:: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9 - THURSDAY, OCTOBER 15 ::

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

The Revolution Is My Boyfriend: The Films Of Bruce LaBruce

FACETS (except where noted) — See showtimes below

Bruce LaBruce's NO SKIN OFF MY ASS (Canada)
Friday, 9:30pm
NO SKIN OFF MY ASS takes you back to a time when queer cinema was vital and dynamic; a time before gay-indie calling-cards featuring supporting/faded TV stars; a time before sexual explicitness was confined to films with explicit arti(farty)ness. Such a time is exemplified by Bruce LaBruce's NO SKIN OFF MY ASS, a film that is frisky and frayed and a hell of a lot of fun. The joy LaBruce has for handcrafting his films, a lovable trait that he's abandoned in his later digital films, is evident here in the tape splices on the Super-8 black-and-white frames (blown up to 16mm). NO SKIN OFF MY ASS's loopy story is a riff on Robert Altman's 1969 film THAT COLD DAY IN THE PARK, which ASS' main character, known as The Hairdresser (played by LaBruce), is shown watching before reenacting its plot by going to a local park and picking up, in this case, a stoic skinhead for sex. The production's randy charms, a combination of amateur performances and wry humor, are endearing and bring a liveliness to Altman's setup. (1991, 73 min, DCP Digital) [Josh B Mabe]
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Bruce LaBruce’s OTTO; OR, UP WITH DEAD PEOPLE (Germany/Canada)
Music Box Theatre — Friday, Midnight
It’s around the midpoint of OTTO; OR, UP WITH DEAD PEOPLE where, in reference to the zombification of queer men across Germany, a character proclaims “a gay plague has descended upon society,” and the larger goals of LaBruce’s work start to click into place. It feels impossible to hear the phrase “gay plague” and not immediately think of its horrific ties to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, but one could also be forgiven for overlooking this kind of stark detail within the otherwise droll and sardonic work of homoerotic zombie fiction on display. Such casual interplay between heavy topics and gleeful irreverence is fairly commonplace in LaBruce’s work, and that tension between the film’s gut-busting humor and the introspective malaise of the titular Otto (Jey Crisfar)—a young zombie trying to find his sense of self in Berlin—gives most of the film its energy and verve. The main plot engine of the film comes from the gothic histrionics of director Medea Yarn (Katharina Klewinghaus), herself working on an overt work of pornographic homo-zombie horror, aided by a macabre cadre of characters including the amusing addition of her sister, Hella Bent, a character inexplicably rendered entirely in black-and-white who can only speak through silent film era intertitles. Medea stumbles onto Otto and, taken with his commitment to his newfound role as one of the undead, decides to center her whole film around his ghoulish wants and needs. LaBruce’s cinematic reckoning with what it means to grapple with past loves and past versions of one’s self is interspersed with gnarly scenes of Otto savagely munching on the carcasses of rabbits, birds, and cats, building his way up to enacting his deepest carnal desires on his fellow man. There’s enough gore and sex and gory sex to keep audiences sated (as ever, LaBruce knows what audiences are here for), but the jagged edges of OTTO; OR, UP WITH DEAD PEOPLE hint at something deeper beneath the attention-grabbing premise of “look at these gay zombies.” Here, desire becomes something so powerful, it’s worth sinking your teeth into. LaBruce in person to introduce the film. (2008, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
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Bruce LaBruce's SAINT-NARCISSE (Canada)
Saturday, 3pm
The mythological figure of Narcissus has long been associated with homosexuality, his love of his own reflection translated as a love of others whose bodies match his own. As the film's title lets on, SAINT-NARCISSE is not only preoccupied with this notion, but with how its queer possibilities might intersect with and subvert the sexually repressive institution of the Church. This being a film by cult queercore director Bruce LaBruce, one knows that blasphemous irreverence is in store. The setting is Quebec in 1972. Twenty-something Dominic (Félix-Antoine Duval) has never known his parents; living with his ailing grandmother, he passes the time by getting drunk and habitually taking pictures of himself. One day, he comes across a box in his grandmother’s closet containing a cache of letters addressed to him by a woman who claims to be his estranged mother. Despite foreboding warnings and premonitions (LaBruce uses a heavy hand in his smash cuts to ominous figures), Dominic sets off to the small town of Saint-Narcisse to track down a woman named Béatrice, an alleged lesbian witch living with her immortal girlfriend. If that weren’t enough, Dominic is soon drawn to an abused Trappist monk who bears his exact likeness. Things get more bewildering and knottier from there, as SAINT-NARCISSE transitions into a religious sexploitation thriller featuring autoerotic flagellation, twincest, and all manner of affronts to Catholic dogma. Somehow, none of this feels quite as outrageous as it probably should, especially coming from someone as renowned for taboo-busting as LaBruce; perhaps after all these years we’ve simply grown inured to the wanton perversion of religious iconography. SAINT-NARCISSE still has its campy fun, though, and it’s nothing if not queer in its defiance of the orthodoxies of family, love, and faith. (2020, 101 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
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Bruce LaBruce's LA ZOMBIE (Germany/US)
Sunday, 2pm
Coming off a career high with the masterful OTTO; OR, UP WITH DEAD PEOPLE, Bruce LaBruce's deliberately campy follow-up, LA ZOMBIE, is a strangely poetic, though ultimately sloppy feeling, pure "art" piece, which dispenses with such things as a structured narrative, characters, and general logic. But nothing about LaBruce's films or videos is terribly logical. They're punky gay fantasies filled with men who are essentially real-life renderings of Tom of Finland illustrations. There's an aura of fantasy/fetish about the entire project. Our zombie protagonist emerges from the ocean, hitchhikes around, and screws corpses. That's about it. The movie itself, shot on what looks like prosumer HD, is full of shaky camerawork, minimalist "sets" and locations, and, despite its title, makes very little use of its titular city. The fact that it's even located in LA is denoted only by a few shots with palm trees in them as well as an occasional wide shot of the downtown skyline. Of course, any LA resident or lover will clearly pick up on subtleties, such as the prominence of a donut shop and the work's setting within the homeless community. Perhaps LaBruce is trying to create subtle commentary about the emptiness of Los Angeles, or what he perceives as the nondescript nature of the city? The fact that our zombie hero never makes it downtown but clearly seems to traverse the neighborhood of Westlake with its large houseless population, which lies directly west of the center of the city, is an indicator of something. Maybe the ending, which involves our zombie hero crying, just a little, while wandering in a cemetery, is supposed to symbolize his inner humanity? It's hard to tell whether LaBruce is trying to pull the proverbial wool over his audience's eyes by convincing them that this meaningless series of vignettes is supposed to be resonant with symbolism, or maybe this is a loose combination of narrative and abstraction in its purest form? It's hard to say and I don't know if the answer really matters. LA ZOMBIE is definitely the INLAND EMPIRE of LaBruce's career. Interpret that as you will. (2010, 63 min, DCP Digital) [Joe Rubin]
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Bruce LaBruce’s THE VISITOR (UK)
Sunday, 3:30pm
There’s an exciting immediacy with which writer-director Bruce LaBruce demands we connect the pornographic acts of his latest feature with the political overtones on display, going as far as to have flashing slogans pop up on screen throughout the plentiful acts of coitus (some personal favorites include “Keep Calm and Fuck On,” “Open Borders, Open Legs,” and “Give Peace of Ass a Chance”). LaBruce’s pointed sci-fi psycho-sexual drama—his contemporary spin on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s TEOREMA (1968)—is satisfyingly dense for a film that could just as lazily be described as “an alien fucks a rich family so hard that they all lose their minds.” THE VISITOR’s orgasmic trappings contain deep commentary on contemporary immigration in the UK, the deep-seated insecurities of the upper class, and the repressed desires that keep all of us hidden away from the true pleasures of the world, all while relishing in the allure of an otherworldly figure (Bishop Black, as magnetic and statuesque as they come) who dares to upend all the social mores within their orbit. There is a comic, artful joy to LaBruce’s world, so thematically rich and so unsubtle in its horniness, so aesthetically sumptuous and so willingly absurd, to the point where the silly and the serious become one. What joy that, for the genuine sake of artistic freedom and expression, a maid being butt-fucked by a Jesus dildo accompanied by the flashing text “Let Jesus Fuck You” demands to be seen as an incredibly serious act. As the Visitor goes from sexual episode to sexual episode—eventually creating an air of temptation so powerful that some family members start lustily devouring each other in the bedroom—the distinct marriage of political anxiety and horny release provides enough variation in each scene so as not to let us become mired in a repetitive mindset of sexual boredom. (God forbid!) LaBruce’s visual stylings are also intoxicating in their own right, including the use of multi-quadrant space to divide the frame up into different scenes and different color filters, and one particular scene late in the action where each family member disrobes before the Visitor, unraveling as a sort of Moebius strip of filmmaking horizontally transporting through space. LaBruce opens the film with a voiceover bellowing an anti-immigration screed far too familiar to anyone with their ears open these days, but the subsequent action lets us know that perhaps those who have traveled so far to wash up on our shores have a lot more to teach us than we could ever imagine. THE VISITOR is, as one of the intertitles puts it, “Creating Change, One Fuck At A Time.” (2024, 101 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
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Bruce LaBruce & Rick Castro’s HUSTLER WHITE (Canada/Germany)
Sunday, 7:30pm
Bruce LaBruce co-wrote, co-directed, and co-stars in HUSTLER WHITE, playing an anthropologist named Jürgen Anger (no relation to Kenneth) who comes to Los Angeles to study gay hustler culture and becomes obsessed with one of the young men he encounters in the field. Modish, verbose, and snippy, Anger is just one of the film’s memorable characters, among them the object of his fascination (who goes by the name Montgomery Ward), a skinhead hustler who loses his foot in an accident, an older gentleman who’s into bondage and who likes to boast of being a regular on General Hospital, and a porn director named Roger V. Deem. LaBruce and co-writer/director Rick Castro shift focus between these subjects casually but curiously—the film evokes the perspective of a voyeur who’s unable to sit still. Befitting the underground subject matter, HUSTLER WHITE wears its underground filmmaking bona fides on its sleeve; the sound is post-sync, the effects are lo-fi, and the performances have a talent show kind-of eagerness. Please be advised this is not for the squeamish, as the characters meet all sorts of sexual degradation in their adventures, and the filmmakers present these in vivid detail. At the same time, the tone is generally gleeful in the fashion of many of LaBruce’s movies. The film isn’t a study of sex work so much as it is a celebration of the various experiences one has while doing it, and the characters are, for the most part, viewed with affection. For this reason, the stray moments of tenderness in HUSTLER WHITE—like the scene of Monti Ward playing with his young son, whom he’s responsible for supporting—don’t feel out of place. If anything, they add to the richness of the human comedy on display. Followed by a Q&A with LaBruce moderated by Frédéric Moffet. (1996, 80 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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On Friday, 6pm, preceding LaBruce’s 1994 film SUPER 8 ½ (100 min, Digital Projection) at 7pm, there will be a VIP mixer, and it will be followed by a Q&A with LaBruce and Joe Swanberg. Full program and more info here.

