:: FRIDAY, DECEMBER 20 - THURSDAY, JANUARY 2 ::

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

The Worlds Of Wiseman at the Gene Siskel Film Center

See dates and showtimes below

Frederick Wiseman’s LAW AND ORDER (US/Documentary)
Wednesday, January 1, 6pm
“Generally speaking, the presence of the camera doesn't change people’s behavior,” Frederick Wiseman told the New York Times in 1970. “If it did, the camera would become the great behavior‐change instrument of our time.” Based on the context given in the article, it would seem the documentarian was being asked about LAW AND ORDER, in which he documents the Kansas City Police Department mere weeks after the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, when racial tension was especially high. Perhaps of all Wiseman’s films it would be this one where viewers might consider the influence the camera could potentially have on the subjects; with cops specifically one wonders if they’ll put on a front for it, aware enough of their bad behavior and the public’s perception of it to know that they shouldn’t commit any blunders to posterity. Alas, they may have proved Wiseman right, as in a pivotal moment during this otherwise benign depiction of policing one particularly brutal officer puts a Black sex worker (the racial dynamics are most pronounced in this moment but suffuse the film in general) in a chokehold to the point where her tongue lolls out of her mouth. Wiseman’s editing feels especially strategic in this film, the short yet potent burst of violence mixed randomly among situations that might showcase the police as being generally harmless or potentially helpful. Even this is a complex sensation that Wiseman considers; having originally “saw it as a chance to do in the pigs,” he “realized my little stereotype was far from the truth, at least in Kansas City. The cops did some horrible things but they also did some nice things. We liberals frequently forget that people do terrible violence to each other, against which the police form a minimal and not very successful barrier. I understand now the fear that cops live with. When we got back to the car after the last scene, where one cop disarms three holdup men, his hand was shaking as he lit a cigarette.” I don’t know if I personally would have this change of heart, but it’s exactly this complexity of modern-day institutions and our feelings toward them that Wiseman probes in his deceptively straightforward examinations, challenging assumptions of every which kind in the process. In combining situations both uncommon and banal, Wiseman's films evoke the unsteadiness of life itself. The camera is merely a witness to this truism; if anything it’s the editing of Wiseman’s films that doesn't change peoples’ behavior but reveals it. (1969, 81 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Kat Sachs]
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Frederick Wiseman's HOSPITAL (US/Documentary)
Wednesday, January 1, 8pm
While much of Frederick Wiseman’s documentary output comprises hours-long examinations of the institutions that make up American society, his earliest works often clock in at little more than an hour. Regardless of this relative brevity, he manages to make the most of each opportunity, using his signature fly-on-the-wall, 360-degree style. Over five weeks in 1969, Wiseman made his fourth film, HOSPITAL, for public television, for which he picked up two Primetime Emmys; these were the last major awards he ever earned for a specific film. His subject, Metropolitan Hospital Center, sits a few blocks west of the Harlem River between 97th and 99th streets. The hospital, then and now, draws its patients from New York City’s poor and immigrant populations and helps train students from New York Medical College, an arrangement that began in 1875. Wiseman takes us right into his subject (and I do mean “in”) by filming a patient being prepped and cut into by a team of surgeons, a procedure he will come back to from time to time to give us a good look at the patient’s expanding lungs and beating heart. In between, we watch medical students examine the atrophied brain of an alcoholic and a nurse gently coax an embarrassed Latino man into telling her about problems he suspects signal genital cancer. Throughout the film, Wiseman reveals sympathetic New York City cops who care in their own way for the people they bring to the hospital. They help get a patient to sit in a chair so that he can be restrained to prevent him from falling on the floor, ruminate with emergency medical technicians on the senselessness of driving a patient from one hospital to another, and escort a paranoid art student from the room where he was puking his guts out after an overdose of methedrine to the psychiatric ward. This patient, a young white Minnesotan, voices what many of the city’s immigrants and poor might be feeling, “It’s hard to make it alone in the city.” Our hearts go out to a woman who is likely watching her mother die following a heart attack, her anxiety coming out as belligerence, another ailment healthcare workers face routinely. Particularly poignant is a penniless, gay teen whose family kicked him out; the psychiatrist trying to get him emergency shelter placement is one of Wiseman’s caring souls trying to break through the impenetrable barrier of bureaucratic indifference. Wiseman said he expected to find worn-down, apathetic hospital workers churning vulnerable people through an institutional machine, but was pleasantly surprised by how caring and determined they were to do the best job possible for all of their charges. He ends HOSPITAL in a chapel, where a Spanish hymn acts as a buffer against the ceaseless motion of the city without. (1970, 84 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Frederick Wiseman’s BASIC TRAINING (US/Documentary)
Thursday, January 2, 6pm
The setting is the US Army Base at Fort Knox, Kentucky. The year is 1970. An Army photographer is taking professional shots of every recruit who’s about to start basic training. Frederick Wiseman, the director of this documentary, presents one person standing in front of the camera, then another, to illustrate that this is part of a routine, a process. Once that’s been established, a young recruit who’s Black gets his turn in front of the lens. The photographer, who’s been saying corny things to get each recruit to smile, says in a folksy drawl, “Say something nice about George Wallace.” End of sequence. A key work of Wiseman’s early punk period, BASIC TRAINING is full of short, pointed moments like this. It’s an angry and righteous film that puts a spotlight on the dehumanizing practices of the US Armed Forces at the height of the racist, unjust war they were waging on Vietnam. While that conflict gets discussed a few times in the movie, Wiseman is mainly concerned with the process by which young men get turned into anonymous soldiers. In this regard, the film feels like a continuation of the director’s HIGH SCHOOL (1968), which presented the titular institution as a factory for producing law-abiding American citizens and which memorably concluded with the oration of a letter from a recent graduate then serving in Vietnam. “Think of me as a body doing a job,” that graduate wrote, and often BASIC TRAINING encourages us to look at its subjects the same way. Wiseman frequently presents activities and exercises that one recruit performs after another (getting haircuts, running an obstacle course, target practice), reinforcing the idea that these people are cogs in a machine. Occasionally, Wiseman provides a sense of an individual life amidst all the dehumanization… only to show that person being led back into line. In one harrowing sequence, an Army psychologist calmly and cheerfully tells a suicidal recruit to just “help himself” and simply make his depression disappear. In another, an officer turns into a monster when a different recruit refuses to fire a weapon. BASIC TRAINING is one of Wiseman’s most pulverizing films; even the jokes are pretty grim. There’s a passage of sick humor where Wiseman introduces us to an officer who’s so committed to cleaning the bathroom that he might make you want to throw up, and almost all the scenes of would-be levity (like the sequence with the photographer) involve the joker revealing himself to be bigoted or heartless. Does it go without saying that the first half of FULL METAL JACKET (1987) would be inconceivable without the influence of BASIC TRAINING? (1971, 86 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Ben Sachs]
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Frederick Wiseman’s ESSENE (US/Documentary)
Thursday, January 2, 8pm
An outlier amongst Frederick Wiseman’s early work, ESSENE isn’t, as one might expect from this particularly irascible period in his 50-plus-year career, an excoriation of a religious institution. Even as the film reveals the pettier aspects of ascetic living, it’s endearing, representative more of human vulnerability and the ideals of spirituality and communal living than it is indicative of a potentially oppressive belief system. The institution in question is a Benedictine men’s monastic community in Michigan. Had it been about a church, say, there may have been more opportunity to interpret nonsecular dogma as the scourge it is (can you imagine if Wiseman had access to a megachurch?). As the subject is a monastery, it’s therefore about a different, more personal commitment to one’s beliefs whilst also trying to live communally, showing religion as an intimate reconciliation with oneself and one’s fellow man as well as any kind of higher power. Without additional context for why exactly the brothers are doing what they are, the communal practices are both captivating and inane. In a sequence toward the beginning, the brothers seem to be discussing what to pray for; one mentions his former psychoanalyst while another asks the group to remember the innocence of Hiroshima and those who died. The dynamic between the men is at once disparate (each seems to have their own motivation for seeking this life) and connected (despite any differences, all are seeking meaning for the human condition). In another scene a man reasons why he thinks it’s disrespectful to call someone by their first name; later the same man visits a local store and banters with a shopkeeper over the virtues of different potato peelers. Where this man is a bit wry, another is emotional, appearing in certain scenes crying or singing with equal fervor. There’s a self-awareness and even an element of humility at play among the subjects that’s lacking in some of Wiseman’s earlier, caustic institutional probes. The editing stands out more here than in some of his other films; I ultimately found myself wondering what drew him to certain scenes as being representative of this singular arcane institution. (1972, 89 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Kat Sachs]

Howard Hawks' RIO BRAVO (US)

