:: FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 11 - THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 17 ::

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Mary Pickford's SPARROWS (US/Silent)

Chicago Film Society at the Music Box Theatre — Sunday, 11:30am

Describing Mary Pickford as "America's Sweetheart" simultaneously encapsulates the expectations of her vast contemporary public and unfairly diminishes the tonal complexity of her work. At 33, she's a bit too old to play a standard waif and naturally graduates to de facto motherhood in SPARROWS, looking after nine orphan scamps. (Late in the film, there's a bit of comic business when a cop incredulously mistakes her for the kids' biological mother; she made the immaculate conception literal the next year when she appeared in a cameo as the Virgin Mary in husband Douglas Fairbanks's THE GAUCHO.) But it's also Pickford's unblemished matinee image that allowed her to embark on a project as despairing as SPARROWS. In casual tastelessness and unapologetic melodrama, SPARROWS is comparable to one-time Cine-File favorite THE PAPERBOY: alligators menace children and dogs; psychopaths concoct outrageous ransom schemes and barter orphans like hogs; the heroine brandishes a pitchfork to defend her honor; quicksand swallows all. This is Southern Gothic put over at the very highest level, overflowing with a disarming evangelical sincerity. (When Christ himself appears in a dream sequence, we might think to ask, 'What took 'im so long?') As a totally studio-bound rendering of atmospheric backwoods topography, SPARROWS is a clear dress rehearsal for the rustic pictorialism of SUNRISE, which cinematographers Struss and Rosher would shoot later that year. Still, it's Pickford's sensibility that predominates—certainly more so than the defiantly pedestrian William Beaudine, whose directorial credits run to some several hundred titles, including the most successful exploitation film of the 1940s (MOM AND DAD), a clutch of Bowery Boys adventures, and a few genuinely acclaimed silent features (including this one and THE CANADIAN). Beaudine's studied lack of interest in composition and rhythm serve to emphasize the sets and kiddie antics. Preceded by the trailer for SPARROWS on 35mm. (1926, 92 min, 35mm) [K.A. Westphal]

Black Harvest presents Ngozi Onwurah's WELCOME II THE TERRORDOME (UK)

Siskel Film Center — See Venue website for showtimes

As the first theatrically released film by a Black woman in England, Ngozi Onwurah’s WELCOME II THE TERRORDOME is a film that tends to live in articles about disparities in filmmaking. The film was a commercial failure on its release in 1995, likely for the predictable racist and sexist reasons, but also likely because a dystopian quasi-musical about the transhistorical struggles of the African diaspora doesn’t exactly scream “commercial.” Thankfully, in time, the film has found its audience, and a new and long-overdue 2K restoration will allow wider audiences to grapple with Onqurah’s incendiary work. Among other things, the film is a sort of ethnography of Transdean (called “the Terrordome” by its residents), a massive ghetto scaled up into a sort of autonomous zone. As laid out in voiceover, it’s designed by broader British society to contain poverty, drug use, and violence among its almost entirely Black residents (though the sign at the city limits clarifies it’s a “smoke free zone”). Spike (Valentine Nonyela), a drug dealer whose white girlfriend Jodie (Saffron Burrows) is pregnant with his child, begins the film preparing for a deal that might bring his product out of the Terrordome into wider society. When the deal goes south and violent conflict erupts with a group of white supremacists (including Jodie’s ex), Spike is caught in the middle as his Black radical brethren mount an operation of their own. The plot machinations, borne in both tone and content from exploitation films, is largely a canvas for Onwurah’s considerations of the current state of the African diaspora. The film’s fantastical framing story, an adaptation of the 1803 mass suicide at Igbo Landing where the enslaved people and their white captors are played by the same cast we later meet in Transdean, makes this clear by putting the characters’ subjugation and eventual liberation on a historical continuum with that of their ancestors. The characters are connected offscreen to the present day too, with the dystopia on display a recognizable and barely exaggerated version of the social segregation one can see in any major city. Cinematographer Alwin H Küchler, Onwurah’s husband and a later collaborator of Lynne Ramsey and Dany Boyle, gives Transdean a striking look that inverts our sense of space. The outdoors are cluttered, dense with people in constant proximity to fires and garbage, and veiled in the same thick fog that seemed to cover all “inner city” spaces at night in ‘80s and ‘90s cinema. Interiors often feel more spacious, with a series of more sparsely populated warehouses containing much of the film’s later action. It’s a visual feast to accompany the sonic one that, while not featuring the Public Enemy song that gives the film its name, is replete with narrative-describing rap music that, somewhat miraculously, doesn’t suck. It’s one of many elements of the film that would slip from the grasp of a less capable filmmaker, but is expertly worked into a totally unique and discursively strong work by Onwurah. Followed by a conversation with Chi Achebe and Troy Martin from the Black Film Club Collective and Black Harvest Community Council Member Barbara Allen after the Friday 8:30pm showtime. (1995, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Maxwell Courtright]

Stanley Kwan’s CENTER STAGE (Hong Kong/Taiwan)

Siskel Film Center — See Venue website for showtimes

CENTER STAGE is a multifaceted portrait of Ruan Ling-yu, a legendary mainland Chinese film star from the silent era who died by suicide in 1935 at the age of 24. Stanley Kwan interweaves dramatized scenes from Ruan’s life with recreations of scenes from her six surviving films (shot in color and with sound, unlike their source material), actual clips from those films, and documentary footage from the present day in which Kwan talks with actors who worked with Ruan as well as the actors from CENTER STAGE about what Ruan means to them. Ultimately, the film is about the seductive mystery of screen acting: What draws spectators to a particular performer, and to what extent does our knowledge of their offscreen life color our appreciation of what they do on screen? Maggie Cheung stars as Ruan, and Kwan creates stark contrasts between the self-effacing person Cheung is in real life (or at least the self-effacing person she appears to be when she’s being interviewed on camera) and the Garbo-like presence she embodies as the film’s subject, defamiliarizing both personas in the process. Like the director’s earlier film ROUGE (1987), CENTER STAGE doesn’t simply look at the past; it asks us to consider (via its dialogue between past and present) how the past might look at us. Jonathan Rosenbaum has often cited this as a film that succeeds in making the past seem richer and more mysterious than the present, using it as a counterexample of the diminutive historical portraits created by such Hollywood heavyweights as Walt Disney, Steven Spielberg, and James Cameron. Rosenbaum has also likened Kwan to George Cukor, another openly gay filmmaker who worked wonders with—and respected the mysteries of—female movie stars. (Given the postmodernist approach of CENTER STAGE, Todd Haynes may be an apt point of comparison as well.) Kwan’s majestic camera movements during the dramatic scenes further evoke the lushness of classic studio-era filmmaking, while the recreations of 1920s and 30s Shanghai are exquisite enough to get lost in. The morbid undercurrent has the strange effect of making the romanticism seem more pronounced. (1991, 154 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Ben Sachs]