David Fincher's SE7EN (US)

Music Box Theatre — Sunday, 11:30am

SE7EN has all the typical strengths and weaknesses of a great artist's early work. In it we see all the hallmarks of Fincher's mature style already expressed to a masterful degree: the intense scrutiny of the cruelty and eroticism of male power dynamics, the aching pessimism underlying heterosexual romance, and the abstraction of the human being to mere physicality. This is a crushingly well-composed movie, one that moves to a brutal rhythm, that creaks and groans and drips and cries out without mercy. The obvious theme, notoriously, is sin: a serial killer murders a person every day over the course of the film's week-long narrative, each death staged in the style of one of the deadly sins. But that is to read the film as mere illustration of the well-crafted but cliché-addled script by Andrew Kevin Walker. The real concern here is not one of theology but, as is so often the case for Fincher, of ethics. In this case, the question is the largest of Fincher's career to date: is cinema evil? Which is another way of asking, is there a line film cannot cross, or is it, by its very existence, unforgivable? This isn't a new question, though it is one that lacks a satisfying answer. One of my favorite early opponents of cinema, the art and food critic Elizabeth Robins Pennell, believed that cinema was a kind of special perniciousness that threatened to destroy civilization through its thought-numbing evil. "The movies," she wrote, "are worse than a sedative—they are dope, pure dope, the most deadly ever invented," adding that film was an "unpardonable sin" that destroyed the morals of its viewers by "the stifling of all tendency to thought." Pennell, writing in 1921, was part of a large-scale ideology of panic over the movies. Only six years earlier, Joseph McKenna had pronounced a withering unanimous Supreme Court opinion noting that motion pictures are "capable of evil, having power for it, the greater because of their attractiveness and manner of exhibition." Movies, in other words, were under suspicion: so magnetic and captivating were they, so addictive and worthlessly pleasurable, that they constituted a danger, real and immediate, for the morals of America. Cinema was after our very souls. SE7EN's antagonist sees the world as having already lost that moral war, as having already surrendered its soul. He moves in a world that has been neutralized of meaning, and so he tries, through his horrifying crimes, to restart our outrage, our righteousness, our lives, so that the devilish spectacle of modern media can be destroyed. SE7EN's form, like its villain, sees evil in every shadow, creeping all around its characters, but recognizes that the mesmeric force of its imagery has its own moral value. We cannot look away from the grotesqueries that the killer's staged for us, his real audience, and in that weakness we damn ourselves, but SE7EN, for all its darkness, presents a vision of absolute moral clarity: there's nothing that can't be shown, but there are some things that even when shown can't be seen. Screening as part of Music Box of Horrors: The Final Chapter. (1995, 127 min, 35mm) [Kian Bergstrom]

Richard D. Maurice's ELEVEN P.M. (US/Silent)

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

“This story revolves around the strange imagination of a young writer,” promises an early title card of this late-period silent—one of the revelations of Kino Lorber’s Pioneers of African-American Cinema box set—and what follows definitely lives up to that assertion. ELEVEN P.M. flits between several sets of characters and across  more than a dozen years, yet the pieces are held together by a highly developed dream logic that at times suggests a proto-Buñuelian sensibility. Most people writing on the movie feel compelled to mention that it climaxes with the hero turning into a dog to exact revenge on his enemy, but what’s even stranger than this detail is how snugly it fits with the sincere melodrama and gritty urban portraiture. Writer-director Richard D. Maurice, a Cuban-born jack-of-all-trades who made a couple of features in 1920s Detroit, communicates a love of storytelling that makes any development feel appropriate, no matter how outlandish it may seem on the page; he also exhibits an ambitious visual sensibility that incorporates some of the most sophisticated techniques of ’20s cinema. And by the evidence of this film, he was a rather good actor as well; his performance here—as an altruistic street musician named Sundaisy—is affecting without being cloying. Too bad Maurice’s only other known feature, NOBODY’S CHILDREN (1920), is presumed lost. ELEVEN P.M. reveals a perspective that’s unique not only to race movies, but to movies, period. With a live musical score by Damon Locks. Screening as part of the Repossessed: Reviving Supernatural Cinema from Beyond the Grave series. (1928, 56 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Louis Feuillade’s LES VAMPIRES – Episode Six, "Hypnotic Eyes" (France)

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

Comparing two epics released in 1915, D.W. Griffith’s feature THE BIRTH OF A NATION and Louis Feuillade’s serial LES VAMPIRES, Jonathan Rosenbaum has pointed out that Griffith’s film fetishizes a past that never was, a dynasty built on sawdust, tinsel, and nostalgia, while Feuillade’s series dives forward with scientific apprehension, suspicion, and conspiracy—an accurate depiction of the century ahead. The Frenchman was an unlikely candidate for cutting-edge surrealist cinema. A military officer turned Catholic newspaper columnist turned director, Feuillade churned out over 600 films across his career, most of which survived but many of which remain unseen. Famously, Henri Langlois showed the entire serial after saving the negative from the trash. Embraced by the Nouvelle Vague crowd, Alain Resnais would go on to call Feuillade "one of my gods.” LES VAMPIRES is predicated on deception and misdirection, the relationship between mundane aesthetics and deeper peril. The episode being screened at Block follows a journalist as he pursues successive evil masterminds and the enchantress Irma Vep (an anagram for Vampire). With rollicking tropes of parlor tricks, Feuillade anticipated thrillers of the next hundred years. Up until this point, there was a noted longstanding conceit in the French imagination of the illegal underworld, a notion documented through the literature of Balzac and Hugo. Cast in amber as the great femme fatale, Musidora has captivated the world for over a century as the luscious queen of crime. She collaborated with Feuillade on ten more pictures before her career took a dive, quitting in 1925, the year of the cineaste’s demise. The serial, with a reverie of moving images stationed in realistic locations, become very likely the first instance of the social uncanny—or in the words of Pierre Mac Orlan, le fantastique social—poetically marrying realism and surrealism. Live improvisational score performed by the Chicago string trio of Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart. Presented in partnership with International Anthem. (1915, 59 min, 16mm) [Ray Ebarb]

