COVID-19
Note that screening cancellations and program changes in response to the Coronavirus have started in Chicago. Cine-File will try to stay on top of these as best we can. We will note any that we are aware of in our weekly email, and will also update our web version as information becomes available. Information will be included with individual reviews and listings and/or in a dedicated section at the bottom of the list that will include all updates. We will not catch everything, though, and as we’re all-volunteer, updates will be fast but not immediate, so always check the venue/series/festival’s website or social media.
CRUCIAL VIEWING
Tsai Ming-Liang’s STRAY DOGS (Taiwanese Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Friday, 7pm and Sunday, 1:30pm
If Tsai Ming-Liang had indeed retired from making feature-length narrative films after STRAY DOGS in 2013, as he indicated in interviews when it premiered, he would have gone out on a high note (he has since returned with 2020’s DAYS). This beautiful film found the great Taiwanese director training his patient camera eye on a homeless man (the inevitable Lee Kang-Sheng) who struggles to provide for his two young children in contemporary Taipei. There are extended wordless sequences of Lee’s unnamed character “working” by standing in traffic and holding an advertising placard—and thus functioning as a human billboard, not unlike the protagonist of Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s THE SANDWICH MAN—as well as washing his children in a grocery store bathroom; these shots are almost startling in their clear-eyed compassion and remind us that, for all of the audacious experimenting he does with form, Tsai has also grounded much of his best work in an authentic sense of character and milieu. The film's high point occurs about half-way through: a long take of Lee’s character smothering a head of lettuce with a pillow (before doing other interesting things to it, including voraciously biting into it and cradling it in his arms and sobbing over it), a sad, funny and crazy scene that is far more emotionally moving than the similar but more shrewdly contrived and melodramatic climax of Michael Haneke’s AMOUR. Then there is the matter of the amazing penultimate shot: a static close-up of two faces staring at a mural that ticks well past the 10-minute mark before cutting, with one of the characters effortlessly shedding a few tears halfway through, a moment that recalls the famous final shot of Tsai’s breakthrough VIVE L’AMOUR in 1994. Without taking anything away from its culturally specific qualities, I think that the depiction of a family of “have nots” in STRAY DOGS has more to say about the lives of ordinary Americans in the 21st century than the vast majority of movies that have come out of the United States. (2013, 138 min, DCP Digital) MGS
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The Friday screening is introduced by Cine-File associate editor Ben Sachs.
Emir Kusturica’s UNDERGROUND (Serbian Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Sunday, 7pm
Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival, UNDERGROUND is Emir Kusturica’s greatest achievement, an epic satire that takes on a full half-century of Balkan history. It centers on two lifelong friends and black marketeers named Blacky and Marko (played, respectively, by Lazar Ristovski and Miki Manojlovic). During the bombing of Belgrade in WWII, the pair hatches a scheme to keep their families and friends safe by hiding everyone in a giant underground bunker. Marko, elected to serve as a liaison with the aboveground world, sells munitions made by the underground community and becomes known as a hero in the anti-Nazi resistance. After the war ends, he maintains his position as an arms dealer by telling the folks underground that war is still going and has them continue to work. Decades pass and new generations are born, the bunker community carrying on in ignorance. The premise is an obvious metaphor for the closed-off world of Tito’s Yugoslavia, with Marko standing in for the tyrant and the underground bunker representing the oppressed nation, yet Kusturica fleshes it out so vividly that the movie never feels simplistic. UNDERGROUND is filled with rollicking comic set pieces, gloriously outsized characterizations, and near-constant marching band music—it feels as much like party as it does a film. Kusturica has been compared often to Federico Fellini, yet there’s a sense of formal control underscoring the chaos here that’s arguably beyond anything the Italian director achieved. Also, you’ve got to love that chimpanzee driving a tank! (1995, 170 min, DCP Digital) BS
CHICAGO EUROPEAN UNION FILM FESTIVAL
Gene Siskel Film Center
The Siskel’s European Union Film Festival continues this week and runs through April 2. We’ll have select reviews each week, but note that most of the higher-profile films have press holds (no reviews allowed) until their later theatrical runs.
