📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING
Ernst Lubitsch's TO BE OR NOT TO BE (US)
Music Box Theatre – Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am
When TO BE OR NOT TO BE was new, it was understandably treated as a dybbuk in clown's clothing—a doubly insensitive vulgarity that mocked the ongoing holocaust in Europe while likewise disgracing the memory of hardscrabble, All-American goddess Carole Lombard. (She had died in a plane crash one month before the film's premiere—on a war-bond tour, in fact, which elevated the movie's poor taste to an aura of unpatriotism.) We can laugh more easily at the jokes these days—the post-GUNS OF NAVARONE (1961) epics have chipped away at the reverence that once encrusted combat movies, making WWII merely the backdrop for dad's go-to action sweet spot—but we shouldn't diminish TO BE OR NOT TO BE either by plucking it out of that moment. As a moral statement for 1942, it's difficult to imagine a more complex and courageous movie, especially coming from a German Jew. (TO BE OR NOT TO BE, its every gag wrapped up in real-time argument and exegesis, is also conceivably the most Jewish movie ever made.) The genius of TO BE OR NOT TO BE is that it views Nazis, for all their terror and malevolence, as pathetic vessels of self-parody—feckless fascists whose Sieg heil shibboleths weakly conceal the intellectual and spiritual void at the center of their project. It's social psychology in the guise of comedy. Two decades before Hannah Arendt, Lubitsch demonstrates the banality of evil, treating the hilarious Concentration Camp Ehrhardt as an emblematic figure—a status-seeking bureaucrat who cannot comprehend his absurd indistinction. Lubitsch conveys this farcicality through repetition of a single joke. Ehrhardt, or Tura as Ehrhardt, respectively amuses himself or gets out of a sticky situation by repeatedly asking, “So they call me Concentration Camp Ehrhardt?” Typically not one to linger on a joke longer than is necessary, Lubitsch conveys a sense of humorous futility through such a comic faux pas. Ultimately, its subject is illegitimacy—artistic, sexual, and political. The treatment of actors and lovers is just as nuanced as its politics, and essentially in parallel. The only object for the individual Nazi is to repudiate any suggestion that he is a subpar black shirt, wherever that may lead. (As Andrew Sarris observed, "For Lubitsch, it was sufficient to say that Hitler had bad manners, and no evil was then inconceivable.") The same logic prevails for Jack Benny’s Joseph Tura and the rest of his theatrical troupe, always asserting personal integrity through maximal performance, textual intent be damned. Screening as part of the Carole Lombard x3 series. (1942, 99 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs and K.A. Westphal]
MUBI Presents: Highs & Lows (CLUELESS & GOLDEN EIGHTIES)
Music Box Theatre – Tuesday, 7pm
Amy Heckerling’s CLUELESS (US) - 7pm
There’s magic to be found in CLUELESS’ ability to transcend eras. It’s arguably not just the best cinematic version of Emma but among the greatest of any Jane Austen adaptation. Set and released in 1995, it’s also a perfect time capsule of mid-'90s American pop culture; in fact, the film’s fashions and slang have since become stand-in icons for the decade as a whole. Amy Heckerling (FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH) sets her Emma in Beverly Hills, and reflected the niche upper-class culture she saw there, which continues to influence American pop culture at large. With '90s fashion trending, CLUELESS is still present, though I’d argue its looming influence never waned, even when that decade fell out of favor. It’s one of the most '90s films ever made, but it never felt dated. Heckerling's sharp script keeps the film as fresh as ever, with smart one-liners that are funny as well as completely character driven; it’s an endlessly quotable film—“Ugh, as if!”—but it never feels excessive. Ambitious high school match-maker Cher (a dazzling Alicia Silverstone) is so positive in her goal to set up everyone around her, that she fails to recognize not only their needs but also her own desires. Her sweetness and willingness to help others make her easily lovable, though the film does take her journey to self-reflection seriously, not letting her off the hook for her mistakes. Silverstone's spectacular center performance is supported by a great overall cast, including Brittany Murphy as Cher’s latest makeover project, Paul Rudd as her disaffected college-aged stepbrother, and Dan Hedaya as her overprotective but loving father. A teen movie, too, CLUELESS features the traditional tropes: a party scene, classroom shenanigans, and multiple fashion and makeover montages. Cher’s outfits are unrivaled in terms of memorable film wardrobes, particularly because Heckerling makes fashion a key plot point, emphasizing its importance to the characters themselves. In addition to its iconic fashions, CLUELESS boasts a killer '90s soundtrack—including Beastie Boys and Counting Crows. It balances everything it does with such precision, and the result is one of the great effortlessly enjoyable films that will continue to delight viewers new and old. (1995, 97 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]
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Chantal Akerman's GOLDEN EIGHTIES (Belgium/France/Switzerland) - 9pm (approximately)
