We will highlight physical screenings at the top of the list for theaters and venues that are open, grouped in our standard Crucial Viewing and Also Recommended sections, as well as all other physical screenings, and list streaming/online screenings below.
Please note: With an uptick of Covid cases, remember to check the venue websites for information on safety protocols and other procedures put in place. More and more venues are now requiring proof of vaccination or a negative PCR test. We recommend verifying those protocols before every trip to the theater. And, of course, stay home if you’re sick, be nice to theater staff, and always wear a mask!
📽️ YEAR-END LISTS
Per tradition, we at Cine-File conclude each year by sharing lists of our favorite movies we’ve seen in the past year. Like most film writers, we tend to focus on new releases, but we also discuss favorite older films we’ve either discovered or rediscovered. When you expand your search to encompass past and present (in addition to narrative, documentary, and experimental) cinema, you find there’s really no such thing as a bad year for movies. Our contributors’ lists can be found here.
📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING
Asghar Farhadi’s A HERO (Iran)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
With such films as ABOUT ELLY (2009), A SEPARATION (2011), and THE SALESMAN (2016), Asghar Farhadi established himself as a master of intricate, morally complex social dramas. Concerned with how seemingly small actions can carry wide-reaching social, economic, and political implications—particularly within and across the stringent societal dictates of Iran—he has cultivated a taut, character-driven style that builds both suspense and intellectual frisson out of snowballing ethical quagmires. After the relative disappointment of his Spanish-language EVERYBODY KNOWS (2018), Farhadi returns to his bailiwick with A HERO. Amir Jadidi plays Rahim, a sign painter in debtor’s prison for failing to pay back a loan to his aggrieved creditor, Bahram (Mohsen Tanabandeh). During a short leave, Rahim comes into possession of what could be his ticket out of jail: a handbag containing 17 gold coins, found by his girlfriend at a bus stop. However, when this turns out to not be worth enough, he decides to return the bag to its owner. For his allegedly altruistic deed, Rahim is hailed as a hero by the media, given a certificate of merit from a prisoners’ charity, and offered a job in the city council. What we see that these groups don’t is that Rahim’s publicized story of civic goodness is not as he claims. Gradually, his relatively minor misrepresentations branch out into a latticework of face-saving lies and ethical predicaments in which nearly everyone, from the prison warden to the leader of the charity, becomes complicit. A HERO continues to prove Farhadi’s adeptness at navigating a sprawling cast of three-dimensional characters with divergent backgrounds and vantages, whose personal stakes he parcels out with a rigor befitting a procedural thriller. He doesn’t make value judgments on their decisions, as there’s always another unexpected wrinkle to complicate the situation, always another (and then another) detail to problematize our sympathies. The RASHOMON-esque perspectives of his dense script are further compounded by the presence of social media, a timely device Farhadi uses to comment on the propagation of fraudulent narratives by opportunistic actors. A HERO may not be as grand as A SEPARATION or have as engrossing a central performance as THE SALESMAN, but it’s just as effective at getting us to look beyond judgment-minded systems and their reductive logics to acknowledge the fallible, multifaceted humanity of which we’re all part. (2021, 127 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
Pedro Almodóvar’s ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER (Spain)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Wednesday, 7pm
In a review of Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film, PARALLEL MOTHERS, New York Times critic A.O. Scott refers to the Spanish writer-director as being perhaps the “most prodigious world builder” among living filmmakers, employing a phrase that’s typically used to describe sci-fi, fantasy, and superhero narratives. Nevertheless, it’s true that Almodóvar has created a world entirely his own, where his characters—whose identities are fluid, changeable at a moment’s notice, and whose appearances run the gamut from the highest of high fashion to the lowest of whatever low life has subjected them to—live in large, meticulously decorated apartments and encounter problems that even soap operas wouldn’t dare broach. Specifically, Almodóvar’s ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER involves a degree of protrusion sometimes present in his films, suggesting an inter-awareness among the seemingly disparate endeavors. In his earlier film, THE FLOWER OF MY SECRET (1995), there figures a nurse called Manuela, who appears in a training video for doctors on how to communicate with family members of potential organ donors; in ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER, Almodóvar regular Cecilia Roth stars as Manuela, an organ procurement coordinator who also enacts such a simulation and later must decide whether or not to have her son’s organs donated after he dies