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.
Remember to check venue websites for information on safety protocols and other procedures put in place for COVID prevention. We recommend verifying those before every trip to the theater.
🇪🇺 CHICAGO EUROPEAN UNION FILM FESTIVAL
The 25th Annual Chicago European Union Film Festival continues at the Gene Siskel Film Center through Thursday. We have reviews of select films below; in addition to these, Dace Pūce’s 2020 Latvian film THE PIT (107 min, DCP Digital) screens on Friday at 8:15pm; David Ondříček’s 2021 Czech film ZÁTOPEK (131 min, DCP Digital) screens on Sunday at 1pm; and Mauro Russo Rouge’s 2021 Italian film BLOOM UP: A SWINGER COUPLE STORY (88 min, DCP Digital) screens on Sunday at 6:45pm. More info on all screenings here.
Ivan Ostrochovsky’s SERVANTS (Slovakia/Romania/Czech Republic)
Friday, 6pm
With shockingly brilliant whites and oubliette blacks, the icy monochromatics of this film underpin the reshaping of unrelenting religious horror into religious terror. A story of a seminary in 1980s Czechoslovakia whose members are forced to decide whether to go against the official decree of the Church and collaborate with the totalitarian government or find themselves at odds with the government itself and all its available Eastern Bloc apparatchiks. Visually this film is stunning. There is an invocation of grandeur in the minute that echoes that of the Church itself. Fitting somewhere between the works of Poland’s Paweł Pawlikowski and Hungary’s Bela Tarr, SERVANTS’ deliberate aesthetic deconstruction of the world into blacks and whites, moral rights and wrongs, and absolutes so strong they can be seen with the eye create a sense of visual awe that can often feel overwhelming. At times it can almost feel like the story is being lost under the weight of the camera, that capturing the light is more important to Ostrochovsky than everything else. Perhaps it is. But perhaps that's the point. This film feels like a constant metaphor that allows it to free itself from the human eye and give us an omniscient, omnipresent gaze, making the audience the very God of judgment that the characters find themselves under. At a short 80 minutes, we get both a film whose story moves at a glacial gait but still ends sooner than expected, an achievement nothing less than herculean. But it's within those short 80 minutes that an abstruse profundity is slowly dispersed as though through a censer. Black and white may have never been both more literal and metaphorical than in this film here, an absolutely beautiful one that tries the soul. (2021, 80 min DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
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Ildikó Enyedi’s THE STORY OF MY WIFE (Hungary/Germany/France/Italy)
Saturday, 1pm
With MY TWENTIETH CENTURY (1989) and the Golden Bear-winning ON BODY AND SOUL (2017), Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi displayed an affinity with classic Surrealism in her non-sequitur humor, love of dreams, and exuberant formal experimentation. THE STORY OF MY WIFE is less overtly Surrealist than the other films of hers I’ve seen, but its central theme—the eternal unknowability of others—is still in line with Surrealist tradition, with its undercurrents of psychological and erotic discovery. Based on a 1946 novel by Hungarian author Milán Füst (one of Enyedi’s favorite books since adolescence), the film is an epic meditation on the meaning of marriage that walks a knife’s edge between realism and dream logic. This description might recall EYES WIDE SHUT (1999), but from moment to moment, the film feels more like the soft, elegant Surrealism of Manoel de Oliveira features like ABRAHAM’S VALLEY (1993) and A TALKING PICTURE (2003). Jakob Störr (Gijs Naber) is a Dutch sea captain on leave in Paris who bets a friend he’ll marry the first woman he sees at a bar; in a miraculous stroke of luck, that woman not only looks like Léa Seydoux, but said woman, Lizzy, accepts his proposal. The remaining two and a half hours of THE STORY OF MY WIFE chart this unlikely marriage over several years, during which the partners fluctuate between being intimate with and strangers to one another. Sometimes they do this over the course of individual scenes, and it’s remarkable to see how Naber and Seydoux execute the subtle turns of character in order to make them work dramatically. Seydoux is particularly impressive, capping a 2021 trilogy of Brechtian performances (with Bruno Dumont’s FRANCE and Wes Anderson’s THE FRENCH DISPATCH) that acknowledge the artificiality of performing yet create a nuanced character in spite of this. THE STORY OF MY WIFE takes some getting used to; it’s performed mainly in English by a cast of non-native English speakers, and the historical period is never clearly defined. Personally, I thought these qualities heightened the movie’s mysterious power—the idea of a Dutchman and a Frenchwoman conducting their most intimate affairs in English out of some abstract sense of diplomatic tact makes them seem like actors in a play, not the authors of their own lives. Yet who’s writing the play, and for whom are they writing it? Enyedi, a great poker-faced director, offers no clues. (2021, 169 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Giedré Žickytė’s THE JUMP (Lithuania/Latvia/France/Germany/Documentary)
