:: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 17 - THURSDAY, OCTOBER 23 ::

👁️ THE 61ST CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Venues and showtimes listed below; see festival website for complete schedule and more information on all screenings and events

Alexandre Koberidze’s DRY LEAF (Georgia/Germany)
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Friday, 1pm
Siskel Film Center – Wednesday, 8pm
In an era of 4K, IMAX, and the absolute standardization of ultra-high-resolution images, there is perhaps no more willfully perverse act in visual media than shooting your three-hour movie in 240p. This is exactly what the adventurous Alexandre Koberidze did with his debut feature, LET THE SUMMER NEVER COME AGAIN (2017), and what he has done again with DRY LEAF. The director shot the movie himself on a 2008 Sony Ericcson phone camera, and there may be moments when the viewing experience conjures memories of watching early YouTube videos or heavily compressed digital files. Yet DRY LEAF is ultimately nothing like that, because Koberidze is deliberately turning technological deficiencies into aesthetic features. So instead of trying to mentally clear the noise by watching through the pixelated surface, we are made to look at it, to find in the pulsating fuzziness, jagged lines, and smeary colors an impressionistic beauty that defies photographic norms and prescribed standards of aesthetic value. The confounding of vision is the point here, and it resonates perfectly with a story about failed location and absent geographical information in which a man, Irakli, embarks across rural Georgia to find his missing daughter. As his very Kiarostami-esque road trip unfolds, Irakli encounters signs of loss: of landmarks and the memories tied to them, and of visual representation itself (on top of the diminished detail due to the low resolution, several characters are invisible and drolly appear in scenes as disembodied voices). But if DRY LEAF is in part about what’s lost to modernity, it’s even more about what can possibly be gained. By making us sit for three hours with images in a format so outmoded they now look alien, Koberidze aims to make us see anew. There is a palpable childlike wonder in the way his camera lingers over rustling leaves, flowing water, foggy mountainsides, and a plethora of animals; one can sense the filmmaker’s delight in discovering how different movements, shot scales, and qualities of light interact with the digital noise of 240p to create effects impossible to achieve in traditional cinematography. Alongside the twinkly and plaintive score from his brother Giorgi, he ends up transforming putative lack into mesmeric perceptual abundance. (2025, 186 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
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Hong Sang-soo’s WHAT DOES THAT NATURE SAY TO YOU (South Korea)
Siskel Film Center – Friday, 2pm
How many of Hong Sang-soo’s movies don’t contain a scene where someone gets drunk and makes a fool of themselves? No matter how much he evolves formally, Hong returns again and again to the same narrative and thematic fixations (his filmography may be the closest equivalent in narrative cinema to Monet’s haystacks), and drunken embarrassment happens to be one of them. So, if you’re a fan of the South Korean writer-director, then WHAT DOES THAT NATURE SAY TO YOU might play like a mystery for most of its run time, the mystery being, who will play the inebriated ass? In this film, Hong assembles a collection of characters, each of whom seems likely to implode when drunk, puts them in close proximity of one another for long enough for their foibles to become apparent, then gives everybody booze. Here’s the set-up: Donghwa (Ha Seong-guk), a 30-something poet, goes with his girlfriend of three years, Junee (Kang So-yi), to meet her family for the first time. Her mother, father, and older sister (who recently moved back home to “work things out”) live on the side of a mountain outside of Seoul; all three are interesting people with cool hobbies. Donghwa and Junee’s socially awkward sister (Park Mi-so) start to clash in subtle ways, which may lead you to think that one of them will make a faux pas after the wine starts to pour. But what about Junee’s dad (Hong regular Kwon Hae-hyo), who seems almost unnaturally happy about everything? Or her mom (Cho-Yun-hee), herself a poet of local renown? Who knows what resentments they’re harboring? As usual with Hong, the fun of WHAT DOES THAT NATURE SAY TO YOU lies in how the filmmaker unpeels his characters, revealing more about them as the story progresses until you reach their true natures. The film contains some jabs at the egos of poets, but for the most part, it maintains the gentle attitude that’s been running through Hong’s 2020s work so far. (2025, 108 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Orian Bakri & Meriem Bennani's BOUCHRA (Italy/Morocco/US)
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Friday, 2:45pm
Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani have teamed up again after their collaborative web series 2 Lizards, which documented life during lockdown. In a similar stylistic vein, BOUCHRA, a 3D-animated metafilm, tells an intimate story of multiculturalism, city night life, queer love, and its consequential struggle of navigating family expectation. Taking place between a cyberpunk, rainy Manhattan and a sunny, colorful Casablanca, Bouchra, this centers on a young lesbian filmmaker, who takes the form of a humanoid coyote; she moves into her New York apartment and tries to make an autobiographical film as she reconnects with her ex-lover. She draws her life and memory into storyboards and meticulously finds ways to initiate a conversation over the phone with her mom, Aicha, who lives back home in Casablanca, about her sexuality—or to resolve something that was mentioned years ago but has been buried since. At some point, scenes from the film Bouchra's making blends with the reality that Bouchra occupies, but to figure out what’s real and what isn't is missing the point. Barki and Bennani excel at constructing an absorbing story that so effortlessly conveys many things at once. For one, this reflects the lived experience of someone who constantly finds ways to reconcile parts of her identity that are difficult to be forged together. It’s a love letter to metropolitan loneliness and living with differences. The dizzying tracking shots that close up to the face are dreamy. Light and shadows convolute under flickering neon signs. It’s also a medium-conscious film that’s rich in social commentary. Many shots, albeit fleeting, are given to teenagers (also animal humanoids) loitering in groups but each hooked to their phone screens. The myriad screens integral to our daily life are represented thoroughly: the smartphone that lights up when it rings; the phone calls we take through the computer; the back-and-forth text messages that progress into voice messages; a 3D-animated “Is It Cake?” put through a moiré filter to look like it’s on TV; cell phone videos that are shown in a vertical format… The details are touching and thought-provoking. And even though the animated body can sometimes come off stiff, there’s never an ounce of doubt that a beating heart is therein, screaming to be understood. Barki scheduled to attend. (2025, 83 min, DCP Digital) [Nicky Ni]
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Shorts 5: Comedy
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Friday, 5pm
The six films in this program use various comedic tactics to explore the complexities of being human and navigating society. Eve Liu humorously pits ambition against reality in NERVOUS ENERGY (15 min), where two young female filmmakers make a deal to leave their boyfriends and focus on their careers; life, however, chooses a different path, and they begin to learn what they truly value. Tropes of comedy storytelling and rapid split-screen montage subvert this film into a farcical satire. Though highly stylized, the film seems to be chasing after something in vain just like its protagonists. 1:10 (18 min) weaves together a few independent storylines and intentionally leaves them unresolved. A woman who can’t be bothered to waste others’ time; a waitress who rage-quits; two dads who escalate a fight that their sons didn’t start… Mainly shooting from above, Sinan Taner wittily make everyone look miniscule on an elementary school’s playground: children and their parents, indistinguishable. The bittersweet-ness of getting over a breakup and growing out of the old self is both hilarious and heartfelt in HEARTSICK (9 min), in which protagonist Jess tries to reconnect with her ex Ellen as she struggles to navigate new work, life, and relationships. Actress Heather O'Sullivan is a born comedian who can brighten your heart even when the story itself misses a beat. MOONLUCK WONTON (15 min) sets a friendly hangout at a Chinese restaurant against the backdrop of a supposed crime thriller. The danger of a gangster-style bloodbath, as soon as it grows imminent, deflates into lighthearted jokes. Siddiq Saunderson ingeniously mixes black-and-white and color to dramatize a restaurant sketch that ends on a heart-warming note. In DUCK DUCK GOOSE (13 min), a recent divorcee goes to a funeral with her mother; absurdly, she is pressured to impress the grieving widow in the hope of securing a marriage prospect from that widow's son. Chase and competition ensue, and comedy flares around an oppressive core. A couple meet their therapist in a special session with the presence of a group of international psychologists auditing in EXAM (17 min), and their strategy to pretend to be a perfect couple fails when they fall back to arguing with each other. For this meticulously shot film, director Jan Naszewski understands that a well-timed silence is worth a thousand words. MK Quane and Siddiq Saunderson scheduled to attend. (2025, Total approx. 87 min, DCP Digital) [Nicky Ni]
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Sven Bresser’s REEDLAND (Netherlands/Belgium)
Siskel Film Center – Friday, 5:30pm
Reminiscent of Bruno Dumont’s work prior to the comedic breakthrough of LI’L QUINQUIN (2014), Sven Bresser’s debut feature REEDLAND employs silence, meditative static shots, and emotionally withholding performances to craft a stark, almost Biblical story of a put-upon individual in the present day. The film takes place in a small community in the Dutch lowlands and centers on an older widower named Johan, who makes his living reaping the reeds. There’s a silent-movie purity to Johan’s life—he still reaps with a scythe rather than a motorized harvester, and he looks at everything and everyone with the same intense yet concerned stare. He gets along well enough with his immediate neighbors, participates in the regular town hall meetings (where he learns one night that new neoliberal lending policies are about to upend his community’s way of life), and raises his preadolescent granddaughter with great affection but obvious difficulty. The set-up seems to promise a low-key character study about a good man facing difficult times, and that is what REEDLAND intermittently delivers. But early on in the picture, Johan discovers the corpse of a young woman on the land he tends to, and a portion of the film concerns his personal investigation into the woman’s possible murder after the police fail to look into her death. The detective story sits awkwardly with the more artful, ruminative passages, which might make you wish that Bresser taken one path and stuck with it. Regardless, REEDLAND is uniformly handsome; the cinematography, credited to Sam du Pon, grants tremendous nuance to landscapes and faces alike. In particular, the visage of Gerrit Knobbe, who plays Johan, becomes the subject of Bressonian contemplation. Bresser scheduled to attend. (2025, 112 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Michèle Stephenson's TRUE NORTH (US/Canada/Documentary)
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Friday, 6:15pm
Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 3pm
Former human rights attorney Michèle Stephenson masterfully weaves photographs, archival footage, and one-on-one interviews into TRUE NORTH a black-and-white documentary that retells the story of the 1969 student protest at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia), from the perspectives of the event’s Black participants and witnesses. The film shines light on a lesser-known center of the civil rights movement, Montreal, and examines more insidious forms of racism and xenophobia that entrenched Canada at the time. Against our current upswing of bigotry, this film proves to be glaringly timely. The incident, named “The Sir George Williams Affair,” began when several Black students accused a university professor of racially prejudiced grading. When the university refused to take the matter seriously, peaceful protest escalated into an occupation, and many participants faced grave consequences that lasted years into their lives. “Crossing borders—whether through forced migration, the pursuit of freedom, escape, or exile—lies at the heart of the Black diasporic experience.” Such is the epigraph that sets the tone. These movements of crossing, pushing, and transgressing not only emerge from the intimate interviews—almost always shot in a close-up to the dimly side-lit face—with the protest leaders or participants, a cohort composed of figures such as Dr. Norman Cook, Brenda Dash, Josette Pierre-Louis, Philippe Fils-Aimé, and Dr. Rodney John. Images also gain their poetic and metaphoric meanings when these movements are implied through archival footage of boats riding the waves, of dazzling sunlight through the leaves, of trains, of a shaky camera that has captured nameless Black people running, dancing, protesting, rejoicing. There’s a kind of powerful simplicity in Stephenson’s camera work and non-linear editing that galvanizes, not unlike the way Rosie Douglas—the Dominican international student and main leader of this occupation—spoke on TV, so concisely but eloquently, so on-target and without an extra word to spare. “I’m going to feast at the welcome table,” the refrain of one of civil rights movement’s anthems recurs throughout the film, leaving echoes that still reverberate today. Stephenson scheduled to attend both screenings. (2025, 96 min, DCP Digital) [Nicky Ni]
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Curtis Miller’s A BRIEF HISTORY OF CHASING STORMS (US/Documentary)
Chicago History Museum – Saturday, 11:30am
This essayistic documentary could’ve been tailor-made for me. I love tornadoes (and when I say love, I mean am in awe and fear of), and I love the movie TWISTER, and Curtis Miller’s A BRIEF HISTORY OF CHASING STORMS is about both. But more so about tornados in general, as it traces an abridged history of Tornado Alley, a section of the country where tornados are most frequent, using several particularly monstrous occurences as well as touchstones of “tornado culture,” as one might call it, to tell a rich story of this particular natural disaster. More than just delivering the macabre facts of these devastating events, Miller also mines them for sociological truths about our society. For example, one tornado originally rated an F6 on the Fujita scale but later downgraded to an F5 (Fujita, whose research was facilitated through the University of Chicago, personally surveyed the tornado’s damage, which helped to established guidelines for the newly realized scale) decimated a Mexican neighborhood in Lubbock, Texas, a history that’s been whitewashed, literally, to underemphasize the disproportionate amount of damage done in that area. It’s an elegant mix of such realities and the more folksy aspects, such as the TWISTER Movie Museum in Wakita, Oklahoma, where several of the film’s pivotal moments take place and were filmed—there’s a shrine to the late Bill Paxton, of whom the tour guide speaks very highly. This isn’t the only such museum in the film; it’s a fascinating examination of local histories and how they become the stuff of local legend, sometimes complete with charming museums that may not rival official ones in size but certainly exceed them in spirit. There’s also a crusty amateur storm spotter (and car enthusiast—his storm chasing vehicle the Primo Victoria recently had some screen time in the 2024 sequel TWISTERS), whose interest in tornadoes doesn’t appear to be backed by science so much as a  homegrown communion with the phenomena, and a tornado safe room salesman who may represent the more capitalistic side of disaster speculation but is still strangely likable, in no small part due to the enthusiasm he exudes over his grandfather’s artwork, which peppers his office space. Evocative landscapes of impending storms were shot on 16mm (scenes involving interviewees were shot digitally but made to look like film in post-production), and a horn-heavy score resembles the beautiful but violent nature of the subject matter. If you didn’t “love” tornados before, you might after seeing this, and if you already do, well, join the club and enjoy the show. Miller scheduled to attend. (2025, 70 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
