:: FRIDAY, APRIL 4 - THURSDAY, APRIL 10 ::

🧅 2025 Onion City Experimental Film Festival

All programs at Chicago Filmmakers Firehouse Cinema (1326 W. Hollywood Ave.) except where noted

Is This Thing On? (Shorts)
Friday, 6pm
Watching these six experimental shorts put me in mind of composer Nicholas Jaar’s song "Space Is Only Noise If You Can See." It’s a phrase I think about a lot, as someone endlessly fascinated by the relationship between image and sound, both on and off screen. The films here each examine in different ways how image can be noise and how noise can be imagined; sound signals both a deeper visual understanding yet can also create deliberate confusion. Both V.A. Doch’s TIDAL (2024, 10 min) and Ayanna Dozier’s BOUNDED INTIMACY (2024, 6 min) feature sex workers in city locations. In the former, voiceover is heard of a phone sex operator, unseen, as she soliloquies about her clients. Images of a sinister and grainy blue ocean-like space reveal a large office building at night, where figures, mostly women, are seen cleaning empty spaces. The division of the building’s windows, in combination with the voiceover, reflects a sense of segmentation and alienation, particularly for women in service positions. Conversely BOUNDED INTIMACY presents a voyeuristic view of a sex worker in daylight, shot from high atop of building before the camera comes to ground level. There, the subject recognizes and performs for the camera, completely in control. Both films acknowledge the relationship between distance and control, between being seen and being heard but never both. Ela Kazdal’s if you seek amy (2025, 2 min) depicts images of flip phones and clips from early aughts music videos, combining and distorting both sound and image through the clashing of analog and digital formats. In Guan Huang’s NOISE TO SIGNAL (2024, 2 min) a falling tone is heard over a pink screen. Disoriented in the image, it feels, too, like the viewer is falling, until it’s revealed this is in fact an extreme zoom in, alerting to the ways in which sound and image together are misleading. Valentina Rosset’s UM TROPEÇO EM CINCO MOVIMENTOS (A SLIPPAGE IN FIVE MOVEMENTS) (2024, 15 min) uses Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu’s “Corona: For Pianist(s)” to explore relationships between human and instrument, nature and technology. The musical piece is a graphic score, meaning it’s visually rendered without traditional notation, thus giving the musician playing freedom to interpret. It’s a visually rendered sensory experience, as shots of the artist’s hands playing are interrupted by images of nature and blocks of color; its form suggests a connection between sound and silence and stillness and movement. The final piece of the program, Joshua Gen Solondz’s WE DON’T TALK LIKE WE USED TO (2023, 36 min) presents a travelogue of sorts, exploring early parenthood and the juxtaposition between home and adventure beyond. With repetitive, thrashing sound and most faces obscured by masks, it compels one to see image as noise, and noise as image. [Megan Fariello]
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Tailwind (Shorts)
Saturday, 2pm
Onion City road trip, take one. Ready, steady the camera, go. This is an easy, breezy shorts block that turns to the open road as an organizing principle. The first stop along the program is Brian Lu's FIRST LOVE / LATE SPRING (2024, 3 min), a tender vignette of post-collegiate melancholy that slows time to a crawl in order to capture the flickering emotional gradations of a particularly bittersweet rumination. A young woman, still rocking the full cap and gown, reflects on her graduation in a luggage-packed sedan, recalling candid photos from the ceremony, totally suspended between the celebratory tenor of the event and the understanding that life has in an instant. In Molly Pattison and Andrew Wood's delightful two-panel piece IT'S CALLED ROUND LIKE A HEAD (2024, 6 min), the two collaborators film the coastal landscape near San Luis Obispo in tandem, their footage of the same terrain presented side by side to highlight the subtle differences between their individual perspectives. The program notes posit a search for empirical knowledge between the two filmic data sets, but I strongly suspect that there's a love letter of sorts hiding here, one that blossoms into romantic poetry once Morro Rock appears, its bifurcate depictions slowly rotating into a unified whole. WALKING FROM PARIS TO BREST (2021, 6 min) is filmmaker Vincent Le Port's loose remake of a 1927 film from Oskar Fleschinger, a German animator who documented his three-week trek from Munich to Berlin in a series of still photographs that were later cobbled together into a stop-motion film journal. Le Port set off nearly a century later in 2020 on a month-long walk between Paris and Brest yet clearly went to great lengths to preserve the style of the original picture, electing to shoot a bevy of wayward travelers and farm animals on low grade black and white film. Paradoxically both pastoral and beholden to a blistering blink-and-you-miss-it tempo. Hometown hero Ben Creech gives us another great look at the recent solar eclipse and a terrific song for the road trip playlist in WE MAKE THE ROAD BY WALKING (2024, 9 min), the latter coming courtesy of Electric Light Orchestra (I'll give you a hint: it's the one you're thinking of). This is a terrific, feel-good road trip extravaganza that sets out to answer the question that rightly should have been on all of our minds last year: what the hell happens when you point a film camera at the total solar eclipse in the path of totality? The answer: sick shit. Likely the heart and soul of the program. Josh Weissbach's A FILM WITH SOUND (TAKE THREE) (2023, 3 min) documents an unbelievably precious exchange between the director and his young daughter, the latter of whom requests that they shoot with sound this time around, their previous collaborative effort clearly having been a silent film. And so, they sit in a riverboat where Weissbach has her snap and recite the time plenty of times—to get the sound right, y'know? Vasilios Papaioannu's RAIN (2024, 6 min) is a waterlogged psychotravelogue that seems to tunnel directly out of a couple's conversation and into the streets where the camera simply roams unbounded, seemingly across a few countries, through city streets and onto country roads, into ornate homes, and so on. It's as though once the rain begins to strike the camera lens in the opening moments, the associative floodgates are thrown wide open and the film is carried adrift in quicksilver rivulets of memory. In Tristen Ives' RIGMAROLE (2024, 8 min), the program takes a lovely aesthetic detour into diarism and queer body cinema, yet the film's relative sense of stasis in no way detracts from the broader conceptual gambit at play. Here, between ebullient scenes at the club and wistful shots of boats resting at harbor, there emerges a sense of a powerful yearning for escape. Renato Garvez Umali takes us right back to the site of the solar eclipse with A HOME MOVIE (2024, 4 min), a low-key meditation on the best qualities of family home movies that unfolds with extreme nonchalance. Brett Swenson's FANTASIA (THE WEARY WHEEL) (2024, 10 min) wastes no time in presenting an upside-down landscape as seen from a car window and then keeps the world in total inversion for much of its run-time. I could scarcely tell you what this film is going on about, although I mean that with a great deal of respect. This is a beguiling work that seemingly gestures towards matters of family lineage, the desire to break ground and stake out a home for one's family, as well as the ways in which the experience of the atomized family unit distorts one's view of the world, although it is willfully arcane and reticent to relinquish its secrets. It's hard to be overly concerned with scrutability when there is a sequence as viscerally engaging as the descent into a home's fiberglass insulation contained within this work. PARK AND RIDE (2024, 6 min) is director John Clark's quaint portrait of a local park and ride where he conducts camera tests, gets in some sporadic exercise, fantasizes about movie ideas, and hilariously does not take advantage of public transit whatsoever. The final destination of this whole journey and the anchor point of the program is Carl Elsaesser's magnificent HOW TO RUN A TROTLINE (2024, 19 min), a film that we have covered before at Cine-File, and one that never fails to electrify me from its insane opening moments: a mesmeric cell phone recording of someone sneaking up on a sleeping fox and getting in a few leisurely pets before it wakes up and takes the hell off. This is free jazz filmmaking of the highest caliber, and I'd struggle to imagine a more appropriate conclusion for the program than the montage of literal street poetry that concludes this piece. Always be sure to ride out in style. [David Whitehouse]
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Vivid Detail (Shorts)
Saturday, 4pm
My interest is always piqued by the word ‘visceral,’ which appears in the description for this program: “The films… chart the visceral potential of augmented perception brought on by medical interventions, brushes with death, and erotic encounter.” The baseness of these kinds of reactions cuts to the core of what cinema is, the emotions it provokes. Almost explicatively, Sarah Ballard’s FULL OUT (2025, 15 min) draws a connection between 19th century Paris and the current day in a tenebrous probe into incidents of mass hysteria then and now. Culling heavily from archival resources for imagery and dialogue to illustrate the scenario, the effect is haunting, the past a ghostlike presence in the current day’s corollary. Similarly surreal but less honed in on any one subject, Josh Brainin’s EYES CLOSED SEE STARS (2025, 12 min), shot on Hi8 and VHS tape, features two teenagers as they consume a potion, wander the city and eventually succumb to the mystical allure of the lake. It is, as the kids say, a vibe, a lo-fi one to be exact, that evokes a DIY sensibility, which is fitting for depicting teenage aimlessness. The noun, viscera, literally means “the internal organs in the main cavities of the body, especially those in the abdomen, e.g. the intestines,” and that’s literally what Markus Maicher’s THE ACT OF NOT SEEING WITH ONE’S OWN EYES (2023, 9 min) is—a small camera traveling through his viscera, revealing his literal inner self in the process, metaphor and reality becoming one and the same. It’s a mesmerizing journey, the images produced kaleidoscopic. At the end, where he also credits his body as the filmmaker, text explains that the small intestine transit time was 369 minutes, all of which I would have gladly watched at its original speed (this being sped up). Matthew Berka’s TRUE COLOURS (2022, 6 min) is an adaptation of sorts, as passages from Gerald Muranane’s 2017 novel Border Districts are read above an X-ray and other medical-related imagery. There’s a soothing opacity to this one, and while I lack a total understanding it has made me want to read the book. Another sort of adaptation is brought to life in Felicity E. Palma’s EURYDICE IN THE UNDERWORLD (2024, 14 min), a restaging of Kathy Acker’s eponymous play, which she wrote while contending with terminal breast cancer. It would seem Palma herself has cancer, and the underworld in question is the hospital system she’s having to navigate as a result, certainly an apt and ever-relevant comparison. A collage of 16mm footage, sometimes with Acker’s text overlaid, many of the images, like those of nature, are ethereally beautiful, in contrast to the scenes that take place in a hospital setting (which it would seem are the filmmaker’s appointments and are also still beautiful but in context more darkly so). Zachary Epcar’s SINKING FEELING (2024, 21 min) feels like Cecilia Condit’s POSSIBLY IN MICHIGAN for our modern-day, late(r?)-stage capitalist society; white-collar workers stuck in a train fantasize about all types of possible intimate connections. Corporate spaces are the landscape against which these reveries are projected, imbuing them with a haunting romanticism that’s as tender as it is uncanny. It’s visceral, absolutely, an evocation rather than any kind of proclamation. Some films in the program are more literal, some emblematic, but all indeed visceral. [Kat Sachs]
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Ben Russell and Guillame Cailleau's DIRECT ACTION (France)
Block Cinema (at Northwestern University) – Sunday, 12pm
In Notres-Dames-des-Landes, we see the gears of what makes a protean society work. The area, the most prominent ZAD (zone à défendre, or “zone to defend”) in France, is occupied by ecological activists and has been a site of mass mobilization and protest, most notably to oppose an airport that was proposed for development in the area but scrapped in 2018 after almost a decade of actions. Long-term occupation demands all kinds of labor, making the area prime material for Ben Russell, a filmmaker always attuned to the intersection of labor, nature, and belief. Shooting with collaborator Guillame Cailleau between 2022 and 2023, the filmmaker created DIRECT ACTION as a Wiseman-esque study of process, roundabout in a way that enriches our understanding of the subject at all levels of operation. While they seem to have extensive access, Russell and Cailleau keep the action at arm’s length, keeping a flatly observational style over the film’s 3.5 hours, mostly looking at the minutiae of living and organizing in a community like this. Watching extended takes of community members cutting wood, blacksmithing, and farming, the material feels oddly timely, coinciding with a rise in self-sufficiency and homesteading “content” usually associated with the more bizarre corners of the American right wing. But here the dialectical message seems to be the reminder that the particulars of shelter-and-sustenance labor are the backbone of any new society, especially one that hopes to advocate for sustainable land use. Russell and Cailleau brush up against without directly addressing their own material relationship to the movement and what messaging, if any, their film aims to promote. It’s only later in the film that the filmmakers call attention to their own constructions, when during a clash with police, one protestor says into the camera that “this isn’t what you should be filming." This climatic portion is followed by a closing scene which contains the film’s first secondary reference to the ZAD, when an interviewer offers some pushback to the group’s official narratives when interviewing three representatives. It’s telling that these discursive jumping-off points come so late in the film, as the political action can only succeed because of the scaffolding set up by months and years of organizing efforts; similarly, Russell and Cailleau suggest that a film can only examine its dialectical relationship with its subject once that subject has been thoroughly depicted and understood on its own terms. Though the film doesn’t go too far down this path with its limited remaining runtime, even this suggestion opens up DIRECT ACTION into a more fluid document that can be solipsistic or practical as needed. At its best, it’s both, like in the film’s standout scene: a 10-minute take of a baker kneading tons of dough. (2024, 216 min, DCP Digital) [Maxwell Courtright]
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(Re)Visitations (Shorts)
Sunday, 3pm
The first piece in this program, Leonardo Pirondi’s ADRIFT POTENTIALS (2024, 12 min), begins with an evocative premise: the film is the reconstruction of an unfinished work started in the 1970s by a Brazilian artist living in exile in Los Angeles because of the military dictatorship at home. What follows may be fairly abstract at times (such as the quick, probing shots of plants, beaches, and fences), but the film still conjures a concrete sense of persecution through allusions to Brazil’s colonialist origins and dictatorial period. Pirondi’s sound design is inventive, incorporating radio recordings, interviews, and even a bit of bongo playing; the soundtrack rarely corresponds directly to the images, which gives each shot a certain alienated quality. Jade Wong’s REFRIGERATOR HUM (2025, 15 min), which continues the program, feels more grounded by comparison. Incorporating discussions between Wong and their mother and grandmother, the work considers traditions passed on through generations, particularly those related to cooking. The work also considers how we create physical memories across various media, as Wong shares images in the form of film loops, video cinematography, and photographic prints. Interspersed throughout the film are gorgeous closeups of different textures and objects; these add to the richness of the work on the whole. THAT SPLIT-UP PLACE (2024, 9 min), by Spanish filmmakers Inés Pintor Sierra and Pablo Santrián, offers a surprisingly comprehensive portrait of a relationship in its short running time, charting the friendship, separation, and reunion of two childhood schoolmates over more than 50 years. The filmmakers depict this relationship through letters, then answering machine messages, that one character sends to another, which are illustrated with a heady montage that incorporates still photographs, home movies, and industrial films. The mixed media approach cleverly reflects the changing times—note that when the narrative gets to the ‘80s, the home movies are now shot on VHS. Cam Archer’s OH PAULO (2024, 16 min) continues the tender mood established by THAT SPLIT-UP PLACE. In it, the filmmaker muses on his relationships to (and emotional distance from) the young men he shoots as part of his creative practice. The film begins with an anecdote about Archer filming a group of teenage boys on a bridge under construction but failing to get one of them, Paulo, in the frame. Archer then shifts his attention to one of his favorite models, a young man named Angus who transitioned and became known as Benja. In diaristic fashion, the filmmaker addresses his complicated feelings toward his subjects, accompanying his narration with film portraits of young men and sensuous impressions of the California coastline. Archer eventually returns to Paulo, regarding him as a metaphor for everything that’s missing in life. Xiaolu Wang’s AT THE BAMBOO GREEN (2024, 11 min), on the other hand, isn’t about absence but rather how much you can fit into one shot. In one continuous take from a cell phone, the filmmaker documents her visit to her grandmother’s grave in the Ningxia Hui Muslim Autonomous Region in China. Wang presents part of her car ride there, during which her family picks up an imam on the side of the road, and then the religious rituals they all perform at the site. This feels like a miniature compendium of what makes contemporary Chinese documentaries so compelling—the filmmaking is immediate and observant, and the framing is always interesting. The final two shorts in this program are also intensely focused in their sense of place but incorporate historical concerns as well. Chi Jan Yin’s I WAS THERE, PART II (2024, 10 min) is the second in a trilogy of short experimental documentaries about, per the artist, “the problem of radiation, our society’s fading collective memory of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the unresolved debate between ethics and science.” Here, the filmmaker incorporates archival footage from the US National Archives and Records Administration Moving Images Related to Military Activities to show the atomic bombings of Japan during WWII and the immediate aftermath of these events. She counterposes the historical lessons with a dream she recounts on the soundtrack that climaxes with her losing her infant daughter in a melee. The intimacy of the dream throws the documentary footage into stark relief, evoking profound feelings of vulnerability. UN ÂNE (2023, 13 min), by Sirah Fopighel Brutmann and Eitan Efrat, also builds upon a provocative frisson between sound and image. While the filmmakers present shots of the same desert landscape Chantal Akerman traversed in NO HOME MOVIE (2015), the soundtrack features an open letter to the late filmmaker, which finds fault with her depiction of the region. “Since 1948, this desert is a place of continuous and daily erasure,” the letter says, thereby reframing the location we see as a site of tragedy. The most prescient work in the program, UN ÂNE concludes this strong collection on a mournful note. [Ben Sachs]
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Niche Appeal (Shorts)
Sunday, 5pm
This shorts program opens with the longest and most ambitious piece: Stéphanie Lagarde’s EXTRA LIFE (AND DECAY) (2025, 22 min), which brings together such disparate subjects as fungi, parenthood, collective action, and the future of the planet. The ideas and images come rapidly, conveying the sometimes-overwhelming complexity of contemporary life as well as the stress of navigating it. Lagarde narrates the film, often speaking in poetic riddles before she identifies what she’s talking about. For instance, she introduces her infant daughter with such lines as “she has become what is holding her down… she is one of her million possibilities.” The challenge of figuring out Lagarde’s meaning (along with keeping track of the busy montage) heightens the viewer’s engagement with the work. Eislow Johnson’s in place of a hollow tree (2024, 8 min) follows, and it’s a sparser work in comparison to Lagarde’s. A meditation on a flock of chimney swifts migrating across northern Illinois, this features multiple shots of birds in flight. Some of the shots contain images of a surrounding skyline, while others just feature birds against sky. Set to the sounds of the deep ocean, the film evinces a soothing tone and inspires an admiration for natural beauty as a form of abstract beauty. Rita Tse’s SERENE HUES (2024, 4 min) continues the relaxed vibe, with shots of reeds moving slowly, fish swimming, and plants swaying in the breeze. Even the scratches on the film seem pleasant, the hand-processed textures suggesting a photochemical analogue to the delights of the natural world. Next up is Carlo Nasisse and Shirley Yumeng He's LACUNA (2024, 13 min), a short experimental documentary about the former site of California’s Tulare Lake, which, per an early onscreen title, was drained in the early 20th century to become farmland but has since been ravaged by decades of drought. The filmmakers also inform us that now farmers are drilling the land in search of an ancient aquifer; they show some of the machinery used to drill and upturn the arid farmland as well as some of the residual wetlands from Tulare Lake. The mood is apocalyptic, especially during a digression that shows a demonstration of a robotic farming machine at work. This sequence points to a future without humans—and it is considerably less cute than WALL-E. In DISTANT EARLY WARNING (2024, 9 min), Anna Chiaretta Lavatelli digitally manipulates archival 8mm footage of workers constructing a nuclear warning system on Alaska’s Aleutian Islands in the mid-1950s. Like LACUNA, this considers the strangeness of interactions between complicated machinery and the natural world, with shots of the warning system and other technology interspersed with shots of Eskimos, ice fishing, and people cavorting in the snow. The digital manipulation renders all of this even stranger, though the effect isn’t dispelled when Lavatelli presents some of the footage as is. The program concludes with James Sansing’s A LIGHT UNSEEN (2024, 10 min), which, per the artist, “uses the camera to put into focus the light that reflects off spider webs.” Some of Sansing’s fascinating closeups contain legible views of webs, while others just present the colored light they reflect. No shot is held for very long, yet the work still feels contemplative, inspiring (like most of the program) a greater appreciation for the natural world. [Ben Sachs]
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Many filmmakers will appear in person. See the full festival lineup here.