Siu-Tung Ching and Raymond Lee’s SWORDSMAN III: THE EAST IS RED (Hong Kong)

Music Box Theatre — Saturday, 11:30pm

The final installment of the Tsui Hark-produced wuxia series, SWORDSMAN III: THE EAST IS RED leaves behind the central martial arts hero, instead choosing to shift focus to its memorable villain. This film begins by recapping the climax of the previous, with the defeat of Invincible Dawn (Brigitte Lin, who returns here), leader of the Sun Moon Sect. By becoming the focal character, Invincible Dawn’s androgyny and themes of gender and transformation are all the more apparent. This is true especially of Xue Qian Xun (Joey Wong), a former lover of Invincible Dawn who’s been successfully masquerading as the vanquished chief; their tortured romance and the way it’s complicated by the introduction of a righteous officer (Yu Rongguang) is at the heart of the film. The magic scroll from previous SWORDSMAN entries still looms as the vague source of political hostilities, as both Spanish and Japanese forces attack the martial arts world in search of it. The invading outsiders’ seemingly advanced weaponry is in constant contrast to—and proves no match for—the mysterious martial arts powers. The raiding warships also result in this chapter primarily taking place on the sea; these sequences, arranged against the mist of the ocean air, are visually striking, culminating in an epic sea battle finale and allowing for such memorable moments as Invincible Dawn catching a ride on a helpful swordfish. (1993, 93 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]

Andrei Tarkovsky's MIRROR (USSR)

Siskel Film Center — See Venue website for showtimes

Long before the great TREE OF LIFE euphoria of 2011, another film (from another director's famously sparse oeuvre) went off uncharted into the space between memories past and present, mapping onto them a universal significance. Andrei Tarkovsky's THE MIRROR may lack dinosaurs and metaphorical doors in the desert, but it does set a mean precedent for everything a passion project can be when an auteur is working on such an intensely personal level. Long a dream project of Tarkovsky's, it was only in the wake of SOLARIS that he was able to secure funding, and armed with a meager allotment of film stock, he began production in late 1973. Given the non-linear, dreamlike progression of the film, such obstacles aren't hard to comprehend, and they perhaps explain why this is his most fleeting film outside his debut, IVAN'S CHILDHOOD. Drawn across the middle of the 20th century, THE MIRROR takes a stream of consciousness journey through familial memories, with actors in dual roles as father and son, as wife and mother. Woven in are poems penned by Tarkovsky's father, assorted clips of wartime newsreel footage, and the quiet, ethereal imagery characteristic of all his films. It all makes for a hazy dream of cinema, one from which you tragically wake too early. But lest the length should fool you, this is not Tarkovsky for beginners. No surprise that at his most personal, he's also at his most esoteric, so an afternoon spent with one of his aforementioned films would be a good primer. As for those already in his thrall, this is imperative viewing. Screening as part of the Andrei Tarkovsky: Complete Retrospective. (1974, 108 min, DCP Digital) [Tristan Johnson]

Andrei Tarkovsky's SOLARIS (USSR)

Siskel Film Center — See Venue website for showtimes

In Tarkovsky’s luminescent and beautiful adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s novel, Kris Kelvin, a psychologist, has been sent to a space station orbiting the mysterious planet Solaris, which is covered entirely by a potentially sentient ocean. Kelvin is to take charge of the station and either close it down or take drastic, violent measures against the ocean in order to generate scientific data. When he arrives, though, he discovers that the station is regularly populated with ‘visitors,’ people seemingly generated out of thin air while one sleeps, who are manifestations of one’s own memories and dreams. In adapting Lem’s book, Tarkovsky develops a complex structure of flashbacks, dream sequences, and fantasies that are at times indistinguishable from the ‘actual’ events of the plot, and alternates between color and black-and-white cinematography to further alienate us from the narrative flow. The way he shoots Natalya Bondarchuk, uncannily incandescent in nearly every shot as she ethereally wafts through the sets, is in direct conflict with the staid, weathered and deeply conflicted Donatas Banionis, questioning her very existence. While the novel is set solely on the space station, Tarkovsky developed a crucial prologue set on Earth, in which the philosophical and aesthetic issues are introduced that will later play out in dramatic form. It is there that Burton appears, a retired scientist who is the only one we meet to have actually returned from the mysterious planet. It is Burton who gives voice to a potential thesis of the film, that “knowledge is only valid when it is based on morality,” when he learns of the potentially destructive nature of Kris’ mission. Burton’s shadow hangs low over the film, over the violence that the story heaps on the body of Hari, Kelvin’s lost love reborn. If Burton is right, what are we to make of Kelvin’s own understanding of his relationship with her, which is based on betrayal and pain?  What conclusions are we to draw on the apparent attempts by Solaris itself to study the scientists by means of the ‘visitors,’ when their inevitable result is heartbreak?  Late in the film, the camera lingers on a print of Breughel’s “Hunters in the Snow,” a painting that seems to imply that the titular hunters, instead of returning home empty-handed, are instead on the trail of the ice-skating children in the distance. It is an invocation of the untamable nature of violence, which once released can never be controlled. Kelvin’s reaction to his first ‘visitor,’ the first appearance of Hari, is to attempt to destroy her. Breughel’s hunters with their ambiguous target are mocking commentaries on Kelvin’s own predetermined failure as a scientist and as a human being. Like them, his inability to come to terms with his own nature leads him to lash out against those closest to him, and in so doing to destroy himself. When, in the end, he returns to a heavily ironic homecoming with his surely deceased father, it is with a sense not of a journey completed, but of a cycle repeated, with inevitable tragedy and with inescapable loss that he can never come to terms with. Screening as part of the Andrei Tarkovsky: Complete Retrospective. (1972, 166 min, DCP Digital) [Kian Bergstrom]

Na Hong-jin’s HOPE (South Korea)

The 400 Theater, Alamo Drafthouse, and the Music Box Theatre — See Venue websites for showtimes

