CRUCIAL VIEWING
Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation (Animation)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) – Saturday, 1pm (Program 1) and 3:30pm (Program 2) (Free Admission)
Founded in 2010 by the dearly missed Alexander Stewart and Lilli Carré (former Chicagoans, now living in Los Angeles), the Eyeworks Festival is essential viewing every year. It's a tightly curated package—this time just about two and a half hours of work, spread over two afternoon screenings. The programming always ranges from some established classics, rediscoveries of forgotten or underappreciated films, and bleeding edge new work. The highlights this year include: Annapurna Kumar's MOUNTAIN CASTLE MOUNTAIN FLOWER PLASTIC (2017), a Robert Breer-esque, flickering, squirming, poetic trip through suggestive mountains, an 8-bit castle, gif-y flowers, and a shifting floating plastic debris island. It's a jolting and gorgeous tottering tumble of suggestive colors and shapes. Jacolby Satterwhite's HEALING IN MY HOUSE (2016) is a rousing and contradictory puzzle featuring dance, leather, dimly lit dungeons, and quietly beautiful tunes. It shoots for a grand scale, but is made up of inscrutable personal elements. Like if Wagner wrote an opera based on his "incognito mode" web browsing history. Ruth Lingford's early 2-D computer animation WHAT SHE WANTS (1994) shows a surreal city where everything becomes sexualized—alternately humorous, frightening, and erotic. Other great ones include Hans Richter's dada classic of eclipses, eyeballs, shifting panels and patterns FILMSTUDIE (1926); Steve Reinke and Jessie Mott's sexual doomsday soothsaying EAT YOUR SECRETS (2017); Jaakko Pallasvuo's funny acceptance of total loss of self SOFT BODY GOAL (2017); Sam Bell's hooky fuzzy feedback KRELL EXPERIMENT (2017); and Barbara Hammer's erotic and funny planting a flag on the pixilated beach NO NO NOOKY T.V. (1987). (1926-2017, approx. 71 min total each program, 16mm and Digital Projection) JBM
J.G. Blystone’s THE LAST MAN ON EARTH (Silent American Revival)
Chicago Film Society at the Music Box Theatre – Saturday, noon
Imagine a world where petty conflicts are the only conflicts; superannuated rituals are determined via equally primordial methods; and the president is a woman who gives f*ck all about housekeeping and instead prefers to dote on her many, many cats. Now imagine the silent film that makes this a reality, complete with costumes straight out of your wildest, Gatsby-inspired, sci-fi-lite dreams. What you’re envisioning probably isn’t too far off from the actuality that is J.G. Blystone’s THE LAST MAN ON EARTH, though its intention was presumably less utopic. (I’ve chosen to interpret what was likely intended as a caustic satire to be something of a compliment. If—excepting obvious problematic elements such as gender and heteronormative mores that are undoubtedly products of their time—the worst you could say about women running the world is that we’d dress cool, love cats, and, oh yeah, be hyperfocused on making sure the human race didn’t die out, then so be it. But as Chicago Film Society co-founder and Cine-File associate editor K.A. Westphal opined in his blurb on the CFS website, the film is “super-charged by festering 19th Amendment anxieties,” referring, of course, to the landmark legislation that was ratified just four years prior. Almost a hundred years later, and we’re still wondering when those anxieties will cease suppurating.) Set largely in 1954, thirty years into the future from when it was made, LAST MAN depicts a world ravaged by a disease called masculinitis, which inexplicably plagues males aged fourteen and older. All that’s left are women and boys, now even more valued by society for their proto-masculine quintessence, and, as comprises the plot of the film, a single man, a dolt named Elmer Smith, who had previously recused himself from society after his sweetheart rejected his marriage proposal. In the film’s present, said dolt becomes a de facto Don Juan, the object of the world’s affection and the prize in a senatorial boxing match (yeeeeah), his sweetie, Hattie, having too late realized her love for the oafish lecher but still hopeful for a reunion. Liberally based on Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel The Last Man and itself remade by Alfred L. Werker in 1933 as the musical-comedy IT’S GREAT TO BE ALIVE, THE LAST MAN ON EARTH isn’t perfect in how it depicts an otherwise increasingly desirable scenario, but I’d take anachronous gender roles—assuming, of course, it’s the dominant gender, and taking into account the narrow-minded idiosyncrasies of the era out of which the film originated—and a benignly ineffective, cat-loving president over this fresh hell any day. We have the Museum of Modern Art to thank for the preservation of such an idiosyncratic entity, one that’s ripe for yet another remake, but this time with a workaround rather than a cure. Preceded by Max and Dave Fleischer’s 1926 cartoon IT’S THE CATS (7 min, 16mm). Live accompaniment by Dennis Scott. (1924, 70 min, Restored 35mm Archival Print) KS
Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s DAUGHTER OF THE NILE (Taiwanese Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Check Venue website for showtimes
Until recently, DAUGHTER OF THE NILE has been the most difficult to see film of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s post-BOYS FROM FENGKUEI (1983) mature period; it has never been released on home video in the U.S. and was absent entirely from the Siskel Center’s Hou retrospectives in 2000 and 2015. It has also been the director’s most critically neglected work to date; when discussed at all, most critics, including Jonathan Rosenbaum, have tended to compare this contemporary urban drama unfavorably with the rural period pieces that immediately precede and follow it in Hou’s filmography (i.e., 1986’s DUST IN THE WIND and 1989’s A CITY OF SADNESS). When seen from the vantage point of today, however, thanks to a superb new 4K digital restoration by the Taiwan Film Institute, it seems obvious that this is where the modernist Hou of the 1990s was truly born. Based on a proposal from a record company, and conceived of as a star vehicle for the young female pop singer Lin Yang, Hou, working with three screenwriters, turned the project into a highly personal and stunningly oblique examination of disaffected Taipei youth that prefigures his better known returns to the same milieu in later masterworks like GOODBYE, SOUTH, GOODBYE (1996), MILLENNIUM MAMBO (2001), and the contemporary segments of GOOD MEN, GOOD WOMEN (1995) and THREE TIMES (2005). Lin, in her screen debut, gives a soulful, quietly riveting performance as Hsiao-yang, a teenage girl who works at a Kentucky Fried Chicken by day and goes to school at night, all the while trying to prevent her fractured family from breaking apart for good. Lin finds fleeting moments of happiness by imagining herself as the protagonist of her favorite manga, the source of the movie’s title, and when flirting with Ah-sang (Fan Yang), the best friend of her older brother, Hsiao-fang (future Hou regular Jack Kao), both of whom are on the verge of falling dangerously into a life of crime. Hou’s extensive use of nighttime exteriors, illuminated by neon lights and, in one unforgettable sequence, fireworks, combine with Lin’s past-tense voice-over narration to make the whole thing float by like a sad and haunting yet beautiful dream. If you have never seen a film by Hou Hsiao-hsien and are curious as to why a lot of critics, including me, consider him the best narrative filmmaker working today, this is an excellent place to start exploring his work. (1987, 93 min, DCP Digital) MGS
David Cronenberg’s NAKED LUNCH (Canadian Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Thursday, 9pm
One of the more distinctive aspects of David Cronenberg’s post-DEAD RINGERS career lies in his attraction to “unadaptable” novels, like Patrick McGrath’s Spider, J.G. Ballard’s Crash, and Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis. These films reveal how literary Cronenberg always was—despite his name being synonymous with “body horror,” his themes are ultimately cerebral, concerning internal as well as external transformations. (SPIDER [2002], which feels entirely Cronenbergian while being also entirely psychological, confirms this truth about his filmography.) There are plenty of external transformations in NAKED LUNCH—in what’s perhaps the most memorable, a typewriter turns into a sentient, talking insect—but its chief subject is the mind of a writer, specifically that of William Burroughs, who wrote the avant-garde novel on which the film is supposedly based. I write “supposedly” because it would be impossible to make a film out of Naked Lunch; the characters and story change shape so frequently that the events wouldn’t make sense without the connective tissue of Burroughs’ prose. Cronenberg solves the problem of adapting the book by taking elements of it that appeal to him and combining them with aspects of Burroughs’ life and other works (Junky, Exterminator, Queer). Peter Weller stars as a Burroughs stand-in named Bill Lee, an aspiring author working as an exterminator in postwar New York; after he accidentally kills his wife (an incident taken from Burroughs’ life), Lee goes to an unidentified North