Music Box Theatre – Thursday, January 2, 12:15pm

RIO BRAVO marks the symphonic culmination of themes that Howard Hawks had been developing for most of his directorial career, and the film delivers such a profound sense of coming together that it’s easy to understand why many Hawks fans consider this to be his greatest work. On one level, it’s a passionate love letter to Hollywood movies (which explains why it was such a crucial text for the French New Wave). The actors aren’t playing characters, per se, but rather larger-than-life variations on their screen personas; and the archetypal premise, about a group of committed good guys working together, reflects on ideas central to the western in general and Hawks’ filmography in particular: namely, the beauty of teamwork and the desires of the individual versus the needs of the society. On another level, RIO BRAVO is an audacious experiment in film form, as Hawks (working from a script by Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett, two of the greatest screenwriters in Hollywood history) frequently relinquishes any sense of narrative momentum to consider niceties of character and the joys of hanging out. Starting around the mid-40s, Hawks claimed to have stopped approaching films as stories and started looking at them as collections of scenes, and RIO BRAVO shows this method at its finest. The film contains funny scenes, poignant scenes, romantic scenes, and suspenseful scenes—it’s as though Hawks, who famously worked in every Hollywood genre, wanted to condense his entire career into a single feature. Yet for all his ambition, Hawks maintains the direct, understated visual style that was as central to his filmmaking as any of his themes. Screening as part of the Silver Fox: Howard Hawks Matinees series. (1959, 141 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Howard Hawks' SCARFACE (US)

Music Box Theatre – Saturday, December 28, and Sunday, December 29, 11:30am

Howard Hawks' early talkie SCARFACE finds him adapting Armitage Trail's nigh-unreadable novel of booze slinging and unbridled incestuous lust into a free-for-all of cinematic show-offery. The perversely mannered, highly symbolic cinematography and visual patterns Hawks brings to this dirty and unwholesome tale are justly famous: the fortuitous 'X' appearing within the mise-en-scene just as death approaches, the playful long-take of murder the opens the film that's been stolen out of Von Sternberg's UNDERWORLD, the tommy gun that blasts away the pages of a calendar to mark the days of Tony Camonte's mob rule. As Camonte, Paul Muni seems to move through the frame like a caged animal, infinitely furious and simultaneously perpetually calculating, a monster whose body exists only because his desires need physical form to be satisfied. Screening as part of the Silver Fox: Howard Hawks Matinees series. (1932, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Kian Bergstrom]

UZI’S PARTY and New Works by Lark Lyra Lou Hill (US/Experimental)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, December 30, 6pm

Beloved Gene Siskel Film Center projectionist, multi-disciplinary artist, and tour de force Lark Lyra Lou Hill graces us with light, sound, and magic, from within and without the booth. Hill is a seasoned Master of Ceremonies, once again bringing together cinema and performance through live scoring, lightworks, overhead projection, storytelling, and audience participation. Attendees can look forward to a welcome offering of salt water, evergreen branches, small lights, and questions, too. The program will commence with overhead projector choreography and loop pedal vocal collage, Hill’s hands animating paper silhouettes as they recite a story titled Everybody’s Tripping. The script spirals through a community circle of bestiary figures, a convening of comrades, ebbing with a psyche-sexual-delia that swells between resolution and dissolution. This trip drops us off at UZI’S PARTY (2017, 30 min, 16mm), the filmmaker’s instant-classic teen sleepover noir that mines the depths of feminine vulnerability to demonic effect. Painstakingly shot and scripted to the rhythmic calculus of an in-camera edit shaped by careful matting and multiple exposure, UZI’S PARTY is the work of a Bolex virtuoso. The film effortlessly conjures both suspense and comedy, featuring a mesmerizing acting performance from Hill’s sister Johanna, who plays five discrete (and indiscreet) characters timidly venturing into the unknown of a Ouija board séance. SAFETY SHAKES (2024, 10 min, 16mm) lets the chills subside, shakes off the demons, and grounds embodiment with a live score of drum machine and synth from Hill and their collaborator Charly Warden. The black and white film sees Hill tremble, gyrate, and thrash on screen, flesh leaping from bone, joints buckling, muscles folding, and chained nipples whipping light across the frame. The program bids farewell with HELLO LOVES (2024, 7 min, Super 8 on Digital), a poetic dream mesh of home movies and sundry experiments shot over the course of 20 years. The soundtrack is compiled from voice notes sent between the artist and their loved ones—partners, friends, and lovers of the past four years. Presented as part of Gene Siskel Film Center’s Off Center experimental film series. Masks will be provided and are required. [Elise Schierbeek]

Jacques Demy's THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (France)

Music Box Theatre – Opens Friday, December 27; see Venue website for showtimes

Jacques Demy is a cinematic alchemist. Ever present in his body of work is an uncanny ability to transform standard, even banal, elements of various genres into 'gold'—or, rather, something so luminous and rarefied that it can only be Demy who's created it. THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG is arguably the best of his films, and almost certainly the first film of his to so fully bend genre and style convention. Demy was a member of the French New Wave and, like several of his peers, he had an unabashed love for Hollywood studio musicals of the era. Demy's most 'New Wave-ish' films preceded THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG; LOLA (1960) and BAY OF ANGELS (1962) were shot in black and white, and dealt more straightforwardly with themes inherent to the movement. Both hinted at Demy's progression, but THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG, when viewed in the context of his first three features, certainly stands out. (For example, it’s his first film in color.) In an essay about the film for the Reader, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum admitted that he originally considered it to be a commercial sellout, comparing it to other "corny pretenders" allegedly borne of the New Wave but merely ascribing the label where it didn't belong. Demy's vision is understandably confounding, as he uses elements that, when mixed, shouldn't create something this spectacular. Virtually undefinable, THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG is neither just a musical nor entirely an opera. The film's narrative is completely conveyed through song, with a jazzy score by longtime Demy collaborator Michel Legrand providing the music against which the sung dialogue is set. It's about a young couple, Guy and Genevieve; she's the too-young daughter of an overbearing mother who owns an umbrella shop in Cherbourg, he's a mechanic who hasn't yet served his time with the French military. Their courtship is shown in the first part of the film, titled "Departure." Naturally, he's drafted to fight in the Algerian War and soon thereafter Genevieve learns she is pregnant. In this part, titled "Absence," Genevieve's mother compels her to consider the overtures of a well-to-do jeweler while Genevieve wonders if her and Guy's love is waning. (It was common among the New Wave filmmakers to reference other films in their work, and here Demy references himself. The jeweler, Roland Cassard, was a suitor of Lola's in LOLA, and Lola herself returns in Demy's 1969 film MODEL SHOP.) Genevieve soon gives in to Roland, who accepts that she is pregnant with another man's child. In the third and final part, "Return," Guy is back from the war and spiraling out of control, likely due to Genevieve's desertion. The ending is bittersweet and surprisingly cynical, two hallmarks of Demy's romantic pragmatism. It has this in common with his previous films, and somewhat separates it from his 1967 film THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT, in which all is happy in the end despite Demy's overall tone of deceptively joyful endurance. This and THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT are noted for their use of color, but the schemes are distinct. In the latter, the fluffier of the two, sunny pastels and bright whites obscure any hint of grimy realism. In THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG, which is more operatic in tone and structure, Demy utilizes bolder, more primary colors. This further allows for hints at the film's fateful bitterness. All that glitters is gold in Demy's world, but his is a gold that illuminates the screen while revealing its own artifice. (1964, 91 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Kat Sachs]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Francis Ford Coppola’s MEGALOPOLIS (US) and Leos Carax’s IT’S NOT ME (France)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday, December 20, 8:15pm and Tuesday, December 24, 6pm (MEGALOPOLIS); Saturday, December 28, 8:30pm, Monday, December 30, 8:15pm, and Wednesday, January 1, 7:45pm (IT’S NOT ME)

One particularly revealing moment in Leos Carax’s essay film IT’S NOT ME (2024, 42 min, DCP Digital) occurs during a discussion of a tracking shot from Murnau’s SUNRISE (1927). Narrating over the scene in which George O’Brien walks guiltily through the bulrushes, Carax rhapsodizes that camera movements on old tracks evoke the heavy gaze of gods; this feeling is absent in moving images today, he argues, when a tracking shot can be achieved with just a cell phone. How do we recapture the perspective of the gods? Carax ponders, effectively summing up the chief concern of his filmmaking career. The French director has often expressed affinity with silent age filmmakers, and his six features to date teem with the sort of try-anything enthusiasm that distinguishes the first few decades of cinema. His affinity transcends cinephilia and approaches something like a spiritual quest, with the goal being to recapture the wonder with which cinema was greeted when the medium was new. Early cinema isn’t the only spectre hovering over IT’S NOT ME; the work is also indebted to Jean-Luc Godard’s HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA (1988-’98) in its heady mix of intertitles, autobiographical detail, visual and aural quotations, and wordplay. And like Godard in his later works, Carax is trying here to understand his place within film history, and he does so, in part, by inserting clips of his own films among the montage. At the same time, IT’S NOT ME feels more concerned with the present moment than anything else Carax has made, with references to the global rise of totalitarian movements interspersed with the cinematic musings. It may seem disjointed at times, but the film is more than the sum of its parts, presenting how the flow of sounds and images can approximate that of private thought. No less personal or obsessed with history (cinematic and otherwise), Francis Ford Coppola’s MEGALOPOLIS (2024, 138 min, DCP Digital) at times suggests a $100 million-plus version of IT’S NOT ME. Coppola doesn’t interweave his contemporary and historical concerns, like Carax does. Rather, his 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 still clearly finds awe in filmmaking; the digressions into weird humor, classical quotations, and garish eroticism create the impression the director was discovering the movie as he went along, throwing anything into the work that reflected his deep love of cinema. Screening as part of the Be Kind, Rewind series. [Ben Sachs]