Saturday, 6:30pm
In November 1970, in a rare measure of cooperation with the United States, the Soviet Union sent some negotiators on one of their fishing trawlers to rendezvous with a U.S. Coast Guard cutter called Vigilant, off Martha’s Vineyard, to discuss complaints from U.S. fisheries in the area that the Soviets were disrupting the waters where their boats worked. One of the sailors aboard the Soviet ship, a Lithuanian named Simas Kudirka, seized the opportunity to escape from what he experienced as a floating prison by jumping onto the deck of the Vigilant to ask for political asylum. The events of that fateful day and their aftermath comprise the compelling history lesson that is THE JUMP. Director Giedrė Žickytė reconstructs these events using U.S. news coverage and interviews with Kudirka and several American officials, including the captain of the Vigilant, Ralph Eustis. Kudirka, eager to see the world after hearing the stories of his seagoing grandfather about palm trees and waves as tall as a house, reveals all of his anger and despair at life under the thumb of the Soviet Union, which refused to issue him a passport despite his duty traveling the oceans of the world. After being denied asylum, Kudirka spent four years in a Siberian concentration camp, but his plight became a cause célèbre (with an interesting Chicago connection) and a TV movie, “The Defection of Simas Kudirka” (1978), starring Alan Arkin in the title role. Older and wiser, Kudirka found out that the palm trees that look so inviting from a distance will cut your hands when you try to trim them. Now that current events have caught up with THE JUMP, it would behoove us all to listen to Kudirka’s disdainful appraisal of how the abundance in the United States has led many Americans to be wasteful and self-absorbed. Before we inevitably start to grouse and punish our elected officials for high gas prices, it would be instructive for all of us to really absorb what kind of world Vladimir Putin is trying to resurrect with a clear-eyed viewing of THE JUMP. (2020, 84 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Kate Dolan’s YOU ARE NOT MY MOTHER (Ireland)
Saturday, 9:30pm
An intense psychological folk horror that, if it had “A24” slapped on before the start of the film, the entirety of the “elevated horror” crowd and 20-something Film Twitter would lose their collective minds over. This is a movie that's genuinely unnerving and disturbing. The pacing is magnificent; slow enough to keep you wanting more, yet the story somehow quietly accelerates, not once losing speed, from the very moment it begins. The film centers itself around Char, a teenage girl living in an Irish council estate (what us Americans would call “housing projects”) with her grandmother and her mother. Her already strained relationship with her grandmother only gets worse when her mother mysteriously disappears, only to return with a seemingly different personality. With some echoes of the equally terrifying 2014 German horror GOODNIGHT MOMMY, here we get a decidedly feminine and folk view on the possible horrors of family and the maternal. Not being Irish, I can't speak to whether any kind of mythologies or specific folk tales were being played with, but as a horror film aficionado I can state that not knowing this didn't make the movie any easier to watch. The acting is great, especially the work Carolyn Bracken was doing with her body. So often these days horror movies use that cheapo move where a character moves slowly and then suddenly darts at an above-human speed; or bodies contort in an inhumanly, CGI-drenched manner with bad bone-cracking sound effects overdubbed. Here is an actress fully in her own body, and moving in a way that is aggressively disquieting. Add to this the film’s wonderful use of sound, and a film score that seems to reach back to the religious/psychological horror films of the ‘60s and ‘70s, and you get a movie that is far greater than the sum of its scares. For a first feature, this is incredibly impressive, and I can only hope that writer-director Kate Dolan has fistfuls of money thrown at her after this, because I want to keep living (scared out of my wits) in whatever world she has going on inside her head. (2021, 93 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
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Jacqueline Lentzou's MOON, 66 QUESTIONS (Greece/France)
Sunday, 4pm
