:: FRIDAY, JULY 3- THURSDAY, JULY 9 ::

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Howard Hawks' THE DAWN PATROL (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) — Thursday, 8pm

Describing the early talkies of Howard Hawks, Henri Langlois observed that they are "stripped bare almost to the point of abstraction—it is as if they are made of concrete." This applies especially to THE DAWN PATROL, an effort as orderly and grim as its subject matter. Coming after a cycle of elaborate Great War epics (THE BIG PARADE, WHAT PRICE GLORY, WINGS, and ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT), THE DAWN PATROL looks diminutive and rough. The cynical sobriety undercuts the action climax and the overarching fatalism preempts traditional character development. It lacks the vulgar immediacy of Howard Hughes's box office rival, HELL'S ANGELS. What makes THE DAWN PATROL haunting—and undermines the traditionalist reflex of assuming that early talkies were merely incompetent—is the fact that these choices were apparently deliberate. Interviewed by Joseph McBride in 1977, Hawks took credit for the undercooked intensity and creaky integrity of the production: "When I was making THE DAWN PATROL, which was my first talking picture, I got forty letters from the front office saying that I'd missed chances of doing good scenes because I'd underdone them so much. I've saved the letters just for fun. The dialogue before that reminded you of a villain talking on a riverboat, UNCLE TOM'S CABIN or something like that. They hammed it up. And I stopped them from doing that in DAWN PATROL. They weren't used to normal dialogue. They weren't used to normal reading. They wanted to have somebody beat his chest and wave his arms." This disavowal of melodrama is THE DAWN PATROL's most notable aspect: Hawks' next picture, THE CRIMINAL CODE, hinted at a reversion to the norm, while SCARFACE exploded the excess—and effectively purged it from Hawks' art. Hawks' visual sense isn't very developed here: the handling of confined spaces and restricted geography is threadbare next to RIO BRAVO or TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT. The themes, developed in concert with novelist John Monk Saunders, are visible in embryo: THE DAWN PATROL serves as a sketch and spiritual prequel to Hawks' ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS—another portrait of men so frightened by death that they can only mock it, disbelieve it, and gleefully submit. (The two pictures also share silent heartthrob Richard Barthelmess: his DAWN PATROL despair serves as an alternative biography, or perhaps an alibi, for his broken flier in ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS.) So, the pleasures of THE DAWN PATROL are largely auteurist—those not invested in the trajectory of Hawks' career need not apply. Screening as part of the Howard Hawks’ Pre-War Years series. (1930, 108 min, 35mm) [K.A. Westphal]

John Cameron Mitchell's HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH (US)

Music Box Theatre — Tuesday and Wednesday, 7pm [Sold Out]

HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH is a magnificent, glam rock, genderbending film adaptation of an off-Broadway musical by John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask. Mitchell and Trask co-wrote and produced the songs together, and the soundtrack is electric, emotive, cinematic, and unforgettable. Mitchell wrote, directed, and starred in HEDWIG as the titular transgender woman from East Berlin. Hedwig grew up daydreaming about David Bowie and Lou Reed in dreary communist housing with her single mother. A failed misfit at university, Hedwig (then Hansel) is swept off her feet by American Sgt. Luther Robinson, a smooth-talking man who convinces Hansel to leave a little...something...behind in order to get married and emigrate to the US, which had been Hansel's dream. One botched sex change operation and failed relationship later, Hedwig finds herself in a singlewide trailer in the midwestern prairie wondering just what to do with her life. The number "Angry Inch" describes her operation to the extreme discomfort of unsuspecting patrons at the seafood restaurant chain where Hedwig regularly performs with her band, followed by "Wig in a Box," a fantastic number about the iconic women who inform Hedwig's feminine persona as she picks herself back up again. Hedwig's life changes dramatically when she begins babysitting an angsty 17-year-old who becomes Tommy Gnosis under her careful tutelage. They fall in love, Tommy catapults to fame, and he leaves his co-writer and lover in the dust. Hedwig has to pick herself back up once again, re-examine her Platonic ideals (her obsession with Greek and German Idealist philosophy shines through the song "The Origin of Love" and her dissertation title: "You Kant Always Get What You Want"), and figure out what she really wants to do with her life and career. HEDWIG shifts from comedy to pathos with masterful ease, despite this being Mitchell's first movie. He workshopped the script at the Sundance Labs and went on to win a string of awards, including three at Sundance Film Festival. It's not difficult to see why, with the fabulous score, cinematography, acting (Miriam Shor is especially wonderful as Yitzshak, Hedwig's disgruntled, scruffy present-day husband who yearns to don drag himself), and a beautiful animation sequence by Emily Hubley. In the 17 years since I was in high school, when I drove two hours away to Madison, Wisconsin to see HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH and left the theatre feeling exuberant, understood, thrilled, and wonderfully alive, this movie has shaped my understanding and appreciation of the film musical. I am happy to say that it still holds up. After seeing many more musicals since HEDWIG, I am convinced that it is one of the most skillful, gorgeous, and effective film adaptations of a stage musical ever made. This may seem ambitious, but I would count this wacky cult classic alongside FUNNY GIRL and CABARET as successful adaptations that use elements specific to the medium of film to amplify powerful moments within the drama and intensify the intimate connection we as audience feel with the protagonist. Like Barbra Streisand's first semi-sarcastic look in the mirror ("Hello, gorgeous!"), Hedwig's semi-panicked-but-pleased look in the mirror after she dons her Farrah Fawcett wig speaks to something tentative and tenacious in us as we don tenuous personas to tackle our quotidian lives. Though Hedwig's experience is strange and unusual and a general audience may not relate to her particular gender odyssey, the intimacy created by the most cinematic and theatrical moments of HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH makes her quest for self-realization magnetic and compelling. Much like Minnelli's musicals, HEDWIG even seems to veer into the protagonist's mind in the final sequence, bringing an actualized self to life through music. I dare you to watch the final number of this movie and not feel chills. John Cameron Mitchell in attendance for post-screening Q&As and acoustic performances. Note that the Wednesday show is sold out. Arrive early for the pre-show costume contest—held in every city—for a chance to win prizes. (2001, 95 min, 35mm) [Alex Ensign]

Alfred Hitchcock’s MARNIE (US)

Music Box Theatre — Saturday, 11:30am

The second collaboration between Tippi Hedren and Alfred Hitchcock is a lush, seething melodrama of perversion. It is a filthy little fairy tale about the domestication of violence and the violence of domestication, about the ways women are raised to be their own victimizers. Hedren plays Marnie, a frigid ice maiden prone to kleptomania, compulsive lying, a morbid fear of the color red, and a general loathing for all men everywhere. The only creature she feels any affection for is her horse Forio, to whom she whispers, “If you want to bite someone, bite me.” She has no stable identity, moving from town to town, living under fake names and disguises, keeping herself carefully quarantined away from the world. Sean Connery, having rocketed to stardom by his role as James Bond in DR. NO (1962) and FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE (1963), plays Mark Rutland, an erection in the shape of a man who serves as the film’s fairy tale monster. He is a hunter, a tamer of wild beasts of all kinds, and a scholar of “predators, what you might call the criminal class of the animal world.” Rutland stalks and captures her, determined to cure Marnie’s problems with the magic powers of blackmail and marital rape. As he puts it, “I’ve tracked you and caught you and by god I’m going to keep you.” And keep her he does, all the way into perhaps the most astonishing flashback sequence in Hitchcock’s career. In keeping with the artificial, constructed nature of Marnie’s past, Hitchcock develops his visual style to its most expressionistic: rear projections, flashes of color saturation, off-putting framings, explosions of non-naturalistic acting, lighting, set design. Characters move through, are divided by, vast architectures of glass, fields of peculiar opacity, backdrops of impossible fakeness. (In Hitchcock’s subtlest visual metaphor, Marnie carries bundles of stolen cash in a variety of leather bags shaped like vaginas.) Two demented souls, each cursed to bring misery to the other, each damned to find the other inescapable. A general theme for Hitchcock is that there is a sickness at the heart of every love story, and here, too. But there’s also a weird, uncanny love at the heart of the degradation and corruption here. Indeed, degradation and affection are, in the end, inseparable here, as Marnie’s mother angrily points out. Do we grow out of our traumas or just ripen into them? As with all the best fairy tales, and as all children already know, neither: the only way to truly love something is to kill it. After all, it’s not for nothing that the pivotal scene in MARNIE is one of euthanasia. Screening as part of the Fond of His Mother: Queer-coded Hitchcock series. (1964, 130 min, 35mm) [Kian Bergstrom]

