:: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 28 - THURSDAY, MARCH 6::

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Michael Snow's PRESENTS (Canada/Experimental)

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

The so-called Structural arm of avant-garde film is routinely and casually pegged as dry, academic, and formal to a fault. What is often overlooked in cursory treatments of this side of the field is its surprisingly common use of humor—everything from the sly intellectual sort to downright slapstick. Michael Snow's PRESENTS has both ends covered. The first ten minutes tweaks expectations as the image slowly unsqueezes from a vertical slit to reveal a nude woman on a bed. The next two sequences are absurdist explorations of "camera-movement": in the first it is the set that moves, with the performers struggling to stay afoot; in the second, the camera invades the set, demolishing everything in its path. Finally, the back wall collapses revealing a window on to the real world. What follows are hundreds of hand-held shots: automobiles, birds, street scenes, demolition sites, stovetops—a cataloging of the filmmaker's environs. Many of the shots are peculiarly pedestrian and seemingly artless—given Snow's background, they feel deliberately so. With a drumbeat at every cut Snow riffs on one definition of the title, crying now, now—and with this section's hour-long duration, it's an eternal now. This concluding sequence is both strangely compelling and frequently tedious, and it seems that's the point. It's a game of dare with the audience: can you stay till the end? Screening as part of the Back and Forth, Around and Around: Michael Snow on 16mm series. (1981, 90 min, 16mm) [Patrick Friel]

Zeinabu irene Davis’ COMPENSATION (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

In each of the two timelines depicted in COMPENSATION, there is a sequence of the central couple going to the movies. Their experiences are somewhat different: the first seeing a film in a Nickelodeon in the early 20th century, the other in a more modern Cineplex in the '90s. But, still, almost one hundred years later, the movies are considered a dating activity. It’s one of the many things director Zeinabu irene Davis is so skillful at—creating stories that simultaneously depict specificity and universality of experience. COMPENSATION features many reflections and juxtapositions, not to jar or distort, but rather to softly suggest that both change and constancy can occur together. Grounded historically, the film features archival images, blurring the lines of reality and fiction. Presented in the style of a black and white silent film, COMPENSATION begins during the Great Migration of the 1910s, in Chicago (where it was entirely set and shot), recounting both important Black artistic achievements of the time, while noting a coinciding rise in racism in northern cities as more Black southerners arrived. The earlier set story focuses on Malindy (Michelle A. Banks), a seamstress who’s pushing back against the recent segregation of her school for the deaf. She falls in love with an illiterate migrant worker, Arthur (John Earl Jelks). Across time, in 1990s Chicago, Malaika (also Banks), a deaf woman and artist, falls in love with a hearing man and local librarian, Nico (also Jelks). Each couple finds sincere romance, as Jelks’ characters eagerly further educate themselves to better communicate with Banks’, who fall further in love. There also come questions from those around them about the practicality of such relationships, while disease crises (tuberculosis and AIDS) that disproportionately affect already marginalized groups threaten to separate the couples. COMPENSATION in its distinct form focuses on intersectionality and inclusivity, featuring detailed subtitles along with its silent film style. Davis presents an egalitarianism between visuals and sound; the film’s sound design, highlighting noises like trains and scribbling writing set the audience in space and time as equally as the images. Music, too, is important, as the early 20th century scenes feature ragtime music by composer Reginald R. Robinson, and the more modern sequences by Atiba Y. Jali feature instruments of the African diaspora; it’s something Davis has emphasized in other work, the cultural shifts and connections through music. Throughout COMPENSATION archival images are featured, both that portray the shifting cityscape, but also those individuals affected by these changes in history. Even beyond Malindy and Arthur and Malaika and Nico, the film expresses a sense that all the faces featured in these photographs have stories of joy and struggle worth knowing, as Davis’ beautiful and empathetic storytelling gently but purposefully reaches into history. The filmmaker, screenwriter Marc Arthur Chéry, and actor John Earl Jelks in attendance at the Friday, 7:30pm screening.  (1999, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Richard Kramisen and Sonya Baevski's I AM NOT THIS BODY (US/Documentary)

Block Cinema (at Northwestern University) – Wednesday, 6pm [Free Admission]

In a compassionate and timely act of historical preservation, Block Cinema will be screening an in-house restoration of I AM NOT THIS BODY, an educational documentary about transgender life in the '70s that had been considered a lost film for decades. This cinéma vérité piece, remarkable insofar as it represents one of the very first films of its kind, was shot by two Columbia documentary students and bankrolled by the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF), a philanthropic organization oriented around transgender resources whose director, Zelda Suplee (I encourage readers to click here to marvel at her astonishing resume), moderates the panel discussion that serves as the film's focal point. At the center of the roundtable are two trans women, Lyn Raskin and Deborah Hartin—the latter of whom made national news and became a talk-show staple in the '70s when her need to transition compelled her to separate from her wife and child—who discuss their transition processes from a pre-op and post-op position, respectively. Also in conversation: their surgeon, trailblazing gynecologist Leo Wollman, and actress Pamela Lincoln (of THE TINGLER [1959] fame), who was purportedly seeking to learn more about transgender life in earnest and whose presence serves as a symbolic bridge between the realm of marginalized experience and the broader American mainstream. Intended to educate via broad strokes (the film was available for educational rental courtesy of the EEF), the discussion drifts from matter-of-fact descriptions of phalloplasty to personal anecdotes about the difficulty of shopping for women's clothes in anticipation of transitioning. The camera is mostly content to linger over speakers' faces in tight close-ups, although in the film's more arresting passages a Bressonian immanence guides the frame towards Hartin's pristine manicured hands, and during a particularly harrowing confession of an aborted suicide attempt travels all the way down to her stilettoed feet, dangling a few inches above the ground. Viewers will find that much of the film's terminology and many of the assertions offered regarding the essence of transgender becoming are woefully passé, but it is difficult not to feel moved by the speakers' insistence on affirming the normalcy and validity of gender dysphoria, be it through Wollman's measured scientific input or Raskin and Hartin's mutual assertions that they really have felt this way for nearly as long as they can remember. In light of the Trump administration's redoubling of efforts to eradicate any semblance of trans visibility, I AM NOT THIS BODY is reborn imbued with an immense sense of urgency, one of its opening lines now fraught with historical innuendo: "Our chief concern is the transexual problem." Screening as part of the Trans Portraiture Series. Trans science scholar and researcher Dr. Os Keyes in attendance for a post-screening Q&A. (1971, 25 min, Digital Projection) [David Whitehouse]

Rosa von Praunheim’s I AM MY OWN WOMAN (Germany/Documentary)

Block Cinema (at Northwestern University) – Thursday, 7pm [Free Admission]

