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
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.
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Listen to the Cine-Cast here!
📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING
Douglas Sirk’s THE TARNISHED ANGELS (US)
Music Box Theatre – Sunday, 11:30am
A number of the talents responsible for WRITTEN ON THE WIND (1956)—director Douglas Sirk, screenwriter George Zuckerman, producer Albert Zugsmith, and stars Rock Hudson, Robert Stack, and Dorothy Malone—teamed up again the following year for this adaptation of William Faulkner’s 1935 novel Pylon. Though not as widely admired as its predecessor, THE TARNISHED ANGELS may well be the greater achievement, a formally striking masterpiece that manages to translate the glories of Faulkner’s literature into wholly cinematic terms. Interestingly (though perhaps not coincidentally), Pylon was one of the author’s least ambitious novels; Faulkner readily admitted that he devised the melodramatic story (about an alcoholic journalist who becomes infatuated with a team of airshow performers living in a ménage-a-trois) with the aim of penning a bestseller. Yet Sirk and company transform the material into the stuff of high tragedy, channeling the profound, romantic fatalism of Faulkner’s best books. This accomplishment can be credited in part to the cast, who bring a gravitas to their roles that they rarely displayed elsewhere (Hudson, playing the journalist, was arguably never better; his delivery of a distinctly Faulknerian monologue at the climax is a career highlight), yet the movie belongs overwhelmingly to Sirk, whose ability to convey emotion through visual style is simply breathtaking. THE TARNISHED ANGELS has got to be one of the best movies shot in black-and-white CinemaScope, with Sirk creating stark, expansive compositions in practically every scene. The shots of the carnival where Stack flies his stunt plane exhibit a monumentalism topped only by the carnival shots of Minnelli’s ‘Scope melodrama SOME CAME RUNNING (1958), and there’s a comparable sense of grandeur to the interior sequences—every inch of space between the characters carries dramatic weight. The critic and filmmaker Luc Moullet, writing about THE TARNISHED ANGELS in Cahiers du cinéma in 1958, likened Sirk’s baroque camera movements to Faulkner’s flamboyantly lengthy sentences, arguing that they instilled meaning into the story where there was none to begin with. Rainer Werner Fassbinder expressed a similar sentiment in a 1971 essay about Sirk: “In this film the camera is constantly in motion, acting like the people the film’s about, as if something were actually going on. In reality, in the end they could all lie down and let themselves be buried. And the traveling shots in the film, the crane shots, the pans! Douglas Sirk shows these dead souls with such tenderness and with such a light that you say to yourself that they’re all in such a shitty situation and yet so lovable that something must be to blame for it. What is to blame is loneliness and fear. I’ve seldom felt loneliness and fear the way I do in this film.” Screening as part of the Music Box’s Black and White Cinemascope Matinees. (1957, 91 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
Jim Jarmusch's GHOST DOG: THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI (US)
Chicago Film Society at the Music Box Theatre – Tuesday, 7pm
Were the late 1990s and early 2000s a golden age of cinema, or do I just say this because these were the years when I was a burgeoning young moviegoer? This was a time of reverence for new sights, sounds, and experiences on my impressionable and somewhat growing mind; this was the time I began to turn my eyes and ears to the world stage of new and challenging cinema. I knew EYES WIDE SHUT was important even though I didn’t understand it at the time; I knew YI YI was a life-changing experience that I couldn’t wait to have; and I was deeply convinced I had to immediately clasp looks on some Iranian film called THE WIND WILL CARRY US. It wasn’t just these canonical classics—names like Claire Denis, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Pedro Costa, and others were beginning to percolate in my brain, entire worlds were opening up to me. Even if I couldn’t quite grasp their galactic reach, I still understood their reverence. There was at least one movie I saw during this time that I felt I could get a grip on, and that was Jim Jarmusch’s GHOST DOG: THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI. The film was readymade for my taste buds at the time, with its combined love of LE SAMOURAI and BRANDED TO KILL (both 1967), plus Isaach de Bankolé (who had dominated that last decade of cinema with his memorable roles in CHOCOLAT, NO FEAR NO DIE, NIGHT ON EARTH, and CASA DE LAVA), the great Henry Silva as a terrifying, cartoon-loving mobster, and the RZA-produced soundtrack, featuring tracks performed by Jeru the Damaja and a host of affiliated B characters from the Wu-Tang dynasty. These elements meld into something that, on the one hand, seems deadly serious in its portrait of steeled morality and brutal violence while, on the other, offers a deadpan parody of the hit-man genre and its graveness. In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, the components would combine like oil and water or resemble something closer to Jim Abrahams’ MAFIA! Instead, Jarmusch allows GHOST DOG to pierce the middle ground between heavy and light, making the film another unique entry in its director’s work within various genre formats. Revisiting this film for the first time since it was released, I am more than pleased to say it remains as comically cool as it always was—a gleaming example of what made that era something of a halcyon time for the movies. Preceded by Woody Woodpecker in Walter Lantz’s PANTRY PANIC (1941, 7 min, 16mm). (1999, 116 min, 35mm) [John Dickson]
This Radiant World: Lines of Force: Moving Forward and Standing Still (Experimental Shorts)
Film Studies Center (Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm (Free Admission)
Per the event description, “[t]he six works in this program act in counterpoint to each other—some are focused on stasis, pausing, and contemplation; others on movement, progression, building, and speed.” The majority of them convey those modes using appropriated imagery, mostly from celluloid film but also other ephemera such as—in the case of the first film, James N. Kienitz Wilkins’ BEST YEAR EVER (2020, 14 min, Digital Projection)—a children’s book. Kienitz Wilkins narrates Richard Scarry’s Best Busy Year Ever over images of illustrations from the book shot on 16mm. It’s as if he’s reading the story aloud like an adult would for children, though his generally monotone timbre and deliberate vocal and aesthetic inflections hint at a more sarcastic reading of the on-the-go menagerie and their continual exclamations of something being the “best ever,” a label that very few people (if any) would say about the last two years. Claude Debussy’s “Petite Suite” accompanies the drollery, providing for yet another tonal discrepancy, the majestic music at war with the guileless text and the benign rancor of Kienitz Wilkins’ narration. In several places, the book emphasizes the goings-on of various workers, connecting the text to the contemporary late-capitalist hellscape. In WILD GIRL (2021, 6 min, Digital Projection), Bill Morrison preserves a sequence from a deteriorating nitrate