:: FRIDAY, DECEMBER 13 - THURSDAY, DECEMBER 19 ::

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Stanley Kubrick's EYES WIDE SHUT (US/UK)

Music Box Theatre – Tuesday, 4pm and 7:30pm

It took more than a decade’s remove from its initial release for general audiences to appreciate Kubrick's final film, which is set in a facsimile of contemporary New York but heeding closely to the psychology and sexual mores of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1924 novella on which it is based. This discrepancy sparked outrage in 1999—particularly among writers in the New York Times, who actually seemed offended by the lack of realism—but it's come to resonate as one of the deepest mysteries of the director's monumental career. For Martin Scorsese, who placed the film in his top five for the 1990s, it's about New York as it appears in a dream. "And as with all dreams," he wrote, "you never know precisely when you've entered it. Everything seems real and lifelike, but different, a little exaggerated, a little off. Things appear to happen as if they were preordained, sometimes in a strange rhythm from which it's impossible to escape. Audiences really had no preparation for a dream movie that didn't announce itself as such, without the usual signals—hovering mists, people appearing and disappearing at will or floating off the ground. Like Rossellini's VOYAGE IN ITALY, another film severely misunderstood in its time, EYES WIDE SHUT takes a couple on a harrowing journey, at the end of which they're left clinging to each other. Both are films of terrifying self-exposure. They both ask the question: How much trust and faith can you really place in another human being? And they both end tentatively, yet hopefully. Honestly." Kubrick arrived at this combination of mystery and exposure through singular working methods unlikely to be repeated in a major film. Reportedly the longest shoot in movie history, Kubrick spent weeks on individual scenes, running actors through conversations until they were no longer conscious of performing. He had pursued this sort of marathon process before—most notably on THE SHINING and FULL METAL JACKET—but never on material so explicitly psychological. As a result, even superstars like Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman (giving their finest performances as a wealthy married couple) seem unfamiliar and strangely vulnerable. But EYES WIDE SHUT is only truly unsettling on contemplation: on the surface, it's one of Kubrick's funniest (with some of the most eccentric supporting performances in anything he made after THE KILLING) and most luminous, capturing the allure of Manhattan in winter with remarkably simple lighting arrangements. Screening as an Alternative Christmas Feature. (1999, 159 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Michael Schultz’s COOLEY HIGH (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 2pm

“I grew up in the Cabrini–Green housing project,” said the Chicago-born writer Eric Monte, “and I had one of the best times of my life, the most fun you can have while inhaling and exhaling.” Monte’s assertion is, of course, antithetical to the general conception of the storied public housing projects as being a terrifying place out of which it would seem joy is unlikely to emanate. COOLEY HIGH, which Monte wrote and Michael Schultz (CAR WASH, WHICH WAY IS UP?) directed, revels in the elation of youth, apolitical inasmuch as children and young adults themselves usually are but still evincing a message similar to Monte’s above, resisting any kind of bourgeois pity. It’s the final weeks of high school for Preach (Glynn Turman) and Cochise (Lawrence Hilton Jacobs) at Cooley High (the film was inspired by Monte’s childhood and his time at Cooley Vocational High School, near Cabrini–Green); the story takes place over the course of several days, during which Preach (a bad student but one who nevertheless reads poetry and history books for fun) falls in love and Cochise finds out he received a full basketball scholarship. All of this is seemingly incidental as the boys and their friends hang out at the local dive, go to a party, take a joy ride in a stolen car (where they partake in an impressive car chase through warehouses on Navy Pier), and see a movie (GODZILLA VS. MOTHRA, though it’s the fight in the theater that really grabs the audience’s—both in the film and out— attention), normal things young people do, the memories of which are often bright spots among the relative dimness of subsequent adulthood. Preach and Cochice eventually find themselves in trouble for the joy ride, though an encouraging teacher (played by Saturday Night Live cast member Garrett Morris) helps get them out of trouble with the cops. That, however, sets into motion the events that lead to the film’s heartbreaking conclusion. It’s been compared to George Lucas’ AMERICAN GRAFFITI, which was released the year prior, but, as Keith Corson notes in Trying to Get Over: African American Directors after Blaxploitation, 1977-1986, “While Lucas’s portrait of high school graduates in the San Fernando Valley relies heavily on on feelings of nostalgia, COOLEY HIGH remains grounded in the realities of urban transformation and decline.” Though not political in nature, the stakes in Schultz’s film are naturally higher than that of any predominantly white corollary, as is evidenced by the dramatic climax and sobering aftermath. The film has gone on to inspire many a Black filmmaker (e.g., Spike Lee, John Singleton) yet still stands on its own as an auspicious entry into the coming-of-age subgenre and a necessary corrective to pervasive assumptions. Screening as part of the Heartland series. (1975, 107 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]

Michael Curtiz's THE SEA HAWK (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 2pm

