:: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 7 - THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 13 ::

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Festival of Films from Iran

Gene Siskel Film Center – See below for showtimes

Abbas Kiarostami’s CLOSE-UP (Iran)
Friday, 8:30pm
CLOSE-UP is an almost unclassifiable film: part documentary, part fiction, a film about fakery and the illusion of cinema, but an illusion that still resonates and weaves a story somehow that is deeply personal, moving, and tragic. CLOSE-UP revolves around a man named Hossein Sabzian who is obsessed with cinema, and especially with Mohsen Makhmalbaf, one of the greatest directors of post-revolutionary Iranian cinema. Makhmalbaf's films THE CYCLIST and MARRIAGE OF THE BLESSED (the plot of which draws an interesting parallel to CLOSE-UP, which would require a much longer discussion) have made a deep impression on Sabzian. In a tale that is baffling and complex, Sabzian is mistaken for Makhmalbaf on a bus by Mrs. Ahankhah, a woman whose sons are both obsessed with the cinema as well. Sabzian bizarrely decides to impersonate Makhmalbaf and pretends that he would like to shoot a film starring the Ahankhah brothers, and is later found out and arrested. Kiarostami learned of Sabzian’s impersonation and his upcoming trial through a short news story and became obsessed. After a sleepless night, Kiarostami asked his producer if he could postpone his next film and shoot Sabzian's trial instead. Writing the script and designing the film concurrent with the 40 days of shooting allowed Kiarostami to create something that melds documentary and fiction in a way that calls into question the very limits and possibilities of cinema. We watch Sabzian on trial in extreme close-up for long, excruciating, vulnerable minutes, as he confesses his motives for impersonating Makhmalbaf, and the wounded Ahankhah brothers complain about their betrayal. Miraculously, Kiarostami got the judge to agree to let him film the trial, and in an especially fascinating turn, Kiarostami becomes an integral part of the trial, something of a prosecutor, asking probing off-screen questions interspersed with the judge's on-screen fact-finding. Before the trial we see re-enactments of Sabzian's arrest starring all of the real people involved, including the journalist who broke the story and the deceived family, and throughout the trial we cut to further re-enactments of Sabzian on the bus with Mrs. Ahankhah and in the family’s home. In an especially poignant scene closing the film, Kiarostami arranges for the real Makhmalbaf to meet Sabzian as he leaves the prison, but deliberately does not warn Sabzian in advance—Kiarostami's manipulation of actors in his films is a source of valid criticism, but elicits unforgettable cinematic moments, much like Dreyer's brutal treatment of Maria Falconetti in THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC, a film I am always reminded of when I experience the intensity of CLOSE-UP on a big screen. Makhmalbaf drives Sabzian to the Ahankhah's house on his motorcycle (in a very long shot—the close-ups seem deliberately saved for Sabzian, not the real Makhmalbaf), and Kiarostami and crew follow in what seems to be the most verité-style shooting of the entire film. But with Kiarostami, nothing is ever what it seems: interviews with the filmmaker reveal that Kiarostami deliberately cut out the sound and masked the silence with a plot device, because Makhmalbaf's conversation was too "sentimental" and "ruined" the ending. Like all of Kiarostami's work, CLOSE-UP is at once a story about an individual and also a collective documentary-fiction about the nature and limits of truth and reality, class struggle, the role of the director and spectator in manipulating narrative...honestly, every time I watch this movie I find new themes emerge. The spiraling nature of the meta-narrative rewards every re-viewing. And much like his other works, CLOSE-UP is both beautiful to watch and beautiful to listen to: each frame and sound is thoughtfully orchestrated and considered. For the rest of his life, Kiarostami talked about CLOSE-UP as his most personal work, and one of his best. This reviewer agrees. (1990, 98 min, 35mm) [Alex Ensign]
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Dariush Mehrjui’s LEILA (Iran) and Marva Nabili’s THE SEALED SOIL (Iran)
Saturday, 12pm (LEILA) and Saturday, 5pm (SEALED SOIL)
Life is often contradictory, so it follows that Leila (Leila Hatami), the title character of Dariush Mehrjui’s LEILA (1997, 102 min, DCP Digital), is herself acting contradictorily when she insists that, having recently discovered that she’s infertile, her husband take another wife in order have a child. For her narration reveals otherwise, that she’s desperately unhappy about her predicament; why, then, does she encourage her husband when it seems he doesn’t want another wife and is okay with not having children? The paradox is tied to that of contemporaneous Iranian society, seemingly having modernized yet still attached to traditions that inherently foreground patriarchal society. Leila and her husband, Reza (Hatami’s husband, Ali Mosaffa; they met while starring in this film), are attractive, middle-class Iranians who are genuinely in love and seem poised to shirk less enlightened ways of living. That is, until Leila discovers she’s infertile and Reza’s mother guilts her into pushing him to take another wife. The duration of the film is this maddening push-pull; one might almost feel frustrated with Leila as she urges her husband to continue meeting eligible women despite claiming not to want kids. But, in the style of much Iranian cinema, there's more than meets the eye: his mother reveals that Reza had asked her and his aunt to pray for them (leading Leila and perhaps us viewers to believe he may be lying to his wife to avoid upsetting her), which he dismisses as having merely been a platitude. This relative elusiveness of who wants what and why sustains two hours of back and forth, and as the walls begin to close around Leila so, too, do they begin to close on us. “By now veiling had gone far beyond a cloth that covered women,” writes Hamid Naficy in A Social History of Iranian Cinema, “it had been internalized as film aesthetic and style.” He then goes on to cite a scene in LEILA wherein the couple have removed their clothes to go to bed, anything verboten (e.g. her hair, their naked bodies). Throughout the high-contrast lighting schema represents a metaphorical split between tradition and modernity, duty and love, society and self. It also further hints at the significance of what’s absent—what’s not being said—against what’s being shown. The last in a trilogy of films by Mehrjui focused on women (the other two are SARA from 1993 and PARI from 1995), the film's reception by those whose mindset it purports to interrogate and against whom society has placed such contradictory expectations is divided. One source suggests its popularity in Iran was in part due to Leila’s selflessness (though the film’s denouement would betray this sentiment) while even more others note that many Iranian women found its scenario to be preposterous. Where Mehrjui’s films often deal with the country’s middle class, Marva Nabili’s THE SEALED SOIL (1977, 91 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration)—the earliest complete, surviving film directed by an Iranian woman—takes place in a poor village in southwest Iran. It’s the opposite in almost every way to LEILA; its protagonist Roo-Bekheir doesn’t want to marry, rejecting potential suitors at every turn. Whether she embraces the monotony of domestic life, which, like the push-pull of LEILA, composes much of the film, is not clear. It's solicited comparison Chantal Akerman’s JEANNE DIELMAN, considering the action, or notable lack thereof, and also because like the Belgian filmmaker’s protagonist there’s an eventual bubbling up of Roo-Bekheir’s suppressed emotions, leading to the villagers having her exorcised (Nabili said in an interview that the man playing the exorcist was one in real life as well). There’s of course a feminist implication to it all, especially as certain scenes find Roo-Bekheir taking off her head scarf and even at one point removing all her clothes, in broad daylight, the antithesis of Mehrjui’s veiled-unveiling of Leila. But like LEILA, there’s contention at play between tradition and modernity, as the village chief works to convince his people to move to government-mandated housing rather than to stay in their rural village, a move that Roo-Bekheir, paradoxically, resists. And also like Leila, there’s a contradiction in Roo-Bekheir’s final actions, further distancing us from any clear-cut understanding of her. Nabili cites Brechtian theory as an influence; as the German playwright said, “The audience must not be allowed to lose themselves in the [text], but must be made to think about what they are seeing.” (At the US premiere of the film at Pacific Film Archive in 1978, where Nabili responded to many ignorant questions about viewers not being able to understand it, she offered up a similar viewpoint, saying, “It's a very demanding film. It's very demanding because you constantly have to put all your concentration on it.”) You’re unlikely to lose yourselves in either of these films, per se, but there's much to be found in what might seem to be missing. [Kat Sachs]
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Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s PERSEPOLIS (France/US/Animation)
Sunday, 5pm
PERSEPOLIS is an animated film of the autobiographical graphic novels by Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian who has been living in self-imposed exile in France for some time, that chronicles Marjane’s life in Tehran under the Western-backed shah, through the Islamic revolution that deposed the shah and on to the strict Islamist government that replaced it. The journey on which Satrapi takes us is both back in time through her life as told in voiceover flashback, and to the echoes of Iran’s ancient capital of Persepolis and its sad fate repeated again in the 20th century AD. The film begins at an airport, where an adult Marjane (voiced by Chiara Mastroianni) is asked for her passport and ticket. She looks dumbfounded at the ticketing agent, then adjusts her veil on her head and walks away. She sits, and the full-color illustration turns black and white as Marjane reminisces about her life. As a child, Marjane (voiced by Gabrielle Lopes) is exuberant and outspoken. Her hero is Bruce Lee. So is her grandmother (voiced by Danielle Darrieux). Her parents (voiced by Catherine Deneuve and Simon Abkarian) are against the shah, who imprisoned Marjane’s Uncle Anouche (voiced by François Jerosme) for being a communist. When the shah is overthrown in 1979, the Satrapis and most of the rest of the country rejoice. Unfortunately, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism brings a different kind of repression to the country. Not only are communists persecuted, but also anyone who challenges the authority of the mullahs and the fundamentalist Muslims who take over the instruments of government. Marjane, still outspoken, takes risks to preserve her former way of life as best she can, advertising