🎉 2025 YEAR-END LISTS
Check out our blog to see our contributors’ lists of favorite viewing experiences of 2025. As per tradition at Cine-File, we have no rules about what constitutes a new viewing experience—anything the contributor found meaningful that year is fair game. Here’s to another great year of moviegoing!
📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING
Johnnie To's EXILED (Hong Kong)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm
The year is 2006. Johnnie To is about to make a film. The cast and crew assemble at the first location. On the call sheet, they will begin with the first sequence: the door of our hero’s house as various figures arrive. Beyond this, the director has no idea what he’s doing. There is no screenplay, outline, or written characters. The next day, they film a sequence made up on the spot and the following day the same approach. As production progresses, the film begins to reveal itself to the director: anything he thinks up on the day, they film it. To later reminisced, “I wanted to make a film as if it was like a vacation, but I can’t really call a film a holiday. Just no planning, no preparation.” Through its cabaret of turncoats and odd bedfellows, the storyline becomes scenery for the filmmaking itself. Plotwise, To treads familiar ground here—wise guys going out with a bang as they fight for honor—yet EXILED still carries an emotional weight distinctive to his other crime pictures. Because To had already performed extensive research into the Hong Kong triads with ELECTION (2005) and ELECTION II (2006), he had a strong understanding of the underworld. (Afraid to expose a young audience to accurate triad protocol, the censors removed a scene from the Hong Kong release in which Boss Keung and Boss Fay shake with their left hands.) In the late ‘90s (when the film takes place), Macau presented an opportunity for organized crime to squeeze as much money as possible out of the region before Portugal surrendered its colony to mainland China. Sparking the film’s conflict, two hit men sent from Hong Kong come to tie up loose ends with their reformed associate, now married and newly a father. To takes image and sound very seriously. Growing up, the director watched English-language films without understanding their dialogue. As a result, his films resort to speaking only when necessary. While there is a rich tradition of urban crime action in Hong Kong cinema, film scholar Stephen (author of Director in Action: Johnnie To and the Hong Kong Action Film) likens To’s action sequences to Jackson Pollack paintings. His most riveting scenes balance the line between chaos and order. Beginning with static subjects, a dynamic camera dollies through the frame to trigger characters into the space. When the fight begins, the camera becomes subjective as it closes in on various individuals within the scene. Influenced by paintings of Chinese antiquity, Hong Kong films often fill the frame with smoke and mist. According to To, this image also leaves room for the imagination of the viewer. (He’s also cited Akira Kurosawa as an influence on his staggering ‘Scope framing.) At the time of production, Milkyway Image was experiencing a golden age, even while the Chinese government began meddling in Hong Kong’s political and economic landscape, thus affecting its film industry. Milkyway had its films distributed all over Asia, a system no longer in existence. Even in the mid-aughts, bloated blockbusters polluted with CGI fantasy plots delivered at the box office and appeased mainland censors. The tragic ending to EXILED matches the timing of its release: the end of romanticism and historical rumination, a death of fraternity and the ascendency of state fealty. At the height of his career in the mid 2000s, To had an immense output of two films per year (not counting the others he produced) and remained the only iconic Hong Kong director who stayed true to the streets, sites, language, and culture of Hong Kong as others of his caliber migrated north. The films depict loyalty and honor as sacred principles, two traits that carry over to a life in pictures. As he reflected at a 2024 American retrospective: “Film is magic. And magic is art. Why is film art? Because it’s a limitless world.” Screening as part of the Revolution of Their Time: 30 Years of Milkyway Image series. (2006, 110 min, 35mm) [Ray Ebarb]
Fyodor Otsep & Boris Barnet’s MISS MEND (USSR/Silent)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Sunday, 2pm
By the time Boris Barnet made his directorial debut with the three-part serial MISS MEND, he had already served as a medic with the Red Army, fought as a professional boxer, and acted in a film by Lev Kuleshov, THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF MR. WEST IN THE LAND OF THE BOLSHEVIKS (1924). He was also just 24 years old. MISS MEND, co-directed by Fyodor Otsep, feels like a young man’s work, for better and for worse. On the one hand, it’s plainly derivative of Louis Feuillade’s serial LES VAMPIRES (1915) and Fritz Lang’s two-part THE SPIDERS (1919-20), with a knotty plot featuring evil conspiracies, international cabals, and intrepid, idealistic heroes. On the other hand, Barnet and company seem so excited to try out different stylistic and narrative techniques that it’s easy to get wrapped up in the energy of the filmmaking. MISS MEND had its origins in Marietta Shaginian's serialized novel Mess-Mend: Yankees in Petrograd, in which “mess-mend” was the code word of an underground revolutionary group that aimed to “mend the mess” created by capitalism and fascism. In the adaptation process, the revolutionary group was replaced by a cohort of American journalists—plus one headstrong secretary, Miss Vivian Mend—but the enemies remained wicked industrialists who wanted to undermine revolutionary communism. Barnet plays one of the journalists, whose name is Barnet; he’s joined by a photographer named Fogel and a clerk named Hopkins who provides much of the comic relief. In the first part, the heroes must thwart an assassination attempt against a famous tycoon (which the assassins plan to pin on “the Bolsheviks”); in parts two and three, they have to stop a plot to spread a plague across the Soviet Union by means of powerful radio waves. Along the way, there are farcical episodes, international travel, plenty of stunts, a bit of romance, and a couple of misguided jokes about American music being unlistenable. MISS MEND is of historical significance for not advancing a radical editing style à la Eisenstein, Kuleshov, et al. Rather, the goal seems to have been to beat the capitalist film industries at their own game—the filmmakers draw on practically every popular genre of the day to craft a super-entertainment that also defends the principles of the Soviet Union. The characterizations are winning, ditto the fantasy vision of America in the first episode, and it’s elements like these that tend to overwhelm any formal concerns. Still, there’s plenty of suspense spread across the three episodes, which shows that Barnet was no slouch when it came to editing; his pratfalls are nothing to sneeze at, either. If anything, MISS MEND may have been too entertaining for its own good. The film was a popular success, but it was generally denounced in the Soviet press as Western-style decadence. Screening as part of the Boris Barnet: A Cinema Despite Life series. (1926, 250 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Boris Barnet’s THE HOUSE ON TRUBNAYA (USSR/Silent)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Wednesday, 7pm