African nation to hide out. Along the way he talks to strange, possibly extraterrestrial creatures (or are those hallucinations?), gets involved in espionage (or is that a hallucination?), contemplates his sexual identity, and works on a new book. The narrative allows Cronenberg to consider Burroughs’ life and work in multiple contexts (sexual, historical, artistic), switching between perspectives in a manner akin to Burroughs’ free-form prose. Burroughs emerges as a complex figure, a man torn between multiple identities; in this regard, he’s truly Cronenbergian, a mysterious entity even to himself. NAKED LUNCH is also very funny and features some excellent showboating from Judy Davis (as Lee’s wife), Roy Scheider (as the elusive Dr. Benway), and the puppeteers behind the strange creatures. (1991, 115 min, 35mm) BS
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Ruben Östlund's THE SQUARE (New Swedish)
Music Box Theatre – Check Venue website for showtimes
In Ruben Östlund's THE SQUARE, Claes Bang gives an exceptional comic and dramatic performance as Christian, the long-suffering, hapless director of a contemporary art museum in Stockholm. The movie is a wild, suspenseful satire of the art world that's also a cringe comedy: Östlund, the audacious provocateur who most recently gave us FORCE MAJEURE, a withering comedy of manners about masculinity, cheerfully accepts a definition of his aesthetic as a cross between Larry David and Michael Haneke. As we meet Christian, his museum has acquired a new installation: a "relational aesthetics" piece entitled The Square, to be carved into the cobblestones in front of the museum. A plaque reads, "The Square is a sanctuary of trust and caring. Within it we all share equal rights and obligations." Based on an exhibition Östlund actually co-mounted at Sweden's Vandalorum museum, the Square is an imagined "free zone" of humanitarianism, where if you ask for help, passersby must give it—where you could, say, leave your luggage if you're tired, without fear of its being stolen. Of course, the principles of the Square are the ones most often violated in public encounters, where structural societal inequities result in people living such different lives—lives freighted with material hierarchies that neither the Square, nor liberal niceties, can paper over. In fact, modern social convention dictates distrusting others, and tuning out cries for help, especially from the homeless, interactions with whom make up some of this movie's most memorably ironic scenes. Since the sense that anything can happen is a chief pleasure of the film, I'll restrict the plot summary to just a taste: to retrieve stolen items tracked to an apartment complex in a rough part of town, Christian's friend/employee (Christopher Læssø) hits on a brilliant, if ill-advised, scheme: they'll drop a threatening letter through each mail slot in the building. It's a lark, really, but the plan quickly goes south, and keeps going. At two-and-a-half hours, this big movie, winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes, certainly takes its time to hoist Christian on his petard, yet it's so well-paced, and Östlund so deft at playing with our minds, that we're always engaged. It helps that Bang is so spot-on and charismatic: Christian may be a bit of a fraud, but he's good-humored and, really, rather sympathetic: he just never really expected to find himself put on the spot. Gradually, he becomes aware of the fear and prejudices underlying his own veneer of sheltered, well-heeled liberalism. Some set pieces are so crazy we sense they could only be based on real life, as in the scene where a ballroom full of guests, including Dominic West as a visiting artist, is terrorized by a performance artist pretending to be a monkey (Terry Notary of the PLANET OF THE APES reboots): it's based on a Ukrainian performance artist who, playing a dog, went around actually biting people at a gala. That scene allows Östlund to examine the bystander effect, as well as to forgo realism altogether, as he does in a gobsmacking sex scene with a journalist played by Elizabeth Moss (what a whip-smart actress, what timing). If THE SQUARE is occasionally slightly pat and even facile, as a satire on the breakdown of the social contract, its aim is true. At its best, the skewering bears a dark moral complexity and the knowing gimlet eye of the insider. In fact, I suspect the people who get the biggest kick out of it will be folks who work at contemporary art museums themselves. (2017, 151 min, DCP Digital) SP
Kelly Richmond Pope’s ALL THE QUEENS HORSES (New Documentary)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Check Venue website for showtimes
