:: FRIDAY, APRIL 18 - THURSDAY, APRIL 24 ::

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Masaki Kobayashi’s HARAKIRI (Japan)

Chicago Film Society at the Music Box Theatre – Monday, 7:30pm

HARAKIRI will always be crucial big screen viewing on the basis of Masaki Kobayashi’s mastery of black-and-white widescreen, the single most fascinating cinematic format. Working with cinematographer Yoshio Miyajima, Kobayashi employs deep focus to stage multiple planes of action across the long frame, while he uses the black-and-white palette to reflect the starkness of the film’s moral drama. Of course, HARAKIRI would not have endured if it were only an exceptional aesthetic object. The film is a landmark in Japanese cinema in large part for how it critiques the samurai genre and, by implication, the social hierarchy of postwar Japan. It takes place in 1630, shortly after the Tokugawa Shogunate consolidated political power and put a stop to fighting between various clans across the country; however, we learn early on that peace is bad news for samurai, as many of them have been relieved of their duties and relinquished to living in poverty. Some former samurai have taken to extorting money from feudal lords by showing up at their estates, requesting an audience to commit harakiri, or ritual suicide, and then accepting money when the lords take pity on them. HARAKIRI begins with the initiation of such a scheme, as the masterless warrior Hanshiro Tsugumo (Tatsuya Nakadai) arrives at the estate of the Iyi Clan and announces that he intends to kill himself in the traditional manner. Through an ingenious flashback structure, Kobayashi reveals that Tsugumo has ulterior motives for doing this—his son-in-law recently attempted the same trick but was denied money and forced to commit harakiri by the merciless Iyis. Tsugumo intends to take revenge on their house, but only after he exposes the hollowness of the code of honor that the Iyi Clan claims to uphold. In his mission to denounce hypocrisy, especially with regards to those in power, Tsugumo has a lot in common with Kobayashi, who came to prominence in the 1950s with hard-hitting films about corruption in contemporary Japanese society. (One of these, THE THICK-WALLED ROOM, a drama about Japan’s refusal to confront atrocities committed in WWII, was suppressed for three years due to its incendiary nature.) As Joan Mellen wrote for the Criterion Collection, Kobayashi meant for his critique of the feudal era in HARAKIRI to extend to the nascent corporatism of Japan in the 1950s and ‘60s. “In any era, I am critical of authoritarian power,” Mellen recalls him telling her, and the film’s urgency—much like its stirring, expressionistic style—closes any sense of distance between the past and the present. When Takashi Miike remade the film in 2011, he shot it in 3D to build upon the accomplishment of Kobayashi’s brilliant deep focus effects, yet for all the later film’s visual imagination, it can’t compare with the original in terms of political anger or overall forcefulness. (1962, 133 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

James Benning's 11 x 14 (US/Experimental)

Block Cinema (at Northwestern University) – Thursday, 7pm

James Benning’s exquisite feature-length narrative collage captures a series of arresting scene fragments, those moments of drama and tension found in the in-between of life. We glean traces of narrative throughout—​a man most likely having an affair, a lesbian couple on a road trip, a hitchhiker looking through odds and ends—​but are primarily left with snapshots of time that leave indelible impressions on any audience member willing to come along for the ride. Amidst this bevy of naturalistic montage, packed with billboards and vehicles and grand American nature, are three distinct long takes spread throughout the runtime, each announcing itself with little fanfare before burrowing into the watcher’s mind and laying root. First, a ten-minute, unbroken shot of a shadowy figure riding at the front of a Chicago L train, the audience projecting themselves into the silhouetted mind of the onscreen persona. Does sorrow lie there? Acceptance? Heartbreak? Mere passivity traveling across the tracks resting above Chicago? Next, two women in bed together, both nude in their respective fashions, as a record plunks away in the background. Reveling in silence for minutes on end, they eventually embrace each other in a tender contortion, projecting ease, comfort, and a beautiful stillness. Finally, perhaps the most inane image to sit with for minutes on end, a smoke stack, billowing a dragon’s breath of smoke over the course of seven minutes with an unidentified country track playing behind it, its own place in the film’s diegesis a mystery to the viewer. Benning is more than content to let his audience sit with moving images, be they organic or mechanical, dynamic or static, to revel in the faint recollections of the world around us. His worlds are, very much so, much weightier than puffs of smoke. Benning in person for a post-screening discussion and Q&A. (1977, 83 min, 35mm) [Ben Kaye]

Attractions of the Moving Image: An Evening with Tom Gunning

Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St.) – Friday, 7pm

University of Chicago Professor Emeritus Tom Gunning has been a guiding light in Chicago film culture for decades. An expert on early cinema and avant garde filmmaking, Gunning has taught many generations of U of C students and helped develop the invaluable collection at the Film Studies Center. This screening will celebrate his work with a screening of films covered in his career-spanning new book The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde. The screening begins with three silent films, two very early films from the turn of the century and one from a decade later, D.W. Griffith's THE LONEDALE OPERATOR (1911), which shows cinematic language making a great leap forward in regards to editing, framing, and narrative structure. According to Gunning, these first films "(show) how the early twentieth century caused machines of movement and the camera’s ability to capture motion to collide, transforming our sense of time, and merging physicality with virtuality." The rest of the screening focuses on giants of the American avant garde, with three films that share the silent films' focus on cinematic structure and technology, then three films that come from the more poetic tradition. Ernie Gehr's UNTITLED 1977 is a playful structural riff on camera movement, focus, and legibility. Ken Jacob's THE DOCTOR'S DREAM (1978) takes what could be a didactic editing exercise and creates something surreal and moving. Lewis Klahr's MONOGRAM (2019) uses Gunning's words and Klahr's always gorgeous collage animation. Kenneth Anger's FIREWORKS (1947) is literally and historically an explosive queer classic that somehow never gets old. Finally, two classic cameraless films by Stan Brakhage, the entomologically tactile MOTHLIGHT (1963) and the hand-painted and etched poetic eruption FIRST HYMN TO THE NIGHT - NOVALIS (1994). Preceded by a book signing with Gunning at 6:30pm. (1898-2019, Total approx. 78 min, 16mm & 35mm & Digital Projection) [Josh B Mabe]

Michael Roemer’s PILGRIM, FAREWELL (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Saturday, 7pm and Sunday, 4pm

