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.
Check the venues’ websites for information on safety protocols and other procedures put in place.
📽️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS
Music Box Theatre
Showing this week at the Music Box are Jon M. Chu’s 2021 film IN THE HEIGHTS (143 min, DCP Digital) and Jaco Bouwer’s 2021 South African film GAIA (96 min, DCP Digital). Check the MB website for showtimes.
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COVID policies for the Music Box here.
Comfort Film at Comfort Station
Released and Abandoned: Forgotten Oddities of the Home Video Era presents: Crime Wave
Comfort Film at Comfort Station (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave. – Outdoor Screening) – Wednesday, 8pm [Free Admission]
Comfort Film presents John Paizs’ 1985 Canadian cult film CRIME WAVE (80 min, Digital Projection) as part of their occasional “Released and Abandoned” series.
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More info and COVID policies for Comfort Station here.
The Nightingale Drive-In
The Nightingale hosts a free drive-in screening in the parking lot of the Hyde Park Art Center on Thursday at 8pm. The Program, Get in Bitches (1978-2021, approx. 65 min total), includes work by Branda Miller, Grace Mitchell, Jennifer Reeder, Caitlin Ryan, Eva Marie Rødbro, Gloria Camiruaga, Emily Lucid and Elizabeth Quezada-Lee, Alee Peoples, and Ilene Segalove. More info and a required RSVP link here.
👀 DOC10
The Doc10 Film Festival runs through Sunday. ALL THESE SONS takes place at the ChiTown Drive in; all others are in-person at the Davis Theater. Complete schedule and more info here.
Joshua Altman and Bing Liu’s ALL THESE SONS (US/Documentary)
ChiTown Drive In – Friday, 8:30pm; purchase tickets here
Bing Liu’s highly anticipated follow-up to MINDING THE GAP (co-directed by Joshua Altman) is like its predecessor in that it’s a study of young men in blighted communities trying to change their lives. If it inevitably feels less personal, that’s because Liu isn’t a subject this time; also, the film doesn’t span as many years as MINDING THE GAP did, so Liu doesn’t foster the same deep connection with his subjects. Still, ALL THESE SONS does an impressive job of conveying the scope and complexity of Chicago’s gun violence crisis, and the filmmakers achieve an affecting intimacy with the men and women they document. The film cuts between portraits of two organizations for at-risk young men in Chicago, one on the south side and one on the west side. Liu and Altman introduce viewers to men enrolled in the program, some of the older men who serve as mentors, and the families of both groups. Most of the subjects have been in gangs; many have left them only recently and are just learning how to adjust to lives outside their influence. Their personal stories are affecting, yet the film acknowledges the ways in which they are, sadly, not unique; Liu and Altman address the history of gun violence on the south and west sides as well as the widespread nature of the problem today. ALL THESE SONS recalls the films of Steve James (with whom Liu worked on the cable series America to Me) when the filmmakers talk directly to their subjects and encourage them to reflect on their experience. This process of cinema-as-social-work underscores the positive impact that filmmaking can have in the world. (2021, 88 min, Digital Projection) [Ben Sachs]
Natalia Almada’s USERS (US)
Davis Theater – Saturday, 2pm
Historically, people have viewed technological evolution as either leading toward utopian progress or dystopian ruin. USERS, which broadly grapples with the impact of modern technology on our lives, doesn’t exactly commit to either position. Rather, from a perspective of casual detachment, it considers technology as a kind of preexisting material condition, an omnipresent, largely invisible infrastructure that becomes naturalized in all its forms. In fact, the technology is so invisible that USERS sometimes doesn’t focus on it at all; despite its title, you’ll find scarce footage of actual device interfacing in the film. Director Natalia Almada instead favors a highly discursive, languorous, and abstract montage in a similar vein as KOYAANISQATSI, loosely linking aerial landscape shots with images of industrial labor and modern transportation, while pointedly voice-synthesized narration ruminates on our transforming world. If there’s any through-line here, it’s Almada’s two toddler sons Elías and Gray, who serve as