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
Noir Across the Atlantic
Music Box Theatre – Check Venue website for showtimes
Jean-Pierre Melville's LE CERCLE ROUGE (France)
"[Jean-Pierre] Melville set out to synthesize all the thoughts and feelings he'd acquired about cops and robbers in fifteen years of genre moviemaking and a lifetime of movie watching in LE CERCLE ROUGE," wrote Michael Sragow for the Criterion Collection, adding, "he emerged with something greater than a summing up." The film is an expansive crime thriller in which every major character has the time to reveal novelistic depths and contradictions (in addition to a flamboyant personal style). Alain Delon, playing a variation on his cool assassin from Melville's LE SAMOURAI, is Corey, a recent ex-con who sets out to organize a perfect jewel heist—but as a fake Buddhist quote informs us at the movie's onset, no man can evade punishment if that's to be his fate. Like SAMOURAI but to an even greater extent, Melville constructs the criminal progress around precise, professional maneuvers: It is a wholly cinematic work in which characterization is the result of fetishized, highly choreographed movement. LE CERCLE ROUGE climaxes with a 25-minute, dialogue-free robbery scene where every action carries extreme consequence—a bold attempt on Melville's part to "outdo" a similar sequence from Jules Dassin's RIFIFI. But where Dassin's achievement stands out from the film around it, Melville's seems the culmination of a very personal style. As Sragow describes it: "Melville uses music minimally, deploys natural sounds like a virtuoso, and, along with cinematographer Henri Decaë, evokes vibrant color with a restricted palette by staying alert to the shifts in light that come with changing time and weather. One could call the result a feast for the senses, except that would imply satiation, even gluttony, and one emerges from this film with senses primed." (1970, 140 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Louis Malle’s ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS (France)
Considered one of the very first films of the French New Wave, Louis Malle’s directorial debut ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS follows two lovers, Florence (Jeanne Moreau) and Julien (Maurice Ronet), who plan to kill her wealthy husband Simon and take his money. Their meticulously plotted perfect murder goes awry when Julien becomes trapped in an elevator after being forced to reenter the building to retrieve evidence he stupidly left behind after shooting Simon and staging the crime to look like a suicide. When Julien fails to meet at their rendezvous, Florence gloomily wanders the Parisian streets at night searching for her beau at every place she can think of. Meanwhile, a subplot involving a young couple stealing Julien’s car while he’s trapped feels a spiritual precursor to the protagonists of Jean-Luc Godard’s BREATHLESS. Malle’s film is so successful thanks in part to the spectacular talents involved. Miles Davis’ wholly improvised jazz score adds a melancholic tone while also sprinkling in both franticness and serenity. Cinematographer Henri Decaë, who had recently worked on another French noir, Jean-Pierre Melville’s BOB LE FLAMBEUR, manipulates superb tracking shots with thoughtful, interesting lighting to enhance the film’s overall mood, including some remarkable sequences of Florence navigating the streets. Intended as an homage of sorts to Robert Bresson, with whom Malle had worked on A MAN ESCAPED, with a touch of thriller thrown in, ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS is a perfect storm of a film where all fronts involved combine to create something most impressive. (1958, 91 min, 35mm) [Kyle Cubr]
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Alexander Mackendrick’s THE LADYKILLERS (UK)
To my mind, the Ealing Studios’ THE LADYKILLERS is the most perfect comedy ever made. Never was there a comedic performance to equal Katie Johnson’s; her little old lady not only cows the robbery gang that uses her crumbling old house as their headquarters, but also bests the greatest comedic actors of the time. That Johnson doesn’t get top billing is a crime, but her casting is in keeping with the spirit of the film—she was rejected for the role initially, but won it when the scheduled star died. Mrs. Louisa Wilberforce (Johnson) is the very picture of the shabby-genteel Victorian widow. She lives in a house in which every picture, window jamb, and doorway defies the right angle, just above London’s King’s Cross train station. Mrs. Wilberforce is a regular at the local police station, where she's granted the solicitude of the superintendent (Jack Warner), to whom she reports dubious activities in the neighborhood that has sprouted up around her. Mumbling appreciation of her good citizenship, he ushers her to the door and hands her the umbrella she left at the station during a previous visit; musing on how she keeps leaving places without it, Mrs. Wilberforce confesses that she never much liked the umbrella. Before returning to her home, Mrs. Wilberforce stops at the green grocer and asks if there have been any inquiries about her room-to-let notice on the bulletin board. Disappointed by the answer, Mrs. Wilberforce sighs. A spot of rain starts, and Mrs. Wilberforce opens her unloved umbrella and leaves just as a shadow, accompanied by appropriately sinister music (provided by Tristam Cary), falls over her to-let notice. No sooner does she return