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.
🍊 CINE-FILE PRESENTS
A Girl's Own Story: Jane Campion's Short Films (Australia)
Chicago Filmmakers – Saturday, 7pm
There's an understandable temptation to view Jane Campion's shorts as rough drafts for her feature work, interesting predominantly for what they portend rather than what they are. So, AN EXERCISE IN DISCIPLINE: PEEL (1982, 9 min, Digital Projection) prefigures the off-center compositions and family dysfunction of SWEETIE (1989), while A GIRL'S OWN STORY (1984, 27 min, Digital Projection) looks forward to the monochrome adolescent portraiture of THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY (1996) and the ominous ice-skating imagery of IN THE CUT (2003). This is all true, as far as it goes, but suggests auteurism as a wholly self-referential closed loop of familiar references, trademark themes, and evolving concerns—what do these Campion films tell us about some other Campion films? And yet these films tell their own stories—rough, contested, tentative, elliptical, and finally confident and content. PEEL, A GIRL'S OWN STORY, and PASSIONLESS MOMENTS (1983 min, 13 min, Digital Projection) form a beguilingly distinct film school trilogy—versatile calling cards that brought Campion festival acclaim, TV employment, and an oddball commission that shares the bill on this program. Posed between quietly furious feminist agitprop and an open-ended educational film that might seed group discussion, AFTER HOURS (1984, 26 min, Digital Projection) has been disowned by Campion. That's a pity—it's unusually adventurous example of the form, jumping back and forth in time while chronicling a workplace sexual assault and its aftermath, ably illustrating the unreasonable expectations of flawless recall imposed upon women who come forward. The political remit is embroidered throughout, but it's articulated so subtly and organically that Campion preserves a sphere of mystery and autonomy for her characters, who zig when they're expected to zag. It's the rare political film that honestly positions solidarity as a tough bargain rather than a fait accompli. But even that wasn't even-handed enough for Campion, who later lamented that AFTER HOURS "had to be openly feminist since it spoke about the sexual abuse of women at work. I wasn’t comfortable because I don’t like films that say how one should or shouldn’t behave." Indeed, A GIRL'S OWN STORY depicts extramarital affairs, abusive marriages, and an incestuous teenage tryst that results in pregnancy, and continues to reserve judgment. It's not wanton amorality or an effort to scandalize the bourgeoisie. Campion just doesn't want to say how one should behave. Put another way, she doesn't want to ground a story in a particular character's perspective, in a particular character's morality. A GIRL'S OWN STORY flits between the consciousness of three Catholic school friends in the mid-1960s. Their stories weave in and out of each other, a rumor begets a sidelong glance, a fantasy life projected onto someone else's body. Whose story is this, anyway? Heterosexual desire is continually turned inside out and made strange. The girls long for boys, but wind up making out with each other under crude cardboard masks in a Beatlemania masquerade. The rapt close-ups that open A GIRL'S OWN STORY appear to be reaction shots to a textbook illustration of an erect penis, a "sight that may shock young girls" per a caption; when those reaction shots are repeated at the film's conclusion, the context is totally different: an empowering fusion (and confusion) of subject and object, the gaze folded in on itself. Even if Campion never told another story, this one would be enough. Also on the program: Anna Campion's THE AUDITION (1990, 24 min, Digital Projection). [K.A. Westphal]
---
Programmed by Cine-File managing editor Kathleen Sachs. See some excellent short films and grab a few pins illustrated by critic and cartoonist Nathan Gelgud, made specially for the screening.
🇺🇦 UKRAINIAN CINEMA SERIES AT THE FILM CENTER
Through April 7, the Gene Siskel Film Center presents a series of Ukrainian films ranging from silent classics to contemporary documentaries. A portion of ticket sales will be donated to Voices of Children, a Ukrainian-based non profit which provides art therapy and resources to young people in Ukraine. More info here.
Iryna Tsilyk’s THE EARTH IS BLUE AS AN ORANGE (Ukraine/Lithuania/Documentary)
Friday, 6pm and Sunday, 12:30pm
While most of us look to a film’s title for a clue as to what the contents of the film might be, the illogical title THE EARTH IS BLUE AS AN ORANGE doesn’t lend itself to immediate interpretation. Yet, it is exactly the unfathomable condition that is war that Ukrainian director Iryna Tsilyk captures in this document of life on the front lines. Anna and her four children live in Krasnohorivka, a town in eastern Ukraine’s Donbass region, where they have been subject to assaults and shelling by Russian troops for five years. The film opens at night, when a mortar crashes through a brick wall surrounding someone’s home. Anna and her neighbors run to inspect the damage. Then it’s back to life as usual in a war zone. Anna’s oldest daughters attended a cinema camp one summer, and both are keen to use what they learned to process their abnormal daily life by re-enacting for the camera their actions during a 2014 attack. As the whole family, including Anna’s parents and sister, decide how to film certain scenes, Tsilyk captures the destruction and trauma that continue to scar this family and their community. I remember feeling confused at how the Ukrainians approached the recent build-up of Russian troops with something less than alarm—a shocking show of my ignorance of Ukraine’s recent history and my privilege as an American who has never experienced a military invasion. THE EARTH IS BLUE AS AN ORANGE illustrates in painful detail the long-term ordeal that has fueled Ukraine’s fierce resistance to Russian rule. (2020, 73 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
---
Valentyn Vasyanovych's ATLANTIS (Ukraine)
Friday and Tuesday, 7:45pm
Every now and again a film appears that gets compared to Andrei Tarkovsky’s classic STALKER. More often than not the comparisons are facile at best, using only the basic plot points as comparison—think 2018’s ANNIHILATION. But Valentyn Vasyanovych’s ATLANTIS falls so precisely into that slow cinema sci-fi micro-genre that it feels like it could be taking place in the same universe as STALKER. ATLANTIS is set in a near-future Ukraine of 2025, where, after a prolonged war with Russia, the country, and its people, have been devastated. Serhiy is a former soldier with PTSD who loses his job as a smelter when the local works is closed due to automation. The world he once knew is so far in the past that it’s almost unrecognizable. Water now has to be shipped in. A giant wall is being built along the border. As he tries to cope with this new normal, Serhiy takes on a job exhuming corpses. Here he meets Katya, one of the rare individuals who can see past the immediate. Serhiy’s world in ATLANTIS has the same kind of meditative expanse as Tarkovsky’s STALKER and Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky’s WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES. It’s a sci-fi film only in that it presumes a near future; it could very well be in a contemporary setting (I can think of at least one American city that has lost its metalwork economy and requires bused-in drinking water). ATLANTIS has a poetic ugliness to it that is an absolute joy to revel in. The psychic devastation of a post-war society, resigned into submission of duty, is rendered nearly physical as we watch the quietly mundane pace of people’s lives. With nearly nothing left, the past literally becomes the future: the exhuming and examining of the dead has become one of the only reliable means of employment. Filmed with nearly all wide-angle stationary shots, the film immerses us as voyeurs in this world. We have no choice but to examine everything, including ourselves. Vasyanovych’s framing both creates a sense of claustrophobia with its tight borders and a pronounced sense of agoraphobia, from an inescapable emptiness that threatens to go on forever. Despite its darkness, ATLANTIS is a gorgeous film, and a must see for anyone interested in slow cinema, speculative sci-fi, or explorations of existentialism. (2019, 106 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
---
Dziga Vertov’s MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA (USSR/Silent)
Saturday, 4pm and Tuesday, 6:15pm
