:: FRIDAY, JANUARY 9 - THURSDAY, JANUARY 15 ::

🎉 2025 YEAR-END LISTS

Check out our blog to see our contributors’ lists of favorite viewing experiences of 2025. As per tradition at Cine-File, we have no rules about what constitutes a new viewing experience—anything the contributor found meaningful that year is fair game. Here’s to another great year of moviegoing!

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Rose Lowder’s Scènes de la vie française (France/Experimental)

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

The Peruvian-born, French-based artist Rose Lowder has made some of the most beautiful films I know, exquisitely crafted meditations that elicit enchanting harmonies from quotidian images. Presented entirely on 16mm, the Lowder series beginning at Doc Films on Sunday constitutes one of the most important cultural events in Chicago this season, not just for cinephiles, but for anyone with an interest in visual art. “Her films present as treasures of the natural world, but not overly precious depictions,” writes series programmer (and Cine-File contributor) Olivia Hunter Willke, “tactile exercises of what film encompasses at its most simple yet exacting modes of operation.” Those exacting modes refer to Lowder’s unique process of “compos[ing] and edit[ing] in-camera, splicing frames together as the film strip continually advances over the lens. Filming frame-by-frame, but not sequentially, Lowder emulsifies some of the skipped frames and leaves others blank, then uses the camera to rewind and film the frames she had previously not used.” There’s a strobe-like effect to Lowder’s process, since she alternates between images in such rapid succession, yet the work never feels jarring or alienating. Lowder typically maintains a steady, comforting rhythm—her shots seem to vibrate in a pleasant hum. In the series Scènes de la vie française, made in the mid-1980s, Lowder generates characteristic wonderment in four different areas of France. Completed first but screening third in Sunday’s program is SCÈNES DE LA VIE FRANÇAISE: ARLES (1985, 21 min, 16mm), a spectacular work shot in and around an amusement park. Because of Lowder’s in-camera editing, the park rides appear to stagger in a herky-jerky motion; real life becomes something resembling a hand-cranked diorama. The short climaxes with wide shots of a Ferris wheel at night, with the lit-up circle against a blue-black sky looking like a futurist painting come to life. SCÈNES DE LA VIE FRANÇAISE: AVIGNON (1986, 11 min, 16mm) opens the program with shots of a public park, a town square, and other everyday spots in the southeastern French city. It’s a lovely piece of portraiture that finds continuity between human beings, plants, and architecture, suggesting a holistic beauty that exists between all three. The pulsating quality of Lowder’s work is especially compelling in moments when no people are on screen, as AVIGNON’s penultimate shots of the residential street demonstrate; moments like these exhibit a mesmerizing interplay between movement and stasis. By nature of the city’s size, a lot more people appear in SCÈNES DE LA VIE FRANÇAISE: PARIS (1986, 26 min, 16mm), yet Lowder creates a sense of cozy familiarity with her use of high-angle shots. Looking down on passersby at another park, a commercial district, and busy thoroughfares, the filmmaker makes her human subjects seem like trails of ants who have just found the greatest picnic on earth. When Lowder puts the camera at ground-level, the effect is no less wonderful; her interweaving of light effects at different times of day speaks to a painterly understanding of natural splendor. PARIS peaks with shots taken from a bridge of boats going up and down the Seine. The simple action of the scene, coupled with the static camera angle, recalls some of the first films by the Lumières, yet Lowder’s intervention into the filmmaking apparatus feels forever modern. I wasn’t able to preview SCÈNES DE LA VIE FRANÇAISE: LA CIOTAT (1986, 31 min, 16mm), the longest and final work in Sunday’s program, but per Lowder: “Whereas throughout the film SCÈNES DE LA VIE FRANÇAISE: PARIS the image is formed by means of relatively long sections recorded on different dates, in SCÈNES DE LA VIE FRANÇAISE: LA CIOTAT the image showing the port, the dry docks, the workers leaving the ship yards, a tanker launched, fishermen and the beaches, rests on the interweaving of two distinct but closely situated durations.” Screening as part of the Cinema’s Garden: The Films of Rose Lowder series. [Ben Sachs]

Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam, and Johnnie To's TRIANGLE (Hong Kong)

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

Ringo Lam, Johnnie To, and Tsui Hark decided to play a game of exquisite corpse, and it's one of the great auteurist experiments. From a production standpoint, TRIANGLE is a "Johnnie To movie": made through his company, Milkyway Image, starring his regular actors (Simon Yam, Louis Koo, and Kelly Lin), shot by his cinematographer, Siu-keung Cheng, and cut together by his regular editor, David M. Richardson. (Those who believe the quality of a film's editing depends on the editor should look no further than Richardson's resume; the man who works on the brilliant editing of To's films is the same one who edits Uwe Boll's movies.) The plan: Hark will begin a story—a heist gone wrong—which Lam and then To will continue. Hark's episode is full of clever conceits and twists; Lam jettisons the heist in favor of its results: the loot and fear, both equally dangerous. So if Hark imprisons the characters and Lam shows us how they imprison themselves, it's up to To, then, to set them free. For To, the essence of a person, maybe their soul, is visible in what they choose to do when compelled to do nothing, in the choice they make when they can just run away or betray. It's no surprise that, like James Gray's WE OWN THE NIGHT (2007), it all ends in reeds and fog. It's the sort of emotional wilderness that brings To closer to André Téchiné than either of his two co-directors here. Screening as part of the Revolution of Their Time: 30 Years of Milkyway Image series. (2007, 93 min, 35mm) [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

Preston Sturges' THE LADY EVE (US)

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

Preston Sturges' THE LADY EVE may be one of the best revenge movies ever made. Jean (Barbara Stanwyck) is a beautiful con artist; Charles (Henry Fonda) is a wealthy snake enthusiast. They fall in love aboard an ocean liner, only to break up when he learns of her cardsharp predilections. She gets her revenge by posing as an English aristocrat—Lady Eve—and seducing him into (another) marriage proposal. They wed, and hilarity ensues. By the end, Jean has exacted her revenge and gotten exactly what she'd wanted, leaving the audience as smitten and bewildered as Charles. Sturges' nimble direction lends itself to the narrative finesse of this befuddling romantic comedy, which, as the title suggests, is a play on Adam and Eve, the snake and the apple, and the rest of that Biblical nonsense. But the moral lesson at its core doesn't warn against temptation. Rather, it warns against judgment and an inability to forgive, though it's not beyond reproach—Jean makes her swindler self seem more appealing by having Lady Eve be something of a floozy. On one hand, it's sort of a backhanded commentary on censorship; on the other, it's odd to see slut shaming in a film that's arguably sexier than it is humorous—and it's pretty darn funny. But I don't mean sexy like Marilyn Monroe in SOME LIKE IT HOT is sexy; I mean sexy as in ‘I can imagine them having sex,’ something I can't say about many other films. Sturges expertly balances the sensuous, screwball comedy and the straight-up slapstick that further complements the sexiness. For example, Charles can't seem to stop falling over things when in Jean/Eve's presence, which is not only humorous, but also emphasizes the strength of their attraction. Whereas Lubitsch had his touch—and Wilder his slap—writer-turned-director Sturges seems to abide by Jean's father's motto: "Let us be crooked but never common." Some of it may be crooked, but, certainly, nothing in the film is common. Screening as  part of the Working Girl: The Films of Barbara Stanwyck series. (1941, 94 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]