Ken Russell's THE DEVILS (UK) [Restored Director’s Cut]

Music Box Theatre — Thursday, 6pm

Ken Russell thought big and made big gestures, overloading most of his movies with historical references, psychedelic stylization, and outsized acting. He’s the sort of director you love or hate, but never accuse of holding back. THE DEVILS comes from the middle of Russell’s most productive period as a director of feature films (he had been a prolific director of TV documentaries for years before that), when over a four year period (1969-1972) he released five of his strongest films, which cover the full range of his style and themes. Perhaps the most extreme of that lot, it maintains an unrelenting air of hysteria that makes the bold, psychosexual imagery seem that much more provocative. The story, taken from true events, deals with power struggle and religious persecution in 17th-century France, but the design—as is often the case with Russell—is brazenly anachronistic. (Derek Jarman, who would become an uncompromising director in his own right, is the credited production designer.) Past and present bleed into each other to hallucinogenic effect, while Russell’s sincere interest in religious and political history vies with his strong desire to gross people out. Oliver Reed, in the role he was born to play, is a morally corrupt priest with a large flock of loyal followers; Vanessa Redgrave is the mad nun who desires him and wants to destroy him. (1971, 108 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Wu Yonggang’s THE GODDESS (China)

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

Ruan Ling-yu, also known by her English name Lily Yuen, is the most famous Chinese actress to have worked only in the silent era. Although she starred in many movies until her premature death in 1935, they were all silents; as in many countries, synchronized-sound film production began much later in China than in the US. THE GODDESS is generally regarded as the best of her surviving work. It tells the story of a noble single mother doing sex work by night so she can raise her young son in relative comfort by day. Director Wu Yonggang offers both effective melodrama and potent sociological analysis as the ironically named title character must contend with the physical assaults of a brutal pimp as well as the social prejudice of the disapproving parents of her son’s classmates. This latter aspect, which functions as an appeal for tolerance for sex workers from the audience, will no doubt strike many as looking surprisingly progressive from the vantage point of today. But the main reason to see this is Ruan’s emotive and heartrending performance; it's little wonder that Stanley Kwan meticulously recreated her most memorable scene from this in his superb Maggie Cheung-starring Ruan biopic, CENTER STAGE (aka ACTRESS), in 1991. Screening as part of the Mapping Melodrama series. (1934, 79 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]

Paula Andrea Gonzalez-Nasser’s THE SCOUT (US)

Siskel Film Center — See Venue website for showtimes

One of the most poignant assertions of adult life I’ve recently experienced is when a character says to another in writer-director Paula Andrea Gonzalez-Nasser’s THE SCOUT that there’s so much she doesn’t tell anyone. It’s not expressed dramatically or about anything in particular, but rather to a friend, the titular New York City location scout, as the two haven’t kept in touch and are exchanging excuses as to why that’s so. The film’s title and premise, at least on paper, may give it the impression of being about the niche profession, but as such moments indicate, it’s rather a microcosm of adulthood in general, the period when enthusiasm gives way either to contentment or complacency, with Sofia (Mimi Davila), the titular scout, seemingly more resigned than fulfilled. Similarly antithetical to the expectations of its ostensible subject, which might logically invite some situational pandemonium, THE SCOUT is almost deceptive in its relative impassivity. Tumult surrounds Sofia in her career, to be sure, but as she goes about her daily activities—traveling to and from prospective shooting locales, interacting with the people who live in them as well as her coworkers—there’s an almost eerie sense of calm that accounts for the film’s existential underpinnings. Chantal Akerman’s influence looms serenely but still with a similar degree of philosophical tension, Sofia almost like a millennial Jeanne Dielman as she moves from one task to another; the film takes place over the course of a single day, and each vignette feels both contained to itself and belonging to a whole, as a day divided and then eventually completed often feels. Sofia encounters a menagerie of characters whose interactions are predicated on their homes potentially being used as sets for a TV show. (Gonzalez-Nasser was a television location scout for several years, the inspiration for her auspicious debut.) To Sofia they’re liminal spaces but for those she encounters it’s their home, or in one case their place of work. The inherent contradiction of a space, to be at once temporary, specifically for visitors but also in the way that everything essentially is, and permanent in the sense of a person living there for an extended period of time, is on display as much are the assorted interiors of the various residences. Gonzalez-Nasser rejects the lazy impulse to have the random encounters of day-to-day life impart profound meaning, to simply find beauty in the mundane and be content with doing so. For the most part, the exchanges are awkward, and what little nuggets of wisdom do come through are given in natural conversation.The residents are likewise interested in Sofia, perhaps mistaking the intimacy of being in their homes for that occurring between them; Sofia responds in kind, though it’s hard to tell if her graciousness is sincere or affected, if not completely fake then at least a begrudging necessity of having to interact with people and ultimately needing something from them. Davila is exceptional, embracing her character’s interiority without revealing too much. For example Sofia goes to see the owner of a fish store, who’s angry that she’s late. She agrees to go to dinner with him, presumably to assuage his anger and ensure he agrees to let them use his store. It’s an overstep on his part, but despite the inappropriate nature of his request, there’s a vulnerability to the exchange that’s non-judgmental despite the obviousness of the impropriety. Sofia agrees, listening as he tells her about an inane book he’s writing, after which she commends him for his creative pursuits. Though it ends awkwardly, it’s a reminder of the ways we try to connect with one another, often failing in the process but persisting in spite of it. It’s these moments, like the houses, that come and go for Sofia, and thereby for us, that become part of that which we don’t share but perhaps keep inside, the quiet amidst life's chaos. Post-screening Q&A with González-Nasser on Saturday after the 7pm screening. (2026, 89 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs] 
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Read an interview with González-Nasser on our blog here.

F.W. Murnau's FAUST (Germany/Silent)

Siskel Film Center — Monday, 7pm

The last film F.W. Murnau made in Germany before emigrating to Hollywood is surely his most Germanic, an adaptation of one of the most famous tales in his nation’s history. At the center of it is Emil Jannings’ astonishing performance as Mephisto, a collection of outsize gestures and facial expressions that convey the full extent of the demon’s malign power. Indeed, Jannings’ work may be the most expressionistic part of FAUST outside of the brilliant special effects, which incorporate miniatures, superimpositions, and stark lighting to convey a world in the grip of supernatural forces. (Per Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Like Kubrick’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, this… integrates its dazzling special effects so seamlessly that they’re indistinguishable from the film’s narrative, poetry, and, above all, metaphysics.”) The sets and costumes, however beautiful, are more naturalistic than those of Murnau’s NOSFERATU (1922) and THE LAST LAUGH (1924), and they provide a baseline of realism that makes the effects stand out even more. It all but goes without saying that Murnau was the most imaginative director of the silent era, and the supreme pleasure of his FAUST lies in watching his imagination run wild. The shots of a gigantic Jannings looming over the town where Faust lives mark just one unforgettable example of the filmmaker’s artistry, yet every scene inspires wonder; some other standouts include the lavish Italian wedding that Mephisto takes Faust to attend, the architectural shots of crowds fleeing a town square at the outbreak of a plague, and the sequences set in the heavens, where Mephisto and an archangel stand flanked by enormous wings. These overwhelming images render towering the film’s essential conflict between good and evil. Screening as part of the Creature Features series with a live musical score by ten thousand lakes. (1926, 107 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

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Ousmane Sembène’s XALA (Senegal)

