:: FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25 - THURSDAY, OCTOBER 1 ::

🤘 33RD CHICAGO UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL

Harper Theater (except where noted) — See below for showtimes

Shorts Program: Feedback Loop
Friday, 6:30pm and Saturday, 12:30pm [SOLD OUT]
Centering around music, this shorts program explores both traditional and historical approaches with avant garde playfulness. David Rodriguez’s BROWN BUTTERFLY (2026, 4 min) exemplifies this attitude. A digital rendering of original VHS footage of a live performance by the Miami hardcore band Hairy Pussy is all frantic jump cuts: a segmentation of sound and format still rooted in archive and preservation. Elliot Bryan Lear’s WHIPLASH 89 (2026, 5 min) and Jessica Dzielinski & Stu Cline’s COLD ON THE INSIDE (2026, 6 min) convey a more traditional music video approach through themes of transformation and liminal spaces. The latter is itself a music video for the band Glurge, using found materials and stop motion to travel through mundane yet still quite magical spaces. WHIPLASH 89 is set during a boring day at film school, where a student imagines being the star of a 1989 Metallica performance, using real footage and continuing the juxtaposition of monotony and fantasy, with music as a form of time travel. Bart Weiss’ ROLLING FILM, ROCKING HISTORY: AL MAYSLES CAPTURES THE BEATLES (2026, 11 min) and Ben Creech’s NO TIME TO THINK: BOB DYLAN AS FILMMAKER (2026, 33 min) each use archival footage to explore the intersection of film and music. Using interviews with Maysles himself, Weiss brings to light the nature of reminiscences and the technological evolution of the documentary. Through Maysles’ own words, there’s somber revelation in connecting his exciting footage of The Beatles in the early ‘60s to the capturing of the tragic events at Altamont in 1969, essentially bookending the decade. In NO TIME TO THINK, Creech uses a video essay format with voiceover from author and Cine-File contributor Michael Glover Smith to discuss Bob Dylan’s underdiscussed role as filmmaker and onscreen performer, focusing on his political work as documentarian. Finally, both Rankin Renwick’s THE SWIRL OF THE SHINE PIERCED (2026, 3 min) and Monet-Chanel Khanyahl’s SISTAS IN THE PIT (2026, 18 min) illuminate the role of women in punk music. Using imagery that evokes Joan of Arc, THE SWIRL is a visual and aural meditation on women’s role in punk history. The standout of the program, SISTAS IN THE PIT documents contemporary Black femmes in the punk and hardcore scenes, depicting both performances and interviews. Loose but self-assured, the film is deeply engaged with the political nature of punk that’s often diminished by racism and misogyny; Khanyahl highlights both the rage and joy these performers find in their art. [Megan Fariello]
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Alice Voena’s HEAVEN ABOVE ROWEN (US)
Friday, 7pm
Splitting the difference between apocalypse and rapture, Alice Voena’s HEAVEN ABOVE ROWEN is lo-fi and high-minded, bursting through its collage-like aesthetics and exquisite artifice with something raw and truthful. One could mistake the film at times for an earnest piece of confessional art from its director, a vivid look into the eponymous Rowen Amadeus Camor, whose mystical thinking and glamorous stylings help usher in a new kind of doomsday cult that seems to dominate the headlines. Voena collaborates with Stephen Trask, best known as the songwriter behind Hedwig and the Angry Inch, another artwork focused on a lost artist’s journey through gender exploration and cult-like adoration. Trask contributes an almost-alien soundscape through the entire work that exists concurrently with the impeccable imagery. Voena’s scenes almost exist outside of reality, with meetings set in sound stages and talk shows staged on beaches, the emotional truth of a scene outweighing the physical reality necessary for the moment. Rowen’s parents have their faces obscured under white cloth, while other characters have their faces erased by white static, the unknowability of those around you completely obscuring them from sight. Voena’s film drips in poetry, reckoning with her own body dysmorphia (“Will I be happy having any body for eternity?”) alongside her own fear of what it means for her cult, the Church of Avalon, to be perceived by society at large (“Is it so bad to allow your image to become digested?”). Rowen’s short-but-sweet journey meets its natural endpoint, as the apocalyptic nature of the Church of Avalon causes her to isolate even further, causing a break in the very nature of the imagery onscreen, almost akin to the ending of Abbas Kiarostami’s TASTE OF CHERRY (1997). HEAVEN ABOVE ROWEN is an act of confession, a farewell letter, and an introduction to an artist’s simultaneous self-destruction and reclamation. (2026, 63 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye] 
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Check our blog this weekend for an interview with Voena.
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Shorts Program: What Remains
Friday, 8:30pm and Sunday, 3pm
One thematic through line in this program is endings—endings of relationships, of lives, of the planet we live on. Opening the set is Rajee Samarasinghe’s A FLOWER FALLING BACK INTO THE EARTH (2026, 7 min), which uses abstract techniques to consider a woman whose son disappeared during the Sri Lankan civil war. This work contemplates the subject as she addresses the camera, yet the sound of her address is notably absent and replaced with field recordings of the region. As the short progresses, the woman’s visual presence becomes overwhelmed in the montage by images of the region—a haunting metaphor for how individual lives can get lost in the swirl of the world. Jesse McLean’s PLACEHOLDER (2026, 12 min) introduces a strain of bitter irony to the program. As I wrote of McLean’s film, one of the best American movies of 2026, when it screened earlier this year, it’s “a wry yet tender portrait of a woman who withdraws into depression and alcoholism after her marriage breaks down. McLean’s narration, as usual, is clear and observant, and it goes well with the black-and-white imagery, which incorporates pictures from a book about Frank Hurley's 1914 expedition to Antarctica and handsome shots of the Swedish actor with whom the film’s heroine becomes obsessed. Both of these serve as foils to the heroine’s loneliness and despair, which McLean depicts without sentimentality.” RECOLLECTIONS FROM THE YEARS OF SLEEP (2026, 12 min) takes the program in a more lighthearted direction. Director Adam Marshall Present assembled it from test shots and outtakes from his documentary AMERICAN DENDRITE (a Cine-File favorite of 2025), and the tone is casual and pleasant. The short considers filmmaking as a collaborative process, with frequent shots of crew members looking like they’re having a good time. Another assemblage continues the program, acclaimed experimental filmmaker Maryam Tafakory’s DARIA’S NIGHT FLOWERS (2025, 16 min). Tafakory created the work primarily from clips of post-Revolutionary Iranian cinema (a lot of it directed by Dariush Mehrjui), using them to craft a story about a woman who falls in love with another woman—a subject that obviously could not be tackled in post-Revolutionary Iran. The frisson/dialogue between images and thematic content is provocative. Blake Knecht’s NOW THAT WE ARE SENDING YOU TO THE END (2025, 13 min) offers another compelling provocation, combining a young boy’s imagined apocalyptic scenarios (on the soundtrack) with black-and-white 16mm footage of the American Southwest. Knecht’s work flows nicely into the next selection in the program, Dominic Angerame’s AEON (2025, 12 min), which was also shot on black and white 16mm. Angerame plays a similar game as Knecht, combining terrestrial and cosmic ways of thinking; in this film, grainy, associative shots of San Francisco give way to images of outer space that look like something out of a planetarium star show. Rounding out the program are two short and highly tactile pieces, Ariana Gerstein’s but days pass like this (2026, 5 min) and Kelly Egan’s CUSTOM TRAILER SERIES: AUSTIN POWERS (2025, 5 min). The first of these incorporates hand-processed stereo photography to create, per the artist, a “meditation on memory, perception, and the rhythms of history that seem destined to repeat.” The second splices and warps frames from a coming attraction for AUSTIN POWERS: THE SPY WHO SHAGGED ME, turning it into a work of abstraction. [Ben Sachs]
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Shorts Program: What Refuses to Disappear
Saturday, 2pm and Sunday, 12:30pm
In What Refuses to Disappear, there are five short films that answer the title question. Feminism and flowers bind these films from four countries. Each short was made by a female director and features plants, flowers, and overgrowth as focal points. Inspired by Jacques Boyceau de la Baraudière's 1638 garden design manual Traité du jardinage, Adebukola Bodunrin’s LEAKS IN THE LINES (2026, 5 min) mixes laser-etched animations with footage from various gardens. The animation has the allure of the uncanny as the lines etched onto the frame are different from scratched celluloid; they react almost as a living organism. The lines create order when they draw frames on top of the greenspace footage, but they can also spiral into chaos and disregard for the footage underneath. Bodunrin’s innovative etching is inspirational. Alexandra Kumala’s 20 YEARS AND OTHER UNTRANSLATABILITIES (2024, 9 min) is a camera-locked, composition-heavy meditation on loss. Comprised of various locations, we watch a symbolic cremation. Fire and rain battle for smoke. The ceremony is hers, to purge hate that’s still being fueled. Beautifully composed frames and the allure of the flame mix with fantastic, emotional results. In Erica Schreiner’s PHOTOSYNTHESIS (2026, 8 min), a fragile lily sits in a bowl excreting wonderful colors. Fingers slide over the petals, collecting the paint to smear it all over their body. Violently, vibrant green leaves are mutilated by shears. Cutting. Slashing. The pace quickens. The lily no longer makes any color. It is stained, bruised, and no amount of scrubbing can clean it. Two ride-or-die friends of twenty years tell their survival stories. The sexual assault experienced in college continues to haunt. Sharing in each other’s trauma becomes a step toward mending old wounds. Erin Wilkerson’s STRANGE FLOWER (LITTLE SISTER TO THE POOR) (2025, 30 min) begins with dried roses floating on water and narration that discusses a world divided into male and female alchemists. As the men sought gold and the moon, the women nurtured the Earth. As gold seekers often do, they destroyed themselves and all around them in their rich pursuit. Wilkerson edits public domain paintings with footage of empty streets, using a style the director describes as Feral Filmmaking. The shots include women mixing herbs and wandering the countryside while telling us the Earth will scorch herself to be rid of men and the damage they’ve caused. But what of the flowers? Alchemists forget some flowers sprout only after being inundated by flames and smoke. Also in the program is Miranda Pennell’s A PERSON OF THE FOREST (2026, 34 min). [Shaun Huhn]
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Shorts Program: Where We Stand
Saturday, 3pm
