:: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 6 - THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 12 ::

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Ernst Lubitsch's LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN (US/Silent)

Chicago Film Society at the Music Box Theatre – Thursday, 7:30pm

More than anything, Lubitsch worked with timing, constructing in his scenes triangular, dance-like editing rhythms that provoked audience members to see actions from multiple angles not to understand them but rather to perceive and judge more clearly the misconceptions and prejudices of his characters. A master of shifting points of view, Lubitsch was never satisfied with allowing us simplistic character identification when he could complicate things by making us at the same time mock each communication gone awry, each gesture misunderstood, each secret reluctantly kept. When it came to adapting Oscar Wilde's play, Lubitsch gleefully excised all of Wilde's celebrated witticisms and word plays, maintaining from the text only the skeleton of a plot: a young wife, who thinks her husband is sleeping with a disreputable older woman, decides to take a lover of her own in revenge. Lubitsch knew that any attempt to appropriate Wilde's language in his intertitles would result only in stillborn cinema. The film instead is filled with visual and temporal analogues to its source: meaningful glances that can be multiply decrypted; overflowing sexual longings compressed into a twitch of an eyebrow, the curl of a haircut; cataclysmic social faux-pas outlined in mysterious chiaroscuro. Lubitsch breaks the world of the film into two contradictory designs, each oppressive, heartless, and ultimately maddeningly insular. Within the interior world of the wealthy, strong vertical lines predominate, turning the inhabitants of these houses, particularly the stunningly diminutive Lady Windermere, into permanent strangers to one another. They move through their spaces as though each of them is the only free creature left within a world of exhibition and captivity. This is contrasted to the outside world, a place of horizontal chaos, in which social bonds exist only so that they can be used to hurt one another, to destroy fervent hopes, and to exploit small ideals. Grouped uncomfortably together by the sly eye of their director, characters here behave furtively, recognizing their intimate vulnerability, as though at any moment each one's neighbors will realize that their friend and companion is a fraud. Lubitsch's famous touch, built on synecdoche and implication, directs our imaginations far more than his actors, for his is a hieroglyphic style of cinema in which what ultimately most matters never actually occurs before our eyes but only between our ears. Things are rarely exactly what they're presented to be in a Lubitsch film—there's always a complication, always a nuance, always another side to every story—and this tendency is at its most delicious height here, in his greatest silent film. It was reported when the film was released that Wilde's estate would give its permission to adapt the play only on the condition that Lubitsch be the director. They couldn't have chosen better, and Wilde's play couldn't have been better served. With live musical accompaniment by Dave Drazin. Preceded by Les Goodwins’ 1928 short film A MUSICAL MIXUP (21 min, 35mm), which was restored by the Chicago Film Society in collaboration with UCLA Film and Television Archive and Cineverse with funding from the National Film Preservation Foundation. (1925, 90 min, 35mm) [Kian Bergstrom]

Lionel Rogosin’s COME BACK, AFRICA (South Africa/USA)

Siskel Film Center – Wednesday, 6pm

Filmed in secret under the guise of being a travelogue, Lionel Rogosin’s pioneering docufiction COME BACK, AFRICA is a testament to cinema’s role as witness. Though born into privilege (his father was a textile mogul), Rogosin—whose first film, ON THE BOWERY, he made to practice for this one—came back from serving in World War II vowing “to fight racism and fascism wherever [he] saw it.” This led him to South Africa, where he hoped to pull back the veil on apartheid. Rogosin was heavily influenced by Robert Flaherty and Vittorio De Sica, both of which are starkly evident. COME BACK, AFRICA is, like ON THE BOWERY, an almost perfect amalgamation of the modes those filmmakers were instrumental in refining—Rogosin’s use of non-actors and transformation of documentary realism into a rousing fiction still rooted in filmic verism. He spent more than a year researching in South Africa, talking to activists and writers such as Lewis Nkosi, Bloke Modisane, and Can Themba, all of whom wrote for DRUM magazine, helped to craft the film’s story, and appeared in it; he cast the film before he began writing it, using the performers and crews’ experiences to inform the narrative. The film centers on Zachariah, a young Zulu man who goes to Johannesburg (though he resides in Sophiatown, a poorer area outside the city, which was home to many notable South African cultural luminaries) to find work so that he can support his family back in their village. He starts in the gold mines, but in attempting to find better work must navigate the country’s Kafkaesque pass laws, which necessitate draconian oversight by the white, ruling class. In spite of that, he goes through several jobs, working in a house, at a garage, and in a restaurant, each presenting its own obstacles. Eventually his wife and children come to live with him; though the film is impactful in its depiction of apartheid South Africa, there are many moments of joy and camaraderie that undergird its revolutionary spirit. There are also blatant instances of this in the form of meetings and conversations centered on the political circumstances of Black South Africans in the apartheid state. (The film’s title is taken from the African National Congress’ slogan, “Mayibuye iAfrika!”) I mentioned Sophiatown above; one such luminary from there was Miriam Makeba, also known as Mama Africa, a well-known South African singer and activist. She appears in the film and performs a song. Rogosin later bribed officials to get Makeba out of the country so that she could appear with the film at the Venice Film Festival, which garnered her international recognition. Not for nothing, the distributor of the 2005 restoration, Milestone Films, declares COME BACK, AFRICA to be “one of the bravest and best of all political films.” It’s still alive with a fineness that’s neither didactic nor austere, but rather reflective of the good people in a bad situation. Screening as part of the African Cinema from Independence to Now Lecture Series series.(1959, 83 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Adam Marshall Present’s AMERICAN DENDRITE (US/Documentary)

Chicago Filmmakers – Friday, 7pm

Super 8 filmmaking has been having a renaissance of sorts lately. Between the explosion of professional Super 8 wedding “videography” and a proliferation of big budget music videos shot on the format, the medium once relegated to backyard movies made by teenagers and angry art school students with a fetish for filming lofts and alleys in black and white is seeing an explosion. Kodak themselves released the first new model Super 8 camera in decades just this past year. Despite all that, the amount of serious feature length films made on the format is still incredibly miniscule. So to see a feature travel documentary shot on Super 8 is amazing. AMERICAN DENDRITE is a lush, dreamy, and earnest travelogue with more of an approach than a subject: to follow the water path of the Chicago River from Chicago to its terminus in the Gulf of Mexico as the Mississippi River. Along the way, Present and his crew interview people who happen to be there. There’s a poetic sociology that reveals itself in AMERICAN DENDRITE. Made by a Chicagoan, it feels incredibly reminiscent of the city’s great barstool sociologists like Mike Rokyo and Studs Terkel. And much like Terkel's book Division Street, the film uses a road—or in this case a waterway—as both guide and metaphor for America as a whole and allows the people to use their voices to tell their own stories. AMERICAN DENDRITE focuses equally on the rural as the urban, and recognizes that the terms rural and urban can have different meanings themselves. Chicago is not St. Louis is not New Orleans. Cape Girardeau, MO is not Cairo, IL. Present and company seek to show the nobility of the common person and Middle America as it truly is, complex and nuanced. As similar as it is dissimilar. The film has a breezy, meandering pace that is both comfortable and relaxing. This lazy river approach not only adds more depth to the film’s metaphorical and philosophical points, but really allows the beauty of the cinematography and the honestness of the interview subjects room to breathe and be fully appreciated. Despite it being shot on Super 8 film, this is a sync sound movie. The filmmakers were able to get a camera custom modified to allow for crystal syncing of sound, thus letting them not only shoot at the traditional 24 frames-per-second (as opposed to Super 8’s standard 18fps) but to fully capture the moment with matching sound. Still, the film often uses voiceover to give equal weight to the beauty of the moving image and the storytelling of the interviewees. Each one complimenting the other while still standing on its own. This is a massively impressive film that is truly only comparable to David Simpson’s 1995 film HALSTED STREET USA (which was coincidentally narrated by Terkel) in its approach. But let’s get real, AMERICAN DENDRITE unquestioningly surpasses it when it comes to cinematography, editing, and overall aesthetic beauty. I can’t wait to see more of what Adam Marshall Present makes, and I very much hope he continues to make films using celluloid—because it’s rare to see a filmmaker create something that is equally impressive narratively as it is technically. Films like this give filmmakers hope that they too can shoot on film, regardless of subject matter or form. Plus, it's just goddamn beautiful. Marshall Present in person. Co-presented by DOC CHICAGO, Chicago Filmmakers, and Friends of the Chicago River.‍ (2024, 77 min, Unconfirmed Format) [Raphael Jose Martinez]

Employees Only Presents Cam Archer’s THEIR HOUSES (US) and Zachary Oberzan’s YOUR BROTHER. REMEMBER? (US)

