☀️ 41st Chicago Latino Film Festival
Landmark Century Centre Cinema – See showtimes below
Alexandra Latishev Salazar’s DELIRIO (Costa Rica)
Friday, 5:45pm
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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Luciano Vidigal’s WHITE HOUSE (Brazil)
Friday, 6pm and Sunday, 3pm
Brazilian actor and director Luciano Vidigal makes his feature film directorial debut with a tale of poverty, love, and friendship among Black residents of Rio de Janiero’s crowded favelas. André (Big Jaum), nicknamed Dé, rents a small, whitewashed house where he cares for his beloved grandmother (Teca Pereira), who has end-stage Alzheimer’s disease. He’s three months behind in his rent and gets help from his fast friends, Adrianim (Diego Francisco) and Martins (Ramon Francisco), for everything from prescriptions and avoiding his landlady, dubbed “the Blair Witch,” to transportation to the hospital and some open spaces where they all can escape the city. The film provides slice-of-life observations of how the chronically poor band together, going the extra mile when one of them is in need and sharing the joys and heartaches normal to any life. Indeed, the person who comes in for the most opprobrium is Dé’s father, who abandoned him and his grandmother and who remains a distant figure in Dé’s life. While the title of the film explicitly refers to the house Dé shares with his grandmother, it also puts a subtle point on the fact that these descendants of Yoruba tribesmen and women brought by slavers to Brazil live in a “house” governed by the ruling white minority. I found this film emotionally moving and an interesting window into the traditions of Brazilians of Yoruba descent who manage to survive and even thrive in circumstances meant to break their spirit. (2024, 95 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Xavier Chávez’s DAMNED OLD PEOPLE (Ecuador)
Friday, 8:45pm and Sunday, 6:15pm
Cat owners be warned: Xavier Chávez’s deceptively comic drama no doubt holds sympathy for friends of felines everywhere, but isn’t shy about depicting brutal acts of violence against them either. The supposed folly of loving these furry friends is put into question as Elias (a committed Jamie Bonelli), a bitter old man still reeling from the death of his wife, learns to love a local feral cat (that he affectionately names Simon), who is otherwise a seeming terror to the other residents of the condo where he lives. Chávez’s film, a serious work punctuated by intentionally comically abrupt edits and off-the-wall theatrical performances, aims to be somewhat serious in its navigation of grief, especially among the elderly, and how nearing the end of one’s life heightens all other fears. Bonelli’s journey of coming out of his shell is the brightest spot amidst the droll and dreary attitudes plaguing the characters of DAMNED OLD PEOPLE, whose sour outlooks are no match for Elias and Simon. I wouldn’t be surprised if Chávez was inspired by the work of the Coen Bros, as his film angrily, methodically toes the line between tragedy and comedy to convey the innate cruelty of the human spirit, cats be damned. (2025, 104 mins, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
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Fabien Pisani’s EN LA CALIENTE – TALES OF A REGGAETON WARRIOR
(Cuba/US/Documentary)
Saturday, 9pm and Sunday, 5:30pm
The 1990s were a seminal era in Cuba. The fall of the Soviet Union meant that Cuba would be on its own in providing for its people. With a rigid, limited economy and a communist government that favored conformity over creativity, the Cuban people fell on very hard times. Ripe for the kind of rebellion seen in Thatcher’s England, a new music of the streets was born: reggaeton. Makeshift radio receivers set up on the hills of Santiago de Cuba brought the music of Jamaica and the US to the island, where it was reinterpreted and disseminated through underground radio, flash drives, and CDs. Of the practitioners of reggaeton, the most famous was Rubén Cuesta Palomo, aka, Kandyman. His sex-soaked lyrics and driving beats drew masses of young people to his music. Of course, he and other reggaeton artists were immediately condemned by the Cuban government for being vulgar and low-class, and eventually, the music was suppressed. EN LA CALIENTE tells the story of reggaeton, with Kandyman at its center, and how it became the voice for an impoverished generation of Cubans. Archival and current footage, many talking heads, and a generous soundtrack give viewers a feel for the scene, though the film lacks a deeper exploration of Cuba and the lives of the artists during this period. A “where are they now” wrap at the end of the film is welcome, and the final image on a Cuban beach is one of the most gorgeous things I’ve ever seen. (2024, 85 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Juan Olea’s BITTER GOLD (Chile/Mexico/Uruguay/Germany)
Sunday, 3:30pm
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 into the pain and goes to a hospital? The film alternates between these two questions, with each one heightening the tension of the other. As Carola assumes more responsibility for her family, she also carries the weight of the film, 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 a 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 90 minutes, 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]
📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING
Films by Warren Sonbert (US/Experimental)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Sunday, 7pm
This program of works by experimental film great Warren Sonbert bookends his career with one of his earliest films, made while still a student at NYU, and two films from near the end of his short life (he died from AIDS in 1995 at age 47). Sonbert was a master of editing, largely in an associational manner; but unlike Bruce Conner and those who followed his example, Sonbert worked with his own footage, which he shot during his wide-ranging travels around the globe. In the first film in the program, HALL OF MIRRORS (1966, 7 min, 16mm), he has not yet settled into his signature style. The first third of the film is drawn from an editing exercise for one of his film classes; it’s a reworking of outtakes from a 1948 Hollywood film featuring Frederic March and Florence Eldridge. It’s in this section that Sonbert’s early editing talents are in evidence, as he creates a jarring rhythm from shots of Eldridge trapped in a fairground hall of mirrors. The second and third sections are Sonbert’s own material. He films Warhol stars René Ricard (at home in his apartment) and Gerard Malanga (trapped, like Eldridge, in a mirrored room, part of an art exhibit). Sonbert’s inquisitive, intuitive hand-held camera work takes precedence here. The 1960s pop song soundtrack adds a tonal counterpoint to the sense of entrapment and claustrophobia in the three sections. THE CUP AND THE LIP (1986, 21 min, 16mm) is one of Sonbert’s final silent films after a long period of working without sound and exemplary of his mature associational editing style. He combines, as would be his practice, disparate shot footage from across many years and many locations. The disconnected images slowly start to take on resonance, with darker and more somber and disquieting material seeming to crowd out lighter fare. After a while, occasional shots of a hearse, driving through the streets and arriving at a graveyard, and then the casket it carried seen lowered into the ground, become a through-line for the later part of the film. At the time of its release critic Amy Taubin called it Sonbert’s darkest work. It is dark, but it needs an attentive viewer to follow the build-up of Sonbert’s careful editing to see it. FRIENDLY WITNESS (1989, 31 min, 16mm) marks Sonbert’s return to sound after about twenty years. It’s an astonishing film and, while not his final one, it has the feel of a culmination and summation of his career. In writing about it in 1990, critic Fred Camper described it as “a swirling montage of images”—“swirling” is an apt word; the shots here are shorter than in CUP so the pacing is faster. And the images we see are dominated by subjects in motion. The feeling is one of exhilaration, accentuated by the use of 1960s pop songs on the soundtrack. If one pays attention to the lyrics, though, they are—like many songs of that time—full of youthful angst, heartbreak, loss, and uncertainty. This anticipates the comparatively more somber tone of the second part of the film, which substitutes the pop songs for the overture to Gluck’s “Iphigénie en Aulide.” Similarly, the buoyancy and movement of the footage gives way to a somewhat slower pace and more static images. It doesn’t go as dark as CUP; rather it seems more cautionary, more tempered. As ecstatic and awe-inspiring as the world can be, it’s also fragile and fleeting.[Patrick Friel]
Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet’s HISTORY LESSONS (West Germany/Italy)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Wednesday, 7pm
HISTORY LESSONS is Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s unfinished novel The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar, which the great playwright worked on during his exile in Denmark between 1938 and 1939. The book takes an economic/sociological approach to Caesar’s rise, highlighting the financial decisions that accompanied Caesar’s consolidation of political power. The author also sought to emphasize the criminal aspect of Caesar’s trajectory, thereby drawing parallels between gangsterism and politics, a theme he’d later explore in his play The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. This being a Straub and Huillet production, Brecht’s language is the star of the show in HISTORY LESSONS, with lengthy recitations of the author’s text that draw attention not only to his ideas but his command of the German tongue. (This emphasis on recitation over performance serves as a Brechtian distancing effect as well.) Much of the movie proceeds in the form of monologues, as a young man in modern dress meets, in the present, with a few people who knew Caesar and who have insight into his business affairs. In between the interviews are long takes shot from the back of a car in which the interviewer drives around contemporary Rome; these are also characteristic of the materialist filmmaking couple, as they ground the history lessons in an appreciation of physical reality. Jonathan Rosenbaum has noted how the filmmakers’ use of direct sound heightens our sense of the concrete world in their films, and that’s certainly true of HISTORY LESSONS, in which the voices of Brecht’s ancient personages are constantly bumping up against the sounds of modernity. The effect of such aesthetic choices is to close the historical gap between Caesar’s time and ours, making us recognize the roles of economic maneuvering and outright criminality in our own political leadership. (1972, 85 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Rob Tregenza’s THE FISHING PLACE (Norway)
FACETS Cinema – Sunday, 1pm
A shocking twist occurs about an hour into THE FISHING PLACE, Rob Tregenza’s first feature in almost a decade. I won’t reveal what it is, suffice to say that it disrupts the narrative and sets it on a very different, self-referential course. Such experimentation is in keeping with the career of this unique independent director, whose ambitious long takes interweave beautifully with his narrative content as well as inspire reflection on the filmmaking process. Before Tregenza’s experimental side overwhelms the film completely, THE FISHING PLACE is an engrossing WWII drama set in Nazi-occupied Norway. It centers on Anna, a middle-aged domestic worker released from prison near the start of the film; she’s selected by a Nazi officer to work for a German minister stationed in Telemark who’s suspected of aiding the Norwegian resistance movement. Anna is to spy on the minister and report on his activities to local officials, although she feels deeply ambivalent, if not repulsed, about doing so. The title refers to the spot where the minister likes to go ice fishing, something that occupies his days while he lives under suspicion; it also reflects the unusual sense of calm that pervades many of the scenes. Tregenza’s camera, which is often on a dolly or a crane, explores the environments of the film like a curious ghost, suggesting a mix of engagement and detachment. One watches THE FISHING PLACE in a constant sense of suspense, wondering not just what will happen, but where the camera will go. Working as usual as his own cinematographer, Tregenza shot the movie in an extremely wide aspect ratio, which he uses to underscore the lateral distances between characters and to minimize the spaces above and below them. This tension between expanded space on the x-axis and limited space on the y-axis has a beguiling effect on the drama, and it primes viewers for the formal meditation that determines the third act. (2024, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Todd Haynes' VELVET GOLDMINE (US)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Thursday, 9:30pm
The past decade has not been kind to Todd Haynes. His last three major projects represent a steady, precipitous decline for a director whose work once was one of the most excitingly iconoclastic and theoretically informed in the country. The stillborn Sirk mimicry of FAR FROM HEAVEN, the empty, desperate casting games of I'M NOT THERE, the glacial tedium of MILDRED PIERCE, his HBO miniseries... his retreat into the safe and plasticine is a disappointment, but mustn't be allowed to diminish the fecund achievement of that first decade, years in which he brought forth his suppressed Karen Carpenter biopic, a haunting meditation on the works of Jean Genet, and SAFE, an infectious and quietly harrowing film of uncompromising brilliance. VELVET GOLDMINE is a transitional work, sandwiched between the intensity and coldness of his earlier works and the complacency of the later: a truly decadent work in all the best senses of the word. Loosely based on the lives of David Bowie, Lou Reed, and Iggy Pop, and gleefully stealing the structure of CITIZEN KANE, Haynes's film attempts nothing less than a reinvention of the musical as a micro-historical fantasia. Christian Bale's reminiscing journalist investigates the career, stardom, and afterlife of Brian Slade, compellingly played by Jonathan Rhys-Meyers. A loose Bowie-stand-in, Slade is disturbingly charismatic, indiscriminately carnal, and brilliant. He crosses paths with, mentors, and then brutally battles Curt Wild, played by Ewan McGregor. An uncontrollable maniac, furious and self-destructive, Wild unleashes within Slade an explosion of sexual and sonic experimentation that brings about glam rock. Haynes rips the frame to shreds, burns the celluloid, cross-casts new covers of minor 1970s hits, and turns the memoiristic call-and-response of the Welles film into a postmodern refusal of master narratives. History, Stephen Dedalus famously muttered, was a nightmare from which he was trying to awake. VELVET GOLDMINE presents history as a nightmare from which no one awakens, a pulsating, thumping fever-dream of debauchery and incomprehensibility, one that never grows clear, only more distant, and from which emerge not wakeful eyes in the daylight but the monstrous, Reaganite undead. (1998, 124 min, 35mm) [Kian Bergstrom]
David Lynch: Moving Through Time
Music Box Theatre – See below for showtimes
David Lynch's ERASERHEAD (US)
Friday, 7pm and Tuesday, 6:30pm