Following the success of CAPTAIN BLOOD in 1935, Michael Curtiz reteamed with leading man Errol Flynn to again conquer the high seas, this time in the late 16th century under the prudent reign of the adamantine Queen Elizabeth I. Though it shares the same name and ostensibly the same source material as Frank Lloyd’s 1924 silent film, it’s an altogether different story: Flynn plays Geoffrey Thorpe, an English privateer and ship captain whose piratical sensibilities are born of loyalty rather than anarchy. After capturing a ship transporting a Spanish ambassador and his beautiful niece, he becomes embroiled in the conflict between Spain and England, centered on the former’s desire to conquer the world by first subduing the latter. Its plot is amusing, but its strengths lie largely in its clever production design and superb supporting cast; the main battle scene is comprised of footage from either the original THE SEA HAWK or CAPTAIN BLOOD, depending on which source you're referencing, and the elaborate castle set was repurposed from Curtiz’s 1939 film THE PRIVATE LIVES OF ELIZABETH AND ESSEX. Though Flynn and Brenda Marshall, substituting for Olivia de Havilland (who starred with Flynn in several films) as the ambassador’s niece, are sufficiently charming in their respective roles—Flynn is adept at navigating the graceful demarcation between boyish charm and swashbuckling finesse—the real scene stealer is one Flora Robson, an English actress whose performance as Queen Elizabeth I is truly something to behold. She plays the role—a difficult one, to be sure, as it conceives of Queen Elizabeth I as being a fierce but amiable monarch who’s especially fond of her buccaneer buddies—with an amused dignity that’s cognizant of its ridiculous conceit while elevating both the role and the film entirely. It’s unfortunate that the 109-minute edited version eliminates her final monologue, in which she laments that England must “prepare…for a war [with Spain] that none of us wants,” because “when the ruthless ambition of a man threatens to engulf the world, it becomes the solemn obligation of all free men to affirm that…freedom is the deed and title to the soil on which we exist.” Timely words for a historical character; per Dave Kehr’s capsule review of the film in the Chicago Reader, “[Warner Brothers] [s]tudio boss Harry Warner had the disconcerting habit of using his adventure films as vehicles for his opinions on foreign policy...here the Spanish Armada is standing in for the Nazi U-boats, and Flynn can hardly wait to get his hands on 'em, if only Good Queen Bess/FDR will give him the go-ahead.” Presented in partnership with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, as they perform The Tempest & The Sea Hawk, December 12–14 at Symphony Center. (1940, 109 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Hannah Peterson’s THE GRADUATES (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Wednesday, 8:15pm and Thursday, 6:15pm

Navigating grief and trauma is never a clear path; it is a constant struggle to figure out how best to move forward. Hannah Peterson’s feature film debut THE GRADUATES is a slow, painful, yet ultimately hopeful rumination on grief in the aftermath of a school shooting that took the lives of several students. A memorial at the center of the high school, as well as fleeting shots of metal detectors and ID cards, subtly suggest the ways in which everyday life has forever changed for this community. The film primarily focuses on senior Genevieve (Mina Sundwall, providing an unswervingly real performance), whose boyfriend Tyler was killed in the incident. She reconnects with their mutual friend, Ben (Alex Hibbert), who transferred schools after the shooting. He’s returned to town, and they address their grief both individually and together. Finally, Tyler’s dad and the school’s basketball coach, John (a heartbreaking John Cho), is balancing the struggle of his profound loss while being a pillar for his students. All suffer from survivor's guilt, which THE GRADUATES does not gloss over but rather honestly addresses. It also insightfully examines digital technology and social media as complicated coping mechanisms for grief; Genevieve's interest in film photography also indicates the film’s interest in the analog. None of this feels like a doctrinaire look at current tragedies. Rather, Peterson grounds these larger themes within the day to day. Beautiful shots of typical coming-of-age moments like a first kiss and high school party scene are both grounded in normality while a shadow hangs over everything. The look of THE GRADUATES, too, oscillates between gray, muted tones and brightly sunlit scenes, emphasizing these continual shifts between sorrow and joy that each character faces. Petersen in conversation with filmmaker Jennifer Reeder after Wednesday’s screening. (2024, 87 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Paul Schrader's OH, CANADA (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

During a masterclass, Paul Schrader once said to an audience: “I used to be an artist who never wanted to leave this world without saying fuck you. And now I’m an artist who never wants to leave this world without saying I love you.” The director’s obsession with inner transfiguration has remained constant his entire life. The belief in art’s capacity to create spiritual transformation centers his 1972 book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, his script for TAXI DRIVER (1976), and his “man in a room” trilogy FIRST REFORMED (2017), THE CARD COUNTER (2021), and MASTER GARDENER (2022). In his early work, Schrader focused on characters’ transubstantiation into the grotesque; more recently, he’s been interested in forgiveness and absolution of the wicked. His latest film, OH, CANADA, adapts Russell Banks’ novel Foregone. Schrader first adapted Banks’ novel Affliction in 1999, sparking a decades-long friendship. The two would enjoy summers together in the Northeast outdoors. When Banks’ health began to decline due to a cancer diagnosis, Schrader wanted to dedicate a film to his dying friend. Declaring Foregone as his version of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Illych, the two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee requested Schrader name the film the title he wished for the book, OH, CANADA. The film opens on a successful documentary filmmaker, Leonard Fife (Richard Gere), and his wife and producer of 40 years, Emma (Uma Thurman). Former students ask for his final interview, and he accepts on the condition that his wife is present. At 78, ill and on the verge of death, he’s ready to avow the lies and betrayals that have ravaged his life like a cancer. In the book, Emma knows what Fife will say and wants to protect his reputation by stopping him; Schrader has Fife confess for the first time, only revealing when the cameras are running.  Like a man desperate to expel a demon, which he can be free of only if his wife witnesses the exorcism, Fife insists repeatedly that she stay and listen. His mind fogged by medication, he’s transported into his past. With Fife as his surrogate, Schrader wants to know if someone who spends most of their life convinced that they are unlovable will die unlovable. Rejoining the director after their legendary collaboration on AMERICAN GIGOLO (1980), Gere portrays Fife as vulnerable and at times ugly, a worthy portrayal of the dying. Jacob Elordi, who plays Fife as a young man, has incredible star power. His instincts pulled from an emotional inner life are never missed by the camera. After playing Elvis and the Euphoria, I believe he’s still only warming up. Schrader calls back to the structure of his seminal work, MISHIMA: A LIFE IN FOUR CHAPTERS (1985): an acclaimed artist on the brink of death conjures memory and fantasy to the tune of one motif. Comparable to how John Ford dealt with the theme of memory, Schrader flexes his talent not as a storyteller but a poet. The film comments on marriage and the secrets kept. One can spend 40 years with someone and not know who they truly are. Out of love, Leo reveals scars and warts to his love as his final gesture of devotion. He leaves the world loved, completely exposed, and with his spoken truth documented at 24 frames a second. (2024, 95 min, DCP Digital) [Ray Ebarb]