T. Hayes Hunter & Edwin Middleton’s LIME KILN CLUB FIELD DAY (US/Silent)

Film Studies Center (at the University of Chicago) – Wednesday, 7pm

Though unfinished, LIME KILN CLUB FIELD DAY has emerged as an important cultural artifact, largely owing to its featuring a nearly all-Black cast and perhaps being the oldest surviving feature film to do so. In 2014 the unfinished film was the subject of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, “100 Years In Post-Production: Resurrecting a Lost Landmark of Black Film History.” The film had been at the museum after Biograph donated it, among 900 film canisters, in 1939, over 20 years after the studio had ceased production. The museum would then go on to make a print of the film in 1976, taking liberties with its title—the Lime Kiln Club was a fictional Black social club and the subject of a popular stage routine—and the concept of what makes a film in general, as its undergone “archival assembly,” per the event description, which includes “multiple takes have been organized into narrative order, generated without access to the film’s original script, intertitles, or cutting continuity.” The popular Bahamian-born vaudeville performer Bert Willliams stars as a man vying for the affection of a local beauty (Odessa Warren Grey) against members of his social club; it culminates in the titular field day, where the man competes with others, undertakes a wry money-making scheme that involves well gin, and enjoys the fair’s offerings with his lady friend. Produced by Biograph and Klaw and Erlanger, and directed by Edwin Middleton and T. Hayes Hunter—though it’s an assistant director, Sam Corker Jr., who can be credited with also helping to preserve the film’s memory, as the only written reference to it from when the film was made is his obituary in August 1914 issue of the New York Age—it’s undeniably the work of a system awash in whiteness. Though its star, Williams, is Black, he nevertheless had to don blackface; per an NPR story from 2014, “MOMA curator Ron Magliozzi says the theater conventions of the day required one performer in a Black musical to don blackface, and the rest of the cast could perform without makeup, more naturally.” (“It was a sop to the white audience,” Magliozzi says in the story. “The fact that the lead wore blackface allowed the rest of the cast not to wear blackface before white audiences.”) Some of the characterizations are garish, but it’s the overall depiction of joy, leisure and romance (it depicts a kiss between Williams and Warren Grey, a rare occurrence at the time) that make the film a testament to at least some aspects of the Black experience. Presented in supplement to Jacqueline Stewart’s Winter 2026 ‘Film Ecosystems’ and ‘African American Humor’ courses. The film will be preceded by a short introduction from Stewart, and will be presented with live musical accompaniment from acclaimed ragtime pianist, recipient of the 2004 MacArthur Genius Grant, and Hyde Park local Reginald R. Robinson. (1913, 65 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]

Boris Barnet’s OUTSKIRTS (aka OKRAINA) (USSR)

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

Henri Langlois and much of the Nouvelle Vague considered Boris Barnet to be the greatest Soviet filmmaker after Eisenstein, and OUTSKIRTS (Barnet’s first sound film) offers ample evidence as to why. The movie suggests the work of a Russian Jean Vigo—there’s no allegiance to any genre; the mood turns comic or tragic seemingly at random, with the one consistent thing a certain poetry of the mud. Set in a small community “on the outskirts of the czarist empire,” Barnet’s film begins in 1914 and surveys the day-to-day workings of the town on the eve of World War I. (The first line of dialogue is delivered by a talking horse, who sadly does not return but whose presence signals that anything can happen.) When the war begins, Barnet shifts focus between the town and the frontlines, where several young men from earlier in the film are now fighting for their country. Barnet achieves some extraordinary effects in cutting between military and civilian life, namely during a montage where a cobbler in the town tosses a shoe in his workshop and seems to set off an explosion near the home front; these moments reflect the influence of Barnet’s mentor, early montage theorist Lev Kuleshov. The jumps between comedy and seriousness are no less invigorating, however, and they look forward to the 1960s films of the director’s French fans. In one scene, an older gentleman, upon hearing that war has broken out, suddenly and violently disowns his best friend, a German émigré who had lived in the town for years. In another, a soldier pretends to be dead after a nearby explosion for so long that his comrades really believe he’s died; when he opens his eyes, it seems like a small miracle. (Was Godard paying tribute to this scene with the fake death in BAND OF OUTSIDERS [1964]?) Barnet champion Jonathan Rosenbaum has praised the film’s inventive soundtrack—which, like Fritz Lang’s early sound masterpiece M (1931), uses sound selectively, so that everything we hear stands out as distinctive. “The sound in OUTSKIRTS has the curious, primal effect of redefining silence, as if we’d never experienced it before,” Rosenbaum has written. “By punctuating extended stretches of silence with whizzing or whistling and then the sounds of explosions, Barnet sensitizes our ears as well as our nerves, and he rarely allows the dialogue to carry the story.” OUTSKIRTS still conveys a sense of wonder and possibility with regards to its soundtrack, since Barnet approaches sound itself as something new. It speaks to why the film feels forever youthful. Screening as part of the Boris Barnet: A Cinema Despite Life series. (1933, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Stephen Sayadian’s DR. CALIGARI (US) and CAFÉ FLESH (US/Adult)

FACETS – Friday, 7pm (CALIGARI) and 9:30pm (FLESH)

With a background in satirical writing and art design (for magazines like Hustler and for movie posters like Brian DePalma’s DRESSED TO KILL), Chicago-born director Stephen Sayadian translated those skills into erotic, dystopian cinematic excess in his two best known films. Straddling the ‘80s, CAFÉ FLESH (1982, 74 min, Unconfirmed Format) comes at the tail end of the Golden Age of Porn, while DR. CALIGARI (1989, 80 min, DCP Digital) is a biting punk burlesque made during the final days of the Reagan Era. Forced to include hardcore scenes in CAFÉ FLESH by his investors, Sayadian creates a meta sci-fi commentary on porn itself. The film’s high concept concerns a post-apocalyptic future where 99% of human survivors are “Sex Negatives,” unable to have sex without becoming violently ill. They thus force the few “Sex Positives” to perform theatrical sex acts for their viewing pleasure at the famous Café Flesh. When a famous Sex Positive (Kevin James) arrives at the club, a woman (Michelle Bauer) begins to question her relationship with her husband (Paul McGibboney) and her own Sex Negative status. The sex scenes featured are the diegetic Café Flesh performances themselves, hosted by flashy emcee, Max Melodramatic (Andy Nichols); this framing device also addresses the movie audience, calling them out for their participation. It’s funny and strange, an odd but very relevant vestige; it’s the intriguing sci-fi premise and creatively staged sex scenes that turn CAFÉ FLESH into a social commentary on the early Reagan Era that makes it impossible to not also reflect on the growing AIDS crisis at the time. One can see the influence of Sayadian’s work in theater and music videos in his next feature, DR. CALIGARI. Free from the pressure to include hardcore scenes, this film even feels nimbler, moving in its transgression without restraint. With vibrant visuals and a rhythmic, humorous script, DR. CALIGARI is essentially New Wave poetry come to life. This is most evident in the performance of the nymphomaniac housewife, Mrs. Van Houten (Laura Albert), whose language is the most lyrical and whose movements are like dance. Mrs. Van Houten becomes a victim of Dr. Caligari (Madeleine Reynal), who performs brain-swapping experiments on patients placed in her mental intuition; part of an amusing horror trope, she is meant to be the granddaughter of the original Dr. Caligari. Combining German expressionism with Pee-wee Herman-esque kitsch, the distorted setting seems to exist in a large void with nothing beyond, while the costuming is an outstanding sea of bold yellows and pinks that foregrounds almost every scene. The set design also features warped objects of suburbia (a refrigerator, a television set), turning them both erotic and horrific. An elegiac banquet of the surreal, DR. CALIGARI exposes in a most pulsating way the turmoil and frustration at the end of the decade. Sayadian will be present for a Q&A between the two features, conducted by filmmaker and Northwestern University professor Spencer Parsons. Screening as part of the Optical Noise series. [Megan Fariello]