Chantal Akerman’s upbeat musical may be her least characteristic film prior to A COUCH IN NEW YORK (1996), though it’s still extremely personal. The meticulous framing and camera movements reflect her exacting visual sensibility, and the emphasis on romantic disappointment is in keeping with such films as JE TU IL ELLE and TOUTE UNE NUIT. This takes place almost entirely in the basement level of a shopping mall, where a beauty salon sits next to a family-run clothing store. (Shot on a claustrophobic, neon-and-fluorescent-lit soundstage, the film certainly captures how cave-like and weirdly ominous malls could be in the 1980s.) The family’s son, Robert, is an unrepentant ladies’ man who’s carrying on with Lili, the salon owner; when his father tells him he needs to settle down, he proposes on a whim to the salon manager, Mado, who has long loved him from afar. Meanwhile, Robert’s mother (Delphine Seyrig, Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman) reconnects with an American (John Berry, the blacklisted director of HE RAN ALL THE WAY) who fell in love with her when stationed in Europe during World War II. The various connections and misconnections play out in exquisite geometric patterns—Akerman takes obvious delight in assembling the characters as though moving pieces on a chessboard—and they spark some pretty good songs to boot. Akerman wrote the script with four other writers: critic and scenarist Pascal Bonitzer, American screenwriter Henry Bean, Jean Gruault (who collaborated with François Truffaut and Alain Resnais), and Leora Barish. Despite the number of fingers in the pie, the story doesn’t feel disjointed; in fact it moves as smoothly as any classic Hollywood musical. The film deserves to be seen with Akerman’s documentary LES ANNÉES 80 (1983), which details the casting of the film and some of the director’s working methods. It works well on its own too, but the lack of jarring juxtapositions may be surprising to viewers who know Akerman only through her more experimental efforts. (1986, 96 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Todd Haynes' SAFE (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6pm
Director Todd Haynes has restless eyes and ears that never linger in one aesthetic or time-period for longer than a film. And despite his continual shifts, it's the aesthetic that tends to star in his films, but this is never a shallow engagement. If Haynes can be said to have a formula, it is to find a pristine surface and scratch until we can see the uneasy construction underneath. His first (banned) public experiment was SUPERSTAR: THE KAREN CARPENTER STORY, in which he used Barbie doll whittling as an inspired, literal representation of Karen Carpenter's struggle with her eating disorder. FAR FROM HEAVEN honored and interrogated the world of Douglas Sirk. In I'M NOT THERE, he chipped away at the impenetrable image of Bob Dylan, all the while pointing at the impossibility of his project with a graphic mix of sympathy and irony. SAFE takes a break from public images to get intimate with a housewife's health. Shot and lit with the peachy haloes of a douche commercial, SAFE's blurry suburban Los Angeles is an unlikely venue for horror. We follow Carol White on her errands, to her exercise classes, with her friendly acquaintances; no one seems to mean her any harm. But it's precisely this vagueness—of purpose, of symptoms, of identity—that begins to gnaw at Carol until she is reduced to her flintiest self-preservation impulse. She suffers from both the controversial Multiple Chemical Sensitivity and the middle-class affliction of Unlimited Healing Budget, and either condition could prove fatal. Haynes takes care not to fix any problems or to answer stupid questions; the ending lingers in one's mind like an unresolved chord. Screening as part of SAIC professor Daniel R. Quiles’ Gore Capitalism lecture series. (1995, 119 min, 35mm) [Josephine Ferorelli]
David Cronenberg's NAKED LUNCH (Canada)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Thursday, 9:30pm
One of the more distinctive aspects of David Cronenberg’s post-DEAD RINGERS career is in his attraction to “unadaptable” novels: Patrick McGrath’s Spider, J.G. Ballard’s Crash, and Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis. These films reveal how literary Cronenberg has always been—despite his name being synonymous with “body horror,” his themes are ultimately cerebral, concerning internal as well as external transformations. (SPIDER [2002] and A DANGEROUS METHOD [2011], which feel entirely Cronenbergian while being also entirely psychological, confirm this truth about his filmography.) There are plenty of external transformations in NAKED LUNCH—in what’s perhaps the most memorable, a typewriter turns into a sentient, talking insect—but its chief subject is the mind of a writer, specifically that of William Burroughs, who wrote the avant-garde novel on which the film is supposedly based. I write “supposedly” because it would be impossible to make a film out of Naked Lunch; the characters, story, and syntax change shape so frequently that the events wouldn’t make sense without the connective tissue of Burroughs’ prose. Cronenberg solves the problem of adapting the book by taking elements of it that appeal to him and combining them with aspects of Burroughs’ life and other works (Junky, Exterminator, Queer). Peter Weller stars as a Burroughs stand-in named Bill Lee, an aspiring author working as an exterminator in postwar New York; after he accidentally kills his wife (an incident taken from Burroughs’ life), Lee goes to a fictional North African nation to hide out. Along the way he talks to strange, possibly extraterrestrial creatures (or are those hallucinations?), gets involved in espionage (or is that a hallucination?), contemplates his sexual identity, and works on a new book. Cronenberg considers Burroughs’ life and work in multiple contexts (sexual, historical, artistic), switching between perspectives in a manner akin to Burroughs’ free-form prose. Burroughs emerges as a complex figure, a man torn between multiple identities; in this regard, he’s truly Cronenbergian, a mysterious entity even to himself. NAKED LUNCH is also very funny and features some excellent showboating from Judy Davis (as Lee’s wife), Roy Scheider (as the elusive Dr. Benway), and the puppeteers behind the strange creatures. Screening as part of Doc’s Thursday II series, “Skin Under Skin: A Retrospective of David Cronenberg.” (1991, 115 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