Caroline Link’s ALL ABOUT ME (Germany)
Friday, 2pm and Sunday, 3pm
One of Germany’s most beloved entertainers is Hape Kerkeling, a 55-year-old comedian, actor, and TV presenter whose complement of comical characters are as well known to Germans as Julia Sweeney’s Pat or Tyler Perry’s Madea are to American audiences. He started writing in his later years, and produced a best-selling memoir about his childhood, The Boy Needs Fresh Air, in 2014. The book attracted the attention of Caroline Link, whose strongly character-driven films include her Oscar-winning film NOWHERE IN AFRICA (2001), and she adapted it for the screen with veteran screenwriter Ruth Toma. ALL ABOUT ME covers the years 1971–73, during which time Hape, then still Hans Peter (Julius Wechauf), moves with his family from his paternal grandparents’ home in the country to Recklinghausen, near the western border of The Netherlands, to live with his maternal grandparents. He experiences great joy, great sorrow, and discovers the gifts for humor and mimicry that will serve him well in his adult career. ALL ABOUT ME came out in Germany around Christmastime, and despite some dark content, it is an almost perfect holiday film for the whole family. Revelatory is the extraordinary performance of young Wechauf. His natural charisma and comedic talent make him a believable stand-in for the real Kerkeling, yet, thankfully, he never behaves as anything but a child. The large supporting cast is uniformly wonderful, enveloping Hans Peter with love and support as he negotiates being the new kid in school, explores his attraction to men and dressing in drag, and tries to manage his mother’s depression. The sun-dappled, widescreen film is a pleasure to look at and the warmth of this energetic and loving family made me nostalgic for the ever-present extended family I had in my youth. (2018, 96 min, DCP Digital) MF
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Justine Triet's SIBYL (France)
Friday, 6pm and Sunday, 3pm
SIBYL is going to infuriate viewers who go to films to gain insight into the reasoning behind people’s behavior, and delight viewers who get off on puzzling out the logic that guides the construction of a work of art. The interplay between these two processes—the bad judgment that promises to tear lives and careers apart, the erratic impulses that improbably guide artists towards successful creation—is vividly, even ludicrously dramatized in Justine Triet’s film, which follows an established psychotherapist, Sibyl (Virginie Efira), as she abandons her practice to return to creative writing. Unable to extricate herself from Margot (Adèle Exarchopoulos), one of her needier clients, Sibyl begins surreptitiously recording their sessions, drawing on her patient’s drama for her own writing. Triet’s go-for-baroque plotting finds room to explore her heroine’s fraught relationships with her underemployed sister, AA group, son, partner, her other patients, and her own therapist, while multiple flashbacks peer into Sibyl’s reawakened memories of a passionate love affair gone sour. And that’s before things go fully meta, as Margot’s crisis—she’s an actress, pregnant from an affair with her co-star, and unable to decide whether to keep or terminate the pregnancy—gradually ensnares Sibyl as well. Once the therapist is called to help her patient make it through a tense film shoot on—get this—the volcanic island of Stromboli, the film’s lower-key comic elements erupt, thanks especially to the welcome midway addition of TONI ERDMANN’s Sandra Hüller as the disconcertingly pragmatic film director whose partner has been fooling around with Margot. The willful improbability of the second act will throw viewers for a loop, but it’s entirely in keeping with a film about the pleasures of breaking rules and taking license as a woman and as an artist. In this, I was reminded of two other recent films which contemplate female empowerment by dramatizing the pitfalls of the creative process, Greta Gerwig’s LITTLE WOMEN and Céline Sciamma’s PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN ON FIRE; like those films, SIBYL proposes that the social boundaries of acceptable behavior for women are inextricably linked to the boundaries of how art should or shouldn’t be composed. In all three films, narrative unfolds towards the fulfillment of creative desire, defiantly leaving a trail of broken rules behind—SIBYL just breaks more than the rest. (2019, 100 min, DCP Digital) MM
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Steve Kriskris’ THE WAITER (Greece)
Friday and Thursday, 8pm
Renos (Aris Servetalis) is used to the comfortable and methodical routines of his life. When he isn’t waiting tables at a stuffy pastry shop, he spends his days drawing, cooking, or caring for his meticulously organized plants. He doesn’t stand out, he never causes a scene—he lives an excruciatingly normal life. That all changes when his neighbor goes missing and is replaced by a stranger who seems a little too friendly. Over a disturbing dinner, Renos becomes suspicious of the man next door, his elusive partner, and the mysterious meats in between them. While still trying to maintain a semblance of the life he once had, Renos finds himself deep in the throngs of the mystery—guided by an unshakable score and a deadpan humor. Steve Kriskris creates a formidable sense of tension and dread that's hard to look away from while still finding levity in the film's characters. Fans of the sterile and unsettling films of Yorgos Lanthimos or the sinister eroticism of HANNIBAL will feel right at home with the nebulous ways THE WAITER unfolds. (2018, 104 min, DCP Digital) CC
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Gregor Božič’s STORIES FROM THE CHESTNUT WOODS (Slovenia/Italy)
Saturday, 5pm, and Wednesday, 8pm