☀️ 41st Chicago Latino Film Festival

Landmark Century Centre Cinema – See showtimes below

Ana Endara’s BELOVED TROPIC (Panama/Colombia)
Friday, 6pm and Saturday, 5:45pm
The great Chilean actress Paulina García delivers an understated but compelling performance as Mechi, a well-to-do retiree in the early stages of dementia, in this Panamanian-Colombian coproduction. García doesn’t overplay the character’s suffering, nor does she exaggerate her efforts to maintain dignity in spite of her cognitive decline. Mechi maintains her day-to-day activities until her symptoms overwhelm her, and García portrays those symptoms with a specificity that signals a commendable empathy for others. Set in Panama City, BELOVED TROPIC charts the relationship between Mechi and the woman who’s hired to be her live-in caretaker, a pregnant, undocumented Colombian immigrant named Ana María (Jenny Navarrete). It’s revealed about 15 minutes into the film that Ana María is harboring a secret: her pregnancy is really a sham, though it’s left ambiguous as to whether she’s pretending to be pregnant for financial gain or whether she’s delusional. In a few unsettling scenes, Ana María visits a hospital waiting room, seeks out pregnant women to chat with, and asks intimate questions that make them uncomfortable. These moments stand out in contrast to the comparatively warmer one depicting the growing bond between Ana María and Mechi, which (like the film’s portrayal of dementia) avoid sentimentality without sacrificing emotional resonance. Director Ana Endara, who cowrote the script with Pilar Moreno, favors medium-wide shots that give the characters room to interact with other people and the immediate environment; this shows a refusal to resort to closeups for easy emotional effects. Befitting the subject matter, BELOVED TROPIC is often a somber experience, though it’s not without moments of levity; there’s wisdom in Endara’s acknowledgment that life goes on amidst crises. (2024, 107 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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José Pérez’s WHAT RHYMES WITH MAGDALENA? (US)
Friday, 8:15pm and Sunday, 3:30pm
José Pérez’s debut feature, both emotionally rhapsodic and structurally lackadaisical, feels lovingly in conversation with self-reflexive comedic dramas of the 1990s and early 2000s: Magdalena (a wondrous Cher Alvarez) walks in the same footsteps as the fourth-wall breaking, confidently excruciating protagonists of HIGH FIDELITY (2000) and JUST ANOTHER GIRL ON THE I.R.T. (1992). Her journey across Chicago’s cluttered apartments and colorful bars and laundromats exudes similar hang-out vibes as Gregg Araki and Richard Linklater movies, but this distinctly 21st century remix finds new poetic vistas to distinguish itself from those cinematic markers. A poet at the end of her emotional rope, Magdalena spends the film bouncing from ex to ex, interrogating past lovers—and herself—on the eve of taking a huge emotional step in her life; she wonders if her own romantic immaturity can be tempered through an exhaustive autopsy of past relationships. There are no easy answers awaiting her, as each encounter either brings up the shortcomings of the respective ex or Magdalena’s unwillingness to commit to the person before her (that her romantic history involves partners across the gender spectrum, along with a brief stint in a polyamorous relationship, provides depth and variety to her journey). Magdalena’s asides to the audience reveal a backstory about her parents falling in love and how that determines the life she's chasing after today, and they're rendered beautiful by the character's poetic mind and Alvarez’s committed delivery. Pérez finds a meaningful balance between the surreal mode of expression of Magdalena’s internal journey and the almost improvisational feel of the dramatic interactions, then ends things with a gesture of reality-breaking significance that feels entirely suited to our eponymous poet’s quest, a woman taking agency over her story through cinematically daring means. (2024, 100 mins, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
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Juan Olea’s BITTER GOLD (Chile/Mexico/Uruguay/Germany)
Saturday, 1:15pm
This one’s worth seeing on the big screen for the widescreen views of Chile’s Atacama Desert, which provides a stark backdrop for a suspenseful tale of murder and deceit. Pacifico is an older man who lives in the middle of the desert with his teenage daughter Carola; they manage the excavation of an artisanal mine, overseeing the work of a half-dozen employees. One night, a disgruntled former employee tracks down Pacifico and tries to kill him; Pacifico kills the assailant in the ensuing scuffle but suffers a gunshot to the leg. BITTER GOLD gets more suspenseful from there, as Pacifico, too weak to go back to work and too afraid of a police investigation to seek medical treatment, hides out at home and sends Carola to manage the mine in his stead. How long can she keep the workers from looking into where her father is? And how long until Pacifico caves in to the pain and goes to a hospital? The film alternates between these two questions, with each one adding to the tension of the other. As Carola assumes more responsibility for her family, she also carries the weight of the film, becoming the central narrative focus, and Katalina Sánchez, the young actress who plays her, does an impressive job at exuding a confidence and world weariness well beyond her years. The rest of the cast exhibits an marked ruggedness that heightens the film’s desolate atmosphere; so too does the cinematography (by Sergio Armstrong, who’s shot multiple films for Pablo Larraín), which renders the sunlight and stone dust almost palpable. Though it runs less than an hour and a half, BITTER GOLD reaches a point of almost excruciating intensity—the film is like a tightly wound spring—though the suspense gives way to a most satisfying conclusion, which reflects a Rube Goldberg-like inventiveness. (2024, 87 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Luis Carlos Hueck and Alfredo Hueck’s BACK TO LIFE (Venezuela/US)
Saturday, 3:15pm and Monday, 8:45pm
Venezuelan directors Luis Carlos Hueck and younger brother Alfredo hail from a family steeped in the home movie tradition. The opening moments of BACK TO LIFE, based on their true story, show their father (José Roberto Díaz) filming his sons, Ricardo (José Ramón Barreto) and Manuel (Allan Grynbal), and making Ricardo responsible for looking out for his brother and his soon-to-be-born sister. A flash-forward takes us to the now-grown Ricardo returning from study in the United States and blowing off a family trip to camp on a beach with his friends—a trip that will end with a life-threatening medical diagnosis for Ricardo. The elder of the two Hueck brothers won mainstream popularity in his home country with his baseball-themed, box office smash PAPITA, MANÍ, TOSTÓN (2013), and he applies many of that film’s crowd-pleasing strategies to BACK TO LIFE. Adolescent sex humor and scantily clad women abound in the first part of the film, showing off the carefree lives of Ricardo and his friends as they romp on a sun-soaked beach. The turn toward the serious even starts with Ricardo suffering from a painful, hours-long erection. The film dissolves into melodrama and eventually moves from dramatization to actual footage of the medical journey Hueck and his family took. The fictional section is sketchy and a bit slapdash, but I enjoyed the beautiful views of Venezuela and the examination of the financial precarity and threadbare medical care in the country during the mid 1990s. Best of all, dream sequences in which Ricardo’s anxieties manifest show imagination and some power. BACK TO LIFE is a modest, uplifting film that treats its subject with honesty. (2023, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Tania Hermida’s THE INVENTION OF THE SPECIES (Ecuador)
Saturday, 6pm and Sunday, 3:15pm
If there ever was an appropriate place to set a film about the origins of life and death, it is the Galapagos Islands. With THE INVENTION OF SPECIES, Ecuadorian director Tania Hermida completes a trilogy begun with HOW FAR AWAY (2006) and continued with IN THE NAME OF THE DAUGHTER (2011) that explores sadness, loss, and the power of words. The film is loosely structured around the creation myth in the Book of Genesis to chart the journey of 13-year-old Carla (Ana María Carrión) as she spends a week on Isla Isabela with her father (Santiago Villacísa), an expert on turtles who is presenting at a conservation conference there. Carla has suffered the loss of her brother, Pedro, whom she thinks took his own life. Struck nearly mute, Carla, who adopts the name Isla, eventually finds youthful companionship with a cantina worker named Darwin (Jean Carlo Cabrera) and a boy about her age they nickname Wiki (Gabriel Saltos) for his devotion to looking up trivia on Wikipedia. The trio explores separately and together the bounty of the island as Carla finds nature and the poetry of a trans healer (Pancho Aguirre) who has also cycled through several names a balm for her grieving heart. Cinematographer Tomás Astudillo provides sharp, indelible images of the overground and underwater environments as the narrative ponders the unaware innocence of it all before ships came across the once-primordial sea and started naming what they found. I found the close-up of an iguana’s head particularly majestic and a clear inspiration for the look of Godzilla. (2024, 91 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Paulo Filipe Monteiro’s CLEAR NIGHTS (Portugal)
Saturday, 8:30pm and Monday, 5:30pm
It’s only fitting for a film about characters struggling with their ever-shifting identities that Paulo Filipe Monteiro’s feature feels like a text in the midst of an identity crisis. Equal parts melodramatic and intimate, and inexplicably devolving into moments of stylized movement, each scene of CLEAR NIGHTS aims to pass the baton of its story along while morphing into whatever it feels it needs to be emotionally. Even with these mood swings of scene work, Monteiro seems most comfortable in exploring his story of siblings in crisis through colliding scenes of dramatic crisis. Lidia (Beatriz Godinho) is initially elated for her impending motherhood, but once her baby comes along, she grows a complete detachment from herself, the never-ending cries of her child drilling a hole between herself and whatever kind of life she had pre-parenthood. Lidia’s brother, Lauro (Romeu Runa), similarly feels outside of his own skin, though this stems more from his uncomfortable around his every blooming bisexuality (though, as Lidia says at one point, “it’s the 21st century,” and ideally such a discovery shouldn’t be shameful anymore). Monteiro seems fascinated by the shifting spirit of the self, how we grow from one self to another, and how liberating it can finally feel to love the person we’ve become while not forgetting the selves that have gotten us to this point. In a film full of bodies and minds constricted and being held back, it follows that the last images are of our characters free falling, completely carefree in a world rushing past them. (2024, 100 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
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Mariana Wainstein’s LINDA (Argentina/Spain)
Sunday, 3:30pm and Tuesday, 8:30pm
The title character of writer-director Mariana Wainstein’s feature debut is a twenty-something woman who comes to work as the live-in maid for a wealthy family in Buenos Aires. Linda speaks very little about who she is or where she comes from yet is preternaturally confident in a cool, rock-and-roll way. In a telling early scene, she casually informs the matriarch of the family that she won’t wear a uniform on the job as requested; the employer, taken back by the new maid’s stridency and perhaps wanting to be seen as cool herself, acquiesces at once. Linda’s also beautiful in an earthy, workaday manner, which seems to take everyone in the family off guard. Husband, wife, teenage son, and college-aged daughter all begin to regard the stranger with erotic fascination, but as soon as you think the film will become a modern-day spin on Pasolini’s TEOREMA (1968), Wainstein pulls back. Linda grows close with each family member and makes them feel comfortable enough to divulge personal information, but the relationships stay chaste for the most part. Wainstein is more interested in power dynamics in general than power dynamics in sexual matters; Linda’s exoticism, which is a substantial source of her power over the other characters, is very much a function of her belonging to a different class. Her exoticism also owes something to the fact that the family—as well as the audience—knows so little about her; when the film reveals, in a rare sequence showing Linda outside of her job, that she’s the mother of a little girl, the discovery comes as a small shock. For the movie to continue generating suspense, Wainstein can only reveal so much—or rather, so little—about Linda, and this can result at times in a certain dramatic inertia. Still, LINDA delivers worthwhile insight into the erotic aspects of class conflict as well as the class-bound aspects of erotic conflict. (2024, 100 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Marcos Díaz Sosa’s NATURAL PHENOMENA (Cuba/Argentina/France)