print of Howard Estabrook’s eponymous 1917 film starring Eva Tanguay, whose unintentionally modified figure composes the short’s duration. The effects of the film’s deterioration make it visually arresting; one also gets the impression of a ghost striving for corporeality, refusing to perish from the human world. It’s noted that Tanguay, who was once referred to as the Queen of Vaudeville, may have been the first person to achieve widespread celebrity. Thus this reimagined silent also comments on the hoped-for duration of fame and the unavoidable corrosion of it. Thai virtuoso Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s NIGHT COLONIES (2021, 14 min, Digital Projection)—which featured in last year’s pandemic omnibus film THE YEAR OF THE EVERLASTING STORM (taking its name from prose that appears onscreen in Weerasethakul’s film)—most certainly embodies the idea of stasis put forth in the program summary. But it’s not entirely silent and still—the short features a stark white bed, over which bright lights are positioned, attracting a variety of insect and reptile life. Weerasethakul could render anything sublime, as he does here with the stuff of some peoples’ nightmares. The occasional onscreen prose and subtitles of barely coherent audio from protests and what seem to be random conversations suggest a deeper meaning, though perhaps not. In a recent article on the filmmaker in the New Yorker, Hilton Als notes that the photographs that appear in the short were collected on Weerasethakul’s trips with a former romantic partner. They were just “a fond memory, nothing more,” Als recounts from their conversation. Just as stasis is often meditative, so, too, are Weerasethakul’s films continuous reminders that something need not have meaning to be meaningful. During a time when many people go long periods without leaving their home, the floor plan of a living space may feel more like an outline for insanity. In 22 LIGHT-YEARS (2021, 17 min, Digital Projection), Janie Geiser uses digitally rendered floor plans, along with appropriated material such as photo negatives, patterned paper, and archival footage, to emphasize the impermeability of home as both a place and an abstraction. Bugs feature in this one, too, at least as hand-drawn pictures, and generally in a more disconcerting way than in the previous film. David Haxton’s BRINGING LIGHTS FORWARD (1970, 4 min, 16mm) was not available for preview but appears also to incorporate a film negative. The filmmaker’s website states that this and other elements of the film “serve as a literal demonstration of the way in which light affects the perceptual quality of the film image.” Another throughline in this program is the transformation of images, mostly those that pre-exist but also some, such as Haxton’s film, as they’re occurring on camera. Austrian experimental filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky’s TRAIN AGAIN (2021, 20 min, 35mm) is the third film in his Rushes Series and an homage to Austrian structuralist Kurt Kren. Where Weerasethakul’s film is the apotheosis of a contemplative tranquility, TRAIN AGAIN is movement, progression, building, and speed writ large. Using black-and-white footage of trains and various activities surrounding the transportation mode—some of it negative and others not, and most altered in some way—the trajectory of a great many things is exemplified. The history of man, machine and cinema are linked through continual motion. While similarities connect the six short films, each is alchemical in its own right, conveying the transformative properties of the moving (or not-so-moving) image. This is the second of the four-program “This Radiant World” series, co-curated by Julia Gibbs and former Cine-File managing editor Patrick Friel. [Kat Sachs]
Vincente Minnelli’s CABIN IN THE SKY (US)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Tuesday, 7pm
To call CABIN IN THE SKY groundbreaking for being one of the first Hollywood films with an all-Black cast would be slighting a good many achievements by Black independent filmmakers, who had been making movies with all-Black casts for decades before CABIN came out. Still, the film remains important as a document of what mainstream entertainment about Black people made by white filmmakers looked like in 1943. The film is an electrifying showcase for some brilliant performers—among them Lena Horne (in her only major film role), Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, Rex Ingram, and Duke Ellington and His Orchestra—yet it also perpetuates some inappropriate racial stereotypes. The moral contradiction of the film is complicated by Vincente Minnelli’s elegant, compassionate direction, which gives shape and dimension to the archetypal characters. This was the first feature Minnelli got to direct after several years of working assistant-level jobs on the MGM lot, and the film suggests an eruption of long-repressed art-making zeal. Minnelli’s camera movements are already beautiful, and the performers’ sense of comfort and happiness reflects the dignity he accorded to every actor he directed. The property came to Hollywood from Broadway, where it had been a successful musical. The stage show’s director (George Ballanchine), designer (Boris Aronson), and composer (Vernon Duke, né Vladimir Dukelsky) were all Georgian or of partial Georgian descent, which is one reason why no one cites CABIN IN THE SKY as a realistic work about Black American life. To their credit, though, the authors recognized their distance from their subject matter and, to overcome their lack of direct experience, aimed for a sort of universal folklorishness: the story is a blunt parable about an angel and a devil fighting for the soul of a well-meaning but easily tempted everyman. The familiar narrative provides a useful framework for some bang-up musical numbers. This is a Freed unit production from 1943, so needless to say, the singing and dancing are fantastic, displaying the sort of opulent, sophisticated visual imagination one associates with their work. Screening as part of Doc’s Tuesday night series: Nights of the Swingers! Jazz in Film. (1943, 98 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
Francis Ford Coppola’s THE CONVERSATION (US)
Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes
If Francis Ford Coppola only made films between 1972 and 1979, he would still be considered one of the greatest American directors of the second half of the twentieth century. And THE CONVERSATION would still be (arguably) his crown jewel. Made in between his landmark first two GODFATHER films, THE CONVERSATION still stands as Coppola's most fully realized project of his heroic era. Conceived in the ‘60s but not realized until the richly paranoid Watergate era, there’s a prescience to this film that made it hit harder on its release than Coppola could have imagined. THE CONVERSATION, loosely inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni’s BLOW-UP (1966), is about San Francisco surveillance expert Harry Caul. An incredibly taught, genuinely terrifying paranoid thriller, it revolves around a job Caul takes on to record a couple’s mid-day conversation in a busy public downtown square. Caul is the kind of guy who takes a job but doesn't ask questions. He’s into the work, the technology, how to get the job done, not who's hiring him and why. Unfortunately, the realities of wiretapping and surveillance don't lend themselves to such clean-cut separations; also, Caul’s Catholic