In 2005, my mind was completely blown by the solo performance of Jefferson Mays as Charlotte van Mahlsdorf in I Am My Own Wife, a play based on the subject’s autobiography I Am My Own Woman (Cleis Press, 1995). Born Lothar Berflede in Germany, she used the old term “transvestite” to self-identify as a person comfortably living in a man’s body while dressing and thoroughly identifying as a woman who had sexual and emotional relationships with men. Van Mahlsdorf, who took her last name from the German town where she settled, showed incredible bravery in being herself during the Nazi era and the repressive communist regime of East Germany. Happily made aware that her story had not only been told on stage, but also made into I AM MY OWN WOMAN, a documentary by the brilliant queer director and activist Rosa von Praunheim, I relished the chance to spend time with the real van Mahlsdorf as she worked with actors Jens Taschner and Ichgola Androgyn in recreating experiences from her teen and adult years, respectively, and told her own present-day story. Van Mahlsdorf discovered an interest in antiques and furniture early on and went to work in an antique shop, in part to escape the violence of her father, a Nazi soldier who beat and raped her mother regularly and who never showed van Mahlsdorf a moment of love or tenderness. Luckily, her beloved grand-uncle, with whom the family lived, provided some safety, and van Mahlsdorf found acceptance and encouragement to be who she was from her lesbian aunt. The documentary is frank about sex and the difficulties of pursuing relationships in East Germany; for example, a recreation shows how she had to write notes on the walls of public toilets to hook up because no East German publication would print her kind of personal ad. Equally important to her was her work collecting antiques and restoring grand estates as places to live and showcase her collections. Particularly interesting is her successful effort to acquire and reconstruct an entire gay and lesbian bar as a way to preserve LGBTQ history and connect the community she helped establish and foster. Van Mahlsdorf is a delightful, insightful historian and raconteur whose mild manner belies the horrors she witnessed and lived through. Von Praunheim, well versed in telling stories like Van Mahlsdorf’s, really outdoes himself with this fascinating, enjoyable documentary. Also on the program is COMMUNICATION FROM WEBER (1988, 15 min, 16mm to Digital) from American filmmakers Robert Gates and Lyn Wyatt. The documentarians profile Lily Sabina Weber, a transgender, transgressive artist whose densely packed written tracts and art collages put me a bit in mind of a gently provocative manifesto. Those around Weber share an obvious affection for them, which makes the final moments of the film muted and sad. Screening as part of the Trans Portraiture Series with Brooklyn-based queer film historian, programmer, and filmmaker Elizabeth Purchell in person. (1992, 91 min, 16mm) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Peter Weir's MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD (US)

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

The films of Australian director Peter Weir feature characters who must face incredible breaks in their everyday reality, on both small and large scales; his 2003 period epic MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD does this on an extremely large scale while still centering the personal. Based on the book series about Royal Navy captain Jack Aubrey (here played most steadily by Russell Crowe) by British author Patrick O’Brian, the film features the minute details of life aboard a warship during the Napoleonic Wars—MASTER AND COMMANDER famously begins with an intertitle stating "OCEANS ARE NOW BATTLEFIELDS." Caught off guard off the coast of Brazil by a French privateer, Aubrey and the crew of the HMS Surprise must out-sail and outwit the superior ship—​notably recouping in the Galápagos Islands. It oscillates between the claustrophobia of experiencing wartime trapped on a ship and expressing the sense of wide adventure that sea life offers. The empathy and care Aubrey shows for his crew, particularly for the much younger sailors on board, is complicated by the many tough decisions he must make throughout; it’s also complemented by his friend Dr. Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany), the ship’s surgeon, who isn’t afraid to gently question Aubrey’s leadership. MASTER AND COMMANDER is also a film that focuses a great deal on education and skill, with scenes of Aubrey and Maturin teaching the crew about sailing and nature. In addition to the impressive shots of the ships themselves, Weir emphases objects and tools. The detail here is not just minutiae or historical grounding; it underscores that each crew member not only has a particular job, but also a particular story. The comradery of the crew in moments of singing sea shanties and playing music, as well as unsettling loss of life, are at the heart of the film. Like Maturin, MASTER AND COMMANDER also questions modernity and progress through its examination of war, imperialism, and their effect on the nature of men; the film is devoid, it should be mentioned, of women, with arguably the ships themselves being the only female characters. But just as important to the film’s larger themes are the shots of the ships in battle on the ocean and the stunning cinematography from long-time Weir collaborator Russell Boyd. A striking early shot of a massive amount of crew members climbing around the rigging demonstrates Weir’s skillfulness at piecing together arrestingly beautiful imagery grounded in specific time and experience. Screening as part of the Inner Voyages series. (2003, 138 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]

A. Edward Sutherland’s INTERNATIONAL HOUSE (US)

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

If someone asked me right now what film might best exemplify the pre-Code sensibility, I’d say this one. It’s got sex, drugs, and the 1930s equivalent of rock n’ roll (i.e. Cab Calloway and torch singer Baby Rose Marie—what’s cooler than a child crooner?), all packed into one Chinese hotel and a tight, cinematic hour (plus some change). The Chicago Film Society’s synopsis for the film refers to it as a “low-rent GRAND HOTEL,” and that’s an apt reference to describe its construction, with multiple characters and storylines brought together in a single location, a hotel in Wuhu, China (a city name exploited for its comic potential) where a Chinese inventor is taking bids for purchase of his “radioscope” invention. A representative from an American electric company teams with real-life socialite Peggy Hopkins Joyce, playing herself, to get to Wuhu after they’re unable to get a train; the rep is the cause of a later quarantine at the hotel, due to a mistakenly diagnosed case of the mumps, just one in a string of illnesses that have prevented him from marrying his sweetheart (who’s also in the mix). Also involved are one of Hopkins Joyce’s supposed ex-husbands, a general played by Bela Lugosi who’s interested in the radioscope; the hotel’s doctor-and-nurse duo, the latter of whom is played by comedian Gracie Allen; a cranky hotel manager; and, eventually, W.C. Fields as Professor Henry R. Quail, who arrives in a gyroscope that he’d intended to fly to Kansas City. It’s all very unserious, with vaudevillian-style vignettes and, once the radioscope is being exhibited, an invention that can “tune in” anywhere in the world and that its inventor is keen to use to see a six-day bicycle race, to musical performances by Calloway and Rose Marie, as well as Rudy Vallee, Stoopnagle and Budd, and Lona Andre in a particularly inspired (albeit not politically correct) performance as a Chinese tea cup. The double entendres are plentiful, and Calloway performs a song about marjiuana that, in the film’s restoration, was dubbed 4 dB louder to make that part especially swinging; there’s also a joke directed at Will Hays. Unrelated to the content but of interest nonetheless is that an earthquake took place during the film’s production, and footage of which has been touted as what was happening on set during it. Alas, it was a publicity stunt devised by Fields and the film’s director A. Edward Sutherland. Fake news is never good, but salaciousness is always welcome. Preceded by the Fleischer Studios’ 1932 cartoon MINNIE THE MOOCHER (7 min, 35mm). (1933, 68 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]