Jim Jarmusch's FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER (US)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

With FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER, aging icon of sulky indie cool Jim Jarmusch may have reached the autumn of his career, that stage when some filmmakers, perhaps a little weary and with nothing left to prove, undergo a mellowing or paring-down of style. This is in many ways his straightest, simplest, and most sentimental feature, which is not to say it lacks his signature laconic wit or droll sense of existentialist detachment. The film is a tryptic of short stories of intergenerational distances, each bookended by a screen of dreamy flickering lights. In FATHER, well-off siblings Jeff (Adam Driver) and Emily (Mayim Bialik) check in on their widowed, financially and possibly mentally struggling recluse father (Tom Waits) in his New Jersey home. MOTHER focuses on a more dissimilar sibling pair, the materialistic pink-haired Lilith (Vicky Krieps) and the modest Timothea (Cate Blanchett), as they pay their annual visit to their posh writer mother (Charlotte Rampling) in Dublin. Finally, in SISTER BROTHER, fraternal twins Skye (Indya Moore) and Billy (Luka Sabbat) clean out their late parents’ flat in Paris. The first two stories unfold as dry comedies of manners, guarded encounters between estranged children and parents in which halting pleasantries conceal pains, insecurities, and resentments that are never spoken but are keenly felt. More sanguine, the third finds hope in how intergenerational gaps can be (belatedly) filled. All three stories include motifs that are mirrored or inverted across the others; as in Jarmusch’s PATERSON (2016), much of the pleasure here comes from picking up on the patterns. Some are obvious and quite funny—slow-motion skateboarders, Rolex watches, water and tea as questionable toasting beverages, a particular bit of British lingo—while others, like the use of eyeglasses or the repetition of certain camera angles, are more subtle. The latter helps spice up the flat digital images, mostly static closeup and medium shots that foreground the performers’ telling micro-expressions. Jarmusch hasn’t gone soft, exactly—these frosty relationships never do thaw out—but FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER does tap a heartfelt universality in the familial(r) aches of its characters, reaffirming a maxim from Rynosuke Akatagawa once used by an idol of Jarmusch’s, Yasujiro Ozu: “Life’s tragedy begins with the bond between parent and child.” (2025, 110 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]

José Antonio Nieves Conde’s MARTA (Spain)

Music Box Theatre – Monday, 7pm

MARTA is half-giallo, half-psychodrama, and entirely haunted. Directed by José Antonio Nieves Conde, a filmmaker whose career mirrored the emotional climate of Francoist Spain, the film occupies a peculiar historical hinge. It draws inspiration from Gothic melodrama and Italian excess while circling Conde’s career-long obsession: that institutions promising protection often deliver captivity. Conde’s early works, such as SURCOS (1951), established him as an uneasy insider within the Franco regime. While a wavering Falangist, he smuggled social critiques into sanctioned productions. By the late 1960s, as Spain opened to international co-productions, Conde adapted Juan José Alonso Millán’s stage play without abandoning his core preoccupations. MARTA represents the peak of this evolution: a giallo in structure, yet unmistakably Spanish in its fixation on lineage, property, and maternal authority. The rural-urban tension of Conde’s earlier films is here sealed inside a castle outside Madrid. Stephen Boyd plays Miguel, a landowner and insect collector frozen in time. His estate is a mausoleum of secret rooms and unburied memories. Into this closed system wanders Marta (Marisa Mell), a murdering fugitive claiming self-defense. Her resemblance to Miguel’s missing wife, Pilar—also played by Mell in flashbacks—prompts him to shelter her. However, the voice of Miguel’s overbearing mother persists in his mind. Like PSYCHO (1960), the mother functions as a castrating force. To Miguel, his mother, his wife, and Marta are doppelgängers: women poised to devour him, a theme literalized by the film's international title (“Afterwards, It Kills and Devours the Male”) and posters featuring praying mantises. While the film utilizes giallo staples such as mirrors, peepholes, and masquerades, it subverts expectations. Accompanied by Piero Piccioni’s melancholy score, the violence—when it appears—is relatively unremarkable and secondary to the real horror of stasis. Boyd, usually cast in heroic roles, portrays a man whose authority is merely a residual inheritance from a violent lineage. His pathology centers on his mother, who lingers beyond death as both conscience and jailer. Where Hitchcock externalizes repression through murder, Conde lets it fester in long conversations and suffocating interiors. Miguel’s sexual and social impotence becomes the film’s great joke: power preserved too long curdles into paralysis. Mell, known for her roles in DANGER: DIABOLIK (1968) and later Euro-thrillers, brings a mysterious presence that oscillates between investigator and seductress. Her Marta is reactive, adjusting her identity to survive a house governed by male fantasy and maternal law. Continuously dressing Marta in Pilar’s clothes literalizes how women are forced into pre-written roles and punished for autonomy. Within the giallo tradition, MARTA is an outlier. It lacks black gloves and elaborate set-piece murders. Instead, Conde offers a "rural giallo," a chamber piece where madness accumulates through inheritance. The final revelation fuses genre mechanics with historical allegory: Spain houses its past crimes, polished and ceremonial. While Conde’s early films exposed material poverty, MARTA exposes psychic ruin. Francoism’s promise of order is revealed as a private hell ruled by memory. That MARTA survives largely in degraded VHS copies feels perversely appropriate. It is a film about preservation as decay. In its corridors and erotic unease, MARTA remains one of the era's most revealing gialli—a Spanish nightmare spoken with an Italian accent, proving that history always keeps its dead close. Screening as part of the January Giallo series. (1971, 96 min, 16mm) [Shaun Huhn]

Paul W. S. Anderson's MORTAL KOMBAT (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Thursday, 9:30pm