One of the major cinematic events of the 2020s has been the rediscovery of VENGEANCE IS MINE (1984), the fourth narrative feature directed by Michael Roemer, one of the unluckiest auteurs this country has ever seen. Roemer’s first feature, NOTHING BUT A MAN (1964), wasn’t fully appreciated as a masterpiece of American independent filmmaking until it was rereleased in the early 1990s. His second, THE PLOT AGAINST HARRY (a hilarious dark comedy about a two-bit Jewish gangster trying to go straight), was completed in the late ‘60s but barely seen until 1989, and his subsequent work has been all but unavailable until recently. VENGEANCE IS MINE, Roemer’s last narrative feature to date, is an incisive study of mental illness that exhibits the same empathy and dedication to detail as his more socially focused first two features; if anything, these qualities feel even more bracing in VENGEANCE, since it’s rare for an American film to consider characters’ inner lives so thoroughly and unflinchingly. In short, Roemer’s recently rediscovered third narrative feature, PILGRIM, FAREWELL, arrives with great anticipation. If it’s anywhere as good as his other movies, then it’s likely a masterpiece. Here’s how Melissa Anderson described it recently at 4Columns when it played in New York: “PILGRIM, FAREWELL—which Roemer also wrote and which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 1980 before airing on American Playhouse in 1982—focuses on cancer patient Kate (Elizabeth Huddle). Thirty-nine years old, she has a few months to live… I can think of few films as emotionally chaotic. Not only is Kate explosive—constantly changing her mind, howling with pain and wrath, driven solely by base instinct—but she must also contend with an estranged college-aged daughter, Annie (Laurie Prange), who suffers from tenuous mental health and is agonizingly uncertain about the extent to which she wishes to reconcile with her mother. Navigating the maelstrom are the forbearing Paul (Christopher Lloyd, the cast’s only well-known performer), Kate’s lover, and Becca (Leslie Paxton), her younger sister, who arrives from Miami for an extended stay.” Screening as part of the New Releases and Restorations series. (1980, 102 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet’s FROM THE CLOUD TO THE RESISTANCE (Italy/West Germany/UK/France)

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

In a fortuitous programming coincidence, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s FROM THE CLOUD TO THE RESISTANCE gets a rare Chicago revival not long after the local premiere of Matías Piñeiro’s YOU BURN ME (2024), another unorthodox cinematic communion with the writing of Cesare Pavese. I wouldn’t be surprised if the former film inspired the latter, as both are so obsessed with conveying the richness of Pavese’s language that the language seems to determine a good deal of the formal decisions. In the case of Straub and Huillet, this often entails having actors deliver lengthy passages of Pavese’s prose in a declaratory manner that makes the film frame suggest the page of a book. FROM THE CLOUD TO THE RESISTANCE considers two works by the Italian author, Dialogues with Leucò and The Moon and the Bonfires. The first is a collection of philosophical conversations between mythological figures and mortals; the second is a novel, set shortly after WWII, about a man who returns to his hometown in northern Italy 25 years after he left to make his fortune in the United States. Straub and Huillet stage six episodes from Dialogues with Leucò, then several scenes from The Moon and the Bonfires; though the texts are rendered most explicitly, there are no hints as to how they’re thematically connected. This mix of clarity and opacity is characteristic of the filmmaking duo, who aimed for their spectators to be actively engaged with the sounds and images of their films, never taking anything for granted. The premise of a man returning to postwar Italy after getting rich in America takes on a certain miraculous tenor in light of the scenes of gods descending from the heavens to communicate with regular people, though Straub and Huillet refuse to suggest why. Preceded by Straub and Huillet’s 1977 short film EVERY REVOLUTION IS A THROW OF THE DICE (11 min, 35mm). Screening as part of the The History Lessons of Straub and Huillet series. (1979, 105 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Lino Brocka’s BONA (Philippines)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 6pm

Considered lost and now digitally restored, Filipino auteur Lino Brocka’s BONA centers on the titular character’s fixation on a bit actor named Gardo (Phillip Salvador). Instead of helping out around her middle-class home, Bona (Nora Aunor) often skips class and stays out late to watch Gardo on set. Worn down by the violent outbursts of her father, she decides to become Gardo’s live-in maid. Gardo’s mother has recently passed away, and he lives in a shack in the Manila slums. She soon becomes more of a maternal figure to Gardo than a would-be lover. Although Bona has devoted her every waking moment to him, he sees her as nothing but a tool at his disposal. As he flaunts women around her, her family life grows increasingly complicated, and her patience begins to wear thin. The film’s stark semi-neorealism and class consciousness lead to a fascinating examination of obsession. Bona chooses poverty and borderline slavery over a comfortable but violent life, all in the hopes of obtaining what she seems to view as a just-out-of-reach love. The slums of Manila provide Brocka with lively and layered mise-en-scène, whether he’s shooting the interiors of small homes or the exteriors of walkways and watering holes, giving glimpses into its inhabitants' daily routines and family life. Ordinary life is juxtaposed with the oppressive power dynamics that present themselves among the impoverished. The film most often reminded me of was Robert Bresson’s MOUCHETTE (1967), about an isolated teenager in a French village who faces hardship at every turn. As with the title character of that film, there’s an alienating sense of loneliness echoing off of Bona and a harshness permeating her life. She seems resigned to lifelong cycles of abuse. Brocka, with a focus on Aunor’s barely changing expression, taps deeply into Bona’s interiority and ambiguous rumination. The rediscovery of BONA is made possible thanks to José B. Capino, Film Studies Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, whose research for the book Martial Law Melodrama: Lino Brocka’s Cinema Politics helped spur the film’s restoration. Professor Capino will introduce the screening. (1980, 82 mins, DCP Digital) [Olivia Hunter Willke]

Rob Tregenza’s THE FISHING PLACE (Norway)

FACETS – Saturday, 3pm and 5pm

A shocking twist occurs about an hour into THE FISHING PLACE, Rob Tregenza’s first feature in almost a decade. I won’t reveal what it is, suffice to say that it disrupts the narrative and sets it on a very different, self-referential course. Such experimentation is in keeping with the work of this unique independent director, whose ambitious long takes interweave beautifully with his narrative content as well as inspire reflection on the filmmaking process. Before such long takes overwhelm the film completely, THE FISHING PLACE is an engrossing WWII drama set in Nazi-occupied Norway. Anna is a middle-aged domestic worker who’s released from prison near the start of the film; soon after, she’s selected by a Nazi officer to work for a German minister stationed in Telemark who’s suspected of aiding the Norwegian resistance. Anna is to spy on the minister and report on his activities to local officials, although she feels deeply ambivalent, if not repulsed, about doing so. The title refers to the spot where the minister likes to go ice fishing, something that occupies his days while he lives under suspicion; it also speaks to the unusual sense of calm that pervades many of the scenes. Tregenza’s camera, which is often on a dolly or a crane, explores the environments of the film like a curious ghost, suggesting a mix of engagement and detachment. One watches THE FISHING PLACE in a constant sense of suspense, wondering not just what will happen, but where the camera will go. Working as usual as his own cinematographer, Tregenza also shot the movie in an extremely wide aspect ratio, which he uses to underscore the lateral distances between characters and to minimize the spaces above and below them. This tension between expanded space on the x-axis and limited space on the y-axis has a compelling effect on the drama, and it primes viewers for the formal meditation of the third act. (2024, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Bruce LaBruce’s THE VISITOR (UK)