Most of the shorts in Where We Stand are concerned with environments in the physical sense, though some of them consider their subjects from a historical and psychosocial perspective. Greg Jenkins’ RAIDER (2025, 3 min) starts things with a vivid sense of place, namely the plains of Wyoming. The work consists of a single static wide shot of a freight train crossing from right to left; there’s no music on the soundtrack. Comparisons with James Benning’s masterpiece RR (2007) are likely inevitable, and while this is much shorter than the Benning film, it still conjures an agreeably meditative sensibility—a perfect way to get into the program. Next, Meijuan Foo and Valerie Neck’s short documentary INTERSECTION (2025, 9 min) profiles a busy hub in Brooklyn where five streets converge. Bus drivers speak on the soundtrack about how dangerous it is to drive around there (one recounts having ten heart attacks in five years from the stress), while the rapid and cacophonous montage portrays the intersection as a constant rush of activity. It’s an effective mix of the abstract and the concrete (in both senses of the word), relating social portraiture through the accumulation of sensations. Aurèle Ferrier’s CLAWS (2025, 18 min) considers a variety of depopulated spaces in China, the camera floating perfectly linearly through the environments like a robot hummingbird. Entrancing yet eerie, the work evokes a world content without people and the machines left to observe it. There aren’t many people in Lua Borges’ GUARITA (2025, 3 min) either, but that’s because the work is focused on the now-defunct guard houses of São Paulo. Shooting on 16mm, Borges presents one of these little buildings after another, which (as the filmmaker explained at Onion City earlier this year) were decommissioned some time ago. Without functional purpose, the houses become aesthetic objects that add to the character of the city. In REMNANTS (2026, 20 min), Sara Suárez offers a short lesson in pioneer cemeteries that were created across the Midwestern US two centuries ago. Because these plots were spared from industrial development, Suárez explains over split-screen nature imagery, they contain some of the last examples in America of particular prairie ecosystems. The filmmaker goes on to propose that these cemeteries can be repurposed to house different kinds of memories, those of a common natural heritage. Eislow Johnson’s INJURED? (2026, 14 min) is a humorous montage of billboards and advertisements for injury attorneys, also in the Midwest. This film contemplates a different kind of landscape than the other pieces in the program—namely, the shared psychic space that’s become overrun with ads. Concluding the program is a short documentary by CUFF mainstay Usama Alshaibi, TRIP ZIGGURAT (2026, 14 min), which concerns his visit to a ziggurat built by an Arab emigre in a small town in Colorado. The filmmaker presents plenty of good shots of the structure, and he also shares a compelling story about when and why it was built. In his search, Alshaibi meets a handful of Arab-Americans in the Boulder area, and he casually interviews them about living in the US. The piece showcases the filmmaker’s natural curiosity and perceptiveness, as he draws on the testimonies of his interviewees to reflect on what it means to be Arab-American at the present moment. [Ben Sachs]
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Ines Sommer’s THE FAIR (US/Documentary)
Saturday, 4pm and Sunday, 12pm [SOLD OUT]
It’s common to say that something is as American as apple pie, and the county fair is where you’d get just that, but probably deep fried and on a stick. It’s where you can get both the concession and the sentiment; county fairs are cherished Americana, a highlight of the summer social calendar in areas across the country. But as with many things, what one associates with America actually has its roots elsewhere. The first agricultural show took place in North West England in the mid-18th century—less than 100 years later, the first Menard County Fair was held not far from Petersburg, Illinois, according to on-screen text in Ines Sommer’s THE FAIR. That’s the subject of her documentary, a Wisemanesque, fly-on-the-barn-door look at the institution, focusing on craft and livestock competitions and the pageant that yields each year’s Miss Menard County. The description for the film notes its “patient ethnographic approach.” Though the usage is accurate, ethnography frequently suggests communities distant from our own, in more “exotic” locales, but in a way that’s still accurate here, too. Though the area of Ohio where I grew up was not quite as rural, it was close enough to places that were, so I’m familiar with this kind of county fair. But after having lived in Chicago for 15 years, I experienced a bit of culture shock, such as when one of the young women asserts in an interview with pageant judges that she hopes to return to Menard County after finishing college nearby. (Go back to my small town? The thought never crossed my mind.) More specifically relating to the city, when the previous year’s Miss Menard County gives her final speech, she jokes that among the opportunities afforded by her position was one to meet the Illinois governor (not named, but it would be J.B. Pritzker)—”Now don’t everybody cheer at once, I know you all love him,” she says. It’s the only explicit mention of politics and situated toward the end; the shadow of what came before darkens, cooling the summertime fun. I was then prompted to confirm what I assumed to be true: Almost 70% of Menard County voted for Trump in the last election, the highest majority since 1972. Wholesome rural life takes on an edge, becoming an incubator for a mode of so-called traditional life that rejects social progress. It’s like a barrel of apples. Looking at them, shiny and red (comparison to a MAGA hat not intended but apt nevertheless), it’s easy to forget that bad apples might exist in the bunch. Preceded by Gabrielle & Max Fitzpatrick’s 2026 short film DRIVEN (12 min, DCP Digital). (2025, 79 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
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Shorts Program: Nothing Stays Fixed
Saturday, 5pm [SOLD OUT]
Nothing Stays Fixed is a program of tender films as fleeting as the moments they capture. All shot on celluloid, many with a flicker aesthetic, these poetic works speak to identity, desire, and the beauty of impertinence through experimenting with the filmic medium. Set in peak foliage season, Vito A. Rowlands’s Super 8 flicker LEAF PEEPER (2026, 3 min) is drenched in autumn’s sweet colors and skips cheerfully to its jaunty soundtrack. This live-action animation follows a pair of leaf peeper eyes going rogue, cutting through a plaid break into even more plaid. It’s funny, spicy, and seasonally appropriate. Malic Amalya’s sexy 16mm film LEATHER GRAVES (2025, 12 min) layers gravestone inscriptions through in-camera double exposure, recombining them into terms that allude to queer desires. Throughout the film, these terms, such as “GAY POWER” and “TIT RING,” are intercut with scenes of couples sharing syrupy kisses or licking sugar-coated flowers at a cemetery. An electronic soundtrack of calming, echoey noise folds ecstasy, grief, pain, and pleasure into one another. Chiming with LEAF PEEPER, Josh Weissbach’s EXPLANT/IMPLANT (2025, 3 min) is another single-frame animation that flickers and features plaid. This 16mm film diary follows the filmmaker through surgery to replace his pacemaker. Snapshots of traffic, the parking lot, the waiting, blood, tissue, fabric, etc. flash by and glide through a heavy story about the messy business of keeping a body functioning. Kate Solar’s extremely delicate and moody black-and-white film (FOR ONCE I DREAMED OF YOU) (2025, 6 min) takes its title from a verse in Christina Rossetti’s “On the Wing” and has inherited the poem’s agoraphobic sentiments. Dreamy images of a pastoral nocturne have been re-photographed by flashlight contact-printing to turn these impressions into a film that transpires, dreams, and haunts. Till Gombert’s sensorial film ROUGH & SMOOTH (2026, 15 min) begins with an eerie phenomenon: many users across the internet have found themselves sharing a texture dream that alternates between surfaces that are smooth or coarse. Texts excerpted from online posts scintillate on top of footage of landscape and natural patterns that grow abstract. This is a psychedelic film, a visual ASMR that will surely lead you down the rabbit hole of researching all the hypnagogic quirks that our brains can have. Equally soothing and transcendental, Hogan Seidel and Gabby Follett Sumney’s OBJECTIONABLE FRUIT (2026, 15 min) stems from a remarkable feature of the Ginkgo tree—that this normally dioecious plant can develop occasional sex conversion—and finds a marvelous analogy for trans experience in the plant world. Laurent Reyes’s black-and-white, silent VANITIES (2020, 6 min) mashes together photochemically processed images of plants, animals, and human bodies to construct an elusive film of quiet disquiet. The program will close with SUNSHINE ON MY SHOULDERS (2025, 25 min), an expanded cinema performance for three 16mm projectors, by Tristen Ives. It’s a meditation on the sun, foraging, and the process of filmmaking by juxtaposing directed animation films with live-manipulated spoken diary. [Nicky Ni]
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James N. Kienitz Wilkins’ THE MISCONCEIVED (US)
Saturday, 6pm
Imagine a thoughtful, low-budget indie film, maybe something like the recent LATE FAME, as a video game. That’s akin to what James N. Kienitz Wilkins’ THE MISCONCEIVED is—Wilkins used Unreal Engine, “a 3D computer graphics game engine,” the adjoining of words whose collective meaning baffles me, to animate a feature film that he’d originally intended to be live action. Co-written with Robin Schavoir, with whom Wilkins also co-wrote his 2019 film THE PLAGIARISTS, the latest is an unofficial sequel to that previous film. I might liken the intended progression to the difference between Judd Apatow’s KNOCKED UP and THIS IS 40, made five years apart, with the latter reflecting on the same characters from the previous film reaching a different stage of life. (I think Wilkins would appreciate this inane comparison.) The Tyler character from THE PLAGIARISTS was an aspiring filmmaker; an extension of the same character, also named Tyler, is the main character of THE MISCONCEIVED, a single dad and erstwhile creative who’s taken a job as a contractor on a home renovation. I’d heard about the film and knew its conceit but briefly forgot this and was wondering, just for a moment as it got underway, if these were real people, no less because some of them look like real, recognizable actors. If my confusion had continued any longer, it would have been dispelled upon seeing Mikey, the contractors’ young helper, who looks like a proper cartoon character, with big, clearly animated eyes and Keebler Elf ears. With the appearance of Mikey, Wilkins makes a statement that’s unclear in its clarity: this is seriously not serious, existential irreverence the name of the game. As luck would have it, the person whose house they’re renovating is Tyler’s college roommate, a successful artist. Mikey is, aside from looking like a cartoon character, an actual character. He’s crass, lazy, and an aspiring screenwriter who’s obsessed with the CHINATOWN script but hasn’t seen the movie. The lead contractor, Widgey, is an older man; he, Tyler, and Mikey represent three different generations of workers to varying degrees of existential disenchantment, with Widgey being more or less complacent; Tyler on his way to getting there; and Mikey still raging against the machine. The roommate, Tobin, and his wife, on the other hand, represent a privileged creative class who can afford second houses outside the city. Among them all, Tyler and Tobin represent a binary of creative trajectories, the latter having gotten ahead—but still at war for relevance—and the former being left behind, creating in a different way, such as that of human life by way of a child and working in construction, where creation is both literal and pragmatic. (There’s more ironic symmetry also in that Tobin’s wife, Gwen, is a web designer. She creates sites but doesn’t actually build them, another consideration of whose ideas are brought to life and whose might be left to build those of others.) The film culminates in a party at the house with Tobin’s agent and a Whitney Biennial curator where conversations of art and creativity abound. If there’s a sense of misguided idealism toward the beginning, Tobin using examples of Steven Soderbergh making films on the iPhone and just A24 in general to highlight the opportunity that still exists for Tyler, that falls apart in Tyler’s climactic tirade, which diagnoses the state of creative culture and filmmaking in general. THE MISCONCEIVED might look like a video game, but it can’t be played—it suggests also that the game of life can’t be played either. The fate of one’s creativity is predetermined, like the films that may be born of it. (2026, 88 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