anchor points to recurring musings about motherhood and the future of childrearing. Notably, the Spanish-speaking Almada completely effaces herself behind both the camera and the English-translated, computerized voiceover, eerily suggesting how technology might literally and figuratively replace the maternal function as a swaddling blanket answering to our desires. Although it gestures toward commentary on such infantilization, USERS doesn’t really follow this thesis, or any particular thesis for that matter (those looking for insights into the socioeconomic, political, or ethical dimensions of technology should look to other sources). The film is content providing a steady stream of entrancing images, from a macro, slow-craning view of a field of solar panels to a close-up of a napping baby’s gently heaving stomach. These cinematographic sights, USERS implicitly reminds us, are also products of technological mediation. (2021, 79 min, Digital Projection) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
Jamila Wignot’s AILEY (US)
Davis Theater – Saturday, 7pm
As a cinephile and one-time dance student, dance films are one of my obsessions. I have seen dozens of such films—musicals, novelty shorts, filmed dance performances, making-of documentaries, and lately, documentaries about dancer/choreographers. Among the latter, I have noticed that the filmmakers often subordinate a straightforward examination of their subject’s life to an attempt to find a deeper truth in their art. It’s an understandable urge, given how visual dance is, but the results are often mixed. I’m pleased to say that Jamila Wignot has such command of her art that she has been able to make a documentary in such sympathy with its subject, Alvin Ailey, that we feel as though we understand him from the inside out. Throughout this quasi-experimental film that pieces together historical footage, archival footage of Ailey’s works and press interviews, talking-head reminiscences of people in his life, and a present-day dance in the making, Wignot builds a biography unlike any I have ever seen. There is no footage of Ailey’s early life growing up fatherless and impoverished in racist Texas during the Depression. Thus, Wignot uses archival footage of poor Black children from the rural South to suggest what it might have been like for him and uses his voice to narrate the details. From there, the introduction and repetitions of the folk ballet that put him and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre on the map, “Revelations,” link his early life with his work. Wignot also places Ailey in the continuum of Black dancer/choreographers from his first influence, Katherine Dunham, through dancer and friend Carmen De Lavallade, to the dancer/choreographers who were inspired by him, including George Faison and Bill T. Jones The pressures Ailey felt as America’s token Black choreographer, his constant touring, his relentless privacy are all captured as a feeling—the way dance works on viewers. Wignot treats us to generous excerpts from Ailey’s works, some of which show the obvious influence of his former employer, Martha Graham, as well as dance clips that show off the magnificent, long arms he used so well as a dancer and insinuated into the casting and choreography for his own company. Periodically, Wignot hones in on choreographer Rennie Harris as he works on a commission from the Ailey company to commemorate the 50th anniversary of its founding. Even watching mere fragments of Harris’ “Lazarus,” inspired by Ailey’s life, we can plainly see what a powerful piece it is—and what a fitting tribute to a man who brought the Black experience to the rarified world of serious dance. Highly recommended. (2021, 82 min, Digital Projection) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Hogir Hirori’s SABAYA (Sweden)
Davis Theater – Sunday, 4pm