in a car accident. The two Manuelas are not the same exact person, but it’s emblematic of the potential for characters and locations in Almodóvar’s films to exist in the same raffish universe. For its part, ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER is an encapsulation of all that’s particularly wondrous about the Spanish master’s kaleidoscopic sphere, one that also earned him his first Oscar. After her son dies, Cecilia leaves Madrid for Barcelona in hopes of finding his father, now a transgender woman called Lola; there she reunites with an old friend, another transgender woman named Agrado (Antonia San Juan), and makes new friends with a young nun named Rosa (Penélope Cruz) and the actress Huma (Marisa Paredes), who had been performing as Stella in the production of A Streetcar Named Desire that Cecilia and her son had gone to see the night of his death. That play and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s ALL ABOUT EVE factor heavily into the film: the former because it marks Cecilia’s life at two crucial junctures and the latter because, in addition to being a film that Cecilia and her son had watched together, the plot of this movie at times recalls that of the other. Like many of Almodóvar’s films, this is a long, magnificently rambling love letter to the expressions and people he loves most: cinema, theater, actresses, women, and above all, his own mother. (An epigraph at the end declares exactly this.) In Cecilia’s decision to take Rosa and eventually Rosa’s son under her wing, the film emanates the rapture of selfless love that, like other facets of Almodóvar’s pellucid auteurism, permeates the ostentation of his bittersweet melodramas. Screening as part of the Siskel’s ¡PEDRO! series. (1998, 101 min, 35mm) [Kathleen Sachs]
François Truffaut’s DAY FOR NIGHT (France)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 6pm
The end of the French New Wave can be marked by the premieres of two movies at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival: Jean Eustache’s THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE and François Truffaut’s DAY FOR NIGHT. The former is an apocalyptic work that repurposes various Nouvelle Vague hallmarks (cinephilia, bohemian milieux, 16-millimeter cinematography, Jean-Pierre Léaud) to create a vision of hell comparable to Sartre’s No Exit. Eustache shows the movement’s joie de vivre as having curdled to decadence, selfishness, and cynicism, with the slothful, self-destructive love affairs of Léaud’s Alexandre evoking both the failure of the New Wave to change cinema and the failure of the May ’68 revolution to change the world. Despairing even in its form, THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE feels like a conscious retreat by French art cinema away from the mainstream (where the Nouvelle Vague was briefly in vogue), with its daunting run time, discomforting sexual content, and allusions to then-underground filmmakers like Andy Warhol and Philippe Garrel. DAY FOR NIGHT, by contrast, finds Truffaut perfectly at home in mainstream culture. The movie is more conventional in its narrative structure and more reassuring in its tone than pretty much any Nouvelle Vague touchstone; not surprisingly, it was a big commercial success and won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Where THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE represents a critique of the Nouvelle Vague (particularly its chauvinism), Truffaut’s film offers an irresistible ode to cinephilia and filmmaking that even non-cinephiles can warm to, with its episodic, gently humorous depiction of life on a film set. The goings-on are overseen by a nice, paternal director played by Truffaut himself (how ironic that, as a young critic for Cahiers du cinéma, Truffaut once derided bland, old-fashioned movies as “le cinéma du papa”). Léaud, whom Truffaut famously discovered, is on hand too, playing a variation on his lovable Antoine Doinel character, and there’s a characteristically enjoyable score by Georges Delerue. In both its creation and its reception, DAY FOR NIGHT epitomizes how the Nouvelle Vague was popularized outside of France as representing an innocent love of filmmaking for its own sake, free of any sense of confession or social responsibility. It feels significant that the film’s original French title, LA NUIT AMERICAINE, refers to a Hollywood filmmaking practice, as if Truffaut were elevating his love of American-style entertainment above all other aspects of his cinephilia. Truffaut does invoke his love of directors from other countries, as in a moving scene where his character beams over a collection of film books by and about his favorite filmmakers, among them Buñuel, Dreyer, Bergman, and Bresson. It’s a reminder that Truffaut came to cinema with the passion and curiosity of a true scholar; he brought greater attention than ever before to vibrant cinephile communities everywhere. His winning underdog spirit is still very much alive in DAY FOR NIGHT, making it clear why so many people romanticized the Nouvelle Vague in the first place. Screening as part of 50/50, the Siskel’s year-long series including a film from each year the theater has been open. (1973, 116 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
Sergio Martino’s THE CASE OF THE SCORPION’S TAIL (Italy/Spain)
Music Box Theatre – Wednesday, 7:15pm