Sunday, 6:30pm and Wednesday, 6pm
NATURAL PHENOMENA bustles with good cheer, inventive widescreen compositions, and witty references to THE WIZARD OF OZ; it also takes a surprisingly lighthearted look at the decay of Cuban society in the 1980s. It centers on a young nurse named Vilma who lives with her husband Ivan in a village on the outskirts of Santa Clara in 1988. Very little is going right for this couple and everything around them seems to be falling apart, though they remain deeply in love in spite of their bad luck. Their winning chemistry gives the film the feel of a romantic comedy, and this ameliorates the film’s grim social observations. When Ivan encourages Vilma to try her hand at target practice with an old rifle they find around the house, the heroine discovers she’s a sharpshooter, and in little time, she begins to indulge a newfound passion for skeet shooting. In an unexpected turn, NATURAL PHENOMENA becomes a sports drama, as Vilma determines to enter a national skeet shooting competition and hold her own against professional (and mostly male) shootists; in another unexpected turn, this one into the territory of magical realism, Vilma gets sucked into a tornado, which deposits her at the site of the competition she so wants to enter. It’s this twist that feels most in keeping with Latin American storytelling tradition, especially since writer-director Marcos Díaz Sosa presents it in such an understated manner. Indeed, much of the humor in NATURAL PHENOMENA is of a deadpan variety, though the thematic insistence on disappointment and failure prevents the jokes from ever feeling too arch or cutesy. Above all, Díaz Sosa exhibits an infectious love of storytelling—the chief pleasure of the film is finding out just where the narrative is going to go. The conclusion may be the most predictable thing about it (at least if you’ve seen THE WIZARD OF OZ), but in the context of the film’s portrait of Cuba, its poignancy becomes one of the film’s biggest surprises. (2024, 80 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Vanina Spataro’s SHIPWRECKS (Uruguay/Argentina)
Monday, 5:45pm and Wednesday, 8:30pm
It takes over half an hour for SHIPWRECKS to reveal the backstories of any of its characters. Until then, the film is content to observe them from moment to moment, slowly drawing out their personalities from how they interact with each other. This kind of elusive storytelling can come off as evasive or needlessly obscure, yet SHIPWRECKS feels rich in spite of it. Vanina Spataro (who also cowrote the script) creates an atmosphere of lazy serenity that can be just dandy to luxuriate in; further, the interactions between the characters, all of whom get along, have a sweet and becalmed quality. The film takes place in a beautiful coastal resort town during the off season, and, like the title, the setting is ripe with metaphorical significance. Just looking at a few of Spataro’s carefully considered frames inspires notions of who gravitates toward such a place—people looking for quiet and comfort, either to meditate on life or briefly escape from it—and this presumption fills the gaps in the characterizations to the effect that you don’t even realize there are gaps to begin with. Maite is a young woman from Buenos Aires who arrives in town at the start of the film. Gradually, we learn that she’s trying to forget a bad romance by hiding out at her family’s summer home. While Spataro is teasing this out, she introduces the community’s few year-round denizens: Esteban, a painter; Adriana, a cleaning woman who also looks after unoccupied homes during the winter; Lola, a doctor; and Dami, a lifeguard. Maite meets and befriends all of them in turn. Dami develops a crush on her, and the question of whether they’ll hook up generates the closest thing that SHIPWRECKS has to suspense. As Martin Scorsese said of Hong Sang-soo’s WOMAN IS THE FUTURE OF MAN (2004), this is valuable filmmaking because it so strongly conveys a way of being, and on top of that, it’s a way of being we can all aspire to: optimistic, unstressed, convivial, and frequently amorous. (2024, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Carlos Leiva Barahona’s THE RIGHTEOUS (Chile)
Monday, 9pm and Tuesday, 5:30pm
Home invasions in cinema often walk a tightrope between suspense and farce, but THE RIGHTEOUS resists easy classification. Director Carlos Leiva Barahona lays out all the familiar elements: a ragtag quartet of criminals storm a wealthy family’s estate, holding them hostage while waiting for a payday that, predictably, never comes. But what unfolds is less a genre exercise than an interrogation of genre itself, pulling its audience through a carefully orchestrated collision of class struggle, performative power, and the uncomfortable absurdity of survival. Barahona, whose EL PRIMERO DE LA FAMILIA (2016) turned rising sewage into a metaphor for familial dysfunction, inverts the premise here. If that film dissected a working-class family’s implosion, THE RIGHTEOUS forces us to reconsider the moral weight of privilege. The criminals aren’t just after money—they impose their own social order, treating the housekeeper (Roxana Naranjo) with near-religious reverence while forcing Claudia (Paulina García), the matriarch, into humiliating servitude. At its core, the film operates like a controlled detonation. Barahona gives us the signifiers of a crime thriller—guns waved, threats exchanged, betrayals simmering—but continually destabilizes expectations. James (Germán Diaz), the ostensible mastermind, wields his gun (The Devil, as he calls it) with more bluster than purpose. His crew is equally unorthodox: a pregnant woman, her boyfriend, and a stoner more interested in PlayStation and bong rips than crime. These contradictions create a slow-burning tension that feels eerily real, punctuated by moments of uneasy humor and operatic drama. By the time the film reaches its climax, the narrative has shifted under our feet. Is this a takedown of the wealthy? A tragicomedy about power? A home invasion thriller turned inside out? THE RIGHTEOUS doesn’t offer easy answers, but that’s precisely what makes it so compelling. (2024, 78 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]
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Jayson McNamara and Andrea Carbonatto Tortonese’s NORITA (Argentina/US/Documentary)
Tuesday, 8:30pm and Thursday, 6pm
In many parts of the world, Argentina’s Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo have been an inspiration. These white-scarved women, most of whom were housewives, marched for years in the heart of Buenos Aires to demand the return of their activist sons and daughters who had been disappeared by the military junta that established a dictatorship in 1976. Among them, Nora Cortiñas, nicknamed Norita, was a driving force. Stricken with grief when her son Gustavo was kidnapped, she went to police stations, government office—anywhere she could think of—to try to find out what happened to him. In the process, she met other mothers in the same boat as she, and a movement began. Through the use of interviews, photos, animation, and archival and present-day footage, directors Jayson McNamara and Andrea Carbonatto Tortonese, tell the story of Argentina’s turbulent past and Cortiñas’s evolution as an activist and feminist. They pull no punches in outlining the cruelty of the ominously named National Reorganization Process of dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, including the murder of three of the mothers, who were taken, tortured, and dropped alive from a plane into the ocean. They also show the hard-won victories of the protesters, who eventually brought the leaders and rank-and-file perpetrators to justice in trials held across the country. Cortiñas, who died in 2024 at the age of 94, is frank about the sacrifices of her husband and remaining son as she pursued the truth and rose as an international figure. We also meet some of the people, most notably Ana Careaga, who were kidnapped and then returned, perhaps to tell their stories to frighten the activist community into submission. Careaga’s testimony and recollections are as poetic as they are horrifying, and the animation by Tortonese provides a literal throughline of the homely stiches in the fabric of a resistance community that guided Cortiñas on her quest. NORITA demonstrates the power of persistence and dedication to the truth that we need now more than ever. (2024, 88 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Alexandra Latishev Salazar’s DELIRIO (Costa Rica)
Wednesday, 8:30pm
Alexandra Latishev Salazar’s sophomore feature explores three generations of women navigating trauma in a home that may—or may not—be haunted. Crafted by a predominantly female crew, Salazar’s meditation on dementia is heartbreaking, disorienting, and often hallucinatory, mirroring the condition’s effects. The film’s steady camerawork lingers on haunting compositions, often framing characters behind blurred obstructions, as if peering through the veil of a family mystery. The literal veils draped over beds ostensibly protect from mosquitos, yet they also serve as barriers, isolating each woman from the house and the world beyond. The story begins with a long take: Elisa (Liliana Biamonte) and her daughter Masha (Helena Calderón) arrive at Elisa’s childhood home to assist in the care of the family matriarch. The caretaker, Azucena, has been tending to the ailing Ms. Dinia (Anabelle Ulloa) for an unknown length of time. When Dinia first appears, wrapped in a veil, she fails to recognize her daughter and mistakes Masha for Elisa as a child. Eleven-year-old Masha, uprooted from her life, is immediately wary of the house, too frightened to even go to the bathroom alone at night. As the three generations coexist under one roof, an eerie presence begins to take hold. While films like RELIC (2020) and THE TAKING OF DEBORAH LOGAN (2014) have explored Alzheimer’s through horror, Salazar ventures into uncharted territory, intertwining trauma and memory. Whether driven by the house or something more insidious, all three women begin to experience a fraying sense of reality, as dementia—like their past wounds—passes through generations. As their perceptions distort, the cinematography subtly shifts: static, painterly shots give way to handheld movements, POV angles, and shallow focus. The transition is almost imperceptible, yet it deepens the film’s atmosphere of paranoia, unearthing past horrors and the specter of cyclical abuse. Salazar employs the legend of the Vourdalak as a potent metaphor for generational violence. Inspired by Alexander Pushkin’s 1836 poem Wurdulac, later adapted into Tolstoy’s The Family of the Vourdalak, the tale follows a patriarch who returns as a vampire, slowly consuming his family and community. Here, the myth resonates as a chilling allegory for inherited trauma. Like Kelly Reichardt, Salazar finds meaning in quiet moments, allowing movement and stillness to reveal character depth. With DELIRIO, she threads the needle between powerful art, an urgent conversation on generational pain, and the atmospheric dread of a haunted house film. Alongside Antonella Sudasassi Furniss and Nathalie Álvarez Mésen, Salazar stands at the forefront of Costa Rica’s emerging cinematic wave—one led by women, reshaping the language of horror and storytelling itself. (2024, 74 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]
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Many filmmakers will appear in person. See the full festival lineup here.

