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
John Cassavetes’ A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 6pm
Was John Cassavetes a realist? Yes and no. By the director’s own admission, Cassavetes conducted next to no research on mental illness or the Italian-American community before making his masterpiece, A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE, even though both are key components of the heroine’s identity. And as Jonathan Rosenbaum has pointed out, it seems dubious that the heroine’s husband and children never visit her in the mental hospital between the time she’s committed and when she’s released; the events of the film’s galvanic final section would likely be far less catastrophic in real life. One could nitpick at Cassavetes films all day with qualms like these, yet they’re rendered pretty much irrelevant by the films themselves, which convey worlds of emotion with such amazing precision that one never questions the authenticity of what the characters are feeling. Cassavetes didn’t build upon cinematic realism—he invented a cinematic hyperrealism that was no less revolutionary than Chantal Akerman’s and which has become more influential in the 21st century than it ever was when he was working. Where Akerman heightened cinematic reality by drawing attention to the sheer duration it takes routine behaviors to unfold, Cassavetes exaggerated the range of feelings, sensations, and insights that anyone can experience within a short passage of time, making everyday life seem exhaustive. (An achievement of Cristi Puiu’s AURORA [2010], one of the more revolutionary films of the 21st century, is that it marries these two extremes of hyperrealism.) A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE takes Casavetes’ artistic concerns as far as they go, into the realm of madness, emotional breakdown, and devastation. It is simply one of the most wrenching American films. At the same time, it’s never less than exhilarating; Gena Rowlands’ landmark performance as a working-class housewife snapping under the strain of her responsibilities is so exuberant that you feel more alive by watching her. Peter Falk, playing her husband, is almost as good, creating a monumental portrait of a man who, in Kent Jones’ words, “believes so passionately in his idea of perfect happiness, no matter how wrongheadedly, that he’d rather destroy everyone around him than see it compromised.” Given the richness of the characterizations, it isn’t surprising that the acting in A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE (by a seamless mix of experienced and inexperienced performers) tends to dominate conversations about the film. Yet the way Cassavetes constructs a symphony out of his actors’ gestures is what makes the film much more than a performers’ showcase. And like a symphony, its themes are elusive to the end. To quote Jones again: “[I]t’s about… what? Men and women? Family life? The difficulty of distinguishing between your real and ideal selves? Male embarrassment? All of the above, none of the above. Tagging a movie like WOMAN with something as neat as a ‘subject’ is a fairly useless activity. ‘John had antennae like Proust,’ Peter Falk once wrote. A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE and FACES, probably his two greatest films, are both ultimately as impossible to pin down as In Search of Lost Time. Like Proust before him, Cassavetes rode the whims, upsets, vagaries, and mysterious impulses of humanity like a champion surfer.” Screening as part of 50/50, the Siskel’s year-long series including a film from each year the theater has been open. (1974, 147 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
This Radiant World: Dis-Articulations: Dances, Sketches, and Gestures (Experimental Shorts)
Film Studies Center (5811 S. Ellis Ave., Cobb Hall 306) – Friday, 7pm
This Friday, the Film Studies Center at the University of Chicago begins a four-program series (co-curated by Julia Gibbs and Cine-File emeritus editor Patrick Friel) devoted to the best of recent and restored experimental shorts from around the world. The first program includes seven pieces that examine the relationship of movement and cinema. Dutch artists Margit Lukács and Persijn Broersen take on the movie musical in their animated ALL OR NOTHING AT ALL (2020, 8 min, Digital Projection). Riffing on the opening of WEST SIDE STORY, a small group of identical, androgynous avatars dance through the ruins of Viborg, an ancient Viking settlement in Denmark, as it lies mired in the rising sea. The echoing voice of Danish singer Nina Vadshølt performing the Frank Sinatra hit, “All or Nothing at All,” mocks the intractability of global squabbling over climate change action. Native Ohioans Kevin Jerome Everson and Kahlil I. Pedizisai celebrate romantic gestures by riffing on the recently discovered Selig short of an African American couple kissing and hugging in GLENVILLE (2020, 2 min, Digital Projection). Everson and Pedizisai situate the couple in front of a corner liquor store under some elevated tracks, bringing a warmth and humanity to an unexpected location. Romanian director Radu Jude’s CARICTURANA: A FLIP BOOK (2021, 9 min, Digital Projection) takes on an unrealized cinematic experiment of Sergei Eisenstein to “compose the consecutive phases of the French actor Frédérick Lemaître” portraying the fictional swindler Robert Macaire. Using lithographs of Macaire by Honoré Daumier, Jude does just that—in its way, a character study of the gestures that make up this rascal. Being a rascal himself, however, Jude cannot refrain from adding his own commentary in New Yorker