Cold Sweat Double Feature at FACETS Cinema

See showtimes below

Juan López Moctezuma’s ALUCARDA (Mexico)
Friday, December 20, 7pm
Predating Bram Stoker’s Dracula by 25 years, Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla introduced the archetype of the female vampire. The narrative follows Laura, a teenager haunted by childhood dreams of being bitten on the breast. When the peculiar Carmilla enters her life, their friendship deepens into an unsettling intimacy marked by romantic overtures. Carmilla’s aversion to daylight, secretive demeanor, and refusal to pray heighten suspicions as Laura’s health wanes, paralleled by vivid dreams of predation. Discovering Carmilla feeding on her, Laura sets off a chain of events culminating in Carmilla’s destruction by a Van Helsing precursor, who reveals her identity as Mircalla, Laura’s ancestor and whose name is an anagram for Carmilla. Juan López Moctezuma’s ALUCARDA is a gothic spectacle that has roots in Carmilla butpulsates with its own malevolent energy. The title, an anagram of “A Dracula,” is a wink to its blood-drenched lineage. The film begins with a birth in a crypt and a mother left alone with malevolent voices calling to her. From there, we’re hurled into the life of Justine (Susana Kamini), a newly orphaned girl sent to a prison cloaked in piety, a convent. In her new home, Justine bonds with Alucarda (Tina Romero), an enigmatic force of nature. Their connection blurs the lines between friendship, sisterhood, and romantic affection. Alucarda, with her rebellious curiosity, becomes fascinated by a crypt hidden in the woods and begins to challenge the convent’s rigid religious rules, where even a minor sin can be punished by flogging. A strange encounter with gypsies propels the girls toward the dark crypt. Inside, Alucarda opens a coffin, possibly that of her own mother, unwittingly releasing a malevolent force that overtakes them. This unleashes a nightmarish transformation of blasphemy—Justine succumbs to vampirism, while Alucarda is imbued with the powers of witchcraft. The convent’s leaders, Father Lazaro and Mother Superior, pledge to banish the evil through exorcism. Yet their cruel and extreme measures result in devastating consequences, leaving everyone involved to confront the horrifying aftermath. Future Mexican TV star Tina Romero’s portrayal of Alucarda showcases her immense talent and versatility. Her physical and emotional performance during Alucarda’s moments of psychosis foreshadows Isabelle Adjani’s breakdown in Andrzej Żulawski’s POSSESSION (1981). Moctezuma allows viewers to empathize with Alucarda’s quest for revenge against the convent’s oppressive authority, drawing parallels to Carrie White’s rampage in CARRIE (1976). Like CARRIE, the climax of ALUCARDA exemplifies an early rendering of the "Good for Her" subgenre, where female protagonists exact justice against their tormentors. Alucarda balances familiar tropes of “kill-the-gays,” queer villains, and female revenge within the framework of a hallucinatory nunsploitation film. The haunting cinematography enhances the narrative’s dreamlike quality, while juxtaposed editing highlights the similarities between Catholic and Satanic rituals. Moctezuma fluidly shifts between surrealism and gothic horror, a style influenced by his collaboration with Alejandro Jodorowsky on FANDO Y LIS (1968) and EL TOPO (1970). While Moctezuma developed his unique voice, traces of Jodorowsky’s technique remain evident in his films. By reworking Carmilla, Moctezuma crafts a narrative that sympathizes with its supernatural characters while rebelling against religious institutions and patriarchal structures. The film aligns with feminist resistance and serves as an allegory for political change in Mexico. The Tlatelolco Massacre of 1968, where a pro-democracy protest was met with violence and the disappearance of students, underscores the film’s subtext. Through ALUCARA, Moctezuma invites audiences to cheer for the destruction of outdated regimes as a possessed teenage girl engulfs nuns in flames. ALUCARDA remains ahead of its time in every sense. Good for you, ALUCARDA. (1977, 78 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]
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Norifumi Suzuki’s SCHOOL OF THE HOLY BEAST (Japan)
Friday, December 20, 8:45pm
Norifumi Suzuki’s SCHOOL OF THE HOLY BEAST cuts into the underbelly of religious hypocrisy while smashing societal taboos with gleeful abandon. This Japanese exploitation gem isn’t just a nunsploitation film—it’s a feverish descent into the labyrinth of power, repression, and resistance, delivered with the visual excess of a baroque painting and the nihilistic bite of a late-night confession. As one of Toei Studio’s most celebrated directors, Suzuki pushed exploitation boundaries further than most Japanese filmmakers. His highly acclaimed SEX AND FURY (1973) and FEMALE YAKUZA TALE (1973) showcase his talent for elevating exploitative cinema into challenging high art. SCHOOL OF THE HOLY BEAST is a masterstroke of blending the profane with the profound, using the Catholic Church as a backdrop for lurid thrills while skewering patriarchy and the brutal machinery of religious institutions. The story—of Maya Takigawa infiltrating a convent to uncover the truth behind her mother’s mysterious death—is surface-level melodrama. Yet Suzuki’s hallucinatory visuals and a tone oscillating between the operatic and the grotesque reveal a filmmaker at the top of his craft. The film begins in montage, with Maya enjoying her city—going to the movies, splashing her hand in a water fountain, and lying with her lover. Her first line of dialogue announces her intent: she is heading to a place where “a woman is no longer a woman.” The quick editing and off-center framing of Maya in the city give way to meticulously framed compositions and dolly work upon her arrival at the convent. The convent reveals itself as a microcosm of sadistic authority. Punishments inflicted in the name of discipline are staged like rituals—whippings in front of a cross, water torture in candlelit chambers—each sequence more unhinged than the last. Suzuki’s use of religious iconography is sacrilegious and striking, subverting symbols of purity into tools of oppression. Maya, the steadfast hero, challenges the church with fierce determination. She is an avenging angel and feminist insurgent, navigating a world where male authority is absolute, and female suffering is institutionalized. Her vengeance is delivered with blood-soaked ferocity, transforming her into a symbol of divine retribution. Suzuki’s meticulous direction shines throughout. Even amidst sadomasochism and bondage, he maintains full control of the frame. Utilizing chiaroscuro lighting and vibrant splashes of red, the convent becomes a gothic nightmare. The editing underscores the film’s feverish tone, while the soundtrack—a blend of traditional melodies and bizarre modern compositions—elevates the surreal atmosphere. SCHOOL OF THE HOLY BEAST transcends its genre, critiquing not only the Church but broader power dynamics, patriarchy, and moral hypocrisy. The hierarchies, forced celibacy, and self-punishment within the convent serve as metaphors for societal repression. While many exploitation films critique the Catholic Church’s hypocrisy and patriarchal systems, nunsploitation often wrestles with contradictions. These films indict the church while indulging in voyeuristic depictions of female suffering and repressed sexuality, catering to the male gaze they ostensibly critique. Despite its unrelenting violence and blasphemous imagery, SCHOOL OF THE HOLY BEAST distinguishes itself through its ambitious filmmaking. Unlike the onslaught of nunsploitation films inspired by Ken Russell’s THE DEVILS (1971), Suzuki’s work transcends genre conventions. It is a brutal, beautiful act of rebellion that lingers long after the final, fiery reckoning. (1974, 91 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]

Bertrand Bonello's THE BEAST (France/Canada)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, December 24, 12pm and Sunday, December 29, 3pm

The closest precedent to THE BEAST may be Léos Carax’s POLA X (1999), another eerie communion between a cryptic American author and an equally cryptic French filmmaker working more than a century apart. In POLA X, Carax transposed Herman Melville’s novel Pierre, or the Ambiguities from mid-19th century America to late 20th century France, keeping the basic narrative structure but mostly using the text as a talisman to guide his film towards novel insights about privilege, doomed love, and the nature of art. In THE BEAST, Bonello takes the basic premise of a Henry James story called “The Beast in the Jungle” and uses it as a jumping-off point for a fragmented, time-hopping narrative experiment on themes of identity, performance, and the fear of love. Both films approach adaptation as a form of conversation, proposing cinematic analogues for what Melville and James did and considering what these visionary authors might have to tell us about our own time. Bonello seems especially well suited to take on James; like the author of The Turn of the Screw and The Sacred Fount, this French auteur specializes in narratives that are ornate, inscrutable, and frequently spooky. But where James famously subverted psychological realism by refusing to provide explanations for his characters’ behavior, Bonello is more interested in subverting expectations of cinema’s relationship to history, defamiliarizing our sense of both the past and the present. His period pieces HOUSE OF PLEASURES (2011) and SAINT LAURENT (2014) took place in such hermetic environments that they seemed to be playing out on space stations, while his contemporary films like NOCTURAMA (2016) and ZOMBI CHILD (2019) incorporate so many allusions to cultural traditions and past works of art they make the present seem forbidding in its own right. Alternating between stories set in 1910, 2014, and 2044, THE BEAST builds on Bonello’s characteristically alienating portraits of the past and the present by adding a healthy dose of future shock. The 2044 narrative concerns a woman named Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) who undergoes a process that will erase her DNA of any negative memories of her past lives, which include being a concert pianist in early 20th century Paris and being an aspiring actress in Obama-era Los Angeles. In Bonello’s chilling vision of the future, AI technology has replaced people in the majority of jobs and much of humanity has been deemed useless; his visions of the recent and less-recent past are no more inviting. As in much of James’ writing, there’s always something in THE BEAST to keep the audience at arm’s length from what the work is about. That distance seems purposeful here—it must be closed with creativity and emotional intuition. Screening as part of the Be Kind, Rewind series. (2023, 146 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Radu Jude's DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM THE END OF THE WORLD (Romania)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Wednesday, December 25, 3pm and Saturday, December 28, 12pm

DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM THE END OF THE WORLD is completely unhinged with an overwhelming sense of immediacy; it also feels impressively controlled in its chaos. It’s humorous, in large part due to its main performance, but also wholly serious. It’s generally a biting political satire of the current state of things, but it focuses on the struggle of everyday people, the horrors of modern technology, and the damaging effects of work culture. Overworked and suffering from lack of sleep, Angela (a compelling Ilinca Manolache) is a PA working on a multinational corporation’s video about work safety; her task is to drive around Bucharest interviewing potential participants. She spends most of her time in her car—she also works for Uber on the side—and Jude parallels this with moments from ANGELA MOVES ON, a 1981 film by Romanian director Lucian Bratu. The earlier film is about a taxi driver also named Angela (Dorina Lazar), also driving the streets of Bucharest. It’s an interesting internal comparison, but it becomes profound when Bratu’s Angela, played by the same actress, shows up as a relative of one of the current Angela’s participants; their interaction makes for the sincerest and most illuminating moments of the film. It's also the most striking example of how DO NOT EXPECT travels across time, challenging the audience’s ideas about fiction, non-fiction, and the filmmaking processes in general. Current Angela also creates TikToks as an Andrew Tate-inspired persona using an AI filter, streaming the crudest of material from her phone; the streams are presented in full color, while our dystopian present is in black and white. She’s also not afraid to question the state of things around her, shining a light on how those in power place the blame for any injustices on the workers, leaving them to deal with the fallout of unsafe work conditions. DO NOT EXPECT ends with a nearly 40-minute uninterrupted shot of the filming of the work safety promotional video. It’s impossible to fully flesh out everything this film presents, just as it contains so many instances of screens within screens, stories within stories, reflected and refracted, asking “to what end?” Screening as part of the Be Kind, Rewind series. (2023, 163 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s EVIL DOES NOT EXIST (Japan)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, December 21, 11:15am and Wednesday, December 25, 12pm

For his follow-up to the widely acclaimed DRIVE MY CAR (2021), Ryusuke Hamaguchi all but approaches the film as personal challenge to invert the core tenets of the previous work. The prior’s epic three-hour running time is traded in for a more manageable, though no less impactful, sub-two-hour stretch; the focus on suburban and urban landscapes is shifted to more rural and pastoral environs; and the overt Chekhovian underpinnings are replaced with the spirit of Henrik Ibsen haunting every frame (no doubt, "An Enemy of the People" wouldn’t be an out-of-place alternate title here). But for as much differentiates the two films, EVIL DOES NOT EXIST is no less gripping, daring, and ripe for post-screening discussion, its ending almost goading audience members to have heated debates about its meaning for hours on end. Hamaguchi’s work moves with slow, forceful steps, wistful scenery and patient pacing sitting alongside characters who exude righteous anger and distress. The focus on nature here—the film opens and closes with stargazing shots of wintry forests—is imperative, the primary narrative thrust being the residents of Harasawa clashing with a potential glamping site (short for “glamour camping”) that plans to open in the area in a perfect example of the horrors of late-stage capitalism, a corporatized piece of environmental cosplay whose very existence would invariably be an ecological disaster for the region. The key scene of the film is a town hall meeting where the residents air their grievances towards the glamping company, a triumph of turning what could have been banal administrative feedback into riveting, hilarious, squirm-inducing cinema, no doubt cathartic to watch for anyone who has had to deal with the painstaking, time-wasting red tape of corporate decision-making. But the core pleasure of Hamaguchi’s film lies in the slow, silent glimpses into nature, buoyed by Eiko Ishibashi's transcendent jazzy score. Hamaguchi fills the spaces with surrounding forests and mountains, snow littering the ground, characters silently chopping wood for minutes on end, and birds and deer poking through to watch the ensuing drama. Eventually, as so often happens, nature and humanity become one, with protective animal instincts taking over even the calmest of minds to protect what is right. Screening as part of the Be Kind, Rewind series. (2024, 106 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Kelly O'Sullivan & Alex Thompson's GHOSTLIGHT (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, December 23, 5:45pm and Saturday, December 28, 12:30pm

There are days where Chicago’s storefront theater scene can feel like the city’s best-kept secret; abandoned rooms and buildings scattered across the city that have been converted into shelters for imagination and earnest emotional excavation, created by people sharing stories with live audiences for little-to-no money, simply for the pleasure of nourishing that deep, artistic part of the human spirit. It’s corny and scrappy and painful and oftentimes exploitative, and in its best moments, it’s a place where—​despite it all—​art for art’s sake comes alive in a most hopeful and earnest fashion. It’s somewhat surprising that such a potent artistic subculture has rarely been seen as an environ for cinematic exploration, but Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson’s GHOSTLIGHT succeeds in mining this world for all it’s worth, tying this all to a story of familial grief and cathartic retribution that, of course, can only be unearthed through the power of theater. In this case, a hastily tossed-together production of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet does the trick, with construction worker Dan (Keith Kupferer) inexplicably joining the cast after wandering away from his worksite. Sullivan’s script slowly teases out the true narrative meat plaguing Dan’s life, a tragedy of human proportions that finds eerie parallels to the tragic Shakespearean love story Dan and his theatrical cohort (led by a harsh-yet-tender Dolly de Leon) have found themselves exhuming in a dingy storefront in the Chicago suburbs. The layers of authenticity are further deepened by the fact that Kupferer’s real-life family inhabit those same roles on screen here; Tara Mallen (a Chicago theater all-star in her own right) plays Dan’s beleaguered wife, and their daughter Katherine Mallen Kupferer delivers an adolescent tornado of a performance as their rebellious teen offspring. Their shared onscreen family trauma (unfurled late in the film at a deposition hearing in a stunning piece of performance from Kupferer) is always boiling under the surface of their lives, with Dan and his daughter eventually finding a home for these repressed feelings to thrive within the Bard’s text. O’Sullivan and Thompson deliver the final blow with one fleeting image near the end of the film, hiding in the shadows, bringing Dan closer to a breaking point of meaning and understanding than he’s ever felt before. As messy and as slapdash as storefront theater often is, truth and vulnerability always find a way to shine through. Screening as part of the Be Kind, Rewind series. (2024, 110 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Catherine Breillat's LAST SUMMER (France/Norway)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday, December 20, 5:45pm and Sunday, December 29, 12pm

LAST SUMMER is very much a movie of its moment, and not just because it deals in hot-button issues about power dynamics in sexual relationships. The film’s third act (which deviates significantly from that of QUEEN OF HEARTS, the 2019 Danish film it’s based on) relates the heroine’s protracted, knowing deception of the people around her—in other words, her distortion of reality to make it play out in her favor. The character’s self-serving actions are nothing new, yet her methodicalness suggests an exaggerated version of what people do on social media every day, manipulating the facts of their lives in order to create the most attractive versions of themselves. What Catherine Breillat achieves with this section of the film is comparable to what Radu Jude achieves in another great movie of 2023, DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM THE END OF THE WORLD, with the extraordinary 40-minute shot that shows the real-time manipulation of reality that occurs during the making of a public safety video. In both cases, a major filmmaker is assessing the zeitgeist using the cinematic mode in which they operate best: for Jude, that mode is presentational, Brechtian, and ironically distanced, while for Breillat, it’s inquisitive, wry, and discomfitingly intimate. The French auteur has long shown interest in challenging sexual taboos (indeed, her filmic perspective seems to have grown out of it), and she does it again in LAST SUMMER, a film about what happens when a middle-aged woman enters into a sexual relationship with her 17-year-old stepson. Yet the onscreen sex is relatively brief (especially when compared with some of the director’s other films), as the consequences of the affair take up far more screen time than the affair itself. Breillat uses a similar approach to delineate both the sexual relationship and the heroine’s efforts to cover it up, employing closeups and highly specific sound design to bring viewers into a sense of confidentiality with the characters. Most of the scenes are structured around seduction, persuasion, or argument, which makes the film feel oddly Shakespearean; the classical grounding brings a timeless gravitas to the contemporary concerns. Screening as part of the Be Kind, Rewind series. (2023, 104 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Ariane Louis-Seize’s HUMANIST VAMPIRE SEEKING CONSENTING SUICIDAL PERSON (Canada)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, December 26, 8:15pm and Monday, December 30, 8:15pm

