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!
🔥 HIGHS AND LOWS AT THE MUSIC BOX
Through Thursday, March 10, Oscarbate and Hollywood Entertainment present Highs and Lows at the Music Box Theatre. Below are reviews of select films playing in the series, which includes several double features of “high” and “low” cinema. In addition to the below film pairings is Maurice Pialat’s 1978 French film GRADUATE FIRST (86 min, 35mm) and Paul Weitz’s 1999 American film AMERICAN PIE (96 min, 35mm) on Tuesday at 7pm. One admission admits you to both films. More info here.
Věra Chytilová's DAISIES (Czech)
Saturday, 2pm
Věra Chytilová's films have earned her acolytes and enemies at an equal rate—particularly DAISIES, an anarchic, poetic, visually exhilarating film lacking in any affirmation whatsoever. In more recent years, it has cemented Chytilová's stature as an avant-garde genius, a feminist icon, and a major influence behind films such as CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING and MULHOLLAND DRIVE. In the period immediately following its release, Chytilová was marked as both a dangerous dissident (by the Czechoslovak government, who unofficially blacklisted her) and a political traitor to the Left (by Godard, who made her the central figure of his anti-Soviet/Czechoslovak documentary PRAVDA). During one of the first screenings of her work in France, audience members walked out, complaining that "they shouldn't make that kind of film. It undermines people's faith in socialism. If that is the way it really is, then none of it is worth it at all." DAISIES leads with exactly this kind of "objectionable" nihilism, opening with the two protagonists deciding that "the world is spoiled; we'll be spoiled, too." These two teenage girls, both named Marie, spend the rest of the film on a hedonistic rampage of consumption and destruction, in no particular order, culminating in a banquet scene that merges both tendencies to an apocalyptic conclusion. Marie and Marie do everything that decent women shouldn't (cheat, steal, make messes, advertise casual sex without following through, overeat, etc)—and care about precisely nothing. They speak in nonsensical, non sequitur dialogue that seems like it could have been randomly generated ("Why say 'I love you?' Why not just 'an egg?'"), but was actually carefully curated by Chytilová to serve as "the guardian of meaning" for her "philosophical documentary." During production, the only thing that she insisted remained untouched was the original script; everything else was up for grabs. Her production team took full advantage of this freedom in depicting the Maries' nihilistic spree, resulting in a surreal and stunning display of meaningless excess at every turn. Most notably, Jaroslav Kucera, the film's cinematographer (and Chytilová's husband), shot the film as one of his famous "colour experiments," and Ester Krumbachová, the film's costumer, styled the Maries in trendy mod bikinis and minidresses as often as elaborate sculptural outfits made from newspaper and loose wires. (1966, 74 min, 35mm) [Anne Orchier]
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Screening after Jesse Dylan’s 2001 stoner classic HOW HIGH (93 min, DCP Digital).
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Rainer Werner Fassbinder's ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL (Germany)
Tuesday, 7pm
Rainer Werner Fassbinder remains an unsettling force in world cinema decades after his death—bringing an urgency to cinephilia by marrying it to radical politics and emotional candor—and ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL is an ideal starting point for those unfamiliar with his work. Taking Douglas Sirk's ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS as inspiration, Fassbinder updated the '50s melodrama to confront modern social ills such as racism and the enduring presence of fascism in German culture. Sirk's May-December romance is now set among Munich's working-class, with the players recast as a former Nazi bride and a Moroccan immigrant; the pair's punishment by society is far crueler than anything Sirk could have imagined. Yet in Fassbinder's eyes, even the most prejudiced individuals are above loathing: His diagrammatic approach to drama, influenced by Brecht and Straub and Huilet, lets us see all the characters as victims of the State's neglect. (One critic described Fassbinder's milieu as a "democracy of victims," which nicely summarizes his radical, if pessimistic worldview.) The style is breathtaking, as was often the case in the director's Hollywood-influenced middle period, evoking Sirk's tracking shots and controlled mise-en-scene while critiquing their underlying emotion. This paradox inspires not only social commentary but some brilliant dark humor, which helps the film from seeming truly merciless: The jokes are to prevent us from weeping. (1974, 94 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
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Screening after Kevin Rodney Sullivan's 1998 film HOW STELLA GOT HER GROOVE BACK (124 min, 35mm).
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William Greaves’ SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM: TAKE ONE (US/Experimental)
Thursday, 7pm
The majority of William Greaves’ filmmaking career consists of television documentaries about African-American life, but he made an important contribution to experimental cinema with his 1968 feature SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM: TAKE ONE. A quasi-documentary meta-movie with an original score by Miles Davis, it alternates between footage of actors performing a drama about marital discord in New York’s Central Park, footage of the crew shooting the drama, and footage of that crew shot by a third party. Greaves plays the director of the film-within-a-film (and to complicate matters further, he’s often seen holding a camera himself); he’s a persistent, often aggravating presence, goading his performers and locking horns with his technical collaborators. For Amy Taubin, writing about SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM for the Criterion Collection in 2006, the film provokes questions about much more than filmmaking, opening up issues of power dynamics and representations of race. “It did not directly engage race or racism,” Taubin concedes, “although the fact that Greaves is both the film’s director-writer-producer and its on-screen protagonist—the focus of almost every scene—guaranteed that the viewer, regardless of race, had to confront whatever racial stereotypes she or he held. Quite simply, in 1968, there were at best a handful of African-American directors working in television and no African-Americans directing feature films. For an African-American director to make a feature film, let alone one as experimental as a film by Warhol or Godard, could not have been imagined if Greaves hadn’t gone out and done it.” The provocative nature of Greaves’ presence ties into larger political issues shaping the zeitgeist in which the film was made. Taubin continues: “Given that in May of 1968 the war was raging in Vietnam, students were occupying university buildings, the French left had almost staged a successful takeover of the government, and a string of assassinations had begun, [the film-within-a-film] would be absurdly reactionary if it were taken at face value. Is the crew’s eventual antagonism, then, part of [Greaves’] master plan to dramatize the other major, though not explicitly stated, theme of the film: power, in particular the power struggle between the leader and the group?” This 35mm revival of SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM feels particularly relevant in our current era, when debates about representation and the significance accorded to directors have become most pronounced in film writing. In this regard, it may be the most contemporary movie playing in town this week. (1968, 75 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
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Screening before Ron Howard's 1999 film EDTV (124 min, DCP Digital).
📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING
Marguerite Duras’ LE CAMION (France)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Sunday, 7pm
With INDIA SONG (1975), Marguerite Duras crystallized a personal form of cinematic minimalism in which a good deal of the mise-en-scène exists in the viewer’s imagination. The film is famously devoid of onscreen conversation (all the dialogue transpires outside the frame) and nearly devoid of onscreen action as well; but through a canny fusion of detailed locations, dramatic recitations, and pointed music cues, Duras conjures up a vivid portrait of French colonial life that foregrounds the colonialists’ repression and dissatisfaction. LE CAMION takes Duras’ minimalist aesthetic even further in order to consider such varied topics as the essence of cinema and the death of the dream of Communism. Beating MY DINNER WITH ANDRE to the punch by a few years, LE CAMION mainly consists of a conversation between two people sitting at a table: Gérard Depardieu and Duras herself, making her first onscreen appearance in a feature film. They sit with pages of a script Duras has written about a man and a woman driving across the country in a truck. Sometimes Duras and Depardieu read the script aloud, sometimes they discuss it, and sometimes they break away from the “movie” to consider the political message Duras hoped to get across with it. The conversation unfolds in short segments punctuated by landscape shots with trucks; the barrage of medium closeups of people talking make the landscapes seem epic in contrast, while the landscapes grant a certain larger-than-life quality to the conversation. LE CAMION is a conceptual work, and not just because it’s essentially a proposal for an unrealized film. Duras is concerned above all with giving space to ideas, namely myths about men and women, utopian promises of Communism, and the sorts of poetic metaphors that are best realized in the mind. The very form of LE CAMION suggests that the film Duras wants to make is simply impossible—why else film the planning stage and stop there? There’s no denying the heavy air of defeat that hangs over the work and sometimes threatens to engulf it; as death-of-the-Left movies go, it feels almost as monumental as Chris Marker’s A GRIN WITHOUT A CAT, which premiered the same year as this and runs more than three times as long. Befitting a film made by a famous writer, the language is frequently glorious, and the spectacle of watching Duras read her words aloud feels special enough to counteract the defeatism. Screening as part of Doc’s Sunday night series: Destroy, She Said: A Marguerite Duras Retrospective. (1977, 76 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
Haile Gerima's SANKOFA (US/Ghana)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 6pm
Casually described as a masterpiece in the UCLA Film & Television Archive's program notes for their touring “L.A. Rebellion” series several years back, SANKOFA has provoked passionate devotion from African American audiences while barely making a dent with the white critical establishment. The acknowledged landmarks of the L.A. Rebellion, such as KILLER OF SHEEP, BLESS THEIR LITTLE HEARTS, and Gerima's thesis film BUSH MAMA, cultivated their reputations through non-theatrical play—classrooms, academic conferences, community screenings and the like. Other filmmakers like Jamaa Fanaka made inroads through traditional exploitation and teenpic frameworks in urban grindhouses. By contrast, SANKOFA played in competition at the Berlin Film Festival but found no distributor in the US. Gerima wound up releasing it ad hoc through his own Mypehduh Films—renting out movie theaters in African American communities, partnering with local groups to spread word-of-mouth, maximizing box office through personal appearances. It screened to sell-out crowds and ultimately grossed $3.5 million. Essentially continuing the four-wall "race films" strategy pioneered by Oscar Micheaux, SANKOFA brought the tent-show tradition to its psychotronic, politicized conclusion. When SANKOFA came to Chicago in September 1994, the Hyde Park Herald promised that it would screen "exclusively in Loews Hyde Park Theater, 5238 S. Harper Ave., until people stop going to see it." By the time of that declaration, it had already been playing for three weeks and showed no signs of dropping off. (It even performed well on Monday nights—typically the slowest slot for any theater.) That Gerima's film achieved this level of business while playing alongside FORREST GUMP and TIME COP (!) in a neighborhood movie theater marks SANKOFA as something fundamentally out-of-time—a grassroots, showbiz phenomenon in the shadow of ever-deafening Sundance hype. (1993, 125 min, DCP Digital) [K.A. Westphal]
Christopher Harris' STILL/HERE (US/Experimental)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) – Thursday, 7pm
As STILL/HERE opens, a flurry of black and white images depicting a multitude of buildings in downtown St. Louis is shown. A disembodied voice speaks about how every brick was hand-lain, how each bricklayer had a family, and how many people it took to construct all those places. Christopher Harris' avant-garde documentary is a mournful take on the urban decay that had befallen St. Louis and what that decay means within the context of the city's past, present, and future. In a minimalist style, Harris uses long, static shots of derelict facades interjecting household diegetic sounds such as washing dishes to ruminate on what life was like within those four walls when they all were standing. Harris frequently frames the subjects of his shots behind obstructions (fences, glass cases, etc.) to imply a sense that the city has become a neglected object in some museum of sorts, further endangered by apathy and a lack of resolve to improve it. STILL/HERE's imagery conjures up visions of a rundown Detroit in the post-Recession era, a spiritual predecessor to 2012's DETROPIA. One of the film's most remarkable aspects is its lack of human presence on screen. Relying instead on voiceovers and recorded messages to fulfill this element, an eeriness sets in as the magnitude of the city's indifference towards these structures is realized. STILL/HERE is an abstract observation on finding meaning and beauty in imagery that's anything but. Screening with Crystal Z. Campbell's 2017 film GORILLA MEANS WAR and her 2021 film A MEDITATION ON NATURE IN THE ABSENCE OF AN ECLIPSE as part of a program entitled “Environments of Struggle.” Filmmakers in person. (2001, 60 min, 16mm) [Kyle Cubr]
Holding Binoculars, Pointing a Camera: A Cinema of Birdwatching (Experimental/Shorts)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University, Evanston) – Friday, 7pm