HOPE is the most expensive South Korean film to date, and when you set it aside any recent Hollywood monster movie of its scale, you realize just how idiosyncratic and daring it is. Na Hong-jin (returning to filmmaking after a ten-year absence) accomplishes some jaw-dropping shifts in tone, from subdued drama to white-knuckle horror to nauseating gross-out comedy, resulting in a truly panoramic blockbuster. For roughly its first half-hour, HOPE plays like a Godzilla movie by way of Nuri Bilge Ceylan, following a handful of human characters as they survey the damage wrought by some unseen giant alien creatures in and around a small town near the northern border of South Korea. Na’s commanding widescreen compositions make exceptional use of the woody, mountainous terrain and hint at everlasting offscreen space, where untold further atrocities wait to be discovered. A sense of dread builds slowly, artfully; like Ceylan, Na alternates unpredictably between wide and medium shots, so that every edit becomes an event. When the aliens do appear, however, HOPE shifts gears and becomes as kinetic a film as you’ll ever see. Indeed, this may be the most accomplished movie of its kind since MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (2015) in that it conveys worlds of detail while barreling forward at breathtaking speed. It will likely require multiple viewings to parse everything Na has put into his frames, but HOPE works perfectly well as a suspense picture, with multiple chase sequences so brilliantly engineered that the craft seems invisible and the action sucks you in like a cyclone. In between the action set pieces, HOPE develops much like Na’s previous two features, THE YELLOW SEA (2010), and THE WAILING (2016), two-and-a-half-hour affairs that carefully meted out their networks of characters in novelistic fashion. Here, the writer-director shifts focus between a few groups of characters, including law enforcement agents, some vigilantes who decide to hunt the aliens for sport, and finally the aliens themselves, whose perspective enters the film only near the end but has a seismic impact on everything that’s occurred before. The intricate visual design of the aliens reflects the richness of Na’s imagination, ditto the varied human responses to their arrival. The film is ultimately concerned with civil society at present vis a vis how it’s likely to respond to great change, and Na’s observations on this front confirm the bitter irony of the title. Na Hong-jin in attendance for a post-screening Q&A following the Sunday, 5:30pm screening at the Music Box. (2026, 156 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Peter Watkins' PUNISHMENT PARK (US)

FACETS — Friday, 9:15pm

I don’t know if I should find it discomforting or maybe actually just comforting that almost everything I’m thinking and feeling about the present-day political situation is echoed in PUNISHMENT PARK, which takes place during the Vietnam War and trades in speculative, worst-case-scenarios of that turbulent moment. Discomforting for obvious reasons, but comforting because, as it turns out, we’re not all that special. We joke about yearning for “precedented” times, but it’s possible those never existed. What we thought was political and economic stability was an illusion; the power of hope and our high standard of living, comparative to 99% of everybody else on the planet, tricked us into believing things might be okay. But it’s always been there, lingering underneath the surface, the cracks getting bigger and bigger and then it oozing out of them, resulting in our current dire situation. A pseudo-documentary in which the documentary is being filmed by a European TV crew, PUNISHMENT PARK centers on the titular landscape, a long swath of desert where dissidents detained under the recently invoked McCarran Act are brought as a possible alternative to jail time, supposing they’re able to reach the American flag after three days walking through the Californian desert while being pursued by the police. It focuses on two groups: one already sentenced and on their way through the desert, and another being tried for their alleged crimes, things like draft evasion and writing incendiary music that inspires radical behavior. The hearings are led by a kangaroo court (modeled after the proceedings of the Chicago Seven) with a jury composed not of their peers but a panel of conservative blowhards. There’s an element of additional conflict when a prison guard is found to have been killed, giving the police an excuse to be especially brutal toward the detainees. The park altogether is intended to provide the police with more training, echoing a recent suggestion by Trump that American cities be used as military training grounds. In going back and forth between the group in the desert and the group on trial, writer-director Watkins creates a disorienting, Kafka-esque effect. Joan Churchill’s cinematography is chillingly effective, as are the actors’ performances, even as many of them were non-professionals; all told it’s too scarily like a real documentary. Upon its initial release the reviews were largely negative. In his review for the New York Times, Vincent Canby declared that “PUNISHMENT PARK poses as a warning about what might happen here, but because it does little more than confirm our worst fears, it invites—quite recklessly—apathy instead of action.” Is it apathy or the realization of actuality? Admittedly, the latter can cause vanquished inaction—at first. But in the absence of hope Watkins raises the stakes; even if he’s not clearly suggesting as such, it’s possible that fighting back may be all the more important when doing so is especially futile. (1971, 91 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
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Screening as part of an Optical Noise double feature with Ivan Dixon’s 1973 film THE SPOOK WHO SAT BY THE DOOR (103 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration), which begins at 7pm.

Gregg Araki’s MYSTERIOUS SKIN (US)

Music Box Theatre — See Venue website for showtimes

MYSTERIOUS SKIN marked Gregg Araki’s first attempt at adapting someone else’s work, a significant deviation from the previous six films that burst out fully formed from the skull of the New Queer Cinema titan. Yet this effort, an adaptation of Scott Heim’s 1995 novel of the same name, feels emotionally tethered to the rest of Araki's oeuvre, excising some of his usual arch humor and abrasive wit but still remaining as curious and empathetic. Within Heim’s text—a devastating work navigating the long-term effects of childhood sexual abuse—Araki clearly identified thematic elements that resonated with him: queer isolation, chosen family, our varying relationships with sex and intimacy, and, of course, aliens. Trauma finds itself wandering in multiple directions as two young boys, both the victims of sexual abuse by an older man, find vastly different methods of coping with their respective experiences. Brian (Brady Corbet) has fully erased the experience from his mind, cocooning himself deeper and deeper into the belief that this bizarre blip in his memory must be the result of a freak encounter with a UFO. Alternately, Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) begins projecting his experience onto his continued sexual relationships with older men, eventually turning to sex work to perhaps regain some form of bodily autonomy over his sense of desire. Araki has always created characters who wear their emotions naked on their sleeve, and here is no different, his young actors yearning for escape and understanding, conveyed through dual narration from Neil and Brian, echoing the literary source material. In the filming of MYSTERIOUS SKIN, Araki went to noble lengths to make sure his youngest actors would not fall prey to the same mental abuses of the characters they were portraying, providing them with abridged scripts that only contained specific scenes and actions, with much of the more toxic sexual content crafted through shots and moments cemented back together again in the editing room. This careful, considerate filmmaking practice ultimately became an artistic boon for Araki, resulting in a film that never feels exploitative, toxic, or cruel, but rather built upon the implied relationship of images with one another, memories becoming refracted and distorted and eventually finding their way back together again. (2004, 105 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Ben Kaye]

Michelle Handelman’s BLOODSISTERS: LEATHER, DYKES, AND SADOMASOCHISM (US/Documentary)