Alan Rudolph’s BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday, 5:45pm, Saturday, 12pm, and Wednesday, 5:45pm

When Kurt Vonnegut published Breakfast of Champions in 1973, critics dismissed it for its experimental narrative and the inclusion of the author as a godlike figure. Alan Rudolph’s 1999 film adaptation faced similar criticism. Both the novel and the film layer satire so intricately that disentangling its commentary can be challenging. Themes of commercialism, blind patriotism, the responsibilities of authorship, American attitudes toward mental health, and the hidden lives of the bourgeoisie join to form a bleak portrait of the American Dream. With the film, Rudolph took a career swing much in the same way Vonnegut did with his novel. Rudolph had been known for his romantic dramas such as AFTERGLOW (1997) and thrillers MORTAL THOUGHTS (1991) and EQUINOX (1992), which are set in a recognizable reality, whereas BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS is a farcical and hyperbolic depiction of suburban America. Rudolph retains much of Vonnegut’s essence but omits a glaring element: Vonnegut himself as the story's omnipotent narrator. This choice, while departing from the source material, makes the thematically complex story slightly more digestible for audiences knowing Rudolph’s prior work. Imagining a literal deus ex machina—a giant hand manipulating characters or a divine voice narrating—can be a bit much if you’re not watching a Terry Gilliam film. Instead, Rudolph embraces absurdism without an author-god and explores existential crises through its stellar cast led by Bruce Willis. The 1990s marked the height of Willis’s career, with hits like HUDSON HAWK, DEATH BECOMES HER, PULP FICTION, DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE, 12 MONKEYS, THE FIFTH ELEMENT, ARMAGEDDON, and THE SIXTH SENSE. His versatility—equally adept as a stoic action hero, zany comedian, or emotionally complex spouse—makes him a fitting Dwayne Hoover. Willis expertly portrays Hoover’s descent into madness, captured in manic paranoia, sexual compulsions, and feverish anxiety. Albert Finney joins the cast as Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut’s recurring character and pseudo-alter ego. A failed science fiction writer, Trout spends the film hitchhiking and spouting his ideas to strangers, culminating in his overdue moment of fame. The narrative follows Trout and Hoover as their paths converge at the Midland City Arts Festival. Hoover’s introduction sets the tone: a man on the verge of suicide, revolver in mouth, stopped only by his maid announcing, “Breakfast of champions.” His plastered-on smile masks his unraveling life, which spirals further until his inevitable encounter with Trout. When Hoover reads Trout’s science fiction, he takes it as prophetic gospel and concludes that he is the only living being in a world made up of robots. Liberated from societal conventions, he erupts in violent chaos. This final act underscores Vonnegut’s satire, revealing a truth beneath the absurdity: reality itself is an irrational construct. Retrospectively, all of the characters’ bizarre behaviors align with their disconnected agendas. Nick Nolte, as Hoover’s sales manager Harry Le Sabre, exemplifies this with his hidden penchant for wearing women’s clothing. Le Sabre desires to keep his secret but also desperately wants Midland City to know the self he keeps beneath his funeral-director black suit. Seeing Nolte in drag is a standout moment, as are Bruce Willis’ outlandish dealership commercials, habitually watched by his sedated, television-addicted wife (Barbara Hershey). Their son, Bunny (Lucas Haas), has limited screen time, but his eccentric outfits and lounge singing (performed by Haas himself) add to the surreal humor. It is the seemingly over-the-top flourishes made by the cast of idiosyncratic characters that make the existential absurdity consistently humorous and are reason enough to revisit this "unfilmable" adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut. (1999, 110 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]

Make it a Double: Miguel Llansó’s CRUMBS (Spain/Ethiopia) and JESUS SHOWS YOU THE WAY TO THE HIGHWAY (Spain/Estonia/Ethiopia/Latvia/Romania)

FACETS Cinema – Friday, 7pm (CRUMBS) and 8:45pm (JESUS)

These two features exhibit a distinctive oddball sensibility that’s at once underground and international—likely because writer-director Miguel Llansó is Spanish-born but currently based, alternately, in Ethiopia and Estonia. Both of these nations feature prominently in his second film, JESUS SHOWS YOU THE WAY TO THE HIGHWAY (2019, 83 min, DCP Digital), an ambitious but low-budget sci-fi satire that sometimes suggests a Nollywood remake of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s WORLD ON A WIRE. It takes place in a bizarre vision of the mid 21st century where the Cold War never ended and CIA agents still use dial-up modems to connect to the internet. One agent, Gagano (Daniel Tadesse), works on top-secret projects in which he enters into a virtual reality realm in order to fight Soviet-made viruses, or something like that. When he isn’t working, Gagano dreams of opening a pizzeria on the beach with his girlfriend, who presently runs a kickboxing academy. There’s a chance that his girlfriend is being unfaithful, but that may be a dream or a virtual reality projection. In fact, most of what occurs in JESUS SHOWS YOU THE WAY could be part of a simulated reality, and the characters discuss this possibility in conversations that sound like they could have come out of a Philip K. Dick novel. Llansó shares Dick’s loopy humor, which can alleviate the story’s darker implications about CIA interference with global affairs and the all-consuming role that technology plays in our lives. The most impressive thing about JESUS SHOWS YOU THE WAY may be how it achieves a kind of maximalism on the cheap; on the other hand, Llansó’s first feature, CRUMBS (2015, 68 min, DCP Digital), is more of a minimalist affair. Set in a post-apocalyptic future, it follows a man named Candy (Tadesse again) as he leaves the relative comforts of home to seek a shaman named Santa Claus for hopefully life-changing advice. As it was shot in Ethiopia and concerns things to come, CRUMBS carries a strong Afrofuturist flavor, even though Llansó’s ultimately concerned with the sins of the past. Per FACETS’ program notes, the film takes place among “the remains of 20th century consumerism” and concerns “the cosmological power of found objects and appropriated cultures.” For all of Llansó’s outré flourishes, his underlying seriousness may be his most surprising quality. [Ben Sachs]