With the popular WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS comedically surveying the idiosyncrasies and mundanity of vampirism in the modern age, it seems we’ve hit a crossroads in the horror subgenre. HUMANIST VAMPIRE SEEKING CONSENTING SUICIDAL PERSON builds upon that dark comedy twist, exploring vampire lore by way of John Hughes. It sets it within a traditional coming-of-age story, as Sasha (a perfectly sulky, Linda Deetz-inspired Sara Montpetit) tries to navigate vampirism on her own terms. HUMANIST VAMPIRE considers the pitfalls of being a teenage vampire, with a family who loves you but doesn’t understand your distaste for the violence of it all. Sasha's rebellion is in attempting more ethical ways to be a vampire; as she finally gains her fangs—a clear analogy for puberty—her family decides to stop coddling her with pre-packaged bags of blood and force her to hunt for herself. Though starving, Sasha decides to go about this her own way, attending a support group for those struggling with suicidal thoughts. There she meets depressed high schooler Paul (Felix-Antoine Benard) who’s all too willing to be her first victim. Her compassionate confusion at Paul’s willingness to die makes her hesitate and instead—in a play on the typical teen comedy trope—the two venture into the one night where everything changes. There’s a sweet love story at the center of HUMANIST VAMPIRE, one that takes seriously the struggles of both Sasha and Paul. The awkwardness of growing up not entirely replaced, but certainly intensified by her vampirism. While a lot of this does tonally feel very familiar, the teen coming-of-age film genre gives the modern vampire dark comedy some new and interesting territory to examine. Director Ariane Louis-Seize, in her feature film debut, also creates a distinct visual style, with the gaunt vampires interestingly arranged in bold and neon lit night spaces. Subtle vintage aesthetics in set dressing and costuming, and, most notably, her extensive vinyl collection, hints at Sasha’s true age of sixty-eight. Screening as part of the Be Kind, Rewind series. (2023, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Alice Rohrwacher's LA CHIMERA (Italy/France/Switzerland)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, December 21, 8:30pm and Thursday, December 26, 5pm

For Arthur, there’s little that separates the living from the dead. Played by a steely, towering Josh O’Connor, most often seen sidling through scenes donning a detritus-laden white linen suit, he spends his days wandering about with his merry band of "tombaroli," pilfering the tombs hidden beneath their feet across Italy, raiding a myriad of resting places for long-lost Etruscan treasures that, in their eyes, aren’t doing the dead any good just sitting about. Arthur’s mind wanders about, too, to his long-lost love Beniamina, a figure seen in flickers, dreamlike, perhaps also sitting in that nebulous zone between what we know is gone but what we wish was still here. Indeed, our first glimpse of Arthur is of him riding a train back home after the end of his prison sentence, his own resurrection back into the land of the "living." Alice Rohrwacher’s film tends to navigate various planes of existence, often changing aspect ratios, film stocks, even genres; the story curves through tropes found in heist thrillers, comedies, and romances, employing techniques found within the realms of silent film, experimental essay, and documentary filmmaking. Her collage of storytelling ends up falling somewhere—​spiritually and thematically—​between a fairy tale and a ghost story, weighing the love of the present with the love of that which is long past, of building your life in deference to death, of weighing one’s soul against the thrill of unearthing objects not meant for human eyes. Arthur himself is gifted with an otherworldly spirit of divining, of knowing in his very soul where these underground treasures lie, with Rohrwacher’s camera literally performing revolutions to find Arthur in another visual plane, familiar yet upside-down. What a gift to find a film so brimming with passion, humor, and otherworldly desire brimming from every frame for those curious enough to pull on the threads Rohrwacher leaves lying before us. Perhaps a glimmer of light will shine through after all that digging. Screening as part of the Be Kind, Rewind series. (2023, 130 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Phạm Thiên Ân’s INSIDE THE YELLOW COCOON SHELL (Vietnam/France/Singapore/Spain)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, December 22, 4pm and Tuesday, December 31, 2:30pm

When Thiên (Lê Phong Vũ), a Saigon resident in his 20s, learns that Hahn, his sister-in-law, has been killed in an accident, he makes the journey with Dao (Nguyễn Thịnh), Hahn’s 5-year-old son, to the rural village where they were raised for her funeral and burial among family. Thus begins the physical and spiritual journey of Phạm Thiên Ân’s namesake character in the atmospheric drama INSIDE THE YELLOW COCOON SHELL. This film won the Caméra d’Or as the best debut feature at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. It’s not surprising that YELLOW COCOON SHELL captured the hearts of the Cannes judges; Phạm channels other Cannes award winners: the long-take, slow cinema of Tsai Ming-liang and the sound design of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s rural meditations, his ghostly visitations, and especially the discursive documentary style of his MYSTERIOUS OBJECT AT NOON (2000). Phạm’s film moves slowly from the worldly city life in which Thiên is immersed to the countryside where Hahn’s family, devout Catholics, catalyze his spiritual quest wrapped in an effort to find his long-absent brother. Phạm subtly move us from Thiên’s egocentrism, particularly with regard to his former fiancée (Nguyễn Thị Trúc Quỳnh), whose choice to become a nun really has nothing to do with him. Humbled, he listens intently to people he meets as he traces his brother’s whereabout, learning about the war from a veteran who has him touch a bullet scar at his ribs. This scene calls to mind the biblical story of Thomas touching the scars of Jesus to convince himself of the reality of resurrection. Thiên learns from an old woman’s experience of the soul when she died briefly. Finally, he finds his brother’s home and sees the yellow cocoon shells of a silk farmer in his backyard, a practice that requires the death of the larvae before they can transform into moths. Much about YELLOW COCOON SHELL is derivative and on the nose when it comes to symbolism, and the long takes of mundane action seem designed, not always successfully, to slow us down and put us into a meditative state. While the film betrays the inexperience of its director, there is tremendous beauty in the images he creates. With time, Phạm could take his place alongside the filmmakers he so admires. Screening as part of the Be Kind, Rewind series. (2023, 179 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Andrea Arnold’s BIRD (UK)

FACETS Cinema – Saturday, December 21, 3pm and Sunday, December 22, 5pm
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, December 21, 4pm and Friday, December 27, 6pm

After a trip to the United States and forays into television and documentary, Andrea Arnold returns to her English social-realist roots with the lovely, vibrant BIRD. Specifically, she’s back in the grungy environment of the council estate (UK housing development), a place where the adolescent Mia lived in Arnold’s 2009 feature FISH TANK, and where Arnold herself was raised by a teenage single mother. Like Mia and Arnold, the protagonist of BIRD comes from a broken, indigent family. A tender twelve years of age, Bailey (Nykiya Adams) lives with her young, impulsive dad Bug (an electric Barry Keoghan, torso aptly covered in tattoos of creepy-crawlies) and her half-brother Hunter (Jason Buda), figures of a masculinity she both detests and subconsciously idolizes. In an early scene, Bailey has her frizzy Black hair cut short in protest of her father’s just-announced remarriage, and in defiance of the femininity she’s expected to perform as a bridesmaid. It’s also so she can fit in with her half-brother and his gang of self-described vigilantes, who coordinate home attacks on those who have been pegged as wrongdoers. Amid these bleak influences, Bailey exercises an irrepressible creative spirit; like FISH TANK’s Mia, who yearned to escape her poverty through dance, Bailey is an amateur filmmaker whose camera is drawn to the freedom of winged creatures, especially birds. A strain of magical realism enters the film when the girl is visited by, well, Bird (Franz Rogowski), a fey skirt-wearing loner with his own history of a broken home who comes blowing in on a gust of wind. Bird becomes Bailey’s nebulous reflection, confidant, surrogate family member, and guardian angel, continuing a long storytelling tradition of children whose fears and desires become manifest as figures of palliative imagination. Or is he? Despite its whimsy, BIRD stays so grounded in the tactile immediacy of its surroundings—aided by Robbie Ryan’s energetic, intimate handheld 16mm camerawork—that the sometimes-literal flights of fancy register as totally plausible occurrences in a child’s experience of her world. There’s typically a popular song or two that serves as an unofficial anthem to an Arnold film, and here it’s Blur’s science-fiction-tinged "The Universal," assuring Bailey, and us, that even seemingly naive or quixotic things “really, really, really could happen.” Screening at the Film Center as part of the Be Kind, Rewind series. (2024, 119 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]

Edward Berger’s CONCLAVE (UK/US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

It can be an uphill battle to craft a film about the Catholic Church and not have the end product be overshadowed by its grand scale and influence on the world, for better or worse. In Edward Berger’s CONCLAVE, adapted from the Robert Harris novel of the same name, the Vatican looms large over bouts of political tension and petty gossip, acting as another member of its ensemble. Following the death of the Pope, Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) is responsible for managing the vital, and intentionally covert, proceedings to select a successor in the papacy. Lawrence struggles with his faith as well as the direction of the church, and efforts to block the conservative reactionary Cardinal Tedesco (a commanding and oft-vaping Sergio Castellitto) that would set progress back decades turns into an all-out campaign war for the vacant spot. CONCLAVE is grounded by its performances from its superb ensemble, particularly Fiennes, Isabella Rossellini, and Stanley Tucci, but the most compelling performance lies in newcomer Carlos Diehz as Vincent Cardinal Benitez, a surprise addition to the vote who manages to navigate being an outsider in the flurry of internal politics with a masterful hand. This is a story about power, not just within the echelons of the Catholic Church and what it represents, but the innate human nature of craving it so desperately it festers until it rots a person’s core. There are only so many times a weak-willed man can try to convince him that he is above the fantasy of power until it takes hold and erodes any good will, or punishes him for flying too close to the sun, whichever comes first. And yet, CONCLAVE leans into both that cynicism and an almost naive sense of optimism—the idea that if one really tried, they could change everything that is wrong with a problematic institution from the inside. It’s a monkey's paw that has no clear answers, but it plays out in stunning fashion. Screening as part of the Be Kind, Rewind series. (2024, 120 min, DCP Digital) [Cody Corrall]