Sergio Martino directed THE CASE OF SCORPION’S TAIL the same year as THE STRANGE VICE OF MRS. WARDH and the year before ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK and YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY. Whatever happened to movie titles? The names of Martino’s films exhibit such showmanship and unpretentious good cheer that you can easily forgive the movies themselves when they’re lousy. THE CASE OF THE SCORPION’S TAIL, however, isn’t bad at all. Representing the lighter side of giallo filmmaking, it contains fun plot twists, engaging suspense set pieces, handsomely shot locations (in London and Athens), and lots of sex appeal; viewers who are put off by the ugliness of the violence in many gialli may be pleased to learn that there’s little onscreen violence here and that what’s there is relatively easy to swallow. Martino may not be a stylist on the level of Mario Bava or Dario Argento, but he achieves some engaging effects with widescreen and garish color. The movie holds your attention at every moment, not only with its flashy visuals but with its wild story, which contains so many deceptions and surprises that it’s difficult to synopsize without giving any of them away. Suffice it to say that the movie involves a large inheritance, murder, and travel to attractive Grecian locations. Screening as part of January Giallo 2022, presented by Cinematic Void and Music Box of Horrors. (1971, 95 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Pedro Almodóvar’s WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN (Spain)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 1pm
WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN was Pedro Almodóvar’s break-out hit, the film that introduced him to a wider audience and secured widespread distribution of his work for the rest of his career. It isn’t as provocative as the Almodóvar films that immediately preceded it (WHAT HAVE I DONE TO DESERVE THIS?, MATADOR, LAW OF DESIRE), yet it reflects a breathtaking fluency in all aspects of cinematic art that hadn’t been achieved to such a degree in his work until then. WOMEN is gorgeously designed; the costumes, decors, and camera movements are not only impressive on their own, they interact sumptuously. Favoring bold colors and ostentatious bric-a-brac, Almodóvar creates something like a live-action cartoon or pop art painting. It’s so easy to get wrapped up in the mise-en-scene, in fact, that the rapidly escalating plot developments can seem like a blur on a first (or even a second) viewing. The tone oscillates between melodrama and farce, charting a few calamitous days in the life of a frustrated actress (Almodóvar’s first muse, Carmen Maura) who can’t get in touch with her married lover, whom she suspects is going to leave her. Almodóvar shows great sympathy towards his characters’ desires and vulnerabilities while making light of hard drug use, terrorism, and the mentally ill, and the galvanic mixtures of good and bad taste match the visual design splendidly. If the film doesn’t add up to more than the sum of its parts, that may be because Almodóvar hadn’t yet developed the melancholy undertones that would enrich his work from THE FLOWER OF MY SECRET on. The mastery may be superficial here, but it’s still mastery. Screening as part of the Siskel’s ¡PEDRO! series. (1988, 89 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
Ryusuke Hamguchi’s DRIVE MY CAR (Japan)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
How do we deal with misfortunes that arrive when we least expect them? In DRIVE MY CAR, the characters channel their emotions (or lack thereof) into their art, their tools, and their environments. The film follows Yūsuke Kafuku, a theater director who is known for putting on multilingual productions, a concept you could spend hours discussing. For a large portion of the film, we find him traveling in his car, listening to a cassette recording of his wife reading lines for Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in preparation for a production he's going to put on. The film takes on these various layers (it's a cinematic lasagna, if you will), filled with references, different languages, and emotions that are both explosively expressed and shamefully hidden. This comes as no surprise, given that the film is an adaptation of a short story by Haruki Murakami, whose work is also filled with references and taboo eroticism. Hamaguchi delivers a nuanced film that should only get better with each viewing, as details and subtleties are weaved into things said or left unsaid. This makes sense—Kafuku’s multilingual production raises some interesting questions on the ways we can approach communication. Despite a language barrier, or an unwillingness to say something out loud, intentions and feelings can still seep through with a knowing glance or shy shift of the body. Often, the audience and maybe one or two characters might know the truth of the scenario, but Hamaguchi places us in an awkward position, knowing right next to the main cast. It’s hard to say what's the right way to deal with these scenarios, but delaying the inevitable impact of your feelings will only do you harm in the long run. (2021, 179 min, DCP Digital) [Drew Van Weelden]
Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart’s WOLFWALKERS (Ireland/Luxembourg/France/Animation)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday and Sunday, 11am