that “Punk Is Not Ded” on the back of her jacket. Eventually, worried for Marjane’s safety, her parents send her to stay with a cousin in Vienna. Her time in Europe is unhappy, but her return to Iran leaves her feeling like an alien in her own land. In the end, Marjane leaves Iran for France, probably for good. I had a leg up in understanding Marjane’s story because I had read the remarkable memoir of these very times, Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi, an educated woman and university professor who described poignantly the lot of women under the mullahs and the variety of choices they had to make depending on their level of devoutness and Westernization. None of the horrors Nafisi described are missing from PERSEPOLIS—the waste of the eight-year war with Iraq, the bombed houses, the executions, including the silhouette of a woman standing in front of a hangman’s noose. We also get a bit of a history lesson about the first and second shahs, whose deals with the West to modernize Iran included persecuting dissidents against democracy and Western influence. Perhaps surprisingly, the film is also quite lighthearted. We laugh when Marjane and her friend make fun of an ABBA album in class. When Marjane illustrates her growth spurt, with each part of her body suddenly ballooning and toppling her one way and another, it’s a true revolution in the depiction of puberty. The absurdist-humanist eye that started when Marjane doodled her first caricature is fully developed in the straightforward lines and painful memories she creates for PERSEPOLIS. For Marjane, honesty is the most important value. She betrays that code to save her own skin at one point, bringing down the wrath of her grandmother. “Always be yourself, know yourself,” admonishes her grandmother, who says it’s the only way to endure the lousy facts of life. This sounds like good advice, but to a woman trying to make peace with living in another country that is somewhat hostile to Muslims, clinging steadfastly to her Iranian identity is no small feat. (2007, 96 min, 35mm) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Ana Lily Amirpour's A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT (US)
Tuesday, 6:15pm
Distributor Kino/Lorber has cannily but misleadingly marketed A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT as the "first Iranian vampire western." The film's writer/director, Ana Lily Amirpour, was born in London to Iranian parents and raised in America; it was shot in Bakersfield, California (standing in for a fictional Iranian ghost town named "Bad City"); the cast consists almost entirely of Persian-American actors speaking Farsi; and, aside from a stray spaghetti-western-inflected song or two on the diegetic-heavy soundtrack, the movie bears almost no relationship whatsoever to the western genre. It would be more accurate to describe this stylishly crafted, auspicious debut feature as an adult version of LET THE RIGHT ONE IN—a poignant love story about the coming together of two lonely souls, one of whom just happens to be a vampire. The fact that the titular bloodsucker is a hijab-wearing young woman (the excellent Sheila Vand) who only preys on "bad men" has drawn both political and feminist allegorical readings from critics, although this is arguably giving too much credit to a film whose substance is primarily to be found in its surface pleasures. Still, what a surface. Amirpour and director of photography Lyle Vincent weave a potent alchemical magic with their high-contrast black-and-white cinematography—Amirpour's almost exclusive focus on nighttime exteriors in weird industrial locations (i.e., Bakersfield's oil refineries, factories, and railroad yards) recalls the nightmarish atmosphere of her hero David Lynch's ERASERHEAD but, combined with her impeccable taste in pop-music cues, creates a dreamy/druggy vibe that is both entrancing and wholly her own. It's probably too early to tell whether the movie's weaker second half is the result of Amirpour's failure to build narrative momentum or a byproduct of the fact that her true talents may lie outside the realm of traditional storytelling altogether; A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT's single best moment is a non-sequitur involving a drag-queen dancing with a balloon. In this startling non-narrative sequence, the charm of the choreography between performer and balloon is almost perfectly matched by the charm of the choreography between camera and performer. (2014, 99 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]
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Jafar Panahi's TAXI (Iran)
Tuesday, 8:30pm
Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi is currently under a twenty-year ban from making movies in his home country, but despite this, he has managed to release multiple "secret" films. TAXI finds Panahi playing a dramatized version of himself as he drives passengers (nontraditional actors whose identities are concealed in order to be protected from the government) around Tehran. Utilizing three cameras positioned in the cab plus an iPhone, the setting never leaves the confines of the vehicle. With this setup, the viewer is treated to some impressive long takes and minimal editing that highlight Panahi's skills at mise-en-scène. The tight quarters never feel too claustrophobic thanks to the bounty of ever shifting background images seen through the windows. TAXI manages to poke fun at its secretive, backdoor style when, at one point, Panahi picks up a passenger who specializes in procuring bootlegged copies of films and selling them in back alleys. TAXI never takes itself too seriously and at times is quite funny—it's part drama, part documentary, and part dark comedy. The film's overarching theme of repression is conveyed through a handful of vignettes, as fares come and go for Panahi. Sociologically, Tehran and its denizens are depicted as any other ordinary metropolis and populace, but with the always-present underlying fear of the oppressive regime that rules over them. TAXI is a creative stroke of resourcefulness that manages to encapsulate modern day Iran in an uncompromising way. (2015, 82 min, DCP Digital) [Kyle Cubr]
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Mehrdad Oskouei’s STARLESS DREAMS (Iran/Documentary)
Wednesday, 8:30pm
The New York Timeshas called Mehrdad Oskouei "perhaps Iran's most prominent documentary filmmaker"; his STARLESS DREAMS is a fascinating, deeply attentive look inside a female juvenile-detention ward near Tehran. The spunky young women we meet have all been abused and neglected, often sexually. Many were drug addicts. Ultimately, their criminality flows from the gap between rich and poor. Still, when a girl admits to murdering her abusive father, one notices first her great smile. They're just kids, and Oskouei shows them having snowball fights in the yard. They crack each other up; they're witty, even ironic, about their fates. One ham even commandeers the crew's boom mic, leading a sing-along in the bunk bed-lined dining hall. It's when they open up that we see the depths of their despair. "The pain drips from the walls" here, one says. Oskouei asks one girl, what is your dream? Her response: to die. (He will return to this resilient young woman, and ask her the same question, on the day of her release.) The way he examines power in his society through the prism of an institution, utilizing a "show, don't tell" approach, evokes the Direct Cinema of Frederick Wiseman, as does his thematic concerns with societal misfits and punishment. His eye for the telling detail recalls Albert Maysles, and he shares Maysles' invisible camera style. It's fascinating enough when the girls are aware of the camera—their faces are so expressive—but when their awareness drops away, the level of intimacy is extraordinary. Oskouei is their soft-spoken, offscreen confessor, listening to their heartbreaking stories. Some of these kids have kids themselves, and there's such warmth in visiting day scenes wherein these damaged girls attend tenderly to the babies. Oskouei's aim is "to change how my society and the international community view girls and girl offenders." While the particular marginalization of these Muslim girls may be specific to a culture with different perceptions of gender than ours, this film demonstrates powerfully that the experiences of abused girls are similar the world over. These girls live in a religious, traditional society, true—one that, as Oskouei has drily noted, is "perhaps very similar to the American Midwest." At a time when Trump beats the drums for avoidable war against Iran, we must consider it a part of the resistance to see a film like this one, which crosses cultural boundaries to show that we all share the same basic dream: to live. (2016, 76 min, DCP Digital) [Scott Pfeiffer]
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Panah Panahi's HIT THE ROAD (Iran)
Thursday, 8:30pm
Panah Panahi’s debut as a writer-director bears resemblance to his father Jafar Panahi’s recent feature 3 FACES (2018) in that it’s a seriocomic road movie that considers the difficulties of being a young adult in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The film approaches its concerns obliquely, however, making it an open-ended allegory more in line with certain films by Mohsen Makhmalbaf (THE CYCLIST, THE SILENCE) and Mohammad Rasoulof (IRON ISLAND, THE WHITE MEADOWS). Most of the story follows a family of four on their road trip across a remote, mountainous region of the country. Panahi generates winning humor from the familiar situation of family members trapped in a car with each other’s quirks, and he provides the principal characters with memorable idiosyncrasies. The father, mother, and 20-ish older son each get moments in the dramatic spotlight, but they’re all overshadowed by the family’s six-year-old younger son, a hyperactive brat who goes unpredictably (yet always believably) from being endearing to being obnoxious. Like a lit firecracker, he doesn’t seem to belong inside a moving car—he really ought to be doing sprints up and down the mountains the family keeps passing. The little boy’s liberty stands in sharp contrast to the fate awaiting his older brother, which Panahi starts to intimate around the half-hour mark of HIT THE ROAD, continues to allude to, but never reveals outright. All we ever learn for certain is that the family is delivering him to some group of people—maybe good, maybe bad—in the middle of nowhere. That the character’s future is literally unwritten brings an air of dread to this superficially pleasant movie, and it inspires alarm about whatever hangs in the balance for all of Iran’s young people. Yet in keeping with the poetic tradition of much Iranian art cinema, Panahi buoys the proceedings with plentiful moments of childlike wonder, most vividly in a late sequence that findsfather and bratty tyke literally floating through the cosmos. (2021, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Also screening are Majid Majidi’s 1997 film CHILDREN OF HEAVEN (89 min, DCP Digital) on Saturday at 8pm; Asghar Farhadi’s 2011 film A SEPARATION (123 min, 35mm) on Monday at 5:45pm; and Mohammad Rasoulof’s 2013 filmMANUSCRIPTS DON’T BURN (125 min, DCP Digital) on Monday at 8:15pm. More info here.