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Shorts Program: Performance Review
Saturday, 6:30pm
Every day, the tenuous link between reality and performance seems to crumble in real time, with smartphones and social media exacerbating our relationship to one another to the point where the performative version of ourselves that exists online threatens to consume us whole. This tortured relationship between our many selves haunts the short films in this program, none more so than the longest work of the bunch, PROJECT XXX (2026, 28 min), a film practically built upon the altar of self-reflection. Framed as a diegetic film being watched by an online film critic, we’re presented with a raucous birthday party being held in honor of Nelly Dansen, a mysterious presence who has asked her guests to attend this gathering assuming her identity entirely, to the point where, by the end of the night, no one is really sure of the identity of the “real” Nelly Dansen. Here, performance becomes a form of truth in itself, the act of presenting oneself as one of many “Nelly Dansens” emerging as the only real way of being “seen,” no matter what you may lose in the process. This particular desire for visibility in the vast attention economy exists on a spectrum in two other films in the program. In MANTIS STREAM! LIKE & SUBSCRIBE (2025, 9 min), visibility becomes a literal prison for our protagonist, whose real-time health crisis becomes nothing but fodder for nearby partners, family, and even paramedics, all of whom are absurdly committed to livestreaming their every waking move, to the point where authentic reality—or, the lack thereof —folds in on itself. Alternately, in THE MAN WHO CRAWLED WOLF (2025, 20 min), a performance artist attempts to resurrect a past work of endurance-based performance (specifically, the late Pope.L’s Tompkins Square Crawl), but struggles to adapt the act to today’s surveillance state, leaving the viewer to question the authenticity of his art by the end of things. Other shorts here also ask us not only to ponder who we are, but how we remember the world around us. With WHEN EVERYTHING WAS GONE (2025, 12 min), four employees of a company that has inexplicably vanished all contend with their competing explanations of how to solve this mystery, ranging from the supernatural to the overtly conspiratorial. Meanwhile, the outright hilarious giallo pastiche THE SEEING EYE DOG WHO SAW TOO MUCH (2026, 17 min) plays with our own shared relationship with the tropes and hallmarks of the beloved genre, reveling in glorious practical gore, hilariously poor ADR, and intensely convoluted plotting. It feels only right that the program begins with the brief but dynamic BOB, PAUL... BYRD AND PETE GO TO THE MOVIES (2025, 2 min), a flickering piece of animated storytelling about four friends going to the movies, where their shared experience— poetic and mystifying—barely has anything to do with movies at all. [Ben Kaye]
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Shorts Program: Strange Knowledge
Harper Theater — Saturday, 7pm
This program begins and ends with challenging works—one in terms of form, the other in terms of content. The curtain-raiser, Björn Kämmerer’s CONFERENCE (2025, 9 min), is a structuralist take-off on the western in which the filmmaker cuts between three semicircular tracking shots, each one presenting a different cowboy around the same campfire. The effect can be hypnotic or vertiginous, depending on how you look at it; over nine minutes, you may find yourself alternating between both modes of looking (and maybe some others as well). Kylie Mungenast’s PEPPERMINT PIXIE DREAM GIRL (2026, 18 min) closes the program on a dark note, with a shocking scene of anti-trans violence that leads to the sight of an atomic bomb being detonated. Prior to that downbeat conclusion, the film is a colorful pastiche of 1950s kitsch in which a diner waitress fantasizes about a female customer. Mungenast draws on ‘50s juvenile delinquent films in her creation of the film’s villain, a loathsome bully in a leather jacket. The other works in the program aren’t so confrontational, though they run from narrative-driven to totally abstract. On the narrative end of the spectrum is TWIN SNAKES (2026, 15 min), the latest from Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn, directors of the daffily offbeat features L FOR LEISURE (2014) and TWO PLAINS & A FANCY (2018). Their new one has something to do with an investigation into the disappearance of a New Age spiritualist; the dialogue touches on Condoleezza Rice and one of Brendan Fraser’s MUMMY movies. Fans of the filmmakers’ non-sequitur humor (or anyone with an ironic nostalgia for the Bush II Presidency) should get a kick out of it. On the abstract end is Laura Kraning’s experimental short INTERWOVEN INTERVALS (2026, 6 min). Per the artist, the film is “a material hybrid of film and textile, as the intermediary device of a laser printer transcribes weaving patterns onto strips of 16mm clear leader, connecting the material process of handmade films with hand-crafted textile production.” The black and white images are wonderful to stare at, suggesting an artisanal version of old TV test patterns. Benjamin Wigley’s SPIKA: GROWING TEETH (2025, 7 min) splits the difference between storytelling and experimentation, blending footage of strange new structures at the Triennale di Milano with narration that imagines a city where architecture blends with organic life. The film, written by Rachel Armstrong and Rolf Hughes, responds creatively to the creativity on display. Lastly, Paul Tarragó’s DOMESTIC WEIGHTS AND MEASURES (2026, 19 min) is a characteristic blend of autobiography, social observation, and playful handmade animation. The work considers the period of time during which Tarragó waited to have his last film processed; clearly his imagination was firing on all cylinders for the duration. In a characteristic passage, Tarragó notices a sign for a lost dog in his neighborhood, which inspires him to create a rapid montage of seemingly every poster for this pet that was hung around town. The sequence, which lasts less than half a minute, is so breathtaking you may not recognize the sadness behind it until after the movie ends. And the movie is full of moments like this. Also in the program is Jessie Mott, Alejandra Trigoso, and Diane Christiansen’s NOW THAT I’VE LOST MY BUFFALO, I DON’T KNOW WHO TO GRIND (2024, 5 min). [Ben Sachs]
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Lynne Sachs’ EVERY CONTACT LEAVES A TRACE (US/Documentary)
Sunday, 2:30pm
I’m not related to Lynne Sachs, though I do know her personally, and one of the things I appreciate about her work is how it feels like an extension of spending time with her. Sachs often shares intimate details of her life in her films, yet she does so in a modest, convivial, and discursive way, as if she were initiating a discussion with the audience rather than simply confessing to them. She also reveals things about herself in order to get her onscreen subjects to do the same, regardless of whether they’re strangers or members of her family. In EVERY CONTACT LEAVES A TRACE, she engages in conversation with both; to find the strangers (or at least people she doesn’t know well), she draws on her collection of the roughly 600 business cards she’s collected over the past four decades and seeks out the contacts whom she thinks will make for compelling presences in her movie. The interviewees range from Sachs’ hairdresser to a forensic scientist to the artist and filmmaker Lawrence Brose, who through no fault of his own spent two years under FBI surveillance. Sachs interweaves these stories eloquently (perhaps not coincidentally, one of the interviewees gives her a lesson in stitching), creating a cinematic tapestry of interesting lives. In between the varied profiles, the filmmaker reflects on how these subjects have affected her, reminding us (as per the title) of how the lives we encounter can mark our own. Sachs doesn’t make a to-do about this; like Agnès Varda’s nonfiction work, EVERY CONTACT LEAVES A TRACE feels informal despite asking big questions. This informality, of course, is deceptive—you’re likely to come away from the film feeling stimulated, compelled to reconsider how each life is a make-up of various others. (2025, 82 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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C.S. Nicholson’s A STRANGER HAS NO EYES (Norway/Benin/Documentary)
Siskel Film Center — Sunday, 7pm
A fascinating portrait, A STRANGER HAS NO EYES introduces viewers to Martine de Souza, a jovial and outspoken middle-aged woman living in contemporary Benin. Martine is quick to tell strangers that she’s a descendant of Francisco Félix de Souza, a Brazilian-born slave trader who oversaw the capture and sale of hundreds of thousands of people in west Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Francisco Félix may have died in 1849 (at the age of 94!), but his life continues to impact Martine’s. She talks about him often with a mix of disgust and admiration, and while she seems to lead her life in recognition of the legacy of his sin, she still honors his memory at a shrine for de Souza ancestors. Director C.S. Nicholson probes the complexity of Martine and her family, not only in their relationships to their roots, but in their daily routines and religious practices. The de Souzas observe both Christianity and Vodun, we learn, and Martine’s outlook draws freely from both religions. Nicholson shows her attending Church services and Vodun rituals (which he often presents in slow motion), talking about reincarnation, and praying to Jesus. Martine’s religious devotion can be charming—at one point, she asks Nicholson if he’d like her to ask her forebears to look over his movie and make it a success—but on a deeper level, it seems to have forced her to think long and hard about what her family means. Martine doesn’t arrive at any easy conclusions, and neither does A STRANGER HAS NO EYES, which can be an uncomfortable viewing experience because of what Nicholson uncovers. It’s also a lively piece of filmmaking that’s tuned into the colors and street life of Benin. (2026, 128 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Many filmmakers in person for post-screening Q&As. For a complete schedule, visit here.

