Cine-File continues to cover streaming and other online offerings during this time of covidity. We will list/highlight physical screenings at the top of the list for theaters and venues that have reopened, and list streaming/online screenings below. Cine-File takes no position on whether theaters should be reopening, nor on whether individuals should be attending in-person. Check the venues’ websites for information on safety protocols and other procedures put in place.
🔊 CINE-CAST: The Cine-File Podcast
New! – Episode #16
Episode #16 of the Cine-Cast finds us talking about movies about talking! To begin, Associate Editor Ben Sachs and contributor John Dickson reflect on some new and old movies available to Chicagoans in early May before delving into MALMKROG, a divisive, 200-minute philosophical gabfest written and directed by Romanian New Wave stalwart Cristi Puiu and which has been available to stream on MUBI.com for the past month. (Ben also wrote about it for this week's Cine-List—see below.) Next, Ben joins contributors Scott Pfeiffer and Michael Glover Smith to discuss Éric Rohmer's final film cycle, the Tales of the Four Seasons, which was recently restored by Janus Films and had been available to rent through the Music Box Theatre through April. This wide-ranging discussion addresses not only Rohmer's late period, but also his evolution as a filmmaker, his pioneering work as a film critic, his days as a schoolteacher, and his mysterious private life. The introductory theme is by local film composer Ben Van Vlissingen. Find out more about his work here.
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Listen to the Cine-Cast here!
📽️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS
Music Box Theatre
The Music Box presents physical screenings of Jer Sklar’s 2020 film TOM OF YOUR LIFE (93 min, DCP Digital) and in a heist film series, Jules Dassin’s 1955 French film RIFIFI, Steve McQueen’s 2018 film WIDOWS (129 min, DCP), Steven Soderbergh’s 2001 film OCEAN’S ELEVEN (116 min, 35mm), and Michael Mann’s 1995 film HEAT. Reviews for HEAT and RIFIFI below. Check the Music Box website for showtimes.
Michael Mann's HEAT (US)
Saturday, 6pm, Sunday, 12:30pm, Tuesday, 7:30pm, and Thursday, 3:45pm
By 1995, Michael Mann was already one of the most formally accomplished directors of modern Hollywood. His TV series Miami Vice brought a new style to the police procedure genre: streamlined, fixated on technological detail, and coolly—even inhumanly—detached from its characters. His previous theatrical features, MANHUNTER and THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS, married these qualities to a rich visual language that drew from centuries of American painting. But HEAT was a new breakthrough: the introduction of a relentlessly inquisitive film style, willing to sacrifice focus and even spatial orientation in order to capture the most stimulating detail of any given moment. (It was perhaps the first pointillist action movie.) Mann's gifts as a visual artist would be superficial, though, if he weren't so thoroughly educated in his subject matter. The obsessiveness of Al Pacino's Lt. Vincent Hanna in arresting a master thief was inspired by one of Mann's friends in the Chicago Police Department; and equally important to the film's power is the near-documentary explication of almost every bit of surveillance equipment and artillery we see. (As in his later COLLATERAL and MIAMI VICE [2006], Mann had much of the cast undergo professional weapons training before production.) Mann's eternal subject is the shark-like grace of the career professional; this film conveys, in an epic accumulation of detail, the challenge of keeping up with him. It also reflects on the professional's struggle in keeping up with himself. Pacino's Hanna and Robert DeNiro's Neil McCauley (Hanna's criminal doppelganger) are similar cases of middle-aged regret, worn down by decades of living by professional code, but Mann never paints them schematically. This isn't a film about the futility of law and order, but the codependence between law and crime. It's also an awe-inspiring portrait of contemporary Los Angeles, as striking a postmodern (in the architectural sense) piece of art as any of Antonioni's 60s films. (1995, 171 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Jules Dassin's RIFIFI (French Revival)
Friday, 4pm, Saturday, 12:15pm, Tuesday, 4:30pm, and Thursday, 7:30pm
Though not made in the US, RIFIFI is possibly the greatest byproduct of the Hollywood blacklist. Exiled to France, American director Jules Dassin landed his first film in five years (after a string of gritty late 40's noirs) when Jean-Pierre Melville gave him the script for the film. The plot is classically Melville: an old crook... honor among thieves... one last score... etc., etc. In many ways Dassin likely empathized with the main character of RIFIFI: an aging professional, suddenly irrelevant and in surroundings he can't control, with a crew he does not know, just hoping he can still pull it off. Today the film is most famous for the riveting heist sequence, a gorgeous and tense half-hour spent breaking into a jewelry store in total silence, the hushed robbers agonizing over the slightest sounds they make. Complications arise (don't they always?) and our man finds himself embroiled in the underworld intrigues of nightclub owners, junkies, and the woman he loved before he went to prison. Will he make it to the end? There is a likely-apocryphal story surrounding RIFIFI, from Jules Dassin's screening of the first cut for critic André Bazin. When the lights came up in the theater, Bazin supposedly said to Dassin: "Hitchcock makes the same film over and over, and he is Hitchcock. Keep making this film, Jules, and you'll be Dassin." (1955, 122 min, DCP Digital) [Liam Neff]
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COVID policies for the Music Box here.