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

One of the most punk rock movies ever made, XALA can kick the ass of pretty much any satire not directed by Paul Verhoeven since the end of the Cold War. Its anger is righteous, persuasive, and direct; like many a great punk recording, its power is heightened, not diminished, by its unadorned aesthetic, which makes the message seem unpretentious and true. That Sembène clearly drew inspiration from folklore gives his anger a timeless quality as well, as if he were summoning forces from the past to strengthen his curse on the present. The main character of XALA is also the villain of the story, which is a deliciously protracted saga of his downfall and humiliation. A stand-in for profiteering post-colonial politicians all over Africa, El Hadji Abdoukader Beye (his overstuffed name was surely intentional) is a money-grubbing businessman who has secured a position in Senegal’s new government. By the time the story begins, he and his fellow cabinet members have received untold sums in bribes from French elites in exchange for allowing European business interests to continue calling the shots in Senegal. El Hadji’s lifestyle is as ostentatious as his corruption, and he revels in both. In a characteristic early scene, he callously passes a group of homeless people outside his office, tosses a handful of coins at them, then stays just long enough to watch them fight over the pittance. The film takes a turn on the night of El Hadji’s marriage to his third wife, when he discovers that someone has cursed him with xala, a Wolof term meaning temporary impotence. The ensuing narrative follows our protagonist’s increasingly desperate efforts to revoke the curse; El Hadji becomes so obsessed with curing his impotence, in fact, that he doesn’t realize he’s under investigation for his crimes or that his marriages are falling apart. All this unfolds in a cheerful tone and bright colors, as though there were nothing more wonderful than watching this piece of shit get what’s coming to him. It’s worth noting that XALA has a hero as well as a villain, but per the radical cinematic tradition to which Sembène belongs, that hero is not an individual but instead the People. Sembène personifies the world of have-nots through a variety of lovingly observed supporting characters, from El Hadji’s fed-up wives and kids to the beggars he encounters all over Dakar. Appropriately, it is the People who get to have XALA’s last word—or, rather, its final, unforgettable sounds. Presented by writer, filmmaker, and cultural critic Ytasha Womack, who will also lead a post-screening discussion. (1975, 123 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Maya Annik Bedward’s BLACK ZOMBIE (Canada/US/Documentary)

FACETS – Thursday, 6:30pm

A most discerning aspect of BLACK ZOMBIE is its measured focus on the cultural impact of cinematic depictions of the zombie, not the films or filmmakers themselves. It’s not that they go unmentioned; director Maya Annik Bedward weaves an insightful history from the pre-code WHITE ZOMBIE through George Romero’s seminal NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD to THE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW in the 1980s and beyond. What she presents here, however, is not a shallow survey of horror history, but rather a cycle of disconnect, a lack of intention, and appropriation. The figure of the zombie is used as a tool of justification, performing cultural work to continue systemic oppression; its recurring revival in American culture reflects white fears about Black power, resistance, revolution, and retribution. Bedward grounds this exploration not in a study of cinema, but of Haiti and its often-misunderstood—and outright suppressed—culture and history. She focuses on the real spiritual tradition of Vodou, its importance to enslaved peoples, and its ongoing practice. Zombies, here, are presented not as mindless monsters, but as tragic; a gut-wrenching reading of the prominence of zombie horde imaginary at the end of the film emphasizes how this lack of cultural understanding of the monster’s origins continues to reflect colonizing oppression. Incorporating her own cinematic portrayal of the zombie within BLACK ZOMBIE, Bedward’s questioning of whether she herself is contributing to the problematic representations the film is itself critiquing shows an insightful self-reflexiveness often missing in approaches to media history and culture. Screening as part of the Must-Watch Indies series. (2026, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Sam’s Trilogy of Madness

Music Box Theatre — See below for showtimes

Andrzej Żuławski's POSSESSION (France/West Germany)
Saturday, 6:45pm
Originally hacked down for American release to a schlocky—and downright absurd—ninety-minutes, POSSESSION has been restored to Zulawski's original cut, showing in a new 4K digital restoration. The added footage doesn't necessarily make the infamous tentacled-monster sex thing any less nuts, because it still is a shocking sight to behold. But its purpose is more nuanced and creepy when the film really goes off the rails. Drawing from his own divorce, Zulawski's film follows the collapse of Mark and Anna's marriage and the impossibility of Mark ever fully knowing, or possessing, his wife in love. Largely set in an apartment near the Berlin Wall, Mark is confronted with divorce and descends into severe depression. He emerges in a near-psychotic state intending to reclaim Anna and their son. He soon becomes aware of Anna's lover, but after confronting him, both men realize Anna is seeing someone—or something—else. Zulawski keeps the camera in almost constant motion, pushing in and pulling back during confrontations between Mark and Anna as their fights escalate to bloody moments that are somehow both expected and completely terrifying. In one scene, Anna grinds meat as Mark maniacally berates her. The noise of the kitchen rises with the tension and Anna, tired of the diatribe, takes an electric knife to her neck. Paired with scenes of their individual genuine tenderness toward their son, POSSESSION is filled with mirrors. Mark meets his son's school teacher, a benevolent doppelganger for his wife, and a double of Mark appears with Anna at the end. Even the setting is exploited for an otherworldly nothingness and an exactness in East and West Germany, itself perversely mirrored. The unrestrained acting—Anna thrashing hysterically could describe many scenes—adds to a heightened reality where Anna's possession is not demonic, but love can be. (1981, 124 min, DCP Digital) [Brian Welesko]
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John Carpenter's IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS (US)
Saturday, 9:15pm
GHOSTS OF MARS (2001), CIGARETTE BURNS (2005), and THE WARD (2010) all have their defenders (and rightfully so), but IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS is the last John Carpenter film to win a cult following on par with that of THE THING (1982) or THEY LIVE (1988). Like those earlier Carpenter masterpieces, MADNESS didn’t make a splash on first release, opening in early 1995 to mixed reviews and middling box office returns. Maybe after a year of such grandstanding, elephantine American movies as FORREST GUMP, NATURAL BORN KILLERS, THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, and PULP FICTION, Carpenter’s tribute to H.P. Lovecraft (another quirky American genre storyteller) seemed too modest in its themes and too goofy in its execution for most people to take it seriously. (Leave it to Jonathan Rosenbaum and the staff of Cahiers du cinéma to buck the trend: the former wrote a thoughtful essay on the film for the Chicago Reader, and the latter named it one of the ten best of the year.) Over time, MADNESS has revealed itself to be a multilayered work that rewards repeat viewings, presenting ideas about the power of storytelling and employing clever meta-cinematic formal jokes—it’s got to be Carpenter’s most self-reflexive movie. Projecting the right mix of charisma and snark, Sam Neill stars as an insurance investigator hired to track down a popular horror writer who’s gone missing. His search takes him to New Hampshire and, ultimately, into the setting of many of the writer’s books—a creepy small town that’s a composite of recurring locales in the work of Lovecraft and Stephen King. This transition from the real world to the fictional world isn’t the first or last time in MADNESS when reality gets shaken by storytelling. Soon after the movie starts, Neill’s character learns that the writer’s latest book is literally driving people insane; near the end, the writer appears and literally unleashes unholy beasts on the world. The story may sound silly on the page, but under Carpenter’s inspired direction, it’s exciting and often quite scary. (1994, 95 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
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Also screening is Paul W.S. Anderson’s 1997 film EVENT HORIZON (96 min, 35mm). Tickets can be purchased individually or for all three films. Screening as part of Music Box of Horrors: The Final Chapter.

Claire Denis' BEAU TRAVAIL (France)

Siskel Film Center — Tuesday, 6pm

Claire Denis's BEAU TRAVAIL is a film of sweltering, oppressive heat; a sun-drenched rendering of Melville's Billy Budd that unfurls across the deserts of Djibouti, where a troop of French legionnaires perform a dance of drills and exercises as daily ritual. The men are soldiers, athletes, and the embodiment of physical perfection, and Denis venerates their physique with framing that recalls Leni Riefenstahl's ode to human beauty, OLYMPIA (1938). Day in and day out, they adhere to a strictly choreographed routine, their mechanized motions made downright hypnotic by the operatic overtones of Benjamin Britten. At the center of this tightly wound fever dream is Sergeant Galoup (Denis Lavant), whose own unflappable façade begins to crack upon the arrival of a new legionnaire, whose inherent beauty and goodness marks him as an object of obsession. It's here that the film's stifling (yet eloquent) discipline begins to clash with deeply repressed desire, and Galoup sets events in motion that will bring about his own undoing. Most notable is the unshakable denouement, where one tragic soldier at the end of his rope at last finds his ideal form of expression. Suddenly, Galoup is dancing a very different dance, and as the periodic flashes of local nightlife foreshadow, salvation may just lie in the universal escape of pop music. Screening as part of the Contact Zones: Cinema of Globalization, 1989–2024 lecture series. (1999, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Tristan Johnson]