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Vincente Minnelli’s BELLS ARE RINGING (US)

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

Adapted from the 1956 stage musical, BELLS ARE RINGING serves in part as a gloss on the technologically motivated plot of SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN (1952), in which Hollywood greeted the world-shaking advent of synchronized sound “talking pictures." It further recalls the prior year’s Rock Hudson/Doris Day comedy PILLOW TALK (1959), where a telephone party line provided the impetus for romantic farce. At once shaggier and more particular than either of these films, BELLS ARE RINGING contemplates the emergence of new, miniature horizons in social alienation via the device of a human answering service, “Susanswerphone”, a nascent industry that would become obsolete within two decades. Staffed by Judy Holliday (ADAM’S RIB, BORN YESTERDAY, THE MARRYING KIND) in her final film performance as Ella, reprising her starring role from the Broadway production, Susanswerphone serves as a localized nexus of presentist anxieties about social deterioration. Investigators poke around at the margins, unable to see the women-run business as anything but a front for sex work, while an unscrupulous boyfriend manages to launder his bookkeeping operation through the service, with callers placing orders for classical records that are coded bets on the ponies. (The scheme flops when a neighbor points out there’s no such symphony as Beethoven’s 10th.) The love story running between these vignettes links Holliday with Dean Martin's depressed playwright, badly in need of the inspiration and comfort Ella can provide—first by affecting the voice of a motherly operator, then appearing in the flesh as her dream-girl actress alter ego "Melisandre Scott." The final film produced by the legendary Arthur Freed unit at MGM, which had collaborated many times with director Vincente Minnelli (MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, THE PIRATE, AN AMERICAN IN PARIS), BELLS ARE RINGING remains a picture poised between eras; the late number “Drop That Name” at a luxe downtown soiree cites dozens of musical luminaries, including Freed and Minnelli themselves, expressing at once a pride in the recent past and skepticism of a future in which the gold standard of Hollywood artistry is reduced to currency in high-society circles. Holliday, a celebrated performer in her abbreviated career—cut short by an untimely death from breast cancer in 1965—nonetheless underrated by modern audiences, proves an ideal vector for this ambivalence, evoking her classic comic performances along with the contemporary sea change in dramatic acting, at one point pausing her courtship of Dino to join Frank Gorshin in a Brando burlesque. Her cherubic flushes of mischief and melancholy look forward to a future of infinite online identities, personalities to be adopted and discarded at whim, and the resulting estrangement from one’s own knowledge of self. Some films that appear at first to be footnotes reveal an acute awareness of their moment, and by extension ours: here, it is Holliday’s interpretive genius which has stood the test of time. Screening as part of the Something in Your Eye: Early Meet Cutes series. (1960, 129 min, 35mm) [Brendan Boyle]

Ben Russell: Against Time (Shorts/Experimental)