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Agnieszka Holland’s FRANZ (Czech Republic/Germany/Poland)
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Saturday, 2pm and Sunday, 11am
It seems fittingly absurd that a writer as influential and prescient as Franz Kafka, whose voluminous letter-writing made most details of his life an open book, is only now getting a proper biopic, 101 years after his death and long after he has become a cultural icon in whose name the Kafka Burger fast-food joint attracts thousands of tourists in Prague. Agnieszka Holland, a brilliant half-Jewish filmmaker from Poland who was greatly influenced by her experiences in Prague, which included spending time in prison as a dissident, seems a natural to focus on the German-Jewish chronicler of totalitarianism in such surreal novels and stories as The Trial and In the Penal Colony. Her approach is accurate and nonchronological, giddy as it skips across Kafka’s formative and mature years, from his prosperous upbringing in Prague to his literary endeavors, romantic entanglements, and premature death from tuberculosis. As portrayed brilliantly by Idan Weiss, Franz is an odd, particular, but sweet presence who propels the viewer through a densely packed two hours that mix straight-up biography with Kafka’s present-day commodification by the tourist industry and fantasy sequences lifted from his work. A scene from In the Penal Colony, being read to an increasingly horrified audience, in which the Traveler watches The Apparatus being used to torture and kill a man who has committed a minor infraction is a particular standout. Kudos, too, to Polish cinematographer Tomasz Naumiuk for creating the lushly evocative images of this inventive and original biopic and to Mary Komasa and Antoni Komasa Lazarkiewicz for pulling it all together with an effective score. Holland scheduled to attend both screenings. (2025, 127 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Jafar Panahi’s IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT (Iran/France/Luxembourg)
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Saturday, 3pm
Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 5pm
There’s a scene in this film, where the group of Iranians who have kidnapped their supposed torturer in hopes to identify him beyond a shadow of a doubt so that they may enact their own justice and ruin his life as he had theirs, are pushing the van that contains the man’s prostrate body—tranquilized but not yet dead, and in a wooden box that foreshadows his intended fate—after it has run out of gas. It’s a humorous scene, ironic but also openly laughable because one of the “kidnappers” is a bride wearing her wedding gown. But as the group pushes the van, one or two others, strangers, rush to help them. As much as it’s a film about a torturer, it’s also a film about helpers; there’s no clear connection between Panahi and Mister Rogers, but this thought brought to mind his famous statement that, “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’” The overall narrative of helping pertains to the central drama. A family pulls over after their car breaks down; at the place where they stop and are helped by a random person also works Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) who, upon hearing the squeak of what sounds like a prosthetic leg, suspects that the father might be Iqbal, or Peg Leg, the man who tortured him and countless others while detained as political prisoners several years prior. He meets some of those others when referred to another victim by his friend, also a victim but who doesn’t want to be involved; ultimately a ragtag group is assembled, which includes a photographer, her troubled ex-boyfriend, and a bride and her groom (they'd been taking pre-wedding photos with the photographer), all one-time political prisoners who are first eager to confirm the torturer is in fact who they think he is and then to decide what to do with him. Ambiguity is inherent to Iranian cinema, as much of it embodies a sense of irresoluteness. But while I wouldn’t go so far as to say this is a bait and switch, it at first seems more enigmatic than it ends up being. Eventually it becomes about retribution and whether it will ease their trauma; it’s a consideration on the prolongation of violence, not really about if the torturer is who they think he is, and if that violence will ever end if they exact revenge. This is obviously personal for Panahi, who has been imprisoned twice for dissent, most recently in 2022; he had been previously unable to leave the country and made this film, as well as many others, without permission from the Iranian government. The film’s meditation on the futility of revenge finds a real-world parallel: just as the characters confront the limits of retribution, Panahi receives support from a global network of artists and audiences, proving that solidarity, not violence, is what carries lasting power. (2025, 103 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
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Radu Jude’s KONTINENTAL ’25 (Romania)
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Sunday, 11am
With the title and premise of KONTINENTAL ’25, Radu Jude invokes Roberto Rossellini’s EUROPA ’51 (1952), one of the hallmarks of postwar European cinema. In that film, Ingrid Bergman plays an upper-class woman who acts on the preventable death of her ten-year-old son by committing herself to charity with increasing fervor; through her actions and the way they’re greeted by the people around her, Rossellini raises the question of whether saintliness is possible in modern times. Jude’s film is not a remake of Rossellini’s, nor are its concerns particularly religious, yet the Romanian director is clearly a descendant of the great Italian modernist in how he makes films to generate thought about morality and the state of the world. KONTINENTAL ’25 begins as a documentary-like account of a homeless man in the Romanian city of Cluj-Napoca (once the capital of Transylvania), centering on his degrading efforts to find work and food. After a bailiff comes to the boiler room where he’s been sleeping to evict him, the man commits suicide, and Jude shifts focus to the bailiff for the rest of the picture. Orsolya (Eszter Tompa) may feel terribly guilty about the man’s death, but she doesn’t develop any aspirations of saintliness (she does, however, deliver a Brechtian monologue in which she relates how much she donates each month and to which charity). Rather, she falls into a funk but tries to go on with life as usual, tending to her job, marriage, and children and trying to disregard the waves of online hate that have entered her life since news of the homeless man’s suicide went viral. In what’s become characteristic for the Romanian filmmaker, Jude presents Osolya’s life as a series of encounters that double as psychosocial examinations of late-capitalist Romania; more than ever, the prognosis looks bad. The writer-director’s wit remains forever sharp, though, and the subject matter here offers plenty of opportunities for his gallows humor. But the overriding sensibility is one of sadness and resignation; the more we learn about Osolya, the more unhappy we realize she is. A lot of this has to do with her limited economic possibilities, but that’s not all—Jude is trying to identify a despiritualized quality in contemporary Europe that’s making everybody miserable. (2025, 109 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Jean-Luc Godard’s BREATHLESS (France)
Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 12pm
The cinematic equivalent of "Like a Rolling Stone," Jean-Luc Godard's first feature was a near-unprecedented mix of pop and intellectual sensibilities, breaking numerous rules of the form and paving the way for a good deal of art in the 1960s. The film's stylistic breakthroughs have been so influential as to seem familiar now—particularly the newsreel-like cinematography and randomly employed jump-cuts (which Jonathan Rosenbaum has compared to "a needle skipping gaily across a record"). But beneath the carefree attitude is a rich poetic sensibility, arguably the one consistent trait throughout Godard's varied body of work. In BREATHLESS' justly celebrated centerpiece—an extended lovers' interlude between Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg—Godard mixes literary quotations and frank sexual dialogue across a romantic depiction of time being gloriously wasted. All these elements were revolutionary in 1960, though the explicit use of citation may have attracted the most attention at the time. This was, after all, the film that marked the explosion of the French New Wave, the first filmmaking movement presided over by film critics. And from the opening title card (a dedication to B-movie studio Monogram Pictures) to the climactic shoot-out, BREATHLESS is a film fascinated by the cinema's influence over real life. Belmondo's petty thief tries to act like Humphrey Bogart, and Seberg was cast, according to Godard, as a continuation of her role in Otto Preminger's BONJOUR TRISTESSE (1957). Five years after the film was released, Godard would make the famous proclamation that a director must put everything into a film; but BREATHLESS—which combined storytelling, criticism, autobiography, and formal experimentation more boldly than any narrative film before it—was the first glimpse of what this may look like. Preceded by a talk with Nick Davis as part of the “Digging Deeper into Movies with Nick Davis” series at 10:30am. Admission is free, but RSVPs are highly encouraged as space is limited.(1960, 90 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
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Shorts 4: City & State
Chicago History Museum – Sunday, 12:30pm
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Thursday, 5:30pm
This selection of works by Chicago and Illinois-based filmmakers forms an intriguing blend of political discourse and the gap between hope and reality. Shiloh Tumo Washington’s BAILEY’S BLUES (11 min) uses the format of found footage from the early 1960s of fictional jazz bassist Marion Bailey (Namir Smallwood) being interviewed for French television to critique the casual racism of white people. While many of the accusations are by now familiar, the specter of an angry Black America seething while surviving still hits a raw nerve and demolishes the apparent allyship of a clueless white population. Set against the late 2023 bussing of migrants to sanctuary cities, Missy Hernandez’s MADRINA (7 min) could not be more timely. Jessica (Magdaliz Rivera) is setting off to spend Christmas with her family, but is warned not to come and is then rejected once she arrives. The harsh winter facing Venezuelan refugees in Chicago matched with Jessica’s open heart helps Hernandez provide a grace note that will resonate with viewers currently under siege. Alex Heller’s beautifully orchestrated DEBATERS (10 min) uses a high school debate to consider how to balance the pros and cons of policy issues—in this case, a federal minimum wage—in a country where such issues are usually seen in black and white. Heller’s script is clever in forcing a student (Sripadh Puligilla) who only prepared to argue the “pro” side to think on his feet to see the downside of such a mandate. In the process, the film argues for the development of critical-thinking skills. Director Kenneth Lonergan makes an appearance as a teacher. Fernando Saldivia Yáñez’s YOUR TOMORROW WILL BE MY SONG (14 min) focuses on a Quechua couple living in Chicago having a quiet conversation about their impending return to their home in the Chilean Andes to get married as the woman braids her partner’s long, black hair. Their reminiscences about being chosen as leaders of their community, which prompt them to break into a traditional song, starts their journey of reintegration even as they wonder whether their Chicago friends will come to their wedding. It’s a moment of understanding about what is lost and what is gained by leaving home. In CHASING THE PARTY, director Jessie Komitor travels back in time to New York 2007, to examine the fraught fantasies and stark reality of being a teenage girl. Melissa (Lucia Ryan) and Stephanie (Kitana Turnbull) hope to be included in “Chasing the Party,” a feature about the New York party scene. Their faux sophistication and wide-eyed wonder at the grungy bar where they hope to be discovered—a well-done fantasy musical sequence ensues—turns dark as a well-known photographer played by Chicagoan Joe Swanberg attempts to make topless photos of Melissa. Heartbreak and disillusionment, however, may be the best thing that ever happened to Melissa, while Stephanie continues the fame-seeking dance. IT’S JUST A FUCKING OPENING (18 min), directed, written, and edited by Josh Brainin and Youssef Boucetta, takes on the art economy, as Anisa (a brilliant Ireon Roach) premieres a performance art piece. Much trash-talking of her work, intellectualizing of the Black art experience, and career hustling surround Anisa, whose vulnerability and despair that her girlfriend bailed on her opening are heartbreaking. Human drama in a dehumanized context doesn’t get any rawer than this. MAKE NO MISTAKE: THESE ARE THE GLORY DAYS (15 min) documents the U.S. tour of Home Is Where, a trans-led emo band that helps create community wherever it goes. Director Texas Smith shows the band in performance, on the road, and at home, and asks fans what the band means to them. Lead vocalist Bea MacDonald reads something of an autobiographical manifesto at the film’s end that reveals the triumphs and travails of being who they are. Several filmmakers scheduled to attend. (All films 2025, Total approx. 90 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s A USEFUL GHOST (Thailand)
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Sunday, 8pm and Tuesday, 2pm
The past literally refuses to stay quiet in the sly and captivating A USEFUL GHOST, an absurdist queer supernatural political allegory that imagines a society haunted by the vengeful ghosts of historical injustice. It starts, naturally, with a pair of possessed vacuum cleaners. When a man purchases a vacuum for his apartment, he finds that it discharges dust in the middle of the night with the unmistakable sound of a human cough. His request for service brings him a guy named Krong, who tells him the story of a home appliance factory haunted by the angry spirit of a worker who was killed on the job. Two other deaths loom over the factory: that of its former manager, whose role is now assumed by his widow Suman, and the widow’s daughter-in-law Nat, who died from a respiratory illness while pregnant. Nat’s spirit also returned in a vacuum cleaner, and in an early laugh-out-loud moment, she reunites with her husband March by erotically embracing him with the machine’s hose and rotating brush, much to the horror of onlookers. Initially persecuted for this unholy romantic union, Nat becomes a valuable asset to Suman when it’s discovered that she can find and eliminate troublesome ghosts in the dreams of Suman’s factory employees. Her abilities reach the attention of the Prime Minister, who wants nothing more than to silence the ghosts of political dissidents murdered by the state—and by extension the contemporary protestors animated by their memory. Unpredictable to the last, A USEFUL GHOST begins as a surrealist comedy with anti-capitalist undertones and evolves into a righteous, bloody reckoning with authoritarianism and its vain attempts to erase inconvenient realities. Ratchapoom stuffs his film with potent symbolic images and motifs, from the pervasive dust that indexes the residue of the past to the pink light leaks, iris shots, and projector clicks that mark the dream sequences, suggesting cinema as one of the ultimate provinces of ghosts. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this remarkable film is how emphatically queer it is, with multiple gay characters whose well-learned spirit of defiance holds the key to revolution. Boonbunchachoke scheduled to attend the Sunday screening. (2025, 130 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
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Milagros Mumenthaler’s THE CURRENTS (Argentina/Switzerland)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 5:30pm
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Tuesday, 5:30pm