Hogir Hirori has lived in Stockholm for more than 20 years, but his heart is never far from his homeland in the Middle East where the Kurdish people have lived for centuries, often caught up in the periodic conflicts between the Turks, Iraqis, Syrians, and other national, ethnic, and religious groups of the region. Hirori’s previous films include a documentary about a Kurdish colonel who travels the roads of Mosul disarming roadside bombs (THE DEMINER [2017]) and another about the fates of more than one million people forced to flee from ISIS fighters (THE GIRL WHO SAVED MY LIFE [2016]). His newest film, SABAYA, focuses on Yazidi Kurds, who practice an ancient religion that the Islamist State considers heretical. The Yazidi are vulnerable targets of ISIS, whom they call Daesh, who frequently conduct pogroms on Yazidi towns and kidnap girls and women to serve as sabaya (sex slaves). Dedicated to rescuing these Yazidi are dedicated members of the Yazidi Home Center. Women volunteer to infiltrate the Al-Hol refugee camp, populated by about 15,000 Daesh, to locate the kidnapped women and pass information on where they can be found to Mahmud and Shejk, two Yazidi men who execute dangerous rescues from Al-Hol. Sometimes, the traffickers get ahead of them and move the sabaya, but we see several successful rescues. We should feel happy about this result, but seeing Mahmud and his comrades pick three women out of a tent holding about 30 other women graphically illustrates the extent of the problem and the focus of the Home Center on helping only their own people. Further, Mahmud visits a prison holding Daesh men. The conditions are beastly, with large cells so packed that the men lay on the floor like sardines. Trouble deepens when Turkish President Erdogan invades Syria following former President Trump’s withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country. The last straw for me was the rescue of a 7-year-old girl who had been taken from her family when she was an infant and would certainly have ended up as a sabaya in a few years’ time. The actions of the rescuers are heroic and truly do matter to those they have saved, but the whole enterprise seems like sorting sand on a beach given the massive, inexorable inhumanity on display. (2021, 90 min, Digital Projection) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – New Reviews
Ena Sendijarevic’s TAKE ME SOMEWHERE NICE (New Bosnia-Herzegovinian/Netherlands)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here and the Music Box Theatre here
The life of Alma (Sara Luna Zoric), the protagonist of TAKE ME SOMEWHERE NICE, reflects that of the film’s director, both Bosnian immigrants to the Netherlands. While her film lifts inspiration from ‘70s and ‘80s road movies, especially STRANGER THAN PARADISE, Bosnia is not an ordinary European country, and the road trip her characters pursue reflects its tragedies. Alma returns to Bosnia to see her sick father in the hospital. She meets up with her cousin Emir (Ernad Prjnavorac), who smuggles black market goods into Bosnia, and his friend Denis (Lazar Dragojevic), to whom she’s attracted, for the trip. The opening scenes bring out her isolation and boredom. Sitting at home watching an astronaut tap dance on the moon, she’s moved to get up and dance herself. But the return to Bosnia brings out an attraction to the rather macho, even sexist and homophobic, Emir and Denis. TAKE ME SOMEWHERE NICE is steeped in a dry wit more concerned with quirk, absurdism and irony than jokes. Sendijarevic’s a confident stylist. The early scenes set in the Netherlands are decorated with pastel colors. Shot in Academy ratio, TAKE ME SOMEWHERE NICE consistently makes unusual framing choices. A sex scene is shown through the heads and necks of a gyrating couple, with their mirrored reflection looming almost as large. The camera turns upside down in a trip to the dance floor. The film doesn’t quite break Alma’s haze of detachment and ennui or find a new voice apart from its own influences, but it hints at her slowly finding her own way. (2019, 91 min) [Steve Erickson]
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Held Over/Still Screening/Return Engagements (Selected)
Cathy Yan’s DEAD PIGS (China)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here and the Gene Siskel Film Center here
Writing for MUBI about the influences on her debut feature, DEAD PIGS, writer-director Cathy Yan cited two films—Robert Altman’s NASHVILLE and Paul Thomas Anderson’s MAGNOLIA—and several contemporary photographers. These influences play out clearly in DEAD PIGS, an ambitious, multi-character narrative that’s rich in striking imagery. Like NASHVILLE and MAGNOLIA, the movie is as much about its setting (in this case, rapidly evolving Shanghai and its outskirts) as it is about the characters, and both are portrayed with a mix of sympathy and cynicism. Yan’s storytelling feels more closely aligned with Anderson’s than Altman’s: DEAD PIGS is not a hazy hang-out movie where the characters cross paths by chance (if at all), but rather a fully orchestrated affair in which people come together by destiny and grand fictional devices. Yan’s narrative