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!
🔊 CINE-CAST: The Cine-File Podcast
Episode #21 - New!
For episode #21 of the Cine-Cast, nine Cine-File contributors come together to discuss some of their favorite films of 2021. (Full lists can be found on the blog here.) Participating in the discussion are Cody Corrall, John Dickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Michael Glover Smith, Drew Van Weelden, and editors Ben and Kat Sachs. The conversation covers American movies ranging from Angelo Madsen Minax's NORTH BY CURRENT to Steven Spielberg's WEST SIDE STORY and such international milestones as Apichatpong Weerasethakul's MEMORIA and Ryusuke Hamaguchi's DRIVE MY CAR. The introductory theme is by local film composer Ben Van Vlissingen.
---
Listen to the Cine-Cast here!
📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING
Chantal Akerman's JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES (Belgium)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 6pm
I used to think that Chantal Akerman’s films had more in common with Yasujirō Ozu’s than even those of his most devout disciples. Her use of still, waist-level medium shots (similar to Ozu’s signature “tatami shots,” intended to mimic the perspective of someone kneeling on a tatami mat), settings hyper-respective to her cultural background, and a seemingly detached tone that cloaks rich subtext all recall Ozu’s invariant oeuvre. After rewatching her crucial 1975 film JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES, which she made when she was just 25 years old, I still believe that her work exhibits these aspects but to antithetical effect. Where Ozu reveals the calm within life's chaos, Akerman inveigles chaos out of calm, and there’s perhaps no better example of this than her 201-minute tour de force depicting three days in the life of its title character, a middle-aged mother played to perfection by the solemn, red-haired Delphine Seyrig. Most of the film is comprised of superlative long takes in which Jeanne does her daily chores, intercut by brief expositional conversations with her 16-year-old son and oblique references to her “job” as a rather apathetic sex worker. Though it evokes experimental cinema in how it ingeniously uses a simple concept to confront the illusion of that simplicity, it’s also a brilliant depiction of real life as narrative; in a 2009 interview with the New York Times, Akerman observed that “in most movies you have crashes or accidents or things out of the ordinary, so the viewer is distracted from his own life… this film is about his own life.” A friend once remarked to me that their standard response when asked by a filmmaker to provide feedback about a film they didn’t like was to say that at least it gave them space to think about things. Ironically, the same is true about the masterwork that is JEANNE DIELMAN. The long takes are simultaneously hypnotic and freeing, producing a sensation that’s almost as mindless as the tasks themselves. Akerman’s depiction of these chores, which are certainly banal even if rendered extraordinary by Babette Mangolte’s lens, is often regarded as a feminist tract, a label that Akerman rejects. Indeed, she’s said in several interviews that the seemingly monotonous routines were lovingly inspired by childhood memories of her mother, as well as Jewish ritual; in the aforementioned interview, she also said that “Jeanne has to organize her life, to not have any space, any time, so she won’t be depressed or anxious … [s]he didn’t want to have one free hour because she didn’t know how to fill that hour,” which speaks less to the mundanity of the tasks at hand and more to Jeanne’s general discontent. At the risk of spoiling the film for anyone still unfamiliar with its abrupt ending, the duration doesn’t so much emphasize the monotony as it provides context around the downturn of both character and tone. It doesn’t show three days in a life, but rather the day that cracks start to appear in the foundation, and then the day that it finally crumbles to the ground, out of which something altogether new and different arises. (On a tangential note, the ending reminds me of these lines from Sylvia Plath’s Holocaust-adjacent poem, “Lady Lazarus”: “Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air.” In 1986, Akerman directed an adaptation of Rose Leiman Goldemberg’s off-Broadway play Letters Home, based on Plath’s letters to her mother. So much to unpack there.) Only the late filmmaker’s second feature, JEANNE DIELMAN is almost daunting in its command of the medium—perhaps the only label that can rightfully be attached to it is “masterpiece.” Screening as part of 50/50, the Siskel’s year-long series including a film from each year the theater has been open. (1975, 201 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]
Francesco Barilli’s THE PERFUME OF THE LADY IN BLACK (Italy)
Music Box Theatre – Wednesday, 7:15pm