FACETS – Thursday, 9pm

There’s an exciting immediacy to which writer/director Bruce LaBruce demands we connect the pornographic acts of his latest feature with the political overtones on display, going as far as to have flashing slogans pop up on screen throughout the plentiful acts of coitus (some personal favorites include “Keep Calm and Fuck On,” “Open Borders, Open Legs,” and “Give Peace of Ass a Chance”). LaBruce’s pointed sci-fi psycho-sexual drama—his contemporary spin on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s TEOREMA (1968)—is satisfyingly dense for a film that could just as lazily be described as “an alien fucks a rich family so hard that they all lose their minds.” THE VISITOR’s orgasmic trappings contain deep commentary on contemporary immigration in the UK, the deep-seated insecurities of the upper class, and the repressed desires that keep all of us hidden away from the true pleasures of the world, all while relishing in the allure of an otherworldly figure (Bishop Black, as magnetic and statuesque as they come) who dares to upend all the social mores within their orbit. There is a comic, artful joy to LaBruce’s world, so thematically rich and so unsubtle in its horniness, so aesthetically sumptuous and so willingly absurd, to the point where the silly and the serious become one. What joy that, for the genuine sake of artistic freedom and expression, a maid being butt-fucked by a Jesus dildo accompanied by the flashing text “Let Jesus Fuck You” demands to be seen as an incredibly serious act. As the Visitor goes from sexual episode to sexual episode—eventually creating an air of temptation so powerful that some family members start lustily devouring each other in the bedroom—the distinct marriage of political anxiety and horny release provides enough variation in each scene so as not to let us become mired in a repetitive mindset of sexual boredom. (God forbid!) LaBruce’s visual stylings are also intoxicating in their own right, including the use of multi-quadrant space to divide the frame up into different scenes and different color filters, and one particular scene late in the action where each family member disrobes before the Visitor, unravelling as a sort of Moebius strip of filmmaking horizontally transporting through space. LaBruce opens the film with a voiceover bellowing an anti-immigration screed far too familiar to anyone with their ears open these days, but the subsequent action lets us know that perhaps those who have traveled so far to wash up on our shores have a lot more to teach us than we could ever imagine. THE VISITOR is, as one of the intertitles puts it, “Creating Change, One Fuck At A Time.” Preceded at 7pm by FACETS Film Trivia. Followed by a pre-recorded Q&A with LaBruce and local film programmer Scott Potis. (2024, 101 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