Walt Disney's PINOCCHIO (US/Animation)

Music Box Theatre – Monday, 4:30pm and 7:15pm

Where does one begin with PINOCCHIO, the greatest and most durable animated feature produced by the Walt Disney Company? There is the extraordinary creative decision that all movement should follow the example of the crooked, pre-automobile cobblestone streets of Collodi's Italy, with characters constantly pivoting and colliding at odd angles, continually twisting and re-jiggering the space between themselves and the camera. There is the remarkable casting of washed-up vaudevillian Cliff "Ukulele Ike" Edwards (who had lately been cutting pornographic party records with such blunt titles as "Take Out That Thing") as Jiminy Cricket, the puppet boy's literal Conscience, who is crucially both a moral authority and a naïf nearly as fallible as Pinocchio himself. ("Why doesn't Jiminy know how worried Geppetto will be?" asks Roger Ebert. His lovely and logical conclusion: "Maybe crickets don't understand human love.") There is the terrifying scale of Monstro the Whale, a rigorous abstraction to equal anything in FANTASIA and the all-around least cute creature in the Disney canon, abetted by innovative effects animation that masterfully suggests ocean spray. But unsurprisingly, it's the moral education that cuts deepest and lingers longest in PINOCCHIO. The naughty puppet's erect nostril is justly famous, but for me the jaunt to Pleasure Island has no parallel. (The only other sequence that can scare the bejesus out of children so thoroughly is the worship of the Golden Calf in DeMille's Technicolor TEN COMMANDMENTS remake.) The late critic Richard Schickel famously surveyed the specter of butt stuff in the studio's character animation and conjectured that Disney had some sort of rectal fixation, but the kink is more diffuse and mysterious in PINOCCHIO. The boys are initiated by a nameless, burly pederast with an alcoholic's maroon nose, spirited away to a run-down amusement park of pre-pubescent delights. Through an alchemy that remains unexplained, the boys slowly, then suddenly, adopt the ears and tails of donkeys, braying a donkey's HEE-haaaaaw into the thick night air. The dirty old man herds the donkeyboys into cages and earmarks them for salt mine slavery and circus chicanery, as if donkeys were ever so rare as to justify an industrial-scale bootlegging operation. Watching this sequence again as an adult, you get the unmistakable sense that the evil coachmaster doesn't so much need the donkeys or the money they'll fetch on the black market; he just gets off on the sense of irrevocable violation. When Pinocchio's ne'er-do-well buddy Lampwick tugs at his friend's shoulders and discovers only hooves, his horror is ours—the impotence that knows no expression, the stolen manhood that will never be restored. I don't know if I learned the right lessons from PINOCCHIO, but I tell you this: I've never so much as picked up a cigar. Nota bene: the Disney vault giveth and taketh away. PINOCCHIO played on nearly 2,000 screens when it was restored in 1992, but 35mm screenings today are few and far between. This edition is especially noteworthy as among the last Disney restorations that stopped short of buffing out film grain and eliminating cel shadows, the unforgivable indication that these corporate evergreens were once assembled by human hands. PINOCCHIO simply looks stupendous in 35mm—none of the video editions come close. These screenings are free and available to Music Box Theatre members only. (1940, 88 min, 35mm) [K.A. Westphal]

Michael Snow’s WAVELENGTH (Canada/US/Experimental)

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

“A perfect example of the cinema of stillness,” wrote Amos Vogel in Film as a Subversive Art, “[WAVELENGTH] weaves its charms so subtly that those who come to scoff remain transfixed. A speculation on the essence of the medium and, inevitably, of reality, the real protagonist of this film is the room itself, the private life of a world without man, the sovereignty of objects and physical events.” The room in question is Michael Snow’s Manhattan loft studio; the film begins with a wide-angle shot of the main living area and ends, without the camera ever changing position, with a close-up of a picture on a wall in between two sets of windows. (Stanley Kubrick paid tribute to the film’s conclusion at the end of THE SHINING [1980].) The imperceptibly slow zoom inward is the movie’s chief event, and it dwarfs the significance of whatever human beings appear in front of the camera. A few people do turn up in WAVELENGTH, yet they enter and exit fairly quickly, and Snow presents them in such a withholding manner as to render all human activity banal, even the onscreen death of a random man and the subsequent discovery of his corpse. The unrelenting nature of Snow’s style has a lot to do with the movie’s hypnotic charge, and the unique soundtrack adds to this effect. Snow created the eerie extended glissando with an audio oscillator; the noise heightens the film’s abstract quality, keying your attention to the formal construction. Snow devised WAVELENGTH in 18 segments, with each one determined by a different position of the zoom lens. This plan, which allows for a predetermined form to guide the content, makes the film a perfect example of structuralist cinema too. Screening with Snow’s 1976 short BREAKFAST (TABLE TOP DOLLY) (15 min, 16mm) as part of the Back and Forth, Around and Around: Michael Snow on 16mm series. (1967, 16mm) [Ben Sachs]

Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham & Rachel Szor’s NO OTHER LAND (Norway/Palestine/Documentary)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