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – New Reviews
Tom Palazzolo’s CALIGARI’S CURE (US)
Chicago Film Archives and The Hideout present a virtual screening on Wednesday at 8pm—tickets available here
Inspired by the archetype of German expressionist film, THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, Chicago-based underground filmmaker Tom Palazzolo’s first feature length narrative is a cartoonishly whimsical examination of his childhood. CALIGARI’S CURE features actors from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago playing children and adults alike, emphasizing the idiosyncrasies of the director’s working-class Catholic midwestern upbringing. Chicago stands in for 1940s St. Louis, with the outdoor city shots amusingly mismatching with vibrantly painted canted and oversized indoor sets. The mise-en-scène stresses that—despite scenes of childhood friends pretending to be a married couple—even the adult characters are playing house in this constructed world. Particularly striking is the consistent engagement with the role of women at the time. This is established in the film’s opening monologue, given directly to the audience by the mother, who casually explains how she ended up in her marriage. Despite the film essentially being from Palazzolo’s own observations of his youth, the women characters stand out as the driving force. Delightfully unkempt, CALIGARI’S CURE balances dark humor with a warped sweetness. Childhood occurrences continually blend into one another, reminiscent of distorted memory or dreams. Through the dissection of familiar tropes and visual references and by merging a classic cinema homage with underground filmmaking, Palazzolo imaginatively—but not completely contemptuously—scrutinizes both his personal history and midcentury American culture in general. (1982, 65 min) [Megan Fariello]
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Followed by a Q&A with Palazzolo.
Grímur Hákonarson’s THE COUNTY (Iceland)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
The people united will never be defeated. Many a social movement has started with that mantra in mind and carried its true believers to victory. But what happens when a people’s movement becomes institutionalized? Dairy farmer Inga (Arndís Hrönn Egilsdóttir) finds out the hard way that the co-op that she and her husband belong to has become corrupted by greed and power, making their members dependent on them for survival and demanding so much in return that many of the members are reduced to the status of tenant farmers on their own land. Grímur Hákonarson, director of the well-regarded Icelandic pastoral RAMS (2015), is back in familiar territory as he surveys the relationships that can both help and harm the people carrying on the traditions of rural Iceland. Hákonarson’s opening long shot of Inga’s farm surrounded by shield volcanoes is the perfect metaphor for this story of resilience against the barely seen coercive forces against which Inga will fight to break the stranglehold of the co-op. Immediately, he eschews the metaphorical for the literal, as he gives audiences a strong taste of farm life by showing Inga helping a cow to give birth, dumping fodder for the herd to eat, filling a trough with milk for the new calves to drink from rubber udders, and using technology to hook the cows to milking machines and clean their barn. Hrönn Egilsdóttir is, for me, the Frances McDormand of Iceland, and she is ably supported by the understated performances of the rest of the cast. Particularly touching is Hinrik Ólafsson as her husband, Reynir. (2019, 92 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Held Over/Still Screening/Return Engagements (Selected)
Roy Andersson’s ABOUT ENDLESSNESS (Sweden)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here, the Gene Siskel Film Center here, and the Music Box Theatre here
Swedish writer-director Roy Andersson trades almost exclusively in tableau-like shots that suggest the offscreen space goes on forever—in this regard, all of his features beginning with SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR (2000) could be called ABOUT ENDLESSNESS. Andersson’s style is by now immediately recognizable; as Nick Pinkerton summed it up in a November 2020 article for Sight & Sound: “It comprises a string of vignettes, almost all playing out in a single take, viewed by a locked-down camera with a static frame that holds its human subjects in the philosophical distance of a deep-focus long shot… The skies in his Stockholm are overcast or pale; the light in the city is weak and milky; and the walls are bare in the city’s seedy cafés and offices and flats. Grays and off-whites proliferate, and the palette is desaturated, as though colors have lost their will to live in this cold climate.” For those who appreciate his aesthetic or his dry, Scandinavian wit, Andersson’s approach is endlessly compelling. Each shot feels like a little world unto itself (too bad Chicagoans can’t see this on a big screen); the director strews details all around the frames, creates expansive backgrounds, and brings each scene to a pointed observation reminiscent of a fable or parable. ABOUT ENDLESSNESS (for which Andersson won the Best Director prize at the Venice Film Festival) feels especially parable-like in its focus on big