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Victor Erice's THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE (Spain)

Music Box Theatre — Sunday, 11:30am

Set on the Castilian plateau in 1940 at the beginning of the Franco dictatorship, THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE essentially bookends the regime; director Victor Erice’s first feature film was made in the last years of Franco’s rule as censorship began to loosen. THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE itself features a pre-Code film known for its subsequent censorship: James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN (1931). Shown as a special event to the children of the small village, Ana (a heartbreakingly impressive Ana Torrent) is particularly struck by the scene in which the creature drowns a little girl. Her sister, Isabel (Isabel Tellería, also remarkable), teasingly assures Ana everything in movies is fake, though the creature does exist as a spirit that can be called upon; Ana eventually finds this presence in an unexpected way. Meanwhile, the adults in her life are trying to find meaning in this post-war moment: her father (Fernando Fernán Gómez) obsesses over his beehives while her young mother (Teresa Gimpera) yearns for a former lover. With its stunning golden-hued cinematography and arresting and painterly imagery, THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE is a relatively quiet—reflecting Ana’s whispered voice—but tremendously affecting coming of age film. Reminiscent of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE itself influenced films that constellate childhood with important historical and cultural moments—most notably Guillermo del Toro’s PAN’S LABYRINTH (2006). Erice’s film is a beautiful representation of the ways the most provoking stories and images can be layered to create something both familiar and entirely new. Its use of FRANKENSTEIN is so perceptively done, drawing not only on the film, but Mary Shelley’s larger themes of consciousness and dreams, connecting them to the inevitability of reality confronting and shaping Ana’s childhood. THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE is an historically grounded story about the indelible mark that cinematic images leave on us as young children and how those images can wholly change our perception. As the adults wander lost through this space, Ana’s story demonstrates that these illuminated worlds are as impactful as the real one, can provide empathy, and help to make sense and meaning of it all. Screening as part of the ongoing  Crucemos al Otro Lado series. (1973, 98 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]

Terrence Malick’s THE NEW WORLD (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) — Thursday, 6pm

One of the most divisive films of the 21st century, Terrence Malick’s fourth feature sparked fierce debates on first release about the writer-director’s merits that have continued unabated to this day. Some viewers considered THE NEW WORLD proof that Malick lost his grip on cinema, haphazardly shooting too much material just so he could play around with it in the editing room. (To those viewers’ point, Malick re-edited the film at least twice after its premiere: once before its wide release in early 2006, then again for a three-hour version that came out on DVD.) Others saw in THE NEW WORLD a supreme example of spiritual cinema in which every moment was rendered mythic and sublime. One can find plenty of evidence to support either argument—indeed, a quick online search will generate more than enough—yet getting lost in the weeds of Malick criticism has always seemed like a misguided endeavor. As Emerson wrote that Shakespeare is not made by the study of Shakespeare, so too does Malick tower over the various interpretations (both pro and con) that have been brought to his work. This isn’t to say that THE NEW WORLD is without its risible moments. Who can forget Colin Farrell’s anachronistic tattoos, the puppy dog eyes of the movie’s young lovers, or Malick’s chronic reliance on a young woman spinning blithely in an open field to signify spiritual transcendence? At the same time, these things never overwhelm the film’s poetic flow; they’re part of a continuum of sensations that speak to the majesty of being alive. To quote Kent Jones’ 2006 essay on the film (sorry): “A lock and key, an open book, a flash of lightning, a candle, a girl’s face—Malick jumps onto everything and startles us… into looking before placing, comparing, evaluating, or any of the other (largely unconscious) tasks we bring to moviegoing. Malick is the only working narrative filmmaker who devotes entire movies to the wonder of presence.” In THE NEW WORLD, that wonder stems from the first encounters between Europeans and the indigenous people of North America, which are rendered so disorienting as to seem like the stuff of science fiction. Yes, we have Malick’s associative editing to thank for that, but also his inspired use of Wagner, Emmanuel Lubezki’s free-flowing (and often deep focus) camerawork, Q’orianka Kilcher’s force-of-nature performance as Pocahontas, and Jack Fisk’s characteristically immersive production design. On a big screen, all of these will be larger than life, as they were intended to be. Screening as part of the Heteroglossia: Languages and Translation series. (2005, 151 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs] 

Andrei Tarkovsky's THE SACRIFICE (Sweden)

Siskel Film Center — Saturday, 4pm; Sunday, 2pm; and Wednesday, 6pm

Critic Wesley Morris observed of our collective cultural habits, "I think everybody might have a handful of books or movies that they happily return to because they honestly don't remember the plot—they just remember the mood or the experience." Similarly, I think everyone has movies they return to solely for a particular moment or scene. These moments can be so singular that everything around them fades slightly into the background. This isn't to make a virtue of flawed memory, but rather to highlight those directors with the rare gift to sculpt a mood or moment that hovers above a film. Andrei Tarkovsky's cinema is rife with these exalted moments: Capt. Kholin's acrobatic embrace of Masha over a trench and her limp surrender in IVAN'S CHILDHOOD; a floating candelabrum and a chandelier's subtle jangle in SOLARIS. Tilda Swinton encapsulated this phenomenon in a speech referencing STALKER: "I saw an image of a dream that I have been visited by all my life made real... A bird flying towards the camera dips its wing into the sand that fills a room. Did I imagine this? I haven't seen the film for years. Can somebody tell me?" Released in 1986 and garnering Tarkovsky his second Grand Prix at Cannes (Roland Joffé's THE MISSION took home the Palme d'Or—a banner year for Christendom) THE SACRIFICE is considered by some to be a challenging, ancillary work by the Russian master. With time though the debates over 'slow cinema' and the film's relationship to Tarkovsky's legacy have faded, and what remain are some of the most haunting moments of the director's career: The sudden and uncanny desaturation of the film's image—courtesy of master cinematographer Sven Nykvist—as Erland Josephson roams his estate in a nuclear daze; the flickering TV test pattern reflected on the family in tableau; the film's breathtaking denouement, which never ceases to terrify me. These are the images I return to again and again, echoing Swinton's disbelief: Did I imagine this? Screening as part of  Andrei Tarkovsky: Complete Retrospective. (1986, 142 min, DCP Digital) [James Stroble]

Chris Marker’s ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF ANDREI ARSENEVICH (France/Documentary)

Off Center at the Siskel Film Center – Monday, 6pm

In his writing about ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF ANDREI ARSENEVICH, Jonathan Rosenbaum has argued that Chris Marker invoked Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the title to underscore how Soviet persecution shaped Andrei Tarkovsky’s life and career. That’s a useful point of entry to this complex, essayistic documentary, which elucidates the political context in which Tarkovsky operated without spoiling the mystical quality of his work. In characteristic fashion, Marker evokes a stream of consciousness in his construction of ANDREI ARSENEVICH, moving between analyses of Tarkovsky’s films, stories about his life (some of which feel mythopoetic), footage of him on the set of THE SACRIFICE (1986), and scenes of him on his deathbed in Italy. Marker incorporates details about the Soviet government’s interventions into Tarkovsky’s filmmaking, such as some of the State censors’ ridiculous issues with SOLARIS (1972) (one censor apparently wanted fewer shots of Kris Kelvin walking around the space station without pants); knowing about such difficult working conditions makes it even more astonishing that Tarkovsky routinely achieved a sense of transcendence through his cinema. Marker considers possible sources for this transcendental quality, and one he proposes is Tarkovsky’s Russian Orthodox background, which associates the natural world with the Divine. Marker also notes the tragic irony of this most Russian of directors being unable to work in Russia. ANDREI ARSENEVICH is heartbreaking when Marker shows Tarkovsky reuniting with close family members as he’s dying from brain cancer; the narration points out that they had been unable to leave the USSR since Tarkovsky fled the country and were granted permission to visit him only after the authorities were informed of how bad his condition had gotten. The documentary ends on a rapturous note, however, when Marker identifies some of the beautiful symmetries in Tarkovsky’s films, reinforcing the depiction of his oeuvre as a world unto itself. Preceded by Marker’s 1973 short film THE EMBASSY (21 min, Digital Projection). (1999, 55 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

James Cameron’s ALIENS (US)

Music Box Theatre — Thursday, 6pm and 9:15pm

Like its predecessor ALIEN (1979), ALIENS explores the sheer horror of coming face to face with an unknowable other in the bug-like, Freudian nightmare of the xenomorphs, aliens that reproduce in a violent manner using human hosts. Unlike ALIEN, a daring sci-fi horror directed by Ridley Scott that prioritized atmosphere and suspense over gratuitous action or world-building dialogue, ALIENS shifts to sci-fi as action thriller, building upon Cameron's immense success with THE TERMINATOR (1984), which similarly established an enduring sci-fi heroine in Sarah Connor. Setting the stage for Cameron’s TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY (1991), ALIENS is remarkable as a successful sequel that builds intricately upon the original of the franchise and only improves upon its sci-fi heroine. Some would consider ALIENS the peak installment of the ALIEN franchise, even as Ridley Scott has revisited the world-building with several more film installments and a television series. ALIEN leverages the tropes of horror through its restrained imagery, barely showing the xenomorph until the end of the film, making it difficult to even complete a mental picture of the grotesque creature so that it grows exponentially in the mind's eye. Conversely, ALIENS relishes the opportunity to display the xenomorphs in their acid-dripping, grossly articulated, double-mouthed fervor, bringing the audience through infested tunnels with a crew of delightfully crass and battle-hardened marines and overwhelming us with dozens of xenomorphs killed in battle or snatching members of the crew to cocoon alive in agony. Even as ALIENS departs from the stricter tone and somber nihilism of the original, it layers the narrative with new horrors of capitalism running its course through Carter Burke (Paul Reiser), a representative of the corporate conglomerate that prizes biotech over lives and who manages to portray such a skillfully nice villain as the situation escalates. ALIENS' greatest success, though, is in its layering of Ripley's character, which earned Sigourney Weaver an Academy Award nomination for best actress. Ripley is powerful, complex, and driven by trauma from her previous experience with the xenomorphs. As an exploration of post-traumatic stress syndrome, ALIENS finds Ripley achieving new levels of bravery as a result of her trauma and inhabiting a superhuman role by the climax of the film to protect Newt, the lone survivor of the colony she's been sent with the crew to rescue. Weaver's acting is restrained and relatable as she faces abject terror head-on and battles the xenomorph queen. Though Ripley dominates the exuberantly action-packed script and screen, ALIENS is bolstered by a wonderful supporting cast, notably Lance Henriksen as Bishop, the android Ripley instantly distrusts aboard the rescue ship from her previous trauma in ALIEN. ALIENS packs full intensity into every moment of its over-two hours of film, generating such unease and excitement that a viewer might need to recover with a wholesome cartoon palate cleanser or check (just to make sure) no face huggers are hiding under the bed. Screening as part of Music Box of Horrors: The Final Chapter. (1986, 137 min, 70mm) [Alex Ensign]