Ngozi Onwurah's WELCOME II THE TERRORDOME (UK)

Sisters in Cinema Media Arts Center (2318 E. 75th St.) — Friday, 7pm [Free Admission]

As the first theatrically released film by a Black woman in England, Ngozi Onwurah’s WELCOME II THE TERRORDOME is a film that tends to live in articles about disparities in filmmaking. The film was a commercial failure on its release in 1995, likely for the predictable racist and sexist reasons, but also likely because a dystopian quasi-musical about the transhistorical struggles of the African diaspora doesn’t exactly scream “commercial.” Thankfully, in time, the film has found its audience, and a new and long-overdue 2K restoration will allow wider audiences to grapple with Onqurah’s incendiary work. Among other things, the film is a sort of ethnography of Transdean (called “the Terrordome” by its residents), a massive ghetto scaled up into a sort of autonomous zone. As laid out in voiceover, it’s designed by broader British society to contain poverty, drug use, and violence among its almost entirely Black residents (though the sign at the city limits clarifies it’s a “smoke free zone”). Spike (Valentine Nonyela), a drug dealer whose white girlfriend Jodie (Saffron Burrows) is pregnant with his child, begins the film preparing for a deal that might bring his product out of the Terrordome into wider society. When the deal goes south and violent conflict erupts with a group of white supremacists (including Jodie’s ex), Spike is caught in the middle as his Black radical brethren mount an operation of their own. The plot machinations, borne in both tone and content from exploitation films, is largely a canvas for Onwurah’s considerations of the current state of the African diaspora. The film’s fantastical framing story, an adaptation of the 1803 mass suicide at Igbo Landing where the enslaved people and their white captors are played by the same cast we later meet in Transdean, makes this clear by putting the characters’ subjugation and eventual liberation on a historical continuum with that of their ancestors. The characters are connected offscreen to the present day too, with the dystopia on display a recognizable and barely exaggerated version of the social segregation one can see in any major city. Cinematographer Alwin H Küchler, Onwurah’s husband and a later collaborator of Lynne Ramsey and Danny Boyle, gives Transdean a striking look that inverts our sense of space. The outdoors are cluttered, dense with people in constant proximity to fires and garbage, and veiled in the same thick fog that seemed to cover all “inner city” spaces at night in ‘80s and ‘90s cinema. Interiors often feel more spacious, with a series of more sparsely populated warehouses containing much of the film’s later action. It’s a visual feast to accompany the sonic one that, while not featuring the Public Enemy song that gives the film its name, is replete with narrative-describing rap music that, somewhat miraculously, doesn’t suck. It’s one of many elements of the film that would slip from the grasp of a less capable filmmaker, but is expertly worked into a totally unique and discursively strong work by Onwurah. Following the screening, Black Film Club Collective will lead a community talkback. (1995, 90 min, Digital Projection) [Maxwell Courtright]

Michael Dougherty’s TRICK ‘R TREAT (US)

Music Box Theatre — Thursday, 9pm

In August 2009, Terror in the Aisles 2 presented an unforgettable triple feature at the historic Portage Theater. EVIL DEAD (1981) screened with makeup artist Tom Sullivan in attendance. George Mihalka then presented his uncut version of MY BLOODY VALENTINE (1981) for the first time. The final screening began with "Season's  Greetings," a short animated film that introduced Michael Dougherty's totem of Halloween, Sam. Dougherty gave a brief introduction before TRICK 'R TREAT screened for the first time in Chicago. Warner Bros. had pulled the film less than a month before its scheduled 2007 theatrical release. Tie-in toys were already in stores, but there was no film to go with them. Barnes & Noble carried plush toys of a figure in orange footed pajamas, wearing a burlap mask with button eyes and holding a jagged pumpkin-shaped lollipop: equally cute and sinister. The anticipation only fueled the excitement that comes with rumors of a lost horror movie. Set over one Halloween night in the fictional Warren Valley, Ohio, TRICK 'R TREAT interweaves stories of vampires, werewolves, killers, and ghosts. It is an anthology of sorts, but unlike the frame narratives of DEAD OF NIGHT (1945) or TALES FROM THE CRYPT (1972), its structure doesn't rely on a storyteller. Instead of presenting individual vignettes, Dougherty braids the threads together. A murderous school principal (Dylan Baker) disposes of bodies between carving pumpkins with his son. Teenagers at a quarry encounter the undead victims of a decades-old school bus massacre. A young woman (Anna Paquin) discovers that her Halloween date is not what he seems. And in the "Scrooge" segment, Brian Cox plays Kreeg, a bitter, asthmatic old man whose refusal to take part in holiday traditions summons Sam, the soul of Halloween. Short for Samhain, Sam embodies the traditions of All Hallows' Eve, and those who don't abide are tricked to death. Give out candy, wear a costume, respect the dead, and never blow out a jack-o'-lantern. Dougherty's idea was to create a mythic figure for the holiday, like Santa Claus with a sack full of screeching cats. The stories were originally written as separate tales, but Dougherty was dissatisfied with the predictable rhythm of the anthology. In CREEPSHOW (1982), each story has a title card and an inevitable conclusion before the next begins. CREEPSHOW perfectly captures the feel of the EC horror comics, which Dougherty pays homage to in his opening credits. To disrupt that contained pattern, he has characters cross paths, events occur out of sequence, and details from one story quietly reappear in another. Moving from portmanteau to non-linear, hyperlink cinema akin to MAGNOLIA (1999) or PULP FICTION (1994), the film unifies around all things Halloween: autumnal colors, monsters, candy, costumes, urban legends, and practical effects. TRICK 'R TREAT may have had a bumpy start, but its message always read loud and clear: Halloween is a collection of rituals we willingly repeat because the repetition is part of the fun. As Sam sets out to punish those who don't celebrate properly, he would be happy to know that TRICK 'R TREAT itself has become part of the tradition. Screening as part of Music Box of Horrors: The Final Chapter with Dougherty in attendance for a post-screening Q&A. (2007, 82 min, 35mm) [Shaun Huhn]

Adam McKay’s THE BIG SHORT (US) + Hito Steyerl’s THE FREE FALL (US/Experimental)

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

Adam McKay’s THE BIG SHORT (2015, 131 min, DCP Digital) may look like a mockumentary that cosplays a docudrama, but in essence it’s a heist movie. The film is based on Michael Lewis’s 2011 page-turning nonfiction of the same name, following a list of prescient players in Wall Street who sensed the burst of the real estate bubble prior to the 2008 financial crash, and how they did not waste the good crisis. It was a sensation when it hit the screens in 2015. I vividly remember how finance dramas like MARGIN CALL (2011) and THE WOLF OF WALL STREET (2013) stoked the college-students-cum-aspirational-bankers who were my peers; THE BIG SHORT arrived as yet another adrenaline-fueled movie that didn’t quench but fed their desire. Scion Capital’s Michael Burry (Christian Bale) is the barefoot numbers genius who lives in his office and spots the structural vulnerability in subprime mortgages. Then there’s Mark Baum (Steve Carell), portrayed after Steve Eisman, an angry contrarian with a family tragedy he can’t get over and a deep disdain for the very water he swims in. When approached by Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling, and in real life Greg Lippmann), a Deutsche Bank bond trader and smart-ass intimidator possessing a money-hungry nose (“I smell money!”), and after each firing a round of ego, with finger-pointing and swearing and all, Baum and his team decide to work with Vennett. The drama is incomplete without a pair of underdogs: there are Charlie Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock), the indie rock of the investors, guided by Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt), a trader in self-imposed exile who decides to exercise his cynicism to a great deal by helping them do something bad for their conscience but good for investment. One of the appeals of the film is not that it’s a lush spectacle based on a true story, but that it was also made like a true story. Its playful self-awareness comes through when characters break the fourth wall to address the audience directly, undermining claims they made just seconds ago. Interstitially, celebrities including Margot Robbie, Anthony Bourdain (RIP), and Selena Gomez make cameo appearances to explain financial jargon in a way that moms understand. The camera is shaky, zooming in and out or scanning between the talking heads. Jump cuts are so agitating that it’s like cocaine is in the air and everyone is, if I may quote Vennett, “jacked to the tits.” Except that, in stories as in real life, women are usually the ones left out. THE BIG SHORT’s glaring omission is Meredith Whitney, a research analyst and a figure with whom Lewis opens his book, who blew the whistle on the collapse of Citigroup. McKay’s characters are problematically authentic that it’s hard to hate them as much as you’d like to—and they know: they hate themselves and hate the system too, and they demand your mercy because, like Vinnie Daniel says at the end of the film, when he tries to convince his boss, Baum, to sell the company’s swaps, “We are not the bad guys.” The system is crooked; don’t kill the messengers who take their slice of cake. The film absorbs its moral messaging into spectacle and, as in reality too, no real consequence for the “real bad guys.” THE BIG SHORT closes on itself like a Möbius loop of cynicism that sells as clairvoyance—and a kind that’s strangely relevant today: the AI bubble is getting very big, and Burry and Eisman are debating how it’s gonna burst more fabulously for them and their investors. Preceded by THE FREE FALL (2010, 32 min, DCP Digital), Hito Steyerl’s film essay that uses the material history of a Boeing 4X-JYI jet as a guiding principle to describe the entanglement of economic collapse, state-sanctioned violence, and the afterlife of things that repeats the cycle. The “queen of spectacles” (as dubbed by media artist Alan Warburton) is fond of juxtapositions of great contrast: scenes of airplanes in free fall or hijackings, sourced from Hollywood movies, are cut against airline safety videos. In front of the debris of a giant civilian aircraft, a laptop computer plays clips of an explosion stunt from a DVD that could have been made from materials recycled from the very aircraft being destroyed. Even the soundtrack adds a spectacular contradiction, with Charlotte Gainsbourg singing about an airplane crash against A.I.R.’s dreamy beats. Chiming with THE BIG SHORT, the film sabotages its own illusion by including outtakes and mistakes, repeatedly exposing the seams between documentary and fiction. Screening as part of the There Is No Center: Screening the Obama Era, 2009–17 series. [Nicky Ni]