philosophical questions. The movie runs just 76 minutes but has the air of an epic, since Andersson seldom strays from considerations of what it means to live, love, believe, act morally, kill, grieve, and die. Most of the scenes are narrated by an omniscient figure who flatly delivers pithy descriptions of the onscreen action (e.g., “I once saw a man who wanted to surprise his wife with a nice dinner…”), which renders them, alternately, universal and almost comically simple. Indeed, the straight-ahead, presentational style is a reliable source of deadpan humor; even the recurring character of the preacher who’s lost his faith comes across as a little funny when seen from such an exaggerated distance. Andersson’s style can be devastating too, as in the scene of a man who instantly regrets carrying out an honor killing; and it can be majestic, as in a scene occurring roughly halfway into ABOUT ENDLESSNESS that finds three young women improvising a dance in front of an outdoor cafe in late afternoon. A director prone to using miniatures to create the illusion of outsize spaces, Andersson is very good at reminding us how small—which is to say, precious—humanity is in light of eternity. (2019, 76 min) [Ben Sachs]
Dieudo Hamadi’s DOWNSTREAM TO KINSHASA (Democratic Republic of the Congo/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
In Kisangani, a city in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a six-day war occurred between Uganda and Rwandan forces in 2000. Approximately 1,000 people died, and 3,000 more were injured. Five years later, the International Court of Justice compelled the former country to pay reparations in the sum of ten billion dollars, one billion of which was to be allocated to people wounded in the conflict. In his visceral, evocative documentary, Congolese filmmaker Dieudo Hamadi accompanies a cadre of differently abled survivors as, almost 20 years after the fact, they make their way to Kinshasa to demand their due. Apart from opening title cards that explain the circumstances of the Six Day War and a sequence where some of the town’s residents take Hamadi to a mass grave (and explain directly to the camera the atrocities that occurred there), the film avoids didacticism by immersing viewers in the subjects’ stories in a manner at once intimate and extensive. Hamadi initiates these tactics subtly, showing the lives of some of those wounded as they go about their day-to-day in Kisangani; in particular he focuses on a young woman, Sola, who lost both her legs and uses prosthetics (which are generally in disrepair) to walk. The journey to Kinshasa via the Congo River is introduced by way of meetings held by a de facto committee of victims deciding who should represent the group in the capital city. Their perilous voyage, shot on Hamadi’s iPhone, composes the middle part of the film. It’s direct cinema to the extreme, as the camera moves among the passengers of a cramped boat whose roof is made of plastic tarps and the like. The ride is no pleasure cruise, with passengers crammed together like sardines, eating bad food and contending with the elements. Some of the most harrowing scenes involve intense rain and wind storms that compromise the boat’s slipshod roofing. The group takes it in stride, however, as their challenges on the boat are relatively minute compared to the ones they face in life—consider a conversation between a man and woman in the group as they discuss being told by their families to commit suicide, so as to relieve the burden on them. The faction makes it to Kinshasa, where more strife awaits; upcoming elections, which were eventually postponed, become an excuse for lawmakers to ignore them. But the group forges on, employing protest tactics to make their stories heard. Throughout Hamadi includes footage of performances by members of the group as cohorts of the Troupe les zombies de Kisangi, a collective comprised of victims of the Six-Day War. In the rehearsal space, a woman without arms or legs called Mama Kinshade (a truly inspirational spirit) gives a rousing speech, encouraging the others to perform before a new audience. They break into song and dance, the release brought on by such creative activities almost palpable, especially as one participant writhes on the floor without shame. Hamadi himself experienced the Six Day War when he was just 15 years old; he spent an arduous 24 hours hiding in a church with his siblings until they could go home. His commitment to the stories of his people is reflected in his filmmaking, the camera urgent and unwavering. The film also has the distinction of being the first from the DRC to be an official selection at Cannes. (2021, 89 min) [Kathleen Sachs]