guilt begins to eat away at him and affect his work. This is a masterful mystery thriller that goes deep into the American psyche of paranoia that was so prevalent at the time it was made. But it holds an even more interesting view on privacy and surveillance culture in our present times, when we live in a world with no expectation of privacy. Once there was a time when a man like Caul, who made sound recordings of people who never expected it, was a rarefied expert. Now, we happily turn the cameras on ourselves, and everyone behind us is collateral surveillance damage. The irony of THE CONVERSATION lies in the fact that, while its main character snoops on people for a living, he tries to maintain as private a life as possible. He goes so far as to not even have a phone in his house, using only public payphones to communicate when not face-to-face. This makes the ending of the film ever more delicious. Just as Caul inadvertently captured a conversation with implications beyond what he expected, the film itself inadvertently anticipated the zeitgeist of 1974. It was released just a few months before President Richard Nixon’s resignation, an event bound up in wiretaps and surveillance. To Coppola’s shock, some of the actual equipment and techniques used in the film were used by the Nixon administration. Because of this, Coppola had to deny any real-world influence by pointing out that the film had been written before Nixon was in office and completed before his paranoid transgressions were made public. But besides the strange real-world coincidences and the weaving, mysterious plot, THE CONVERSATION is one of the most technically inspired films ever made. The sound editing here is beyond brilliant. In our age of YouTube clickbait-oriented “film criticism,” the term masterclass gets thrown about to the point of it being near meaningless. But when confronted with what may be the pinnacle of sound design in film, I’d say it's actually appropriate in this case. The sound was created by Walter Murch, who would later be the first person ever to be credited as sound designer on a film (for APOCALYPSE NOW). It is no exaggeration to say that sound itself not only plays a key role in this film; it's actually a character. Perhaps the main character. Seeing this film on a new 35mm print will only show off how insanely ahead of its time and, yes, masterful it really is. In our world of doorbell cameras, red light cameras, ATM cameras, ShotSpotter, and those super creepy Facebook recommendations that seem to come just minutes after you mentioned to a friend how you were thinking of maybe getting some Thai food later, THE CONVERSATION distills our still deep-seated paranoia of being watched (even if now we know we are) into a powerful, timeless, piece of art. (1974, 113 mins, 35mm) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor’s THE FRESHMAN (US/Silent)
Chicago Film Society at the Music Box Theatre – Saturday, 11:30am
Among the so-called “Big Three” men of silent comedy, Harold Lloyd was the one with whom audiences could most easily identify. Far from the cartoonish tramp of Charlie Chaplin and the nonplussed adventurer of Buster Keaton, Lloyd usually played an awkward regular Joe in bookish spectacles whose ambitions were largely modest and attainable. THE FRESHMAN marked a bit of a departure from what Lloyd’s fans had come to expect. Instead of performing feats of daring-do, like climbing up the outside of a tall building in SAFETY LAST! (1923), Lloyd’s character in THE FRESHMAN, the aptly named Harold Lamb, must contend with the rigors of fitting in as a college freshman. To prevent audiences from feeling they were heading into rarified surroundings, a title card assures us that Tate College is “a large football stadium with a college attached.” Harold’s hope is to be named the most popular man on campus, but he has a long way to go to dethrone the current BMOC, football captain Chet Trask (James H. Anderson). In fact, through his clumsy attempts to make friends, Harold becomes the campus clod. Most of the gags in the film involve Harold as the butt of some embarrassing prank instigated by a small clique led by The College Cad (Brooks Benedict), but Harold comes in for some serious injury at the hands of The Football Coach (Pat Harmon) when he is used as a tackle dummy for hours. The love of a good, working-class woman (Jobyna Ralston) redeems Harold, though her message to him to make friends by being himself is rather lost when he gains popularity by miraculously scoring the winning touchdown in the climactic big game. While I found the premise of the film to be rather sad and to start off on a sexist note, Lloyd and his great supporting cast execute their gags with precision and spunk. The title cards themselves are stylishly drawn and cleverly written, and Lloyd manages to pull off a couple of terrific sound-related gags without ever needing the sounds themselves. Preston Sturges used footage from THE FRESHMAN in directing Lloyd in his last film appearance, THE SIN OF HAROLD DIDDLEBOCK (1947), which examines what happens to those who have only their past glories to recommend them in their later years. Preceded by Putnam Family Home Movies (1930s, 10 min, 16mm) and including
live musical accompaniment by Music Box house organist Dennis Scott. (1925, 76 min, 35mm) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
George Cukor’s GASLIGHT (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 7pm
Almost 80 years after its premiere, George Cukor’s GASLIGHT remains an essential and influential staple of the psychological thriller genre, successfully blending elements of horror, film noir and melodrama like few other films of its era. After a two-week whirlwind romance, Paula (an incredible Ingrid Bergman) marries Gregory (Charles Boyer), who convinces her to move back into her deceased aunt’s house in London. This childhood home, however, is not a place of comfort for Paula, as her aunt was brutally murdered there years ago. Gregory’s manipulation doesn’t stop there: his increasingly abusive behavior towards his wife involves cutting her off from the outside world and systematically convincing her she’s going mad. With memorable supporting performances from Joseph Cotten, Dame May Whitty, and Angela Lansbury (in her movie debut), GASLIGHT is a skilled illustration of psychological torture. The camera at times isolates Paula from everything and everyone around her, and Bergman’s expressive face reveals each thought and emotion as she stands amongst the decisively crowded mise-en-scène. In other moments, the camera flies into close-up, suggesting the insidious force traumatizing Paula; Cukor merges performance, camerawork, and staging in spectacularly practiced ways. Perhaps the largest cultural effect of the film is felt in the denominalization of the title; also, “gaslighting” has recently become a more widely recognizable tactic of abusers. GASLIGHT often feels surprisingly contemporary—it’s impossible to watch it and not consider present dialogues surrounding true crime stories, especially regarding female audiences. Early in the film, Paula encounters an older lady on the train who is enthusiastic to describe true and fictional accounts of violent crimes against women. This continues to be a familiar conversation, and it establishes GASLIGHT as a strikingly realistic antecedent of current cultural fascinations. Screening as part of the Film Center’s Bad Romance Series. (1944, 118 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]