Lina (Isabel Aimé González-Sola), a fashion designer from Buenos Aries, is in Geneva, Switzerland, to accept an award. She seems nonplussed by the accolades of the well-wishers around her, and after washing her hands in the venue’s bathroom, she throws her paper towel and the award in the garbage. Her escape to the street ends in an irrational, life-threatening act and a phobia that alters her life at home. Veteran Argentine filmmaker Milagros Mumenthaler has created an elusive, slow-burn drama that attempts to put us inside the experience of a person having a nervous breakdown. Her camera never strays far from its subject, zeroing in especially on her mainly inscrutable face. She creates disorienting scenes by seamlessly blending ordinary events in Lina’s life with hallucinatory fantasies that may only be discerned by the introduction of music to the soundtrack. Mumenthaler, who also wrote the screenplay, provides an answer of sorts to the source of Lina’s trauma, but maintains the mystery that none of us can avoid when faced with the ultimate unknowability of another person’s psyche. Mumenthaler scheduled to attend. (2025, 104 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Clint Bentley’s TRAIN DREAMS (US)
Music Box Theatre – Monday, 6:30pm
AMC Newcity 14 – Thursday, 2pm
Adapting Denis Johnson’s brief yet towering novella into a film is a formidable challenge, requiring a balance of the epic and intimate as well as the sacred and the decaying. Will Patton’s voice introduces Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) against the majesty of Redwood trees, immediately establishing a tone of cosmic smallness. Director Clint Bentley and co-writer Greg Kwedar craft a story driven by atmosphere rather than events, following a man whose life embodies the loneliness of American progress. The film traverses Grainier’s decades with the rhythm of memory, glimpsing his youth as a logger and the quiet grace of his frontier life with Gladys Oakley (Felicity Jones). Moments of pastoral beauty—like the couple lying by a river—are starkly juxtaposed with brutality, such as Robert's witness to the expulsion of Chinese laborers. This moral failure through inaction becomes the film's hinge, quietly acknowledging that modernity’s advances are built on systemic violence and omission. To mirror Johnson’s fragmentary poetics, Bentley employs a non-linear structure that collapses time. Parker Laramie’s editing fuses years into single breaths, while Patton’s narration preserves Johnson’s matter-of-fact mysticism. What the novella internalized, the film externalizes through potent imagery: the hand over a dying tree, the blank stare into wildfire, and the faint, vanishing flicker of a soot-covered girl. Cinematographer Adolpho Veloso renders the Pacific Northwest as both an Eden and a graveyard. Utilizing natural light or candles to match their era, Veloso’s frames—in which humanity is dwarfed by trees or locomotives slice through fog—evoke nature’s indifference and human awe. Bryce Dessner’s score, enriched by Nick Cave’s collaboration, murmurs as it blends the sounds of trains, animal cries, and ghostly whispers until progress itself seems to mourn. The film pointedly asks what civilization costs its builders. Grainier’s hands laid the rails connecting the nation, yet his own life remains isolated. As machines replace men and the forest yields to fire, silence gives way to the roar of modernity. William H. Macy, as explosives expert Arn Peeples, issues an early, prophetic warning: felling a five-hundred-year-old tree “does something to a man’s soul.” Bentley’s direction finds grandeur in the mundane, his camera observing with reverence, neither romanticizing nor condemning. TRAIN DREAMS fuses memory and melancholy but remains rooted in the working-class experience. Ultimately, Bentley transforms Johnson’s spiritual isolation into a lament for the laborers who built modernity. Grainier’s obscurity, through Bentley’s vision becomes luminous. Robert Grainier’s small life echoes beyond the screen as an elegy for the builders and the world they lost. A life carried on the wind through the pines and the fading whistle of a train. Bentley and Edgerton scheduled to attend the Monday screening. At this screening, Bentley will receive the Festival’s Artistic Achievement Award in Directing, and Edgerton will receive the Festival’s Artistic Achievement Award in Acting. (2025, 102 min, 35mm [at Music Box] / DCP Digital [at NEWCITY]) [Shaun Huhn]
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Shahram Mokri’s BLACK RABBIT, WHITE RABBIT (Tajikistan/United Arab Emirates)
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Tuesday, 7:45pm and Thursday, 8:15pm
Shahram Mokri is the closest contemporary equivalent we have to Alain Resnais in the 1960s; his endlessly imaginative work engages with film form to interrogate the nature of perception, memory, and cinematic storytelling. His fifth feature, BLACK RABBIT, WHITE RABBIT, is characteristically mysterious and entrancing, raising more questions than it answers while developing a distinctive, enveloping atmosphere. Told across several episodes, the film alternates between two principal narrative lines. In one, a well-to-do woman who recently survived a terrible car crash navigates her uneasy life in the labyrinthine mansion she shares with her husband and preteen stepdaughter. The other takes place on a soundstage where a director named Shahram (who never appears) is remaking of a classic Iranian film that contains a scene of political assassination; these passages center on the movie’s prop master, an industry veteran named Babak (played by the great Iranian actor Babak Karimi, a regular of Mokri’s films), who fears that a gun being used in the assassination scene contains real bullets. In both stories, Mokri employs fluid, roving long takes to explore the narrative environment as opposed to merely present it. At times, the camerawork suggests the intervention of a curious ghost, almost like in Steven Soderbergh’s recent PRESENCE (2024). A few of the shots run close to half an hour, and these exhibit Mokri’s typical brilliance with blocking, with the camera shifting between different characters’ point of view and circling back over the same places in a way that consistently defamiliarizes the settings. The threat of violence hangs over most of the proceedings, not only in the form of the questionable gun but in the unsubtle tyranny with which the husband in the first story lords over his wife. The tension can be excruciating, especially since Mokri provides no clue as to where the narratives are going—the film seems to take place in an uneasy interval between catastrophes. While it can be rough going to contemplate the inevitability of violence, BLACK RABBIT, WHITE RABBIT isn’t uniformly heavy; in fact, the film contains moments of levity that speak to Mokri’s unabashed joy in making movies. One passage features a giant, walking coffee cup, and in another, a group of props carry on a conversation via subtitles. Details like these affirm the endless possibility inherent in cinema just as others convey an unspecified terror latent in real life. The film moves gracefully between concerns pertaining to reality and the imagination, resulting in a rich cinematic poetry that’s uniquely Mokri’s. Mokri and writer Nasim Ahmadpour scheduled to attend both screenings. (2025, 139 min, DCP Digital)[Ben Sachs]
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Annemarie Jacir’s PALESTINE 36 (Palestine/UK/France/Denmark/Norway/Qatar/Saudi Arabia/Jordan)
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Tuesday, 8pm
Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 8pm
There’s a double-edged sword to the grandiose methodology of Annemarie Jacir’s often-bracing PALESTINE 36, a film that tackles unexplored territory through extremely well-trod means. Taking on the general structure of the Western Historical Epic, Jacir’s narrative portrayal of the early history of Palestinian rebellion against British Imperialism seems to follow in the footsteps of the most epically scaled work of filmmakers like David Lean, Ridley Scott, and Steven Spielberg, her camera navigating lush, sweeping scenery while following swaths of characters marching through the annals of history. It’s a tried-and-true means of using enormous tools to tell enormous stories, yet one worries that the cliches and trappings of these works threaten to flatten what is otherwise a genuinely compelling piece of history, here dividing our attention between soon-to-be revolutionaries, mothers protecting their children, reporters trying to stay afloat amidst a sea of Western propaganda, and politicians waffling between protecting their people and amassing power. Between these large stretches of historical fiction lie what appear to be digitally upscaled and colorized newsreel footage of Palestine as it truly existed in the early 1900s, though one wonders whether removing the shiny, digital gloss and letting the bare truth shine through might have made for a more honest and daring choice. Either way, the strengths of Jacir’s film, a genuinely entertaining piece of bravado, lie in its being able to contort this particular brand of motion picture around a tale blatantly opposing Western Imperialism, centering the Palestinian cause for self-determination within a narrative structure that has otherwise left them villainized or altogether absent. Most interestingly of all, in my eyes at least, the Jewish immigrants of PALESTINE 36—those cast away from Europe due to intense anti-Semitism and bigotry—primarily exist here as the British Empire likely saw them: silent pawns, relegated to the role of scapegoat to allow for the West’s continued dominance over Palestine land and independence. How thrilling then, almost a century later, for Palestinian artists to be able to reclaim the cinematic tools of the oppressor, to remake history, and cinema, in their own image. Jacir scheduled to attend both screenings. (2025, 118 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
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Dennis Harvey and Lars Lovén’s CELTIC UTOPIA (Sweden/Ireland/Documentary)
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Tuesday, 8:15 pm and Wednesday, 3 pm
With a loose irreverence that doesn’t overshadow a melancholic seriousness, CELTIC UTOPIA examines the role of folk music in postcolonial Ireland. The film doesn’t present music as savior, acknowledging how it is simultaneously revolutionary yet often terribly nostalgic. Through a whirlwind of profound and haunting music, the documentary questions how to recognize a painful past while striving for a better future. Directors Dennis Harvey and Lars Lovén focus on the musicians, highlighting a myriad of artists; this is punctured by archival footage to ground in the complex and painful history that continues to resonate. But, music in Ireland is everywhere and—as seen throughout the film—it can be still or mobile; quite a few of the musicians are seen walking and singing. As they emphasize, folk music is meant to be offensive to those in power, in the case of Ireland particularly politicians and the Catholic Church. There’s a large focus here on the Church’s role in punishing unwed mothers and separating families, a devastating practice that ran into the 1990s; interviewees are still directly affected by it, speaking of missing family members. The Church, as one interviewee points out, was also a site of Irish language preservation and many acknowledge their continuing Catholic faith. Thus, it’s a common refrain throughout CELTIC UTOPIA of the difficult complexities of moving forward. Folk music is presented as an essential tool to make sense of it all; it can constellate multiple histories and identities, allowing for reflection and reflexivity. CELTIC UTOPIA isn’t presenting easy answers, but the ways in which the musicians are grappling with these issues head-on. Harven, Lovén, and producer Elin Lilleman Eriksson scheduled to attend both screenings. (2025, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
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Rowan Haber’s WE ARE PAT (US/Documentary)
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Wednesday, 6pm and Thursday, 2:45pm
When it comes to Pat Riley, the clownish, androgynous sketch comedy figure created by Julia Sweeney in the early 1990s for Saturday Night Live, it’s hard to find someone more obsessed with the character than director Rowan Haber. Don’t take my word for it, though; they practically admit as much in the opening moments of the incisive and absurd documentary WE ARE PAT, a work built upon both adoration and condemnation of a figure far more complex than meets the eye. Haber’s obsession with the character—beyond their impressive and extensive collection of Pat memorabilia—revolves around how incisive—or not incisive—Pat sits within larger conversations of gender. Is Pat a “nonbinary icon” as some might suggest, or are they just a dated finger-wag at the concept of androgyny altogether? The question of who is the subject of ridicule in the Pat sketches—Pat themselves, or the gender-panicked cis-people attempting to “solve” Pat’s gender—frequently arises throughout the documentary, with no true answer to be found, though not for lack of trying. For a documentary covering the legacy of an arguably dated SNL character featured in a dozen on-air sketches and a flop feature film, Haber gets some surprising mileage out of this cinematic autopsy of the character, amassing a room of trans and genderqueer artists to write and perform “new and improved” Pat sketches, interviewing a wide array of trans and nonbinary comedians (including the likes of Murray Hill, Ally Beardsley, River Butcher, Joey Soloway, and Molly Kearney, to name just a few) to discuss the past and present of trans comedy, and even talking with Sweeney about the development of the character and her own feelings of personal “gender oppression," notably pointing out how —withing the overbearing Boy’s Club of early ‘90’s SNL—it’s no coincidence that the only way a female comedian could break out was to create a character far removed from perceived femininity. You may be asking yourself; is this far too much intellectualizing around a character whose primary comedic premise solely comes down to “we don’t know what their gender is?” But truth be told, gender is a joke, a performative charade of societal roleplay, and for decades now, trans and nonbinary artists and comedians have been mining that joke for all its worth in the most artful, absurd, and insightful ways possible. Why can’t Pat be reclaimed as part of that liberatory comic history? It doesn’t feel like a coincidence that, when highlighting their interview subjects for the film, Haber often features their subjects in artfully framed wide shots, sharing the fullness and beauty of the present and future of trans comedy. As a wise theme song once said, “It’s time for androgyny.” Haber, Sweeney, and producer Caryn Capotosto scheduled to attend both screenings. (2025, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
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Ildikó Enyedi’s SILENT FRIEND (Germany/Hungary/France)
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Wednesday, 8:30pm 
The title character of this puzzling art movie is not a person, but rather a tree, specifically a ginkgo biloba located on a German university campus. SILENT FRIEND alternates between three separate time periods and considers how people relate to this tree at different points in history. The principal story line concerns a neuroscientist from Hong Kong (Tony Leung) who comes to the university as a visiting scholar in 2020; during the COVID lockdown, he becomes fascinated with the tree and ends up conducting an unusual experiment having to do with its reproduction. The other two narratives take place in 1908 and 1972 and deal with, respectively, the exploits of the university’s first female student and the relationship between a socially awkward graduate student and the co-ed who tries to get him to open up emotionally. It’s never clear what writer-director Ildikó Enyedi is trying to say with all this, but that’s typical of this Hungarian writer-director, who’s marched to the beat of her own drummer since her debut feature, MY TWENTIETH CENTURY (1989). SILENT FRIEND circles around themes of alienation, connection, and the mystery of the natural world without coming to an obvious point about any of them—the film is essentially a dance of ideas, kind of like Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s MEMORIA (2021) but without the transcendental elements. And like MEMORIA, this functions partly as a love letter to higher learning, as Enyedi successfully conveys the excitement of performing research and making academic discoveries. It’s a film that advances a scientific worldview, regarding people as case studies and their feelings as so much data to sort through. Some may find this perspective comforting; for one thing, it reflects a certain faith in progress and the triumph of intellectual endeavor. If nothing else, the film is undeniably unique, highlighting an alternative approach to both humanist and antihumanist thinking. Enyedi scheduled to attend. (2025, 147 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Bob Balaban’s PARENTS (US)

