:: FRIDAY, JUNE 23 - THURSDAY, JUNE 29 ::

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Howard Hawks’ RED RIVER (US)

Chicago Film Society at Northeastern Illinois University (The Auditorium, Building E 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) – Wednesday, 7:30pm

Released the same year as John Ford’s FORT APACHE, Howard Hawks’ RED RIVER also considers clashing modes of leadership against larger-than-life western settings. But to paraphrase the critic Jean-Pierre Coursodon, Ford’s westerns depicted microcosms of American society while the groups in Hawks’ adventure films contained only exceptional men and women. The director’s unwavering penchant for brilliant, talented, and/or headstrong individuals raises the story of RED RIVER—which writer Borden Chase admitted to having ripped off from Mutiny on the Bounty—to the level of myth. When John Wayne, playing the ruthless cattle driver Thomas Dunson, goes into Captain Ahab mode in the movie’s second half, he seems to be summoning the wrath of a vengeful god; and when Joanne Dru enters the film, she immediately registers as the eternal feminine force capable of upsetting the dynamic between the two powerful men at its center, Dunson and his stepson-cum-nemesis Matthew Garth (Montgomery Clift). RED RIVER was one of Dru’s first films, yet Hawks elicits such star power from her that you’d think she’d been in movies forever; ditto Clift, whose Method approach clashes fascinatingly with Wayne’s iconographic presence. Their opposing acting styles mirror the conflict between their characters, with Clift trying to summon a stoic reserve to match Wayne’s and Wayne finding newfound nuances in his familiar screen persona. This was famously the movie that convinced Ford that Wayne could really act, and he built upon the actor’s achievement in RED RIVER the next year with SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON, again asking Wayne to play a character older than himself. The genius of Wayne’s performance here is to play up Dunson’s sense of loss, making the character seem vulnerable even when he’s issuing firm orders to his men. (Wayne would explore his vulnerability even further in RIBBON and to arguably more powerful effect, though his work for Hawks is nothing to sneeze at.) Still, RED RIVER earns its classic status in part for being the movie that gave the cinema Montgomery Clift (even though it was released after Robert Zinnemann’s THE SEARCH, it was shot first), and he’s electrifying. Everyone who writes on the film nowadays feels obliged to bring up the scene where Clift and John Ireland compare guns, and while it’s true there’s a sleek and mysterious sexual energy to Clift at this point in his career, what makes his performance so compelling is its introspective nature. Clift was one of the first American actors who seemed to be thinking when he was on screen, weighing his decisions and exhibiting a very modern neurosis about it. To see this in a western in 1948 must have been absolutely bracing. Hawks ordered numerous rewrites throughout the shoot of RED RIVER and amassed a vast amount of footage; the film ended up taking two years to edit. The process suggests that Hawks went “looking” for his film in the cutting room, much like Michael Cimino would go looking for his western epic, HEAVEN’S GATE (1980), a generation later. In Hawks’ case, the result emerges as an early experiment in the director’s evolution from thinking about movies in terms of stories to thinking about them in terms of scenes—an outlook that would find its greatest expression in his later western RIO BRAVO (1959). Preceded by a collection of trailers of other Hawks films (35mm). (1948, 133 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Elliott Gould x 2 😍

At Doc Films (at the University of Chicago

Paul Mazursky's BOB & CAROL & TED & ALICE (US)
Friday, 6pm and Saturday, 8:30pm
Bob and Carol arrive at a California mountain retreat geared toward helping people discover spiritual enlightenment within themselves, almost certainly at a generous asking price. They take part in group activities that look more like acid trips than counseling sessions. All of it begins prickly at first, but eventually the couple finds something of value in the rituals. Discovering that they have a renewed view of physicality, honesty, and love within their relationship, they cannot wait to return to their upper-middle-class lifestyle and tell their friends Ted and Alice about it over cocktails. Good, healthy, and purifying ideas about honesty begin to get turned on their heads as Bob and Carol, coming down from the exhilaration of their experience at the new age resort, misdirect their newfound philosophy into trivial matters with their waiter. Ted and Alice don’t seem quite sure what to make of their friends’ new outlook on life. Director Paul Mazursky frames Bob and Carol’s excitement as youthful and invigorating, yet, at this point in the narrative, it is uncertain how much they’ve really understood. The two Boomer couples become caught up in the Free Love movement of the time, foreshadowing the radical notions of sex and love that are most susceptible to distortion, both mildly and monstrously (the latter not depicted here), as love for one another devolved into the impenetrable narcissisms of the “Me” generation. The conflation of the ego pops up most innocently when Carol asks their Dominican waiter how he feels about waiting on their table, even up to the moment she goes to apologize to him in the kitchen—a moment that certainly helps draw the comparison made between Mazursky and Jean Renoir (the former remade the latter’s BOUDOU SAVED FROM DROWNING as DOWN AND OUT IN BEVERLY HILLS). Eventually Bob and Carol rope Ted and Alice into their new takes on sex and love, which results in a both tender and hilarious dissection of emotional honesty. Beyond the biting human comedy, this film is wrapped up in the end of an era, as the ‘60s gave way to the ‘70s, and those approaching middle age tried to make sense of the changing times. The awakening Bob and Carol experience at the beginning of the movie gives way to raw moments of ridiculousness; it is this contrast that makes the film so deeply humane and teeming with an unexpected positivity despite all its satire. The lengths these two couples will go to to grapple with their own selves while still maintaining a marriage, are imbued with so much embarrassment and warmth, the main ingredients constituting real feelings, that it’s a shame that it hasn’t received wider acclaim (beyond it being notable as a “trad comedy of Boomer orgies,” which it is most certainly not). It’s not hard to view it cynically when simply looking at its poster image of four forty-somethings sitting naked in a bed together, but beyond that it is closer in spirit to the films of Albert Brooks or John Cassavetes, albeit his lighter works like MINNIE AND MOSKOWITZ. Woody Allen’s films are often compared to Mazursky's, but in the comparison Mazursky’s films reveal just how overly self-interested and intellectually inflated a filmmaker like Allen can be. Not unlike the film’s title characters, Allen’s work can be intensely self-serious with its modernity in a way that doesn’t feel fully formed or understood. What Allen lacks as a filmmaker, Mazursky nails, in effect placing the work of Allen neatly inside this film’s very critique of a certain generation, with Mazursky displaying an honesty and humility Allen could only begin to hint at. It isn’t too important to situate Allen’s work alongside Mazursky’s, but it shows which of them understood themselves better as an artist and human being, an understanding key to making works as transcendent as this is. (1969, 105 min, 35mm) [John Dickson]
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Robert Altman's THE LONG GOODBYE (US)
Friday, 8:30pm and Saturday, 6pm
When Robert Altman agreed to direct THE LONG GOODBYE, he had one condition: it was written into his contract that the studio could not change screenwriter Leigh Brackett's ending, which differs from that of the book. Now, a story by Raymond Chandler always gets around to solving the mystery. But a Philip Marlowe novel isn't really about mystery-solving any more than NASHVILLE is really about country music. Rather, each is a zigzag in the form of a stroll, passing through moods and textures on its unhurried way to adding up. The general critical disdain that greeted Altman's take on THE LONG GOODBYE when it was first released must have stemmed more from a clinging nostalgia for the Bogie/Hawks vision of Marlowe than a reverence for Chandler's actual text. Altman may not offer up a period piece in the vein of THIEVES LIKE US, but he faithfully hews to the contours of Chandler's novel. Casting Elliott Gould is a masterstroke, but he further displays his genius for casting by using Henry Gibson and Mark Rydell to manifest two complimentary shades of evil. There's never been a more Chandlerian "old man" than Sterling Hayden. And you know what? The film's ending is better. (1973, 112 min, DCP Digital) [Rob Christopher]