Elaine May's A NEW LEAF (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 7pm
Cine-File co-managing editor Ben Sachs, also my husband, once wrote for this site that F.W. Murnau’s SUNRISE is “probably one of the greatest [movies] ever made about love.” I disagreed, arguing that I didn’t think it was very loving for a husband to try to kill his wife. It was my opinion that, at the bare minimum, romance should be free of attempted murder, something I expect as much from my auteurs as I do my spouse. But Elaine May’s A NEW LEAF has swayed me, at least in the filmic sense. (Ben and I are eight years into a murder-free marriage, and I don’t foresee myself altering those preferences.) May was the second woman after Ida Lupino to direct a major Hollywood feature; she was the first to both write and direct one, and she also stars in this woefully underappreciated black comedy. Walter Matthau plays Henry Graham, a seemingly asexual playboy who decides to marry after exhausting his inheritance. He sets his sights on May’s character, Henrietta Lowell, a wealthy heiress who teaches botany and dreams of discovering a new species of fern. Such a description should provide an insight into why Henry picks her as his intended target. Except he doesn’t intend just to marry her, but also to kill her, so that he can assume her riches and continue his life of leisure. A few critics have described the film as cockeyed, a sentiment May would likely agree with for different reasons. The original version was a whopping 180 minutes, and she fought to have her name removed from it after Paramount edited it down to its current length. I can only imagine that it seemed as lopsided to her as the present iteration might seem to some. Still, the brilliance of May’s careful direction and Matthau’s subtle dramatics are fully evident by the film’s end. Just as the set-up recalls SUNRISE, the climax is reminiscent of Roberto Rossellini’s JOURNEY TO ITALY. But instead of a religious procession inspiring a romantic miracle, it’s a fern that prompts Henry’s characteristically supercilious epiphany. Screening as part of the Film Center’s Bad Romance Series. (1971, 102 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]
Akira Kurosawa's YOJIMBO (Japan)
Music Box Theatre – Saturday, 4:15pm
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, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s FLEE (Denmark/Animation/Documentary)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
Mass media has a tendency to reduce refugees to a faceless, monolithic Other; in ubiquitous images of teeming crowds spilling off lifeboats or huddled in asylum centers, a harmful narrative is perpetuated that anonymizes and dehumanizes a vast array of individuals seeking to escape myriad perilous circumstances. FLEE is a compassionate, much-needed corrective to the popular narrative, replacing xenophobic generalizations with lived specificities. The film is structured as an extended interview between former refugee Amin Nawabi and Jonas Poher Rasmussen, his close friend; crucially, this marks the first time Amin has shared his story, making FLEE a project of genuine biographical revelation. In his soft-spoken but candid words, Amin recounts his turbulent upbringing in war-torn Kabul, Afghanistan, in the 1980s and his and his family’s tense, splintered attempts to find asylum in safer lands. Compounding the danger was Amin’s burgeoning awareness of his homosexuality, one of many facets of his identity he learned to suppress for the sake of survival (now out and married, his forthcoming observations about his nascent gay desire provide FLEE’s loveliest moments). Rasmussen renders both the present-day interview and the dramatic re-creations of Amin's harrowing journey in animation, a decision no doubt motivated in part by a respect for Amin’s privacy, allowing him to talk openly about his experiences without having to fear the sensationalistic exposure made possible by photography. Although the primary animation style here is more serviceable than compelling in its own right (better are the intermittent passages that take on an expressionistic, charcoal-like aesthetic), it feels beside the point to quibble. What’s more pertinent is the very use of the animated medium both to fill in for what can’t be shown and to foreground Amin’s voice, tacitly privileging his oral history over the schematics of visual re-presentation. His narration illuminates with great clarity and palpability not only the social, political, and economic conditions of his displacement, but the lingering, internalized shame and vulnerability that continue to pattern his thoughts and behavior. A stirring testimony, FLEE suggests how simply being able to tell your own story can be a radical and liberating act of agency. (2021, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
Hong Sang-soo's INTRODUCTION (South Korea)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo has been so prolific for so long, obsessively revisiting the same narrative and stylistic tropes, that it is often difficult even for viewers who are well-versed in his work to understand some of the gradual, almost imperceptible ways his unique brand of cinema has evolved over time. Anyone with a cursory familiarity with Hong's movies knows to expect bifurcated structures, long takes, and cringe humor arising from soju-fueled conversations between men and women (many of them artists). But when exactly did he abandon the nudity and sex scenes that were so prominent in his early films? And when did he begin the dramatic use of zooms so prevalent in his more recent work? I've seen 21 of his 26 movies, many more than once, and I cannot tell you. INTRODUCTION, Hong's 25th feature, marks a noticeably new chapter in the director's filmography: much like his hero Eric Rohmer, who pared down his crew to just three people when making THE GREEN RAY (1986) (Hong's personal favorite), the Korean director is also choosing to work with a skeleton crew now. INTRODUCTION is the first film in which he serves as his own cinematographer, a feat that he has since repeated on IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE, his second feature of 2021, as well as the forthcoming THE NOVELIST'S FILM. The result is a visual style that seems almost self-consciously primitive—with images that swim in and out of focus, interior scenes that appear to be unlit entirely and windows that are completely blown out. (The visual crudeness is less noticeable in INTRODUCTION, which is shot in forgiving black-and-white, than it is in the smeary digital color of IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE.) This minimalist/handmade aesthetic is perfectly captured by the movie's U.S. theatrical-release poster, which consists of a simple pencil sketch. Hong's approach to narrative and characterization, however, remains as complex as ever: this short comedy-drama follows an aimless young man, Young-ho (Shin Seok-ho), who has appointments with three loved ones in three discreet vignettes. In the first, he visits his doctor-father (Kim Young-ho) at work but remains in the waiting room while Dad is preoccupied tending to a patient who happens to be a famous actor (Ki Joo-Bong). In the second, Young-ho travels to Berlin to visit his fashion-student girlfriend (Park Mi-so) on a mere whim. In the third, he meets his mother (Cho Yun-hee) and her friend, the same actor from the opening scene, at a restaurant for lunch. Not much happens, but impish humor arises from what critic Chuck Bowen refers to as the film's "structural perversity"—the sense that Young-ho, the ostensible protagonist, is continually forgotten about, sidelined or marginalized by the other characters. Hong also includes a daring leap forward in time and a realistic dream sequence, devices that can only be understood in retrospect, and prove delightful examples of the filmmaker's poker-faced narrative gamesmanship. (2021, 66 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