Chicago Film Society at the Music Box Theatre – Sunday, 8:45pm

By the time the mid/late ‘80s rolled around, it seemed like a lot of people were getting really sick of Ronald Reagan and the insidious mentality surrounding his whole “Let’s Make America Great Again” campaign from 1980 had worn thin. The pendulum swung hard from the anti-establishment ‘60s and ‘70s to a neo-conservatism filled with such ghouls as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Alexander Haig, Edwin Meese, and of course Reagan himself. There was a strange glorification of the law and order 1950s and its culture of conspicuous consumerism and cultural hegemony of the white, suburban middle class. Various underground art movements, such as hardcore punk rock, had sounded the alarms in the early ‘80s, but by the time of Reagan’s second term, more mainstream and commercially minded art began to address this puerile regressiveness and portrayed it as being both strange and unsettling. BLUE VELVET (1986) explored the confused darkness and malice in suburbia, and EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (1990) saw the loneliness of its conformity. Bob Balaban’s 1989 directorial debut, PARENTS, split the difference almost exactly. The film follows the most unreliable of narrators, a 10-year-old boy, as he and his family move from Massachusetts to suburban California. The boy, Michael, is prone to surrealistic dreams and waking nightmares while his parents—amazingly portrayed by Randy Quaid and Mary Beth Hurt—want nothing more than to have their son just be as normal as possible. Michael slowly begins to fear his parents, especially his father. The audience is often seeing the world of the film through Michael's eyes, leaving us wondering if the increasingly creepy and menacing behavior of his father is real or just the overactive imagination of a little boy who is just starting to develop his own point of view and personality that conflicts with the adults around him. We're never quite sure if Michael is being paranoid, naive, or unfortunately, very correct in his discoveries. Balaban mixes truly surreal and impressionistic arthouse imagery, Church of the SubGenuis-esque satire and biting Yippie-styled social commentary, and genre faithful slasher/’80s horror tropes in a way that even when it’s a little overstuffed and/or clumsy still manages to be incredibly engaging and wildly interesting. This is a genre-bending horror film that takes a lot of risks and chances and somehow manages to be simultaneously of its time and timeless because of them. PARENTS manages to be cerebral and artistic while keeping one foot firmly in the grindhouse of exploitation. You can tell that Bob Balaban, born into a legendary family of Chicago movie theater owners, grew up loving horror films as much as experimental arthouse fare and he drank deep from those influences knowing that this film may have been his only chance to make a film. Ken Russell said this movie did it better than BLUE VELVET, and when my Uncle George surreptitiously gave me a VHS copy when I was 12, he told me never to let my mom see it and if she found it not to rat him out 'cause he would throw me under the bus. If those aren’t ringing endorsements, I don't know what would be. Preceded by Heather McAdams’ 1989 short film FETAL PIG ANATOMY (7 min, 16mm). Screening in partnership with the Music Box of Horrors: Dead and Loving It! series. (1989, 81 min, 35mm) [Raphael Jose Martinez]

Buñuel x2 at Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)

See below for showtimes

Luis Buñuel's ÉL (Mexico)
Saturday, 5pm
Much less well known than the other classics of his Mexican period due to its spotty availability over the years, ÉL (sometimes known as THIS STRANGE PASSION) nevertheless functions as a Rosetta stone of his favorite themes: Catholicism, crazy love, women's feet—all three of which he manages to combine in the very first scene. Rodney Welsh describes it: "During Holy Week, Don Francisco Galvan de Montemayor (Arturo de Cordova) is taking part in a Catholic foot-washing ceremony when he very suddenly falls in love—with a pair of feet. The middle-aged Don Francisco is a wealthy businessman, a devout Catholic, and, we come to find out, still a virgin. The problem isn't that he can't find anyone; he's handsome, vigorous, confident and a sharp dresser. The problem is that no one has ever been good enough. He's a romantic purist. These beautiful feet, then, present a challenge. He's a believer not just in love at first sight, but at first and last sight; having held out for a lifetime for the woman of his dreams, he is committed to possessing her for eternity." It doesn't turn out well. Always one for understatement, Buñuel once wryly wrote, "The hero of ÉL interests me as a beetle, or a disease-carrying fly does. I've always found insects exciting." (1953, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Rob Christopher]
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Luis Buñuel’s ILLUSION TRAVELS BY STREETCAR (Mexico)
Tuesday, 7pm
Set in Mexico City, ILLUSION TRAVELS BY STREETCAR is one of the few standout features that has emerged from director Luis Buñuel’s vast catalog of forgettable Mexican films. The film centers on No. 133, a cranky, old streetcar scheduled to be dismantled. Conductor Juan Godinez (Carlos Navarro), nicknamed “Curls” for his dreamy head of hair, and his motorman, Tarrajas (Fernando Soto), have managed to repair No. 133, but are told it is destined for the scrap heap. What else is there to do but go to a fiesta and get drunk? At the very Buñuelian fiesta, the revelers are treated to a staged version of Adam and Eve being tempted by the serpent. The impact of sinning is rather lost since the First Couple are dressed like Fred and Wilma Flintstone, but the amateur theatrics give Buñuel a chance to send up religion for the low-rent pagan undertaking he always believed it to be. Soon, Curls and Tarrajas’s sorrow and inebriation lead them to take No. 133 for one last joy ride. Navarro and Soto are a bit like Abbott and Costello as they tool around the city with half-aware beneficence for the passengers they pick up and carry to their destinations free of charge. The nighttime group of workers from the city slaughterhouse feature in an especially colorful sequence in this black-and-white film. Workers pile into the streetcar with their pig’s heads and sides of beef in tow. Why they would be carrying these items out of the abattoir is a mystery to me, but I imagine Buñuel couldn’t pass up the chance to throw some surreal, Francis Baconish images at the audience. In the glaring light of day, Curls and Tarrajas realize they could be in big trouble if they don’t get the streetcar back to the depot. Yet, at every turn, their journey is thwarted by blocked tracks and, in one instance, a retired, asthmatic streetcar inspector, “Daddy” Pinillos (Agustín Isunza), who threatens to report them for minor irregularities, never noticing that he is on a rogue streetcar. The plot amounts to a case of mistaken identity, but of the streetcar itself, with its rolling sign changing to accommodate the routes Curls and Tarrajas need to return to the depot. The script is a bit confused, with Curls and Tarrajas first being worried about being fired and then with being charged with theft, but typical for the lazy bureaucracy Buñuel ridicules, nobody believes a streetcar can be stolen. After all, how could it run other than on the company tracks? Good point. So again, we are left with a kind of nonsense plot, something I imagine happened a lot with the numerous quickies Buñuel made during his directorial career in Mexico. He may even have enjoyed the lack of coherence. He doesn’t spare the unwashed masses his jaundiced eye, the same eye he trained on the tramps in VIRIDIANA (1961). Yet, despite these paeans to the director’s favorite peccadillos, the short, matter-of-fact discussions his characters engage in have the kind of lived-in reality that contradict the director’s early adherence to surrealism. Money and the corruption form a constant theme and the source of more than one melee between consumers and their crooked suppliers. Perhaps living in Mexico for so many years was a grounding experience for Buñuel. The surrealist, iconoclastic, political touches that mark it as a Buñuel film, mixed with a cross-section of urban Mexican life, make ILLUSION TRAVELS BY STREETCAR an enriching viewing experience. (1954, 82 min, 35mm) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Both screen as part of the Buñuel in Mexico series.

Picture Restart: Nightmare Fever (Shorts)

Chicago Filmmakers — Saturday, 6pm

It's a testament to both the breadth of material contained in the Picture Start collection as well as the depth of curator Ben Creech's archival inquisition that enough material surfaced to flesh out this spooky seasonal iteration of Chicago Filmmakers' indispensable Picture Restart series. This time around, the usual grab bag of revivified 16mm shorts (always thematically through-composed, but consistently eclectic in both style and form) is instead assembled with total genre unanimity in mind; this is a veritable fright night of gnarly horror flicks—shamelessly beholden to the mid-'80s for the bulk of its run-time—that centers night zombies, Draculas, and murder clowns for maximum pulp-Halloween impact. Sara Petty's FURIES (1975, 3 min, 16mm), a brisk animation that sets black two cats adrift in a bizarre, cubist orbit around one another, is a particularly inspiring opening statement. Another animated film follows in the form of John Schnall's FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER (1984, 10 min, 16mm), a deeply reverent and shockingly chilly adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe's short story of the same name. It's a genuinely disquieting piece owing to its scratchy texture and enveloping darkness, the result of having been inked on newsprint, carefully hand-painted on acetate cels and liberally textured with colored xerox prints, per the program notes. REALLY DEAD (1993, 4 min, 16mm) is a bonkers exercise in "vampire trance" from Dan Dinello & Sharon Sandusky that plays like a Oneohtrix Point Never cut up of a lost German Expressionist classic. It's the rhythm of the night, basically, and more or less exactly as freaky as I'm making it sound. The program veers full-tilt into genre silliness with Charles Wittington's A GIFT FOR TOBY (1987, 7 min, 16mm), in which a factory model dork child (plaid pajamas and thick-rimmed glasses, for reference) receives a malevolent jack-in-the-box in the mail and is subjected to all manner of hellish depravity after giving the handle a few ill-conceived cranks. The program's centerpiece is Kip Hanks' THE DUST (1986, 24 min, 16mm), a shaggy homebrew zombie slasher—and a dose of pure heroin '80s aesthetics, I must add—that delivers all the meat and gristle necessary to qualify the screening as proper Halloween spectacle (with a goofy dish soap denouement that I'd be remiss not to mention). Most remarkable on the lineup, however, is the closing film: Dorn Martell & Eric Iversen's ZUG (1987, 12 min, 16mm), a brain-melting work of post-industrial nightmare fuel that executes the most confident and assured ERASERHEAD (1977) pastiche imaginable—there's even a chicken scene at the outset to hammer home that colossal point of reference—dramatizing a factory worker's deranged inner landscape against a fetid backdrop of billowing smokestacks and synthesized industrial clatter. The aforementioned comparison is difficult not to make, although to my eye, as the film unfurls from cramped apartment interiors to some sort of wretched tech-dystopian laboratory, it lands in the broader Lynchian cosmos somewhere closer to an expanded riff on perhaps his most quintessential short, 1995's blood-curdling PREMONITIONS FOLLOWING AN EVIL DEED. It's got the feel of a Midwestern classic that could have been, and it's a privilege that it's being salvaged from obscurity for such a worthwhile endeavor. [David Whitehouse]

Jim Jarmusch's ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE (US)