THE HOUSE ON TRUBNAYA suggests a Soviet counterpart to Frank Capra films in how it balances humor, pathos, and patriotic sentiment. It tells the story of a plucky 19-year-old peasant named Paranya who ventures to Moscow in search of housekeeping work, suffers at the hands of a malicious employer, and gets elected deputy to the city maids union, all in the span of a few days. Boris Barnet, who substantially reworked the script he was given, brings a freewheeling sensibility to the proceedings. The film begins by introducing the titular house (a multistory apartment building with storefronts on the first floor), then proceeds to show the people living inside. Barnet uses wide shots to reveal the set of the building’s interior has no fourth wall, making it look like the inside of a doll house. Jerry Lewis would employ a similar effect in his film THE LADIES’ MAN (1961) more than three decades later, but the effect is different, warmer in THE HOUSE ON TRUBNAYA—one gets the reassuring sense during shots of the tenants doing their chores that everything has its right place here, even the chaotic elements. In another example of chaos being charming in Barnet’s world, Paranya is introduced chasing her pet duck down a busy street. When a streetcar nearly hits her, Barnet literally pauses the film, then presents a title card that reads, “But wait, we forgot to explain how the duck wound up in Moscow…” The film then flashes back to summarize the previous day from Paranya’s perspective, which culminates with her (and her duck's) bewilderment in the big city. In its rousing shots of Moscow, THE HOUSE ON TRUBNAYA at times suggests a city symphony film; the plot builds upon the enthusiasm of these passages with scenes that lovingly depict the bustle of urban life. Paranya comes to take part in a workers' union play, a parade, and an election, and Barnet finds genial humor in all these events. In fact, the film succeeds in making life under the nascent communist regime seem like fun, though this stems less from the director's propagandistic instincts than his wit and sympathy for eccentrics. Preceded by the surviving fragments of Barnet’s 1929 feature MOSCOW IN OCTOBER (Total approx. 33 min, Digital Projection). Screening as part of the Boris Barnet: A Cinema Despite Life series. (1928, 89 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
Peter Greenaway’s DROWNING BY NUMBERS (UK/Netherlands)
Film Studies Center (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm [Free Admission]
Jumping rope while counting the stars, the angelic Skipping Girl (Natalie Morse) sets up one of the unique concepts of Peter Greenaway’s DROWNING BY NUMBERS. She remarks, “A hundred is enough; once you’ve counted to a hundred, all the other hundreds are the same.” Thus, the film, in mostly numerical order, features the numbers from one to one hundred—both subtly and noticeably—within the frame. That frame itself is positively painterly; the stunning, colorful cinematography is by Sacha Vieny, who worked for many years with Alain Resnais before beginning a collaboration with Greenaway in the mid-’80s. With every shot so extraordinarily constructed, one is tempted to pause to examine more closely the meticulously placed objects strewn about in layered scenes of action; it’s evocative of the popular and often unsettling I Spy children’s books of the ‘90s and very clear that Wes Anderson has been greatly inspired by the film. DROWNING BY NUMBERS follows three women, each named Cissie Colpitts: a mother (Joan Plowright, driving the film with poised, yet comedic stoicism), her daughter (Juliet Stevenson), and her niece (Joely Richardson). One by one, they drown their husbands and each time coax the local coroner, Madgett (Bernard Hill), to help cover up the murders. Among all this, Madgett’s young son Smut (Jason Edwards) plays a series of mostly invented games, with ritualistic, complex, and oddly specific rules; in his game “Dawn Card Castles,” for example, “Those players who wish to dream of romance build their castles with the seven of hearts.” Both the convoluted games and the numbers suggest a childlike impulse to invent some sort of order in a messy and absurd world of adultery, murder, and sex. This is also implied in DROWNING BY NUMBERS’ fairytale themes: there’s the emphasis on numbers and the repetition of names and stories between generations, all swirling around an account of gender power dynamics; a scene of all three women convening in a brightly lit car suggests a coven of witches. Balancing the film’s mayhem and humor is Michael Nyman’s score, which, at Greenaway’s request, consists of variations on the slow second movement of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Viola, and Orchestra and used to underscore each death. Presented as part of the Year of Games. (1988, 118 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
Mikko Niskanen’s EIGHT DEADLY SHOTS (Finland)
Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 11am
On March 7th, 1969, four policemen in Pihtipudas, Finland, heading to the home of a man said to be in the midst of a drunken episode, were shot and killed in their tracks. Three years later, Finnish multi-hyphenate Mikko Niskanen would go on to adapt these events into a four-part television miniseries, one of the few pieces of televised drama that has rightfully been reclaimed as part of the cinematic canon. Though many of the details of the shooter’s life and circumstances, as far as the record goes, have been faithfully transliterated into the fictional character of Pasi— played by Niskanen himself—the filmmaker would likely be the first to tell you that EIGHT DEADLY SHOTS exists more as dramatic interpretation than factual document. Each segment of the series begins with a disclaimer from Niskanen explicitly stating his goal for the work, how “everyone may have his own truth, but this is the truth I saw and experienced, having been born into these surroundings, having lived this particular life and having studied these manners.” Niskanen, then, is more interested—and wholly successful—in crafting a social drama of how economic disparity can lead the working class into the depths of moral sin, isolation, and anguish. The film lives in a space of stark realism, the oscillation between long, steady shots and jittery handheld camerawork giving it an almost documentary feel; the rural realities of Central Finland are captured in an often cold manner (quite literally, for the many scenes were captured in the blanketed winter months). Pasi’s own desperate economic situation—he’s a poor farmer scraping by on odd jobs to support his family—leads to his proclivity for illegally brewing moonshine with his friends, setting off his own disastrous descent into alcoholism. Niskanen isn’t shy about the film’s firm anti-alcohol stance—the phrase “Booze was the root of all evil in our family” adorns the top of every episode—and Pasi’s loose grasp on fighting this toxic addiction makes for some of the more tragic moments throughout the series. (One might as well nickname the film “Days of Moonshine and Roses.”) The drudgery that accompanies the march to the foregone conclusion of EIGHT DEADLY SHOTS is aided by Niskanen’s outstanding central performance, grounded in the harsh, truthful reality he has constructed, but willing to burst into blotto theatrics on a dime. The journey of EIGHT DEADLY SHOTS holds few narrative surprises, but its particularly chilling, epic portrait of pastoral life turned sour still cuts bone deep. Screening as part of the Settle In series. (1972, 316 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