Guy Maddin's CAREFUL (Canada)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Wednesday, 7pm
CAREFUL, director Guy Maddin's third feature, is a perfect realization of his postmodern appropriation of silent film aesthetics and Freudian psychosexual theories. The film takes place in a small Alpine town where all the residents speak in whispers for fear of starting an avalanche. The suppression of noise in the village naturally makes outbursts of emotion and impulse undesirable—resulting in a rather repressed and inhibited populace. Of course, this is where the real fun starts for Maddin, who lets this scenario devolve to explore his by-now usual interests of incest, mother obsession, hysteria, and sexual deviance. Guy Maddin's expert use of silent film techniques (images by Murnau, editing by Eisenstein) rather effectively provides a burlesque of the popular cultural notion that past times were more decent ones. Screening as part of Doc’s Wednesday night series: A Guy Maddin Retrospective. (1992, 100 min, 35mm) [Doug McLaren]
Celeste Bell and Paul Sng’s POLY STYRENE: I AM A CLICHÉ (UK/Documentary)
Music Box Theatre – Wednesday, 9:45pm
In the early days of punk rock in the United Kingdom, a disaffected, mixed-race young woman from the projects of London’s Brixton neighborhood saw the Sex Pistols in an early performance and decided to form a band. That band, X-Ray Spex, and that young woman, the self-christened Poly Styrene, took the new music scene by storm. POLY STYRENE: I AM A CLICHÉ documents the life and times of the former Marianne Elliot-Said through the eyes of her daughter, Celeste Bell (author of Day Glo: The Poly Styrene Story, product-placed in the documentary), still grieving over her mother’s death from cancer in 2011, and the fans and people in Poly’s life who were inspired by her, angered by her, and deeply concerned about her. Poly was a self-acknowledged rebel whose single “Oh Bondage, Up Yours!” is a classic feminist anthem. While she was an attractive woman obsessed with fashion, she eschewed traditional glamor by inventing her own thrift store chic and cementing braces to her teeth. A hippie at heart, Poly was an extremely sensitive psychic sponge, which was an important source of her creativity but also a dangerous vulnerability. Her first trip to New York City to play with her band at CBGB was an enormous shock to her system, as she saw the plastic, consumerist world she made fun of in England in full, world-destroying flower. The film addresses memories Bell has of her grandparents, a white Scots Irish woman and a Somali dock worker who left the family early, and her not-good-enough mother whom she left at the age of 8. Others interviewed include Poly’s bandmates, her sister Hazel Emmons and former husband Adrian Bell, and those who found inspiration in her music and style, including fashion designer Vivienne Westwood and Gina Birch, founding member of post-punk band The Raincoats. Poly’s mental turmoil was eventually diagnosed as bipolar disorder, and with on-and-off medication, she found relative stability in the Hare Krishna movement and continued to cut records. Generous clips of X-Ray Spex performances, interviews Poly gave, and Poly’s own words, voiced by Ruth Negga, round out an interesting portrait of a music pioneer. (2021, 134 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Jóhann Jóhannsson’s LAST AND FIRST MEN (Iceland)
Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes
Based on Olaf Stapledon's pioneering sci-fi novella from 1930, LAST AND FIRST MEN is the posthumously released feature-length directorial debut by composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. Originally designed as a multimedia project, this was adapted into a form suited for a theatrical release after Jóhannsson’s passing in 2018; it's now finally getting the opportunity to make the rounds on the big screen. Jóhannsson shot the film in black-and-white 16mm, and his incredible score is enhanced by narration from none other than Tilda Swinton. She voices a visitor from a future human species who is now among the last of her kind. In a final effort to save humankind, the "last men" send a message back to us, the "first men," describing what is to come. The only thing accompanying the narration and score are images of towering sculptures, shot from all sorts of fascinating angles that evoke a sense of otherworldliness. Swinton explains how humans eventually move to Neptune due to Earth being uninhabitable; somewhere along the way, they evolve another appendage that can gaze up to the stars with the same magnifying power as our modern telescopes. Jóhannsson’s alien and awe-inspiring score really lets you imagine what life might be like millions of years in the future. At times the music roars to a terrifying crescendo, with chaotic images of the universe at full display, or pulls back to something that suggests the nature of a being that can live over one thousand years. As people change from beast to human to whatever unfamiliar form we may take down our uncertain path, one thing remains the same: We will always look to the heavens in awe and in search of answers. With imminent doom facing us on a global scale, we can find solace in shared struggle and the human will that runs through our veins. (2020, 71 mins, DCP Digital) [Drew Van Weelden]
Pedro Almodóvar’s VOLVER (Spain)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 1pm
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]
Kim Ki-young's THE HOUSEMAID (South Korea)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm
THE HOUSEMAID, Kim Ki-young’s mind-blowing cult classic from 1960, offers a unique hybrid of domestic horror, social commentary, black comedy, and lurid melodrama that's as pungent today as when it was first released. Made during South Korea's original cinematic Golden Age, a brief window of time when the country was between military dictators, Kim’s provocative and singularly nutty film tells the twisted tale of a piano teacher and aspiring bourgeois, Kim Dong-shik (Kim Jin-kyu), whose brief affair with the mentally unbalanced young maid (Lee Eun-shim) he's hired to help his overworked wife (Ju Jeung-nyeo) threatens to tear the family apart. Kim's lively mise-en-scène exploits its chief location of the family's two-story home to maximum effect, with each character seemingly trapped in his or her own box-like room, the distance between which is continually emphasized by many fluid tracking shots and one very dangerous staircase. The way the story touches on both the characters' aspirations to an ideal middle-class life (symbolized by the upstairs "piano room") and fears about the disintegration of the family unit makes the subject matter universal and timeless, but fans of contemporary South Korean cinema should recognize the articulation of working-class rage against the "one percent" as being hugely influential on Bong Joon-ho's PARASITE in particular. And this is to say nothing of a twist ending that will knock you into next week. THE HOUSEMAID was loosely remade twice by Kim Ki-young himself, as WOMAN OF FIRE (1971) and WOMAN OF FIRE '82 (1982), and more recently by Im Sang-soo (as THE HOUSEMAID in 2010), but the O.G. version remains unsurpassed. The gorgeous high-contrast black-and-white cinematography still looks immaculate, thanks to an extensive digital restoration by Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project, which was based on the original camera negative (except for two reels of lower quality that had to be sourced from an exhibition print). Screening as part of Doc’s Friday night series: Classics of South Korean Cinema. (1960, 111 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]