"It's my PHILADELPHIA STORY. It just doesn't have Jimmy Stewart in it." In Lynch's debut feature, a man and a woman conceive a monstrous child somewhere in between suburban alienation and industrial rot, a mostly conventional situation with the most grotesque punchline. Watching ERASERHEAD now feels like wandering through a nightmare more than ever, due in part to its central conceit and the expected barrage of disturbing events and images that it entails—distended faces, animal carcasses, etc.—but even the film's few familiar features add to this dreamlike quality. For example, most of ERASERHEAD takes place in an apartment building whose lobby is recognizable as the Other Place from TWIN PEAKS, and its checkerboard floors trigger a series of half-conscious connections, the common dream trope of a location playing the role of another location. But for every fact we know about the film's production, we're equally uncertain about what it is we're actually looking at, including the creature-child itself, whose uncertain origins have inspired theories that claim it as everything from a cow fetus to an elaborate puppet. Then, amidst this uncertainty, the film's most destabilizing quality emerges: its sweetness. As the father, Jack Nance has a constant wide-eyed, beleaguered stare that is almost as infantile as the creature-child that he tends to, ambivalently at first and then urgently as soon as he sees it in distress. It's effectively moving for the same reason that it's effectively dreamlike, with conscious logic and psychological realism applied to unreal conditions. But because Lynch's mind doesn't seem to format in the conditional or hypothetical, this aspect of unreality is always underlined as literal, so that the scenario of a largely silent father figure demonstrating real concern over his freak spawn is never played as what would happen but what is happening, shifting the focus onto affect and away from conditions. The silhouette of Nance's head has become a visual shorthand for the film, and is also emblematic in many ways of this oddly bound logic; its shape is both inexplicable and inevitable, and the only place is could possibly make sense is on the floor of a pencil factory, which is exactly where it ends up. (1977, 89 min, 35mm) [Anne Orchier]
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David Lynch's LOST HIGHWAY (US)
Friday, 9:45pm
David Lynch loves to play in the dark. His longtime cinematographer Frederick Elmes once remarked that "with David, my job is to determine how dark we're talking about." There's sort-of-dark, and really-dark, and pitch-black-dark; all of these kinds and more are put to gripping use in LOST HIGHWAY. The most breathtaking example (perhaps echoing a shot from THRONE OF BLOOD) is a scene that takes place in a shadowy hallway. Avant-garde sax player and demi-protangonist Fred Madison slowly moves from lightness to dark, appearing to slowly dissolve before our very eyes. It's the sort of infinitely subtle visual moment that home video just can't adequately reproduce, and LOST HIGHWAY is packed with them. For too long this movie has overshadowed by its more-celebrated follow-up, MULHOLLAND DR. But the fact is the two movies function as a true diptych, exploring similar themes of doubling and identity in ways that complement each other. To ignore LOST HIGHWAY is to discount some of Lynch's most indelible moments: including an unforgettably disquieting sex scene, the eerie Natalie Woodishness of a leather-clad Natasha Gregson Wagner, a gorgeous use of This Mortal Coil's "Song to the Siren," Richard Pryor's out-of-left-field cameo (it was his final film), and of course Robert Blake's unforgettable performance as the sinister Mystery Man. (1997, 135 min, DCP Digital) [Rob Christopher]
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David Lynch's THE ELEPHANT MAN (US)
Saturday, 11am and Monday, 9:30pm
An admirer of David Lynch’s ERASERHEAD, Mel Brooks lobbied to get Lynch hired as director for this historical drama about Joseph Merrick, a profoundly disfigured young man who became a minor celebrity in Victorian-era London after he was taken under the care of the physician Frederick Treves. Brooks also fought executives to let Lynch shoot the film in black-and-white and incorporate some experimental dream sequences reminiscent of his underground classic. The producer’s victories are worth mentioning not only because they speak to Brooks’ magnanimity, but also because they helped shape THE ELEPHANT MAN into the gorgeous work that it is. A quick scan of IMDB’s trivia page for the film reveals that it’s highly inaccurate with regards to Merrick’s life: he was never abused by the proprietor of the freak show where Treves discovered him, nor did the proprietor ever abduct him from the hospital where he came to live. Yet Lynch’s film is still a deeply moving fairy tale on the themes of friendship and compassion, imagining how caring individuals can elevate a person long held in low esteem by others and himself. The scenes of Merrick tearfully accepting the kindness of his benefactors are among the most forthrightly emotional in Lynch’s filmography; as realized by John Hurt (and an extraordinary team of makeup artists), the character is perhaps the most beautifully vulnerable Lynch would consider prior to Alvin Straight in THE STRAIGHT STORY. The film’s aesthetic adds greatly to its emotional impact—the sooty and shadowy black-and-white imagery, the dreamlike dissolves, and the haunting sound design (co-created by Lynch and as dense in industrial noises as the soundtrack of ERASERHEAD) evoke a decaying world where kindness seems an especially rare commodity. You feel almost as grateful as Merrick when you sense its presence. (1980, 124 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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David Lynch's THE STRAIGHT STORY (US)
Saturday, 1:40pm
Critics regularly describe THE STRAIGHT STORY as David Lynch’s least characteristic film because it’s a G-rated docudrama without any explicitly avant-garde flourishes, yet Lynch’s artistic personality is plainly evident throughout. The performers speak in that unemphatic, naïve-sounding manner that’s been a Lynch trademark since the beginning of his career, and the director films the all-American imagery (in this case, Midwestern farmlands and small towns) in an iconographic way that shows a direct connection to the settings of his BLUE VELVET and Twin Peaks. After the fashion of those two landmarks, there are even implications of dark, buried secrets beneath the Norman Rockwell-esque surfaces: the life of Alvin Straight, we learn, is marked by war trauma, alcoholism, family disputes, and a particularly heartbreaking episode that befell his adult daughter. These secrets never come to light in images, however (which is why the film had no trouble getting its G rating); instead, they take the form of poignant monologues that reveal how Straight has internalized and atoned for his tragedies. This narrative strategy allows THE STRAIGHT STORY to maintain a warm, contemplative tone from beginning to end. Some have likened this to the late films of Yasujiro Ozu, but it more likely has roots in Lynch’s longtime practice of transcendental meditation. Whatever inspired the film’s blissful patience is less important than the refreshing effect it has on the viewer; to watch THE STRAIGHT STORY is a bit like engaging in transcendental meditation yourself. For me, it all comes down to the long shot of Straight on his riding lawn mower, progressing at a snail’s pace down an unremarkable highway. The camera pans up, contemplates a perfect Heartland horizon for a few moments, then pans back down to find that Straight has barely progressed since we last saw him. The moment is both funny (Lynch suggests an ellipsis, only to reveal it isn’t one) and touching (the moment encapsulates the old man’s perseverance and quiet integrity), showing how much Lynch is able to assert his personal aesthetic in atypical circumstances. Deserving special mention for their creative contributions are veteran cinematographer Freddie Francis (who came out of retirement to shoot the film) and Sissy Spacek, who gives an unbelievably moving performance as Straight’s daughter. (1999, 112 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