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's QUERELLE (West Germany/France)

Alamo Drafthouse – Monday, 7pm

With QUERELLE, Rainer Werner Fassbinder married the slick professionalism of his “German Hollywood” films with the stark mise-en-scène and starker philosophizing of his early work. If it seems like a valedictory film, that’s only because Fassbinder died, at age 37, just six weeks before the premiere; his premature passing heightens the sense of finality already in the material. QUERELLE presents sex, pain, and death as tragically, inextricably linked, making it not only an appropriate final testament from Fassbinder (who famously named his first feature LOVE IS COLDER THAN DEATH) but also one of the major S&M films. The themes of sadomasochism and the theme of the interconnectedness between eroticism and crime come directly from the 1947 Jean Genet novel on which this is based, and Fassbinder accentuates it with lurid color and highly theatrical sets that make all the onscreen behavior seem like ritualistic role-play. In some ways, it feels like a sequel to the director’s sole other film in color and widescreen, the quasi-Western WHITY (1970), which took a similarly garish approach to American racism. But Fassbinder was capable of a more opulent minimalism by the time he made QUERELLE—the brazen artificiality of it all, which has the effect of making the sex seem more shocking, suggests a 1980s update on the films of Josef von Sternberg. This link must have been intentional, as Jeanne Moreau explicitly channels Marlene Dietrich in her performance (one practically hears Dietrich’s voice when Moreau sings her character’s theme song, “Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves”) and the facsimile of Brest rivals the China of SHANGHAI EXPRESS (1932) in its ersatz exoticism. As usual, Fassbinder also invokes Bertolt Brecht, distancing the audience from the drama with impassive narration, explanatory intertitles, and detached line readings from the actors. These qualities further add to the sense of inevitability in QUERELLE, as if to say that expressions of vulnerability will always invite brutality.  Screening as part of the Queer Film Theory 101 series. (1982, 108 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Francis Ford Coppola's THE CONVERSATION (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Tuesday, 6:30pm

If Francis Ford Coppola only made films between 1972 and 1979, he would still be considered one of the greatest American directors of the second half of the twentieth century. And THE CONVERSATION would still be (arguably) his crown jewel. Made in between his landmark first two GODFATHER films, THE CONVERSATION still stands as Coppola's most fully realized project of his heroic era. Conceived in the ‘60s but not realized until the richly paranoid Watergate era, there’s a prescience to this film that made it hit harder on its release than Coppola could have imagined. THE CONVERSATION, loosely inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni’s BLOW-UP (1966), is about San Francisco surveillance expert Harry Caul. An incredibly taught, genuinely terrifying paranoid thriller, it revolves around a job Caul takes on to record a couple’s mid-day conversation in a busy public downtown square. Caul is the kind of guy who takes a job but doesn't ask questions. He’s into the work, the technology, how to get the job done, not who's hiring him and why. Unfortunately, the realities of wiretapping and surveillance don't lend themselves to such clean-cut separations; also, Caul’s Catholic guilt begins to eat away at him and affect his work. This is a masterful mystery thriller that goes deep into the American psyche of paranoia that was so prevalent at the time it was made. But it holds an even more interesting view on privacy and surveillance culture in our present times, when we live in a world with no expectation of privacy. Once there was a time when a man like Caul, who made sound recordings of people who never expected it, was a rarefied expert. Now, we happily turn the cameras on ourselves, and everyone behind us is collateral surveillance damage. The irony of THE CONVERSATION lies in the fact that, while its main character snoops on people for a living, he tries to maintain as private a life as possible. He goes so far as to not even have a phone in his house, using only public payphones to communicate when not face-to-face. This makes the ending of the film ever more delicious. Just as Caul inadvertently captured a conversation with implications beyond what he expected, the film itself inadvertently anticipated the zeitgeist of 1974. It was released just a few months before President Richard Nixon’s resignation, an event bound up in wiretaps and surveillance. To Coppola’s shock, some of the actual equipment and techniques used in the film were used by the Nixon administration. Because of this, Coppola had to deny any real-world influence by pointing out that the film had been written before Nixon was in office and completed before his paranoid transgressions were made public. But besides the strange real-world coincidences and the weaving, mysterious plot, THE CONVERSATION is one of the most technically inspired films ever made. The sound editing here is beyond brilliant. In our age of YouTube clickbait-oriented “film criticism,” the term masterclass gets thrown about to the point of it being near meaningless. But when confronted with what may be the pinnacle of sound design in film, I’d say it's actually appropriate in this case. The sound was created by Walter Murch, who would later be the first person ever to be credited as sound designer on a film (for APOCALYPSE NOW). It is no exaggeration to say that sound itself not only plays a key role in this film; it's actually a character. Perhaps the main character. Seeing this film on a new 35mm print will only show off how insanely ahead of its time and, yes, masterful it really is. In our world of doorbell cameras, red light cameras, ATM cameras, ShotSpotter, and those super creepy Facebook recommendations that seem to come just minutes after you mentioned to a friend how you were thinking of maybe getting some Thai food later, THE CONVERSATION distills our still deep-seated paranoia of being watched (even if now we know we are) into a powerful, timeless, piece of art. Screening as part of the Alamo Time Capsule 1974 series. (1974, 113 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]