Pedro Almodóvar’s BROKEN EMBRACES (Spain)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Wednesday, 7pm
BROKEN EMBRACES is one of the films Pedro Almodóvar made during what I call his Blue Period—those films from the early aughts to the early 2010s that retain elements of his trademark bawdiness but are altogether more serious, even melancholy, in their particular modulation. This is perhaps the most traditionally melodramatic of his films, with a structure that is decidedly Sirkian in its passionate crescendo and tragic rallentando. Lluís Homar, who’d previously acted in Almodóvar’s BAD EDUCATION (2004), stars as a blind filmmaker confronted with his past. After he’s visited by a strange aspiring filmmaker and learns about the death of a millionaire with whom he’d previously been acquainted, the writer-director, now calling himself Harry Caine, reveals his history to his agent’s son, whom he’s taking care of after the latter accidentally overdoses on drugs. The film mainly consists of a lengthy flashback in which Harry—then going by his real name, Mateo—falls in love with the millionaire’s mistress, Magdalena (Penélope Cruz, in her fourth collaboration with Almodóvar), whom he chose to star in his latest production. Not for nothing, the film-within-the-film is basically Almodóvar’s WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN (1988) with Magdalena playing the Carmen Maura character. (One meta reference looks back but another looks forward: a poster for a film called PARALLEL MOTHERS can be seen on the wall of Harry/Mateo’s office.) The elderly millionaire, who’s also producing the film, is overly controlling and begins spying on Magdelena by way of a professional lip-reader whom he hires to analyze on-set footage taken by his son. He becomes enraged when he learns of the affair between Mateo and Magdelena, devolving into physical abuse. There’s a tenuous connection to the present, with some loose threads (though I should say “loose celluloid,” as recutting the film-within-the-film, GIRLS AND SUITCASES, becomes a source of catharsis for Harry/Mateo) tied up by the end, but mostly it’s a film concerned with the past. Perhaps this Blue Period is the quasi-beginning of Almodóvar’s current period, with films like PAIN AND GLORY and PARALLEL MOTHERS rooted in what came before; much of Almodóvar’s work is so alive in the present that this eye to the past suggests a creative reckoning, not necessarily with the direct self (though that’s evident in PAIN AND GLORY), but with all the ways in which an artist can be defined. Screening as part of the Film Center’s ¡PEDRO! Series. (2009, 127 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]
Lina Wertmüller’s THE SEDUCTION OF MIMI (Italy)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday and Saturday, 9:30pm
Lina Wertmüller’s THE SEDUCTION OF MIMI combines the wonderfully intriguing—albeit disorienting—political nuances of Italian cinema with a sort of broad comedy that has at its center Giancarlo Giannini’s Chaplinesque charm. Wertmüller’s breakout hit follows Giannini’s Mimi, a Sicilian laborer, as he goes north to find work after a run-in with the mafia, having voted communist out of disdain for the status quo. There he finds a better job, and a better lover, his own wife refusing to have sex with him while his mistress pledges herself only to him. In true tragicomic fashion, it’s all downhill from there. Wertmüller, who also wrote the script, rewards Mimi for his conviction but then punishes him when he begins to experience happiness by virtue of traditionally bourgeois ideals. He’s not so much a character, much less a man, as he is Wertmüller’s lab rat, put to test in a political maze that rewards principles with cheese and hypocrisy with poison. Screening as part of the Film Center’s Fringe Benefits Series. (1971, 121 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
Nicolas Roeg's THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (UK)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 6pm
At once the origin story of a pop icon, a McLuhan-esque critique of mass media, a postmodern western, and a commentary on the space age, Nicolas Roeg's elusive, kaleidoscopic THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH firmly defies classification. David Bowie plays Thomas Jerome Newton (in his first film role), an extraterrestrial who has traveled to Earth in search of water for his drought-stricken planet. Candy Clark and Rip Torn turn in equally offbeat performances as Newton's lover and scientific consultant, respectively. The plot, which involves Newton becoming a technology tycoon and celebrity enigma, is disjointed and incoherent. The sooner one can refrain from attempting to impose a conventional narrative structure onto the film, the easier it becomes to appreciate it as a freeform, hallucinatory head trip. Stylistically, the film is as capricious and unpredictable as Bowie's off-screen shape-shifting persona. Roeg hurls every trick in his cinematic arsenal at the screen, from point of view shots to trippy flashbacks. Time is warped to the point that days, months, and even years vanish between scenes, and just when things begin to feel stagnant, the viewer is bombarded with a neon lit alien sex scene right out of a Jodorowsky graphic novel. A film that could have only been made by a foreigner, THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH is a twisted fun house mirror image of post-60s America in which even the most far out of outsiders embraces the ways of the establishment: capitalism, religion, and the imbibing of copious amounts of gin. Screening as part of 50/50, the Siskel’s year-long series including a film from each year the theater has been open. (1976, 139 min, DCP Digital) [Harrison Sherrod]
Alain Resnais' HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR (France)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Sunday, 7pm