William A. Wellman’s YOU NEVER KNOW WOMEN (US/Silent)

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

In his book on the filmmaker, Frank T. Thompson dubs William A. Wellman’s 1926 silent film YOU NEVER KNOW WOMEN “very nearly a masterpiece.” In my estimation the “very nearly” is unnecessary. It just is a masterpiece; what it's very near to is Wellman's WINGS, released the following year. That film understandably eclipsed YOU NEVER KNOW WOMEN in Wellman’s career, but its proximity throws into relief the distinctive visual elegance he was already commanding. Given the film's assurance, it's hard to believe the director had been on thin ice with Paramount—his first assignment was the now-lost THE CAT’S PAJAMAS, which Wellman himself called “one of the most horrible pictures ever made.” Wellman had been brought to the studio by B. P. Schulberg, who is credited with having discovered the likes of Clara Bow and Gary Cooper and who became head of West Coast production after his own studio, Preferred Pictures, had to file for bankruptcy. “When we saw the picture,” Wellman said of THE CAT’S PAJAMAS, “they decided I was no good and they were going to let me go. But Schulberg had to keep me, and the next one they gave me was YOU NEVER KNOW WOMEN. I sort of bounced back on that one. Then I got WINGS.” Bounced back, indeed. Based on a story devised by the Hungarian playwright and novelist Ernest Vajda (who would later work on several of Ernst Lubitsch’s films, to which this is comparable), the film centers on a group of traveling circus performers from the Imperial Vaudeville of Moscow on their first American tour. It begins with Vera (Florence Vidor, by then estranged from King) almost being killed by a falling beam while walking down the street; a rich cad (Lowell Sherman) pretends to have saved her, setting into motion the love triangle between him, Vera, and fellow performer, Norodin (Clive Brook), who is devastatingly in love with her. It’s a simple scenario made visually sublime by Victor Milner’s supernal cinematography (he’d shot THE CAT’S PAJAMAS and would later shoot many of Lubitsch’s films) and Wellman’s spirited mise-en-scène. In one extraordinary sequence, a performer balances a board on his upraised legs while Vera performs atop it; peering through the gap of his outstretched limbs, he sees his own beloved flirting with one of the cad’s wealthy and therefore pernicious associates. Tears seep from his eyes; despite his “Wild Bill” epithet, Wellman here demonstrates an unguarded sensitivity, perhaps ironic for a self-proclaimed man’s man. Maybe he’s only just very nearly one, after all. Preceded by Tony Starg’s 1921 short film THE FIRST CIRCUS (6 min, 35mm). (1926, 71 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]

Rosa von Praunheim's CITY OF LOST SOULS (West Germany)

Goethe-Institut Chicago (150 N. Michigan Ave.) — Tuesday, 6pm

Rosa von Praunheim is certainly not an unknown filmmaker, but much of his work is nearly impossible to see in the US; only a small handful of his more than 150 features and documentaries are currently available on home video or streaming platforms. A shame, given his importance as a pioneer of queer cinema and as an early figure of New German Cinema. Praunheim began directing in the late 1960s, along with compatriot gay German directors Werner Schroeter and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, though he would be less associated with the New German Cinema movement than as a central and influential maker of queer cinema. In contrast to Schroeter's formal play and Fassbinder's lacerating character studies, Praunheim would quickly adopt an unapologetically camp aesthetic, that mixed comedy, bad taste, and exaggerated stereotypes with pointed political and cultural critiques, sometimes controversially aimed at his own gay community, and with a keen appreciation of history. His 1983 film CITY OF LOST SOULS exemplifies the various strains in his work. It, like many of his films, is concerned with individuals on the fringes of society. Here, we have an ensemble work about American émigrés living in Germany who collectively represent a wide range of queer, trans, and drag identities, starring performers who are playing variants of themselves (most prominently punk singer Jayne County). The film follows their intersecting lives (all either work at Angie Stardust's hamburger stand or live at her pension), as they contend with relationship issues, work problems, accidents, religious epiphanies, rivalries, in-fighting, and a broader society that views them as permanent outsiders. Think R.W. Fassbinder meets Robert Altman meets John Waters. And add some musical numbers. It's a delirious and wonderfully uncouth film that pokes its finger in a lot of eyes, isn't afraid to reveal warts, and tries hard to have a good time, damn the naysayers. What keeps it from being too sharp or cynical, though, is Praunheim's obvious care for these individuals (both the characters and the performers, as they're basically one in the same). There's an underlying tenderness, beneath the crass and exaggerated surface. (1983, 91 min, Digital Projection) [Patrick Friel]