Robert Frank & Alfred Leslie’s PULL MY DAISY (US) and Robert Frank’s ME AND MY BROTHER (US/Documentary)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Sunday, 7pm
The Swiss-born Robert Frank is most famous for his groundbreaking photography collection The Americans (1958); after that, he may be most famous for PULL MY DAISY (1959, 26 min, Digital Projection), the sole film written by Jack Kerouac. A portrait-cum-celebration of the Beat Generation, the film features poets Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, many of their bohemian friends, and jivey narration delivered by Kerouac himself. It also contains some of most lackadaisically performed comedy in motion picture history, yet the onscreen lounging has a purposeful, defiant quality. Indeed, PULL MY DAISY is a crucial document of the historical era that Spalding Gray once described as the time when hanging out became a thing. It feels as though the group in the movie is actively rejecting the bourgeois notion that time should be spent purposefully. (For a decade after it came out, it was widely believed that the film was entirely improvised until co-director Alfred Leslie wrote an article in the Village Voice describing the production, which involved plenty of rehearsing.) The slight plot involves a group of bohemians who crash the dinner party of a friend and his wife, and the charmingly entropic nature of the story feels purposeful too—this is a movie that wants to win you over so it can ask you for bus fare when it ends. Far more ambitious and unsettling is ME AND MY BROTHER (1969, 85 min, DCP Digital), a feature-length documentary Frank directed a decade later. It also stars Ginsberg and Orlovsky, the latter being the “me” of the title; his brother, Julius Orlovsky, is a paranoid schizophrenic whom Peter had released from a mental hospital in the mid-1960s and tried taking care of for a while. The film contains scenes of Peter and Ginsberg (who were lovers and lived together for years) trying to incorporate Julius into their lives, going so far as to bring him along on their speaking engagements around the country. It also contains fictionalized sequences (written by Frank and a young Sam Shepard) in which Peter is played by Christopher Walken and Julius is played by the Open Theater’s Joseph Chaikin. Frank cuts between the real and the imagined in a jagged, discomforting manner that evokes, alternately, Julius’ alienation and Peter’s struggle to accommodate it. The formal strategies further complicate the sense of unease created by the filmmakers’ close proximity to Julius, which some might reject as invasive or exploitative. Despite these moral issues (or perhaps because of them), ME AND MY BROTHER is one of the most viscerally affecting movies about mental illness, spotlighting both the challenges of living with schizophrenia and the challenges of caring for someone who’s so profoundly impacted by it. Screening as part of Doc’s Sunday series, “The Decisive Moment: Photographers Turned Filmmakers.” [Ben Sachs
Nicole Holofcener x 2
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Nicole Holofcener’s FRIENDS WITH MONEY (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 6pm
In an interview from around the time FRIENDS WITH MONEY was released, writer-director Nicole Holofcener spoke about the dynamic between her characters and noted how three of them feel superior to another because she hasn’t yet achieved the same things in life, such as having a lucrative job or being married; Holofocener then offhandedly remarked that such feelings exist in spite of the fact that “no one is truly safe from pain or change.” It’s easy to forget, especially because of certain disparities that influence our perception of how much or how little a person is likely to suffer, that no matter a person’s circumstances they are still privy to the inevitable heartbreak that is living. Empathy could be the word for this kind of realization, but in Holofcener’s worldview, which is illuminated in many of her films, it’s something else altogether, an understanding of peoples’ innermost lives (especially women’s) and how to render them on screen. In FRIENDS WITH MONEY she considers how a person’s finances impact their lives. Like the title, the concept is simple and straightforward, a jumping-off point from which to flesh out the character-driven narrative. (Narrative being the key word, as Holofcener is one of those rare directors who’ve distinguished themselves solely through their narrative inventions and not because of any formal or aesthetic idiosyncrasies.) The film centers on three couples and their single friend: Christine (regular Holofcener collaborator Catherine Keener) and David (Jason Isaacs); Jane (Frances McDormand) and Aaron (Simon McBurney); Franny (Joan Cusack) and Matt (Greg Germann); and Olivia (Jennifer Aniston). Christine and David are married screenwriting partners looking to build a gargantuan addition onto their Los Angeles home. Jane’s a fashion designer and Aaron the owner of a company that produces organic bath products; they contend with constant suspicion that Aaron is gay because he’s decidedly effeminate. Franny comes from family money and stays at home with the kids while Matt works as an accountant. Olivia is the least financially solvent of the group, having once taught high school but now working as a maid; her predilection for weed represents a general listlessness. But even though