Caring for an aging loved one is a common film trope, in part because it’s a common life experience. But this also comes from the way that these narratives offer up potential for juicy, awards-baiting performances and dramatic tension. A new entry in this canon, Jacqueline Lentzou’s debut feature MOON, 66 QUESTIONS, certainly contains awards-worthy performances, but these are cut with a thematic interest in performance itself that puts the film into more complicated, fruitful territory. The film follows Artemis (Sophia Kokkali), an aimless post-grad who gets corralled into taking care of her middle-aged father, Paris (Lazaros Georgakopoulos), who has lost bodily function for an unknown reason. Estranged from her father after she had a distant relationship with him in childhood, Artemis is openly frustrated with Paris’ continuing lack of communication and the nonlinear process of his recovery. As she learns how to physically balance him, the physical therapist training her remarks that the movement is "like dancing," a similarity underlined by Artemis’ gradual embrace of dance and free movement in her private time. Typical for this kind of narrative (however slowly and artfully established in this case), her embrace parallels her growth toward Paris as they synchronize physically and emotionally. All of this is peppered with video footage time-stamped from the '90s, suggesting home movies that Artemis narrates in conversation with others. However, the "others" are gradually revealed to be Artemis herself, adopting voices as a sounding board for ruminations on her personal history. Kokkali’s performance carries the film, portraying a woman who seems to process and grow closer to people only through imitation, taking on empathy as not just a thought exercise but an active performance. This is cinema of the body; the two characters are both the subjects and the landscapes of the film, trading energy and developing the plot largely through their physicality. As one body depletes, the other comes into itself as a more elastic and loving version. The central relationship is not parasitic, though; all of the love given is love that is shared, and this film is nothing if not a moving portrait of undying familial bonds. (2021, 108 min, DCP Digital) [Maxwell Courtright]
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Joke Olthaar's BERG (Netherlands/Slovenia)
Tuesday, 7:30pm
Triglav is the highest peak of the Julian Alps, and it towers over Slovenia as a major cultural landmark. In BERG, we are taken up the mountain along with three hikers, mere ants when compared to the immensity of nature at hand. With this film, Olthaar successfully delivers a project that is both meditative but also shocking and bold at times. It can be easy for a filmmaker to throw together some pretty cinematography and competent editing and call it a day, but Olthaar goes beyond that with BERG. Not only does he achieve stunning shots and a natural rhythm to the editing, but also an understanding of when to digress from the meditation and take us down a new path. While the narrative is very, very slim, there is still a story of sorts as well as themes you could extract. At its core, the film is about our struggle for the sublime and the dangers we are willing to endure to reach it. At one point, Olthaar executes a POV shot that lets us see how truly daunting the mountain is, and it hits you then how dangerous the trek is not just for the hikers but for the film crew as well. For whatever reason, humans are drawn towards this sublimity no matter the risk, and in cinema it's no different. Whether it's in the name of reaching the peak of a mountain or capturing the perfect shot, death might just be worth it. (2021, 79 mins, DCP Digital) [Drew Van Weelden]
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Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović’s MURINA (Croatia)
Wednesday, 7:30pm
Julija (Gracija Filipović) lives in a remote cove off Croatia’s Adriatic coast with her beautiful mother and controlling father; the film’s narrative centers on the tension that rises between the three during a visit from an old friend (Cliff Curtis) of the girl’s father, who has achieved significant financial success and whom her father hopes to persuade to buy their land and build a resort. It’s difficult to believe that such an island paradise could also be a veritable aquatic prison, but so it is for Julija, in spite of her apparent affinity for the water. She’s not so much trapped by her surroundings, but by her father’s immature and dominating attitudes. His friend, Javier, shows Julija what she and her mother have been missing, namely a loving spouse and parent with the means of making their dreams come true; it’s insinuated that Javier has a romantic history with her mother, Mela. When Javier puts forth the idea of Julija one day attending Harvard, she latches onto the notion that life could be different, which intensifies her relationship with her father. She begins acting out in a way that it’s implied she hadn’t before Javier’s arrival, when she’d silently and sullenly withstood her father’s behavior, even accompanying him on daily spearfishing expeditions to catch the fish that gives the film its name. As Julija, Filipović gives an arresting performance; her steely demeanor evinces volumes about the relationship she has with her parents without much being said. (Filipović is something of a muse to Croatian writer-director Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović, having starred in Kusijanović’s 2017 short INTO THE BLUE; this is also the filmmaker’s debut feature, an auspicious inaugural endeavor produced in part by Martin Scorsese’s Sikelia Productions.) Kusijanović’s direction is likewise