“This is a story about power.” Basel Adra, a lifelong resident of the Masafer Yatta region of the West Bank, speaks these words to cap off a story about former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s visit to the region, a visit that—while perhaps nothing more than a publicity stunt—resulted in the IDF's previously scheduled demolitions of Palestinian schools and homes to be called off. But this film, NO OTHER LAND, is also a story about power, about needless emotional and physical damage, about the constant barrage of senseless destruction of peoples’ livelihoods that so many around the world have either become desensitized to or have found labyrinthine methods of justifying to themselves this continued degradation of humanity. The framework of the onscreen narrative stretches from the summer of 2019 through October of 2023, and it focuses on the growing friendship between two of the film’s directors: the aforementioned Basel and Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist who has arrived to learn more about the continuing Israeli mission of Palestinian subjugation. The footage we see is, at the very least, rage-inducing: homes and schools and entire villages senselessly bulldozed to oblivion, supposedly for the flimsy excuse of being turned into “military zones.” The ensuing carnage and accompanying attitudes perpetrated by the Israeli soldiers captured on film oscillates between “duty-bound” apathy or entitled machismo, in one instance resulting in a soldier shooting and paralyzing a friend of Basel’s, Harun Abu Aram. The law is, indeed, on the side of the Israelis, so why should these Palestinian children be so upset when their homes are destroyed in broad daylight when it’s perfectly “legal” to do so? The filmmakers make a point to highlight the intentional existential ploy being pulled off here, where Israelis can come and go as they please throughout the West Bank, whereas Palestinians are legally bound to the region and otherwise othered in all aspects of Israeli society (Basel notes, despite having a law degree, he would only realistically be able to find a job as a construction worker were he to move to Israel). Throughout it all—perhaps to actively combat it all—there are still laughs shared among family members, there are still games played in the snow during winter, and the children still play and swing around and try to find some semblance of joy amidst their displacement. Underneath the political mire of the “complicated” banner so often thrown at the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, there are simply families wanting to share a meal together, mothers caring for sons, fathers keeping businesses afloat, and countless young people staring at their phones, because what else is there? That the directing team is comprised of both Israelis and Palestinians points towards some kind of hopeful future where a shared understanding of the horrors at hand can be truly realized (some of the more noteworthy and thorny passages arise when various Palestinians question Yuval’s own complicity in the continued settlements of the region, though the film leaves these points dangling rather than digging deeper, for better or worse). Additionally, that the film failed to find US theatrical distribution, while still receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature, speaks to how open endorsement for Palestinian rights tends to only go so far. Perhaps the true power of NO OTHER LAND, and of this entire story, is the continued resilience and drive in Palestinians capturing the reality on the ground and urgently spreading the truth as far as possible. Here, the camera proves mightier than the sword. (2024, 96 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Malt Adult presents Experimental Animations by Chinese and Chinese American Animators

Chinese American Museum of Chicago (238 W. 23rd St.) – Wednesday, 6pm

Chicago’s experimental animation series Malt Adult is teaming up with the Chinese American Museum of Chicago to present an animated shorts program featuring emerging Chinese and Chinese American animators, followed by a conversation between some of the featured artists, artist and scholar Larry Lee, and author Karen Fang. Jordan Wong’s I WOULD’VE BEEN HAPPY (2023, 9 min) is a highly stylized and masterfully scored stop-motion animation made from shuffling ceramic tiles and a quilt imprinted with line drawings of stylized domestic spaces. Weaving together touching conversations between the filmmaker’s mom and brother, the film pieces together fragments and traces of an absent dad. Memories collide and chip like the tiles and are as fragile. Leilei Xia topples the owner-pet hierarchy in CAT (2017, 4 min), which portrays the filmmaker’s art teacher’s soul-bounding relationships with two cats who used to hang around his neighbor’s balcony. In the animation, the protagonist is a reticent cat person who prefers solitude, and the cats are rubicund cherubs who look out for their designated caretaker. Xingpei Shen’s navel-gazing, surrealist LOTUS LANTERN (2017, 7 min) mixes the phantasmagoria of Suzan Pitt’s ASPARAGUS (1979), the eerie melancholy of De Chirico’s paintings, and pop songs from the 1930s by China’s “Golden Voice” Zhou Xuan to unveil a queer protagonist’s teeming desire for love and beauty. Dian Liang’s simple yet sufficiently psychedelic SPARKY (2018, 5 min), clocked at precisely four minutes and twenty seconds if you know what I mean, fluidly depicts a tripping mind that free-associates as the animation morphs from one frame to the next. I think I see a bunch of bacteria having a shopping spree party around the tongue and the teeth. The point is not to make sense but to stress the importance of having a toothbrush. It’s hard to tell if Hailing Liu is trying to parody the United Nations or celebrate ice cream in THE FIRST UNITED ICE CREAM ASSEMBLY CLOSES TODAY (2020, 3 min), a mock news broadcast that announces the closure of a fictional international organization that overcomes tastebud preferences to unite ice cream flavors. Haomin Peng animates a Chinese philo professor’s Zizek-esque intense monologue about Bill Viola’s time-stopping videos in the fast-paced, high-energy spectacle TIME! TIME! TIME! (2018, 2 min). There are also a few music videos with magnetic visuals, such as Qianwen Yu’s animated woven patterns for rock band Melkbelly’s catchy LCR (2020, 3 min), and Jiaqi Tang’s low-poly, bizarre, handless avatar rapping lovesickness in the artist’s own composition STARLIGHT (2023, 3 min), full of sass and swag. Also screening are Margaret Wang's CASEY (2024, 2 min) and a surprise selection from Yana Pan. Followed by a post-screening conversation with some of the featured animators, local Chinese American artist and scholar Larry Lee, and Karen Fang, author of Background Artist: The Life and Work of Tyrus Wong. [Nicky Ni]

Howard Hawks' BRINGING UP BABY (US)

Music Box Theatre – Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am

A box-office flop when it was released in 1938, Howard Hawks' screwball comedy has since gained classic status. Cary Grant takes a nerdy turn as David Huxley, a klutzy paleontologist reluctantly wooed by flaky socialite Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn). The baby is, of course, a pet leopard that unwittingly brings the two together. As is typical of the genre, the pair is mismatched, the banter is rapid-fire and full of double entendres, and the plot leads to a variety of slapstick situations in WASPy locales (the Connecticut countryside). Stanley Cavell likens the structure to a "comedy of equality" in its refusal to exclusively identify either of its leads as the hero or the "active partner" in quest. There's some truth to that sense of romantic parity, but more simply, what we have here is a kooky woman relentlessly pursuing a strait-laced man. Call it the anti-KNOCKED UP. Here, love equals the triumph of the quirky and childlike over the proper and adult. Also of note: reputedly, Grant's ad-libbed line, "I just went gay all of a sudden!," is among the first filmic usages of the word in a homosexual context. Screening as part of the Silver Fox: Howard Hawks Matinees series. (1938, 102 min, 35mm) [Martin Stainthorp]

Raoul Ruiz’s LOVE TORN IN A DREAM (France/Portugal/Chile)

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

One of the most Ruizian titles also belongs to one of the most Ruizian movies. LOVE TORN IN A DREAM is all about playing with narratives as though they were toys; the first several minutes even set up rules for the game the movie is about to play. The film starts by introducing nine different premises, whose settings range from the 17th century to the present. Not only will Ruiz cut between these nine stories; he will sometimes have characters interact with characters from other stories, and, to make matters even more complicated, the same actors will play multiple characters across multiple plots. The deliberate formal construction of LOVE TORN IN A DREAM recalls Julio Cortázar’s postmodern novel Hopscotch as well as various plays by Alan Ayckbourn (e.g., Bedroom Farce, Home and Garden), but the tone and content are pure Ruiz, touching on perennial themes of religion, fantasy, and outrageous coincidence. One of the stories involves a magic mirror that has curative powers for whoever looks at it; another involves a ridiculously protracted debate between two theologians. Pirates, cannibals, and erotic temptresses also factor into the proceedings; the sole storyline set in the present—about a man who discovers a website that tells him everything that will happen in his life the next day—feels like an update of something in Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales. Though he made it with mostly French actors, Ruiz shot LOVE TORN IN A DREAM in Sintra, a municipality in the greater Lisbon region that’s known for its castles and other architectural marvels dating back to the 12th century. My guess is that producer Paulo Branco (who’s Portuguese) suggested he shoot there, but it’s clear how Sintra would appeal to Ruiz’s literary imagination. It doesn’t take much movie magic to make the area seem like something out of a fairy tale or Gothic fiction; still, Ruiz takes full advantage of the locations to make all the narratives feel like they exist out of time altogether. Special mention, as always, should be made to Ruiz’s collaborator and wife Valeria Sarmiento, who edited the picture. How in the world does this make any sense, let alone flow so poetically? Screening as part of the Love Torn in a Dream: The Illusory Odysseys of Raúl Ruiz series. (2000, 122 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Kyle Henry’s TIME PASSAGES (US/Documentary)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday, 6pm, Saturday, 2:30pm, and Sunday, 3pm
Block Cinema (at Northwestern University) – Thursday, 7pm