machinations don’t become obvious for a while; for its first 20 or 30 minutes, DEAD PIGS hums along on the energy of the gliding camerawork and hyped-up cross-cutting, both of which convey a sense of constant activity befitting the ever-changing environment. The film largely takes place in two settings, old neighborhoods on the brink of demolition and the modern skyscrapers taking their place. Embodying the first of those settings is Candy Wang, a beauty parlor owner who refuses to leave the two-story home she was raised in, despite the fact that every other homeowner on her block has sold their property to a large-scale development firm, which has already razed all the other buildings before the movie starts. (Yan based the character on a real-life woman who helped start China’s “nailhouse” phenomenon of homeowners who refuse to leave their homes when developers attempt to demolish them.) Representing the new Shanghai is Sean, an American architect embarking on a career with the firm that wants to buy Candy’s house. A naive westerner who sees China’s wild capitalist dog race as an opportunity to make it big, Sean resembles the hero of John Maringouin’s gonzo independent production GHOSTBOX COWBOY (which premiered the same year as this), though DEAD PIGS never becomes a nightmare like Maringouin’s film does. The closest it gets is in the hideous spectacle of the title. Throughout the story, Shanghai is plagued by a disease that kills pigs by the thousands; the region’s poor pig farmers abandon the corpses in the rivers, and the image serves as a metaphor for the displaced victims of China’s avalanche-like urbanization. (2018, 122 min) [Ben Sachs]
Rob Gordon Bravler’s MOBY DOC (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
At the beginning of MOBY DOC, electronic music sensation Moby poses a question: “Why in the world would I want to make a documentary about myself?” He claims he doesn’t want to make just another biopic of a weird musician. His aims are more existential. We know we count as nothing in the mega-ancient, vast-beyond-comprehension universe. Why then do we think that building, as he puts it, the right existential portfolio of accomplishments and material riches will make us happy and help us figure it all out? To answer this question, Moby then acts as the unreliable narrator of his personal journey to fame, fortune, and animal rights activism. Moby has enlisted long-time music video director/editor Rob Gordon Bravler, as well as friend and visual artist Gary Baseman, to create his biopic as a phantasmagorical music video loaded with animation and puppetry, generous clips from Moby’s huge stadium concerts and other venues, archival interviews Moby gave to the likes of Conan O’Brien and David Letterman, play-acted recreations of how Moby saw his early life of poverty and parental neglect, and burlesques of psychotherapy sessions he has with actor Julie Mintz. The filmmakers don’t trouble us with identifying labels for locations and people, presumably because they are unimportant to the question of why we do what we do, and that approach extends to Moby himself. The film is a superficial account of his troubled childhood, his punk phase, and his dip into the rock ‘n’ roll cliché of sex, drugs, and alcohol. He could be anyone who has hit it big, bottomed out, and confronted his demons, quite literally, as he has a conversation with an actor dressed as Death near the end of the film. All anyone can get out of this mythical white whale of a “documentary” is that Moby finds meaning in nature and helping animals, who have never treated him with anything but love and acceptance. Oh, and David Lynch is enough of a pal to appear in the film. To be sure, as a consummate performer, Moby delivers a great show. Just don’t expect anything more. (2021, 92 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Hong Sang-soo’s THE POWER OF KANGWON PROVINCE (South Korea)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