The Mortal Kombat video games never really got a chance to be transgressive due to being immediately, wildly popular. While the series was an instant lightning rod for parents’ fears about violence in media, and was partially responsible for establishing the ESRB ratings system, the early games’ blocky streams of viscera feel quaint in a time where game developers (those for the later MK sequels included) have reported PTSD from the amount of violent content they have to study in order to accurately animate increasingly detailed kills. Like in movies, the cutting edge of gaming content was normalized pretty quickly, and parents’ worst fears became a massively successful multimedia property when MORTAL KOMBAT became a #1 film on its release in 1995. There’s an odd feel throughout the movie, stemming at least in part from its makers’ extensive tinkering to ensure it could meet high-octane expectations while still making a product marketable to children. The film makes up for this aesthetic confusion by never missing an opportunity to remind you that this is a Mortal Kombat movie. The Immortals’ “Techno Syndrome” hits as soon as the New Line logo does, and rarely does 2 or 3 minutes of runtime go by without a fight crammed into the narrative. The film’s plot and overall concept similarly provide a thin justification for why the individual setpieces matter. Shang Tsung (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) and his team of fighters from the Outworld realm (Sub-Zero, Scorpion, Goro) need to win the Mortal Kombat fighting tournament for the tenth time in a row in order to take control of Earthrealm, which is defended by Raiden (Christopher Lambert, somehow the movie’s biggest comic relief) and his scrappier team made up of Liu Kang (Robin Shou, a Hong Kong stuntman prior to this) and two White Americans, ostensibly representing the world’s best fighters. There’s a modular quality to the film, where semi-random pairings of characters come together at a regular clip to keep the action moving. Two of the biggest fights were added entirely in re-shoots due to test audiences complaining that the first cut didn’t have enough of them. But while this disjointed quality may hamper other movies, it heightens this one, an adaptation where true fidelity to the game experience requires evermore unmotivated fisticuffs. The film’s best scene is one of the later-added fights which finds Johnny Cage (Linden Ashby) and Scorpion teleport from a forest to a hellish dimension littered with broken wood. Where do all of these platforms and their broken pieces lead to? Who cares? The film’s environments are designed exclusively for the current scene’s fight to have some interesting detritus for the fighters to work with, and this one sings because of just how much they manage to cram on-set. DP John Lionetti does an excellent job shooting everything as moodily as possible, which goes a long way toward unifying the film’s very 90’s blend of practical and digital effects. Silly as it may feel, MORTAL KOMBAT looks like a turning point in cinema culture 30 years onward. For one, it rescued the idea of video game adaptations, allowing director Paul W.S. Anderson to spend much of the rest of his career in the subgenre. It wasn’t the first or last western film to incorporate Hong Kong action tendencies, but it’s certainly notable for doing so in such a high-profile way several years before THE MATRIX. In its dual-approach to violence, it’s a prototypical PG-13 film, hyperviolent yet bloodless, its palatability based on technicalities of the rating system. Its narrative is a thin pretext for getting characters you already know and love into position, echoing our protean interest in franchise films’ expanded universes. Whether you see these innovations as good or bad things in the history of film, there’s an fascinating quality to how all of them come together in what is maybe the most focus-grouped piece of ultraviolence to ever exist. Like with BIRTH OF A NATION, we must study it in order to know ourselves. Screening as part of the Screen Play: Cinematic Visions of Video Games and Sports series. (1995, 101 min, 35mm) [Maxwell Courtright]

Michael John Warren's YOU GOT GOLD (US/Documentary)

Music Box Theatre – Wednesday and Thursday, 7pm

Roger Ebert attended a folk performance one night in 1970 “and heard a mailman from Westchester singing.” The next day, the film critic wrote a music review of an unknown, John Prine, launching a two-tour vet into the talk of the Chicago underground folk scene. Ebert wrote of Prine’s set: “After a song or two, even the drunks in the room begin to listen to his lyrics. And then he has you.” Early Prine embodied the working-class poet, a civil service worker (not yet twenty-four) writing inventive lines before his Maywood mail route. Prine’s career grew from after-hours smokey Chicago backrooms to opening acts for Kris Kristofferson and eventually touring as a solo act. A rare case, the artist maintained his elegiac touch across 15 studio albums until his untimely death. Forever interested in giving voice to idiosyncratic Americana, his music invites the listener to feel the world through unconsidered nonpareils of American society: a housewife from Alabama, a Purple-Hearted morphine addict, a closeted teenage boy to name a few. Passing away from COVID-19 as a two-time cancer survivor, Prine pushed the boundaries and kept the work personal until the end. His final album, Tree of Forgiveness, displays an old dog contemplating death and reflecting on a lifetime of mistakes; the author embraces the listener with abundant joy over the heaven that waits. YOU GOT GOLD started as a tribute concert series organized by Prine’s widow in memory of her late husband. Director Michael John Warren cut together a concert film from the highlights pulled over two nights at Prine’s favorite venue. Interviews with musicians and archival footage of Prine function as interludes between songs. In these moments, the musicians explain how much Prine meant in their development as performers. Through all the spotlights, camera compositions, and production, the poet’s lyrics shine the brightest when performed by those who loved him most. The performers range from the first generation exposed to Prine’s work (Bonnie Raitt, Bob Weir) to the new guard (Jason Isbell, Brandi Carlile) to contemporary country (Kacey Musgraves, Tyler Childers). Gen Z (my generation) has discovered Prine on their own for had it passed down. As young performers recite Prine’s lyrics, it reinforces their timelessness. YOU GOT GOLD celebrates the gift of Prine, one of the greatest songwriters there ever was. While the singing mailman sang his last note years ago, his voice remains immortal. Fiona Prine in attendance for a Q&A after the Wednesday screening. (2025, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Ray Ebarb]

Éric Rohmer's A TALE OF WINTER (France)

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

A TALE OF WINTER is the second film that Éric Rohmer made in his "Tales of the Four Seasons" series—the third and final of his major film cycles, after "Six Moral Tales" and "Comedies and Proverbs"—but, thematically and according to the narrative's placement within the calendar year, it feels like the true end point to the series. (For the record, the films can be enjoyed when seen in any order.) It is also a special movie in the director's canon, one that begins atypically with an extended wordless montage as two newly acquainted lovers, Félicie (Charlotte Véry) and Charles (Frédéric van den Driessche), cavort in a French seaside resort town while on vacation before they become separated by a simple twist of fate. Even more atypically, Rohmer then flashes forward five years into the future to focus on Félicie's day-to-day life as an unwed single mother living in Paris. She's now involved with two new men, the snooty academic Loic (Hervé Furic) and the more down-to-earth hairdresser Maxence (Michel Voletti), but she refuses to fully commit to either of them since she has never gotten over Charles, the man she considers to be her soulmate in spite of the fact that their time together was so brief. In many ways, A TALE OF WINTER feels like a more female-centric remix of Rohmer's beloved 1969 film MY NIGHT AT MAUD'S. Both are set during Christmastime and feature "Pascal's wager," the philosophical argument that it is logical to "bet" in favor of the existence of God, as a prominent plot point. But WINTER is also arguably a more mature and profound reworking of the earlier film's ideas: in contrast to Jean-Louis Trintignant's mathematician-protagonist in MAUD, Félicie has never even heard of Pascal—whose name is only invoked by Loic, a character portrayed as an annoying mansplainer—so that she works through her dilemma regarding faith on the level of emotional intuition rather than intellectual calculation (and thus allowing Rohmer to keep his philosophical themes more on the level of subtext). It is not giving anything away to say that the lovably stubborn Félicie is ultimately rewarded for her faith and that the film climaxes with the depiction of a miracle that is as moving as any scene Rohmer ever directed. As in A MAN ESCAPED, an otherwise very different kind of movie by another great French Catholic director, Robert Bresson, the outcome here seems preordained from the beginning, with Rohmer generating suspense not by making viewers wonder what will happen but rather how it will happen. The result is Rohmer's most purely romantic film, a balm for the heart as well as the mind. Screening as part of the Board Picks series. (1992, 114 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]

Agnès Varda's ONE SINGS, THE OTHER DOESN'T (France)

Alliance Française de Chicago (Julius Lewis Auditorium [54 W. Chicago Ave.]) – Tuesday, 6:30pm