I am always happy for the release of a Tomm Moore animated film, ever since his stunning feature debut, THE SECRET OF KELLS (co-directed with Nora Twomey) and his heartrending sophomore film, SONG OF THE SEA. WOLFWALKERS—co-directed with Ross Stewart, the art director for Moore’s previous films—is likewise an emotionally poignant and beautifully animated coming-of-age family film inspired by Irish folklore. In the 17th century, Robyn (Honor Kneafsey) has relocated from England to the Irish village of Kilkenny with her father, Bill Goodfellowe (Sean Bean), a hunter who’s been hired by the cruel Lord Protector (Simon McBurney) to rid the area of wolves. Overly eager to help her father in his task, Robyn ventures into the woods and meets a Wolfwalker, Mebh (Eva Whittaker)—a magical girl with healing powers who transforms into a wolf while sleeping. Her infectiously playful nature charms the English girl, and they quickly become friends. Her encounter with the Wolfwalkers, however, has a profound effect on Robyn—not only in a change of heart, but a supernatural one—and complicates her father’s precarious position. The animation captures a dreamlike magic, with softly lit earth tones that made me gasp at times at the expressiveness and intricacy of the imagery. The scenes of Robyn and Mebh spiritedly exploring the forest are particularly enchanting and stand out as they juxtapose the harsher colors and lines seen in Kilkenny. The backgrounds and characters are rendered in such a way that they feel traditionally inspired yet surprise with movement and emotion, such as the use of triptychs to show multiple scenes on screen at once. WOLFWALKERS features arresting animation, but with an equally touching tale of friendship and family, creatively steeped in folklore, art, and history. (2020, 103 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
Paul Thomas Anderson’s LICORICE PIZZA (US)
Music Box Theatre - See Venue website for showtimes
There are strong similarities between LICORICE PIZZA and PHANTOM THREAD (2017), Paul Thomas Anderson's previous film, though they present very different depictions of burgeoning romance. PHANTOM THREAD wrapped its lovers inside a hermetic world of high-end fashion, poisonous mushrooms, and very precise food orders. While the tone seemed to spell a romance bathed in doom, the results were closer to an arthouse rom-com. Anderson kicks up the romance and comedy for LICORICE PIZZA, yet the film’s construction doesn’t feel as pensive or classical as that of the previous film; it's something looser and shaggier, if only on the surface. LICORICE is glossy, loud, bright, and brimming with comedic subplots, but what holds it together are the experiences of its two main characters, played by Alana Haim (of the band Haim) and Cooper Hoffman (son of the late, great Phillip Seymour Hoffman)—their youthful romance will tug on the heartstrings of even the most jaded filmgoers. The film takes place in a world where youth is subjected to the forces of impending adult realities, represented here by a coked-out film producer (Bradley Cooper's winking portrayal of Jon Peters, the producer of the 1976 A STAR IS BORN), a gay politician with a cold attitude toward love (writer-director Benny Safdie, portraying LA politician Joel Wachs), or a pair of thrill-seeking actors hellbent on continuing the raucous nature of their lives well into their 60s (Tom Waits and Sean Penn, the latter portraying a character based on William Holden). The protagonists even encounter an actress based on Lucille Ball and America's gas-shortage crisis (pay close attention to a Herman Munster cameo as well). Though our young main characters remain locked in their growing views of love and human relationships, they're challenged in their beliefs when they come into contact with each of these adults. Anderson throws in plenty of quirks that could read as random flourishes, yet these quirks are designed to highlight our main characters’ lack of awareness of their surroundings, how the things they encounter make no sense to them; it makes sense that the audience isn’t allowed an easy explanation. I'm sure the surface-level casualness will be more deeply understood as the years roll by, but as far as entertainment goes on an immediate level, you aren’t going to find anything more heartwarming or funny than LICORICE PIZZA. (2021, 133 min, 70mm) [John Dickson]
Steven Spielberg’s WEST SIDE STORY (US/Musical)
Various multiplexes (AMC, Regal, et al.) – See Venue websites for showtimes
It’s hard to imagine what cinema would be like without remakes. From the lowliest programmers to the most bizarre arthouse films, no producer, director, or film star seems immune from thinking, “I wonder what I could do with that.” But taking on a remake of a film as beloved and revered as Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’ WEST SIDE STORY (1961) is another matter. Despite its flaws—an unconvincing Tony, an Anglo Maria, stagebound scenes and dances, dubbed singing—the world embraces that version and quivered in apprehension when Steven Spielberg announced his intentions to give it another go. I was concerned about what would happen to Jerome Robbins’ magnificent choreography and use of space, and whether Spielberg’s patented emotional manipulation would somehow trivialize the genuine