FACETS Cinema – Tuesday, 7pm

As a boon to Chi-town cinephiles and psychonauts alike, the local leg of Ben Russell's stateside DIRECT ACTION (2024) tour will be supplemented by an additional screening, showcasing a career-spanning selection of the maverick documentarian's finest short works, each of which explores various manifestations of embodied time. The séance (to borrow a more apt word from the French) will kick off with WORKERS LEAVING THE FACTORY (DUBAI) (2008, 6 min), a pithy paraphrasing of one of cinema's very first utterances. There are of course workers—Southeast Asian day laborers this time around—but rather than departing the factory floor, they are instead captured on a Dubai construction site, turning in after a day spent fabricating the ultramodern metropolis' ever-swelling skyline. The change of scale is reflected in the slow and lengthy path of traversal they undertake across the arid landscape and towards their shuttle bus. Next on the program is ATLANTIS (2014, 23 min), a daring, damn near-Sebaldian work of false ethnography that reconfigures the island of Malta into a site of playful psychogeographical inquiry, mounting an exploration of the myth of Atlantis that turns on two tells: its first description in the writings of Plato and its reiteration in a bargain bin '70s sci-fi novel. Sojourns through derelict hotels and temple facades glimpsed on handheld mirrors sell the conceit by directly evoking the so-called lost city, but Russell tunnels even further inward, interviewing a local priest, documenting a drunken bar sing-a-long, and following a wide-eyed teenager into a nightclub, all in search of refractive glimpses of utopia. The choice of subject couldn't be more poignant for a (psychedelic) ethnographic filmmaker of Russell's caliber, since for centuries Plato's obvious confabulation has served as an unlikely nucleation point for all manner of pseudoarchaeological gobbledygook and demented race science. RIVER RITES (2011, 11 min) is a kinetic marvel and something of a trick film, documenting a variety of quotidian affairs (women washing clothes, children playing games, fishermen casting nets) at a sacred riverside site in Suriname over the course of a single, virtuosically fluid long take. The aforementioned trick is that the entire sequence plays in reverse, a fact that is scarcely noticeable until people begin hurtling backwards out of the water like dolphins breaching. BLACK AND WHITE TRYPPS NUMBER THREE (2007, 11 min) finds ecstatic truth and hysterical poetry deep in the pit at a Lightning Bolt show. Sweat-drenched concert-goers shimmer under the harsh illumination of a handheld flashlight, and time slows to a near-total halt as they gradually begin to lose themselves in the deep-trance reverie of sonic annihilation. The film is remarkable in part because of its rich, sensorial articulation of ritual psychedelia propagating between Rhode Island hardcore scenesters, but also because it is likely the single highest fidelity recording of the notoriously deafening noise rock terrorists that had been captured as of 2007. The program concludes with AGAINST TIME (2022, 23 min), a savage flicker symphony that repurposes excerpts from Russell's 2021 feature THE INVISIBLE MOUNTAIN to create a hallucinatory road movie of sorts, one whose destination seems to fall somewhere between the soul itself and the cosmos. It begins in Belarus amidst a fireworks display before turning its attention to an eerie, smoke-filled stage—around this point it becomes clear that the work belongs to the now-rich lineage of early meditations on the global pandemic. Dread mounts even further at a thoroughly Lynchian DJ set (Silencio), until the tension finally breaks and the film rides out into total stroboscopic majesty, culminating in a Marseille sunset that evokes the splendor of Levi Strauss' impossibly beautiful writing on the subject. Russell in attendance. Presented by Video Data Bank and Employees Only Cineclub. [David Whitehouse]

J.L. Anderson’s SPRING NIGHT, SUMMER NIGHT (US)

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

“It just ain’t right.” This simple logic, uttered by a man confronting the realities of an unwed pregnancy, is challenged throughout J.L. Anderson’s SPRING NIGHT, SUMMER NIGHT. Set in rural southeastern Ohio, it’s about a teenage girl who becomes impregnated by her maybe-half-brother. (The plot centers around the aforementioned man trying to figure out who "did this" to his ex-wife's daughter.) The inherently "hillbilly," and thus “unsophisticated,” premise is paralleled by stunningly beautiful cinematography that evokes silent cinema, expressionism, and neorealism: silent cinema in its occasional reliance on physical action to move the story; expressionism in its ashen depiction used to impart tone; and neorealism in both how it looks and how it was made. Anderson had been hired to establish the film production department at Ohio University in Athens, and though he wasn’t from the Appalachian region, he spent years exploring the area and becoming familiar with its idiosyncrasies. The three cinematographers responsible for the ghostly aesthetic were students of his, and most of the cast and crew were locals who had volunteered their time. Ross Lipman, Senior Film Restorationist at the UCLA Film & Television Archive, wrote that he’d “gradually been realising the existence of an unknown and completely accidental—but surprisingly coherent—body of American neorealism,” placing SPRING NIGHT, SUMMER NIGHT alongside such films as Charles Burnett’s KILLER OF SHEEP, Kent MacKenzie’s THE EXILES, Barbara Loden’s WANDA, Billy Woodberry’s BLESS THEIR LITTLE HEARTS, and Floyd Mutrux’s DUSTY AND SWEETS MCGEE. The subheader of Lipman’s Sight & Sound article refers to it as being part of “1960s indie neorealism,” a label that concisely—and perhaps arguably—conveys its distinction. Anderson’s first and only feature, it was supposed to screen at the 1968 New York Film Festival but was replaced at the last minute with John Cassavetes’ FACES. It was later acquired by exploitation distributor Joseph Brenner, who hired a young Martin Scorsese to consult on the re-edit. Lipman writes that, “according to legend, Scorsese told him the film was perfect as it was and should remain unchanged.” Despite this recommendation, Brenner proceeded to have Anderson add a few nude scenes and changed its title to MISS JESSICA IS PREGNANT. Though it likely made for an artful soft-porn film, such additions could only reinforce the id rather than explicate it, as is accomplished by the original cut. In the Sight & Sound piece from a few years back, Lipman wrote that “as yet we have no funding to restore it.” Thankfully, the Packard Humanities Institute has since provided the funds, so we can all revel in the morally complex hillbilly classic (or, as Anderson referred to it, the “New Appalachian Cinema”) that is SPRING NIGHT, SUMMER NIGHT. (1967, 82 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]

Steven Soderbergh’s OUT OF SIGHT (US)

Music Box Theatre – Monday, 7pm [Free for Music Box Members]

Steven Soderbergh has said that the problem with contemporary American cinema isn’t the lack of good directors but rather the lack of good studio directors; OUT OF SIGHT marks his first attempt to rectify this problem. The film is a grand entertainment in the classic Hollywood tradition, brimming over with star power, sex appeal, humor, and action; but more importantly, Soderbergh delivers these things with elegance and a consistent perspective, qualities that have become rare in mainstream American movies over the past three decades. George Clooney, in the first performance to take full advantage of his Cary Grant-like charisma, stars as Jack Foley, a master bank robber who prides himself on never having had to use a gun in a hold up. Jennifer Lopez plays Karen Sisco, the federal marshal he falls in love with after he inadvertently kidnaps her when he breaks out of jail. Screenwriter Scott Frank, adapting a novel by Elmore Leonard, deftly interweaves their burgeoning romance through what’s generally a gritty crime comedy, while Soderbergh maintains an effervescent tone that makes the plot twists and shuffled chronology seem effortless. And then there’s the cast, which is an embarrassment of riches. Don Cheadle, playing Clooney’s criminal nemesis, is a fantastic movie villain, exuding charm and maliciousness in equal measure, but he’s just one standout in a supporting cast that includes Albert Brooks, Luis Guzmán, Cathrine Keener, Dennis Farina, Ving Rhames, and Steve Zahn. Even the walk-ons are impressive, with single-scene turns from Michael Keaton, Nancy Allen, and Wendell B. Harris Jr. (director and star of the indie classic CHAMELEON STREET [1989])—and they’re all at the top of their game. If the film is famous for any particular sequence, it’s the one in which Soderbergh intercuts a steamy conversation between Clooney and Lopez at a bar with the consummation of their romance in a hotel room shortly thereafter. The director claims to have ripped it off of the lovemaking sequence between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in DON’T LOOK NOW (1973), but it may best the original in terms of eroticism in spite of being less graphic. Introduced by Michael Moreci and Keir Graff of The Filmographers podcast. (1998, 123 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Hype Williams' BELLY (US)

Music Box Theatre – Friday and Saturday, Midnight

There are multiple filmmakers who started as music video directors—David Fincher, Michel Gondry, and F. Gary Gray—but Harold “Hype” Williams is something special, not just for what his work meant to Black culture, but for what it did for mass culture. While the others went on to be more conventional filmmakers, Hype made only one feature, and it is so consistent with his pioneering music video style that there is no change in aesthetic from the earlier work. He didn’t choose one or the other; he pushed his language further, possibly to its limits. Generally, hip hop videos before Hype featured mostly dudes in junkyards next to barrel-fires (a la F. Gary Gray’s "Natural Born Killers"). Hype had tried his hand with that world with "Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing ta F' Wit," but it seems around the time of Missy Elliot's “Supa Dupa Fly” in 1997 that he really nailed his style: the fish-eye lens; the saturated colors; light glistening off skin, clothing, and objects; the almost abstract use of the widescreen ratio; and split screens (both length- and width-wise). Hype’s cinema (and it is certainly that) was a significant part of most mornings sat watching MTV or BET. Not to downplay the producers and musicians whose work he helped visualize, but Hype presented a generation of songs in a way that made the videos almost indistinguishable from the songs themselves. They're some of the few examples where music videos actually compliment the music, rather than distract from it: the wild surrealism of Busta Rhymes and Janet Jackson’s "What's It Gonna Be," the minimalist perfection of TLC’s “No Scrubs” (and TLC's own T-Boz stars in BELLY), the bombastic use of red and BELLY-adjacency in Mobb Deep’s remix for "Quiet Storm," which featured Lil’ Kim in her prime. BELLY, made the year after "Supa Dupa Fly," is a kind of a gangster film. Hype was no stranger to that genre—given his videos for Usher’s "Nice & Slow," Biggie’s "Warning," and R. Kelly’s "Down Low"—but BELLY is closer to Pop Art for the big screen. The film’s plot is nothing to get too excited for, as it leans heavily into familiarity with SCARFACE and every cliched plot mechanism the genre can muster, but that isn't the point of appreciating BELLY. The late DMX (in a fantastic performance) and Nas (in a so-so performance) are two friends trying to make it in the drug game; as priorities and morals change, they find themselves at a crossroads in their personal lives, not to mention squaring off against a smoked-out Jamaican drug lord (the movie also features maybe the most blunt-smoking of any movie to date, as nearly every scene has someone blazing up). From the hair-raising, much-discussed opening scene to Method Man’s first-person shooter moment to the hypnotic re-rendering of SCARFACE’s infamous finale (transposed to 3/4 of the way in the plot), the movie gives viewers enough to admire, even though the story may leave a lot to be desired. The released version is heavily compromised, with Hype and his team having battled the money people left and right throughout the production; as a result, the movie can feel off-kilter and disorienting on first viewing. None of this takes away from the singular experience of BELLY’s intoxicating rush of hallucinatory visuals and sounds, an experience truly fit for 35mm. (The Blu-ray transfer of the movie significantly lightens the film’s intentional hypnotic contrast; Hype apparently fought with executives over their insistence that he use a film stock that "lightened" black skin.) Yet Hype’s moviemaking, aside from BELLY, has been non-existent, which is astounding. He was attached at one point to the SPEED RACER remake, and most tantalizingly of all, was developing a 3-D reggaeton zombie film set in Jamaica. BELLY provides ample justification that Hype remains a premier artist of our time, and we should be thankful for whatever bits and pieces of his imagination we get. (1998, 92 min, 35mm) [John Dickson]

Mel Brooks' BLAZING SADDLES (US)