Payal Kapadia’s ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT (France/India/Italy/Netherlands/Luxembourg)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Premiering as the first Indian film in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in thirty years, Payal Kapadia’s sophomore feature—and her first official foray into fiction filmmaking—dazzles with a confidence of voice and spirit that continues her emerging canon of poetic and politically charged narratives. Kapadia’s vision of feminine perseverance through lives of longing crafts a sprawling and complex vision of Mumbai as a nocturnal city that shines menacingly with wonder and opportunity. Voices that open the film tell us of the entrancing promise of money and stability that can be found in Mumbai, yet such gifts can only realistically be bestowed on the lucky few. For everyone else, you may end up like Prabha (Kani Kusruti) or Anu (Divya Prabha), two women living together and working together at the same hospital, each with varying levels of dedication to their work. Kapadia’s slice-of-life storytelling mode often finds these two at their most intimate and vulnerable in silent moments alone, each desperately working to take in the overwhelming world and circumstances around them. Prabha is stuck in time, her husband working abroad in Germany, with no attempts to contact her in months, save for a recent delivery of a rice cooker; Anu is conversely fixated on the promise of future love, with her nights spent with her new love—the charming Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon)—embarking on that most epic of quests: trying to find a place to hook up. Just like her previous film A NIGHT OF KNOWING NOTHING (2021), the repressive politics of mainstream Indian society find themselves hideously seeped into the fabric of the story, most prominently with Shiaz’s Muslim faith becoming a roadblock for any future life with Anu in an overtly Hindu nationalist society. Yet love, lust, and independence fight their way through to Kapadia’s hopeful ending, where a trip away from Mumbai literally uproots our protagonists from the horrors of living lives of passivity, and provides them each with opportunities to finally move forward in their respective lives. The gift of Kapadia’s film is in how major of a work it feels even with such slight and understated tools, the power of these emotional bubbles filling up to the point of bursting in ways cathartic and mystical and joyously communal. Screening as part of the Be Kind, Rewind series. (2024, 110 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Paul Schrader's OH, CANADA (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

During a masterclass, Paul Schrader once said to an audience: “I used to be an artist who never wanted to leave this world without saying fuck you. And now I’m an artist who never wants to leave this world without saying I love you.” The director’s obsession with inner transfiguration has remained constant his entire life. The belief in art’s capacity to create spiritual transformation centers his 1972 book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, his script for TAXI DRIVER (1976), and his “man in a room” trilogy FIRST REFORMED (2017), THE CARD COUNTER (2021), and MASTER GARDENER (2022). In his early work, Schrader focused on characters’ transubstantiation into the grotesque; more recently, he’s been interested in forgiveness and absolution of the wicked. His latest film, OH, CANADA, adapts Russell Banks’ novel Foregone. Schrader first adapted Banks’ novel Affliction in 1999, sparking a decades-long friendship. The two would enjoy summers together in the Northeast outdoors. When Banks’ health began to decline due to a cancer diagnosis, Schrader wanted to dedicate a film to his dying friend. Declaring Foregone as his version of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Illych, the two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee requested Schrader name the film the title he wished for the book, OH, CANADA. The film opens on a successful documentary filmmaker, Leonard Fife (Richard Gere), and his wife and producer of 40 years, Emma (Uma Thurman). Former students ask for his final interview, and he accepts on the condition that his wife is present. At 78, ill and on the verge of death, he’s ready to avow the lies and betrayals that have ravaged his life like a cancer. In the book, Emma knows what Fife will say and wants to protect his reputation by stopping him; Schrader has Fife confess for the first time, only revealing when the cameras are running.  Like a man desperate to expel a demon, which he can be free of only if his wife witnesses the exorcism, Fife insists repeatedly that she stay and listen. His mind fogged by medication, he’s transported into his past. With Fife as his surrogate, Schrader wants to know if someone who spends most of their life convinced that they are unlovable will die unlovable. Rejoining the director after their legendary collaboration on AMERICAN GIGOLO (1980), Gere portrays Fife as vulnerable and at times ugly, a worthy portrayal of the dying. Jacob Elordi, who plays Fife as a young man, has incredible star power. His instincts pulled from an emotional inner life are never missed by the camera. After playing Elvis and the Euphoria, I believe he’s still only warming up. Schrader calls back to the structure of his seminal work, MISHIMA: A LIFE IN FOUR CHAPTERS (1985): an acclaimed artist on the brink of death conjures memory and fantasy to the tune of one motif. Comparable to how John Ford dealt with the theme of memory, Schrader flexes his talent not as a storyteller but a poet. The film comments on marriage and the secrets kept. One can spend 40 years with someone and not know who they truly are. Out of love, Leo reveals scars and warts to his love as his final gesture of devotion. He leaves the world loved, completely exposed, and with his spoken truth documented at 24 frames a second. (2024, 95 min, DCP Digital) [Ray Ebarb]

Ingmar Bergman's CRIES AND WHISPERS (Sweden)

Alamo Drafthouse – Tuesday, January 2, 7pm

Sometimes the great works of art risk going too far. Ingmar Bergman's CRIES AND WHISPERS is, I think, that kind of film. It is an extreme and beautiful erotic poem, a dreamscape about death, a song of love and hate where love has the last word. The story is set around the turn of the century in a resplendently gothic manor house, festooned, famously, in red—walls, carpets, draperies, all of the interior crimson. The manor is set in a verdant park. Harriet Andersson plays kind Agnes, a woman of faith in her late thirties who is dying an agonizing death of cancer of the womb. Agnes's two sisters, cruel in their various ways, have come to her deathbed: the bitter, suicidal Karin (Inrid Thulin) and the false, adulterous Maria (Liv Ullmann). There is also Anna (Kari Sylwan), Agnes's good, Christian maidservant (and likely her lover), who had a baby who died. The movie is a vision in red, black, and white, with, as Roger Ebert notes in his Great Movies essay, the colors representing "their fundamental emotional associations, with blood, death, and spirituality." It is so red that Liv Ullmann even has red hair. Bergman even innovates with film punctuation, fading to red instead of to black. As Pauline Kael wrote, "The incomparable cinematographer Sven Nykvist achieves the look of the paintings of the Norwegian Edvard Munch, as if the neurotic and the unconscious had become real enough to be photographed...The film is emotionally saturated in female flesh—flesh as temptation and mystery...The effect—a culmination of the visual emphasis on women's faces in recent Bergman films—is intimate and hypnotic. We are put in the position of the little boy at the beginning of PERSONA, staring up at the giant women's faces on the screen." She positions Bergman as working here in the Expressionist dream-play mode of his hero, Strindberg. It's precisely this stylized fantasy mode—of memory and dream—that makes the film's breaks from sanity and reality work. Most startlingly, the dead Agnes seems to come back to life. This may be the very crux of the film, which is profoundly about the yearning for the comfort of the human touch. Kael again: "Touching becomes a ritual of soul-searching." This may fit into Bergman's own conception: the whole movie, he's said, probably "is something internal," that "ever since my childhood I have pictured the inside of the soul as a moist membrane in shades of red." There are stunning moments of intimacy: Anna loosening her bare breast so that it may pillow Agnes. Agnes's sisters bathing her. Anna cradling the dead Agnes in bed, forming a pietà that is one of Bergman's very greatest images. It also contains devastating moments of falseness. Maria implores hateful Karin to let down her guard. The estranged sisters caress and kiss, but instead of their words, we hear the Saraband from Bach's cello suite No. 5 in C minor. When Maria later acts as if the moment was imagined, it's terrifying. The final scene leaves me shattered and feverish on every viewing. Agnes, whose short life was consumed by pain and suffering, remembers a happy autumn day when her sisters visited. "All my aches and pains were gone. The people I'm most fond of in all the world were with me...I could feel the presence of their bodies, the warmth of their hands. I wanted to cling to that moment, and I thought, come what may, this is happiness...and I feel profoundly grateful to my life, which gives me so much.” Screening as part of the Robert Eggers Guest Selects series. (1972, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Scott Pfeiffer]

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

Alamo Drafthouse – See Venue website for showtimes

It took more than a decade’s remove from its initial release for general audiences to appreciate Kubrick's final film, which is set in a facsimile of contemporary New York but heeding closely to the psychology and sexual mores of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1924 novella on which it is based. This discrepancy sparked outrage in 1999—particularly among writers in the New York Times, who actually seemed offended by the lack of realism—but it's come to resonate as one of the deepest mysteries of the director's monumental career. For Martin Scorsese, who placed the film in his top five for the 1990s, it's about New York as it appears in a dream. "And as with all dreams," he wrote, "you never know precisely when you've entered it. Everything seems real and lifelike, but different, a little exaggerated, a little off. Things appear to happen as if they were preordained, sometimes in a strange rhythm from which it's impossible to escape. Audiences really had no preparation for a dream movie that didn't announce itself as such, without the usual signals—hovering mists, people appearing and disappearing at will or floating off the ground. Like Rossellini's VOYAGE IN ITALY, another film severely misunderstood in its time, EYES WIDE SHUT takes a couple on a harrowing journey, at the end of which they're left clinging to each other. Both are films of terrifying self-exposure. They both ask the question: How much trust and faith can you really place in another human being? And they both end tentatively, yet hopefully. Honestly." Kubrick arrived at this combination of mystery and exposure through singular working methods unlikely to be repeated in a major film. Reportedly the longest shoot in movie history, Kubrick spent weeks on individual scenes, running actors through conversations until they were no longer conscious of performing. He had pursued this sort of marathon process before—most notably on THE SHINING and FULL METAL JACKET—but never on material so explicitly psychological. As a result, even superstars like Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman (giving their finest performances as a wealthy married couple) seem unfamiliar and strangely vulnerable. But EYES WIDE SHUT is only truly unsettling on contemplation: on the surface, it's one of Kubrick's funniest (with some of the most eccentric supporting performances in anything he made after THE KILLING) and most luminous, capturing the allure of Manhattan in winter with remarkably simple lighting arrangements. (1999, 159 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Billy Wilder's THE APARTMENT (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Sunday, December 29, 12pm