The thing I appreciate most about Kelly Richmond Pope’s ALL THE QUEENS HORSES is the straightforward manner in which Pope presents the material. An associate professor at DePaul University, Pope is also a certified public accountant with a PhD in accounting; she participated in the inaugural Diverse Voices in Docs fellowship program at Chicago’s esteemed Kartemquin Films—all facts that likely contribute to the directness and socially minded perspective with which the subject matter is conferred. In 2012, Rita Crundwell, the comptroller and treasurer of Dixon, Illinois (a small town of just 16,000 people almost two hours west of Chicago), was arrested after it was discovered that she’d been embezzling from the city for more than 20 years—to the tune of $53 million. Although the details of Crundwell’s fraud were highly publicized at the time, Pope and her crew of KTQ-adjacent filmmakers present a deep dive into both Crundwell and Dixon’s worldviews, from the former’s penchant for expensive quarter horses and other such luxuries to the latter’s laissez-faire method of governing. Perhaps unintentional is the bitter irony to be found in the situation: Dixon’s former mayor Jim Burke not only described the small town as being “a kind of conservative county, in a way,” but it’s also the hometown of trickle-down mountebank President Ronald Reagan. Small government proves ineffective in the face of brazen avarice, taking all the queen’s horses (Crundwell’s stable was sold off to recoup what she stole) and all the more men (the city voted to restructure their local government, thus dividing responsibility between more departments), to put Dixon back together again. (2017, 71 min, DCP Digital) KS
GERMANY IN AUTUMN (German Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Sunday, 7pm
As long as there is money, every film will be an economic gesture. To buy film stock, to pay actors and crew, to rent an editing room is to direct capital towards a certain goal instead of another. With the huge sums of money involved, cinema inadvertently becomes the most moral, the most ethically-concerned art. To make a painting of a subject is one thing; to spend the equivalent of several years' salaries for a large group of people on it is another. There's a fascinating set of equations in Western culture, something akin to the transfer of energy in physics, wherein monetary capital can be converted into cultural capital. So let's treasure the "political film," where a filmmaker proves they care about something else by making a large sum of money disappear (even a cheap movie costs a lot) in the hope of forcing the public into the difficult conversation it doesn't want to have. Alexander Kluge got a group of Germans together for GERMANY IN AUTUMN, a movie that's like a panel discussion on West Germany's then-active RAF terrorist group, public figures voicing their opinions in turn (through directing, writing, acting) with time for the audience's questions (to themselves) afterward. Thirty years later, two of the film's key voices, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Heinrich Boll, are long dead and the RAF is the subject of a slick thriller that's Germany's entry for the Oscars. (1978, 123 min, 35mm)
Terence Davies' DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES (British Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Thursday, 7pm
Terence Davies' first feature is one of the most original and accomplished debuts of the 1980s, and a masterpiece of personal filmmaking. Fixated on memory, Davies makes films whose unorthodox structures create a sense of present-moment immediacy while reinforcing the idea that the viewer is watching a past event; for this overtly autobiographical diptych (the film actually consists of two 40-minute narratives: DISTANT VOICES and STILL LIVES), he mines his childhood in postwar Liverpool to create an impressionistic, chronologically-jumbled portrait of working-class British life. By inventing a style that reflects his own memories, Davies touches upon a universal theme: our relationship to the past. A visionary work. (1988, 85 min, DCP Digital) IV
Robert Zemeckis' WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT (American Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 3pm and Tuesday, 6pm