Dorothy Arzner’s THE WILD PARTY (US)

Siskel Film Center — Saturday, 1:45pm; Sunday, 2:30pm; and Tuesday, 6:15pm

THE WILD PARTY is, among much else, a film of firsts. It was the first venture into the world of Talkies for both silent film icon Clara Bow and trailblazing queer director Dorothy Arzner; it was the first of numerous collaborations between Arzner and leading man Frederic March; and it was the first sound film to be helmed by a female director. Given this array of “firsts” then, it’s no surprise that THE WILD PARTY—no relation to the infamous Joseph Moncure March poem published a year prior—feels like a first draft of what the next few decades of sound cinema would look and feel like, with all the growing pains of such an endeavor intact. Hollywood at large was collectively contending with how to add an aural level to an art form that had been otherwise presumably perfected, and both the technical and artistic ramifications of adding sound to the movies are on full display here in this charming-if-slight college girl romp full of muffled dialogue and structural inconsistencies. You can often feel Arzner, a passionate and skilled director in her own right, actively navigating through the transition from the filmic techniques of silent cinema to the necessities that come with sync sound. The most notable remnants of the silent era include select onscreen intertitles retained to help with narrative exposition, and Arzner still relies on her personal knack for visually appealing staging, along with the leverage she can pull from accessing her actors’ physical comedy chops. Most helpful for a film about the flagrant, debaucherous lifestyles of young college girls throwing caution to the wind, letting loose in a pre-Code film stuffed with revealing outfits and even more revealing glances. Bow’s leap into the world of Talkies is practically seamless, her beaming face full of countless expressions surrounded by a bouncing bob of hair having already lit up screens throughout the 1920s, now coupled with an impeccable rapport with her castmates, volleying dialogue from scene to scene with natural rhythm and charisma. She makes a meal out of every scene, especially an early salacious comic encounter with March, playing the stern and staunch anthropology professor who eventually convinces Bow to give up her rowdy ways. THE WILD PARTY may not be the most memorable of the early Talkies, but hey, it’s a start. Screening as part of the 20th Century Queers series. (1929, 77 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Claire Denis’ TROUBLE EVERY DAY (France)

Siskel Film Center — See Venue website for showtimes

TROUBLE EVERY DAY was Claire Denis’ most contentious film before BASTARDS (2013); not surprisingly it was also her goriest film to date, trading in dark, eroticized violence that can be a deal-breaker for many viewers. Vincent Gallo stars as an American doctor who travels to Paris with his innocent young wife. He says they’re on a honeymoon, but really he wants to research the rare condition with which he’s afflicted—it makes him want to drink human blood. Gallo encounters a doctor (Denis regular Alex Descas) whose wife (Beatrice Dalle) is afflicted with the same condition; Denis goes on to parallel Gallo’s story with Dalle’s, showing how terrible things might get for the American doctor. The violence is shockingly graphic, yet the narrative is characteristically vague. Is TROUBLE EVERY DAY an AIDS allegory? A Cronenbergian fable about how little we understand our own bodies? Or just a reflection of whatever nightmares Denis was having at the time? As usual for the director, Denis makes you feel vivid sensations before you understand what the film means. The associative editing, the moody cityscapes, and the evocative Tindersticks score combine to create a memorable sensory assault. Screening as part of the 25 for 25 series, in celebration of the Film Center’s 25 years on State Street. (2001, 101 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Katsuhito Ishii’s THE TASTE OF TEA (Japan)