David Lynch: Moving Through Time

Music Box Theatre – See below for showtimes

Billy Wilder's SUNSET BOULEVARD (US)
Friday, 3pm
Drenched in cynicism, Billy Wilder's SUNSET BOULEVARD ranks up there with Robert Altman's THE PLAYER and David Lynch's MULHOLLAND DR. as one of the best critiques of Hollywood's toxic narcissism and cruelty. The last collaboration between Wilder and screenwriter Charles Brackett, SUNSET BOULEVARD centers on Norma Desmond (played with maniacal intensity by Gloria Swanson), a forgotten silent star who spends her days cooped up in her gothic tomb/mansion, obsessing over her glory days and penning the script which will launch her revival. By chance she encounters Joe Gillis, a down-on-his-luck screenwriter. Their working relationship mutates into a strange sexual dynamic, with Gillis eager to escape; however, he ultimately finds himself contaminated by the greed and disillusionment of Hollywood. Wilder enlisted the help of master cinematographer John F. Seitz, who also photographed DOUBLE INDEMNITY, to lend the film a chiaroscuro, noir-ish look. This is notable during one of the film's most memorable scenes, in which an entranced Desmond watches her celluloid self on the movie screen, the light from the projector flickering over her face creating a kind of literal fusion of reality and fantasy. Look for a cameo from silent filmicon Buster Keaton (referred to by Gillis as a "waxwork"), as well as Cecil B. DeMille playing himself. (1950, 110 min, 35mm) [Harrison Sherrod]
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David Lynch's MULHOLLAND DRIVE (US)
Friday, 5:45pm
Part mind-bending mystery, part hair-raising thriller, part tear-jerking break-up soapfest, David Lynch’s MULHOLLAND DRIVE evokes an aura of nocturnal wonder and dread, a realm caught between the parameters of waking life and dreams, achingly poignant in its emotional core, absolutely hypnotizing in its formal ambiance, and sometimes-frustratingly labyrinthine in its thorny construction. Addressing the cult of personality that is David Lynch’s public persona, it’s hard to look past the hovering cloud that is his semi-comical presence as a cult figure. His fan base certainly gives the impression that Lynch has been, and will always be, the only director who can tap into the idea of dreamworlds and existential cinematic strangeness. Even though this is severely not the case, it isn’t enough to diminish an artist who frequently operates at the height of his powers behind the camera. MULHOLLAND DRIVE contains many elements of his previous work and re-contextualizes them into a concise, epic investigation into the landscape of a shifting personality, that moves with the weight of a person waking and falling into a series of dreams, contrasted with possible realities imagined and lived in. Naomi Watts plays “Betty,” who comes to Hollywood hoping to achieve stardom as an actress in the movies. She catches the attention of a young director played by Justin Theroux, who has been told by a shady, ultra-powerful group (led by Twin Peaks’ “The Arm”) to cast a different actress in his movie. This actress, first glimpsed being driven along the spiraling and ink-black road of the film’s title, suffers a near-assassination attempt, and is left an amnesiac. When she wakes, she believes her name is “Rita”, eventually running into “Betty,” where together they try to solve the mystery regarding “Rita” and her true identity, falling into a romantic obsession in the process. Over the course of the movie, the characters’ identities begin to shift, leading to possible alternate realities in the film’s story and timeline, where Lynch plays with the illusion of the cinema as a false construction that occasionally evokes deep emotional responses from those witnessing it. This idea is fleshed out in the “Silencio” scene, where the two women stumble upon a nightclub with a singer, Rebecca Del Rio, performing a Spanish version of a famous Roy Orbison song. As she sings, the two women begin to cry uncontrollably at the performance, which is eventually revealed to be false, as the singer isn’t even singing and the music is pre-recorded. When the music stops, so does the singer, as she collapses on stage and is dragged off. Lynch pulls a cinematic magic trick on his viewers, engulfing them in the emotions of these two women, who are witnessing something that is a construct, while simultaneously being emotionally swept up in its power and beauty, crying to an illusion that is revealed to be false. One of the most powerful scenes of the last several decades, the rest of the film is a testament to a director operating at peak levels of his matured artistry. Twin Peaks: The Return has much in common with this bewitching work, even in its production history. MULHOLLAND DRIVE started originally as a TV pilot, later to become a series, but never actually materialized into one, so it was changed to a feature film, while Twin Peaks: The Return is a television show that feels more like a long movie in the spirit of Jacques Rivette (who once remarked that the feature film TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME, very much the origin to MULHOLLAND, left the French filmmaker “floating” when he left the theater). Much like his recent work with Peaks, characters tend to appear and vanish without trace, while identities twist and morph into sometimes wholly different characters. Like the devastating, yet cathartic ending of his recent 18-hour masterwork, digging deeper into an obsessive mystery can sometimes bring you further and further from the reality of what it is you began searching for in the first place. (2001, 147 min, 35mm) [John Dickson]
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David Lynch's BLUE VELVET (US)
Friday, Midnight
This is where the legend really began. It's curious to think how Lynch's career would have developed if DUNE (1984) had not been a box office failure, but cinema history can thank him for not playing it safe with this rebound project. Though Lynch had already made three features, BLUE VELVET was the first full articulation of his core theme of the evil that lurks in small towns everywhere. Not the outright surrealist endeavor that was ERASERHEAD, it is also not the most accessible of narratives. Dark, violent, sexual, and reeking of 1963 suburbia, the film is at times a noir mystery and at others a violent thriller. Many of the visual symbols that would populate TWIN PEAKS are introduced here, such as red curtains appearing when danger is present in a scene, and Lynch's continued growth as a complete cinematic artist is evident. Despite having a cast that didn't feature a legitimate star (Dennis Hopper may be the exception, but his career was in the dumps when he was cast...as the third choice), the film earned Lynch his second Academy Award nomination for Best Picture, as well as praise from critics throughout the world. It's also notable that Kyle MacLachlan (essentially playing Dale Cooper) might never have worked again if not for his excellent performance. Still dangerous all these years later, the film is as gorgeous as it is classic. (1986, 120 min, 35mm) [Jason Halprin]
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Tim Hunter's RIVER'S EDGE (US)
Saturday, 4:30pm
When considering the teen movies of the 1980s, it is hard to deny the power of John Hughes’ comedies to capture collective cultural memory, driving a nostalgia that continues to be referenced. RIVER’S EDGE, winner of the Independent Spirit Awards for Best Feature and Best Screenplay, is an entirely different take on teen-hood as a true-crime that bends heavily into horror. After one of their own (Daniel Roebuck) murders his girlfriend, Jamie (Danyi Deats), and leaves her naked body by the river, a group of California teens grapple with what to do with the knowledge of their friend’s crime. RIVER’S EDGE handles themes of violence against women, drug use, and domestic abuse with stark realism. Tim Hunter’s direction presents a natural grey-toned world as the jean and plaid-clothed teenagers listen to thrash metal while they struggle to recognize the gravity of their peer’s actions and their own complicit silence. Addressing throughout the differing levels of apathy amongst the teens, Neal Jimenez’s disquieting script is excellent; it is decidedly dark but not nihilistic. The film features expectedly unsettling turns from Dennis Hopper and Crispin Glover, but it’s the other young actors from the time who deliver the most impressive performances, including Keanu Reeves, Ione Skye, and a particularly remarkable Joshua John Miller. RIVER’S EDGE’s influence may not be as obvious as other 80s teen films, but its effect is felt nonetheless; the repeated and haunting visual of Jamie’s body is a clear predecessor of the more iconic image of another girl found dead by the water a few years later: Laura Palmer. Hunter went on to have a long career directing television, including three episodes of the original Twin Peaks series. (1986, 100 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]
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David Lynch's TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (US)
Saturday, Midnight
I once knew a survivor of childhood sexual abuse who told me that David Lynch's TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME is the only film that ever really got it right. The way incest deranges you, the unprocessable betrayal, the PTSD. Describing her abuse, she said she'd had her own personal Freddie Krueger, and Lynch portrays Laura Palmer's final days as a horror movie—scarier than most, and truer. Critics missed the thrust of this baffler, calling it the worst thing Lynch ever did, if not one of the worst films ever made. Today, it looks like a flawed masterpiece, exhausting and exhilarating. It's a singular portrayal of "garmonbozia" (pain and sorrow), the cream corn of evil—with all the Lynchian disjunctures that sentence implies. It's abrasive at every level, from Lynch's screaming, whooping sound design to the punishing immersion into Laura's hell. But its extremism is the source of its hypnotic power, and Lynch's corybantic surrealism fits the theme. Sheryl Lee is astonishing as doomed, anguished Laura; Ray Wise is terrifying (and, in deranging moments, loving) as her molester father. Then there's that first 35 minutes, which play like a savage parody of the TV show, with Chris Isaak and Keifer Sutherland investigating a murder in Deer Meadow, a negative image of our favorite Pacific Northwest town. Here, the coffee's two days old, the diner is seedy, the small-town cops are jerks, and the dead woman is not exactly the homecoming queen. (One suspects that the cherry pie would be damn poor.) The "Lil the Dancer" scene is a delightful thumbnail illustration of semiotics, and Harry Dean Stanton is on hand as Carl, manager of the Fat Trout trailer park. Angelo Badalamenti's score is creamy and dreamy, mournful and menacing. Actually, I suspect that if you're not already well-versed in the lore of Bob, Mike, the One-Armed Man, The Arm a.k.a. The Man From Another Place, Mrs. Tremond and her grandson, and the Owl Cave ring, then you might have stumbled upon this site by accident. I'd guess our readers share my excitement that the stars, and the passage of 25 years, have aligned so that we are actually poised to reenter the Black Lodge. If you haven't boned up on this prequel, then hie to this revival. (Or even if you have: you'll see something new every time.) (1992, 135 min, Unconfirmed Format) [Scott Pfeiffer]
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David Lynch’s THE STRAIGHT STORY (US)
Sunday, 11:15am
Critics regularly describe THE STRAIGHT STORY as David Lynch’s least characteristic film because it’s a G-rated docudrama without any explicitly avant-garde flourishes, yet Lynch’s artistic personality is plainly evident throughout. The performers speak in that unemphatic, naïve-sounding manner that’s been a Lynch trademark since the beginning of his career, and the director films the all-American imagery (in this case, Midwestern farmlands and small towns) in an iconographic way that shows a direct connection to the settings of his BLUE VELVET and Twin Peaks. After the fashion of those two landmarks, there are even implications of dark, buried secrets beneath the Norman Rockwell-esque surfaces: the life of Alvin Straight, we learn, is marked by war trauma, alcoholism, family disputes, and a particularly heartbreaking episode that befell his adult daughter. These secrets never come to light in images, however (which is why the film had no trouble getting its G rating); instead, they take the form of poignant monologues that reveal how Straight has internalized and atoned for his tragedies. This narrative strategy allows THE STRAIGHT STORY to maintain a warm, contemplative tone from beginning to end. Some have likened this to the late films of Yasujiro Ozu, but it more likely has roots in Lynch’s longtime practice of transcendental meditation. Whatever inspired the film’s blissful patience is less important than the refreshing effect it has on the viewer; to watch THE STRAIGHT STORY is a bit like engaging in transcendental meditation yourself. For me, it all comes down to the long shot of Straight on his riding lawn mower, progressing at a snail’s pace down an unremarkable highway. The camera pans up, contemplates a perfect Heartland horizon for a few moments, then pans back down to find that Straight has barely progressed since we last saw him. The moment is both funny (Lynch suggests an ellipsis, only to reveal it isn’t one) and touching (the moment encapsulates the old man’s perseverance and quiet integrity), showing how much Lynch is able to assert his personal aesthetic in atypical circumstances. Deserving special mention for their creative contributions are veteran cinematographer Freddie Francis (who came out of retirement to shoot the film) and Sissy Spacek, who gives an unbelievably moving performance as Straight’s daughter. (1999, 112 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
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David Lynch's LOST HIGHWAY (US)
Sunday, 2:30pm
David Lynch loves to play in the dark. His longtime cinematographer Frederick Elmes once remarked that "with David, my job is to determine how dark we're talking about." There's sort-of-dark, and really-dark, and pitch-black-dark; all of these kinds and more are put to gripping use in LOST HIGHWAY. The most breathtaking example (perhaps echoing a shot from THRONE OF BLOOD) is a scene that takes place in a shadowy hallway. Avant-garde sax player and demi-protangonist Fred Madison slowly moves from lightness to dark, appearing to slowly dissolve before our very eyes. It's the sort of infinitely subtle visual moment that home video just can't adequately reproduce, and LOST HIGHWAY is packed with them. For too long this movie has overshadowed by its more-celebrated follow-up, MULHOLLAND DR. But the fact is the two movies function as a true diptych, exploring similar themes of doubling and identity in ways that complement each other. To ignore LOST HIGHWAY is to discount some of Lynch's most indelible moments: including an unforgettably disquieting sex scene, the eerie Natalie Woodishness of a leather-clad Natasha Gregson Wagner, a gorgeous use of This Mortal Coil's "Song to the Siren," Richard Pryor's out-of-left-field cameo (it was his final film), and of course Robert Blake's unforgettable performance as the sinister Mystery Man. (1997, 135 min, DCP Digital) [Rob Christopher]
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David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE (US)
Sunday, 5:30pm
So few digitally-shot features dare to place the medium's technical limitations at the front and center of their aesthetic. Mostly filmmakers just hope that the audience ignores how crappy everything looks. Not David Lynch. INLAND EMPIRE obsessively fixates on the look of mid-grade digital video: blocky smears of light, washed-out colors, hazy and peculiar. It's literally a dreamworld. As in a dream, you can't always tell what you're seeing—or what it means. There is only the eternal now; in the film's world, memory can just as easily refer to tomorrow as to yesterday. Memory is as blurry as the degraded visuals. We're forced to squint between the pixels, trying to remember. Lynch marries this to a soundtrack that's arrestingly intricate, populated with all manner of industrial noises and hair-raising sound effects. It's an image/sound mashup as scary and bewildering as any nightmare. Seen in a darkened theater we're caught in its brilliant grip. (2006, 180 min, DCP Digital) [Rob Christopher]
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More information on the series, including additional programs not covered above, available here.