Hong Sang-soo’s second feature is in some ways his first. It’s the first he scripted himself, and it introduces themes and motifs he would continue to explore in numerous subsequent movies. Like VIRGIN STRIPPED BARE BY HER BACHELORS (2000), TALE OF CINEMA (2005), and RIGHT NOW WRONG THEN (2015), the narrative is divided into two parts, which allows the South Korean writer-director to revel in doublings and opposites—two of those key Hongian motifs. One set of opposites is city and country; the story is split between Seoul and a vacation area in the titular Kangwon Province, a mountainous region in South Korea’s northeast. Hong loves to consider characters when they’re on vacation or else away from home—see WOMAN ON THE BEACH (2006), NIGHT AND DAY (2008), IN ANOTHER COUNTRY (2012), and HOTEL BY THE RIVER (2018). It’s likely because a change of scenery inspires people to shed their inhibitions and say or do things they might not in their ordinary lives. (It’s also likely that Hong’s thematically obsessed with drunkenness for the same reason.) The first half of THE POWER OF KANGWON PROVINCE follows a 22-year-old college student named Ji-sook (Oh Yun-hong), who indulges in reckless behavior while on vacation at the mountain resort, entering into a fling with an older, married police officer (Kim Yoo-sook). The affair escalates even after Ji-sook returns to college in Seoul (the power of Kangwon Province having followed her back); but when she goes back to see him weeks later, their chemistry vanishes, and she ends the relationship. In the second half of the film, Hong picks up with unemployed college professor Sang-kwon (Baek Jong-hak), who vacations with a male friend at the same Kangwon Province resort from earlier. As Hong spins variations on scenes from the film’s first half, it gradually becomes apparent that Sang-kwon—another older, married man—has been having an affair with Ji-sook as well. And so, the film becomes, in part, a study of inadvisable (and predictably disastrous) romantic relationships, yet another theme that would recur regularly in the director’s films. Where Hong’s work after TALE OF CINEMA became sunnier, at least on the surface, POWER OF KANGWON PROVINCE is still bleak and discomforting in the manner of his early period. The graphic sex scenes are deliberately unpleasant, and the camera is often at an alienating position vis-à-vis the action, like from far away or at a skewed angle. Such modernist tactics feel in keeping with the 1990s work of other major arthouse figures like Amos Gitai, Edward Yang, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, or Tsai Ming-liang. (On the other hand, the lovesick policeman seems to have stepped out of a Wong Kar-wai movie.) Yet Hong’s distinctive wry humor, which was evident from his directorial debut, THE DAY A PIG FELL INTO THE WELL (1996), makes the film look less like a product of its era than of the director’s timeless imagination. KANGWON PROVINCE features early iterations of at least two of Hong’s favorite character types: one, the charismatic yet amoral and self-destructive middle-aged man; and two, the beautiful, yet neurotic young woman unsure of what to do with her power over men. These characters may thrive in contemporary South Korean settings, but, as always with this gifted portraitist, anyone who’s spent time in the worlds of higher learning or the arts will see someone they’ve known in the onscreen behavior. (1998, 110 min) [Ben Sachs]
Paul Bishow and James Schneider’s PUNK THE CAPITAL: BUILDING A SOUND MOVEMENT (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Early in PUNK THE CAPITAL: BUILDING A SOUND MOVEMENT, Jake Whipp of the band White Boy states, “If D.C. seems like a town that punk shouldn’t happen in, then maybe that’s exactly where it should happen.” The film is anchored by constant clashing images of the growing punk scene with stodgy shots of D.C. government buildings and workers; particularly notable is archival footage of members of the band Teen Idles rattling off which government department each of their fathers work at. Directors Paul Bishow and James Schneider present the establishment of the D.C. punk scene as audible outrage during the Carter and Reagan eras. PUNK THE CAPITAL chronologically traces the early groups that came up in the mid-70s, the powerful entrance of the influential band Bad Brains, and the formation of the distinct D.C. hardcore sound and scene in the early 80s. Using montage of talking head interviews, conversations filmed at local places around D.C., and archival footage, the film quickly establishes the complicated, experimental, and often unsung aspects of this unique city-centric music community. Then, of course, there’s the music, played relentlessly throughout and tracking a vibrant evolution of sound and message. What PUNK THE CAPITAL does best, however, is illuminate the importance of building a music community beyond the bands themselves, through local radio, labels, record stores, music publications, and venues—and acknowledging the individuals behind it all. (2019, 90 min) [Megan Fariello]