First-time director Gregor Božič is nothing if not ambitious. He purports to tell stories of a forgotten and largely vanished community from an area in Slovenia separated from Italy by a vast chestnut forest, and he does, indeed, divide his film with the titles “Mario, the Stingy Carpenter” and “Marta, the Last Chestnut Seller.” But this a not a straightforward recitation of folktales. Instead, his film is a scramble of dreams, memories, actions in the present time of the narrative—post-World War II Yugoslavia—and visitations from heavenly emissaries dressed in traditional garb. The elderly Mario (Massimo De Francovich) seems barely to notice the changes around him as he plays a competitive game in a pub, worries about his money-losing carpentry business, and fails to recognize that his wife (Giusi Merli) is dying. Young war widow Marta (Ivana Roščić) wishes to join the rest of the populace, mired by poverty and isolation, in emigrating to other parts of the world. When the two meet, their actions form the final story from this forgotten place. Whether this story is truly a part of the folklore of this region or just a conceit on Božič’s part, who cowrote the screenplay, it is nonetheless told with empathy and gorgeous imagery lensed by Ferran Paredes that may cast a spell over audiences that have patience with the director’s elliptical, almost experimental approach. (2019, 81 min, DCP Digital) MF
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Stephan Komandarev's ROUNDS (Bulgaria)
Saturday, 7:45pm and Thursday, 6pm
Once when the late film scholar Miriam Hansen was workshopping the transnational theory of 'vernacular modernism' that became the core of her work in the last decade of her life, I recall her colleague Yuri Tsivian, grand old man of Soviet cinema, listening respectfully and replying, "Ah, but where does this leave my little Russians?" The limitations of an elite, globalized perspective—whether postulated in Hyde Park, Davos, or Berlin—and its tendency to sand down the profound idiosyncrasies of national experience are central to Stephan Komandarev's ROUNDS, a corrosive tour de force that may as well be subtitled "Where does this leave my little Bulgarians?" With comedy as black as the pavement and social commentary as blunt as a murder weapon, ROUNDS is pointedly set in Sofia on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The action follows three pairs of night shift cops, who vigorously debate Bulgaria's future in the European Union, the comparative sexual stamina of the Communist-era populace, and the tatters of the contemporary social safety net. The three strands of the story—with each individual sequence unfolding in a balletically choreographed unbroken take—initially appear to be independent of one another, but each is in fact tethered to the others in refreshing and unexpected ways. In outline, it's a familiar gimmick, but one of the pleasures of ROUNDS is the way its narrative tricks reinforce and demonstrate its overarching diagnosis: each thread of the story is another problem to drop in someone else's lap, another buck to be passed. What responsibility do we bear for perpetuating the inequities of modern capitalism in our own lives? Where do we fit into a history that we inherited, but cannot reverse? When do a group of people become a nation? ROUNDS doesn't set out to answer any of these questions, but simply leaves them to fester like a corpse by the side of the railroad track, waiting for the sunrise. An essential film about the state of the world as we find it. (2019, 106 min, DCP Digital) KAW
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Johannes Nyholm's KOKO-DI KOKO-DA (Sweden)
Saturday, 8pm and Tuesday, 6pm
Ideally, you would know next to nothing about KOKO-DI KOKO-DA, Johannes Nyholm’s scary, unusual, and unexpectedly poignant second feature, before going in. So just a taste, then, of what you will experience. It’s a time loop movie. A bickering couple (Leif Edlund and Ylva Gallon) has suffered an insuperable rupture to their family. A few years after their loss they’re on a camping trip deep in the woods, when they are attacked by a strange trio, who appear to be distorted characters from a nursery rhyme. There’s a jaunty man in a white suit and a boater; a bearded woodsman carrying a mauled dog; and a woman in a child’s nightie who walks a man-eating pooch. Their arrival tends to be augured by the titular children’s lullaby, a madly repetitive tune which gets stuck in one’s head in a way that’s certainly thematically resonant. No matter what the besieged couple does, this awful scenario repeats itself. There are also intervals of wordless, inexplicably moving shadow puppetry. The overriding mood is one of menace, but in some profound way this is a film about PTSD, about death and the lacerating pain of grief, and about love and healing. KOKI-DI KOKA-DA is a horror-adjacent experience: Nyholm has said that “evil fairy tale” is an apt description. It’s an allegory—with some of that form’s limits, perhaps, but also its primal power. For me, its lyricism surmounted any taste of gimmickry. The influence of David Lynch is here, mainly in the uncanny sense that Lynch has for the way our unconscious minds filter associated details, manifesting them in nightmarish form. The film is about how a couple can lose each other when the shadows get too deep, or when they move on at different paces. Most of all, it’s about how we use metaphor—that is, storytelling—to help us get through events too traumatic to process literally. You’ll know the feeling it evokes if you’ve ever awakened in the small hours of the night to find yourself stuck in a terrible moment, torturing yourself with the idea that there might have been something you could have done to make things turn out differently. Terrifying and cruel, but also deeply humane and hopeful, this nasty, elegiac little film is just the kind of offbeat filmgoing experience for which I’m always keeping my eyes peeled. (2019, 86 min, DCP Digital) SP
JCC CHICAGO JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL
The JCC Chicago Jewish Film Festival continues through March 15 at various locations.