Samuel Fuller's FORTY GUNS (US)
Music Box Theatre – Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am, and Monday, 3pm
FORTY GUNS is a hardboiled feminist Western and one of the most progressive films about female agency coming out of a Hollywood studio at a time when Father Knows Best had a firm grip on the airwaves. In a post-McCarthy America, mass media emphasized the importance of the nuclear family and expectations of female subservience. Fuller cultivates a female outlaw (“a high-riding woman with a whip”) who's unapologetic for her position of power or how she got there. The film opens in an America reaching the end of the frontier. Federal marshal Griff Bonnell (Barry Sullivan) rolls into an Arizona town looking for two men from Jessica Drummond’s (Barbara Stanwyck) gang of 20 gunslinging male outlaws. Romance ensues between the lawman and the lawless woman, leading to the death of both their siblings. In Fuller’s original script, Bonnell was supposed to execute his girlfriend to avenge his brother, but the studio pushed him to a more optimistic ending, concluding the film with forgiveness between the two lovers. A longtime member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals and self-identified conservative Republican, Stanwyck lends iconic screen presence and fortitude to this progressive exploration of a woman holding her own in the Wild West. Having won the title for highest paid woman in America in 1944, the movie star was at a unique moment in her career, a former starlet making bold career moves. Fuller began his career as a crime reporter and entered into filmmaking with I SHOT JESSE JAMES (1949) when he was in his late 30s. Shooting low-budget features gave him some liberty in storytelling—he famously shot the principal photography of THE STEEL HELMET (1951) in ten days. While Fuller had a larger budget to work with on this film, $300,000 was still small for an action-packed Western starring Stanwyck at Twentieth Century Fox. Engineering grit and sentiment, FORTY GUNS glides from utmost tension through its fight sequences and moving vulnerability. Taking full advantage of CinemaScope, Fuler overwhelms the audience with stylized shots of action (paired with impeccable editing) and close-ups of actors. Even in still moments, whether the storm sequence or the heart-melting interludes sung by Jidge Carroll, the work is never dull. In Jean-Luc Godard’s PIERROT LE FOU (1965), Fuller makes a cameo to tell Jean-Paul Belmondo film is “like a battleground. It’s love, hate, action, violence, death… in one word, emotion." As Australian film critic Adrian Martin notes, Fuller's stylistic tics marked the first signs of a personal cinema possible within the System. Screening as part of the Working Girl: The Films of Barbara Stanwyck series. (1957, 80 min, DCP Digital) [Ray Ebarb]
Pupi Avati’s THE HOUSE WITH LAUGHING WINDOWS (Italy)
Music Box Theatre – Friday and Saturday, 11pm
Among highly regarded giallo films, THE HOUSE WITH THE LAUGHING WINDOWS occupies a distinctive position because it systematically inverts the conventions that defined the genre by the mid-1970s. Instead of placing itself within the cinematic allure of a city, an exotic location, or showy murder set pieces, Pupi Avati delivers in atmosphere, pacing, and anticipation. Advancing with a craftsman’s patience, Avati prefers pace over spectacle. Much of the film was shot in small towns in the Po Valley, near the director’s home town, where flat landscapes, fog, and sparse architecture contribute to a sense of isolation. Budget limitations further encouraged Avati to minimize spectacle and rely on pacing and framing. The film begins quietly, allowing us to settle in with Stefano (Lino Capolicchio). He arrives in a small village where he’s been commissioned to restore a painting of Saint Sebastian. Stefano instills confidence that he is the best in his trade and believes knowledge of the painter could aid in the restoration. The artist, Buono Legnani, is remembered locally as the “Painter of Agony.” The painting of a tortured Saint Sebastian proves to be uncanny in its depiction of suffering, which compels Stefano to inquire further. According to village lore, Legnani spent time sketching terminally ill patients in their final days. Avati presents this information through incomplete conversations, rumors, and evasive responses, never offering a definitive account. Suggestions that Legnani may have caused suffering rather than simply observed it emerge gradually, without explanatory emphasis. Stefano is warned to stop work on the painting, but this only encourages him to find answers. Avati’s direction avoids the rapid editing and elaborate camera movements common in giallo at the time. Scenes often hold on empty spaces or neutral compositions after characters exit the frame. Dialogue is frequently interrupted or cut short. Several supporting roles were played by non-professional actors from the region, contributing to the halting, indirect conversational style that defines Stefano’s interactions with the villagers. These choices reinforce the sense that the community shares knowledge it refuses to articulate. Music is used with subtlety. Italian jazz pianist Amedeo Tommasi’s score is soft and unsettling. Avati draws on a decade-plus of giallo and subverts quick edits, orchestral prog-rock, and J&B whiskey to provide a horror film. We don’t watch beautiful Italians doing horrible things to each other. We watch a dormant, collective trauma reawaken. Stefano’s role as a restorer becomes thematically central. His task is to stabilize and clarify an image, yet his presence disrupts a social balance maintained through avoidance and dissociative amnesia. It’s a good bet that none of the villagers will soon forget this new collection of atrocities. And neither will most audiences, as the ending holds a satisfying reward. Screening as part of January Giallo with Cinematic Void’s Jim Branscome in attendance. (1976, 110 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]
Warren Beatty's REDS (US)
Alamo Drafthouse – Thursday, 2:30pm
Warren Beatty's epic chronicles the life of leftist reporter John Reed and the Russian Revolution, cutting a wide path through history and memory. Something akin to an epigraph opens REDS: "Witnesses" of the time period are filmed documentary-style against a black void as they recall the events of World War I, John Reed, communism, what have you. It's gripping in its own way, lending Beatty's narrative a veneer of authority while hinting at memory's inconsistencies and biases. Indeed, REDS concerns itself with John Reed and his rise as a reporter and partisan, deeply involved in the divided socialist factions in the US and invested in the Bolshevik struggle in Russia. REDS, like Beatty's Reed, offers but one history of events. Novelistic in scope, the film wends through the period, amassing historical figures—a steamy Eugene O'Neill (Jack Nicholson), for one—and recounting Reed's tumultuous romance with Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton). Reed and Bryant's relationship—expertly detailed with the same level of depth as the political minutiae—leads them to Russia, and ultimately a wrenching climax. Of course, to talk about Reed is to talk about Warren Beatty, the director, writer, producer, and star—an omnipresent talent who ultimately seems unknowable. Jonathan Rosenbaum writes, "If REDS reaches a political conclusion of any sort, this may be the recognition that certain events, like certain lives, invariably get lost in (or devoured by) history." You see the parallel. (1981, 194 min, DCP Digital) [Brian Welesko]