Olivia initially appears to be the most desultory, it soon becomes evident that each woman is struggling with her own issues. Simultaneously the most entertaining and heartbreaking thread is Jane’s descent into Karendom while abandoning some crucial aspects of personal hygiene—anger seeps out of her like the oil coating her interminably unwashed hair. It’s easy to dismiss her feelings as entitled rage, but Holofcener peels back the layers to reveal the paralyzing fear and sadness beneath the virulent acridity. It’s a fear of growing old and a sadness over the drudgery of life when there’s little left to look forward to. But it’s not all sad: there’s Franny, whose marriage seems to be happy, save for Matt’s occasional spendiness. (Are they happy because they’re rich? That’s for you to decide.) Olivia is granted a happy ending only in as much as she learns a lesson about what to look for in life, abandoning preconceptions of what it means to be successful. It’s a murderer’s row of a cast, but Jennifer Aniston is especially noteworthy. That America’s sweetheart can convincingly pass as a broke, down-on-her-luck stoner is quite a feat of pretense. Holofcener’s film might first appear to be all about the money, but really it isn’t. A kind of existential macguffin, money becomes the element around which the characters’ happiness, or lack thereof, is examined. Where someone like Sofia Coppola explores the lives of the rich and the famous to revel in the glamor and excess of fate’s chosen few, Holofcener does it to explore the things that connect us, perhaps in hope that we can begin to understand one another a little bit better. (2006, 88 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]
Nicole Holofcener’s ENOUGH SAID (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Wednesday, 8:30pm
After a meet-cute at an upscale party where the two insist that they are pointedly not attracted to each other, soon-to-be empty nesters Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and Albert (James Gandolfini) begin dating and slowly grow to enjoy each other’s company. The nascent relationship is complicated by Eva’s growing professional relationship with her client Marianne (Catherine Keener) whom she doesn’t realize (at first) is Albert’s dreaded ex-wife. Despite Eva and Albert’s growing comfort and attraction, Eva’s attraction to Marianne’s enlightened LA divorcée lifestyle competes for her affections. What starts as a sort-of useful Yelp review of the man she’s dating begins to warp Eva’s perspective, as Marianne’s shallow (and predominantly fatphobic) complaints shift her image of him as a charming, easygoing man into a depressed and clumsy slob. It’s this part of the film that’s classically Holofcener; she knows how difficult it is to separate our own wants and needs from those that are thrust onto us socially, particularly as this plays out among the Californian suburban middle class. It’s a breezy but no less feminist cinema, trying to parse aspirations toward true happiness from aspirations about class and received ideas of beauty and success. She explored these sorts of shifting frames of social perception before, most poignantly in the class lenses of PLEASE GIVE (2010) and FRIENDS WITH MONEY (2006); while this film is more romantically focused, she still knows these are the means by which traits become quirks and quirks become flaws in our minds. Gandolfini and Louis-Dreyfus never quite had the film careers they deserved outside of TV, a fact seemingly referenced by Albert’s television-archivist job and Marianne’s deep lack of respect for it. This sort of later-career resignation textures both performances in profound ways and lets the two old pros work in sync beautifully. It’s perfect rom-com alchemy, two leads best known for long arcs as awful people on some of the most important TV shows of all time dialing up the charm to play with smaller, more everyday failings. While the minutiae of modern relationships explored in ENOUGH SAID is closer to Seinfeld than The Sopranos, it’s far gentler than both, suffused as it is with Holofcener’s trademark humanism. She’s not trapping her characters in modern life but gently nudging them to find peace within it. (2013, 93 minutes, 35mm) [Maxwell Courtright]
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
Dario Argento's SUSPIRIA (Italy)
FACETS Cinema – Saturday, 7:30pm
Dario Argento is one of Italy's greatest living artists, and his 1977 SUSPIRIA is one of his greatest achievements in both storytelling and visual design. Jessica Harper plays Suzy, a dance student who becomes embroiled in a plot by her ballet school's faculty (revealed to be witches) to unleash the forces of hell onto the world. The first in Argento's "Three Mothers" trilogy (the subsequent features are 1980's INFERNO and 2008's MOTHER OF TEARS), SUSPIRIA may not be the director's most complex or visually stunning work, but it's perhaps the crux of Argento's canon, the film that firmly established him as an auteur worthy of international discussion and analysis. Loved by genre fans for its excessive violence and pulsating score by the rock group Goblin, SUSPIRIA is as much a testament to Argento's love for classical art, which can also be seen in 1987's OPERA and 1995's THE STENDHAL SYNDROME. Argento's genius is to set these films, all of them bloody and relatively sleazy, in the world of "high" art. By doing so, he not only satirizes the pompous nature of "connoisseurs" who dismiss cinema—particular genre films—as a "lower" form, but also recontextualize these "higher" forms to fit in the realm of "commercial" work. Screening as part of the Halfway to Halloween event. Barbara Magnolfi in person for a pre-and post-screening Q&A. Additional ticket packages include a VIP meet and greet, a signed photo, and other perks. More info here. (1977, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Joe Rubin]
Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (UK/US)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm and Sunday, 4pm
For many, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is not simply a masterpiece, but the apotheosis of moviegoing itself. In no other film is the experience of seeing images larger than oneself linked so directly to contemplating humanity's place in the universe. Kubrick achieves this (literally) awesome effect through a number of staggering devices: a narrative structure that begins at "the dawn of man" and ends with the final evolution of humankind; one-of-a-kind special effects, the result of years of scientific research, that forever changed visual representations of outer space; a singular irony that renders the most familiar human interaction beguiling; blasts of symphonic music that heighten the project of sensory overload. It isn't hyperbolic to assert, as film scholar Michel Chion has in his book Kubrick's Cinema Odyssey, that this could be the most expensive experimental film ever made; it's certainly the most abstracted of all big-budget productions. As in most of Kubrick's films, the pervasive ambiguity—the product of every detail having been realized so thoroughly as to seem independent of an author—ensures a different experience from viewing to viewing. Much criticism has noted the shifting nature of "thinking" computer HAL-9000, the "star" of the movie's longest section, who can seem evil, pathetic, or divine depending on one's orientation to the film; less often discussed is the poker-faced second movement, largely set in the ultra-professional meeting rooms of an orbiting space station. Is this a satire of Cold War diplomacy (something like a drier follow-up to DR. STRANGELOVE)? An allegory about the limitations of scientific knowledge? Like the "Beyond the Infinite" sequence that makes up most of the film's final movement--an astonishing piece of abstract expressionist art every bit the equal of the Gyorgy Ligeti composition that accompanies it—one can never know concretely what it all "means," nor would one ever want to. Screening as part of Doc’s Friday series, “Sight & Sound: The Greatest?” (1968, 142 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Danny DeVito’s MATILDA (US)
FACETS Cinema – Sunday, 1pm
Children’s literature is often focused on abandonment—a child who's a missing parent or even orphaned completely, on one’s own or placed in the care of heartless guardians. Roald Dahl’s Matilda is rather about the struggle of dealing with selfish and incompetent parents. In his adaptation, Danny DeVito plays Mr. Wormwood, Matilda’s scheming father. He also provides a voiceover throughout the film as an omniscient narrator. It may seem unnecessary, but in a children’s film about child abuse, DeVito’s dual presence provides a balance to the horrors that Matilda (Mara Wilson) faces every day. He also provides an off-kilter cinematic world, with saturated bright colors and exaggerated camera angles and close-ups to emphasize a child’s perspective. It’s not a storybook, but the style is exaggerated just enough to steady the implications of real horror the characters face. Born to the Wormwoods (Rhea Perlman plays her mother, in stupendously kitschy costumes and makeup), Matilda learns to take care of herself at a very young age, her intellect allowing her to manage on her own—and develop telekinetic powers. She also finds comfort in books, escaping into the fictional worlds they provide. She finally gets her wish of going to school and is there provided some much-needed comfort from her sweet teacher, Miss Honey (Embeth Davidtz); however, she continues to be mistreated there, now by the terrifying principal Miss Trunchbull who actively hates children. Played with impressive unhingedness by Pam Ferris, Trunchbull is the true villain of the film. While the Wormwoods are cruel, they rarely come off as truly threatening, providing much of the comedy of the film. Trunchbull gets in some hilarious one-liners, but she is an unambiguously violent character. Again, MATILDA uses exaggeration here to counteract any realistic violence, but the horror of angry and hateful adults is ever present. Fortunately, MATILDA is ultimately a story of resilience, friendship, and the profound effect of small and big kindnesses alike. Screening as part of the Halfway to Halloween event. Come dressed as your favorite Matilda character or in Halloween costume and receive a free popcorn at this special “Family Frights” screening. (1996, 102 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
Ari Aster's BEAU IS AFRAID (US)
Music Box Theatre – See venue website for showtimes
Beau Wasserman (Joaquin Phoenix) is not at home in his world. The street outside his dingy apartment building is a dystopian hellscape of caterwauling maniacs, his therapist asks him questions he can't or won't answer, and his mother keeps calling. He's to visit her the next day on the anniversary of his father's passing but never makes it to the airport. Instead, the route to his mother's house goes through a Freudian looking-glass of past, present, and future versions of his inner monologue. Along the way to confronting the Jewishest mother of Jewish mothers, Beau is hit by a car, returns repeatedly to his fraught boyhood, and finally gets together with his childhood love. None of it goes well. Aster's third feature (after the hit horror films HEREDITARY [2018] and MIDSOMMAR [2019]), doesn't veer away from the genre that made his name so much as take it internal. This is a movie in which little of what's shown can reliably be described as anything but Beau's overmedicated, paranoid perception. It's a journey through the psyche of a man