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Alexandre O. Philippe's LYNCH/OZ (US/Documentary)
Saturday, 4:10pm
Perhaps every cinematic experience is like a trip to Oz, as we travel from reality to fiction. That notion certainly pondered in Alexandre O. Philippe’s LYNCH/OZ, a documentary that is as much about the power of cinematic storytelling as it is more specifically about director David Lynch’s obsession with THE WIZARD OF OZ. The film is divided into six parts, each featuring a focused voiceover essay by a critic or filmmaker (or, in one case, two filmmakers: Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson). Philippe skillfully transcribes the aural essays in edited images that not just reflect the words being spoken but expand and complicate them—his work reflects the unique visual and aural relationships of Lynch’s work. Each essay stands on its own, but themes begin to run throughout, particularly about representations of trauma, the earnestness of Lynch’s filmmaking, as his grappling with distinctly American mythologies. This construction is powerful, allowing each participant extended time to discuss their theories, analysis, and even personal relationship to Lynch, THE WIZARD OF OZ, and cinema more broadly. In so many ways, LYNCH/OZ is a reflection on our own individual relationship to film; as pointed out, THE WIZARD OF OZ is so often a “first favorite film,” so it is wholly informative to our understanding of cinema and storytelling. That’s as much true for Lynch as it is for all the essayists, making this an incredibly self-reflexive documentary. It forced me to think about my own relationship to THE WIZARD OF OZ, my obsession with it as a very young child, and the well-worn out VHS which had the film recorded from television, complete with commercials. I never thought that my early constant rewatching of that film might be why I’m such a Lynch fan as an adult, why WILD AT HEART with its overt references is my personal favorite of his. It’s illuminating to dive deeply into Lynch’s preoccupation with THE WIZARD OF OZ and its dream spaces, not because they’re a unique fascination of his, but because it is a fascination for all of us cinephiles. (2022, 108 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
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David Lynch's WILD AT HEART (US)
Saturday, 9pm and Thursday, 4:15pm
Films of the “lovers on the run” subgenre are sexual, dark, and exude a melodramatic dreaminess. They often, too, thematically address complications of Americana and nostalgia. With continual references to THE WIZARD OF OZ, WILD AT HEART explores themes of home that are found throughout David Lynch's work; while his more recent Twin Peaks: The Return is all about how it’s impossible to go home again, WILD AT HEART is ultimately about the dream beyond the rainbow. After getting out of prison for murder, Elvis-obsessed Sailor (Nicolas Cage) and his girlfriend Lula (a transcendent Laura Dern) run away to California, telling each other stories of their pasts along the way. Unbeknownst to them, they’re pursued by Lula’s mother (a fabulously unhinged Diane Ladd), who hires hitmen to kill Sailor. Filled with surreal vignettes and characters, WILD AT HEART is dynamic and strange, sordid and ethereal. At one point Lula and Sailor pull over to dance on the side of the road to heavy metal; it’s as if the film, too, needs to shake off some irrepressible energy. Scenes like these are paired with quiet moments of horror—namely, the scene where Willem Defoe’s character aggressively corners Lula in a motel is one of the most upsetting in cinema; Laura Dern portrays Lula’s reaction with heartbreaking authenticity. But the most affecting scene is where Lula and Sailor find a woman (Sherilyn Fenn) injured in a car accident on the side of the road. These kinds of emotionally driven images of violence and trauma experienced by women would be more fully addressed in his film TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME, released just a few years later. (1990, 124 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
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Preceding WILD AT HEART is Rob Christopher’s short film MY LAST MARTINI. Christopher, one of Chicago’s finest filmmakers and a Cine-File contributor, has drawn more inspiration from his long-time muse, writer Barry Gifford, and adapted one of Gifford’s short stories for the screen. A blocked screenwriter (Mickey O’Sullivan) sitting in a dark cocktail lounge encounters a woman of a certain age (Wendy Robie) who feels the need to talk. She spins a story of familial intrigue over martinis. (“Two is my limit. This is my third,” she says.) Christopher understands the short story’s use of small details to spin its spell. His camera lingers on a $20 bill placed on a table, a cheesy painting of a topless woman hanging on a wall, a barely heard comment by their waiter (Edward Thomas-Herrara) hoping to get his green card. Maximal use of close-ups, especially of the entrancing Robie, made me lean in and become the attentive listener she so hoped to find. (2024, 14 min, Digital Projection) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Jack Sholder’s THE HIDDEN (US)
Saturday, Midnight
THE HIDDEN is a sci-fi punk-rock odyssey of hedonism, sexual fluidity, and fancy Italian sports cars. It may also be the missing link between David Lynch's BLUE VELVET (1986) and Twin Peaks. The film kicks off with a shotgun blast in a bank, launching a high-speed chase through the sun-bleached streets of West Hollywood. Jack DeVries—played by Chris Mulkey, a familiar face from both DUNE and Twin Peaks—tears through the city in a stolen car, Shok Paris’ “Say Goodbye” screaming from the stereo. The pursuit ends at a police barricade with a well-placed bullet from seasoned LAPD detective Tom Beck (Michael Nouri). But the bloodshed is far from over. DeVries, once described as a “nice and quiet gentleman,” was merely a shell—possessed by a parasitic alien lifeform. In the hospital, the insectoid creature slithers from DeVries into its next host: Jonathan Miller (William Boyett), a man on the verge of heart surgery and gastrointestinal distress. Once inside, Miller rises from his bed to resume the carnage. This alien doesn’t just wear people—it joyrides their lives into destruction before hopping to the next. Only one person understands that these aren’t isolated acts of madness: FBI agent Lloyd Gallagher (Kyle MacLachlan). Forced into partnership, Beck and Gallagher must hunt down the alien before it reaches a position of true power. THE HIDDEN was written by Jim Kauf (credited here as “Bob Hunt"), whose screenwriting résumé includes STAKEOUT (1987), RUSH HOUR (1998), and NATIONAL TREASURE (2004). Kouf originally hoped to direct the film, but after the studio passed, he distanced himself from the project, adopting a pseudonym. That alias, “Bob Hunt,” may be more than a shrug—it’s a sly nod to the film’s possible inspiration. Hal Clement’s 1950 novel Needlefeatures an alien known as The Hunter, which inhabits a fifteen-year-old boy named Bob, working with him to find another parasitic creature hiding in plain sight. Kouf’s script reimagines that premise through the framework of the buddy-cop genre, colliding alien