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

ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE continues Jim Jarmusch's habit of ruminating on familiar topics at a glacial pace with a witty character study and touching love story that just happens to be about two vampires who may or may not have birthed all of humanity. Tom Hiddleston plays Adam, a musical genius and tinkerer with a deep love for antiquated instruments and technologies. Unfortunately, Adam is mired in the throes of a deep depression and can only seem to compose funeral music of late. Sensing something is amiss, Eve (played by Tilda Swinton with her offhandedly strange and serene otherworldliness) calls Adam from her book-laden apartment in Tangier, Morocco. After a brief and tender conversation, she resolves to pay a visit and cheer him up, although she loathes traveling. Eve prepares herself for a night flight to Detroit, where Adam lives in a dilapidated Victorian home. Like most Jarmusch films, the plot meanders in an unhurried fashion and remains peripheral at best. The viewer's enjoyment of ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE relies instead on lovingly and carefully crafted aesthetics, niche jokes and references, and maddeningly cool characters. The film lingers on numerous elements of the mise-en-scène that characterize the abode of each vampire, the treasures that they hoard over centuries, and their vintage wardrobes, indicating that the vampires are as maximalist in their aesthetics as Jarmusch is minimalist in his narratives. The soundtrack, composed mostly of Jarmusch's band SQÜRL, also features key songs like "Funnel of Love" by Wanda Jackson and an arresting scene with Lebanese singer/songwriter Yasmine Hamdan provides waves of sonic pleasure and engrossing atmosphere. Monologues and asides in honor of Nikola Tesla, Christopher Marlowe (who, by the way, is also a vampire and may or may not have penned all of Shakespeare's works), Franz Schubert, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others provide waves of allusive pleasure. And small-but-mighty roles played by John Hurt, Jeffrey Wright, Mia Wasikowska, and Anton Yelchin round out the humorous and morbid character study, dosing us with delightfully comedic and soberly tragic asides in a careful rhythm that maintains a lighter and perversely more optimistic tone than one would expect for a vampire movie. One special pleasure in viewing ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE, indeed, is the joy of observing ways in which Jarmusch adheres to generic conventions around vampires (crossing thresholds, sleeping during the day, drinking blood) and deviates from generic conventions (sucking blood "is so 15th century"), or creates new vampiric rituals of his own. In this way, he upends the genre of vampire movies in the same way that STRANGER THAN PARADISE and DOWN BY LAW subvert road trip films and GHOST DOG and DEAD MAN reimagine narratives of an alienated, lone wolf protagonist. ONLY LOVERS may be one of Jarmusch's slighter films, but it is (for a 10,000-year-old love story about the undead) oddly enough, one of his most accessible and optimistic. Come for the moody soundtrack; stick around for affectionate, knowing banter that makes you believe that true love can last an eternity. Screening as part of the The Ethical Vampire: The Moral Dilemma of Vampirism series. (2013, 123 min, 35mm) [Alex Ensign]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

W.S. Van Dyke's THE THIN MAN (US)

Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6:15pm

"The important thing is the rhythm. Always have rhythm in your shaking," Nick tells the bartenders. "Now a Manhattan you shake to fox-trot time, a Bronx to two-step time. A dry martini you always shake to waltz time." THE THIN MAN was released in the spring of 1934; Prohibition had been repealed less than six months earlier. It was nothing less than the first major post-Prohibition movie to unashamedly feature drinking at its core, offering a portrait of a sophisticated married couple whose wholesale devotion to tippling presents no impediment whatsoever to solving crimes and generally looking glamorous. When Nick and Nora (William Powell and Myrna Loy) aren't (almost half-heartedly) trying to solve a series of murders, they're throwing wild parties in their hotel suite and hobnobbing with assorted lowlifes from Nick's past. THE THIN MAN is also highly underappreciated as a holiday movie. During a memorable scene on Christmas morning, Nora lounges around in pajamas and fur coat, while Nick tests out his new BB gun on some Christmas tree ornaments. Isn't that the kind of Christmas morning we've all fantasized about? This screening is free for Siskel Center members. (1934, 91 min, DCP Digital) [Rob Christopher]

Jacques Tati’s JOUR DE FÊTE (France)

Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 8:15pm

Most summaries of Jacques Tati’s boisterous debut feature say it’s about a provincial French postman who makes a fool of himself when he tries to implement modern, “American style” techniques at his job, but that describes only the second half of the movie. For its first half, JOUR DE FÊTE is a generally plotless comedy about what happens in a small town on the day that a carnival arrives. Tati works in short scenes depicting children, workers, and various denizens of the town; these add up, as they do throughout the director’s filmography, to a sense of community, of society functioning as a whole. The presence of American military police situates the action around the end of WWII, which grants historical significance to the celebration—this is a film about a nation coming out of its shell. Tati exhibits great affection for all his characters, no matter how minor, and this air of goodwill makes the carnival seem more festive and magical than it really is (there are some wonderful gags involving the phoniness of the proceedings). Per Jonathan Rosenbaum, Tati’s sympathetic outlook likely derives from his having lived during the war in the town where the film was shot, and so it serves on one level as a documentary portrait of the community he had come to love. Jean-Luc Godard wrote, with characteristic hyperbole, that Tati invented French neorealism with JOUR DE FÊTE, and while that’s probably true, the compliment downplays how funny the film is. Every scene contains at least one inspired gag, whether visual or aural, that reflects the filmmaker’s unique ways of seeing and hearing the world. At the same time, there is a marked political component to the second half, with its running joke of Tati’s postman trying and failing to be like an American. For Rosenbaum, the movie “initiates a complex and ambivalent critique of technology in general and Americanization in particular that informs the remainder of Tati’s work.” This screening is free for Siskel Center members. (1949, 86 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

John McNaughton’s HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER (US)

FACETS – Saturday, 5pm

Decades before the advent of a depressingly cynical streaming culture which capitalizes on the label of “true crime” to churn out endless paint-by-numbers documentaries and series, HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER achieved its veneer of squalid plausibility by adapting a genuine fake. Director John McNaughton, a Columbia College graduate whose only previous credit was an archival documentary about Chicago gangsters, developed a film based on serial killer Henry Lee Lucas after watching a 20/20 segment on his exploits; in reality, Lucas had fabricated much of his legend during a period in Williamson County, Texas, jail where he copped to over six hundred killings. In April 1986, Texas Attorney General Jim Mattox released the “Lucas Report” comparing a timeline of the confessed crimes to Lucas and his accomplice Ottis Elwood Toole’s documented whereabouts, concluding “it is now clear that he confessed in reasonably accurate detail to murders he could not possibly have committed.” While he was ultimately convicted of eleven of these, Lucas’s tall tales—a feedback loop between a disturbed mind and the assumptions of police interrogators motivated to clear their own cold cases—combined with McNaughton and co-writer Richard Fire’s eye for local color to generate a uniquely vivid slasher in the Chicago way. Initially suppressed by its backers, HENRY discreetly circulated on video for years after its 1986 premiere at the Music Box (boosted by a favorable writeup by the Tribune’s Rick Kogan, who had borrowed a tape from then-colleague Dave Kehr), until its “unrated” theatrical run in 1990. The film’s Henry (Michael Rooker) and Otis (Tom Towles), first acquainted in prison, share a Wicker Park apartment with their television set, copious cans of Old Style, and Otis’s sister Becky (Tracy Arnold), crashing for a few weeks to escape a troubled marriage. Rooker’s mush-mouthed Bogart act establishes the strange bond between Becky and Henry, both victims of childhood sexual abuse by a parent, and although only the viewer at this point knows that Henry is an impulsive spree killer, Arnold’s battered, half-hypnotized performance suggests that his crimes might not be a dealbreaker. The Alabama-born Rooker showed up to an audition wearing paint-spattered clothes from his day job as a decorator, while McNaughton was introduced to Fire, Towles, and Arnold through their work with playwright and horror master Stuart Gordon’s Organic Theatre Company; the influence of Gordon’s confrontational stage productions (notably, 1968’s The Game Show, which simulated a literal assault on the audience), can be felt in HENRY’s self-reflexive wrinkle on the filmmaking process. When Otis joins Henry on the prowl, they randomly select a black-market TV merchant for their first joint kill, picking up a video camera which they use to document a home invasion in the movie’s most notorious scene. Presenting this and others episodes of violence only on a television screen—after an opening montage of attractively mutilated female corpses—the film establishes a discomfiting binary between Henry’s cold misanthropy and Otis’s sexual sadism, getting off on their rewound crimes. Although these devices serve to implicate the viewer, the primitive sophistication of McNaughton’s direction (call it outsider arthouse) has too much command of the genre’s pleasures to opt for indicting the audience at the expense of lurid payoffs; what has made HENRY a classic is the deep contrast between its sick fantasies and ugly truths. Critic Ray Pride, director McNaughton, and producer Steve A. Jones will take part in a conversation after the film; afterwards, there will be a live DJ set by Chicago-based producer Beau Wanzer. (1986, 83 min, DCP Digital) [Brendan Boyle]

Jean-Luc Godard's PIERROT LE FOU (France)

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

Jean-Luc Godard made 14 feature films during the first phase of his filmmaking career, the celebrated French New Wave period that began with BREATHLESS in 1960 and ended with WEEKEND in 1967. PIERROT LE FOU premiered two years before the latter film and similarly uses the story of a bourgeois couple in flight to engage in some wildly absurd scenarios. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays a bored husband who runs off with his beautiful babysitter (Anna Karina, Godard's wife at the time) to the south of France. Never serious or sensible, the film is well described by New Yorker film critic Richard Brody as a collage of "sociology, philosophy, poetry, politics, and outright caprice." Godard was known for putting together his films on the fly, and such spontaneity is evident here, with random plot developments (Belmondo driving his car into a river) casually merging with set pieces (a short play about the Vietnam War). And littered throughout are the cultural artifacts that Godard so liked to reference: static shots of posters and paintings, repeated mentions of consumer goods, a cameo by Samuel Fuller. Mostly playful, the film nevertheless dabbles in the type of film essay that would mark Godard's post-1967 turn towards more political and experimental works. There are surely politics here, but they're hidden within the comic angst of the leads, who, like many in the 1960s, were quite sure of what they were fighting against, but less sure of what they were fighting for. Screening as part of the Conversations in Cars: Road Trips and Relationships series. (1965, 110 min, 35mm) [Martin Stainthorp]

Francis Ford Coppola's MEGALOPOLIS (US)

The Davis Theater – Sunday, 6:30pm

Francis Ford Coppola’s MEGALOPOLIS at times suggests a $100 million-plus version of Léos Carax's recent persona essay film IT’S NOT ME. But unlike Carax, Coppola doesn’t interweave his contemporary and historical concerns. Rather, the film takes place in a strange amalgam of ancient Rome and present-day New York—a grand, metaphorical way of saying that contemporary America looks a lot like the Roman Empire just before its fall. Coppola’s “New Rome” is mired in decadence, extreme income inequality, and widespread public distrust of government, and numerous characters speculate that the general order could be upturned at any time. The situation may be dire, yet MEGALOPOLIS is hardly a dour film. In fact, it’s often quite funny (especially when Aubrey Plaza or Jon Voight is on screen), and Coppola’s imagery can be breathtaking. Taking inspiration from Lang’s METROPOLIS (1927), Coppola and his team imagine a giant city of the imagination, a platform on which people can realize their grandest dreams for civilization. And per the architect (and Coppola stand-in) played by Adam Driver, this is what cities are supposed to be. Driver’s character spends the movie trying to construct a new urban center that will be so glorious that it restores the citizenry’s faith in their city-state/nation/empire. (The character’s messianic ambition, coupled with the brazenly sexual atmosphere, suggests that Coppola had spent a lot of time studying King Vidor’s film of THE FOUNTAINHEAD [1949] before he made this.) His mission is comparable to Carax’s goal of recapturing the vision of the gods—in each case, a passionate artist wants to return a sense of awe to our despiritualized world. Perhaps the most inspiring thing about MEGALOPOLIS is that Coppola clearly still finds awe in the process of filmmaking; the digressions into weird humor, classical quotations, and garish eroticism create the impression the director was finding the movie as he went along, throwing anything into the work that reflects his deep love of cinema. (2024, 138 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Screening as part of a double feature with Mike Figgis’ 2025 documentary MEGADOC (107 min, DCP Digital), which was shot during the making of MEGALOPOLIS.