Filmspotting Fest

See Venues and showtimes below

Rian Johnson's BRICK (US)
Music Box Theatre – Friday, 7pm
The logline for BRICK is that it's like one of those god-awful John Hughes movies played dead straight, a high school clique story conceived as terse neo-noir. It's been accused of being a calling card film (which it probably is), but it's one of the finest films to ever belong to that unfashionable category. There are the usual trappings of a calling card: the film school compositions, the endless fade-ins, an over-use of shallow depth-of-field, a high concept, vintage-store production design, resourceful use of a tiny budget (half-a-million dollars isn't much to shoot a 35mm feature on) in order to entice future financiers. It's a feature-length cinematography reel and a showcase for Rian Johnson's range as a screenwriter, director, and editor, for his cousin Nathan's abilities as a composer, and for the talents of its actors. In its mad rush to prove itself, in the low-budget insecurity that pushes it to immodestly use its modest means, and, above all, in its desire to impress us, BRICK takes routes a less ambitious movie never would. To show how serious he can be, Johnson treats his subject matter with more maturity than a mature filmmaker ever would; to show how exciting BRICK can be, he invests more kinetic energy into a pan of the camera than a better-funded filmmaker would put into his car chases. By making every role showy, the film gives its cast the depth of a classic studio production. It seems like Johnson aspired to nothing more than the chance to direct bigger and "better" films but, then again, that's what Polanski aspired to in making KNIFE IN THE WATER. Johnson's like a man who, while trying to impress a potential employer, blurts out something beautiful. Mercenary aspirations are often the first step to poetry. Followed by a post-screening conversation with filmmaker Rian Johnson. (2005, 110 min, 35mm) [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]
---
Satyajit Ray's PATHER PANCHALI (India)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 2:30pm [Sold Out]
In 1993 Satyajit Ray requested that several of the original negatives of his films be shipped to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles for storage in their vaults. En route they stopped at Henderson Laboratories in London where a tragic nitrate fire burnt and warped, if not destroyed, nearly all the negatives, including the acclaimed Apu Trilogy (not to mention treasured Ealing Studio Comedies). Fortunately, the Academy decided to proceed with shipment and the negatives continued on to LA where they would remain untouched for nearly 20 years. After a protracted negotiation for the rights to the Apu Trilogy and multiple unsuccessful efforts to locate usable material for digitization the Criterion Collection unearthed these negatives and in conjunction with the L'Immagine Ritrovata and the Academy Archive began an extensive restoration effort in 2013. It is ironic that such a complicated undertaking including a successful rehydration, a combination of fine-grain masters and dupe negatives, the successful removal of glue and wax (used for storage in India and burned in the fire) and almost a thousand hours of meticulous hand labor, would be performed for films of such clear-eyed simplicity. Among these three the most direct and lucid (and the one whose negative was most badly damaged) is PATHER PANCHALI the inaugural chapter in a rural Bengali bildungsroman centered on the inquisitive and sprightly Apu Roy. Influenced by a conversation with Jean Renoir (when he was in India shooting THE RIVER) and a viewing of Vittorio De Sica's BICYCLE THIEVES in London, Ray's film transplants a neorealist style onto Bibhuti Bhushan's novel. While not inaccurate, the complete placement of Ray's film within the neorealist canon threatens to undermine his truly revolutionary banishment of traditional dramatic structure. While both Ray and De Sica find interest in small, innocuous events, choosing to reveal their characters through gestures and attitudes and thereby dispensing with preconceived notions of plot and character, Ray takes it a step further. The impetus in BICYCLE THIEVES is to find the bicycle; the impetus in PATHER PANCHALI is simply to live. Time, as it is felt in Ray's film, expands and contracts not with breaks but rather a gummy elasticity that reveals both the sufferings caused by the ceaseless march of time and the perpetual chance for rebirth and renewal. Ray's characters, trapped by their economic conditions, brutally compound this effect. In the beginning of her review of L'AVVENTURA Pauline Kael wrote, "It had begun to look as though only those with a fresh eye—working in poverty and inexperience... discovering the medium for themselves—could do anything new and important (like the Apu Trilogy)." It still kind of does. Followed by a post-screening conversation with critic Dana Stevens. (1955, 125 min, DCP Digital) [Camden G. Bauchner]
---
Jeff Nichols' TAKE SHELTER (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 5:45pm
Curtis (Michael Shannon) is suddenly plagued by apocalyptic nightmares and visions—animal attacks, mysterious people coming to take his daughter away; these dreams are all set during a terrible storm that rains oil from the sky. Noteworthy, they don’t initially involve his caring wife, Samantha (Jessica Chastain), and he hides his visions and concern for his mental health from her. Despite this awareness, Curtis can’t help but doomsday prep by working on a tornado shelter in the backyard. His daughter, Hannah (Tova Stewart), recently became deaf and Samantha’s primary concern is supporting her daughter, troubled that Curtis’ shift is starting to make that even more challenging. Small, sweet moments between the family trio that dot the film make Curtis’ unstable behavior even more distressing. Unsurprisingly, Shannon is remarkable, depicting the seriousness of Curtis’ situation without ever losing sympathy for the character, even as his actions become more and more alarming. This is aided by Chastain’s performance as Samantha, never letting her growing frustration overshadow the love she has for her husband; the chemistry between the two grounds their relationship in such a sincere, believable way. TAKE SHELTER is the second feature from director Jeff Nichols, after his outstanding debut SHOTGUN STORIES, also starring Shannon. All of Nichols’ films tackle a crisis of white American masculinity, depicting its toxicity as not just destructive to themselves and those around them, particularly the women in their lives who are forced into even more demandingly supportive roles. TAKE SHELTER further connects this to the issues of climate change—it’s no accident that Curtis’ is in construction, working on an oil rig; wide shots of the sky sit above Curtis’ modifying of the land below. These themes are most profoundly felt in the film’s shocking ending, one of the most quietly disconcerting I’ve ever seen.  Followed by a post-screening conversation with critic Matt Singer. (2013, 120 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]
---
Kogonada's COLUMBUS (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 8:30pm [Sold Out]
I cherish Kogonada's COLUMBUS for what it values, and questions, in architecture and cinema both. At the same time, it's a thoughtful, moving story of a budding friendship that becomes a form of love, and a middle-aged man contemplating a parent's mortality. Kogonada is a justly celebrated video essayist; I highly recommend you visit his site, kogonada.com, and check out his beautiful, exhilarating video essays on the likes of Ozu, Godard, Bresson, Bergman, Malick, Kubrick, Hitchcock, Tarkovsky, and Kore-eda. He wrote, directed and edited this dramatic feature debut, and he's filled it with compositional homages: Kubrick's one-point perspective, Ozu's passageways, Bergman's mirrors. It's about a pensive, melancholy middle-aged man (John Cho) who arrives in Columbus, Indiana, from Seoul, after his estranged father, a noted professor of architecture, falls into a coma. Columbus is a small, rural midwestern town that also happens to be a kind of open-air museum, where some of the greatest figures in Mid-Century Modern architecture created masterpieces of the form. (Just for starters, there's First Christian Church by Eliel Saarinen, North Christian Church by his son Eero, and Michael Van Valkenburgh's beautiful Mill Race Park, with its covered bridge and lookout tower.) While waiting on the fate of his father, Cho forms a friendship with a bright, young working-class woman (Haley Lu Richardson), an "architecture nerd" who's stayed in town a year after high school because she's essentially a mother for her own mother, a recovered meth addict (Michelle Forbes). He also gets reacquainted with his father's protégé (Parker Posey), who's just a couple years older than he. We only see his father, truly, at the beginning: from a distance, standing with his back to us in the gardens of Eero Saarinen's famous Miller House. (Watch for, and think about, how this sequence is mirrored later in the film.) Yet his father's absence is seen and felt throughout, as Cho moves through the man's vacated rooms at the historic Inn at Irwin Gardens: in a game of Chinese checkers with the absent man, in his hat on a chair. (Kogonada frequently deploys still-life views, absent of the people who were present before, or will be later.) The movie features beautifully-played interaction by the actors, as they circle and discover one another and make, or miss, connections. (As in Bresson, Kogonada's characters express feelings beyond words with hands: a squeeze, a caress.) Previously known for comedy, Cho gives a fine dramatic performance. Richardson is amused by other people, and I enjoyed watching that amusement break over her face, as well as the wonder when she engages the buildings, tracing their contours with her hand. She's also good at showing the wrenching burden for a young person of carrying the world on her shoulders. At the local library, designed by I.M. Pei, she shelves books alongside her co-worker, a thoughtful grad student who's not quite her boyfriend (Rory Culkin, who tickled me, as he does her, with the earnest way he engages ideas.) At the Republic newspaper offices, a historic building designed by Myron Goldsmith, Richardson applies for a newsroom job; this also happens to be where her mother cleans at night. This gets to the crux of Kogonada's concerns. What is the effect of these buildings, if any, on contemporary everyday life? What is the legacy for modern human beings of the modernists' promise that architecture could change the world? That, as Polshek believed, architecture is the healing art, the one that has the power to restore? If the buildings are just the unnoticed, almost unseen, places where people live and work, whose failure is it, if anyone's? As shot by Elisha Christian, Columbus is a magical place, but there's something forlorn about it, as well, as if the buildings are telling their own story about the way their spirit has been abandoned. For her part, Richardson likes to park her car in the middle of the night and sit in front of Deborah Berke's Irwin Union Bank, glowing ghostly in the darkness. She tells Cho the story of how she'd probably seen it a thousand times, until the day, near her darkest hour, when she finally saw it. Suddenly, the place she'd lived her whole life felt different. There is a vision here, of art as comfort, and maybe even life-saver, that at least begins to answer some of the questions the film’s asking. Followed by a post-screening conversation with the filmmaker. (2017, 104 min, DCP Digital) [Scott Pfeiffer]
---
Richard Linklater's BEFORE SUNRISE (US)
Music Box Theatre – Sunday, 11:30am
A French woman and an American man (Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke) spontaneously disembark from a train in Vienna and spend the afternoon, evening, and wee hours of the morning together—talking, walking, listening, flirting. Before this slender movie became the opening chapter of a trilogy, it was easy to dismiss its premise as flattering, post-collegiate wish fulfillment—a narcissistic ode to pitter-prattle interpersonal profundity that bears a striking proximity to resoundingly conventional male fantasies. Yes, but—viewing BEFORE SUNRISE in narrowly heterosexual terms or pigeonholing it as a precociously alt-Gen X love story would be enormous errors. More so than any screen romance I know, BEFORE SUNRISE exalts the pliability of gender roles and records a desperate, joyous urge to inhabit another person's consciousness. (By contrast, the deflationary exhaustion of BEFORE MIDNIGHT endorses a middle-aged imperative to live in one's own stubborn body and to ridicule and repudiate youthful idealism; but see below for an alternate opinion.) The closest direct antecedent to the radical vision of BEFORE SUNRISE is Jean Vigo's L'ATALANTE (1934), but that film is about characters who can't talk to each other, who thrash about and dream of faraway cities and disembodied hands in jars. BEFORE SUNRISE, instead, is about the endlessly fecund possibility of connection. When Delpy sits in a restaurant, leans into her imaginary telephone, and belches, "Hey dude, what's up?," we're witnessing one of the most quietly utopian moments in movies. In another one of BEFORE SUNRISE's key moments, we watch Delpy and Hawke in a cramped record booth, listening to a Kath Bloom LP and trying so hard to conceal their mutual interest in one another: she cannot let him know that she's looking at him, just as surely as she must not know that he's looking at her. It's a scene that bedeviled Robin Wood's famously inexhaustible powers of analysis, perhaps because the content, form, and emotion are thoroughly irreducible and inseparable. In this movie, where people cannot help but reveal the totality of themselves to strangers, a single glance could prove fatal. Eschewing the concentrated intensity of its even finer follow-up, BEFORE SUNRISE manages to present a parade of deftly sketched supporting characters as well, none appearing for more than a minute or two but each suggesting an infinite expanse of possible feeling outside of Delpy and Hawke's bodies. A landmark of modern cinema. Followed by a post-screening conversation with critic Scott Tobias. (1995, 101 min, 35mm) [K.A. Westphal]
---
Sean Baker’s 2015 film TANGERINE (88 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday at noon, also as part of the fest, followed y a post-screening discussion led by critic Alison Willmore.