João Pedro Rodrigues’ WILL-O’-THE-WISP (Portugal)

Music Box Theatre – See below for showtimes

Like many of his compatriotic contemporaries, João Pedro Rodrigues often makes films that irreverently interpret Portugal’s past and present and radically imagine its future. His cinema stands out for its explicit queerness, not only in terms of its unorthodox narrative and formal strategies but for how it centers sexual otherness as a disruptive, transformative, and liberating historical force. WILL-O’-THE-WISP is Rodrigues at his most whimsically surreal as well as economical. The film focuses on Alfredo, the crown prince of Portugal who is first seen on his deathbed in the year 2069. After a brief introduction, we are whisked back to ancient 2011, when Alfredo is a curly-haired blond twink chafing against the bourgeois trappings of his noble family. Hypocrisy abounds, especially from his father, who speaks of the sanctity of the forest even as he nonchalantly tosses his lit cigar to the earth; meanwhile, being surrounded by so much wood stirs something in Alfredo’s pants. In a tableau at the dinner table staged with maximum Brechtian artifice, the young man inveighs—with words borrowed from Greta Thunberg—against the indifference of world leaders to the despoliation of the environment. To fix the problem? He decides to become a firefighter, dropping him into the ranks of the working class. From there, WILL-O’-THE-WISP winds and shimmies through homoerotic tableaux vivant, an electric dance number, and alternately sensuous and comical scenes of Alfredo’s courtship with a black firefighter named Afonso. At just over an hour, the film feels like something of a minor lark, but it’s a strange and inventive one, fizzing with Rodrigues’s signature blend of libidinous energy, postcolonial critique, and anything-goes phantasmagoria. (2022, 67 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]

Harry Dodge and Silas Howard’s BY HOOK OR BY CROOK (US)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Wednesday, 7:30pm

“By hook or by crook” effectively translates to “by any means possible.” And even though the “crook” in this particular saying may not mean those who commit crime (historians think it originally referred to a shepherd’s hooked staff), it certainly applies in Harry Dodge and Silas Howard’s BY HOOK OR BY CROOK, in which the two directors also star. Shy (Howard) abandons small-town Kansas in the wake of his father’s death, fleeing to San Francisco. Both Shy and Valentine (Dodge), whom he meets upon arrival, are characters often described as trans, butch, or gender-bending. Similarly, the film, also written by Dodge and Howard with co-star and collaborator Stanya Kahn, avoids definitive labels, which allows the nuances of the pair’s gender identities to be revealed naturally versus didactically. (Howard remarked about this, “We take gender ambiguity… and we don’t explain it, dilute it or apologize  for it—we represent it for what it is—something confusing and lovely!”) Shy comes across Val as he’s being beat up; Shy intervenes, and then they hit the town. A friendship develops when Shy, feeling guilty over having stolen Val’s wallet after the skirmish, returns it. Where Shy is more jaded—having been inspired to pursue a life of crime after seeing a newscast in his hometown where a woman (played by Joan Jett in a great cameo) admiringly recounts interacting with some bank robbers during a hold-up, saying how they didn’t steal from the customers, but rather from the big corporation, something she thinks is very Bonnie and Clyde of them—Val is something of a troubled naif, plagued by severe mental illness but also blessed with a kind countenance and sweet eccentricity. They and Val’s lover Billie (Kahn) begin committing relatively minor crimes to get by, while Shy starts dating a woman and Val, who had been adopted as a baby but later disowned by her adoptive parents for dressing like a boy, continues to search for his birth mother. The trio find trouble when the police show up at their house, setting into motion the climatic events that further solidify their connection. Dodge and Howard, who co-owned a cafe together in San Francisco at the time, haphazardly threw themselves into independent filmmaking; the movie indeed looks like what it cost, which isn’t much. But that’s only to its benefit, the gritty digital video aesthetic perfectly serving the underground yet still tight-knit community on screen, evoking how it may have appeared in home movies at the time. (It was shot by Chicago-born cinematographer Ann T. Rossetti, who also shot Rose Troche’s 1994 lesbian classic GO FISH.) Released just a few years after Kimberly Peirce’s controversial BOYS DON’T CRY (1999), Dodge and Howard’s film is a sometimes humorous, occasionally intense non-response to the trope-ish arcs of queer and trans characters before theirs. As Jack Halbertsam writes in his book In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, “Representations of transgenderism in recent queer cinema [Ed. note: the book was published in 2005] have moved from a tricky narrative device designed to catch an unsuspecting audience off guard to truly independent productions within which gender ambiguity is not a trap or a device but part of the production of new forms of heroism, vulnerability, visibility, and embodiment.” Comparing the film to BOYS DON’T CRY, Halbertsam continues that the latter film “make[s] clear the flaws of ‘representative history,’ and call[s] for the kind of shared vision that we see in BY HOOK OR BY CROOK—a vision of community, possibility, and redemption through collaboration.” Something that Dodge and Howard and a subsequent generation of filmmakers have achieved by any means possible. Preceded by a prerecorded introduction and discussion with historian and programmer Elizabeth Purchell and critics Willow Catelyn Maclay and Caden Mark Gardner, coauthors of the upcoming book Corpses, Fools, and Monsters: An Examination of Trans Film Images in Cinema. (2001, 98 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Daddy Issues