Siskel Film Center — See Venue website for showtimes

THE TASTE OF TEA feels like a remake of Yasujiro Ozu’s beloved family comedy EARLY SUMMER (1951) by way of Luís Buñuel’s surrealist free-for-all THE PHANTOM OF LIBERTY (1974). Writer-director Katsuhito Ishii takes the basic framework of Ozu’s film—a season in the life of a generally happy extended middle-class Japanese family—then proceeds to treat it like Silly Putty, pulling it into a variety of narrative digressions and dreamlike non sequiturs. The tone is gentle overall, the visual style generally understated. Ishii favors static, medium-wide long takes that suggest living comic book panels—not surprisingly he’s worked as an animator (most famously on the cartoon sequence of KILL BILL: VOL. 1 [2003]) in addition to making live-action films—and which have the effect of grounding everything in a sort of deadpan realism. Dave Kehr once wrote that Buñuel proved how much realism is required in surrealism, and so it goes with THE TASTE OF TEA, which earns its surrealist bona fides through its attenuation to the mundane. Most reviews of the film point out the subplot about the little girl who’s pestered by visions of a giant version of herself; fewer note such reassuring details as the father of the Haruno family catching the train home at the same time as his adolescent son every night or how the father and son quietly bond over games of Go. It’s because Ishii has such a strong grasp of the quotidian (the children rarely seem overly cute, for instance) that his more outlandish ideas are able to flourish. Consider the ghost story that Tadanobu Asano’s Uncle Ayano tells his young niece early on in the picture. The story comes out of nowhere, of course, but what makes it really funny is that Ishii introduces the episode as though Ayano is going to pass on some lesson to his relative. Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned (Don’t shit on a rare egg?), but whatever it is, Ishii overshadows it with his inventive storytelling. It’s always reassuring to remember how susceptible the cinema is to the will of dreams. (2004, 143 min, New HD Restoration) [Ben Sachs]

Robert Altman's THE PLAYER (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) — Thursday, 5pm

Robert Altman, having successfully brought QUINTET, HEALTH, and O.C. AND STIGGS to the big screen, was perhaps overly familiar with the very special interaction ritual known as the Hollywood Pitch, whose unformalized rules permeate nearly every other scene in THE PLAYER. The prevalence of these consistently awkward interrogations (pragmatically asking: why should your movie exist?) become inevitably redirected to the material on screen, and part of the elegance of THE PLAYER is how it cues into and channels this spectatorial recursiveness. For while there has been many a movie about making a movie, this is the only one firmly lodged inside some scumbag studio VP's (Tim Robbins) head: with nary a camera crew in sight but many, many celebrity faces milling about and making awkward, backstabbing small talk in the background. Thomas Newman's oneiric score of extended dissolve cues, in particular, successfully transforms the narrative into a psychological study, like the fever dream an exec might have on his deathbed, after a career's worth of speed-reading by-the-numbers screenplays penned by anxious, balding dudes in their late 20s. Perpetually ironic and thoroughly unsubtle mise-en-scène provides a steady flow of chuckles, but the film's other theoretical subject—the Hollywood Ending—manages to refer not just (as Hollywood Endings do) to the century past of Hollywood Endings but to the entire structure of the film itself. This is Altman's ANSIKTET—morally ambiguous, self-reflexive in the extreme, questioning the very social foundations of the endeavor of film production—but somehow it can keep the audience grinning as they leave the theater. The cast is primarily a Who's Who ass-kissing orgy, but Richard E. Grant (WITHNAIL AND I) and Cynthia Stevenson are exceptional as a director and young executive who respectively attempt, unsuccessfully, to keep it real in the land of the hyperreal. Screening as part of the L.A. Neo-Noir series.  (1992, 124 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Castelle]

Tsui Hark's ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINA (Hong Kong)

Alamo Drafthouse — Sunday, 3:15pm

From its opening sequences, ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINA sets a standard not only for the wuxia genre but for all period-set action films to follow. It demonstrates extraordinary set pieces with its visually stunning credit sequence depicting the protagonist, Chinese folk hero Wong Fei-hung (a career defining performance by Jet Li), training his militia in martial arts on the beach, the landscape presenting a stunning backdrop for the choreography. Set in Foshan in the late 19th-century Qing Dynasty, ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINA thematically focuses on Westernization, not just politically, but culturally. Director Tsui Hark uses objects, like technology and weapons, and especially costuming—in one fight sequence, Wong sports a boater hat and sunglasses—to humorously and effectively emphasize these tensions at the center of the film; the clothes worn, as well as changes in personal fashion are key plot points and political and cultural statements by characters throughout the film. The oppressive intrusion of Western politics and culture is also addressed throughout the film as a larger global issue, including human trafficking and labor. At one point Wong speaks to a man who's returned from working in America, detailing the horrible labor conditions and discrimination of the Chinese overseas; this also provides a historical connection to the first film to don the oft-used title format: ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST. A martial artist and physician of traditional medicine, Wong himself becomes the symbol of Chinese sovereignty, culture, and identity as he and his followers fight against the Western imperialist influence in Foshan and grapple with impending modernity. Not surprisingly, ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINA's incredible fight scenes are ultimately what stand out, and are also the most demonstrative of the film's distinctive fluid and kinetic oscillation between tone and genres: kung-fu, comedy, melodrama, romance. It's a lot for one film, but with Tsui's masterful use of costumes, set pieces, and props, cleverly combined with memorable action sequences and clever camerawork and movement—including some precisely placed slow motion shots—ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINA truly earns the descriptor of "epic." (1991, 134 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Jacques Demy's THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT (France)