Brian Henson’s THE MUPPET CHRISTMAS CAROL (US)

Music Box Theatre – Thursday, 4:30pm and 7pm

Along with bearing the emotional weight of being the first theatrically released Muppet film made after the untimely passing of creative visionary Jim Henson, THE MUPPET CHRISTMAS CAROL carries the mighty task of representing two of the most beloved staples of American culture: The Muppets, a troupe of felt and fur vaudevillian puppets initially created and pioneered in the mid-to-late 1970s by the late, great Henson, and Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, a mid-19th-century novella warning against the perils of greed that has inexplicably become the signature cash-cow stage adaptation for regional theaters nationwide. Under the direction of Brian Henson, one of Jim’s children devoted to carrying on the Henson legacy, this high-concept literary adaptation is far from the contemporary comic antics that had previously been seen in Muppet Cinema. Rather than playing versions of themselves, Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, and the rest of the delightful squad of weirdos are tasked with acting out classics of canonized literature (cemented by their next film, MUPPET TREASURE ISLAND), here playing the roles of various Dickensian characters, anchored by a lead human actor (the irreplaceable Michael Caine) as Ebenezer Scrooge. As tricky of a task as this could have been, the undeniable success comes in this being less so a Muppet-ized spin on A Christmas Carol, but rather a supremely well-crafted cinematic Dickens adaptation that just happens to star Muppets in prominent roles. Each Muppet brings their well-defined characteristics to their respective roles in ways that are comically potent, but never getting in the way of their assigned role (Miss Piggy’s Emily Cratchit is still a diva, and Statler and Waldorf’s Marley Brothers still heckle up a storm). It’s the central performance from Caine that really cements the tone here, exchanging dialogue with talking frogs and pigs as if he were performing on the National Theatre stage. His journey of personal redemption is treated with utmost sincerity and grave seriousness, with the primary moments of comic deviation coming from the narration of Charles Dickens, here portrayed with gusto by The Great Gonzo, alongside his trusty sidekick Rizzo the Rat (as himself, natch) providing ribald Mystery Science Theater-esque commentary. As with any successful Muppet film, earnestness wins out, with the comic foibles at hand balanced out by Paul Williams’ tuneful and tearful earworms, plus Henson’s keen sense of magic and horror that has been key to Dickens’ tale for generations. Even with his passing, the spirit of Jim Henson’s artistry—that inimitable balance of laughter and heart—finds itself ever alive in this now-well-established holiday classic. And so, as we observed, Henson bless us, every one!  Screening as an Alternative Christmas Feature. (1992, 85 min, 35mm) [Ben Kaye]

Andrea Arnold’s BIRD (UK)

FACETS Cinema – Saturday, 5pm and Sunday, 3pm

After a trip to the United States and forays into television and documentary, Andrea Arnold returns to her English social-realist roots with the lovely, vibrant BIRD. Specifically, she’s back in the grungy environment of the council estate (UK housing development), a place where the adolescent Mia lived in Arnold’s 2009 feature FISH TANK, and where Arnold herself was raised by a teenage single mother. Like Mia and Arnold, the protagonist of BIRD comes from a broken, indigent family. A tender twelve years of age, Bailey (Nykiya Adams) lives with her young, impulsive dad Bug (an electric Barry Keoghan, torso aptly covered in tattoos of creepy-crawlies) and her half-brother Hunter (Jason Buda), figures of a masculinity she both detests and subconsciously idolizes. In an early scene, Bailey has her frizzy Black hair cut short in protest of her father’s just-announced remarriage, and in defiance of the femininity she’s expected to perform as a bridesmaid. It’s also so she can fit in with her half-brother and his gang of self-described vigilantes, who coordinate home attacks on those who have been pegged as wrongdoers. Amid these bleak influences, Bailey exercises an irrepressible creative spirit; like FISH TANK’s Mia, who yearned to escape her poverty through dance, Bailey is an amateur filmmaker whose camera is drawn to the freedom of winged creatures, especially birds. A strain of magical realism enters the film when the girl is visited by, well, Bird (Franz Rogowski), a fey skirt-wearing loner with his own history of a broken home who comes blowing in on a gust of wind. Bird becomes Bailey’s nebulous reflection, confidant, surrogate family member, and guardian angel, continuing a long storytelling tradition of children whose fears and desires become manifest as figures of palliative imagination. Or is he? Despite its whimsy, BIRD stays so grounded in the tactile immediacy of its surroundings—aided by Robbie Ryan’s energetic, intimate handheld 16mm camerawork—that the sometimes-literal flights of fancy register as totally plausible occurrences in a child’s experience of her world. There’s typically a popular song or two that serves as an unofficial anthem to an Arnold film, and here it’s Blur’s science-fiction-tinged "The Universal," assuring Bailey, and us, that even seemingly naive or quixotic things “really, really, really could happen.” (2024, 119 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]

Coralie Fargeat’s THE SUBSTANCE (France/US)