cartoon style. San Francisco-based, African American filmmaker Toney Merritt is represented by three very short pieces called LONESOME COWBOY, THREE MASKED PIECES, and EF (all 1979, Digital Projection). In each of the wordless films, Merritt portrays mythic figures—from a cowboy and a superhero to Icarus and the devil—in ways both comic and highly disturbing. Influenced by his long-time meditation practice, artist Al Wong decided to film himself over an entire year as he drove his bus on the mobius-shaped Twin Peaks Boulevard above San Francisco. Watching TWIN PEAKS (1977, 50 min, 16mm) was like experiencing the boredom, creative thought, and mild terror of floating in a samadhi tank. By moving through the mundane repetition of the route to driving through various types of inclement weather that make the journey seem more dangerous, and then completely destabilizing the scene by projecting an asynchronous landscape through the separate halves of the windshield, Wong’s invaluable film allows viewers to monitor their own micro-reactions and observations. [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Bruno Dumont's FRANCE (France)
Gene Siskel Film Center — See Venue website for showtimes
With FRANCE, Bruno Dumont remains wildly unpredictable, lurching from satire to melodrama and back again and tossing off all sorts of psychological and sociological provocations along the way. A friend of mine cheekily described this crazy movie as "the Bresson version of BROADCAST NEWS," but I think it may be more instructive to see it as a politically explicit, Gallic variation on Lucrecia Martel's THE HEADLESS WOMAN (2008). Dumont signals his allegorical intentions with the title, which refers not only to his native country but also to the protagonist (Léa Seydoux in her finest performance to date), a celebrated TV news personality who's clearly meant to embody what Dumont sees as the virtues and flaws of his nation's character. As a journalist, France is smart and talented, but some of the dubious ways she constructs segments for the nightly news signal a certain lack of self-awareness (as typified by a bravura sequence where she "directs" members of a third-world Muslim militia for an interview segment she's shooting in the desert). The plot of FRANCE concerns the eponymous character as she undergoes a crisis of conscience after accidentally striking the Middle Eastern delivery driver Baptiste (Jawad Zemmar) with her car. Through France's interactions with the working-class Baptiste and his immigrant parents (all of whom seem awed by her celebrity), as well as a subsequent extramarital affair that carries disastrous consequences, France becomes more in touch with her own feelings and begins a halting journey towards redemption, which marks her as a kind-of secular saint. (Another productive way to read FRANCE is as the third part of a martyrdom trilogy following Dumont's musical diptych about Joan of Arc.) Dumont's real masterstroke was casting Seydoux, an actress who was catapulted to fame by her lead performance in the controversial BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR and went on to appear in a couple of James Bond films and Wes Anderson's THE FRENCH DISPATCH (where she also seems to have been cast to evoke the very idea of French womanhood). Here, the-real-life-glamorous-movie-star Seydoux is playing a glamorous television star, one whose authentic identity has become subsumed by her need to be constantly "on" for the cameras. Dumont has spoken in interviews of his interest in showing, in the latter stages of FRANCE, the "awakening" of a character who until then has "practically been a robot" and how the heart inside of her is ultimately moved. Through the ever-deepening emotional intelligence of Seydoux's layered performance, the director and actress have achieved this feat in perfect symbiosis. (2021, 133 minutes, DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]
Pedro Almodóvar’s TALK TO HER (Spain)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Wednesday, 7pm
In his review of Pedro Almodóvar’s TALK TO HER, Roger Ebert noted that “[n]o director since Fassbinder has been able to evoke such complex emotions with such problematic material.” Indeed, the comparison is warranted, though Almodovar obviously favors gaudiness over grittiness, his outlook of the world and the people in it decidedly sunnier. On paper, many of Almodóvar’s films sound questionable, if not outright quease inducing. I've previously been reluctant to write about TIE ME UP! TIE ME DOWN! because I couldn’t quite defend its premise (a man kidnaps an actress in order to make her fall in love with him, which—spoiler alert—he succeeds in doing), even though it’s inarguably the work of a subversive master. In regards to plot, TALK TO HER isn’t much better; it’s about two men who bond over their love of unconscious women. One man’s attachment is more legitimate than the other’s; the former watches over his bullfighter girlfriend after she’s gored during a match, while the latter is a nurse whose obsession with a young dancer started even before the accident that put her into a coma at his hospital. I won’t spoil this particular Almodóvar film, but let’s just say that if that last part sounds squicky, then the twist will really make your skin crawl. Regardless, it’s not so much how Almodóvar is saying it, but what he’s trying to say; just as in TIE ME UP! TIE ME DOWN!, he’s exploring traditionally feminine notions of family and nurturing through his male characters’ distasteful behavior, exposing toxic machismo and all it implications. It’s the definition of fragile masculinity as filtered through Almodóvar’s pleasant irony, resulting in a film that’s as enjoyable as it is revolting. It also features a performance by Tanztheater pioneer Pina Bausch that informs the otherwise disconcerting story with a softness that braces viewers for impact. Screening as part of the Film Center’s ¡PEDRO! Series. (2002, 112 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]