assured, especially in her decision to include numerous scenes that take place underwater. The sea is Julija’s respite and refuge, and ultimately the only place where she finds freedom when the men in her life fail her. The film’s cinematographer, Hélène Louvart, has worked on similar films wherein a body of water figures as a motif: Agnès Varda’s THE BEACHES OF AGNÈS, Eliza Hittman’s BEACH RATS, and, more recently, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s THE LOST DAUGHTER. Thus Kusijanović and Louvart’s understanding of the sea as a symbol is proffered subtly, both lending weight to Julija’s confinement and revealing to her a possible means of escape. As far as coming-of-age stories go, MURINA offers something unique in its high-stakes tension and the extent of Julija’s physical entrapment by the very thing that offers liberation (while the familial discord and her Freudian attraction to Javier are more run-of-the-mill tropes); much like the Mediterranean moray that gives the film its name, the young protagonist proves to be slippery and perilous when threatened. (2021, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
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Fernando Leon de Aranoa’s THE GOOD BOSS (Spain)
Thursday, 8pm
It’s been a joy to watch Javier Bardem age and not only get better at what he does over time, but be able to find new characters to inhabit that manage to show us that he really is on par with the Daniel Day-Lewises of the world. With this film, we have peak (as of now) Bardem as Julio Blanco, the head of a very successful scale manufacturing company in small town Spain, who is willing to do whatever it takes so that his company wins a business award. This concise premise gives so much room for anything to happen to Bardem’s mediocre Machiavelli. Nestled somewhere between a comedy of manners and a comedy of errors, THE GOOD BOSS brings a distinctively Spanish dark charm to a story that would equally befit the world of the Coen brothers. Bardem’s Blanco is so obsessed with everything being in perfect order (he does manufacture scales after all) that as problems start to occur in the personal lives of his employees, he sees it as his duty as a paternal boss to help remedy them. Everything that goes wrong is in the pursuit of perfection. And everything Blanco does is drenched in false magnanimity. Whether or not Blanco sees this we’re never quite sure. So like so many stories of a man fighting the world and attempting to control the things he cannot, we see the unraveling of Blanco’s world coming at the worst possible time—as the committee for the one business award he has yet to win is due to visit. This film is equal parts corporate satire, sex farce, class analysis, and morality play. Yet despite all these things happening at the same time, THE GOOD BOSS maintains a surprisingly digestible decorum. Everything is in its place as it falls out of place, and the story never falters or muddles. In fact, I had the good luck to see this the week it opened while in Spain alongside my travel companion who doesn't speak much more than passing Spanish. Despite there being no subtitles they were able to follow the film perfectly and we actually had a great conversation about it afterward. Honestly, this is a near perfect film storytelling wise. And boy oh boy did the Spaniards seem to agree. This film was nominated for a record 20 Goyas (the Spanish equivalent of the Oscars) and won six (Best Picture, Director, Actor, Original Screenplay, Score and Editing), so it’s kind of a ringer if you’re looking for a quality picture to watch. Plus you get to see something absolutely magical which is Javier Bardem dressed, and acting, as a middle aged, middle of the road, uninteresting businessman. We’re given this sleight of hand where we get to see exactly what Bardem would be like if he wasn't one of the most successful actors in the world. If it was anyone but Bardem I’d call it stunt casting, but in this case it’s not only charming, but ingenious. (2021, 120 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING
Marguerite Duras’ AGATHA ET LES LECTURES ILLIMITÉS (France)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Sunday, 7pm
At an empty seaside hotel, an adult brother and sister meet and discuss their happy childhood and their long-suppressed incestuous desire for one another, and because this is a film by Marguerite Duras, most of the scenario plays out in the spectator’s imagination. The brother and sister never appear onscreen together; moreover, the film doesn’t contain any diegetic dialogue—all the speaking transpires in the form of voiceover narration. To further complicate matters, the sister is played by Bulle Ogier but voiced by Duras, while Yann Andréa plays the brother onscreen and delivers his offscreen musings as well. It’s easy to describe Duras’ films as minimalist, given how little action they contain, yet this description belies the sheer magnitude of their ideas. AGATHA ET LES LECTURES ILLIMITÉS (whose common, decidedly unpoetic English translation is “Agatha and the Limitless Readings”) is an important chapter in Duras’ investigation of the relationship