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. All 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 #22 — New!
In anticipation of the Highs and Lows series starting February 12 at the Music Box (which comprises eight double features of a “lowbrow” movie paired with an art film), Cine-File editors Ben and Kat Sachs talk high and low cinema with series programmers Will Morris and John Dickson (who's also a Cine-File contributor). The discussion topics range from Robert Bresson to '90s teen comedies, with considerations along the way of critic Robin Wood, programmer Henri Langlois, and the 1980s work of Francis Ford Coppola. Things get a little wild. 🙃 The introductory theme is by local film composer Ben Van Vlissingen.
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Listen to the Cine-Cast here!
📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING
Takashi Miike’s THE BIRD PEOPLE IN CHINA (Japan) - NOTE! This screening has been replaced with a screening of Miike’s LEY LINES (1999)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Thursday, 9:30pm
Among the world’s most renowned directors, Takashi Miike is not only one of the most prolific, but also one of the most unpredictable. While he may be best known for his ultraviolence and crime films, he has produced everything from science fiction films (TERRA FORMARS [2016]) and fantasies (YATTÂMAN [2009]) to the almost undefinable horror musical THE HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS (2001). Miike himself has traced the varied cinematic opportunities he has tackled to THE BIRD PEOPLE IN CHINA, a film he took over from another producer who just couldn’t get it done. The magical story of a Japanese businessman and a yakuza who go deep into an undeveloped region of Yun Nan Province in search of high-quality jade is based on a book by Makoto Shiina, a serious novelist and essayist who has said that he writes fantasy and science fiction to refresh himself and his imagination. The idea of trying something new in a new country appealed to Miike, and he threw himself into the difficult shoot. Masahiro Motoki plays Wada, the young salaryman who is a last-minute substitute for this geological expedition when the original project manager ends up in the hospital (possibly by design). As Wada starts on his way to the “jade village,” Ujiie (Renji Ishibashi) accosts him and attaches himself to the project to protect the financial interests of the yakuza gang that loaned a large sum of money to Wada’s company. The trip to the village is arduous for Wada and Ujiie, but absolutely hilarious to watch. Their guide and translator, Shen (Mako), takes them over pitted roads in motorized wrecks, up mountain trails on foot, and finally, to a river they must negotiate on a raft pulled upstream by a team of river turtles. Once they reach the village, Wada and especially Ujiie are spellbound by the spectacular scenery and the flying class a young woman (Li Li Wang) conducts for the village youngsters, who strap homemade wings to their arms and flap through the verdant fields. The two men settle into the village, and Ujiie starts to undergo a radical change. When Wada prepares to return to Japan, Ujiie becomes the unlikely champion for rejecting capitalism and preserving the natural environment and the traditional lives of the people. Cinematographer Hideo Yamamoto seduces the audience with images that recall Fan Kuan’s “Travelers Among Mountains and Streams.” A wonderful score by Kôji Endô has a contemporary feel that unites the traditional with the modernizing Chinese society. The origin of the “bird people” of Yun Nan is a wonderful surprise I wouldn’t dream of spoiling. Suffice to say that I’ll never hear the Scottish folk song “Annie Laurie” again without thinking of THE BIRD PEOPLE IN CHINA. Screening as part of Doc’s second Thursday night series: No Love in Your Violence: A Takashi Miike Retrospective. (1998, 118 min, 35mm) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Stories in Sand and Glass: Animation by Caroline Leaf (Experimental Animation)
Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm (Free Admission)
A pioneer in the practice of sand and paint-on-glass animation, Caroline Leaf makes films that are abundant in awe-inspiring technique and somber whimsy. The Canadian-American filmmaker began her career in a way befitting her chimerical realizations: an architecture student at Harvard University, Leaf was invited to join the school’s first animation class. Unconfident in her drawing skills, she took sand from the beach and animated it on backlit glass under a camera to create her first film, SAND, OR PETER AND THE WOLF (1969, 10 min, a reimagining of the classic fairy tale. The film exhibits the first use of sand as a material for animation, cementing Leaf as a vanguard in the realm of experimental animators—experimental here being used in the purest sense of the word, with Leaf introducing a new method and a new way of considering what it means for something to assume an animated form. (This short wasn’t available for preview, but it will screen on a 16mm archival print from the Harvard Film Archives at Friday’s show.) This auspicious debut intrigued her