At the Gene Siskel Film Center

Peter Bogdanovich’s PAPER MOON (US)
Friday, 8pm
Laszlo Kovacs’ cinematography is a wonder to behold in PAPER MOON—especially during the night scenes, in which black skies appear so rich and deep that you almost feel you could swim in them. Shooting in high-contrast black-and-white (and frequently in Wellesian deep focus), Kovacs creates vivid images that make the past seem startlingly, palpably alive. (It was Welles himself who suggested that Kovacs shoot through a red filter to get the contrasts especially high.) Bogdanovich’s direction is another feat of hyperrealism: the film features numerous long takes that contain both lots of dialogue and complicated blocking; these sequences are all the more impressive given that one of the leads was only eight years old when the movie was made. The immersive, arty visuals—redolent of much '60s European art cinema (and the contemporaneous road movies of Wim Wenders)—mix surprisingly well with Alvin Sargent’s classical, three-act script, which features much '30s screwball-style dialogue and Chaplinesque pathos. Bogdanovich makes the old-fashioned qualities seem new again and the modernist elements feel rooted in tradition. Ryan O’Neal plays a traveling con artist in 1935 Kansas who gets saddled with a young orphan (Tatum O’Neal, the actor’s real-life daughter) after one of his schemes goes awry; the little girl turns out to be a born scammer, and the two go into business together. Bogdonavich maintains a delicate balance between sweet and sour, pitting the winning relationship between O’Neal and O’Neal against stark Dust Bowl settings and a fairly jaundiced view of humanity that reduces almost everyone to con artists or dupes. (The film abounds with scenes of callousness and petty cruelty—despite the presence of a precocious eight-year-old, there’s nothing cute about it.) The forces of cynicism and romanticism don’t cancel each other out, but rather combine to yield something multifaceted and grand. (1973, 102 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
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Vittorio De Sica's BICYCLE THIEVES (Italy)
Saturday, 12pm
BICYCLE THIEVES may not have started Italian neorealism, but it was (and still is) the most beloved and influential film the movement produced. Every scene of this concentrated masterpiece speaks volumes about the state of postwar Italy and the indignity of poverty everywhere, but the movie never feels academic or dogmatic. Rather, it is a supremely emotional work, developing such strong empathy for its protagonists that the viewer comes to share in their anxiety, anger, and small joys. Vittorio De Sica cited Chaplin as his favorite filmmaker, and one feels Chaplin’s influence on BICYCLE THIEVES in the precision of the characterizations. The gestures are graceful and expressive, and they create a direct link between the viewer and whatever the characters are feeling. A fine actor himself, De Sica deserves much credit for the beautiful performances, but one shouldn’t write off the cast, most of whom hadn’t acted before and who don’t play their characters so much as embody them. The use of non-professional actors here inspired countless other directors, notably Abbas Kiarostami, whose work with children (and the sweet-and-sour effect he often achieved with them) seems to have grown directly out of De Sica's work with eight-year-old Enzo Staiola on this film. Staiola’s Bruno is one of the most enduring characters in cinema, an adorable little boy hardened by growing up in Rome after it was decimated by war. One of the film’s most shocking moments is of Bruno starting his shift at a gas station at a time when he should be in school—in just one shot, De Sica shows not only a life of hardship, but the dignity with which the boy accepts his position. Indeed, BICYCLE THIEVES is one of the most affecting of all films when it comes to the theme of dignity, specifically what people will do in order to preserve it. One continues to empathize with Bruno’s father Antonio even after he accosts and threatens strangers because De Sica—directing a script he wrote with neorealist mastermind Cesare Zavattini and five others—makes it clear that the character is acting out of desperation. Antonio only threatens others because he needs information about his stolen bicycle, which he needs to maintain his job putting up posters around Rome, which he needs to keep his family from utter destitution. His single-minded quest for the bicycle takes up a good deal of the film, though he briefly pauses from it to take his disillusioned son to lunch. Their brief fun at a restaurant registers as a miracle. (1948, 89 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
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Maren Ade's TONI ERDMANN (Germany)
Saturday, 5:30pm
On paper, TONI ERDMANN is the stuff of early-aughts awards fodder, the sort of vehicle that might've starred Dustin Hoffman opposite Julia Roberts in an Alexander Payne production. And were Hollywood to remake it today, as they have already threatened, one easily imagines an Adams-De Niro pairing helmed by David O. Russell. As it is, it goes something like this: after the death of his beloved dog, Winfried Conradi, an eccentric music teacher of the hippie generation, alone, divorced, and on the wrong side of the retirement age, sets out on a desperate attempt to woo back his estranged daughter Ines, an eighties child turned management consultant in Romania, and a good soldier in the neoliberal conquest of Eastern Europe. With the aid of a set of false teeth and an ill-fitting wig, Winfried, an outrageous prankster, crashes Ines in Bucharest, assumes the role of Toni Erdmann, “consultant and coach," and proceeds to upend her scrupulously cultivated professional life through a slew of haphazard, grotesquely humiliating sneak attacks. Sound familiar? In Maren Ade’s hands, this story of generational conflict is anything but. There is an extraordinary level of attentiveness and restraint to Ade’s regard here. On the one hand, this is a matter of camerawork and editing that always respect the evolving moment. On the other, it’s a matter of a screenplay that refuses to take even standard shortcuts to hit its beats. At no point, does any hand-of-god logic assert itself to steer things more quickly or more surely to their end. Instead, Ade preserves a deep, abiding trust in her leads Peter Simonischek and Sandra Huller, coupled with a refusal to allow them even momentary transcendence of the discomfort of their situation, and deepened by a wry, alert sense for the banal absurdities of self-presentation that dominate far too much of our contemporary lives. The result achieves a momentousness of both scale and intimacy the cinema simply hasn’t seen since the likes of Maurice Pialat and John Cassavetes. It’s also hilarious. (2016, 162 min, DCP Digital) [Edo Choi]
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Charlotte Wells' AFTERSUN (US/UK)
Sunday, 12pm
There’s something about the quality of DV home-movie footage that feels particularly, singularly fragile. Maybe it’s the tendency of the image to pixelate at relatively slight movements, or the fact that the format now exists in hindsight as a consumer video relic that experienced only the briefest of heydays before being usurped by HD and smartphones. Whatever the case, writer-director Charlotte Wells employs DV to poignant effect in her debut feature. The film opens in the low-resolution format, presented as video taken by 11-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) of her father Calum (Paul Mescal). The pair, whom we soon learn are sharing a motel room near a resort in Turkey, are spending one last summer vacation together before Sophie heads back to live with her divorced mother in Scotland. Wells will return to the girl’s video diaries throughout, although it takes one a while to situate them in time: are they sweet documents of the present or fragmented representations of the past? What’s the difference? Such temporal indeterminacy gradually reveals itself to be central to the meaning and effects of the film, which regards memory as always a hazy refraction of the then, now, and never-quite-was, an equation that, as it so happens, finds expression in the ontology of moving images. Not unlike the work of Wells’s compatriot Lynne Ramsay, AFTERSUN comes at its characters and events from oblique angles that delay or preclude our apprehension. In visual terms, this sometimes manifests as a darkness in which figures are barely or fleetingly perceptible; at other moments, Wells composes shots using various reflective surfaces, such as when we see Sophie’s live video playing on a tube television in front of a mirror, the source of the action never glimpsed directly, just as Calum’s unspoken inner turmoil remains elusive to Sophie. Based on Wells’ relationship with her own father, who passed away when she was an adolescent, AFTERSUN both diegetically depicts the splintered, wistful process of remembrance and evokes it through a nonlinear, diaphanous formal construction. During the climax, an outsize emotional crescendo set to “Under Pressure,” the film snaps into focus as a kind of spiritual bridge from daughter to father, through which their “last dance” leaves a perpetually echoing afterimage. (2022, 101 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
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Andrei Tarkovsky's THE SACRIFICE (Sweden)
Sunday, 5:30pm
Critic Wesley Morris observed of our collective cultural habits, "I think everybody might have a handful of books or movies that they happily return to because they honestly don't remember the plot—they just remember the mood or the experience." Similarly, I think everyone has movies they return to solely for a particular moment or scene. These moments can be so singular that everything around them fades slightly into the background. This isn't to make a virtue of flawed memory, but rather to highlight those directors with the rare gift to sculpt a mood or moment that hovers above a film. Andrei Tarkovsky's cinema is rife with these exalted moments: Capt. Kholin's acrobatic embrace of Masha over a trench and her limp surrender in IVAN'S CHILDHOOD; a floating candelabrum and a chandelier's subtle jangle in SOLARIS. Tilda Swinton encapsulated this phenomenon in a speech referencing STALKER: "I saw an image of a dream that I have been visited by all my life made real... A bird flying towards the camera dips its wing into the sand that fills a room. Did I imagine this? I haven't seen the film for years. Can somebody tell me?" Released in 1986 and garnering Tarkovsky his second Grand Prix at Cannes (Roland Joffé's THE MISSION took home the Palme d'Or—a banner year for Christendom) THE SACRIFICE is considered by some to be a challenging, ancillary work by the Russian master. With time though the debates over 'slow cinema' and the film's relationship to Tarkovsky's legacy have faded, and what remain are some of the most haunting moments of the director's career: The sudden and uncanny desaturation of the film's image—courtesy of master cinematographer Sven Nykvist—as Erland Josephson roams his estate in a nuclear daze; the flickering TV test pattern reflected on the family in tableau; the film's breathtaking denouement, which never ceases to terrify me. These are the images I return to again and again, echoing Swinton's disbelief: Did I imagine this? (1986, 142 min, 35mm) [James Stroble]