emotional pull of the original. At the same time, the moment seemed right to bring this story of tribal division and violence to the screen. I am happy to report that this new WEST SIDE STORY more than justifies its existence. The film blends elements of the original, such as Robbins’ choreography for Tony (Ansel Elgort) and Maria (Rachel Zegler) at the school dance, with more realistic actions. Instead of the world falling away in a white haze as the teenagers fall in love, Spielberg stages this moment behind some bleachers. Yet, he doesn’t entirely abandon the poetry of Robert Wise’s mise-en-scène. For example, the neighborhood that is the setting for this tragedy is haphazardly crumbling under the wrecking ball of “urban renewal,” rather than being efficiently clear cut for new high-rise apartments and (ironically) today’s artistic mecca, Lincoln Center. He also hangs the back courtyard of Maria’s apartment building with laundry that never comes in to be folded. Justin Peck, resident choreographer of the New York City Ballet, largely coordinates his style with Robbins’, but finds a way to open up the dances to incorporate the community and the everyday lives of the characters—a big plus for “America,” though the dance still does not escape its clichéd construction. His new dance for “Cool” isn’t as evocative for me as Robbins’ crablike scream of shock from the Jets following Riff’s death because the sequence was moved back to its original spot before the rumble. Nonetheless, the mixture of playful sparring between Tony and Riff (a magnetic Mike Faist) as they vie for the handgun Riff has just purchased (a great new scene) and the danger of the rotting dock on which they dance provides a satisfying foreshadowing of death. The biggest change in this WEST SIDE STORY is the script by Tony Kushner. The film was so frontloaded with dialogue in both English and Spanish that I grew impatient to hear Leonard Bernstein’s magnificent score, which benefits from new orchestrations and singing voices that can handle its expert level of difficulty. That said, the intelligence of Kushner’s dialogue and where he locates each scene drive home the point that the outmoded gang culture represented by the Jets and the Sharks was bound to give way to the toxic nationalism that is currently tearing our country apart. In a stroke of genius, it is left to Rita Moreno, who has moved from her portrayal of a youthful Anita to the shopkeeper Valentina, to plead for “a new way of living” and “a way of forgiving” in her rendition of “Somewhere” that is as timely as ever. Her life experience and understanding of this sad story grace the film with a welcome depth that I found extremely moving. If you have qualms, put them aside and immerse yourself in the pain and glory of this new WEST SIDE STORY. (2021, 156 min, DCP Projection) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Wes Anderson’s THE FRENCH DISPATCH (US)
Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema – See Venue website for showtimes
Wes Anderson's intricate compositional sensibility is on full display in THE FRENCH DISPATCH, his 10th feature film and the first to focus on the practice of journalism. Anderson lends his idiosyncratic style to a new fixation, meticulously crafting each moment as he explores another way of life. His style has lost luster for some audiences, yet this compendium of stories from a newspaper's single issue—told through three long vignettes and a travelogue—cements Anderson's storytelling as more than whimsy, his style more than schtick. His films are more than just dollhouse frames slammed together, despite protestations from detractors. His curiosity fills each scene here; one senses his love and admiration for journalism, a profession widely seen as on the brink of death. The writer-director brings together another giant cast, with Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Benicio del Toro, and Léa Seydoux standing out; the latter two appear in the most effective of the vignettes, "The Concrete Masterpiece." Following an artist prisoner, his guard, and his muse, the mini-narrative finds meaning in the ethereality of art. It finds del Toro, Seydoux, and Adrien Brody in top form. Anderson wants to amaze, educate, intrigue, and sift through an abundance of information, characters, plots, and emotions—the film is sure to reward on third, fourth, and fifth viewings. It's a treat to spend time with an artist like Anderson, a filmmaker unperturbed by box office showings and corporate intellectual properties, even though he's working with a $25 million budget and a never-ending procession of movie stars. He still finds catharsis, political meaning, and myriad themes, creating something that deepens with time, analysis, and conversation. (2021, 103 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Frank]
🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
Also Screening
⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Joel Coen’s 2021 film THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH (105 min, DCP Digital) continues for the second half of a two-week run; see Venue website for showtimes. More info here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
Richard Brooks’ 1967 film IN COLD BLOOD (134 min, DCP Digital) screens on Saturday and Sunday at 11:30am as part of the Black and White Cinemascope Matinee series.