The Davis Theater — Tuesday, 7pm

Jacques Demy, in the preparation for his follow-up to the downbeat psychedelic jazz opera UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG, reportedly waited two years to cast Gene Kelly as a love-struck American composer in this symmetrical ensemble of Crayola-coded seaside romantics—a move which helps place the perpetually sunny ROCHEFORT as one of the best "date movies" in Demy's otherwise surprisingly existentialist oeuvre. Taking place over the course of one weekend in and about the town square of the namesake Atlantic seaport, the film literally "transports" us (via the opening crane shots on an extended mechanical gondola) into a harmonious lattice of unresolved heterosexual affinities established through two complete hours of straight-faced song and dance in Iambic hexameter. With each character in the network colored fairly exclusively by garish pastel wardrobe signifiers (e.g. Catherine Deneuve's canary yellow and her sister Françoise Dorléac's lavender), the viewer—at least on the big screen—can relax their focus on the protagonists and enjoy the kaleidoscopic spectacle of public space dispersed into a chromatic orgy of pirouetting passersby. Initially criticized for a level of semi-professionalism unworthy of its ostensive Hollywood musical progenitors, the essentially half-assed choreography remains one of the film's most glorious attributes—a singular mode of expression that attempts to dissolve the distinction between the individual and the collective. And in a tableau that reduces the missed connections of a complex urbanity into the orchestrations of 8-10 amorous souls, Michel Legrand's hyperactive score projects a traditional musical narrative into just four or five essential themes that mirror and overlap each other in tandem; behold, the first (and last) great fugue musical. Screening as part of the Big Screen Classics series. (1967, 125 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Castelle]

4x4: Contemporary Art in Chicago (US/Documentary)

Comfort Film at Comfort Station (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave.) — Wednesday, 8pm

Produced by local documentary house Pentimenti Productions, these short profiles of local artists are infused with pride in the Chicago scene. Each work brims with detail about the artist and their practice, and each considers how the figure in question fits into the city’s larger artistic community. The first piece in the program is we are two., directed by cai thomas, which looks at Jenn Freeman, who also performs under the name Po’Chop. This work considers how burlesque and striptease function as forms of creative expression, as these are essential parts of Freeman’s practice; it also meditates on the history of Black queer expression through looking at her work with the House of the Lorde, a studio-cum-meeting space dedicated to writer and activist Audre Lorde. In ERROL ORTIZ: HEADSPACE, the next piece in the program, directors Erin Babbin and Michael Sullivan visit the veteran Chicago Imagist in his home studio as he completes a new painting. This work may be the most poignant of the four, as Ortiz reflects on aging and his experiences with the other Imagists in between advancing on his latest work. Past and present intermingle, yielding a rich portrait of an artistic legacy. Alex Morelli’s BENEATH THE SURFACE OF THE EVERYDAY offers a profile of visual artist and author Deb Sokolow, whose work touches on (among other subjects) McDonald’s, conspiracies, and the movie ROCKY (1976). Per the title, this short is concerned with quotidian phenomena as well as theories about what may lurk behind them, with Sokolow serving as an engaging guide to her distinctive world. The piece also boasts attractive 16mm photography and pleasant street-level views of Wicker Park. Closing the program is I DREAMT OF COWBOYS, COTTON FIELDS, AND CLOUDS — BERNARD WILLIAMS, which profiles the painter and sculptor as he ruminates on his work in particular and Black history in general. Director Kevin Shaw depicts Williams as curious and thoughtful, addressing his investment in resurrecting aspects of the past through his practice. The piece culminates with Williams visiting the public installation of one of his sculptures, which reinforces the program’s theme of how artists engage with the community at large. (2026, Total approx. 67 min, Digital Projection) [Ben Sachs]