Catherine Corsini’s AN IMPOSSIBLE LOVE (France)
CMX CinéBistro at Old Orchard, Skokie — Friday, 7pm
Based on the 2015 novel Un Amour Impossible by Christine Angot, Catherine Corsini’s meticulous drama recounts the highly sexual and emotionally abusive relationship of Rachel (Virginie Efira), a provincial Jewish woman, and Philippe (Niels Schneider), a selfish man from a wealthy family, as told in voiceover by their love child, Chantal (Jehnny Beth). The strong physical attraction Rachel feels for Philippe leaves her helpless to refuse him anything, including letting him impregnate her while refusing to ever marry her. His anti-Semitism comes out in a remark about money-grubbing Jews that shocks Rachel, but does not dissuade her from her attachment to him. When she does eventually break from him, Chantal eagerly continues to pursue his affection. The film covers a long period, from the 1950s to the 2010s, without clearly defined divisions of time or obvious changes of wardrobe and appearance, aside from Chantal’s growth from a baby to an adult. What could be five years turns out to be one, and events late in the characters’ lives are dropped into the narrative without preparation or development. Efira is a magnetic actress, and her chemistry (including explicit sex scenes) with Schneider is breathtaking. AN IMPOSSIBLE LOVE takes up such familiar subjects in French cinema as class and incest, but does so in a sly, largely unstated way. While the film can be slow going, it creates an aura of love as an entity that exists out of time. (2018, 135 min, Digital Projection) MF
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Cynthia Lowen’s NETIZENS (New Documentary)
Century 12 Evanston/CineArts 6 — Saturday, 1pm
Early in Cynthia Lowen’s new documentary, NETIZENS, she includes archival footage of newscasters describing a newfangled form of communication that we now call the internet. Then, it was often called “the information superhighway,” a descriptor of how it would work, and now, an apt metaphor for the vast amounts of information pollution that would be loosed in its wake. Worse than that, it is a place where cruelty and criminality roam freely, where anonymous bullies, angry ex-lovers, and obsessive stalkers can pretty much ruin a person’s life. Lowen zeroes in on three women—attorney Carrie Goldberg, commodities trader Tina Reine, and Feminist Frequency founder and popular-culture critic Anita Sarkeesian—whose lives were upended by men known and unknown to them who used the internet as their weapon. Stories about women receiving online death threats, having to move frequently after being doxxed repeatedly, losing out on jobs and forced into unemployment by spurious internet slurs, are, sadly, nothing new, so NETIZENS doesn’t add substantially to the subject. Lowen is also somewhat deceptive about revealing Reine’s backstory, perhaps out of fear that viewers will rush to judgment about the clearly fragile Reine in the same way prospective employers did. Nonetheless, I found watching NETIZENS to be a valuable experience. This documentary helped me realize that the harassment that forces women to make themselves smaller in the world also makes them emotionally numb and hardened. When Reine is confronted by a man in her Toastmaster’s group about her need to toughen up in the face of harassment, I got an inkling of what boys and men are forced to do to fit society’s roles for them to avoid rejection. While NETIZENS is about cyberwarfare against women, society’s pathology toward men is an underlying and underexamined aspect of the problem. (2018, 96 min, Digital Projection) MF
70MM FILM FESTIVAL
Music Box Theatre
The 70mm Film Festival continues through Thursday. In addition to the films below, also screening this week are Basil Dearden’s 1966 UK film KHARTOUM (128 min, 70mm) on Friday at 2pm and Sunday at 7pm; and Gene Kelly’s 1969 film HELLO, DOLLY! (146 min, 70mm) on Saturday at Noon and Wednesday at 7pm.
Christopher Nolan's INTERSTELLAR (US)
Friday, 7pm, Tuesday, 2:30pm, and Thursday, 7pm
Throughout the summer and early fall of 2014, INTERSTELLAR was discussed in hushed tones by Oscarologists and box office prognosticators, positioned sight unseen as an automatic blockbuster that would steamroll everything in its path—a feat of original I.P. that would tug at the heart and the wallet. Projectionists everywhere welcomed director Christopher Nolan's emphatically pro-celluloid public posture and marveled at the clout he exercised in goading Paramount Pictures to commit to a sizable run of 35mm, 70mm, and 70mm IMAX prints months after the studio had quietly abandoned analog distribution. When was the last time a one-sheet listed the available gauges under the contractual credits block? When word leaked