Hisayasu Satō’s RE-WIND (aka CELLULOID NIGHTMARES) (Japan)

The Davis Theater – Wednesday, 8pm

With its body horror and videotape-focused plot, prolific pink film director Hisayasu Satō’s RE-WIND (aka CELLULOID NIGHTMARES) can be easily compared to David Cronenberg VIDEODROME (1983). When a gruesome snuff film is discovered in an abandoned refrigerator, the investigation into its contents reveals dark secrets in Tokyo's underground video scene. Satō constantly folds voyeurism in on itself, questioning the shifting relationship in the 1980s between technology and sex. The sex scenes start to become more unnerving as they become more reflexive, holding the audience accountable for their own participation in watching. Amidst fluorescent '80s fashion and neon light, Satō uses odd angles and reflections to highlight technology’s omnipresent watch over modernity; the most interesting of these happen in outdoor daylight scenes, where glass telephone booths become alien as the light of the city warps the image. Sex scenes surrounded by a sea television sets suggest the technology is inherently voyeuristic, always watching, even when off. The voyeurism of it all is noteworthy, but RE-WIND implies an even more subtle and complex take on the video era. There’s a scene early on in which the investigators are sitting in a car as they discuss the underground American film scene while drinking very prominently placed cans of Coke; Steven Spielberg also gets mentioned shortly after. The rise of video technology prompted economic anxieties about this easily rewritable, copiable, and sharable format. Noted by theorist Caetlin Benson-Allott, foreign produced films like VIDEODROME additionally reflect a fear of a complete Americanization of global media and video’s role in that domination. Through its pink genre, RE-WIND is commenting on this, too, and is deserving of a place amongst other films about videotapes that question and complicate the format’s profound effect on culture. Presented by Oscarbate with an introduction by film historian Liz Purchell. (1988, 65 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Tomas Alfredson's LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (Sweden)

Music Box Theatre – Monday, 9:30pm

Vampire mythology has a rich history that’s been explored in a myriad of different fashions throughout film history. From horror to comedy and more, it’s a subject that’s proved to be quite malleable in cinema. LET THE RIGHT ONE IN is centered on a 12-year-old boy named Oskar who’s constantly picked on by his classmates and who fantasizes about getting revenge on them. One day, some new neighbors move in next door to his apartment, including the seemingly 12-year-old girl Eli, who is actually a vampire. Set during the 1980s in a sleepy town in the suburbs of Stockholm, Oskar and Eli strike up an unlikely friendship that grows to be mutually beneficial to the two socially isolated preteens. It’s a beautifully crafted film. The cinematography features large swathes of snowy white that becomes marred with crimson red when Eli has to feed. The sound design is relatively music-free outside of a few diegetic pieces and instead forces the viewer to focus on the visceral. Its dark tone harmonizes the awkwardness of not fitting in at school, dealing with single-parent households, and the permanent reality Eli faces of having to stay 12 for the rest of her life. The romance that blooms between Oskar and Eli is innocent, sweet, and endearing, as the two become one another’s protectors at various times. Hauntingly beautiful, LET THE RIGHT ONE IN is one of the finest vampire films ever made, one that soars thanks to its leads’ excellent performances, its striking imagery, and the poignant undertones. Screening as part of the Music Box of Horrors: Dead and Loving It! series. (2008, 115 min, 35mm) [Kyle Cubr]

Takashi Miike's DEAD OR ALIVE (Japan)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 9:30pm and Saturday, 10pm

DEAD OR ALIVE bursts onto the screen with a six-minute opening montage of sex, drugs, violence, gluttony, wrath, all of the seven deadly sins and a couple more for good measure. Often abbreviated as DOA and forming the first part of a trilogy, the film follows detective Jojima (Show Aikawa), indebted to a Yakuza boss for helping pay for life-saving surgery for his ill daughter, who must track down and exterminate a small-time rival boss, Ryūichi (Riki Takeuchi), who has decided to go big-time. Stylish, formally expressive, and ultraviolent, Miike's splashes of extreme perversity are woven within the narrative seamlessly and give an edge to the distinct melancholy surrounding each and every character. Sweeping, fluid action mimics the textural sludge that oozes from the image, rain, blood, feces, mud, broth, vomit among gunfire and firefights. The cavernous gonzo world these figures occupy acts as a never-ending maze with no way out and no reward. Each man is trapped within a despairing violence and alienation that can only multiply, even when immense efforts are made to thwart it. Screening as part of the Board Picks series. (1999, 105 min, DCP Digital) [Olivia Hunter Willke]

Francis Ford Coppola’s BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA (US)

The Davis Theater – Monday, 7pm

BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA capped the most prolific, varied, and unpredictable period of Francis Ford Coppola’s career, and it delivered a happy ending in at least one respect: its popular success allowed Coppola to save his production company American Zoetrope, which had gone bankrupt after a series of commercial failures. Almost all of those failures look better today than they probably did in the 1980s, when memories of THE GODFATHER (1972) and APOCALYPSE NOW (1979) were still fresh in the minds of most moviegoers and led them to expect more bloated, thematically obvious epics like those. But Coppola was never content to repeat himself. The dozen years post-APOCALYPSE found the director following his whims wherever they took him, exploring not only new ways of making movies, but different ways of contemplating his relationship to film history. (It’s no wonder that Coppola helped shepherd the American release of Jean-Luc Godard’s EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF [1979]; one might describe Godard’s work beginning with that film along similar lines.) This long experiment could take the form of A WOMAN IS A WOMAN by way of the cinéma du look (ONE FROM THE HEART [1981]), American International teensploitation mixed with Norman Rockwell (THE OUTSIDERS [1983), or modern imperialist history seen through the lens of John Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy (GARDENS OF STONE [1987]). Not every film of this period began as a personal project, but they all ended up that way. Case in point, BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA was intended to be a TV movie directed by Michael Apted before Winona Ryder brought the script to Coppola’s attention; the inveterate cinephile, taking over the project, quickly decided that his version of Dracula would be a tribute to F.W. Murnau’s NOSFERATU (1922) in particular and German Expressionism in general. In the tradition of that movement, the film is a feast of brazenly unrealistic production design and playful camera tricks, which were made (as in the movies that served as inspiration) without the aid of digital technology. Coppola insisted on practical effects, going so far as to fire the special effects team he’d been assigned and replace them with his comparatively inexperienced son Roman, who was just 29 at the time of production. The contributions by Coppola fils are loads of fun to watch, as they riff not only on German silent classics, but such other expressionist touchstones as Frank Capra’s THE BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN (1932) and Jean Cocteau’s BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (1946). Both Coppolas are aided immeasurably by the great cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, whose lighting schemes and tracking shots are appropriately baroque; he’s matched in showmanship by the much of the cast, namely Gary Oldman (as Dracula), Anthony Hopkins (as Van Helsing), Sadie Frost (as Lucy), and Tom Waits (as Renfield). Keanu Reeves and Ryder, playing the romantic leads, are about as flat as the ones in A NIGHT AT THE OPERA (1935), but that’s a minor complaint; Coppola gives us almost too much to chew on here, visually as well as thematically. Jonathan Rosenbaum suggested that Coppola was drawn to the story’s 1897 setting because it enabled him to reflect on the origins of both cinema and psychoanalysis; one of the more enjoyable elements of BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA is how the malleable the horror is, how it conforms to the thematic influence of those phenomena depending on what Coppola wants to do with it. Screening as part of the Big Screen Classics series. (1992, 127 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

George Cukor's THE WOMEN (US)

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

When asked by Gavin Lambert for his 1972 book On Cukor which recent movies he admired, the first title to cross George Cukor's mind was Andy Warhol's transgressive LONESOME COWBOYS. It's a fun bit of trivia, but also a revealing insight into this misunderstood filmmaker—a heartfelt melodramatist as well as a gender-studies theorist avant la lettre, some of whose best work (HOLIDAY, GASLIGHT, ADAM'S RIB) critiqued hetero-male hegemony well before such practice was commonly accepted. On paper, THE WOMEN seems like ideal material for Cukor: it's the screen adaptation of a Broadway play (Cukor began his directorial career on Broadway and maintained a sure hand with actors throughout his career) famous for having no male characters among its large cast. Occupying the void of powerful men is a web of female alliances and rivalries, scripted in part by the poison pen of Anita Loos (and, characteristically uncredited, F. Scott Fitzgerald) and starring some of the brassiest actresses of the day—Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, and Joan Fontaine, among many others. The film has plenty of Old Hollywood charm, but it's nowhere near as subversive as Cukor's previous HOLIDAY or his subsequent collaboration with Crawford, the morbid A WOMAN'S FACE. It's far too reverent of its high society milieu, and the film ends up endorsing male hegemony by making its central conflict a woman's fight over her husband with a scheming mistress. In Lambert's book, Cukor says the movie would have worked better if the characters recognized the husband's corruption and became friends instead of enemies. Still, the movie works well enough, thanks to the sharp dialogue and Cukor's typically ingenious use of longer takes. Screening as part of the Joan Crawford: Actress as Auteur series. (1939, 133 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Bruno Mattei’s CRUEL JAWS (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Wednesday, 9:30pm

Welcome to Close-Talking 101. Lesson one: if you think you’re too close to your co-star, step closer and scream directly into their mouth. That’s the Bruno Mattei school of acting, where the line between emotion and concussion is thin, and rigging microphones to actors fixes everything as long as the performers scream into them. Lesson two: if you can’t afford a shark, steal one. CRUEL JAWS, Mattei’s magnificently illegal love letter to Spielberg’s classic, is the cinematic equivalent of rummaging through Universal’s trash bin with a glue stick. "We're gonna need a bigger... Helicopter!" It’s a movie stitched together like a mixtape from footage of JAWS (1975), JAWS 2 (1978), JAWS 3-D (1983), THE LAST SHARK (1981), and DEEP BLOOD (1990). It steals John Williams’ music from STAR WARS (1977). It even borrows a few dolphins just to confuse the viewer. But to Mattei, theft was liberation. Bruno Mattei—a.k.a. "William Snyder," a.k.a. "Vincent Dawn"—was Italy’s reigning monarch of cinematic plagiarism. From the 1970s through the early 2000s, he operated like a cultural pickpocket, snatching bits of Hollywood success and reassembling them into delirious, low-budget doppelgängers. His HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD (1980) cribbed Romero, his SHOCKING DARK (1989) ripped off both ALIENS (1986) and TERMINATOR (1984), and by the time of CRUEL JAWS, he’d reached his creative zenith—or moral nadir, if you’re a copyright lawyer. Shot in Florida with a half-American cast and nearly a fully Italian crew. CRUEL JAWS pretended to be an American blockbuster for markets that didn’t know better. One of the characters, Dag, played by Richard Dew, wasn’t just a Hulk Hogan lookalike for the film, he was a professional Hulk Hogan impersonator, cast to guarantee recognition without copyright risk. The film’s budget allegedly hovered around $300,000, though watching it, one suspects most of that went to hairspray and lunch. Mattei’s approach to filmmaking was as chaotic as it was pure. Actor Jay Colligan recalls the director barking orders in Italian while his assistant director, lost in translation, simply read the stage directions aloud. When the camera dollies squeaked, the Italian grips solved it by pouring seawater on the chrome tracks. When pyrotechnics were needed, they built what looked like a pipe bomb and told the actors to dive for safety. It was filmmaking as folk art. It was dangerous, inspired, and utterly indifferent to OSHA compliance. As a film, CRUEL JAWS is a miracle. It should not exist. It’s a collage of delusion and persistence, a vision so determined to exist that it ignores the boundaries of legality and logic alike. The dolphins smile, the shark changes size mid-attack, and the dialogue—"They’re locomotives with mouths full of butcher’s knives!"—aspires to its own Shakespearean nonsense. Mattei's films are evidence that filmmaking can be an act of piracy, that rip-offs can reveal as much about their originals as any reverent homage. Thirty years later, its legacy is paradoxical: a film banned by Universal but beloved by bootleggers, mocked by critics but worshipped by cultists. It’s a reminder that even cinema’s most illegitimate offspring deserves a birthday party. CRUEL JAWS survives against reason, against taste, and against copyright law. It swims on, a cinematic barnacle clinging to the hull of history, forever hungry, forever stealing. Screening as part of the Weird Wednesday series. (1995, 97 min, Digital Projection) [Shaun Huhn]

F.W. Murnau's NOSFERATU (Germany/Silent)

The Davis Theater – Tuesday, 7:30pm

Like his contemporary Jean Vigo, F.W. Murnau died far too soon. His death in an auto accident cut short the career of a great talent who was reaching new artistic milestones after his arrival in the U.S. He died having directed only three films for Hollywood (not including TABU) and, while he is celebrated among auteurists and cinephiles, his popular reputation never reached the level of other European émigrés like Fritz Lang. David Thomson writes that Murnau had an unparalleled talent for "photograph[ing] the real world and yet invest[ing] it with a variety of poetic, imaginative, and subjective qualities. The camera itself allowed audiences to experience actuality and imagination simultaneously." In the case of NOSFERATU, the result is a vampire story of startling realism. This is no fantasy, nor is it a lush period piece. This is mania, creeping fear, disease, and plague. Perhaps no film better illustrates the difference between dreams, which inhabit the margins of our world, and fantasies, which we each manufacture. Thanks to Murnau's pioneering style here and in later films, directors as diverse as Douglas Sirk and David Lynch have continued to practice a similar alchemy of melodrama, movement, desire, and fateful circumstance. Presented by Terror in the Aisles with live organ accompaniment, a burlesque performance ahead of the feature, and vendors in the theater lobby.(1922, 94 min, Digital Projection) [Will Schmenner]

Jeff Nichols' TAKE SHELTER (US)

FACETS – Friday, 7pm

Curtis (Michael Shannon) is suddenly plagued by apocalyptic nightmares and visions—animal attacks, mysterious people coming to take his daughter away; these dreams are all set during a terrible storm that rains oil from the sky. Noteworthy, they don’t initially involve his caring wife, Samantha (Jessica Chastain), and he hides his visions and concern for his mental health from her. Despite this awareness, Curtis can’t help but doomsday prep by working on a tornado shelter in the backyard. His daughter, Hannah (Tova Stewart), recently became deaf and Samantha’s primary concern is supporting her daughter, troubled that Curtis’ shift is starting to make that even more challenging. Small, sweet moments between the family trio that dot the film make Curtis’ unstable behavior even more distressing. Unsurprisingly, Shannon is remarkable, depicting the seriousness of Curtis’ situation without ever losing sympathy for the character, even as his actions become more and more alarming. This is aided by Chastain’s performance as Samantha, never letting her growing frustration overshadow the love she has for her husband; the chemistry between the two grounds their relationship in such a sincere, believable way. TAKE SHELTER is the second feature from director Jeff Nichols, after his outstanding debut SHOTGUN STORIES, also starring Shannon. All of Nichols’ films tackle a crisis of white American masculinity, depicting its toxicity as not just destructive to themselves and those around them, particularly the women in their lives who are forced into even more demandingly supportive roles. TAKE SHELTER further connects this to the issues of climate change—it’s no accident that Curtis’ is in construction, working on an oil rig; wide shots of the sky sit above Curtis’ modifying of the land below. These themes are most profoundly felt in the film’s shocking ending: one of the most quietly disconcerting I’ve ever seen. (2013, 120 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
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Screening as part of a double feature with Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 film SAVE THE GREEN PLANET! (118 min, DCP Digital), which starts at 9:15pm. Both films are part of the monthly Cold Sweat horror and cult film series.