Mona Fastvold’s THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE (UK/US)
Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes
THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE can be approached less as a historical biopic than as an inquiry into how belief is embodied, transmitted, and policed. Directed by Mona Fastvold, the film resists the reassuring grammar of prestige historical drama and instead situates Ann Lee’s life within a tactile, experiential framework that privileges ritual, movement, and collective sensation over narrative efficiency. History is not highlighted so much as recast as mythos, delivered through Thomasin McKenzie’s narration. What follows is a story reenacted as a series of pressures placed on women’s bodies. Childbirth and loss share the same breath. Bodily autonomy and antiquated notions of “wifely duty” collide again and again. Fastvold’s use of natural light, hand-painted backgrounds, and rigorously composed frames does more than evoke the 18th century. It places the image in a liminal space between realism and iconography, recalling Baroque painting as much as ethnographic observation. Many scenes conclude with tableaux that suggest Caravaggio-like figures emerging from shadow, poised to behead Holofernes. This painterly strategy mirrors the film’s broader refusal to isolate Ann Lee as a singular genius. Her authority is inseparable from the collective that gathers around her. The Shakers’ theology holds that the second coming of Christ will be female, because God encompasses both masculine and feminine principles. This belief positions Ann Lee as an existential challenge to patriarchal Christianity, and to patriarchal society more broadly. The film makes clear that persecution arises less from the Shakers’ ecstatic dances or celibacy than from their devotion to a woman permitted spiritual authority. Paganism becomes a convenient accusation; gender is the real heresy. Amanda Seyfried’s performance is remarkable for its range, capable of erupting into exuberance or retreating into stillness without signaling either as spectacle. She avoids charisma, presenting Lee as a figure shaped by grief, labor, and belief rather than destiny. This approach aligns with the film’s skepticism toward heroic individualism, even when engaging a figure historically framed as messianic. That THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE arrives at a moment when the world is grieving the unprovoked loss of an American citizen at the hands of their own government gives the film an unintended but piercing contemporary resonance. Upon arriving in America, Lee’s response to a slave auction, her cry of “Shame,” echoes beyond the frame and into daily life. Later, the detention and beating of Shaker congregants by British soldiers evokes modern immigration enforcement, reinforcing the film’s argument that institutional brutality tends to repeat itself with only minor cosmetic updates. What distinguishes THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE from more conventional faith-based narratives is its insistence on pacifism as praxis rather than abstraction. Though not depicted onscreen, later generations of Shakers would be exempt from the Civil War draft, an early instance of conscientious objection. They sheltered both Confederate and Union soldiers. Their commitment to nonviolence is not symbolic but disciplinary, an ethical system requiring continuous labor, restraint, and dancing. Stripped of theology, the film ultimately reveals a social model grounded in collective work, gender equality, and the rejection of violence. It suggests that radical change does not require divine intervention so much as the redistribution of authority. Fastvold’s film emerges as a punk-rock feminist manifesto, sketching the blueprint for utopia: believe women, follow women, dismantle the patriarchy, and live out our days under a matriarchy. History’s male-ruled societies seem to agree on one thing. The most threatening idea in any era is not heresy, but women governing themselves. (2025, 137 min, 70mm) [Shaun Huhn]
Ousmane Sembène's BLACK GIRL (Senegal/France)
Siskel Film Center – Wednesday, 6pm
Frequently cited as the greatest African filmmaker, Ousmane Sembène was also a strike leader and novelist before working in cinema. His decision to begin making films grew out of his progressive politics, as he felt he could reach a larger audience with movies than with literature, especially in his native Senegal. Sembène's style was fittingly accessible, sometimes to the point of transparency: he often depicted controversial social issues in terms of everyday life, relishing in human behavior and allowing larger themes to emerge organically from the characters' experiences. This is certainly true of his first feature, BLACK GIRL (LA NOIRE DE...), which broaches the subject of African labor in Europe by regarding a servant girl as she accompanies her employers as they return to France to live. The film is based on one of Sembène's early stories; it exemplifies the concentration and eye for detail best associated with short fiction. Screening as part of the African Cinema from Independence to Now lecture series. (1966, 59 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Léos Carax's THE LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE (France)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Monday, 7pm
THE LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE is one of the culminating works of the 20th century, channeling numerous great films and filmmakers of the previous several decades while advancing a romantic, almost innocent vision that harkens back to some of the very first movies. It begins like a blunt report on the homeless population of Paris (as though to honor the cinema’s roots in documentary realism) before it erupts into a full-blown spectacle about the titular characters, a former circus performer who can’t stop drinking (Denis Lavant, the leading man in four of Carax’s six features to date) and a painter who’s losing her sight (Juliette Binoche, who had been Carax’s girlfriend for several years when this was made). The writer-director famously rebuilt Paris’ Pont Neuf and its surrounding blocks on a lake outside Montpelier so he could shoot as much as he wanted, which made THE LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE one of the most expensive French productions of all time. Yet this is no populist spectacle in the tradition of Cecil B. DeMille and James Cameron, but rather something very personal, even delicate writ large. Jonathan Rosenbaum has likened it to Murnau’s SUNRISE (1927) and Tati’s PLAYTIME (1967) in how it treats the modern city as a playground, while Adrian Martin invoked everything from Abel Gance’s NAPOLEON (1927) to Francis Ford Coppola’s ONE FROM THE HEART (1982) in his writing on LOVERS. Carax’s film does operate in such grand gestures as to invite, and often merit, comparison to any of these cinematic zeppelins. What distinguishes it from most of these touchstones is the feeling of wild uncertainty it engenders; the surprising shifts in tone and the unpredictable camera setups suggest a film not entirely in control of itself, as if the movie were taking cues from the reckless abandon of its main characters. Screening as part of the City Serendipity series. (1991, 126 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Francis Ford Coppola's APOCALYPSE NOW: THE FINAL CUT (US)
