:: FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13 - THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 19 ::

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Joe Dante's GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH (US)

Music Box Theatre — Thursday, 7pm

In 2003, Joe Dante attempted to bring the Looney Tunes back to the big screen in an experience he would go on to call “the longest year and a half of my life.” While certainly not the unmitigated disaster one might expect from such a remark, the unfairly maligned LOONEY TUNES: BACK IN ACTION still represents a creative nadir for Dante within the studio system, a harrowing production where any sense of creative vision was all but hampered by the powers that be at Warner Bros. Curious, then, that just over a decade prior, that very same studio had given Dante carte blanche over what is, in essence, the greatest Looney Tunes film ever made, spiritually if not literally (but heck, Dante did have the gleeful nerve to open the film with an original, Chuck Jones-directed Bugs Bunny & Daffy Duck short). Back in 1984, Dante’s initial entry in the Gremlins franchise was a delightful, horrifying, kooky creature feature firmly situated within the larger Amblin universe of family entertainment with an edge. GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH, meanwhile, does everything in its power to take all that goodwill granted by the first film and shove it right into a paper shredder until all that’s left is green goop. You can practically hear Dante giggling behind the camera in every scene, reveling in a film that actively thumbs its nose at its predecessor’s earnestness—characters actively attempt to poke holes in the franchise’s sci-fi logic and the monsters even attack an unsuspecting Leonard Maltin while he delivers an on-camera pan of the original film. Creating even more topographical opposition from the first film, the action is moved from quaint suburbia to a bustling capitalist high-rise in the heart of Midtown Manhattan, where the comically capitalist Clamp Corporation—a charming caricature of late 1980s business-minded suits that almost feels quaint compared to today’s roster of techno-fascist billionaires—becomes the perfect playground for Gizmo and his demented offspring to lay siege. Calling back to one of his earliest projects, the epic mashup film THE MOVIE ORGY (1968), Dante uses this once-in-a-lifetime franchise opportunity to throw all of his influences and eccentricities into a blender and let loose; references ranging from Batman to Busby Berkeley to Kander & Ebb to RAMBO color the margins of the runtime until the Clamp Corporation Lobby is filled head to toe with enough mutated Gremlins to make you wonder how no one at Warner Bros. caught wind of this maniacal anti-capitalist parade. Watching GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH is perhaps one of the more anarchic experiences one could have watching a major studio blockbuster, but for Joe Dante, it was the moment when, perhaps more than any time in his career, he felt like he was king of the hill, top of the heap. (1990, 106 mins, 35mm) [Ben Kaye]
---
Featuring an introduction and post-screening Q&A with cartoonist Nathan Gelgud, moderated by Cine-File co-managing editor Kat Sachs. Copies of Gelgud’s new book, No Concessions, will be available for sale before and after the show.

Jonathan Demme’s RACHEL GETTING MARRIED (US)

Chicago Film Society at the Siskel Film Center — Wednesday, 6pm

Of all that one could say to sum up the work and spirit of Jonathan Demme, I find myself pulled toward his overt generosity as a filmmaker. His empathy is inherent in the stories he narrativized and the specific filmmaking techniques found therein (the notorious “Demme Close-Up” is perhaps his most recognizable style choice), but his myriad of projects, more times than not, felt in service of uplifting other artistic voices around him. His films have served as cinematic conduits for writers like Toni Morrison, Spalding Gray, and Wallace Shawn, performers like Anthony Hopkins, Tom Hanks, and Thandiwe Newton, and especially musicians like the Talking Heads, Neil Young, and Robyn Hitchcock. Music has also been a clear driving force across Demme’s career; alongside films like MARRIED TO THE MOB (1988) and SOMETHING WILD (1986) that carried with them rollicking, rocking soundtracks, he committed much of his later filmography to chronicling musicians in their element in intimate, exacting detail, cementing their legacies through his empathetic camera. That spirit of intimacy, musicality, and generosity swells up into the emotional burst of narrative filmmaking that is RACHEL GETTING MARRIED, a film some may call Demme’s final masterpiece, as loaded as that term has become in recent years. For such a grand declaration of artistic achievement, Demme narrows his scope somewhat, with his cinematographer Declan Quinn shooting the film on HDCAM video, giving the entire story a handheld feel that almost approximates what it might feel like to watch home movies from a relative’s nuptials. Perhaps this choice in a more grounded technological approach is there to ease the overall heartbreak at the center of the story, watching Kym (Anne Hathaway, in possibly her best work to date) arriving home for her sister’s wedding, navigating her own addictive tendencies (frequent visits to AA meetings are seen throughout) and how her previous substance abuse led to the tragic death of a younger sibling. Demme’s approach feels almost in conversation with the tenets set by the Dogme 95 movement, or even the nascent “mumblecore” movement of the time, all lighting elements and sound cues seemingly existing as diegetic elements within the frame, the musicians on hand for Rachel’s wedding providing the only sense of aural reprieve from a family (consisting of such luminaries as Bill Irwin, Rosemarie Dewitt, and Debra Winger) trying to find joy and normalcy amidst an air of dysfunction and pain. Still, the film ends as most weddings do; with joy, music, laughter, and no idea of what will come next. Preceded by a 10-minute Demme trailer reel. (2008, 113 min, 35mm) [Ben Kaye] 

Med Hondo’s SARRAOUNIA (Burkina Faso/Mauritania/France)

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

Compared with Med Hondo’s previous film, WEST INDIES: THE FUGITIVE SLAVES OF LIBERTY (1979), SARRAOUNIA is a relatively straightforward historical drama, as it contains no musical numbers, flash forwards to the present, or Brechtian monologues in which characters declaratively summarize geopolitical systems. But it still conveys the anger and incisiveness of WEST INDIES; it’s told in short, cutting scenes that concentrate complex ideas into few words and powerful images. The title character is the queen of the Azna tribe in Niger around the turn of the 20th century. Skilled in traditional medicine, witchcraft, and warfare, Sarraounia leads the Aznas as they defend themselves first against other tribes and later against the French colonialists rampaging through North Central Africa. Hondo isn’t interested in making a traditional biopic about Sarraounia but rather a truly historical film (à la Rossellini’s TV work of the 1970s or Mike Leigh’s later PETERLOO [2018]) that elucidates the context in which she lived. The movie frequently switches focus between the Aznas, the leaders of other tribes, and the French colonialists, imagining how each group responded to their era of seismic historical change. Sometimes, the most important lines of dialogue aren’t delivered by major characters, but by side players commenting on their circumstances. In one representative scene, Hondo’s camera traverses the colonialists’ camp and passes by an African cook hitting another African who’s bringing him something. “Why do you hit us?” the man asks, referring to himself and the other menials. “Because if I don’t, the whites hit me,” the cook responds. In this scene and others, Hondo dramatizes the schism within Niger’s native population over how to respond to the French—acquiesce to them or defy them and get punished or even killed? The film advances respect to both sides, thereby forcing viewers to choose where they stand. Hondo uses widescreen brilliantly, often working in medium wide shots that allow us to contemplate multiple characters at once; the battle sequences (made with the cooperation of Burkina Faso’s military) are spectacular as well. Screening as part of the Four from Burkina Faso, 1982–92 series. (1986, 122 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Hans Richter’s DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN BUY (US/Experimental)

Chicago Film Society at Block Cinema (at Northwestern University) — Friday, 7pm [Free Admission]