FACETS — Wednesday, 7pm

Michelle Handelman’s BLOODSISTERS: LEATHER, DYKES, AND SADOMASOCHISM is a staggering monument to the San Francisco lesbian BDSM tribe of the '90s, a spirited anthem of queer fluidity and a candid activist tape. Equal parts concerned with community ethics, political praxis, and the sexual sublime, the documentary largely undertakes a project of demystification. At a time when sadomasochism was acutely marginalized within feminist, LGBT, and civil rights discourses, the “queers of the queers” became a sacrificial lamb in the bid for progressive state reform, necessitating an in-group “social system and learning system,” as one interviewee elaborates in the film. Educators, leatherdykes, and activists flesh out this landscape along the horizons of BDSM vernaculars, decorum, safety skills, and political advocacy. Despite these codified techniques for surviving and thriving, the film’s participants emphasize the community’s open circuit and fluidities: freeform approaches to power play, desires to be of service that cut both ways across domination and subordination, and the ways in which community enthusiasm for leather and enthusiasm for violence need not be a perfectly overlapping Venn diagram. The film’s dialogues are intercut with a trove of archival play scenes that hold tension across slow-motion clamps, whips, and cinchings, documentation of public teach-ins, protest demonstrations, leather competitions, and the staged ecstasies of private rooms. Testimonies veer into reveries, the camera is dommed in first-person, and Coil’s “Windowpane” ushers in a climactic montage of chains become tender. Life and death blur, and characters break. The film is a seminal and defining text that manages to carefully acknowledge the mercurial status of sexuality before language and consent before the law. Limits, extremes, and devastation sit comfortably alongside healing, commitment, trust, and futurity. In a particularly moving interview, trans writer Patrick Califia (known as Pat Califia at the time of the film) expresses a serene appreciation for the possibility of social change evidenced by younger generations who had shockingly only ever experienced an SM sexuality, having come of age under the protection of a new era of social bonds and visibility. BLOODSISTERS is a message in a bottle sealed in blood and ceremoniously entrusted to the tides of intergenerational genderfuckery. (1995, 69 min, DCP Digital) [Elise Schierbeek]
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Screening as part of a double feature with Kirby Dick’s 1997 documentary SICK: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF BOB FLANAGAN, SUPERMASOCHIST (89 min, Digital Projection), which begins at 8:30pm.

Shirley Clarke's ORNETTE: MADE IN AMERICA (US/Documentary)

Siskel Film Center — Saturday, 2pm and Monday, 6pm

Twenty years in the making, Shirley Clarke's final feature, ORNETTE: MADE IN AMERICA, is a riotous and impish attempt to stake out a cinematic correlative to Ornette Coleman's free jazz. ORNETTE departs from the concentrated patterns and deliberate frustrations of Clarke's THE CONNECTION and PORTRAIT OF JASON to fashion something with a thousand autonomous, moving, flashing, and flaring parts. It's analogous to the improvisatory safe havens that Coleman embedded in his Symphony No. 1, Skies of America, which forms the editorial and rhythmic backbone of the film. A proudly promiscuous film, ORNETTE explodes the documentary form by paying lip service to its conventions before scrambling them into something new. Talking head interviews are self-consciously inscribed within cartoony cathode-ray tubes and near wordless re-enactments of formative moments in Coleman's life butt up against reaction shots from latter-day on-lookers. Fragmentary film and tape footage is transformed and distorted by aggressive video effects. Fiction co-mingles with documentary, or, more precisely, biography merges with public life. There's dichotomy, but no tension, no line of demarcation. The electronic ticker outside the concert hall advertises Coleman's appearance and then slips seamlessly into presenting the film's opening credits. ORNETTE: MADE IN AMERICA is a documentary film, I guess, that also announces itself as a thing in the world. Screening as part of the 25 For 25 series, revisiting standout titles from the Siskel's State Street history. (1985, 85 min, DCP Digital) [K.A. Westphal]

Lucio Fulci's LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN (Italy)

Alamo Drafthouse — Tuesday, 9:30pm

Long before Lucio Fulci was tediously known as "the godfather of gore," he was unofficially known as "the godfather of Franco and Ciccio," a pair of comedians who were essentially Italy’s Martin & Lewis. Usually in their movies, the comedic duo found themselves caught up in situations involving war, bank robberies, atomic bombs, and sexy spies. Fulci wasn’t the only notable Italian filmmaker to have provided his impeccable craft to this lowbrow fare: Sergio Corbucci did a few, along with Mario Bava and even Vittorio de Sica. It was normal in Italy to offer up your more-than-qualified talents to the trends of the day, and whatever those were, they were pumped out ad nauseam. Having nearly avoided the peplum genre, or the sword-and-sandal craze brought about by the success of HERCULES (1958), Fulci found himself starting his career with these middling comedies. He was able to catch the spaghetti western train at full steam with the underrated MASSACRE TIME (1966), his grandest cinematic statement up to that point. Three years later, he would get to exercise his strengths properly with ONE ON TOP OF THE OTHER, a dazzling display of filmmaking that must have found an admirer in Brian De Palma, whose cinematic trickery is foreshadowed in every frame of this 1969 erotic thriller. Fulci came even closer to cementing his style with the fantastic BEATRICE CENCI, but it wouldn’t be until 2 years later that he came into his own with A LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN, maybe the most shining example of the oft-debated giallo genre. This is the film that matched the sensational heights of Dario Argento’s supremely successful debut feature, BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE (made the previous year), after scores of stale imitators began pouring out like fake blood from a well-timed squib. Densely plotted and sensuously hallucinatory in its depiction of pitch-black fantasy, A LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN centers on Carol, the daughter of a wealthy lawyer/politician (played by genre starlet Florinda Balkan), who fears her husband is having an affair with his secretary. Not only is her suspicion making her waver between her jealousy and excitement, she's having dreams about her neighbor (played by another of the genre’s mainstays, Anita Strindberg), who likes to host LSD-aided orgies in her swank apartment. As Carol's repressed sexual desire builds, her dreams become even more erotic as they start to veer into nightmare territory. She awakens from one sweat-and-blood-soaked reverie to discover that her kinky neighbor has been murdered. Soon, Scotland Yard fingers her for the murder as they discover her diary depicting, in vivid detail, her sexually charged nocturnes. Carol becomes suspect number one, which makes her start to suspect that maybe she had been at the orgy after all. It's also possible she's being framed by two other participants in the horny bacchanal, who may be committing murders modeled off ones described in her diary. As her mind races to solve the mystery, she's pursued by phantasmagoric figures through dreamlike labyrinths: one involving a show-stopping chase through London’s Alexandra Palace, and another involving a group of disemboweled dogs in a sanitarium. The bloody canine prosthetics were so convincing that Fulci and his effects guy, Carlo Rimbaldi, were dragged to court and forced to prove those were indeed fake dogs; Rimbaldi would go on to create the iconic xenomorph-head effects for Ridley Scott’s ALIEN as well as E.T. for Steven Spielberg. Along with a perfectly stone-cold score by Ennio Morricone, there's the camera work of Luigi Kuveiller, a cinematographer known at the time for his work with Elio Petri, and who would go on to shoot DEEP RED for Argento, AVANTI! for Billy Wilder, and eventually THE NEW YORK RIPPER (1982) which saw him re-teaming with Fulci a decade later. With this dream team of collaborators, Fulci had come a long way from his Franco and Ciccio days. The filmmaker could now embark on the journey that would cement him as one of cinema’s leading genre masters. Every surreal touch in his later masterworks, every strange and unexplained happening that would emerge from his gloomy and shadow-drenched rooms, can be traced back to LIZARD, a wondrous highlight of the giallo genre and cinema itself. Screening as part of the Terror Tuesday series. (1971, 95 min, DCP Digital) [John Dickson]
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Also screening as part of Terror Tuesday is Alan Parker’s ANGEL HEART (113 min, Digital Projection) at 7pm.