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Med Hondo’s SOLEIL Ô (Mauritania/France)

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

Mauritania-born filmmaker Med Hondo's 1970 film SOLEIL O is one of the key films of the burgeoning of African cinema of the 1960s and 70s—though in this case it's more accurate to say African diasporic cinema, since the film is set and was shot primarily in France. Hondo had emigrated to France in 1959, and worked at a variety of jobs before taking an interest first in acting, then directing theater, and eventually filmmaking. SOLEIL O was his first film, and it grew out of his own experiences in France and is shaped by many of the New Wave and modernist formal tactics that were in flower at the time. The story concerns a young African man who travels to Paris to find work opportunities. What he finds though, as did Hondo on his own arrival, is only low-paying and menial work, hostility towards immigrants, entrenched casual and explicit racism, and lingering colonialist paternalism and condescension. Hondo targets these social ills through a variety of means, appropriating a number of New Wave strategies and turning them against their own country and society. At times, this leads to trenchant and humorous scenes; other times, ones that are more explicitly biting and angry. This approach is conceptually exciting, but sometimes uneven in practice; in a few places throughout things feel a bit forced, but the emotional energy underlying the film carries through. Ultimately, SOLEIL O is both a playful and scathing indictment of Hondo's adopted country, and invigorating filmmaking. Screening as part of the Pan-African Cinema series. (1970, 98 min, DCP Digital) [Patrick Friel]

Anthony Minghella’s THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Saturday, 7pm and Sunday, 4pm