who feels no agency over anything that's happened in his life. When I saw the trailer a few months back, I immediately thought of Charlie Kaufman's SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK (2008), but a more recent film working in this sort of waking nightmare/reverie mode is Alejandro Iñárritu's BARDO, FALSE CHRONICLE OF A HANDFUL OF TRUTHS (2022). All three attempt to wrest free of narrative constraints and try to visually and aurally render an individual's particular psychic landscape. They're visions that can't help being compared to the biography of their creators and come off as indulgent and egomaniacal to the broad movie audience. I hope this doesn't sink a promising young director's career, but I can't imagine fans of the Marvel Universe embracing the kind of neurotic saga of self-immolation that Aster unhurriedly rolls out over three hours. I loved every painful second. Beau is a pitiful nonentity, but Phoenix, cowering and bloated, a look ranging from worry to outright terror never leaving his face, makes us absolutely and utterly feel his pain. He knows his life is ridiculous and out of control and he makes us laugh even if he can't laugh himself. (2023, 179 min, DCP Digital) [Dmitry Samarov]
Kelly Reichardt's SHOWING UP (US)
AMC River East 21 (322 E. Illinois St.) and AMC NEW CITY 14 (1500 N. Clybourn Ave.), et al. – See Venue websites for showtimes
Far away from posh corporate fairs and Insta glamor lifestyle-influenced meta-worlds, our globe is dotted with pocket communities of painters, sculptors, and multimedia artists quietly going about the esoteric, sometimes inchoate business of making art day to day. It is one such alcove—set in director Reichardt's home town of Portland, Oregon—that is the focus of her eighth feature. Throughout her 30-year career Reichardt has consistently avoided the peak-valley conventions of traditional narrative film. Her work is often described as quiet, but I think that shortchanges its slow-burn intensity. Just because her characters avoid cliché conflict points doesn't mean they lack passion or anger. In fact, by often underplaying moments that might be treated as cataclysmic in a Hollywood picture, Reichardt imbues real human friction with a much longer echo. She has a knack for staging low-key, seemingly mundane scenes that linger in the mind. Lizzy (Michelle Williams), a frustrated put-upon sculptor is waging stealth passive-aggressive war against Jo (Hong Chau), her more successful, extroverted colleague/landlord/frenemy. She complains about being without hot water to take a shower and cares for the injured pigeon Jo "discovered" in the yard after Lizzy's cat nearly ate it. She watches enviously as Jo gets accolades for her work, takes men home, has parties, and generally lives the embodied, actualized life Lizzy can't even bring herself to dream of. Williams anchors the film with a performance seemingly inspired by the lumpy, not-quite-formed figures Portland artist Cynthia Lahti has provided to stand in for Lizzy's work. Wearing only earth-toned outfits designed not to reveal a thing about the wearer, her hair a mousey brown, Lizzy is a vague peripheral being who nevertheless hints at depths. She's not the typical movie hero and her challenges are not usual movie problems. The thing Reichardt's film nails most precisely is how ill-suited artists are to deal adequately with quotidian problems but how gracefully they can let intractable differences roll off their backs. Mental illness is treated as a possible mark of genius rather than a symptom to be corrected, and baffling behavior of every kind is accepted with bemused humor. The final scene of Jo and Lizzy wandering away from Lizzy's art opening, trying to track the once-injured pigeon who's flown away is graceful, funny, and a little melancholy all at once. A perfect coda to a movie that celebrates the value of detours and left turns. (2022, 108 min, DCP Digital) [Dmitry Samarov]
Kristoffer Borgli’s SICK OF MYSELF (Norway)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
This film might have the highest amount of severe facial injuries I've ever seen. Definitely for a comedy. And I'm fully here for it. Rashes, swelling, head wounds, open wounds, hair falling out. As in THE FLY (1986), we get to sit and be entertained by someone literally falling apart. But in this case, we laugh at the horror because this person is doing it to themselves and they're kind of a piece of shit anyway. Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp) and Thomas (Eirik Sæther) are an awful couple. They're petty, cruel, jealous, spiteful. Downright contemptuous of each other. It isn't even clear if they actually like each other. So when Thomas’s art career takes off, Signe can’t stand that he’s the center of attention. After realizing that sympathy and pity are the easiest ways to get it herself, she gets her hands on a drug that's known for having the side effect of severe skin disease. Enter pitch-black comedy body horror. Right now we’re starting to see the social media commentary/satire coagulate into a legitimate genre. The thing is, though, most of these films center the medium as the hero or villain. SICK OF MYSELF gets to the root of it all—good old-fashioned vanity. Instead of focusing on social media and the effects of its use, here we see why people love it like a drug in the first place. This is narcissism in the world of self-branding, at a time when concepts previously left to states and corporations, such as optics, are considered by teenagers every time they communicate. Right now infamy is the same as fame. So in having the main character slowly kill themselves for attention, Borgli brings what is usually left to subtext to a grotesquely visual level. We all feel like we’re slowly killing ourselves everytime we scroll, like, or share. Like we are willingly destroying ourselves so someone who we may, or may not, know—possibly even a robot—gives us just the tiniest crumb of attention. It's nice to be able to laugh at this extreme, yet recognizable, version of ourselves—in all our rotting, self-absorbed, slowly suicidal glory. SICK OF MYSELF is as funny as it is disgusting. Gross times deserve gross movies. (2022, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