THE PERFUME OF THE LADY IN BLACK stands proudly at the artier end of giallo cinema—or is it the trashier end of arthouse cinema? In any case, it’s one of those only-in-the-‘70s works that brings together the highest and lowest impulses in the medium, proceeding (correctly) as though middlebrow cinema simply did not matter. Cowriter-director Francesco Barilli cited Roman Polanski’s ROSEMARY’S BABY as an influence on this dreamlike tale of a woman going insane, and one can detect traces of Polanski’s REPULSION in the mix as well; it’s also possible that Barilli was thinking of Ingmar Bergman’s THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY or John Hancock’s exploitation-cinema variation on that film, LET’S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH. The Chicago-born Mimsy Farmer stars as Silvia, a successful chemist who starts to experience frightening hallucinations when her boyfriend goes out of town. The most striking of these visions is of the title character (who always appears sitting in front of a mirror), but Silvia also finds herself reliving a traumatic episode from her childhood that’s best not to know about before watching the film. LADY IN BLACK begins in a relatively naturalistic mode, then gradually introduces uncanny elements. Its transformation into a full-fledged horror film is surprisingly graceful and gracefully surprising—you can’t pinpoint when it cuts ties to reality, since the dream imagery is so subtle at first. Only when it’s too late do you realize that the narrative has been lost in the heroine’s mind. Barilli visualizes the character’s madness with commanding imagery that makes the most of giallo cinema’s lurid colors and seemingly endless supply of fake blood. Screening as part of January Giallo 2022, presented by Cinematic Void and Music Box of Horrors. (1974, 104 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
Pedro Almodóvar’s VOLVER (Spain)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Wednesday, 7pm
Perhaps the most impressive thing about Pedro Almodóvar’s maturation is how the Spanish writer-director has managed to find so much nuance within artistic excess—indeed, one can identify at least four distinct periods of his career. There are the anarchic, go-for-broke farces of the 1980s; the discomforting mixes of high fashion and base behavior that marked his work from WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN (1988) through LIVE FLESH (1997); the gentler, self-reflexive melodramas of the 2000s; and the ruminative, classically beautiful films he started making with JULIETA (2016). VOLVER (from period three) looks back to Almodóvar’s first era in its lighthearted depictions of deceit, murder, familial resentment, cancer, smoking weed, and ladies farting. At the same time, the film looks forward to the director's later work in its relaxed pacing, sincere ode to female camaraderie, and underlying theme of making amends. (Critics like to note that this was Almodóvar’s first film with Carmen Maura in 18 years; their offscreen reconciliation surely played a part in the movie’s mellifluousness.) Like Almodóvar’s other two masterpieces from this period, ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER (1999) and TALK TO HER (2002), the film sustains a voluptuously complex tone. The heightened, melodramatic elements that had always been crucial to the director’s work are still present, but rather than exploit them for boisterous humor, he underplays them to disarming, moving effect. Similarly, Almodóvar continues to wink at the audience when presenting those elements, which encourages a certain giddiness at playing make-believe, yet he elicits genuine emotion in spite of this, and his ability to pull off the dramatic paradox serves as another, richer cinematic joke. VOLVER communicates its sincerity chiefly through the female ensemble cast, which exudes extraordinary earthiness and warmth; the film’s community of women is such a utopian model of its kind that VOLVER comes to suggest what a feminist Howard Hawks movie might have looked like. The Sophia Loren of her generation, Penélope Cruz stars, filling the role of idealized Spanish womanhood with classical movie-star grace, but the whole cast shines; fittingly, the six leads shared the Best Actress prize at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. Screening as part of the Film Center’s ¡PEDRO! Series. (2006, 121 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
Jamie Babbit's BUT I'M A CHEERLEADER (US)
Music Box Theatre – Thursday, 9:45pm
Instead of rewatching BUT I'M A CHEERLEADER, a hilarious, if occasionally inexpert, tribute to John Waters in a hard, vinyl bubble gum palette that skewers gay conversion therapy, gay culture, and binary gender roles, among other things, instead I decided to read contemporary reviews of the movie (spoiler: most critics hated it). Having loved the movie so much that I've seen it a good half dozen times, I wondered what I was missing, or what those critics were missing, and then I realized no one seemed to be mentioning just how camp this movie is, and why it could not be enjoyed as anything else and still enjoyed. Lou Lumenick of the New York Post called it "dumb, heavy-handed satire." Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly declared, "Any self-respecting lesbian should rear up in horror at [this movie]." (Spoiler: I didn't.) Gemma Files at film.com disparaged the film's "Ungainly sentiment and unnecessary stylization." (Emanuel Levy's moustache also hated the movie.) Did these critics watch the same movie as me? Or do they just not love camp? In lieu of tracking them down and asking why they hated the movie so much, I re-read Susan Sontag's popular essay from 1964, "Notes on 'Camp.'" Sontag admitted in her notes, "I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it." How presciently that hints at the enduring magnetism of PINK FLAMINGOS and the rest of Waters' glorious spectacles! Sontag also notes, "Many examples of Camp are things which, from a "serious" point of view, are either bad art or kitsch." ...much like BUT I'M A CHEERLEADER. The subject matter of Jamie Babbit's first feature film is, in many ways, so horrifying and traumatic in reality that the only way to properly tease out the absurdity, the trauma, and the brutally oppressive systems at play that sculpted these actual camps where fragile LGBT youth were sent to "pray the gay away" or learn how to properly conform to gender roles is through camp, in Sontag's definition of the term. The only way to process and analyze just what was at stake (and still is, by the way...this pseudoscientific "therapy" is only banned in 15 states today, and that only for minors), was through extreme stylization and aestheticization, devotion to overblown artifice, and "failed seriousness" that define camp. Sontag goes on to say, "The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious." "Camp is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness." Babbit's direction of BUT I'M A CHEERLEADER is crystal clear in this sense. She skewers each subject she tackles with "heavy-handed satire," or, as Sontag would put it, that feeling of "it's too much!" through fabulous actors like RuPaul as an "ex-gay" counselor who constantly displays his (failed) masculinity in a sort of reverse-drag performance, Clea DuVall as the brooding fellow inmate at camp who lures Natasha Lyonne's innocent cheerleader to the dark side of homosexuality, Dante Bosco (whom you may remember as Rufio from HOOK, an accidental, as opposed to deliberate, camp film), and of course, Cathy Moriarty as the seethingly angry director of "True Directions." Perhaps, now that I think about it, BUT I'M A CHEERLEADER isn't a good movie. Is it so bad that it's good? Or is it that gay conversion therapy is so morally repugnant you just have to laugh, have to make it playful? Perhaps it's just so camp that it doesn't have to be good. Camp is a sensibility that doesn't lend itself to traditional criticism. All I can say is that the first time I walked out of this movie I chuckled at remembered jokes, but I also felt seen and understood in a unique way that only queer, camp movies can do, and that it reached something beyond the comedy and made me feel quite tenderly about the earnest first love the teens experience in one of the few lesbian films from the 1990s with a happy ending. Because, as Sontag put it so well, "Camp is a tender feeling." Presented by Ramona Slick and Rated Q - A Celebration of Queer, Camp, & Cult Cinema. Enjoy pre-show drinks and DJ set in the Music Box Lounge at 9pm. (1999, 92 min, 35mm) [Alexandra Ensign]
Akira Kurosawa's YOJIMBO (Japan)
Music Box Theatre – Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am
Akira Kurosawa’s loose and darkly funny adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest is a visually expressive marvel, with the director taking full advantage of the lateral possibilities of the widescreen frame. One scans the screen for details as if watching a tennis match—the garish visuals pop up on one side of the screen, then the other, then the other. (It’s hard to imagine Kurosawa having more fun on a picture than he did with this one.) Directed to behave like a mangy dog, Toshiro Mifune stars as Sanjuro, a wandering samurai who arrives in a small town and takes up work as a bodyguard (yojimbo) for two warring gangs. He cynically pits one group against the other, killing several baddies himself and allowing the gangs to take care of the rest. “Kurosawa converts the impending melodrama to comedy by abandoning his [usual] quest for fully human characters,” wrote Alexander Sesonske for the Criterion Collection in 2006. “Sanjuro is a Supersamurai, a whirlwind in combat; the village gangs are so grotesquely wicked, they become ludicrous and enlist neither our sympathy nor our belief. By the film’s end most are dead, but we feel no regret at the slaughter, nor cringe at its execution. The exaggerated evil of the gangs leaves them no other appropriate fate, and theirs is achieved with such style and cinematic verve that we are exhilarated by the spectacle and not at all dismayed by its content.” Screening as part of the Music Box’s Black and White Cinemascope Matinees. (1961, 110 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Jane Campion’s THE POWER OF THE DOG (US/UK/Australia/New Zealand/Canada)
Gene Siskel Film Center — See Venue website for showtimes