professor, animator Derek Lamb, who also worked at the National Film Board (NFB) of Canada. Leaf went there to make the next several films in the program, starting with THE OWL WHO MARRIED A GOOSE: AN ESKIMO LEGEND (1974, 7 min, Digital Projection), on which she collaborated with Inuit artists to convey a wry legend from their culture. Leaf’s work is notable not just for the innovative style but also her resourceful narrative constructs, which are less stories than they are eddies of imagination, born from the key animating tennant of metamorphosis. “All my animating life I did not know how to make an edited cut,” she said, “and found my way around the problem by making morphed scene changes. Some would say my animation is noteworthy for its moving camera and morphing scene changes. I credit my originality to the animation class where we were left alone for the most part and found our own solutions.” The unwisely coupled animals speak Inuktitut to one another, with no subtitles provided; the overall effect is humorous and heartbreaking. Another sand animation, THE METAMORPHOSIS OF MR. SAMSA (1977, 9 min, Digital Projection), was also not available to preview, but, according to the NFB’s website, is a “sound film without words” based on Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Evident in Leaf’s oeuvre is a predilection for simplistic figurations whose narrative shrewdness allow for maximum creativity on her part. Adapting a text by Canadian writer Mordecai Richler; THE STREET (1976, 10 min, Digital Projection) considers a young boy’s response to a dying family member. Here Leaf employs another style of animation, ink on glass lit from below and shot from above. The effect is similar to her work with sand, indicating a vision that transcends form. Similarly, INTERVIEW (1979, 13 min, Digital Projection) features a variety of techniques and materials. Made with fellow animator Veronika Soul, the film involves each depicting the other in their respective style. (This work was also not available for preview.) Also featuring two figures is ENTRE DEUX SOEURS (TWO SISTERS) (1991, 10 min, Digital Video), which relates the bizarre relationship between two sisters, one a disfigured writer and the other her churlish companion, which gets thrown into disarray when a stranger visits. The discomfiting animation is scratched directly onto tinted 70mm Imax film, yet another technique that evinces Leaf’s mastery of coalescing form and content. Leaf has said her methods are one-off performances in that the image, composed of sand or paint on glass, no longer existed after she transformed it into the next image, and then the next. And so each of the films in this program is exhibitive of the liminality inherent to Leaf’s craft, of which nothing else exists except for these moving-image metamorphoses. [Kat Sachs]
Robert M. Young’s RICH KIDS (US)
Chicago Film Society (at Northeastern Illinois University, The Auditorium, Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) – Wednesday, 7:30pm
The late 1970s and early 1980s witnessed a cycle of surprisingly grown-up American films about issues faced by children, with the release of OVER THE EDGE, FOXES, LITTLE DARLINGS, OUT OF THE BLUE, and this largely forgotten comedy-drama executive produced by Robert Altman. Set on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, RICH KIDS centers on 12-year-olds Jamie and Franny. His mother and father divorced a few years ago; hers are in the process of splitting up. These kids meet at private school and become fast friends, spending lots of time alone because their clueless, archetypal Yuppie parents are too self-absorbed to realize their children are hanging out unsupervised. (This is one of those movies, like Michael Ritchie’s SEMI-TOUGH, that seems ready to bury the Me Decade.) There are few big events in RICH KIDS, as playwright Judith Ross (in her only produced screenplay) emphasizes character and milieu over plot, generating plenty of affecting insights about both. Like Kenneth Lonergan’s MARGARET (2011), the film is neither an overt critique of wealthy New York kids nor a myopic tribute to them. Ross and director Robert M. Young recognize that their subjects are exceedingly privileged, but they also recognize that there are universal qualities to their experience. There’s a superb sequence late in the film when Franny and Jamie discover their first feelings of sexual attraction vis-à-vis one another; their encounter is as poignant and embarrassing as these things typically are in real life, though thankfully, the scene decidedly avoids the squeamishness of something like FOXES or LITTLE DARLINGS. RICH KIDS features an early screen appearance by John Lithgow as Franny’s dad, a cameo by Irene Worth, and a characteristically witty turn by Paul Dooley (who was on quite a roll in 1979—he had delivered a memorable lead performance in Altman’s A PERFECT COUPLE just months before this came out), but, to the movie’s benefit, there are no other big names in the cast. With few movie-star associations hanging on the characters, they seem more ordinary and relatable. Ultimately, this feels less like a movie about rich kids than average kids with the misfortune to have been brought up in an ivory tower. Preceded by the 1941 Daffy Duck cartoon “The Henpecked Duck.” (8 min, 16mm). (1979, 96 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