The ten short films Block Cinema’s Associate Film Programmer Malia Haines-Stewart has selected for “Holding Binoculars, Pointing a Camera: A Cinema of Birdwatching” both question the intrusion of human beings on the natural world and find connection with that world, and especially birds, to be a very human need and endeavor. The first clue director Kevin Jerome Everson gives us in BROWN THRASHER (2020, 3 min, Digital Projection) that we are not going to be looking at brown thrashers is that his subjects are looking into trees, not toward the ground where this bird is usually found. It soon becomes apparent that he is interested in these African American and South Asian birders themselves. His camera simulates a birder holding a pair of binoculars unsteadily to observe them close up. Like brown thrashers, which are not really uncommon but are sometimes difficult to find, diverse birdwatchers are rare in birding communities. AERIAL (1974, 4 min, 16mm) is an impressionistic work by Margaret Tait that seems like a memory piece about her childhood in the Orkney Islands of Scotland. Fun in the snow mixes with birds feeding, heavy skies, and images of mortality that linger in the mind. Rebecca Meyers’ COME WISHES BE HORSES (2016, 8 min, 16mm) is a visualization of W.H. Auden’s poem, “Their Lonely Betters.” While we listen to a group out on a guided bird walk trying to identify various species, Meyers trains her camera on the vegetation and birds that have no need of names. Eventually, filming gives way to the night and a proverbial “… robin with no Christian name ran through/The Robin-Anthem which was all it knew.” Tyler Turkle takes us on a very short motorboat tour of a wetland somewhere in the American South in OBSERVEILLANCE (1975, 3 min, 16mm). The nattily uniformed tour guide smokes a cigarette as he identifies items of interest—an American egret, some American coots, an osprey nest, and the place where his company repairs its boats. For Turkle, he is the real item of interest. Heehyun Choi’s humorous BIRDSAVER REPORT VOLUME 2 (2021, 11 min, Digital Projection) concerns itself with perception, as images within images illustrate the idea of trompe l’oeil within the context of a Korean report on bird collisions and how to monitor and prevent them. Choi also seems to be mocking the mitigated reality much of the world has embraced by putting a person in a bird mask in a woodland with a camera in her hand. Sam Easterson turns the idea of a bird cam literally on its head in BIRD-CAMS (2008, 8 min, Digital Projection). Somehow he managed to affix a camera behind the head of a mallard, some type of falcon, a wild turkey, a pheasant, and a fluffy yellow chick to give us a view of the world from their perspective. Recording reliability is a bit iffy, particularly as the falcon’s aerial adventures jar and disorient. It’s lucky Easterson’s wading duck decided not to go tail-up to feed on vegetation below the water or we might have gotten a very soggy presentation. The vulnerability of the turkey and pheasant, both game birds, is revealed in their furtive travels through a tall-grass prairie, as is the tiny chick traversing a farm loaded with dangers. In THE VERY BIG CROW (2021, 2 min, Digital Projection), Joelle Mercedes explores folk horror as an African American boy relates a dream he had of a large crow eating his head and other parts of his body. Aggressive, electronic sounds, an ominous hollow in a tree, and a bright, ever-enlarging light welcome us into this wilderness of terror. Deborah Stratman’s documentary RAY’S BIRDS (2010, 7 min, 16mm) features Ray Lowden, whose adoption of an injured kestrel burgeoned into the Kielder Water Birds of Prey Centre in Northumberland, England, a full-fledged tourist attraction. It’s as easy to become as fascinated as Ray is in the large and varied birds—owls, storks, hawks, vultures, and eagles—he keeps on the compound and uses in demonstrations to curious visitors. It’s important to be philosophical about the food chain when going to the center—Ray recalls that a hawk once killed an unlucky rabbit that darted out during a demonstration. Frédéric Moffet’s THE MAGIC HEDGE (2016, 9 min, Digital Projection), shot before completion of the restoration of what is now the world-famous Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary on Chicago’s lakefront, pays homage to the site’s earlier incarnations and uses. Images and a soundtrack of news reports reveal Montrose was a Nike missile site that was decommissioned in 1965. A Latino man who opens the short reminds us of when the Magic Hedge was a hook-up spot for gay men seeking anonymous sex under the stars. Now gay sex and the bicycles spotted on the trails have been banished as birders take over completely. Another film by Kevin Jerome Everson, CARDINAL (2019, 2:30 min, Digital Projection), again portrays African Americans birding. The film supposedly depicts them looking for Ohio’s state bird, the cardinal, but it is shot in black and white in apparent defiance of the bird’s brilliant plumage. Filmmakers Moffet, Mercedes, and Stratman in person. [Marilyn Ferdinand]
This Radiant World: Harmonies and Discords (Experimental/Shorts)
Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm [Free Admission]
The fourth and final in the series "The Radiant World" (co-curated by Julia Gibbs and former Cine-File Managing Editor Patrick Friel) is the most entertaining and tuneful of the bunch. This one, as advertised, revolves around harmonies and discords—as well as collapses and breakthroughs, real estate knockdowns and animatronic primates. First up is the legendary and beloved Lawrence Jordan with BELLE DU JOUR (2021, 10 min, 16mm). Jordan has been making surreal, fanciful cut-out animations since the late 50s. This piece might seem a bit impenetrable narratively, but as the filmmaker writes, "[t]here are no hidden meanings in these conjunctions, except those that form in the mind of the receptive viewer. To me that is the ultimate lesson of the surreal path. I have tried to infuse a certain spiritual essence into the flow of imagery. That is all." Butterflies and bubbly shapes recur throughout scenes of cutesy cartoon bears and religious iconography. High and low culture are effortlessly dissolved into a palliative elixir. Bill Morrison's HER VIOLET KISS (2021, 5 min, Digital Projection) is a continuation of his project of slowed down deteriorated film, imbued with new meaning by selection and musical score. In this case, it's a romantic interlude singled out from a 1928 silent film. Charlotte Clermont's LUCINA ANNULATA (2021, 4 min, Digital Projection) is a beautiful work of audible incantations with odd visual rhymes of earth made soft with folds of flesh and stuttering weathered film stock responding in kind. Lisa Barcy's THE EPHEMERAL ORPHANAGE (2020, 15 min, Digital Projection) is an endlessly charming and playful cut-out animation with a narrative of orphans escaping their fate for a life on a lunar landscape full of flowers and mysteries. Olivia Block's AXIOLIST (FOR ANNA KAVAN) (2021, 6 min, Digital Projection) leans more heavily into the "discords" theme of the show. For those unfamiliar, Block is a singular and brilliant local sound artist and musician, and this is a music video of-sorts for the lead-off track of her new album. Visually it's a series of reveals, pulling back from an icy and fiery mystery to a sad scene of domestic destruction to a plain and matter-of-fact document of a city in disrepair and rebirth. Eve Heller's SINGING IN OBLIVION (2021, 13 min, Digital Projection) is a masterful film in the shape of a mournful prayer. The work begins with images of a Jewish cemetery in beautiful peaceful disrepair. Life, in the form of overgrown limbs and bird calls, has reconnected to the space. The breath of life bursting out through crumbling monuments continues with a gentle montage of photographs found at a Vienna market. These long-past figures are animated, celebrated, and consecrated with the simplest of cinematic and auditory tools. It's a humble and beautiful work. Fully shifting gears into a gorgeous slap of Pop calamity, Michael Robinson's POLYCEPHALY IN D (2021, 23 min, Digital Projection) is, as the filmmaker describes, "[e]xistential drift in the age of rupture." Which of course means flooding and death. But also means reality show interstitials, video game monsters and damsels, and overwrought romantic self-flagellation. Oh, and in the middle, in a section I can't quite make sense of, is a romantic interlude between King Kong, Katniss Everdeen, and Michael Douglas in prime-hunk ROMANCING THE STONE era. It's a movie with the primary metaphor of confused monkeys (a universal surrogate if there ever was one) unlocking the mysteries of an unnervingly queer doll that explodes the whole damn world into a dance club denouement. That description probably doesn't make sense, but if it sounds even a little intriguing, this movie is for you. Wrapping up is a delightful oddity from the usually profoundly intense Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, MOON VEILS (2021, 4 min, Digital Projection), which features layered, mottled, and swirling geometric shapes and robotic, sing-songy hooks on the soundtrack. [JB Mabe]