Many films came (and are still coming) out from the early days of Covid lockdowns, a time when, amid international turmoil, filmmakers had to navigate drastic changes in how they created and released work. Smaller-scale films boomed out of necessity, and experimental and nonfiction filmmakers became even more reliant on the time-honored traditions of archival filmmaking. For filmmaker Kyle Henry, these aesthetic restrictions drove the structure of his new film TIME PASSAGES, a testament to his mother Elaine. She spent the last years of her life in a nursing home, struggling with dementia and not able to see family in person due to Covid lockdown restrictions. As anyone who has lost a loved one to dementia can tell you, it’s a slow-dawning sort of grief, a loss spread over time that merely hits an apex when the person is actually gone. Because Henry’s relationship with his mother was interrupted twofold, he made TIME PASSAGES as an attempt to recreate the woman in aggregate from older interviews he'd conducted with her, screengrabs of their Facetime conversations from the nursing facility, and other bits both found and invented. The nonlinear timeline of the material puts different parts of her life in stark contrast, showing just how much Elaine lost of herself in her later years. But the material is more celebratory than not; she was a unique woman, outspoken and both a nurturer and breadwinner for Kyle’s family. Even in her later days one can see her warm spirit, with Kyle’s calls (particularly when he sings with her) excavating the real person, much like he’s attempting to do in his archival pulls. One of the film’s stranger gambits involves Henry dressing up as his mom to “interview” her, trying to imagine how she might have responded to the numerous conversations they never got to have before she passed. There’s a palpable grief to these recreations, a pained searching because of just how close these conversations could have been to happening if not for the ravages of time and disease. This is where Henry gets the most direct in confronting documentary ethics, particularly the question of whether this type of portrait is really fair to a person who can’t advocate for themselves anymore. But in a roundabout way, Henry is still the primary subject of the film; these are his stacked griefs, and the film’s aesthetic messiness is not just an essay film byproduct but an intentional reflection of a man trying to organize his own memory. As an ode to the desire to know ourselves by truly knowing those we love, it’s a beautifully sincere film. Henry will be in attendance at all screenings. At the Film Center: On Friday, Henry will be joined by Zahna Woodson (they/she), Regional Organizing Manager for Caring Across Generations; on Saturday, by Margaret LaRaviere and Stacy Subida, Chicago Department of Family & Support Services - Senior Services; and on Sunday, by Amy Brennan, Illinois Family Caregiver Coalition (co-presented with AgeOptions). At Block: A reception will be held in the Block Museum lobby at 6pm. Following the screening, Ines Sommer (Director of the Pritzker Pucker Studio Lab) will moderate a discussion with Henry, and guests Ai-jen Poo (President, National Domestic Workers Alliance & Executive Director, Caring Across Generations) and Northwestern Professor of Psychology Dan McAdams. (2024, 86 min, DCP Digital) [Maxwell Courtright]

Atom Egoyan’s THE ADJUSTER (Canada)

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

Like Soderbergh’s SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE (1989), only odder and more Canadian, Atom Egoyan’s breakout fourth feature looks at sexual perversity as a means of considering perversity in general. All the major characters in THE ADJUSTER exhibit some kind of compulsive behavior involving sex, and the fact that all of them are kinky in some way becomes a marvelous joke, the moral of the movie being that nothing could be more ordinary than being weird. Playing with space the way he would play with time in his later movies, Egoyan cuts between the lives of a handful of characters in a nondescript suburban sprawl, waiting a while to show them together so that their relationship is at first a mystery. (It’s a narrative strategy that Tsai Ming-liang would start to use a few years after this was made.) Elias Koteas plays the title character, an insurance company agent who helps clients rebuild their lives after they lose their homes in accidents; he ends up sleeping with all his clients (a nod to TEOREMA?) at the same nondescript motel where all the employees know him by name. He rarely sees his wife (played by Egoyan’s wife, Arsinée Khanjian), who works at the government censorship office. Her job is to preview films containing extreme acts of sex and violence to determine what label to brand them with; she secretly videotapes what she screens and brings it home to her sister, with whom she has an exceedingly close bond. And then there’s the wealthy husband and wife who don’t know what else to do with their money than to act out elaborate sex fantasies, one of which involves renting out the entire York University football team. THE ADJUSTER is essentially a chamber drama, but Egoyan shot it in widescreen to play up the characters’ alienation from one another. It’s an effective technique, allowing you to feel what the movie is saying before Egoyan announces it more directly. Screening as part of the Lust & Intrigue: Erotic Thrillers series. (1991, 102 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

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Nobuhiko Obayahi's HOUSE (HAUSU) (Japan)

Music Box Theatre – Friday, Midnight

It's a film like HOUSE, a film so manic, so bewildering and so singular, that makes one become obsessed with its genesis. The film's abrupt stylistic shifts and bizarre visual effects fill one's mind with but one question: "Who the hell made this movie?" It would surprise no one then to learn that Nobuhiko Obayashi was an experimental filmmaker—nor would it surprise anyone that he made TV ads—previous to HOUSE. What is surprising is that his forays into experimental films were lyrical psychodramas more akin to Gregory Markopoulos than, say, Pat O'Neill. CONFESSION (1968) is Obayashi's most visually complex experimental work, and even that only uses creative editing between shots and the occasional unorthodox camera angle. HOUSE's genius lies in its veritable catalogue of optical effects, displaying a virtuosity previously unseen from its maker. And yet, the film is more than just a sum of its traveling matte parts. True, its paper-thin plot does serve only to move from one novel death to the next, but this is the essence of many horror films. Like some giddy, crazed, superior version of THE ABOMINABLE DR PHIBES (1971), HOUSE provides a fat-trimmed index of inventive ways to die, all with tongue placed firmly in cheek. (1977, 88 min, 35mm) [Doug McLaren]

Andrei Tarkovsky's THE SACRIFICE (Sweden)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

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, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [James Stroble]

Wong Kar-wai's THE GRANDMASTER (Hong Kong/China)