Maria Sødahl’s HOPE (Norway/Sweden/Denmark)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Scandinavian filmmakers seem to have a particular affinity for stories of troubled marriages. Along with the brilliant marital dramas of such luminaries as Ingmar Bergman and Jan Troell, we must add Norwegian director Maria Sødahl’s masterful film HOPE. Two of the world’s finest actors, Andrea Bræin Hovig and Stellan Skarsgård, play Anja and Tomas, a long-time couple with a large, blended family of adult and dependent children. Anja is a dancer/choreographer who has just had a great success in Amsterdam, the first such opportunity in a long time. Tomas, a theatrical producer who is extremely busy and often absent from home, is about to start a new project. Their world is turned upside down when they learn that the lung cancer Anja was treated for the year before has metastasized to her brain. Sødahl, who also wrote the semi-autobiographical screenplay, moves deftly between Anja and Tomas’ home life filled with friends, family, and celebrations, and the medical diagnostics and consultations that begin just before Christmas and culminate in brain surgery on January 2. However, the main focus of the film is on Anja and Tomas, who are forced to face their emotional alienation. They are together, but not married, and it is easy to see that Anja has suffered the fate of many women, sacrificing her own career and tending to Tomas’ children with his ex-wife and the three they had together as Tomas happily immerses himself in his work. With death staring her in the face, Anja can finally voice how much she has felt like a convenience to him, challenging him to really stand beside her as a fully committed partner. It is a privilege to see two titans of cinema, under Sødahl’s sensitive direction, create not only two separate individuals, but also the “one” they have struggled for nearly two decades to become. Their intensely personal moments are handled with complexity and understanding, illuminating what it means to confront not only the fear of death, but also the fear of intimacy. (2019, 130 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Charlène Favier’s SLALOM (France/Belgium)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Elite athletics is a perilous place for youngsters. Freighted with demanding coaches, strict and often punishing training regimes, and physical hazards like anorexia, amenorrhea, and injury, it’s not a track most parents would choose for their children. Yet the exhilaration and accolades of competing often make it the course children choose for themselves, not realizing that they may be risking much more than they realized. That is certainly the case with Lyz Lopez (Noée Abita), a teenage Alpine skier with Olympic dreams and the talent to realize them. Her father is absent, and her mother (Muriel Combeau) is the opposite of a sports mom, barely taking an interest in Lyz’s training and aspirations. Quite naturally, Lyz looks to her coach, Fred (Jérémie Renier), for approval. Once she becomes a winner, he focuses a great deal of attention on her and eventually rapes her. In her first full-length feature, director Charlène Favier offers an unflinching look at a teenage girl wrestling with her emotions as an angry, disappointed man comes close to destroying her while insisting he is helping her achieve her dreams. Favier’s close observations reveal the complicated situation of the two main protagonists while surrounding them with supporting characters who help paint a portrait of the elite sports world in all its pain and glory. Footage of the ski runs is thrilling, and the location shooting in Val-d’Isère, a mecca for competitive skiing in the French Alps, provides a perfect backdrop for the beauty and danger Lyz faces as she tries to discover her strength in a fraught situation. SLALOM is a riveting, horrifying film that goes behind the headlines to show exactly what some of these young athletes suffer. (2020, 92 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Also Screening/Streaming
Block Cinema (Northwestern University)
Block Cinema presents the free two-program series The Impasse of Blackness: Interrogating the Possibility of Resolution from Sunday through May 16. Showing are Ngozi Onwurah’s 1995 UK feature WELCOME II THE TERRORDOME (90 min) and a Shorts Program (1988-2019, 101 min) that includes films by Onwurah, Languid Hands, and Ebun Sodipo. More info and registration here.
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
The 2021 Film, Video, New Media, Animation, and Sound Festival, comprised of work by graduating BFA and MFA students at the School of the Art Institute, takes place online through the Gene Siskel Film Center from Monday through May 16. It includes four shorts programs and a work-in-progress feature. The programs are free and tickets can be reserved here.
Chicago Filmmakers
Chicago Filmmakers presents the next program in their local filmmaker spotlight series The Spirit of Chicago from Monday through May 16. Included are short films by Brandon Jones, Sarah Clark, Shelby Gamble, Eric Liberacki, and John Fay. More info and tickets here.
Sound of Silent Film Festival
Two different programs of silent short films are showing virtually this weekend. Program One is on Friday at 8pm and Program Two is on Saturday at 8pm. More information and tickets here.
Chicago Film Society
The CFS has programmed a series of six online screenings, titled Leader Ladies, for the NYC venue Metrograph which take place from this Sunday through June 1. Three programs have start dates this week: Girls on Film Shorts – Program 1 is available from Sunday through May 21; Sarah Jacobson’s 1996 independent feature MARY JANE’S NOT A VIRGIN ANYMORE (98 min) is available from Tuesday through May 17; and Josh and Benny Safdie’s 2009 film DADDY LONGLEGS (100 min) is available from Wednesday through May 18. All programs will include various trailers and snipes. More info here.