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

Is there any other director alive who's mastered the spoof film as an art film like Mel Brooks has? A Black man named Bart (Cleavon Little) is appointed sheriff of Rock Ridge under the guise that the entire town will be so displeased that they'll all pack up and move away so that the devious Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman) can snatch their land to become rich. Brooks' essential western-comedy BLAZING SADDLES is rife with parody in every scene. Whether it's a group of railroad workers tricking their overseers into singing ridiculous renditions of Southern spirituals or the entire production of BLAZING SADDLES itself spilling across the Warner Bros. lot and into a Dom DeLuise-directed musical, the film's comedic style is a blending of satire, misdirection, and the eccentric. Brooks' take on racial tensions is the key theme in the film. Bart is stereotypically cool and suave while the townspeople are moronic and racist. Through Bugs Bunny-esque hijinks, Bart is able to sway the citizens to his side. Humor is Brooks' way of bringing opposing sides together. While 1970s racial biases are present (Brooks' scene dressed as a Native American Chief comes to mind), BLAZING SADDLES is very deliberately self-conscious of its era. A few subtle jabs are taken at Hollywood, and the shot that zooms out to show the studio is pure genius. BLAZING SADDLES' legacy is long lasting and its lesson on how to do parody in film is rarely matched. Screening as part of the Board Picks series. (1974, 93 min, 35mm) [Kyle Cubr]

David Lean’s BRIEF ENCOUNTER (UK)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Sunday, 3pm

Along with SUMMERTIME (1955), BRIEF ENCOUNTER represents the best of David Lean’s small-scale pictures; the emotions are so finely etched that even the smallest gestures speak volumes. It’s a movie about resignation disguised as a movie about passion and shot (by Robert Krasker, just a few years before he teamed up with Carol Reed to make ODD MAN OUT [1948] and THE THIRD MAN [1949]) like a crime film, which may help explain the richness of the tone. Adapted from a one-act play by Noël Coward called Still Life, it takes place during a month some time before the war when a suburban housewife and a city doctor, both married to other people, have an affair, then call it off once the excitement gives way to feelings of guilt and paranoia. Celia Johnson (who received an Oscar nomination for her work) and Trevor Howard (in his first major role) are the leads, and they strike a remarkable balance between restraint and movie-star expressiveness—which is exactly what they’re supposed to do, given that they’re playing normal people experiencing the thrill of living outside their normal routine. One could argue they’re as much the auteurs of BRIEF ENCOUNTER as Lean, Coward (who also produced), Krasker, or Anthony Havelock-Allan and Ronald Neame (who both co-wrote the script with Lean and co-produced the movie uncredited); like a lot of classic studio films, it’s kind of an authorless work and yet no less cinematic for it. Does it matter who decided to break with the general air of realism and have the lights go dark around Johnson just before her pivotal epiphany, or who decided to “open up” Coward’s play by having it told in flashbacks? Probably not. Through a combination of talents and ideas, BRIEF ENCOUNTER exquisitely conveys feelings of middle-class repression and furtive romance—feelings that are evidently common enough to warrant the film’s enduring appeal. Screening as part of the Something in Your Eye: Early Meet Cutes series. (1945, 86 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

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Andrei Tarkovsky's MIRROR (USSR)

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

Long before the great TREE OF LIFE euphoria of 2011, another film (from another director's famously sparse oeuvre) went off uncharted into the space between memories past and present, mapping onto them a universal significance. Andrei Tarkovsky's THE MIRROR may lack dinosaurs and metaphorical doors in the desert, but it does set a mean precedent for everything a passion project can be when an auteur is working on such an intensely personal level. Long a dream project of Tarkovsky's, it was only in the wake of SOLARIS that he was able to secure funding, and armed with a meager allotment of film stock, he began production in late 1973. Given the non-linear, dreamlike progression of the film, such obstacles aren't hard to comprehend, and they perhaps explain why this is his most fleeting film outside his debut, IVAN'S CHILDHOOD. Drawn across the middle of the 20th century, THE MIRROR takes a stream of consciousness journey through familial memories, with actors in dual roles as father and son, as wife and mother. Woven in are poems penned by Tarkovsky's own father, assorted clips of wartime newsreel footage, and the quiet, ethereal imagery characteristic of all his films. It all makes for a hazy dream of cinema, one from which you tragically wake too early. But lest the length should fool you, this is not Tarkovsky for beginners. No surprise that at his most personal, he's also at his most esoteric, so an afternoon spent with one of his aforementioned films would be a good primer. As for those already in his thrall, this is imperative viewing. Screening as part of the State and Revolution: Film Under the Boot series. (1974, 108 min, 35mm) [Tristan Johnson]

Yasujiro Ozu's LATE SPRING (Japan)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday, 6pm

The appropriately titled LATE SPRING is the film generally considered the beginning of Ozu's late period. Not only does the film introduce stylistic elements with which Ozu's name has become interchangeable (little to no camera movement, geometric compositions, deliberately unemphatic line readings, etc.); it marks the director's first deployment of a story that would preoccupy him for the remainder of his career: A middle-class family must arrange the marriage of an adult child who, for whatever reason, appears in no rush to be married. Like the great ceramic artists of Japan's late-feudal period, Ozu developed a totally personal body of work from the variation of the most familiar elements—in this case, narrative tropes of the shomin-geki ("common-people's drama"). By focusing on this critical juncture in the life of a family, Ozu found endless grace notes on the theme of generational conflict (more often than not passive, which would prove a goldmine for the director's sly humor), cultural changes (reflected visually in Ozu's painterly attention to the changing seasons), and the character of Japan. Screening as part of the Curated by Paul Schrader series. (1949, 108 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Krzysztof Kieslowski’s BLIND CHANCE (Poland)

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

BLIND CHANCE is a crucial work in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s filmography, expanding on the political themes of his 1970s films with the metaphysical themes that would define his films from DEKALOG to the Three Colors trilogy. It’s also the most entertaining Polish film of its era, exhibiting a mix of showmanship and formal mastery that recalls the best of Hitchcock. Kieslowski is having great fun here playing with time and space, and the film invites us to have fun with him. The ingenious script tells three variations on the same story, which begins when a young man named Witek (a well-intentioned but naive intellectual straight out of the films of Kieslowski’s mentor, Krzysztof Zanussi) races to catch a train. Kieslowski imagines what might happen to Witek if he catches the train, then what happens if he doesn’t, and then if he doesn’t catch the train in a different manner. In the first story, Witek befriends a Communist official he meets on the train and enters into a career in the Party. In the second, he gets stuck doing community service (for reasons too complicated to explain here), falls in with a group of activists, and ends up protesting the State. In the third, Witek ignores politics altogether, returns to medical school, and finds the love of his life. Kieslowski uses cinema as Hitchcock did, to grant small objects and gestures a monumental importance and generate tremendous suspense in the process. (Indeed, the scenes of Witek running through the train station are some of the most suspenseful sequences ever filmed.) The narrative turns are exciting—you’re always trying to spot what little thing will change Witek’s life this time—and they’re ripe with Polish irony. BLIND CHANCE tells a grand, bitter joke: no matter which way Witek goes, he always ends up in the same place. The Polish government didn’t appreciate this joke, which reflects the general disillusionment that Poles felt toward their government in 1981, and it banned BLIND CHANCE for six years. Communist Poland ended, but the film lived on, inspiring at least one enjoyable knock-off (Tom Tykwer’s RUN LOLA RUN) and drawing decent-sized audiences whenever it’s revived. Today, its political anger is less impressive than Kieslowski’s wonderful curiosity about fate, choice, and other factors that shape human experience. Screening as part of the State and Revolution: Film Under the Boot series. (1981, 123 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Trương Minh Quý’s VIET AND NAM (Vietnam)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

In the pitch-black barrenness of a coal mine, in the bowels of the earth, two young men share tender kisses and caresses. Their lean, naked bodies smeared with soot and sweat, the coal glistens behind them like stars as time seems to hang in suspension. They are the titular characters of VIET AND NAM, Trương Minh Quý’s meditative, spectral tone poem on the lingering national trauma that reverberates—spiritually and physically—in the hearts of Vietnam and its people. Trauma has a way of rupturing the normal flow of things, dismantling one’s sense of time and unity; although a news bite about the 9/11 US terrorist attacks places VIET AND NAM at a certain date, the film’s near-continuous invocation of memories of war, sacrifice, and bereavement give it the destabilizing feeling of being in a state of constant temporal recursion. Following from that, Trương never delineates which of his characters is Viet and which is Nam, inviting us to read them as a chiastic unit through which intimacy and angst are psychically and somatically intertwined. Sharing and fueling their angst are one of the men’s mothers, who lost her husband during the war and is using her dreams as a guide to find his missing body; and her brother, who fought with and ostensibly witnessed her husband’s death. In static master shots that often evoke the tropical reveries of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, characters in damp rooms and becalmed forests stolidly relay their pain as if they were channels for a collective, primordial anguish; at one point, an actual psychic medium is enlisted, and her blanched face, gagged in horror, briefly cuts through the film’s placidity. If there is hope to be found in the overwhelming sorrow of VIET AND NAM, it is indeed in the relationship of the titular duo, an improbably blooming romance born in a place littered with corpses. (2024, 129 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]

Alain Resnais' HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR (France/Japan)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6pm

Alain Resnais beautifully interweaves themes of love, memory, and oblivion with flashbacks to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR. This gem of the French New Wave blissfully depicts a Japanese architect and French actresses' torrid love affair. "You're destroying me. You're good for me." Elle (Emmanuelle Riva) and Lui's (Eiji Okada) passion burns as hot as the bomb that leveled Hiroshima. Intercut with footage of the city and its denizens post-blast, Resnais juxtaposes intimacy with ugly wreckage. Seemingly this says that love completely destroys a person and turns them into something completely different. Memory's role in this film is heavily interlaced with love. Lui reminds Elle of her first true love, a German solider she met during World War II. His memory brings back tragic thoughts for Elle, who forcefully tries to forget Lui immediately. Forgetfulness and the mental void that accompanies it push the realization that both Lui and Elle are truly symbols for any young, intense romance. HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR features quick editing that is synonymous with the film movement to which it belongs. These rapid transitions push the imagery conjured by the a-bomb and the fleeting nature of the protagonists' relationship. The film's score ranges from light and playful to hauntingly tragic--always lending itself perfectly to each scene. Many lessons can be imparted from this film, but chief among them is that love's eternal bonds can be both a blessing and a curse. Screening as part of the Shadows of War lecture series. (1959, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Kyle Cubr]

Robert Wiene's THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (Germany/Silent)

Music Box Theatre – Wednesday, 7pm

THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI is the definitive German Expressionist film, one in which all the elements of the mise-en-scene (lighting, set design, costume design, makeup, props, the movement of figures within the frame, etc.) have been deliberately distorted and exaggerated for expressive purposes. The end result, a view of the world as seen through the eyes of a madman, single-handedly inaugurated Expressionism in the movies in 1920, a movement that would then go on to dominate German cinema screens for most of the rest of the decade. No mere museum piece, the influence of THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI is happily still very much with us today (Martin Scorsese's SHUTTER ISLAND, John Carpenter's THE WARD, and Tim Burton's entire career would be unthinkable without it), and if you care at all about film history then you need to see this. Long seen only in faded, scratched and often incomplete prints, this new digital restoration—based on the original camera negative—runs 75 minutes and renders a ridiculous amount of never-before-seen detail in the film's striking visual design, including even paint brush strokes on the intentionally artificial-looking sets that surround the actors. (The first reel of the camera negative is missing so note how the image quality makes a leap around the 10-minute mark from looking merely excellent to looking as if it were shot yesterday.) Co-presented by the Chicago Humanities Festival with a live original score by Chicago-based musicians Macie Stewart, Lia Kohl, and Whitney Johnson. (1920, 75 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]

John Boorman’s EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Tuesday, 9:30pm