What are films if not dreams money can buy? Described upon its release by the New York Times as being “a frankly experimental picture,” Hans Richter’s DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN BUY was the first feature-length Surrealist film made in the United States. The Dadaist painter and filmmaker had emigrated to America in 1941, several years after he was stripped of his German citizenship by the Nazis. He eventually became an American citizen and began teaching at the Institute of Film Techniques at the City College of New York. It’s with assistance from students at the school, and from several of the era’s most pre-eminent artists, of course, that Richter made DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN BUY, which was shot on 16-millimeter Kodachrome and possesses a ghostly, lo-fi sheen. A dreamy omnibus film, it’s made up of several vignettes; the framing device is that of a man, Joe/Narcissus, who rents a room and, when determining how to pay for it, decides to use it as an office space wherein to sell dreams. Looking into a mirror, he discovers this ability to look inside himself. “You’re promoted. You’re no longer a bum. You’re an artist!” This happens by way of projection—figuratively, in the realization of the artists' individual visions through the various dreams, and literally, in their projection onto the screen. Many of the sequences are difficult if not impossible to describe effectively, seeing how the film is a portmanteau of idiosyncratic works by even more distinctive artists. The first dream (“Desire”) is that of a man whose wife wishes for him something of practical value; he reveals that his idea of private fun is cutting pictures out of magazines, an allusion to the collage-like style of Max Ernst, who conceived the sequence (his 1934 collage novel A Week of Kindness inspired it). The segment involves a beautiful woman and evocations of desire, with appearances by Ernst and his wife, artist Dorothea Tanning, and examines the tension between erotic fantasy and bourgeois respectability. The second, “The Girl with the Prefabricated Heart,” was made by French artist Fernand Léger and is accompanied by a song written by John Latouche and sung by Libby Holman and Josh White. It’s the dream of a young woman preoccupied with various causes, at first begging Joe/Narcissus to sign up for one. Her dream then reveals a selection of department store mannequins who act out the contents of the song, which had been inspired by a walk down Grand Street and the artist’s admiration of the mannequins’ ostensible “folklore.” The wife of the man from the first dream returns; her own dream, “Ruth, Roses and Revolvers,” by Man Ray (though apparently he just supplied the scenario, with Richter taking on the actual direction of it), features a couple going to a movie where the audience is instructed to behave exactly as the characters in the film, mimicking their actions as they occur on screen. The film folds the audience into its own logic, using the mimicry conceit to dissolve the boundary between watching and doing. Marcel Duchamp’s contribution, “Discs,” with music by John Cage, is the dream of a gangster who hopes for a vision that will help him win at the horse races and thereby secure his fortune. He rather receives an amalgamation of Duchamp’s artistic stylings, most prominently the rotoreliefs. This and the next two sequences, “Ballet” and “Circus,” both by Alexander Calder, are the most conspicuous renderings of a contributing artist’s style; Calder appears as a blind man who comes to the office with his granddaughter. The former contains Calder’s signature mobiles, which transform from the granddaughter’s toy ball (hence, maybe, “Ballet”) into the unpredictable yet strangely harmonious choreography of shapes suspended in midair. The latter, in which Calder’s blind man hopes to sell Joe/Narcissus a dream rather than buy one, incorporates Cirque Calder, the artist’s miniature circus. Richter’s own sequence, aptly titled “Narcissus,” closes out the film. In it Joe/Narcissus experiences a nightmare in which his attempts to escape violence and bodily disintegration culminate in a disturbing confrontation with his own identity after having turned blue. “At this time I had a very disturbing experience, which is much too private to explain,” Richter wrote about his section. “It boiled down to the self-realization that I was not the self-hero I thought I was… this experience was so strong that I decided to make a film about it. In the film, a man in his forties suddenly realizes he isn’t the man he thought he was… he is blue. He’s a bird of a different color… the idea was to make something like the story of Narcissus. Narcissus is a man who looks at his own image, but in this new version, not only at his own image but into it and into the world which is mirrored in himself... This is a good part of the artist’s problem. But though I had this idea, I couldn’t very easily find a form to express this inside look.” He went on to describe how the sequence was inspired by watching a telephone cable fall in a continuous motion, giving him the idea of a man compelled to follow a line, wherever it might lead. The film, which received financial backing from famed art patron Peggy Guggenheim, was produced through Richter's own company and accompanied by a promotional booklet featuring illustrations by Ernst. Among its more surprising distinctions is an uncredited appearance by a young Stanley Kubrick, who can reportedly be spotted sitting beside his first wife, Toba Metz, during Man Ray's sequence, which also features his future second wife, Ruth Sobotka. The film would later count David Lynch among its admirers. But DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN BUY is more than the sum of its curiosities, a work that transcends its novelty as a collaboration between artistic luminaries to make a compelling case for cinema as the ultimate realization of the imagination, wherein dreams become something not only to be seen, but shared… and sometimes bought and sold. Introduction and post-screening discussion with Karina Longworth, writer, creator and host of You Must Remember This. (1947, 80 min, 16mm) [Kat Sachs]

Gordon Parks’ SOLOMON NORTHUP’S ODYSSEY (US)

Siskel Film Center — Sunday, 6pm

Gordon Parks felt that SOLOMON NORTHUP’S ODYSSEY was a compromised work in that he wished it had portrayed slavery more horrifically than it did, but it remains a harrowing film despite its lack of graphic violence. Based on the eponymous Northup’s autobiography Twelve Years a Slave, the film is concerned with how Northup, a Black man born in New York State who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the 1840s, was dehumanized in his plight. Like Charles Burnett would do in his film about slavery, NIGHTJOHN (1996), Parks takes an understated approach, drawing attention to demeaning social interactions rather than physical abuse; the film asks us to consider the societal framework that permits enough people to think that an evil such as slavery is acceptable. One of the more shocking things about SOLOMON NORTHUP’S ODYSSEY is how polite some of the slave owners come across. While there are certainly slave owners in the film who are outwardly villainous, the inclusion of “nice” ones raises the unsettling point that people can perpetuate social ills while still thinking they’re acting correctly. However cerebral the film can get, it still contains plenty of moments that immediately painful to consider, like when Northrup, arriving on his first plantation, discovers that slaves have no silverware to eat with or, later, when he’s instructed to talk “less uppity” and more “like a slave.” Parks and company depict slavery as the accumulation of these indignities; Avery Brooks, who plays Northup, seems to age visibly from scene to scene. SOLOMON NORTHUP’S ODYSSEY was made for PBS with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the film sometimes has a dutiful, educational feel to it; but then, this solemnity is appropriate, given the historical importance of Northup’s story. (1984, 114 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Ben Sachs]
---
This is the closing night film of the Black Harvest Film Festival, which runs through Sunday. For more information, including a complete schedule, visit the festival website here.

Jean-Luc Godard's GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE 3D (Switzerland/France)

Doc Films (at the Film Studies Center) — Thursday, 7pm [Free Admission]

In Jean-Luc Godard's 1996 film FOR EVER MOZART, the director poses the question, "In the 'I think, therefore I am,' is the 'I' of 'I am' no longer the same as the 'I' of 'I think' and why?" GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE 3D seeks to answer this Cartesian inquiry with a resounding "no" by offering a philosophical meditation on the fractured nature of identity in our era of mass communication. In his astonishing first feature in 3D, the 84-year-old Godard pointedly shows, through an almost impossibly rich tapestry of stereoscopic images and sounds, how language and technology have conspired to create barriers that separate humans not only from each other but also from themselves ("Soon everyone will need an interpreter to understand the words coming from their own mouths," is one characteristically epigrammatic line of dialogue.) The film is split into three parts: "Nature" (a section demarcated by a title card reading "1"), which focuses on Josette and Gedeon (Héloïse Godet and Kamel Abdelli); "Metaphor" (a section demarcated by a title card reading "2"), which focuses on Ivitch and Marcus (Zoé Bruneau and Richard Chevallier); and a short third part (beginning with a title card reading "3D"), which introduces a third couple—Godard and his longtime collaborator Anne-Marie Mieville, who are not seen but whose voices are heard on the soundtrack. The real "star" of GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE 3D, however, is not a human at all but rather Godard's mixed-breed dog Roxy, who is frequently depicted alone, frolicking in nature, commanding both the most screen time and serving as the subject of some of the film's most dazzling stereoscopic effects. The shots of Roxy's handsome snout in the maw of Godard and cinematographer Fabrice Aragno's homemade 3D-camera rig, which convey an overwhelming feeling of love for the animal on the part of his owner/director, are so rapturously beautiful they may make you want to cry. The film ends by juxtaposing the sounds of a dog barking with that of a baby wailing on the soundtrack, thus linking Roxy not only to nature but, implicitly, to a state of unspoiled innocence that humans possess only prior to learning to speak. Godard's poetic use of 3-D in GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE 3D, the best such use of the technology in any movie I've seen, puts this groundbreaking work in the class of his (and the cinema's) great achievements. Screening as part of the Heteroglossia: Languages and Translation series. (2014, 70 min, 3D DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]

Frederick Wiseman’s HIGH SCHOOL (US/Documentary)

Mouse Arts and Letters (555 W. 31st St.) — Sunday, 5pm

Frederick Wiseman’s second film, HIGH SCHOOL, is titled the way so many of his works would go on to be titled, evoking a solitary object turned under the light and offered as an eternal form that will inevitably collapse into its own cinematic shadow. So, this is high school, a microcosm at once particular—a relatively conservative Pennsylvania public school that can just barely hear the trumpets of global student uprising through its white brick walls—and universal—that Foucauldian institution where subjectivity is deftly hammered into shape, resembling the discursive regulation of social space that Wiseman explored in his other early films. This 1968 documentary about Philadelphia's Northeast High School unfolds as day-in-the-life vignettes that narratively calcify one on top of another and proceed mostly in close-up, from class to class, from literature and typing to gym and home economics. Beginning with HIGH SCHOOL’s opening scenes, Wiseman adheres to an ironic dialectic structure that can’t help but admit to the film’s allegory, its “reality fiction” to use the filmmaker’s own turn of phrase. A teacher’s patronizing promotion of the school bulletin as potentially life-altering literature is succeeded by shots of a Spanish class practicing their pronunciation of the phrase un filósofo existencialista. A parent-teacher conference is charged by parents’ heated ethical pleas against their daughter’s failing marks, while a dean’s reprimand over a disputed incident assigns a student convoluted agency with the cynical aim to “establish that you can be a man and you can take orders.” Sex education elaborates shifting divisions of labor and sexual technique for the boys, birth control regimens and STD biology lessons for the girls. Teachers’ warmth and humor in these interactions reveal ideological impartment to be a process of soothing naturalization. Wiseman is focused on the school’s power imbalanced dyads caught up in exacting moments of self-assured authority, where unique threads of empathy at times pull loose. In many scenes, teachers and administrators perform their torn-ness between supporting students’ self-actualization and defending institutional norms, foregrounding very human negotiations against a backdrop of rote jurisprudence. Between its various disciplinary traumas, HIGH SCHOOL inserts the tender texture of read-aloud classroom atmospheres. In the middle of the film, a young teacher quotes at length from Simon & Garfunkel’s 1966 song "The Dangling Conversation" before playing the tape for her class. The saccharine swell fills the room: “...In the dangling conversation / And the superficial sighs / The borders of our lives…” Here, Wiseman cuts to students’ contemplative pen twirling and the inertia of a wristwatch, perhaps as torn as the film’s flustered administrators, at once teasing out the ironic poetry of teenage malaise and offering up the beauty of connection in the classroom. The second half of the film will go on to explore the sociopolitical and economic instruction of the school through guidance counselors’ and teachers’ pontifications on family life, work ethic, race and gender relations, as well as the labor movement. Ultimately, we trace the rebellious contours of an institutional critique drawn from within the student body, only to see it quashed by an endless stampede of adult axioms which are frequently banal and occasionally violent. (1968, 74 min, Digital Projection) [Elise Schierbeek]
---
Screening as part of Wise Man Weekends, a monthly series programmed by Cine-File co-managing editor Kat Sachs, presenting the films of Frederick Wiseman in chronological order.

