:: FRIDAY, MAY 8 - THURSDAY, MAY 14 ::

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Michael Glover Smith’s HEKLA (US)

Music Box Theatre – Sunday, 7pm

HELKA arrives as Chicago filmmaker (and Cine-File contributor) Michael Glover Smith’s most dynamic feature to date. Its genesis came from Smith’s desire to see a film about a day in the life of an actor—a universally known “impossible career.” Having wanted to tell this story for ten years, he waited for the right actor to come along. When making RELATIVE (2022), Smith discovered the powerhouse of actor Elizabeth Stam, a local young talent. Later, executive producer of Sweet Void Cinema Jack McCoy cast Smith in a supporting role of one of their films and provided resources for the director in the form of gear and manpower. Smith raised funds for previous features through multiple investors. Without securing any financiers for HELKA, the director took a page from John Cassavetes, a high rolling artist known to bet the farm just to make the next picture, and sold his condo to finance the work. Already twelve drafts in, Michael invited Stam into the preproduction process to rewrite the script to cater to her character to her rhythms, patterns, mannerisms, and blemishes. To solidify the organic partnership between actor and director, Smith involved the actor to design dream sequences depicting her character’s inner life. The director’s open collaboration with the actor frees the actor to deliver an organic performance. HEKLA is Smith’s most kinetic and chaotic film as his most Chicago movie to date—it’s CLEO 5 FROM TO 7 (1962) if Cleo had a Malört shot at the end. Principal photography moved very fast, bypassing film permits, remaining handheld for all, an aesthetic rallying for more French New Wave inspired filmmaking. Stam gives her all. Rarely does an artist’s life look pretty; the audience bears witness as Hekla navigates the ugly. The film leans into the interpersonal strain one faces choosing their career over their relationships—the consequences echo both internally and externally for the character. For most, the struggle to create a life well lived feels like an impossible task, and such is making a living as an actor in 2026. At the conclusion of the film, Hekla stands reciting Shakespeare to drunks with a broken heart. The film feels so authentic in approach and performance, it feels like a piece of living autofiction. Aside from the ambition to make more films, Smith seeks to inspire other filmmakers whether his students or fellow filmmakers to just go out and do it. As a director who has hustled for years, his filmmaking only ascends and carries the rare passion for the local film scene. With an approach that requires no permits and no complicated lighting setups, the filmmaker hopes to fuel the fire for a Chicago New Wave. Followed by a Q&A with Smith and writer-star Elizabeth Stam, with cast members Wendy Robie, Mary Tilden, Brookelyn Hebert, Sadieh Rifai, Grant Carriker, and Sadie Rogers. (2026, 89 min, DCP Digital) [Ray Ebarb]

Rapturous: Tatsu Aoki, a Chicago Asian-American Avant-Garde (US/Experimental)

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

Tatsu Aoki is a treasure of the Chicago arts scene. The Japanese American filmmaker, musician, and educator was born and raised in Tokyo. Throughout his childhood, he trained as part of his family’s geisha business, learning about traditional arts practices—shamisen, taiko drumming, classical dance—while attending underground theater performances at the behest of his movie-producer father. It was in these spaces that he met Japanese pioneers like Toru Takemitsu and Hiroshi Teshigahara, but he also learned of American independent filmmakers like Jonas Mekas and Stan Brakhage. The latter, he heard, taught at the Art Institute of Chicago. AACM, the Black avant-garde music collective that Aoki loved, was also there. These interests led to his eventual move to Chicago, and in the decades since he’s been incredibly prolific: he’s the founder of MIYUMI Project, he spearheads the Chicago Asian American Jazz Festival, and he's made numerous experimental shorts shot on film. With the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters grant, the Chicago Film Society has restored four of Aoki’s works. 3725 (1980, 9 min, 16mm) is a vibrant domestic odyssey set to Stéphane Grappelli’s jazz violin playing. The camera pans and scans the interior and exterior of his apartment, and these fun, frilly images are occasionally ruptured by less typical fare: Aoki playing with a kendama toy, set to explosion sound effects; stop-motion sequences and giant bubbles that carry a science-fiction sheen; deteriorated and blown-out color images. 3725’s joys are in its contrasts. DREAMWORKS (1983, 11 min, 16mm) is also set in an apartment but has a clearer arc, following a cat as a narrator relays Freudian theories about a cat. Soon, the camera employs POV shots complete with sound effects of the cat eating, drinking, and purring. Hand-processed effects then depict the cat in a hypnotic reverie, utilizing the purring noise as a form of droning psychedelia—a representation of being on catnip, perhaps. RAPTUROUS (1983, 6 min, 16mm) is far simpler, transforming a parking garage into a flurry of fluorescent lights via a mirrored image across the y-axis. HARMONY (1991, 9 min, 16mm) is the best of the batch, utilizing 32 layers of superimposed images to create a hallucinatory depiction of folks walking around downtown. It occasionally feels like Norman McLaren’s PAS DE DEUX captured in the everyday, but the multiple exposures frequently blur with such intensity, especially when rapid camera movements are involved, that the film becomes a pure exercise in color, rhythm, and texture. It’s one of Aoki’s most fully realized works. The program contains additional films beyond the CFS restorations, including LOCAL COLOR (1987/1990/2000 reedits, 10 min, 16mm), another exercise in blurred images of people walking. It’s more consistently abstract than HARMONY, like viewing Chicago pedestrians through a series of funhouse mirrors. PUZZLE 2000 (2000, 20 min, 16mm) takes the Lincoln Park Zoo as its subject, deeply interested in light and shadow and color. The program also features an excerpt from Tatsu Aoki’s upcoming film. Presented by Tien-Tien Jong and Carson Wang as the Spring 2026 Film Studies Center Graduate Student Curatorial Selection, with Aoki in person, in conversation with Jacqueline Stewart. [Joshua Minsoo Kim]