home than a stranger with a mighty odd smile comes to her door inquiring about the rooms for rent. Delighted, she shows Professor Marcus (Alec Guinness) up. When the professor sees the view from the window—the train platform where steel payroll boxes are brought for transport each week—he snaps it up. He mentions that he's in an amateur string quintet and that its members will be over frequently to practice. The image of each member of the professor’s gang coming by with violin cases and their variants tucked under their arms is a brilliant use of a cliché for comic effect. Of course, the gang runs the gamut of types: punchy ex-boxer “One Round” Lawson (Danny Green); refined, cowardly Major Claude Courtney (Cecil Parker); aging Teddy Boy Harry Robinson (Peter Sellers); and paranoid, switchblade-happy Louis Harvey (Herbert Lom). For his part, Guinness is the model of solicitude to Mrs. Wilberforce and rather touchy about suggestions that he might be mad—which, of course, he is. The train robbery goes off without a hitch, but once Mrs. Wilberforce learns what’s happened, it’s lace curtains for the String Quintet Gang. THE LADYKILLERS plays with our assumptions about old women to confound the bad guys and amaze the viewers with its sly humor. Mrs. Wilberforce is neither as foolish as others think her to be nor as smart as Miss Marple. Dressed in the same lavender suit throughout the film, she's like an ancient sachet whose sweet niceties and constant offers of tea (“...or coffee if you prefer”) provide a cover for her nosiness. She’s perfectly willing to see and hear what she wants—suspecting nothing when she sees Mr. Robinson hold his violin in a manner unsuitable for playing and unable to discern a recording of Boccherini’s Minuet from live playing. Watching Mrs. Wilberforce bully these grown and disreputable men through the sheer force of her indignation is priceless. When the gang starts pressuring her to remain quiet about the robbery, Johnson’s growing alarm and confusion about her situation is a masterpiece of comic timing and physical humor; when they tell her she’ll be thrown in stir and made to sew mailbags if they’re caught, the split-second edit of a close-up of her stunned, simple face uttering a single word (“Mailbags?”) had me falling on the floor. Eventually she gets tough herself, adopting their slang about remaining “buttoned up” and waiting in growing pique as one by one, the conspirators run from the task of bumping off “Mrs. Lopsided” to doing each other in instead. The film has a certain poignancy as well. It makes me rather angry, as it did her, that so many people underestimate Mrs. Wilberforce and assume that everything she says is either half-understood gossip or the onset of senility. Of course, she gets her due when a fabrication by the gang actually comes true. The comedy of THE LADYKILLERS works because Johnson remains completely in character, a less-pompous Margaret Dumont to these Marx Brothers of the British screen. The film is also quite anarchic in its send-up of both proper British village life and urban lawlessness. Its indescribable weirdness could be called Pythonesque had the Monty Python crew not been so clearly influenced by it. (1955, 91 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Carol Reed’s THE THIRD MAN (UK)
Robert Krasker’s black and white cinematography may be the star of Carol Reed’s THE THIRD MAN. His aggressive use of Dutch angles makes it feel as if the characters will at any moment slide off the frame, which is continually unstable and perplexed, and this feeling culminates in a critical scene taking place on Vienna’s famous Ferris wheel. The characters’ pessimistic fatigue in this post-World War II setting is also exemplified by extreme close ups on world-weary faces amidst the ruins of the city. Hinging on powerhouse performances by Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles, THE THIRD MAN is also filled with incredible—sometimes comical, sometimes haunting—side characters populating the spaces of Vienna; even faces that appear for only a scene or two make an impact. The plot follows pulp western novelist Holly Martins (Cotten), who has just arrived in Vienna to accept a job from an old friend, Harry Lime (Welles). Martins soon discovers, however, that Lime has been recently killed in a car accident. Suspicious of the circumstances (particularly those surrounding the appearance of the mysterious, titular “third man”), Martins decides to stay in Vienna to investigate the death; he's joined in his quest by Lime’s girlfriend, theater actress Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli). As a classic of both film noir and British filmmaking in general, the list of reasons for THE THIRD MAN’s iconic status can go on and on: striking shot compositions that continue to the final melancholic moment; Welles as a scene-stealing mercurial villain who convincingly pivots between moods of menace and charm at dazzling speeds; a score that produced a hit song by zither player Anton Karas (a shot of the instrument being ghostly played by no one opens the film); Graham Greene's solid, at times surprisingly funny script. It all comes together to make an essential noir that expresses the confusing inner world of its characters as it grounds them thematically in the postwar setting. (1949, 93 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
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Jacques Becker’s TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI (France)