If I had to sum up the droll sagacity of Agnès Varda’s scintillating cinematic timbre, it would be this exchange from ONE SINGS, THE OTHER DOESN’T: a handsome man, a photographer, surrounded by pictures of women in various poses and states of undress, exits his darkroom to find a teenaged girl perusing his gallery. “Waiting for me?” he asks. “People sometimes give up.” The young woman replies: “So put up a doorbell,” referring to his lack of such a necessity. The delivery is pure Varda, capriciously pragmatic, as if the answer to every question—the benign and the momentous alike—is an obvious one. It’s also a hilarious inversion of art world tropes, the handsome male artist chided rather than celebrated for his gratuitous eccentricity. It’s an apt representation of Varda’s work as pointedly feminist art, of which ONE SINGS, a film that could be described as an abortion musical, is a perfect example. The aforementioned young woman is Pauline, a fiery redhead who stumbles into the man’s gallery to discover that one of his subjects, Suzanne—also his partner and the mother of his children—is a former neighbor. The two become close after Pauline, learning that Suzanne is pregnant, helps her to procure the funds for an abortion. A sudden tragedy, which I won’t reveal here, bonds them further. They meet again ten years later at a demonstration for reproductive rights, centered around the watershed Bobigny trial, where Pauline, now going by Apple, performs protest songs about abortion (the lyrics written by Varda herself), and Suzanne reveals that she’s opened a family planning center. Their reunion is joyful, albeit brief, and the rest of the film traverses the next several years of their largely long-distance friendship (the section set in Iran is especially wondrous). Flowing through the permeable narrative are delightful songs performed by Apple and whatever band she’s with at the time, the music political and avant-garde but still entertaining. (A soundtrack exists—I highly recommend it.) The film teems with Varda’s effortless ebullience, its world scooped from inside her head and thrown into the frame like paint onto a canvas. Speaking of which, Charles Van Damme’s cinematography is painterly à la the best of the Impressionists, and the production and costume design, both from Franckie Diago, imbue the women with even more sense of character, each having their own distinct style. Screening as part of the Cinémélodie series. (1977, 122 min, Digital Projection) [Kat Sachs]

Terrence Malick's BADLANDS (US)

Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 2pm; Tuesday, 6:15pm; and Wednesday, 8:30pm

Terrence Malick's first feature film remains as opaque and seductive as it must have been for audiences upon its release in 1973; none of his subsequent work has given us a Rosetta Stone to de-code his unique language of deadpan narration, breathless romance, horror, and whispering tall-grass. Later films have tinkered with the proportions (more romance in THE NEW WORLD, more grass in DAYS OF HEAVEN), but never the unsettling combination of ingredients. In BADLANDS, Sissy Spacek (as 15-year-old Holly) provides the flattened voice-over that suggests both teenage sass and PTSD. As Kit (a full-bore Martin Sheen) seduces her, murders her father, and takes her on the run, it's Holly's voice that pulls the viewer by the nose so deep into their world that conditioned reactions don't work. Playfully sexy shots of Spacek in short-shorts and Sheen in his Canadian Tuxedo block efforts to moralize about their ages (Kit is 25). The weapons and traps Kit builds to defend their forest hideout are as cartoon-stupid as they are dead-serious. We aren't shocked because there's no room for shock under this heavy blanket of affectless style; if Kip is Holly's captor, Holly and Malick are our captors, and we all have Stockholm Syndrome. Screening as part of the Needle Drops series. (1973, 95 min, DCP Digital) [Josephine Ferorelli]

Richard Linklater's BEFORE SUNRISE (US)

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

A French woman and an American man (Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke) spontaneously disembark from a train in Vienna and spend the afternoon, evening, and wee hours of the morning together—talking, walking, listening, flirting. Before this slender movie became the opening chapter of a trilogy, it was easy to dismiss its premise as flattering, post-collegiate wish fulfillment—a narcissistic ode to pitter-prattle interpersonal profundity that bears a striking proximity to resoundingly conventional male fantasies. Yes, but—viewing BEFORE SUNRISE in narrowly heterosexual terms or pigeonholing it as a precociously alt-Gen X love story would be enormous errors. More so than any screen romance I know, BEFORE SUNRISE exalts the pliability of gender roles and records a desperate, joyous urge to inhabit another person's consciousness. (By contrast, the deflationary exhaustion of BEFORE MIDNIGHT endorses a middle-aged imperative to live in one's own stubborn body and to ridicule and repudiate youthful idealism; but see below for an alternate opinion.) The closest direct antecedent to the radical vision of BEFORE SUNRISE is Jean Vigo's L'ATALANTE, but that film is about characters who can't talk to each other, who thrash about and dream of faraway cities and disembodied hands in jars. BEFORE SUNRISE, instead, is about the endlessly fecund possibility of connection. When Delpy sits in a restaurant, leans into her imaginary telephone, and belches, "Hey dude, what's up?," we're witnessing one of the most quietly utopian moments in movies. In another one of BEFORE SUNRISE's key moments, we watch Delpy and Hawke in a cramped record booth, listening to a Kath Bloom LP and trying so hard to conceal their mutual interest in one another: she cannot let him know that she's looking at him, just as surely as she must not know that he's looking at her. It's a scene that bedeviled Robin Wood's famously inexhaustible powers of analysis, perhaps because the content, form, and emotion are thoroughly irreducible and inseparable. In this movie, where people cannot help but reveal the totality of themselves to strangers, a single glance could prove fatal. Eschewing the concentrated intensity of its even finer follow-up, BEFORE SUNRISE manages to present a parade of deftly sketched supporting characters as well, none appearing for more than a minute or two but each suggesting an infinite expanse of possible feeling outside of Delpy and Hawke's bodies. A landmark of modern cinema. Screening as part of the City Serendipity series. (1995, 101 min, DCP Digital) [K.A. Westphal]

Joseph Losey's THE BOY WITH GREEN HAIR (US)

Northbrook Public Library – Wednesday, 2pm and 7pm

Joseph Losey’s career-long sympathy for misfits and outcasts found its most genial expression in his first feature film, THE BOY WITH GREEN HAIR. A family-friendly fantasy with musical numbers and eye-popping color design, the film might be considered an outlier in the director’s estimable if frequently dour filmography if it weren’t about a 12-year-old boy whose parents are killed in an air raid. Dean Stockwell stars as Peter, who relates the story of his hardship to a sympathetic child psychologist played by Robert Ryan (in one of the earliest examples of psychology being presented as a positive force in a Hollywood film). Peter describes how, after his parents went to England to aid in the relief effort, he got passed around from one relative to another until he came to stay with an affectionate singing waiter called Gramp (Pat O’Brien). Things were going well until Peter got the bad news about his parents, which magically caused his hair to turn green; on top of his grief, he now had to deal with being seen as different by everyone around him. In the film’s climax, Peter has a vision in which he’s visited by a group of war orphans from all over the world who tell him to take pride in his hair; it will make people notice you, they say, and remind them that war is not good for children. This intervention of didactic rhetoric into the drama shows the direct influence of Bertolt Brecht, with whom Losey worked during the great playwright’s stay in Los Angeles (the year before this movie was made, the two men co-directed the world premiere of Brecht’s Galileo with Charles Laughton in the title role). The antiwar message was so explicit as to infuriate no less than Howard Hughes, who bought RKO Radio Pictures after they’d finished making THE BOY WITH GREEN HAIR, then immediately tried to have it suppressed. The film got released anyway, albeit with almost no fanfare; it ended up losing money for RKO. Today, it seems like a historical curiosity that Thomas Pynchon might have dreamed up: a card-carrying Communist filmmaker just barely got away with making a pacifist fantasy for kids, only for it to be buried amidst so much cultural detritus. This screening isn’t a revival—it’s a resurrection. Screening as part of the Shades of Green series. (1948, 82 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Paul Verhoeven's SHOWGIRLS (US)