Avalon Fast’s CAMP (Canada/US)

FACETS — Sunday, 12pm

“Are you guys all religious then?” Emily (Zola Grimmer) asks earnestly midway through Avalon Fast’s CAMP, struggling to piece together why her new cohort of rebellious camp counselors keep coming back to the Jesus-happy campgrounds where she herself has ended up. The answer from her new friend Rosie (Cherry Moore) is a firm, fast “No,” but perhaps that depends on how one might use the word “religious.” This young cadre of magically-inclined young women certainly aren’t as Christ-loving as the eager-to-please camp leader, Dan (Austyn Van de Kamp), but there’s a certain level of faith and devotion that they carry around with them as the summer days move along, a certain spirit and dedication to ritual and community that is anything but godly but could definitely be read as “divine.” This sense of trying to find somewhere, anywhere, to truly belong haunts Fast’s film, which focuses on Emily, a young woman who has inexplicably suffered twin tragedies in her brief venture into adulthood: years after Emily accidentally killed a four-year-old while driving, a close friend of Emily’s suffers a drug overdose in her car, leading Emily to wallow in what she believes is a cursed existence. Emily turns to her role as camp counselor as a means of finding space to exist again and integrate herself into society in a way where the sins of her pasts can no longer follow her. CAMP thrives in literalizing the way we build these narratives around our own choices; the film’s tense, spooky vibes emanate from every pore of Fast’s impeccably crafted world, animated stars and red lights filling the space, characters staring off into space feeling as magical as when they’re literally floating. It’s a “witchy” film, but its magic refuses to remain as simple and as that descriptor would suggest, leading us down a path of horror, sacrifice, and feminine anxiety that feels singular in its intimate exploration of youthful risk and exploration. You won’t find Jesus here, but you may find something even holier. Screening as part of the Must-Watch Indies series. (2025, 111 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Jörg A. Hoppe, Klaus Maeck, and Heiko Lange's B-MOVIE: LUST & SOUND IN WEST BERLIN (Germany/Documentary)

Goethe-Institut Chicago (150 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 420) — Monday, 6pm [Free Admission]

A disclaimer at the start of this irreverent video love-letter to the long-gone underground art and movie scene in West Berlin just prior to the fall of the Wall reads, "ALL EVENTS AND PEOPLE ARE FICTIONAL. SIMILARITIES WITH PEOPLE ALIVE ARE ACCIDENTAL AND PURELY INTENDED." Perhaps this is a bit of slapdash German-to-English translation but it is also a good indicator of the filmmakers' intentions when it comes to factual accuracy and provenance of filmed footage. Narrated by the ever-chipper Mark Reeder—who moved from his dreary hometown of Manchester, England to Berlin as an emissary of British punk rock to chase his own music and romantic dreams—this isn't so much a documentary as a kind of hyper-personal moving scrapbook. The free mix-and-match of archival and reenacted footage might be frustrating to viewers hoping to gain hard knowledge about a creative scene that burned bright and flamed out in under ten years, but those who want a whiff of what it might've been like to be there will be well satisfied. Music and art luminaries including Nick Cave, Tilda Swinton, and Martin Kippenberger flit past but it's only Reeder who gets a proper portrait. Everything from his penchant for military attire to his varied CV—including a stint doing porn voice-over—is gleefully detailed. He makes a likable Virgil for this short-lived circle of Hell but the shot of a triumphant David Hasselhoff serenading the demolition of the Berlin Wall in a leather jacket embedded with blinking electric lights made me long for a squat filled with desperate junkies. Everyone's idea of freedom is different, I guess. Screening as part of the Punk@50 series. (2015, 92 min, Digital Projection) [Dmitry Samarov]

Gaspar Noé’s CLIMAX (France/Belgium)

The Davis Theater — Thursday, 9pm

Gaspar Noé says CLIMAX is based on a true story. In 1996, a group of dancers had their beverages spiked with LSD during an after-party. The rest of Noé’s film is based on taking that shred of unvetted news and applying absurdist logic toward a nightmarish conclusion, described as “a group of people creating something together and then collapsing,” like a modern Tower of Babel. While the film descends into an infernal abyss of despair—like most of Noé’s films—first he forces us to stare at his reference films, while watching dancer interviews. Around the television set: VHS copies of ANGST, BAISE MOI, SALO, ERASERHEAD, SUSPIRIA, ZOMBIE, FOX AND HIS FRIENDS, POSSESSION, INAUGURATION OF THE PLEASURE DOME, and more are disheveled amongst books by Nietzsche, Wilde, Kafka, and Hans Christian Anderson. Creating a mood board for the film. This collection of cultural artifacts works as an indoctrination, to help provide a set of guidelines for the film that follows. We know without a doubt, it will end in bleak nihilism. Possibly due to this, CLIMAX continues to be Noé’s most accessible film. Baring in mind, Noé’s trademarks of taboo themes are still present such as child abuse, abortion, and drug addiction. Set during the heyday of ‘90s rave culture—“Life is a collective impossibility”—multiple choreographed dance styles are present including voguing, krumping, and breakdancing. Shot in 15 days with a 3 page outline and non-professional actors, improvised dialogue, and improvised character development combine to become a Bakunin feast of social collapse. The look of the film is hyper-stylized with long takes, impossible camera movements, flashes, text, and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it details. The style collides with its improvised documentary approach to create the feeling of a collective psychosis. CLIMAX provides a celebration of dance culture as it was, while commenting on its death and deconstruction. Beginning in a place of harmony with bodies moving in sync, led by Selva (Sofia Boutella), a dance troupe gathers for an after-party fueled by music, sweat, and a punch-bowl of acid-spiked sangria. As the trip begins, the film pivots from harmony to collapse. From suspicion to paranoia to primal instincts, the dancers spiral into varying states of delirium. Noé stated he structured the film around 1970s disaster films, with THE TOWERING INFERNO and THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE in mind. Hierarchies crumble and the microcosm society, struggling to survive after the disaster, normally falls apart into sects. Only in CLIMAX, the society becomes irredeemable as they blame each other, set each other on fire, laugh at potentially electrocuted children, commit incest, assault, and suicide. But have you heard the soundtrack? Beginning with Giorgio Moroder's "Utopia Me Giorgio," pushing you toward Cerrone's "Supernature," and filling in the gaps with Aphex Twin, Soft Cell, Gary Numan, Daft Punk, and Patrick Hernandez, this is the ultimate dance playlist. CLIMAX is the film equivalent to Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is,” she sings, “If that’s all there is, then let’s go dancing.” If the abyss does want to look back, let it find us dancing. Presented by momimgoing with a DJ set from Miss Twink USA from 7pm - 9pm at Sojourn. Screening as part of the Not Quite Midnight series. (2018, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]