Ken Russell’s LISZTOMANIA (UK)

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

Just a year after his biopic on composer Gustav Mahler and the very same year of his adaptation of the rock opera TOMMY, British director Ken Russell released LISZTOMANIA. Like TOMMY, the film stars The Who’s lead singer Roger Daltry as Hungarian composer Franz Liszt. The term “Lisztomania” is an historical one, coined from the observations of hysteria by fans of the mid-19th century artist. It’s a perfect term in which to approach the themes surrounding Russell’s work thus far; his obsession with exploring the cross-sections of history and celebrity is perhaps no more distilled than in LISZTOMANIA. Following a very fantastical version of Liszt’s life, the film focuses on his many romances—aspects of the script are taken from a book by his lover, Maria d’Agoult (played here by Fiona Lewis)—as well as his rivalry with Richard Wagner (a chaotic Paul Nicholas). Itself a musical composed by Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman, LISZTOMANIA’s music is less memorable than its imagery, its picture-book style constellating history and fantasy. Most famously is a mesmerizing set piece in which Liszt’s is dragged atop a giant phallus to a guillotine, surrounded by the women of his life. Wagner is presented as a twisted Universal monster villain, with Russell clearly—both narratively and visually—connecting the composer’s nationalism and antisemitism with the rise of Nazism a century later. Frankenstein imagery stands out here as a repeated figure in cinematic rock musicals from the time: it appears in TOMMY, Brian De Palma’s PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE the year before, and in THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, also released in 1975. It’s perhaps easy to see LISZTOMANIA’s commentary on ideology, history, and the nature of media and celebrity as being overshadowed (Ringo Starr plays the Pope!), but these surface amusements conceal a dense text. Screening as part of the Ken Russell’s Pitch-Perfect Perversions series. (1975, 103 min, Digital Projection) [Megan Fariello]

Paul Verhoeven's SHOWGIRLS (US)

Alamo Drafthouse — Sunday, 12:15pm

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

Paul Verhoeven's STARSHIP TROOPERS (US)

Siskel Film Center — Saturday, 2pm and Monday, 6pm

It may be hard to believe, 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. Screening as part of the 25 For 25 series, revisiting standout titles from the Siskel's State Street history. (1997, 129 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Tobe Hooper's THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (US)

Alamo Drafthouse — Friday, 11:30am; Sunday, 10:15pm; and Monday, 7pm

IA film of seminal importance, THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE sits at the crux of a huge shift; it feels as if American cinema had always been moving toward it, and its wake is continually influential. It’s certainly an essential film in the horror canon with regards to many subgenres, though notably as an early example of the slasher, with Marilyn Burn’s Sally Hardesty as one of the most iconic of final girls. The film opens with Sally, her brother Franklin (Paul A. Partain), and their friends as they travel through Texas to visit their late grandfather’s home. After picking up a strange and violent hitchhiker, they find the house, but they're unable to escape the savage behavior of a family of vicious cannibals residing nearby. While this plot by now feels all too familiar, THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE continues to be shocking in its grotesqueness. It’s a slow film, not in pace necessarily, but in the way the violence builds, the way the characters unhurriedly move through the landscape, and the way in which director Tobe Hooper portrays the muggy weather of the open Texas countryside, everything and everyone covered in sweat and flies. The graininess of the film gives a sense of humidity. Its iconic imagery is due, in part, to its distinctive look, taking place primarily during the day with the light of Texas sun; it’s quite a beautiful film despite its extreme violence. Though, important to note, it’s not especially explicit. The power of THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE is how much unsettling horror Hooper implies. It feels like the film is drowning the audience in it, that slow burn contributing to the terror. This is one of the most impressive examples of American independent cinema, made in extreme conditions and on an extremely low budget. Cowritten by Hooper and Kim Henkel, THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE also remains evergreen in its subtle (and not so subtle) social commentary, not just on US culture and politics in the 1970s, but in its continued reverberation fifty years later. As Hooper’s breakout feature, it was perhaps inevitably impossible to live up to its cultural impact, and his oeuvre has yet to get the same re-appreciation as horror figures like John Carpenter or George Romero. But aspects of THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE show up in all his films, particularly its repulsive take on humanity grounded in bonkers humor. (1974, 83 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

René Clair’s I MARRIED A WITCH (US)

The 400 Theater — See Venue website for showtimes

“‘Twill be sweet to plague the human race again,” is one of the first lines Veronica Lake’s Jennifer remarks in I MARRIED A WITCH, holding fast to her witch predilections. Jennifer is mischievous and otherworldly; she’s given life by Lake’s effervescent performance. Unbound by both reality and human behavior, she’s an unquestionably memorable and influential cinematic witch. The film is influential on the lighthearted depictions of housewife witches on film and television for decades to come. In revenge for being burned at the stake along with her father (Cecil Kellaway), Jennifer places a curse upon the perpetrator Jonathan Wooley and his entire line; every Wooley man will be fated to marry the exact wrong woman. In 1942, lightning strikes the tree under which father and daughter are buried; they return as magical smoke, though eventually taking human form. Determined to continue her tormenting, Jennifer finds the current descendent, the politician and soon to be married Wally (Fredric March, who plays all the Wooley men). Director René Clair and cinematographer Ted Telzlaff seamlessly fuse classic screwball moments with impressive fantasy and effects sequences; the scenes of Jennifer and father appearing as smoke by the tree are truly haunting, right out of an atmospheric horror film. The film’s fanciful nature doesn’t completely overpower the actuality of the situation and the darkness present at its start; this is perhaps most visibly seen through Jennifer’s distinct costume changes throughout the film, as they shift from white gowns to dark flowing garments and cloaks, more suited to a Hollywood witch. Even as the love story between Jennifer and Wally develops, her early impishness hangs over the film, commenting on the mystifying, and challenging, nature of love and relationships, even without the involvement of any magic at all. Screening as part of the Black Cats and Broomsticks series. (1942, 77 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Tod Browning's DRACULA (US)