John Early's MADDIE'S SECRET (US)

Alamo Drafthouse, Davis Theater, Music Box Theatre and Siskel Film Center — See Venue websites for showtimes

Social media can be a real villain to self-image, causing us to unfavorably compare ourselves to others or worry about how we’re being perceived. When Maddie (John Early) unexpectedly lands a job as an online food influencer, her deep-seated insecurities about her body are triggered in destructive ways. She appears to be a total natural when presenting her new recipes on camera, but what people don’t see is her chronic struggle with bulimia nervosa, a condition that only becomes harder to handle when cooking and eating are her very vocation. The directorial debut of comedian, actor, and writer John Early, MADDIE’S SECRET exhibits the askew tone of some of his previous projects, mixing camp, earnestness, melodrama, and satire in ways that bring to mind John Waters and Douglas Sirk. His use of high-key lighting and expressionistic color (particularly deep blues and reds in the scenes in Maddie’s home) create a heightened, off-kilter atmosphere, while the more broadly comic elements, such as the performances from Conner O’Malley, Vanessa Bayer, and a deliciously hammy Kristen Johnston, tie the film to a playful sketch-comedy sensibility. Early is dealing with serious subjects — eating disorders, parental abuse, psychiatric treatment — and he manages to give them sufficient weight while still winking at the audience. Perhaps what is most admirable about MADDIE’S SECRET is the uncommonness, indeed the queerness, of characters rarely seen on screen in quite this way, from Maddie’s doting teddy bear of a husband Jake (Eric Rahill) to her lesbian best friend Deena (Kate Berlant). The most unusual might be Maddie herself, played by Early like a more sedate Divine from POLYESTER. No comment is made about this woman being portrayed by a man in drag; it’s just another element revealing the arbitrariness of body-image standards, and how feeling comfortable in your own skin is for nobody but you to decide. (2025, 100 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]

David Lean's LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (UK)

Alamo Drafthouse — Friday and Tuesday, 10:45am and Saturday, 11:15am

If there is a single sequence in the history of film that tells you what watching a movie on a big screen really means, and how that larger-than-life way of experiencing a movie can be so important, it's in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. A breathtaking long-shot of the desert. A view extending to the horizon. At first, we see nothing more than a shimmer. A mirage. Then a speck. Then, finally, a rider on a horse. Trotting toward us at a deliberate pace. All at once an Arab in the foreground rushes to his own horse, pulls out a gun—and is shot. His body falls to the ground, a streak of blood across his black robe. It lies on the sand. Peter O'Toole looks down at it. After a time, the rider sidles right up to him and undoes his veil. Omar Sharif. They exchange words. The Pinteresque intimacy of their dialog is startlingly paired with the infinite vastness of the desert. It's only one of countless great moments in this truly great film. And when the ten-minute intermission occurs, I dare you not to go to the concession stand and buy yourself a drink. (1962, 216 min, DCP Digital) [Rob Christopher]

Brian De Palma’s SCARFACE

Alamo Drafthouse — Friday, 5:45pm and Monday, 6pm

The director’s second biggest theatrical hit, and the one with the longest life as gangsta staple and dorm room wallpaper (not to mention decades of legendarily risible censored AMC schedule filling). De Palma needed a grabber after the financial disaster of BLOW OUT, and he delivered in spades: a headline-ripping, three-ring circus of excess, causing an epic battle with the MPAA over its ultraviolent set-pieces and spare-no-expense disreputability. It was, and still is, despised by all the right people, and a few of the other kind, too. It’s not seen by De Palma partisans as anywhere near the purest representation of his sensibility, and they have a point; whole sequences roll by in a logy, somewhat rote haze. One can spend stretches of the film daydreaming about what it could have been if directed by its writer, Oliver Stone, in full Warners-meets-SALVADOR punch-and-parry tabloid mode. But despite those passages, SCARFACE still has its fascinations, beginning with its star. Nothing quite prepared 1983 audiences for the 180-degree change in Al Pacino’s basic attack, his very mien, his transformation from supreme underplaying to jabbing, bobbing, ostentatious bombast. The accent is broad and ludicrous, but the kinesis is unfettered, utterly free; for better or worse, this is the film where he became a wholly different kind of actor, and it is nothing if not captivating. And many of those set-pieces really are something; De Palma’s native willingness to go there, to deliver the goods, to break out the chainsaws, grenade launchers, and defenestrations with a childlike glee, a delinquent’s love of pissing off the squares, is appreciated if you’re just plain in the mood to get off. Even the three-hour running time works if you feel it as a cokey hangover instead of the rush that you go to a Scorsese for. It is, in the final analysis, a deeply strange affair when looked at in the right light. With Michelle Pfeiffer in the first bloom of career luminescence, F. Murray Abraham as a guy you can’t wait to see die, a bonhomous Robert Loggia, and the great actor Harris Yulin, who delivers the finest expulsive “Fuck you!” in the whole of American cinema. Screening as part of the De Palma Summer series. (1983, 170 min, DCP Digital) [Jim Gabriel]