Mikio Naruse’s FLOATING CLOUDS (Japan)

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

Mikio Naruse's 1955 slow-burn melodrama has long been considered his crowning achievement. This adaptation of feminist writer Fumiko Hayashi's novel tracks a doomed affair between two demobilized WWII veterans, piercing it with memories of its beginnings in Indochina via spectral mini-flashbacks four years before Alain Resnais' HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR. Naruse mainstay Hideko Takamine stays irrationally devoted to one of cinema's all-time pricks (Masayuki Mori) as he refuses to leave his wife and indulges in other flings. This is no mystical Mizoguchi shrine to female suffering, but a hard-nosed study of the cost—and the virtue—of one woman's pursuit of all-giving love amidst a post-war world of suffocating pragmatism, where scenes reek of desperate people bargaining and taking. Takamine and Mori breathe conviction into their characters' tortuous push-pull, occupying opposite sides of a shared self-abasement, while the tropical notes of Ichiro Saito's haunting score exude a feverish trance. Still, nothing beats the radiance of Takamine's face when Mori's decency is finally kindled. Screening as part of the Mapping Melodrama series. (1955, 123 min, DCP Digital) [Kevin B. Lee]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Steve McQueen’s LOVERS ROCK (UK)

Music Box Theatre — Friday, 7pm

Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology—a quintet of made-for-TV films that craft a tapestry about West Indian immigrants in London across the mid-to-late 20th century—chiefly concerns itself with stories of Black perseverance and struggle within a wider British culture still steeped in bigoted systems and attitudes. All five films are made with care, intelligence and remarkable visual clarity, as is typical with McQueen’s output, but this larger focus on Black pain perhaps points to why LOVERS ROCK has emerged as the stand-out entry in this ambitious collection. Stemming from his years in the world of visual art, McQueen’s ode to the revelatory spell cast by reggae music excels as atmospheric cinema, the film’s devotion to mood and sensory stimuli overpowering any sense of traditional narrative. We do still get a set of central characters to guide us through a particular house party, the film opening with the young and earnest Martha (Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn) sneaking out of her house to make her way to this community gathering, which marks a brief respite away from the everyday life, where the obligations of church and family await when the sun rises. Along the way, you can practically taste the food being prepped in the kitchen, and as the evening goes on, the marijuana haze fills the air of this compact West London home to the point that you wonder when it will waft above your own head. The speakers pulsate like a heartbeat, songs like “Kung Fu Fighting” and “Silly Games” digging under your skin, with entrancing yellow lights pulling us in like moths to this intoxicating flame, and McQueen’s camera primarily rests in an intimate register throughout, focused on hands gripping hips and lips in sensual congress. In an immaculately rendered larger catalogue overtly reckoning with systemic injustice, McQueen builds a pocket within his oeuvre for unencumbered Black joy, where the danger and hurt of the world can’t intrude. There is only here, now, the music, and each other. With an introduction by Aja Essex. Screening as part of the From The Heartbeat: Roots, Reggae, & Resistance series. (2020, 70 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
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Also screening as part of the From the Heartbeat: Roots, Reggae, & Resistance series, co-presented by Dusty Groove, are Franco Rosso's 1979 documentary DREAD BEAT AN BLOOD (72 min, DCP Digital) on Friday at 8:45pm, introduced by Damon Locks; Perry Henzell's 1972 film THE HARDER THEY COME (103 min, DCP Digital) on Saturday at 4pm; Stefan Paul's 1979 documentary REGGAE SUNSPLASH (107 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) on Saturday at 9:15pm; Franco Rosso's 1980 film BABYLON (95 min, DCP Digital) on Sunday at 7pm; Ted Bafaloukos's 1978 film ROCKERS (100 min, DCP Digital) on Sunday at 9:15pm, also introduced by Aja Essex; Menelik Shabazz's 1981 film BURNING AN ILLUSION (106 min, DCP Digital) on Monday at 7pm; and Nicholas Campbell's 1992 documentary STEPPING RAZOR: RED X (106 min, DCP Digital) on Monday at 9:15pm.

Olivier Assayas' IRMA VEP (France)

Siskel Film Center — Tuesday, 6pm

IRMA VEP successfully takes on the influences of Truffaut, Fassbinder, and Louis Feuillade and still manages to include a lesbian subplot and address French racial attitudes in the film industry. The film takes place in an alternate reality where Maggie Cheung, playing herself, gets cast in a French feature-film remake of Louis Feuillade’s classic serial LES VAMPIRES (1915). As principal photography starts, the relationships between collaborators deteriorate and reality loosens its grip on both star and director. You might assume that the characters' problems could come off as niche; in reality, Assayas places the audience right in the middle of the chaos that is making a picture. The camera pans through the heart of production as all departments rush to get their work done on time, comparable to any busy office or dinner hour restaurant kitchen. As Assayas has mentioned in interviews, IRMA VEP specifically invokes Fassbinder's BEWARE OF A HOLY WHORE, with a short-tempered manic director in charge of a disorganized film; Jean-Pierre Léaud plays the director, slipping into an archetype previously played by Lou Castel in the self-reflexive 1971 classic. It should be noted that Fassbinder’s difficult auteur plays a difficult racist auteur in this film, as an artist frustrated that an Asian actress would be cast in a French film. Maggie Cheung, already a beloved star at this point in her career, gives a part of herself here, showing not her glamorous side, but seeming like a woman just trying to do her job well under constraints. It’s very easy to idolize stars but Cheung exemplifies the experience of many actors working in the industry, someone trying to get through the day, not get fired and maybe create some good work. Screening as part of the Contact Zones: Cinema of Globalization, 1989–2024 lecture series. (1996, 99 min, DCP Digital) [Ray Ebarb]

Alice Diop's SAINT OMER (France)

Siskel Film Center — Wednesday, 6pm

Acclaimed documentary filmmaker Alice Diop (whose non-fiction work I am not familiar with) made her narrative feature debut with this complex and beautiful character study about two women of Senegalese descent living in contemporary France. Pregnant Rama (Kayije Kagame), a successful novelist and professor of literature, attends the trial of—and becomes obsessed with—Laurence (Guslagie Malanga), a college student of limited means who stands accused of murder after abandoning her baby on a beach at night. The film, which daringly asks viewers to sympathize with a character who has committed a monstrous crime, is based on the true story of Fabienne Kabou, who was arrested for infanticide in 2013 and whose 2016 trial Diop attended. The dialogue is based in part on transcripts from Kabou’s real-life trial, which lends the extended courtroom scenes a rare verisimilitude, but what really impresses here is Diop’s mise-en-scène. Diop shoots Laurence from a different camera angle during each day of the trial, although she never deviates from this angle within each individual scene, lending a near-Bressonian formal rigor to the proceedings. While the technique of shot/reverse shot editing has become synonymous with lazy filmmaking in the modern era (because of how it often removes creativity from the process of shot selection, turning dialogue scenes into simple ping-pong matches), Diop imbues this technique with a fresh relevance: she refuses to show reverse angles when viewers are most likely to expect them, a strategy that eventually pays emotionally devastating dividends during a climactic exchange of glances where one character smiles while another silently weeps. Diop’s final masterstroke is to end the film before the verdict is reached, an unusual touch that recalls the denouement of Fritz Lang’s M (1931). Diop is wise enough to know that hearing a judge proclaim “Guilty” or “Not guilty” would put viewers in the position of agreeing or disagreeing with the judgment, when her real interests have lain elsewhere all along. As Jonathan Rosenbaum remarked on his website, the director has generated enough questions by the end in order “to make a verdict seem either impossible or superfluous.” Screening as part of the Black Perspectives at 30: Through the Lens series. (2022, 122 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]

Nikyatu Jusu’s NANNY (US)

Siskel Film Center — Wednesday, 8:30pm

Figures of West African folklore feature prominently throughout NANNY. As a character remarks, they “are figures of survival and resistance for oppressed people. They challenge the dominant order, subverting through chaos, anarchy, creative energy—they refuse to be ruled by the human or the divine.” Unhurried and dreamy, NANNY is an impressively meditative first feature from director Nikyatu Jusu, a deliberately paced character study concerning displacement, found community, and motherhood. Aisha (a fantastic Anna Diop) is a Senegalese immigrant who takes a job as a nanny for a wealthy New York City family; she’s hoping to save enough money to have her young son join her in the United States. Dreams and visions of water and spiders haunt her as she navigates her position as an exploited domestic worker and immigrant. Jusu presents gorgeously constructed shots: the cold NYC apartment in which Aisha spends the bulk of her time is filled with windows and mirrors that emphasize the themes of reflection, juxtaposing the warm reds and browns of her home spaces. The horror of the film comes less from the frightening images that disturb Aisha and more from the daily challenges she faces as an immigrant mother working to reunite with her son. The couple she works for (Michelle Monaghan and Morgan Spector) are clearly in a deteriorating marriage, which results in the neglect of their young daughter, Rose (Rose Decker), and their mistreatment of Aisha. But NANNY is not all that interested in delving into their lives much deeper than that; this is in no way their story. The film never turns away from Aisha and her experiences, including the uplifting, as when she begins a new romance. It’s also interested in the wider themes of domestic work, the African diaspora, the immigrant experience, and systemic injustice in general. Screening as part of the Black Perspectives at 30: Through the Lens series. (2022, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Jacques Rivette's DUELLE (France)