For many—including Wilder himself—this was the director's finest hour, the film in which all the elements converged with grace, sass, and a tinge of tragic inevitability. It was inspired by a line that Wilder wrote in his notebook sometime in the 1940s and couldn't forget: "Movie about the guy who climbs into the warm bed left by two lovers." By the time the film was made (during the so-called "New Permissiveness" of the early 60s), the two lovers had multiplied into several men and countless mistresses and the warmth of the bed had turned musty. The guy, however, retained all the bittersweet sympathy of that initial premise. As incarnated by Jack Lemmon (in the most tolerable performance of his career), C.C. Baxter is the ultimate schlemiel, a resigned bachelor who lends his apartment to his insurance company superiors because he can't imagine any alternative to advancing in a job that kills him. Shirley MacLaine plays the disabused mistress who turns out to be the girl of his dreams, one of the great creations of the movies: her Fran Kubelik is a woman who seems ideal even in her faults—youthful, spontaneous, naive, sexy, resilient: exactly the type who could humanize an office drone like Baxter. The romance between them is so affecting (to say nothing of the dialogue, which pops as only Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond's writing can) that it's easy to overlook what a superior piece of filmmaking THE APARTMENT is. Wilder remains underrated as a visual artist; and here, working in sparkling black-and-white 'Scope, he creates some remarkable effects, such as the unforgettable loneliness of the apartment itself and the modernist nightmare of the insurance company office (an image borrowed from King Vidor's THE CROWD), where rows of desks seem to extend into infinity. Wilder also employs small objects with an imaginative economy worth of Hitchcock. As he explained in Cameron Crowe's book-length interview Conversations with Wilder: "When Baxter sees himself in [Fran's broken compact] mirror, he adds up two and two. He gave it to the president of the insurance company [Fred MacMurray], the big shot at the office, now he knows what we know. And we see it in his face in the broken mirror. That was a very elegant way of pointing it out. Better than a third person telling him about the affair—that we did not want to do. This was better. This gave us everything, in one shot." (1960, 125 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Coralie Fargeat’s THE SUBSTANCE (France/US)

FACETS Cinema – Saturday, December 21, 5:30pm

The newest film by French genre fiend Coralie Fargeat is body horror in extremis. In 2017 she gave us REVENGE, an over-the-top bloody pastiche of rape and revenge/one-(wo)man army exploitation films. A preposterously bloody affair to the point of almost being camp, REVENGE polarized its audiences. With THE SUBSTANCE, we see both the natural evolution and a giant leap in her filmmaking. A sci-fi horror, THE SUBSTANCE centers around Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a 50-year-old media celebrity whose star has faded into being a TV aerobics host. After getting into a car accident, the nurse who is attending to her gives her a flash drive with an ad for “The Substance,” a mysterious cure-all guaranteed to make you perfect again. After some deliberation, Sparkle decides to partake. The film ratchets up into high-concept here as the serum creates a fully formed, younger, astonishingly beautiful woman that literally crawls out of Sparkle’s body like some kind of Cronenbergian Athena. This new Sparkle, Sue (Margaret Qualley) is both a physical and psychological manifestation of Sparkle that requires upkeep. Only one can be conscious at a time, and must switch back and forth every seven days in order to maintain stasis. But of course, they don't. Fargeat uses THE SUBSTANCE to talk about a lot of things at once: the psychological weight of aging (particularly as a woman), the entertainment industry, Ozempic, self-loathing, addiction. But while this movie is gross—and it's very gross—it's also decidedly campy and funny. It just received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, if that gives you an idea of how purposefully silly this movie is. There is a great balance between the unsettling and the humorous, and Fargeat knows exactly when to lean harder into which. While one could dismissively say this is a modern take on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, it equally draws from such diverse films such as Brian Yunza’s SOCIETY (1989) for body horror social satire, Paul Verhoeven’s SHOWGIRLS (1995) for camp explorations of sex and sexuality, Darren Aronofky’s REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2000) for the physical degradation of addiction, and of course David Cronenerg’s THE FLY (1988) for, well, watching a human body fall apart in real time. By far greater than the sum of those parts, THE SUBSTANCE gives us something like Katheryn Bigelow’s POINT BREAK (1991), a film that can be enjoyed on multiple levels as either pure, mindlessly indulgent genre entertainment, or as an acerbically sharp commentary. It's a rare film that is as clever and smart as it is completely disgusting. Somehow this movie has found an audience in both the arthouse and grindhouse, with both the credentialed critics and the gutterstink gorehounds. When Ovidio G. Assonitis and Roberto Piazzoli released BEYOND THE DOOR (1974), the legally adjudicated Italian rip off of THE EXORCIST (1973), they infamously hired people to pretend to pass out during screenings and have ambulances waiting outside movie theatres in order to drum up hype for the film. Two months ago, as I was at the movies seeing a different film, someone in the next theatre actually threw up, passed out, and took a ride in an ambulance out of a screening of THE SUBSTANCE. Proof that for 50 years that the film industry has been trying to fake what THE SUBSTANCE naturally has. (2024, 141 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]

Fetish Film Forum

Leather Archives & Museum – See showtimes below

Tim Burton's EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (US)
Saturday, December 21, 7pm
After the success of BATMAN, Tim Burton was able to pull out all the stops for this personal take on teenage suburban isolation and got twice the budget that was originally planned. The title character is based on drawings Burton made while growing up in Burbank, where he struggled to keep friends and often retreated into painting and stop-motion animation. This contemporary fairy tale vacillates between elements that would be right at home in a Universal horror film and a stylized set of pastel tract homes, emphasizing Burton's mixed feelings about the American middle class. Johnny Depp's portrayal of the meek and scarred Edward is among his finest performances, notable for his character's economy of dialogue and cautious demeanor. The incomplete construction of a deceased inventor (played by Vincent Price), Edward stands in for every adolescent who would rather be left alone to make art than conform in order to make friends. Dianne Wiest is wonderful as the Avon Lady who finds Edward in the abandoned mansion on a hill and takes him home to join the cookie cutter enclave below. Frightened by his outward appearance but seeing the gentle prince underneath, her motherly efforts to integrate him into the conservative town are doomed from the start. But there is magic in both of their hearts, and eye-candy galore for us. (1990, 105 min, Digital Projection) [Jason Halprin]
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Tim Burton’s BATMAN RETURNS (US)
Saturday, December 21, 9:15pm
No one else captures the nostalgic kitsch and dark melancholy of Christmastime with perfect balance like Tim Burton. His first feature after one of his other Christmas classics, EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (1990), BATMAN RETURNS shifts the gloomy holiday cheer from the suburbs to Gotham City. The constructed sets and detailed production design have produced some of the most iconic images in a career filled with memorable visuals. The story involves Gotham industrial businessman Max Shreck (Christopher Walken) teaming up with twisted crime lord Penguin (Danny DeVito), who’s searching for his origins. Superhero vigilante Batman (Michael Keaton) is out to stop them, but everyone’s plans are complicated by Selina Kyle (Michelle Pfeiffer), Shreck’s meek secretary who seeks revenge against her boss as the formidable, whip-brandishing, latex-wearing Catwoman. It's hard to argue that this isn’t Pfeiffer’s movie, as the submissive cat lady violently transforms into the dominant Catwoman, one of the great cinematic femme fatales. Her early scenes, set in her baby pink apartment, where Selina talks to herself to cope with the loneliness of her life are unexpectedly moving, so much so that her story looms over the other characters'. Through her, the film presents complex themes about duality and female sexuality. She also helps to make the film more noir than anything else, despite its titular superhero; like its conflicted approach to the holiday season, BATMAN RETURNS is funny and morbid, beautiful and grotesque, ridiculous and sincere—one of Burton’s best. (1992, 126 min, Digital Projection) [Megan Fariello]

Jack Conway’s THE EASIEST WAY (US)