Sapphopalooza

Music Box Theatre – See showtimes below

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT (West Germany)
Saturday, 11:30am
Rainer Werner Fassbinder was not yet 28 when he released the film adaptation of THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT, yet he had already written and directed a dozen features. This set of factors helps explain why the movie feels at once youthful and mature. On the one hand, PETRA VON KANT (which Fassbinder originally staged as a play in 1971) exudes a brash defiance of conformism; it’s a profoundly angry work about how we internalize the oppressive order of capitalist society and replicate it in our personal affairs. On the other hand, the film reflects the confidence of a master artist: the eloquent camera movements, bold visual compositions, and astute manipulation of melodramatic conventions combine to make the cynical message feel like the stuff of earned wisdom. The action takes place exclusively in the apartment of the titular fashion designer (played by Margin Carstensen) and charts the rise and fall of her romance with a younger model, Karin (Fassbinder’s supreme muse Hanna Schygulla). The narcissistic Petra thinks she’s flaunting convention with her lesbian affair, and in the tradition of classical tragedy, her pride signals a fall—blinded by her infatuation with the younger, flightier Karin, Petra fails to recognize that her beloved does not love her back. Fassbinder embraced melodrama, in part, because he saw in the highly theatrical form a means of critiquing the unnatural conventions of society at large, in this case competition, oneupmanship, and exploitation. (Fassbinder took flak for showing that these conventions could be replicated even in a historically marginalized community, yet in hindsight, this decision underscores the universality of his concerns.) Yet he also loved melodrama for its ability to stir viewers’ emotions, and indeed, PETRA VON KANT is a heartbreaking experience in spite of (or perhaps because of) its cynicism. The film may be as crammed with movie references—the all-female cast recalls George Cukor’s THE WOMEN (1939), the central relationship recalls Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s ALL ABOUT EVE (1950), and the sinuous tracking shots and ostentatious mise-en-scène evokes the work of Josef von Sternberg—but the force of Fassbinder’s anger cuts through the distancing devices. Presented in partnership with the Goethe-Institut Chicago. (1972, 124 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
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Todd Haynes' CAROL (US)
Sunday, 11:30am
Todd Haynes’ film was nominated for six Oscars and was jobbed out of every last one, including a few that it wasn’t up for. It might seem in questionable taste to bring up awards when talking about a film as rigorous and lavishly emotional as CAROL, but it’s one of those pictures that makes you notice all its artisans’ work, from prop masters to painters, from the masterly concision of the writing to the costumers’ precision, on down the line, every last bit of it, the care taken to recreate this womb-world where people played 78s and drove drunk with their kids in the back seat. You appreciate it so—love it so—that your back tends to get up when you run into someone who doesn’t feel similarly. The leads are pitched just right: Rooney Mara’s lightly tremulous Therese, with her increasing inability to abide men’s demands on her, so much so that she’s nearly jumping out of her skin at their insinuations, is “flung out of space” into the path of Cate Blanchett’s Carol, whose martini-lunch bearing is being shredded by a divorce and a legal fight for her daughter. (Blanchett’s line readings as haunting as a smoke eddy, and when she loses it, never tips over into divadom; when asked if she knows what she’s doing regarding Therese, her quiet response of “I never did” seems the fulcrum of the film’s prevailing mood.) The director’s attunement to the women even extends to the blocking; his keen stratagem of constantly placing figures (mostly men) in Therese and Carol’s way subliminally works on you, and his little visual detours, such as a set of closeups giving way to a montage made of lovely, positively avant-garde out-of-focus dissolves, are plainly beautiful. He’s the perfect director for this material. Time will tell if CAROL has the resonances of a classic, much less a masterpiece, though I suspect it will. In the meantime, any day we can see it in a theater is a happy one, especially when we're seeing the 35mm print Haynes and cinematographer Ed Lachman paid for out of pocket. Co-presented by Women and Children First. (2015, 118 min, 35mm) [Jim Gabriel]
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F. Gary Gray's SET IT OFF (US)
Tuesday, 7pm
A profoundly affecting display of female friendship and the unique trials faced by Black women, F. Gary Gray’s SET IT OFF will—to be completely cliche for a moment—make you laugh, and it will make you cry. The powerhouses that are Jada Pinkett Smith, Queen Latifah, Vivica A. Fox, and Kimberly Elise star as four best friends in Los Angeles. Stony (Pinkett), Cleo (Latifah) and T.T. (Elise) work together as cleaners; Frankie (Fox) is a bank teller. The film begins with her bank getting robbed by someone she knows from the projects. Because of this, she’s unfairly fired from the bank, and a cop on the scene (John C. McGinley) even presumes she was involved in the crime. This is just the first of several hardships faced by the women—Stony’s brother is shot by McGinley’s cop, T.T.’s son is taken away from her after he accidentally drinks cleaning detergent at his mother’s job, as she had been unable to afford childcare—hardships that eventually drive them to start robbing banks themselves. While casing a bank, Stony, who emerges as the de facto main character, meets Keith (Blair Underwood), a handsome, well-educated banker. Yet it’s the friendship between the four women where the real love of the film is found. Deeply bonded after decades of friendship, their love for one another transcends any traditional sort of romance. The group is successful at first, but setbacks continue to rear their ugly heads. Scripted by Takashi Bufford and Kate Lanier, the story is altogether too realistic where it has no business being so. It shouldn’t be realistic that people from disenfranchised communities must resort to illegal and often dangerous activities just to get by. It shouldn’t be realistic that a mother can’t afford childcare and thus can’t keep a job. And it certainly shouldn’t be realistic that a young Black man might be shot dead by police, because of a white cop’s prejudiced assumptions over his actions during an arrest. But also realistic is the love this community has for its own, protecting each other where society at large has failed to do so. Gray (whose first feature was the stoner buddy classic FRIDAY) tautly directs the riveting script, relying largely on medium close-ups and wide shots to emphasize environment and include all four women, or variations of them, in one shot. It’s finely edited, too, by John Carter, who edited Miloš Forman's TAKING OFF, Elaine May’s THE HEARTBREAK KID and MICKEY AND NICKY, and other films such as THE KILLING FLOOR, Gray’s FRIDAY, and SOUL FOOD. (He had a fascinating career, being the first Black editor employed by network television [CBS] and the first Black person to be admitted to the American Cinema Editors society.) Not for nothing, author and activist Ibram X. Kendi is a big fan of the film, writing in his book Stamped from the Beginning that it was the “most sophisticated, holistically antiracist thriller of the decade,” which did what “law-and-order and tough-on-crime racism refused to do: it humanized inner-city Black perpetrators of illegal acts, and in the process forced its viewers to reimagine who the real American criminals were.” The subject is hard, and the stakes are high, but the film is tinged with a joy shared by the four women that makes it as much a beautiful love story as anything else. Co-presented by Chicago Reader x the Art Idiot. Cortlyn Kelly from The Art Idiot to introduce the film. The first 200 guests will get a copy of the Chicago Reader's May print issue and the May edition of The Art Idiot's movie postcard. (1996, 123 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]

Lucrecia Martel’s OUR LAND (Argentina/Documentary)

Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Lucrecia Martel’s four narrative features are some of the most important films of the 21st century, and one of the remarkable things about her first feature-length documentary is how it expands on themes of these previous achievements while operating on its own terms. Martel’s earlier work considered (among other things) white privilege in Argentina, with the country’s Indigenous people existing on the margins; in OUR LAND, she confronts the impact of colonialism and industrialization on Argentina’s native population, looking specifically the Chuschagasta community in the northwest part of the country. The film centers on the trial of several white men who killed a member of this community when he was resisting eviction from his land in 2009 (the shooter had claimed ownership of the region)—a trial that didn’t take place until nearly a decade after the events unfolded. Martel interweaves courtroom footage with profiles of the dead man’s friends and neighbors, gradually expanding her scope to consider the last two centuries of Argentine history vis a vis the Chuschagasta people. (To give a sense of how broad her perspective is, Martel starts the film with NASA footage regarding the Earth from space, and she frequently incorporates drone shots that observe the Chuschagastas’ land from above.) It’s a sobering history lesson about how Indigenous people have been consistently discriminated against and forcibly removed from land they’ve always known as theirs. One can observe traces of this historical ill treatment in the condescending attitudes of the judge and prosecutors at the trial, who seem barely able to hide their contempt for the Chuschagasta witnesses. At the same time, Martel tempers her portrait of these individuals (the first “villains” to appear in any of her movies, per a recent MUBI interview) with affectionate views of the Indigenous subjects, who recount their connection to their homeland and their struggles to get by over the decades. The complex form of OUR LAND speaks to Martel’s genius as a storyteller; the film’s intermingling of history and contemporary struggles has the effect of flattening time and allowing for a more holistic point of view. Per the director, this comes from “a conviction that the history of Indigenous communities has to do with the future of the country, not just the past.” (2025, 124 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

He Killed You First: A Richard Kern Retrospective (US)