An Evening with Meriem Bennani (USA/Morocco/Experimental)
Conversations at the Edge at the Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 6pm
Meriem Bennani’s video work has a certain familiarity to it in an era of post-internet video art that feels equally at home in a gallery or a late-night block on Adult Swim. In both the present-days and futures depicted in her work, chill vibes and the bleak realities of the surveillance state coexist, and silliness and hedonism carry unseen costs. This program of Bennani's work contains three films: PARTY ON THE CAPS (2018) and GUIDED TOUR OF A SPILL (2021)—which comprise two parts of a trilogy*—and 2 LIZARDS (2020), an anthology of short films originally posted to Instagram. Though the three films are distinct, they all carry an internal disjointedness that ties the program together as one long mixtape of capitalism in decline. 2 LIZARDS began in the early days of Covid lockdowns continued through the mass protests following George Floyd’s murder; the work was released in weekly 1- to 2-minute shorts. The titular lizards (anthropomorphic Geico-like creatures voiced by Bennani and her co-director Orian Barki) go through their days, grappling with the new realities of Covid week by week. Even though the release of 2 LIZARDS came when most people were making the same banal observations (“It’s weird to stand far away from your friends!"; "I don’t like wiping my groceries down!”), the films’ charm lies in their ability to underline this absurdity by populating New York City with only 3D-rendered anthropomorphic animals. The other two films in the program lay out an ethnography of the future where teleportation has replaced air travel, allowing for increased movement across borders. The United States’ ICE responds by intercepting illegal immigrants mid-teleport and redirecting them to a penal colony in the middle of the Atlantic known as The CAPS (“Short for capsule, not capital,” as our narrator clarifies). As time goes on, the colony’s density gives way to a new society, still ruled over by American forces but harboring mini-enclaves and third cultures. In this post-humanist world where all residents have to “piece themselves together” following their de-atomization on the island, Bennani bounds through with dayglo animation and blaring party music to soften the blows. If this feels like a complex groundwork for two short films, it’s because Bennani’s films have the rare and beautiful quality of revealing a completely built-out world only partially, carefully. They also have a chaotic rhythm, mixing forms and cutting between a Hitchhikers’ Guide-like tour of the CAPS, a party for an 80-year-old’s plastic surgery, and a young man rapping about his disappointment when he wasn’t given enough French fries at a sandwich shop. This is the infinite-scroll-as-film, a post-genre flurry of world-building and anti-imperialist satire that’s essential for anyone who likes a good helping of fun with their avant-garde. Filmmaker in person. The third film in this series will be on view as a gallery installation at University of Chicago’s Renaissance Society from Saturday through April 17. (64 min, Digital Projection) [Maxwell Courtright]
Mia Hansen-Løve’s ALL IS FORGIVEN (France)
Facets Cinema – See Venue website for showtimes
There’s a great 1993 episode of the long-running French TV series Cinéma de Notre Temps about André Téchiné in which the critic-turned-filmmaker speaks with near embarrassment about his cinephilia. He confesses that one reason he makes movies is to better understand other people, whom he had long neglected in favor of studying cinema. Téchiné seems to have identified the psychological impulse behind a good deal of post-’60s French filmmaking, which has distanced itself from the influence of the Nouvelle Vague by finding reference points not in other movies, but rather in life itself. Ironically, the best filmmakers to have worked in this mode have always made intensely cinematic movies. The work of Téchiné, Maurice Pialat, and Mia Hansen-Løve (to name three personal favorites) experiment with bold and idiosyncratic ways to communicate lived experience through the tools of their particular medium. To cite one powerful example, Hansen-Løve (who started writing for Cahiers du cinéma as a teenager and directed her first feature, ALL IS FORGIVEN, at 25) and her regular editor, Marion Monnier, like to cut the beginnings and ends off of scenes so as to create a continuous dramatic flow, with no downtime between events. The goal, the director has said, is to reflect “the rhythm of life, not the rhythm of movies.” This approach to editing dovetails with Hansen-Løve's unpredictable choices about what she chooses to dramatize, devoting rapturous passages to relatively mundane moments in her characters’ lives and leaving important events offscreen. A straightforward synopsis of ALL IS FORGIVEN might make it sound like any number of naturalistic dramas, yet whenever it starts to feel familiar, Hansen-Løve and Monnier execute some deft narrative leap, whether to consider the story from a different character’s perspective or move the events forward in time. For roughly its first half, ALL IS FORGIVEN centers on Victor, a self-absorbed aspiring writer, as he slides into drug addiction. The filmmakers regard this character—all their characters—with empathy, presenting his addiction through a rather engrossing montage that catalogs the little things he does to fill time when he's not doing drugs. But as any recovering addict will tell you, the satisfaction doesn’t last, and the film is appropriately sobering when it cuts away from Victor to show how his actions have hurt other people. ALL IS FORGIVEN takes this decentralized approach even further in the second half, when it jumps 11 years into the future and shifts focus from Victor to his daughter Pamela, now a teenager who hasn’t seen her father since her mother walked out on him at the end of the first part. What ensues is not the straightforward redemption drama you might expect from the title, but instead an elusive, tonally complicated film that proceeds according to the staggered process of psychological healing. In this way, it feels like the film itself is a living thing. (2007, 100 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Elaine May's A NEW LEAF (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 5pm
Cine-File contributor 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 Ben. But Elaine May’s A NEW LEAF has swayed me, at least in the filmic sense. (Ben and I are two 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 he exhausts 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 taken off 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 cavalier epiphany. Screening as part of the Film Center’s Bad Romance Series. (1971, 102 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
Takashi Miike’s DEAD OR ALIVE 2: BIRDS (Japan)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Thursday, 9:30pm