Ringo Lam's FULL CONTACT (Hong Kong)

Alamo Drafthouse — Wednesday, 9:30pm

In many of the films of Don Siegel, you will encounter a scene or two of violence that shocks you not because of its explicitness but because the cruelty behind it is rendered so vividly that you all but feel it—consider the attacks on children that occur in THE LINE-UP (1958) and THE KILLERS (1964) or the effects of the warden’s sadism in ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ (1979). In many of the films of Ringo Lam, almost every scene is like this. The brutality of Lam’s most characteristic work may be unrelenting, but it is also exactingly staged, kinetic, and vigorous, reflecting a kind of purity of creative vision. If there’s a cinematic equivalent to the trilogy of Rick Rubin-produced masterpieces that Slayer released between 1986 and 1990, it’s probably a film like FULL CONTACT, where the violence is punishing by design yet also cathartic and exhilarating. More importantly, the painfulness of the stabbings and shootings marks a serious artistic response to a world where corruption is rampant, most relationships end in betrayal, and sometimes having to maim or murder everyone in sight is the only way to survive. Lam’s favorite leading man Chow Yun-fat (whom the director had known since his acting school days in the 1970s, effectively making him the De Niro to Lam’s Scorsese) stars as Gou Fei, a decent guy who’s forced to join a group of psychotic, trigger-happy criminals to help his best friend pay off a loan shark in Bangkok. The group stages a number of heists that might also be described as terrorist attacks, given how many innocent civilians get killed. When the leader of the group (Simon Yam) crosses Gou Fei after one heist and leaves him for dead, the protagonist drops his heroic attitude and sets his sights on bloody revenge. FULL CONTACT was one of Lam’s less successful films in Hong Kong because audiences were apprehensive about seeing the lovable Chow Yun-fat play such a violent criminal; in fact, Chow’s reliable charisma ends up having a palliative effect on Lam’s nihilistic vision. Screening as part of the Weird Wednesday series. (1992, 104 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Ben Sachs]

Gregg Araki's I WANT YOUR SEX (US)

FACETS — Saturday, 1pm; Sunday, 3pm; and Thursday, 7pm

It feels good to have Gregg Araki and his sex-positive, gonzo energy back on the big screen. After a twelve-year absence from feature-film making (though not for lack of trying, and with plenty of television work to keep his directing muscles active), one of the key figures of the 1990s New Queer Cinema movement remains as true to his spirit as ever, his worlds still full of bright colors, angsty young people, and cartoonish style centered around a disaffected, sex-obsessed culture. Araki was reportedly inspired to dig into I WANT YOUR SEX after a study came out stating that only 30% of Gen Z had been sexually active in the last year. Araki, who had built his career on art investigating a sex-crazed youth culture, knew that he had to respond to such a dire report with his own cinematic debate (carried out with both words and bodies) concerning contemporary sexual habits. Araki resists the temptation to merely finger-wag at younger generations, instead painting an earnest portrait of a young man (the ever-charismatic Cooper Hoffman) entering a submissive relationship with his domineering visual artist boss (a livewire Olivia Wilde) and exploring how such a relationship might manifest itself in 2020s America. I WANT YOUR SEX revels in Araki’s signature garish environments, now rendered in appropriately sickly digital cinematography, filling his frame with eye-popping costumes and deliciously decadent production design (there isn’t a wall that Araki can’t turn into a modern art piece), while his droll characters utter the kind of oddball quirky dialogue that Quentin Tarantino could only dream of. While the early portions of the film focus on the physical dimensions of Hoffman and Wilde’s relationship, much of the remainder of I WANT YOUR SEX attempts to dig deeper into the emotional toll such a power dynamic might take on such a young, impressionable mind. Even Araki, the secret softie that he is, can’t help but let his earnestness get the best of him as the plot unravels, though things are kept appropriately spiky by hilarious supporting turns from Chase Sui Wonders, Daveed Diggs, and Mason Gooding. It’s Hoffman and Wilde’s effortless chemistry, though, that carries even the duller moments in I WANT YOUR SEX, their ease across frequent dialogue scenes—alongside their respective performance styles’ natural fit within the larger Araki-verse—providing a believable and endearing emotional underpinning for a film that frequently tries to have its absurdist cake and eat it too. Naturally, Araki ends things back where they started, in the realm of the ridiculous, reminding us that all relationships are equal parts foolish, rewarding, and repulsive. Screening as part of the Must-Watch Indies series. (2026, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Paul Brickman's RISKY BUSINESS (US)