FACETS – Friday, 7pm

One of the best known and most prolific artists under the “no wave” banner, Richard Kern set the blueprint for a sort of post-exploitation film practice in the ‘80s and ‘90s New York underground. In FACETS’ retrospective program covering Kern’s work from 1985 to 1993, we see Kern developing a harsh moving image style to accompany the squalling industrial music developing in tandem by the likes of Foetus and Cop Shoot Cop. Much like the harsh synths and broken guitars of his contemporaries, Kern’s camera is a weapon, the means by which a sadist subjugates both his subjects and audience to his whims. The work is at its best when Kern can tap into the iconoclastic presences of his no wave contemporaries and engage them in a sort of battle of wills with his photographic gaze. His most famous works, like SUBMIT TO ME (1985) and SUBMIT TO ME NOW (1987), are largely highlight reels of cool and notable friends, like an edgy evolution of Warhol’s screen tests. But Kern always has a good eye for faces that can carry the televisual weight of his interests in sex and death, everyone some potent balance of beautiful and grotesque. His subjects writhe and stare into the camera, usually doing some kind of erotic or violent act directed at themselves. Kern aims to make his audience into both passive consumers and active voyeurs, trapped in a feedback loop as we submit to images of subjects being made to submit to us. Or at least this is his conceptual dressing for work that shares most of its imagery with exploitation films and porn. Kern explores this issue with more verbosity in his collaborations with Lydia Lunch, who co-wrote and stars in the two mid-length films RIGHT SIDE OF MY BRAIN (1985) and FINGERED (1986). In the former, Lunch’s onscreen persona writhes around in a series of vignettes while her overdubbed voiceover describes various fantasies of submission, including one involving a Fabio-esque Henry Rollins. As we move through different dingy warehouses and abandoned apartments, Kern’s black and white chiaroscuro photography turns each environment into an impossibly deep dream space. The space and material becomes more literal in FINGERED, which features Lunch and Marty Nation going on a Bonnie and Clyde trip replete with beatings and sexual assault. In these films and elsewhere, Kern’s provocations are a necessarily hit-and-miss endeavor. Sometimes the provocation for its own sake results in a grating sketch, or a more pedestrian kind of exploitation that presents an objectified body or an objectionable act plainly without “subverting” much of anything. But this is a necessary part of the broader tapestry of the work. Much like how both successful and failed “experiments” of avant-garde cinema can help define the boundaries of film itself, art of transgression must sometimes fail in order to know not just the boundaries of good taste, but also art’s ability to effectively interrogate its ethics in the first place. Kembra Pfahler’s appearance in THE SEWING CIRCLE (1992) getting her vagina sewn shut for a performance piece ranks as one of the more upsetting stretches of the program but also one of the most radical for its documentation of a genuine and autonomous act. Other, stagier pieces in the program like YOU KILLED ME FIRST or WOMAN AT THE WHEEL (both 1985) hew more closely to the John Waters school of kitchen table kink-kitsch and can blunt their more troubling and violent narratives with theater kid amateurishness. This quality can also make the more purely pervy pieces go down smoother, with something like MY NIGHTMARE (1993) feeling more quaint than scintillating. But the variety of approaches Kern took in this period, taken here altogether, create work with additive value in the way they document a time and place where nihilism made great and, ironically, lasting art. (1985-1993, 158 min, Digital Projection) [Maxwell Courtright]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Sophy Romvari's BLUE HERON (Canada)

Siskel Film Center — See Venue website for showtimes

Like a long-lost childhood memory, Sophy Romvari’s BLUE HERON exists within a series of flitting moments of comfort before shifting suddenly and revealing something entirely raw, pulling the rug out from under you in the process. Though this is her feature debut, Romvari has already made a name for herself with an array of short films that explore the uncanny marriage between media and memory. Her particular fascination, and the patient, anthropological methodology with which she explored it could have only culminated in something like BLUE HERON, a jarring yet kindhearted work whose efforts to prod nostalgia reveal nothing but a tender bruise in the aftermath. Romvari has oh-so slightly twisted and morphed her own biography to create the family at the center of the film, a Hungarian-Canadian quintet who have recently moved to a scenic new home on Vancouver Island in the late 1990s. The summer weeks that follow comprise the first half of the narrative, where brief, jutting memories emerge as revelatory moments within young minds. A young girl, Sasha, amusingly draws a mouse on Microsoft Paint while her two brothers play in the other room; an older brother, Jeremy, steals a bird keychain from a nature gift shop, while Mom peels potatoes, Dad develops photographs, and summer hours idle away. Romvari’s camera prefers static wide shots, entire canvases of nature bathed in cool tones providing the backdrop for a young family that is unknowingly in the midst of a personal crisis. Jeremy, the only child born from the mother’s previous relationship, has begun behaving in exponentially more aggressive ways, building to his own arrest for shoplifting, with his parents struggling to come to terms with their own inability to manage his social and emotional needs. The cast, comprised of both actors and nonactors (Edik Beddoes, playing Jeremy, was discovered from a clip Romvari had found of him talking about video games), move through these difficult spaces almost effortlessly, their naturalistic styles meshing together with ease. This would all be well and good for a charming film debut, but BLUE HERON levels up and takes a turn about halfway through, shattering the chronology we’ve become accustomed to and shifts from the story of a struggling family into the story of a struggling mind. We follow one of our characters, now twenty years older, and using the archival tools at her disposal to try and see where things all went wrong two decades ago. We eventually begin to grapple with how helpful it really is to use the art of film, of photographs, of recreation, to try and, in essence, bring someone back to life. BLUE HERON builds to a scene where characters move across time and space to dissect whether there’s any catharsis to even be found in using cinema to excavate trauma. Romvari has no answers, our distrust in our own memories merely a feature, not a bug, of this ugly, beautiful world of ours. But that doesn’t mean we can’t cherish the things we do remember, the lives we do live, and the art we do create. (2025, 90 mins, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Martin Ritt's HUD (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) — Sunday, 1pm

A sardonic, hard-drinking anti-hero, Paul Newman's Hud Bannon is both lamentable and irresistible. Based on Larry McMurtry's first novel Horsemen, Pass By, HUD is a steamy take on a male melodrama that pits Hud, his father Homer, and his impressionable nephew Lonnie in a family conflict where nothing less than the values of the next generation are at stake. Homer, an honorable cattleman nearing the end of his life, discovers a possible devastating outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease among his stock. Homer wants to abide by the law; Hud wants to do everything but; Lonnie is caught between his father figure and the rebel he admires. Patricia Neal delivers an equally compelling (and Oscar-winning) performance as Alma, the sultry though world-weary maid who confounds Hud, rebuffing his so-called charm. Hud is something of a filmic brother to Frank Sinatra's Dave Hirsch in SOME CAME RUNNING: both have no regard for people or rules, both are incompatible with their surroundings, and both ultimately can never be truly happy. And like SOME CAME RUNNING, HUD is set in the recent past of a postwar small town that appears static—see the quaint Kiwanis Club fair—but where its inhabitants are constantly evolving. Shot in black and white, the film evokes a tempered nostalgia for a grittier but simpler West. As David Kehr put it, the film puts "a little too much dust in the dust bowl," but it is nonetheless effective in drawing a stark contrast between rudderless Hud and his principled father; where the west was and where it is going. Screening as part of the Painting with Light: The Cinematography of James Wong Howe series. (1963, 112 min, 35mm) [Brian Welesko]

Richard Quine’s BELL, BOOK, AND CANDLE (US)