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

While Wong Kar-wai has been a darling of Western critics and cinephiles for much of his career, his movies have been regarded as arty and pretentious specialty items back home in Hong Kong. The reversal of this trend with THE GRANDMASTER may be explained by its China-centric qualities, namely its deep exploration of Chinese identity and history and the philosophical side of kung-fu. Western critics lamented the film’s “patchwork” quality (it is certainly the most elliptical thing Wong has ever made), and they have a point. But to paraphrase something André Bazin wrote about THE DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST, THE GRANDMASTER's narrative awkwardness is the price Wong pays for something more important; for, while it may not be as “perfect” as beloved earlier films like CHUNGKING EXPRESS (1994) or IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (2000), its thematic richness makes it more profound than either. THE GRANDMASTER definitely seems like the digest of a much longer movie: the plot unfolds as a series of self-contained vignettes in the life of Ip Man (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, charismatic as ever), a real kung-fu master who immigrated from southern mainland China to Hong Kong in the mid-20th century, single-handedly popularized the minimalistic fighting style known as Wing Chun, and became Bruce Lee’s first teacher (yes, an adorable moppet turns up as young Bruce in the final scene). Each scene feels like a narrative block that has been separated from the ones that precede and follow it by several years, sometimes with only intertitles supplying crucial missing information. Characters who seem like they will be important (like Ip’s wife and a mysterious barber/martial artist known as “Razor,” played by Song Hye-kyo and Chang Chen, respectively) pop up for a scene or two, make a big impression, then vanish for the rest of the movie. The second most important character is Gong Er (an excellent Zhang Ziyi), the daughter of a kung-fu master from the North, who, in a parallel narrative, attempts to avenge her father’s murder and shares feelings of mutually unrequited love with Ip. Unrequited love has long been a pet theme of Wong’s, but the characters’ emotions here, however moving, are not the film’s reason for being. They are instead the byproducts of a fascinating allegory about the paths different Chinese people took in dealing with social upheaval and adapting to exile during a specific period in history. Wong has always been concerned with preserving the past, and the importance of preserving the past becomes the explicit theme of THE GRANDMASTER, as Wong uses kung-fu as a metaphor for Chinese culture in general—the “grandmaster” Ip is a teacher who passes along traditions and thus allows his cultural heritage to perpetuate. One of the most important scenes shows how Gong Er’s father, Gong Yutian (Wang Qingxiang), is incapable of teaching his traitorous disciple, Ma San (Zhang Jin), a particular kung-fu move that involves the act of “looking back.” Ma San soon colludes with occupying Japanese forces and thus symbolizes disrespect of tradition and sacrifice of one’s integrity in order to survive. Gong Yutian informs Ma San that he will never attain the highest level of martial arts—the ability to “see humanity,” which follows “seeing oneself” and “seeing the world.” By contrast, Ip and Gong Er are able to maintain their ideals and live in exile in Hong Kong—although their differing philosophies ensure that they meet different destinies. Gong Er betrays her father’s wish in seeking vengeance for his death and allows herself to become mired in pessimism and opium addiction. Ip, however, has the ability to look forward and backward simultaneously; his essential optimism—even in the face of overwhelming suffering (two of his daughters starve to death, and he and his wife are separated from each other against their wishes)—ensures that he alone among the film’s characters is able to “see humanity,” and that his Wing Chun school in Hong Kong will flourish. The final scenes are among the most mature that Wong has created. The action was choreographed by the great Yuen Woo-Ping, and part of the fun of watching these characters fight is seeing how their personalities are expressed through different fighting styles: the clever and humble Ip’s brand of Wing Chun is based on the precise execution of a few effective blows, while the more petulant Gong Er is the last remaining practitioner of the maximalist style known as “64 hands.” Wong, working with his longtime editor (and production/costume designer) William Chang, as well as collaborating for the first time with cinematographer Phillipe Le Sourd, breaks with martial-arts movie tradition by capturing the fights not with long takes and wide shots but by using close-ups, varying film speeds, fast cuts, and a shallow depth of field. (This last aspect has the effect of turning everything in front of the camera lens—drops of water, icicles, Zhang Ziyi’s porcelain skin—into a fetish object.) The breathtaking visuals, aided by bone-crunching sound effects, make each fight—especially the instant classic train-station climax involving Gong Er and Ma San—a master class in filmmaking. Note: There are three different versions of THE GRANDMASTER. The Doc Films website lists that they will be showing the 111-minute cut. Screening as part of the “Martial” Arts series. (2013, 111 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]

Carl Theodor Dreyer's THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (France/Silent)

St. Vincent de Paul Paris (1010 W. Webster) – Friday, 7:30pm

Praised effusively upon its release by critics who instantly regarded it as a belated vindication for the whole art of cinema (do seek out Harry Alan Potamkin's review), THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC was also recognized as the capstone of an expiring medium. This is a proudly silent movie, one that integrates the intertitle into its rhythm better and more comprehensively than any other example I can name. (Astonishingly, rather than interrupting the flow of Dreyer's breakneck montage, the titles actually serve as graphic punctuation.) It's also a perverse one—stripped down to essentials, focusing on faces even though Dreyer's investors paid for enormous and authentic sets barely glimpsed in the finished film. When we see a man in very modern-looking glasses in the final sequences, this possible anachronism registers as something else: Dreyer and Falconetti have truly created a living Joan, larger than liturgy and beatification and indeed, larger than her own time. The film itself was not so lucky. Its original cut lost in a fire, with a subsequent recut lost in another fire, PASSION played for many years in a version cobbled together from outtakes. (Appropriately enough, an original print of the first Danish version turned up in a mental hospital in the 1980s.) Featuring live organ accompaniment by Jay Warren of the Silent Film Society of Chicago. (1928, 82 min, Digital Projection) [K.A. Westphal]

Ondi Timoner’s DIG! XX (US/Documentary)

Music Box Theatre – Sunday and Tuesday, 6:30pm

Originally released in 2004, when it won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film festival, DIG! XX is a 20th anniversary extended cut of Ondi Timoner’s documentary, which followed the bands the Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre between the years 1996 and 2003. Originally filmed to be part of a larger doc following 10 different bands, the filmmakers realized that there was more than enough going on with these two to focus their attention wholly. On its release this film was an immediate cult classic. A viral film of the old school dubbed VHS (and then brand-new burned DVD) variety, DIG! was passed around between musicians and music scenesters as a kind of modern mix of the Rolling Stones/Robert Frank film COCKSUCKER BLUES (1970) and THIS IS SPINAL TAP (1984). By the time the film was released, the Dandy Warhols had pretty much risen and fell in the mercurial world of rock’n’roll revival/garage rock, so it was fascinating to get an inside peek behind the curtain of a careerist indie band trying desperately to get signed and get big knowing that they had already been cast aside by the record industry machine. The parallels between them and their frenemies the Brian Jonestown Massacre (BJM), the rock critic and A&R rep intelligentsia’s darlings, made for an incredible film. While the Dandies did everything they could to sell out, BJM—led by the drug-addicted, alcoholic, increasingly mad, and by all accounts more talented Anton Newcombe—did everything they could to self-sabotage while multiple record labels courted them. We see the Dandies get signed to Capitol records and make a $400,000 music video while BJM writes and records an entire LP in a week after getting demo time from an A&R rep and immediately blow a major label record deal with outrageous demands. DIG! was the perfect documentation of the last days of actual “indie” music, when the term was changing from having a socioeconomic and cultural meaning into a bastardized, amorphous musical subgenre. It also proved that if you film drunks and addicts long enough, you’ll get some infinitely quotable lines. I can’t possibly recall the amount of times in the late ‘00s I heard someone shout “You broke my sitar, motherfucker!” at a 3am after show party when something got knocked over or “I don’t do anything wrong, that’s why I don't say I’m sorry” after spilling beer everywhere while loading music gear into a van. This new 20th anniversary cut adds an additional 35 minutes of footage to the mix, as well as added narration by BJM member Joel Gion—the Bez/Bosstone-esque “band member”-cum-stage mascot of the band. While the original, solely narrated by Dandies lead singer Courtney Taylor-Taylor, focused on the increasingly scary and dangerous dissolution of the two bands' friendships, DIG! XX understands that BJM were the breakout stars of the original and mainly focuses on them. In 2004 the Dandies were the selling point of the film. In 2024, it's BJM. There’s a bit of “what happened after” explanations and more focus on Newcombe’s descent into substance-induced madness. While a lot of the additional footage feels like it could have been relegated to physical media bonus feature material, if getting this cut puts this film back in theatres and the public eye it’s well worth it. While all films become documentary as time passes, documentaries sometimes become about something different. Seeing this now, it’s no longer just about two bands trying to make it, it’s also about the music industry just before its complete collapse due to file sharing. It’s a look at a world that absolutely no longer exists; one that has more in common with 1974 than 2024. It’s about the bands and a scene that everyone was talking about saving rock’n’roll that never became the White Stripes or the Strokes or the Black Keys. It's about a time when even the most alcohol-soaked maniac with a guitar had to reckon with the idea of “selling out” and be prepared to have a defense for doing so. Dave Grohl appears at the beginning of this new cut (because he is The Last Rocker™, after all) explaining why this is “the greatest rock’n'roll documentary of all time.” While I generally roll my eyes anytime he appears in yet another music documentary that has nothing to do with him, this time I rolled my eyes while begrudgingly thinking that he just might be right. (2024, 147 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]

Tony Paterson’s CENTRESPREAD (Australia)