FACETS – Wednesday, 7pm

Cam Archer has been directing shorts and music videos since 2003, crafting visual poems for artists like Six Organs of Admittance, Xiu Xiu, and Emily Jane White. His first feature, WILD TIGERS I HAVE KNOWN (2006), featuring Fairuza Balk, offered an adolescent blossoming into their queer identity, while SHIT YEAR (2010) served as a black-and-white love letter to Ellen Barkin. After these narrative works, Archer created THEIR HOUSES (2011, 32 min, Digital Projection), a thirty-two-minute experimental short that functions as both an investigation of creative anxiety and a formal experiment in autobiographical distance. Shot in Archer's cul-de-sac in Santa Cruz, California, the film transforms Hi8 footage into a lyrical exploration of suburban life. The degraded video quality, combined with photographic interpolation and ambient sound design by Nate Archer and Sunny Walker, reimagines the "home video" as high art. Rather than narrating himself, Archer employs actress Jena Malone (a collaborator from WILD TIGERS) to speak his first-person words, creating a deliberate displacement between filmmaker and subject that interrogates gender, identity, and the construction of self. The film operates as a meta-referential essay, with Malone's narration speaking from Archer's perspective about neighbors, creative doubts, and the environment while images provide impressionistic, non-literal illustrations. "What do you want me to do?" Malone asks the clouds. The camera documents Archer’s cul-de-sac, capturing activity in the park such as slow-motion running and people kissing. Archer watches and waits, turning the camera on himself in self-portrait: the artist watching the art watching the artist. The narrative weaves through specific memories and observations: passing a cruising spot in Rodeo Gulch where blackberry bushes sprout fresh men's underwear; documenting brothers in the neighborhood who make video games about rafts and bikini-clad girls; lingering on the blue house where Archer met someone he calls "The Pretender." Fragments emerge as the Hi8 captures caterpillars, flowing streams, coyotes, and cats. It is the eloquent poetry of the mundane. THEIR HOUSES is a conversation Archer is having with himself regarding how creative process affects identity. After the release of SHIT SHOW, he returned home and to pass the time he recorded everything around him. The images gave him a voice; later, the words followed. This video diary became an artistic sabbatical to strip back to a blank canvas, showing how one may cope with existential questions of creative confidence. Archer jokes early on that alternate titles included Landscapes For Loneliness or Landscapes, “whichever one made you cringe.” THEIR HOUSES stands as a significant underseen work in a tradition that honors the diary films of Jonas Mekas. It transforms an ordinary suburban street into a minefield of microscopic details filtered through lo-fi visuals that just might hold the meaning we’re looking for. [Shaun Huhn]
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When we were children, my brother—seven years older—would make me climb inside a cardboard box and push me down the linoleum stairs. I was the fool who climbed back up for more. Ours was a strained relationship, held together by the duct tape of shared VHS obsessions: PHANTASM II (1988), RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (1985), and COBRA (1986). These films provided the common ground we desperately needed. And still do. YOUR BROTHER. REMEMBER? is a mirror reflection for siblings separated by an age gap. Written, shot, edited, and performed by Zachary Oberzan, the film initially resembles a lo-fi home-movie remix, using David Worth’s KICKBOXER (1989) and John Alan Schwartz’s FACES OF DEATH (1978) as raw material for a 63-minute autobiography, reenactment, and video essay. Following the success of his one-man, $96 adaptation of David Morrell’s First Blood, FLOODING WITH LOVE FOR THE KID (2007). Oberzan told Filmmaker, "I should do what Hollywood does, which is to remake its own movies every 20 years or so." A cache of videos he had created with his brother Gator in 1990 would be the source of his remake. Twenty years later, Oberzan returned home to recreate these childhood scenes, casting himself once again as Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Kurt Sloane. The brothers originally used KICKBOXER as escape architecture, hiding from domestic turbulence by reconstructing scenes from their cinematic obsessions. With younger sister Jennie joining the reconstruction, the film generates a before-and-after portrait through simple editing. Film becomes a medium of temporal haunting, capturing ghosts of moments separated by decades. The structure operates across three looping timelines: original clips from KICKBOXER, the brothers' 1990s recreations, and the 2010 remake. This triptych creates a closed system that simultaneously protects and exposes. After a decade of estrangement, during which Gator cycled through prisons and rehabilitation, the project provided neutral territory for reconnection without requiring direct confrontation with trauma. KICKBOXER offered an allegorical framework: Kurt Sloane watches his brother paralyzed by an illegal martial arts move, then trains for vengeance and family redemption against impossible odds. The narrative provided a language for examining childhood innocence and time lost, allowing the brothers to communicate through choreography rather than confession. The film gradually sheds its protective framework. Acoustic "History Lesson" songs recount Gator’s drug overdoses with sibling jest, but these sequences collapse into raw documentation. Gator sobs through withdrawal, begging for help. The safety of KICKBOXER dissolves; the reality of twenty years asserts itself. Like Mabrouk El Mechri’s JCVD (2008), Van Damme here functions not as campy punchline but as a vessel for masculine vulnerability. Though critics initially grouped the work with Guy Maddin’s KEYHOLE (2012) as "nostalgia cinema," Oberzan’s unflinching autobiography inaugurated a trilogy of self-exorcism. TELL ME LOVE IS REAL (2014) and THE GREAT PRETENDER (2015) would continue diving deeper into the director’s personal life. YOUR BROTHER. REMEMBER? offers no tidy reconciliation, no therapeutic closure. Instead, it constructs a temporary space where two brothers can occupy the same frame as equals. Sometimes it takes the Muscles from Brussels to help you reconnect with family. (2012, 63 min, Digital Projection) [Shaun Huhn]
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Programmed by Cine-File contributors Elise Schierbeek and David Whitehouse.

Films by Priit and Olga Pärn (Estonia/France/Animation)

Conversations at the Edge at the Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 6pm

The work of Estonian animator Priit Pärn is defined by elasticity, a quality only increased in the collaborations he’s made with his wife Olga. Conversations at the Edge’s retrospective program of his work pairs two of Priit’s earlier solo works with the new film from the couple to trace the expansion of his style over time. In his classic BREAKFAST ON THE GRASS, Parn sketches 4 interrelated stories of people grappling with life in Estonia wherein they must keep a paranoid eye over their shoulders, fight for resources, and fight to even maintain their own sense of self before eventually resolving into the titular Manet painting. TRIANGLE, which is less overtly political while still being steeped in gendered relationship dynamics, feels like the more playful of the two, studying housewife Julia as she attempts to cook dinner for her husband while being thwarted by an amorous and tiny man who keeps eating her ingredients and stealing her heart before she can finish. Her body constantly shifts throughout the short, her features sometimes morphing into magazine cutouts for moments before they fall off and become raw material for her cooking, while the characters’ partnerships swap around just as fluidly. While more patient and deliberate, the Pärns’ newest LUNA ROSSA finds further avenues for invention. The film unfolds from the perspective of a man observing the lead-up to a terrorist bombing through an elaborate eye-in-the-sky surveillance apparatus, which watches its major players as they plot and slip items to one another, changing disguises along the way. If Priit’s early solo works were playful deconstructions of Estonian life under Soviet rule, the approach is updated here for a liberated country that is now, like all of the “free world,” dictated by the soft power of techno-capitalism. The man’s surveillance equipment interacts with scenes as much as it observes, taking the “zoom and enhance” trope to absurd extremes as everything observed becomes a digital object to be dragged, dropped, and manipulated, like DEJA VU (2004) remade in The Sims. The couple’s mixed-media style matches the fluidity of the figures, with 3D modeling mixing with Priit’s usual collection of appropriated photographs, extra-detailed mattes, and more crudely drawn 2D surfaces. Each character has a trademark Weird Face, but a more unmoving, unnerving version stretched onto a seemingly rotoscoped body. While the effect is rather upsetting when paired with the work’s relative slowness and paranoia, it’s no less playful than Priit’s classic work (and no less pervy, though that’s maybe more forgivable in a film he made with his wife). The pleasure in watching it is in seeing the way every part of the screen contains unsteady objects, things whose reality is warped and called into question in ways that keep the viewer on their toes. Even the logic and execution of the terrorist plot has an innate silliness to it, like if Spielberg had adapted Roald Dahl during his moodier post-9/11 period. More than anything, the film demonstrates the durability of such a rubbery style to weather changes in both history and technology. Followed by a virtual conversation and Q&A with the Pärns. (1982-2024, Total approx. 74 min, 35mm and Digital) [Maxwell Courtright]

Craig Baldwin’s TRIBULATION 99: ALIEN ANOMALIES UNDER AMERICA and ¡O NO CORONADO! (US/Experimental)

Block Cinema (at Northwestern University) – Friday, 7pm

TRIBULATION 99: ALIEN ANOMALIES UNDER AMERICA is undoubtedly Craig Baldwin’s most visionary assemblage. Congealed from educational and industrial ephemera, TV news, and B-picture sci-fi, TRIBULATION 99 capitalizes on the paranoid connotations of found-footage montage to spin out a preposterously dense and disorienting 48-minute alternative history of CIA meddling in Latin American politics—pictured, two years before The X-Files even, as an occult struggle against a reptilian race of hollow-earth dwelling “Quetzals.” Baldwin’s crackpot mutterings (think William Burroughs as a Castle Films News Parade announcer) clearly anticipate the constipated conspiracies of the InfoWars set, yet I can think of no other film that invented the very genre it parodies: it’s impossible to imagine the archival and geopolitical hopscotching of Adam Curtis’s THE CENTURY OF THE SELF (2002), not to mention the “synchromysticism” of contemporary YouTube emissions like “BACK TO THE FUTURE predicts 9/11” without it. Baldwin has said that “all of my films are about history,” and he remains a stalwart custodian of a perennially endangered “other cinema” whose roots go as deep as the century-spanning archive of celluloid he culls from—but in our absurd era of Q-Anon, Pizzagate, and Flat Earth theory, TRIBULATION 99 alarmingly seems less like a museum piece and more like a special bulletin. (1991, 48 min, 16mm) [Michael Metzger]
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Screening with Baldwin’s 1992 film ¡O NO CORONADO! (40 min, 16mm) and followed by a conversation between Northwestern professor Luisela Alvaray and Brett Kashmere, one of the editors of Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live!, a recent collection of critical writings about the San Francisco-based filmmaker.