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

Arriving as the studio-era dream was deteriorating at the end of the 1950s, BELL, BOOK, AND CANDLE presents a melodrama in form but not in subtext. Photographed by James Wong Howe, the film wraps Greenwich Village in Christmas Eve snow and a warm amber glow alike. Its bohemian Manhattan soundstage becomes a refuge for outsiders, artists, beatniks, and witches living parallel to postwar conformity. Based on John Van Druten’s Broadway play, the film functions as a barely disguised metaphor beneath its romantic surface. Van Druten, an openly gay playwright working under McCarthy-era pressure, coded his witches less as supernatural figures than as a hidden minority surviving through secrecy and private spaces. The Zodiac Club, where the witches gather, vibrates with queer subtext: a secret nightlife community beneath respectable Manhattan, filled with jazz, flirtation, and the understanding that outsiders “wouldn’t get it.” The supporting cast includes Elsa Lanchester, Ernie Kovacs, and Jack Lemmon—whose character thumbs bongos with proto-beatnik energy and offers an early glimpse of the comic timing that would later define Lemmon’s career. James Stewart’s Shep enters this witchy-world as an ordinary square engaged to the rigidly conventional Merle. While Merle is immediately uncomfortable inside The Zodiac Club, Shep is fully open to it. His disbelief about the existence of witches slides into fascination, then acceptance and allyship. Kim Novak’s Gillian is caught between assimilation and authenticity. She no longer wants her life of witchcraft, yet surrendering her powers for love drives much of the film’s melodrama. Beneath the romance lies a harsher implication: to enter heterosexual domesticity, Gillian must give up the very thing that makes her different. At the same time, Gillian is portrayed as a strong and independent entrepreneur. She has agency, respect, and the power of Pyewacket—her beautiful Siamese familiar. She can restock her entire inventory overnight and even rename her business on impulse. These witches are modern urban women with careers, desires, and agency rooted in power. Witchcraft is reframed as an alternate social identity existing outside patriarchal expectations. Howe and Quine fill the interiors with wafting smoke and festive holiday lights spilling across nightclubs and city streets. The famous green gels coating Novak’s close-ups become the film’s closest visual equivalent to the traditional image of a green-faced witch. One of the last glossy studio romantic melodramas before the rise of 1960s television, BELL, BOOK, AND CANDLE directly influenced Bewitched and helped normalize the witch as sympathetic and culturally modern. The film marks the beginning of a decades-long fascination with earthly witches as feminist symbols while delivering progressive ideas beneath a polished studio surface. By the end, fear of witchcraft gives way to acceptance, and the metaphor becomes impossible to miss. Screening as part of the Painting with Light: The Cinematography of James Wong Howe series. (1958, 106 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]

Johnnie To's THROW DOWN (Hong Kong)

Alamo Drafthouse — Wednesday, 9:30pm

Dedicated to Akira Kurosawa, Johnnie To’s THROW DOWN makes direct references to the Japanese director’s first film, SANSHIRO SUGATA (1943). Made during the midst of the SARS epidemic in Hong Kong, THROW DOWN is a touching film that acknowledges struggle and celebrates perseverance, featuring a down-on-their luck trio, each one searching for something. Bo (Louis Koo) is a club owner and former judo champion who’s drowning in gambling debts. He’s approached by Tony (Aaron Kwok), a current judo competitor looking to prove himself by fighting the best. Mona (Cherrie Ying) is an aspiring singer, eager at the chance to find some fame singing at Bo’s club: the After Hours Bar and Lounge. Bo and Mona’s enthusiasm draws Bo into a journey of redemption and determination, set against the underground night scene of Hong Kong. To uses pops of bright neon color which constantly splits the blue-gray dark of the city. Lights spill onto characters like spotlights, especially in the bar scenes. THROW DOWN also features a lot of music, with characters performing at the bar and a score that shifts between orchestral arrangements and jazz. The lighting and dreamy use of music creates some fantastical moments; the film is staged at times like a classic Hollywood musical. At one point the camera spins around the three protagonists, as each holds a conversation at an adjacent table before they all come together at one, their overlapping individual stories reflected in the cycles. Also notable is the repeated imagery of games and toys. A few key sequences take place in an arcade, and, most notably, there is a scene in which the three wordlessly and playfully work together to get a red balloon unstuck from a tree. The balloon scene reflects the film’s overall themes and how it can feel both powerful and childish to let go, ask for help, and start over. Screening as part of the Weird Wednesday series. (2004, 96 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Tia Lessin & Carl Deal’s STEAL THIS STORY, PLEASE! (US/Documentary)

Music Box Theatre — See Venue website for showtimes

I’m not going to assert that Amy Goodman is perfect—a cursory Google search turns up plenty of Reddit threads about how she’s failed some ideological purity test or another—but there’s no denying that she’s devoted her life to independent media, free of corporate bias and bureaucratic interference, and to a form of journalism that doubles as social justice advocacy. Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s STEAL THIS STORY, PLEASE! details not just Goodman’s life but also captures the urgency with which she tells the stories of others. The film traces her upbringing by liberal Jewish parents in New York, to her early interest in Phil Donahue—a telling influence in her path toward progressive media—and eventually to the founding of Democracy Now!, where she has reported groundbreaking stories for more than three decades. The documentary is as compelling as its subject; Lessin and Deal convey her affable intensity, depicting her as an energetic mover and shaker, as at home finding the story as she is telling it. The film opens with Goodman chasing down Wells Griffith, then Donald Trump’s energy advisor, at the United Nations Climate Summit in 2018—literally pursuing him up stairs and through crowded hallways as he tries to evade her. Goodman has no hesitation here. She doesn’t second-guess her resolve, nor is she embarrassed to look a little ridiculous in pursuit of an answer; if anything, that willingness is part of what makes her formidable. This is Goodman in miniature: beyond committed, perhaps even obsessed with uncovering the mess beneath the all-too-tidy narratives of mainstream media. Much like her reporting, the film itself serves as a necessary explainer for issues such as the corporatization of news media. It also revisits some of her most notable stories, including Chevron Corporation’s involvement in a confrontation between the Nigerian Army and aggrieved villagers that resulted in multiple deaths. The film covers Goodman’s infamous call with Bill Clinton as well, when, on the eve of the 2000 election, he phoned into radio stations to “get out the vote,” only for Goodman to seize the opportunity to question him for nearly 30 minutes. As shrewd as she can be, there are moments when the stories she reports appear to affect her deeply; in another rebuttal of mainstream media norms, Goodman suggests that even the most rigorous journalists need not divorce feeling from fact. Lessin, Deal and Goodman in attendance for post-film Q&As; check individual showtimes for more details. Meet your local independent media at the Friday and Saturday shows in partnership with the Chicago Independent Media Alliance featuring WZRD, Lumpen Radio, CAN-TV, the pub, Borderless Magazine, City Bureau, Palestine in America, Invisible Institute and Haymarket Books. (2025, 98 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Grace Glowicki’s DEAD LOVER (Canada)