between words and images, and how the two can create more together than either would alone. The combination of depopulated settings and character-driven stories results in a polytonality that conveys that ineffable feeling of loneliness within a crowd. Also, many of the shots speak to the eerie sense of narrative suggested by distinctive architecture (a subject that Duras’ onetime collaborator Alain Resnais explored in his book of photography). Lastly, the film is a tour of subjective memory in the Proustian tradition, as Duras weaves delicately through the characters’ reminiscences, past behavior, and unspoken feelings. Seeing this in a theater should be like sitting inside a giant brain. Screening as part of Doc’s Sunday night series: Destroy, She Said: A Marguerite Duras Retrospective. (1981, 86 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
Jane Campion’s IN THE CUT (US)
Chicago Film Society at the Music Box Theatre — Monday, 7pm
Though many things in recent years have made me think to myself, “Hey, the kids really are alright,” one in particular chuffs me to no end: the re-evaluation by younger critics of Jane Campion’s 2003 erotic thriller IN THE CUT. Lambasted upon its initial release—one critic at the time said it “feels only vicariously dangerous, like a coffee-table collection of images from the inferno”; another declared it a “puzzling affair of murky motivations and leaps of logic that no amount of Meg Ryan skin and no number of faked orgasms can hide,” an assessment that didn’t age particularly well—Campion’s adaptation of Susanna Moore’s 1995 novel is, like many films of its caliber, one that graciously unveils itself only to those receptive of its brilliance. The reward is a blisteringly sexy and almost egregiously cool genre turn in which a woman’s sexuality is as much a mystery as the bizarre serial murders (a bizarre but nevertheless accurate equivocation). Meg Ryan, in perhaps her best performance, stars as Frannie, a New York City English teacher who becomes embroiled in the hunt for a serial killer after remnants of a murdered woman are found in her garden; she’d also been at the same bar as the victim, meeting with a student she consults on slang for a project she’s doing. Indicated by the film’s idiomatic title, a fascination with language persists throughout, as Frannie collects words and phrases from all over, even diligently observing community poetry displays on public transit. It's clear that Frannie doesn't make much time for romance, evidently having been put off by her parents’ disastrous marriage. That changes, at least to an extent, when she becomes involved with the investigating officer on the case, Detective Malloy (pre-Marvel Mark Ruffalo, when he was actually an interesting actor). Their affair accounts for the erotic sex scenes, which effectively disrupt the male gaze as much as anything that might lay claim to that achievement. (In her excellent capsule for the screening, Chicago Film Society member and fellow Campion devotee Rebecca Lyon notes that the film was pitched to investors as something akin to David Fincher’s SE7EN; both have myriad virtues, but I’m more interested in Campion’s answer to the question, “What’s in the box?”, which Malloy does his best to find.) Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Frannie’s half-sister, Pauline, a hopeless romantic who’s the complete opposite of Frannie in her near-histrionic vulnerability. When the murders become personal for Frannie, her suspicions over Malloy potentially being the killer come to a head, leading to a dramatic but still provocative conclusion, fitting of both the genre and Campion’s interpretation of it. All this is made even more impactful by Dion Beebe’s cinematography, which presents Campion’s anguished grittiness superlatively. The visual aesthetic accomplishes many things, representing various elements at play within the film, from the literal violence of the murders to the emotional violence of the ever-apocryphal search for romance. As do the camera movements and shot compositions, which are heady and revelatory at most every turn, even as the dimness of the light sometimes obscures the action. That’s an apt metaphor for the film itself: there’s more there to what you can’t see than what you can. The abiding enigma of intimacy and the secrets that people, especially women, hold within are here appreciated for their unremitting mystery. Preceded by a Meg Ryan trailer reel. (2003, 119 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]
George Miller’s THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK (US)
Music Box Theatre – Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am