The 400 Theater — Thursday, 7:15pm

In DRACULA, Tod Browning, the greatest horror director of the silent period, famously inaugurated Universal's long cycle of scary movies. Browning's Dracula, played with astounding charisma by Béla Lugosi, is a handsome, collected, and hyper-civilized monster whose lust for blood and power plays out not in fangs, hairy palms, and vivid, animalistic transformations (as in Bram Stoker's novel) but in the pregnant look, the deliberate pause, and the contorted, barely controlled fury threatening to boil over in every gesture.  Lugosi's performance as the titular count was a radical departure from the rat-like portrait drawn in the novel, but has become the gold standard in stately and erotic menace, haunting the nightmares of the susceptible for three-quarters of a century now. The product of a deep collaboration with Karl Freund, perhaps the greatest cinematographer ever to live, DRACULA is a beautiful and disturbing film, one of the great financial successes in Universal's history, and a high-point in any consideration of the genre. The film's oneiric pacing and logic defy summary: nothing makes any sense at all, and yet feels so utterly and terrifyingly inevitable. For years, critics were fond of dismissing DRACULA as a shallow and sloppy exercise that contrasted poorly to James Whale's FRANKENSTEIN, arriving later the same year. But in the roughness of DRACULA's style, its stagy performances, its incoherent plotline, its strange, stuttery dramaturgy, they missed the ways all of these ostensive faults only enhanced the film's true power. Dracula is a demonic, supernatural force of evil that, repeatedly, is equated in power and malice, to cinema itself. His hypnotic gaze penetrates into our eyes as much as into those of the innocent flower-vendor he murders upon his arrival in England, and that gaze is symbolically and visually linked to that of his exact opposite, the mysterious foreigner Van Helsing, whose glasses have the unearthly power to reflect the lights of artifice itself. Screening as part of the Monster Mash series. (1931, 75 min, DCP Digital) [Kian Bergstrom]

Clive Barker's HELLRAISER (UK)

Alamo Drafthouse — Friday, 7pm

“Jesus wept,” utters Frank Cotton as hooks and chains manifest from a hellish dimension and tear his body to scraps of flesh and fiber. With HELLRAISER, Clive Barker made his feature film directing debut, and he certainly did not hold himself back. Barker, adapting his 1986 novella The Hellbound Heart, knew exactly what he wanted to do here—and that's an extremely undervalued quality. This is a fabulously disgusting, funny, and erotic film. HELLRAISER presents what happens after Frank comes into possession of a mysterious puzzle box that summons the grotesque Cenobites, who describe themselves as “Explorers in the further regions of experience. Demons to some. Angels to others.” The Cenobites are demonic-looking beings whose flesh is mutilated in horrific ways. The most recognizable one is Pinhead—a giant, ghostly white being with nails protruding from all over his head. Pinhead has transcended the HELLRAISER films, being featured in popular video games among the likes of the other horror icons like Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers, while the HELLRAISER IP has stagnated and declined. The good news is that HELLRAISER will be receiving a reboot with Barker closely involved, something that hasn’t happened since he received a “Story By” credit on HELLBOUND: HELLRAISER II (1988). While the disdain towards remakes and reboots is understandable, let's hope the makers of the new one can take some cues from the originator of the series and produce something equally fun and filthy. HELLRAISER is full of amazingly gory practical effects that will leave horror aficionados pondering the techniques that make everything look so slimy. The film also contains a healthy blend of corny dialogue and sexual tension that round this out as a horror classic. (1987, 93 minutes, DCP Digital) [Drew Van Weelden]

John Fawcett’s GINGER SNAPS (Canada)

Alamo Drafthouse — Tuesday, 7pm

The werewolf has long been thematically connected to puberty and coming-of-age stories. This is most felt in the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood, but modern cinema has made use of the allegory, as seen in such tonally diverse films as TEEN WOLF and THE COMPANY OF WOLVES. John Fawcett’s horror film GINGER SNAPS sits between those two films; it’s at once a teen comedy about what happens when your sister becomes a werewolf and a dark and moving examination of puberty, sexuality, and female bonds. Antisocial sisters Ginger and Brigette Fitzgerald (Katharine Isabelle and Emily Perkins) are incredibly close; they act out their own violent deaths much to the dismay of their parents. They obsess over death, vowing to escape their dull suburban existence or commit suicide together at 16. Their macabre bond is shaken, however, after Ginger gets her first period and is attacked by a werewolf. Ginger begins to change–into both a hideous creature and a self-possessed teenager interested in sex and boys. Simultaneously, Brigette gets increasingly concerned, worried both about the monster her sister is becoming and the ways in which Ginger is rejecting their withdrawn lifestyle. While part horror-comedy, GINGER SNAPS doesn’t stray from the violent, real-world consequences of Ginger’s transformation, complete with disturbing practical special effects. Isabelle and Perkins’ off-kilter yet sincere performances drive the film, keeping the core relationship at the heart of this wild teen tale. In its dreary suburban setting, GINGER SNAPS aptly balances a grounded reality with fantastical horror elements. It’s a cult horror film that endures because of its dark humor and serious feminist themes, intelligently observing how simultaneously funny, horrifying, and empowering it is to grow up. Screening as part of the Terror Tuesday series. (2000, 108 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Wim Wenders' WINGS OF DESIRE (West Germany)

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

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

Ryusuke Hamaguchi's DRIVE MY CAR (Japan)

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

How do we deal with misfortunes that arrive when we least expect them? In DRIVE MY CAR, the characters channel their emotions (or lack thereof) into their art, their tools, and their environments. The film follows Yūsuke Kafuku, a theater director who is known for putting on multilingual productions, a concept you could spend hours discussing. For a large portion of the film, we find him traveling in his car, listening to a cassette recording of his wife reading lines for Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in preparation for a production he's going to put on. The film takes on these various layers (it's a cinematic lasagna, if you will), filled with references, different languages, and emotions that are both explosively expressed and shamefully hidden. This comes as no surprise, given that the film is an adaptation of a short story by Haruki Murakami, whose work is also filled with references and taboo eroticism. Hamaguchi delivers a nuanced film that should only get better with each viewing, as details and subtleties are weaved into things said or left unsaid. This makes sense—Kafuku’s multilingual production raises some interesting questions on the ways we can approach communication. Despite a language barrier, or an unwillingness to say something out loud, intentions and feelings can still seep through with a knowing glance or shy shift of the body. Often, the audience and maybe one or two characters might know the truth of the scenario, but Hamaguchi places us in an awkward position, knowing right next to the main cast. It’s hard to say what's the right way to deal with these scenarios, but delaying the inevitable impact of your feelings will only do you harm in the long run. Screening as part of the Heteroglossia: Languages and Translation series. (2021, 179 min, DCP Digital) [Drew Van Weelden]

Sofia Coppola's THE BLING RING (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) — Saturday, 3pm

Paris Hilton's real house is prominently featured in Sofia Coppola's THE BLING RING, with no question as to whose it could be. The decor is distinctly personal, her face appearing on everything from the pictures on the wall to the pillows on her bed. It's hard to tell whether or not Hilton is in on the joke—she agreed to let her house be used and even appears in a cameo—but it's no secret that the film is a somewhat mocking representation of a vainglorious celebrity culture so rampant as to inspire theft in an already privileged group of teenagers. If Hilton isn't in on it, then the late Harris Savides must have been. The renowned cinematographer shows a world so beautiful as to seem unreal, even fake, producing the cinematic equivalent of luxury brand magazine ads and some of the classier network reality shows. (That's not to criticize Savides' work, but to recognize his impressive ability to duplicate and even expand upon a familiar aesthetic.) Both Hilton's involvement and Savides' portrayal represent the complexity of a film that appears as vapid as the lifestyle it's infiltrating, with only the subtlest of indicators suggesting any depth beyond its glossy surface. The lack of any outward ugliness in relation to the film's debauched premise is a nuance that has caused many a critic and moviegoer to wonder if the film isn't more endorsement than depiction. That's not to say people believe Coppola is condoning her characters' actions, but the film's portrayal of tantalizingly beautiful stuff lends itself to an uncomfortable understanding from the audience as to why someone might want to steal it. Ironically, the thieves in question were not admiring from afar but instead lurking in the fringes of entitlement—the film is based on true events during which a group of affluent LA teenagers (later dubbed the "Bling Ring") robbed the houses of several celebrities whom they proclaimed to admire. Coppola makes no attempt to mask the glamor or denounce an appreciation for beautiful things, instead forcing viewers to reconcile that acknowledgement with their disdain for the criminal actions rooted in society's envy of the rich and famous. Hers is an uncomfortable truth, one in which very little effort is made to add depth where it does not belong; the stuff is beautiful and the people are shallow, but there is no need for them to be anything more than that. As the teenage robbers admire Hilton's vast collection of clothes, shoes and accessories, one cannot help but to wonder if them admiring the beautiful things is the same as us admiring Savides' beautiful images. Any semblance of depth exists not within the narrative, but in what it reflects back upon and says about the viewer. Screening with Jem Cohen's 2011 short film GRAVITY HILL NEWSREELS: OCCUPY WALL STREET (64 min, Digital Projection) as part of the There Is No Center: Screening the Obama Era, 2009–17 series. (2013, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

📽️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Alamo Drafthouse
Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s 2026 documentary NAZA (80 min, DCP Digital) screens this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

Dismember the Alamo, a horror-movie marathon programmed by Oscarbate, takes place Saturday and starts at 3pm.