The 1950s movies of Jean-Pierre Melville anticipated the work of the French New Wave in their self-consciousness, in the way they foregrounded, even fetishized, the filmmaking process. BOB LE FLAMBEUR (1956), for instance, isn’t so much a crime film as it is a film about crime films, playing off viewers’ memories of THE ASPHALT JUNGLE and their expectations of how cinematic heists are supposed to unfold. The 1950s movies of Jacques Becker anticipated the New Wave in another manner, undermining the functions of genre filmmaking through careful observations of the mundane. His crime film TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI (whose title roughly translates as “don’t touch the loot”) may be most compelling when it simply presents a 50-year-old Jean Gabin, playing world-weary career criminal Max the Liar, as he puts on his pajamas, brushes his teeth, then smokes his final cigarette of the day in bed. Becker is so unconcerned with crime-movie mechanics here that he doesn’t even show the big heist that Max has vowed will be his last; GRISBI begins after the heist has taken place, when Max the Liar unwinds from the heist by enjoying a routine evening among the nightclubs of Paris. Following Max in his familiar activities of gambling, drinking, and flirting, Becker reveals the other characters who are central to his life or who will play a role in upending it over the coming days: his best friend, Riton (René Dary), who also took part in the robbery; his mistress, Betty (Marilyn Bufferd), who will betray him to another criminal; and Angelo (Lino Ventura, in his film debut), a drug dealer who aims to usurp Max’s place in Paris’ criminal underworld. Though GRISBI takes place over just a few days, it conveys the full weight of Max’s nefarious career—his successes and failures, and his desire to put it all behind him (there’s a reason the scene of Max getting ready for bed carries such dramatic weight). These emotions can be felt in every gesture of Gabin’s brilliant performance, which was so well-received that it revitalized his career. Becker’s understated storytelling directs focus to the characters and their milieu, but he was also fully capable of turning up the suspense. The film climaxes with a thrilling car chase-cum-shootout that’s all the more surprising for standing in stark contrast to the melancholy character study that preceded it. (1954, 96 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
Ira Deutchman’s SEARCHING FOR MR. RUGOFF (US/Documentary)
Music Box Theatre – Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am
Most of those of us who are devoted to arthouse films and the venues that show them have no idea how they came to be in the first place. SEARCHING FOR MR. RUGOFF provides the kind of entertaining history lesson that cinephiles like us need to learn—the story of Donald Rugoff, founder of Cinema 5, the New York City movie chain and distribution company that began the arthouse cinema movement and spawned such companies as Miramax, New Line Cinema, and New Yorker Films. Director Ira Deutchman—who worked for Cinema 5 until he was laid off when Rugoff closed down the distribution arm of the financially distressed company—hadn’t thought about his former boss until his name came up at a Gotham Awards ceremony. Distressed to hear that Rugoff had died penniless and was consigned to a pauper’s grave, Deutchman searched out the truth about the impresario’s last years. Deutchman keeps the excursions into his investigation short, preferring to take a deep dive into Rugoff’s life and cinephilia. The number of major directors who first played the United States in one of Rugoff’s exquisitely designed theatres is legion: Jean-Luc Godard, Costa-Gavras, François Truffaut, Lina Wertmüller. Indeed, Rugoff’s campaign to promote Z (1969) led to an unheard-of number of Oscar nominations and awards for a foreign film. Wertmüller, who is interviewed in the film, was courted by many distributors, but chose to sell SWEPT AWAY (1974) to Rugoff. In turn, he made her reputation in the United States. The film discusses his marketing ideas, which ranged from having employees promote MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975) by walking through Midtown Manhattan wearing chain mail to running ingenious ads in the newspapers. When a Cinema 5 employee said the ad for Robert Downey Sr.’s PUTNEY SWOPE (1969) was better than the movie, he was told in no uncertain terms never to repeat that statement again. Deutchman succeeds in his quest to track Rugoff down to his final resting place on Martha’s Vineyard, but the real show is the incredible film culture he resurrects—one that will make cinephiles nostalgic for a time when a movie opening was an exciting event every single week. (2019, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Also available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here.
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Also showing at the Music Box Theatre are David Lowery’s 2020 film THE GREEN KNIGHT (126 min, DCP Digital) and Andreas Koefoed’s 2021 documentary THE LOST LEONARDO (100 min, DCP Digital). Midnight movies are back, with Neill Blomkamp’s 2021 film DEMONIC (105 min, DCP Digital) and Tommy Wiseau’s 2003 cult classic THE ROOM (99 min, 35mm) screening on Friday and DEMONIC and Jim Sharman’s 1975 classic ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (100 min, 35mm) screening on Saturday. Check Venue website for all showtimes and the Music Box Garden Series line-up.