With its distinctly surreal visuals from cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond highlighting the relationships between women portrayed by huge stars, THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK is a prototype for later fantasy-comedies like DEATH BECOMES HER (1992). MAD MAX series director George Miller’s first Hollywood feature is uninhibited in a way that is equally fun and disconcerting; despite the large budget and well-known actors, it's the profound weirdness that keeps me continually intrigued by THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK. Three friends (Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer), each abandoned by the men in their lives, unwittingly conjure their “ideal” man one night over martinis. Daryl Van Horne (Jack Nicholson) arrives in the witches' small, conservative New England town, though as he systematically begins to seduce each of them, it’s clear that the stranger’s motives are devilish, to say the least. As the three friends oscillate between being each other’s competition and working together to discover the breadth of their powers, THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK provides a complex look at female friendship and sexuality. It’s also a deeply grotesque film, particularly when it tends towards body horror. The special effects, especially in the final showdown between the witches and Daryl, are notably uncanny. Despite the four charismatic leads, the most memorable performance is by Veronica Cartwright as Felicia, the witches' and Daryl's most outspoken naysayer; the scene where the witches unconsciously cause Felicia to vomit cherry pits as she monologues about the evil she sees corrupting her town is beyond unnerving. (1987, 118 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]
Kathleen Collins' LOSING GROUND (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 6pm
"There's nothing wrong with telling stories." So says one artist when another expresses envy over his ability to work instinctively as opposed to narratively. Director Kathleen Collins' LOSING GROUND is composed of various such oppositions that manifest themselves through Victor (played by GANJA & HESS director Bill Gunn) and his wife, Sara (Seret Scott), a professor of philosophy. He's artistic; she's logical. This is the jumping off point from which other dichotomies—male versus female, creativity versus intellectualism, abstraction versus specificity—are explored. With regards to race, which is a de facto theme owing to its being one of the first fictional features to be directed by a black woman, the film shows rather than tells; many suspect that it was neglected upon its release because it portrays Black characters as well-to-do professionals instead of as victims or thugs. (In response to being asked if minority filmmakers have a duty to address their respective struggles, Collins said, "I think you have an even greater obligation to deal with your own obsessions.") Though LOSING GROUND isn't exactly autobiographical, Collins herself was a professor, and the name of the film comes from one of her own short story collections. Sara's almost obsessive study of aesthetic experience both parallels the aforementioned oppositions and prompts the changes that occur over the course of the narrative. "Essentially it's that change is a rather volatile process in the human psyche," Collins said in an interview with James Briggs Murray for Black Visions. "And, that real change usually requires some release of fantasy energy." This last part refers to the dance-centric film-within-a-film that Sara acts in at the behest of one of her students, which she does in an attempt to achieve the same creative ecstasy as her husband and actress mother. (The meta-film also mirrors the central drama of the narrative.) Overall, the film is an astute meditation on a great many things: the academic experience, the aesthetic experience, the Black experience, and Sara's experience as a woman. Collins was also a person of varied interests; in addition to teaching, writing, and making films, she was also a playwright and an activist. Collins once remarked, "I'm interested in solving certain questions, such as: How do you do an interesting narrative film?" LOSING GROUND is an exceptional solution to that dilemma. There's nothing wrong with telling stories, indeed. Screening as part of 50/50, the Siskel’s year-long series including a film from each year the theater has been open. (1982, 86 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
Jane Campion’s THE POWER OF THE DOG (US/UK/Australia/New Zealand/Canada)
Music Box Theatre – See Venue websites for showtimes
It’s been 12 years since Jane Campion’s last feature film, BRIGHT STAR. That movie stays with me for containing one of the rawest scenes of a character crying in grief I’ve ever witnessed; I still get chills thinking about it. THE POWER OF THE DOG is darker, but no less emotional, unhurriedly revealing the devastating and murky inner lives of its characters with astonishing skill and empathy. The film is demarcated by roman numeral chapters, each building tension by slightly shifting audience expectations. It’s clear this growing anxiety is leading to a dark, violent end, but I was constantly reconsidering what that end might be and consistently taken aback by Campion’s twisting complexity of the characterization onscreen. The story takes place in 1920s Montana, following the Burbank brothers: quiet and clean-cut George (Jesse Plemons) and rough yet charismatic Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch). For years they've run a prosperous cattle ranch, but their situation is upended when George