In his 1999 book Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story, critic Gary Indiana made a startling admission: “I have, in my lifetime, known five murderers (that is, five that I know of), two of them documented serial killers… and although I have lived a rangier life than some, it’s my suspicion that this is not such a bizarre circumstance.” Here, Indiana claimed personal authority in sorting through the myths and misapprehensions around the case of Cunanan—the spree killer whose murders culminated with the July 1997 shooting of Gianni Versace and his own suicide a week later—and expressed a conviction that his own perspective lay closer to the median than outlets who covered the killings as a freak transmission from the underground would have their readers believe. As another fin-de-siècle work iterating on the Cunanan affair, with an analepsis to midcentury pulp fiction, Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley has emerged from decades in rotation on cable channels and streaming services as a classic in the millennial movie canon, suggesting that the figure of the lone, queer assassin has not yet gone out of style. Often screencapped on microblog platforms, the film is easily appreciated in still images—for its clotheshorse costuming, its John Seale compositions layered like record sleeves fanned out on the floor, its European location shooting, and its Olympian cast of young movie stars—all signifying the sort of film “they” don’t make anymore, an exemplar of the Miramax Tradition of Quality. Removed from the indie wars of the 1990s, Minghella’s choices of adaptation can be better appreciated as a contribution to the Highsmith canon. His elevation of the novel’s queer subtext to text reflects a full understanding of the Ripley character (Matt Damon)—a con man, a forger, and a serial murderer—and the source novels. In the four subsequent entries in the series, Tom Ripley functions less as a viewpoint character than a corrupting agent on the books’ secondary protagonists, an elemental force like water, air, or money, which compels interest precisely in relation to the surrounding ensemble. Minghella, therefore, expands the scope and sympathies of Highsmith’s story to foreground Tom’s courtship of wealthy young expats Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law) and Marge Sherwood (Gwyneth Paltrow) on their indefinite Italian sojourn. Only the finishing-school bully Freddie Miles (Philip Seymour Hoffman, thunderously heterosexual) fails to be seduced. Tom’s approach hinges on his resemblance to the figure of Chet Baker, the white jazz trumpeter and singer whom Dickie himself once impersonated for Marge, and a womanizing fixture in the Italian tabloids during his Milano sessions; like the fabulist Cunanan, even the idle rich study and mimic the lives of celebrities. Law and Damon change partners in a dance of mutual lust, recognition, and self-hatred, while Minghella’s expanded treatment of Marge gives Paltrow one of her finest roles, a portrait of suspicion overlaid with the determination to shake off her life in Dickie’s shadow and drag their relationship into the sunlight, the lone agent of full disclosure in a high-society sphere that runs on shame. In novels from her stalker thriller The Cry of the Owl to the lesbian romance Carol, both drawn from personal experience, Highsmith, like Indiana, argued for the prevalence of deviant behavior; to her, the suspense plot flowed inevitably from the collision of human impulse with social norms and criminal codes. Minghella’s twist on the book’s open-ended anticlimax stays true to the values of Highsmith’s fiction, hinging both upon the burden of straight respectability and the suffocating power of wealth: a well-appointed closet swinging finally and fatally shut. Screening as part of the Board Picks series. (1999, 140 min, DCP Digital) [Brendan Boyle]

Sergio Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (Italy/US)

Music Box Theatre – Wednesday, 6:45pm

ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST is a grand, summative mosaic of western-movie imagery and themes—it’s the western to end all westerns. Not for nothing did Sergio Leone shoot the film in Monument Valley, the location for many John Ford westerns; ONCE UPON A TIME harkens back to numerous films in the genre (not just Ford’s, but also SHANE, JOHNNY GUITAR, and DUEL IN THE SUN), suggesting that the film takes place not in the actual American past but in the fictional past created by the movies. (It goes without saying that the film is a major influence on Quentin Tarantino.) Leone, who wrote the story with Dario Argento and Bernardo Bertolucci, sets the film in the last days of the Wild West, when progress (represented here by the construction of a railroad) completed its conquest of the untamed region. This temporal setting gives the film an elegiac air, while the dynamic, monumental imagery gives the film a palpable vivacity. Bolstering the theme of conclusions, the central drama hinges on the impending final showdown between an aging assassin and a younger bandit-cum-avenging angel in the Leone tradition. Playing the assassin, Henry Fonda delivers an atypical performance that also happens to be one of his greatest. Leone inverts the actor’s true-blue honesty to suggest something like pure evil, and Fonda dives into the role with scarifying precision. The specificity of his acting counterbalances Leone’s epic imagery, and it makes up part of a quartet of fascinating lead performances. Jason Robards, Charles Bronson and Claudia Cardinale deliver the other three; each one acts so differently from the others that they practically seem to inhabit different movies, yet the combination works, adding to the film’s mosaic-like form. Screening as part of the Mud, Blood, & Marinara: Spaghetti Westerns series. Preceded by an introduction from Andrew Stasiulis, faculty member at DePaul University’s School of Cinematic Arts. (1968, 164 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Wolfgang Becker's GOODBYE, LENIN! (Germany)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6pm

One of Germany’s more recent attempts to understand itself, GOODBYE, LENIN! is a walking identity crisis. At its heart, it’s a family drama, depicting one character's struggle to hold his family members close in a violently shifting capitalist world. The film follows Alex, a young man living with his mother in East Germany. His mother, a staunch supporter of the Socialist Unity Party, falls into a coma from a heart attack. In that time, the border with West Germany opens and the country begins free elections, and capitalism returns to Deutschland. When Alex’s mother wakes, she may go home on the condition that she experiences no shocks that could cause another heart attack. Behind their mother’s back, Alex and his sister must dress the home and maintain the illusion that nothing has changed in their East German flat, going as far as to create fake news channels. Eventually, the cat gets out of the bag: Alex’s mother discovers the truth and suffers a fatal heart attack. A film only 20 years old, galaxies have shifted in the free market-dominated world. With the advent of the subprime mortgage crisis, the shockwaves of NAFTA, the Citizens United decision and DOGE, Alex’s mother becomes more empathetic. Prior to these events, films and books (such as The Black Book of Communism) praising the American system as universal truth sold like hot cakes but do so no more. In our current political situation, I start to believe my girlfriend’s grandmother when she claims Eastern Europe experienced its “good old days” under Soviet rule. For a new generation, societal change isn’t as simple as “capitalism good, communism bad”; knowing what’s to come in the “new world” promised by Thatcher and Reagan, GOODBYE, LENIN! reads as a horror film. Screening as part of the Shadows of War lecture series. (2004, 121 min, 35mm) [Ray Ebarb]

Kurtis Spieler & John Liu's NEW YORK NINJA (US)

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

There's a poetic absurdity to a film shot in 1984, lost for decades, and resurrected in 2021 through cinematic archaeology. If old movies are ghosts haunting our imagination, then NEW YORK NINJA is an exhumed body, stitched together with equal parts reverence and mischief. Directed by John Liu, a martial artist who vanished from the industry as abruptly as one of his characters in a back alley, the film gains an even greater mystique. Its 2021 reassembly by Kurtis Spieler for Vinegar Syndrome isn't a restoration—it's a radical reinvention, a genre séance summoning a spirit that may or may not have wished to return. Had NEW YORK NINJA been completed in 1984, it likely would have landed in the VHS bargain bin alongside countless for-profit action flicks—marked by clumsy acting, frantic cuts, and a worldview where crime is best solved with spin kicks. Yet, its guerrilla-style filmmaking has a raw, endearing quality. The grainy shots capture an unpolished New York, a city on the brink, where street thugs leer and snarl like cartoon villains. Liu's suave footwork and directorial ambitions were abandoned when 21st Century Distribution Corporation went bankrupt, leaving the film in limbo without a script, soundtrack, or production notes—a half-formed cinematic embryo. Enter Spieler and Vinegar Syndrome, undertaking the Herculean task of reconstructing NEW YORK NINJA from its original, silent reels. With no script or sound, Spieler essentially lip-read an unseen movie, guessing at its narrative from visual cues. The result is less restoration and more inspired reimagining—a BLADE RUNNER: THE FINAL CUT for grindhouse aficionados, if BLADE RUNNER had roller-skating goons, radioactive perverts, and a score by Voyag3r. Spieler leans into the chaos, enlisting cult icons Don "The Dragon" Wilson, Cynthia Rothrock, Michael Berryman, and Linnea Quigley to voice the re-dubbed dialogue. But this isn’t lifeless kung fu overdubbing—it’s stylized, calculated lunacy, played straight to heighten the inherent goofiness of its over-the-top '80s narrative. The plot follows Liu's character as he avenges his wife's murder at the hands of a wild syndicate of sex traffickers, kidnappers, and a deranged mutant named The Plutonium Killer. Continuity and logic take a backseat; editing here is less about coherence and more about intensifying the film’s hallucinatory energy. Imagine THE WARRIORS and MIAMI CONNECTION in a cinematic union of lunacy. If NEW YORK NINJA is poetic, it’s in how it embodies the ephemeral, disposable nature of B-movie history. Many exploitation films were churned out as forgettable trash, remembered only by die-hard VHS nostalgists. Yet, this is a rare case where a lost movie is reborn—not as the film it was meant to be, but as a celebration of its own incompleteness. Spieler and Vinegar Syndrome didn’t just restore a forgotten film; they crafted a love letter to an era, a subgenre, and a style never meant to be perfect. NEW YORK NINJA isn’t just a wild early 80’s kung-fu film, it is a 21st century ghost story of a bygone era retold with nunchucks. Screening as part of the “Martial” Arts film series. (1984/2021, 93 min, 35mm) [Shaun Huhn]