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Denzel Washington’s FENCES (US)
Monday, 6pm
Among American playwrights, August Wilson is unquestionably the greatest chronicler of the Black experience our country has yet produced. Between 1973 and 2005, Wilson wrote eighteen plays, most famously the Pittsburgh (Century) Cycle, an ambitious series of ten plays—one for each decade of the 20th century. All but one are set in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, where Wilson grew up, and all deal with aspects of Black life as he saw it, imagined it, and lived it. Despite the fact that the cycle in its entirety has been performed by several companies, (the first being Chicago’s Goodman Theatre over a 21-year period), getting a chance to see even part of this monumental work of power and poetry on the boards is rare. Thus, when Denzel Washington announced plans to bring every play in the cycle to the silver screen to make these great works widely accessible, all I could say was “amen.” First out of the blocks was Wilson’s 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Fences, which Wilson adapted for the screen himself. Washington, who gave a Tony Award-winning performance in the play’s 2010 Broadway revival, cast most of the principals from that production for the film—fellow Tony Award winner Viola Davis, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Russell Hornsby, and Mykelti Williamson. FENCES opens on the streets of Pittsburgh as Troy (Washington) and his friend and workmate Bono (Henderson) dump garbage into the back of the municipal garbage truck on which they labor. Troy complains that it’s unfair that only white men get to drive the trucks, a situation he intends to change with the help of his union rep. The pair end the day at Troy’s home, where Rose (Davis), Troy’s wife, collects his week’s pay and readies dinner. The men hang out in the backyard to drink their customary pint of gin while Troy regales a quiet and appreciative Bono with tall tales of his youth. Lyons (Hornsby), Troy’s grown son from a previous relationship, shows up to borrow money, prompting Troy to complain that he only comes around on payday. Rose and Troy’s son Cory (Jovan Adepo), a high school football player who is being recruited for a collegiate team, is either at practice or working his part-time job at the A&P, his industry a contrast to Lyons’ idleness as a would-be musician, at least in Troy’s eyes. The family dynamic is both tense and loving, particularly between Rose and Troy, but even their obvious affection will not inoculate them from the curdling feelings inside Troy because FENCES is all about Troy—his failed promise as a baseball player, his devotion to providing for his family despite the unsavory meaninglessness of his work, and most of all, his sense of entitlement because of how he feels life has cheated him. Washington’s Troy sucks the air out of every room with his boasting, anger, and fearsome authority. Yet, he’s also a great storyteller and genial company when he is catered to by the likes of his wife and Bono, a salt-of-the-earth companion who became his loyal sidekick and confidant during the years when they were incarcerated. Davis brings strong emotion to Rose, nakedly displaying her love for Troy and the stabbing hurt he inflicts on her when his entirely expected infidelity is revealed. Hornsby, a great actor, unfortunately doesn’t have much to do, but Adepo surprises in his strength, as Cory stands up to Troy in a great burst of his own authority. Despite its theatrical origins, FENCES feels expansive not only in the very cinematic shooting of cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen, but also in the generous and complex performances of the top-flight cast. In the final analysis, the character of Troy is both a very relatable human being and a figure out of folklore, swinging at the baseball he hung from a tree like a latter-day Casey and falling down dead with a grin on his face, experiencing, perhaps, a final moment of remembered glory before striking out for good. If FENCES sounds like Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, another canonical work of the American stage, well, the resemblance is a reminder that family, an urgent concern of playwrights from Aeschylus and Euripides to O’Neill and Wilson, is the vital marker of what it means to be human. (2016, 139 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Peter Weir’s THE MOSQUITO COAST (US)
Wednesday, 6pm
The hubris, the hubris! That’s what came to mind when watching Peter Weir’s adaptation of Paul Theroux’s titular novel, written for the screen by Paul Schrader (who stays faithful to the source material while still imparting his personal trademarks). And appropriately so, for THE MOSQUITO COAST is something of a domestic APOCALYPSE NOW, trading determinedly in the same allusions to Western imperialism and the folly of rugged individualist American values, except with a family at its center rather than a naval unit. Allie Fox (Harrison Ford, who had been advised against taking the role) is a prodigious inventor who, as his son Charlie (River Phoenix) recounts in voiceover, dropped out of Harvard to “get an education.” This is to say that he eschewed the ivory tower in favor of the so-called real world, which in Allie’s vernacular represents something akin to the old way of doing things, nostalgia for a time where people pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and provided for their families with hard work and apparently no desire for any luxury that would make their lives easier or more enjoyable. What one may assume about Allie, considering that he’s well educated, is likewise confirmed and disavowed. Naturally it’s capitalism for which Allie has disdain and the lives of people in developing countries for whom he has respect, considering them to be people who live more simply and closer to nature. Still, in a scene at the beginning of the film in which he and Charlie are at a hardware store, he makes derisive comments about products not made in America that are blatantly xenophobic; he respects people living differently than himself, but only inasmuch as they don’t encroach upon his fantasy of the American dream. Allie’s family, consisting of his wife, whom he calls Mother (Helen Mirren), his sons Charlie and Jerry (Jadrien Steele), and two twin daughters, have no qualms with Allie’s idea of moving to Central America, along the Mosquito Coast, to start a new life free from western influence. That his family gleefully goes along with it is a testament to how familial ties can be almost cult-like, as is evidenced nowadays in how the right has capitalized on dynasties of disdain to continue propelling a fanciful narrative. Arriving at their destination, the family goes to a small village called Jeronimo, which, in a fit of imperialist impulse, Allie has purchased. Though skeptical at first (as the village is expressly undeveloped), Mother and the kids soon buy into Allie’s vision, seeing how he mobilizes the village’s residents to assist in constructing a more “civilized” town from the region’s limited resources. This also involves the realization of an invention that, at the beginning of the film, a nearby farmer had rejected; it’s a mammoth structure that turns fire into ice, which Allie refers to as “civilization” and uses to preserve food and air condition the villager’s huts (something he says results in better sleep and thus yields more productivity). Everything seems to be working out until another of Allie’s feats—or, more accurately, fits—of hubris proves catastrophic. I won’t go into the remainder of the film’s events, but, as one may rightly assume, it’s all the result of Allie’s Icarus- like qualities. Instead of flying too close to the sun, however, he glides too close to the water, unaccepting of the nearby Caribbean's awesome power to destroy a makeshift dwelling. Charlie is at first his father’s willful assistant, but it’s he and his brother Jerry, traumatized by their father's lie that the United States had been destroyed by nuclear warfare, who communicate their skepticism toward Allie’s increasingly alienating ideals. Another source of conflict is a missionary family that the Foxes meet on the boat to Central America, led by Reverend Spellgood (Andre Gregory). He and Allie come to odds over their respective beliefs, the former compelling the native population to accept God and their lots in life while the latter, whom Spellgood calls a communist, espouses an atheistic belief in self-sufficiency that scorns religion in favor of innovation. The films Schrader has written and directed often assume the “Man in a Room” structure, shoving big ideas into compact physical spaces wherein they’re diligently, and often painfully, worked out. But here the Man has the Central American rainforest in which to implement his ideas, effectively using the local population as guinea pigs. Thus this utopian quest, fueled by an earnest, if misguided, desire to live free from capitalism, is revealed as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a colonizer's effort to appropriate not just a way of life but also the local population’s physical space and labor. Schrader’s complicated relationship with religion is likewise on display; where Allie’s ideals prove to be tangibly disastrous, it’s nevertheless suggested that Spellgood’s beliefs promote a more spiritual form of colonialism, realized in a scene where local residents sit spellbound in front of a television on which Spellgood preaches, even though he’s still physically in the area. The TV is to the residents a misguided revelation and to Allie an excrable abomination, and the irony that it’s a screen on which one is watching the film is another of its vague ironies. Perhaps inspired by his heritage, which often involves non-Indigenous Australians' collective (and justified) guilt over indigenous dispossession, Weir’s work largely up to this point also involved morally thwarted outsiders who eventually contend with their interference. All of this forms the crux of Allie’s insolence, which later rears its ugly head in the form of the racism and white supremacy that it’s steeped in when he resorts to calling a local who’d become a family friend a savage as he tries to give live-saving advice. He wanted this mission, and for his sins, he got it. (1986, 117 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]
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Also screening as part of the Daddy Issues series are Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff’s 1994 animated feature THE LION KING (89 min, 35mm) on Friday at 6pm and John Huston’s 1982 musical ANNIE (127 min, DCP Digital) on Thursday at 6pm. More info here.