“This experimental work aims at creating a truly international language of cinema based on its total separation from the language of theatre and literature,” proclaims a title card at the start of Dziga Vertov’s silent masterpiece. In fact, it’s one of the only titles that appears in the film—MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA conveys meaning almost entirely through images and cinematic effects like split-screens, sped-up and slowed-down motion, and some of the most astonishing montage ever. The film proceeds as an avalanche of details; some are profound, but many are banal, and the unpredictable way that Vertov races between them suggests a superhuman effort to catalogue everything that happens in a city (in this case, Odessa) over the course of a single day. In this overarching creative mission as well as its nonstop formal invention, MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA resembles such other Modernist touchstones as James Joyce’s Ulysses and the poetry of William Carlos Williams, and as with much Modern art, the name is the game is defamiliarizing the ordinary. Vertov’s inspired visual rhymes locate humanity within inanimate objects and occasionally make people seem like machines. In one characteristic passage, Vertov cuts from a car traveling down a road to the bare neck of a sleeping woman, presenting both lines at the same angle so as to imply a continuity between the images. In another sequence, a woman opening her legs to give birth gets intercut with a chasm created between two skyscrapers. Appearing throughout the film is the unnamed title character (played by Vertov’s brother, Mikhail Kaufman, the film’s actual cinematographer), who pops up all over town to record the events of the day; his tripod, with its long, skinny legs, looks like a giant grasshopper accompanying him on his rounds. The man with the movie camera seems to be everywhere at once—a stirring metaphor for cinema’s ability to enter into any area of worldly experience. That sense of possibility has obvious ties to the triumphalism of the Soviet Union’s early days. When Vertov started making MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA, the Russian Revolution was only about a decade old; the film’s theme of discovering a new world was not metaphorical. Seen after the fall of the USSR, Vertov’s call to arms still resounds on an abstract level, signaling that anyone anywhere can transform the world through art. (1929, 68 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
---
Sergei Loznitsa’s MAIDAN (Ukraine/Netherlands/Documentary)
Sunday, 2:30pm and Wednesday, 8pm
Toward the end of 2013 and the beginning of 2014, there occurred in Ukraine a series of demonstrations later dubbed the Euromaidan movement, during which protesters took up residence in Kyiv’s Independence Square (Maidan Nezalezhnosti); for several months, they occupied the space to register their dissatisfaction with the government for succumbing to pressure from Russia and abruptly choosing not to sign into an association agreement with the European Union. Representing this decision was President Viktor Yanukovych, whose resignation the protesters were demanding. In summary, the uprising sounds like the stuff of history—valorous, emotional, striking in the clarity displayed by its leaders and participants—but, as is evidenced by Sergei Loznitsa’s transfixing documentary about the revolution, it’s more like the stuff of life, ranging from the cannily mundane to the extraordinarily moving. The Belarus-born Ukrainian filmmaker, whose oeuvre consists of acclaimed narrative and documentary films, has said that he divided the film into parts; the construction is loose (discernible largely through sporadic interstitials that contextualize what’s happening) and suggestive of how it was made, with Loznitsa editing the film as the situation persisted and, later, deteriorated. If this urgent cinematic proclamation could be said to have any considered mise-en-scène, it would be in the filmmakers’ consistent use of largely observational static shots, framed long and wide, wherein protestors take pictures, look directly at the camera, and often idle about, the campaign initially having been a waiting game more than anything. There are various presentations, too, by speakers, poets, and musical groups, evincing feelings of peace and hope. At various intervals, Loznitsa returns to shots of crowds singing the Ukrainian national anthem—in one vaguely humorous scene, the participants all put their winter hats back on at the same time—myriad faces densely populating the frame. Throughout, announcements and dialogue are heard, with the speakers’ identities obscured by the clamor, an unwittingly cogent technique that suggests the dual sensation of agitation and omnipotence. As the violence escalates upon the turning of a tide in early 2014, after an unofficial truce between the protesters and the police came to an unceremonious end, the compositions become more chaotic, demarcated by fire, smoke, gunshots, and cries for help. The physical distance of the camera during some of these sequences, representative of a period of the uprising known as the Revolution of Dignity, is more disquieting than if the camera people (Loznitsa and two others are credited with the cinematography) were right up in the action; viewed from afar, thoughtless violence befalling nameless, faceless people is made poignant, the same perspectives often used in news reporting fully utilized here for their potential to impact rather than to depersonalize. It’s revealed that many protesters died, were injured, or went missing—the end of the film is that rare stuff of documentary that captures the equally rare stuff of life, the sublime moments of beauty found even in the darkest days, as singers perform a beautiful Ukrainian folk song before the announcement of two peoples’ deaths. The loss of these people comes to symbolize the great loss of conflict and war, foreshadowing current events in Ukraine. But the events of early 2014 give reason to hope, as the Maidan led to Yanukovych’s ousting and the overthrowing of the government. May such courage and tenacity get the brave Ukrainians through these darkest of days and bring them out again into the light. (2014, 130 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING
An Evening with Dani and Sheilah ReStack (US/Experimental)
Onion City Experimental Film & Video Festival and Conversations at the Edge at the Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 6pm
Dani and Sheilah ReStack's "Feral Domestic" trilogy follows a tradition of experimental moving image work that is rooted in home movies and has all the power, discomfort, and strangeness of the homespun genre. The work is preoccupied with current topics of queerness and climate change, but it also serves up primal mediations on childhood play and parenthood, injury and conflict, sex and beasts great and small. The ReStacks are an artistic and domestic couple living and teaching in central Ohio, with Dani being a familiar face around these parts for having screened solo work here extensively while attending UIC. Their work is multidisciplinary in the best way possible, using a sculptural/symbolic potential of objects, performance and narrative both natural and angular, bodily informed editing finesse, and the blunt potential of drawing and collage. First in the series is the provocative and sweeping STRANGELY ORDINARY THIS DEVOTION (2017, 27 min, Digital Projection), which lays out all the elements that will be returned to in the subsequent pieces. Rocks and water are common images, both as places of play but also as physical realities to be ritualistically engaged with. Parenthood is discussed as a site of conflict, but is shown as a joyful exercise. Fractures and lacerations bind all flesh whether human, animal, or imagined. Playacting is emphasized as a vital part of growth and connection. If the rest of the trilogy is feral, then COME COYOTE (2019, 8 min, Digital Projection) is ferocious. The expansive palate given to us in the previous film is concentrated, controlled, and focused. There are heartbreakingly beautiful explosions of play, conflict, and joy. It's a potent, fierce, abrupt masterpiece. FUTURE FROM INSIDE (2021, 19 min, Digital Projection) takes a different tactic and expands on the palate. The previous conflicts that were only hinted at are magnified and directly addressed. Domestic troubles are reenacted in scripted narrative asides. Concerns about climate are explored with a boat trip to a glacier and transformations of the ice melt into a curative salve. The three pieces in this series form a thrilling whole with a sharp trajectory and, while not exactly a clear resolution, ends with some hopeful beauty. [JB Mabe]
---
This is the opening night screening of the Onion City Experimental Film & Video Festival. We will have more coverage of the festival on next week’s list.