FACETS – Saturday, 5pm and Sunday, 3:30pm

Grace Glowicki’s DEAD LOVER is absolutely repulsive, and thank goodness for that. Brought to vivid, odorous life by a quartet of performers playing multiple roles across a variety of spaces—evoking the irreality of storefront theater more than anything—this is the kind of film whose particular brand of crassness can only be supported by immense creative minds working at the height of their depraved powers. In assembling this “Frankenstein meets Sarah Squirm” nightmare, Glowicki has concocted a stew of admirable artistic inspiration, drawing on traditions of silent cinema and German expressionism in conjuring the images onscreen, with outsized performance styles matching the outre genre ambitions on display. My mind also kept wandering to Guy Maddin, a fellow Canadian mining the cinematic techniques of the past to create new living dreams. Kicking off with a Mary Shelley epigraph, lest we forget what aesthetic realm we’re playing in, we enter the world of The Gravedigger, played by Glowicki as a foul smelling, foul-mouthed romantic whose quest for companionship continually hits the stumbling block of her own off-putting aura. She eventually becomes entangled with The Lover (the film’s co-writer, and Glowicki’s real life partner, Ben Petrie), a man entirely enamored with all that has made the Gravedigger repellent to the world around her (“I want to lick your stink,” he utters, in a manner frighteningly palpable). Sadly, he meets his end far too soon in a freak accident, and the Gravedigger is left with no choice but to turn to the dark scientific arts in an attempt to reunite with her deceased beau, with her mantra of survival (“Dig deep, dig hard, never stop digging”) burrowing itself further and further until she hits upon a plot of resurrection that would make Mary Shelley wince. Glowicki and Petrie are joined by Leah Doz and Lowen Morrow, exchanging costumes as town gossips, sailors, and nuns engaged in illicit behavior (call it “cun-nun-lingus,” perhaps), injecting the film with a playful energy, all engaging in a work whose tactility and collaborative spirit provides a welcome respite from the digital sludge of daily life. Glowicki’s film is horny, sickly, poetic, and at times, very, very stupid, all of which, well, Frankensteins itself together to make something you immediately want to fall in love with. Some moviegoers may even be lucky enough to come across one of the few “Stink-O-Vision” screenings occurring for the film, harkening back to the scratch-and-sniff cards pioneered for John Waters’ POLYESTER (1981). What a delight to revel in something so gloriously rotten. The opening screening on Saturday will be accompanied by an introduction from Must-Watch Indies series programmer Marya E. Gates. On Saturday, the screening will be presented in glorious Stink-O-Vision with special scratch-and-sniff cards. (2025, 84 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Alain Resnais' HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR (France)

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

Alain Resnais beautifully interweaves themes of love, memory, and oblivion with flashbacks to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR. This gem of the French New Wave blissfully depicts a Japanese architect and French actresses' torrid love affair. "You're destroying me. You're good for me." Elle (Emmanuelle Riva) and Lui's (Eiji Okada) passion burns as hot as the bomb that leveled Hiroshima. Intercut with footage of the city and its denizens post-blast, Resnais juxtaposes intimacy with ugly wreckage. Seemingly this says that love completely destroys a person and turns them into something completely different. Memory's role in this film is heavily interlaced with love. Lui reminds Elle of her first true love, a German solider she met during World War II. His memory brings back tragic thoughts for Elle, who forcefully tries to forget Lui immediately. Forgetfulness and the mental void that accompanies it push the realization that both Lui and Elle are truly symbols for any young, intense romance. HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR features quick editing that is synonymous with the film movement to which it belongs. These rapid transitions push the imagery conjured by the a-bomb and the fleeting nature of the protagonists' relationship. The film's score ranges from light and playful to hauntingly tragic--always lending itself perfectly to each scene. Many lessons can be imparted from this film, but chief among them is that love's eternal bonds can be both a blessing and a curse. Screening as part of the Psychodynamic Cinema series. (1959, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Kyle Cubr]

Carol Reed's THE THIRD MAN (UK)

Alamo Drafthouse — Monday, 7pm

Carol Reed and Graham Greene's THE THIRD MAN stars Joseph Cotton as Holly Martins, an American writer of "cheap novelettes" such as Oklahoma Kid and The Lone Rider of Santa Fe. In 1949, Martins goes to Vienna to visit his old friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) and soon finds out that he is dead. In an international zone designated for police at the center of the city, the British Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) and his officers investigate Lime's recent death and his role in selling diluted penicillin on the black market. Martins also begins to look into whether the death was an accident or murder only to inadvertently discover that Lime is alive and hiding out in the Russian sector. (Although Welles spends very little time on screen, Harry Lime is his most celebrated performance after Charles Foster Kane; in fact, André Bazin said that the role made Welles into a myth.) Similar to Vittorio De Sica's THE BICYCLE THIEF (1948) and Jean Cocteau's ORPHEUS (1950) in its semi-documentary quality, THE THIRD MAN captures Europe in ruins after the second war to end all wars. Following the February 1948 coup that brought the Communists to power in Czechoslovakia, the film's producer Alexander Korda asked Greene to go to Vienna and write a screenplay on the city's occupation by the Americans, Russians, British, and French. According to Lime's associate "Baron" Kurtz (a reference to the corrupt ivory trader in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness), all of the Viennese are now at the mercy of the black market. Robert Krasker's camera often catches their faces in close-up as they watch what happens on the city's streets; they rarely, if ever, make the mistake of speaking about it. Toward the end of the film, Martins meets Lime at an empty carnival in Prater Park. While going around on the Ferris wheel, Lime reveals to his friend, "You're just a little mixed up about things in general. Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't. Why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat. I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It's the same thing. They have their five-year plans, so have I." THE THIRD MAN is one of the great works of British film noir that considers what, if anything, is left of morality for those who were spared by the Second World War. (1949, 104 min, DCP Digital) [Candace Wirt]

Sidney Lumet's DOG DAY AFTERNOON (US)

The Davis Theater — Tuesday, 7pm

In DOG DAY AFTERNOON, Sidney Lumet exploited his theatrical background to electrifying effect, building consistent dramatic tension from the essential mise-en-scene of a few stark locations and ramped-up performances. AFTERNOON has been justly canonized for Al Pacino's star turn, a product of genuine exhaustion and second-wind adrenaline. (Pacino nearly turned the film down because it began shooting immediately after the epic schedule for THE GODFATHER PART II had wrapped); yet it's only one bright spark among a uniformly wired cast. Going against his usual loyalty to the written word, Lumet encouraged his actors to improvise after rehearsing Frank Pierson's script for seven weeks. The process yielded a unique performance style—which was, on the whole, perhaps Lumet's greatest contribution to movies—that combined the specific, spontaneous gestures of cinematic acting with the internalized characterizations common to stage drama. The film depicts an infamous Brooklyn bank robbery of 1972, committed by a married man who wanted to raise the money for his male lover's sex change operation. The botched robbery devolved into a highly publicized hostage standoff, and under Lumet's direction, the events play out as a series of escalating, acutely realized crises. Thanks to the extended rehearsal period, everyone on screen seems confident in their daily business—be it running a bank or negotiating for the FBI—yet the demands of improvisation make everyone visibly, and convincingly, nervous. The film generates great suspense as well as comedy (note the scene where John Cazale's ad lib about Wyoming nearly makes Pacino crack up), often at the same time, as in Pacino's impassioned and ultimately exhausting phone conversation with his lover (Chris Sarandon). It's also worth noting that the exterior shots present some exciting snapshots of New York in the mid-'70s and that the film's sexual politics don't feel dated. Screening as part of the Big Screen Classics series. (1975, 125 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

David Lynch's THE ELEPHANT MAN (US)