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Rodrick F. Wimberly and Senuwell Smith's THE WOODSTOCK OF HOUSE (US/Documentary)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 8:30pm

Serving as a foundation for mainstream hits we love today, house music first evolved out of disco. Named after the club Warehouse, where legendary DJ Frankie Knuckles spun tracks night after night, house quickly spread around the globe and continues to influence millions. This documentary focuses on “The Woodstock of House,” which takes place at the Chosen Few DJ’s Picnic in Jackson Park—a massive event that brings in over 40,000 house fans from all over the world. The film takes us through a history of disco, then tells of disco's retreat following the infamous “Disco Demolition Night” at Comiskey Park and the subsequent creation of the house genre. Directors Rodrick F. Wimberly and Senuwell Smith show that house, with its thumping pulse and evocative flips on old favorites, is not just about having fun. The music was a response to the hatred and bigotry of the era; it promoted peace and love and sought to uplift, not unlike the original Woodstock Music and Art Fair of 1969. This pulse that beats throughout the music is something we all share on an instinctual level, and on those grounds, we can connect with one another. The interviews with important house music figures are great, and the knowledge they impart will make you appreciate this city even more. Be sure to have your weekend free though, because after the credits roll, you will want to grab your friends for a fun night out dancing. Followed by a post-screening discussion with crew and subjects scheduled to attend. (2021, 98 min, DCP Digital) [Drew Van Weelden]

C.B. Yi's MONEYBOYS (Austria/France/Belgium/Taiwan)