Rebecca Zlotowski’s OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN (France)
Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes
The French are so good—and so consistent—at making understated dramas about middle-class discontentment that they probably have a name for this subgenre. Claude Sautet’s run of masterpieces from the 1970s may be the high-water mark for whatever it’s called, though there have been excellent entries from directors as diverse as Bertrand Tavernier, André Téchiné, François Ozon, and Mia Hansen-Løve. (Claude Chabrol, who blended the subgenre with elements of the suspense thriller, worked in a category all his own.) It seems like a difficult type of movie to pull off: if you get too cynical or angry about middle-class hypocrisy, you may end up with trite moralizing; but if you’re too accepting of your characters and their worldview, you may end up with something soft and complacent. As such, writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski walks a fine line in OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN. This semicomic movie, about a 40-ish divorcée who first realizes she wants to be a mother, doesn’t really question the logic behind typical bourgeois aspirations; however, it feels realistic in its depiction of the challenges that keep the bourgeoisie from realizing their dreams. The heroine, Rachel, is a high-school teacher who falls in love with Ali, a car designer who’s also divorced. He shares custody of his five-year-old daughter, Leila, and as romance develops between the two protagonists, so does Rachel fall for Leila and, in the process, discover that she longs for the “banal” goals of settling down and raising children. As proven by Justine Triet’s SIBYL (2019) and Paul Verhoeven’s BENDETTA (2021), Virginie Efira excels at playing headstrong women who are more than a little neurotic, and she delivers another smart and compelling performance as Rachel; she makes you reflect on what it means to be happy along with her. Zlotowski, for her part, delineates the hurdles to Rachel’s happiness in a manner that’s neither too obvious nor obscure. One recognizes a certain self-sabotaging quality in the heroine but also the impact of things beyond her control, like the unpredictable nature of interpersonal relationships, the demands of a high-stress career, and plain old bad luck. Life gives us plenty of reasons to be dissatisfied. (2022, 104 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Laura Poitras' ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED (US/Documentary)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Saturday, 8pm
Never underestimate the reach and power of a tenacious, iconoclastic artist. If you’re feeling hopeful, that might be a takeaway from Laura Poitras’s latest multifaceted documentary. Her subject is photographer Nan Goldin, whose provocative portraits of her friends and associates in New York City’s hedonistic, drug-fueled underground made her a star of the scene in the late 1970s and '80s. Goldin’s confrontational, often explicitly sexual photographs—many focused on the LGBTQ community before and during the AIDS crisis—were fueled by an activist’s ethos to preserve the lives of those cast to the margins by society, a position she related to as both a lifelong misfit and a forthright woman in a male-dominated field. Essentially co-authored by Goldin, who narrates the film, ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED takes us up to her present-day involvement with P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), an advocacy group she formed in 2017 in response to her battle with opioid addiction. Her work with the group has a surprising connection to the art world via the Sackler family, former owners of OxyContin producer Purdue Pharma. The Sacklers have donated millions that they made from the distribution of deadly opioids (over 450,000 American casualties) to arts and cultural institutions around the world to launder their reputation, and Goldin has made it her mission to have the family’s name removed from wings in the Met, Guggenheim, Tate, and Louvre, and other museums. The cohesiveness with which Poitras pulls together the film’s myriad threads—biography, sociocultural chronicle, advocacy, and art display (excerpts of Goldin’s famed slideshows punctuate the film’s chapters)—evinces the inextricability of art and lived experience from politics and economics, and highlights the frequently vexed relationship between subversive creators and the establishment interests they depend on to culturally enshrine their work. Poitras also posits a fascinating connection between art and the legacy of medical science, as she continually shows how various health stigmas, from mental illness to HIV, have been catalysts for artists to transform pain and erasure into social action. With ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED, Poitras and Goldin vibrantly demonstrate the real and very visible change such action can affect. Screening as part of Doc’s Saturday series, “Dóc: New Releases.” (2022, 117 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
ALSO SCREENING
âš« Asian Pop-Up Cinema
The extensive Asian Pop-Up Cinema series continues its sixteenth season. Their in-person and virtual offerings are too many to list; visit here for more information.