FACETS — Saturday, 6pm

In SCREAM (1996), Kevin Williamson jokes that pausing RISKY BUSINESS reveals Tom Cruise in all his glory, a sly wink at how the film was long misread as a teen-sex trifle. Studios wanted to sell it as another PORKY’S (1982). Its reputation calcified early: the underwear slide, the CTA tryst, the makeshift brothel. These images turned into pop-culture cutouts, much like THE GRADUATE (1967), whose iconic frames—Mrs. Robinson’s angled leg, Benjamin drifting in the pool, the wedding crash—eclipsed the darker pulse beneath. Both films trace boys seduced by systems larger than themselves, mistaking desire for autonomy until the trap springs shut. Williamson’s own misreading resurfaced in 1999 when Dawson’s Creek opened season three with “Like a Virgin,” swapping Joel Goodsen for Dawson Leery, who wrecks his father’s boat while chasing sex and scrambles to pay for the damage. He falls in with a stripper, hosts a chaotic house party, and winds up punished back into puritanism. The joke lands: RISKY BUSINESS had been reduced to a glossy emblem of 1980s misbehavior. Brickman, however, was crafting an anti-capitalist satire smuggled inside the language of a teen romp. The Trojan horse is obvious, complete with ice cream cones and adolescent fantasies. Inside it, Brickman hides a critique of Reagan-era prosperity and the market logic that colonizes adolescent dreams. Joel Goodsen isn’t merely a college-bound kid losing control; he’s a willing apprentice to an ideology that turns everything, including people, into negotiable assets. His Future Enterprisers club teaches him to compress life into profit margins: desire becomes cost, risk becomes capital, and Lana (Rebecca De Mornay), who is magnetic, unreadable, and alive in a way Joel barely understands, enters his life as both temptation and market disruption. Brickman’s tone oscillates between exuberance and dread. Cruise’s improvised slide feels buoyant and innocent until the Porsche sinks into Lake Michigan. A sacrifice to the gods of ambition. That tonal slipperiness baffled the studio, which wanted uncomplicated fun rather than an indictment of structural economics. Producer David Geffen battled Brickman over the ending, a conflict that sharpened the film’s thesis: the cost of doing business is always collected, even from the artist. Brickman’s near-silence as a director after 1983 reads like the film’s final warning. The film’s sensuality also leans toward something more adult than its reputation suggests. Cruise’s loosened charm, De Mornay’s luminous wariness, and the off-screen volatility of their relationship bleed into the film’s dreamlike atmosphere, heightened by Tangerine Dream’s score. What emerges isn’t voyeurism, but the fragile rhythm of two people briefly outrunning the world that will inevitably reclaim them. By the time Joel Goodsen delivers his infamous line, “I deal in human fulfillment,” the film has already exposed the greed behind the dark sunglasses. It’s easy to imagine Joel aging into Frank T. J. Mackey from MAGNOLIA (1999), a man who finally perfects the sales pitch he learned as a teenage manager of sex workers. Brickman shows us the price of confusing capitalism with identity, the way a boy can glide across a polished floor believing he’s free while the system surrounding him quietly tallies his value. RISKY BUSINESS shows that you can buy the American Dream for the low price of moral corrosion. But sure, try to pause it to see Tom Cruise’s penis. Chicago On Screen presents a rare screening of the director’s cut of RISKY BUSINESS, with actress Rebecca De Mornay in a live Zoom Q&A. (1983, 99 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Shaun Huhn]

Stanley Kubrick's BARRY LYNDON (UK)

The Davis Theater — Tuesday, 7pm [SOLD OUT]

Borrowing many of the 18th century costumes directly from European museums and selecting his score after listening (allegedly) to every piece of 18th century music ever recorded, Stanley Kubrick brought an unprecedented level of verisimilitude to the historical drama with BARRY LYNDON. But rather than revel in the details for their own sake, Kubrick used them to create the eerie effect of a past existing autonomously from us as something like an alien planet--which may explain why Jonathan Rosenbaum has called the film a follow-up of sorts to 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Rosenbaum has singled out John Alcott's “slow backward zooms" as key to the movie's impact, since they "distance us, both historically and emotionally, from its rambling picaresque narrative." Kubrick manages another great distancing effect with the film's wry, clinical-sounding narration (read by Michael Hordern), which often explains the action before it occurs. This has the immediate impact of making the spectacular, pageant-like mise-en-scene feel anticlimactic: It would be a fine nose-thumbing gesture in itself, but the movie is more complicated than that. Beneath the pomp and technical perfection (this is also the film for which Kubrick developed a special lens that allowed him to shoot scenes entirely by candlelight) is a fable about one man's rise and fall along the conventions of his time. Since the conventions themselves remain just beyond comprehension, Ryan O'Neal, as the title character, seems less of an antihero upon repeated viewings and more of a tragic figure—every bit the victim of systems beyond his control as Dave Bowman in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Screening as part of the Big Screen Classics series. (1975, 184 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Ben Sachs]

Mark Jenkin's ROSE OF NEVADA (UK)

FACETS — Saturday, 3pm; Sunday, 5pm; and Thursday, 9pm

Made with Bolex 16mm cameras and an acute attunement to physical detail, ROSE OF NEVADA is ravishingly haptic cinema; throughout, light leaks and scratches on the surface of the film form a quivering textural tapestry with pervasive images of rust, water, wood, and dirty skin. This materialist bent is well suited to the film’s milieu, an economically depressed coastal town in Cornwall, England, where nearly every surface bears the marks of decay. Into this village floats the Rose of Nevada, a fishing boat that was lost at sea with its crew 30 years ago. Its inexplicable reappearance draws two very different young men into its orbit: family man Nick (George MacKay) and drifter Liam (Callum Turner), who are recruited by the boat’s former owner Mike (Edward Rowe) to resume the fishing expeditions that once pumped blood through the village. That seemingly distant past returns, quite literally, when Nick and Liam disembark after their first voyage and are transported back to 1993, the year the Rose went missing. What’s more, both men are perceived by the community as the original crew members from the doomed ship. While Liam settles easily into the domestic stability this time warp affords him (he’s now married with child), Nick has inversely lost contact with his own wife and child and seeks desperately to reach the solid ground of the present. In the hands of Mark Jenkin—who served as writer, director, cinematographer, editor, composer, and sound designer (the intricate soundscape is entirely post-sync!)—ROSE OF NEVADA is not your grandfather’s time travel movie. More in the vein of Alain Resnais, it has an elliptical logic that borders on abstraction, making the spectator feel as disoriented as Nick. Jenkin tells his story primarily through images, prompting us to locate meaning in cryptic montage, varied shooting and editing speeds, and objects of peculiar fixation, particularly shoes and hands. What emerges most vividly from this mannered, sometimes impenetrable form is the plight of the working-class laborer, fed through a callous, cyclical system that values him only as an expendable source of profit. Will Nick and Liam simply repeat the fate of their predecessors, swallowed by the merciless forces of industry and time? Maybe, if Jenkin’s searing images are anything to go by, they will not be so easily forgotten. Screening as part of the Must-Watch Indies series. (2025, 114 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]

📽️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Alamo Drafthouse
Poh Si Teng’s 2025 documentary AMERICAN DOCTOR (93 min, Digital Projection) screens this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

Ted Kotcheff’s 1982 film FIRST BLOOD (95 min, Digital Projection) screens Saturday at 3:45pm.