Chicago Filmmakers – Friday, 7pm

It’s a common cliché to lament that gay art focuses too much on trauma and that we need more uplifting stories of queer fulfillment and contentment. But especially for the miserablists among us, a healthy diet of new queer media demands some true bummers in the mix too. Chinese-Austrian filmmaker C.B. Yi seems to be carving out that niche for himself with his debut feature MONEYBOYS, the newest addition to the Gay Hustler Drama canon. A former student of Michael Haneke’s, Yi balances that Austrian giant’s frank social cynicism with the type of bruised romanticism found in the romantic dramas of the Taiwanese New Wave. The film opens with new and naive hustler Liang Fei (Kai Ko) meeting the more seasoned Xiaolai (JC Lin) at a hired threesome in Taipei, where the two quickly hit it off and begin dating. When Xiaolai gets brutally beaten trying to defend Fei’s honor from a violent former john, Fei decamps back to his former village in the mainland where he stays long enough to establish how different he’s grown from his homophobic family, whom he still financially supports with his work. Disgusted, he returns to Taipei with Liang Long (Bai Yufan), a fellow gay villager longing to escape, where he plays the same sage elder/lover role to Long that Xiaolai played to him. This steady flow of plot means we don’t get much in the way of a clear “point,” aside from the longer arc of psychological development for our lead, the film having the most in common with Ninja Thyberg's PLEASURE (2021) and its system-as-character analysis of the cyclical reproductions of violence in the sex industry. As Fei moves through the film, increasingly sensual and assured yet dead-eyed, we see how the protections that transactional relationships have offered him in his work have bled into his life, where he conceives of himself as a “spider” who can trap others with the promise of love without returning it. Kai Ko seems to be following the Joseph Gordon-Levitt model of rebranding your image as a teen star into that of a Serious Actor by starring in an intense gay drama. And while Ko never reaches the intensity of Gordon-Levitt in MYSTERIOUS SKIN (2004), his brooding and chiseled face is a fine canvas for the film’s opaque emotional currents. Visually, Yi borrows from both Austrian and Taiwanese cinemas’ tendencies toward elegant master shots. DP Jean-Louis Vialard (most famous for being one of the three cinematographers on TROPICAL MALADY [2004]) frames Taipei’s grimy stairwells and pristine hotels with the same deep-focus geometry, letting characters’ bodies and blocking tell the story more than their faces. Time will tell if Yi will be able to reach the heights of his forebearers, but MONEYBOYS is a promising start that shows he’s learned the right things. Screening as part of the Reeling Pride Month film showcase, presented by MUBI. (2021, 116 min, Digital Projection) [Maxwell Courtright]

Matthew Bright's FREEWAY (US)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Wednesday, 9:30pm

Most fairy tales start out as parables for adults but lose their bite as they're adapted for children; some end up as little more than innocuous texts to decorate cute picture books or severely abridged source material for what is now chillingly referred to as IP. Matthew Bright's hilariously profane take on "Little Red Riding Hood" upended that unfortunate trend by resetting the tale in a grubby present-day Southern California full of fleabag motels, gangs, and serial killers. Vanessa Lutz (Reese Witherspoon, in a signature early role) is an illiterate juvenile delinquent with a prostitute for a mother and sexually abusive meth head stepfather. Faced with a return to foster care after their latest arrest, Vanessa embarks on a trek to the trailer park where the grandmother she's never met supposedly lives. A mild-mannered troubled youth counselor named Bob Wolverton (Kiefer Sutherland at his oiliest) picks up Vanessa on the highway after the beater she's driving dies and sets her on a much more circuitous path than even she could have imagined. Anchored by Witherspoon's bright-eyed cheerleader take on a young girl in crisis and littered with great turns by Bokeem Woodbine, Dan Hedaya, Brittany Murphy, and Brooke Shields, among others, this is a movie that rarely slows down but doesn't lower the stakes or resort to exploitation for its own sake. Those are some tricky needles to thread considering the levels of violence and disturbing behavior throughout. A pile of trigger warnings wouldn't save a fragile viewer from exposure to the abject human ugliness on display, but this is not a film that is at all confused about where the audience's sympathy should lie. In the end, after a harrowing journey, Vanessa asks the cops for a cigarette with a smile on her face. It almost made me nostalgic for smoking. (1996, 102 min, DCP Digital) [Dmitry Samarov]

Albert Serra’s PACIFICTION (International)

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

Like Bertrand Bonello or Tsai Ming-liang, Spanish filmmaker Albert Serra seems less interested in telling stories than evoking a particular state of mind. PACIFCTION is worth seeing—and on the biggest screen possible—for this reason alone; it’s as environmental a moviegoing experience as any IMAX nature documentary. The film harkens back to the fabled era of LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD, L’ECLISSE, PLAYTIME, and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, when art movies created a sense of boundless possibility with every shot. Once you figure out what PACIFICTION is about (it takes about an hour), that sense of possibility develops a fairly revolting aftertaste, for not only is Serra’s new movie a work of hit-for-the-rafters art filmmaking, it’s also something of the slow cinema WOLF OF WALL STREET. The hero is a French wheeler-dealer based in Tahiti, something of a cross between Ben Gazzara in SAINT JACK (1979) and those frighteningly hollow nationless contractors in Don DeLillo’s novel The Names. Played by Benoît Magimel in an electric performance, this guy is so intent on making a deal with everybody he meets that he comes off as gross even before you know what he’s wrapped up in. That he enjoys a life of sleazy luxury (through his connections to the local tourism industry) and wears just two variations on the same loud suit only thicken the toxic aura around him. In his previous films STORY OF MY DEATH (2013), THE DEATH OF LOUIS XIV (2016), and LIBERTÉ (2019), Serra presented the hedonistic pleasures of aristocracies past with such museum-piece airlessness as to make them seem like rituals from an alien planet; here, he brings the same approach to a contemporary milieu, and the effect can be entrancing, funny, disgusting, or just plain dull, depending on how you look at it. Is this a movie about the cult of Donald Trump? Why not? (2022, 165 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Gordon Quinn's '63 BOYCOTT (US/Documentary)