possession with the chilling reality of “normal” people who snap into sudden violence. Director Jack Sholder, coming off A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 2: FREDDY’S REVENGE (1985), saw THE HIDDEN as a chance to escape horror pigeonholes. Still, his horror roots fed the film’s pulse. Of all his works, including ALONE IN THE DARK (1982), RENEGADES (1989), and WISHMASTER 2 (1999), Sholder considers THE HIDDEN his best studio effort. The alien first hungers for experience—earthly pleasures to be devoured in a frenzy. In Miller’s body, it gulps fried food, chases a shiny new car, and keels over from a heart attack. It’s capitalism incarnate: kill, consume, discard, repeat. It robs a Wells Fargo, steals a Ferrari 308 GTB, and murders a record store clerk just to snag a boombox and some cassettes. It lusts for sex, and it takes it. The alien inhabits Brenda (Claudia Christian), a stripper, and has sex with a sleazy guy with a car. It is implied the alien had sex with the Cadillac owner until it killed him. But strikingly, the film never sensationalizes its gender-hopping or sexual fluidity—it simply is. That quiet radicalism still feels ahead of its time. When the alien glimpses a senator on a diner TV, its appetite shifts. Pleasure is passé. Now it wants power. Sholder, inspired by Sidney Lumet’s gritty realism and police procedurals, crafts operatic car chases with surgical precision—explosions of chaos cut to the rhythm of a ticking clock. Beneath the genre trappings lies a question that haunts every scene: What does it mean to be human? A long-standing fan theory suggests THE HIDDEN is the spiritual bridge between Kyle MacLachlan’s Jeffrey in BLUE VELVET and Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks. Gallagher is awkward like Dougie in Twin Peaks: The Return, methodical like Cooper, and very possibly a prototype. Watching the film through that lens, you’ll see a work that hasn’t just aged well; it’s mutated into something richer, stranger, and more vital. Like its alien antagonist, THE HIDDEN wears many skins: action flick, body horror, procedural, satire. And underneath them all: a burning desire to feel everything—even the hulking weight of a flamethrower. (1987, 97 min, 35mm) [Shaun Huhn]
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David Lynch's BLUE VELVET (US)
Sunday, 2:15pm and Wednesday, 6pm
This is where the legend really began. It's curious to think how Lynch's career would have developed if DUNE (1984) had not been a box office failure, but cinema history can thank him for not playing it safe with this rebound project. Though Lynch had already made three features, BLUE VELVET was the first full articulation of his core theme of the evil that lurks in small towns everywhere. Not the outright surrealist endeavor that was ERASERHEAD, it is also not the most accessible of narratives. Dark, violent, sexual, and reeking of 1963 suburbia, the film is at times a noir mystery and at others a violent thriller. Many of the visual symbols that would populate TWIN PEAKS are introduced here, such as red curtains appearing when danger is present in a scene, and Lynch's continued growth as a complete cinematic artist is evident. Despite having a cast that didn't feature a legitimate star (Dennis Hopper may be the exception, but his career was in the dumps when he was cast...as the third choice), the film earned Lynch his second Academy Award nomination for Best Picture, as well as praise from critics throughout the world. It's also notable that Kyle MacLachlan (essentially playing Dale Cooper) might never have worked again if not for his excellent performance. Still dangerous all these years later, the film is as gorgeous as it is classic. (1986, 120 min, 35mm) [Jason Halprin]
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David Lynch's MULHOLLAND DRIVE (US)
Monday, 3:40pm
Part mind-bending mystery, part hair-raising thriller, part tear-jerking break-up soapfest, David Lynch’s MULHOLLAND DRIVE evokes an aura of nocturnal wonder and dread, a realm caught between the parameters of waking life and dreams, achingly poignant in its emotional core, absolutely hypnotizing in it’s formal ambiance, and sometimes-frustratingly labyrinthine in its thorny construction. Addressing the cult of personality that is David Lynch’s public persona, it’s hard to look past the hovering cloud that is his semi-comical presence as a cult figure. His fan base certainly gives the impression that Lynch has been, and will always be, the only director who can tap into the idea of dreamworlds and existential cinematic strangeness. Even though this is severely not the case, it isn’t enough to diminish an artist who frequently operates at the height of his powers behind the camera. MULHOLLAND DRIVE contains many elements of his previous work and re-contextualizes them into a concise, epic investigation into the landscape of a shifting personality, that moves with the weight of a person waking and falling into a series of dreams, contrasted with possible realities imagined and lived in. Naomi Watts plays “Betty,” who comes to Hollywood hoping to achieve stardom as an actress in the movies. She catches the attention of a young director played by Justin Theroux, who has been told by a shady, ultra-powerful group (led by Twin Peaks’ “The Arm”) to cast a different actress in his movie. This actress, first glimpsed being driven along the spiraling and ink-black road of the film’s title, suffers a near-assassination attempt, and is left an amnesiac. When she wakes, she believes her name is “Rita”, eventually running into “Betty,” where together they try to solve the mystery regarding “Rita” and her true identity, falling into a romantic obsession in the process. Over the course of the movie, the characters’ identities begin to shift, leading to possible alternate realities in the film’s story and timeline, where Lynch plays with the illusion of the cinema as a false construction that occasionally evokes deep emotional responses from those witnessing it. This idea is fleshed out in the “Silencio” scene, where the two women stumble upon a nightclub with a singer, Rebecca Del Rio, performing a Spanish version of a famous Roy Orbison song. As she sings, the two women begin to cry uncontrollably at the performance, which is eventually revealed to be false, as the singer isn’t even singing and the music is pre-recorded. When the music stops, so does the singer, as she collapses on stage and is dragged off. Lynch pulls a cinematic magic trick on his viewers, engulfing them in the emotions of these two women, who are witnessing something that is a construct, while simultaneously being emotionally swept up in its power and beauty, crying to an illusion that is revealed to be false. One of the most powerful scenes of the last several decades, the rest of the film is a testament to a director operating at peak levels of his matured artistry. Twin Peaks: The Return has much in common with this bewitching work, even in its production history. MULHOLLAND DRIVE started originally as a TV pilot, later to become a series, but never actually materialized into one, so it was changed to a feature film, while Twin Peaks: The Return is a television show that feels more like a long movie in the spirit of Jacques Rivette (who once remarked that the feature film TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME, very much the origin to MULHOLLAND, left the French filmmaker “floating” when he left the theater). Much like his recent work with Peaks, characters tend to appear and vanish without trace, while identities twist and morph into sometimes wholly different characters. Like the devastating, yet cathartic ending of his recent 18-hour masterwork, digging deeper into an obsessive mystery can sometimes bring you further and further from the reality of what it is you began searching for in the first place. (2001, 147 min, 35mm) [John Dickson]