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Andrzej Wajda x2

Music Box Theatre — See below for showtimes

Andrzej Wajda’s ASHES AND DIAMONDS (Poland)
Tuesday — 7pm
Possibly the most beloved of  Andrzej Wajda’s films, ASHES AND DIAMONDS marks a breakthrough in Polish cinema. Home Army Soldiers await the arrival of Szczuka, the new secretary of the adversarial political party, with the instructions to kill him. After killing the wrong man, they must wait for their next opportunity through a night in the small town of Wrocław. Among them, the young soldier Maciek falls in love with a local barmaid and questions his role as assassin. Through the night, characters waft through streets, bars, and dinner parties, as if Wajda wants to give a tour of the town. By the end of the night, Maciek kills Szczuka in a sequence of visceral violence and spectacular images. Wajda’s cinema is lavish and charming—not only in the movement of the camera but how subjects move in relation to it. The images of ASHES AND DIAMONDS contradict themselves: A man riddled with bullet holes kneels and collapses before a statue of the Virgin Mary; a love scene contains an upside-down statue of Christ in the foreground while conversing characters remain in background; a victim embraces his killer and dies as fireworks illuminate the sky. Many compare Zbigniew Cybulski’s portrayal of Maciek to James Dean—it’s one of cinema’s most charming performances. While qualifying as a realist film, there are moments where the actor’s physical theatricality drives entire sequences over the edit. (1958, 103 mins, Digital DCP) [Ray Ebarb]
---
Andrzej Wajda’s KANAL (Poland)
Wednesday, 6:45pm
KANAL is the product of special political circumstances; it could not have been made in Poland much earlier than it was. Its subject is the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, which had never been portrayed on film before because it was such a sensitive subject. Many Poles believed that the Soviet Army didn’t help the Uprising, even though they could have, because it would be easier to subject the city to Soviet occupation if they let the Nazi Army kill off its Resistance first. The Soviet government, which effectively controlled Poland in the postwar decade through Stalinist leader Bolesław Bierut, didn’t like bringing up the Uprising, but when they brought it up at all, the Party line was that the Uprising was a heroic cause that was doomed to fail. Bierut died in early 1956, shortly after Nikita Khrushchev publicly denounced Stalin’s atrocities; both events signaled the start of a political thaw in Poland, which was confirmed later in the year when Bierut was replaced by the reformist Władysław Gomułka. Only then could Jerzy Stefan Stawinski try to get his screenplay for KANAL (which he based on his experiences of fighting in the Warsaw Uprising) made into a movie. After director Andrzej Munk passed on the project, the script was offered to Andrzej Wajda, who had just made his first film, A GENERATION (1955). Wajda brought to KANAL a distinctive blend of extreme realism and expressionist techniques—as in A GENERATION, he used real bullets during the combat sequences, whereas he employed bold, artificial lighting in the passages set in Warsaw’s sewer system. The director’s mix is bracing when brought to bear on Stawinski’s relentless meditation on death. A narrator informs us in the opening minutes that all of the characters we’re meeting—many of the last members of the Warsaw Uprising, introduced via an extended tracking shot as they march—are going to die in the next few hours, and the deaths play out more or less continuously, first in an ambush on a bombed-out home where the Uprising members reconnoitre, then in the city sewers, where they try to flee the Nazis in the film’s second half. Because KANAL depicts the final hours of the Uprising, it can’t help but feel pessimistic; for this reason, the film was met with hostility when it was released in Poland in early 1957. Why finally make a film about the Warsaw Uprising, critics asked, if it was going to take what was essentially a Stalinist viewpoint? The critics changed their tune a few months later, however, after Wajda brought KANAL to the Cannes Film Festival and it shared the Special Jury Prize with THE SEVENTH SEAL. Now they began to champion Wajda’s artistry, his moral seriousness, and his flashes of poetry. Their turnaround marked the liftoff of the director’s 60-year career, one of the most prolific and decorated in Polish cinema. (1957, 96 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
---
Both screening as part of the A Cinema Named Desire: The Films of Andrzej Wajda series. 

Susan Seidelman's DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN (US)

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

Susan Seidelman’s SMITHEREENS (1982) is one of my favorite discoveries of recent years, prompting me to explore her career further. Imagine my surprise at learning that DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN (1985), Seidelman's most recognizable work (owing to its casting of Madonna in her first major film role), was inspired in part by Jacques Rivette’s 1974 film CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING, one of the most idiosyncratic French New Wave masterpieces. In hindsight, both SMITHEREENS and DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN (and perhaps other films of hers—I still have more to discover or revisit) are absolutely Rivettian in nature, Seidelman’s filmmaking aligned with Rivette’s in more than just basic plot points. SUSAN stars Rosanna Arquette as Roberta, a bored suburban New Jersey housewife who’s enthralled with a series of personal ads written by a man named Jim; he’s desperately seeking a woman named Susan, played by Madonna, whom Pauline Kael affectionately called “an indolent, trampy goddess” despite not otherwise liking the film. The two women cross paths when Roberta goes to New York City's Battery Park, where Jim’s ad had requested he and the freewheeling Susan rendezvous. Thrown into the mix are such charmingly Rivettian elements as New Wave mobsters, stolen ancient Egyptian earrings, amnesia, and, finally, mistaken identity. Roberta temporarily forgets who she is and everyone assumes she’s Susan; this soon turns into a sort-of switcheroo when the real Susan invades Roberta’s humdrum suburban life. As Susan, Roberta meets Dez, played by Aidan Quinn (swoon), a projectionist (double swoon) at the Bleecker Street Theatre who’s friends with the real Susan’s Jim—when it comes to heteronormative romances as a central plot point, a young Aidan Quinn playing a projectionist (again, swoon) is about as good as it gets. The twists and turns down the rabbit hole—Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was an inspiration for both Rivette and Seidelman’s films—even include a magic club reminiscent of the one where Juliet Berto performs in CELINE AND JULIE. The small details most obviously suggest Rivette’s influence, but the larger concepts cement it. In his obituary for the filmmaker in the New Yorker, Richard Brody opined that “[h]is films reflect something bigger than the practical details of one person’s life; they represent an effort to capture the fullness of an inner world, a lifetime’s range of obsessions and mysteries.” This interpretation of Rivette’s ideology dovetails with my appreciation of Seidelman’s first two films as veritable feminist texts, specifically in how they illuminate that so-called inner world of humans whose gender often precludes them from being thought of as beings with rich interior lives. That array of obsessions and mysteries could be said of Wren from SMITHEREENS and the heroines of SUSAN, for whom things like music, fashion, and even romance—things sometimes associated, and sometimes in a negative context, with women—present an opportunity to escape the plodding monotony of domestic life. Adding to Seidelman’s all-around-cool cred is a supporting cast that features the likes of Laurie Metcalf, John Turturro, Giancarlo Esposito, Richard Hell, John Lurie, and even a cameo from the THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS triplets. The overall aesthetic, from the snazzy costumes to the absolutely awe-inspiring production design and finally the neon and candy-colored lighting, is superb, the attention to detail an appropriate ode to the fullness of its protagonists’ inner worlds. Screening as part of the Behind the Mask: Femininity as Fabrication, Performance, and Identity Crisis series. (1985, 104 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]

Music Box of Horrors presents Sam Raimi's EVIL DEAD II: DEAD BY DAWN (US)

Music Box Theatre — Friday, 11:45pm

Sam Raimi's THE EVIL DEAD broke astonishing ground in its cinematic inventiveness and willingness to go for broke in terrifying its audience. It was brutal, coarse, grimy, and fabulously scary: his preternaturally mobile camera implied—and often inhabited—overwhelming forces of evil rushing past and at his characters at all times, unseen and terrible, possessing and destroying at their whim and pleasure. EVIL DEAD II: DEAD BY DAWN finds Raimi operating in a much more complicated mode, melding the horror of the first film with an increasing interest in slapstick and gross-out comedy. Neither evincing the relentless stream of malevolence that is the first EVIL DEAD film nor the good-natured silliness of ARMY OF DARKNESS, for many viewers, this second entry in the series is the best, finding the perfect balance between stupid and startling, between eerie and icky. Less a sequel than a loose remake of the first, EVIL DEAD II brings back Bruce Campbell's Ash, the knuckle-headed zombie-slayer of uncertain destiny, now stronger, more resourceful, and more idiotic than ever. In many ways, the film resembles the tail-end entries in Universal's classic cycle, only reflecting Raimi's peculiar influences, as if it were MOE HOWARD MEETS THE LEGIONS OF THE DAMNED. In his precarious dance between absurd and terrifying, Raimi conjures a vision of the uncanny in which the line separating the living is less a heart-beat than a gasp, and for which the of the world is but the set-up to a punchline just about to be uttered. Featuring a pre-screening Q&A with film critic and author Nick Digilio. Copies of Nick’s new book, 40 Years, 40 Horror Films, will be available for sale before and after the screening. (1987, 84 min, 35mm) [Kian Bergstrom]

Jack Arnold’s IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (US)