Facets Cinémathèque
Ivo van Aart’s 2019 Dutch film THE COLUMNIST (86 min) is available for streaming beginning this week. Check the Facets website for hold-over titles.
Gene Siskel Film Center
Check the Siskel website for hold-over titles.
The current offering in the Film Center’s new online lecture series, Talking Pictures, is from journalist and curator Sergio Mims (Mondays through the end of May). Details here.
Music Box Theatre
Burhan Qurbani’s 2020 German film BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ (183 min), Tran Quoc Bao’s 2021 film THE PAPER TIGERS (108 min), and Anthony Chen’s 2019 Singaporean/Taiwanese film WET SEASON (103 min) are all available for streaming beginning this week. Check the Music Box website for hold-over titles.
🎞️ ADDITIONAL ONLINE SCREENINGS
Cristi Puiu’s MALMKROG (Romania)
Streams with a subscription to MUBI
Cristi Puiu had been obsessed with Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov’s quasi-novel War and Christianity (1900) for decades before making his adaptation, MALMKROG, which has been dividing audiences ever since it premiered at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival. Indeed, the movie seems created to divide; it’s a forbidding work, and not only for its three-hour-20-minute run time. Every detail feels so thoroughly considered and loaded with meaning that the work exudes a dark opacity akin to that of EYES WIDE SHUT or HARD TO BE A GOD, two other long-labored-over cinematic landmarks. The title refers to the country estate of a Russian aristocrat named Nikolai. On Christmas Day sometime in the late 19th century, Nikolai has over four friends, and the group spends a lengthy, indeterminate amount of time discussing various philosophical matters. Their dialogue comprises most of the movie, yet MALMKROG never feels static or stagey, in spite of the fact that the writer-director had previously adapted parts of War and Christianity for a theatrical workshop. Puiu trained as a painter before he started making movies, and he remains a master visual stylist, no matter that he’s working with dialogue-driven drama and very few locations—so few, in fact, that it feels like an event whenever the camera moves beyond the salon or dining room. As one might expect from the director of AURORA, some of Puiu’s aesthetic choices are downright confounding, like his decision to film a crucial monologue about the massacre of an Armenian community with the speaker offscreen and the camera’s view partly obscured by a wall. When Puiu finally introduces conventional patterns of shot-reverse shot in the movie’s second half, the effect is jarring and defamiliarized; the movie had trained you not to think about faces, so it feels like an intellectual challenge when you do. The discourse, though challenging as well, is consistently stimulating and dynamic. After a lengthy, wordless opening shot outside the manor, the philosophy arrives at full-throttle; it isn’t long until the characters pontificate over when and whether murder can be morally justified. That conversation sets the stage for some critical themes of MALMKROG, namely violence and the seductive power of abstract thought. The characters get so wrapped up in their theoretical discourse that they seem unmoored in time and space (in this regard—as well as its gargantuan length—the movie recalls Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain), and Puiu heightens this sense of dissociation by keeping obscure whether the action takes place over one day or multiple days. In keeping with period custom, the sophisticated conversation transpires in French, which adds a degree of distance to the discussions of Russian politics, Russian militancy, and Russian identity. It’s as though the characters exist in a bubble, one that needs to be tended to constantly so that it doesn’t burst. Puiu often shows Nikolai’s servants in the shots, attending to chores meant to pamper the nobles (setting the table, clearing plates during meals, et cetera), who ignore them as they stand just a few feet apart. Yet certain things can’t be ignored or rationalized away. Death is one of those things, and it lingers around MALMKROG like a malign ghost. At a few important junctures, Puiu abandons the sitting-room conversation to contemplate a dying old man in another room of the estate (the film never reveals his name or his relationship to Nikolai). There’s another jarring departure about two-thirds into the film and that I won’t spoil here; suffice it say it brings the film’s death theme to the surface so suddenly that the effect is almost comic. (This is probably intentional, as Puiu has cited Luís Buñuel’s THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL as a reference.) Less jarring, but no less revealing, is a scene in the movie’s second chapter that finds head servant István berating an underling with far greater severity than the situation requires. It’s a reminder of the less atrocious, commonplace violence that pervades our culture and that allows extreme social inequality like the sort presented in the film to persist all over the world. (2020, 201 min) [Ben Sachs]
CINE-LIST: May 7 - May 13, 2021
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Liam Neff