An oddly specific thing I’ve noticed about John Boorman’s filmmaking is his use of sparkle. From Regan’s wild tap recital outfit to the mirrored filled sets that seem to go on infinitely, that sparkle is present so thoroughly in EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC, and it may be a symbol of why it made everyone so terribly angry upon its release in 1977. A sequel to William Friedkin’s extremely successful THE EXORCIST (1973), Boorman’s film marks a complete shift in tone, with a turn toward artifice and dark fantasy—something seen more explicitly in his next film, EXCALIBUR (1981). EXORCIST II is still not culturally appreciated for what it is, with its audacious choices—it’s essentially a teen psychic melodrama—while the third film has gotten its due with internet listicles of greatest horror moments recognizing its incredible jump scare sequence. In EXORCIST II, it’s four years after after the first film, and Regan (Linda Blair) is trying to maintain a normal teenage life while being studied and monitored at a psychiatric institute, under the supervision of Dr. Gene Tuskin (Louise Fletcher); Regan remembers nothing of the incident in D.C., though she seems to have developed some telepathic powers in the meantime. Father Lamont (Richard Burton) is tasked by the Cardinal to find answers surrounding the mysterious death of Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) and seeking help from Regan, searches for an African man, Kokumo (James Earl Jones), who defeated the demon Pazuzu as a small boy. The haziness of the film’s look fits the incongruity of the plot, but Boorman’s visuals are so dreamy it lulls one into hypnosis. Images like a shot of Pazuzu as a single locust hovering in midair, priests speaking in front of giant frescos that crowd the space with two-dimensional figures, and Regan atop her NYC apartment clad in a white Gunne Sax-style dress are all positively hallucinatory. EXORCIST II is also engaging with the Nigel Kneale-inspired themes of combining science with religious mysticism—namely through the psychiatric study of Regan as well as Kokumo’s work as an entomologist. It’s perhaps a bit ahead of its time in that way, as this subject is also explored later on in '80s American horror films like HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH and PRINCE OF DARKNESS, both with direct connections to Kneale and John Carpenter. Also, both of those films were underrated at the time of their release and have gotten a second life and cult followings in the last few decades, with appreciation for their boldness in twisting the genre. It’s high time EXORCIST II got the same consideration. Screening as part of the Terror Tuesday series. (1977, 117 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Paul Schrader's AMERICAN GIGOLO (US))

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 2:30pm

As Julian Kay (Richard Gere) confidently saunters through his lavish, sunny, mid-century modern LA environs, he resembles an opulent item to possess. The camera captures the same appreciation for his high cheekbones and coiffed hair as his swanky apartment, tailored to a T Armani suits, or sleek black Mercedes. He is a luxury object among luxury objects. Julian is a male escort, catering to the older, wealthy women of the Los Angeles area. Managed by a procurer, Anne (Nina Van Pallandt), and pimp, Leon (Bill Duke), he takes pride in his appearance and the status it affords him. While lounging at a hotel bar, eyeing potential clientele, he meets Michelle Straton (Lauren Hutton), a state senator’s wife. Upon learning who she is, he backs away and leaves abruptly. That same night, Leon calls him in need of a “substitute” in Palm Springs. He arrives at Mr. Reihman’s, a well-off financier, who wants to watch as Julian beats his wife, Judy. It is the opposite type of trick Julian is used to. As if it is a higher calling, Julian is obsessed with giving women pleasure, satisfying them. His own sexual pleasure is nonexistent, he seems to only receive gratification by materialistic means and through transactional performance. Paul Schrader is a connoisseur of lonely men, and Julian Kay is one of his loneliest creations—a solitary soul who has curated a distinctly palatable yet superficial identity but maintains a troubling ambivalence at his core. It is this paper-thin persona on which the entire film hangs, delicately balancing neo-noir turns with a mysterious interrogation of the commodification of pleasure. AMERICAN GIGOLO is a study of the ways in which we erase ourselves to integrate and thrive in a capitalist society, and how, no matter who you are, there is always someone above you willing to take you down to save themselves. Screening as part of the Directed by Paul Schrader series. (1980, 117 min, DCP Digital) [Olivia Hunter Willke]

Gregg Araki's SMILEY FACE (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Sunday, 12:45pm

In Gregg Araki’s SMILEY FACE, Anna Faris is Jane F, an unemployed actress who accidentally ingests an excessive amount of pot-laced cupcakes that her roommate (Danny Masterson) left in the fridge and sets off an incredibly stoned misadventure to pay $384 back to her drug dealer (Adam Brody) before he takes all her furniture, including her beloved bed, as collateral. From the moment a neon screen appears to introduce the animated opening credits, you know you’re in for a whimsical tale. SMILEY FACE lives almost entirely in Jane’s head, and Faris is committed and deft as a woman wading through the world in a drug-induced haze. The comedy of the film comes from the exceedingly observant, albeit baked thought process that runs through her inebriated mind juxtaposed with the real world. Whether acting on paranoia, impaired cognitive function, or pre-existing stupidity, Jane can never get any interaction quite right. Nonetheless, she’s one of the most charming characters to cross the screen in the last two decades. Unambitious and endlessly spacey, Jane captures the humanity of figuring it all out as you go along, even if you might be a few steps behind. A follow up to his stunning, heart-wrenching, and exploratory coming-of-age sexual drama MYSTERIOUS SKIN (2004), SMILEY FACE must have been a much-needed change for Araki. He uses Dylan Haggerty's light-as-air script to experiment with form to comic effect. Sound effects, onscreen text, animation, overlays, rewinds, and dramatic cross-fades all serve as opportunities for humor. Akin to a live-action cartoon, the film has a pitch-perfect cinematic accentuation of whatever hijinks are occurring. The texture of the 35mm cinematography allows for a rich glow to wrap around every image, situating us within Jane's hazy, dreamlike state, though the film truly revolves around Faris. It is nearly constantly focused on her face or physicality, and when it's not, we await the reappearance of her goofy smile and half-lidded eyes. SMILEY FACE is a compulsively rewatchable and quotable romp with a punk edge, a slacker’s heart, and a stoner’s mind. And, perhaps most importantly, it is a love letter to bubbly, lovable-despite-it-all stoner girls everywhere who just really, really love their beds. (2007, 84 mins, DCP Digital) [Olivia Hunter Willke]

Alain Guiraudie's MISERICORDIA (France)

Gene Siskel Film Center and the Landmark's Century Centre Cinema — See Venue websites for showtimes

Alain Guiraudie, one of contemporary cinema's great regionalists—he documents rural life in the south of France as reliably as Bruno Dumont does in the country's northern enclaves—returns to his old stomping grounds with a sublime and slippery work that is generating an unexpected amount of buzz for the perennially unsung maven of pastoral surrealism. It is without a doubt the most attention Guiraudie's work has received since his 2013 breakthrough STRANGER BY THE LAKE, a minor masterpiece that was nonetheless notable for its eschewal of a number of his signature directorial flourishes, notably a certain proclivity for freewheeling absurdism and surrealistic diversion (Guiraudie's cinema represents, above all, a bracingly cold plunge into the murky waters of the unconscious mind) as well as an unspoken and wholly unquestioned pansexual thrust that renders his characters as potential romantic vectors for virtually anybody with whom they might cross paths. MISERICORDIA follows Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), a journeyman industrial baker, who leaves the modest city of Toulouse for the remote village of Saint-Martial to mourn the death of the town boulanger, under whom he apprenticed during his youth. As it turns out, Jérémie long harbored an unrequited love for the recently deceased baguette purveyor, although he might also be attracted to his newly widowed wife Martine (Catherine Frot) as well as their son Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand) and perhaps a few other village inhabitants for good measure. Tensions rapidly escalate (with a singular, devastating act of violence looming on the horizon) as Jérémie settles into Vincent's childhood bedroom and indicates no desire to ever leave, having found himself swept up in comforting the grieving widow, foraging for wild mushrooms, and basking in the uneasy embrace of childhood nostalgia. That last part is crucial, as the film feels particularly raw and vulnerable; Guiraudie admitted as much in a recent Chicago Q&A, during which he explained that the film is a meditation on his own Catholic upbringing and a total exorcism of uneasy coming-of-age reminiscences, adding that he deliberately scouted a shooting locale that would be a dead ringer for his actual place of birth. MISERICORDIA is in part a film about the elaborate rituals and clandestine intensity that come with the territory of queer life, particularly for an emissary of an older generation like Guiraudie. Through all manner of cheeky allusions, the film explicitly links that constant sense of shame and dire need for secrecy to the Catholic faith. God loves you—in a way that is certainly quite gay—but you have blood on your hands, and you really ought to spend more time with the parish priest in order to allay some of that guilt. The film also posits, much like Thomas Wolfe, that you really can't go home again, lest you discover the town to be even smaller than you remember, or that your former friends are your friends no longer. Perhaps they've changed too much. You have definitely changed. Perhaps too much. (2024, 102 min, DCP Digital) [David Whitehouse]
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Read co-managing editor Ben Sachs’ interview with Guiraudie at our blog here.

Martin Davidson’s EDDIE AND THE CRUISERS (US)

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

On March 15, 1964, at the height of his career, Eddie Wilson—frontman of Eddie and the Cruisers—drove his '57 Chevy off a bridge and into the water. His body was never found. Eighteen years later, the reissue of their first album brings the Cruisers' hit song, “On The Darkside,” roaring back. Journalist Maggy Follie (Ellen Barkin) investigates the mystery of Eddie's death and lost album. Her search pulls in Frank “Word Man” Ridgeway (Tom Berenger), the band’s last and pivotal addition—once their lyricist, now a quiet schoolteacher haunted by the ghosts of what could have been. As Follie tracks down the surviving Cruisers, Frank is drawn into the past, and the film, like a needle skipping across vinyl, jumps between the present and the band’s brief, tumultuous rise. We meet Doc Robbins (Joe Pantoliano), the fast-talking former manager turned DJ; Sal Amato (Matthew Laurance), clinging to nostalgia by fronting a tribute act; Kenny Hopkins (David Wilson), the drummer now playing the casino circuit; and Joann Carlino (Helen Schneider), Eddie’s former lover, now choreographing others' dreams. Each provides insight into the enigmatic Eddie, adding another piece to the puzzle. Where the P.F. Kluge novel on which this is based leans into a dark, American Gothic tone and culminates in a series of bloody murders, director Martin Davidson saw it as a reflection on three decades of rock music. Eddie Wilson is an amalgam of various musical influences, but Jim Morrison’s spirit looms largest. Played by Michael Paré, Eddie is a cipher wrapped in leather and rebellion, a back-alley philosopher whose presence lingers even in his absence. Paré (who was a chef before landing the role) brings an easy arrogance, channeling Morrison as well as James Dean. EDDIE AND THE CRUISERS is essentially Jim Morrison fan fiction told through the eyes of his devoted bandmates. Davidson structures the film much like CITIZEN KANE, using interviews and flashbacks to reconstruct Wilson’s story. The lost album, A Season in Hell, serves as the film's Rosebud. It's named after Arthur Rimbaud’s seminal work, and the reference strengthens the mythos surrounding Eddie. In the film, Follie explains how Rimbaud, having achieved greatness by nineteen, disappeared from the public eye for nearly thirty years. Similarly, Eddie, misunderstood and uncompromising, may have chosen to walk away rather than sell out. Did he drown under the weight of his ambition, or did he slip away into the night, leaving the world to wonder? When the record company deems A Season in Hell unplayable, it sets off a chain reaction leading to Eddie’s accident, suicide, or faked death. Critics, including Roger Ebert, found the film's unresolved ending frustrating, with Ebert calling it “so dumb, so unsatisfactory, that it gives a bad reputation to the whole movie.” On theatrical release, EDDIE AND THE CRUISERS barely made an impact. Davidson and his team moved on from the near-flop, but after its HBO debut, the film found a second life, becoming a cult sensation. The soundtrack, performed by John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band, surged up the charts, with “On The Darkside” becoming a bona fide hit. The irony is almost poetic—just like Eddie’s music, the film was dismissed by the establishment, only to be resurrected by those who truly understood it. Without Paré’s performance, Cafferty’s voice, and Morrison’s lingering influence, EDDIE AND THE CRUISERS might have faded into obscurity. But the film isn’t about a lost album—it’s about rock 'n' roll’s eternal struggle between art and commerce, purity and selling out. It’s a love letter to the ones who never made it and the artists who refused to compromise. And like Eddie Wilson himself, it never really fades away; it merely becomes a legend that refuses to disappear. Screening as part of the Doc and Roll: Rockstars of the Silver Screen series. (1983, 95 min, Digital Projection) [Shaun Huhn]