Fern Silva's ROCK BOTTOM RISER (US/Experimental)
Gene Siskel Center – See Venue website for showtimes
Fern Silva is looking to expand “nature films” beyond their stuffy reputation. To the beat of a loud, mixed-genre soundtrack, he doesn't just look at a piece of land but fully grapples with its messy past and future. In Silva’s short work, his love of the natural world is apparent, and it's exactly this love that pushes him to engage with nature in a way that recognizes human culture as not outside, but an extension of the natural world. His debut feature ROCK BOTTOM RISER is of a piece with these shorts, focusing loosely on the Hawaiian mountain of Mauna Kea, where the proposed site for a new space telescope threatens to pillage historically protected indigenous lands. Spending time with the active volcano on the mountain and the citizens who coexist with it, Silva weaves landscapes with found footage and historical texts to build an essay film around the competing natural and scientific histories of the land. Silva knows the conventional pleasures of nature films well, and he does a commendable job balancing the research that a film like this requires with the sense of wonder needed to be blown away by how cool a stream of lava looks. Compared to his contemporaries, Silva leans further into the sublime, propulsive, and funny aspects of his material, like when he features an extensive, context-free scene of employees at a tobacco shop doing vape tricks to a dubstep soundtrack. This scene, confusing and gradually more hilarious the longer it lasts, is a bit of local color that encapsulates the radial approach Silva brings to the feature. It’s here that Silva’s film feels most similar to those of Theo Anthony, a fellow essayist with a tendency to take roundabout ways to his politically trenchant theses. Silva does a bit less hand-holding in his work though, letting the ties between his collection of explorers, mystics, and scientists explain themselves. For all its density, though, ROCK BOTTOM RISER is most effective as a landscape film capturing the awesome power of Mauna Kea, a power that requires images more than words. (2021, 71 min, 35mm) [Maxwell Courtright]
Peter Bogdanovich’s MASK (US)
Music Box Theatre – Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am
Rough-around-the-edges characters often get portrayed sentimentally; apparently filmmakers feel the need to provide viewers with excuses for these characters’ behavior as well as subtle revelations of how they’re not as bad as we may have been led to believe. The based-on-a-true-story MASK eschews such two-dimensionality in its depiction of Rusty Dennis, mother of the film’s subject—Rocky Dennis, who had a rare disease called craniodiaphyseal dysplasia (often referred to as lionitis), which causes cranial enlargement. This can be credited to director Peter Bogdanovich, screenwriter Anna Hamilton Phelan, and superstar Cher, who portrays the no-fucks-given biker babe. The film begins with Rocky (Eric Stoltz, whose portrayal of a differently abled person is highly respectful) enrolling in a new high school, experiencing the trials and tribulations respective to being the new kid along with the added difficulty of his unique condition. Bogdanovich and Phelan compact what were undeniably a lifetime of issues—related to Rocky’s illness and Rusty’s personal struggles with substance abuse and contentious romantic relationships—into the first part of the film, nimbly introducing it as part of central drama, which is simply these peoples’ lives. But where there’s drama there’s also a lot of love; while Rusty has no compunctions about doing drugs and bedding strangers in front of her kid, it’s clear that she also loves him immensely. This provides an almost inconspicuous commentary that such a parent can truly love her child, served glacially via Cher’s stirring performance. Bordering on sentimentalism, however, is the depiction of the neighborhood biker gang and their unrelenting affection for Rocky. It’s nevertheless entertaining and heartwarming, especially in how Gar (Sam Elliot) looks out for both Rusty and Rocky, becoming enmeshed in their lives as a love interest for the former and a father figure for the latter. It wouldn’t be a coming-of-age movie centered on a young, heterosexual male if sex didn’t come into play. In one of the film’s best scenes, Rocky and a young, Black sex worker, whom Rusty “buys” for him, have a sweet conversation about happy moments in their lives. And later, at a camp for blind children where Rocky works as a counselor aide, he meets Diana (Laura Dern), a blind girl who’s able to appreciate Rocky for his personality in spite of his appearance. The film ends with Rocky’s death (although he outlived his prognosis by over a decade); it’s sad and sweet, with Rusty appreciating this development for the eternal freedom it will allow her idealist son, whose dream it was to travel across Europe on a motorcycle. This wasn’t a particularly personal project for Bogdanovich, who said he only did the project because he needed money, but his competent direction keeps it from going over an emotional waterfall, even though he and Cher apparently didn’t get along. (Bogdanovich opined about Cher that “[i]t was like being in a blender with an alligator”; she said, “he thinks the frigging director is God.”) The version screening is the director’s cut, which reinstates several Bruce Springsteen songs that were replaced by Bob Seger songs after the producers were unable to clear rights for the Boss’ tunes. Despite his professed lack of interest in the film, Bogdanovich still felt it important to include the music of an artist whom the real-life Rocky admired. Screening as part of the Music Box’s Cher! matinee series. (1985, 120 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]
Sergio Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA (US/Italy/France)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 6pm
Four years after Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up debuted on the London stage, J. M. Barrie appended an epilogue. Wendy Darling has grown up, married, and had a daughter of her own; Peter Pan returns to Wendy's childhood bedroom and fails to comprehend that any time has passed since his last visit. Wendy recounts their past exploits and shows Peter her life in the present, but he doesn't understand. The underlying concept is sharpened: he is not simply the boy who wouldn't grow up, but the boy who couldn't, blind to time's passage, immune to its symptoms. Hauntingly, he does not feel time, does not feel the world turning beneath his feet, a boy in perpetual motion who nevertheless remains static. The cycle will never end, Barrie writes, so long as children remain "gay and innocent and heartless." Sergio Leone's long-gestating epic ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA is apparently based on a forgotten gangster memoir (Harry Grey's The Hoods), but that Barrie line may as well be its epigram. Although it is filled with scenes of appalling physical and sexual violence, Leone's film often plays like a boy's adventure in Never Never Land, a swashbuckling knave's tale, complete with pirates and warring tribes and lives laid to rest in the briny deep. (At one point, a gangster urchin thumbs through a more literary boy's saga, Jack London's Martin Eden, while on the commode.) But beyond its rollicking tone and sense of adolescent daring-do, the connection to Barrie runs deeper. ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA is a fairy tale about David "Noodles" Aaronson (played by Robert De Niro as both a young and old man, and by Scott Tiler as a child), the hood who wouldn't grow up. The poetry of Leone's vision is rooted in Noodles' inability to feel time, his shambolic effort to make sense of the shards he finds in train station lockers, television broadcasts, and long-forgotten peepholes. He's perpetually floating in an opium haze, stuck in a cycle of guilt, betrayal, and redemption that may, in the end, be only a literal pipe dream. ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA is plausibly constructed as a flashback, a flashforward, a speculative dream, an astral projection, a crackpot copout, a suspended moment of indecision—all of the above, all at once. There are other innovations brought to bear upon the gangster genre here—a lewd, anti-romantic realism, a half-hearted Jewish angle, a quarter-hearted nod towards organized crime's connection to organized labor—but the overweening achievement of Leone's yarn is its radical freedom in sloshing and ambling through time. Famously, Leone's nearly four-hour original cut was manhandled by producer Arnon Milchan and the moneymen at the Ladd Company, trimmed by ninety minutes and re-assembled in thuddingly chronological order, robbing the film of its major aesthetic strategy. (The shortened American release version appears, fittingly, lost to time, though Roger Ebert, who saw both versions in 1984, described the telephone ringing endlessly in the opening reel of Leone's version and only once in Milchan's.) Those of us who love ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA remain bowled over by its transitions no matter how many times we see them, particularly the moment when 35 years are elided with a hidden cut, a Robert Indiana-inspired painting, and a Muzak version of Lennon and McCartney. To revisit Leone's masterwork is to be struck by how few such moments exist in the film—it jumps around, but often stays in a given period (1922, 1933, 1968) for 20 or 30 minutes at a stretch; the 1922 scenes are, in fact, a discrete section, told from beginning to end without interruption or diversion. Yet the pleasure of temporal collision and disorientation looms large over the film, elevating and obfuscating the story of a nasty, simple man who does little to earn our empathy. (It is fitting, too, that a 12-year-old Jennifer Connelly thoroughly upstages De Niro, James Woods, Joe Pesci, Elizabeth McGovern, and Treat Williams, stealing the film with two-and-a-half scenes and an unnerving recitation of The Song of Solomon.) Shortly after the belated Stateside release of Leone's original cut, Michael Sragow imbued Noodles's saga with meaning in a memorable review in the Boston Phoenix, suggesting that he "learns that everyone's life is, in part, a work of fiction, a reordering of the past to make the present livable." Perhaps, but to do that, Noodles would first need to distinguish between the two. Screening as part of 50/50, the Siskel’s year-long series including a film from each year the theater has been open. (1984, 229 min, DCP Digital) [K.A. Westphal]
John Woo's FACE/OFF (US)
Music Box Theatre – Tuesday, 9:30pm
1997 found John Woo in a strange place. Considered a genius by his admirers thanks to the Heroic Bloodshed films he made in Hong Kong in the 80s and early 90s, Woo was brought to the big-budget Hollywood action filmmaking machine in 1993 to make the Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle HARD TARGET. The director hit a snag immediately, losing final cut of the film and seeing the studio release a much-maligned version. His follow up, BROKEN ARROW (1996), fared even worse critically, probably because he put nearly none of his signature style into the action. Thankfully, it made enough at the box office for him to get to make FACE/OFF, by far the greatest of his American films. The plot is completely bonkers. I mean, really bonkers. Terrorist psychopath Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage) tries to assassinate FBI agent Sean Archer (John Travolta); instead, he accidentally kills Archer’s child. Jump to six years later, and Archer is about to finally arrest Troy. Before he does, Troy lets Archer know that he’s hidden a time bomb somewhere in Los Angeles. And by bad luck, Troy gets knocked into a coma before he can let Archer know where it is. So, of course, Archer decides to have Troy’s face surgically removed and swapped with his own so that he can trick Troy’s brother into revealing the bomb's location. Oh my god, how fun is this ridiculousness, a surreal two hours of acting in which the two leads do their best impressions of each other doing impressions of themselves. We have Nic Cage doing Travolta doing Nic Cage, and vice versa. We also have the kind of cop-and-robbers story that John Woo needs to do his beautiful John Woo thing. FACE/OFF fulfills the promise of John Woo in America—it's a Heroic Bloodshed film for Western audiences, complete with his signature gun duels, bullet ballets, and birds. The film invokes a giddiness that's almost humorous, but without coming off as trite or planned. Screening as part of a Nicolas Cage Double Feature with Ridley Scott’s MATCHSTICK MEN (2003, 116 min, 35mm) playing at 7pm. The event will be hosted by critic Keith Phipps, whose new book Age of Cage will be available for purchase. (1997, 139 min, 35mm) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
Susan Seidelman's SMITHEREENS (US)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Thursday, 9:30pm
Unlikeable protagonists—even those that have the additional bad luck of not being male—are nothing new, yet there’s still something refreshing about the vainglorious antihero of Susan Seidelman’s cult classic SMITHEREENS. Her lack of discernible artistic talent in spite of lofty music ambitions is a common talking point amongst both Seidelman and those critiquing the film; one interviewer notes that the protagonist, ironically named Wren (described as being a “plain brown bird with an effervescent voice,” something Seidelman’s character surely is not), is “a precursor to this era of being famous for being famous.” It’s not untrue: the film opens with Wren stealing a pair of stylish checkered sunglasses before hopping onto a train and pasting xeroxed posters of her face on most any surface she can find. “Who is this?” it asks. Good question. Wren (Susan Berman) is a determined twenty-something who’s as brash as she is lithe, her distinct style and beauty obfuscated by a grating New Jersey bray. Still, she’s got a certain sort of charm that attracts a bevy of other city-dwelling misfits, some of whom are good but most of whom navigate the world with a similar anti-social bullheadedness that informs an air of procacious nonchalance. On the train she meets Montana-born Paul, an artist who lives in a spray-painted van he refuses to sell to his neighborhood pimp; in a bar she meets gritty Eric (Richard Hell), who styles his hair with beer and once belonged to a punk band called the Smithereens. Paul is enamored by Wren’s autonomy, frustrating though it may be, while Eric sees in her perfidious nature something that he can exploit. Indeed, Wren embodies both those things: independent and naive, ruthless and jejune, as willing to use people as she is