Flavio Mogherini’s THE PYJAMA GIRL CASE (Italy)
Music Box Theatre – Wednesday, 7:15pm
A curious hybrid of the giallo and poliziotteschi modes (the former for which it’s a later entry, the latter being more discernible despite its Italian title having the word ‘giallo’ in it), Flavio Mogherini’s THE PYJAMA GIRL CASE is based on the true story of a young Australian woman who, in 1934, was found to have been brutally murdered. In Mogherini’s retelling of this tragic case there’s a particularly gruesome sequence in which the body of the victim—who’d been beaten, shot and set on fire—is put on public display in hopes that someone will be able to identify her. (The real woman in question was later identified as Linda Agostini, though there are still doubts as to whether or not they identified the body as the right person.) Initially this had seemed like the most ghastly sequence in what had otherwise been a rather mild, vaugely horror-adjacent film up to that point. But, no, this actually happened; her corpse had been preserved using formalin and was on display for ten years until a dental analysis supposedly linked the body to Agostini. That this part had happened in real life makes Mogherini’s film, already affecting in its bold narrative construction, even more impactful. There are two interwoven stories in the film, though I’ll be vague about these and their connection. Suffice it to say, it’s largely about the police investigation into the murder of a young woman who’s found dead in a car on the beach at the beginning of the film; burned beyond facial recognition, like the real Agostini, she’s referred to by what she had been wearing, yellow pyjamas. Ray Milland features as a retired detective who volunteers his time to identifying the woman and finding her murderer, much to the chagrin of the younger detectives on the case. It’s often joked that plot doesn’t matter in these kinds of genres, but here it does… and doesn’t. The story routinely jumps forward (or is it backward, left, or right?) with little explanation. What happens is of the essence, yet much goes unshown, unsaid, with a certain gravitas that’s often missing from the spotty plotting of gialli. The film is also unique in that it’s set in Australia; at a recent January Giallo screening, programmer Will Morris said it may be the only such film set in the Land Down Under, though some claim there are a few others out there. Much of it was shot on location in Sydney, and Mogherini otherwise does a decent job evoking the atmosphere of the setting. Two original songs by French iconoclast Amanda Lear help in this regard—vibey bangers better suited for a chill get-together rather than a crime movie—and the score by Riz Ortolani makes some already uncomfortable scenes even more distressing in how discordant the music is. It’s fitting that the film itself isn’t one thing or another; the audacity and inventiveness indicate something not easily categorized. Screening as part of January Giallo 2022, presented by Cinematic Void and Music Box of Horrors. (1977, 103 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
Billy Wilder's THE APARTMENT (US)
Music Box Theatre – Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am
For many—including Wilder himself—this was the director's finest hour, the film in which all the elements converged with grace, sass, and a tinge of tragic inevitability. It was inspired by a line that Wilder wrote in his notebook sometime in the 1940s and couldn't forget: "Movie about the guy who climbs into the warm bed left by two lovers." By the time the film was made (during the so-called "New Permissiveness" of the early 60s), the two lovers had multiplied into several men and countless mistresses and the warmth of the bed had turned musty. The guy, however, retained all the bittersweet sympathy of that initial premise. As incarnated by Jack Lemmon (in the most tolerable performance of his career), C.C. Baxter is the ultimate schlemiel, a resigned bachelor who lends his apartment to his insurance company superiors because he can't imagine any alternative to advancing in a job that kills him. Shirley MacLaine plays the disabused mistress who turns out to be the girl of his dreams, one of the great creations of the movies: her Fran Kubelik is a woman who seems ideal even in her faults—youthful, spontaneous, naive, sexy, resilient: exactly the type who could humanize an office drone like Baxter. The romance between them is so affecting (to say nothing of the dialogue, which pops as only Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond's writing can) that it's easy to overlook what a superior piece of filmmaking THE APARTMENT is. Wilder remains underrated as a visual artist; and here, working in sparkling black-and-white 'Scope, he creates some remarkable effects, such as the unforgettable loneliness of the apartment itself and the modernist nightmare of the insurance company office (an image borrowed from King Vidor's THE CROWD), where rows of desks seem to extend into infinity. Wilder also employs small objects with an imaginative economy worthy of Hitchcock. As he explained in Cameron Crowe's book-length interview Conversations with Wilder: "When Baxter sees himself in [Fran's broken compact] mirror, he adds up two and two. He gave it to the president of the insurance company [Fred MacMurray], the big shot at the office, now he knows what we know. And we see it in his face in the broken mirror. That was a very elegant way of pointing it out. Better than a third person telling him about the affair—that we did not want to do. This was better. This gave us everything, in one shot." Screening as part of the Music Box’s Black and White Cinemascope Matinees. (1960, 125 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Hayao Miyazaki’s PRINCESS MONONOKE (Japan/Animation)