Music Box Theatre — See Venue website for showtimes

An admirer of David Lynch’s ERASERHEAD, Mel Brooks lobbied to get Lynch hired as director for this historical drama about Joseph Merrick, a young man with elephantitis who became a minor celebrity in Victorian-era London after he was taken under the care of the physician Frederick Treves. Brooks also fought executives to let Lynch shoot the film in black-and-white and incorporate some experimental dream sequences reminiscent of his underground masterpiece. The producer’s victories are worth mentioning not only because they speak to Brooks’ magnanimity, but also because they helped shape THE ELEPHANT MAN into the gorgeous work that it is. A quick scan of IMDB’s trivia page for the film reveals that it’s highly inaccurate with regards to Merrick’s life: he was never abused by the proprietor of the freak show where Treves discovered him, nor did the proprietor ever abduct him from the hospital where he came to live. Yet Lynch’s film is still a deeply moving fairy tale on the themes of friendship and compassion, imagining how caring individuals can elevate a person long held in low esteem by others and himself. The scenes of Merrick tearfully accepting the kindness of his benefactors are among the most forthrightly emotional in Lynch’s filmography; as realized by John Hurt (and an extraordinary team of makeup artists), the character is perhaps the most beautifully vulnerable Lynch would consider prior to Alvin Straight in THE STRAIGHT STORY. The film’s aesthetic adds greatly to its emotional impact—the sooty and shadowy black-and-white imagery, the dreamlike dissolves, and the haunting sound design (co-created by Lynch and as dense in industrial noises as the soundtrack of ERASERHEAD) evoke a decaying world where kindness seems an especially rare commodity. You feel almost as grateful as Merrick when you sense its presence. (1980, 124 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Ben Sachs]

Bruce Pittman's HELLO MARY LOU: PROM NIGHT II (Canada)

Alamo Drafthouse — Tuesday, 7pm

I was first introduced to HELLO MARY LOU: PROM NIGHT II last year when it was featured on an episode of the “bad” movie podcast How Did This Get Made? The hosts, along with guests Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen, concluded the film is worth a watch, and I wholeheartedly agree. HELLO MARY LOU: PROM NIGHT II is an absurd horror with wildly fun performances and genuinely unsettling special effects. Despite the subtitle, the film has nothing to do with the 1980 original PROM NIGHT (which starred formative scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis) other than a high school setting. In 1957, right after being crowned prom queen, Mary Lou Maloney (Lisa Schrage) is murdered in a prank gone terribly wrong. Thirty years later, shy high schooler Vicki (Wendy Lyon) goes searching for a cheap prom dress option in the props department of the school theater and finds herself possessed by Mary Lou’s uninhibited spirit. The film also stars Michael Ironside as Mary Lou’s former beau turned high school principal, who also happens to be the father of Vicki’s steady boyfriend (Justin Louis)—needless to say, things get complicated. HELLO MARY LOU: PROM NIGHT II draws on familiar tropes of late 70s and 80s teen horrors but smashing them together results in an entertaining supernatural slasher; it helps, too, that the film doesn’t take itself too seriously. There are disturbing kills and impressive effects, with especially unnerving scenes involving a possessed rocking horse and a haunted chalkboard. There are also surprisingly sincere moments, particularly early scenes between Vicki and her friend Jess. Screening as part of the Terror Tuesday series. (1987, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
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Jan Jensen's 1988 film THE LAST SLUMBER PARTY (78 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday, 9:30pm, with writer-director-star Jensen in person for a post-screening Q&A, also as part of Terror Tuesday. 

Hayao Miyazaki's SPIRITED AWAY (Japan/Animation)

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

For evidence that Hayao Miyazaki works from a different playbook than his Disney counterparts, look no further than the dynamic, kaleidoscopic world of SPIRITED AWAY. In this coming-of-age story set in a modern-day wonderland, the animation grandmaster creates a detail-rich realm of the spirits where the only rule seems to be that the rules can always change. Here, physiologically impossible characters shape shift through various forms, villains quite suddenly prove themselves to be friends, and the plot itself refuses to settle into a groove, redefining the boundaries the moment we become aware of them. What begins as a spectral plunge down the rabbit hole takes an abrupt shift the moment young Chihiro lands on her feet, and it's not long before she is neck-deep in the politics of the magical bathhouse at the center of this world. She is tugged at in all directions by the denizens therein, including the disproportioned governess, Yubaba, the dragon-boy, Haku, and the ghostly No-Face, whose part in the story temporarily takes us into horror movie territory, and lest we think the world of SPIRITED AWAY is confined to this singular, vibrant location, the final chapter opens the world even further, allowing neither Chihiro nor the viewer to grow too complacent. The film, like any great imagination, knows no bounds, and its scope and soaring ambition have rightly marked it as Miyazaki's masterpiece. Screening as part of the Board Picks series. (2001, 125 min, DCP Digital) [Tristan Johnson]

Rungano Nyoni’s ON BECOMING A GUINEA FOWL (UK/Zambia/Ireland/US)

Siskel Film Center — Sunday, 12pm

Rungano Nyoni’s transfixing sophomore feature opens in silence and ends in cacophony. The journey from one end to the other is littered with images volleying between painfully accurate recollection and lucid dreaming, sometimes within the same scene, or flowing into one another seamlessly. From the moment our protagonist Shula (Susan Chardy in a revelatory debut performance) finds a dead body in the middle of the road and slowly realizes that the corpse just so happens to be her Uncle Fred, she finds herself (literally) caught between her adult self seeking shelter from the situation and her younger self enraptured by the bizarre scenario before her. Nyoni is deeply fascinated by the rituals of mourning, particularly in older generations, and how the reverent behaviors of preserving someone’s legacy often clash with the sins of the dead. Steeped in the cultural specifics of its Zambian characters and setting, there are still cultural echoes that reverberate, from the aunties’ disappointment in Shula having bathed before the burial, to the lethargic tone that occupies the memorial home. This seemingly holy experience is ultimately threatened by the unfurling revelations of Uncle Fred’s lecherous past, particularly his proclivity towards sexually abusing the younger women of the family. As humorous as early stretches of the film are (Nyoni’s actors nimbly handle early moments of dark comedy with aplomb), the film takes a seamless sour turn, as Shula navigates her own past mirrored against the twists and turns and horrid revelations that lie before her. Visions of the past are resurrected, threatening to upend Shula’s steely exterior, the dam ever in fear of breaking. Perhaps most remarkably, Nyoni’s work of self-actualization finds an ending that confidently navigates narrative ambiguity and thematic closure, seeking justice and retribution and connection through sheer, discordant rage. Screening as part of the African Cinema: From Independence to Now lecture series. (2024, 99 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Hong Sang-soo's RIGHT NOW, WRONG THEN (South Korea)

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

Hong Sang-soo’s 17th feature is divided (like his third, VIRGIN STRIPPED BARE BY HER BACHELORS) into two parts of roughly equal duration; each half relates more or less the same events, but with subtle differences in how they play out. In a sense, the movie represents Hong’s entire cinema in miniature, as his body of work is all about theme and variation, fine points of behavior, and how the cinematic apparatus affects the way we interact with others. The protagonist—as is often the case with Hong—is a passive-aggressive filmmaker who loves drinking and women. Visiting the city of Suwon to introduce a screening of one of his films, Ham Cheon-soo finds himself with time on his hands after the screening gets pushed back one day. He visits a palace and meets a former model and aspiring painter named Yoon Hee-jeong. She takes him to her studio, a restaurant (where much soju is imbibed), and to a bookstore owned by one of her friends. Is this the beginning of a beautiful friendship or a prolonged episode of social embarrassment? As Hong demonstrates, the events could go either way. In the first half (given the subtitle “Right Then, Wrong Now”), director Han behaves cavalierly and Hee-jeong a little too eager-too-please, and both end up embarrassing themselves; in the second, both are more demure and self-effacing, and things go more or less okay. That’s not to say that the two halves are as different as night and day (to recall the title of another one of Hong’s films)—many events stay the same from one half to the other (and some go even worse the second time around), regardless of the characters’ changes in attitude. Maybe fate is indifferent to how we aspire to be, maybe our inner natures are more rigidly defined than we’d like to think, or maybe Hong is just having fun with us. He’s certainly having fun with his actors, eliciting wonderful comic performances and an ingratiatingly casual vibe. Still, there’s a rigorous formal sensibility beneath the casualness, as evidenced by the characteristically scrupulous framing and the careful narrative rhymes and half-rhymes. (2015, 121 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Leos Carax's HOLY MOTORS (France)