It’s been 12 years since Jane Campion’s last feature film, BRIGHT STAR. That movie stays with me for containing one of the rawest scenes of a character crying in grief I’ve ever witnessed; I still get chills thinking about it. THE POWER OF THE DOG is darker, but no less emotional, unhurriedly revealing the devastating and murky inner lives of its characters with astonishing skill and empathy. The film is demarcated by roman numeral chapters, each building tension by slightly shifting audience expectations. It’s clear this growing anxiety is leading to a dark, violent end, but I was constantly reconsidering what that end might be and consistently taken aback by Campion’s twisting complexity of the characterization onscreen. The story takes place in 1920s Montana, following the Burbank brothers: quiet and clean-cut George (Jesse Plemons) and rough yet charismatic Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch). For years they've run a prosperous cattle ranch, but their situation is upended when George marries sweet Rose (Kirsten Dunst), a widow who brings along with her scholarly son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Phil is enraged by this change, and his immediate cruelty to Rose and Peter is distressing. It’s slowly revealed his unbridled rage is complicated by his past; most notably he had a deeply meaningful relationship early in his life with a cowboy mentor who’s long since passed. Though never onscreen, Bronco Henry’s presence looms as large as the Montana mountains. And, oh, those mountains. Ari Wegner’s cinematography is breathtaking and true to the Western genre, but it also feels alien. The landscape seems both impossibly picturesque and quietly full of terrors. Shots of wide-open spaces are juxtaposed with tight quarters, driving the characters fears and desires: the camera captures scenes through windows and doors (à la THE SEARCHERS), the brothers’ cold ranch house, and Phil’s secret sanctuary in the nearby woods. We witness the characters as they navigate not only the setting, but their own troubled existence within it. They dance around each other as they grapple with overwhelming loneliness fueled by constantly needing to assess the intentions of those around them. Cumberbatch is powerfully unsettling, but the film belongs to Dunst, who masterfully portrays Rose’s emotional shifts with crushing compassion. Smit-McPhee, too, is incredible as Peter, whose motives are skillfully inscrutable until the final, quietly shocking moments. (2021, 125 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
Dasha Nekrasova’s THE SCARY OF SIXTY-FIRST (US)
Music Box Theatre — See Venue website for showtimes
What happens when two young women move into a NYC apartment that was formerly owned by Jeffrey Epstein? Well, unfortunately, what happens is pretty much what you would guess by the premise. While being equal parts gross, unsettling, and sleazy, THE SCARY OF SIXTY-FIRST is surprisingly competent. It looks and feels like some of the great midnight movie cult classics, which acts as a safety net for some of the other unsavory elements. The film feels like it's catered toward a certain audience, primarily the type that finds themself extremely online and caked in cynicism. It's hard to say how a movie like this will age, as it certainly draws heavily on current events and language. In the same regard, it could prove to be particularly useful in understanding contemporary culture. The list of films that accurately predict the collective pessimism and anxiety of our time seems short. When a video of a drug cartel decapitation can pop up on Twitter at any moment, Freddy Krueger doesn’t really do much for a person anymore. The film is aware of this Pandora’s Box, two of our characters spiral down into a rabbit hole of conspiracy leading into the classic “what is really happening?” scenario. The only character that is somewhat likable and sincere is also the one who suffers the most. It makes sense then that one would protect themself, armor-clad with irony, to endure the disgusting world we live in. Tasteless perhaps, but the film is certainly not devoid of intent and worth a watch if you’re into these sorts of exploitation films. (2021, 81 min, 35mm) [Drew Van Weelden]
John Connors’ ENDLESS SUNSHINE ON A CLOUDY DAY (Ireland/Documentary)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 5pm and Sunday, 2pm
In January 2018, Anthony McCann, a garden manager living in Greystone, County Wicklow, learned that the cancer he beat 23 years earlier was back. His beloved daughter Jade, a popular beauty influencer on social media who was a baby during her father’s first bout with the disease, informed her 60,000 followers about the ubiquity of an illness that had never been on her radar; a mere month later, she, too, would be diagnosed with cancer. Actor and screenwriter John Connors, who makes his directorial debut chronicling the devastating battle that Anthony, his wife Kim, and their children, Jade and Eion, waged over the next two years to beat back death, shows a deep empathy for his subjects. He halts an interview with Jade when she starts to break down, avoids exploiting both her suicide attempt and her severely altered appearance resulting from the cancer treatments, and presents the family’s rollercoaster moods, desperate positivity, and just plain desperation respectfully. Less generous are the intertitles that show how Jade’s followers on Snapchat and Instagram wax when things are going poorly and wane when Jade shares hopeful news—numbers that could indicate caring support, morbid curiosity, or both. Tiernan Williams, the film’s producer, cinematographer, and editor, contrasts Jade’s candy-colored pre-cancer posts and emoji-filled cellphone vlogging by shooting the McCanns’ everyday reality in black and white. ENDLESS SUNSHINE ON A CLOUDY DAY is a harrowing experience, but one made bearable by the beauty of the images