Lucrecia Martel's THE HEADLESS WOMAN (Argentina)

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

Lucrecia Martel’s films demand your attention to infinitesimal details and then upbraid you—albeit thoughtfully, like a sage imploring you to reconsider all your preconceived notions—for caring too much about them. Her 2008 film THE HEADLESS WOMAN, the last in her de facto Salta Trilogy (called as such because all three, with LA CIÉNAGA from 2002 and THE HOLY GIRL from 2004, are set in the eponymous Argentine province, also her hometown) and her most recent film before ZAMA, is the preeminent example of this tactic within her oeuvre. The plot is deceptively simple: before the title card even appears, a well-to-do Argentine woman, Verónica (referred to as Vero and played in a masterful performance by María Onetto), gets distracted by her phone while driving and hits something—possibly a dog, possibly a child. Rather than verify and, if necessary, help the victim, she drives on, presumably stopping only to get out and seek assistance for herself. The film’s Byzantine trajectory is rendered dreamlike via Martel’s perversely epical perspective (and real-life inspiration; she reportedly conceived of the film in a dream)—nothing is what it seems, neither for the protagonist nor the viewer. Although this is a recent trend in world cinema of late, considering some noteworthy films born of the Iranian and Romanian New Waves such as Asghar Farhadi’s A SEPARATION (2011) and Călin Peter Netzer’s CHILD’S POSE (2013), Martel’s disembodied approach is less tactical and more intrinsic than others’ use of such means. It may be trite to say that Martel challenges viewers to question what they see (and hear—her use of sound is exquisite), but it’s a logical assumption. After Vero hits whatever it is, I was almost sure that, when the film shows the casualty in the car’s rear window (movie pun unintended, though many critics reference its Hitchcockian overtones) as she drives away, it was in fact a dog; but when her family starts quietly helping cover up the accident following a series of disconcerting events—a servant’s child goes missing and is then found drowned in the canal next to the road where the accident occurred—I wondered what it was I think I saw, this newfound confusion mirroring Vero’s while likewise reinforcing the flimsy impudence of the very sense most crucial to film viewing. Martel’s sound design is similarly dumbfounding, the acousmatic dialogue further distancing us from already removed figures, practically unable to be called characters in how little is revealed about them. This distance, then, makes us question our own complicity, thus positioning the role of spectator, a seemingly passive viewpoint, as an active, if not political, stance. Martel said in an interview that “[t]here is a relationship between the dead body you never see and the desaparecidos,” referring to when a military junta disappeared tens of thousands of political dissidents during Argentina’s 'Dirty War' of the 1970s. This context reframes the scenario, prompting one to wonder if there’s any real difference between what one thinks they see and what one, either naively or maliciously, wants to see. There’s also an intriguing motif involving Vero’s hair, dyed blonde, making her bourgeois status even more prominent against the darker-skinned, lower-class people who serve her, that ties all this together. It’s another element that confronts one’s perceptions—what seems like a clever embodiment of the film’s central metaphor is, when Vero dyes her hair dark brown towards the end, further indictment of one’s connivance. Where Martel challenges her viewer’s preoccupation with minute narrative details, she impugns for what is confessed in that very absorption. If there’s no detail too small, how do we miss—or, better yet, ignore—so many big ones? Screening as part of the Femalaise series. (2008, 87 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]

Mike de Leon’s BATCH ’81 (Philippines)

Siskel Film Center – Friday, 5:45pm; Saturday, 4pm; and Thursday, 8:30pm

Made during the final year of Ferdinand Marcos’ decade of martial law, BATCH ’81 is a searing allegory about the brutality of the Marcos regime. It’s so searing, in fact, that it can be difficult to watch—the film has an exploitation-movie bluntness to its depictions of torture, suggesting that director Mike de Leon and company had to meet the zeitgeist on its own ugly terms. As a demonstration of fighting fire with fire, it remains a powerful document of the rage and despair that many Filipinos must have felt throughout Marcos’ dictatorial rule. BATCH ’81 takes place mainly at a fraternity house and focuses almost exclusively on the hazing rituals that the new recruits are subjected to. One of the recruits, a freshman named Sid (Mark Gil), serves as the main character and audience surrogate, bearing witness to the abuses that the fraternity’s established brothers enact on more vulnerable members and reflecting on the point of it all. Taken in at first by notions of solidarity and masculine strength, Sid is willing to put up with humiliation and even physical assault. The camera—with its angry, confrontational gaze—is resolute in its disgust at the proceedings, however, capturing the worst of the abuses in artless medium closeups that foreground the ugliness of the behavior. The movie’s most harrowing sequence may be the one in which a recruit who had previously tried to leave the fraternity returns to the frat house under pressure from his father; the young man agrees to sit in an electric chair and receive shocks from his superiors to show penance for having even contemplated getting out. With this development, de Leon dramatizes the power of conformism that leads people to support a dictatorship, whether willingly or not. BATCH ’81 climaxes not with another initiation ritual but with extended sequences of the university talent show, where Sid and his brothers recreate numbers from CABARET in drag. They also perform on sets decked out in Nazi regalia, a chilling inversion of the moral of CABARET as well as a blatant condemnation of the characters. (1982, 105 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Ben Sachs]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Stephen Maing and Brett Story’s UNION (US/Documentary)

Block Cinema (at Northwestern University) – Thursday, 7pm

Stephen Maing and Brett Story’s UNION follows fired Amazon worker Chris Smalls and the tight-knit cadre of dedicated workers and labor organizers in the independent Amazon Labor Union (ALU) as they work to organize the more than 8,000 employees at Amazon’s Staten Island warehouse, JFK8. Union films follow a certain formula—worker beefs, union organizing ups and downs, certification vote, and next steps—spiced with internecine conflict and company pushback. Despite the expected structure (and well-publicized outcome), Maing and Story get us deeply invested in the process and people whose lives have become intertwined with their cause. We don’t get much in the way of the private lives of Smalls or any of these comrades, though we learn he spent three years living in his car and that one of the organizers, Natalie, is homeless despite being employed at Amazon. Madeline, an organizer from Florida, becomes an integral part of the team as a “salt,” a person hired by the company who works for unionization from the inside. Another outside recruit calls everyone “comrade” and questions Smalls’ accelerated tactics by citing the coming winter weather as a reason for delay. I could only guffaw as I recalled the Willmar 8, immortalized in Lee Grant’s brilliant documentary THE WILLMAR 8 (1981), who picketed their Minnesota bank through two dangerously frigid winters to protest gender discrimination. Thankfully, ALU members didn’t have to put their lives on the line as so many others have, but their struggle was not only equally important to the quality of life for Amazon workers, but they also helped revive the labor movement so necessary to help curb the unbridled greed and power of the multibillionaires like Jeff Bezos who have destabilized the lives of millions of frontline workers. Story in person to introduce the film and discuss it afterwards. (2024, 102 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Djibril Diop Mambéty’s HYENAS (Senegal)

Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 12pm

Djibril Diop Mambéty’s first feature, TOUKI BOUKI (1973), is one of the most important African films, a work that single-handedly brought an avant-garde sensibility to the cinema of Senegal and to that of the continent as a whole. (It’s also exuberant and laugh-out-loud funny—there’s nothing highfalutin’ about Mambéty’s experimentalism.) His second, HYENAS, is less groundbreaking in terms of imagery and découpage, but it’s hardly a minor work. A fierce satire of Africa’s colonial history, HYENAS advances a deceptively subdued aesthetic that allows the caustic themes to resonate loudly. It tells the story of a poverty-stricken village in the middle of the desert that receives a visit from a woman who grew up there but left years ago to seek her fortune. She’s filthy rich now; indeed, she seems to have nothing in common with the young woman the townspeople once knew. She’s also poised to lavish her wealth on the needy community... so long as the inhabitants agree to murder the shopkeeper who impregnated her and left her in the lurch when she was a teenager. Mambéty adapted the story from the 1956 play The Visit by the Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt, yet he tailors it so perfectly to the concerns of modern Africa that I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d learned after watching it that the writer-director conceived of it himself. Mambéty’s willingness to make both sides look bad may be the film’s most courageous aspect. Rather than vilify solely the capitalist/colonialist, HYENAS also critiques the colonial subjects who go along with them and end up internalizing their exploiters’ warped morality. This moral vision brings to mind Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s explanation for his satire MOTHER KUSTERS GOES TO HEAVEN: “I fire in all directions.” Screening as part of the African Cinema from Independence to Now Lecture series. (1992, 107 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Alex Phillips’ ANYTHING THAT MOVES (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Wednesday, 9:30pm

Perhaps you’re like me and, upon hearing the title of Alex Phillips’ latest Chicago-based genre rollercoaster hopped up on adrenaline, your mind went to Dennis Hopper’s inimitable delivery in David Lynch’s BLUE VELVET (1986), maniacally declaring that he will, indeed, “fuck anything that moves.” It’s not a huge leap, to be fair, as echoes of Lynch inarguably reverberate through the cheekily sordid and sickly sweet ANYTHING THAT MOVES like a dream folding in on itself to create something new. If BLUE VELVET exposed the dark underbelly of squeaky-clean American suburbia, then Phillips discovers the underbelly of the underbelly, a rot living deeper within the rot. Yes, the world is depraved and vile, but that’s just surface level, folks. What else can we find? This isn’t to say there aren’t moments of joy and absurdity throughout (far from it), as the tender core of the film slowly emerges through the muck of it all. Captured on visually sumptuous Super 16mm film—some shots feel like the film reels were unearthed from the depths of an abandoned grindhouse cinema—accompanied by a transfixing melodic score by Cue Shop, and luxuriating in frequent oscillating moments of ecstatic sex and gore-focused violence, Phillips’ protagonist, the lovable sex worker Liam (Hal Baum), is constantly told to question the authenticity of the love he doles out. “I don’t know if you love anybody,” an older client tells him early in the film, “but we love you just the same.” Off the clock, Liam gets plenty of love from his fellow sex worker/lover Thea (Jiana Nicole), similarly affectionate yet weary and watchful of the world outside their orgasmic bubble. One might call them partners in crime were it not for Liam’s client list slowly morphs into a series of homicidal crime scenes, his litany of lovers mysteriously being brutally murdered one by one. With two maniacal, all-nonsense cops on their tail, Liam and Thea slink through this exciting genre exercise, a giallo lathered in giardiniera, touring through delightfully recognizable Chicago locales, from the side streets around Wrigley Field to the immortal Wolfy’s sign. Phillips is in full control of the tone and style that a piece like this demands, the emotional stakes of the characters never butting heads with the more absurd comedic beats encountered along the way (a personal favorite; a funeral for one of the murder victims leading to a young child sheepishly smoking a cigarette to honor his late deadbeat dad), as if A BAY OF BLOOD (1971) and MULTIPLE MANIACS (1970) were spliced together. Most noteworthy is another invention of cinematic fantasia, where moments of orgasm are captured with musical trills and bright shining lights, as if the angels themselves were on hand to deliver coital reward to the respective climaxing character. Once more, a delightful device where the elements at hand seamlessly entwine in sexual and cinematic congress. Screening as part of the Weird Wednesday series. (2025, 80 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

John Coney's SPACE IS THE PLACE (US)

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

SPACE IS THE PLACE is a very odd film, written by and starring the brilliant composer/prophet from space Sun Ra. The main plot is basically that of Sun Ra's own reinvention as an interstellar prophet. He plays Sun Ra, who finds enlightenment on another planet and returns to Earth to save his African-American brethren from a supernatural pimp-overlord, using his music to spread his message. Ra intended it as a lighthearted homage to cheap 1950s science fiction, but a lengthy subplot involving pimps and sex workers clashed with Ra's scenes and placed it firmly in the Blaxploitation genre. Ra decided that these elements were unnecessary pandering that detracted from his message (and he was right), and for decades the film was available only in a shortened 63-minute version that stuck more closely to his vision. The suppressed footage was eventually restored for the 2003 DVD release. Genre digressions aside, SPACE IS THE PLACE is a unique creation, a foggy window into one of the most creative minds of the twentieth century: equal parts maddening and enlightening, off-putting in its sometimes-amateurish construction but hypnotizing nonetheless. Screening as part of the Lo-Fi Sci-Fi series. (1974, 85 min, DCP Digital) [Michael W. Phillips, Jr.]

Gina Prince-Bythewood’s LOVE & BASKETBALL (US)

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

Based on her own experiences, Gina Prince-Bythewood’s LOVE & BASKETBALL is an outstanding example of the romantic drama. A first feature, it’s also an impressive sports film and coming-of-age story; it elegantly combines all three genres, none overpowering the other, resulting in a grounded, modern film for the turn of the millennium. At a time, too, when women of color were so often limited to supporting roles in mainstream romantic films, LOVE & BASKETBALL’s personal perspective brings a multifaceted genuineness to its story and characters. This is especially true of Monica (Sanaa Lathan), whose goal since childhood has been to be a great basketball player. She and her family move to Los Angeles, where she meets her next-door neighbor, Quincy (Omar Epps). The son of a professional player, Quincy seems destined for success, while Monica faces more struggles and scrutiny as a female athlete. Broken into four quarters, the film covers Monica and Quincy’s often rocky relationship from childhood through to their professional careers. LOVE & BASKETBALL is truly dedicated to the ampersand in the title; neither element is more important than the other. This is especially true for Monica, who’s constantly told her tough attitude and obsession with the game isn’t appropriate. Her argumentative relationship with her stay-at-home mom (Alfre Woodard), as well as her more stable connection with her older sister (Regina Hall), and friendship with teammates all emphasize a subtle yet multidimensional examination of identity as a Black woman and an athlete. Monica, however, is also always consistent in her self-confidence, and the film is never more about her relationship than her figuring out what she wants for herself. Prince-Bythewood presents her scenes on the court as graceful and commanding, her athleticism and love for the game the focus. The romance between her and Quincy is ultimately all the more satisfying due to how truthfully the film features the everyday reality of balancing life. Screening as part of the Screen Play: Cinematic Visions of Video Games and Sports series. (2000, 124 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Simón Mesa Soto’s A POET (Colombia)

Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

At first and second glance, Oscar Restrepo (Ubeimar Rios) is a loser. Middle-aged, estranged from his wife and daughter, and freeloading off his pensioner mother when he’s not collapsing on the sidewalk after a drunken late-night rant, he’s unable to hold a job or even profit from the legacy of a poetry career fading into obscurity. But he also claims to thrive in such a condition, alluding to a fellow Oscar—Wilde—when he shares with a room of other poets the quote “Where there is suffering, there is sacred soil.” He then immediately confesses that poets constantly exaggerate their suffering. Situating itself within a squirrelly vérité-style visual idiom, A POET grapples sardonically with age-old notions about the lot of the “tortured artist” while remaining attuned to contemporary socioeconomic realities. When Oscar finally finds employment teaching at the local poetry school, he takes under his wing a fledgling young poet named Yurlady (Rebeca Andrade) from an impoverished family. New ethical and social questions emerge from this relationship. To what extent is Oscar using his charge as a personal or career project to accomplish? What boundaries is he crossing by seeing her outside of school? And where can poetry, or any art-making, fit in the lives of the materially precarious? Needless to say, A POET does not have a romantic view of the working artist, nor of the institutional contexts in which their work is funded and circulated. As if matching the perturbed, ramshackle comportment of Rios’s remarkable performance as Oscar, Mesa Soto uses handheld 16mm cinematography with deliberately exposed film rebate, leaving every shot framed by jagged black edges. It’s a striking, appropriately scrappy look for a film about flailing at the margins. Impressively, A POET avoids making Oscar into a grotesque or pitiable character; he may still be a loser, but his resilience and fundamental good-heartedness prove he’s no failure. (2025, 124 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]

Steven Spielberg's WEST SIDE STORY (US)