Suzanne Lindon’s SPRING BLOSSOM (France)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here and the Music Box Theatre here
Suzanne Lindon was just 20 years old when SPRING BLOSSOM (which she wrote, directed, and starred in) received its virtual premiere at the 2020 Cannes Film Festival, making her one of the youngest filmmakers—if not the youngest—to have a film in competition there. It is very much a young person’s movie, for better and for worse. On the one hand, Lindon conveys youthful feelings of vulnerability, restlessness, and self-involvement with striking accuracy; on the other, the film sometimes comes off as simple and naive, and Lindon’s tendency to place herself at the front and center of the scene makes the film’s self-regarding perspective indistinguishable from the one it depicts. SPRING BLOSSOM doesn’t approach the level of narcissism that Vincent Gallo reached with THE BROWN BUNNY, but it seems to come from the similar place, as Lindon demands viewers watch herself as she watches herself. Underscoring the personal nature of the project, Lindon plays a character named Suzanne. A seemingly well-adjusted 16-year-old Paris high school student, Suzanne is tired of her routine: she’s introduced surrounded by friends, their conversation muffled into background noise, as she finds herself unable to engage with them with much interest. One afternoon, Suzanne notices an actor outside a theater where the play he’s in is being performed. She becomes smitten with the older man (whom, we later learn, is 35), and gradually works her way into an acquaintance with him, setting up “accidental” meetings until he decides to invite her to a cafe on his own. Viewers dreading the story of an illicit sexual relationship will be pleasantly surprised to find that Lindon keeps the budding romance chaste, focusing on Suzanne’s growing confidence rather than her sexual awakening. Raphael, the actor, may come off as something of a cipher (the film never establishes convincingly why he’d welcome the romantic attention of a high school student), but Arnaud Valois at least succeeds in making him not seem like a creep. Lindon parts with realism in a few unexpected sequences where the characters break out in choreographed movements (it would be an overstatement to call it dancing), putting their ineffable feelings into moving images. The technique, like most of SPRING BLOSSOM, walks such a thin line between charm and preciousness that it will probably take another few films before Lindon falls decisively on one side or the other. That’s just fine—she certainly has time. (2020, 74 min) [Ben Sachs]
Melvin Van Peebles’ THE STORY OF A THREE-DAY PASS (France)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here and the Music Box Theatre here
THE STORY OF A THREE-DAY PASS, the first feature by influential independent Melvin Van Peebles, inspires comparisons with Jean-Luc Godard’s BREATHLESS with its intercontinental romance and jazzy montage, but a more fitting point-of-reference may be the films of William Klein, another American expatriate working in France when this was made. Like Klein, Van Peebles shifts frequently between naturalism and cartoonish exaggeration, and he exhibits a chic visual sensibility throughout. (The black-and-white cinematography is by Michel Kelber, whose long filmography includes Jean Renoir’s FRENCH CANCAN and Nicholas Ray’s BITTER VICTORY.) The three-day pass in question belongs to Turner, a Black American soldier who’s stationed in France. The white superior officer who grants the leave makes clear that he’s doing so to reward Turner for his obsequious behavior; in fact, he promises Turner a promotion when he gets back. The protagonist has mixed feelings about all this, and Van Peebles dramatizes the character’s ambivalence through scenes where he talks to another version of himself in the bathroom mirror, the mirror-image raising doubts and even calling his double an Uncle Tom. Turner manages to put his concerns aside when he leaves his base for Paris, enjoying himself first as a tourist and then as a paramour, entering into a romance with a white Frenchwoman named Miriam. Van Peebles presents their relationship in a freewheeling, Nouvelle Vague-like style, though the aesthetic doesn’t distract from the obstacles they face in finding happiness. Everywhere the couple goes, they’re met with dirty looks, insidious questions, and even physical confrontations; things reach their worst when Turner runs into some