George A. Romero's CREEPSHOW (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Monday, 4:15pm and Tuesday, 7pm

Between the masterful DAWN OF THE DEAD and the just slightly overrated DAY OF THE DEAD, George Romero made two of the most unlikely films of his career: 1981's KNIGHTRIDERS and 1982's CREEPSHOW. While the former is a rather pedestrian sex comedy, the latter is easily the greatest horror anthology film ever made. A send up/homage to the popular horror comics published in the 1950's by E.C., CREEPSHOW's "wrap-around-story" involves a young boy's father confiscating his "Creepshow Magazine" after declaring it "filth" only to have it returned by the titular "Creep" (a more than obvious take on E.C.'s famous Crypt Keeper), who shares with our young hero (and us) five tales of supernatural horror. What immediately sets CREEPSHOW apart from other horror films of the era, and even its cinematic predecessors such as VAULT OF HORROR and TALES FROM THE CRYPT (both directly based on E.C. stories), is a combination of stylization and brilliant comic timing, thanks in great part to the screenplay authored by Stephen King, who clearly has as much nostalgic affection for horror comics as Romero does. King, who also appears in one of the stories, providing a rather fascinating and quite compelling performance, is able to bring out the clear humor in genre contrivances which previous anthologies unwisely played completely straight faced. CREEPSHOW is truly a kid's film in the most literal sense: despite subplots involving alcoholism, infidelity, and frequent sexual innuendos, Romero maintains a sense of mysterious optimism and constant excitement which is wholly in keeping with the structure of the pre-teen to teen oriented comics he's emulating, completely ignoring the overt savagery and hate which found its way into so many horror films of the era. The film literally moves from panel to panel, thanks to creative opticals, and scenes are often bathed in red or blue light, or shot from canted angles, to maintain a feeling of cartoon-like wonderment. As horrifying as any given story might become, each tale ends with a silly punchline, to serve as a reminder that everything is in good fun. (1982, 120 min, DCP Digital) [Joe Rubin]

Jack Sholder's A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 2: FREDDY'S REVENGE (US)

Leather Archives & Museum – Saturday, 7pm

Freddy Krueger: one of the few horror villains so iconic that he got a crossover movie in the mid-2000s. Oft-imitated but never replicated (even within the series), Robert Englund’s Krueger is as rock-solid a slasher villain as there is, peppering his phantasmagoric killing streaks with puns and murder methodology borrowed from Looney Tunes. The series persists partly because of the iconic villain at the center, but mostly because of its reliance on finding novel ways to fold Freddy into the fabric of the characters’ minds. In a series that plays fast and loose with how Freddy works, the second entry perhaps plays the loosest, with Krueger essentially hijacking the corporeal form of one person rather than hopping between the minds of a group, as he does in most entries. This ups the allegorical potential especially in how it centers Mark Patton’s raw-nerve central performance, a turn that’s anchored the film as a queer cult classic. Despite its departures, the film opens right where the previous one’s abrupt cliffhanger left off, with a busload of teens careening in an uncertain dreamspace. This introduces us to Jesse (Patton), a teen whose dreams have become haunted by our murderous melty-faced friend since he moved into the house where the previous NIGHTMARE took place. As inexplicable occurrences and dead bodies begin to pile up, it becomes clear that Freddy is not only in Jesse’s mind but moving through him to dispatch everyone around him. Based in the realm of dreams, all ELM STREET films revel in being two things at once. The viewer never feels firmly in reality or the dream world, the two often collapsing, overlapping, and prefiguring one another. The unique alchemy is something both broadly entertaining and as cerebral as you want it to be, which is especially where this film’s status as an LGBT horror staple has germinated; while Jesse’s battle with a repressed inner desire could be read a few ways, it’s scaffolded by occasional dips into softcore and S&M aesthetics and an unconventional bully-nerd frenemy-ship between Jesse and his occasional wrestling partner Grady (Robert Rusler). And as with all great '80s horror, the film is also a repository for fun SFX ideas that build out the requisite gore with pyrotechnics, matte paintings, and a few ravenous dogs with the faces of human babies. Director Jack Sholder, for his part, infuses the proceedings with a Real Film stateliness, widescreen compositions and loads of steam grounding an emotional through line that heightens the horror of each set piece. Forget the Johnny Depp blood geyser; Freddy’s physical exit through Jesse’s body deserves its place on any highlight reel of horror effects. There’s really something for everyone in this thinking-gorehound’s coming-of-age nightmare, but horror fans in particular should recognize it for the essential work that it is.(1985, 87 min, Digital Projection) [Maxwell Courtright]
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Screening as part of a double feature with Stuart Gordon’s 1986 film FROM BEYOND (86 min, Digital Projection), which begins at 9pm.

Jonathan Glazer's UNDER THE SKIN (UK/Switzerland)

The Davis Theater – Thursday, 9pm

Jonathan Glazer’s first feature in nearly a decade following 2004’s BIRTH and what a return it was. In what is arguably the finest performance she has ever given, a black-haired Scarlett Johansson plays an alien who appears in Scotland and dons the aforementioned actresses’ appearance as if it were a costume. For much of the film, she roams around Glasgow in a utility van to pick up unwitting men only to lead them back to her abyss-like lair from which they never return. Many of these sequences maintain a hyperrealism thanks in part to the fact that Glazer hid cameras in and around the van while Johansson speaks with these men (many of whom were not actors, but rather just people out walking around). These unscripted scenes are fascinating to behold because they further stress the notion that her character is an outsider trying to blend in with modern society while she goes out to "hunt." Mica Levi’s haunting score boosts the film’s unnerving tone. The discordant sounds heighten the uncomfortable, sinister atmosphere Glazer cultivates and at times, seem otherworldly. One of the most interesting facets of this film is the way in which sexual politics and traditional gender roles are essentially reversed: here it is the men who should by wary of a strange woman attempting to pick them up. There is a strong sense of feminism underlying the film’s dark veneer. Heady, parasitic, and eerie, UNDER THE SKIN brings to the forefront contemporary societal issues and tackles them in unique fashion. It is the kind of film that sticks with you long after leaving the theater and in this writer’s opinion, a modern masterpiece. Screening as part of the New Cult Canon and Not Quite Midnight series. (2013, 108 min, DCP Digital) [Kyle Cubr]

Tom Holland’s FRIGHT NIGHT (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Friday, 12:15pm and Sunday, 12pm

If you’re looking for kitsch, look no further than Tom Holland’s FRIGHT NIGHT. The big hair, the fashion disasters that we thought were so hip and funky, and the technopop music with a driving backbeat that turns you into a bobblehead whether you like it or not—all of these wonderfully awful ’80s artifacts are on splendid display. The story is pretty simple. Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale) is a typical horny teenager. The film opens with him making out with his perky girlfriend, Amy Peterson (Amanda Bearse), on his bedroom floor while his favorite TV show, “Peter Vincent: Vampire Killer” (Roddy McDowell), plays in the background. When she refuses to go all the way, Charley gets mad. They’ve been going together for a year, after all. Charley looks out his window to avoid Amy’s hurt gaze. He doesn’t notice that she has moved to his bed and is willing to give him what he wants. He’s too busy watching an elaborate coffin being moved into the house next door. The next day, Charley passes an attractive woman on the street who is looking for the address of his new next-door neighbor. The fact that she is a hooker initially escaped me because a lot of women dressed like her back then—tight, short skirt in an impossibly bright blue; big, blonde hair; shocking nail polish. When next he sees her using that very ’80s movie accoutrement in movies—binoculars—she is stripping in his neighbor’s house. But his voyeurism ends with a big shock when he sees the man of the house bite her. A very cool shot of three rivulets of blood trickling down her bare back caps the scene. Now Charley is sure his new neighbor, Jerry Dandridge (Chris Sarandon), is a vampire. When he tries to confront Dandridge, he is stopped by smarmy Renfield-like houseboy Billy (Jonathan Stark). To stop Charley from snooping, Dandridge trashes Charley’s already trashy-looking car. Don’t ask me how that’s an effective deterrent. Now Charley is in full vampire hunter mode. He brings a cop over to his neighbor’s home to see the coffin and convince him that the murders being reported in town—in a very blasé way, I might add—are Dandridge’s doing. The cop laughs and leaves. Not only does Charley get dismissed, but as in any self-respecting teen-centered movie, his clueless single mother (Dorothy Fielding) is brought in to trigger a plot twist—inviting the vampire into her home—and then disappears from the film. Charley is now in grave danger because the vampire can enter his home at will. Enter Charley’s favorite vampire stalker, a fraud willing to take a $500 savings bond as payment for services he has no expertise in rendering. The film has the obligatory smoky disco scene, with Dandridge in ’80s dressed-to-kill garb hypnotizing Amy and bringing her onto the dance floor. Suddenly, Amy is transformed into an ’80s-style vamp, her perky, barrette-clad hair poofed into seriously big hair and her unadorned face painted and seductive. We get a lot of disco-beat close-ups of Dandridge manhandling Amy, putting his hand up her skirt, and then whisking her off to his lair, with Charley in hot pursuit. The corny vampire-hunting scenes in Dandridge’s home reveal some of the silliest-looking vampires I’ve ever seen. Roddy, with his clown-whited hair, is perfection in a seriocomic role, performing with conviction to give the kids in the audience a thrill while maintaining a certain ironic distance. This isn’t great art, and it’s not even a major comic addition to the vampire canon. But, all the “don’t worry, be happy” vibes of the 1980s found in the abundant tongue-in-cheek horror movies of the era—in its own way, much smarter than the humor of today—still make for a great evening of popcorn viewing. (1985, 106 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Tallulah Hazekamp Schwab’s MR. K (Netherlands/Norway/Belgium)

Music Box Theatre – Wednesday, 9pm

Twenty years in the making, Dutch director Tallulah Hazekamp Schwab’s MR. K is finally open for guests—and those guests may never leave. A surreal, Kafkaesque dark comedy steeped in nightmare logic and philosophical riddles, MR. K unfolds like a fever dream. Schwab invites us into a world where doors lead to nowhere and meaning is a mirage glimpsed just as it vanishes. Crispin Glover stars as the titular Mr. K, a traveling magician no longer capable of conjuring awe. In his opening monologue—a soliloquy of loneliness—he announces himself with heartbreaking sincerity. Known for roles teetering on the edge of the uncanny—Layne in RIVER’S EDGE (1986) or the loner WILLARD (2003)—Glover here trades eccentricity for stillness. His Mr. K becomes an avatar for the disoriented everyman: caught in a trap with no rules, no reason, and no exit. Mr. K’s failure of self-realization is actualized when he’s trapped in a crumbling hotel: a structure more organism than building. It wheezes, pulses, and sheds its walls like skin. Paisley wallpaper leaks, a heartbeat thumps behind plaster, and it cries out in pain. The byzantine hallways twist into a maze without center or edge, extending the terror of liminal space into something cosmic. Cinematographer Frank Griebe paints this world in sickly, seductive tones that echo early Jean-Pierre Jeunet: DELICATESSEN (1991), THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN (1995). The palette is putrid yet playful, as if rot had a sense of humor. A marching band erupts from the vents. Guests speak in riddles. Silver-haired ladies of a certain age—Ruth and Sarah—comfort Mr. K with coffee and a reminder that the hotel has everything you need. One closet leads impossibly into a bourgeois artist’s sprawling flat. She urges Mr. K to find art in the smallest of details. Another door opens into a brutalist kitchen, where our hero is absorbed into a surreal workplace soap opera. Here, egg-cracking becomes metaphor, and success is awarded not for skill, but for spectacle. Schwab skewers capitalism as each promotion handed out is a punchline to a joke too bleak to laugh at. Graffiti scrawled across the walls suggests the coming of a messiah liberator. When Mr. K is asked if he is the one he replies, “I am nobody,” echoing Josef K.’s bewildered pleas of innocence in Kafka’s The Trial. As rooms shrink and furniture spills into the halls, the building decays from within. A torn strip of wallpaper reveals veins—proof the hotel is alive, and sickly. Mr. K becomes a prophet to the guests, warning of collapse. Is there escape, or will the content guests of the hotel turn on their new prophet? Schwab leans fully into the absurdity of meaning-making. She cites Kafka, but her voice is unmistakably her own. “There are no right answers,” she says of the film. This idea beats at the core of MR. K as each scene disorients and every answer is a riddle. It resembles a dream you half-remember but fully feel, the film bypasses logic to speak directly to something quieter, more terrified within. In a cinematic landscape of second-screen approved films drowning in exposition and closure, MR. K stands apart. It doesn’t explain. It doesn’t even try. Instead, it dares to sit with the ache of ambiguity, the sharp terror of not knowing why we are here or where we are going. And in doing so, it becomes something rare: a haunting, hypnotic echo of the human condition—confused, yearning, and beautifully lost. Featuring a post-screening Q&A with Glover. Screening as part of the Music Box of Horrors: Dead and Loving It! series. (2024, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]