Alain Resnais beautifully interweaves themes of love, memory, and oblivion with flashbacks to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR. This gem of the French New Wave blissfully depicts a Japanese architect and French actresses' torrid love affair. "You're destroying me. You're good for me." Elle (Emmanuelle Riva) and Lui's (Eiji Okada) passion burns as hot as the bomb that leveled Hiroshima. Intercut with footage of the city and its denizens post-blast, Resnais juxtaposes intimacy with ugly wreckage. Seemingly this says that love completely destroys a person and turns them into something completely different. Memory's role in this film is heavily interlaced with love. Lui reminds Elle of her first true love, a German solider she met during World War II. His memory brings back tragic thoughts for Elle, who forcefully tries to forget Lui immediately. Forgetfulness and the mental void that accompanies it push the realization that both Lui and Elle are truly symbols for any young, intense romance. HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR features quick editing that is synonymous with the film movement to which it belongs. These rapid transitions push the imagery conjured by the a-bomb and the fleeting nature of the protagonists' relationship. The film's score ranges from light and playful to hauntingly tragic—always lending itself perfectly to each scene. Many lessons can be imparted from this film, but chief among them is that love's eternal bonds can be both a blessing and a curse. Screening as part of Doc’s Sunday night series: Destroy, She Said: A Marguerite Duras Retrospective. (1959, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Kyle Cubr]
Denis Villeneuve’s DUNE (US)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Saturday, 6pm
Much of the conversation surrounding Frank Herbert’s influential 1965 science-fiction novel Dune has been about how difficult it is to adapt, whether adaptations of it (particularly David Lynch’s 1984 version) are successes or failures, and even—as detailed by the documentary JODOROWSKY’S DUNE—how it has been adapted into cinema in unintended ways. Denis Villeneuve’s highly anticipated take on the source material is an efficacious amalgamation of all those conversations, skillfully engaging with a narratively and culturally complicated text. Villeneuve has proven more than adept at bringing weighty science fiction franchises back to the big screen; his BLADE RUNNER 2049 (2017) was successful as both a sequel and as a visual feat. This accomplishment continues in DUNE, with multiple shots stunningly rendered in abstract imagery of alien settings and technology. In a far-distant future, faster-than-light space travel is made possible by a substance known as “spice,” found only on one planet, the desert-based Arrakis. The powerful families of the universe are embroiled in violent struggle for control over this planet and its precious resource, with the young heir Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) finding himself portentously at the center of the conflict. It’s a complex plot with lots of characters, but DUNE effectively conveys issues of colonization, environmental devastation, and political and interpersonal concerns. At the core of the film are the characters, and standing out is Paul’s mother, Lady Jessica, played by Rebecca Ferguson. Jessica’s love for Paul and his father—the honorable Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac)—is burdened by her devotion to the influential religious sisterhood in which she was raised and trained, and this group has insidious political plans of their own. Ferguson brings Lady Jessica to life in shockingly honest ways as the character grapples with myriad roles; her position as mother, partner, and devoted acolyte often clash, and Ferguson’s restrained performance reflects that internal struggle, particularly in relation to Paul. As with Jessica, the film delicately reflects its characters’ inner lives in gorgeous costuming and set and art design. Like the sandworms that populate Arrakis, the world of DUNE is massive, but its large ideas and colossal visuals are grounded in their effects on the character’s choices. Screening as part of Doc’s Saturday night series: The French Docspatch: New Releases. (2021, 156 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
Takashi Miike's ICHI THE KILLER (Japan)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Thursday, 9:30pm
ICHI THE KILLER isn’t the best of the seven movies Takshi Miike directed in 2001—that would be either the yakuza saga AGITATOR or the family comedy-cum-zombie-musical THE HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS. Nor is it the most tasteless—that would be VISITOR Q, a movie that opens with a discomfitingly comic depiction of incest and steadily ups the ante from there. ICHI’s distinction is that it’s the one that gained the most attention in the West, its popularity confirming Miike’s reputation here as a cult figure and shockmeister. The underground success of ICHI THE KILLER (which built on that of AUDITION and the first DEAD OR ALIVE, both made two years earlier) proved to be a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it generated enough interest in Miike to create a DVD market for his many other films, which range from children’s fare to serious crime dramas to art house movies; on the other hand, it overshadowed his less brazen work to the extent that relatively few U.S. critics acknowledged it until the mid-to-late 2000s. Like PINK FLAMINGOS or SALO, ICHI THE KILLER is an all-time shocker, a movie that presents such extreme content—and so much of it—that you’re likely to watch it with mouth agape. Miike indulges in graphic scenes of torture and mutilation, and the settings are so garish and sleazy that they make the violence seem more disgusting than it actually is. (It’s worth noting that the film’s most brutal acts take place offscreen.) At the same time, the film’s tone is so giddy as to seem practically innocent—Miike, adapting a manga by Hideo Yamamoto, maintains a sense of cartoonish escapism that emphasizes the imaginative quality of the gore. You watch the film much like you read the Marquis de Sade’s fiction—to find out just how far the perverse imagination reaches. Essential to the film’s comic/grotesque tone is Tadanobu Asano, who gives one of the great lead performances in a Miike movie. He plays Kakihara, a yakuza enforcer searching for his missing boss. The character aspires to the be ultimate sadomasochist, devising elaborate methods of torture to punish his enemies and taking delight in experiencing pain. (In what may the film’s most unforgettable set piece, Kakihara cuts out his own tongue to ask forgiveness of a rival crime boss.) Running parallel to Kakihara’s story is that of the title character, an assassin who kills his victims while under hypnosis. Ichi takes no delight from killing; in fact, when he realizes what he’s done he sobs like a baby. The most surprising thing about ICHI THE KILLER—apart from its surface naturalism, which Miike creates through a rigorous long-take style—is the sensitivity with which the filmmakers characterize the antihero. Ichi is always weirdly pathetic; his attacks of conscience offset the extreme violence, making the movie especially discomforting. The film culminates in one of the most brilliant sequences in Miike’s career, as the two narratives merge and the disparate themes (of pain and pleasure, self-definition versus self-negation) come together and reach fruition. Miike has always been a more sophisticated filmmaker than he lets on, as the symphonic structure of ICHI THE KILLER demonstrates. Though he would top this film many times over, it still stands as one of his most potent. Screening as part of Doc’s second Thursday night series: No Love in Your Violence: A Takashi Miike Retrospective. (2001, 129 min, Digital Projection) [Ben Sachs]
Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s DRIVE MY CAR (Japan)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Select showtimes through Sunday
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, DCP Digital) [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)
David Lynch’s much-maligned 1984 film DUNE (137 min, DCP Digital) screens on Saturday at 9pm after the 2021 version.