Tony Scott’s THE FAN (US)

Music Box Theatre – Saturday, Midnight

THE FAN inaugurates a cycle of Tony Scott films that hinge on a sort of postmodern stunt casting. Here, Robert De Niro, playing an obsessive baseball fan who devolves into a homicidal maniac, consciously evokes his roles in Scorsese’s TAXI DRIVER (1976) and THE KING OF COMEDY (1983), thereby setting the stage for Gene Hackman to burlesque his performance from THE CONVERSATION (1974) in ENEMY OF THE STATE (1998) and for Robert Redford to signal back to THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR (1975) in SPY GAME (2001). In revisiting these earlier films, Scott familiarizes them, making them all the easier to dice up and throw into his spicy montage. THE FAN finds Scott editing at a brisker pace than he had up until then; the film introduces techniques that would bear fruit in the director’s 2000s work, in which the editing pushes the films toward borderline abstraction. One gets a sample of how rich Scott’s work would become in an early sequence of THE FAN, where most of the principal characters connect via a call-in radio show. Scott cuts frenetically between De Niro, Ellen Barkin (who plays the radio host), and Wesley Snipes (who plays the star hitter with whom De Niro becomes dangerously obsessed), suggesting a unity of space through parallel details even though the characters are all in different settings. (The filmmaker would use this device to more expressive ends in his 2009 remake of THE TAKING OF PELHAM 123.) THE FAN presents further parallels between De Niro and Snipes’ characters, which raises the possibility that the former may represent the latter’s repressed qualities, yet the film dashes this potential when De Niro goes crazy and the story gets progressively uglier. In the movie’s third act—wherein Scott’s misanthropic tendencies come to the fore—De Niro’s crazed fan represents nothing less than what Hollywood executives probably think of most of the viewing public: as entitled, angry, infantile psychotics who are never to be trusted. In this regard, THE FAN is an instructive film, and all the more unpleasant for it. Screening as part of the Play Ball! series. (1996, 116 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Matthew Rankin’s UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE (Canada)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

This is one cozy film. Between the soft palettes, wide shots that seem to engulf you, and its soft, absurd surrealism, UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE creates such a lovely atmosphere to tell its stories. We’re in a liminal Canada where Farsi is the common language of Winnipeg. Where we see two girls find money frozen in ice and want to get it out, a local tour guide walking a confused group around, and a government worker traveling to visit his mother. Children here dress up like Groucho Marx and go to school. The film is very serious about being a bit silly. It’s beautifully shot with gorgeous and playful framing. The details are so perfectly tuned and we’re given a whimsy that never goes near becoming saccharine or cloying because there’s a game-like feel to the way Rankin plays with things like muted existentialism, broad comedy, serendipity, and cinematic pranksterism. It’s such a delight to watch. It’ll be worth going outside in the dead of winter and getting a chill on the way to the cinema. Honestly, it might even help you enjoy it all the more. (2024, 89 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]

John Carpenter's ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (US)

The Wilmette Theatre – Thursday, 6pm

High concept and low class, John Carpenter's 1981 sci-fi/action film premises itself on a paranoid endgame scenario: what if crime just keeps going up? Carpenter settles on the conservative trajectory of 400 percent and cedes Manhattan to the most violent criminals, turning it into an island prison and letting it go to ruin. Only the most hardened offenders are sentenced there—new prisoners are given the option of cremation before arrival—making it a particularly bad place for the President (Donald Pleasance) to crash land. Charged with fishing him out within 22 hours, the police commissioner (Lee Van Cleef) offers a full pardon to incoming convict 'Snake' Plissken (Kurt Russell), a former Special Forces operative-turned-criminal—but only if he can successfully recover the President. ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK is a wild ride that is at times clever and at other times surprisingly dull. Most interesting is not the search-and-rescue but the creative depiction of a ruined New York and its ad hoc city-life, circumscribed by extreme danger. An old acquaintance, Cabbie (Ernest Borgnine), watches an all-convict Broadway production before making his way uptown with Molotov cocktails at the ready. Shot mostly in darkness, Carpenter succeeds in creating a closed-off atmosphere that is both somehow dingy and futuristic. These touches, along with several solid performances, breathe life into the rote barrel fire-pocked landscape, and Snake himself. Screening as part of the Cult Classics series. (1981, 99 min, DCP Digital) [Brian Welesko]

Osgood Perkins’ THE MONKEY (US)