So, how does Miike circumvent the narrative impossibility of making a sequel to a movie no one thought it was possible to make a sequel to? Well, by making a sequel in name only. The second in Miike’s DEAD OR ALIVE trilogy features the same main actors (Riki Takeuchi and Show Aikawa) as the other two films, and like the other two films, it's a standalone story. Miike made this film right in the middle of his most prolific, and heroic, period. It's one of 33 films he made between 1997 and 2002, when he attracted international attention not only by the sheer amount of work he produced, but by the rangne of genres and styles he covered. DEAD OR ALIVE 2 gives us more of Miike’s gallows humor and blood-soaked yakuza fare; his signature mix of reverence and irreverence for the Japanese gangster genre; and a liberal sprinkling of manga logic and visuals. Often things don't make logical sense in Miike’s films, and that's because they're not supposed to. But they're supposed to feel right. The cartoonish element of the DEAD OR ALIVE trilogy is meant to suspend disbelief. It's like a Bugs Bunny cartoon, but Japanese and gangster. Pitted against some of Miike's other films of this era, such as AUDITION, ICHI THE KILLER, HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS (or even the more straightforward BLUES HARP or GRAVEYARD OF HONOR), DEAD OR ALIVE 2 doesn't seem like one of Miike’s greatest. But that doesn't mean it isn't one of his most fun. For every loyal yakuza picture Miike makes, like FUDOH: THE NEW GENERATION (1996), he does a tongue-in-cheek deconstruction of the form—and the DEAD OR ALIVE trilogy, BIRDS included, is a perfect piss-take on the genre he knows so well. Screening as part of Doc’s second Thursday night series: No Love in Your Violence: A Takashi Miike Retrospective. (2000, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
John Landis’s THE BLUES BROTHERS (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 6pm
The unofficial "official movie of Chicago." Originally released in 1980, THE BLUES BROTHERS is the only other thing piped into Chicagoland homes as much as fluoridated water. There is something so charming about this movie that, no matter that it’s screened locally every 3 months on average and everyone, at some point, owned a copy on physical media, the theater will always fill up when it's programmed. For those of you unlucky souls that have yet to catch this (or perhaps you lucky souls that get to see it for the very first time!), let me set out the adventure. After serving three years in prison, Jake Blues (John Belushi) reunites with his blood brother Elwood Blues (Dan Aykroyd) to reform their old band so they can raise enough money to save the orphanage that took them in as children. There’s Point A for you. To get to Point Z involves some lying, some cheating, a handful of rednecks and Nazis, and a whole lot of cops. It's an anarchic road movie-cum-musical that's also a love letter to blues, jump, and R&B, and the city of Chicago itself. The list of musicians who perform in the film is staggering: Ray Charles, Cab Calloway, John Lee Hooker, James Brown, Chaka Khan, Carolyn Franklin, and Pinetop Perkins. I choose to give Aretha Franklin her own mention because she not only steals the film the moment she appears, but because this movie paved the way for her career comeback. Even the Blues Brothers Band has half of Booker T and the MGs and various other blues/R&B sidemen with far-than-better-than average pedigrees. And this pool of talent doesn't even count the supporting cast, which features everyone from John Candy to Steven goddamn Spielberg. Everything about this movie is cranked to 10 and somehow nothing suffers from that. The delightful anarchy of THE BLUES BROTHERS taps into the rebel inside everyone—this is a punk rock movie for people who would never actually consider themselves punk. Or even fans of punk. But here we have a glib disdain for any kind of authority except a sacred morality of goodness. The Blues Brothers are “on a mission from God” to save an orphanage, and they won't let anyone get in the way. They crash 103 cars (mostly cop cars) making this film, a world record at the time (and now held by Chicago filmmakers the Wachowskis for MATRIX RELOADED). There's an anticapitalist/anti-consumerist lens in the film's wanton destruction of a mall—so much so that John Landis was jokingly upset that George Romero got his “anti-mall” film, DAWN OF THE DEAD, into theaters before he could release this one. The Blues Brothers also take a couple jabs at hillbilly type as well as neo-fascists, nearly killing an entire parade of "Illinois Nazis." Again, so very punk. But most importantly, THE BLUES BROTHERS is a musical about the power of music itself. Music isn't just a means of communication—it's the end all, be all of communication. So many musicals use music to advance the plot; the plot of THE BLUES BROTHERS is used to advance the music. Everything leads to The Big Concert, where the band needs to put on a show so big that they can save the orphanage. It’s an admittedly hacky trope that somehow feels honest and heartfelt. On top of the sentimentality, this film makes the City of Chicago a character in its own right. New York may have multiple great directors, like Martin Scorsese and Abel Ferrara, to give their town a cinematic soul, but Chicago needs only one movie to capture its essence fully, and that movie is THE BLUES BROTHERS. Asking me how many times I've seen this film is like asking me how many shots of Malort I've had. Screening as part of 50/50, the Siskel’s year-long series including a film from each year the theater has been open. (1980, 133 min, 35mm) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
Dorian Walker’s TEEN WITCH (US)
Music Box Theatre – Friday and Saturday, Midnight
Bolstered by annual appearances on cable television Halloween movie marathons, TEEN WITCH rebounded from box office failure to achieve cult status. The late ‘80s styles are impeccable—all bright colors, oversized tops, and layered skirts—highlighted by an archetypical unfashionable-to-trendy teen transformation. It’s also sort of a musical, or rather a film filled with unconnected musical moments. TEEN WITCH has a frothy and sometimes perplexing plot, but the oddities add to its charm as a pop culture time capsule. The film follows dowdy teenager Louise Miller (Robyn Lively), who dreams of dating the most popular boy in school, football player Brad (Dan Gauthier). As her sixteenth birthday approaches, she learns from a zany fortune teller, Madame Serena (Zelda Rubinstein), that she’s a witch. Louise begins to test her powers, taking revenge on those who made her miserable and helping her friends. It's essentially about how magic can get you the best of ‘80s fashion, popularity, and the hottest guy in school. It is also filled with memorable subplots and moments. Joshua Miller’s performance as Richie transcends the annoying little brother trope, becoming something almost avant-garde; his killer one-liners—my favorite, “You think you’re hot stuff ‘cause you went to a dance?”—are delivered with disdainful extravagance. The most well-known scene, however, is the musical number “Top That,” in which Louise’s best friend Polly (Molly Ingber), with a little helpful magic, rap battles the school’s resident music group in the middle of a suburban street; it’s a masterful demonstration of manufactured and misguided ideas of what defines “cool.” Featuring a pre-show vinyl DJ set by Gaudy God starting at 11:30pm. (1989, 90 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]
Guy Maddin's MY WINNIPEG (Canada)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Wednesday, 7pm
Like Todd Haynes' I'M NOT THERE, Guy Maddin's essay on his hometown attempts to capture the essence of its subject by honoring its mythology, as wells as inventing a few choice legends of its own. But where Haynes is schematic, Maddin is, as always, intensely personal, staging reenactments of traumatic childhood incidents (starring DETOUR's Ann Savage as his mother!) and mourning the corporate-sponsored destruction of his favorite haunts with righteous anger. Perversely, this densely layered dreamscape is being billed as a documentary, but considering the prevalence of fog machines, somnambulists, and tongue-in-cheek sexual hangups, it is more likely a conclusion to the autobiographical trilogy Maddin began with the COWARDS BEND THE KNEE and BRAND UPON THE BRAIN!. Like those, this follows the esoteric, free-floating whims of Maddin's particular brand of MOS cinema—ever since HEART OF THE WORLD, his visuals have had an impulsive spontaneity that Maddin has been straining to replicate to in his audio tracks, recently assembling a formidable rotating cast of narrators for BRAND UPON THE BRAIN!, and here reputedly improvising the rambling, evocative voiceover in a sort of aural equivalent of automatic writing. If Maddin's pipes lack the theatrical gravitas of, say, Crispin Glover or Isabella Rossellini, the intimacy, humor, and imagination afforded by this gambit more than makes up for it, uncovering the ecstatic truth Werner Herzog has been scouring the globe for in recent years on his first try, and right in his own backyard. Screening as part of Doc’s Wednesday night series: A Guy Maddin Retrospective. (2007, 80 min, 35mm) [Mike King]