Alamo Drafthouse — Saturday, 3:30pm

To say that HOLY MOTORS is Leos Carax's valentine to film and filmmaking would be appropriate, as the film that is itself rife with overused clichés. That word is surprisingly apt for Carax's film, though only in the most literal sense: he addresses the overwrought concepts of filmgoing and filmmaking, but in a uniquely lyrical way that is respective to the madhouse stylings of the wunderkind film critic-turned-filmmaker. His first feature film since 1999, Carax makes up for lost time as he takes Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant) from one “appointment” to another, presented as brief vignettes within the film's overall narrative structure. Listing them would be redundant after all that has been written; that being said, Carax's cinephilia is more blatantly reflected in the discussions that take place as Monsieur Oscar and his various companions drive between genres. Oscar sadly reflects that while cameras were once bigger than ourselves, they are now so small we can barely see them. This begs a pertinent question: will out of sight eventually become out of mind? This is pondered not only by the man, but also by the machine—after Oscar's chauffeur (played by Edith Scob, with both eyes and a face) takes the limo back to a seemingly ethereal parking garage, the cars speculate that their owners and operators no longer have use for visible machinery. Carax solidifies his nostalgia with various references to other notable films, including King Vidor's THE CROWD (1928), the afore-referenced EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1960), and even work of his own, with one of Lavant's personifications having previously appeared in a segment Carax directed for the film TOKYO! (2008). Carax also appears in the film as a man with a key in lieu of a finger who unlocks the hidden door to a mysterious cinema. Certainly, his auteurship does not go unrecognized even as he toys with themes not previously seen in his filmography. Edith Scob, Michel Piccoli, Eva Mendes, and Kylie Minogue round out the randomness that also involves a full-fledged musical number and an on-screen erection of the same caliber. HOLY MOTORS is presented as part of Alamo’s Boots Riley Guest Selects for his new film, I LOVE BOOSTERS. (2012, 115 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Ousmane Sembène's BLACK GIRL (Senegal)

Chicago Art Department (1926 S. Halsted) – Saturday, 8pm

Frequently cited as the greatest African filmmaker, Sembène was also a strike leader and novelist before working in cinema. His decision to begin making films grew out of his progressive politics, as he felt he could reach a larger audience with movies than with literature, especially in his native Senegal. Sembène’s style was fittingly accessible, sometimes to the point of transparency: he often depicted controversial social issues in terms of everyday life, taking pleasure in human behavior and allowing larger themes to emerge organically from the characters' experiences. This is certainly true of his first feature, BLACK GIRL (LA NOIRE DE...), which broaches the subject of African labor in Europe by regarding the servant girl of the title as she accompanies her employers as they return to France to live. The film is based on one of Sembène’s early short stories; it exemplifies the concentration and eye for detail best associated with short fiction. Preceded by Mati Diop’s 2009 short film ATLANTIQUES (16 min, Digital Projection) and presented by Cinemanita as part of the Toxic Workplaces series. (1966, 65 min, Digital Projection) [Ben Sachs]

John Waters' SERIAL MOM (US)

Alamo Drafthouse — Friday at 1:45pm; Saturday at 12:45pm; and Tuesday at 2pm

Perhaps not the best John Waters film, and definitely not the most influential, but without a doubt the movie he was working toward his entire career. The trajectory of his transgressive ‘60s and ‘70s Warhol meets Wishman, arthouse for the grindhouse films was always aiming toward the mainstream. Waters looked to subvert and knew that the more mainstream you are, the more subversive you can be. Plus, he's a populist at heart and has never been shy about his love of Big Hollywood. So, after the surprise breakout success of HAIRSPRAY (1988) and critical love for CRY BABY (1990), he decided to leave the world of ‘50s subgenres like dance films and J.D. films behind and go for the least “John Waters” type of story possible, a family comedy. But of course, he couldn't possibly have it be totally normal. Presented as a true crime biopic, SERIAL MOM follows the story of Beverly Sutphin, a seemingly perfectly average suburban homemaker. A dutiful and loving wife and mother, Sutphin is actually completely deranged when alone. Played to perfection by Kathleen Turner, we see that she secretly gets perverse joy from making obscene phone calls to her neighbors and that she scrapbooks news clippings about serial killers. When a teacher insults one of her kids at a parent teacher conference, she gets revenge by running them over in the parking lot. Now having a taste for blood, she starts killing people whom she feels are breaking the rules of polite society. Even when Waters wants to make a film about a loving family who sticks together no matter what, he can't help but be John Waters. But what really makes SERIAL MOM the high-water mark of his career is its cultural context. This is the exact moment the culture met John Waters where he was at. The saturation of the 24-hour news cycle. Tabloid journalism as news. News as entertainment. When infamy became interchangeable with fame. This was the first time you could make a family comedy about serial killing and not have it be taken as being purely in bad taste. It's so prescient of where American society was heading that it's now almost quaint. It's no surprise that this seems to be the last Waters film that people have a visceral love for. It was the last time John Waters could possibly be seen as being more distasteful than the news and the daily media being presented to the average American. It's the movie Waters was always trying to, hoping to, working to make—a fully accessible film based on an utterly trashy conceit. Utterly distasteful but with a veneer of family friendliness, the satire of SERIAL MOM reveals how morally disgusting Americans really are. That our moral fabric is threadbare at best. This is a high camp j'accuse in the vernacular of populist low art. A dumb movie for smart people. Undeniable proof that John Waters is America's Only Director. (1994, 95 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]

Alejandro Jodorowsky's THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (Mexico)

FACETS — Saturday, 7pm

Two sects of toads, garbed as Aztecs and Conquistadors, wage war across a model recreation of Tenochtitlan in a bloody and explosive show staged for a gathering crowd. This early scene in THE HOLY MOUNTAIN recalls another celebrated surrealist text, Antonin Artaud's theoretical Theatre of Cruelty, which similarly maps the infamous Mesoamerican massacre onto the destruction and rebirth of an artistic medium. Of course, Artaud's scope encompassed a radical overhaul of the stagnating state of theater, while the change Jodorowsky's film seeks to affect comes from within the viewer, but much in the spirit of The Theatre and its Double, THE HOLY MOUNTAIN strands the spectator as the very center of the objet d'art, and in a kind of out-of-body experience, immerses them wholly in the spectacle. Powered by meditation, LSD, and a bankroll from John and Yoko, the film tells the story of a humble thief, repeatedly depicted as a Christ-like figure, who one day ascends a tower and falls under the tutelage of the enigmatic alchemist residing therein. The allegory amps up as they acquire the assistance of the seven most powerful individuals under the sun, and together they embark on a journey to the titular sacred mountain. But all this is filtered through Jodorowsky's kaleidoscope, complete with disorienting aerial shots and eerily elegant mirror images, hallucination fuel for those not already under the influence. Screening as part of the Staff Picks series; a secret bonus screening follows at 9:15pm. (1973, 114 min, DCP Digital) [Tristan Johnson]

📽️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Alamo Drafthouse
Pete Ohs's 2025 film ERUPCJA (71 min, Digital Projection) begins screening. See Venue website for showtimes.