susceptible to being used. But even though she doesn’t appear to have any talent of her own, she’s far from being just a groupie (though I’d argue that’s an art form in and of itself). “At that age, you are kind of looking for what you felt like your life should be, this life you imagined,” Seidelman, who produced SMITHEREENS independently on a shoestring budget—largely with an inheritance her grandma had saved for her future wedding and with help from her NYU film school friends—told Vogue in a recent interview. “You know there’s something more interesting out there somewhere.” This speaks not only to Wren’s intrepidness, but also to the undeniable fact that a woman is owed these things in spite of what she has to offer the world, beautiful and talented—or not. (It’s fitting that, after Eric reveals himself to be a creep, Wren and his wife discover that he’d promised them both a job managing his new band. Hollow as the offer is, it’s not so unbelievable that either of these steadfast women could handle a group of entitled man-children.) After SMITHEREENS, which was the first American independent film to compete for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1982, Seidelman would go on to make the wildly popular DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN three years later, followed by several features of varied distinction; she also directed the pilot episode for HBO’s Sex and the City (the aforementioned checkered glasses came from Patricia Field’s punk clothing store on East 8th Street). She cites films such as Blake Edwards’ BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S and Federico Fellini’s NIGHTS OF CABIRIA, as well as filmmakers Billy Wilder and Lina Wertmüller, as inspirations, their influence more evident in SMITHEREENS than most of her other films—Wren’s unapologetic narcissism recalls all four in various ways, different as they seem. Fittingly, the soundtrack features several songs by The Feelies (who Seidelman was connected to by a friend-of-a-friend named Jonathan Demme) and Hell’s band, Richard Hell and the Voidoids. Also fitting is how the new 35mm print of the film (which was shot, again fittingly, on grainy 16mm) came to be; Seidelman said she had the last known print of it under her bed and was devastated when it had turned out to be “pickled” due to disintegration following years of haphazard storage. She then found out that a negative existed at the DuArt Film Lab, after which independent film activist Sandra Schulberg submitted it to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who preserved the negative and made the new print. But like anything punk, even fresh celluloid can’t erase the visual stench of early-80s NYC, and thank goodness for it. (1982, 89 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]
---
Note that Doc Films screenings start again this week, but the website has not been updated. We just published a review for the one film whose capsule we have on file. Keep checking the Doc Films website for this quarter's calendar and more information about what else is screening this week.
Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh's WRITING WITH FIRE (India/Documentary)
Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes
Despite having the distinction of being the world’s largest democracy, India clings to its ancient traditions and illiberal ways to a truly shocking degree. The caste system is officially outlawed, yet it continues to govern human interactions at every level—from marriage, to employment, to housing. One group, the self-described Dalits, was considered so low that they were excluded from the caste system—and it is often the outsiders who can best critique the society in which they live. WRITING WITH FIRE chronicles the lives and activities of some intrepid Dalit women in India’s powerful Uttar Pradesh region who publish Khabar Lahariya (Waves of News). As with newspapers all over the world, these journalists are pivoting to online publishing to survive and tell the stories of rape, political corruption, and worker exploitation that most of the major media outlets don’t go near. Led by Meera, the managing editor, and ace reporter Suneeta, the staff learn journalism basics and reporting for electronic publication, gain in confidence, and find the courage to speak truth to power in a country that regularly murders its journalists. Watching the positive impact of their reporting on the lives of ordinary people is nothing short of breathtaking, as is the growth of their audience into the millions and their operations into other regions of the country. (2021, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
Mariama Diallo’s MASTER (US)
Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema – See Venue website for showtimes
MASTER does not fully avoid the didactic pitfalls of "elevated horror," using genre as a delivery mechanism for its themes, but it reflects serious thought about what we find monstrous; it also considers our culture’s turn to the supernatural as a symbol of evil when the cruelty of everyday life is right in front of us. Avoiding violence, it goes for psychological horror instead, trapping its heroine in her nightmares. It begins with Jasmine’s (Zoe Renee) arrival at the fictional Ancaster Academy, a college near Boston. One of its few Black students, she’s greeted by another girl calling her “a live one.” She’s assigned room 302, the subject of an urban legend about the ghost of a Black student who killed herself by jumping out its window. The college is also reportedly haunted by a witch executed in the early days of white settlement in the vicinity. Meanwhile, her English professor Liv Beckman (Amber Gray), a rare Black woman at the school, is up for tenure, facing a board who are all white apart from an Asian-American man and a Black woman, Gail (Regina Hall). Jasmine’s life grows increasingly hard as her days at the school terrify her, but the specter of suspicious bag checks at the college library and white bros singing the N word as they dance to hip-hop is as traumatizing as the film’s paranormal elements. The film balances several narrative strands, changing paths two-thirds of the way through. Gail becomes the protagonist, with Hall turning in a stunning performance as the disillusioned administrator. It envisions Black women’s lives as an endless, unavoidable string of microaggressions. The downside is that MASTER isn’t exactly subtle—the dialogue is quite blunt about its ideas, and a late plot twist can be predicted much earlier. Diallo and cinematographer Charlotte Hornsby incorporate a careful color design —as Jasmine is surrounded by the whiteness of a snowy New England winter, her dreams pulsate a bloody giallo red. Her paper on THE SCARLET LETTER is even marked by a bright red F. MASTER’s vision of corporate diver$ity barely hiding an intractable institutional racism passed down for centuries, with a few people of color exploited as tokens to cover up a deep rot, suggests a deeply pained pessimism. (2022, 99 min, DCP Digital) [Steve Erickson]
Chandler Thistle’s LUCIFER’S SATANIC DAUGHTER (Australia)
Music Box Theatre – Friday, Midnight