Music Box Theatre – Thursday, 9:45pm

Beautiful as money, Nomi Malone hitches a ride to Las Vegas in this film's opening moments, vividly asserting, switchblade at the ready, that she's going to be a dancer. Already she's a commodity, a body circulating through a network of temporary owners for a price, though this won't be fully clear until her past is revealed near the end of the narrative. Vegas proves exactly her equal, a hometown for people rejecting their origins, a city that Verhoeven shows to thrive precisely on the dissemination of dashed dreams and rude awakenings. Any sense of what a “real” Vegas might look like, how an actual dancer's career trajectory might be completed, is jettisoned in favor of a variegated torrent of imagery drenched in kitsch, in expertly ham-handed appeals to emotional response, in intricate and deadening formal maneuvers. But SHOWGIRLS isn't interested in characters, in narrative, but in glamour, in work, and in the tremendous effort that sexual entertainment takes to produce. 'You like her? ... I'll buy her for you,' the film's substitute Svengali says of Nomi, watching her gyroscopic breasts and buttocks slide around a stripper pole. This is of the falsest of films, constructed out of a series of intersecting surfaces utterly evacuated of substance. Its performers blandly dissemble wide, desperately erotic smiles, force their bodies into simulations of arousal, sweat through humiliating routines of grunt-and-thrust choreography, paint and festoon themselves with lacquer-thick make-up and acres of rhinestones. Verhoeven has always been a master of the physical object, at understanding human relationships as systems of conflicting and merging material engagements, but there has elsewhere always been the underlying hope that reason could see its way clear to an unmediated, somehow genuine connection between real people, could abolish, could transcend the mere appearances of things and give us access to ourselves as whole. Robocop finding, recuperating his family. Doug Quaid claiming interplanetary heroism. Nick Curran catching the killer. SHOWGIRLS will have none of this. It is the ne plus ultra and culmination of Verhoeven's cinema, a film that allows us no escape, that finds beneath every skin and layer nothing other than yet more sequins, glitter, ejaculate, and grime. No film takes American mass culture more seriously, or skewers it more dispassionately. Presented by Rated Q and Ramona Slick! - A Celebration of Queer, Camp, & Cult Cinema with preshow drinks and a DJ in the Music Box Lounge at 9pm and a dragshow performance in the main theater at 9:45pm, with the screening to follow. (1995, 132 min, DCP Digital) [Kian Bergstrom]

Andrzej Żuławski's POSSESSION (France/West Germany)

Music Box Theatre – Friday, Midnight

Originally hacked down for American release to a schlocky—and downright absurd—ninety-minutes, POSSESSION has been restored to Zulawski's original cut, showing in a new 4K digital restoration. The added footage doesn't necessarily make the infamous tentacled-monster sex thing any less nuts, because it still is a shocking sight to behold. But its purpose is more nuanced and creepy when the film really goes off the rails. Drawing from his own divorce, Zulawski's film follows the collapse of Mark and Anna's marriage and the impossibility of Mark ever fully knowing, or possessing, his wife in love. Largely set in an apartment near the Berlin Wall, Mark is confronted with divorce and descends into severe depression. He emerges in a near-psychotic state intending to reclaim Anna and their son. He soon becomes aware of Anna's lover, but after confronting him, both men realize Anna is seeing someone—or something—else. Zulawski keeps the camera in almost constant motion, pushing in and pulling back during confrontations between Mark and Anna as their fights escalate to bloody moments that are somehow both expected and completely terrifying. In one scene, Anna grinds meat as Mark maniacally berates her. The noise of the kitchen rises with the tension and Anna, tired of the diatribe, takes an electric knife to her neck. Paired with scenes of their individual genuine tenderness toward their son, POSSESSION is filled with mirrors. Mark meets his son's school teacher, a benevolent doppelganger for his wife, and a double of Mark appears with Anna at the end. Even the setting is exploited for an otherworldly nothingness and an exactness in East and West Germany, itself perversely mirrored. The unrestrained acting—Anna thrashing hysterically could describe many scenes—adds to a heightened reality where Anna's possession is not demonic, but love can be. Introduced by Grelley Duvall, with a preshow DJ set by GLAMOUR CADAVER in the Music Box Lounge from 10pm - 11:30pm. (1981, 124 min, DCP Digital) [Brian Welesko]

Kelly Reichardt's THE MASTERMIND (US)

FACETS – Saturday, 5:30pm and Sunday, 3:30pm
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Saturday, 7pm

THE MASTERMIND begins, like so many Kelly Reichardt films, obliquely and suggestively. A man moseys through an art museum, his gaze oddly intense. In another room, a woman, turned away from the camera, ignores her chatty boy; both then ignore another, similar-looking boy who sits down beside the other, nose in a comic book. As a security guard naps in the background, the man nicks a small figurine from a glass case and slips it unnoticed into the woman’s bag before they and the kids leave together. In this quietly observant opening, Reichardt succinctly sets the stage for a film about compromised attention and useless hubris, and how a person’s myopic self-interest ultimately effects a self-defeating estrangement from the world. The ubiquitous Josh O’Connor is smartly cast as James, bringing a soft-spoken affability to a character who is profoundly selfish and dishonest. Living a comfy, conservative middle-class life with his wife (Alana Haim, sadly underused) and two kids in suburban Massachusetts circa 1970, he puts it all on the line by plotting the heist of four Arthur Dove paintings from the museum he was scouting in the opening scene. Only, the unduly confident James doesn’t feel he’s risking anything at all, and after he’s able to successfully steal the paintings with his two accomplices, he thinks he’s in the clear. But things fall apart quickly, not with the frenzy of a traditional thriller but with the placid melancholy Reichardt has honed throughout a filmography populated with the most ordinary and hapless of outcasts and loners. James takes the inverse course to many of the filmmaker’s protagonists, starting from social privilege before becoming increasingly displaced and alienated. Surrounded by news broadcasts of the Vietnam War and the activism of protestors, he can do nothing but retreat ever-inward; his tragedy is not born from his criminal activity but his chronic failure to attend to the things that actually matter. Reichardt’s longtime DP Christopher Blauvelt shoots in glowing autumnal shades that gradually give way to the chilly light of late fall; Rob Mazurek’s lively jazz score is the only element not joining in the sense of regressive drift. By the deeply ironic denouement, thick with societal disillusionment, THE MASTERMIND has repeatedly and dolefully shown that its ostensible hero—perhaps America itself—has no clothes. (2025, 110 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]

Paul Verhoeven's TOTAL RECALL (US)

The Davis Theater – Thursday, 9pm

What if memory is not an individual repository of information and facts but instead a socio-technical product which may have already been commoditized? What if "being yourself" is a thoroughly unnatural and processual task of auto-impersonation (a fact which proper names do much to conveniently disguise)? And what if advanced technologies of perpetual surveillance and statist suppression are necessary to maintain the existing, illusory qualities of these concepts? The true artist knows all this already, and Paul Verhoeven is one such artist. With the felicitous help of Jost Vacano's characteristically lurid cinematography; Jerry Goldsmith's suggestive soundtrack, which slips oneiric themes between bombastic brass horns and soaring synths; the outrageous make-up effects of Rob Bottin's team; and ingenious location managers (casting Mexico's Distrito Federal as an estranged and already-austere future-city), Verhoeven here links underappreciated and everyday moral and philosophical dilemmas of identity and knowledge into a traditional and implausible hero narrative about a laborer (Arnold Schwarzenegger) leading a subaltern people's revolt against an autocratic mineral sheik (Ronny Cox). Screening as part of the Not Too Distant Future series. (1990, 113 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Castelle]

Spike Jonze's HER (US)