Alamo Drafthouse — Wednesday, 9pm

Jacques Rivette understood that the magic of narrative cinema had little to do with narrative; rather, it came from the accumulation of gestures, fetish objects, and make-believe that rendered each movie a world unto itself. A follow-up to his greatest achievement, CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING (1974), DUELLE was released along with NOROÎT in 1976 as parts of an intended quartet of films, but the third and fourth episodes were never made. In hindsight, the unfinished nature of the project seems to epitomize Rivette, who was known for his unresolved, yet remarkably intricate, conspiracy premises. DUELLE even goes so far as to invent its own cosmology, which involves immortal beings assuming human form in contemporary Paris, but the nature of the myth remains opaque until the end. As a storyteller, Rivette was more concerned with imagining complications than with connecting them, and this makes DUELLE feel like a Louis Feuillade serial, with the suggestion that the narrative innovations could spin out indefinitely. Enhancing the connection with silent cinema, Rivette had pianist Jean Wiener on set throughout the filming of DUELLE to accompany the action. As Henry Witt explained in his program notes for the UW Cinematheque, "Though always on-location when providing accompaniment, Wiener and his piano are only sometimes visible onscreen. His appearances vary from having entirely sensible diegetic motivations—performing at a nightclub, for instance—to the nonsensical, like when he appears midway through a private hotel room conversation... This slippery approach to the diegesis reflects the film’s handling of realism and fantasy generally." The cinematography, by regular Rivette collaborator William Lubtchansky, adds to the film's slippery nature. While it doesn't seem overtly fantastical, the photography nonetheless captures magic auras in real locations, like the great shafts of lights that shoot through a train station early on in the film or the glow off of fish tanks in a late-night aquarium sequence clearly indebted to Welles' THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (1947). Such effects suggest (like the narrative itself) a supernatural presence lurking beneath the veneer of ordinary life; for Rivette, cinema had the power to bring that presence out into the open. Screening as part of the Weird Wednesday series. (1976, 121 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

SUPER-HORROR-RAMA! presents Robert Englund’s 976-EVIL (US)

Music Box Theatre — Saturday, 11:30pm

The lonely teenage outsider, bullied until they finally strike back, has been a durable horror and teen-film archetype. From MASSACRE AT CENTRAL HIGH (1976) to HEATHERS (1988), stories of picked-on kids getting revenge turn humiliation into catharsis. Sometimes retaliation makes them heroic; Robert Englund’s 976-EVIL reveals what happens when revenge becomes something darker. Stephen Geoffreys plays Hoax, a well-adjusted teenager living under his mother’s strict religious beliefs. He gets excellent grades but has no friends until his cousin Spike (Patrick O’Bryan) inadvertently introduces him to a “Horrorscope” hotline, which provides guidance and the closest thing to companionship Hoax has known. After a gang of New Wave punks—who project films and play cards—try to drown Hoax in a toilet, he uses the hotline to get revenge. When his killing spree includes his own mother, he is no longer a bullied teenager getting even. He is the villain. That makes Spike, initially the less interesting cousin, the film’s de facto hero. He is tempted by the Faustian 1-900 number but ultimately refuses its instructions. The pay-per-minute calls and late-night commercials for sexy voices, psychics, and horoscopes have largely disappeared, but the idea of an isolated teenager seeking out any voice willing to listen has not. Comparisons to CARRIE are obvious: bullied adolescent, religious parent, supernatural revenge. 976-EVIL also belongs to the era’s fear of technology and Satanic panic. Like EVILSPEAK, it is a “techno-devil” movie in which Satan reaches an alienated youth through consumer electronics. Hoax doesn’t join a cult; he makes a phone call. His mother already uses the phone to make countless pledges to television evangelists. If calls can reach Heaven, the movie reasons, why shouldn’t they reach Hell? Englund fills the film with playful visual and verbal allusions: the El Diablo Theater, Dante’s Diner, a mechanic named Virgil, and even a deviled-egg sandwich foreshadow the climactic literalization of Hell freezing over. Beneath the jokes is a darker reading of Hoax’s alienation. He never identifies as gay, but his perceived lack of masculinity marks him as an outsider. He idolizes Spike, watches him having sex, and envies the confidence he associates with his cousin. His supernatural transformation gives him the physical power and sexual confidence he believes other boys possess. Geoffreys chose 976-EVIL over reprising Evil Ed in FRIGHT NIGHT PART II and later appeared in nearly 30 queer adult films before returning to horror. Like Evil Ed, Geoffreys approached the role of Hoax with queer subtext. Englund’s directorial debut leaves a lot of room for a queer reading of Hoax: the devil gives Hoax a grotesque version of the masculinity he thinks he lacks. He becomes stronger, confident, and possessed by surrendering his real identity. The devil doesn’t make Hoax into someone else. He gives him exactly what he thinks he wants and lets it consume him. Spike may be the hero, but the villain is ultimately who we learn from. (1988, 95 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]
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Also screening as part of SUPER-HORROR-RAMA! is Eric Weston's 1981 film EVILSPEAK (88 min, DCP Digital) on Friday at 11:30pm. Both were guest-programmed by Full Bleed.

Ishiro Honda's DESTROY ALL MONSTERS (Japan)

Alamo Drafthouse — Saturday, 1:45pm and Sunday, 12pm and 10:15pm

The ninth feature in the extensive Godzilla filmography was originally slated to be the last in the series, so what better way to go out than with an all out, no holds barred, kaiju melee? DESTROY ALL MONSTERS reunites the Toho Showa Era Holy Trinity moviemaking team of director Ishiro Honda, special effects supervisor Eiji Tsuburaya, and composer Akira Ifukube, who are all working at the top of their game. The story itself is fairly straightforward. In the future year 20XX, mankind is working in near harmony, taking frequent trips to the moon and studying all of Earth's kaiju population, who have been corralled to the appropriately named Monster Island. A nefarious alien race, the Kilaaks, places the monsters under mind control and unleashes them across the globe to create destruction, effectively holding the Earth hostage. As with most Godzilla movies, the destruction sequences are the main draw, and DESTROY ALL MONSTERS features some of the most impressive miniatures work the series has to offer. The climactic battle is a glorious cacophony of rubber suits, pyrotechnics, and a driving score as well. Honda's movies frequently feature an optimistic outlook towards the future, envisioning a world where humanity sets aside its differences and global politics to make the Earth a better place for all. To Honda, the betterment for the collective good comes first and foremost. In an era where Godzilla movies had all but lost their initial messages about the horrors of nuclear war and shifted towards children's popcorn movies, DESTROY ALL MONSTERS strikes a balance with its ability to appeal to audiences of all ages and reigns as one of the classic era's very best entries. (1968, 88 min, DCP Digital) [Kyle Cubr]

Ken Russell’s ALTERED STATES (US)

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

“So, let’s get married, and if it turns out to be a disaster, it’ll be a disaster. We’ll shake hands and say goodbye.” If only it were that simple. Ken Russell’s sci-fi trip ALTERED STATES focuses on Eddie Jessup and his research on various mental states, utilizing methods like isolation chambers, psychoactive drugs or a combination of both. Eddie and Emily (who delivers the line referenced above) quickly meet, fall in love, and marry; after a jump forward in time, they prepare for their divorce. While this may sound like a lot of emotions to juggle, that’s not even the half of it. William Hurt, in his breakout role as Eddie, delicately fluctuates from passionate lover in one scene to cold, rational, and narrow-minded in another. His struggle—between the physical and the mental, the rational and the emotional, the body and the mind—is perpetually on display in ALTERED STATES, and it was at play during the development of the film itself. It was adapted from a novel of the same name by novelist and screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, who dropped out of the production and took credit under the pseudonym Sidney Aaron after butting heads with Ken Russell over creative differences. Despite the departure, Russell claimed they mostly shot the script as it was presented. The tension between a screenwriter and a director is nothing unheard of, but the clash between two mediums—literature vs cinema—can be seen to seep into the finished film. Frequently the characters present us with mountains of intellectual jargon; it almost sounds poetic, the way they interrupt and talk over one another, layering on the pieces of an orchestra ensemble. Russell interrupts the talk to bombard us with extraordinary visuals that resemble something at an art installation. The filmmakers' refusal to pull back into comfortable tropes and accessibility proves that, with the right vision, you can create something unique, no matter how tough it may be to get to that point. Give ALTERED STATES a shot if you’re seeking true madness (genius?) on display. Screening as part of the Ken Russell’s Pitch-Perfect Perversions series. (1980, 102 min, Digital Projection) [Drew Van Weelden]

Mike Nichols' THE BIRDCAGE (US)

Alamo Drafthouse — Friday, 3pm; Monday, 3:45pm and 7pm; and Tuesday, 3:45pm

THE BIRDCAGE, a 1996 American remake of the French film LA CAGE AUX FOLLES (1978), itself an adaptation of a play, was the first film collaboration by classic comedy duo Mike Nichols and Elaine May. Thirty years later, it ages incredibly well as an artifact of how successfully they collaborated with each other and a talented cast in the film to produce the first big American studio film featuring openly LGBTQ lead characters and, more significantly, a heartwarming comedy instead of a tragic drama. May wrote the screenplay and took full advantage of the opportunity to leverage the plot to skewer gender norms, fragile masculinity, heteronormative "family values," and politically expedient anti-LGBTQ sentiment that was common at the time and is, unfortunately, currently dominating the political landscape in the form of drag bans, bathroom bills, and other anti-gay and anti-trans legislation. Nichols and May also took full advantage of their talented cast and history with improv to collaborate together on the screenplay, conducting weeks of rehearsals and inviting the cast, especially Robin Williams and Nathan Lane, to improvise their lines. Williams and Lane play Armand and Albert, a gay couple who have spent two decades running a successful cabaret club in flamboyant South Beach, Florida, and raising a son, Val, played by Dan Futterman. Val surprises his parents with the news that he has become engaged to Barbara (Calista Flockhart), the daughter of a conservative senator (Gene Hackman) and his demure wife (Dianne Wiest). Concerned that Barbara's parents will not consent to the marriage if they meet Val's "alternative" family in all their glory, Val begs Armand to play it straight, keep Albert out of the house, nix the variety of fertility statues peppering the apartment, and rein in Agador (Hank Azaria), their Guatemalan housekeeper who dreams of gracing the stage at Armand's cabaret. Chaos ensues when Albert learns of the scheme and the team improvises desperately to appear heterosexual before the senator and his wife. This incredibly well-oiled farce plays perfectly from start to finish, a testament to Nichols and May and their talent for nurturing spontaneity while adhering to a quickly-paced plot. In contrast to the intense energy of the farcical scenes between the Goldmans (ahem, the "D" is silent) and the Keeleys, quiet moments of intimacy and candor between Williams and Lane as the loving lead couple are moments to truly savor in the film, a rare glimpse at a healthy gay relationship at a time when LGBTQ characters were solely used as comic foils, tragic plot devices, or cautionary tales. Screening as part of Queer Film Theory 101. (1996, 119 min, DCP Digital) [Alex Ensign]