that the film was nearly three hours long, the fanboys relitigated their starry-eyed comparisons to Kubrick and Tarkovsky. Physicists Kip Thorne and Neil deGrasse Tyson touted the movie's scientific bona fides. Then INTERSTELLAR actually came out. The reception was icier than the snow-swept landscapes that automatically connote a Nolan movie, a trope appearing in his work almost as frequently as murdered wives and guilt-ridden husbands. (How does Nolan's own spouse, Emma Thomas—also his producer—feel about all that?) It was pretentious, talky, sentimental, and it stopped the nascent McConnaissance dead in its tracks. The sound mix, including Hans Zimmer's Wendy-Carlos-at-the-electromagnetic-church-organ score, was roundly pilloried as unintelligible mud. Nolan and his co-scripting brother Jonathan cited 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY as their Rosetta Monolith, but fell short of their inspiration: if the 1968 film melded the dreamy design of vintage sci-fi illustrations with the weighty, pseudo-spiritual aura of a photo essay in Life, INTERSTELLAR played more like a crumpled issue of the Saturday Evening Post, unstuck in time. All told, INTERSTELLAR is just about the squarest blockbuster to arrive in many a moon. (How square? When the INTERSTELLAR Oscar campaign failed to gain traction, Paramount bought a two-page spread in the Hollywood Reporter that reprinted a recent endorsement from David Brooks in its entirety.) In any other movie, astronaut Anne Hathaway's monologue about the unsung scientific value of love would come across as a moment of eye-rolling sexism. And it is that, but it's also unquestionably, unabashedly sincere. INTERSTELLAR believes in love and family as real forces in the physical world, and I don't have the heart to tell it otherwise. (It also literalizes string theory as a multicolored pane of time-bending strings behind your bedroom wall. Think about that for a moment!) The ambition of INTERSTELLAR is inseparable from its clean-shaven nuttiness and its discreet romanticism. Its essential value would only become more pronounced in the aftermath of THE MARTIAN, with which it shares many plot points and several cast members. Both films can be construed as infomercials for NASA and a renewed commitment to STEM education, but the smartass quips and transparent ingratiation of THE MARTIAN are utterly alien to straight-arrow awe of INTERSTELLAR. John Lithgow's grandfatherly ramblings just about sum it up: "When I was a kid, it seemed like they made something new every day. Some, gadget or idea, like every day was Christmas." Make America Great Again? (2014, 169 min, 70mm) KAW
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Steven Lisberger's TRON (US)
Friday, 11pm, Sunday, Noon, and Monday, 6:30pm
A few years back, the Walt Disney Company dreamed of reviving TRON, building a global, mass-market franchise out of a film most fondly remembered by laserdisc collectors and middle-school computer instructors. (Indeed, I first saw it in seventh grade, spread across a few days of a DOS-era programming elective.) The new franchise beachhead, 2010's arrogantly uncompelling TRON: LEGACY, cashed in on the post-AVATAR 3-D boomlet, but TRON 3 has stalled out indefinitely. Disney's shareholders may be disappointed, but the real TRON legacy belongs to those who cherish this echt-1982 experiment on its own terms. At first, TRON may sound like an unlikely candidate for large-format thrills, but its primitive CGI effects withstand latter-day scrutiny through a combination of restraint and clean, Day-Glo design. (They're certainly more elegant than the embarrassing digital f/x of many '90s blockbusters, like ESCAPE FROM LA.) Though one friend left a 1982 showing aghast at the movie's dumbly literal idea of how data worked and what it meant, this lack of human imagination is probably TRON's greatest strength: it's a movie set inside a computer that feels wholly computerized in affect and effect. The screenplay comes off more like machine-labor than human effort, as if Disney developed a proprietary algorithm to crunch together the formulae of fifty recent s-f blockbusters and produce a best-approximation of the box office sweet spot. The robotic edifice is revealed most directly when TRON engages sexual matters: we're confused to hear about Cindy Morgan's messy bedroom habits in the middle of a Disney showcase, and her last-minute partner swap plays like an A.I. hiccup. There's something oddly moving about the miscalculations of TRON—a cyborg's kludgey effort to conjure a flesh-and-blood past. (1982, 96 min, 70mm) KAW
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Bruce Logan, TRON’s cinematographer, will no longer be in person at the Sunday and Monday screenings.