Siskel Film Center – Friday, 7:30pm; Sunday, 2pm; and Thursday, 6pm
Every man has a breaking point. Many filmmakers have attempted to adapt Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel Heart of Darkness, most notably Orson Welles. APOCALYPSE NOW (1979) was the first to succeed as a war requiem and fireworks finale to 1970s New Hollywood. APOCALYPSE NOW: THE FINAL CUT (2019) is the third cut of the film made by the Don of American cinema, Francis Ford Coppola. Writing the script in collaboration with Coppola and Michael Herr, John Milius recalls, “The screenplay started when I was in USC’s film school. Francis had the arrogance, the hubris, the ambition to make APOCALYPSE NOW. Francis’ personality is also the one most similar to Hitler’s that I know: Hitler could convince anybody of anything, and so can Francis. Francis is my Führer. I’d follow him to hell.” The script followed a simple story: Captain Willard is given a top-secret mission to travel up the Nùng River to locate the rogue commander, US Army Special Forces Colonel Walter Kurtz, and terminate him with extreme prejudice. Kurtz's only crime was to have waged a war against the Vietcong in his own way, ignoring all orders from higher command. Willard and his crew float through the jungle, with each sequence feeling like a deeper circle of Dante’s inferno until they arrive at the leader’s barbarous palace. In 1976, believing he’d only shoot for 6 months, Coppola moved his family to the Philippines to begin principal photography. As production started, the director requested that his wife Eleonor Coppola make a film about the production. Recording discussions without her husband’s knowledge and filming on set, Eleonor shot what would later end up in the infamous documentary, HEART OF DARKNESS: A FILMMAKER’S APOCALYPSE (1991), the story of an artist waging war against chaotic, overblown film budgets and battling Mother Nature herself. Shooting in the middle of typhoon season, sets and costumes were destroyed and the life of one crew member was taken. Initially, Coppola cast Harvey Keitel in the role of Willard but felt he had made a mistake after shooting a few scenes. Keitel was replaced by Martin Sheen. Sheen said of Coppola, “I don’t think he realizes how tough he is to work for. God, is he tough, But I will sail with that son of a bitch anytime.” Brando agreed to play Colonel Kurtz, receiving $2 million for two weeks' work, only to show up severely overweight, self-conscious, and completely unprepared. For military equipment, Coppola requested helicopters and other machinery of warfare from the United States military but was denied by then-Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld. Instead, Coppola gained permission from Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos to use his army’s helicopters. This request happened to coincide with a Communist uprising in parts of the country, resulting in the army taking back helicopters last second in the middle of filming to take part in actual battle. Under immense pressure, the then 37-year-old director wanted to abandon ship. Reflecting on his approach to the impossible challenge of filmmaking, the director said, “If I didn’t say it, believe me, someone else would have,” he said. “When I made THE GODFATHER, the first thing people said was, ‘Oh, Coppola’s just like Michael Corleone, cold and Machiavellian.' Or, 'He’s just like Kurtz, a megalomaniac.' Regardless of all adversity, strain on crew, actors, budget, and family, Coppola pushed on, risking his ranch, house, and studio. Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro was given full control over the image. He exclusively worked with an Italian color processing studio, with technicians he trusted to develop the Eastmancolor with his exact instructions. When an executive told the cameraman his prints for dailies would become processed in Los Angeles, Storaro forced the studio to continue his process and collaboration with fellow picture makers in Rome. Relishing in his large budget but physical constraints, Storaro created visionary scope. After 238 days and capturing over one and a half million feet of film, Coppola returned to the US in May 1977 to begin post production. Sound editor Walter Murch, designers Richard Beggs, Randy Thom and the rest of the team built their own Doby split sound system and had the task of cutting 236 miles of footage. Editor Walter Murch said, “It was certainly the longest post production of any film I worked on, I was on it for two years, Richie Marx was on it even a year longer. It was a long period, and you have to also gage your own energy level and focus on something that lasts that long.” Finally, after unsuccessful private screenings and recuts, APOCALYPSE NOW released on August 15, 1979. In all its cost, misery, and mayhem, like the war itself, the psychic impact of the film would leave a dent in the American zeitgeist for decades to come. APOCALYPSE NOW has reached the highest artistic achievement: an allegory of people facing reality and truth. A Homeric epic telling the secrets of life, nature, man, war, and violence. A timeless story, Heart of Darkness served as the perfect inspiration. Taking ten years to fit page to screen, the astonishment created by this film grows exponentially with each new cutting. Like collective memory, an event is not only remembered differently by each spectator but changes for the individual every time a moment is recalled. The same poetics should apply to the recutting of APOCALYPSE NOW, the same old nightmare made new again. At the will of one man, this great task continues to echo throughout the ages, insistent that even masterpieces experience rebirth. Screening as part of the Needle Drops series. (1979/2019, 184 min, DCP Digital) [Ray Ebarb]
John Cassavetes' OPENING NIGHT (US)
Alamo Drafthouse – Wednesday, 6:30pm
After Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) watches an adoring young fan get hit by a car and die right outside the theater where she’s performing in a new play, she experiences a sort of ego death. Rehearsals for and productions of the play, The Second Woman, written by playwright Sarah Goode (Joan Blondell), compose much of the action in John Cassavetes’ OPENING NIGHT, a self-reflexive examination of an artist contending with getting older and thus further and further away from the fervor of youth. “When I was 17, I could do anything,” Myrtle laments toward the beginning of the film. “It was so easy, my emotions were so close to the surface. I’m finding it harder and harder to stay in touch.” The play she’s in mirrors her real life to an uncomfortable degree, though she’s insistent that she’s nothing like her character, Virginia, a resolutely middle-aged woman at a crossroads in both life and love. Her onstage partner and offstage ex is played by Cassavetes; Ben Gazarra is the play’s director, tasked with the herculean responsibility of making sure Myrtle appears on stage, on time, in the wake of an apparent breakdown. For the most part she does, though she begins with a series of minor disruptions during rehearsals—such as balking when the script calls for Cassavetes’ Maurice to slap her—that escalate, even as she’s in front of an audience, into wholesale changes to the text, in an attempt to “dump it upside down and see if we can’t find something human in it,” as she tells Maurice, trying to get him to let go with her. Earlier Maurice had told her she’s not a woman to him anymore, she’s a professional; Gazarra’s Manny tells her the same thing, discrediting the connection, even if Myrtle won’t quite admit it, she feels with Virginia, Myrtle wanting more for her character and by extension herself. She also has this dead girl, as she says at one point. The young woman who was killed at the beginning appears to her, at first a coy apparition and then a withering trickster, imbuing the films with a giallo-esque sensibility that complements the overall theme of a fractured self. The generally warm hues of the cinematography and the motif involving pops of bright red—from the walls, floors and decor at the theater and on the set in particular to the red bedspread and bar in Myrtle’s penthouse hotel room, which looks like something out of either an Argento or Fassbinder film—lend the film to this comparison, as they add a sense of horror to the existential inquiry going on therein. The horror intensifies and then lets up at a critical point, when Myrtle has an epiphany vis-à-vis her performance, when she again reclaims her emotions and breaks the mold of aging star and complacent artist. It helps, too, that this occurs during a scene between Rowlands and Cassavetes, their chemistry dynamite. That Cassavetes might be considering his own ego death through a female character is interesting; it’s of course possible that it’s merely a technicality, as his co-auteur, Rowlands, just happened to be a woman, though I can’t help but to wonder if there was safety to be had in expressing his feelings via a woman, for whom emotions are more accepted but also against whom accusations of so-called hysteria are often lobbed. The film didn’t do too well when it opened in 1977, and it didn’t get a distributor until 1991, two years after Cassavetes died. Much like Myrtle, the film had to suffer a spiritual death before being reborn. Screening as part of the Guest Selects series; programmed by Charli XCX, ahead of her film THE MOMENT. (1977, 144 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
Martin Scorsese's THE COLOR OF MONEY (US)
Northbrook Public Library – Wednesday, 2pm and 7pm
Martin Scorsese’s stunning late career run and concomitant status as a grandmaster of American film can make it hard to remember that his career once hung by the thinnest of threads after a series of personal hardships and box office failures. He promised to be one of many victims of the changeover from the director-dominant American cinema of the Long Seventies to the 1980s corporate reclaiming of creative power by high-concept-obsessed studios, as well as the ascension of agencies and their obsession with “packaging” talent. It mostly made for garbage pictures; THE COLOR OF MONEY is decidedly not one of those. The super-agent Michael Ovitz paved the way for Scorsese’s studio comeback after the indie retrenchment of AFTER HOURS, and the film is obsessed with matters of, yes, money, as well as self-satisfaction that covers deep dissatisfaction, of scratching back some measure of pride after hitting a psychological bottom. Richard Price’s script picks up the life of Paul Newman’s “Fast” Eddie Felson some 25 years after the events of THE HUSTLER; Eddie is now a liquor salesman with a penchant for peddling Wild Turkey labels to cover up the sale of inferior hooch, but keeps his toe in the 9-ball life by bankrolling young hustlers. (Price’s script is marvelous, tough, slangy, and very funny. For someone who came to describe the craft of screenwriting as “haiku for morons,” he was awfully good at it.) He finds the ultimate side-hustle in the person of Tom Cruise’s Vincent, a pool savant, all flash and cockiness, the kind of guy who takes all the air out of the room—in short, Tom Cruise. Felson may have mellowed, but as he says, “I never kid about money,” and he sweet-talks Vincent and his girlfriend, played by Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (who takes money pretty seriously herself), into letting him bankroll a road trip to learn the hustle, to play the rube, then flip the switch, leading up to a high stakes Atlantic City tournament. Vincent’s preternatural will to win—it’s a superior early examination of Cruise’s star persona—and seeming inability to throw a game confounds Eddie, and when Eddie is hoist on his own petard and hustled himself, he breaks free from the kids and searches for his lost game, his very self. It’s a redemption narrative, but Scorsese and crew don’t get all wet about it. Newman is terrific, as good as he ever was, tossing out Price’s street koans with the ultimate agility and directness, and Scorsese’s camera loves him up; the swoops and swirls appraising that perfect face are smile-inducing. Scorsese’s also looking for redemption here, feeling his way between delivering the box-office goods and finding his way into the material; it was unclear at the time of THE COLOR OF MONEY’s making if there was indeed a place for him in the big show, in a way that he could make money but still comport himself as an artist, to bring something personal to an assignment. There’s little of the stink of the package in this film, but there is plenty of craft and commitment. It’s a hinge that opened the door to a flourishing mid- and late career for Scorsese, but without a whiff of being tamed. As Eddie’s girlfriend Janelle says to him late in the movie, “I’m a real big fan of character in people”; this movie—and its maker—has character to burn. Also starring John Turturro and a luminous Helen Slater, with a sly cameo by Forest Whitaker. Screening as part of the Shades of Green film series. (1986, 120 min, DCP Digital) [Jim Gabriel]
Todd Haynes' SAFE (US)
Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
Director Todd Haynes has restless eyes and ears that never linger in one aesthetic or time-period for longer than a film. And despite his continual shifts, it's the aesthetic that tends to star in his films, but this is never a shallow engagement. If Haynes can be said to have a formula, it is to find a pristine surface and scratch until we can see the uneasy construction underneath. His first (banned) public experiment was SUPERSTAR: THE KAREN CARPENTER STORY, in which he used Barbie doll whittling as an inspired, literal representation of Karen Carpenter's struggle with her eating disorder. FAR FROM HEAVEN honored and interrogated the world of Douglas Sirk. In I'M NOT THERE, he chipped away at the impenetrable image of Bob Dylan, all the while pointing at the impossibility of his project with a graphic mix of sympathy and irony. SAFE takes a break from public images to get intimate with a housewife's health. Shot and lit with the peachy haloes of a douche commercial, SAFE's blurry suburban Los Angeles is an unlikely venue for horror. We follow Carol White on her errands, to her exercise classes, with her friendly acquaintances; no one seems to mean her any harm. But it's precisely this vagueness—of purpose, of symptoms, of identity—that begins to gnaw at Carol until she is reduced to her flintiest self-preservation impulse. She suffers from both the controversial Multiple Chemical Sensitivity and the middle-class affliction of Unlimited Healing Budget, and either condition could prove fatal. Haynes takes care not to fix any problems or to answer stupid questions; the ending lingers in one's mind like an unresolved chord. (1995, 119 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Josephine Ferorelli]