Alamo Drafthouse – Wednesday, 9:30pm

“Warning: All data contrary to the interests of social stability not to be processed.” Not to be confused with a 2025 White House memo, this ominous text launches us into the dystopian, computer-controlled world of Tony Paterson’s CENTRESPREAD. In this rigidly stratified society, the only outlet for darker impulses is through violence and sex showcased in a magazine run by the all-powerful Central computer. CENTRESPREAD dives headfirst into the seedy underbelly of Australia’s media industry, wrapped in the sweat-slicked aesthetic of Ozploitation cinema. It’s a melancholic fever dream—part sci-fi parable, part soft-focus erotica, and wholly detached dystopia. You half expect a booming voiceover to announce, “The future is now... and it’s very lonely.” It’s a hazy meditation on male disempowerment, artistic rebellion, and sex as both currency and illusion. The film simultaneously critiques and exploits its subject matter, making it as prescient as it is indulgent. Watching it is like flipping through a men’s magazine from the late ’70s: titillating, garish, and uncomfortably revealing about human nature. While not a global success, CENTRESPREAD remains a cornerstone of Australian erotic cinema. The film weaves a critique of female commodification into its Ozploitation era sultry narrative. Our protagonist, photographer Gerard (Paul Trahir), is assigned by Central to find a model embodying “a new look, a different approach, someone for a new century.” After a sequence of stylized, hyper-sexualized photoshoots, Gerard randomly encounters Niki (Kylie Foster), who works in an antique shop. Gerard, intrigued by her authenticity, tempts her with the status and glamour of modeling for Central. As their connection deepens, Niki begins to consider a future she never envisioned. Visually, CENTRESPREAD is a masterclass in Ozploitation aesthetics. Its glossy, hyper-stylized imagery contrasts with the bleak reality of its characters. The magazine’s pages construct an idealized femininity that masks the exploitation beneath. Soft lighting and intimate close-ups manufacture a sense of closeness that is ultimately artificial. The color palette is deliberately garish, evoking the excess of the era. The sterile, clinical magazine office starkly contrasts with the sensual world of the models, a visual metaphor for the disconnect between polished illusion and grim reality. Gerard operates in a world where sex is omnipresent yet meaningless, reduced to a government-sanctioned product. He captures women engineered to fit an impossible standard, their sexuality refined into an airbrushed simulation. But Niki disrupts this order—she is human in a world of mannequins. Through her, Gerard realizes that real desire cannot be processed through the cold lens of his camera. CENTRESPREAD borrows from the Pygmalion trope, and in its strange, hypnotic way, it works. Most Ozploitation films depict men as brutish, brawling figures, yet here, they are domesticated by a soulless culture machine. Meanwhile, women exist under an aesthetic dictatorship—desired but depersonalized, displayed but never truly known. Paterson, a seasoned editor, crafts the film with a painterly touch, using long, languorous shots, ethereal lighting, and mirrors to emphasize themes of illusion and control. Geoffrey Simpson’s cinematography shifts between airbrushed magazine-style compositions and the sterile bleakness of a future dictated by technology. CENTRESPREAD simultaneously celebrates and condemns its aesthetic. It lingers on female bodies while critiquing industry objectification, creating an ironic loop of self-awareness. Paterson never directed another film, adding to CENTRESPREAD’s ephemeral quality. It feels like a relic from an imagined future—a dream of the 21st century that never quite materialized, or maybe one still yet to come. Screening as part of Weird Wednesdays. (1981, 82 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]

Tarsem Singh's THE FALL (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm and Saturday, 9:30pm

Escape into fantasy is so often a result of harsh, unjust, and violent realities. In Tarsem Singh’s ambitious film THE FALL, the clash of fantasy and reality is explored throughout. This tension could also be connected to the film’s production and release. With shooting locations in multiple continents, THE FALL contains fantasy sequences, all of them breathtaking set pieces, in places and structures that do in fact exist, which blurrs the lines between fiction and reality. These scenes are stunningly color saturated, shot with graphic precision, and beautiful expansive vistas; its visuals are consistently astounding. Its ambition, however, was considered a self-indulgence of director Tarsem Singh (THE CELL), and its fragmented and loose storytelling was criticized. In considering its themes, as well as the real-world response to the film, the narrative is quite smart in its self-awareness. In 1915, movie stuntman Roy Walker (a dreamy Lee Pace) has the job of creating fantasy on film, yet is severely injured on set. Bedridden and depressed in the hospital, he befriends a little girl with a broken arm, Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), with whom he begins to share an epic tale of heroes and villains. The story comes alive in her mind, the characters built from the real-life figures within the Los Angeles hospital. She also humorously interrupts Roy with the curiosity and distraction of a typical child, and Untaru’s performance is captured with heartbreaking earnestness. As the confined Roy realizes he can use Alexandria’s trust and innocence to his advantage, both characters' own harrowing stories become entwined with the fantasy. THE FALL is also noteworthy for the costume design by Japanese artist Eiko Ishioka, who worked with Singh on all of his films until her passing in 2012. Costumes from this film are truly masterpieces, shocking in their beauty, form, and storytelling. The costumes especially, but the film as a whole inspires such a desire to see more, and, like Alexandria, to reside in the fantasy. But, as she laments to Roy, “You always stop at the same part when it’s very beautiful… and interesting.” Screening as part of the Inner Voyages series. (2006, 119 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Sergio Corbucci's DJANGO (Italy)

Music Box Theatre – Wednesday, 7pm

The first in Italian director Sergio Corbucci’s unofficial Mud and Blood trilogy (followed by THE GREAT SILENCE and THE SPECIALISTS), DJANGO certainly has a lot of both. Corbucci was noted for his violent Westerns—this one especially, as it was banned in several countries for its excessive brutality—hence the latter substance of the trilogy’s fitting sobriquet. The former is also prevalent in the film, as the setting along the border between the US and Mexico is caked in muck. It’s through the sodden mud that the titular gunslinger (Franco Nero, who was to become as iconic as the film itself), a former Union soldier still donning his uniform pants, drags a wooden coffin; a poetic touch, inspired by a comic book the director had seen on a newsstand. The film opens with Django, coffin in tow, coming across a prostitute, María (Loredana Nusciak), as she’s assaulted first by a group of Mexican revolutionaries and then by some Confederate Red Shirts. The film’s opening foreshadows the conflicts faced by Django himself, who’s targeted by the leader of the Red Shirts and eventually enters into a tentative, albeit illusory, partnership with the Mexican revolutionaries, whom he convinces to steal some Confederate gold. Django is ultimately loyal only to himself, though he also has begrudging affection for the lovestruck María. There are economical shootouts involving Django’s machine gun, which comprises the contents of his ubiquitous coffin; the leader of the Mexican revolutionaries cuts off a Red Shirt’s ear and feeds it to him; and the final showdown, the details of which I won’t reveal here, is hands down one of the most violent set pieces I’ve ever seen. The political violence is caustic too, from the Red Shirts’ Klan-like racism to the nebulous characterization of the Mexican revolutionaries (Corbucci made a few Zapata Westerns, so presumably he was sympathetic to them, but the Mexican characters are nevertheless complicit in the pervasive violence here) to the way the female characters, María and the other prostitutes, are treated by the men. No one is spared, and no one is saved. Luis Bacalov and Rocky Roberts’ theme song asks questions of the Kurosawa-esque protagonist, offering up only a hollow adage that life must go on. While many spaghetti Westerns were shot in Technicolor, this was shot on Eastmancolor; aesthetically the film’s sober color palette complements the dispiriting tone. Screening as part of the Mud, Blood, & Marinara: Spaghetti Westerns series, presented in collaboration with DePaul University's School of Cinematic Arts and preceded by an introduction from Andrew Stasiulis, faculty member at DePaul University’s School of Cinematic Arts. (1966, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Takashi Miike's AUDITION (Japan)