Music Box Theatre — Saturday, 11:30am

ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975) opens with Richard O’Brien’s “Science Fiction/Double Feature,” which references eleven science fiction films from the 1950s. Jack Arnold’s work appears twice in the song: IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (1953) and TARANTULA (1955). Arnold began his career making documentaries before Universal brought him in to direct features, beginning with GIRLS IN THE NIGHT (1953). His documentary background and ability to work efficiently on modest budgets made him a natural fit for the studio’s science fiction ambitions. For his next major assignment, Universal handed Arnold an original story treatment by Ray Bradbury, a production budget, and one additional requirement: shoot it in 3D. IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE became Universal's first 3D feature, arriving during the format's brief theatrical boom. That's a considerable amount of responsibility for any director, but Arnold pulls it off. John Putnam (Richard Carlson), an amateur astronomer and science fiction writer, and his girlfriend Ellen Fields (Barbara Rush), a local schoolteacher, witness a massive meteor streak across the Arizona desert. They're first at the scene thanks to the most dangerous-looking helicopter ever put on screen, piloted by their friend Pete Davis (Dave Willock). There isn't even a ceiling in the cockpit. Luckily, nobody stands up. The meteor has landed in a canyon outside Sand Rock, AZ. John climbs down to investigate and discovers a spacecraft concealed within the molten rock. After spotting movement inside, a landslide collapses the canyon wall, burying any evidence of his discovery. John spends much of the first half trying to convince the townspeople he's telling the truth, then the remainder attempting to stop them from grabbing their pitchforks. IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE is an alien-invasion film without invading aliens. These visitors are the antithesis of THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD (1951). Unlike many other alien depictions of the time, these extraterrestrials are without imperialistic ambition. They've crash-landed while traveling to another planet. Time and replacement parts are all they require to fix their ship and leave Earth. Unfortunately, acquiring those parts requires temporarily abducting and duplicating several humans. When Ellen is taken hostage, her brother Sheriff Warden (Charles Drake) forms a posse. John must convince both sides to exercise restraint, with trust ultimately requiring a leap of faith. While not wholly benevolent, Arnold and Bradbury's aliens have the best intentions. The 3D photography adds another dimension to Arnold's compositions, making the desert landscapes and the occasional glimpses of the creatures particularly effective. Yet the film's most interesting achievement is ideological. Where many science fiction films of the 1950s reflected Cold War anxieties, IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE offers an alternative to the suspicion and paranoia that would be central to INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956). Rather than suggesting that the unfamiliar must be destroyed, Bradbury and Arnold imagine the possibility that humanity might recognize its own fear as the greater danger. Sometimes it’s okay to put your gun down first as an act of good faith. In a decade preoccupied with the threat of ideological contamination, IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE offers a message of restraint, patience, and understanding. Bob Furmanek, the founder & president of the 3D Film Archive, in attendance. (1953, 81 min, 3D DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]

Ken Kwapis’ WE ARE THE SHAGGS (US/Documentary)

Block Cinema (at Northwestern University) — Wednesday, 7pm [Free Admission]

Early on in his documentary WE ARE THE SHAGGS, director Ken Kwapis makes a direct comparison between the anarchic ‘60s girl group and filmmaker Ed Wood. Beloved cult icons, these artists were made fun and in turn praised for their discordant approach to their forms, regardless of the purposefulness behind it. What’s perhaps more melancholy about the New Hampshire band The Shaggs is a wavering passion. Composed initially of three sisters whose father pushed them into playing music with dreams of managing a hit band, the band wasn’t completely an artistically driven pursuit. The film focuses on interviews with Dot (lead guitar and vocals) and Betty Wiggins (rhythm guitar and vocals); their sister drummer Helen has since passed. While Dot’s music writing is analyzed as brilliant in its simplistic, honest lyrics and overstimulated sound, Betty is very clear she’s never felt much interest in it. WE ARE THE SHAGGS acknowledges the deep dichotomies of this kind of cult success. While artists like Frank Zappa, Kurt Cobain, and Patti Smith—as well as a group of dedicated contemporary musicians—hear the value of The Shaggs, there a constant teetering between an earnest appreciation and an ironic one; this also reflects the obligatory nature of the band’s creation, and their genuine, if completely unconventional, musical practices. Compared, too, to later musical movements that were also eccentric but more broadly accepted, it’s likely that, because they were a girl group, The Shaggs’ idiosyncrasies were taken less seriously at the time. Missing out on traditional school and social life in their youth to pursue music they were largely made fun of for playing still affects Dot and Betty; WE ARE THE SHAGGS is both a celebration of their music, as well as an empathetic understanding that its unique form of success is incredibly complicated for those who made it. Following the screening, Kwapis and Kyle Henry, Professor of RTVF and Director of Graduate Studies for the MFA in Documentary Media at Northwestern, will be in conversation. (2026, 100 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Yuval Abraham & Rachel Szor’s NAZA (US/UK/Documentary)

FACETS and Uprising Theater & Cafe (2905 N. Milwaukee Ave.)— Saturday, 7:30pm; Sunday, 6pm; and Thursday, 7pm (FACETS) and see Venue website for showtimes (Uprising)

NAZA covers a part of International Customary Law regarding “precaution in attacks.” Its title comes from IDF acronym meaning “collateral damage,” tracking the number of civilian casualties from Israeli military strikes. Some of the film’s subjects discuss different Israeli military intelligence initiatives on the rooftops of Tel Aviv. One initiative includes AI models used to create profiles of alleged Hamas phone calls and match them with calls tracked throughout Gaza. When AI finds a match, the IDF uses drones to remotely target and bomb the suspect. One subject elaborates the technology allows the military plausible deniability for NAZA as AI carries out orders, not the soldiers themselves. Throughout these interviews, the B roll includes civilians enjoying Tel Aviv’s night life and the construction of new skylines. Filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor (who previously worked on NO OTHER LAND) capture an Arendtian tone, displaying images of a flourishing city paired with the monologues of soldiers’ anecdotes conforming to genocidal plans. In an ending echoing the work of Alain Renaias, the final sequence of the film reveals the film’s true subject—the destruction of a people. The film has created major outrage within the Israeli government and military. Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the attorney general to reveal the identities of complicit soldiers and prosecute them. The filmmakers continue to have their lives and families’ lives threatened by far-right groups within their own country. Abroad, the film won the Grand Jury Prize at Venice and continues to draw an international audience, eliciting interest and anguish over their own complacency. (2026, 77 min, DCP Digital) [Ray Ebarb]

John Ford's THE SEARCHERS (US)

Alamo Drafthouse — Saturday, 12:45pm and Tuesday, 4:15pm

The greatest western ever made is also arguably the greatest American movie ever made. Before filming began, director John Ford described THE SEARCHERS as "a kind of psychological epic" and indeed his complex take on the settling of the West, with its head-on—and daringly ahead-of-the-time—examination of racism, finds an appropriately complex and tragic anti-hero in the character of the mysterious Ethan Edwards (John Wayne in his best and most nuanced performance). Spurred on by an unrequited love for his deceased sister-in-law (Dorothy Jordan), the maniacal, Indian-hating Edwards will stop at nothing to recapture his nieces who have been kidnapped by Comanche Indians. "We'll find 'em," Ethan says in one of many memorable lines of dialogue written by Frank S. Nugent but worthy of Herman Melville, "just as sure as the turning of the earth." The dialectic between civilization and barbarism posited by Ford, with Ethan standing in a metaphorical doorway between them, would have an incalculable effect on subsequent generations of filmmakers—from Martin Scorsese to misguided Ford-hater Quentin Tarantino. If you've never seen THE SEARCHERS, or if you've only seen it on home video, you owe it to yourself to catch it projected: both the breathtaking Monument Valley vistas and the minute details of the film's production design (e.g., the "Confederate States of America" logo on Ethan's belt buckle), gloriously captured by Winton Hoch's splendiferous VistaVision cinematography, only really come through on the biggest of big screens. (1956, 119 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]

Youssef Chahine’s CAIRO STATION (Egypt)

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

Much of the visual grammar that we equate with film noir is situated in American and European environments: seedy back alleys of towering cities, nightclubs and cafes filled with steely-eyed detectives and bombshell femme fatales. But Youssef Chahine’s transliteration of the seedy intertwining narratives of the genre fits effortlessly into his Egyptian setting, the train station in Cairo becoming a metropolis of buzzing activity, filled to the brim with an array of larger-than-life characters bursting with desire, frustration, joy, lust, and ultimately, danger. Chahine stars as Qinawi, a newspaper salesboy whose sexual frustrations border on the obsessive when he becomes fixated on a local soft-drink peddler, Hanuma (the radiant and fiery Hind Rostom). This boiling pot of unrequited desire simmers underneath the parallel plots of a woman’s rights march crossing through the station, alongside the laborers at the train station desperately planning an effort to unionize, led by the human charisma machine Abu Siri (heartthrob Farid Shawqy), who not so coincidentally is engaged to Hanuma. These overt thematic tentpoles of women’s liberation and workers' rights were revolutionary topics to tackle in Egyptian cinema at the time, all presenting a rich tapestry for what is altogether a stellar work of atmospheric, ensemble-based filmmaking, using the power and horror of the male gaze to craft what can be seen as an essential entry in the film noir canon. Screening as part of the Mapping Melodrama series. (1958, 77 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Abel Ferrara's THE DRILLER KILLER (US)

Alamo Drafthouse — Tuesday, 9:30pm

Abel Ferrara, who has remained odd and interesting and resolutely independent as other so-called maverick members of his generation have begun collecting lifetime achievement awards, splattered onto the scene with this ultra-low-budget, ultra-stylish slasher film about a tormented artist (played pseudonymously by Ferrara) whose creative block leads him to murder derelicts with a battery-powered drill. New York here is obviously pre-Rudy Giuliani (the streets are infested with picturesque winos) and post-Kitty Genovese (nobody notices or cares if you kill them). But it's also uniquely Ferrara's creation, a collection of shadowy doorways and deserted subway platforms peopled solely by male winos for Ferrara to murder. From its opening admonition that "this film should be played loud," it's a heady, kinetic experience that seldom allows breathing space. Sufficient reasons to watch it abound: Joseph Delia's brilliant Moroder-meets-Goblin score; its dead-on takedown of the bandwagons that creaked along behind punk music and pop art; delightfully stylized murder scenes; and possibly the finest ending ever filmed by anyone, anywhere. Also interesting, if more elliptical, is the film's more or less obvious presentation of Miller as a homophobe of the closeted homosexual variety. He lives with two voluptuous bisexual women but seems uninterested in them aside from an early-film makeout session, and there are offhand comments about him cross-dressing and how he should just let his homosexual art dealer sodomize him. More intriguingly, there are the murder scenes, which, separated from their slasher-movie context, would look like the furtive grappling of anonymous gay sex in shadowy doorways. One murder in particular, which I read as the artist symbolically murdering the artistic block that has plagued him, is modeled on the martyrdom of gay icon St. Sebastian. Screening as part of the Terror Tuesday series. (1979, 96 min, DCP Digital) [Michael W. Phillips Jr.]