Gus Van Sant's MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (US)
Alamo Drafthouse – Monday, 7pm
In a mystical turn about a half-hour into MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO, a Falstaffian character (William Richert) appears onscreen and suddenly the film becomes a full-on Shakespeare adaptation. It’s one of many notable qualities of the film that combine to create a dreamlike atmosphere. Characters wander in and out and poetically remark to themselves while the colorful illusions weave into one another, all set to a wistful pedal steel guitar score; it’s a reflection of the transformative power of character and cinematic storytelling. MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO is nevertheless grounded in the reality of its main characters, the dreamscapes emphasizing a wide world of harsh boundaries and possibilities. The film follows two young hustlers, Mike Waters and Scott Favor (River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves, in transcendent performances), living in Portland, Oregon. Mike, a narcoleptic constantly forced in and out of dreams, seems to be hustling out of necessity, while Scott, the son of the mayor (and the Prince Hal of this Shakespearean tale), is biding time until his inheritance kicks in. Amongst a noteworthy supporting cast—which includes Grace Zabriskie, Udo Kier, and Flea—the two find themselves traveling the country and even to Europe in search of Mike’s mother. A story of unrequited love and subsequent heartbreak, MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO is a significant film of the New Queer Cinema movement of the early 1990s. Early on, the film features a few of Mike’s experiences with clients and interviews with side characters about their experiences hustling and their dreams of the future; it gives the proceedings an almost documentary style, drawing empathy from both the dreamy narrative and real-world experiences. This is found wholly in Phoenix, whose performance as Mike is as compassionate as it is powerful. It’s stuck with me so much over the years that I still find myself wondering and worried about sweet Mike’s ambiguous fate, hoping he makes his way home. Screening as part of the Queer Film Theory 101 series. (1991, 102 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
Jim Jarmusch’s FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER (US)
Music Box Theatre – Sunday, 11am
With FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER, aging icon of sulky indie cool Jim Jarmusch may have reached the autumn of his career, that stage when some filmmakers, perhaps a little weary and with nothing left to prove, undergo a mellowing or paring-down of style. This is in many ways his straightest, simplest, and most sentimental feature, which is not to say it lacks his signature laconic wit or droll sense of existentialist detachment. The film is a tryptic of short stories of intergenerational distances, each bookended by a screen of dreamy flickering lights. In FATHER, well-off siblings Jeff (Adam Driver) and Emily (Mayim Bialik) check in on their widowed, financially and possibly mentally struggling recluse father (Tom Waits) in his New Jersey home. MOTHER focuses on a more dissimilar sibling pair, the materialistic pink-haired Lilith (Vicky Krieps) and the modest Timothea (Cate Blanchett), as they pay their annual visit to their posh writer mother (Charlotte Rampling) in Dublin. Finally, in SISTER BROTHER, fraternal twins Skye (Indya Moore) and Billy (Luka Sabbat) clean out their late parents’ flat in Paris. The first two stories unfold as dry comedies of manners, guarded encounters between estranged children and parents in which halting pleasantries conceal pains, insecurities, and resentments that are never spoken but are keenly felt. More sanguine, the third finds hope in how intergenerational gaps can be (belatedly) filled. All three stories include motifs that are mirrored or inverted across the others; as in Jarmusch’s PATERSON (2016), much of the pleasure here comes from picking up on the patterns. Some are obvious and quite funny—slow-motion skateboarders, Rolex watches, water and tea as questionable toasting beverages, a particular bit of British lingo—while others, like the use of eyeglasses or the repetition of certain camera angles, are more subtle. The latter helps spice up the flat digital images, mostly static closeup and medium shots that foreground the performers’ telling micro-expressions. Jarmusch hasn’t gone soft, exactly—these frosty relationships never do thaw out—but FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER does tap a heartfelt universality in the familial(r) aches of its characters, reaffirming a maxim from Rynosuke Akatagawa once used by an idol of Jarmusch’s, Yasujiro Ozu: “Life’s tragedy begins with the bond between parent and child.” (2025, 110 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
Mary Bronstein’s IF I HAD LEGS I’D KICK YOU (US)
FACETS – Saturday, 3pm and Sunday, 1pm
It wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration to say that at least a quarter of F I HAD LEGS I’D KICK YOU is composed of close-ups of Rose Byrne’s face, the very first shot of the film resting Byrne’s eyes, eventually pulling back to reveal her quizzical and frustrated reactions to the poking and prodding of the world around her. Byrne plays Linda, a psychotherapist whose world has become subsumed by two crises that threaten to swallow her whole. One is that Linda’s daughter suffers from an unnamed malady that has forced her to be hooked up to a feeding tube, leading to an extended absence from school and a strict dieting regimen with seemingly impossible recovery goals. This particular bump in the road of parenting might not be so bad were it not for the newly-emerging gigantic hole in the ceiling that has forced Linda and her daughter to vacate their Montauk apartment and shack up in a local motel (Linda’s husband is conveniently away on a work trip, avoiding this particular chaotic episode). Bronstein’s film exists, then, as its own gaping wound, festering and pulsating and begging to be picked at by whatever antsy force may be tempted to do so. Linda’s quest for peaceful stasis threatens to implode at any moment, her own elasticity (her daughter calls her “stretchy, like putty”) bending to the needs of whatever scenario has deemed itself most pressing. Her orbit additionally consists of her own psychotherapist, played by a tremendously droll Conan O’Brien, a patient (Danielle Macdonald) struggling with her postpartum maternal crisis, and the affable motel super (A$AP Rocky) inexplicably caught up in Linda’s web. One of the most fascinating stylistic turns Bronstein employs is the choice to never highlight Linda’s daughter’s face throughout the majority of the film, her presence captured only through brief physical glances and her constant, hilarious vocal intrusions. Linda’s own despair and suffering has caused her to barely even see her daughter as a presence to acknowledge; she’s just another problem to solve. Throughout her spiral through the drudgeries of parenthood, Linda is constantly being told “it’s not your fault,” a nails-on-a-chalkboard refrain that all but backfires in its intent. The grand truth is—and Bronstein’s film perfectly, hilariously, and artfully explores this—being a parent is an exhaustive role where you simultaneously are and are not responsible for the choices that lie before you. Parents are at the whims of the white noise of baby monitors, sleepless nights, the emotional irregularity of their offspring, and the loss of one’s self to become the guardian and caregiver for someone else. The sky is falling, the hole is expanding, and perhaps one day, it will all be better. (2025, 114 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