George A. Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD (US)
Music Box Theatre – Friday and Saturday, Midnight
Writing about DAWN OF THE DEAD on first release, Dave Kehr likened George A. Romero to Jonathan Swift, highlighting the fierce moral vision behind the writer-director’s grisly social satire. This comparison isn’t inapt—the bluntness with which characters in DAWN confront matters of life and death might remind you of “A Modest Proposal”—but I think Mark Twain is a closer point of reference. Like Twain, Romero worked in a wholly American idiom; his best films are independent, tough, and colloquial. They’re also bracingly democratic: DAWN OF THE DEAD, for instance, provides one of cinema’s greatest capitalist fantasies (the heroes get to enjoy an entire shopping mall to themselves) as well as one of its greatest anticapitalist jokes (pace Kehr, the film equates wholesale shopping with wholesale slaughter). It would be short-sighted to claim the film endorses a particular stance toward capitalism, as what makes DAWN endure as art is the gracefulness with which Romero moves between different philosophical positions based on what the situations necessitate. Indeed, few films render so palpable the challenge of maintaining your morality when you’re struggling to survive. Romero’s ability to juggle complex moral issues with deftly executed violence and off-the-cuff humor is never less than exhilarating; moreover, he imagines the film’s apocalyptic American landscape so vividly that DAWN would be a masterpiece for the immersive storytelling alone. Thanks to Romero’s Twain-like feel for all-American faces and spaces, the environment is eerily, funnily similar to the one we already inhabit. In addition to the shopping mall, the memorable settings include a housing project and a small-time TV news studio; the cast, bereft of movie stars, resembles people you’d see on the street. The film’s anonymous qualities are thrown into relief by Tom Savini’s highly imaginative makeup and gore effects, which remain the gold standard for the genre. (1979, 127 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Courtney Stephens and Pacho Velez's THE AMERICAN SECTOR (US/Documentary)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) – Thursday, 7pm [Free Admission]
For those of us who witnessed it, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was a surprise and the beginning of a sea change in the world order as we knew it. In the ensuing years, sections of the Wall were sold to interested buyers all over the world as historical artifacts and, in some cases, works of graffiti art. Co-directors Courtney Stephens and Pacho Velez spent more than a year crisscrossing the United States to places where one can view pieces of the Wall. The often-random distribution of Wall sections is quite interesting. The film opens with one concrete monolith sitting isolated in the middle of a forest. Two others show up at the side of an interstate highway, apparently not even near a rest stop. Southern California has more Wall segments than any other part of the country, though no one seems to know why. More expected are the museums and other institutions that house segments and chunks, including the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library, where a rather beautiful sculpture shows bronze horses in active motion trampling the Wall underfoot. I was excited to learn that a part of the wall lives inside the Brown Line’s Western ‘L’ station, which I went in and out of for years when I lived in Lincoln Square, an ethnic German neighborhood. Perhaps most fascinating is an audio recording of Stephens speaking with someone at CIA headquarters, who explains that many clearances would be needed for Stephens and Velez to film the section at Langley. The spokeswoman says that people working for the CIA wondered whether the end of the Cold War meant that the agency would be disbanded—how naïvely quaint. I’m not sure that THE AMERICAN SECTOR makes any grand statements, despite its closing words of how we are back to building walls again, but it sure is a fun ride. Co-director Courtney Stephens in person for a post-film discussion. (2020, 69 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
John M. Stahl's LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 7pm