Luc Besson’s 1997 film THE FIFTH ELEMENT (127 min, DCP Digital) screens at 11:30pm on Friday and Saturday.
Joel Coen’s 2021 film THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH (105 min, DCP Digital) continues; see Venue website for showtimes. More info here.
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS –
Held Over/Still Screening/Return Engagements (Selected)
Ryusuke Hamguchi’s WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY (Japan)
Available to rent through Facets Cinema here
HAPPY HOUR, the intimate epic that established Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's international reputation, achieves a novelistic density through the uncommonly detailed way it plumbs the emotional lives of its quartet of lead characters. WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY, the first of two 2021 releases by the director (followed by DRIVE MY CAR), resembles a short-story collection in how it depicts three narratively unrelated vignettes that are formally separated by their own chapter headings and credit sequences. Hamaguchi proves to be equally adept at the short-film format as he was with a 5-hour-plus run time: the mini romantic dramas that comprise WHEEL are gratifying to watch as self-contained episodes, but when one contemplates how they might be linked on a thematic level, the entire project attains a profound resonance (it wasn't until the morning after my first viewing that I realized the magnitude of Hamaguchi's deceptively modest approach). The first section, “Magic (Or Something Less Assuring),” begins with an extended Rohmerian dialogue between two female friends, one of whom regales the other about a "magical" date with a man she has fallen in love with, unaware that he is also her friend's ex-lover. It ends with a chance encounter between all three characters, punctuated by a brief but daring fantasy sequence. The title of the second section, "Door Wide Open," refers to a literature professor's policy of avoiding scandal by always keeping his office door open when meeting with students. One day he receives an unexpected visitor, a woman who is attempting to ensnare him in a trap. Or is she? The final section, "Once Again," is the best: two women who haven't seen each other in 20 years meet providentially on a train-station escalator before spending the day together and eventually realizing that neither is whom the other had thought. Hamaguchi himself has said that "coincidence and imagination" are the movie's main themes and, indeed, as the title indicates, each of the stories involves the intersection of the free will of the individual and the fickle nature of fate. But WHEEL is also about the inexorable pull of the past and how the characters' regrets over roads not taken have keenly shaped who they are. This latter aspect is the key to understanding how a film so charming on the surface can also contain such a melancholy undertow and how characters with only a small amount of screen time can seem so fascinatingly complex and believable. Hamaguchi shows the psychological underpinnings of everyday human behavior in a manner rarely seen in the movies. He knows how to pierce your heart. (2021, 121 min) [Michael Glover Smith]
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS –
Also Screening/Streaming
⚫ Music Box Theatre
Check hold-over titles here.
⚫ VDB TV
In acknowledgement of the ten-year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, the Video Data Bank is highlighting the work of Jem Cohen by making his twelve-part GRAVITY HILL NEWSREELS: OCCUPY WALL STREET series available for continuous and complete viewing. More info here.
CINE-LIST: January 7 - January 13, 2022
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // John Dickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Michael Frank, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Michael Glover Smith, Drew Van Weelden