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Brian De Palma’s THE UNTOUCHABLES (US)
Saturday, 4pm, Tuesday, 7pm, and Wednesday, 2:30pm
For the most part, De Palma's career has moved between the very personal, deeply self-reflexive, and politically agitational films which he has largely written himself (the major exceptions here are the astonishing late ‘70s pair OBSESSION and THE FURY) and the impersonal, formalist exercises in genre and narrative construction for which he has mainly been a hired director for the projects of others. These journeyman pieces tend to be opportunities for him to explore tensions and structures in the creation and manipulation of space, of rhythm, of imagery that are more daring and extreme than what is found in his more organically built films. Depending on the very conventional, very unproblematic scripts and Hollywood-standard casting developed through the studio processes has allowed him to be more wildly and dangerously experimental in many ways in his direction, knowing that his competent and star-powered actors and predictable, predigested dialogue and story patterns will be reliably intelligible to a mainstream audience no matter what devious or disruptive visual strategies he might deploy around them. THE UNTOUCHABLES is one of De Palma's most extraordinary deviations from the norms of cinematic narrative, though its propulsive, fascistic screenplay by David Mamet and wooden, aw-shucks central performance by Kevin Costner do wonders in disguising that. De Palma creates a Prohibition-era Chicago that is drunk on violence and corruption, in which the vileness of the city's degradation and humiliation by Al Capone's rule of terror seeps up from the streets like a miasma, distorting the world as though the very atmosphere was drunk, as though the city buildings themselves were insane. He shoots in disconcerting, narratively-unmotivated wide angles, and makes his camera weave in eldritch patterns through corridors, through shootouts, through windows and off the edges of rooftops, creating a kind of evil-eyed counterpoint to the staid and simplistically heroic tale of white hats battling black hats that the movie's ostensibly telling. As the film progresses, the incoherence between the deeply sane, self-satisfied, and respectably inoffensive Hollywood half and the mad, self-critical, and cartoonish De Palma half reaches a breaking point in the justifiably lauded sequence in which Costner's Eliot Ness attempts to capture Al Capone's bookkeeper amidst a firefight in Union Station. Any pretense of realism is abandoned as De Palma teleports characters from one end of the station to another, has gunshots propel victims multiple yards through plate glass walls, dilates time well past its breaking point, and does this all as part of a grand upstaging of himself by building the shootout around a short moment lifted and perverted from Eisenstein's BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN. While others of his films are more accomplished and powerful and disturbing—there is nothing here to rival, for instance, the anti-patriotism of BLOW OUT and its vision of America as a machine for turning the deaths of the poor into capital, or the distressingly insoluble problems of free-floating personal identity, determinism, and illusory mental states that are at the heart of FEMME FATALE's double roles and unreliable narration—but the constraints provided by the crutches of so much prima facie normalcy come with their own radical freedoms. This is top-notch B-grade De Palma. (1987, 119 min, 70mm) KB
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Quentin Tarantino’s ONCE UPON A TIME… IN HOLLYWOOD (US)
Saturday, 7pm and Sunday, Monday, and Thursday, 2:30pm
Having finally arrived, Quentin Tarantino’s ONCE UPON A TIME… IN HOLLYWOOD could not be any truer to its creator’s decades-long fascination and obsession with 1960’s and 70’s cinema, though it also feels slightly atypical for the director. Without giving anything away, the long blocks of back-and-forth dialogue that Tarantino usually indulges in have begun to give way to more preoccupation with staging, fourth-wall-breaking camera moves, and all around color, resulting in an ambling and evocative dreamscape rife with a whole host of characters. Atmosphere has never been so palpable and dialogue between characters so natural in a Tarantino film—there’s nary a monologue in sight. The film begins at the tail end of an era in Hollywood filmmaking in which rapidly-fading TV actor/cowboy “heavy" Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) is seeing his career head towards Italy, specifically towards the cheap and fast genre films of Sergio Corbucci. Burt Reynolds went to Rome to work with Corbucci, Eastwood did the same for Sergio Leone, along with character actors like Lee Van Cleef, and so did one-time TV western stars like Ty Hardin (Rick Dalton is probably most similar to the latter). In the cases of Reynolds and Eastwood, their careers were revitalized by the Italian industry, but many others, like Hardin, were pushed further into obscurity. While watching his star power sputter out in what he perceives to be his twilight years, Dalton is accompanied by his sidekick/assistant/stunt man/reflective image Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), who lives in a trailer behind a drive-in theater, while Dalton lives in a Benedict Canyon home (with pool, naturally). He lives next door to Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), and Manson family members are prowling around the streets of L.A., hollering at police officers and offering up blowjobs while they try to hitch back to their nesting grounds at the Spahn Ranch. Tarantino covers a lot of ground in ONCE UPON A TIME—an entire landscape of stories is on view, not dissimilar to something like Robert Altman’s NASHVILLE or even Richard Linklater’s DAZED AND CONFUSED. The film has a near three-hour running time, but three hours that have never seemed so short and compact in recent film memory. The movie has a blink-or-you’ll-miss-it pace, rare for a director who sometimes has a tendency to halt the rush of his work with overly bravura dialogue sequences. Tarantino seems to find fresh new ground within his already steadfast movie-making abilities, to let the scope of his powers extend further than previously thought possible. He barely pauses for the chance to show off his noted screenwriting abilities, and instead chooses to craft an ensemble work that somehow feels more epic than any of his films have ever felt; this is Los Angeles completely transformed back to the summer of 1969, in a way that only a very large budget and large talent could realize. It might possibly be one of the last times we see Hollywood bankroll such an ambitious project, by an auteur still powerful enough to retain final cut. ONCE UPON A TIME isn’t as cynical a look at Hollywood as other films have been (such as Altman’s THE PLAYER—even though it does share a curious opening shot). It’s more bittersweet nostalgia, and is perhaps Tarantino’s breeziest and best work to date; his entire career as a director bursts forth as both a marvelously crafted time-capsule and a fantasy-land-rendering of a mythical Hollywood, specifically the place where dreams, however real, are made. (2019, 165 min, 70mm) JD