Louise Weard’s 2025 film CASTRATION MOVIE ANTHOLOGY ii. THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS (300 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday, 6pm, as part of the Weird Wednesday series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Chicago Athletic Assocation
Emma Seligman's 2023 film BOTTOMS (92 min, Digital Projection) screens Friday, 7:15pm, the first installment of More Than a Movie, a new monthly screening series presented by BaQyard Babes, the Chicago Athletic Association, and MUBI. Back-to-school pre-show activities start at 6:30pm and include a performance by Pagina and vendors offering tooth gems and grillz, nail sets, custom bag charms, apparel, and baked goods. There's also a school supply drive for CPS students with CUSP Chicago. Attendees get a free nonalcoholic drink and a MUBI tote. More info here.

⚫ Chicago Cultural Center
Barbara E. Allen's 2010 documentary DUSABLE TO OBAMA: CHICAGO'S BLACK METROPOLIS (76 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday, 6:30pm, as part of the Chicago Film Office's On Set: Conversations series. Followed by a conversation with Allen. Free admission. More info here.

⚫ Chicago Film Archives
Maria Moraites's 1974 documentary A NICE PLACE TO LIVE (55 min) screens Wednesday, 6:30pm, in the Sanctuary at the Epiphany Center for the Arts (201 S. Ashland Ave.), as part of Chicago Film Archives' Inside/Out: Stories of Origin and Dis/Placement series. The screening is presented by journalist Natalie Y. Moore (The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation) and followed by a conversation with West Side community leader Deondré Rutues and Pastor Marshall Hatch, Jr. of New Mount Pilgrim Church. Free admission. More info here.

⚫ Chicago Public Library
The Chicago Public Library's Community Cinema program presents free film and TV screenings at dozens of neighborhood branches throughout the week. See the full schedule here.

⚫ ChiTown Drive-In (2343 S. Throop St.)
ChiTown Movies screens outdoor films throughout the week. More info here.

⚫ Eyewash Station
For this week's screenings at Eyewash Station, check the calendar here.

⚫ FACETS
Sweet Void Cinema presents a screenwriting workshop on Wednesday from 6pm to 9pm in the Facets Studio. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Logan Center for the Arts (915 E. 60th St.)
The Logan Center's Digital Storytelling Initiative presents the 2026 Production Institute Film Showcase on Sunday, 1pm, in the Performance Hall at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts. The program features 12 original five-minute narrative and documentary shorts made by this year's cohort of South Side media makers at the end of a 13-week production training program run in partnership with the Community Film Workshop of Chicago. Followed by a moderated discussion with the filmmakers and a reception in the lobby. Free admission; RSVP requested, but an RSVP doesn't guarantee a seat, so arrive early. More info here.

⚫ Media Burn Archive
Media Burn Archive presents Learn With Media Burn! on Thursday, 5:30pm, at its space at 348 N. Ashland Ave. (Suite 1D). It's a monthly third-Thursday series in which the archive screens a surprise vintage instructional video from its collections. Materials for following along are provided, and comfortable clothing is suggested. Doors open at 5pm for mingling and a look around the archive, and the screening (approx. 60 min) is followed by more socializing and rewinds of favorite moments. Light refreshments provided. Free admission; registration requested, donations appreciated. More info here.

⚫ Mouse Arts and Letters (555 W. 31st St.)
Abbas Fahdel's 2015 documentary HOMELAND: IRAQ YEAR ZERO (360 min, Digital Projection) screens Friday, 5pm, on the 25th anniversary of the War on Terror.

The Independent Labor Club presents a film screening and retrospective discussion on 25 years of Global War on Terror social revolution and the role of media workers in resistance on Saturday at 7pm.

Mouse Arts and Letters presents HALSTED ST.: CAMERA 101 on Sunday from 4pm to 7:30pm, a hands-on cinematography workshop taught by three seasoned filmmakers covering the exposure triangle, framerate, camera navigation, and focus pulling, with screenings of Nobuhiko Obayashi's ONOMICHI (1963) and THE MASTERS OF DISASTER (1986). The workshop is part of an ongoing skill-share series for Mouse's group-led documentary project, Halsted St. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Movies in the Parks
The Chicago Park District's Movies in the Parks series continues throughout the summer, bringing free outdoor screenings of Hollywood classics, family favorites, and local films to parks across the city for its twenty-sixth season. Check the Park District website for the full schedule of dates, locations, and titles. More info here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern’s 2026 documentary OASIS: DON’T LOOK BACK IN ANGER (119 min, DCP Digital) begins screening and Jane Schoenbrun’s 2026 film TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA (112 min, DCP Digital) continues. See Venue website for showtimes.

Liam Lynch’s 2006 film TENACIOUS D IN THE PICK OF DESTINY (93 min, 35mm) screens Friday and Saturday, 11:45pm, as part of the Late Show series.

Nikias Chryssos’ 2026 film BLOODY TENNIS (90 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday and Saturday at midnight, co-presented by Shudder.

Brian Levant’s 1992 film BEETHOVEN (87 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday and Sunday, 11am, as part of the Indoor Kids: Family-Friendly Matinees series.

Gerald Casale, DEVO, and Chuck Statler’s DEVO: RESTORATIONS AND REVELATIONS - COLLECTED FILM WORKS 1976-1984 (80 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday, 7pm, with restorationist Peter Conheim in person for a post-screening Q&A. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Reeling Film Festival
Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo’s 2026 film LA BOLA NEGRA (155 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 6:30pm, as the opening night film of the Reeling 2026 Film Festival. There will be more extensive coverage of the festival in next week’s edition. More info here. 

⚫ Siskel Film Center
Rafael Manuel’s 2026 film FILIPIÑANA (100 min, DCP Digital) continues screening. See Venue website for showtimes.

David Alvarado’s 2026 documentary AMERICAN PACHUCO: THE LEGEND OF LUIS VALDEZ (92 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday at 8pm.

Radu Jude and Christian Ferencz-Flatz’s 2024 film EIGHT POSTCARDS FROM UTOPIA (71 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday at 12pm.

Voices Embodied presents a shorts program, Prognostication, on Monday at 6pm. This screening features short films relating to themes of disability, creativity, and accessible engagement and was produced with support and programming collaboration from the Disability and Learning Resource Center (DLRC) at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Byoung-gon Moon’s 2024 short NIGHT FISHING (13 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday at 6:30pm, followed by a post-screening dialogue between producer/star Son Sukku and SAIC President Jiseon Lee Isbara. Please note that this event is currently at capacity. More info on all screenings here.

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, Maxwell Courtright, John Dickson, Alex Ensign, Megan Fariello, Shaun Huhn, Tristan Johnson, Ben Kaye, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Dmitry Samarov, Elise Schierbeek, K.A. Westphal