Satan-worshiping metalheads, ventriloquism, Nazis, penises, and lots and lots of acid—LUCIFER’S SATANIC DAUGHTER has something for every little midnight movie fanatic. These elements are dropped into a witches' cauldron to produce a bubbling tonic of schlock or, more appropriately, a sheet of Satanic LSD that hits like a psychedelic gut punch. Chandler Thistle employs a lot of cool ideas and visuals; at times it feels like the film is more in touch with contemporary culture than a lot of the stuff that makes it to the big screen. At the same time, it can also feel like an extended music video. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but viewers may feel disoriented by the film, which begins to wear down your senses before it ends. (It could have been about 30 minutes shorter and just as fun.) The film was apparently made on a low budget—the film's Kickstarter shows that Thistle raised AU$ 20,668 for it via backers. Despite this, LUCIFER'S SATANIC DAUGHTER manages to have some pretty cool visual effects, both digital and practical. If you can cast aside some of the budgetary limitations, like audio hiccups here and there, this is a great pick for a midnight movie and one that shows the potential of Thistle’s talent. I just wouldn’t recommend seeing it on any of the numerous substances used by characters in the film. You’ll probably bug out. (2021, 104 min, DCP Digital) [Drew Van Weelden]
Paul Verhoeven's BENEDETTA (France/Netherlands)
Facets Cinema – Thursday, 9:30pm
Rolling off a year choked by disposable offerings, from State Department-backed muck to the latest slabs of stale Oscar bait (promoted, as usual, by the sugary buzz of press-agent dribble), a movie like BENEDETTA stands out from the stinking heap, with elements that challenge the loftier positions of bad "art" as well as the lowliest, flea-bitten examples of cinematic exploitation. Paul Verhoeven, the Dutch-cum-Hollywood pop satirist of such beloved classics as ROBOCOP (1987), TOTAL RECALL (1990), SHOWGIRLS (1995), and his masterpiece, BASIC INSTINCT (1992), released his last movie in 2016, ELLE, which brought him back to audiences for the first time in close to a decade (setting aside his “user-generated” short TRICKED from 2012). Missing the sensitivity of the #MeToo movement by barely a year, where the film risked being severely misunderstood, the filmmaker and its stars still had to go on the defense to the press. ELLE's lead actress, Isabelle Huppert, had this to say about the bubble of controversy surrounding the film: “I had no doubt about the integrity of [my] role. Of course, if you just circle the story around the rape and a woman being attracted by the man who raped her, I mean, that really makes the whole purpose very, very narrow and limited. I think it's a lot more than this. She's a really interesting character because she's always against predictable definitions of what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a man. Obviously, the movie's about a woman. But it's also about men, you know, and the men are sort of fading figures, very weak, quite fragile. So, it's really also about the empowerment of a woman.” Verhoven’s latest, BENEDETTA, did fall prey to “journalists,” who pressed the director during a Q&A at Cannes on the sex and nudity he injected into a purportedly true story about a lesbian nun in 17th-century France. (Someone should have related the aforementioned Huppert quote to these wall-eyed members of the press who, either in mistaken goodwill or intentional bad faith, were more than likely poking the filmmaker at the behest of their publishers and editors, on the prowl for those sweet clicks.) Whatever the case may be, Verhoeven’s latest film is a thought-provoking one, with its most sought-after answers lying somewhere within the murky interiors of the characters, where the cause of the actions can contrast their effects. Verhoeven doesn't follow the sort of classical model that someone like Clint Eastwood still employs (in Eastwood's films, dialogue usually contradicts the onscreen action); rather, he takes a more sarcastic approach, in which harmony is usually undercut by an inescapable ugliness that threatens to scrape open the production's glossier surface. Entire events and sequences in BENEDETTA side-step stock ideas about the past—chief among them that period films should depict historical eras in lofty, grit-and-grime-drenched seriousness, as if the past is immune to mockery (Ridley Scott is a director who epitomizes this latter approach). Grittiness and griminess certainly play a part in BENEDETTA, but they're embedded in the narrative specifically, rather than caking the movie. Consider the very premise, which finds a young girl being sold by her parents into a convent for the steep price demanded by the Abbess, played by Charlotte Rampling. Admitted to the nunnery, nine-year old Benedetta goes to pray in front of a bust of the Virgin Mary until it falls on her; what follows could be a scene out of Buñuel’s L’AGE D’OR (1930), as the girl decides to put the statue’s wooden breast in her mouth. As she grows older, Benedetta (played as an adult by Virginie Efira) begins to experience visions of Jesus, and Verhoeven's renderings of Christ come closer to characters from FLESH + BLOOD (1985) or STARSHIP TROOPERS (1997) than traditional representations of the Lord and Savior. Soon, Benedetta’s body is stricken with strange stigmata; this convinces those around her that she's a vessel for God, though a couple of nuns have doubts. As she ascends to the role of Abbess, snatching power within the nunnery, she enters into a sexual relationship with another young woman in the convent, Bartolomea (hauntingly portrayed by Daphne Patakia), who had been purchased by Benedetta’s parents at the beginning of the film as a “gift” for their daughter. It seems intentional on Verhoeven's part to use the sexual relationship as a smokescreen for more serious issues; after all, he made the main characters of STARSHIP TROOPERS the film’s secret, but true, fascists. Didn't Verhoeven graphically advance this idea of visual distraction in BASIC INSTINCT, in which viewers risked stepping into the role of Wayne Knight's sweat-soaked assistant district attorney as he fails to properly analyze and interrogate Sharon Stone's Catherine Trammel? Not only is the provocation the purpose—Verhoeven’s rendering of his main character keeps alive a trajectory that begins with his 1977 banger, KEETJE TIPPEL (a film that, along with THE FOURTH MAN, BENEDETTA considerably resembles), and continues to his characterizations of Carice van Houten’s Rachel Stein in BLACK BOOK (2006) and Isabelle Huppert’s Michèle Leblanc in ELLE. These are characters whose motivations defy our stock expectations, or as Huppert put it, “the predictable definitions of what it means to be a woman.” Who could miss the parallels between Benedetta and Bartolomea, in their Tuscan convent, laughing on the toilet while one of them wildly farts, to Elizabeth Berkley and Gina Gershon discussing the delights of eating dog food, under a false Venetian sky, in SHOWGIRLS? The salvation in this convent is far from holy, but if you do seek out BENEDETTA, you may be lucky enough to encounter the Catholic leagues protesting in front of your local arthouse theater. Rather than jeer at their well-worn moralizing, remember what this really means for you, me, and the rest of the world: movies are back, baby. (2021, 126 min, DCP Digital) [John Dickson]
---
Screening after Facets Film Trivia, which happens every last Thursday of the month at 6:30pm and is hosted by local programmer Mike Vanderbilt and Cine-File contributor Raphael Jose Martinez. More info here.