Mark Jenkin’s ROSE OF NEVADA (UK)

Music Box Theatre — See Venue website for showtimes

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

📽️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Alamo Drafthouse
Ruggero Deodato’s 1977 film LAST CANNIBAL WORLD (92 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday, 9:30pm, as part of the Terror Tuesday series.

Andrew Fleming's 2008 film HAMLET 2 (92 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday, 9:30pm, as part of the Weird Wednesday series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Chicago Cultural Center (78 E. Washington St.)
Garry Marshall’s 2001 film THE PRINCESS DIARIES (115 min, Digital Projection) screens Thursday, 12pm, in the Claudia Cassidy Theater as part of the Chicago Film Office's Family Matinees series. Free admission; no RSVP required. More info here.

⚫ Chicago Film Archives
A Celebration, a large-scale video installation by experimental filmmaker and Chicago Film Archives curatorial assistant Colin Mason, is on view through Saturday in the lobby of 150 N. Riverside Plaza (enter via Randolph Street); free and open to the public Friday 4–7pm and Saturday 11am–5pm. The installation is part of the 150 Media Stream arts program, curated by Chicago video artist Yuge Zhou, and was produced in partnership with Chicago Film Archives. 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.

⚫ Cinema/Chicago
Denis Imbert's 2023 film ON THE WANDERING PATHS (95 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday, 6:30pm, at the Chicago Cultural Center (78 E Washington St.), as part of Cinema/Chicago's Free Summer Screenings series. Free admission, but note that RSVPs for this screening are sold out online; standby line opens one hour prior to showtime. More info here.

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

Anime Club presents All Cats, All Night Pt. II, a program that includes a rarely screened animated feature, shorts, and TV episodes, on Thursday at 7pm. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Goethe-Institut Chicago (150 N. Michigan Ave.)
Lateral Entrant, a site-specific exhibition by Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist Maya Nguyen incorporating video, photography, and performance, exploring migrant strategies of camouflage and adaptation across languages and visual cultures connecting Vietnam, Germany, and the United States, is on view through July 31. Public viewing hours are available by advance registration on Eventbrite, and a state- or federally-issued photo ID is required for building check-in. More info here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Adrian Chiarella's 2026 film LEVITICUS (88 min, DCP Digital) continues screening. See Venue website for showtimes.

Georgia Bernstein’s 2026 film NIGHT NURSE (95 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday and Monday at 6:45pm with Bernstein and actor Cemre Paksoy in person for a post-screening Q&A at both shows.

Emile Ardolino’s 1992 film SISTER ACT (100 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday. 9:45pm, presented by Rated Q and Ramona Slick! - A Celebration of Queer, Camp, & Cult Cinema with preshow drinks and DJ in Music Box Lounge at 9pm and a dragshow performance in the Main Theater at 9:45pm, with the screening to follow.  More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Siskel Film Center
Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine’s 2025 documentary PETER ASHER: EVERYWHERE MAN (118 min, DCP Digital) screens this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

Megan Seely’s 2025 film PUDDYSTICKS (97 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday, 6pm, with Seely in attendance for a post-screening discussion with filmmaker Joe Swanberg. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Uprising Theater & Cafe (2905 N. Milwaukee Ave.)
Andy Mundy-Castle's 2025 documentary SHOOT THE PEOPLE (86 min, Digital Projection) screens Friday and Saturday at 5:15pm and 7pm. More info here.

CINE-LIST: July 3 - July 9, 2026

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, Michael Castelle, Rob Christopher, Alex Ensign, Megan Fariello, Patrick Friel, Jim Gabriel, Ben Kaye, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, K.A. Westphal