John Woo’s FACE/OFF (US)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Thursday, 7pm
1997 found John Woo in a strange place. Considered a genius by his admirers thanks to the Heroic Bloodshed films he made in Hong Kong in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, Woo was brought to the big-budget Hollywood action filmmaking machine in 1993 to make the Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle HARD TARGET. The director hit a snag immediately, losing final cut of the film and seeing the studio release a much-maligned version. His follow up, BROKEN ARROW (1996), fared even worse critically, probably because he put nearly none of his signature style into the action. Thankfully, it made enough at the box office for him to get to make FACE/OFF, by far the greatest of his American films. The plot is completely bonkers. I mean, really bonkers. Terrorist psychopath Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage) tries to assassinate FBI agent Sean Archer (John Travolta); instead, he accidentally kills Archer’s child. Jump to six years later, and Archer is about to finally arrest Troy. Before he does, Troy lets Archer know that he’s hidden a time bomb somewhere in Los Angeles. And by bad luck, Troy gets knocked into a coma before he can let Archer know where it is. So, of course, Archer decides to have Troy’s face surgically removed and swapped with his own so that he can trick Troy’s brother into revealing the bomb's location. Oh my god, how fun is this ridiculousness, a surreal two hours of acting in which the two leads do their best impressions of each other doing impressions of themselves. We have Nic Cage doing Travolta doing Nic Cage, and vice versa. We also have the kind of cop-and-robbers story that John Woo needs to do his beautiful John Woo thing. FACE/OFF fulfills the promise of John Woo in America—it's a Heroic Bloodshed film for Western audiences, complete with his signature gun duels, bullet ballets, and birds. The film invokes a giddiness that's almost humorous, but without coming off as trite or planned. Screening as part of Doc’s first Thursday night series: Keanu and Nic’s Excellent Adventure. (1997, 139 min, 35mm) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
Andrei Tarkovsky's STALKER (USSR)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 7:30pm
Loosely based on the Soviet novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Tarkovsky's STALKER creates a decrepit industrial world where a mysterious Zone is sealed off by the government. The Zone, rumored to be of alien origin, is navigable by guides known as Stalkers. The Stalker of the title leads a writer and a scientist through the surrounding detritus into the oneiric Zone—an allegorical stand-in for nothing less than life itself—on a spiritual quest for a room that grants one's deepest subconscious wish. Tarkovsky composes his scenes to obscure the surroundings and tightly controls the audience's view through long, choreographed takes. Shots run long and are cut seamlessly. Coupled with non-localized sounds and a methodical synth score, sequences in the film beckon the audience into its illusion of continuous action while heightening the sense of time passing. The use of nondiegetic sounds subtly reminds us that this may be a subjective world established for the Stalker's mystical purpose. Where sci-fi films tend to overstate humanity's limitless imagination of the universe, Tarkovsky reappropriates the genre's trappings to suggest the cosmos' deepest truths are in one's own mind. STALKER posits—perhaps frighteningly—that, in this exploration of the self, there is something that knows more about us than we know ourselves. The writer and scientist, both at their spiritual and intellectual nadir, hope the room will renew their métier; the Stalker's purpose, as stated by Tarkovsky, is to "impose on them the idea of hope." But STALKER is a rich and continually inspiring work not for this (or any other) fixed meaning but rather for its resistance to any one single interpretation. An encore screening from the 50/50 series, the Siskel’s year-long series including a film from each year the theater has been open. (1979, 161 min, DCP Digital) [Brian Welesko]
Albert Birney and Kentucker Audley’s STRAWBERRY MANSION (US)
Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes
There is something uniquely magical about STRAWBERRY MANSION that I can't quite nail down, but I’m sure as hell going to spend the next few hundred words attempting to do so. This film, written and directed by Albert Birney and Kentucker Audley, lives in a weird liminal space between low-budget mumblecore and high-concept sci-fi, and I want to put down the first and last months’ rent to move into it. It takes place in a near future where dreams are taxed and filled with product placement, which at first suggests some kind of BLADE RUNNER-esque neon future world or a criminal, noir-ish hellscape à la STRANGE DAYS. Instead, the entirety of the film takes place in a Victorian farmhouse. STRAWBERRY MANSION gives a twee, yet not saccharine, type of dystopia. There is a low-budget indie feel of “let’s make a movie!” that maintains its charm throughout, even baking into the film a kind of pass for some VFX visuals that might seem underwhelming otherwise. Even the hand-painted props, with their obvious imperfections, feel charming and acceptably dreamlike. This is the kind of movie that is concrete proof that a good premise is more than enough to hang an entire film on if you can see the vision holistically. James (played by Audley) is a "dream auditor" who comes to check on the backlog of Bella, who never upgraded her dream recordings from VHS to digital. Faced with mountains of old tapes, James stays at Bella’s home while auditing her dreams, until he eventually finds himself more involved in them than he expected. It's obvious that Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry, and Spike Jonze are influences, but those comparisons are facile and should be used only as reference points. Birney and Audley not only create a bucolic, thoroughly romantic dream world but add a patina of social commentary that doesn't feel at all forced. The influence of John Carpenter’s THEY LIVE is far more evident than any of the cutesy indiewood features that seem like more obvious parallels. STRAWBERRY MANSION argues that our current technologies have taken such control over us that we no longer see clearly, directly asking, Do you believe your dreams are your own? At what point are we losing our dreams to the advertising we are endlessly inundated with? When you dream about getting some fast food, is it because you are dreaming it, or is it because it's been placed in your dream by looking at ads all day? Do you like what you think you like? Do you love what you think you love? Who you think you love? STRAWBERRY MANSION judiciously draws questions of social control into a story of romance, all while avoiding the antiseptic dystopian sci-fi of a film like George Lucas’ THX-1138. This is a film that comes along rarely. It's smart, it's charming, and overwhelmingly beautiful. The blend of sociopolitical commentary and sweeping romance is exquisite and the visuals commanding. This is one of those films that makes you wish you could cross over into the screen and live in the world it presents. But since that’s an impossibility, go and see this in the theater if possible. (2021, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