Norman Jewison’s MOONSTRUCK (US)
Music Box Theatre – Monday, 7pm
Norman Jewison’s MOONSTRUCK remains a great romantic comedy not just because it’s a meditation on falling in love, but because it examines falling out of it, too. The Brooklyn-set film presents different stages of relationships; the characters navigate new and old love, as well as jealousy, apathy, loss, and accepting happiness even if it’s not guaranteed to last forever. Feeling as if she’s cursed with bad luck after the death of her husband, Loretta (Cher, in her best performance) agrees out of practicality to marry her addled boyfriend Johnny (Danny Aiello). Right after he proposes marriage, Johnny leaves for Italy to be with his dying mother but asks Loretta to reach out while he's away to his estranged younger brother, Ronny (a wildly charismatic Nicolas Cage), and invite him to the wedding. Everything changes when Loretta and Ronny fall madly in love. The script, by John Patrick Stanley, is nearly flawless, with wall-to-wall memorable one-liners (“Snap out of it!”) and hilarious, emotional monologues delivered. In addition to inspiring excellent main performances, the script fully realizes every character. The subplot about Loretta’s parents’ flagging marriage (played extraordinarily by Vincent Gardenia and Olympia Dukakis) stands out, but smaller side stories—like the one about Ronny's bakery coworker Chrissy (Nada Despotovich) being hopelessly in love with him—are also poignant. MOONSTRUCK consistently shows that even the most minor characters have their own worthwhile stories about love and heartbreak. (1987, 102 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]
2022 Oscar Nominated Animated Short Films
Music Box Theatre – See Venue websites for showtimes
The five animated short films nominated for an Academy Award this year are a real grab bag of styles and themes. In Joanna Quinn’s AFFAIRS OF THE ART (UK/Canada, 2021, 16 min), narrator Beryl (voice of Menna Trussler) dissects her own obsession with art and her sister Bev’s (voice of the director) obsession with, well, dissection and all things death. The hand-drawn short is a jittery, raunchy, grotesque affair that eventually deconstructs the art scene. Cruelty to animals—even though animated—might make this a nonstarter for some viewers. BESTIA (Chile, 2021, 16 minutes) is an ominous stop-motion short that begins in an airplane. A woman, impassive with her porcelain, painted head, nonchalantly smokes a cigarette and looks out the window. A bullet hole at her temple is clearly visible. From there, director Hugo Covarrubias takes us through the daily routine of this woman, who lives alone with a dog she feeds at her table and plays fetch with. They both take a bus to a house, where she signs in, goes into the basement, and puts a cassette tape in a recorder. The nefarious deeds that go on in that house and the woman’s fracturing mind are effectively conjured by Covrrabius as he relates the story of Chile’s disappeared under Pinochet and the real woman, Ingrid Olderök, who participated in the crimes of his regime. In BOXBALLET (Russia, 2021, 15 min), director Anton Dyakov asks the question, “Can a prima ballerina find love and happiness with a punch-drunk boxer?” The lively, hand-drawn animation captures the beauty of balletic movement and the bloodlust of boxing fans in this unlikely romance. A timely, though possibly unintentional, swipe at the power of the state will soothe anyone currently boycotting Russia. Netflix presents ROBIN ROBIN (UK, 2021 32 min), a stop-motion short musical that is fit for the whole family. Riffing on common Disney themes, directors Dan Ojari and Mikey take up the story of a baby robin adopted by a family of mice. The usual hijinks ensue when the family tries to steal crumbs from a home and nearly gets caught. There is a magpie that collects things and a cat that threatens them all. Robin, voiced by Bronte Carmichael, eventually accepts that she is a bird, but she stays true to her mouse roots. With THE WINDSHIELD WIPER (US/Spain, 2021, 14 min), directors Alberto Mielgo and Leo Sanchez created some dazzling visuals through the use of computer filters over live action as they offer various images of coupling in the 21st century. Some of the images are or border on cliché (a Japanese girl in a sailor suit contemplating suicide, a man and woman on the beach—she topless, he fully clothed—not looking at each other, two people looking for a hook-up on Tinder as they shop side by side). Others are interesting, especially a window washer kissing a man on the other side of the glass he is cleaning. None of it adds up to much, but it sure is colorful. [Marilyn Ferdinand]
2022 Oscar Nominated Live Action Short Films
Gene Siskel Film Center and the Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes
The five shorts in this program tell stories with an underlying thread of dread. They begin one way and end another, often to highlight the harsh realities of our world. K.D. Dávila and Levin Menekse's PLEASE HOLD (2021, 19 min), from the US, and Martin Strange-Hansen and Kim Magnusson's ON MY MIND (2021, 18 min), from Denmark, represent the lightest of the bunch, even though they depict imprisonment and sickness. Each with sub-20-minute runtimes, they present stronger single-note stories, employing unknown actors and seemingly tighter budgets. THE LONG GOODBYE (UK/Netherlands, 2021, 12 min) finds Riz Ahmed assuming writing, directing, and acting duties; he plays a young man preparing for a wedding with the rest of his immigrant family in Britain. The actor remains in top form, spearheading a short that’s timely, brutal, and arresting, ending with an original song/spoken-word poem that speaks at once to Ahmed's prowess and the far-right racism plaguing the Western world. Two films stand above the rest: THE DRESS (2021, 30 min), from Polish directors Tadeusz Łysiak and Maciej Ślesicki, and ALA KACHUU - TAKE AND RUN (2021, 38 min), a Kyrgyz/Swiss production from Maria Brendle and Nadine Lüchinger. THE DRESS watches a woman with dwarfism as she navigates the anticipation of her first sexual encounter. It’s a film built around routine and expectation, subverting the hopes and desires of both the protagonist and the audience. Łysiak and Ślesicki construct a house of cards, only to shatter it by the time the credits roll. TAKE AND RUN follows a Kyrgyz student as she’s kidnapped and forced into marriage. Though the film broadly contrasts pride and tradition with choice and freedom, the directors take mind not to oversimplify any customs, attempting to find a reason behind this overwhelming suffering. Both THE DRESS and TAKE AND RUN show the power of short-form storytelling, reminding us that a film doesn’t need to be 100 minutes to provoke a visceral reaction. [Michael Frank]
Ti West’s X (US)
Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes
With clear inspiration from the likes of Brian DePalma, Tobe Hooper, and John Carpenter, Ti West’s X is a love letter to late '70s horror. Like West’s outstanding HOUSE OF THE DEVIL (2009), X utilizes familiar horror tropes and visuals while making something fresh. Set in rural Texas in 1979, the film follows a group of actors and filmmakers as they set off to make a porno. Maxine (Mia Goth) is determined to become a star by any means necessary; her producer boyfriend (Martin Henderson) is keen to make it rich by taking advantage of the burgeoning home video market. With two seasoned stars (Scott Mescudi and a standout Brittany Snow), an eager aspiring auteur director (Owen Campbell) and his sound assistant/girlfriend (Jenna Ortega) joining, they settle down to shoot in a rented house on farmland property. The elderly landowner and his wife are unwelcoming, to say the least, and as night falls, the porn shoot turns bloody. With blatant eroticism, X turns the slasher on its head, challenging the established ways in which the genre deals with sexuality, especially in female characters, and it's complicated by its larger themes about aging and vitality. The film also maintains a sense of humor, always quite self-aware of how it distorts and restructures expectations. Perhaps most noteworthy is X’s overall aesthetic, as the film looks and sounds like it’s straight from the late 70s. West’s editing choices, directly inspired by the aforementioned horror icons, is particularly fantastic; with quick cross cutting, overhead and splitscreen shots, the film inventively reveals its themes while successfully building dread. X is both fun and introspective and proof that the slasher is a genre that can be consistently reconsidered and recalibrated. (2022, 105 min, 35mm and DCP [check venue website for screening format]) [Megan Fariello]
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 continues their fourteenth season. The myriad in-person and virtual offerings are too many to list here. (A good problem to have!) Visit their website for more information.
⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Jim Farrell’s 2019 documentary THE TORCH (107 min, DCP Digital), about Chicago music legend Buddy Guy, continues this week. See Venue website for showtimes.
Christopher André Marks’ 2021 film KING OTTO (82 min, DCP Digital) screens on Friday and Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 12pm. There will be a post-screening Q&A with Marks after the Saturday screening.
The National Theatre Live broadcast of Dominic Cooke’s 2017 mounting of Stephen Sondheim’s FOLLIES (155 min, Digital Projection) screens on Sunday at 2pm. More info on all screenings here.
⚫ Facets Cinema
David Lowery’s 2021 film THE GREEN KNIGHT (130 min, DCP Digital) screens this weekend as part of the If We Picked the Oscars series. See Venue website for showtimes.
Norman Jewison’s 1967 film IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (110 min, Digital Projection) screens on Sunday at 1pm as part of the Tribute to Sidney Poitier series. More info on all screenings here.
⚫ Media Burn Archive
As part of Cosmo’s Cosmos, a celebration of the 100-year centenary of artist Cosmo Campoli hosted by Media Burn Archive in partnership with the Smart Museum of Art and the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago, there a few film screenings during the “Chicago Celebrates Campoli” event on Saturday at 6pm, at the Logan Center for the Arts’ Performance Penthouse: Annette Barbier and Terry Moyement’s 1981 documentary short COSMO’S COSMO; new footage, from 1991, of Campoli performing beat poetry, shot by filmmaker Joe Winston; and a screening of a cooking demonstration of the recipe for Cosmo’s Special Spaghetti by Won Kim, chef at Bridgeport’s Kimski restaurant, who recreated Cosmo’s famous dish that he used to serve at the Blue Gargoyle. More info here.
⚫ South Side Projections
South Side Projections and the Bronzeville Historical Society co-present Nirit Peled’s 2009 documentary SAY MY NAME (73 min, Digital Projection) on Saturday at 2pm, at the Parkway Ballroom (4455 S. King Dr. Suite 103), with a discussion led by hip-hop artist Amina Norman-Hawkins. More info here.
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS –
Held Over/Still Screening/Return Engagements (Selected)
James Vaughan’s FRIENDS AND STRANGERS (Australia)
Available to rent through Facets Cinema here
For a while, FRIENDS AND STRANGERS resembles any number of independent comedies of the post-mumblecore era, as it charts an awkward sort-of date between two good-looking, economically comfortable twenty-somethings. Numerous hallmarks of solipsistic contemporary filmmaking are here: staggered, ordinary-sounding dialogue; a dramatic focus on hanging out; casual attempts to probe the social and sexual mores of young professionals. Yet there are clues from the start that writer-director James Vaughan is up to something different, namely his careful and off-beat visual compositions, which suggest self-contained dioramas rather than windows onto a larger world. Then there is the narrative interruption that occurs about 20 minutes into the film, when the central non-lovers encounter a recent widower and his preteen daughter, who are in the middle of touring Australia in a RV as a way of mourning the death in their family. For a few minutes, these strangers supplant the ostensible protagonists as the story’s main characters, giving rise to the suspicion that the rest of the movie will be about them. That’s not what happens, although Vaughan doesn’t develop the sort-of date premise either—in another unexpected interruption, the film jumps forward in time before the initial plot can be resolved and picks up with one of the protagonists, Ray, as he embarks on a new low-key misadventure. The freedom with which FRIENDS AND STRANGERS explores various narrative avenues is somewhat redolent of Richard Linklater’s SLACKER (1991), while the uninflected dialogue and vaguely sociological perspective recall the films of Jon Jost. Yet the overriding quirkiness is distinctly Australian; the unusual mise-en-scène even evokes early Jane Campion at times. (2021, 84 min) [Ben Sachs]
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
A new restoration of South Korean director Hong Sang-soo’s 2000 film A VIRGIN STRIPPED BARE BY HER BACHELORS is available to rent though April 22. More info here.
⚫ Media Burn Archive
On Thursday at 6pm, Media Burn Archive will host photographer and filmmaker Tobe Carey for a virtual screening and discussion of a selection of his work, centered on environmental and political themes. Independent film producer Joey Carey will moderate. More info here.
CINE-LIST: March 25 - March 31, 2022
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Maxwell Courtright, John Dickson, Steve Erickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Michael Frank, JB Mabe, Raphael Jose Martinez, Michael Glover Smith, K.A. Westphal, Drew Van Weelden