Alamo Drafthouse and the Music Box Theatre – See Venue websites for showtimes

A blood-drenched Adam Scott torches a drum-banging toy monkey with a flamethrower, but the cursed relic returns to his twin sons, Hal and Bill (Theo James). Too late, the boys realize that winding the key brings only suffering. Desperate, they discard it in a well, where it remains silent for twenty-five years—until the drumming starts again. No one is safe. Osgood Perkins adapts Stephen King’s short story from Skeleton Crew but takes creative liberties, transforming a tale about suppressed trauma finding its way back into a visceral expression of trauma. Perkins’ film unfolds along multiple threads: two orphaned brothers growing estranged, a son struggling to reconnect with his absent father, and an overarching meditation on inherited anguish. The monkey—don’t call it a toy—becomes both a harbinger of death and a metaphor for generational suffering. Perkins even stitches his own past into the film, drawing from the loss of his mother on 9/11 and the enigmatic shadow of his father, Anthony Perkins. One character states outright that 9 and 11 are just numbers, which highlights the point Perkins is trying to make about the absurdity, pointlessness, and ultimate randomness of death. By shifting the tone of the source material, Perkins makes the story more interactive. Seeing THE MONKEY in a packed theater is the best way to experience this carnival ride. Step right up and see a man's intestines stretched the length of a pawn shop. The FINAL DESTINATION films attempt these feats of Rube Goldberg-style death traps with sincerity, but Perkins strips away the earnestness, leaving only the absurdity. Balancing horror and comedy is no small feat, but a strong narrative and razor-sharp dialogue make it work. The quarrelling and hopeful reconciliation of the twin brothers is an element added by Perkins. Osgood is the older brother of singer-songwriter Elvis Perkins, and within the twin brothers of Hal and Bill there is sibling rivalry, estrangement, and resentment, but theirs is a story of coming back to one another. Whatever relationship the Perkins brothers may have had in the past, they certainly work well together now. Elvis provided scores for THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER (2015) and also LONGLEGS (under the name Zilgi). There is something larger at work within Perkins' variation of King's short story. A reflection of the paradox of human experience where suffering and laughter console each other. Moments of gallows humor offer a relief from the tragedy, while the tragedy itself deepens the stakes of the comedy. The Structuralist view of this link says that tragedy moves from order to chaos and comedy moves from chaos to order. This leaves only a liminal space for laughter and sorrow to greet one another. This absurdist quest to find meaning where there is none, stays within the confines of that liminal space and is on full display in THE MONKEY. Within the stages of grief, moments of dark humor can be necessary and healthy. Perkins' own tragic past works its way into his narratives. He has called his own work a Trojan Horse for exploring his own loss, using genre as a vehicle for deeply personal storytelling. THE BLACKCOAT’S DAUGHTER dealt with sorrow and longing through possession while his other films have been attempts at connecting with his father, his mother, how attachments to the past can get in the way of growth, and now with THE MONKEY, the lasting effect of laughter in the face of incomprehensible pain. Obviously, gallows humor and Grand Guignol spectacles may not elicit catharsis for everyone, but it absolutely did for Perkins, which shows in every frame. Staring into the void has never been this much fun. (2025, 95 min, 35mm or DCP [check venue listings for format]) [Shaun Huhn]

Greg Kwedar’s SING SING (US)

FACETS – Sunday, 5:15pm

Against the dehumanizing stranglehold of the prison-industrial complex, there are initiatives that seek to nourish, rather than deny or punish, the humanity of incarcerated individuals. One such project is the nonprofit Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA), which brings theater, writing, music, dance, and other arts to inmates in a number of New York state prisons, including Sing Sing Correctional Facility. Set mostly within the walls of that prison, SING SING offers a narrative dramatization of RTA using a cast of formerly incarcerated men who are themselves alumni of the theater program, playing versions of themselves. They’re joined by two professional actors playing real people: Colman Domingo, as RTA doyen Divine G, and Paul Raci, who portrays theater director Brent Buell. A self-styled thespian and member of the RTA steering committee, Divine G believes wholeheartedly in the ability of the arts to empower and rehabilitate his fellow inmates. He finds a particular chance to prove his belief when he recruits the prickly, hot-headed Divine Eye (Clarence Maclin) to the program. As the inmates develop their new play, “Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code” (a hilarious time-traveling reimagining of “Hamlet” featuring ancient Egyptian rulers, gladiators, and Freddy Krueger), the idealistic Divine G locks horns with the embittered Divine Eye, who sees little hope in RTA improving his circumstances. Gradually, the two men form a close friendship that only becomes fortified by their eventual, divergent prospects of release. Domingo, Oscar-nominated for his performance here, is outstanding; in his character’s clemency hearing late in the film, he piercingly conveys via extreme closeup a man struggling to maintain the air that has suddenly been knocked from his sails. Maclin, equally good, and the rest of the cast of non-professionals imbue SING SING with an undeniably poignant verisimilitude, their re-staging of their own experiences adding testimony to the restorative power of performance. The film’s masculine tenderness, often rare in prison dramas, is amplified by Pat Scola’s lambent 16mm cinematography, which finds deep warmth behind Sing Sing’s forbidding concrete walls. (2023, 105 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]

Gints Zilbalodis' FLOW (Latvia/Animation)

FACETS – Sunday, 1pm

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]

Christopher Nolan's INTERSTELLAR (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Sunday, 12pm

Throughout the summer and early fall of 2014, INTERSTELLAR was discussed in hushed tones by Oscarologists and box office prognosticators, positioned sight unseen as an automatic blockbuster that would steamroll everything in its path—a feat of original I.P. that would tug at the heart and the wallet. Projectionists everywhere welcomed director Christopher Nolan's emphatically pro-celluloid public posture and marveled at the clout he exercised in goading Paramount Pictures to commit to a sizable run of 35mm, 70mm, and 70mm IMAX prints months after the studio had quietly abandoned analog distribution. When was the last time a one-sheet listed the available gauges under the contractual credits block? When word leaked that the film was nearly three hours long, the fanboys relitigated their starry-eyed comparisons to Kubrick and Tarkovsky. Physicists Kip Thorne and Neil deGrasse Tyson touted the movie's scientific bona fides. Then INTERSTELLAR actually came out. The reception was icier than the snow-swept landscapes that automatically connote a Nolan movie, a trope appearing in his work almost as frequently as murdered wives and guilt-ridden husbands. (How does Nolan's own spouse, Emma Thomas—also his producer—feel about all that?) It was pretentious, talky, sentimental, and it stopped the nascent McConnaissance dead in its tracks. The sound mix, including Hans Zimmer's Wendy-Carlos-at-the-electromagnetic-church-organ score, was roundly pilloried as unintelligible mud. Nolan and his co-scripting brother Jonathan cited 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY as their Rosetta Monolith, but fell short of their inspiration: if the 1968 film melded the dreamy design of vintage sci-fi illustrations with the weighty, pseudo-spiritual aura of a photo essay in Life, INTERSTELLAR played more like a crumpled issue of the Saturday Evening Post, unstuck in time. All told, INTERSTELLAR is just about the squarest blockbuster to arrive in many a moon. (How square? When the INTERSTELLAR Oscar campaign failed to gain traction, Paramount bought a two-page spread in the Hollywood Reporter that reprinted a recent endorsement from David Brooks in its entirety.) In any other movie, astronaut Anne Hathaway's monologue about the unsung scientific value of love would come across as a moment of eye-rolling sexism. And it is that, but it's also unquestionably, unabashedly sincere. INTERSTELLAR believes in love and family as real forces in the physical world, and I don't have the heart to tell it otherwise. (It also literalizes string theory as a multicolored pane of time-bending strings behind your bedroom wall. Think about that for a moment!) The ambition of INTERSTELLAR is inseparable from its clean-shaven nuttiness and its discreet romanticism. Its essential value would only become more pronounced in the aftermath of THE MARTIAN, with which it shares many plot points and several cast members. Both films can be construed as infomercials for NASA and a renewed commitment to STEM education, but the smartass quips and transparent ingratiation of THE MARTIAN are utterly alien to straight-arrow awe of INTERSTELLAR. John Lithgow's grandfatherly ramblings just about sum it up: "When I was a kid, it seemed like they made something new every day. Some, gadget or idea, like every day was Christmas." Make America Great Again? (2014, 169 min, DCP Digital) [K.A. Westphal]

Julia Ducournau’s TITANE (France)