Music Box Theatre – Tuesday, 7pm

It’s hard to imagine what cinema would be like without remakes. From the lowliest programmers to the most bizarre arthouse films, no producer, director, or film star seems immune from thinking, “I wonder what I could do with that.” But taking on a remake of a film as beloved and revered as Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’ WEST SIDE STORY (1961) is another matter. Despite its flaws—an unconvincing Tony, an Anglo Maria, stagebound scenes and dances, dubbed singing—the world embraces that version and quivered in apprehension when Steven Spielberg announced his intentions to give it another go. I was concerned about what would happen to Jerome Robbins’ magnificent choreography and use of space, and whether Spielberg’s patented emotional manipulation would somehow trivialize the genuine emotional pull of the original. At the same time, the moment seemed right to bring this story of tribal division and violence to the screen. I am happy to report that this new WEST SIDE STORY more than justifies its existence. The film blends elements of the original, such as Robbins’ choreography for Tony (Ansel Elgort) and Maria (Rachel Zegler) at the school dance, with more realistic actions. Instead of the world falling away in a white haze as the teenagers fall in love, Spielberg stages this moment behind some bleachers. Yet, he doesn’t entirely abandon the poetry of Robert Wise’s mise-en-scène. For example, the neighborhood that is the setting for this tragedy is haphazardly crumbling under the wrecking ball of “urban renewal,” rather than being efficiently clear cut for new high-rise apartments and (ironically) today’s artistic mecca, Lincoln Center. He also hangs the back courtyard of Maria’s apartment building with laundry that never comes in to be folded. Justin Peck, resident choreographer of the New York City Ballet, largely coordinates his style with Robbins’, but finds a way to open up the dances to incorporate the community and the everyday lives of the characters—a big plus for “America,” though the dance still does not escape its clichéd construction. His new dance for “Cool” isn’t as evocative for me as Robbins’ crablike scream of shock from the Jets following Riff’s death because the sequence was moved back to its original spot before the rumble. Nonetheless, the mixture of playful sparring between Tony and Riff (a magnetic Mike Faist) as they vie for the handgun Riff has just purchased (a great new scene) and the danger of the rotting dock on which they dance provides a satisfying foreshadowing of death. The biggest change in this WEST SIDE STORY is the script by Tony Kushner. The film was so frontloaded with dialogue in both English and Spanish that I grew impatient to hear Leonard Bernstein’s magnificent score, which benefits from new orchestrations and singing voices that can handle its expert level of difficulty. That said, the intelligence of Kushner’s dialogue and where he locates each scene drive home the point that the outmoded gang culture represented by the Jets and the Sharks was bound to give way to the toxic nationalism that is currently tearing our country apart. In a stroke of genius, it is left to Rita Moreno, who has moved from her portrayal of a youthful Anita to the shopkeeper Valentina, to plead for “a new way of living” and “a way of forgiving” in her rendition of “Somewhere” that is as timely as ever. Her life experience and understanding of this sad story grace the film with a welcome depth that I found extremely moving. (2021, 158 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Jess Franco’s DAUGHTER OF DRACULA (France/Portugal)

Alamo Drafthouse – Tuesday, 6:45pm

DAUGHTER OF DRACULA is Jess Franco by way of the British production company Hammer films, known for their reworkings of Universal monster characters. Continuing his preoccupation with the lesbian vampire trope, this time more aligned with Hammer’s Karnstein trilogy of films, all of which were released in the few years before this. The film is based on the grounding vampire text Camilla, which was written by Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu and predates Bram Stoker’s Dracula by decades, but Franco puts his own unique twist on the tale. Amidst a local murder investigation focused on her wealthy uncle, Count Karnstein (composer Daniel White, who’s featured playing the piano throughout), Luisa (Britt Nichols) returns to her ancestral home to discover she is the descendant of a family of undead. After a shocking meeting with the original Count Karnstein (Howard Vernon) in the family crypt, Luisa begins to lean into her vampiric desires, her sights set on her cousin, Karine (Anne Libert). DAUGHTER OF DRACULA combines more traditional horror sequences with Franco’s signature dreaminess and eroticism. Set in modern times and focusing on the detective story, the movie exhibits a structuredness that is constantly interrupted by Franco’s surreal moments of contemplation. The constantly fluid camera highlights both elements of nightmarish, voyeuristic terror and ethereal sensuality. This is interestingly partitioned, too, by the male characters’ drive to solve the murder versus the women who are in their own quiet and emotional fantasy world. Screening as part of the Terror Tuesday series. (1972, 82 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Ernest Dickerson’s TALES FROM THE CRYPT PRESENTS: DEMON KNIGHT (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Tuesday, 9:30pm

In 1987, Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris wrote a horror script that refused to die. It drifted through Hollywood for nearly a decade before resurfacing as TALES FROM THE CRYPT PRESENTS: DEMON KNIGHT, though it wasn’t conceived as franchise material at all. Written two years before the HBO series premiered, it began life with Tom Holland set to direct and Chris Sarandon and Tommy Lee Jones attached. When Holland left for FATAL BEAUTY (1987), the project slid into development hell, accumulating delays, rewrites, and unrealized intentions. Producer Joel Silver eventually acquired the script and folded it into a three-film theatrical deal with Universal. DEMON KNIGHT arrived just before the series’ final season, followed by BORDELLO OF BLOOD (1996), whose jokey cynicism effectively collapsed the deal. DEMON KNIGHT, by contrast, feels almost willfully serious, as if it’s pushing back against the smirk it’s expected to wear. That seriousness comes from Ernest Dickerson. A former cinematographer for Spike Lee and the director of JUICE (1992), Dickerson brings a physical, political awareness to genre filmmaking. His visual style is aggressive and assured: high-contrast lighting, saturated blues and greens cutting through smoke, expressionistic framing, and restless camera movement. He described his method on set as jazz, which fits. There’s structure, but also improvisation, risk, and velocity. Handheld shots, Dutch angles, and confrontational close-ups don’t just decorate the horror; they make it feel lived-in and volatile. Framed by the beloved Crypt Keeper, the prologue features John Larroquette as an actor who’s no “Gory Cooper,” or even “Robert Deadford.” As Filter’s “Hey Man, Nice Shot,” begins to build to its crescendo we are on the road with two outlaws. The story unfolds in Wormwood, New Mexico, a name that signals apocalypse with biblical bluntness. A decommissioned mission church becomes a siege site when drifter Frank Brayker arrives, pursued by The Collector, a demon whose greatest weapon is charisma. Brayker carries one of seven cosmic keys filled with Christ’s blood, passed across centuries by immortal guardians. This mythology distinguishes the film from the moralistic irony typical of Crypt episodes. The stakes aren’t ironic punishment but endurance, belief, and survival across time. The boarding house residents form a cross-section of marginalized America: a work-release convict, an alcoholic veteran, a sex worker, a disgraced postal employee. The Collector tailors temptation to each of them, offering exactly what they’re already desperate for. Jada Pinkett Smith’s Jeryline, introduced scrubbing stoves, emerges as the film’s warrior. As later documented in HORROR NOIRE (2019), she became mainstream cinema’s first Black Final Girl, a subversion Dickerson actively fought to preserve. Billy Zane’s Collector fuses cowboy swagger, demonic seduction, and comic-book excess in one of Zane’s best roles, while William Sadler grounds the mythology in weary ambiguity. Dick Miller’s Uncle Willy is yet another variation of Miller’s Walter Paisley from A BUCKET OF BLOOD (1959). Shot entirely inside a decommissioned airplane hangar, DEMON KNIGHT exploits total environmental control to create a blacklight nightmare of practical effects, tactile gore, and expressionist space. The film endures. It was a script toughened by neglect, a director at full visual confidence, and a moment when theatrical horror could still be strange, political, and gloriously excessive. (1995, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]

John Palmer & David Weisman’s CIAO! MANHATTAN (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Friday, 7pm

Three months after filming concluded on CIAO! MANHATTAN, the film’s lead, Factory Superstar Edie Sedgwick, passed away at 28 years old from an apparent barbiturate overdose. Thus, John Palmer and David Weisman’s sprawling, manic, bad trip of a film all but functions as a cinematic eulogy for Sedgwick, sitting along similar works like Derek Jarman’s BLUE (1993), David Bowie’s Blackstar, or Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis as a tragic artistic last will and testament. Whether that was the intent or not may be besides the point, the film purposefully blending fiction and reality to the point of meaninglessness, with fellow Superstars (Paul America, Viva, Brigid Berlin, and Pat Hartley, for starters) playing themselves and/or completely fictional characters, and much of the plot pulled right from the weary final years of Sedgwick’s life after her descent following her departure from the Andy Warhol bubble. Sedgwick, playing the character of Susan Superstar (named primarily because the film was originally pitched for fellow Warhol acolyte Susan Bottomly), practically floats through the narrative, her character’s lack of abandon attempting to lead a post-Superstar life resulting in nothing but apathy and a sort of depressed acceptance of circumstances. The hyperkinetic atmosphere of New York City life has been sucked out and thrust into the laid back, wide open spaces of Arcadia, California, in attempts to recover, relax, and revisit a life that once was. Sedgwick, confiding in the roaming Texas drifter Butch (Wesley Hayes) who found her on the side of the road, narrates these past moments of her life told through black-and-white passages edited with frantic and hypnotic energy, a glimpse into the world that handed Edie the keys to her success and her demise. CIAO! MANHATTAN is, undeniably, a bad hang, with a shocking, unforgettable ending that hammers home the tragedy of Sedgwick’s final days, yet there’s something worth reckoning with in bearing witness to this icon’s brief yet unforgettable stardom, a woman shining so bright for such a fleeting moment. (1972, 84 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