Chicago History Museum – Sunday, 12pm

’63 BOYCOTT is a timely look backward as the U.S. public education system stands vulnerably in the crosshairs of public officials who seem determined to destroy it. Archival footage and current interviews with some of the organizers of and participants in the boycott tell the story of a separate and unequal Chicago Public Schools (CPS) system they maintain was created and perpetuated by then Mayor Richard J. Daley. Schools in black neighborhoods were overcrowded and underresourced. Black students used outdated textbooks, and adding insult to injury, they had to share them. Modern scientific equipment and teaching aids found in white schools stood in stark contrast to the lack of any equipment available to black students. The final outrage was the appointment of Ben Willis as Superintendent of Schools. Accused of being a segregationist and a racist, Willis proposed to “relieve” overcrowding not by moving black students to nearby white schools, but rather by turning mobile homes into classrooms situated in school parking lots. Under pressure to resign over this “Willis wagon” plan, his probably insincere offer to step down was rejected by the school board. The time to boycott—and cost CPS hundreds of thousands of dollars in state aid—had arrived. ’63 BOYCOTT offers footage and still photos of various activists and activities, including the sit-in at the Board of Education and alternative Freedom Schools set up to teach black history. These images are intercut with footage of protests that broke out in 2013 when Mayor Rahm Emanuel ordered the closing of 54 schools, the bulk of which served students of color. The images are remarkably similar, sadly emphasizing that battles fought years ago have never really been won. Still, it is worth taking heart. Sandra Murray, a bright African-American student in 1963 who was told to forget her ambition to be a research scientist went on to earn a doctorate in biology, win National Science Foundation grants for research into cell biology and endocrinology, and taught in various universities in the United States and in Ethiopia. Screening as part of the Chicago History Museum’s Civic Season events series. Followed by a Q&A with producer Tracye Matthews. All Civic Season events are FREE admission days for Illinois residents. Must register to get the free tickets online. (2016, 30 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Georgia Oakley's BLUE JEAN (UK)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Seeing that we're in the midst of yet another moral panic, it's important to remember that while this hellscape of anti-queer and trans outrage is awful, it isn't new. And it isn't even original. Set in Thatcher's England in 1988, which saw the passage of Section 28 (a law prohibiting "the promotion of homosexuality," aka "Don't say gay") BLUE JEAN is an incredibly personal story about a lesbian teacher who has to balance protecting her job with teenage students and her personal life as a queer woman. Oakley, who also wrote the film, brilliantly uses the ‘80s as both the grounded reality of history and a dreamspace of nostalgia. In western pop culture, the ‘80s have reached this mythological state of un-time. It's an era that was both nearly half a century ago but also just yesterday. In some cases—as in music, film, fashion—it still exists. The eternal kick drum of New Order's "Blue Monday" in this film serves to bridge the gap between the terrifying realities of the AIDS crisis and last night's dance floor debauchery. The easy route for a film like BLUE JEAN would be to have it be a condemning view of the past. Movies like this often look down on the past as a disreputable place, that we've all since moved onward and upward. Oakley doesn't care to do that. BLUE JEAN is the embodiment of Faulkner's adage, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." This is a story of survival in the midst of a moral panic that can kill livelihoods and actual lives. Because 1988 is 2023. The tint of melodrama in the film gives the stakes, already high, a sense of personal depth and urgency. The visuals of the movie (shot deliciously on 16mm) only add to the atmosphere of oppressive confusion. Everything is pastels and soft. Everything's rosy and lovely. But with the titular Jean, and her window twitching neighbors, suspicious colleagues, and the problem of one of her students starting to spend time at her one lesbian safehaven haunt, this softness becomes an oppressive expression of gender rigidity. Everything about BLUE JEAN is perfectly measured. To create a character study about a messy person in the midst of crisis is hard to pull off without it falling into cliche or pure melodrama, and Oakley pulls it off. This may be a film that is distinctively about the lesbian experience, but it's expressed as a universal story about anyone, or any group, that is systemically marginalized and oppressed. And often the finest of points make the broadest of statements. (2022, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]

Cédric Klapisch’s RISE (France)

The Wilmette Theatre (1122 Central Ave.) – See Venue website for showtimes

For the life of me, I can’t understand what film critics have against Cédric Klapisch. They say his characters are cliché. His plots are predictable. He doesn’t offer any original insights. He’s too lackluster, but also too ebullient. What’s a romcom director to do? What I love about Cédric Klapisch is his unabashed celebration of life and its possibilities. In his wonderful new film, RISE, there is every reason for his central character, Élise Gautier (Marion Barbeau), to despair. About to premiere as the lead in the Paris Opera Ballet’s production of La Bayadère, she sees her boyfriend making out in the wings with another dancer. Devastated, she loses concentration and lands a grand jeté awkwardly on her bad ankle, after which she is told by her physician that she may be able to dance again in four months, two years, or never, forcing the ballet company to fire her. Moreover, she lost her mother when she was a girl and has been raised by an inept father (Denis Podalydès) who provides for her materially, but not emotionally. At 26, Élise was nearing the end of her ballet career, but being forced prematurely to plan her “second life,” as all ballet dancers must, leaves her confused and rudderless. Another dancer (Souheila Yacoub), whose career was ended by an injury at 18, invites Élise to come with her and her chef boyfriend (Pio Marmaï) to work at an artists’ colony in Brittany. She peels carrots and watches modern dancer/choreographer/composer Hofesh Shechter (himself) and his company rehearse a new dance. Slowly, Élise starts to envision a new future—one not lighter than air but rather planted firmly on the ground. It’s only fair to say that RISE had me a “hello”—the opening shot is of the exquisitely supple arm of Barbeau, a principal dancer with the Paris Opera Ballet. But Barbeau does more than dance beautifully. Her acting is incredibly strong for a debut performance, adding the kind of nuance and exhilaration she infuses into her dancing to a part that requires quite a few colors. RISE is also laugh-out-loud funny at times, mostly when focused on Élise’s New Age physical therapist (François Civil), who is twice unlucky in love. Most notable are the generous amounts of dancing that are brilliantly filmed by Alexis Kavyrchine. Kavyrchine is able to isolate a small step en pointe, but also the facial expressions that communicate a dancer’s motivation beyond just executing moves. One standout scene is on the cliffs off the Atlantic coast, where the dancers allow the wind to push them around and swirl them together in chains that, from above, resemble Matisse’s human daisy chains, an artistic companion to his more formal shots a la Degas of the corps de ballet lounging and stretching in their white tutus at the beginning of the film. Kavyrchine’s greatest moments come during the premiere of Shechter’s thrilling contemporary dance. He maintains the energy and movement of the heavy steps and swirling runs of the dancers as they weave in, out, and around each other, while never cutting away from the ensemble for too long. His work finds the perfect balance between Fred Astaire’s insistence on full body shots and the frenetic editing that is more impressed with its own movement than the choreographer’s. RISE really gets inside the heads and hearts of those who commit their lives to the stringent discipline of dance, and with one literal leap of faith, fills us with their joy. (2022, 117 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Anton Corbijn's SQUARING THE CIRCLE (THE STORY OF HIPGNOSIS) (UK/Documentary)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