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Charles Burnett's KILLER OF SHEEP (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

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

Braden Sitter's THE PEE PEE POO POO MAN (Canada)

Music Box Theatre – Thursday, 7pm

Consider browning out in decadent, idiotic style at a positively ectopic screening of this deranged no-wave transmission from the Toronto indie scene, which will be besmirching Music Box's historic main theater for one glorious night only. I would just advise you bring a bucket, a change of clothes, and possibly a trip-sitter for good measure, noting that this film contains sequences that may prove hazardous to your psychic wellbeing if you are squeamish, generally uptight, schlock-averse, emotionally well-adjusted, prone to acid flashbacks, or, in the absolute worst-case scenario, a recovering victim of the MKUltra project. Not unlike Gus Van Sant with his ELEPHANT (2003), Braden Sitter Sr. (who, I feel compelled to mention, does not appear to have a son) has produced a work of speculative true-crime fiction that turns its gaze towards a scene of senseless carnage in a desperate (and likely futile) attempt to situate any meaning within it whatsoever. The film is a shamelessly schizoid inquiry into the case of Toronto's real life Pee Pee Poo Poo Man, who terrorized the city over the course of four days in 2019 by tossing buckets of liquefied feces on random passersby. At first, it seems as though the film is hellbent on fabricating possible answers to the most pressing question posed by the whole debacle: what on earth would possess a man to do this? Was it the overwhelmingly nihilistic result of one too many failed job interviews? Perhaps a life-changingly bad tab of acid? Could it have been a garbled message from God? Or a shockingly straightforward message from the CIA agent who seems to intermittently possess the Pee Pee Poo Poo Man's TV set? Eventually, I did begin to sense a coherent message churning in the deepest recesses of this scatological field of nightmares. Any one of us—cowering subjects of late-capitalism, all—who are more often than not desperately clinging to our sanity, could be one catastrophically bad day away from embarking on a similar crusade of total fecal armageddon. In what proved to be a terrific source of clarity and critical insight, insider sources informed me that Sitter financed his film more or less exclusively by enrolling himself in paid medical experiments at local universities. Make of that information what you will. In the massively unlikely event that any readers are still currently on the fence about seeing THE PEE PEE POO POO MAN, I feel as though I should nod to the film's delightfully Canada-centric cameos from Spencer Rice (of Kenny vs. Spenny fame) and Paul Bellini (from Kids in the Hall). Sitter in attendance for a post-screening Q&A. (2024, 79 min, DCP Digital) [David Whitehouse]

Ron Fricke's BARAKA (US/Documentary)

Block Cinema (at Northwestern University) – Friday, 7pm

At a time when Americans’ wings were clipped, and rightly so, because of our previous (mis)leader’s murderous fumbling of the Covid-19 pandemic, I needed Ron Fricke’s BARAKA. I was able to roam and fly across the world virtually via this sweeping, breathtakingly gorgeous documentary. BARAKA (the word denotes “blessing” in both Judaism and Islam) was shot by Fricke himself in widescreen (“Todd-AO”) 70mm, on every continent except Antarctica and in almost as many countries as there are letters of the alphabet. Associational and non-narrative, and deploying not a single word, BARAKA sings of the universal human impulse toward the numinous. We flit across St. Peter’s Basilica, the Western Wall, whirling dervishes in Istanbul, a mass of pilgrims circling Kaaba in Mecca for Hajj, the sacred Uluru/Ayers Rock sandstone formation. The film pulses with a primal beat which evokes the quest—religious, intellectual, or both—for personal or collective transcendence. Michael Stearns composed the original music and curated the soundtrack, which conceives of all the world’s song, on one level, as a form of prayer. It is at least as important as the images to setting the movie’s tone, which veers from solemn majesty to sorrowful/ironic witness to our dehumanizing tendencies. I suppose a certain kind of critic may feel the film’s critique—essentially, that our modern world is out of balance, and that ancient or “primitive” cultures may offer more thoughtful, less destructive ways of living on our planet—is almost cliché. Maybe, but the point happens to be correct; moreover, Fricke’s juxtapositions are never facile, and his method actually involves a certain objectivity. Watch the fast-motion footage of workers in an electronics factory in Tokyo, and perhaps you reflect that it is probably much like the one where your laptop was made. Watch chicks being spit down the conveyor belt in a factory farm in Santa Cruz, and draw your own conclusions about what it takes to produce food for a mass society—as well as what, if any, connections might exist between overconsumption in the West and people foraging for sustenance in dumps in Calcutta. Nor do we pass over humanity’s genocidal impulse—at one moment we find ourselves alone inside Auschwitz, the next we’re in the Khmer Rouge’s S-21 prison/torture center. On the whole, though, this is a deeply humanistic vision. One of Fricke’s motifs is to have subjects gaze without expression directly into the camera, seeming to peer into us even as we regard them. If any of this sounds familiar, it is because Fricke was the cinematographer on Godfrey Reggio’s KOYAANISQATSI, that landmark of “pure cinema” from 1982. I vividly recall huddling around a TV in a darkened room with the family in the ‘80s, mesmerized by that film’s dizzying imagery and the hypnotic Philip Glass music. BARAKA is an evolution of that film’s techniques and themes, using time-lapse photography to show dawn break and night fall from the Angkor ruins to the pyramids of Giza, as the world turns under a whirling, vapory sky. Some may interpret the film as a work of praise—an invitation to celebrate God’s labors in the grandeur of nature. Your choice—but for sure it’s an overwhelming sensory and emotional experience. As BARAKA crescendos to its climax, we glide through the interior of the Shah-e-Cheragh mosque in Shiraz, Iran, which blazes with a seemingly infinite array of bits of colored glass. Its makers meant to evoke heaven. So beautiful. BARAKA is the movie I want flowing through my head on my deathbed. Composer Michael Stearns in person for a post-screening discussion with Northwestern Professor Jacob Smith (Screen Cultures, Sound Arts and Industries). (1992, 97 min, Digital Projection) [Scott Pfeiffer]