FACETS Cinema – Saturday, 7:30pm, Sunday, 5:30pm, and Thursday, 6:30pm

The newest film by French genre fiend Coralie Fargeat is body horror in extremis. In 2017 she gave us REVENGE, an over-the-top bloody pastiche of rape and revenge/one-(wo)man army exploitation films. A preposterously bloody affair to the point of almost being camp, REVENGE polarized its audiences. With THE SUBSTANCE, we see both the natural evolution and a giant leap in her filmmaking. A sci-fi horror, THE SUBSTANCE centers around Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a 50-year-old media celebrity whose star has faded into being a TV aerobics host. After getting into a car accident, the nurse who is attending to her gives her a flash drive with an ad for “The Substance,” a mysterious cure-all guaranteed to make you perfect again. After some deliberation, Sparkle decides to partake. The film ratchets up into high-concept here as the serum creates a fully formed, younger, astonishingly beautiful woman that literally crawls out of Sparkle’s body like some kind of Cronenbergian Athena. This new Sparkle, Sue (Margaret Qualley) is both a physical and psychological manifestation of Sparkle that requires upkeep. Only one can be conscious at a time, and must switch back and forth every seven days in order to maintain stasis. But of course, they don't. Fargeat uses THE SUBSTANCE to talk about a lot of things at once: the psychological weight of aging (particularly as a woman), the entertainment industry, Ozempic, self-loathing, addiction. But while this movie is gross—and it's very gross—it's also decidedly campy and funny. It just received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, if that gives you an idea of how purposefully silly this movie is. There is a great balance between the unsettling and the humorous, and Fargeat knows exactly when to lean harder into which. While one could dismissively say this is a modern take on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, it equally draws from such diverse films such as Brian Yunza’s SOCIETY (1989) for body horror social satire, Paul Verhoeven’s SHOWGIRLS (1995) for camp explorations of sex and sexuality, Darren Aronofky’s REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2000) for the physical degradation of addiction, and of course David Cronenerg’s THE FLY (1988) for, well, watching a human body fall apart in real time. By far greater than the sum of those parts, THE SUBSTANCE gives us something like Katheryn Bigelow’s POINT BREAK (1991), a film that can be enjoyed on multiple levels as either pure, mindlessly indulgent genre entertainment, or as an acerbically sharp commentary. It's a rare film that is as clever and smart as it is completely disgusting. Somehow this movie has found an audience in both the arthouse and grindhouse, with both the credentialed critics and the gutterstink gorehounds. When Ovidio G. Assonitis and Roberto Piazzoli released BEYOND THE DOOR (1974), the legally adjudicated Italian rip off of THE EXORCIST (1973), they infamously hired people to pretend to pass out during screenings and have ambulances waiting outside movie theatres in order to drum up hype for the film. Two months ago, as I was at the movies seeing a different film, someone in the next theatre actually threw up, passed out, and took a ride in an ambulance out of a screening of THE SUBSTANCE. Proof that for 50 years that the film industry has been trying to fake what THE SUBSTANCE naturally has. (2024, 141 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]

Adam Elliot’s MEMOIR OF A SNAIL (Australia/Animation)

FACETS Cinema – Saturday, 3pm and Sunday, 1pm

While the popular notion that loneliness has reached epidemic proportions has largely been debunked, it is true that there are swaths of people who find themselves alone and forgotten. Among them are the orphans and elderly at the heart of Australian animator and filmmaker Adam Elliot’s MEMOIR OF A SNAIL. Using some elements of his own biography to create this highly detailed, stop-motion “clayography,” Elliot tells the story of fraternal twins Gracie and Gilbert, whose snail-loving mother dies giving them life, and whose father, a street performer, is crippled by a hit-and-run driver. The twins’ happy life with their father comes to an end when he dies, and they are sent to separate foster homes—Gracie to a couple of swingers in the east of Australia and Gilbert to a family of weird bible thumpers in the west. Sarah Snook as the adult Gracie narrates the story in flashback to Sylvia, her favorite snail, as we watch the horrors Gilbert goes through as communicated obliquely in letters, while Gracie finds an eccentric elderly friend in Pinky, exuberantly voiced by Jacki Weaver, and a husband whose main interest in her is in fattening her up. MEMOIR OF A SNAIL illustrates how the slings and arrows can cause us to climb inside our shells—almost literally in Gracie’s case—and intensify our feelings of loneliness and isolation. Elliot’s film shows all the detail and love he poured into it over the more than five years it took to make, infusing it with humor, individuality, and a riot of colors and forms. I was a bit exhausted by the end of it, but it was an epically interesting ride. (2024, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Joel Coen's FARGO (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday, 8:15pm

Inarguably pivotal in the Coen brothers’ oeuvre, FARGO is a midwestern fable. It’s not based on a true story, as the opening text claims, and only the first scene takes place in Fargo, North Dakota; it’s primarily set in Minnesota, which is fitting for a film about things never being exactly as they seem. It’s also about how evil isn’t always calculated, but often completely, hilariously inept—which doesn’t make it any less destructive. In desperate need of money, bungling car salesman Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) hires two criminals (played with perfect bizarre chemistry by chatty Steve Buscemi and the mostly silent Peter Stormare) to kidnap his wife and petition his wealthy father-in-law for the ransom. It doesn’t go well, and after some violent mishaps, Brainerd police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) becomes involved in solving the crimes. Seven-months pregnant Marge, who doesn’t appear on screen until more than 30 minutes in, stands out as a unique, impactful cinematic hero; we watch her slowly realize how mundanely insidious the world can be beyond her kind, no-nonsense demeanor. Well-known for its comedic juxtaposition of Minnesota nice accents and snow-covered landscapes with violence, FARGO is ultimately about Marge’s resilience to search for good in the world, despite the messy horrors she witnesses; her final scenes expressing this are heartbreakingly unassuming. Influential on the black comedy genre for decades after, the film’s best successor is the FX series of the same name. Inspired by FARGO and all the Coen brothers’ works, the anthology series excellently expands and complicates the film’s themes and its fascinating side characters. Screening as part of the Heartland series. (1996, 98 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Payal Kapadia’s ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT (France/India/Italy/Netherlands/Luxembourg)