James Cameron's TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY (US)

Alamo Drafthouse — Wednesday, 2:30pm and Thursday, 6:45pm

A prime example of the atomic bomb's unintentional popular promotion of a divine, millenarian Christian theocracy—an ideal from which our nation basically has yet to recover—James Cameron's TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY remains in the gentile closet, despite its explicit subtitle. In retrospect, however, this blockbuster infancy gospel of divinely-born post-apocalyptic savior John Connor (Edward Furlong)—a miraculous ATM-cracker who acquires his morality and military wits under the crossfire of two asexual, fallen archangels (Arnold Schwarzenegger and Robert Patrick)—wholly exposes secular pop science-fiction culture as a simultaneously technophobic and technophiliac boys' theology. The young J.C. instructs his reprogrammed protector in the Commandments ("You can't just go around killing people!"); Judas is recast as an innocent VLSI engineer (BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET's Joe Morton) who sacrifices himself after learning of his own future betrayal to humanity; and the film cannily bridges blue-collar, survivalist vehicular/firearms fetishism with an anti-nuclear Neo-Luddism in addressing the philosophical contradiction (shared by both the Church and the quantum-physics ivory tower) between predestination and free will. The action scenes are also shot with a remarkable, now-antiquated spatial coherence. (1991, 137 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Castelle]

Paul Verhoeven's STARSHIP TROOPERS (US)

The 400 Theater — Saturday and Sunday, 6:30pm

It may be hard to believe now, but in 1997, a sizable portion of the viewing public—including a fair number of American critics—didn’t recognize that STARSHIP TROOPERS was a satire. But then again, how many people were talking about the subtext of Douglas Sirk melodramas in the 1950s? Like Sirk before him, Paul Verhoeven is a leftist European intellectual (with a double PhD in mathematics and physics, no less!) who understands the conventions of Hollywood pulp all too well; his commentaries on American soullessness and material excess deliver the surface pleasures of genre cinema so effectively that one can forgive audiences for being too distracted to read between the lines. Containing as much nudity and carnage as the MPAA would allow in an R-rated film (it had to be trimmed several times to dodge an NC-17), STARSHIP TROOPERS indeed offers plenty of mindless distraction; at the same time, it blatantly equates American imperialism with Nazism, and some of the cutaway jokes about all-American bloodlust (like the commercial for a televised execution) are so over the top as to recall Mel Brooks. Based on a novel by the far-right sci-fi writer Robert A. Heinlein, the film takes place in a distant future where America’s colonization of the entire world has come to pass and the planet is divided into “citizens” (who have served their government) and “civilians” (who haven’t and are thus denied such basic rights as the ability to vote). Now colonizing the galaxy, America (or, “Earth”) decides it must eliminate a widespread species of giant killer bugs on a far-off ring of planets for reasons that are never really clear, at least not until the bugs start defending themselves. The story follows a group of high school friends as they enlist in the army after graduation, go through basic training, and enter into combat. Ed Neumeier’s script is a knowing composite of war movie clichés (there’s even an idealistic recruit who says he’s going to be a writer), and much of the deliberately bland cast seems to have stepped out of an underwear ad. The war and all the people in it come off as stupid; it’s not inappropriate to cheer for the bugs. To that end, Verhoeven realizes the spectacle of giant insects mutilating and killing human beings both vividly and giddily—there’s an undeniable kinetic charge to the film’s battle sequences. The wide shots therein are rife with garish, comic book-style detail, much like STARSHIP TROOPERS on the whole. The “news break” sequences (which have become a lot less funny since the ascendancy of Fox News) are short blasts of righteous humor, recasting American infotainment in the visual language of Nazi propaganda films and highlighting the chilling similarities between the two. (1997, 129 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Wong Kar-wai’s IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (Hong Kong)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) — Sunday, 6:30pm

Taking place in 1960s Hong Kong or in the memory of 1960s Hong Kong—that city deemed too modern, many of the film's exteriors were shot in Bangkok, after all—Wong Kar-wai's film is a beautiful rumination on its title. Much has been made of IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE's restraint, and there is that: a couple, married to other people who are themselves having affairs, become intimate in every way but physical—save for slight, loaded gestures and tight spaces. The film is pregnant with the overwhelming feeling of infatuation, executed in a lusciousness that recalls something from a dream. But for every restraint there is a counterpoint in excess: Maggie Cheung's many gorgeous dresses are as flamboyant as they are confining; the musical score is both pitch-perfect and overwhelming, familiar and foreign; the cinematography is so rich and meticulous that its multitude of color is evocative of Douglas Sirk's melodramas. IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE has hit upon such acclaim because of its local particularity—a commemoration of sorts for Hong Kong's transfer of sovereignty that had not yet happened—as well as its thematic universality as a transnational melodrama. As characters move through Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines, Cambodia, and the film shifts forward and backward in time, we are reminded of the fluidity of borders, time, and memory. The moment is paramount, and Wong Kar-wai gives us a series of beautiful, sumptuous moments that we can live in forever. Screening presented by Night Owls. Followed by a discussion with Daniel Morgan and Agnes Callard. Free admission for UCID holders. (2000, 98 min, DCP Digital) [Brian Welesko]

Sasha Waters’ MARY OLIVER: SAVED BY THE BEAUTY OF THE WORLD (US/Documentary)

The 400 Theater — See Venue website for showtimes

Some filmmakers just love a challenge: how does one document the life and impact of a lesbian poet who was a hermit and intensely private for most of her life? Director Sasha Waters, an experienced documentary and experimental filmmaker, rose to the challenge by using archival footage (diligently sourced from public archives) and photographs sourced from Mary's longtime partner, photographer Molly Malone Cook, to share earlier moments of Mary's life, including imagined moments of archival nature footage to represent her nature rambles, lyrically spliced to readings of her poetry in both her own voice and recited by others who are later interviewed on screen in the film. Oliver is one of our most famous American poets, often compared to Whitman (whom she adored), Thoreau, and other Transcendentalists who ascribed the natural world a power to bring us closer to spiritual enlightenment and understanding of the human realm. Her poetry often leverages metaphors found through observation of the natural world, an experience she describes rapturously, vividly, and with unabashed feeling throughout her body of work—though it meant her work was taken less seriously by critics and contemporaries who thought her subject matter dated, trite, and sometimes downright embarrassing. As a result, Oliver languished in obscurity in Provincetown, Massachusetts, for much of her adult life, working at a bookstore and doing other odd jobs so that she could take precious time to write and ramble in the woods. During her time in Provincetown, she became lifelong friends with John Waters, one of the star talking heads of MARY OLIVER and an astute, irreverent observer of her life and unique personality. Other talking heads include celebrity readers of her poetry (Stephen Colbert, Oprah, Helena Bonham Carter, Lucy Dacus) and fellow poets, critics, and writers. Over time, I became suspicious that this was going to be a train of celebrity fans masquerading as a documentary, but Sasha Waters treads carefully here, only inviting celebrities who were publicly ascribed admirers to read in the film. This is evident in the sheer emotion with which they speak of her work—especially Colbert, who is unable to complete the reading, being so overcome by emotion. These readings do end up taking second stage to Oliver's own readings of her poetry: her voice is powerful and unique in reading her works, which she did rarely in her early years of obscurity but executed almost to excess late in life, up almost until her death in 2019, as though making up for lost time. Several surprisingly powerful interviews in the film relate to this later, gregarious period of her life, so at odds with her decades of hermitage, sparked by a revelation that Mary was a victim of sexual abuse as a child by her own father. One is with V (formerly Eve) Ensler, who shared a similar story of abuse and was met with strong emotion by the typically taciturn Oliver backstage at a conference, and Maria Shriver, who learned of the abuse in an interview with Mary late in life that had been published in written form in Oprah Magazine, but also filmed and never aired—until Waters inquired during the making of this documentary. I like to think that this film will be as moving and insightful for longtime Oliver fans like myself as well as newcomers to her work. It serves as both a revelation to those who thought they knew her and a tender, moving introduction to her for those who are not familiar. Her words, treated with great care and attention by the filmmaker, deserve to be heard, not just read, through this unique opportunity, including these famous lines from "Wild Geese" read in the film by Helena Bonham Carter: "Whoever you are, no matter how lonely/the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—/over and over announcing your place/in the family of things." (2026, 91 min, DCP Digital) [Alex Ensign]

John Carpenter’s ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (US)

The 400 Theater — See Venue website for showtimes

High concept and low class, John Carpenter's 1981 sci-fi/action film premises itself on a paranoid endgame scenario: what if crime just keeps going up? Carpenter settles on the conservative trajectory of 400 percent and cedes Manhattan to the most violent criminals, turning it into an island prison and letting it go to ruin. Only the most hardened offenders are sentenced there—new prisoners are given the option of cremation before arrival—making it a particularly bad place for the President (Donald Pleasence) to crash land. Charged with fishing him out within 22 hours, the police commissioner (Lee Van Cleef) offers a full pardon to incoming convict 'Snake' Plissken (Kurt Russell), a former Special Forces operative-turned-criminal—but only if he can successfully recover the President. ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK is a wild ride that is at times clever and at other times surprisingly dull. Most interesting is not the search-and-rescue but the creative depiction of a ruined New York and its ad hoc city-life, circumscribed by extreme danger. An old acquaintance, Cabbie (Ernest Borgnine), watches an all-convict Broadway production before making his way uptown with Molotov cocktails at the ready. Shot mostly in darkness, Carpenter succeeds in creating a closed-off atmosphere that is both somehow dingy and futuristic. These touches, along with several solid performances, breathe life into the rote barrel fire-pocked landscape, and Snake himself. (1981, 99 min, DCP Digital) [Brian Welesko]

Gregg Araki’s MYSTERIOUS SKIN (US)

Music Box Theatre — See Venue website for showtimes

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

Na Hong-jin’s HOPE (South Korea)

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

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

📽️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Alamo Drafthouse
John Wilson’s 2026 documentary THE HISTORY OF CONCRETE (102 min, DCP Digital) screens this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

Neil Breen’s 2026 film DIRE DUPLICITY (95 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday at 7:15pm, and Monday at 9:45pm.