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David Lynch’s DUNE (US)
Tuesday, 9:30pm
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, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]
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John Dahl’s RED ROCK WEST (US)
Thursday, 2pm
The Wyoming desert bursts through the screen in John Dahl’s deliciously tactile neo-noir, a seedy airport paperback bursting to life with an effervescent coolness that sticks with you for hours afterwards. With Nicolas Cage’s steely lead performance and William Olvis’ twangy score, John Dahl builds a world that thrives in simple concepts telegraphed in the most atmospherically intoxicating ways possible. Michael Williams, an ex-marine whose moral compass is his best and worst feature, is one of the more fascinating characters in Cage’s oeuvre, having arrived just a few years after much showier roles in RAISING ARIZONA (1987) and WILD AT HEART (1990). Presenting him as a calmer, steadier presence, RED ROCK WEST makes a weapon of his restraint, as the general anonymity of his character and self allows others to project whatever they want onto him. Michael eventually gets caught up in a devious plot to kill the wife of the local sheriff (a similarly steely Lara Flynn Boyle) after being confused for an actual contract killer (a shifty-eyed Dennis Hopper) who’s running behind schedule. The cat-and-mouse of it all ends the only way these things can: with gunshots in the dead of night and heaps of cash blowing in the wind. Something of a hidden treasure of the 1990s, RED ROCK WEST deserves to be admired for cultivating the vibes of a neon-laden saloon at 2am, and all the tales that come with that. (1993, 98 mins, 35mm) [Ben Kaye]
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David Lynch's TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (US)
Thursday, 7:30pm
I once knew a survivor of childhood sexual abuse who told me that David Lynch's TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME is the only film that ever really got it right. The way incest deranges you, the unprocessable betrayal, the PTSD. Describing her abuse, she said she'd had her own personal Freddie Krueger, and Lynch portrays Laura Palmer's final days as a horror movie—scarier than most, and truer. Critics missed the thrust of this baffler, calling it the worst thing Lynch ever did, if not one of the worst films ever made. Today, it looks like a flawed masterpiece, exhausting and exhilarating. It's a singular portrayal of "garmonbozia" (pain and sorrow), the cream corn of evil—with all the Lynchian disjunctures that sentence implies. It's abrasive at every level, from Lynch's screaming, whooping sound design to the punishing immersion into Laura's hell. But its extremism is the source of its hypnotic power, and Lynch's corybantic surrealism fits the theme. Sheryl Lee is astonishing as doomed, anguished Laura; Ray Wise is terrifying (and, in deranging moments, loving) as her molester father. Then there's that first 35 minutes, which play like a savage parody of the TV show, with Chris Isaak and Keifer Sutherland investigating a murder in Deer Meadow, a negative image of our favorite Pacific Northwest town. Here, the coffee's two days old, the diner is seedy, the small-town cops are jerks, and the dead woman is not exactly the homecoming queen. (One suspects that the cherry pie would be damn poor.) The "Lil the Dancer" scene is a delightful thumbnail illustration of semiotics, and Harry Dean Stanton is on hand as Carl, manager of the Fat Trout trailer park. Angelo Badalamenti's score is creamy and dreamy, mournful and menacing. Actually, I suspect that if you're not already well-versed in the lore of Bob, Mike, the One-Armed Man, The Arm a.k.a. The Man From Another Place, Mrs. Tremond and her grandson, and the Owl Cave ring, then you might have stumbled upon this site by accident. I'd guess our readers share my excitement that the stars, and the passage of 25 years, have aligned so that we are actually poised to reenter the Black Lodge. If you haven't boned up on this prequel, then hie to this revival. (Or even if you have: you'll see something new every time.) (1992, 135 min, 35mm) [Scott Pfeiffer]
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More information on series, including additional programs not covered above, available here.
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
Shunji Iwai's ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU-CHOU (Japan)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm
Every time I'm compelled to revisit Shunji Iwai's ravishing turn-of-the-millennium masterpiece ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU-CHOU (and trust me when I say that I face down that very compulsion with alarming frequency), an ineluctable sense of intoxication grips me during the film's opening barrage of images. This feeling is a devastating pang of early-internet nostalgia as the screen is littered with jagged scraps of digital ephemera: quick-flickering lines of code and slow-churning loading icons inform the viewer that the shards of text flashing across the frame are real-time posts from an online forum, their individual authors so vaguely delineated from one another as to evoke Joyce's arcane dialogue stylings. This feeling is one of amazement at the otherworldly, windswept beauty of the song playing atop the sequence: the piece in question is Arabesque, performed by the fictional singer Lily Chou-Chou, who viewers will quickly realize is the focal point of the forum discussion whirring past. This feeling is one of shock and awe and breathless wonder at the resplendence of the images undergirding this text salvo: evanescent glimpses of a field of tall grass—luminous, impossibly verdant, seemingly endless—reveal 14 year-old Yuichi (Hayato Ichihara), so caked in sweat as to instantly convey the very height of the summer season, clutching his portable CD player for dear life. He is the film's protagonist, and we will soon discover that he is one of the aforementioned forum users, leading a double life as a troubled middle schooler and an erudite Lily Chou-Chou super-fan. Usually, by the time Yuichi and his classmates embark on an impromptu trip to Okinawa around the film's one-hour mark, I am fully convinced that I'm watching the greatest movie ever made. ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU-CHOU was one of the very first films shot on the groundbreaking Sony HDW-F900, a high-definition video camera that was subsequently used to capture Aleksandr Sokurov's RUSSIAN ARK (2002) and Lars von Trier's DOGVILLE (2003). It commenced its life cycle on the internet fittingly, first unfolding over a series of forum posts where fans of Shunji Iwai, who had begun his career as a prolific director of music videos and recently achieved a dramatic measure of domestic success through his film SWALLOWTAIL BUTTERFLY (1996), were encouraged to interact with the story directly, experimentally co-authoring it as the sinuous narrative began to take shape. It would be foolish to describe the plot any further here—the narrative is as byzantine as they come and the film itself is fractured beyond all belief, wholly given over to wild ellipsis and temporal disjunction and stitched together in a free-associative manner that privileges color harmonies and editing rhythms over narrative legibility—so I simply won't, in the hopes that you might be better equipped to let the elegiac music of it all wash over you, free and easy, gentle, gentle. ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU-CHOU is first and foremost a paean to the life-changing power of pop music, but it is also a devastating portrait of Japan's disaffected youth at the dawn of the new millennium, one whose depiction of an entire generation stricken with apathy (a response to the country's soaring youth suicide rates, no doubt) places it in conversation with a broader movement of contemporaneous films: Sion Sono's SUICIDE CLUB (2001), Hideaki Anno's LOVE & POP (1998), Kiyoshi Kurosawa's BRIGHT FUTURE (2003), to name a few. The film is also, for my money, the defining cinematic evocation of the utopian promise of the internet in its naissance. These schoolchildren will have what remains of childhood innocence irrevocably dispelled by academic pressure and bullying; by divorce and financial hardship; by traumatic accidents and an encroaching cavalcade of grotesqueries I daren't evoke here; yet they will persist in the harsh light of the computer monitor, spurred onwards by the sanctity of the alternative communities they forge and held aloft by their determined pursuit of "the ether," a vague concept repeatedly evoked throughout the film that could alternately refer to the vital essence of life or the internet itself as a means of escaping it all. (2001, 146 min, DCP Digital) [David Whitehouse]
Gregory La Cava's MY MAN GODFREY (US)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Thursday, 7pm
Is there a more quintessential—or contentious—screwball comedy than MY MAN GODFREY? Gregory La Cava's Fifth Avenue farce has been the locus classicus of the genre since an anonymous Variety scrivener off-handedly coined the phrase in a GODFREY review, observing “Lombard has played screwball dames before, but none so screwy as this one." Within two years, the same trade paper would lament "the apparently unending string of screwball comedies." Almost as soon as GODFREY was recognized as a landmark, critics began wagging fingers at the film and its spawn. In 1940, Otis Ferguson cited GODFREY's arrival as the moment when "the discovery of the word 'screwball' by those who had to have some words to say helped build the thesis of an absolutely new style in comedy," before according pride of place to the earlier SING AND LIKE IT, "consistently funnier and more screwball as well." William K. Everson's 1994 screwball survey, American Bedlam, likewise acknowledged GODFREY's place in the canon, with the caveat that the film is "lunatic rather than charming, and in addition to being unreal is totally dishonest." So what is it about this madcap reveille that sets people off and sends them running to the nearest trash heap? There's no arguing with the performances—William Powell’s effortless suavity is the perfect counterpoint to Lombard's antic, giggly effusion, and Mischa Auer's gigolo remains an absurd specimen of primate masculinity. These three, plus matriarch Alice Brady, were each nominated at the 1937 Academy Awards, marking GODFREY as the first film to receive a quartet of acting nominations—in the year that the supporting categories were introduced, no less—but the less-heralded turns from Gail Patrick and Eugene Pallette are equally accomplished. Patrick takes a crude sketch of a cruel character and imbues her with enough interiority to render her climactic question—"What good did you find in me, if any?"—exquisitely deserved and heart-stoppingly earnest. At the decade's start, Pallette was still a somewhat generic second fiddle of comic relief, an embarrassed man scurrying around the lady's locker room in FOLLOW THRU; by MY MAN GODFREY, he had settled into his artistic groove and his highest purpose, embodying the put-upon patriarch with sandpaper vocal cords. Pallette gets the film's most famous quip—"All you need to start an asylum is an empty room and the right kind of people"—and perfects its delivery with an even, unenunciated reading that lets it land with selfless aplomb. La Cava excels at filling an empty room with the right kind of people, and the film's handful of crowd scenes are marvels of camera movement and antic, maximal composition. So far, so good. But the crux of GODFREY is its gossamer social veneer, a Depression-era update of the eternal story of a princess slumming outside the palace walls. Opening amidst the shantytowns of Sutton Place and gradually revealing that its titular hobo is a Harvard man on a sociological vision quest, MY MAN GODFREY isn't just a questionable work of social realism, but something like the business end of a broken bottle. The "forgotten men" are phonies, the Depression is a bunch of hot air, and prosperity is just around the corner—just level the slums and salt the earth with nightclubs. In retrospect, MY MAN GODFREY was clearly a way station for screenwriter Morrie Ryskind, who began as a socialist and Marx Brothers scenarist, but would soon fink for HUAC, provide seed money for The National Review, and pen right-wing diatribes for syndication from his Southern California mansion. "If them cops would stick to their own racket and leave honest guys alone," opines one of Powell's hobo buddies, "we'd get somewhere in this country without a lot of this relief and all that stuff." Amen, brother? (1936, 94 min, DCP Digital) [K.A. Westphal]
Rithy Panh's THE MISSING PICTURE (Cambodia/Documentary)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Tuesday, 7pm
Without pictures, audio, or any other kind of recordings, one man must rely on his own personal memory to create a tale that a majority of the Western world has no knowledge of. Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh re-enacts the Khmer Rouge takeover of his country during his youth through the use of clay figures. The political takeover, reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the Sixties, included the 're-education' of children born to intellectuals and artists and calls for an entirely self-sufficient country. Panh's personal experiences are shown to the audience only as far as the hundreds of hand-carved clay dolls will allow. The filmmaker never appears, only his voice is heard narrating his memories. Interspersed with the figurines is the limited existing news and documentary footage of the time, which gives a broader sense of Cambodia during this three-year period. Propaganda from Pol Pot's regime put forward a tale of a well-fed, educated nation, but the director's own story paints a far different story, one similar to accounts of atrocities from Holocaust victims. The use of hundreds of dolls to detail the plights of famine, torture, and grief is perhaps odd, but it isn't that different in practice from using human performers to portray a historical scene: both are distanced from the actual event, and it's the director's handling of the figures or the actors that allows for engagement with the subject. And yet, with the inanimate clay dolls cut away and painted to represent a mostly forgotten time, a haunting image is produced that may create a longer-lasting impression than more conventional documentary strategies. (2013, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Shealey Wallace]
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]
Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham & Rachel Szor’s NO OTHER LAND (Norway/Palestine/Documentary)
FACETS – Friday, 7pm and Saturday, 3pm