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Tobe Hooper’s LIFEFORCE (US/British)
Saturday, 11pm and Monday, 9pm
LIFEFORCE is one of the absolutely nuttiest film experiences, complete with an iron guard of kitsch that may be difficult to pierce, but that is in line with the complex themes and vision distinct to Tobe Hooper. Hooper’s films are unique; they awkwardly refuse an identifiable moral position, they suggest a long past before dooming the reality of the present, and they hold out no hope of a peaceful, non-destructive catharsis for the viewer at the end. That isn’t to say he creates bleak or deliberately open-ended films; rather, films whose finales don’t provide tidy resolutions. LIFEFORCE starts with the discovery an enormous spaceship floating within the debris of Haley’s comet. Inside the ship, are glass coffins containing the bodies of three space-vampires, which are brought back to Earth, setting off a series of personal and global crises. Hooper has said that the film is “about relationships. It’s about the relationship between men and women and how that can turn, how there can be a dominance in a relationship that can flip flop back and forth […] men dealing with the feminine mystique or the feminine terror […] the feminine inside themselves.” Hooper, tasked by Canon, the low-budget genre-specializing production company, with adapting a book called The Space Vampires, was able to craft a deeply personal, hallucinatory, and often comedic allegorical observance about male sexuality. The widescreen space Hooper employs is breathtaking, and he uses colors and shadows effectively in his particular brand of scuzzed up satire masquerading as horror. Ultimately, he made something way outside of the mainstream, something that was so out of step for the time. LIFEFORCE is certainly kitschy and comedic, with Hooper himself confirming the odd intended mixture of tones. Post-POLTERGEIST, Hooper leaned in more on his blackly comedic and exaggerated sensibilities, allowing them to become more prominent, culminating in films like THE MANGLER and the extremely under-seen THE TOOLBOX MURDERS. While Hooper’s films were never as explicitly political as his fellow contemporary horror film master George Romero, LIFEFORCE captures the dawn of a new America, that of the 80s, one of rampant excess and hedonism. LIFEFORCE pairs well with his late-80s film SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION, both films of considerable camp, they also contain unexpected emotional weight, with Hooper dearly embracing the idea of the doomed couple, forced to grapple with the imperfections and dangers of their love; l’amour fou for the midnight crowd. (1985, 116 min, 70mm) JD
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Ladj Ly’s LES MISÉRABLES (New French)
Facets Cinémathèque — Check Venue website for showtimes
Testifying to the nearly unmatched power of sporting events to unite people across ethnic and class boundaries, Ladj Ly’s LES MISÉRABLES opens with rousing footage of French citizens flooding into the streets to celebrate their country’s 2018 World Cup victory. Ly focuses especially on exultant black faces, including those of characters officially introduced later, as he films this very real national eruption of joy. Accentuated by the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe looming on the horizon, the sequence encapsulates the foundational French tenet of fraternity, realized in one outsized moment of esprit de corps that Ly will soon show as utterly fleeting. There will be plenty more images of bustling congregations to come, but their animating communal pleasure will be replaced by melees of inequity-fueled desperation. Taking its inspiration from the 2005 suburban Paris riots, LES MISÉRABLES chronicles a 48-hour period of pullulating racial tensions in Clichy Montfermeil, where housing projects provide residence to many North African immigrants. Hewing closely to policier genre conventions, Ly uses an anti-crime unit as our initial point of entry to this world, introducing us to the coolheaded Gwada (Djebril Zonga) and the unapologetically racist sergeant Chris (Alexis Manenti), who’re joined by taciturn new recruit Stephane Ruiz (Damien Bonnard). The irony is immediately apparent that this nominally “anti-crime” unit, which spends much of its time harassing random black residents on the street, is really only exacerbating the problem. The film’s main inciting incident comes when Issa (Issa Perica), a boy from the projects, steals a lion cub from a Romani circus. His theft sets off a domino effect of raucous confrontations, hair-trigger police violence, digital media incriminations, and winching civic unrest, cracking racial, religious, and economic fault lines wide open in every direction across the city. Ly brings his background in documentary to bear on the proceedings, using vérité-style mobile shooting to enhance the urgency and chaos of the increasingly fractious conflicts he depicts. At its best, this febrile on-the-ground energy brings to mind the gritty docu-dramatic aesthetics and angry revolutionary politics of Gillo Pontecorvo or Costa-Gavras; at other times, the film can feel hampered by its broad characterizations and reliance on crime-narrative tropes. Still, as a snapshot of a turbulent 21st-century Western sociopolitical climate—and a sonorous reminder of the legacy of institutional oppression and precarious revolt it carries on—LES MISÉRABLES packs a solid punch. “What if voicing anger was the only way to be heard?,” rebuts a Muslim character to Ruiz’s wariness of the growing societal disorder. Ly leaves us with the same question, hanging in the middle of an internecine stalemate between a Molotov cocktail and a gun. (2019, 104 min, DCP Digital) JL
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
The One Earth Film Festival continues through March 15 at various locations. More info and complete schedule at www.oneearthfilmfest.org.