Gene Siskel Film Center - See Venue website for showtimes

Premiering as the first Indian film in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in thirty years, Payal Kapadia’s sophomore feature—and her first official foray into fiction filmmaking—dazzles with a confidence of voice and spirit that continues her emerging canon of poetic and politically charged narratives. Kapadia’s vision of feminine perseverance through lives of longing crafts a sprawling and complex vision of Mumbai as a nocturnal city that shines menacingly with wonder and opportunity. Voices that open the film tell us of the entrancing promise of money and stability that can be found in Mumbai, yet such gifts can only realistically be bestowed on the lucky few. For everyone else, you may end up like Prabha (Kani Kusruti) or Anu (Divya Prabha), two women living together and working together at the same hospital, each with varying levels of dedication to their work. Kapadia’s slice-of-life storytelling mode often finds these two at their most intimate and vulnerable in silent moments alone, each desperately working to take in the overwhelming world and circumstances around them. Prabha is stuck in time, her husband working abroad in Germany, with no attempts to contact her in months, save for a recent delivery of a rice cooker; Anu is conversely fixated on the promise of future love, with her nights spent with her new love—the charming Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon)—embarking on that most epic of quests: trying to find a place to hook up. Just like her previous film A NIGHT OF KNOWING NOTHING (2021), the repressive politics of mainstream Indian society find themselves hideously seeped into the fabric of the story, most prominently with Shiaz’s Muslim faith becoming a roadblock for any future life with Anu in an overtly Hindu nationalist society. Yet love, lust, and independence fight their way through to Kapadia’s hopeful ending, where a trip away from Mumbai literally uproots our protagonists from the horrors of living lives of passivity, and provides them each with opportunities to finally move forward in their respective lives. The gift of Kapadia’s film is in how major of a work it feels even with such slight and understated tools, the power of these emotional bubbles filling up to the point of bursting in ways cathartic and mystical and joyously communal. (2024, 110 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Gints Zilbalodis’ FLOW (Latvia/Animation)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

As a film enthusiast fixated on the art of animation who also just so happens to be a cat owner, I was somewhat predisposed to have a visceral emotional response to Gints Zilbalodis’ FLOW, a dialogue-free animated adventure centered on a feline protagonist thrown into various episodes of peril. But my own personal biases aside, the joys of Zilbalodis’ feature become self-evident early on, the painterly images and gentle atmosphere immediately creating a world you’re thrilled to inhabit for its nimble less-than-ninety-minute runtime. Animated entirely on the open-source software Blender, Zilbalodis and his team have created something almost akin to an open world video game like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, with charmingly rendered creatures navigating treacherous environs with puzzle-like intuition of how to get from one destination to the next. The narrative details of the world are purposefully thin, with preference given to a show-don’t-tell mode of storytelling that trusts the audience to imagine what may or may not have led to this world of abandoned homes and cityscapes surrounded by ever-growing greenery. Even within us filling in the world-building gaps, the ever-rising waters and lack of any human inhabitants can easily lead us down some climate-fueled apocalyptic rabbit holes. One can imagine the worse version of the film, the animal cast (here; a cat, a capybara, a secretarybird, a lemur, and several adorable dogs) given snark-fueled vocal performances from celebrity actors that completely burst the bubble of sincerity. Thankfully, what we have instead is a crew of creatures grunting and meowing and barking, nowhere near approaching anthropomorphism, but still granted enough distinct personality for us to become invested in their journey. Something almost spiritual starts to take over the film, the journey of our lead cat hero becoming less and less about reaching a set destination, and more so merely attempting to find some sense of peace and community with this new pack of disparate animal friends amidst a world falling apart in disarray. Above all else, FLOW succeeds in doing what animation does at its most holy: forgoing the rules and expectations of “real world” cinema to create something singular and spectacular from whole cloth. Most thrillingly, it’s in service of a story about stopping in one’s tracks to take in all that is bigger than ourselves and finding the beauty in knowing that none of us are alone in our journey. (2024, 85 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

The 41st Annual Music Box Christmas Sing-A-Long & Double Feature

See Venue website for showtimes

Frank Capra's IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE (US)