Williams captures, from the Wicklow shore to a reenactment of one of Jade’s dreams depicting her and her father standing under what she calls the Tree of Life. The film includes various versions of the traditional Irish song of departure “The Parting Glass.” Jade’s rendition is made even more poignant when she reveals that she gave up making music when online trolls told her she was no good. Sadly, but unsurprisingly, her relentless honesty about her life with cancer elicits an onslaught of cyberbullying that is mentioned in passing as painful, but largely irrelevant. More important is what the McCanns learned to value most during their darkest hours, which Anthony articulates in a poem: “Endless joy on the shortest day / When all is dark, a light that shows me the way / On the calm ocean, you’re the wind in my sails / Endless sunshine on a cloudy day / For the love you give, never to go away / Forever, forever to stay.” A Hooley Encore screening. Director Connors and producer Tiernan Williams in person. (2021, 89 min, DCP Digital) [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 – Saturday, 1pm
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. A few weeks ago, I was 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 an especially 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 its 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]
Ryusuke Hamaguchi’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 through Sunday; DCP Digital thereafter) [John Dickson]
Steven Spielberg’s WEST SIDE STORY (US)
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 Digital) [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
⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Doc Films had postponed the start of their Winter screenings to Monday, January 24. Check back on their website, mailing list, and Facebook page for updates on the calendar and COVID policies. More info here.
⚫ Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St.)
Alla Kovgan’s 2019 documentary CUNNINGHAM (93 min) screens on 3-D DCP Digital on Monday at 7pm as part of the Film Studies Center’s Open Classroom series. Admission is free. More info here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
Marie Amiguet and Vincent Munier's 2021 documentary THE VELVET QUEEN (92 min, DCP Digital) begins screening this week.
Joel Coen’s 2021 film THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH (105 min, DCP Digital) continues. See Venue website for all showtimes. More info here.
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS –
Held Over/Still Screening/Return Engagements (Selected)
Jessica Kingdon's ASCENSION (US/China/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
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 the director and Steve James. (2021, 97 min) [Drew Van Weelden]
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]
Ryusuke Hamaguchi’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.
🎞️ ADDITIONAL ONLINE SCREENINGS
Maria Sødahl’s HOPE (Norway)
Available to rent on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Google Play, and Vudu
Scandinavian filmmakers seem to have a particular affinity for stories of troubled marriages. Along with the brilliant marital dramas of such luminaries as Ingmar Bergman and Jan Troell, we must add Norwegian director Maria Sødahl’s masterful film HOPE. The film is set during the Christmas holiday season. Andrea Bræin Hovig and Stellan Skarsgård,play Anja and Tomas, a long-time couple with a large, blended family of adult and dependent children and careers in the creative arts that consume much of their time and emotional investment. Anja, a choreographer, has just had a great success in Amsterdam, but Tomas, a film director, has been kept busy at home preparing to shoot a film. His perceived neglect of their younger children in her absence displeases Anja, but this anger may be displacement of her disappointment with his lack of material support for her professional life. Their world is turned upside down when they learn that the lung cancer Anja was treated for a year before has metastasized to her brain. Sødahl wrote the screenplay based on her own near-miraculous escape from death from brain cancer, which halted her career for nine years following the release of her much-lauded feature debut, LIMBO (2010), and made writing an onerous chore. She settles Anja and Tomas into a rich and warm environment filled with friends, holiday preparations, and everyday family life and strife, while the couple faces their emotional alienation as they negotiate Anja’s medical crisis largely in secret. It is a privilege to see two titanic performances that, under Sødahl’s sensitive direction, create not only two, separate individuals, but also the “one” these characters have struggled for nearly two decades to become. Their intimate moments are handled with complexity, understanding, and honesty, illuminating what it means to be human and face not only the fear of death, but also the fear of intimacy. (2019, 140 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
CINE-LIST: January 21 - January 27, 2022
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // John Dickson, Alexandra Ensign, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Michael Frank, Michael Glover Smith, Drew Van Weelden, Candace Wirt