François Truffaut's FAHRENHEIT 451 (UK)

Alliance Française de Chicago (Enter via 54 W. Chicago Ave.) – Monday, 6:30pm

What is it about French directors in the 60's that made them visualize the future as looking pretty much the same, but with a few fancy gadgets and streamlined clothing? And what was it about Ray Bradbury that makes his dystopian futures less frightening than Philip K. Dick's? François Truffaut can share credit for both of these phenomena. In his first color film, and only English language film, Bradbury's 1951 novel of the same name is adapted to become an anti-censorship, pro-intellectual statement. In a future where all books and written language are banned, Oskar Werner plays the book burning "fireman," an up-and-coming fascist about to get promoted who has a crisis of conscience. Julie Christie plays the dual roles of Linda, his sedative and TV-addicted wife, and Clarisse, the young schoolteacher who seduces his mind. Beginning with the opening credits, which are spoken by a narrator while we see two-toned shots of antennae, Truffaut forefronts his visual acumen. Though the dialogue is sometimes lacking in terms of rhythm and delivery, the art direction is sublime. The reds, oranges, and yellows of burning paper dominate Christie's wardrobe and home, and only a handful of cool colors are dripped throughout the film. The film uses some quick zooms, which feel dated today, but sheds many of the cinematic flourishes that populate much of Truffaut's earlier work. Though technically sci-fi, it's light on the science, and heavy on the (literary) fiction. Screening as part of the February Fantastique series. Guests will enjoy a complimentary glass of wine and a post-screening discussion with AF-Chicago’s Geoffrey Ruiz. (1966, 112 min, Digital Projection) [Jason Halprin]

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s BLACK NARCISSUS (UK)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Sunday, 4pm

A deep tension is embedded in the very structure of Powell & Pressburger’s religious drama, a tale of assimilation, desire, and the limits and binding nature of faith. In their quest to build a new convent deep in a Himalayan mountain village, the nuns at the center of BLACK NARCISSUS consistently find their faith tested, their efforts to provide something holy and enlightening at odds with the inherent colonial mission at play, a last gasp of Britain’s tyrannical rule over India before gaining independence just months after the film’s initial release. Among the many treasures of Powell and Pressburger’s feature are the methods by which grand emotional gestures—jealousy, yearning, fear—find themselves thrust onto the screen; Deborah Kerr’s longing for David Farrar infecting frame after frame through flashbacks and understated glances, the sheer heat and intensity of Kathleen Byron’s furious eyes piercing through the screen, the majesty of the church bell ringing, its tones soaring through the hills alternately as a joyous cheer and a cry for help. The film is perhaps most noteworthy for its sprawling, painterly visual palette, transforming England’s Pinewood Studios into a lush, Himalayan landscape, mountain peaks almost poking their way out of the screen. The use of matte paintings to create depth and scope makes each frame painterly in its own right, with the film being justly rewarded Academy Awards for Art Direction and Cinematography, a cherry on top for a film relishing in trying to find the divine in all aspects of life. Screening as part of the Board Picks series. (1947, 101 mins, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Hong Sang-soo's THE NOVELIST'S FILM (South Korea)

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

Another year, another couple Hong Sang-soo features. THE NOVELIST'S FILM, the first of two movies Hong released in 2022 (followed by WALK UP), is also the third of his films to win a Silver Bear at the Berlinale in the past three years. In spite of the recent acclaim (or perhaps even because of it), Hong's extreme prolificity can make it easy to take each of his new features for granted. Given the similarities between so many of his movies in terms of form and content, it can also be easy to overlook what he might be doing that's new each time out. THE NOVELIST'S FILM is a witty black-and-white drama that centers on a veteran novelist, Jun-hee, who attempts to overcome writer's block by making her first short film. This continues Hong's recent trends of focusing on female characters and offering a substantial lead role to an older actress (the star is Lee Hye-young, who also played the lead in Hong's previous feature, IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE), a welcome development in his work. What's most fascinating about THE NOVELIST'S FILM, though, is the way that Hong investigates the creative process by focusing on the role that chance encounters can play in sparking artistic inspiration—and by daringly keeping the actual production of the film-within-the-film offscreen. Most of the running time is spent following Jun-hee over the course of a single day as she first meets an old acquaintance who runs a book shop, then a film director who once expressed interest in adapting one of her novels (but ultimately failed to do so) and, finally, a popular actress in semi-retirement named Kil-soo (the inevitable Kim Min-hee) with whom she shares a mutual admiration. The ending jumps ahead several months to a scene outside of a screening room where a private viewing of Jun-hee's short is being held. Although the film itself is never glimpsed, Hong provides a mysterious documentary-like coda featuring Kil-soo arranging a bouquet of flowers with another actress in a public park that seems intended to "stand in" for Jun-hee's footage. This sequence—which is partially shot in color and resembles the controversial coda to Abbas Kiarostami's TASTE OF CHERRY (1997)—is the key to THE NOVELIST'S FILM, as it contains a moment where Hong himself can be heard offscreen telling Kim, his real-life paramour, that he loves her. It's a breathtaking scene that dissolves the line between documentary and fiction and asks us to reconsider the entire project along more highly personal (perhaps even autobiographical) lines. Screening as part of the City Serendipity series. (2022, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]

David Lean's BRIEF ENCOUNTER (UK)

Alamo Drafthouse – Sunday, 3:30pm

Along with SUMMERTIME (1955), BRIEF ENCOUNTER represents the best of David Lean’s small-scale pictures; the emotions are so finely etched that even the smallest gestures speak volumes. It’s a movie about resignation disguised as a movie about passion and shot (by Robert Krasker, just a few years before he teamed up with Carol Reed to make ODD MAN OUT [1948] and THE THIRD MAN [1949]) like a crime film, which may help explain the richness of the tone. Adapted from a one-act play by Noël Coward called Still Life, it takes place during a month some time before the war when a suburban housewife and a city doctor, both married to other people, have an affair, then call it off once the excitement gives way to feelings of guilt and paranoia. Celia Johnson (who received an Oscar nomination for her work) and Trevor Howard (in his first major role) are the leads, and they strike a remarkable balance between restraint and movie-star expressiveness—which is exactly what they’re supposed to do, given that they’re playing normal people experiencing the thrill of living outside their normal routine. One could argue they’re as much the auteurs of BRIEF ENCOUNTER as Lean, Coward (who also produced), Krasker, or Anthony Havelock-Allan and Ronald Neame (who both co-wrote the script with Lean and co-produced the movie uncredited); like a lot of classic studio films, it’s kind of an authorless work and yet no less cinematic for it. Does it matter who decided to break with the general air of realism and have the lights go dark around Johnson just before her pivotal epiphany, or who decided to “open up” Coward’s play by having it told in flashbacks? Probably not. Through a combination of talents and ideas, BRIEF ENCOUNTER exquisitely conveys feelings of middle-class repression and furtive romance—feelings that are evidently common enough to warrant the film’s enduring appeal. Screening as part of the Sad Girl Cinema Club. (1945, 86 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Lav Diaz’s MAGELLAN (International)

Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

There’s an awkwardness in MAGELLAN that belies its ethereal cinematography and nimble camerawork, but it’s studied rather than amateurish; one senses Filipino auteur Lav Diaz and star Gael Garcia Bernal’s consideration of the Portuguese explorer in what feels like real time, as if trying to embody and understand him from different vantage points. The film begins not with the eponymous explorer but with a Malay woman seeing a white man; in establishing a throughline of perspective, we the viewers do not see the man but just the Malay woman’s unnerved reaction. It’s a justified move, as the rest of the film elucidates upon it, spanning the Capture of Malacca in 1511, where Ferdinand Magellan served under the command of viceroy of Portuguese India Afonso de Albuquerque, to Magellan’s historic two-year expedition on behalf of the Spanish crown, during which he died in the Philippines. (His voyage was completed by Juan Sebastián Elcano, making their journey the first circumnavigation of Earth, as well as the first documented contact with the Philippines by Europeans.) Many are calling this Diaz’s most accessible film, owing both to its comparatively short running time—not quite three hours, the average length of a summer tentpole at this point—and its star, Gael García Bernal, about whom Diaz started a rumor at last year’s New York Film Festival that the Mexican actor had been cast during sex with the film’s producers, Albert Serra and Joaquim Sapinho. About whether or not that’s accurate—its relative accessibility, not Bernal’s casting during sex—Diaz said in an interview with IndieWire that he didn’t think that was the case, and that “it’s still part of the long, long work. I consider all my work as one. MAGELLAN is still part of this continuing dialogue in this medium, trying to talk about the human condition. It’s always about that.” This dialogue centers on colonialism and one of its messianic figures, who’s an integral part of Filipino culture. In a Screen Slate interview, Diaz says one of his country’s most popular songs is about the explorer; it’s a parody by Yoyoy Villame, and more or less lays out the latter half of Diaz’s film, culminating in Magellan’s defeat during the 1521 Battle of Mactan. Diaz has generated controversy by asserting that after several years of research he believes that Lapulapu, a chieftain who is said to have killed Magellan but who is presented in the film as a mythological decoy of sorts, was created by village leadership to rankle the colonizers and spur them to violence. (If you’re interested in questions of historical fealty, this column by Filipino historian Ambeth Ocampo for the Philippine Daily Inquirer is an interesting read.) But as a dangling carrot for colonial hubris, it’s a compelling concept, especially in juxtaposition to Magellan’s quest to convert the natives to Christianity. He initially gains their affection by seeming to heal chieftain Rajah Humabon’s sickly child using the Santo Niño de Cebú, a statue of the child Jesus (now the oldest Christian artifact in the Philippines), resulting in Humabon becoming among the first Christian converts but who later became a traitor, both against his own people—it was he who steered Magellan into battle with the neighboring chieftain Lapulapu, though in this revision it would have been to cease the conversions to Christainity—and eventually the remaining Spaniards following the explorer’s death. I was surprised to learn through interviews with Diaz that the director is committed to a Socratic mode of filmmaking; there’s an opacity to his films, reinforced by their extensive run times, that simultaneously rejects didacticism but in retrospect embraces filmmaking as discourse, a tool to inspire contemplation. Perhaps it’s this, too, that inspires the tentativeness of the staging, with feelings such as pride, ardor, uncertainty, and even prosaism (especially as it relates to the years-long circumnavigation) depicted as tenuous concepts rather than historical equanimity. Amidst the beautiful but still truer to reality cinematography that conveys much of the story, there are interludes featuring Magellan and his wife, Beatriz (Ângela Azevedo), back in Portugal that are filmed dreamily, with Beatriz (who was the original inspiration for the film, which was announced with the working title BEATRIZ, THE WIFE) a stand-in for an inner reverie that doesn’t redeem Magellan but does humanize him in the most literal sense of the word. Speaking of cinematography, between this and Albert Serra’s AFTERNOONS OF SOLITUDE and PACIFICTION, Artur Tort is one of my new favorites in this space. Unrelated to the film itself but interesting to note also is that Diaz contracted tuberculosis whilst editing, and that there’s also a nine-hour version of the film that may someday be released. (2025, 163 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Kahlil Joseph's BLKNWS: TERMS & CONDITIONS (US)

Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 4:30pm

“I know what you’re thinking… But this is not a documentary.” With this bit of cheeky onscreen text—hilariously presented with accompanying memes of a smiling Denzel Washington and a relieved Vivica A. Fox—Kahlil Joseph interrupts himself practically mid-sentence to extend an olive branch to his audience, letting us know that we are not, in fact, about to be subjected to two hours of droll, academic analysis. There are still hints of that sprinkled throughout Joseph’s expansive and purposely uncategorizable BLKNWS: TERMS & CONDITIONS, a film that dares to live and luxuriate in what acclaimed art curator Okwui Enwezor called "the space between the spectator and the work of art." Joseph’s imagery and artistry has been viewed by millions around the world, even if they don’t know his name, as he's collaborated on music videos and visual albums with the likes of Beyoncé, Travis Scott, and Kendrick Lamar, cementing his bona fides as an artist in direct conversation with some of the most influential Black performers of the day. Here, Joseph’s interests have led him to a grander project, using the Africana Encyclopedia—a massive text birthed from the ambitions of W.E.B. DuBois—as a jumping off point to interrogate Black history in four dimensions. Past, present, future, and even alternate realities are extrapolated and interrogated, “BLKNWS” itself popping up as a fictional in-universe news source and Tumblr page, an artistic corrective to re-center and reclaim Black and African culture in the larger diaspora. Joseph intentionally blurs and remixes the lines between reality and fiction, even evoking a charming quotation from Agnes Varda, “What is bad for cinema is the categories; this is real fiction, fake fiction, real documentary, fake documentary. This is a film.” Varda’s not alone as inspiration here, as Joseph’s work, with its intense montage spanning millennia and onscreen text both supporting and contrasting the images presented—recalls Chris Marker’s SANS SOLEIL (1983) and especially the late-career essay films of Jean-Luc Godard, all filtered through an unabashed contemporary Black lens, ancient artifacts and sculptures and cinema positioned alongside memes and TikToks and reality television. The barrage of montage is interspersed with fictional reenactments of the lives of DuBois and Marcus Garvey, alongside beautifully textured explorations of the Nautica, an epic, futuristic ocean vessel looking to retrace the Transatlantic Slave Route but in reverse (a homecoming-turned-luxury liner). Here, a young journalist explores the onboard TransAtlantic Biennale, a place for Black art to be reimagined and recontextualized, perhaps a direct reference to Joseph’s own presence in the art gallery space, where BLKNWS was seen in its early forms. There is certainly something of a museum quality to Joseph’s work; the film warrants intense dissection and analysis, but it could also be easily consumed in short bites by wandering travelers, something to be both memed and studied. This bold attempt at reconfiguring cinematic language and form positions Joseph as a talent to reckon with and watch; his eye for our current moment and what may come next makes him as exciting as any filmmaker out there. A Black Harvest encore screening. (2025, 113 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Alex Cox’s REPO MAN (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Friday, 3:15pm; Monday, 6:30pm; and Tuesday, 3:45pm

Before he made Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen into the punk rock Romeo and Juliet (and incurred Johnny Rotten's lasting wrath in the process), British director Alex Cox directed this cult classic comedy about an LA punk turned car repossessor. Emilio Estevez is convincingly apathetic as the title character in his first starring role, but it's the other repo men who steal the show (particularly Harry Dean Stanton and Sy Richardson) with their grizzled looks, erratic behavior, and desperation to impart wisdom. The first half of the film has some really authentic moments, some nice surreal touches, and great music (including a hilarious cameo by The Circle Jerks as the washed-up nightclub band). The second half devolves into a more typical everything-but-the-kitchen-sink '80s romp which either is your thing or isn't, complete with the paranormal HAZMAT team from E.T. and dull-witted, machine gun-toting, mohawk-sporting bad guys in the Bebop and Rocksteady mold. (1984, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Mojo Lorwin]

John Carpenter’s THE THING (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Friday, 9:30pm

John Carpenter has always been a minimalist when it comes to framing, using his preferred format of widescreen to create a pronounced sense of negative space and, with it, a pronounced sense of dread. Similarly, he tends to sculpt performances that are understated and direct, much as they are in the work of his favorite director, Howard Hawks. THE THING is a remake of Hawks’ foray into sci-fi horror, THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD (1951), and one can sense Carpenter’s reverence for the original in his Hawksian depiction of the professional community that makes up the principal characters. Yet where Hawks’ film was a portrait of heroism, showing how a group of scientists bands together to fight off a hostile extraterrestrial life form, Carpenter’s is a pessimistic work that shows a community coming apart in the midst of an alien invasion. (It’s widely suspected that the film was a commercial flop on first release because it came out only a few months after E.T. THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL, which presented a much rosier view of human-alien relations; Carpenter’s pessimism just wasn’t welcome at the time.) That breakdown is presented in exquisite, gory detail: Rob Bottin’s special make-up effects are some of the most lauded of their kind in movie history, depicting people and animals as they mutate into hideous half-alien creatures. This was Carpenter’s first major studio film, and he took full advantage of the resources available to him. In addition to the first-rate effects, THE THING features a brilliant mix of studio sets and location shooting (with British Columbia standing in for Antarctica) and an appropriately chilling Ennio Morricone score. Free Victory members screening. (1982, 109 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Mona Fastvold’s THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE (UK/US)