Robert Altman's McCABE & MRS. MILLER (US)

The Davis Theater — Tuesday, 7pm

Existing in a middle ground between the life-affirming qualities of the Vancouver landscape where it was shot and his own self-loathing, anti-human biases, McCABE & MRS. MILLER is probably Robert Altman's most satisfying work. Roger Ebert, who can be credited with perpetuating much of the film's initial success, called it "an elegy for the dead," but as it progresses McCABE feels more like an elegy for the living; it's a film about misdirected intentions, poorly communicated emotions, and failed opportunities. Warren Beatty is a gambler and Julie Christie a prostitute in the mining town of Presbyterian Church, where they build a brothel as the rest of the infrastructure goes up around them. The town begins to fall apart as a major mining corporation takes interest in the town's financial prospects, and the lives of simple men and women are disrupted. Shot almost entirely in sequential order (by Vilmos Zsigmond, who may have a better feel for the zoom lens than any other cinematographer), McCABE & MRS. MILLER is a slow burning grumble: nobody raises their voice in anger, but Warren Beatty throws his eyes to the ground and worries about the town's lack of poetry, and as everything falls apart, everyone seems more and more helpless. As it moves along, it feels like the shot of Henry Fonda leaning back on a chair in MY DARLING CLEMENTINE (1946), but were he plucked out of Ford's film and thrown into Altman's, Fonda wouldn't be so hopeful, the name Clementine would bring him less solace, and he'd be leaning back in exhaustion. The whole thing suggests that just as the modern world we know is coming into existence, it has already failed. Screening as part of the Big Screen Classics series. (1971, 120 min, DCP Digital) [Julian Antos]

Maren Ade’s TONI ERDMANN (Germany)

Siskel Film Center — Tuesday, 6pm

On paper, TONI ERDMANN is the stuff of early-aughts awards fodder, the sort of vehicle that might've starred Dustin Hoffman opposite Julia Roberts in an Alexander Payne production. And were Hollywood to remake it today, as they have already threatened, one easily imagines an Adams-De Niro pairing helmed by David O. Russell. As it is, it goes something like this: after the death of his beloved dog, Winfried Conradi, an eccentric music teacher of the hippie generation, alone, divorced, and on the wrong side of the retirement age, sets out on a desperate attempt to woo back his estranged daughter Ines, an ‘80s child turned management consultant in Romania, and a good soldier in the neoliberal conquest of Eastern Europe. With the aid of a set of false teeth and an ill-fitting wig, Winfried, an outrageous prankster, crashes Ines in Bucharest, assumes the role of Toni Erdmann, “consultant and coach," and proceeds to upend her scrupulously cultivated professional life through a slew of haphazard, grotesquely humiliating sneak attacks. Sound familiar? In Maren Ade’s hands, this story of generational conflict is anything but. There is an extraordinary level of attentiveness and restraint to Ade’s regard here. On the one hand, this is a matter of camerawork and editing that always respect the evolving moment. On the other, it’s a matter of a screenplay that refuses to take even standard shortcuts to hit its beats. At no point, does any hand-of-god logic assert itself to steer things more quickly or more surely to their end. Instead, Ade preserves a deep, abiding trust in her leads Peter Simonischek and Sandra Huller, coupled with a refusal to allow them even momentary transcendence of the discomfort of their situation, and deepened by a wry, alert sense for the banal absurdities of self-presentation that dominate far too much of our contemporary lives. The result achieves a momentousness of both scale and intimacy the cinema simply hasn’t seen since the likes of Maurice Pialat and John Cassavetes. It’s also hilarious. Screening as part of the Contact Zones: Cinema of Globalization, 1989–2024 lecture series. (2016, 162 min, DCP Digital) [Edo Choi]

Optical Noise presents Tony Scott's THE HUNGER (US/UK)

FACETS — Friday, 9:30pm

Long before Tony Scott was celebrated as the vulgar auteur of DEJA VU and UNSTOPPABLE, he directed THE HUNGER—the infamous midnight movie where sleep scientist Susan Sarandon trades a Big Mac and an obnoxious boyfriend for a glass of sherry and the promise of centuries of vampire sex with Catherine Deneuve. Scott's first commercial feature after a decade and half making student films and advertising spots, THE HUNGER was roundly ignored by audiences (it ranked 95th at the 1983 box office) and ferociously derided by critics. Roger Ebert called it "an agonizingly bad vampire movie… that has been so ruthlessly overproduced that it's all flash and style and no story." (The only unabashed fans of THE HUNGER were probably horny teenagers who sought out the male-gaze-optimized sex scenes on Cinemax.) This reaction is understandable. With its propulsive but senseless editing, its portentous self-regard, its indifference to exposition, THE HUNGER aggressively imports an overwrought advertising aesthetic to cinema. It plays like a feature-length cologne commercial with soft-core flourishes. Ebert was not wrong about "all flash and style and no story." As a narrative, the failures of THE HUNGER are total, but they are radical, deliberate failures. Instead of individual shots building towards a sequence, each frame dissolves into a miasma of details that refuse assimilation into conventional storytelling rhythm. This strategy is evident from the opening scene, when Bauhaus's performance of "Bela Lugosi's Dead" is continually ruptured by silence and spatio-temporal discontinuity. The shambolic New Grammar (or Neu! Grammar?) of THE HUNGER acts as a blood-letting for classical Hollywood. (The nod to ur-vamp Lugosi isn't the only po-mo touch; between Bessie Love's grotesque cameo, the Schubert cue lifted from BARRY LYNDON, and the left-over doves and smoke machines from brother Ridley's BLADE RUNNER of the previous year, THE HUNGER is an undead edifice of allusion.) It also contains a lovely, low-key performance from David Bowie as Deneuve's deader half, grisly "make-up illusions" from Dick Smith, and an affecting, largely non-fantastic approach to its core mythology. (These vampires don't even have fangs.) If anything, this roundly-ridiculed movie has cast a long shadow over its tonier successors: Jim Jarmusch's pretentious vampire comedy ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE probably owes more to THE HUNGER and less to Marlowe than it would like to admit, and Michael Haneke's AMOUR is a bloodless, glorified remark. Too long dismissed as camp, THE HUNGER actually restores an essential aspect to Susan Sontag's original formulation of that aesthetic—this movie courts absurdity with such guile-free sincerity that it could scarcely see itself in the mirror. (1983, 97 min, DCP Digital) [K.A. Westphal]
---
Screening as an Optical Noise double feature with Nico B.’s 2026 documentary ROZZ WILLIAMS: ROMEO’S DISTRESS (100 min, DCP Digital) at 7pm, which will be followed by a screening of Nico B.’s 1988 short film PIG (23 min, Digital Projection) before THE HUNGER.

Otto Preminger's LAURA (US)

Siskel Film Center — Saturday, 2pm; Monday, 6pm; and Thursday, 8pm

LAURA is one of those films, like THE WIZARD OF OZ and CASABLANCA, seemingly ill-conceived (several hands worked on the screenplay) and ill-fated during production (two sets of both cinematographers and directors) that somehow emerge fully-formed and as perfect as a movie can ever be. It all starts with David Raksin's seductive theme music. Preminger uses it as an anchor for the central mystery, which merely lures us into contemplations of perversity amid the lushly-decorated interiors where the bulk of the action takes place. The dream settings that are the apartments of Laura Hunt and Waldo Lydecker are worlds as self-contained as the White Lodge and the Black Lodge in Twin Peaks. Little wonder then that David Lynch borrowed several character names for his series. Repeat viewings of LAURA only enhance the mystery: Is Waldo gay? Did Waldo and Shelby once have an affair? And the brilliant dialogue detaches itself further from the action. "He's no good, but he's what I want," says Mrs. Treadwell. People live one life with their bodies and another in their words. The characters' behavior functions according to a weird, unknowable logic. Screening as part of the 25 For 25 series, revisiting standout titles from the Siskel's State Street history. (1944, 88 min, DCP Digital) [Rob Christopher]

Pedro Almodóvar's ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER (Spain)