Wes Craven’s SHOCKER (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Tuesday, 9:30pm

This year marks ten years since the loss of Wes Craven—a horror visionary whose career was less a straight line than a series of brave, jagged reinventions. From the brutal transgression of LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972) to the dream-haunting genius of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984) and the postmodern reinvigoration of SCREAM (1996), Craven built—and rebuilt—his legend with each passing decade. For every SCREAM, there were big swings that didn’t succeed as intended. During the decade between ELM STREET and NEW NIGHTMARE (1994), Craven fought a quieter war: one of creative control and personal reckoning. Craven’s output during this period may not have achieved box office success, it still remains a prolific era of his career. He made several TV movies, wrote the third installment of ELM STREET, directed episodes for The Magical World of Disney and Twilight Zone, produced and directed the shows Nightmare Café and The People Next Door, all while financing and directing DEADLY FRIEND (1986), THE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW (1988), SHOCKER, and THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS (1991). SHOCKER stands out as a fascinating act of creative rebellion. The film emerged from a failed promise and a personal grudge. Financing for SHOCKER and THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS came from Alive Films, who had originally secured a four-picture deal with John Carpenter. After THEY LIVE (1988), Carpenter walked away, and Craven stepped in to fulfill the contract. As Freddy Krueger became a pop culture mascot—cracking jokes between kills—Craven watched his creation morph into something unrecognizable. His response? SHOCKER, an ambitious film born of frustration and a deep desire to bury Freddy once and for all. SHOCKER introduces Horace Pinker (Mitch Pileggi), a devil-worshipping TV repairman and serial killer who, after being captured, strikes a satanic deal through a television set just before his execution. When he dies in the electric chair, he transforms into a non-corporeal menace, jumping between bodies and traveling through media signals to continue his rampage. Instead of opening with Freddy making his glove, it’s Horace Pinker with circuit boards and black magic. Newsreel montages of bombings, human skulls, and dog fights set the tone: channel surfing through a mediascape saturated by violence without context. Detective Don Parker (Michael Murphy) and his foster son Jonathan (Peter Berg) may be the only ones who can stop Pinker. Jonthan dreams of the murders before they happen, launching a surreal blend of hunting a killer and supernatural thriller. The first forty-five minutes are akin to Michael Mann’s MANHUNTER (1986)—grim, procedural, methodical. Megadeth’s rendition of Alice Cooper’s “No More Mr. Nice Guy” plays as the camera circles the execution room, signaling a shift in tone from the first half of the film. Once Pinker’s spirit enters the electrical ether, Craven unplugs from realism and surges into absurdist horror. Jonathan and Pinker’s final showdown is a wild, channel-surfing battle that sees them crashing through sitcoms, boxing matches, and news reports. It’s SHERLOCK JR. (1924) by way of Looney Tunes, an electric carnival of media madness. The TV trapped Horace Pinker was ripe for sequels, but Craven’s revenge wasn’t well received. Several horror films of the era depicted executed villains returning to continue their bloodshed including PRISON (1987), DESTROYER (1988), HOUSE III (1989), and THE FIRST POWER (1990). SHOCKER stands apart for its sheer audacity: a gonzo horror experiment filled with possession tropes, tonal whiplash, and pointed critiques of violence-as-entertainment. If the film failed as a blockbuster, it succeeded as a stepping-stone toward the meta brilliance of NEW NIGHTMARE and SCREAM. SHOCKER is an artifact of a filmmaker grappling with his own creation and with the screen itself. In the static between the channels, Craven was able to see something uncanny and unforgettable. Screening as part of the Terror Tuesdays series. (1989, 109 min, 35mm) [Shaun Huhn]

Howard Hawks' BALL OF FIRE (US)

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

In Howard Hawks’ screwball comedy BALL OF FIRE, Professor Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper) is a grammarian who is studying modern slang. He lives with seven other professors who are all working together to produce an encyclopedia of all human knowledge. While out researching, Bertram finds himself at a nightclub where he meets performer Sugarpuss O’Shea (Barbara Stanwyck). Her colorful vocabulary is exactly what he needs for his project but she hesitant to assist him until it is revealed she needs a place to hide from the authorities because they want to question her about her mobster boyfriend. Shades of SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARVES are felt here as the professors and their idiosyncratic personalities learn to live with the saucy Sugarpuss. BALL OF FIRE was the last film written by Billy Wilder before his own foray into filmmaking and working under Hawks on this film had an immense influence on Wilder’s career. Because of the strong writing and even-handed directing, Stanwyck is a perfect example of the quintessential Hawksian woman here. Her quick wit and cool demeanor allow her to assimilate into the professors’ home quite easily and her character is often cool under pressure. Sugarpuss stands tall amongst a cast full of offbeat characters. With an oeuvre as long and celebrated as Hawks’, BALL OF FIRE might not be one of the first titles that springs to mind when thinking of the director but it assuredly carries all the hallmarks of his finest comedic works. Screening as part of the Something in Your Eye: Early Meet Cutes series. (1941, 111 min, 35mm) [Kyle Cubr]

Shinya Tsukamoto's TETSUO: THE IRON MAN (Japan)

Music Box Theatre – Saturday, Midnight

Unmistakable in its bold style and nihilistic tone, TETSUO: THE IRON MAN is truly one of a kind. This low-budget feature holds an important place in the history of cyberpunk cinema, testing the limits of its own aesthetic through 16mm film, shoddy stop-motion animation, and practical body-horror effects created by taping broken electronics to the actors' bodies. The film's cult following (in spite of its nonexistent budget and DIY approach) is a testament to the idea that anyone can make a classic with the right vision and dedication; and man, did Tsukamoto have both. The film was shot over 18 grueling months with a crew that was constantly shrinking, leaving only Tsukamoto, co-cinematographer Kei Fujiwara, and a few others at the end of filming. To emphasize how small this crew was to begin with, Tsukamoto and Fujiwara also act in the film as two of the major characters, only surpassed in screen time by Tomorowo Taguchi in one of the other leading roles. The plot is very loose: a Japanese salaryman and an outcast who was struck in a mysterious car accident both face unimaginable, dreamlike horrors as they morph into monsters made out of metal and other miscellaneous machinery. What's more important to the film than what brought them to these changes is how these changes affect their views of the world. Through each of these men, we see reality quickly turning into a nightmare, whether it's in the form of senseless death, fetishized murder, or people and their surroundings turning into jagged, unappealing masses of metal. It comes as no surprise how quickly the main characters morph into the violent, mechanical creatures they seem fated to become, and in a weird way it almost feels expected that they take their misfortune out on the world around them. TETSUO: THE IRON MAN is a high-octane joyride from start to finish, and there's no other film that has quite captured its relentless, unsettling grit. Programmed and presented by SUPER-HORROR-RAMA. Every ticket includes a limited edition pinback button (new design each night), and every show kicks off with giveaways donated by the House of Monsters, the Shadowboxery, Cryptid Craft Studio, Night Natalie, and Drive-In Asylum for the first people who answer trivia questions correctly. (1989, 67 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Bates]

Martin Scorsese's AFTER HOURS (US)