The Davis Theater and Music Box Theatre – See Venue websites for showtimes

THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE can be approached less as a historical biopic than as an inquiry into how belief is embodied, transmitted, and policed. Directed by Mona Fastvold, the film resists the reassuring grammar of prestige historical drama and instead situates Ann Lee’s life within a tactile, experiential framework that privileges ritual, movement, and collective sensation over narrative efficiency. History is not highlighted so much as recast as mythos, delivered through Thomasin McKenzie’s narration. What follows is a story reenacted as a series of pressures placed on women’s bodies. Childbirth and loss share the same breath. Bodily autonomy and antiquated notions of “wifely duty” collide again and again. Fastvold’s use of natural light, hand-painted backgrounds, and rigorously composed frames does more than evoke the 18th century. It places the image in a liminal space between realism and iconography, recalling Baroque painting as much as ethnographic observation. Many scenes conclude with tableaux that suggest Caravaggio-like figures emerging from shadow, poised to behead Holofernes. This painterly strategy mirrors the film’s broader refusal to isolate Ann Lee as a singular genius. Her authority is inseparable from the collective that gathers around her. The Shakers’ theology holds that the second coming of Christ will be female, because God encompasses both masculine and feminine principles. This belief positions Ann Lee as an existential challenge to patriarchal Christianity, and to patriarchal society more broadly. The film makes clear that persecution arises less from the Shakers’ ecstatic dances or celibacy than from their devotion to a woman permitted spiritual authority. Paganism becomes a convenient accusation; gender is the real heresy. Amanda Seyfried’s performance is remarkable for its range, capable of erupting into exuberance or retreating into stillness without signaling either as spectacle. She avoids charisma, presenting Lee as a figure shaped by grief, labor, and belief rather than destiny. This approach aligns with the film’s skepticism toward heroic individualism, even when engaging a figure historically framed as messianic. That THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE arrives at a moment when the world is grieving the unprovoked loss of an American citizen at the hands of their own government gives the film an unintended but piercing contemporary resonance. Upon arriving in America, Lee’s response to a slave auction, her cry of “Shame,” echoes beyond the frame and into daily life. Later, the detention and beating of Shaker congregants by British soldiers evokes modern immigration enforcement, reinforcing the film’s argument that institutional brutality tends to repeat itself with only minor cosmetic updates. What distinguishes THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE from more conventional faith-based narratives is its insistence on pacifism as praxis rather than abstraction. Though not depicted onscreen, later generations of Shakers would be exempt from the Civil War draft, an early instance of conscientious objection. They sheltered both Confederate and Union soldiers. Their commitment to nonviolence is not symbolic but disciplinary, an ethical system requiring continuous labor, restraint, and dancing. Stripped of theology, the film ultimately reveals a social model grounded in collective work, gender equality, and the rejection of violence. It suggests that radical change does not require divine intervention so much as the redistribution of authority. Fastvold’s film emerges as a punk-rock feminist manifesto, sketching the blueprint for utopia: believe women, follow women, dismantle the patriarchy, and live out our days under a matriarchy. History’s male-ruled societies seem to agree on one thing. The most threatening idea in any era is not heresy, but women governing themselves. (2025, 137 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]

Ugo Bienvenu’s ARCO (France/Animation)

The Davis Theater  – See Venue website for showtimes

Two lonely kids form a life-changing bond across space and time. It’s a familiar premise in children’s media (one that finds a variation in another four-letter 2025 animated sci-fi film named after its protagonist, Pixar’s lovely ELIO), but ARCO has enough idiosyncratic details and artistry to stand out. In some faraway future in which climate disasters have forced humanity to live on self-sustaining platforms in the clouds, young Arco longs for escape. Specifically, he wants to travel through time like the rest of his family, whose mode of transportation is rainbows. Disobeying their rules (children cannot rainbow time travel before the age of 12), Arco takes to the sky and ends up (literally) crashing down back in 2075. Unable to return to his reality, he befriends Iris, a budding artist raised by a robot nanny in lieu of her perpetually-away parents, who show up at the dinner table as holograms beaming in from work. Tailed by a trio of bumbling conspiracy theorists and imperiled by the effects of climate change, the kids seek to find Arco a way home. With his co-writer Félix de Givry, Ugo Bienvenu creates a bittersweet story of foundational childhood friendship subtly set within a larger portrait of societal anomie. Neither Arco’s time, with its isolated homes perched high above an uninhabitable Earth, nor Iris’, with its substitution of AI for human labor, offer reassuring views of our planet’s future. While it’s not clear how one reality grew into the other (one of many world-building mysteries audiences might find intriguing or frustratingly vague), what is clear is that ARCO sees a world of endangerment where hope rests in the younger generations and their ingenuity, reflected in Iris’ ability to imagine things through drawing. Her bright artistic sensibility is embodied by the film, which bursts with literal rainbows of color and contains a gorgeous score by Arnaud Toulon. Without being precious about it, ARCO self-reflexively celebrates its own handmade form—let’s just call it Art—as a way forward for humankind. The version being screened is dubbed in English from the original French; while I admired the clever layering of Natalie Portman and Mark Ruffalo’s voices as the nanny robot Mikki, I was more skeptical of the contributions from Will Ferrell, Andy Samberg, and Flea, as well as the child voice actors. (2025, 89 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]

📽️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Chicago Public Library
View all screenings taking place at Chicago Public Library branches here.

⚫ The Davis Theater
Joachim Trier’s 2025 film SENTIMENTAL VALUE (133 min, DCP Digital) continues screening. See Venue website for showtimes.

Oscarbate presents another edition of their ongoing Trust Fall series on Thursday at 8pm. Per the event description, “In honor of Valentine's Day, this month’s edition of Trust Fall is for lovers! Not just romantically, but for those lovers of a certain film who have been asking about this movie, ever since we teased it back in the Highs and Lows dayz.” More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Johnnie To and Wai Ka-Fai’s 2002 film MY LEFT EYE SEES GHOSTS (97 min, 35mm) screens Friday, 7pm, and Saturday, 9:30pm, as part of the Revolution of Their Time: 30 Years of Milkyway Image series.

Todd Hollander’s 1989 film THE WIZARD (100 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday, 9:30pm, as part of the Screen Play: Cinematic Visions of Video Games and Sports series.

Jem Cohen’s 2012 documentary MUSEUM HOURS (107 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, 4pm, as part of the City Serendipity series.

Aditya Chopra’s 1995 film DILWALE DULHANIA LE JAYENGE (190 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday at 6pm. Co-presented with UChicago SASA.

A program of Films by Rose Lowder (2007-2012, Total approx. 70 min, 16mm), “concerned primarily with gardens and structured natural environments” per the description, screens Sunday at 7pm as part of the Cinema’s Garden: The Films of Rose Lowder series.

Anne-Marie Miéville and Jean-Luc Godard’s 1985 film SOFT AND HARD (49 min, DCP Digital) and Miéville’s 2000 film AFTER THE RECONCILIATION (74 min, DCP Digital) screen Tuesday, 7pm, as part of the Anne-Marie Miéville: Not Reconciled series.

Boris Barnet’s 1942 film A GOOD LAD (67 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday at 7pm, preceded by two of Barnet’s wartime shorts, COURAGE (1941, 23 min) and A PRICELESS HEAD (1942, 25 min), as part of the Boris Barnet: A Cinema Despite Life series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ FACETS
Tyler Michael Balantine presents…Sunday’s Best with ECHOFORM: Films by Amir George on Sunday, 2pm, followed by a Q&A with George and a reception with food in the studio.

Anime Club celebrates Valentine’s Day with a special double feature devoted to yaoi—also known as BL (Boys’ Love)—spotlighting two deep-cut OVAs from the height of the 1990s anime boom, starting on Thursday at 7pm. Anime Club is a Film Club Member exclusive and includes two tickets so members can bring a plus one. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Mouse Arts & Letters Club (555 W. 31st St.)
The screening of work submitted to the Spectacle Optical Corporation 48 Hour MP4 Challenge will take place Sunday at 7pm. More info on how to participate and the screening here.

⚫ Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
A rare performance of Yoko Ono’s influential Cut Piece (1967), a participatory work that invites the audience to slowly cut away the clothing of the performer, restaged live by artist Anna Martine Whitehead, takes place Saturday at noon. Later, she is joined onstage by DJ Lady D (Darlene Jackson), Aram Han Sifuentes, and Hannah Higgins to discuss Ono’s influence on art, performance, and music. The day is capped with a screening of FLUXFILM ANTHOLOGY, a set of more than 30 short films by Ono and her contemporaries, introduced by scholar Magdalena Holdar. Note that the event is sold out. More info here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Quentin Tarantino’s KILL BILL: THE WHOLE BLOODY AFFAIR (2006, 275 min, 70mm) continues screening. See Venue website for showtimes.

Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer’s 2025 film HONEY BUNCH (113 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday and Saturday at 11pm. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Siskel Film Center
The new 4K DCP digital reconstruction of Erich von Stroheim’s 1929 silent film QUEEN KELLY (105 min) begins screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes. Review forthcoming on website.

The director’s cut of George Lucas’ 1971/2004 film THX 1138 (88 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday at 8:30pm; Sunday at 2:30pm; and Tuesday at 6pm.

Julia Loktev’s 2024 film MY UNDESIRABLE FRIENDS: PART I — LAST AIR IN MOSCOW (324 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday and Sunday at 11am. Note that the Sunday screening is sold out.

A Black Harvest encore of the From the Block Shorts Program screens Saturday, 6pm, with select filmmakers in attendance for a post-screening Q&A. Post-event reception hosted by SAIC Office of Campus Enrichment in the Gene Siskel Film Center lobby. More info on all screenings here.

CINE-LIST: February 6 - February 12, 2026

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, Maxwell Courtright, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jason Halprin, Shaun Huhn, Ben Kaye, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Mojo Lorwin, Raphael Jose Martinez, Michael Metzger, Michael W. Phillips Jr., Michael Glover Smith