Alamo Drafthouse — Friday, 7pm; Monday, 12:15pm; and Tuesday, 12pm

In a review of Pedro Almodóvar’s PARALLEL MOTHERS, New York Times critic A.O. Scott refers to the Spanish writer-director as being perhaps the “most prodigious world builder” among living filmmakers, employing a phrase that’s typically used to describe sci-fi, fantasy, and superhero narratives. Nevertheless, it’s true that Almodóvar has created a world entirely his own, where characters—whose identities are fluid, changeable at a moment’s notice, and whose appearances run the gamut from the highest of high fashion to the lowest of whatever low life has subjected them to—live in large, meticulously decorated apartments and encounter problems that even soap operas wouldn’t dare broach. Almodóvar’s ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER involves a degree of overlap sporadically present in his films, suggesting an inter-awareness among the seemingly disparate endeavors. In his earlier film, THE FLOWER OF MY SECRET (1995), there figures a nurse called Manuela, who appears in a training video for doctors on how to communicate with family members of potential organ donors; in ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER, Almodóvar regular Cecilia Roth stars as Manuela, an organ procurement coordinator who must decide whether or not to have her son’s organs donated after he dies in a car accident. The two Manuelas are not the same exact character, but it’s emblematic of the potential for the characters and locations in Almodóvar’s films to exist in the same raffish universe. For its part, ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER is an encapsulation of all that’s particularly wondrous about the Spanish master’s kaleidoscopic sphere, one that also earned him his first Oscar. After her son dies, Cecilia leaves Madrid for Barcelona in hopes of finding her son’s father, now a transgender woman called Lola; there she reunites with an old friend, another transgender woman named Agrado (Antonia San Juan), and makes new friends with a young nun named Rosa (Penélope Cruz) and the actress Huma (Marisa Paredes), who had been performing as Stella in the production of A Streetcar Named Desire that Cecilia and her son had gone to see the night of his death. That play and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s ALL ABOUT EVE factor heavily into the film: the former because it marks Cecilia’s life at two crucial junctures and the latter because, in addition to being a film that Cecilia and her son had watched together, the plot of this movie at times recalls that of the other. Like many of Almodóvar’s films, this is a long, magnificently rambling love letter to the things and people he loves most: cinema, theater, actresses, women, and above all, his own mother. (An epigraph at the end declares exactly this.) In Cecilia’s decision to take Rosa and eventually Rosa’s son under her wing, the film emanates the rapture of selfless love that, like other facets of Almodóvar’s pellucid auteurism, permeates the ostentation of his bittersweet melodramas. (1998, 101 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Pedro Almodóvar’s VOLVER (Spain)

Alamo Drafthouse — See Venue website for showtimes

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Pedro Almodóvar’s maturation is how the Spanish writer-director has managed to find so much nuance within artistic excess—indeed, one can identify at least four distinct periods of his career. There are the anarchic, go-for-broke farces of the 1980s; the discomforting mixes of high fashion and base behavior that marked his work from WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN (1988) through LIVE FLESH (1997); the gentler, self-reflexive melodramas of the 2000s; and the ruminative, classically beautiful films he started making with JULIETA (2016). VOLVER (from period three) looks back to Almodóvar’s first era in its lighthearted depictions of deceit, murder, familial resentment, cancer, smoking weed, and ladies farting. At the same time, the film looks forward to the director's later work in its relaxed pacing, sincere ode to female camaraderie, and underlying theme of making amends. (Critics like to note that this was Almodóvar’s first film with Carmen Maura in 18 years; their offscreen reconciliation surely played a part in the movie’s mellifluousness.) Like Almodóvar’s other two masterpieces from this period, ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER (1999) and TALK TO HER (2002), the film sustains a voluptuously complex tone. The heightened, melodramatic elements that had always been crucial to the director’s work are still present, but rather than exploit them for boisterous humor, he underplays them to disarming, moving effect. Similarly, Almodóvar continues to wink at the audience when presenting those elements, which encourages a certain giddiness at playing make-believe, yet he elicits genuine emotion in spite of this, and his ability to pull off the dramatic paradox serves as another, richer cinematic joke. VOLVER communicates its sincerity chiefly through the female ensemble cast, which exudes extraordinary earthiness and warmth; the film’s community of women is such a utopian model of its kind that VOLVER comes to suggest what a feminist Howard Hawks movie might have looked like. The Sophia Loren of her generation, Penélope Cruz stars, filling the role of idealized Spanish womanhood with classical movie-star grace, but the whole cast shines; fittingly, the six leads shared the Best Actress prize at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. Screening as part of the Sad Girl Cinema Club. (2006, 121 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

SAIC Film Club presents Wim Wenders' WINGS OF DESIRE (West Germany/France)

Siskel Film Center — Wednesday, 8:15pm

In 1971, Wim Wenders and other luminaries of New German Cinema (including Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, and Alexander Kluge) founded the famous Filmverlag der Autoren to produce and distribute their own films, and Wenders and Austrian novelist and playwright Peter Handke completed their first feature film collaboration, THE GOALIE'S ANXIETY AT THE PENALTY KICK (1971). Nearly twenty years later, they co-wrote WINGS OF DESIRE, a beautiful film in the tradition of the German fairytale and dedicated to the angels and to master directors Yasujiro Ozu, François Truffaut, and Andrei Tarkovsky. Wenders tells the story of an angel, Damiel (Bruno Ganz), falling in love with trapeze artist Marion (Solveig Dommartin), who flies through the air at the Circus Alekan (named in honor of the film's cinematographer, Henri Alekan). Damiel fervently desires to abandon his spiritual existence to become a human being and experience the pleasures and pains of life, particularly that of love, which can be both. He and the other angels experience the world in black and white, but Wenders uses bursts of color to indicate the magnificent difference in the way humans see it. WINGS OF DESIRE is also an ode to Berlin, recalling the city films of the early twentieth century, such as Walter Ruttmann's BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY (1927) and Dziga Vertov's MAN WITH THE MOVIE CAMERA (1929). The original German title is DER HIMMEL UBER BERLIN, meaning ‘The Sky, or Heaven, over Berlin.’ Wenders begins shooting the city from an angel's point of view in the sky, and his camera later descends to the streets, looking at or out of cars, buses, and trains. He concerns himself with Berlin's history and the stories of its people, particularly since World War II. Recurring shots of the Berlin Wall covered in decorative graffiti figure prominently as does old war footage of air raids and of the victims they claimed lying amidst the rubble. Ultimately, WINGS OF DESIRE is a story about time—as longed for by angels, as lived by Berliners, and as experienced by us in watching the film unfold. (1987, 128 min, DCP Digital) [Candace Wirt]

Hayao Miyazaki's PONYO (Japan/Animation)

Music Box Theatre — Saturday and Sunday, 11am

Like its understood predecessor, MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO–released 20 years prior–PONYO is a film about the magic and uncertainties of childhood, with the protagonists’ real-world experiences shaped by mythological creatures of nature. Director Hayao Miyazaki’s take on the tale of the Little Mermaid, PONYO stands out for its soft pastel watercolor visuals, which perfectly represent the life within and around the ocean. Its characters, too, are striking in their depictions, as Miyazaki weaves in themes not just of childhood, but aging and parental responsibility. Young but dependable Sōsuke lives in a house on a cliff by the ocean with his gregarious mother, Lisa–his father, a sailor, is often away at sea. While playing at the water’s edge, he discovers a goldfish stuck in a bottle and, naming her Ponyo, decides to keep her. Ponyo is not, however, an ordinary goldfish. She is the rebellious daughter of a wizard and longs to escape the confines of her father’s underwater lair. She uses her connection to Sōsuke and her father’s magic to turn herself into a human, and this sets off an imbalance in nature that results in dangerous winds, rain, and the moon falling from the sky. Most significantly, the ocean begins to rise, engulfing Sōsuke’s hometown. Sōsuke’s dedication to caring for Ponyo is ultimately put to the test to restore balance to the natural world. PONYO’s depictions of the ocean are pure wonder; this is evident from the film’s opening moments, and Ponyo’s journeys out of the ocean, but is particularly astonishing in the aftermath of the tsunami when the water has risen to Sōsuke’s doorstep and ancient ocean creatures swim above city streets. PONYO is often dialogue-less, which allows a focus on the dazzling imagery. The film’s magic doesn’t just reside in its enchanting visuals, but in the moments of ordinary childhood; the scene in which Ponyo sleeps over at Sōsuke’s is full of small moments of play and excitement as the two excitedly eat dinner and get ready for bed. Despite being one of the Studio Ghibli films that is most decidedly geared towards a young child audience, PONYO provides some complex themes. Key set pieces at both a school and senior living center, reflecting multiple stages of life and the childlike wonder to be found at all of them. The adults often act like children–especially Lisa, who throws a tantrum when she  realizes her husband isn’t coming home when promised. These scenes aren’t a judgment of the film, but rather an exploration of the intersections between selflessness and childishness–PONYO gracefully argues these two things aren’t always too far apart. Screening as part of the Indoor Kids: Family-Friendly Matinees series. (2008, 101 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

David Fincher's SE7EN (US)