The Davis Theater – Thursday, 9:30pm

AFTER HOURS conveys, like nothing else in the director’s body of work, the sheer joy that Martin Scorsese derives from making movies. It’s funny, playful, and invigorating, with a style that positively whooshes you through the action. Working with cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (best known at the time for his run of films with Rainer Werner Fassbinder), Scorsese executes breathtaking camera movements indoors and outdoors alike, creating a sense of furious activity that betrays the film’s limited playing space. Most of it takes place in the Manhattan neighborhood of SoHo, where Griffin Dunne’s lonely office drone goes to meet the alluring woman (Patricia Arquette) whom he picked up at a cafe. Searching for easy sex, Paul winds up in a nightmare. His long night consists of one misadventure after another, as he gets bounced around the neighborhood (and into other parts of the borough) like a pinball; the story culminates with Dunne getting mistaken for a wanted criminal and hunted down by an angry mob. As twisty and as witty as Scorsese’s direction, Joseph Minion’s script (originally written for an NYU screenwriting class taught by Dusan Makavejev) operates under a calculated illogic that many have compared to the writing of Franz Kafka. And like a Kafka protagonist, Dunne has the misfortune of living in a universe that just doesn’t like him; his bad luck seems almost cosmic in nature. Adding to his misfortune, almost everyone Dunne meets is some kind of kook, and the colorful supporting cast plays those kooks for all they’re worth. Of special mention are Teri Garr, who plays a flaky artist, and John Heard, who reveals a deep reservoir of angst in his brief turn as a bartender. Screening as part of the Not Quite Midnight series. (1985, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Federico Fellini’s JULIET OF THE SPIRITS (Italy)

Alamo Drafthouse – Tuesday, 6:30pm

Poor Giulietta Masina. In the five films she made with her husband, Federico Fellini, he saw fit to cast her, variously, as a prostitute, a slave, and a hausfrau—all of whom are abused and deceived by the men in their lives. In their last collaboration, JULIET OF THE SPIRITS, Masina is an older, wealthier, more embittered version of the bourgeoise she played in IL BIDONE (1955). In that film, her thieving husband lies to her about how he gets his money and promises to reform when she finds out—another lie she chooses to believe because they're still in love. In JULIET OF THE SPIRITS, however, Masina’s character (also called Giulietta) tries to blind herself to her husband’s infidelities but finally hires investigators to uncover the truth. She then sets out, much like Tom Cruise’s provincial OB/GYN in EYES WIDE SHUT (1999), to see what she’s been missing in her conventional life. With his own marriage in trouble, Fellini said this film was a gift to Masina. But like other director-actor spouses who made films together in times of marital strife—Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman (JOURNEY TO ITALY [1954]), Alexander Payne and Sandra Oh (SIDEWAYS [2004]), Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt (BY THE SEA [2015])— Fellini found a way to air his grievances with his long-suffering star. The film, Fellini’s first in color, is bedazzling. The rich, bold hues help the director present his iconic circus imagery in a way he never could before. The spirits that tempt and taunt Giulietta include figures from her strict Catholic upbringing and a hedonistic neighbor played by Fellini’s lover, Sandra Milo. While no one in the outrageous ensemble surrounding Masina seems even remotely as sincere or interesting as they think they are (like most characters in psychedelic films of the ’60s), Giulietta hardly represents a strong core for the film. She seems almost naïvely lost in a world she must know very well, and that's a contradiction that neither Masina nor Fellini can pull off. By trying to showcase his wife’s virtue, Fellini only manages to scold her for her ordinariness, creating a rather sour atmosphere in the process. Although, like most dreams, this dreamlike film fades rather quickly from memory, it is worth seeing as a crucial link between Fellini’s earlier, more realistic films and the excessive artifice of the later films in his oeuvre. Screening as part of the Queer Film Theory 101 series. (1965, 137 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Terry Gilliam's TIME BANDITS (UK)

The Davis Theater – Sunday, 1pm

If Andrei Tarkovsky crafted profound lyric poems about dreams and the time-space continuum, then Terry Gilliam might be his lowbrow, comic book counterpart. Indeed, anachronistic whimsy abounds in TIME BANDITS, the first feature in Terry Gilliam's "Trilogy of Imagination." The film centers on Kevin, a precocious young history buff who discovers that his bedroom closet is a time portal to the past. After inadvertently joining forces with a team of treasure hunting dwarves, he travels to various centuries, encountering Napoleon, Robin Hood, Agamemnon, and others. Each dwarf has been said to represent a member of the Monty Python troupe (Gilliam himself is embodied by Vermin, the plucky leader of the group). The word "logic" is not part of Gilliam's vocabulary, and the sooner one can jettison the need for any hint of historical accuracy or narrative coherence, the sooner one will be susceptible to the film's charm. Though it has the trappings of a children's movie, TIME BANDITS features some delightfully disturbing images, namely undead minotaurs who emit fireballs from their empty eye sockets. In fact, under its fanciful surface, this is essentially a story about a boy who's so ignored by his parents that he welcomes what befalls them. Gilliam attempts to inject the film with some social commentary by offering a perfunctory critique of techno-modernity and consumer culture, but luckily this gets lost amidst all the wackiness. As with any Gilliam film, TIME BANDITS boasts plenty of psychedelic eye candy and visual wizardry, including spatial distortion, inverted images, and M.C. Escher-esque set design. Screening as part of the Coming of Age series. (1981, 116 min, DCP Digital) [Harrison Sherrod]

Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham & Rachel Szor’s NO OTHER LAND (Norway/Palestine/Documentary)

FACETS Cinema – Saturday and Thursday, 7pm

“This is a story about power.” Basel Adra, a lifelong resident of the Masafer Yatta region of the West Bank, speaks these words to cap off a story about former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s visit to the region, a visit that—while perhaps nothing more than a publicity stunt—resulted in the IDF's previously scheduled demolitions of Palestinian schools and homes to be called off. But this film, NO OTHER LAND, is also a story about power, about needless emotional and physical damage, about the constant barrage of senseless destruction of peoples’ livelihoods that so many around the world have either become desensitized to or have found labyrinthine methods of justifying to themselves this continued degradation of humanity. The framework of the onscreen narrative stretches from the summer of 2019 through October of 2023, and it focuses on the growing friendship between two of the film’s directors: the aforementioned Basel and Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist who has arrived to learn more about the continuing Israeli mission of Palestinian subjugation. The footage we see is, at the very least, rage-inducing: homes and schools and entire villages senselessly bulldozed to oblivion, supposedly for the flimsy excuse of being turned into “military zones.” The ensuing carnage and accompanying attitudes perpetrated by the Israeli soldiers captured on film oscillates between “duty-bound” apathy or entitled machismo, in one instance resulting in a soldier shooting and paralyzing a friend of Basel’s, Harun Abu Aram. The law is, indeed, on the side of the Israelis, so why should these Palestinian children be so upset when their homes are destroyed in broad daylight when it’s perfectly “legal” to do so? The filmmakers make a point to highlight the intentional existential ploy being pulled off here, where Israelis can come and go as they please throughout the West Bank, whereas Palestinians are legally bound to the region and otherwise othered in all aspects of Israeli society (Basel notes, despite having a law degree, he would only realistically be able to find a job as a construction worker were he to move to Israel). Throughout it all—perhaps to actively combat it all—there are still laughs shared among family members, there are still games played in the snow during winter, and the children still play and swing around and try to find some semblance of joy amidst their displacement. Underneath the political mire of the “complicated” banner so often thrown at the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, there are simply families wanting to share a meal together, mothers caring for sons, fathers keeping businesses afloat, and countless young people staring at their phones, because what else is there? That the directing team is comprised of both Israelis and Palestinians points towards some kind of hopeful future where a shared understanding of the horrors at hand can be truly realized (some of the more noteworthy and thorny passages arise when various Palestinians question Yuval’s own complicity in the continued settlements of the region, though the film leaves these points dangling rather than digging deeper, for better or worse). Additionally, that the film failed to find US theatrical distribution, while still receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature, speaks to how open endorsement for Palestinian rights tends to only go so far. Perhaps the true power of NO OTHER LAND, and of this entire story, is the continued resilience and drive in Palestinians capturing the reality on the ground and urgently spreading the truth as far as possible. Here, the camera proves mightier than the sword. (2024, 96 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