Terence Fisher’s 1961 film THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF (93 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 9:30pm, also as part of the Terror Tuesday series.

Bryan Beasley’s 2014 film DRACULA’S ANGEL (87 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday, 9:30pm, as part of the Weird Wednesday series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ The Beach Beneath the Street (1703 E. 55th St.)
Franc Roddam's 1979 film QUADROPHENIA (117 min, Digital Projection) screens Monday, 7pm, presented by the Monday Night Film Club. Drinks and shareable snacks encouraged. Free admission. More info here.

⚫ Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
Kimberly Reed's 2024 documentary I'M YOUR VENUS (85 min, Digital Projection) screens Thursday, 7pm, with Reed in attendance. Free admission. More info here.

⚫ Chicago Film Archives
Silvia Malagrino’s 2005 documentary BURNT ORANGES (90 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday, 6:30pm, at Epiphany Center for the Arts, The Sanctuary (201 S. Ashland Ave.), as part of Chicago Film Archives’ Inside/Out: Stories of Origin and Dis/Placement series. Presented by journalist Nissa Rhee (cofounder of Borderless Magazine), followed by a post-screening conversation with Malagrino and writer Monica Flores Correa. Free admission; RSVP at the link. More info here.

⚫ Chicago Filmmakers
Denis Mueller and Ilko Davidov’s 2026 documentary RUSSELL BANKS: I WRITE IN ORDER TO BE A BETTER PERSON (86 min, Digital Projection) screens Saturday, 7pm, with Mueller and Davidov in attendance. More info here.

⚫ Chicago International Film Festival
The 62nd edition of the festival begins Wednesday with two screenings at the Music Box Theatre (see below), then continues Thursday with screenings at the AMC NEWCITY 14 and the Kennedy-King College Theater (740 W. 63rd St.). Check back next week for our coverage. More info, including a complete festival schedule, 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.

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Kane Parsons's 2026 film BACKROOMS: EVERYTHING MUST GO EDITION (127 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, 7pm, as part of the New Releases and Restorations series.

Fernando Ayala's 1952 film NEVER OPEN THAT DOOR (80 min, DCP Digital) screens Monday, 7pm, as part of the Golden Age of Argentine Noir. More info on all screenings here. 

⚫ Eyewash Station
Norman Tokar’s 1978 film THE CAT FROM OUTER SPACE (104 min, Digital Projection) screens Friday at 7pm.

Michael Wadleigh’s 1981 film WOLFEN (115 min, Digital Projection) screens Saturday at 4:45pm.

Abel Ferrara’s 1979 film THE DRILLER KILLER (101 min, Digital Projection) screens Saturday at 7pm

Yumeji Tanima’s Scream Theater, a two-story horror comedy OVA, screens Sunday at 6pm.

Ujicha’s 2014 animated film VIOLENCE VOYAGER (83 min, Digital Projection) screens Sunday at 7:15pm.

Roger Corman’s 1960 film HOUSE OF USHER (85 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday at 8pm.

Mitchell Lichtenstein’s 2007 film TEETH (94 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday at 8pm.

Shinya Tsukamoto’s 2011 film KOTOKO (82 min, Digital Projection) screens Thursday at 7pm. More info on all screenings here.

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

Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2026 film HER PRIVATE HELL (100 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 9pm, as part of the Must-Watch Indies series, preceded by an introduction by series programmer and film critic Marya E. Gates. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Filmmaker Friday Chicago
Filmmaker Friday Chicago presents a special guest panel for the next Chicago Filmmaker Hangout on funding, festivals, and distribution, on Friday, 7pm, at Kinowerks (5645 N. Ravenswood Ave.), in partnership with Machina Rentals. Free admission. More info here.

⚫ Film Studies Center (at the University of Chicago's Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St.)
John M. Stahl’s 1926 film MEMORY LANE (78 min, 35mm) screens Friday, 7pm, with live piano accompaniment by David Drazin and an introduction by Hunter Koch. Free admission. More info here.

⚫ The Massacre
The Massacre, an all-day horror movie marathon, takes place Saturday starting at 11am and going late, at the Pickwick Theatre (5 S. Prospect Ave., Park Ridge).

⚫ Mouse Arts and Letters (555 W. 31st St.)
Cinemanita presents Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 Japanese film HOUSE (88 min, Digital Projection) on Saturday at 8pm. More info here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s 2026 documentary NAZA (80 min, DCP Digital) and a new restoration of Douglas Keeve’s 1995 documentary UNZIPPED (73 min, DCP Digital) screen this week. Continuing are John Wilson’s 2026 documentary THE HISTORY OF CONCRETE (102 min, DCP Digital) and Louis Paxton’s 2026 film THE INCOMER (100 min, DCP Digital). See Venue website for showtimes.

Joe Johnston’s 1989 film HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS (93 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday and Sunday, 11am, as part of the Indoor Kids family matinee series.

Rustin Thompson’s 2026 documentary THE LAST PICTURE SHOWS (78 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, 1pm, followed by a Q&A with Thompson.

A free, members-only screening of Cristian Mungiu’s 2026 film FJORD (146 min, DCP Digital) is on Sunday, 5pm, in advance of the film’s run, which begins next Friday.

The Cinema Femme Short Film Festival 2026 screens Monday and Tuesday, with shorts programs at 7pm and 9pm on Monday and at 9pm on Tuesday. The 2026 feature film UGLY CRY (94 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 6:45pm, followed by a Q&A with Emily Robinson, Robin Tunney, and Aaron Dominguez.

Also screening in Music Box of Horrors: The Final Chapter are: a new restoration of E. Elias Merhige’s 1989 film BEGOTTEN (72 min, DCP Digital) on Monday, 7pm, followed by a Q&A with Merhige; and Daniel Erickson’s 1991 film SCARY MOVIE (82 min, DCP Digital) on Tuesday at 9:30pm.

The 62nd Chicago International Film Festival begins Wednesday with two screenings: Jordan Firstman’s 2026 film CLUB KID (126 min, 35mm) screens at 6pm, and Zachary Wigon’s 2026 film VICTORIAN PSYCHO (102 min, DCP Digital) screens at 9:45pm. Directors and cast members of both films in attendance for postshow Q&As. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Patient Info
Films by Sarah Ballard, Caitlin Ryan, Steve Reinke, Drew Durepos, Anne McGuire, Paige Taul, and Fernando Saldivia Yáñez screen Sunday, 7pm, at Patient Info (902 N. Western Ave.) in conjunction with the “Moderately & With Great Boredom” exhibition. Screening curated by Emily Eddy. More info here.

⚫ Siskel Film Center
Jim Shea’s 2010 documentary HOW LUCKY CAN ONE MAN GET (92 min, DCP Digital) screens multiple times this week. John Anderson and Fiona Prine in conversation after the Friday, 6pm screening (which is currently sold out). Brydie O’Connor’s 2026 documentary BARBARA FOREVER (101 min, DCP Digital) also screens this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

Iain Softley’s 1995 film HACKERS (104 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday, 12pm, as an encore screening of the Contact Zones: Cinema of Globalization, 1989–2024 lecture series.

A free member’s advance screening of Chris Rock’s 2026 film MISTY GREEN (103 min, DCP Digital) is on Wednesday at 6:30pm.

George Sluizer’s 1988 film THE VANISHING (106 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday, 8:15pm, as part of the SAIC Film Club series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Uprising Theater & Cafe (2905 N. Milwaukee Ave.)
Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s 2026 documentary NAZA (80 min, DCP Digital) screens this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

Colette Ghunim’s 2025 documentary TRACES OF HOME (93 min, Digital Projection) screens Friday at 7pm, Saturday at 7pm, and Sunday at 1:45pm and 3:30pm. 

Through our Eyes, a short film program, screens Wednesday at 6:30pm. More info on all screenings here. 

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Erika Balsom, Kian Bergstrom, Rob Christopher, Kyle Cubr, Ray Ebarb, Alex Ensign, Megan Fariello, Jason Halprin, Shaun Huhn, Nicky Ni, Scott Pfeiffer, Brian Welesko