FACETS Cinema – Saturday, December 21, 7:30pm and Sunday, December 22, 1:30pm

MGM contract director Jack Conway made some very good films, including RED-HEADED WOMAN (1932) and LIBELED LADY (1936). THE EASIEST WAY is not among them. Yet, this pre-Code quickie is not without interest. The story of blonde shop clerk turned model Laura Murdock (Constance Bennett) finding a way out of poverty by becoming the kept woman of a rich ad executive (Adolphe Menjou) sounds racy, but Conway offers not even a kiss between the two partners to this arrangement. Indeed, the entire moralizing tone of the film, including the disapproving rejections of Laura by her brother-in-law (Clark Gable) and the fiancé (Robert Montgomery) who abandoned her back to poverty for months to work in Argentina make this a pre-Code bore. Nonetheless, there are hints of what THE EASIEST WAY could have been. The opening scene of the large Murdock family’s tenement existence is incredibly lively and a window on the past that makes older films so fascinating. Gable’s charisma drips out of every frame he’s in, livening the proceedings however briefly. Finally, the playful exchanges Montgomery and Bennett have in the great outdoors during their courtship actually seem like fun and come close to saving Bennett’s abysmal performance. Adjust your expectations and you might enjoy the ride. The Saturday showtime screens as part of Speakeasy Cinema. This cabaret-style screening treats Chicago film fans to Prohibition-era films, craft cocktails, and live jazz vibes. Programmed by Raul Benitez with live jazz tunes by Alchemist Connections at 7pm. Seating is very limited, tickets include 1 drink token, and non-alcoholic options are available for audience members under 21. (1931, 73 min, Digital Projection) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Gints Zilbalodis’ FLOW (Latvia/Animation)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

As a film enthusiast fixated on the art of animation who also just so happens to be a cat owner, I was somewhat predisposed to have a visceral emotional response to Gints Zilbalodis’ FLOW, a dialogue-free animated adventure centered on a feline protagonist thrown into various episodes of peril. But my own personal biases aside, the joys of Zilbalodis’ feature become self-evident early on, the painterly images and gentle atmosphere immediately creating a world you’re thrilled to inhabit for its nimble less-than-ninety-minute runtime. Animated entirely on the open-source software Blender, Zilbalodis and his team have created something almost akin to an open world video game like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, with charmingly rendered creatures navigating treacherous environs with puzzle-like intuition of how to get from one destination to the next. The narrative details of the world are purposefully thin, with preference given to a show-don’t-tell mode of storytelling that trusts the audience to imagine what may or may not have led to this world of abandoned homes and cityscapes surrounded by ever-growing greenery. Even within us filling in the world-building gaps, the ever-rising waters and lack of any human inhabitants can easily lead us down some climate-fueled apocalyptic rabbit holes. One can imagine the worse version of the film, the animal cast (here; a cat, a capybara, a secretarybird, a lemur, and several adorable dogs) given snark-fueled vocal performances from celebrity actors that completely burst the bubble of sincerity. Thankfully, what we have instead is a crew of creatures grunting and meowing and barking, nowhere near approaching anthropomorphism, but still granted enough distinct personality for us to become invested in their journey. Something almost spiritual starts to take over the film, the journey of our lead cat hero becoming less and less about reaching a set destination, and more so merely attempting to find some sense of peace and community with this new pack of disparate animal friends amidst a world falling apart in disarray. Above all else, FLOW succeeds in doing what animation does at its most holy: forgoing the rules and expectations of “real world” cinema to create something singular and spectacular from whole cloth. Most thrillingly, it’s in service of a story about stopping in one’s tracks to take in all that is bigger than ourselves and finding the beauty in knowing that none of us are alone in our journey. (2024, 85 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Paul Thomas Anderson’s PHANTOM THREAD (US)

Alamo Drafthouse — Wednesday, January 1, 3pm

More often than not, modern movies are endlessly clogged with flimsy, cardboard cutouts of the “classic love story,” a trend hopefully being seared away entirely, given that they seem more offensive in a cavernous last year of cynicism and bitterness. The genre has been in desperate need of a refurbishing to allow for a better understanding of what’s embedded inside its own fragile construction. Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest and possibly greatest achievement isn’t without a mind of its own; it is a wonderfully conceived cinematic dream, wrapped in the lush, evergreen imagination of an artist working closely within the inner representation of his creations, much like Daniel Day-Lewis’ dress-making main character, Reynolds Woodcock. Anderson achieves something much closer to the actual emotions and feelings that echo throughout a relationship between two people, avoiding many of the stale and dry trends found in the modern romance movie. These lifeless morality lessons, usually soaked in a pale blue sadness, seem too bitter and lazy to have much real purpose and functionality, allowing Anderson to spin a delightedly deceptive chamber piece instead. Given the film’s advertising, championing PHANTOM THREAD as a brooding sure-fire contender in the race for awards-season gold, you might be surprised to discover a strange rom-com hiding in the lining of its framework. The plot involves a dressmaker (Daniel Day-Lewis) and his closely-curated daily home and work life, right as another of his romantic relationships is beginning to dim out. As another unfulfilled and lifeless relationship goes, Woodcock decides to retreat to one of his favorite restaurants (it is here I’d like to heavily underline the film’s ideas about taste and hunger, given new literal and metaphorical life in a way that is shockingly unpretentious). It is at this place of dining that he meets Alma, played by newcomer Vicky Krieps, that leads to an intimate portrayal of love’s inherent mystery, built inside an almost hermetic world of imagination that conjures up visions of the classical Hollywood era, while simultaneously managing to subvert the work of “tradition,” straddling the lines of the modern and classical film structure/form with the skill of a master operating at the height of their creative abilities. Despite taking place in Great Britain, this is far from the British-ness on display in BBC dramas and endless droves of Oscar bait. Beginning with its suggestive point-of-view, then unwinding between not two points of view, but a shared point of view, the personal nature of this film for Anderson is evident, with Anderson not only writing the script, but also shooting nearly every frame of film himself (though he  goes uncredited in that role). The everyday gestures, glances, embraces, arguments, and alluring atmosphere between two people seeps through every frame, delivering unexpected surprises carefully yet unabashedly. This is one of the few films in recent years that is really essential to witness in 70mm. The projection’s colors and light are captured in spellbinding luminosity, the sounds and images pushing forth the relationship of one woman and one fragile male ego, across a tapestry of sensual pleasures with hardly a hint of on-screen sex in sight. The results trace the lines around eroticism, rather than circling it directly, letting them blossom into a rare achievement in recent American cinema, a precious gift inside the fabric of its own design; one to keep close through the next several years. (2018, 130 min, DCP Digital) [John Dickson]

Adam Elliot’s MEMOIR OF A SNAIL (Australia/Animation)

FACETS Cinema – Saturday, December 21, 1pm and Sunday, December 22, 1pm & 3pm

While the popular notion that loneliness has reached epidemic proportions has largely been debunked, it is true that there are swaths of people who find themselves alone and forgotten. Among them are the orphans and elderly at the heart of Australian animator and filmmaker Adam Elliot’s MEMOIR OF A SNAIL. Using some elements of his own biography to create this highly detailed, stop-motion “clayography,” Elliot tells the story of fraternal twins Gracie and Gilbert, whose snail-loving mother dies giving them life, and whose father, a street performer, is crippled by a hit-and-run driver. The twins’ happy life with their father comes to an end when he dies, and they are sent to separate foster homes—Gracie to a couple of swingers in the east of Australia and Gilbert to a family of weird bible thumpers in the west. Sarah Snook as the adult Gracie narrates the story in flashback to Sylvia, her favorite snail, as we watch the horrors Gilbert goes through as communicated obliquely in letters, while Gracie finds an eccentric elderly friend in Pinky, exuberantly voiced by Jacki Weaver, and a husband whose main interest in her is in fattening her up. MEMOIR OF A SNAIL illustrates how the slings and arrows can cause us to climb inside our shells—almost literally in Gracie’s case—and intensify our feelings of loneliness and isolation. Elliot’s film shows all the detail and love he poured into it over the more than five years it took to make, infusing it with humor, individuality, and a riot of colors and forms. I was a bit exhausted by the end of it, but it was an epically interesting ride. (2024, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

🎞️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Alamo Drafthouse
Frank Capra’s 1946 film IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (130 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, December 24 at 12pm and Wednesday, December 25 at 12:30pm.

Alexander Payne’s 2023 film THE HOLDOVERS (133 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, December 24 at 6:15pm and Wednesday, December 25 at 3pm. Note that the Wednesday screening is sold out.

Trey Parker’s 1999 film SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER & UNCUT (86 min, DCP Digital) screens Monday, December 30 at 7pm.

Rob Reiner’s 1989 film WHEN HARRY MET SALLY… (96 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, December 31, 3:30pm, as part of the Alamo Time Capsule 1989 series. More info on all screenings here.

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

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Magnus von Horn’s 2023 film THE GIRL WITH THE NEEDLE (123 min, Digital Projection) begins screening Friday, December 20. See Venue website for showtimes.

National Theatre Live presents Robin Lough and Lyndsey Turner’s 2015 production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet starring Benedict Cumberbatch on Saturday and Sunday at 2pm. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Bill Plympton’s 1992 film THE TUNE (69 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, December 21 and Sunday, December 22 at noon as part of the Animation Adventures series.

Robert Eggers’ 2024 film NOSFERATU (132 min, 35mm) begins screening on Wednesday, December 25. See Venue website for showtimes. More info on all screenings here. 

⚫ Sweet Void Cinema (3036 W. Chicago Ave.)
Tone Glow presents The End is Here, one final hurrah in light of Sweet Void’s closing, from Friday, December 27 through Sunday December 29. More info here. 

CINE-LIST: December 20, 2024 - January 2, 2025

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, Cody Corrall, John Dickson, Ray Ebarb, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jason Halprin, Shaun Huhn, Ben Kaye, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Raphael Jose Martinez, Scott Pfeiffer, Elise Schierbeek