On Monday, a double feature of Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 silent Soviet film BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (66 min, Digital Projection) and Emilio Gómez Muriel and Fred Zinnemann's 1936 film REDES (65 min, Digital Projection) screens beginning at 7pm.
Andrew Davis’ 1996 film CHAIN REACTION (107 min, Digital Projection) screens on Thursday at 7pm. More info on all screenings and Covid-related policies here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
John Liu and Kurtis Spieler’s 1984 film NEW YORK NINJA (93 min), recently restored by Vinegar Syndrome, screens on 35mm on Friday and Saturday at midnight and Sunday at 7pm.
The Empty Bottle screens Boy Harsher’s THE RUNNER, a film made in conjunction with their fifth album release, on Friday; the 9:30pm and 10:45pm screenings are sold out, but tickets are still available for the midnight screening. More info on these events here.
Dice Media’s FOLLOW THE SMOKE (90 min, DCP Digital) screens on Saturday at 9:45pm. More info on all Music Box Theatre screenings 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
⚫ Media Burn Archive
Media Burn Archive hosts film pioneers Dean and Dudley Evenson for a virtual screening and discussion of their 1979 retrospective film THE STORY OF THE SOUNDINGS OF THE PLANET on Thursday at 6pm. The event will be moderated by film scholar Peter Sachs Collopy. 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
James Blue’s THE OLIVE TREES OF JUSTICE (France)
Available to rent through Cornell Cinema here
The French colonial experience indelibly marked a generation of French and Francophone filmmakers. Pied-noire Claire Denis made two films specifically related to her upbringing in West Africa: the nostalgia-ridden CHOCOLAT (1988) and the colonists’ nightmare, WHITE MATERIAL (2009). Belgian French filmmaker Agnès Varda includes a French soldier on leave from Algeria in CLÉO FROM 5 TO 7 (1962), and Alain Resnais contends with an atrocity committed by French occupying forces in MURIEL (1963). But it took two outsiders—Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo and American director James Blue—to face the brutality of the Algerian War head-on. Pontecorvo’s THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (1966) is justly considered a classic of neorealism in depicting the war only four years after it ended. Blue, best known as a documentarian and educator, chose to make his only narrative feature, THE OLIVE TREES OF JUSTICE, in Algiers as the war was raging. The barbed wire, armored cars, checkpoints, and especially the poverty, are all as they were during the four months Blue shot the film with an majority Arab crew, first-time actors, and the author of the book on which the film is based, Jean Pélégri, playing the dying father of the main protagonist, Jean (Pierre Prothon). In the film’s simple story, Jean, a pied-noir who left Algeria when he came of age to settle in France and start a family, has returned to Algiers to see his ailing father and mother (Marie Decaître). His father was one of the pioneers of grape-growing and wine-making in Algeria, and Jean grew up on their farm with two Arab children, Said and Boralfa, as his best friends. Now that he has returned, he hopes to reconnect with them. Said has gone into the mountains to fight for Algerian independence, but Jean meets up again with Boralfa when he comes by to pay his respects to Jean’s father after the patriarch’s death. In flashback, the film indulges Jean’s nostalgia for the carefree days he spent on the farm as a boy, though his doting father is sometimes harsh with the Arab field hands and especially with some Algerians who storm his home begging for work. (Interestingly, the film depicts the use of an olive branch to broker peace between the angry parties.) Back in real time, Jean’s trek through the streets of Algiers is disturbing, particularly when he arrives at the shanty of his mother’s longtime housekeeper, Fatima. While the interior of Fatima’s home is filled with what looks like furniture from the comfortable home Jean’s family left when his father had to sell the farm, the exterior and surrounding environment are as makeshift as it gets. Jean’s Aunt Louise (Huguette Poggi), a single woman hanging on to her farm by the skin of her teeth (shades of Isabelle Huppert’s character in WHITE MATERIAL), reflects the desperate harshness of the pieds-noirs toward their rebelling subjects by advocating the beating or killing of 10 Arabs for every one European injured or killed. “It’s all they understand,” she says. In a monologue, Boralfa tells Jean how Louise cheated him and how Jean’s father taught him how to get back at her. This improvised but true story distills the evils of colonialism and why colonists won’t leave unless they are driven out. THE OLIVE TREES OF JUSTICE won the first Critics Prize ever given at the Cannes Film Festival, but it was essentially banned in France. The beautiful 4K restoration of this absorbing film, with an evocative score by Maurice Jarré, has just become available in the United States. It should not be missed. (1962, 81 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
CINE-LIST: January 28 - February 3, 2022
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Kyle Cubr, John Dickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Michael Frank, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Raphael Jose Martinez, Doug McLaren, Harrison Sherrod, Michael Glover Smith, Drew Van Weelden, Candace Wirt