Kelly Reichardt's THE MASTERMIND (US)
FACETS – Sunday, 3:30pm
THE MASTERMIND begins, like so many Kelly Reichardt films, obliquely and suggestively. A man moseys through an art museum, his gaze oddly intense. In another room, a woman, turned away from the camera, ignores her chatty boy; both then ignore another, similar-looking boy who sits down beside the other, nose in a comic book. As a security guard naps in the background, the man nicks a small figurine from a glass case and slips it unnoticed into the woman’s bag before they and the kids leave together. In this quietly observant opening, Reichardt succinctly sets the stage for a film about compromised attention and useless hubris, and how a person’s myopic self-interest ultimately affects a self-defeating estrangement from the world. The ubiquitous Josh O’Connor is smartly cast as James, bringing a soft-spoken affability to a character who is profoundly selfish and dishonest. Living a comfy, conservative middle-class life with his wife (Alana Haim, sadly underused) and two kids in suburban Massachusetts circa 1970, he puts it all on the line by plotting the heist of four Arthur Dove paintings from the museum he was scouting in the opening scene. Only, the unduly confident James doesn’t feel he’s risking anything at all, and after he’s able to successfully steal the paintings with his two accomplices, he thinks he’s in the clear. But things fall apart quickly, not with the frenzy of a traditional thriller but with the placid melancholy Reichardt has honed throughout a filmography populated with the most ordinary and hapless of outcasts and loners. James takes the inverse course to many of the filmmaker’s protagonists, starting from social privilege before becoming increasingly displaced and alienated. Surrounded by news broadcasts of the Vietnam War and the activism of protestors, he can do nothing but retreat ever-inward; his tragedy is not born from his criminal activity but his chronic failure to attend to the things that actually matter. Reichardt’s longtime DP Christopher Blauvelt shoots in glowing autumnal shades that gradually give way to the chilly light of late fall; Rob Mazurek’s lively jazz score is the only element not joining in the sense of regressive drift. By the deeply ironic denouement, thick with societal disillusionment, THE MASTERMIND has repeatedly and dolefully shown that its ostensible hero—perhaps America itself—has no clothes. (2025, 110 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
📽️ ALSO SCREENING
⚫ Alamo Drafthouse
Sam Raimi’s 2009 film DRAG ME TO HELL (99 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday at 9:45pm and Wednesday at 10:30pm.
Uli Edel’s 1981 film CHRISTIANE F. (138 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday at 6:30pm.
Jess Franco’s 1980 film SINFONIA EROTICA (91 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday, 9:30pm, as part of the Terror Tuesday series. More info on all screenings here.
⚫ Chicago Film Archives
The January 2026 CFA Open House takes place on Sunday from 1 to 4:30pm. Drop by to chat with staff, tour the workspace and cold storage vault, see a film scanner demonstration, and watch a 16mm film projected on the wall. More info here.
⚫ Chicago Public Library
View all screenings taking place at Chicago Public Library branches here.
⚫ The Davis Theater
Oscarbate presents Trust Fall, their ongoing mystery screening series, on Saturday at 7pm.
Richard W. Munchkin’s 1987 film DANCE OR DIE (90 min, Digital Projection) screens Monday at 7:30m. More info on all screenings and events here.
⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
A program of Films by Rose Lowder (1995-2022, Total approx. 66 min, 16mm), including the masterful Bouquets series, screens Sunday, 7pm, as part of the Cinema’s Garden: The Films of Rose Lowder series.
Sarah Maldoror’s 1978 film AND THE DOGS WERE QUIET (13 min, DCP Digital) and her 1987 film AIMÉ CÉSAIRE: THE MASK OF WORDS (57 min, DCP Digital) screen Tuesday, 7pm, as part of the Sarah Maldoror: To Make a Film Means to Take a Position series.
Ava DuVernay’s 2012 film MIDDLE OF NOWHERE (101 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 7pm, as part of the Femalaise series.
Rob Letterman’s 2019 film POKÉMON: DETECTIVE PIKACHU (105 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 9:30pm, as part of the Screen Play: Cinematic Visions of Video Games and Sports series. More info on all screenings here.
⚫ FACETS
Joachim Trier’s 2025 film SENTIMENTAL VALUE (133 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday at 6:30pm.
The NOSE Film Festival, “an impetus for DIY filmmaking,” takes place Saturday, 6-9pm.
Ari Aster’s 2025 film EDDINGTON (149 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday at 6pm.
Open Space Arts presents Alan Brown’s 2025 film OTHER PEOPLE’S BODIES (85 min, Digital Projection) on Monday at 7pm.
The Chicago Reel Film Club, showcasing films and filmmakers from around Latin America, presents Gala del Sol’s 2025 film RAINS OVER BABEL (100 min, Digital Projection) on Tuesday, 7pm, preceded by a reception at 6pm. More info on all screenings and events here.
⚫ Mouse Arts and Letters Club
Join the Chicago based arts collective momoration 椋鳥群飛 for a screening of Wan Qing’s 2022 film THREE GIANT SALAMANDERS IN THE BASEMENT (49 min, Digital Projection) along with two other short films concerning anarchist tofu stands, martial arts, and identity cards. Following the screening, attendees will be invited to correspond via letter with the artists in Guangzhou. Screening as part of Mouse’s Event Series: Soybean Investigations. More info here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
Mascha Schilinski’s 2025 film SOUND OF FALLING (154 min, DCP Digital) begins screening. See Venue website for showtimes.
On Wednesday, 7pm, author Chuck Klosterman will be in attendance for a discussion of his new book, Football, and will sign copies afterwards. More info on all screenings and events here.
⚫ Siskel Film Center
Kaouther Ben Hania’s 2025 film THE VOICE OF HIND RAJAB (89 min, DCP Digital) continues. See Venue website for showtimes.
Sara Khaki & Mohammadreza Eyni’s 2025 documentary CUTTING THROUGH ROCKS (95 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday at 5:30pm, Sunday at 2:15pm, and Tuesday at 8:30pm.
Off Center, the Siskel’s monthly experimental screening series, presents WHISPERING PINES (2005-2019, Total approx. 60 min, Digital Projection), “Shana Moulton’s cult video art series in which her alter ego Cynthia seeks meaning and spirituality through various medical devices, self care products, and new age home decor,” on Monday at 6pm. 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: January 23, 2026 - January 29, 2026
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Ray Ebarb, Megan Fariello, Josephine Ferorelli, Jim Gabriel, Shaun Huhn, Ben Kaye, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Brian Welesko