It's been a long, long time since we've seen a blockbuster as singular as WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT. The second-highest grossing film of 1988, the subject of endless critical hosannas, the recipient of a special Academy Award for its wondrous animation--all for a coarse, allusion-heavy valentine to bygone studio cartoons. (If you haven't seen it since you were a kid, marvel at the unapologetic alcoholism, the prostate jokes, the tragic flaccidity of Baby Herman--and how it all flew over your head once upon a time.) It's a big-budget movie created for people who'd otherwise congregate in basements and watch 16mm MERRIE MELODIES prints and bemoan the a.a.p. replacement titles. For animation buffs, ROGER RABBIT is a very specific act of revisionary nostalgia--recalling a moment from the late '40s, before budget cuts and the influential mid-century modern contours of United Productions of America pushed the cartoon studios toward simpler backdrops, sparser character work, jankier movement, and stricter formulas. The imagined legacy of cartoon superstar Roger Rabbit ransacks the violent antics of Warner Bros, the z-axis freedom of the Fleischer Studios, the wanton, buxom carnality of Tex Avery's RED HOT RIDING HOOD--and animation buffs salivated at the prospect of Donald sharing a frame with Daffy Duck, Droopy and Betty Boop inhabiting the same material universe. (For kids, of course, this forbidden co-mingling represented not an epic act of intellectual property horsetrading, but a run-of-the-mill Saturday morning lineup.) But this would all be trivia if ROGER RABBIT wasn't suffused with a yearning for an alternative history of postwar Los Angeles. For '80s Angelenos, the throw-away line about the city having the best public transit system in the world surely inspired chuckles, albeit the dread-of-recognition kind, with visions of the 405 looming after the show's end. With more remove, we can appreciate the longing for a different kind of urbanism, distinct from the discredited, freeway-lovin' theory of urban renewal. (The beleaguered toons in ROGER RABBIT effectively stand in for the soon-to-be-displaced working class denizens of neighborhoods like Bunker Hill.) And it's all wrapped up within a noir framework that suggests the conspiratorial designs of a non-racist James Ellroy, or perhaps a less self-serious Robert Towne. Watch CHINATOWN again fresh after ROGER RABBIT and tell me which movie really leans toward the cartoonish in its costume design, set decoration, and overall atmospherics. With a lecture by film scholar Donald Crafton at the Tuesday show. (1988, 104 min, DCP Digital) KAW
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
The Conversations at the Edge series at the Gene Siskel Film Center presents Sondra Perry: Performance and Video (2015-17, approx. 65 min, Digital Projection and Live Performance) on Thursday at 6pm, with Perry in person.
Gallery 400 (400 S. Peoria St, UIC) screens Lawrence Hott and Diane Garey’s 2015 documentary RISING VOICES [Hótȟaŋiŋpi] (57 min, Video Projection) on Wednesday at 6pm. Free admission.
The Nightingale (1084 N. Milwaukee Ave.) presents Toward the Concrete: Films by Mike Stolz on Friday at 8pm, with Stolz in person. Screening are: TEN NOTES ON A SUMMER’S DAY (2012, 5 min, Digital Projection), IN BETWEEN (2010, 5 min), UNDER THE ATMOSPHERE (2014, 15 min), WITH PLUSES AND MINUSES (2013, 5 min), HALF HUMAN, HALF VAPOR (2015, 11 min), and SPOTLIGHT ON A BRICK WALL (2016, 8 min; in collaboration with Alee Peoples). All 16mm except where noted; and on Wednesday at 8pm, it’s Asides + Besides 2: Video Artists Remixing Artist Videos, with work by Lori Felker, Nellie Kluz, Hale Ekinci, Coorain Devin, A.J. McClenon and Chris Little.
The Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., University of Chicago) screens Dziga Vertov’s 1938 Soviet film THREE HEROINES (54 min, 35mm Archival Print) on Friday at 8pm. Introduced by University of Chicago professor Robert Bird. The screening includes approximately five minutes of never-before-seen outtakes from the film (digitally projected); and Fan Jian’s 2017 Chinese documentary STILL TOMORROW (88 min, DCP Digital) is on Thursday at 7pm, with director Fan Jian in person. Free admission for both.
Comfort Film at Comfort Station Logan Square (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave.) presents the First Nations Film And Video Festival on Friday at 7:30pm. Free admission.
The Chicago Film Seminar presents their Graduate Student Panel on Thursday at 7:30pm. Ilana Emmett (Northwestern University) talks on “Sound and Silence: Conversation, Emotion, and the Creation of Domestic Spaces on American Radio Soap Operas” and Mikki Kressbach (University of Chicago) talks on “Does Data Determine Our Situation?: Wearable Fitness Tracking Technologies and Quantifying the Everyday.” University of Chicago professor James Lastra is the respondent. The event is at DePaul’s Loop Campus in the Daley Building (14 E. Jackson Blvd., Room LL 102; use the State Street entrance located at 247 S. State). Free admission.