Music Box Theatre – Friday and Saturday, 11:30pm
As morally complicated as it is visually complex, PRINCESS MONONOKE was Hayao Miyazaki’s darkest, most contemplative film prior to THE WIND RISES. Like WIND, MONONOKE advances a skeptical view of war and technological progress. It adopts a Medieval setting to portray, in the director’s words, “the very beginnings of the seemingly insoluble conflict between the natural world and modern industrial civilization.” What makes the film intellectually challenging, however, is that Miyazaki refuses to demonize industrial civilization in delineating the story’s conflict. MONONOKE takes place in a mythological feudal Japan where humans interact freely with gods and demons. Much of the second half concerns the persecution of forest spirits by the denizens of Irontown, a refinery/village that’s producing the first iron Japan’s ever seen and which it wants to destroy parts of the surrounding forest in order to expand. In a simpler film, Irontown would be a land of dumb brutes, yet Miyazaki presents the village as progressive, even enlightened. The town’s leader, Lady Eboshi, radically refuses to acknowledge the Emperor’s authority, putting her centuries ahead of her time; she also employs former sex workers, lepers, and other social outcasts in the town’s operations. (Miyazaki claims to have taken inspiration from John Ford’s westerns in his depiction of a diverse small community.) One can’t help but admire the resolute spirit of Irontowners even as they aspire to commit genocide against the gods—Miyazaki’s humanism is so profound that he sees good even in characters that perform evil deeds. Similarly, the film’s hero, Ashitaka, often seems callow and insecure when doing good. Ashitaka is attacked by a demon at the start of the film and spends the rest of the picture slowly dying from a curse that’s placed on him. The young man’s fate parallels that of the forest spirits: he’s doomed to die, but he’s determined to use whatever strength he has left to fight for the protection of the natural world. And as depicted by Miyazaki and the Studio Ghibli team, the natural world seems magisterial enough to die for. (1997, 134 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Jessica Kingdon's ASCENSION (US/China/Documentary)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 6:15pm
Two men in a Chinese factory are surrounded by a mountain of metal parts, their welding rigs casting a bright white light from offscreen. You begin to wonder, Are they assembling car jacks or some other piece of automobile equipment? They start to test their creation, assuring that everything is properly attached and tightened. At this point, they have stood their work upright and it appears to be some sort of metal frame for a robot or animatronic. Director Jessica Kingdon cuts to another factory where a handful of women are assembling, trimming, and lubricating giant silicone sex dolls. Surprisingly, this is not even one of the most absurd scenes in ASCENSION. Kingdon provides us with a gorgeous fly-on-the-wall-style film, bouncing around as an omniscient observer all over China. That is, until one of the subjects gets stung by an insect and the perspective is broken for a second, but that's bee-sides the point. If anything, that moment is a testament to the compassion that Kingdon brings to the subject matter. There is no doubt that China gets slammed by propaganda on the daily in our American 24-hour news cycle. While the nation's not perfect, it faces similar problems that we do domestically. Unfortunately, the majority of those problems weigh heaviest on the lower- to middle-class, something that we as Americans are all too familiar with. The film features its fair share of absurd moments, but they are not any more absurd than the “Not The Onion” headlines we see in the United States. Whether it's Amazon workers having to skip bathroom breaks, or Chinese laborers having to fabricate jiggly sex dolls, workers are pushed to their limits and demeaned around the globe. Hopefully this film gets some attention with the right crowd, and this type of passive, yet focused filmmaking could change others' worldviews for the better. Followed by a pre-recorded conversation between director Kingdon and Steve James. (2021, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Drew Van Weelden]
Pedro Almodóvar’s ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER (Spain)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 1pm
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 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. Almodóvar’s ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER involves a degree of overlap sporadically 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 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 character, but it’s emblematic of the potential for the 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 her son’s 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 things 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 Film Center’s ¡PEDRO! Series. (1998, 101 min, 35mm) [Kathleen Sachs]