Phyllida Lloyd's 2008 film MAMMA MIA! (108 min, Digital Projection) screens Sunday, 1pm, as a Movie Party screening.

A Mystery Machine screening, in which the film is not announced in advance, screens Monday at 7:15pm. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Alliance Française de Chicago (enter via 54 W. Chicago Ave.)
Stéphane Ly-Cuong's 2025 musical film DANS LA CUISINE DES NGUYEN (IN THE NGUYEN KITCHEN) (99 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday, 6:30pm, as part of the Cinémélodie series, in celebration of Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month. A wine reception begins at 6pm, with a complimentary glass of Louis Jadot Bourgogne included. More info here.

⚫ Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
Jacquelyn Mills's 2022 documentary GEOGRAPHIES OF SOLITUDE (103 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday, 7pm, with Mills in person for a post-screening Q&A.

Lee Isaac Chung's 2024 film TWISTERS (122 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, 12:30pm, with an introduction by Northwestern sociologist Dr. Rebecca Ewert, whose research focuses on disaster recovery, gender, and inequality, as part of the Science on Screen: Watching the Weather series.

Rhythm Is A Heartbeat: Video Essays From Frankfurt And Chicago, a program of seven short audiovisual essays developed through the Summer Institute for Audiovisual Criticism, screens Wednesday, 5pm, followed by a Q&A with Domietta Torlasco and Alessandra Raengo.

Sumiko Haneda's 1982 documentary THE POEM OF HAYACHINE VALLEY (186 min, 16mm) screens Thursday at 6pm. Note the 6pm start time. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
A Godzilla double feature screens Saturday afternoon as part of the Special Screenings series: the Americanized Terry O. Morse/Ishirō Honda co-directed GODZILLA, KING OF THE MONSTERS! (1956, 81 min, DCP Digital) screens at 1pm, followed by Ishirō Honda's MOTHRA VS. GODZILLA (1964, 88 min, DCP Digital) at 3pm.

Two documentaries by Judit Elek screen together Sunday, 4pm, as part of the Judit Elek: Reality by Itself series: INHABITANTS OF CASTLES IN HUNGARY IN 1966 (1967, 27 min, DCP Digital) and HOW LONG DOES MAN LIVE? (1967, 60 min, DCP Digital).

A program of four short films that shaped Robert Beavers's early cinematic vision—Harry Smith's EARLY ABSTRACTIONS (1939–1956, 23 min, 16mm), Bruce Baillie's VALENTIN DE LAS SIERRAS (1971, 10 min, 16mm), Stan Brakhage's SIRIUS REMEMBERED (1959, 11 min, 16mm), and Gregory J. Markopoulos's MING GREEN (1966, 7 min, 16mm)—screens Sunday, 7pm, as part of the Robert Beavers: My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure series.

Jacques Rivette's 2007 film THE DUCHESS OF LANGEAIS (133 min, 35mm) screens Tuesday, 7pm, as part of the Jacques Rivette's Late Style series.

Samira Makhmalbaf's 1998 film THE APPLE (82 min, 35mm) screens Wednesday, 7pm, as part of the Iran Through the Lens of Childhood series; admission is free.

Mira Nair's 2016 film QUEEN OF KATWE (124 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 7pm, as part of the Black Girlhood series.

Agustí Villaronga's 1986 film IN A GLASS CAGE (112 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 9:30pm, as part of the Arthouse Vulgarity series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ FACETS
Cherien Dabis's 2025 film ALL THAT'S LEFT OF YOU (146 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, 1:30pm and Sunday, 5:30pm, as part of the Must-Watch Indies series, with a pre-recorded introduction from Dabis.

May Film Trivia takes place Saturday at 4pm.

Harry Lighton's 2025 film PILLION (107 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday, 1pm, as part of the Must-Watch Indies series.

Sweet Void Cinema presents a Screenwriting Workshop on Wednesday from 6pm to 9pm in the FACETS Studio. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Danny Leiner's 2004 film HAROLD & KUMAR GO TO WHITE CASTLE (88 min, 35mm) screens Saturday at midnight.

Ben McKenzie's 2025 documentary EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU FOR MONEY (90 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 7pm, followed by a post-screening Q&A with McKenzie. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Siskel Film Center
Agnès Varda's 1965 film LE BONHEUR (80 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday at 1pm and 6:30pm as part of the Ages of Agnès series.

The 29th Annual Asian American Showcase, presented in collaboration with the Foundation for Asian American Independent Media, begins Friday and continues through Tuesday, with the following screenings: a program of Filipino American shorts, Kapwa (Shared Identity), on Friday, 5:45pm, with filmmakers in attendance; Ramzi Bashour's 2025 film HOT WATER (97 min, DCP Digital) on Friday at 8:15pm; Ben Hethcoat and Keita Ideno's 2025 documentary CORONER TO THE STARS (DCP Digital) on Saturday at 3pm; Kimberlee Bassford's 2025 documentary BEFORE THE MOON FALLS (DCP Digital) on Saturday at 5pm; a program of AAPI short films by Chicago-based filmmakers, Another Version of Me, on Saturday at 8pm, with filmmakers in attendance; a program of AAPI shorts about navigating between worlds, The Other Side, on Sunday at 2:30pm, with filmmakers in attendance; a program of AAPI queer short films, Dissonance, on Sunday at 5:30pm; a program of AAPI shorts about breaking barriers, Breaking Out, on Monday at 5:45pm, with filmmakers in attendance; Sarita Khurana and Yoav Attias's 2026 documentary SEAT AT THE TABLE (DCP Digital) on Monday at 8:15pm, with Khurana and Illinois State Representatives Nabeela Syed and Kevin Olickal in attendance; a program of AAPI animated shorts, Sketches in Motion, on Tuesday at 5:45pm, with filmmakers in attendance; and Shubhangi Shekhar’s 2025 documentary HOOP LIKE THIS (2025, DCP Digital) on Tuesday, 8:15pm, with Shekar and producer Pulkit Datta in attendance.

Mati Diop’s 2024 film DAHOMEY (68 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday, 6pm, as part of the African Cinema: From Independence to Now lecture series.

The SAIC Film, Video, New Media, Animation, And Sound Festival begins Thursday and continues through next Saturday. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art (2320 W. Chicago Ave.)
Cameron Crowe's 2000 film ALMOST FAMOUS (122 min, Digital Projection) screens Friday, 7pm, presented by Ladies Who Lit and The Art Idiot in partnership with UIMA on the occasion of their current exhibition L.A. WOMAN, a memorial surveying the life and career of model, actress, artist, and documentary filmmaker Irene Antonovych; doors open at 6pm for a private after-hours viewing of the exhibition before it closes May 10. More info here.

CINE-LIST: May 8 - May 14, 2026

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Maxwell Courtright, Kyle Cubr, Ray Ebarb, Megan Fariello, Jim Gabriel, Shaun Huhn, Tristan Johnson, Ben Kaye, Joshua Minsoo Kim, Raphael Jose Martinez, Brian Welesko, Candace Wirt