The Polish Film Festival in America continues through November 19. Full schedule at www.pffamerica.org.
The Pride Film Festival presents a shorts program on Tuesday at 7:30pm at The Broadway (Pride Arts Center, 4139 N. Broadway Ave.). Screening are GENDER TROUBLES: THE BUTCHES (Lisa Plourde, 54 min), LOCKJAW (Chris Birkmeier, 8 min), MEN DON’T WHISPER (Jordan Firstman, 22 min), PEARLS (Shelley Thompson, 9 min), and PIGEON-HOLED (Daphne Parkhill, 8 min). More info at www.prideartschicago.com.
The Leather Archives & Museum (6418 N. Greenview Ave,) presents CineKink: Chicago, a selection of touring programs from the annual CineKink Film Festival, this weekend. “Kink & Community” is on Friday at 7pm; “Best of CineKink/2017” is on Friday at 9pm; and “Nasty Women” is on Saturday at 8pm. Details at http://cinekink.com/programs-and-events/tour/tour-2017/chicago.
Asian Pop Up Cinema presents Nattawut Poonpiriya’s 2017 Thai film BAD GENIUS (130 min, Digital Projection) on Wednesday at 7pm at AMC River East 21 (322 E. Illinois St.), with Poonpiriya in person. www.asianpopupcinema.org
The Chicago International Movies and Music Festival (CIMMFest) continues through November 12. Full schedule at http://cimmfest.org.
The Massacre, a 24-hour horror film festival, takes place from Noon Saturday to Noon Sunday at The Patio Theater (6008 W. Irving Park Rd.). Screening are: THE RED SPECTRE (Noon), BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (1946; 12:15pm), THE HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (2:10pm), SLEEPAWAY CAMP (3:45pm), a block of short films (5:25pm), GRAY MATTER (5:50pm), LET’S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH (with director John D. Hancock in person; 6:40pm), CREEPSHOW (8:40pm), TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE 2 (11pm), ALIENS (1am), TERROR TRAIN (3:30am), DRIVE-IN MASSACRE (5:20am), 2,000 MANIACS (6:45am), THE DEVIL RIDES OUT (8:35am), and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1990; 10:20am). All Digital Projection.
Wretched Nobles presents Lindsay Denniberg’s 2017 film WHAT’S INSIDE PANDORA’S BOX? (34 min) on Tuesday at 9pm at The Den Theatre (1331 N. Milwaukee Ave.). Also showing is a selection of short works by Lindsay Denniberg, April Phoenixxx, Alex Bohs, Emily Esperanza, Sally Lawton, and Lyra Hill.
The Mostra Brazilian Film Series continues through November 12 at various locations. Full schedule at www.mostrafilmseries.org.
The Park Ridge Classic Film Series at the Pickwick Theatre (5 S. Prospect Ave., Park Ridge) screens Victor Fleming’s 1939 film THE WIZARD OF OZ (102 min, Video Projection) on Tuesday at 2 and 7pm. http://parkridgeclassicfilm.com
Black Cinema House (at the Stony Island Arts Bank, 6760 S. Stony Island Ave.) presents the shorts program BCH Mixtape: Vol. 1 () on Friday at 7pm. Free admission.
The Chicago International Reel Shorts Film Festival takes place on Friday and Saturday at Chicago Filmmakers (5243 N. Clark St.). The Friday screenings are at 6 and 8pm; the Saturday screenings are at 2, 4, 6, and 8pm (all different programs; the 8pm Saturday show is Best of the Fest). More info at www.projectchicago.com.