suspicious fellow (white) soldiers when he and Miriam are on the beach. The impediments to interracial romance are portrayed, alternately, as scary and comic. In one of the more inspired visuals, Van Peebles cuts from the couple’s first time in bed to a shot of Miriam being surrounded by a group of Africans in traditional tribal garb. This sort of bold imagery points ahead to Van Peebles’ incendiary classic SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSSS SONG (1971), the film with which the writer-director would cement his reputation. (1967, 88 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Mohammad Rasoulof’s THERE IS NO EVIL (Iran/Germany/Czech Republic)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here and the Music Box Theatre here
Mohammad Rasoulof wrote and directed this suspenseful, wise anthology about Iran’s death penalty and its impact on concepts of sacrifice, duty, and denial. The lengthy film contains four diverse stories: a portrait of a family man’s domestic life builds to an ending I mustn’t spoil; a young conscript, under duress, faces his state-mandated turn at executing a prisoner; an engaged couple is reunited in time for the woman’s birthday, but the fiancé, on leave from the army, stumbles upon a terrible realization about something he’s done; a dying man welcomes his niece, a student in Germany, for a visit, but harbors a secret he shudders to tell. From tale to tale, Rasoulof dramatizes decisive moments and the life trajectories resulting therefrom. See this for its nuanced look at saying No to injustice, which suggests the tragedies, but also the compensating rewards, of such a choice. For his efforts, Rasoulof has been sentenced by the authorities to one year in prison for “propaganda against the system.” (2020, 150 min) [Scott Pfeiffer]
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Also Screening/Streaming
Chicago Filmmakers
In conjunction with Reeling, its LGBTQ+ film festival, Chicago Filmmakers presents the shorts program With Love, Reeling online from Monday through June 27. Included are films by Oriana Oppice, Judy Febles, Lydia Smyth, Anna Rose Ii-Epstein, Connor O'Keefe, and Morgan J Fox. More info and tickets here.
Video Data Bank
VDB presents the online series Protest (1970-2020), with work by Adrian Garcia Gomez, Linda Montano, Tony Cokes, Videofreex, and Sabine Gruffat, here.
Facets Cinémathèque
Facets presents The African Diaspora International Film Festival, Chicago through Thursday. Details here. 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 film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. It's on World Cinema in the 1950s and takes place on Tuesdays and Thursdays through July 1. More details here.
Music Box Theatre
Danielle Lessovitz’s 2019 film PORT AUTHORITY (101 min), Alexandre Rockwell’s 2020 film SWEET THING (91 min), Thomas Morgan’s 2021 documentary TOMORROW’S HOPE (78 min), and Zeshawn and Aman Ali’s 2020 documentary TWO GODS (86 min) are all available for viewing beginning this week. Check the Music Box website for hold-over titles.
🎞️ ADDITIONAL ONLINE SCREENINGS
Nicholas Ray’s BITTER VICTORY (France/US)
Available to rent through Amazon Prime Video, Google Play, iTunes and Vudu
Nicholas Ray was one of the first great widescreen filmmakers, having mastered the format just years after it was introduced. The six films Ray directed between 1955 and 1957—RUN FOR COVER, REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, HOT BLOOD, BIGGER THAN LIFE, THE TRUE STORY OF JESSE JAMES, and BITTER VICTORY—may vary in overall quality, but they all utilize the extra-wide frame to dynamic, even bracing effect. In these films, one empathizes with the characters’ emotional isolation through Ray’s manipulation of negative space; even the interiors allow for more room between people than one is used to seeing in movies. Most of these films were compromised in some way (BIGGER THAN LIFE contains a tacked-on happy ending, JESSE JAMES was restructured by the studio against Ray’s wishes), but none more than BITTER VICTORY. After a notoriously unhappy shoot marked by last-minute rewrites and feuding between Ray and producer Paul Graetz, the film was re-cut by 20 minutes before its U.S. premiere, making the film nearly incomprehensible for American audiences. Thankfully, the original, 102-minute version is now the more widely available one, but in any version, Ray’s brilliant mise-en-scene commands. The film opens and closes with one of the director’s best visual metaphors: a