David Lynch’s DUNE (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Friday, 9:45pm

Having seen David Lynch's adaptation DUNE after watching Denis Villeneuve’s version, I am struck at how similar the two are—and by how easy it is to teeter from making an adaptation work to completely missing the mark. While Villeneuve may have found a way to streamline the original novel’s plot, he didn’t make it any less dense. Lynch’s version never figured out its impermeability; this led to a challenging production and eventual box office failure on release. In revisiting, I’m most surprised to see so many parallels between Lynch’s DUNE and his more recent Twin Peaks: The Return, both in the aesthetic—particularly set design and special effects–and in its puzzling nature. Set in the future, the intricate plot—much of it divulged through voiceover—follows young Paul Atreides (an enthusiastic Kyle MacLachlan in his first film role) as his powerful family relocates to the desert planet Arrakis, which is the only place in the universe where spice, a necessary resource for interplanetary space travel, is found. DUNE is filled with bizarre performances by Lynch regulars and one-offs alike: Patrick Stewart, Brad Dourif, Sting, and Alicia Witt, just to name a handful. The film is also scored by rock band Toto with a theme by Brian Eno. There’s a lot going on, and a lot of that doesn’t work, but it's impressive in its attempt, and often weirdly fascinating. While it’s a perplexing film to grapple with, Lynch's DUNE sits oddly somewhere between two of my favorite kinds of cinema: the ambitious and mainly unsuccessful sci-fi/fantasy films of the 80s on the one hand and Lynch’s most inscrutable work on the other. The former taught me missteps can still contain some stunning visuals; the latter taught me that a seemingly impenetrable film experience can also be a very rewarding one. (1984, 137 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Pedro Almodóvar’s THE ROOM NEXT DOOR (Spain/US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Sunday, 5pm

Pedro Almodóvar has cited Ingmar Bergman’s chamber dramas as primary influences on THE ROOM NEXT DOOR, his first feature film in English, and the connection to those touchstones could not be plainer. Like those films, it features few characters and concentrates with unwavering intensity on the themes of death and identity; it’s also, like many of Bergman’s films, an actors’ showcase. Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton, and (to a lesser extent) John Turturro are called upon to channel complicated, even painful emotions, and because there’s little to distract from their performances, one really gets to savor their efforts. But while Almodóvar may admire the Swedish master, he seems constitutionally incapable of making a film as cold as PERSONA (1966) or CRIES AND WHISPERS (1972). THE ROOM NEXT DOOR still feels like the work of the director of THE FLOWER OF MY SECRET (1995) or ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER (1999): the colors, whether expressed through Bina Daigeler’s costumes or Inbal Weinberg’s production design, are vibrant and varied; the film regards sex as part of life and thus something to be enjoyed, like cooking or fashion; and Almodóvar inspires warm, grateful feelings about friendship. Indeed, camaraderie is often presented as the ultimate reason for living in the Spanish master’s films; in THE ROOM NEXT DOOR, he argues that it is a necessary part of dying as well. Swinton plays a former war correspondent who’s dying of stage III cervical cancer; Moore plays the novelist friend whom she turns to when she wants assistance with ending her life. Almodóvar introduces the premise with hardly any exposition—however mutedly, the film plunges us into characters’ experience, refusing to talk around Swinton’s impending death. There’s a fascinating narrative digression into Swinton’s estranged grown daughter and her memories of her daughter’s father, but this too feeds into the larger concern of the character’s preparation for dying. Moore’s character is just as important, as she has to process her friend’s decision and stand as a totem of emotional support; Almodóvar gives her as much, if not more, screen time than Swinton, balancing the theme of death with an equally important theme of living. There’s another, more urgent theme to THE ROOM NEXT DOOR, and it’s given voice eloquently by Turturro, who plays Moore’s climate activist friend and former lover—that is, the foreseeable decline and possible end of the human race due to climate change. Almodóvar intertwines the considerations of humankind’s collective suicide with the central narrative of Swinton’s suicide, arguing that our species as a whole might learn something from how her character approaches death: without fear and emboldened by the love of others. Screening as part of the New Releases and Restorations series. (2024, 107 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Carson Lund’s EEPHUS (US)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

It’s a beautiful autumn day in Massachusetts, with the trees painting the sky various shades of green and orange, and the clouds taking up just enough space to leave room for plenty of sunshine. Sounds like a great day to play some baseball. Carson Lund’s debut feature—focused around a rec-league of ball players and their final game before the town baseball field is paved over to become a school—revels in this pristine sense of atmosphere, creating a baseball film less interested in who ends up winning than the feeling of watching the sun go down while heading into the ninth inning. Baseball is, after all, more than just the game; it’s the old man in the stalls muttering to himself, the crotchety obsessive keeping score in his worn-out notebook, the food truck parked nearby peddling slices of pizza for passersby, and the friendly barbs thrown back and forth between teammates. EEPHUS somehow lands somewhere between “Slow Cinema” and indie dramedy without ever feeling self-indulgent or crass, its respect for its suburban characters too earnest in practice. There’s something inherently noble and relatable about the seriousness with which the players take their sport; here's a group of men who don’t do this for a living but feel some kind of pull towards the game, whether it's passion, obligation, or just an excuse to get out of the house. That Lund’s film is able to capture the tactility of a New England autumnal day, and carry such emotionally lofty material without feeling overly sentimental, and have some of the funniest dialogue in a film I’ve heard in recent memory, is no small feat. Perhaps it’s notable that the first character we hear in the film is voiced by legendary documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, maybe a nod to the film’s pursuit of capturing life’s circuitousness, the great American pastime acting as grand metaphor for all great things having their great moment in the sun, until we’re well into the night, and it’s time to pack it in. After all, there’s always next year. (2024, 98 mins, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

📽️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
Persis Karim and Soumyaa Kapil Behrens’ 2024 film THE DAWN IS TOO FAR (55 min, Digital Projection) screens Friday, 6:30pm, followed by a post-screening dialogue with Karim moderated by Shirin Vossoughi (Associate Professor, Learning Sciences).

Suspension Bridges: Films by Alee Peoples takes place Thursday, 7pm, with Peoples in person for a post-screening discussion. More info on all screenings here.

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

⚫ The Davis Theatre
The Ocarbate Film Collective hosts Trust Fall, a monthly “blind” movie screening, on Thursday at 8:30pm. More info.

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Shohei Imamura’s 1983 film THE BALLAD OF NARAYAMA (130 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday, 7pm, as part of the Driving Towards the End: An East Asian Perspective series.

Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film THE GODFATHER PART II (202 min, 35mm), screens Saturday, 7pm, as part of Special Screenings/Events.

A program of films by Ute Aurand, Vadim Kostrov, and Milena Gierka (1995-2025) screens Sunday, 7pm, as part of the Encounters in the Cinema series.

Ulrike Ottinger’s 1978 film MADAME X - AN ABSOLUTE RULER (137 min, DCP Digital) screens Monday, 7pm, as part of an Ottinger miniseries.

Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Staub’s 1970 film OTHON (88 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday, 7pm, as part of the History Lessons of Straub and Huillet series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Elastic Arts (3429 W. Diversey Ave. #208)
Tone Glow presents Under Some Kind of Hex: Love & Sex in the Films of Stan Brakhage. This two-part program screens Wednesday, 7pm, and features 16 short films that span Brakhage’s entire career. The first program will feature eight abstract works, including the six films that make up his Lovesong series. The second program will feature eight films grounded in actual people and places. All films will be screened on 16mm. More info here.

⚫ FACETS Cinema
Echoes of Spring: A Slice of Life Anime Pairing takes place Thursday with films at 7pm and 9:30pm and a Cup Noodle bar between the films. Free and exclusive to Film Club members. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Michael Shannon’s ERIC LARUE (119 min, DCP Digital) begins screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

Paul Schrader’s 1985 film MISHIMA: A LIFE IN FOUR CHAPTERS (120 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, 12pm, as part of the Directed by Paul Schrader series. 

Off Center: Drumming and Dubbing with Alee Peoples takes place Monday, 6pm, as part of the ongoing Off Center series, with Peoples in person for a live performance.

Fumiari Hyūga’s 2022 film I AM A COMEDIAN (108 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday, 5pm, with Hyūga and comedian Daisuke Muramoto in person for a post-screening conversation. 

Conversations at the Edge presents Aura Satz: Preemptive Listening (89 min, Digital Projection) on Thursday, 6pm, followed by a conversation with Satz. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Green Line Performing Arts Center (329 E. Garfield Boulevard)
Fred Kudjo Kuwornu’s 2024 documentary WE WERE HERE: THE UNTOLD STORY OF BLACK AFRICANS IN RENAISSANCE EUROPE screens Tuesday, 6pm, followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker led by UChicago faculty members Noémie Ndiaye, Niall Atkinson, and Federica Caneparo from the UChicago Black Baroque Project. The screening is free, but RSVP is required. More info here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Tracie Laymon’s 2024 film BOB TREVINO LIKES IT (102 min, DCP Digital) continues and James Griffiths’ 2025 film THE BALLAD OF WALLIS ISLAND (100 min, DCP Digital) begins screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

Randal Kleiser’s 1978 film GREASE (105 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday and Sunday at 11:30am. There will be a sing-a-long screening on Thursday, 9:45pm, presented by Rated Q and Ramona Slick! - A Celebration of Queer, Camp, & Cult Cinema with preshow drinks and DJ in Music Box Lounge at 9pm and a dragshow performance in the Main Theater at 9:45pm, with the screening to follow. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ VDB TV (Virtual)
Wendy Clarke: Love is All Around screens as part of VDB's new virtual program, curated by Kristin MacDonough. This program features a selection of five excerpts from Clarke’s iconic LOVE TAPES series, showcasing personal reflections on love from 2,500 diverse individuals. The LOVE TAPES project, ongoing since the late '70s, explores various interpretations of love, from lust and friendship to first love and familial bonds. This VDB TV program highlights newly remastered works, preserved by Clarke and the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. More info here. 

CINE-LIST: April 4, 2025 - April 10, 2025

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Brendan Boyle, Maxwell Courtright, Kyle Cubr, John Dickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Shaun Huhn, Tristan Johnson, Ben Kaye, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Michael Glover Smith, David Whitehouse, Olivia Hunter Willke