“This is a story about power.” Basel Adra, a lifelong resident of the Masafer Yatta region of the West Bank, speaks these words to cap off a story about former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s visit to the region, a visit that—while perhaps nothing more than a publicity stunt—resulted in the IDF's previously scheduled demolitions of Palestinian schools and homes to be called off. But this film, NO OTHER LAND, is also a story about power, about needless emotional and physical damage, about the constant barrage of senseless destruction of peoples’ livelihoods that so many around the world have either become desensitized to or have found labyrinthine methods of justifying to themselves this continued degradation of humanity. The framework of the onscreen narrative stretches from the summer of 2019 through October of 2023, and it focuses on the growing friendship between two of the film’s directors: the aforementioned Basel and Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist who has arrived to learn more about the continuing Israeli mission of Palestinian subjugation. The footage we see is, at the very least, rage-inducing: homes and schools and entire villages senselessly bulldozed to oblivion, supposedly for the flimsy excuse of being turned into “military zones.” The ensuing carnage and accompanying attitudes perpetrated by the Israeli soldiers captured on film oscillates between “duty-bound” apathy or entitled machismo, in one instance resulting in a soldier shooting and paralyzing a friend of Basel’s, Harun Abu Aram. The law is, indeed, on the side of the Israelis, so why should these Palestinian children be so upset when their homes are destroyed in broad daylight when it’s perfectly “legal” to do so? The filmmakers make a point to highlight the intentional existential ploy being pulled off here, where Israelis can come and go as they please throughout the West Bank, whereas Palestinians are legally bound to the region and otherwise othered in all aspects of Israeli society (Basel notes, despite having a law degree, he would only realistically be able to find a job as a construction worker were he to move to Israel). Throughout it all—perhaps to actively combat it all—there are still laughs shared among family members, there are still games played in the snow during winter, and the children still play and swing around and try to find some semblance of joy amidst their displacement. Underneath the political mire of the “complicated” banner so often thrown at the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, there are simply families wanting to share a meal together, mothers caring for sons, fathers keeping businesses afloat, and countless young people staring at their phones, because what else is there? That the directing team is comprised of both Israelis and Palestinians points towards some kind of hopeful future where a shared understanding of the horrors at hand can be truly realized (some of the more noteworthy and thorny passages arise when various Palestinians question Yuval’s own complicity in the continued settlements of the region, though the film leaves these points dangling rather than digging deeper, for better or worse). Additionally, that the film failed to find US theatrical distribution, while still receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature, speaks to how open endorsement for Palestinian rights tends to only go so far. Perhaps the true power of NO OTHER LAND, and of this entire story, is the continued resilience and drive in Palestinians capturing the reality on the ground and urgently spreading the truth as far as possible. Here, the camera proves mightier than the sword. (2024, 96 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
📽️ ALSO SCREENING
⚫ Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
Matteo Garrone’s 2023 film IO CAPITANO (121 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 7pm, followed by a post-screening discussion with Professors Domietta Torlasco and Massimiliano Delfino of Northwestern University, and Professor Federico Faloppa of the University of Reading. More info here.
⚫ Chicago Film Society at Music Box Theatre
William Worthington’s 1919 silent film THE DRAGON PAINTER (61 min, 35mm) screens Sunday, 11:30am, preceded by Thomas Ince’s 1914 short THE DEATH MASK (21 min, 35mm) and with live musical accompaniment by MIYUMI Project Japanese Experimental Ensemble. More info here.
⚫ Chicago Public Library
View all screenings taking place at Chicago Public Library branches here.
⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Kenneth Lonergan’s 2005/2011 film MARGARET (150 min version, DCP Digital) screens Friday, 9:40pm, and Saturday, 8:30pm, as part of the Board Picks series.
Three films by Ernie Gehr—TABLE (1976, 16mm), GLIDER (2001, DCP Digital), and CARROLL GARDENS (2024, DCP Digital)–screen Saturday, 2pm, as part of the Encounters in the Cinema series.
Heiny Srour’s 2011 film THE HOUR OF LIBERATION HAS ARRIVED (62 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, 4pm, and Srour’s 1974 film LEILA AND THE WOLVES (90 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday, 4pm, as part of the New Releases and Restorations series.
RaMell Ross’ 2024 film NICKEL BOYS (140 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, 5:30pm, and Sunday, 1pm, as part of the New Releases and Restorations series.
Ulrike Ottinger’s 1984 film DORIAN GRAY IN THE MIRROR OF THE YELLOW PRESS (150 min, DCP Digital) screens Monday, 7pm, as part of an Ottinger miniseries.
Elem Klimov’s 1974/1981 film AGONY: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF RASPUTIN (152 min version, 35mm) screens Tuesday, 7pm, as part of the State Revolution: Film Under the Boot series. More info about all screenings here.
⚫ FACETS Cinema
David Winters’ 1986 film THRASHIN’ (93 min, Digital Projection) screens Friday, 9:45pm, preceded by the raw, high-energy sounds of Vatos Tristes at 9pm, as part of the ongoing Hollywood Babylon series.
Werner Herzog’s 1972 film AGUIRRE, WRATH OF GOD (95 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday, 3pm, to kick off a new 50th anniversary series, 5 Films/5 Decades/5 Critics. After the screening, Newcity critic Ray Pride and FACETS Program Director Charles Coleman will discuss the historical and cultural impact of the film with a brief audience Q&A. More info on all screenings and events here.
⚫ Film Studies Center (at the University of Chicago's Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St.)
Victoria Linares Villegas’ 2022 film IT RUNS IN THE FAMILY (84 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday, 7pm, with Linares Villegas in person. More info here.
⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Miguel Gomes’ 2024 film GRAND TOUR (128 min, DCP Digital) begins screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes.
Screening this week in the Chicago Palestine Film Festival are: Carol Mansour’s 2024 film A STATE OF PASSION (93 min, DCP Digital) on Saturday at 7pm; Short Films: Solidarity & Promise (2023-2024, Total approx. 127 min, DCP Digital) on Sunday at 1pm; Leonardo Antonio Avezzano’s 2022 film THE PROMISE (84 min, DCP Digital) on Sunday, 4pm, with Avezzano in attendance; Short Films: Chicago to Palestine (2021-2024) on Wednesday at 6pm; and the 1972 Pacific Newsreel documentary REVOLUTION UNTIL VICTORY aka WE ARE THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE (45 min, DCP Digital) on Thursday at 6:15pm with various shorts. PLEASE NOTE: All of these screenings except for THE PROMISE are SOLD OUT.
April’s Mystery Movie Monday is on Monday at 6pm. More information on all screenings here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
James Griffiths’ 2025 film THE BALLAD OF WALLIS ISLAND (100 min, DCP Digital) begins screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes.
Dana Flor’s 2024 documentary 1-800-ON-HER-OWN (80 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday, 7pm. More information on all screenings 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 11, 2025 - April 17, 2025
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, Rob Christopher, John Dickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Patrick Friel, Jason Halprin, Shaun Huhn, Ben Kaye, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Anne Orchier, Scott Pfeiffer, Shealey Wallace, K.A. Westphal, David Whitehouse