Nadia Fall’s BRIDES (UK)

FACETS – Saturday, 3:30pm and 5:30pm

It’s revealed within the opening minutes of BRIDES that the main characters—a pair of chatty teenage best friends named Fedoza and Muna—are en route from England to Syria, where they aspire to become the brides of ISIS soldiers. Yet what follows isn’t a dour drama about religious fundamentalism, but rather a bittersweet, LAST DETAIL-style road movie about how these girls enjoy a few days of freedom before they willfully give it up. As Fedoza and Muna navigate their way to and then across Turkey, they prove themselves to be bright, resourceful young women capable of overcoming whatever curveballs life throws at them. Ebada Hassan and Safiyya Ingar are charming in the lead roles; they have a believable chemistry as friends. As the movie proceeds, however, it becomes clear that their funny rapport serves to protect them from how miserable they are without each other. Flashbacks to the girls’ life in England are relentlessly bleak, showing how Fedoza (who’s from Somalia) and Muna (who’s Pakistani) face constant Islamophobic bullying at school and abusive environments at home. Given how bad things are, their plan to marry into ISIS seems to them like a reasonable way out, though their naivety becomes heartbreaking over the course of the film. That’s because Suhayla El-Bushra’s script succeeds in humanizing these characters as much as the lead performances do, emphasizing moments of levity amidst what is essentially a very sad story. (2025, 93 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Paul Thomas Anderson’s ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER (US)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

A motif of flooded landscapes recurs in Thomas Pynchon’s novels about the midcentury American counterculture. In Vineland (1990), radical filmmaker turned counterinsurgent Frenesi Gates confesses a recurring vision of disappeared beaches she calls the Dream of the Gentle Flood, set to a siren song promising the return of “whatever has been taken… whatever has been lost….” Pynchon renders this uncommonly emotional scene with a blue-green melancholy, a generational lament for stolen futures and failed alternatives employing the same haunted imagery that Inherent Vice (2009) conjures in one of P.I. Doc Sportello’s aborted reveries, analogizing the broken promise of the hippie decade to the excavation of a mythical underwater continent: “some undrowned Lemuria, risen and redeemed, where the American fate, mercifully, failed to transpire…” Said American fate is the subject of Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER, a loose Vineland adaptation that strips one of the book’s central plots—a government spook returns to hunt an ex-radical’s teenage daughter, living in hiding with her burnout papa sixteen years after the destruction of their revolutionary cell—out of the Reagan ‘80s and plants it in an apocalyptic present tense recent-past-near-future so up-to-the-minute it could have wrapped production this week. (Anderson isn’t a prophet, he’s just paying attention.) In the Californian hamlet of Baktan Cross, forcibly retired explosives expert Bob “Ghetto Pat” Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) tries to keep daughter Willa (newcomer Chase Infiniti) alive by sending her to self-defense classes with Sensei Sergio (Benicio Del Toro) and policing her use of technology, but can’t protect her from the arrival of a federal dragnet led by Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), whose past entanglement with Willa’s mother Perfidia (Teyana Taylor)—and possible fathering of a mixed-race daughter—threatens his initiation into the inner sanctum of a white supremacist cabal. So the thugs surge into town, an old ally (Regina Hall) spirits Willa away, and Bob teams with Sergio to rendezvous with what remains of his network before Steven can smoke them out. Anderson’s treatment of this scenario—angry, funny, frantic—distills the experience of our 21st-century late-capitalist crack-up at a moment when the potential for organized mass resistance has slowed to an ebb tide. The diluvial theme in Pynchon resonates with Hunter S. Thompson’s oft-mythologized monologue in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which describes California at the end of the 1960s as “that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.” The Fitzgeraldian, Lost Generation lilt of Thompson’s prose typifies the rueful sentiment of much post-’60s literature (including Pynchon’s), and Anderson’s reliably knotty, suggestive character work here locates failures aplenty in Bob’s scattered movement: chiefly, the equation of Bob and Steven as parallel father figures with mutual responsibility for the shrunken future offered to Willa, and whose fetishization-slash-idolatry of Perfidia shares Anderson’s roving authorial eye. Bob has another parallel in Sergio, whose work speeding a hidden community of undocumented migrants to safety serves as a quiet contrast to the revolutionaries fixated upon code words and armed resistance. Sergio knows when to lie low and when to run for the high ground, as do the skateboarders they meet whose blissed-out ride for freedom amidst a militarized crackdown sums up this movie’s command of motion and message in a single feather-light shot. If Anderson ultimately wills some optimism into his vision of a shaky generational truce, ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER also acknowledges that an ungentle flood is here, and the tides are climbing high. The American fate may not be to recover what was lost but to move with the rising waters—as in the final chase that sees Willa hurtling through an undulating desert road, mastering its crests and troughs, surfin’ U.S.A. (2025, 161 min, DCP Digital) [Brendan Boyle]

Satoshi Kon’s PERFECT BLUE (Remastered) (Japan/Animation)

Alamo Drafthouse – Sunday, 8:15pm and Tuesday, 1:45pm

Many consider PERFECT BLUE to be Satoshi Kon's magnum opus—and for good reason. The film’s impact on culture reaches far beyond that of most other anime films, arguably rivaling the work of contemporaries like Hayao Miyazaki and AKIRA creator Katsuhiro Otomo. Those filmmakers regularly utilize the format to explore new, colorful worlds of fantasy and science fiction, which was also true of Kon. However, his work in the late '90s and early 2000s was more grounded in reality, exploring a dreamy aesthetic instead through his characters’ psychoses and fractured senses of self; Kon's approach led him to adapt Yoshikazu Takuchi’s novel of the same name, its story acting as a vehicle through which he could explore these themes. The film introduces us to Mima Kirigoe, a pop singer who leaves her idol group to become an actress. Between disappointed fanboys, mysterious deaths in her agency’s circle, and an acting role that increasingly mirrors her struggle to self-identify, Mima begins to lose herself in the horrors around her. This film would not be the last time Kon used cinema to tackle a character’s identity; he further explored the concept in his next original screenplay, MILLENNIUM ACTRESS, which he penned with frequent collaborator and PERFECT BLUE screenwriter Sadyuki Murai. Where that film uses cinema as a positive additive, heightening a tale of lost love and legacy to dramatic peaks, PERFECT BLUE hones in on the anxiety of performance, depicting an actress who loses herself both on camera and in the public eye. To categorize this film as a great work in anime is to do it a disservice; it's a masterclass in psychological horror that holds its own in one of the latter genre’s most memorable decades. (1997, 81 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Michael Bates]

📽️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Alamo Drafthouse
Tim Burton and Mike Johnson’s 2005 animated film CORPSE BRIDE (77 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday at 4pm; Saturday at 12pm; and Tuesday at 11:15am.

Jean Rollin’s 1980 film NIGHT OF THE HUNTED (91 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 9:30pm, as part of the Terror Tuesday series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
Two films by documentary filmmaker Deepa Dhanraj, TOBACCO EMBERS (1982, 27 min, DCP Digital) and SOMETHING LIKE A WAR (1991, 63 min, Digital Projection), screen Thursday at 7pm. Dhanraj in person for a post-screening discussion and audience Q&A. More info here. 

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

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
David Cronenberg’s 2024 film THE SHROUDS (120 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, 7pm, as part of the New Releases and Restorations series.

A program of short films by Hollis Frampton, all on 16mm and primarily concerned with materials and rudimentary engagement of the form, screens Sunday, 7pm, as part of the Infinite Cinema: The Films of Hollis Frampton series.

Two films by Antonio Campos, FALAMOS DE RIO DE ONOR (1974, 65 min, DCP Digital) and GENTE DE PRAIA DA VIEIRA (1976, 73 min, DCP Digital), screen Wednesday, 7pm, as part of the Sounds of Shaking Earth: Landscapes of Portuguese Cinema series.

Stephen Norrington’s 1998 film BLADE (121 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 7pm, as part of the Ethical Vampire: The Moral Dilemma of Vampirism series.

A program of short films by Barbara Hammer, all on 16mm, screens Thursday, 9:30pm, as part of the Celluloid Is Out: Queer Freedom and Subculture of the 1970s series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ FACETS
The special Halloween edition of My First Movies begins Sunday, 10:30am, with a gentle lineup of animated shorts about lovable animal friends and autumn adventures. Before and after the screening, families can enjoy fall-themed fun at the art table, while during the screening little ones can move, dance, and play along with interactive, witchy and whimsical activities led by the Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble.

Mal Hall presents a comedy special WHAT ARE WE DOING TODAY?! on Tuesday at 7pm. More info and tickets here.

Short Stack: Chicago’s Tiny Dance Film Festival, which celebrates the intersection of experimental artmaking, concision, and movement-based storytelling, takes place on Thursday at 6:30pm. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Film Studies Center (at the University of Chicago)
Small Gauge, Big Shoulders: Films by Bill Stamets screens Friday at 7pm. These Super 8 films document Chicago’s many protests, parades, and political campaigns, both mainstream and marginal. Chicago Film Archives, home to Bill’s reversal originals, has worked in recent years to digitize and preserve Bill’s work. This program debuts six films that are newly accessible through these efforts. Stamets in person for a post-screening conversation.

Reel Black Filmmakers, a program of the Community Film Workshop of Chicago (CFWC), will be celebrating its 13th anniversary with a screening of works by filmmakers Shahari Moore, Reginald Rice, and David Weathersby on Saturday at 3pm. More info about all screenings and events here.

⚫ Leather Archives & Museum
SUPER-HORROR-RAMA! and the Gerber/Hart Library & Archives present It’s a Dark and Stormy Night double feature, including James Whale’s 1932 film THE OLD DARK HOUSE (71 min, Digital Projection) and Curt McDowell’s 1975 film THUNDERCRACK! (159 min, Digital Projection), on Sunday at 6:30pm and 7:55pm, respectively. Every ticket includes two limited edition pinback buttons and entry to the one-night-only pop-up exhibit of horror erotica from Gerber/Hart’s special collections. They’ll also have giveaways for attendees who answer trivia questions during the introductions to these screenings. More info here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
The annual Music Box of Horrors 24-hour horror marathon begins Saturday, 12pm and runs through Sunday, 12pm. Please note that the marathon is sold out, but a few tickets for the half-marathon are still available. More info here.

Crispin Hellion Glover presents a live performance and his 2025 feature film, NO! YOU’RE WRONG. (85 min, DCP Digital) on Thursday. The performance begins at 7:30pm, with the film scheduled to begin at 8:15pm, and more festivities to follow afterward.

Also screening as part of the Music Box of Horrors: Dead and Loving It! series are Ken Camp’s 1984 film HIGHWAY HYPNOSIS (90 min, DCP Digital) on Tuesday, 9:30pm, with an introduction by film historian and Muscle Distribution founder Elizabeth Purchell, and Mohammed Shebl’s 1981 film ANYAB (100 min, DCP Digital) on Thursday, 9:30pm. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Siskel Film Center
Julian Schnabel’s 2007 film THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY (112 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 6pm, as part of the Interiority on Screen lecture series. More info 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: October 17, 2025 - October 23, 2025

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Michael Bates, Brendan Boyle, Rob Christopher, Maxwell Courtright, Kyle Cubr, Alex Ensign, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Shauhn Huhn, Ben Kaye, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Raphael Jose Martinez, Nicky Ni, Joe Rubin, Will Schmenner, Martin Stainthorp, David Whitehouse, Olivia Hunter Willke