📽️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Alliance Française de Chicago (54 W. Chicago Ave.)
Francis Legault’s 2016 documentary THE TASTE OF A COUNTRY (102 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday, 6:30pm, followed by a post-screening discussion with Brian Winters, Assistant Director of River Trail Nature Center in Northbrook and a 25-year veteran interpretive naturalist with the Forest Preserves. More info here.

⚫ Chicago Film Society 
Chicago Film Society presents REGULAR 8mm, a short program of films celebrating the standard 8mm format, featuring home movies, oddball commercial releases, and recent work by Kioto Aoki, Rebecca Lyon, and Jiayi Chen, on Saturday, 4pm, at Chicago Cluster (400 N. Peoria). All films screened on regular 8mm and unslit double 8mm film. Approx 60 min. More info here.

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

⚫ Consignment Lounge (3520 W. Diversey Ave.)
Lesli Linka Glatter’s 1995 film NOW AND THEN (100 min, Digital Projection) screens Monday at 7pm. More info here.

⚫ The Davis Theater
Low Saturday, a Trust Fall presentation, takes place Saturday starting at 6pm. Featuring films by Walerian Borowczyk and Jess Franco, the double feature is designed to fill your soul with holy atrocities, bare-breasted ladies of the cloth, and vibes so delightfully sinful. The first feature will be presented in typical Oscarbate/Trust Fall fashion and will be followed by a Q+A about the “nunsploitation” genre with Samm Deighan in between the films. The second film will firmly slot into the unofficial “Trust Fall After Dark” series, only for the most adventurous and lion-hearted viewers. More info here. 

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Fruit Chan’s 1997 film MADE IN HONG KONG (109 min, 35mm) screens Friday, 7pm, as part of the Driving Towards the End: An East Asian Perspective series. 

Paul Schrader’s 1997 film MISHIMA: A LIFE IN FOUR CHAPTERS (120 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday, 9:30pm, as part of the Board Picks series.

Liliane de Kermadec’s 1975 film ALOÏSE (115 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, 4pm, and Monday, 7pm, as part of the After '75: Women Filmmakers in France series.

Christian Hossner’s 1998 short film NIPKOW TV (7 min, 16mm); Peter Miller’s 2014 short film STAINED GLASS (10 min, 35mm); Rose Lowder’s 1979 short film PARCELLE (3 min, 16mm); Giovanni Martedi’s 1975 short film FILM SANS CAMÉRA ST ST (5 min, 16mm); and  Paul Sharits’ 1975 short film APPARENT MOTION (28 min 16mm) screen Sunday, 7pm, as part of the Encounters in the Cinema series.

Fran Rubel Kuzui’s 1988 film TOKYO POP (99 min, 35mm) screens Thursday, 9:30pm, as part of the Doc and Roll: Rockstars of the Silver Screen series. More info about all screenings here.

⚫ FACETS
Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 film THE CELEBRATION (105 min, Digital Projection) and Alejandro Amenábar’s 2001 film THE OTHERS (104 min, Digital Projection) screen Friday, 7pm and 9pm, respectively, as part of the monthly Cold Sweat film series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Miguel Gomes’ 2024 film GRAND TOUR (128 min, DCP Digital) continues screening. See Venue website for showtimes.

Screening this week in the Chicago Palestine Film Festival are: Kamal Aljafari’s 2024 film A FIDAI FILM (78 min, DCP Digital) on Friday at 8pm; Jan Haaken and Jennifer Ruth’s 2024 documentary THE PALESTINE EXCEPTION (70 min, DCP Digital) on Saturday at 1pm; Areeb Zuaiter’s 2025 film YALLA PARKOUR (87 min, DCP Digital) on Saturday at 6pm; and Matt Peterson and Malek Rasamny’s 2023 film SPACES OF EXCEPTION (85 min, DCP Digital) on Wednesday at 6pm.

Michael Moore’s 2002 documentary BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE (120 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 6pm, as part of the Shadows of War lecture series.

Video Data Bank Presents: Roundabout, a screening series in which the Chicago video art distributor invites fellow moving image archives and distributors to collaborate on a conversational program of short experimental works, is on Thursday, 6pm. More info on all screenings here. 

⚫ Music Box Theatre
James Griffiths’ 2025 film THE BALLAD OF WALLIS ISLAND (100 min, DCP Digital) continues and Jeremy Workman’s 2024 film SECRET MALL APARTMENT (91 min, DCP Digital) begins screening this week. For the latter, there will be a post-screening Q&A with Workman on Tuesday following the 7pm showtime. See Venue website for showtimes.

Shin'ya Tsukamoto’s 1987 film ADVENTURES OF ELECTRIC ROD BOY (47 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday at 11:45pm. Programmed and presented by SUPER-HORROR-RAMA. Every ticket includes a limited edition pinback button (new design each night), and every show kicks off with giveaways donated by the House of Monsters, the Shadowboxery, Cryptid Craft Studio, Night Natalie, and Drive-In Asylum for the first people who answer trivia questions correctly.

A preview of François Ozon’s 2024 film WHEN FALL IS COMING (102 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday at 4:30pm. Free screening for Music Box Members only. 

Alek Keshishian’s 1991 film MADONNA: TRUTH OR DARE (120 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 9:30pm, with a pre-film all Madonna vinyl DJ set by Gaudy God and performance by Grelley Duvall in the Main Theatre. 

Night School presents an evening of experimental film and music on Thursday at 9:30pm. Four filmmakers will be paired with four improvising musicians, with each musician live-scoring the films for the first time. More information on all screenings and events here.

⚫ VDB TV (Virtual)
Wendy Clarke: Love is All Around screens as part of VDB's new virtual program, curated by Kristin MacDonough. This program features a selection of five excerpts from Clarke’s iconic LOVE TAPES series, showcasing personal reflections on love from 2,500 diverse individuals. The LOVE TAPES project, ongoing since the late '70s, explores various interpretations of love, from lust and friendship to first love and familial bonds. This VDB TV program highlights newly remastered works, preserved by Clarke and the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. More info here.

CINE-LIST: April 18, 2025 - April 24, 2025

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Michael Bates, Rob Christopher, Kyle Cubr, John Dickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jason Halprin, Shaun Huhn, Ben Kaye, Josh B Mabe, Scott Pfeiffer, Harrison Sherrod, James Stroble, David Whitehouse, Olivia Hunter Willke