room full of human-sized dummies used in military exercises. The image frames the story with a cynical view of war in which soldiers are basically expendable bodies. What comes between these two bookends is a hard-hitting antiwar drama about two opposing British officers forced to work together on a commando mission in the Libyan desert in World War II. One, Captain Leith (Richard Burton), is an intellectual with field experience in the region who doubts the mission will succeed. The other, Major Brand (Curt Jurgens), is a stubborn bureaucrat who insists on pushing forward whatever the human cost. Ray illustrates the men’s opposition through striking compositions full of contrasts (not for nothing is the movie in black-and-white); he also introduces a sexual component to the rivalry when he reveals that Leith and Brand’s wife (Ruth Roman) had been lovers before the war. It’s characteristic of Ray (who adapted René Hardy’s novel with Hardy and critic-turned-screenwriter Gavin Lambert) to render enduring social conflicts in such a personal, neurotic manner—his critiques of 50s’ social values tend to get you where you live. Given the film’s critical attitude and doomed romanticism, it’s no wonder it was a favorite of a young Jean-Luc Godard, who named it the best movie of the year when it was released in France. (1957, 102 min) [Ben Sachs]
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BITTER VICTORY is one of this week’s subjects in the Gene Siskel Film Center’s online lecture series by Jonathan Rosenbaum on “World Cinema of the 1950s.” The event is on Thursday at 6pm. (Rosenbaum will discuss Carl Th. Dreyer’s ORDET on Tuesday at 6pm.) More info and a link to purchase tickets for the lectures here.
Victor Nunez’s RUBY IN PARADISE (US)
Available to stream (with subscription) through Amazon Prime Video and to rent through Apple TV, Google Play, and Vudu
Ruby Lee Gissing (Ashley Judd, in her first major screen role), the protagonist of Victor Nunez’s sublime character study, is an expert eavesdropper. Looking for a new beginning after the death of her mother, Ruby relocates from her grim Tennessee hometown to the resort destination of Panama City, Florida, and wastes no time taking stock of her fresh surroundings. From her bedroom window, she hears motorcycles revving up and neighbors singing; from the cash register at the beach-themed souvenir shop where she lands a job, she peers into the back office and sees store owner Mildred (Dorothy Lyman) chastise her son Ricky (Bentley Mitchum). Ruby arrives in Panama City during the offseason, and Nunez—a Floridian whose small but precious oeuvre, equal parts pictorial beauty and hard economic reality, stands as a vital document of the state—basks in the ethereal emptiness of the shuttered storefronts, quiet promenades, and lonely parking lots bearing “closed for season” signs. Attentive to landscape and the natural world, RUBY IN PARADISE also devotes itself to watching its main character think and feel. Ruby shoplifts, then quickly regrets it and drops her haul off at a donation box. She comes home with a bag of groceries and Budweiser, watches a television segment with the local meteorologist, and afterward mimics the woman’s cadences, making herself laugh. She keeps a journal, related in voice-over, where she records thoughts as disparate as the grand questions of life (“Are there any real reasons for living right anyway?”) and the feeling of a good kiss. Ruby dates around, including with Ricky, a slimy financier, and Mike (Todd Field), who works at a plant nursery and talks a good game of environmental concern and literary appreciation—he analyzes Jane Austen while draining the pasta—but in his own way is just as insidious. Nunez’s gift for restraint emerges in a spellbinding passage after Ruby and Mildred canvass the floor of a trade show. Relaxing on a terrace over drinks, both women exchange intimate eye contact with strangers at nearby tables—and, magically, absolutely nothing results, the import of the glances left unarticulated. Resisting resolution, Nunez and Judd instead specialize in these surprising miniature moments—half-meaningless, half-profound, with no predetermined takeaways—that color Ruby’s days and shape her understanding of the world. (1993, 114 min) [Danny King]
CINE-LIST: June 18 - June 24, 2021
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Steve Erickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Danny King, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Scott Pfeiffer