Much like music videos were in the '80s and '90s, record album artwork is a popular but generally anonymous venture. Music videos were populist films, watched more times than some of the greatest and most successful commercial films of all time. But it's rare to be able to name the people who directed them. Similarly, some record covers have achieved a level of true pop art that would make Andy Warhol blush—let's be real, more people can recognize the cover of Dark Side of the Moon than any Rembrandt. But who can name the artist behind that timeless image? At the beginning of this movement, of album art as capital-A "Art", was Hipgnosis, an English photography and design studio. Breaking onto the scene after designing the cover of the second album by their friends Pink Floyd, Hipgnosis quickly became one of the most sought-after design firms for (primarily) British rock album covers. This film is gorgeously made by Anton Corbijn, himself a known quantity in the rock art world, having started by taking some of the most iconic photographs of Joy Division, along with making videos for Front 242, Echo and the Bunnymen, Depeche Mode, U2, and Nirvana. Though formally a rather standard talking head rock doc, Corbijn appreciates the confluence of fine art and pop music in a way that allows this film to be visually arresting in a way that most films like this simply aren't. The talking head segments are done as black and white portraiture—what Corbijn has excelled in for the past 40+ years. With featured interviewees including the main members of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Paul McCartney, as well members/employees of Hipgnosis such as co-founder Aubrey "Po" Powell, there is a level of cultural weight in the stories and conversations presented. SQUARING THE CIRCLE does a great job of pulling out from the iconic images we've seen for over half a century and showing how they were made via an extensive catalog of behind-the-scenes footage. We get to see how Hipgnosis made the covers for such classic records as Houses of the Holy, Wish You Were Here, Band on the Run, and Animals. Considering how powerful some of the images have become, it's a bit of a shame that there are no artists or art critics featured in the film. This is more of a tale of '70s rock and all of its well-documented ego and excess, and how it bloated to even include the album art. Even a design company had their own Behind the Music-esque rise and fall. We see how punk rock came and tossed Hipgnosis and their clients into the cutout bins of history. While this is definitely a film for the hardcore fans of rock/pop history who have spent hours staring at the sleeves of their Zeppelin, AC/DC, Scorpions, Floyd, Def Leppard and Wings albums, entranced by their surrealistic and often humorous beauty, it's a bit more than another purely nostalgic rock doc piece for the Boomer generation. SQUARING THE CIRCLE speaks about a very specific and unique time, when two-dimensional physical art was nearly as important in the music industry as the music itself. A time, half a century out, that seems just as strange, surreal, and imagined as the record covers that Hipgnosis themselves created. (2022, 101 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]

Edgar Wright's SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD (US/UK/Canada)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Monday, 7:30pm

SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD has undeniably stood the test of time, having influenced music, video games, and other facets of popular culture for well over a decade. Despite a poor box office performance, Wright’s adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novels left its mark on a rapidly growing internet subculture surrounding DIY music scenes—so much so that a new generation of guys you wish you didn’t start talking to at a party were introduced to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope through Ramona Flowers, the title character’s romantic interest whose name will now forever be attributed to girls with brightly colored hair by boys who just bought their first indie rock album. Despite the film’s continued success, some may still write off SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD as a product of its time. After all, there was plenty of nerd-chic to go around in 2010 as the Marvel Cinematic Universe continued to build hype, and TV shows like The Big Bang Theory framed nerd subcultures in a more flattering light for the masses. But to dismiss the film as just having come out at the right time would be to ignore the gripping romance and slapstick humor that have endeared it to audiences for years. Michael Cera and Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Scott Pilgrim and Ramona Flowers have a chemistry that does not feel like it should work on paper, but is electric on film. The two carry an awkwardness that really brings the quirks and discomfort of the early stages of a relationship to life. The film’s supporting cast, a revolving door of actors soon to make their big break, also bring their A-game as effective caricatures of what ex-partners and friends in your 20s are really like. For example, Chris Evans plays one of Ramona’s exes, an overconfident, pompous hunk who became an action star, and Brie Larson plays Scott’s ex-girlfriend, the snobby front woman of Toronto’s hottest indie band who changed her entire personality to fit the role. The plot follows Scott as he fights a league of Ramona’s ex-partners in comic book fashion in order to win her over, learn from his own shortcomings, and grow past the stagnation their daily lives have settled into. While the film doesn't reinvent the wheel, it recontextualizes the tropes of modern drama, action, and comedy films through frameworks that are easily relatable to younger millennial and Gen Z audiences alike, making for an entertaining cult classic and must-see experience for anybody with a nose ring or stick-and-poke tattoo. (2010, 112 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Bates]

🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
ALSO SCREENING

⚫ 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, called 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 minutes, 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. 

⚫ Cinema/Chicago
Joseph Amenta’s 2022 Canadian film SOFT (87 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday, 6:30pm, at the Chicago Cultural Center (78 E. Washington St.). Advance tickets are no longer available. Please pick up a Rush Card when doors open at 5:45pm to reserve your place for a last-minute ticket. Open seats will be made available to Rush Card holders 15 minutes prior to showtime on a first-come, first-served basis. Admission is not guaranteed. More info here.

⚫ Comfort Film at Comfort Station
Comfort Film presents a double feature of Atelier National du Manitoba’s 2006 experimental documentaries KUBASA IN A GLASS (53 min, Digital Projection) and THE TRAGEDY OF THE WINNIPEG JETS (60 min, Digital Projection). Free admission. More info here.

⚫ FACETS Cinema
John Waters’ 1994 film SERIAL MOM (95 min, Digital Projection) screens Thursday at 9pm, following FACETS Film Ed Dept Trivia at 7pm, hosted by critic, programmer and Cine-File contributor Raphael Jose Martinez. More info here.

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
The 2023 National Theatre Live production of Cecil Philip Taylor’s GOOD (160 min, DCP Digital) screens on Saturday and Sunday at 2pm. 

The Midwest Film Festival presents Analog Night in collaboration with the Cinema-Luz Collective on Monday. The event begins at 6:30pm with a networking reception, followed by the screening and a Q&A, and then an excellent after-party. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Goethe-Institut Chicago
Philipp Hartmann’s 2021 film FROM THE 84 DAYS (105 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday ar 6pm. This program accompanies Shift: Music, Meaning, Context, an exhibition produced in collaboration between Goethe-Institut Chicago and The Museum of Contemporary Photography. Free admission. More info here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
It’s officially Music Box Garden Movies season! See Venue website for films and showtimes.

Wes Anderson’s 2023 film ASTEROID CITY (105 min, DCP Digital) opens this week and Nicole Holofcener’s 2023 film YOU HURT MY FEELINGS (93 min, DCP Digital) continues. See Venue website for showtimes. 

Neil LaBute’s 2006 horror remake THE WICKER MAN (102 min, 35mm) screens Friday and Saturday at midnight. These screenings are free for Music Box Members.

Franklin J. Schaffner’s 1968 film PLANET OF THE APES (112 min, 35mm) screens Saturday and Sunday at 11:30am as part of the Stranger in a Strange Land. 

The Front Row presents Titus Ho’s 1983 film RED SPELL SPELLS RED (90 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday at 9:30pm. 

Stacey and Michael's Showcase of Shorts IV (90 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday at 7pm. More info on all screenings and events here. 

⚫ The Reel Film Club (an extension of the Chicago Latino Film Festival
Jayro Bustamante’s 2015 Guatemalan film IXCANUL (91 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday, 7pm, at the Instituto Cervantes of Chicago (31 W. Ohio St.).  There is also a 6pm reception including Guatemalan appetizers and drink. More info here.

⚫ Sweet Void Cinema
Find information on the Humboldt Park microcinema, including its screening and workshop schedule, here.

CINE-LIST: June 23 - June 29, 2023

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Michael Bates, Edo Choi, Rob Christopher, Maxwell Courtright, John Dickson, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Raphael Jose Martinez, Dmitry Samarov, James Stroble, Drew Van Weelden