Alamo Drafthouse — Monday, 10pm and Wednesday, 2:30pm

SE7EN has all the typical strengths and weaknesses of a great artist's early work. In it we see all the hallmarks of Fincher's mature style already expressed to a masterful degree: the intense scrutiny of the cruelty and eroticism of male power dynamics, the aching pessimism underlying heterosexual romance, and the abstraction of the human being to mere physicality. This is a crushingly well-composed movie, one that moves to a brutal rhythm, that creaks and groans and drips and cries out without mercy. The obvious theme, notoriously, is sin: a serial killer murders a person every day over the course of the film's week-long narrative, each death staged in the style of one of the deadly sins. But that is to read the film as mere illustration of the well-crafted but cliché-addled script by Andrew Kevin Walker. The real concern here is not one of theology but, as is so often the case for Fincher, of ethics. In this case, the question is the largest of Fincher's career to date: is cinema evil? Which is another way of asking, is there a line film cannot cross, or is it, by its very existence, unforgivable? This isn't a new question, though it is one that lacks a satisfying answer. One of my favorite early opponents of cinema, the art and food critic Elizabeth Robins Pennell, believed that cinema was a kind of special perniciousness that threatened to destroy civilization through its thought-numbing evil. "The movies," she wrote, "are worse than a sedative—they are dope, pure dope, the most deadly ever invented," adding that film was an "unpardonable sin" that destroyed the morals of its viewers by "the stifling of all tendency to thought." Pennell, writing in 1921, was part of a large-scale ideology of panic over the movies. Only six years earlier, Joseph McKenna had pronounced a withering unanimous Supreme Court opinion noting that motion pictures are "capable of evil, having power for it, the greater because of their attractiveness and manner of exhibition." Movies, in other words, were under suspicion: so magnetic and captivating were they, so addictive and worthlessly pleasurable, that they constituted a danger, real and immediate, for the morals of America. Cinema was after our very souls. SE7EN's antagonist sees the world as having already lost that moral war, as having already surrendered its soul. He moves in a world that has been neutralized of meaning, and so he tries, through his horrifying crimes, to restart our outrage, our righteousness, our lives, so that the devilish spectacle of modern media can be destroyed. SE7EN's form, like its villain, sees evil in every shadow, creeping all around its characters, but recognizes that the mesmeric force of its imagery has its own moral value. We cannot look away from the grotesqueries that the killer's staged for us, his real audience, and in that weakness we damn ourselves, but SE7EN, for all its darkness, presents a vision of absolute moral clarity: there's nothing that can't be shown, but there are some things that even when shown can't be seen. (1995, 127 min, DCP Digital) [Kian Bergstrom]

David Fincher's PANIC ROOM (US)

The Davis Theater — Thursday, 9pm

The home invasion subgenre is one of the most durable in horror and thriller films, and it certainly will stay that way until the day we all start living in bio-pods. Many have been made and continue to be made, but David Fincher’s PANIC ROOM may be the key home invasion film for the 21st century, riddled as it is with post-9/11 anxiety about the limited promise of new technology to protect the homestead. The first night after Meg (Jodie Foster) and her daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart in her first principal role) move into a new home on short notice following Meg’s divorce from her husband, the home is targeted by burglars expecting the unit to be empty. With the sleazy Junior (Jared Leto) leading the pack, creepy Raoul (Dwight Yoakam) and the more gentle, conflicted Burnham (Forest Whitaker) break into the home looking to steal bearer bonds still stashed in the house from the previous owner, Junior’s grandfather. As the men realize the house is inhabited, the women retreat to the home’s titular panic room, locked into a steel-and-concrete box with a surveillance view of the increasingly frantic men as they try to break through. Up until THE KILLER (2023), this was probably the most concentrated Fincher, a director whose best and worst quality is his lean yet meticulously planned execution of his scripts. Fincher’s notorious perfectionism is evident even in the film’s relatively simple single setting, with every corner of the house receiving equal play in elaborately considered tracking shots. Though a skilled technician above everything, Fincher is a true modernist, always depicting his characters reconciling their humanity against the frontier of industrial development. The mass media of ZODIAC (2007), the nascent social media of THE SOCIAL NETWORK (2010), and the gig economy of THE KILLER all provide some thematic grist in their respective films, but here his social concerns are more subtle: the more mixed promise of new security gadgets (and, to a lesser extent, real estate loopholes) that trap our characters in a modern hell represented by a beautiful home, the ultimate in both sentimental and monetary value. PANIC ROOM is a quintessential home invasion movie particularly because the home is given such care (the house and its entire city block were built from scratch on a soundstage to Fincher’s specs); though cliche to say, the house is truly its own character in the film, a neutral labyrinth working against both good guys and bad. The single setting and restricted cast calls to mind theater, and the film’s stacked roster, cast for maximum nobility or skeeviness respectively, all sell their respective characters (Whitaker especially) to texture the thrills. But the thrills, of course, are why we’re here, and Fincher delivers them in spades with the clean concision of the film’s descriptive-yet-evocative title. If nothing else, this simple film is also a reminder of better, simpler times, when you could sit down to watch a movie and count on something awful happening to Jared Leto. Screening as part of the Not Quite Midnight series. (2002, 111 min, DCP Digital) [Maxwell Courtright]

Ridley Scott's THELMA & LOUISE (US)

Music Box Theatre — Wednesday, 9:15pm

In Sir Ridley Scott’s career, crowded with stoic men, mythic landscapes, and the architecture of masculine power, THELMA & LOUISE stands as a sunburnt outlier. Written by first-time screenwriter Callie Khouri, the film transforms the male-coded road movie into a feminist fable of rebellion. Khouri, having endured the chauvinism of the 1980s music and film industries, wrote what Hollywood dismissed as "two bitches in a car," a reaction that only amplified the film's central critique. Khouri and Scott would combat the naysayers with awards, nominations, and big box office. The story begins in domestic hell. Thelma (Geena Davis) is a housewife suffocating under the thumb of her oblivious husband Daryl (Christopher McDonald, cast at Davis' suggestion and perfectly embodying his signature buffoonish machismo). Louise (Susan Sarandon), a hardened waitress, carries the scars of a trauma she never wants to recount. When the pair drive off for a weekend escape in Louise’s aquamarine 1966 Thunderbird, the film seems at first a playful getaway. Tony Child’s "House of Hope" lilts over the stereo as the two embrace the open road. But one saloon, one dance, and one brutal assault later, the tone shifts irrevocably. Louise kills the man who attacks Thelma, and the women become fugitives in a nation that will never believe them. Scott, who studied Terrence Malick’s BADLANDS (1973) during pre-production, paints their flight with the dust and glow of the American West. His desert is a moral wasteland where justice belongs to those who seize it. Thelma and Louise’s journey is both mythic and political: women reclaiming outlaw space once reserved for cowboys and convicts. Each male figure they encounter—rapist, robber, husband, or trucker—embodies a flavor of entitled patriarchy. Brad Pitt’s charming thief JD seduces Thelma and robs her, yet in doing so awakens her sense of desire and agency. Even sympathetic men, like Louise’s ex Jimmy (Michael Madsen) or Detective Hal (Harvey Keitel), are powerless to save the damsels in distress. The film drains its men of authority. A trucker’s obscene gestures are answered by his phallic rig exploding in a plume of feminist fire. A state trooper is reduced to tears as he’s locked in his own trunk. Even the police, camped out in Daryl’s living room, watch a Cary Grant melodrama instead of sports in a quiet satire of Hollywood’s gendered expectations. Scott famously told his actresses to focus on the interior lives of their characters; he gave them full control, he just had to keep up and frame a world too small to contain them. The result is seamless tonal fluidity; the film slips from road movie to Western to myth without warning, driven by the electric chemistry between Sarandon and Davis. The improvised kiss at the finale, Sarandon’s idea, seals their defiance not as victims but as legends. As Marianne Faithfull’s "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan" plays, Thelma and Louise reach a crossroads between capture and freedom. Louise asks, "Do I wanna come out alive? I’ll have to think about that. They choose flight over submission, speeding toward the Grand Canyon as police cars swarm behind them. The Thunderbird, gleaming like a turquoise bullet, sails into eternity and suspended in a freeze frame, free at last. Thirty years on, their leap still asks whether the world has changed, or if women are still forced to drive off cliffs to taste freedom. THELMA & LOUISE is not a tragedy; it’s a revolution that just happens to end midair. Presented by Rated Q and Ramona Slick - A Celebration of Queer, Camp, & Cult Cinema, with preshow drinks and DJ in the Music Box Lounge at 8:30pm, dragshow performance in the Main Theater at 9:15pm, and then the film screening to follow. (1991, 130 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]

Paweł Pawlikowski’s FATHERLAND (Poland/Germany/Italy/France)

Music Box Theatre — See Venue website for showtimes

Having read Colm Tobin’s novel about the twilight years of Thomas Mann, Paweł Pawlikowski became fascinated with a small excerpt about Mann’s return to Germany after sixteen years in exile. The Polish director took liberty with historical events, replacing certain family members with others (for instance, Mann’s daughter Erika stands in for his wife) and altering the chronology with regard to his son Klaus’ suicide and his encounters with actor Gustaf Gründgens (who was Erika’s ex-lover and a friend to Hermann Görring). FATHERLAND is a five-day road movie where Germany’s greatest author tours a chaotic postwar landscape of apprehensive Marxists and defeated fascists. Location scouting for the film took five months solely to find German architecture within Poland’s borders. Sandra Hüller gives a rich performance as Erika; portraying the great writer, Hanns Zischler conjures the ghost of Thomas Mann as a human and great intellectual. The director considers the film a part of a trilogy, after IDA (2013) and COLD WAR (2018). Each film explores identity beyond national borders in a jumbled world of postwar Europe. FATHERLAND stands apart from the other films through its intellectual exploration of mise-en-scene. Mann, while quoted as saying, “Wherever I am, there is Germany,” struggled with his own ideas of the nature of home. It’s presumed that one of the contributing factors for Klaus’ suicide came from not knowing who to write for and in what language—struggling to embrace his German or American identity—all while standing the shadow of his father. As a former conservative (who famously defended Germany in WWI through Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man), Mann became firm against the Third Reich. Art does not recognize borders—even Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe’s art precedes the German state. (2026, 82 min, DCP Digital) [Ray Ebarb]

📽️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Alamo Drafthouse
Noah Segan’s 2026 film THE ONLY LIVING PICKPOCKET IN NEW YORK (88 min, DCP Digital) continues screening. See Venue website for showtimes.

The November 2026 Mystery Dome screening, a “haunted holiday horror film from the 1980s,” takes place Friday at 9:45pm.

Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 film PULP FICTION (154 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday at 9:30pm and Wednesday at 6pm.