A surprise 1960s South African children's film screens Friday, 10pm, as part of the AGFAdrome Mystery Voyage series.

Poh Si Teng’s 2026 documentary AMERICAN DOCTOR (91 min, Digital Projection) screens Saturday at 10:15am and Monday at 1pm.

Geoffrey Wright’s 1999 film CHERRY FALLS (91 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 9:30pm, as part of the Terror Tuesday series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Black Cinema House
Black Cinema House and The Cinema Culture present a screening of Louis Massah and Monica Henriquez's 2025 documentary TCB: THE TONI CADE BAMBARA SCHOOL OF ORGANIZING (105 min, Digital Projection) on Saturday, 6pm, at The Land School (7200 S. Dorchester Ave.), presented by Rebuild Foundation. The screening will be followed by a conversation with Kayla Myers and jada-amina. Free admission; RSVP required. More info here.

⚫ Block Cinema
The Lost DIY Horror Films Of Kip Hanks screens Thursday, 7pm, as part of the Repossessed: Reviving Supernatural Cinema from Beyond the Grave series. The program features the first-ever public screening of Kip Hanks's 1991 film COLD HANDS (60 min, Digital Projection) alongside Hanks's 1986 debut THE DUST (24 min, 16mm). Introduced by Block Cinema curator Michael Metzger and followed by a post-screening discussion with independent filmmaker and Northwestern professor Spencer Parsons. Free admission. More info here.

⚫ The CheckOut (4116 N. Clark St.)
ACM presents Score & Screen: FANTÔMAS PART III on Wednesday, 7:30pm, in collaboration with SUPER-HORROR-RAMA! The third installment of Louis Feuillade's 1913–1914 five-film serial will screen with a live score. More info here.

⚫ Chicago Cultural Center
Asian Pop-Up Cinema presents a Mid-Autumn Festival screening of Ian Hongchan's 2026 film DEAR YOU (117 min, Digital Projection) on Sunday, 2pm, co-presented by the City of Chicago, DCASE, Chicago Film Office, Asian Pop-Up Cinema, and the Consulate General of the People's Republic of China in Chicago. Complimentary moon cakes served after the screening. Free admission; RSVP required.

DCASE and the Chicago Film Office present the Cassidy Theater Film Club x Art is Labor screening series, with Julio Torres's 2023 film PROBLEMISTA (104 min, Digital Projection) on Wednesday, 6:30pm, as the first installment. Free admission; RSVP required. More info here.

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

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

⚫ Cinema/Chicago
Karla Badillo's 2025 film OCA (109 min, Digital Projection) screens Sunday, 1pm, at the National Museum of Mexican Art (1852 W. 19th St.), as part of Cinema/Chicago's Community Cinema series. Free admission; advance registration suggested. More info here.

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Fernando Ayala's 1956 film THE BITTER STEMS (90 min, 35mm) screens Monday, 7pm, as part of the Golden Age of Argentine Noir series.

Lothar Warneke's 1982 film APPREHENSION (96 min, 35mm) screens Tuesday, 7pm, as part of the Films of Thomas Plenert series. More info on all screenings here. 

⚫ Eyewash Station
Frames Within Frames Film Program screens Sunday at 7pm. The program features three films: Stefan Gruber's BOILER ROOM MYSTICS (22 min, Digital Projection), René Jodoin's 1984 animated short RECTANGLES & RECTANGLES (8 min, Digital Projection), and Marcell Jankovics's 1981 animated film SON OF THE WHITE MARE (90 min, Digital Projection).

Radley Metzger's 1970 film THE LICKERISH QUARTET (90 min, Digital Projection) screens Monday at 7pm.

Nagisa Oshima's 1986 film MAX MY LOVE (98 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday at 7pm.

Slava Tsukerman's 1982 film LIQUID SKY (112 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday at 7pm.

N.M. Alvarez and Richie Hidalgo's 2025 film A FIELD, A BODY, AN ANGEL (83 min, Digital Projection) screens Thursday, 7pm, preceded by Hidalgo's short film I THOUGHT I HEARD SOMETHING (11 min). More info on all screenings here.

⚫ FACETS
The Aladerri International Film Festival goes through Sunday.

Mike Doyle's 2026 film BOOKENDS (99 min, Digital Projection) screens Monday, 7pm, presented by Open Space Arts as part of its ongoing Queer Expression Film Festival.

The Reel Film Club presents Antonella Sudassassi Furniss's 2024 film MEMORIES OF A BURNING BODY (100 min, Digital Projection) on Tuesday, 7pm, followed by a post-screening conversation.

Sweet Void Cinema presents a screenwriting workshop on Wednesday from 6pm to 9pm in the Facets Studio.

Shinya Tsukamoto's 2011 film KOTOKO (91 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 7pm, as part of the Staff Picks series, programmed by Facets customer service representative Julia Nordhem. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Mouse Arts and Letters (555 W. 31st St.)
Mouse Arts and Letters presents HALSTED ST.: Final Plans on Sunday at 3pm. This is time to finalize schedules, assemble teams, and produce itineraries for the group-led documentary HALSTED ST. Drop-ins welcome. Free and open to the public. More info here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
John Wilson’s 2026 documentary THE HISTORY OF CONCRETE (102 min, DCP Digital) begins screening this week and Walter Thompson-Hernandez’s 2026 film IF I GO WILL THEY MISS ME (95 min, DCP Digital) continues.

Jared Hess's 2006 film NACHO LIBRE (92 min, 35mm) screens Friday, midnight, as part of the ongoing Crucemos al Otro Lado series. Enjoy a musical performance by Gabacho at 11:30pm featuring songs from Nacho Libre's soundtrack.

Don Chaffey's 1977 film PETE'S DRAGON (128 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday and Sunday, 11am, as part of the Indoor Kids family matinee series.

The Chicago Film Society presents Chris + Heather's 16mm Big Screen Blowout #3 on Saturday at 11:30am, all on 16mm.

Jim Sharman's 1975 film THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (100 min, 35mm) screens Saturday, midnight, with a live shadowcast performed by Midnight Madness.

David Grabias and Brendon Schulze's 2026 documentary BRAILLED IT (73 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday, 2pm, with Grabias in attendance for a post-screening Q&A moderated by Cassidy Dimon.

Nick Davis's 2025 documentary YOU HAD TO BE THERE: HOW THE TORONTO GODSPELL IGNITED THE COMEDY REVOLUTION (98 min, DCP Digital) screens Monday, 7pm, followed by a post-screening Q&A with Davis moderated by Kelly Leonard. Co-presented by the Second City Chicago.

Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens present all three films of their ecosexual documentary trilogy, with Sprinkle and Stephens in attendance, on Tuesday and Wednesday. PLAYING WITH FIRE: AN ECOSEXUAL EMERGENCY (2025, 71 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 6:30pm, preceded by an introduction with an Ecosex 101 Primer and followed by a post-screening Q&A moderated by Matt Fagerholm. GOODBYE GAULEY MOUNTAIN: AN ECOSEXUAL LOVE STORY (2014, 71 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday, 6:30pm, preceded again by an introduction with an Ecosex 101 Primer and followed by a post-screening Q&A moderated by Greg Archer. WATER MAKES US WET: AN ECOSEXUAL ADVENTURE (2019, 75 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday, 9pm, with a special pop-up Water Bar with Lindsay Kelley in the lounge before the screening and followed by a Q&A moderated by alterotics.

⚫ Palestine Film Showcase
Sensitive Visuals presents a Palestine Film Showcase on Saturday, 4pm, at 18th Street Casa de Cultura (2057 W. 18th St., Pilsen), as a fundraiser for documentarian Fadel Moghrabi and Gaza-based filmmaker Woroud Al-Qassas. 100% of proceeds go directly to Moghrabi and Al-Qassas. Note: Tickets are sold out, but a waitlist will be available at the venue starting at 3:15pm. More info here.

⚫ Reeling 2026: The 44th Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival
The festival continues through Sunday at Chicago Filmmakers. More info here.

⚫ Siskel Film Center
Josef Kubota Wladyka's 2026 film HA-CHAN, SHAKE YOUR BOOTY! (122 min, DCP Digital) and Sam Green's 2026 documentary THE OLDEST PERSON IN THE WORLD (87 min, DCP Digital) begin screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

Jack Hill's 1974 film FOXY BROWN (91 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday at 2pm and Monday at 6pm as part of the 25 For 25 series, revisiting standout titles from the Siskel's State Street history.

The Gene Siskel Film Center and Chicago Public Library present SHORTS FROM THE BLOCK: BLACK HARVEST'S CHICAGO STORIES on Tuesday, 6pm, at the Elie Wiesel Auditorium at the Obama Presidential Center Forum (6001 S. Stony Island Ave.), in celebration of the Black Harvest Film Festival's 32nd anniversary. The 46-minute program features five short films and will be followed by a conversation with journalist Sylvia Ewing and Black Harvest Film Festival curator jada-amina. Free admission; registration is currently full, but a same-day waitlist opens at the Obama Presidential Center at 5:30pm, with unclaimed seats released at 6:10pm.

Nancy Andrews: Phantom Limb (75 min, 16mm and Digital) screens Thursday, 6pm, as part of the Conversations at the Edge series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Sisters in Cinema
Dee Rees's 2011 film PARIAH (86 min, Digital Projection) screens Friday, 7pm, at Sisters in Cinema Media Arts Center (2318 E. 75th St.), as a 15th anniversary screening presented in partnership with the Center on Halsted. Free admission. More info here. 

⚫ Uprising Theater & Cafe (2905 N. Milwaukee Ave.)
Poh Si Teng’s 2026 documentary AMERICAN DOCTOR (91 min, Digital Projection) and Padraic McKinley’s 2026 film THE WEIGHT (114 min, Digital Projection) screen this weekend. See Venue website for showtimes. More info on all screenings here.

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Michael Castelle, Kyle Cubr, Ray Ebarb, Alex Ensign, Megan Fariello, Shaun Huhn, Ben Kaye, Kevin B. Lee, Nicky Ni, Michael Glover Smith, James Stroble, Drew Van Weelden, Brian Welesko