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]
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]
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
⚫ Music Box Theatre
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 –
New Reviews
Peter Bogdanovich's THE LAST PICTURE SHOW (US)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
In THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, Peter Bogdanovich tells a coming-of-age story about three teenagers simultaneously living their own lives and reliving those of their parents and grandparents in the small town of Anarene, Texas. While finishing high school in the early 1950s, Duane (Jeff Bridges) dates the gorgeous Jacy (Cybill Shepherd), and Duane's best friend, Sonny (Timothy Bottoms), tentatively begins an affair with his football coach's wife (Cloris Leachman). As a film critic, Bogdanovich popularized the classic Hollywood era by praising its great filmmakers, including John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Orson Welles; he later described the larger aim of his film, "I saw the story as a Texas version of Orson Welles' THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, which was about the end of a way of life caused by the coming of the automobile. This was about the end of a way of life caused by the coming of television." In Bogdanovich's Anarene, the cinema is closing. The owner complains to Duane and Sonny that no one comes to the movies anymore, because they are at home watching TV. The cinema's last picture show is Hawks' RED RIVER (1948), starring John Wayne as a tough cattle driver in the Old West. Hawks depicted yet another way of life from times gone by that only exists in the movies. While Bogdanovich too quickly mourned the passing of a representation of life that is still with us, his co-writer, Larry McMurtry, laments life itself as lived in Anarene, also known as the Archer City of his youth. McMurtry and cinematographer Robert Surtees create an extraordinary sense of both the place of this poor town and the vast, empty space that nearly engulfs it and its last few inhabitants. Anarene is dying; it may soon be a ghost town with no one left at all. It prompts questions like: Why did it exist? Why is it still here? In the middle of THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, Sam the Lion, played by veteran western actor Ben Johnson, tells Sonny that he is just as sentimental as the next when it comes to "old times." Their conversation and the film as a whole remind one of a statement by Terrence Malick, who also deals in memories of his Texas boyhood: "Nostalgia is a powerful feeling; it can drown out anything." THE LAST PICTURE SHOW is a beautiful evocation not only of old times, but also of the possibility—whether great or small—time once held. (1971, 118 min) [Candace Wirt]
🎞️ 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
⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Jessica Kingdon's 2021 documentary ASCENSION (97 min) will begin streaming on Monday following Sunday’s in-person screening. See above for review. Followed by a pre-recorded conversation between director Kingdon and Steve James. More info here.
⚫ 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.
🎞️ ADDITIONAL ONLINE SCREENINGS
Jean-Claude Biette’s THE CARPATHIAN MUSHROOM (France)
Streaming for free on Henri, the Cinematheque Francaise’s website
Among the many notable French filmmakers who started out as critics for Cahiers du Cinema, Jean-Claude Biette is one of the least known in the Anglophone world. He was marginal even in France; THE CARPATHIAN MUSHROOM played in just one Paris theater. But the Cinematheque Francaise has made this film and his debut LA THEATRE DES MATIERES (1977) newly available to English speakers, streaming subtitled versions. The Chernobyl-inspired THE CARPATHIAN MUSHROOM faces down mortality with a tone of gentle but unmistakable disappointment. Howard Vernon plays Jeremy Fairfax, an over-the-hill theater director trying to mount a production of HAMLET in a space that can’t keep its lights on. Unfortunately, the actress cast as Ophelia remains hospitalized after exposure to radiation from a nuclear disaster. Marie picks a rare mushroom under a tree in the dead of winter. Calling it a “magic mushroom,” albeit without any psychedelic effects, she claims that it can heal wounds, prolong life, and even enable seances. Her boyfriend starts selling milk made from it. Biette's career-long fascination with theater, which plays out here in the interpolation of rehearsals, suggests a link to Jacques Rivette, but Biette zooms in on the day-to-day struggle of running a marginal arts organization. Vernon plays much the same character as he did in LA THEATRE DES MATIERES, obsessed with the great art of the past to the detriment of his ability to engage with people. THE CARPATHIAN MUSHROOM’s choice to spin itself out through a group of characters, not all of whom meet, rather than choosing a protagonist, is also reminiscent of Rivette: the film is a web of connections, not a straight line of narrative. But its pale, muted look and mood of quiet endeavor to engage in meaningful work are all its own. Faced with dangerous world events that don’t make add up to a logical story, who wouldn’t want a mushroom to bring the sick back to health? (1988, 96 min) [Steve Erickson]
CINE-LIST: January 14 - January 20, 2022
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // John Dickson, Steve Erickson, Marilyn Ferdinand, Michael Frank, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Michael Glover Smith, Drew Van Weelden, Candace Wirt