Jonathan Demme’s 1988 film MARRIED TO THE MOB (104 min, DCP Digital) screens Monday at 6:15pm.

Robert O’Neil’s 1973 film WONDER WOMEN (82 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday, 9:30pm, as part of the Weird Wednesday series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ The Beach Beneath the Street (1703 E. 55th St.)
David Cronenberg’s 1983 film VIDEODROME (88 min min, Digital Projection) screens Monday, 7pm, as part of Monday Night Film Club. More info here.

⚫ Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
Ken Kwapis’ 2005 film THE SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING PANTS (119 min, 35mm) screens Tuesday, 6pm, with Kwapis in attendance for a post-screening discussion.

Ralph Arlyck’s 1970 short NATURAL HABITAT (18 min, 16mm), Loretta Smith’s 1983 short WHERE DID YOU GET THAT WOMAN? (29 min, 16mm), Don Murie and Thomas G. Smith’s 1959 short FOSTER STREET (13 min, 16mm), and Dan Nelken’s 1972 short MIMI (12 min, 16mm) screen Thursday, 7pm, presented by Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive archivists Carmel Curtis and Charlie Allen, as part of You (Probably) Haven’t Seen This Before. Both screenings are free to attend. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Chicago Cultural Center  (78 E. Washington St.)
Kelly Reichardt’s 2023 film SHOWING UP (108 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday, 7pm, at the Claudia Cassidy Theater, as part of Cassidy Theater Film Club x Art is Labor, followed by a discussion on resources for arts and culture workers. Free admission.

MY MAMA JOE HOPE & HELP screens Thursday, 11am, at the Claudia Cassidy Theater, followed by a panel discussion on caregiver resources and support through DFSS, in recognition of National Family Caregivers Month. Free admission. More info on all screenings here.

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

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

⚫ Cinema/Chicago
“Lee Chang-dong: A Touch of the Poet,” a film talk on the work of Lee Chang-dong hosted by film professor Nick Davis, takes place Saturday, 11am, at Alliance Française de Chicago (810 N. Dearborn St.), as part of the “Digging Deeper Into Movies” series. Free admission; RSVPs encouraged.

Nicolás Pereda’s 2026 film EVERYTHING ELSE IS NOISE (71 min, Digital Projection) screens Sunday, 1pm, at the National Museum of Mexican Art (1852 W. 19th St.). Free admission.

Chan C. Smith’s TWO TWENTY SEVEN (17 min), George Ellzey Jr.’s CLOSED MOUTHS (7 min), Brenden Smith’s ROOTS N DA SAND (8 min), Lauryn Darden and Ragan Henderson’s WHEN THEY’RE GONE (14 min), and Kayla Cymone Sullers’s SOUTH SHORE SONATA (9 min) screen Thursday, 6:30pm, at Kennedy-King College as part of BP Shorts: Southside Spotlight. Free admission. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Renée Green’s 1999 short film SOME CHANCE OPERATIONS (36 min, DCP Digital) and Elvira Notari’s 1922 film ‘A SANTANOTTE (61 min, DCP Digital) screen Saturday, 4pm as part of the Renée Green: In Circuits series.

Poh Si Teng’s 2026 documentary AMERICAN DOCTOR (93 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, 7pm, as part of the New Releases and Restorations series.

Renée Green’s 2008 short film COME CLOSER (12 min, DCP Digital) and 2009 film ENDLESS DREAMS AND WATER BETWEEN (70 min, DCP Digital) screen Sunday, 7pm, as part of the Renée Green: In Circuits series.

Lutz Dammbeck’s 1981 short film HOMAGE TO LA SARRAZ (12 min, DCP Digital), 2008 short film FIRST LEIPZIG AUTUMN SALON (22 min, DCP Digital), and 1996 film DÜRER’S HERITAGE (59 min, DCP) screen Tuesday, 7pm, as part of the Films of Thomas Plenert series.

Ken Russell’s 1989 film THE RAINBOW (113 min, Digital Projection) screens Thursday, 9:30pm, as part of the Ken Russell’s Pitch-Perfect Perversions series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Dorothy (2500 W. Chicago Ave.)
Campbell X’s 2012 film STUD LIFE (91 min, Digital Projection) screens Monday, 7pm, as part of Queer Movie Monday, hosted by Shelli Nicole. Free admission. More info here.

⚫ Eyewash Station
Carlos Enrique Taboada’s 1968 film EVEN THE WIND IS AFRAID (90 min, Digital Projection) screens Friday at 8pm.

Ted Cunningham’s 2026 film HOW TO DEAL WITH TANTRUMS (Digital Projection) screens Saturday at 8pm.

Cartoon Night, 90 minutes of animated shorts curated by Hector Padilla, screens Sunday at 7pm.

Jonas Gonsalves and Liam Baldwin’s 2026 film THE ROOT OF IT ALI (80 min min, Digital Projection) screens Monday at 6:45pm.

CJ Wallace’s 2026 film LOOKING GLASS: THE ROOTBEER OVERFLOWETH (Digital Projection) screens Monday at 8:40pm.

Jeremy Saulnier’s 2015 film GREEN ROOM (95 min min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday at 8pm. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ FACETS
Brydie O’Connor’s 2026 documentary BARBARA FOREVER (102 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, 2:30pm, as part of the Must-Watch Indies series, with an introduction by series programmer Marya E. Gates.

Padraic McKinley’s 2026 film THE WEIGHT (112 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, 5pm, and Thursday, 9pm, also as part of the Must-Watch Indies series and with Saturday’s screening introduced by Gates.

Family Sundays presents Pete Docter, David Silverman & Lee Unkrich’s 2001 film MONSTERS, INC. (92 min, Digital Projection) at 2pm, followed by an art activity.

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

⚫ Film Studies Center (at the University of Chicago's Logan Center for the Arts)
James Cameron’s 1997 film TITANIC (195 min, 35mm) screens Saturday, 11:30am, with a pre-creening lecture by Professor Clint Froehlich, as part of the American Cinema Since 1960 course. Free admission. More info here.

⚫ International Anthem
International Anthem presents Seeing Sound with Brian Ashby, a visual mixtape of rarities, deep cuts, and anomalous moments from 17 years of Ashby’s documentation of Chicago music, plus as-yet-unseen footage from his ongoing documentary with Damon Locks & Black Monument Ensemble, on Thursday, 6pm, at The Land School (7200 S. Dorchester Ave.). More info here.

⚫Logan Square Film Club
Logan Square Film Club hosts a discussion of Billy Wilder’s 1944 film DOUBLE INDEMNITY (107 min, Digital Projection) and Rian Johnson’s 2006 film BRICK (110 min, Digital Projection) alongside a Friendsgiving potluck on Wednesday, 6pm, at Easy Does It (2354 N. Milwaukee Ave.). More info here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Kelly O’Sullivan & Alex Thompson’s 2026 film MOUSE (120 min, DCP Digital) and Javier Ambrossi & Javier Calvo’s 2026 film LA BOLA NEGRA (155 min, DCP Digital) continue screening, and William, David, & Liani Greaves’ 2026 documentary ONCE UPON A TIME IN HARLEM (100 min, DCP Digital) begins. See Venue website for showtimes.

SUPER-HORROR-RAMA! presents Barry Sonnenfeld’s 1991 film THE ADDAMS FAMILY (100 min, DCP Digital) on Friday at 11:30pm, and Sonnenfeld’s 1993 film ADDAMS FAMILY VALUES (94 min, DCP Digital) on Saturday at 11:30pm.

Matt Johnson’s 2025 film NIRVANNA THE BAND THE SHOW THE MOVIE (95 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, 9:30pm. This screening features a prerecorded commentary track by Matt Johnson, Jay McCarrol, Jared Raab, and Matt Greyson.

Wei Lo’s 1978 film MAGNIFICENT BODYGUARDS (101 min, DCP Digital) screens in 3D on Sunday, 11:30am, as part of the Merciless Mayhem series.

Bill Morrison’s 2026 documentary SAWYER AVENUE, SUNDAY AFTERNOON (80 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday, 4:15pm. Introduced by Morrison and Judge Rubén Castillo and followed by a panel discussion with Rey Wences, Antonio Gutierrez, and Gabriel Paez, moderated by María Inés Zamudio. This is a free screening, but RSVP is required.

George Marshall’s 1953 film MONEY FROM HOME (100 min, DCP Digital) screens in 3D on Monday at 7pm. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ National Public Housing Museum (919 S. Ada St.)
Joe Cornish’s 2011 film ATTACK THE BLOCK (88 min, Digital Projection) screens Thursday, 7pm, preceded by short documentaries about public housing in London. Free admission. More info here.

⚫ Siskel Film Center
Lance Hammer’s 2026 film QUEEN AT SEA (121 min, DCP Digital) and William, David & Liani Greaves’ 2026 documentary ONCE UPON A TIME IN HARLEM (100 min, DCP Digital) begin screening. See Venue website for showtimes.

Pablo Larraín’s 2012 film NO (118 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday, noon as part of the Contact Zones: Cinema of Globalization, 1989–2024 lecture series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Uprising Theater & Cafe (2905 N. Milwaukee Ave.)
Jason Osder and William Lafi Youmans’ 2026 documentary WHO KILLED ALEX ODEH? (94 min, Digital Projection) continues this weekend. More info on all screenings here. 

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Julian Antos, Kian Bergstrom, Edo Choi, Rob Christopher, Maxwell Courtright, Ray Ebarb, Megan Fariello, Shaun Huhn, Ben Kaye, Michael W. Phillips Jr., Elise Schierbeek, Michael Glover Smith, K.A. Westphal, Candace Wirt