Alamo Drafthouse – Monday, 10pm

Julia Ducournau’s TITANE is difficult to summarize without revealing too much of the wild and twisted plot. It centers on Alexia (Agatha Rousselle), a woman with a deep predilection for cars and violence and who's had a titanium plate in her skull since a vehicular accident in childhood. Did the accident awaken her perversions? Or did the piece of metal implanted in her head do it? The film cares not to say. One thing that is certain is that many of Alexia's motivations seem to come from someplace deep within herself. She expresses them in an animalistic fashion, focusing on her baser urges and her will to survive. Much like Ducournau's first film, RAW (2016), TITANE takes body horror to a shocking extreme, and the brutalities it depicts again tie into the animal side of human nature. Body horror isn't relegated to violence; it also explores the ideas of the body as status symbol and personal prison. There comes a point in the film where Alexia finds herself living with fire captain Vincent (Vincent Lindon), and their relationship takes on a father-daughter dynamic. The interactions between these two are surprisingly touching, offsetting the film’s more gnarly moments. Like the inhabitants of the Island of Misfit Toys, Alexia and Vincent find solidarity and comfort from a lonely world in each other’s presence. Visceral and thought-provoking, TITANE demonstrates Ducournau’s ability to weave a story that is batshit crazy yet grounded in fully realized characters. Screening as part of the Killer Cuts series. Please note there is also a 7pm show, which is SOLD OUT. (2021, 104 min, DCP Digital) [Kyle Cubr]

2025 Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

It’s a joyful rarity to find that this year, all of the Academy Award-nominated animated short films happen to be thematically linked, as if these five disparate teams of animators took the prompt of “how do we find connection in this world?” and answered it in their own varying ways. Each of these shorts comes filled with deep longing and desire, though some of the films make that more obvious than others. Certainly the two most whimsical shorts of the bunch, Daisuke Nishio’s MAGIC CANDIES (21 min) and Loïc Espuche’s YUCK! (13 min), with their focus on young people, finds their respective yearning resting in the idealism of youth and the discovery of the new. MAGIC CANDIES—a charmingly rendered piece of 3D-modeled anime—does so with gumballs that reveal the innermost truths and wants of those surrounding our youthful protagonist, each awakened thought (be it from the child’s sofa, or the spirit of his late grandmother) reminding our youthful hero that true adventure is never experienced alone. YUCK!, though not centered around literal candy, aims for simpler, sweeter fare, a cartoonish 2D confection about a group of kids retching at the sight of summertime kissing, only for two of the kids to realize that lip-locking might be something worth experiencing. Delving into the more serious and adult fare, while still staying in the realm of 2D-animation, Hossein Molayemi and Shirin Sohani’s IN THE SHADOW OF THE CYPRESS (20 min) leans fully into an emotional blend of realistic and expressionistic storytelling, its psychological depictions of grief manifesting through contorted bodies and graphic novel-esque imagery, all in service of a story of a father and daughter trying to stay afloat. Sadness floats to the top of Nicolas Keppens’ BEAUTIFUL MEN (18 min), a humorously depressing work of stop-motion drudgery, where three brothers—all follically challenged—travel to Istanbul for hair transplants, only to be further subsumed by their own limited perceptions of masculinity. Of all the shorts though, it’s Nina Gantz’s WANDER TO WONDER(14 min) that provides the most fascinating experience, beginning with a stop-motion/live-action hybrid children’s television show—something reminiscent of Teletubbies or The Wombles—before turning into a chilling meditation on loss, filled with the haunting energy of watching a home movie from your childhood that you forgot existed. It’s a dark and idiosyncratic work that feels both too limited by its short runtime, yet still enticing in its brief mysterious designs to hook you completely. [Ben Kaye]
---
See showtimes for the other Oscar nominated shorts programs at Film Center here and the Music Box here.

📽️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Alamo Drafthouse
Andrew Bush’s 2011 film ROLLER TOWN (75 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday, 9:30pm, as part of the Weird Wednesday series. More info here.

⚫ Alliance Francaise
Sarah Baril Guadet’s 2022 Canadian documentary CELLES QUI LUTTENT (SISTERS OF WRESTLING) screens Wednesday, 6:30pm, followed by a post-screening discussion with Dr. Chantal Nadeau, Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies & Criticism and Interpretative Theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, moderated by Colleen Duke, Senior Foreign Policy & Diplomacy Services Officer at the Canadian Consulate. Guests will enjoy a post-screening reception featuring complimentary Quebecois beer.

Rithy Panh’s 2024 film MEETING WITH POL POT (112 min, Digital Projection) screens Thursday, 6:30pm, followed by a post-screening discussion with Laura Ouk and Sophoan Khoeun, President and Vice President, respectively, of the National Cambodian Heritage Museum & Killing Fields Memorial. More info on all screenings here.

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

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
James Foley’s 1990 film AFTER DARK, MY SWEET (114 min, 35mm) screens Saturday, 9:45pm, as part of the Lust & Intrigue: Erotic Thrillers series. 

A new 2K DCP Digital Restoration of Margarida Cordeiro and António Reis’ 1976 film TRÁS-OS-MONTES (108 min), preceded by António Reis and César Guerra Leal’s 1963 film PAINÉIS DO PORTO (20 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, 4pm, as part of the Peasants of the Cinema: António Reis & Margarida Cordeiro series.

A new 2K DCP Digital Restoration of António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro’s 1974 film JAIME (35 min, DCP Digital) and their 1989 film ROSA DE AREIA (87 min, DCP Digital) screen Wednesday, 7pm, as part of the Peasants of the Cinema: António Reis & Margarida Cordeiro series.

Paul Schrader’s 1980 film AMERICAN GIGOLO (117 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 9:30pm, as part of the Lust & Intrigue: Erotic Thrillers series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ FACETS Cinema
Sean Baker’s 2024 film ANORA (138 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday at 3pm and 6pm.

Halina Reijn’s 2024 film BABYGIRL (114 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday at 3pm.

The Chicago Tap Theatre presents Lisa La Touche’s film TRAX: EXPLORING THE BORDERLESS BLACK HISTORY on Monday at 7pm. More info on all screenings here. 

⚫ Film Studies Center (at the University of Chicago)
The Mitchell Cobey Lecture on Cinema with Joshua Oppenheimer takes place Friday at 7pn. More info here.

⚫ Instituto Cervantes
José Sánchez Montes’ 2022 film CANTE JONDO, GRANADA 1922 (80 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday at 6pm. Free and open to the public. More info here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
John Badham’s 1976 film THE BINGO LONG TRAVELING ALL-STARS & MOTOR KINGS (110 min, 35mm) screens Saturday, 11:30am, as part of the Play Ball! Series, with an introduction by William Brashler, author of The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings (1973). 

Mark Anthony Green’s 2025 film OPUS (104 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 7pm, free for Music Box Members only. Filmmaker in attendance for a post-screening discussion. More info on all screenings here. 

CINE-LIST: February 28, 2025 - March 6, 2025

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Camden G. Bauchner, Brendan Boyle, Kyle Cubr, Ray Ebarb, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Patrick Friel, Shaun Huhn, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Ben Kaye, Raphael Jose Martinez, Scott Pfeiffer, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Brian Welesko, K.A. Westphal, David Whitehouse