At the MCA Chicago this week: Filmmaker and artist Deborah Stratman participates in a conversation with Jack Schneider, curator of Stratman’s MCA show that opens this week, on Tuesday at 6pm. Free with museum admission. [UPDATE: This event may remain as scheduled, or it might change to a different time or move to an online-only streaming event; check the MCA website or our website later for confirmation.]
Presented by Asian Pop-Up Cinema this week: He Xiaodan’s Canadian/Chinese film A TOUCH OF SPRING (87 min) is on Monday at 6:30pm at the Alliance Française, with He Xiaodan in person (but is sold out); Liu Miao-Miao and Hu Wei-Jie’s 2018 Chinese film RED FLOWERS AND GREEN LEAVES (96 min) is on Wednesday at 7pm at AMC River East 21; and Yuan Qing’s 2018 Chinese Malaysian film 3 ADVENTURES OF BROOKE (100 min) is on Thursday at 7pm at AMC River East 21. Note that Sunny Chan’s 2018 Hong Kong film MEN ON THE DRAGON, scheduled for Saturday at the Chinese-American Museum, has been postponed until August 15.
The Park Ridge Classic Film series (at the Pickwick Theatre) screens John Sturges’ 1960 film THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (128 min, Digital Projection) on Wednesday at 1 and 7:30pm.
Goethe-Institut Chicago (150 N. Michigan Ave., Ste. 200) screens Axel Fuhrmann and Axel Brüggemann's 2011 German documentary FOR ELISE. BEETHOVEN'S BESTSELLER (55 min, Video Projection) is on Thursday at 6pm. Free admission.
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: Mike Ahern and Enda Loughman's 2019 Irish/Belgian film EXTRA ORDINARY (94 min, DCP Digital) plays for a week; and Arwin Chen's 2013 Taiwanese film WILL YOU STILL LOVE ME TOMORROW? (107 min, 35mm) is on Tuesday at 6pm, with a lecture by SAIC professor Jennifer Dorothy Lee.
Also at Doc Films (University of Chicago) this week: Terrence Malick’s 2019 film A HIDDEN LIFE (173 min, DCP Digital) is on Saturday at 6 and 9pm and Sunday at 4pm.
Also at the Music Box Theatre this week: Céline Sciamma’s 2019 French film PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE (121 min, DCP Digital) continues; Vivieno Caldinelli's 2018 film SEVEN STAGES TO ACHIEVE ETERNAL BLISS (90 min, DCP Digital) is on Friday and Saturday at Midnight and Sunday-Wednesday at 9:45pm; and Tony Tilse’s 2020 Australian film MISS FISHER AND THE CRYPT OF TEARS (119 min, DCP Digital) is on Thursday at 7pm.
COVID-19 UPDATES
The Onion City Experimental Film + Video Festival, scheduled for this weekend, March 12-15, has been cancelled and will be rescheduled at a future time.
The Block Cinema (Northwestern University) screening of BADNAM BASTI scheduled for Friday, March 13, has been cancelled. Additionally, the start of their spring quarter screenings (which would have been at the beginning of April) is on hold, pending Block Museum and Northwestern University decisions.
The MCA Chicago screening of Brett Story’s THE HOTTEST AUGUST, scheduled for Friday, March 13, has been cancelled. It may be rescheduled at a future date.
The lecture by filmmaker and artist Charles Atlas at the Art Institute of Chicago scheduled for this Wednesday, March 18, has been cancelled. It may be rescheduled at a future date.
Bill Morrison's DAWSON CITY: FROZEN TIME scheduled for Tuesday, March 17, at Film Row Cinema (Columbia College Chicago) has been cancelled.
Cinematographer Bruce Logan will no longer be in person at the Sunday and Monday, March 15 and 16, screenings of TRON at the Music Box Theatre.
The Chicago International Film Festival has cancelled their previously announced retrospective screenings of films by Hirokazu Kore-eda and Kore-eda’s in person visit, schedule for this weekend at the Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema. They will likely be rescheduled at a future date. Update: The advance screening of Kore-eda’s film THE TRUTH has also been canceled.
Doc Films at the University of Chicago has cancelled all spring quarter screenings, but will finish out its winter screenings this week, with a cap of 100 patrons per show.
The Asian Pop-Up Cinema screening of MEN ON THE DRAGON, scheduled for Saturday, March 14 at the Chinese-American Museum, has been postponed until August 15.
The Park Ridge Classic Film Series screening of THE AWFUL TRUTH at the Park Ridge Public Library, scheduled for Thursday, March 19, has been cancelled; additionally, the rest of the March screenings have also been cancelled, with updates to follow.
Comfort Film screenings (and all other events at Comfort Station) have been cancelled until further notice.
The Chicago Latino Film Festival, scheduled for April 16-30, has been postponed, with new dates to be announced later.
CINE-LIST: March 13 - March 19, 2020
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs, Kyle A. Westphal
CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, Cody Corrall, John Dickson, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Michael Metzger, Scott Pfeiffer, Michael Glover Smith