âš« Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2006 film SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY (101 min, 35mm) screens Friday, 6:30pm, with the director in person. Please note that the event is currently full, though unclaimed seats will be open to standby attendees starting at 6:20pm. Admission is free. More info here.
âš« Comfort Film at Comfort Station (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave.)
Comfort Film presents a screening of the First Nations Film and Video Festival 2023 on Wednesday at 3pm. More info here.
âš« Chicago Film Archives
The Chicago Transit Authority, in partnership with the Chicago Film Archives (CFA), presents a new, one-of-a-kind temporary art installation now playing at the Cicero Green Line station (4800 W. Lake St.). The installation, known as we love, is a filmic exhibition of home movies and amateur films selected from collections housed and preserved at CFA. The video, which has a runtime of approximately 48 min, will be projected onto a wall in the mezzanine area of the station. The video will run day and night through mid-March next year. More info here.
âš« The Doc10 Film Festival
Davis Guggenheim’s 2023 documentary STILL: A MICHAEL J. FOX MOVIE (95 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 7pm, at the Davis Theater (4614 N. Lincoln Ave.) as part of the Doc10 Film Festival. The festival continues through Sunday, May 7. We’ll have additional coverage of the festival on next week’s list. More info here.
âš« Doc Films at the University of Chicago
Ramón Menéndez’s 1988 film STAND AND DELIVER (102 min, Digital Projection) screens Saturday, 4pm, with commentary by Professor Sergio Delgado. This special event is co-sponsored by MECHA de UChicago.
Carole Roussopoulos, Ioana Wieder, Delphine Seyrig, and Nadia Ringart’s 1976 film MASO AND MISO GO BOATING (55 min, DCP Digital) and Calamity Jane and Delphine Seyrig’s 2020 film A STORY (87 min, DCP digital) screen Wednesday, 7pm, as part of the Delphine Seyrig, More Than a Muse series.
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2000 film AMORES PERROS (153 min, 35mm) screens Thursday, 6pm, as part of Doc’s Thursday I series, “The Three Amigos.” More info on all screenings here.
âš« FACETS Cinema
Alex Proyas’ 1994 horror cult classic THE CROW (102 min, DCP Digital) screens on Friday, 7pm, as part of the Halfway to Halloween event. More info here.
âš« Gene Siskel Film Center
Saim Sadiq’s 2022 Pakistani film JOYLAND (126 min, DCP Digital) opens this week.
The 2023 National Theatre Live production of Shakespeare’s OTHELLO (180 min, DCP Digital) screens on Saturday and Sunday at 2pm.
The Chicago Palestine Film Festival begins this week. View lineup and schedule here. Please note that the opening night film, Jumana Manna’s 2022 film FORAGERS (65 min, Digital Projection), is sold out. More info on all screenings and events here.
âš« Music Box Theatre
The 5th annual Cinema Femme Short Film Fest takes place through Wednesday, with screenings of two shorts programs on Sunday at 7 and 9:30pm and another two shorts programs on Wednesday at 7 and 9:30pm. More info on the festival here.
WBEZ Chicago presents Mortified Live, a night of humorous storytelling from everyday people in Chicago, on Thursday at 8pm.
Richard Marquand’s 1983 film STAR WARS: RETURN OF THE JEDI (131 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday at 10:15pm. Please note that this is a free screening; tickets will be available at the box office the night of the screening only. More info on all screenings and events here.
âš« Sweet Void Cinema
Find information on the Humboldt Park microcinema, including its screening and workshop schedule, here.
CINE-LIST: April 28 - May 4, 2023
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Maxwell Courtright, Ray Ebarb, Megan Fariello, Josephine Ferorelli, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Raphael Jose Martinez, Joe Rubin, Dmitry Samarov, K.A. Westphal