marries sweet Rose (Kirsten Dunst), a widow who brings along with her scholarly son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Phil is enraged by this change, and his immediate cruelty to Rose and Peter is distressing. It’s slowly revealed his unbridled rage is complicated by his past; most notably he had a deeply meaningful relationship early in his life with a cowboy mentor who’s long since passed. Though never onscreen, Bronco Henry’s presence looms as large as the Montana mountains. And, oh, those mountains. Ari Wegner’s cinematography is breathtaking and true to the Western genre, but it also feels alien. The landscape seems both impossibly picturesque and quietly full of terrors. Shots of wide-open spaces are juxtaposed with tight quarters, driving the characters fears and desires: the camera captures scenes through windows and doors (à la THE SEARCHERS), the brothers’ cold ranch house, and Phil’s secret sanctuary in the nearby woods. We witness the characters as they navigate not only the setting, but their own troubled existence within it. They dance around each other as they grapple with overwhelming loneliness fueled by constantly needing to assess the intentions of those around them. Cumberbatch is powerfully unsettling, but the film belongs to Dunst, who masterfully portrays Rose’s emotional shifts with crushing compassion. Smit-McPhee, too, is incredible as Peter, whose motives are skillfully inscrutable until the final, quietly shocking moments. (2021, 125 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]
Kogonada's AFTER YANG (US)
Landmark Century Centre – See Venue website for showtimes
In Kogonada’s first film, COLUMBUS, the director often aimed his camera at the eccentric and exciting architecture of the city of Columbus, Indiana. When juxtaposed with his characters, this really established a sense of space that two or more people can share. In his follow-up film, AFTER YANG, he looks at an internal architecture of sorts to a similar, perhaps greater effect. It focuses on a family of three; Yang is their babysitter/big-brother robot. As the title suggests, he starts to malfunction and the family has to adjust to life without him. We eventually get to a point where the father can view snippets of 10 seconds of each day of Yang’s life, and this internal architecture was seemingly taken for granted. Instead of your typical, “What are robots and AI going to do to humanity” storyline, we get a more realistic “What are humans going to do to robots and AI.” This reading of the film is just one of many, as I am sure on a rewatch I could focus on themes of fatherhood, grief, identity, et cetera. There are a few scenes in this that make me very excited to see what Kogonada does next as he continues to experiment and evolve with his work. Plus, the film has a family TikTok dance battle as an opening credits sequence, and nailing that can be half the battle. With some killer performances by some familiar faces, a great soundtrack (a Mitski cover of the song Glide from Shunji Iwai’s ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU-CHOU), and beautiful visuals, this film is surely one to revisit plenty of times. (2021, 96 min, DCP Digital) [Drew Van Weelden]
Joachim Trier’s THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD (Norway)
Music Box Theatre – See Venue website 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]
🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
Also Screening
⚫ Asian Pop-Up Cinema
The extensive Asian Pop-Up Cinema starts their fourteenth season on Sunday. Their in-person and virtual offerings are too many to list here. (A good problem to have!) Visit here for more information.
⚫ Chicago Filmmakers
Cinema-Luz Collective presents The Short Night, Vol. 1, a program of seven short movies all shot on film, on Saturday at 7pm. The screening is currently sold out; rush ticketing only. More info here.
⚫ Community Film Workshop
The Community Film Workshop celebrates 50 Years of Chicago Women in Film at the Green Line Performing Arts Center (329 E. Garfield Blvd.) on Friday at 7pm. There will be a screening of CFWC alum Pamela Sherrod Anderson’s 2018 film THE G FORCE (57 min, Digital Projection), and new work by emerging women filmmakers Natalie Battles, Melanie Brezill, Devorah Crable, Susan Carlotta Ellis, and Safiya James. There will be a moderated discussion with the filmmakers after the screening. The event is free; register here.
⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Shin Sang-ok’s 1958 South Korean film A FLOWER IN HELL (86 min, DCP Digital) screens on Friday at 7pm as part of the Classics of South Korean Cinema series.
Cary Joji Fukunaga’s 2021 James Bond film NO TIME TO DIE (163 min, DCP Digital) screens on Saturday at 7pm as part of the New Releases series. More info on all screenings here.
⚫ Facets Cinema
Mike Mills’ 2021 film C’MON C’MON (108 min, DCP Projection) screens several times through Sunday as part of Facets’ If We Picked the Oscars series.
Daniel Petrie’s 1961 film A RAISIN IN THE SUN (128 min, Digital Projection) screens on Sunday at 1pm as part of the Tribute to Sidney Poitier series. More info on all screenings here.
⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
The Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts, the Oscar Nominated Live Action Shorts, and the Oscar Nominated Documentary Shorts continue this week.
School of the Art Institute lecturer Rob Schroeder’s 2021 film ULTRASOUND (103 min, DCP Digital) screens on Friday at 8:30pm, with writer, graphic artist and fellow SAIC lecturer Conor Stechschulte (on whose graphic novel the film is based) in a post-screening conversation with cartoonist Anya Davidson, and Saturday at 8:30pm, with Stechschulte and filmmaker Chris Sullivan in conversation after the screening.
Hany Abu-Assad’s 2021 Palestinian film HUDA’S SALON (91 min, DCP Digital) scenes on Tuesday and Wednesday at 5:30pm. More info on all screenings here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
The Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts and the Oscar Nominated Live Action Shorts programs continue this week.
Brad Kofman’s 2021 mockumentary MONSTER OF MINSK (90 min, DCP Digital) screens on Saturday at 9:45pm. The screening will be followed by stand-up performances from cast members.
Ti West’s 2022 horror film X (105 min, 35mm) starts on Thursday with a 9:45pm screening and continues into next week. More info on all screenings here.
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS –
Held Over/Still Screening/Return Engagements (Selected)
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
⚫ Facets Cinema
James Vaughan’s 2021 Australian film FRIENDS AND STRANGERS (81 min) is available to rent through March 31. More info here.
⚫ Media Burn Archive
As part of their Virtual Talks with Video Activists series, Media Burn presents artist and activist Richard Lowenberg for a virtual screening and discussion around his ongoing series of creative and media works, “Info/Eco: The Nature of Information,” on Thursday at 6pm. More info here.
⚫ VDB TV
“Points of View – Video Artists Read the World” (1973 - 2020, 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.
🎞️ ADDITIONAL ONLINE SCREENINGS
Lee Grant’s THE WILLMAR 8 (US/Documentary)
Available to stream on MUBI (subscription required)
Many movie lovers remember Lee Grant as the extraordinary actor whose varied screen career, which began in 1950 and continues to this day, included roles in such seminal films as IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (1967), THE LANDLORD (1971), and SHAMPOO (1975), the latter of which garnered her her only Academy Award. In 1973, Grant went behind the camera to direct feature films, television series, and most famously, documentaries. The first and perhaps most impactful documentary she made is THE WILLMAR 8 (1981). Now little more than a vague memory or a footnote in labor history, the strike of eight women in the small town of Willmar, Minnesota, against Citizens National Bank for sex discrimination was a watershed moment in U.S. labor relations that led to a widespread investigation of unfair labor practices in the banking industry. Beginning in December 1977, the women walked the picket line through two Minnesota winters waiting for the National Labor Relations Board to rule on their complaint. They drew national attention and the support of large unions for a time, but as the public’s attention wavered and moved to other things, the women found themselves isolated, short on money, and unable to secure even part-time work in Willmar to keep them going. All they had was each other and their doubts about whether they had done the right thing. Grant does an excellent job of profiling this rural, conservative community, visiting a restaurant where residents repeatedly rebuff her requests for comment on the strike, attending a card game where some of the town’s women discuss whether feminism is a good thing or an insult to them as traditional women, and, of course, talking with the Willmar 8 themselves—Doris Boshart, Irene Wallin, Sylvia Erickson Koll, Jane Harguth Groothuis, Sandi Treml, Teren Novotny, Shirley Solyntjes, and Glennis Ter Wisscha. The strikers ranged from recent high school graduate to middle-age wives and mothers. All were fed up with being passed over for promotions and salary increases. The final straw was when a young man, the son of the bank president’s friend, was hired into a management position and the women were asked to train him. On the surface, their decision to form a union and strike divided the town, but quietly, customers refusing to cross the picket line caused a noticeable drop in the bank’s profitability. Labor-management disputes, of course, seem to be a perennial problem. In the wake of the changes wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, we have become aware of just how bad some workplaces are for their employees. Many workers are opting out as part of the so-called Great Resignation, and others are breathing new life into the union movement. Now is a great time to learn from and be inspired by labor struggles of the past. Now is a great time to watch THE WILLMAR 8. (1981, 51 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
CINE-LIST: March 11 - March 17, 2022
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Maxwell Courtright, Steve Erickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Raphael Jose Martinez, Michael Glover Smith, Drew Van Weelden