The Davis Theater – Tuesday, 7pm

"I don't get this new world," quipped Benjamin Netanyahu several years back. His subject was smart-phones. "Everybody's taking pictures. When do they have time to live? ... If you didn't take a picture, it's like you never actually lived it. I lived and didn't take a picture ... So I'm the only person here without all these electronic devices. And I'm a free man and you're all slaves. You're slaves to your gadgets." The Israeli prime minister is voicing a common sentiment, one that finds expression in St. Vincent's latest, self-titled album (especially the biting single "Digital Witness") and, much less artfully, in all those critiques of narcissistic millennials endlessly churning through the op-ed/think piece/click bait swamps. This zesty zeitgeist also threatened to swallow whole Spike Jonze's HER—a movie willfully misapprehended by many observers, pro and con. The standard rap on HER is that it's about our relationship to our gadgets and devices—a ready-made statement on How We Live Now, a sleek iMeditation on love and sex in a world that's outgrown face-to-face communication. Are we slaves to our phones, our tablets, our laptops, our e-mail, our social media feed? If we judge HER on these pressing questions, or the ones raised by critic Richard Brody about the movie's stealth consumerism, then it's an obnoxious, twee, feature-length evasion. I'd propose, however, that this interrogation misses the point of HER, reduces its complicated emotions and expansive horizons to the space of a hashtag. Ultimately, HER is a piece of superlative, speculative science fiction—an eternal story about consciousness and corporeality that sat in wait until technology caught up to it, made its premise plausible and relatable. On the plot level, it's about whether Joaquin Phoenix can develop a loving, rewarding, sexually fulfilling relationship with an operating system (Scarlett Johansson). Detractors scoff that this relationship is impossible and vaguely insulting—but even the most hidebound screenwriting manual would acknowledge that Johansson's Samantha qualifies as a full-formed, functional character: she has desires, needs, goals, problems, all quite independent of Phoenix's high-waisted pants and hipster glasses. The empathetic leap demanded by this movie is the recognition that HER is fundamentally about her. Samantha's story parallels Pinocchio's, though we never quite grasped his nebulous, essentially academic reasons for preferring fallible flesh to durable wood. Why should he want to be a real boy, anyway? In contrast, Samantha's yearning for a body—any body—reasserts the centrality of that vessel to the human (and superhuman?) experience. (HER also improves upon another Pinocchio descendant, A.I.: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, which contented itself with asking whether a computer can give sexual pleasure; HER radically asserts that a computer can receive that pleasure as well.) HER presents feeling in search of form, delicately and movingly suggesting the limits of both. And speaking of form: HER is one beautifully conceived movie, with K.K. Barrett's production design shouldering a significant narrative and emotional weight. Jonze, so long assumed to be a game but unobtrusive midwife to Charlie Kaufman's scripts, also proves himself to be a genuinely visionary filmmaker, seamlessly weaving together footage shot in Los Angeles and Shanghai to create an urban utopia comparable to Vertov's fusion of Moscow and Kiev in THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA. Screening as part of the Not Too Distant Future series. (2013, 126 min, DCP Digital) [K.A. Westphal]

Amanda Kramer's PLEASE BABY PLEASE (US)

Music Box Theatre – Friday and Saturday, Midnight

Amanda Kramer’s PLEASE BABY PLEASE presents a surreally playful examination of power dynamics and gender roles; the extreme stylization of the film—an imagined version of 1950s New York—allows for characters to discuss and play out sexual fantasies in a fabricated, fictional space. Deep conversations about the roles of men and women and their relationships are surrounded by visual mischievousness: neon lighting, wipe edits, and theatrically staged sets create a sense of ease in its clear construction. PLEASE BABY PLEASE takes its themes seriously by presenting them in a setting out of time where they are completely unencumbered. While returning home to their apartment building, beatnik couple Arthur and Suze (Harry Melling and Andrea Riseborough) witness a vicious murder committed by a street gang, the Young Gents. Both are deeply affected; brooding Arthur is instantaneously attracted to the gang’s leader, Teddy (Karl Glusman), in his leather and mesh get-up complete with Brando-style cap, while Suze is concurrently troubled and titillated by the demonstration of masculine violence. Encouraged by an encounter with their femme fatale upstairs neighbor, Maureen (Demi Moore), Suze begins to explore her own S&M fantasies while Arthur struggles to come to terms with his masculinity. A WEST SIDE STORY-inspired musical number opens the film, and interludes continue throughout, marking shifts from scene to scene. PLEASE BABY PLEASE’s cast all commit to this earnest artifice, especially Riseborough as the catlike, curious Suze; a particular standout, as well, is comedian Cole Escola as Maureen’s friend, Billy. In its colorfully fun and mischievous vignettes, PLEASE BABY PLEASE is still a sincere scrutiny of strict cultural expectations and simultaneous celebration of the fluidity of gender and sexuality. (2022, 95 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (UK/US)

Symphony Center (220 S. Michigan Ave.) – Friday and Saturday, 7:30pm

For many, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is not simply a masterpiece, but the apotheosis of moviegoing itself. In no other film is the experience of seeing images larger than oneself linked so directly to contemplating humanity's place in the universe. Kubrick achieves this (literally) awesome effect through a number of staggering devices: a narrative structure that begins at "the dawn of man" and ends with the final evolution of humankind; one-of-a-kind special effects, the result of years of scientific research, that forever changed visual representations of outer space; a singular irony that renders the most familiar human interaction beguiling; blasts of symphonic music that heighten the project of sensory overload. It isn't hyperbolic to assert, as film scholar Michel Chion has in his book Kubrick's Cinema Odyssey, that this could be the most expensive experimental film ever made; it's certainly the most abstracted of all big-budget productions. As in most of Kubrick's films, the pervasive ambiguity—the product of every detail having been realized so thoroughly as to seem independent of an author—ensures a different experience from viewing to viewing. Much criticism has noted the shifting nature of "thinking" computer HAL-9000, the "star" of the movie's longest section, who can seem evil, pathetic, or divine depending on one's orientation to the film; less often discussed is the poker-faced second movement, largely set in the ultra-professional meeting rooms of an orbiting space station. Is this a satire of Cold War diplomacy (something like a drier follow-up to DR. STRANGELOVE)? An allegory about the limitations of scientific knowledge? Like the "Beyond the Infinite" sequence that makes up most of the film's final movement—an astonishing piece of abstract expressionist art every bit the equal of the Gyorgy Ligeti composition that accompanies it—one can never know concretely what it all "means," nor would one ever want to. (1968, 142 min, Digital Projection) [Ben Sachs]
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André de Ridder leads the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in a breathtaking live-to-picture performance.

Karyn Kusama's JENNIFER'S BODY (US)

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

Much has been written about the unfairly harsh criticism JENNIFER’S BODY received on its original release; it's been considered a failing of studio marketing executives, who couldn’t figure out who exactly the film’s target audience was. Reassessments have deemed it a feminist, queer, late-aughties cult classic. The film cleverly combines the horror genre with the dark teen comedy. Director Karyn Kusama and writer Diablo Cody create a self-contained world; the visual aesthetic, the characters, and their relationships feel completely lived-in, so that it’s easy to want to go along for the wild ride. Self-proclaimed dork Needy (Amanda Seyfried) has always been best friends with popular cheerleader Jennifer (a fantastic Megan Fox)—their close bond is at times mystically uncanny. A catastrophic night in their small town of Devil’s Kettle results in a conspicuous change in Jennifer; she’s suddenly hungry for flesh, namely the high school boy variety. As more guys from school end up dead, Needy must decide whether to stay loyal to her friend or stop her. At its core, the film is a sincere portrayal of the intensity and angst of female friendships. It’s also been noted that Jennifer’s transformation is a timely and powerful portrayal of sexual violence against women and the aftermath of abuse. The film shrewdly packages these themes into the teen horror comedy. Its imagery, especially of the demon-possessed Jennifer has become iconic. I could discuss the aught fashions on display here for days—so many layers and low rise. Also, very 2009, JENNIFER’S BODY features a relentless pop punk soundtrack, which plays a notably twisted role in the film’s plot. Screening as part of the Femalaise series. (2009, 102 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Park Chan-wook’s NO OTHER CHOICE (South Korea)