Like Steven Spielberg today, Frank Capra was associated more with reassuring, patriotic sentiment than with actually making movies; but just beneath the Americana, his films contain a near-schizophrenic mix of idealism and resentment. In this quality, as well as his tendency to drag charismatic heroes through grueling tests of faith, it wouldn't be a stretch to compare Capra with Lars von Trier. There's plenty to merit the comparison in IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE alone: The film is a two-hour tour of an honest man's failure and bottled-up resentment, softened only intermittently by scenes of domestic contentment. Even before the nightmarish Pottersville episode (shot in foreboding shadows more reminiscent of film noir than Americana), Bedford Falls is shown as vulnerable to the plagues of recession, family dysfunction, and alcoholism. All of these ills weigh heavy on the soul of George Bailey, a small-town Everyman given tragic complexity by James Stewart, who considered the performance his best. Drawing on the unacknowledged rage within ordinary people that he would later exploit for Alfred Hitchcock, Stewart renders Bailey as complicated as Capra himself—a child and ultimate victim of the American Dream. It's because the film's despair feels so authentic that its iconic ending feels as cathartic as it does: After being saved from his suicide attempt (which frames the entire film), Stewart is returned to the simple pleasures of family and friends, made to seem a warm oasis in a great metaphysical void. (1946, 130 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
---
Michael Curtiz's WHITE CHRISTMAS (US)
Critics agree that Mark Sandrich's HOLIDAY INN (1942), the first musical comedy to feature Bing Crosby, an inn, and Irving Berlin's "White Christmas," is a better film than this partial remake. Yet it turns out that it's revivals of this Technicolor, VistaVision version that people look forward to this time of year. WHITE CHRISTMAS incorporates the history of its own title song, which, while it would go on to become perhaps history's largest-seller, actually seemed a flop at first. Music historians Dave Marsh and Steve Propes note, "What saved 'White Christmas' were requests made by GIs to Armed Forces Radio around the world. Soldiers away from home, many of them in the South Pacific or North Africa, uncertain of whether they'd ever again see family and friends, let alone a snowfall, responded passionately to Berlin's understated evocation of the mythic romance of Christmas Past." This history is folded into the opening scene: it's Christmas Eve, 1944, somewhere on a World War II battlefield, and Crosby sings the song to fellow troops amidst some very fake rubble, as bombs explode in the background. The movie's got Crosby and Danny Kaye as music-and-lyrics team Wallace and Davis, and Vera-Ellen and Rosemary Clooney as sister act the Haynes. They're a treat to watch even just sitting around a railroad passenger car singing "Snow," bound for Pine Tree, Vermont, where the inn turns out to be run by ex-General Waverly (Dean Jagger). When people gather for a screening of this movie, I doubt they worry that it may not rank with Michael Curtiz's best work (CASABLANCA, YANKEE DOODLE DANDY, MILDRED PIERCE). They come to mark the change of years together. If there's a season for nestling in the warmth of nostalgia, it's this one. Plus, there's the camp appeal of Crosby and Kaye doing "Sisters." (1954, 120 min, DCP Digital) [Scott Pfeiffer]

🎞️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Alamo Drafthouse
Bob Clark’s 1974 film BLACK CHRISTMAS (98 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday, 9:30pm; Monday, 10:15pm; and Tuesday, 3:45pm, as part of the Alamo Time Capsule 1974 series. Note that the Friday screening is sold out. 

Jack Clayton’s 1974 film THE GREAT GATSBY (144 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, noon, also as part of the Alamo Time Capsule 1974 series.

Richard Loncraine’s 1977 film THE HAUNTING OF JULIA (98 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 9:30pm, as part of Terror Tuesday, programmed by Cine-File contributor John Dickson.

Andres Torres’ 2014 film BAG BOY LOVER BOY (77 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday, 9:30pm, as part of Weird Wednesday. More info on all screenings here.

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

⚫ Cinema/Chicago
Digging Deeper Into Movies with Nick Davis asserts that “Gender Matters” on Saturday, 11am, at the Alliance Française de Chicago (810 N. Dearborn St.). Suggested viewings are MARIANNE AND JULIANE, aka THE GERMAN SISTERS (Kanopy) and/or HAPPY AS LAZARRO (Netflix). Tickets are free. Doors open at 10:30am. Please use the Dearborn St. entrance for admission. More info here. 

⚫ Consignment Lounge (3520 W. Diversey Ave.)
A double feature of Bob Clark’s 1974 film BLACK CHRISTMAS (98 min, Digital Projection) and Glen Morgan’s 2006 reimagining BLACK CHRISTMAS (90 min, Digital Projection) starts at 7pm. Doors open at 6pm. Free admission. More info here.

⚫ FACETS Cinema
Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 film STARSHIP TROOPERS (129 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 9pm, following Film Trivia. This screening will be preceded by Shane Chung’s 2024 short film CHECK PLEASE. More info here.

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Also screening as part of the Heartland series are Chris Smith’s 1999 film AMERICAN MOVIE (107 min, 35mm) on Saturday at 4:45pm and Richard Brooks’ 1967 film IN COLD BLOOD (134 min, DCP Digital) on Saturday at 7:15pm.

Jeff Preiss and Josiah McElheny’s 2023 film THE SECRET WORLD (90 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday, 4:15pm, and Monday, 8:15pm, with Preiss and McElheny in attendance for a post-screening discussion moderated by John Corbett after the SUnday screening. Co-presented by Chicago art gallery Corbett vs. Dempsey. 

Antonio Bigini’s 2023 film THE PROPERTIES OF METAL (93 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 6pm, with actor David Pasquesi in person for a post-screening dialogue. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
A 35mm Mystery Screening celebrating local film programmer Brian McKendry’s birthday takes place Thursday at 9:30pm. Programmed and presented by The Front Row and Olivia Hunter Willke and screening from an IB technicolor print. More info here.

⚫ Sideshow Gelato (4819 N. Western Ave.)
SUPER-HORROR-RAMA! presents Welcome to Primetime: Holiday Edition. On Thursday three surprise TV Christmas specials around the theme of ‘Marriage is Murder’ will screen starting at 7pm, with a social hour starting at 6pm. Every social hour includes a live set by local DJ Leah Lachesis Lazuli; two limited edition pinback buttons included with every ticket, with new designs each week; and every screening is preceded by additional giveaways donated by House of Movie Monsters and The Shadowboxery for people who answer trivia questions correctly. More info here.

⚫ Sweet Void Cinema (3036 W. Chicago Ave.)
Find more information on the Humboldt Park microcinema, including its full screening and workshop schedule, here.

CINE-LIST: December 13 - December 19, 2024

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Ray Ebarb, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Shaun Huhn, Ben Kaye, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Raphael Jose Martinez, Scott Pfeiffer