"Nothing ever happens to Ellen," says one character. Later, another pronounces: "Ellen always wins." Undoubtedly Ellen is at the very center of LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN, a film that represents the zenith of that rare bird, the "Technicolor noir." But to write off Ellen as an archetypal femme fatale is to overlook a more interesting, feminist reading. What if the film is actually a subversive critique of society's oppression of women? As brilliantly played by Gene Tierney, after a time Ellen finds herself trapped in a life of hyper-glossy but empty luxury, her occasional horseback riding her only pleasure. By society's rigid strictures all she's allowed to do is tend to the materialistic concerns of her husband's lifestyle, even as he himself is free to earn a living by spinning escapist fiction (undoubtedly consumed by other Ellens caught in their own traps). As she battles to assert herself, she uses the scant weapons available to her: murder, blackmail, even a self-induced miscarriage. Naturally, because of the Production Code, she cannot be allowed to stand tall at story's end. But even so, as she stands at the top of the stairs before her fall, we can see in her eyes that she's prepared to die rather than continue her empty existence. The film possesses a subterranean commentary every bit as scathing as a Douglas Sirk melodrama, should one care to look for it. (1945, 119 min, DCP Digital) [Rob Christopher]
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
Dennis Hopper's OUT OF THE BLUE (US)
Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes
It’s the start of the 1980s. Michael Cimino's HEAVEN'S GATE signaled the end of New Hollywood's opulence and seemingly unlimited power, while Dennis Hopper's OUT OF THE BLUE signaled the demise of New Hollywood's intimate and piercing fragility. Along with Robert Bresson's THE DEVIL, PROBABLY (1977), this may be the most "punk" film of all-time. Hopper's previous film, THE LAST MOVIE, was already nine years past when he took the reins of this project, which follows Linda Manz, the unbelievably talented teen actress from DAYS OF HEAVEN, as she navigates a new era and counterculture, namely the punk years of the early '80s. Oddly enough, this was also an era whose golden age was waning, almost gone. Seeing it in contrast to the counterculture of the late '60s, we can better understand the world the adult characters inhabit: a fallout town on the outskirts of a city, where dreams go to garbage dumps—perhaps the very same where Manz's father, Hopper himself, now works following a tragic accident that landed him in prison. His daughter, who was witness to the accident, lives with her oftentimes drug-addled and partner-swapping mother. In order to escape her existence, she occasionally sneaks off to the city to catch punk shows and smoke pot. The world she inhabits is a mostly unsentimental world, similar to those found in the work of Maurice Pialat and Abel Ferrara (who cast Hopper in his own reality-shattering film, THE BLACKOUT, almost two decades later). This is not a world where characters change or become better people. These are characters grounded in the reality of stagnation, unable to make adjustments to their lives, only able to continue along, hoping their flaws don't affect the lives of others. It's tempting to view this as a follow-up to Hopper's EASY RIDER, the film that launched the initial flare for the '60s counter-culture movement, so it's not unreasonable to see these characters as shades of those characters, provided they survived the ending of the previous film. At one point Hopper says to a friend of his, "I really fucked up man", a line that echoes the line he said to Peter Fonda over a decade before: "We blew it, man." And just like the title (taken from a song on Neil Young's Rust Never Sleeps LP), these characters search in bottles, joints, needles, music, and sex, for a way to escape into the blackness, a zone whose calling attracts only because it isn't the present; it's the unavoidable unknown, the place deep within those who lasted long enough to see their hopes bleed out before the steps of reality. Where EASY RIDER provided a shocking ending to a beginning full of wonder and freedom, this story is well past the expansive camera positions, open road, and various psych-folk-rock jams, to a world where the camera stays at a cautious distance, the songs never change, and their words wrap the characters in a thicket of prophetic repetition and foreboding. (1980, 94 min, DCP Digital - new 4k restoration!) [John Dickson]
Joel and Ethan Coen’s RAISING ARIZONA (US)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Thursday, 7pm
The Coen brothers’ second feature film could be considered a Western in the same way Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner shorts are Westerns; RAISING ARIZONA is cartoonishly violent, funny, and urges you to root for the scrappiest of protagonists. A predecessor to much of their later work, RAISING ARIZONA is itself scrappy: unhinged but completely proficient. The film is narrated by lifelong criminal H.I., or Hi, McDunnough (Nicolas Cage), who is determined to change his ways when he marries police officer Ed (Holly Hunter). To their heartbreak, Hi and Ed are unable to have children. In a desperate attempt to start a family, they kidnap a baby from a local businessman whose wife recently had quintuplets. Of course, this is a foolhardy plan, and it's made even more complex by the arrival of Hi’s prison buddies (William Forsythe and John Goodman, the latter in a memorable first of many Coen brothers’ roles). Throw in some nosy coworkers and a hellish, motorcycle-riding bounty-hunter, and Hi and Ed’s dream of a peaceful family life gets destroyed. RAISING ARIZONA maintains its absurdity with shots and colorful set designs that often distort visual proportions, especially in relation to the baby as he crawls around a world of bungling adults. It’s a delight to watch exaggerated characters maneuver in exaggerated spaces, particularly during the many bonkers chase scenes. Simultaneously, Cage and Hunter portray the main couple with such sweetness that it grounds the eccentricities in earnest emotion. This is reinforced by Hi’s voiceover as he wistfully declares throughout the film, “I don’t know,” about his own predicaments, American politics, and his future with Ed. It’s repeated in one of the last lines, making RAISING ARIZONA’s ending the one I think of as the most charmingly sincere in cinema, though even in its final moment it maintains its loony sense of humor. Screening as part of Doc’s first Thursday night series: Keanu and Nic’s Excellent Adventure. (1987, 94 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]
David Lynch’s WILD AT HEART (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 7pm
Films of the “lovers on the run” subgenre are sexual, dark, and exude a melodramatic dreaminess. They often, too, thematically address complications of Americana and nostalgia. With continual references to THE WIZARD OF OZ, WILD AT HEART explores themes of home that are found throughout David Lynch's work; while his more recent Twin Peaks: The Return is all about how it’s impossible to go home again, WILD AT HEART is ultimately about the dream beyond the rainbow. After getting out of prison for murder, Elvis-obsessed Sailor (Nicolas Cage) and his girlfriend Lula (a transcendent Laura Dern) run away to California, telling each other stories of their pasts along the way. Unbeknownst to them, they’re pursued by Lula’s mother (a fabulously unhinged Diane Ladd), who hires hitmen to kill Sailor. Filled with surreal vignettes and characters, WILD AT HEART is dynamic and strange, sordid and ethereal. At one point Lula and Sailor pull over to dance on the side of the road to heavy metal; it’s as if the film, too, needs to shake off some irrepressible energy. Scenes like these are paired with quiet moments of horror—namely, the scene where Willem Defoe’s character aggressively corners Lula in a motel is one of the most upsetting in cinema; Laura Dern portrays Lula’s reaction with heartbreaking authenticity. But the most affecting scene is where Lula and Sailor find a woman (Sherilyn Fenn) injured in a car accident on the side of the road. These kinds of emotionally driven images of violence and trauma experienced by women would be more fully addressed in his film TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME, released just a few years later. Screening as part of the Film Center’s Bad Romance Series. (1990, 124 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]
Michel Franco’s SUNDOWN (Mexico)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
Mexican director Michel Franco hit American screens a year ago with NEW ORDER, a severely misguided vision of revolution. It brought out his worst tendencies: cinematography that was superficially stylish rather than expressing an original vision and the kind of edgelord sensationalism that delights in images of rape and torture. SUNDOWN is not entirely free from these tendencies, especially the latter (one scene shows a young boy committing murder on a beach), but Tim Roth, playing a wealthy Englishman who has decided to take an extended vacation in Mexico while ignoring his life’s serious problems, is paradoxically compelling as a man whose actions are inscrutable. At SUNDOWN’s start, Neal Bennett (Roth) is on holiday in Acapulco with his sister Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and his niece and nephew. Alice gets a phone call informing her that her mother is terminally ill, followed by the news of her death. But when they head to the airport to go back to the UK, Neal loses his passport and can’t travel with them. He continues a lazy existence of sitting in the sun, drinking beer, and romancing a much younger Mexican woman, financed by an allowance from a slaughterhouse’s fortune. Without Roth, this film might go nowhere, but he convincingly plays a man who seems to have no inner life, governed only by his moment-to-moment physical desires; he's apathetic even when sent to jail. (Critic Tim Grierson wrote that Roth’s “unknowability has been his secret weapon.”) SUNDOWN avoids the temptation to treat Neal’s behavior like a mystery. While it does eventually try to explain Neal’s behavior, the film decides to leave most of its questions open. A brief blossoming of emotion near the end shows just how thoroughly the film has leaned into its lack of affect. Where NEW ORDER seemed to cater to stereotypes about Mexican violence and Latin American leftism turning into authoritarianism, SUNDOWN plays knowingly with received notions about gringos and their interactions with Mexicans. Franco has frequently been compared to Michael Haneke, but SUNDOWN also suggests the Antoniennui version of recent TV shows about the awful lives of wealthy people. (2021, 82 min, DCP Digital) [Steve Erickson]
Pedro Almodóvar's PAIN AND GLORY (Spain)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Wednesday, 7pm
While not exactly a valedictory work, Pedro Almodóvar’s PAIN AND GLORY signals that the 70-year-old director is feeling the passage of time more acutely. Working again with his long-time avatars, Antonio Banderas and Penélope Cruz, who play fictionalized versions of the director and his mother, Almodóvar has created a fairly subdued memory piece taken from the point of view of an inactive elder statesman of film. Salvador Mallo (Banderas), suffering from the chronic pains of old age and writer’s block, gets word that his first film has been restored and is to be revived. Presenters want him and his star, Alberto Crespo (Asier Etxeandia), to appear together for a Q&A at the screening. This request forces Mallo to reconnect with Crespo, who hasn’t spoken to him since Mallo fired him more than 30 years before over his heroin use. This time, however, Mallo decides to “chase the dragon” himself. His antics trying to score some smack intermix with memories of his move as a child (Asier Flores) with his mother (Cruz) to the small village where his father (Raúl Arévalo), a meager earner, ensconced them in his home in a hillside cave. The contrast between Mallo’s childhood environment and his expensive adult home—fire-engine-red everything hung with museum-quality paintings that he is occasionally asked to loan out to exhibitions—offers the paradox of memory: the cave yields moments of great light, including young Mallo’s homosexual awakening, while his present-day home feels dark and somewhat institutional despite being awash in color. Uniformly fine performances, particularly Banderas’ wry portrait of the artist as a museum piece, inform the generosity of Almodóvar’s cinematic maturation. Screening as part of the Film Center’s ¡PEDRO! Series. (2019, 113 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Agnès Varda's THE GLEANERS AND I (France/Documentary)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Monday, 7pm
Agnès Varda, arguably the first filmmaker of the French New Wave, builds an easy rambling and revelatory road movie in THE GLEANERS AND I, an essay film about the historical French custom of gleaning, the act of collecting crops left to waste after the harvest. Varda takes to the motorways with her digital camera and captures gleaning as it is in contemporary French life. She interviews potato farmers, crust punks, gypsies, grocers, justices, vintners, and artists, illuminating lots of sympathetic thematic tensions along the way. Varda doesn't linger in interviews; she brings us only snippets of the people she speaks with, capturing their charm in a few juicy clips. Varda uses GLEANERS to consider her own aging, revolving technology, the ethics of waste, and the sliding economic realities that brought gleaning back as a common practice. Screening as part of Doc’s Monday night series: Which Side Are You On? Labor and Collection Action On Film. (2000, 79 min, DCP Digital) [Christy LeMaster]
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]
Pedro Almodóvar’s BROKEN EMBRACES (Spain)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 1pm
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 being visited by a strange aspiring filmmaker and learning 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 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]
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, Screening in 35mm at 4:10pm or 9:20pm Friday through Thursday; otherwise all other screenings DCP Digital) [John Dickson]
Julia Ducournau's TITANE (France)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Saturday, 7pm
Julia Ducournau’s TITANE is difficult to summarize without revealing too much of the wild and twisted plot. It centers on Alexia (Agatha Rousselle), a woman with a deep predilection for cars and violence and who's had a titanium plate in her skull since a vehicular accident in childhood. Did the accident awaken her perversions? Or did the piece of metal implanted in her head do it? The film cares not to say. One thing that is certain is that many of Alexia's motivations seem to come from someplace deep within herself. She expresses them in an animalistic fashion, focusing on her baser urges and her will to survive. Much like Ducournau's first film, RAW (2016), TITANE takes body horror to a shocking extreme, and the brutalities it depicts again tie into the animal side of human nature. Body horror isn't relegated to violence; it also explores the ideas of the body as status symbol and personal prison. There comes a point in the film where Alexia finds herself living with fire captain Vincent (Vincent Lindon), and their relationship takes on a father-daughter dynamic. The interactions between these two are surprisingly touching, offsetting the film’s more gnarly moments. Like the inhabitants of the Island of Misfit Toys, Alexia and Vincent find solidarity and comfort from a lonely world in each other’s presence. Visceral and thought-provoking, TITANE demonstrates Ducournau’s ability to weave a story that is batshit crazy yet grounded in fully realized characters. (2021, 104 min, DCP Digital) [Kyle Cubr]
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)
As part of the Classics of South Korean Cinema series, Shin Sang-ok’s THE HOUSEGUEST AND MY MOTHER (103 min, Digital Projection) screens Friday at 7pm.
Henri Colpi’s 1961 French film UNE AUSSI LONGUE ABSENCE (98 min, 35mm), co-written by Marguerite Duras, screens Sunday at 7pm as part of the Destroy, She Said: A Marguerite Duras Retrospective series.
Michael Curtiz’s 1950 film YOUNG MAN WITH A HORN (112 min, 35mm) screens Tuesday at 7pm, as part of the Nights of the Swingers! Jazz in Film series.
Guy Maddin’s 2002 Canadian film DRACULA, PAGES FROM A VIRGIN'S DIARY (75 min, 35mm) screens Wednesday at 7pm, as part of the Guy Maddin Retrospective series. More info on all screenings and Covid-related policies here.
⚫ Facets Cinema
Paul Schrader’s 2021 film THE CARD COUNTER (111 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday, Saturday and Sunday; see Venue website for showtimes. More info here.
⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Adrian Lyne’s 1987 thriller FATAL ATTRACTION (1987, 35mm) screens on Friday at 7pm, as part of the Film Center’s Bad Romance Series.
Also as part of that series, Mike Nichols’ 1966 film WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (131 min, 35mm) screens on Sunday at 5pm.
John Badham’s 1997 film SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (118 min, 35mm) screens on Monday at 6pm, as part of 50/50, the Siskel’s year-long series including a film from each year the theater has been open.
Luis Buñuel’s 1975 film THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE (102 min, 35mm) screens on Tuesday at 7pm, as part of the aforementioned Bad Romance Series.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
Juho Kuosmanen’s 2021 Finnish film COMPARTMENT NO. 6 (107 min, DCP Digital) begins screening this week; see Venue website for showtimes.
Martin Ritt’s 1963 film HUD (112 min, 35mm) screens on Saturday and Sunday at 11:30am as part of the Music Box’s Black and White Cinemascope Matinees.
Coodie and Chike’s 2022 documentary JEEN-YUHS (88 min, DCP Digital), the first of a three-act series about Kanye West, screens on Thursday at 7pm. More info on all 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
⚫ Asian Pop-Up Cinema
In celebration of the Lunar New Year, specifically the Chinese New Year, Asian Pop-Up Cinema is streaming several films for free via Smart Cinema USA through February 15. More info here.
⚫ Blacknuss Network
As part of the Carnegie Hall AfroFuturism Festival, the Blacknuss Network presents We Fly Away Home: A Film and Discussion Series on Afrofuturism in Cinema. The series is virtual; the first event, “The Black Image in Scifi Cinema,” takes place on Sunday at 3pm. Per the event description, the “program will examine how the black image has been portrayed in images of the future in global cinema beginning with silent cinema to the first portrayals in 1960s films television. Film clips from all of these periods will be discussed by a panel of cultural writers, critics and filmmakers.” More info here.
⚫ Facets Cinema
Alice Rohrwacher, Francesco Munzi, and Pietro Marcello’s 2021 documentary FUTURA (110 min) is available to rent starting this week. More info here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
Check hold-over titles here.
⚫ Nightingale Cinema
A performance and non-linear cinema event by M_m<M called Sally Ride’s Hair will take place via the Nightingale’s Twitch channel on Saturday at 7pm. More info here.
⚫ VDB TV
In acknowledgement of the ten-year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, the Video Data Bank is highlighting the work of Jem Cohen by making his twelve-part GRAVITY HILL NEWSREELS: OCCUPY WALL STREET series available for continuous and complete viewing. More info here.
CINE-LIST: February 4 - February 10, 2022
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Rob Christopher, Kyle Cubr, John Dickson, Steve Erickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Michael Frank, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Christy LeMaster, Michael Glover Smith, Drew Van Weelden, Candace Wirt