Alamo Drafthouse and the Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

Neon, the distribution company handling the US release of NO OTHER CHOICE, put out an exquisite piece of PR: “On behalf of Director Park Chan-wook's new film, we are cordially inviting all Fortune 500 CEOs to a special screening of NO OTHER CHOICE. This is truly a film that speaks to our gracious executive leaders and the culture they have cultivated.” Whether any CEO accepted the invitation is beside the point—the provocation lands cleanly. NO OTHER CHOICE looks directly at the class that treats labor as an abstraction and asks them to sit with the human residue left behind. Audiences have embraced the film for its sharp wit and plainspoken clarity, recognizing themselves in its vision as the world lurches each day closer toward economic collapse. The film follows Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), a veteran paper-industry professional whose stable life implodes after an abrupt layoff during corporate restructuring. What unfolds is a slow erosion marked by repetitive job interviews leading nowhere, mounting debts, and quiet domestic compromises. Months stretch into a year. Man-su’s sense of dignity becomes increasingly bound to professional reinstatement, and his family home, formerly a symbol of personal history and stability, becomes a pressure cooker. Park shapes Man-su’s moral descent with procedural discipline. Routine governs the rhythm. Each decision emerges through deliberation, framed as practical problem-solving rather than impulse. Park’s labyrinthine tales of vengeance like LADY VENGEANCE (2005) are traded here for a straightforward logic. The tension at each moral quandary comes from recognition. Every step makes sense. And morality becomes another variable to manage. This framework traces back to Donald E. Westlake’s 1997 novel The Ax, a corporate satire that charts violence as career strategy. Park retains the architecture while reshaping the emotional terrain. Man-su is no longer alone inside his reasoning like the novel’s protagonist Burke Devore. The film places him within a family whose survival depends on shared silence and mutual implication. Responsibility spreads outward. Consequences echo inward. Glimpses of other laid-off workers provide a mirror for Man-su: men who have given up, workers who have been spit out and forgotten. Within Park’s body of work, NO OTHER CHOICE occupies a transitional space. His precision remains unmistakable: calibrated compositions, ironic musical cues, an enduring fascination with self-justifying ethics. Yet the film abandons the operatic violence of his other films like OLDBOY (2003), THIRST (2009), and THE HANDMAIDEN (2016). Violence here feels laborious and draining. Murder aligns with job hunting, interviews, and evaluations. It becomes another task to complete, another box to check. Dark humor, awkward missteps, and poorly executed plans brush against slapstick, an unexpected lightness that keeps Man-su recognizably human. By shifting focus away from revenge and obsession toward systemic design, NO OTHER CHOICE emerges as Park Chan-wook’s most direct examination of work as ideology. Employment defines dignity. Automation signals erasure. Survival demands compromise. The film offers no relief, only a clear-eyed portrait of a system accelerating toward collapse, guided by those insulated from its costs. Build identity around labor, strip it away, demand adaptation, and call it opportunity. Eventually, resistance becomes inevitable. There is no other choice. Unless, of course, a few CEOs attended the premiere and decided to reduce profits and expand their workforce. Cinema inspires miracles all the time; maybe that’s why the film was released on Christmas day. (2025, 139 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]

📽️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Alamo Drafthouse
Sam Raimi’s 1990 film DARKMAN (95 min, Digital Projection) screens Friday at 11am and Sunday at 3:30pm.

Sydney Pollack’s 1975 film THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR (117 min, Digital Projection) screens Friday at 6:15pm and Saturday at 3:15pm.

Lam Ngai Kai’s 1992 film THE CAT (84 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday at 7pm.

Jess Franco’s 1973 film FEMALE VAMPIRE (82 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday, 9:30pm, as part of the Terror Tuesday series.

Bennett Jones’ 2014 film I AM A KNIFE WITH LEGS (84 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday, 9:30pm, as part of the Weird Wednesday series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Cinema/Chicago
“Digging Deeper Into Movies,” this time with the theme Get into the Spirits!, takes place Saturday, 11am, at Alliance Française de Chicago (810 N. Dearborn St.). Hosted by Nick Davis, this lecture explores some of the year’s most interesting movies, as accomplished and provocative as the likely Oscar nominees, despite lower production and promotion budgets. More info here.

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Charles Lane’s 1989 film SIDEWALK STORIES (97 min, DCP Digital) screens Monday, 7pm, as part of the City Serendipity series.

Sarah Maldoror’s OPENING OF THE THEATRE NOIR IN PARIS (1980, 6 min, DCP Digital), L’ENFANT CINÉMA (1996, 23 min, DCP Digital), FOGO, FIRE ISLAND (1979, 32 min, DCP Digital), CARNIVAL IN BISSAU (1980, 27 min, DCP Digital), and CARNIVAL IN THE SAHEL (1979, 28 min, DCP Digital) screen Tuesday, 7pm, as part of the Sarah Maldoror: To Make a Film Means to Take a Position series.

Jason Reitman’s 2011 film YOUNG ADULT (94 min, 35mm) screens Thursday, 7pm, as part of the Femalaise series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ FACETS
Mary Bronstein’s 2025 film IF I HAD LEGS I’D KICK YOU (114 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday at 3pm, and Sunday at 1pm.

Ari Aster’s 2025 film EDDINGTON (149 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday at 8pm.

Joachim Trier’s 2025 film SENTIMENTAL VALUE (133 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday at 6pm.

Necmi Sancak’s 2025 film AYSE (80 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday at 7:30pm. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Jim Sharman’s 1975 film ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (100 min, 35mm) screens Saturday at midnight. 

Bill Condon’s 2025 film KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN (128 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 6:30pm, featuring a post-film panel discussion moderated by actor Lío Mehiel and star Tonatiuh with additional  panelists to be announced. All proceeds from the evening will benefit the Illinois Coalition For Immigrant & Refugee Rights and Pilsen Unidos. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Siskel Film Center
Kaouther Ben Hania’s 2025 film THE VOICE OF HIND RAJAB (89 min, DCP Digital) begins screening. See Venue website for showtimes. Actor Saja Kilani in attendance for a Q&A following the Friday, 5:45pm screening and to introduce the 8:30pm screening.

Sara Khaki’s 2025 documentary CUTTING THROUGH ROCKS (95 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday, 6pm, followed by a conversation with Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni moderated by filmmaker Mehrnaz Saeed-vafa; Saturday at 5:30pm; Sunday at 2:15pm; and Tuesday at 8:30pm.

Lav Diaz’s 2001 film BATANG WEST SIDE (315 min, 2K DCP Digital Restoration) screens Saturday, 11am, as part of the Settle In series.

Oren Rudavsky’s 2024 documentary ELIE WIESEL: SOUL ON FIRE (87 min, DCP Digital) begins screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes. Producer and editor Michael Chomet in attendance for Q&As following the Saturday, 8pm and Sunday, 4:30pm screenings. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ VDB TV (Virtual)
oliverio rodriguez and Victoria Stob's 2018 short film LYNDALE (24 min) and Sandi DuBowski's 1993 short film TOMBOYCHIK (15 min) stream for free on VDB-TV.  Programmed by Cine-File contributor Elise Schierbeek. More info here.

CINE-LIST: January 9, 2026 - January 15, 2026

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, Michael Castelle, Maxwell Courtright, Ray Ebarb, Megan Fariello, Josephine Ferorelli, Shaun Huhn, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Michael Glover Smith, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Brian Welesko, K.A. Westphal