Payal Kapadia's A NIGHT OF KNOWING NOTHING (France/India)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 8:30pm
Payal Kapadia is emerging as something of a mainstream experimental filmmaker, creating poetic collage films that have won prestigious international film awards. Her latest , the Golden Eye-winning A NIGHT OF KNOWING NOTHING, is a documentary that uses a box of letters and diaries found at The Film and Television Institute of India as its source text. The writings are from a student identified as “L”; some are addressed to her lover, a student of a higher caste who is away from school for an unidentified reason. Context places them around 2015-2016, in the aftermath of student protests and a 139-day strike following the appointment of several Modi-friendly figures to the school’s governing council. Reading the texts in voiceover, Kapadia collects archival footage from the 2015 student protests to mix with original footage from unidentified years. While the intellectual basis of the film is clear, the mixed materials and poetic nature of the narration create a more complicated portrait of the inner life of a very public and politicized student body. The personal and political merge as Kapadia tries to understand a person as an amalgamation of her external conflicts. The film thus has a sense of remove, trying to understand recent history through the lens of an incomplete primary source, and that adds a layer of nuance to an already complex portrait of political discord. Where Kapadia sacrifices some sense of directness to marry the narration and images, she takes poetic license to create a more evocative collage, which allows the film’s inevitable descent into police brutality to be calibrated along L’s own increasing sense of despair and nostalgia for her lost love. The film is a more complicated philosophical document for this reason, raising questions about the nature of subversive filmmaking in a cinematic ecosystem that relies so heavily on state-funded institutions. Kapadia, educated herself at the Institute, is in a prime position to provide answers. (2021, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Maxwell Courtright]
Valdimar Jóhannsson’s LAMB (Iceland)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Saturday, 7pm
Cinema serves as the bedrock of modern folk tales, whether by perpetuating the heroism of characters like Batman and Spiderman or by creating sprawling modern myths like STAR WARS. Those famous examples, however, fail to exploit the medium's capacity for tales that would once have been considered worthy of being collected and passed on. Not quite a horror film, LAMB tells a fantastical story about a couple who, after losing their firstborn child, come upon a half-human-half-animal hybrid and raise it as their own. The consequences of this decision involve infidelity, murder, and punishments for transgressions. The lush visuals settle us into the meandering story in a disarming way, regarding the mysteries with a raised eyebrow. The vagaries that make this strange family work are confusing, but in a comforting way. The world of LAMB feels somehow out of time. On the one hand, it's pre-modern, with the sorts of fantastic creatures imagined in times long forgotten; on the other, the film tells a story of a contemporary couple dealing with contemporary life. When the ending comes, with its sudden inevitability, there's no space to feel, just a moral lesson served coldly and decidedly. Co-Produced by Hungarian slow cinema master Bela Tarr, and co-written by the prolific neo-surrealist, Icelandic writer Sjon, LAMB maintains a loping, comfortable gait that makes us forget the whimsical story could have very well began with “Once upon a time…” LAMB has all the benchmarks for the 21st-century cult canon: it's not in English, it's slightly obtuse, there's a hot distribution brand behind it, and it falls somewhere near to the new sub-genre of “elevated horror.” That it'll find its audience this way is quite fine by me. I don't care what formula you use as long as you get the right answer. I just hope that instead of seeing this as a movie that is strange for the sake of being strange, viewers will think of all the jarring fairy tales they were told as children—the ones they barely remember yet are life-altering all the same—and recognize that these stories are still being told. It's just that, this time around, they're being told in the dark of the cinema by the light of a projector instead of in a nighttime bedroom by the light of a lamp. (2021, 106 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
Joachim Trier’s THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD (Norway)
Gene Siskel Film Center and the Music Box Theatre – See Venue websites for showtimes
After watching THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD, I was surprised to learn that it’s not an adaptation of a book, although director and co-writer Joachim Trier is a former novelist. The film perfectly captures the tone of a certain brand of literary novels about the messy lives of women in their 20s and early 30s. It also fits into the lineage of cinema using devices like voice-over and chapter headings, complete with a prologue and epilogue. Julie (Renate Reinsvke) is introduced to the audience as a medical student. The film speeds through her collegiate experience, taking us to the point where meets Askel (Anders Danielsen Lie), a comic book artist known for his character Bobcat, at 30. The two move in together, but she starts growing dissatisfied with this domesticity. One night at a party, she meets Eivind (Herbert Nordrum) at a wedding party and impulsively flirts with him without having sex. (The two watch each other going to the bathroom.) Catching up with him at a café several months later, the tension between them blossoms into a full-fledged romance. Trier may be best known for putting Lie, a part-time actor who has never given up his day job as a doctor, on the world stage. Lie’s role as a recovering heroin addict in Trier’s OSLO, AUGUST 31ST brought out a fragile masculinity, but THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD shows his range: without coming across a macho caricature or even a particularly flawed person, one can see hints of the dark impulses he brings up while arguing with a feminist on a talk show. Despite its title, THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD isn’t concerned with judging any of its characters, least of all Julie. While the film occasionally strains its efforts to feel up-to-the-minute—as in the section where Julie’s essay “oral sex in the age of #metoo” goes viral—its careful structure, embrace of physicality and tonal changes show tremendous backbone. I’m unsure Trier is aware of how small Julie’s world appears— critic Michael Sicinski has pointed out that she has no friends of any gender—but in general, he updates the rom-com for a time whose old fantasies have grown stale and whose new ones are still nascent. (2021, 127 min, DCP Digital) [Steve Erickson]
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)
Various local theaters (Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema, The Logan Theatre) and multiplexes (AMC, Regal, et al.) – See Venue websites 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 local theaters (Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema, The Logan Theatre) and 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]
🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
Also Screening
⚫ Cinema/Chicago
Kogonada’s 2021 film AFTER YANG (96 min, DCP Digital) will screen for Cinema/Chicago members on Tuesday at 7pm at AMC River East (322 E. Illinois St.). More info here.
⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Kang Dae-jin’s 1961 film THE COACHMAN (120 min, DCP Digital) screens on Friday at 7pm as part of the Classics of South Korean Cinema series.
Barbara Kopple’s 1977 documentary HARLAN COUNTY, USA (103 min, Digital Projection) screens on Monday at 7pm as part of the Which Side Are You On? Labor and Collection Action On Film series.
Bertrand Tavernier’s 1986 film ‘ROUND MIDNIGHT (133 min, 35mm) screens on Tuesday at 7pm as part of the Nights of the Swingers! Jazz in Film series. More info on all screenings here.
⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
The Oscar Nominated Documentary Short Films begin screening this week.
Luis Buñuel’s 1977 film THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE (102 min, 35mm) screens on Saturday at 7pm as part of the Film Center’s Bad Romance Series.
The National Theatre Live production of Jamie Lloyd’s CYRANO DE BERGERAC (2020, 180 min, Digital Projection) screens on Sunday at 2pm.
The Midwest Film Festival kicks off their 2022 season with the Best of the Midwest Showcase, featuring all the winning films from the 2021 Best of the Midwest Awards, on Tuesday at 7pm. More info on all screenings here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
The Oscar Nominated Documentary Short Films begin screening this week.
Guillermo Del Toro’s 2021 film NIGHTMARE ALLEY (150 min) screens on Friday at 8pm, Saturday at 3:45pm, and Sunday at 8pm, in a special black-and-white 35mm print. More info on all screenings here.
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS –
Held Over/Still Screening/Return Engagements (Selected)
Blerta Basholli’s HIVE (Kosovo/Switzerland/Albania/Republic of Macedonia)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
One of the most difficult things for people to face is having a loved one vanish without a trace. Filmmakers are attracted to the inherently dramatic stories of the disappeared, particularly when political turmoil is the cause. For example, THE KILLING FIELDS (1984) rages over the mass murders of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and Patricio Guzmán’s NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT (2010) deals in part with the attempts of Chileans to find the remains of those disappeared by the vicious Pinochet regime. Now, from Kosovo, we have HIVE. First-time feature director Blerta Basholli has chosen to tell the true story of Fahrije Hoti, a mother of two living in Krusha e Madhe, where one of the largest massacres of the war in Kosovo (1998–99) took place. The film is set in Krusha in 2006. Fahrije (Yllka Gashi) and many of the other villagers whose husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers were taken are living in ramshackle homes after their own homes were burned to the ground. As Muslim women, they are not allowed to work outside the home or drive, and they rely on pooled income to make ends meet. When a supermarket in Mitrovica offers to sell their homemade avjar (a roasted red pepper spread), Fahrije defies convention—and suffers for it—by getting a driver’s license, starting a company, and trying to convince the village women to work with her. While watching HIVE, I was reminded of Aida Bejić’s marvelous SNOW (2008), a magic-realist tale of grieving widows of the Bosnian War. Despite the story similarities, the films are quite different, with HIVE planted squarely in the real world. It’s infuriating how the “rules” make it impossible for these Muslim women to survive without a man, and sadly predictable how the villagers seek to intimidate Fahrije and those who have joined her. Led by a grounded performance by Gashi and a great supporting performance by Çun Lajçi as Fahrije’s father-in-law, HIVE admirably highlights how Fahrije did what she had to do and inspired others to face their losses courageously and build a new future. (2021, 84 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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
⚫ Chicago Filmmakers
Kapra Fleming’s 2021 documentary LEE GODIE, CHICAGO FRENCH IMPRESSIONIST is available to rent through March 5. More info here.
⚫ Facets Cinema
Alice Rohrwacher, Francesco Munzi, and Pietro Marcello’s 2021 documentary FUTURA (110 min) is available to rent. More info here.
⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Alice Rohrwacher, Francesco Munzi, and Pietro Marcello’s 2021 documentary FUTURA (110 min) is available to rent beginning this week. More info here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
Check hold-over titles here.
⚫ VDB TV
“Points of View – Video Artists Read the World” (1973 - 2020, TRT 118 min), programmed by Abina Manning, is available to stream for free on VDB TV. The program includes short video works by Nancy Holt, Dana Levy, Kevin Jerome Everson, Basma Alsharif, eteam, Martine Syms, Paul and Marlene Kos, and Sky Hopinka. More info here.
CINE-LIST: February 25 - March 3, 2022
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Maxwell Courtright, Kyle Cubr, John Dickson, Steve Erickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Mike King, JB Mabe, Raphael Jose Martinez, Anne Orchier, Michael Glover Smith, Drew Van Weelden, Brian Welesko, K.A. Westphal