At the Northbrook Public Library (1201 Cedar Lane, Northbrook) this week: Dave McCary’s 2017 film BRIGSBY BEAR (97 min, Digital Projection) is on Saturday at 2 and 7:30pm; Richard Boleslawski’s 1936 film THEODORA GOES WILD (94 min, 35mm) is on Wednesday at 1 and 7:30pm; and Jim Henson’s 1982 film THE DARK CRYSTAL (93 min, Unconfirmed Format) is on Thursday at 7pm, hosted by the Sci-Fi/Fantasy Movie Discussion Group. www.northbrook.info/events/film
Alliance Française (54 W. Chicago Ave.) screens Olivier Babinet’s 2016 French film SWAGGER (84 min, Video Projection) on Tuesday at 6:30pm. Preceded by Katherine Mahalic’s 2010 short VACUUM KID (12 min).
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: Rebecca Carpenter’s 2016 documentary REQUIEM FOR A RUNNING BACK (89 min, DCP Digital; check the Siskel website for in-person appearances and sold-out screenings) and Peter Bratt’s 2017 documentary DOLORES (98 min, DCP Digital) both play for a week; and Alon Schwarz and Shaul Schwarz’s 2016 Canadian documentary AIDA’S SECRETS (96 min, DCP Digital) is on Friday at 2pm, Sunday at 3pm, and Monday at 6pm.
Also at Doc Films (University of Chicago) this week: George Stevens’ 1951 film A PLACE IN THE SUN (122 min, 35mm) is on Friday at 7 and 9:30pm and Sunday at 1:30pm; Makoto Shinkai’s 2016 Japanese animated film YOUR NAME (106 min, DCP Digital) is on Saturday at 7 and 9:15pm and Sunday at 4pm; Franco Brusati’s 1974 Italian film BREAD AND CHOCOLATE (111 min, 35mm) is on Monday at 7pm; Aleksander Ford’s 1960 Polish film BLACK CROSS (166 min, DCP Digital) is on Tuesday at 7pm; and James Foley’s 1992 film GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS (100 min, 35mm) is on Wednesday at 7 and 9:15pm.
Also at the Music Box Theatre this week: Alexandre O. Philippe’s 2017 documentary 78/52 (91 min, DCP Digital) opens; Ai Weiwei’s 2017 documentary HUMAN FLOW (140 min, DCP Digital) and Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman’s 2017 UK/Polish animated film LOVING VINCENT (94 min, DCP Digital) both continue; Tommy Wiseau’s 2003 film THE ROOM (99 min, 35mm) is on Friday and Saturday at Midnight; and a selection of shorts from the Adventure Film Festival is on Sunday at 5pm.
Also at Facets Cinémathèque this week: Morten Traavik and Ugis Olte’s 2016 Norwegian/Latvian documentary LIBERATION DAY (100 min, Video Projection) screens on Saturday at 1 and 3pm.
Instituto Cervantes (31 W. Ohio St.) screens Ignacio Ferreras’s 2011 animated Spanish film WRINKLES (90 min, DVD Projection) on Tuesday at 6pm. Free admission.
Sinema Obscura presents ArtFuck at The VCR (check their Facebook page for the address) on Friday at 7:30pm. The event alternates short blocks of films with sets by local musical acts; and screens Heidi Moore’s 2016 film DOLLY DEADLY (82 min, Video Projection) on Monday at 7:30pm at Township (2200 N. California Ave.).
ONGOING FILM/VIDEO INSTALLATIONS
Currently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago: Elizabeth Price’s 2015 video installation K (7 min loop) in Gallery 186; Frances Stark’s 2010 video installation NOTHING IS ENOUGH (14 min loop) in Gallery 295C; and Nam June Paik’s 1986 video sculpture FAMILY OF ROBOT: BABY in Gallery 288.
The SAIC Sullivan Galleries (33 S. State St., 7th Floor) presents Apichatpong Weerasethakul: The Serenity of Madness through December 8. The show features many short films and video installations by the SAIC graduate, along with a selection of photography, sketches, and archival materials.
The Graham Foundation presents David Hartt’s installation in the forest through January 6 at the Madlener House (4 W. Burton Place). The show features photography, sculpture, and a newly commissioned film.
CINE-LIST: November 10 - November 16, 2017
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs, Kyle A. Westphal
CONTRIBUTORS // Jb Mabe, Scott Pfeiffer, Michael G. Smith, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky