 film LA GRAZIA (131 min, DCP Digital) begins screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

Rachael Holder’s 2025 film LOVE, BROOKLYN (97 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday at 6pm and Saturday at 8pm.

Sydney Pollack’s 1973 film THE WAY WE WERE (118 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, 2:30pm, and Pollack’s 1972 film JEREMIAH JOHNSON (108 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday, 6pm, both as part of the Golden Boy: A Robert Redford Retrospective series.

Biliana Grozdanova and Marina Grozdanova’s 2025 film EASTERN WESTERN (108 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, 5:15pm, followed by a conversation with the directors and members of the cast and crew. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ VDB TV (Virtual)
oliverio rodriguez and Victoria Stob's 2018 short film LYNDALE (24 min) and Sandi DuBowski's 1993 short film TOMBOYCHIK (15 min) stream for free on VDB-TV.  Programmed by Cine-File contributor Elise Schierbeek. More info here.

CINE-LIST: December 12 - December 18, 2025

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Ray Ebarb, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jim Gabriel, Shaun Huhn, Ben Kaye, Scott Pfeiffer, Brian Welesko