Alamo Drafthouse – Tuesday, 9:30pm

AUDITION may have been Takashi Miike’s international breakthrough, but it’s an uncharacteristic work in several respects. When Miike is at his freewheeling best (as in DEAD OR ALIVE 2: BIRDS, THE HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS, or DETECTIVE STORY), he’ll change a film’s tonal register repeatedly over the course of the running time; AUDITION, on the other hand, contains only one significant shift in tone. Many of Miike’s other features abound with outlandish humor as well as gruesome violence, but (save for a humorous montage that occurs fairly early) AUDITION abounds only with violence. In terms of style, Miike often likes to alternate between long takes and brisk montage; this film favors the former over the latter. AUDITION is also one of the only Miike features (of which there are now over 100) that can be said to tackle issues of sexual politics and gender roles; his work is usually too absurd to connect to real-world concerns. Still, AUDITION is thoroughly Miike-esque in the devilish glee with which it provokes its viewers. That big shift—from muted drama to grisly horror—is one of the great surprises in modern movies, and it plays like a tramcar veering wildly in a dark funhouse. Miike restrains himself for the movie’s first half, seldom moving the camera and developing a gentle (albeit occasionally wry) tone. The movie promises to be a subdued, if eccentric tale of a 60-ish widower, Aoyama, who gets persuaded to look for a new wife—until the story becomes something totally different. Aoyama pretends to be a producer holding auditions for a fake movie, videotaping women talking about themselves under the assumption they’ll be cast in the lead role. He comes to pay for this ruse and then some, experiencing emotional manipulation and ultimately torture at the hands of the woman he picks to be his bride. His comeuppance is excruciating, yet also bleakly funny, representing an ironic reversal not only of the audience’s narrative expectations, but also what they might think a straight man can get away with. Screening as part of the Terror Tuesday series. (1999, 115 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Brady Corbet's THE BRUTALIST (US/UK/Hungary)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

Poised high atop the crest of a wave of giddy anticipation and propelled onwards by a swell of rave festival reports, a clean sweep of major awards at the Golden Globes, as well as the most eyebrow-raising trailer in recent memory, THE BRUTALIST is finally set to come crashing into a theater near you, clocking in at a whopping thirteen reels of 70mm film stock. Seven years in the making, three and a half hours in length (featuring an intermission, to boot), shot on an improbable budget of less than ten million dollars, and boasting a sprawling narrative that spans more than three decades of American history, this is a rare feat of megalithic classical ambition: a capital "A" Art film, a capital "E" Event film, something like a capital "F" Film per its own maddening sense of self-assurance and exaggerated scope of vision. It is difficult not to evoke THERE WILL BE BLOOD (2007) and THE MASTER (2012), Paul Thomas Anderson's black-hearted oil rush parable and his mystifying examination of quackery and spiritual devastation in post-war America, respectively, in the course of evaluating Corbet's latest. Those kindred American epics—one, an authentic western epic, the other, a crass parody of one—represent not only the clearest antecedent for THE BRUTALIST in terms of their sweeping scale and material fetishism, but also the raw material from which the film is forged, as Corbet has nimbly synthesized the two modes of period filmmaking into a final product that is alternately dingy and lavish; crude and grandiloquent; didactic and frustratingly ambiguous. Adrien Brody stars as László Tóth, a formerly-renowned Hungarian-Jewish architect who, in a subversive visual riff on László Nemes' SON OF SAUL (2014), survives the horrors of the Holocaust and washes ashore in New York in the film's opening minutes. While he waits for his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), to secure her immigration papers, he plans on supporting himself working for a distant cousin's furniture store in Pennsylvania. Through several accidents of fate, his life will soon be dominated by his arduous relationship with a wealthy industrialist (Guy Pearce) who recognizes Tóth's talent and recruits him to design a monumental city center, one whose elegant Brutalist design sensibility will gradually be disfigured by the competing demands of the local township and the patron himself, who demand in turn that the building fulfill the function of library, church, gymnasium, and town hall simultaneously. An aspiring enfant terrible, or at the least a burgeoning provocateur (lest we forget that Corbet's previous film VOX LUX [2018] opens with the Columbine massacre and breezes through the events of September 11 in rapid succession), Brady Corbet has produced in THE BRUTALIST a film that will likely generate white-hot discourse about its precise political intentions. Against the more conventional backdrop of an immigrant being led to the desert in search of the always-illusory American Dream, the film, much like Jonathan Glazer's recent THE ZONE OF INTEREST (2023), examines the ideological foundation—the raw historical material—that underpins Zionism and informed the creation of the Jewish state, reflecting on the immense trauma of wayward survivors of the Shoah and centering a harsh dilemma: endure relentless othering abroad and toil under the tyranny of American capitalist enterprise, or attempt a rebellion against history itself by heeding the call of a fledgling Israel. (2024, 215 min, DCP Digital) [David Whitehouse]

📽️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
Short films by Eduardo Williams (2011-2019) (68 min, DCP Digital) screen Friday, 7pm, with the filmmaker in attendance. Free admission. More info here. 

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

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Niki de Saint Phalle’s 1976 film A DREAM LONGER THAN THE NIGHT (75 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday, 9:30pm, and Saturday, 4pm, as part of the New Releases and Restorations series. 

Raoul Walsh’s 1942 film DESPERATE JOURNEY (107 min, 35mm) screens Sunday, 4pm, as part of the Raoul Walsh: Adventures in Filmmaking series.

Raoul Walsh’s 1932 film ME AND MY GAL (79 min, DCP Digital) screens Monday, 7pm, also as part of the Raoul Walsh: Adventures in Filmmaking series.

Mati Diop’s 2024 film DAHOMEY (68 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 7pm, as part of the Pan-African Cinema series.  

Raúl Ruiz’s 1982 film ON TOP OF THE WHALE (90 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday, 7pm, as part of the Love Torn in a Dream: The Illusory Odysseys of Raúl Ruiz series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ FACETS Cinema
Full Spectrum Features presents Hard Done By: Contemporary Irish Trans Films, a selection of contemporary trans short films from Ireland presented by Dublin-based curator James Hudson, on Friday at 7:30pm and 9:45pm. Note that the 7:30pm screening (followed by a post-screening discussion) is sold out; the 9:45pm screening will be introduced by Hudson.

Anime Club (this month’s theme being Digital Dolls: Cyberpunk Anime in the Age of Experimental CGI) dives into the technological uncanny on Thursday, 7pm, with two early-2000s anime classics that explore identity, morality, and the ever-thinning line between human and machine. Free and exclusive to Film Club Members. More info on all screenings here. 

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
David Bickerstaff’s VAN GOGH: POETS AND LOVERS (90 min, DCP Digital) begins screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

Mystery Movie Monday takes place Monday at 6pm.

Danis Tanovic’s 2001 film NO MAN’S LAND (98 min, 35mm) screens Tuesday, 6pm, as part of the Shadows of War lecture series.

The Best of Black Harvest short film showcase (Total approx. 82 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday at 6pm. Free for SAIC students.

Conversations at the Edge presents the animated short film program Boys and Men (Total approx. 75 min, Digital Projection) on Thursday at 6pm. The program features the work of James Duesing, Sam Gurry, Gabriel Harel, Elizabeth Hobbs, Jinkyu Jeon, Nicolas Keppens, and others. Followed by a conversation with participating artists. More info on all screenings here.  

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Shudder Selects presents Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy’s 2024 film DEAD MAIL (106 min, DCP Digital) on Friday and Saturday at 11:30pm. 

Bloody Disgusting presents an exclusive sneak peek of Osgood Perkins’ 2025 film THE MONKEY (95 min, DCP Digital) on Saturday, 9pm, followed by a post-screening Q&A with Perkins. RSVP here; admittance is not guaranteed. 

Jim Sharman’s 1975 cult classic THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (100 min, 35mm) screens Saturday at midnight. Every screening has a shadowcast of the film (actors acting in front of the screen during the film) performed by Midnight Madness.

Strange and Found takes place Wednesday at 9:30pm. 

Rob Reiner’s 1987 film THE PRINCESS BRIDE (98 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday at 7pm and next Friday, February 14, at 9:30pm. These are special interactive Valentine’s shows with prop bags. More info on all screenings and events here. 

⚫ Film Studies Center (at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St.)
Ian Harnarine’s 2023 film DOUBLES (90 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday, 7pm, followed by a post-screening Q&A with the filmmaker. Presented in partnership with the UChicago Caribbean Studies Collective. Free admission. More info here. 

⚫ VDB TV (Virtual)
Bobby Abate's SYLVANIA (2005) and Barry Doupé's AT THE HEART OF A SPARROW (2006) stream for free on VDB TV. Programmed by Emily Martin. More info here. 

CINE-LIST: February 7, 2025 - February 13, 2025

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Maxwell Courtright, Kyle Cubr, Alex Ensign, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Shaun Huhn, Ben Kaye, Raphael Jose Martinez, Doug McLaren, Nicky Ni, Scott Pfeiffer, Michael Glover Smith, Martin Stainthorp, James Stroble, K.A. Westphal, David Whitehous