Gene Siskel Film Center
See Venue website for all showtimes
Robert Altman’s NASHVILLE (US)
Saturday, 6pm
It remains debatable as to whether NASHVILLE is Robert Altman’s crowning work (one could also make a strong case for MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER, THE LONG GOODBYE, or CALIFORNIA SPLIT), yet in no other film, save for perhaps SHORT CUTS, did the director achieve so many of his ambitions in one go. Indeed, the most remarkable thing about NASHVILLE may be how it threatens to collapse on itself at any moment but somehow doesn’t; Altman’s direction of this two-hour, 40-minute opus is comparable to a captain steering an ocean liner around a range of icebergs without even rattling the passengers. The film famously juggles two dozen principal characters and about half as many different storylines, but no less remarkable is the way Altman succeeds with multiple formal experiments that could have easily come off as gimmicky or distracting. Several of these experiments have to do with sound. Building upon the multi-track audio of CALIFORNIA SPLIT, Altman shot much of NASHVILLE with up to 16 separate microphones, seldom letting the actors know who would be recorded directly and mixing the wealth of sonic material in post-production. Roger Ebert once wrote that the beauty of Altman’s films often lies in basking in the music of a place, and by that token, NASHVILLE is a veritable symphony of jargon, offhand remarks, noise, and actual songs. Most of the movie’s songs, in fact, were written by the actors who sing them, and another one of Altman’s fascinating experiments was to insist that not all of them be good. To reflect the range of quality one finds in Nashville’s music scene, Altman included great songs (like Keith Carradine’s Oscar-winning “I’m Easy” and the classic-style country numbers sung by Ronee Blakeley, arguably the best singer in the cast), hokey songs (like the self-aggrandizing tunes of Henry Gibson’s Haven Hamilton), and even terrible songs (like the ones performed by Gwen Welles’ heartbreakingly naive Sueleen Gay). Similarly, NASHVILLE alternates between a number of tones, ranging from poignant to sardonic to bitter to terrifying. Altman creates the impression that he’s discovering the movie as it goes along, which is fitting, given how the film was shot. Screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury created characters and situations for the film, but per Altman’s instruction, wrote very little dialogue; that was left to the actors, whom Altman directed to improvise as much as possible. This strategy, which the director employed consistently throughout his career, had roots in the cinema verité movement of the 1960s; so too did the overall design of NASHVILLE’s dramatic content. As Altman put it, “We would stage events and then film the events,” resulting in a fiction film that has the look and feel of a documentary. In a sense, NASHVILLE is a documentary about post-60s political disillusion in America—one significant through line comes in the form of campaign speeches by an erstwhile third-party presidential candidate named Hal Philip Walker, who roams the city in a tour bus, blasting calls for political upheaval. The movie ends at a Walker campaign rally that goes catastrophically wrong, then regains ground through the giant sing-along of another Carradine-penned number that would seem to contradict the spirit of liberty that’s run through the epic poem that preceded it. For even a few minutes after the credits end, the song’s haunting refrain repeats: “You may say that I ain’t free, but it don’t worry me.” Part of the Chicago Favorites series, with an introduction from filmmaker Steve James. (1975, 160 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Also showing at the Gene Siskel Film Center as part of the Chicago Favorites Series is Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s 2015 film JUPITER ASCENDING (127 min, 35mm), with an introduction from activist Lasaia Wade on Wednesday at 6pm.
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Federico Fellini’s NIGHTS OF CABIRIA (Italy)
Saturday, 3pm and Tuesday, 6:30pm
NIGHTS OF CABIRIA was made in the late 1950s but you'd be forgiven if you thought it was much older. Despite the brilliant, colloquial contributions to the script by Pier Paolo Pasolini, the boisterous interactions of the large and inspired cast, and the spirited score by Nino Rota, the film centers on Federico Fellini time-traveling back to his boyhood in the 1920s and early ’30s, when silent pictures were the stuff that dreams were made of. NIGHTS OF CABIRIA offers a slice of the life of an extremely low-rent streetwalker named Maria Ceccarelli; she lives in a cinder block house on the desiccated outskirts of Rome and works the Archaeological Walk of the Parco di Porta Capena because it’s easy to get to by tram. Inside the neorealist locations, including caves where the poorest of the poor find shelter during the night, Fellini spins a world of imagination and self-delusion around Maria. She calls herself Cabiria, a reference to the title character of a 1914 silent film about a girl from a wealthy family who ends up a slave. The choice of name signals Maria’s fantasy about her origins, how she sees her situation, and the dichotomy between illusion and reality warring inside her and acted out throughout the film. From the first idyllic scene—in which Cabiria walks with and loves up to her boyfriend, only to be robbed of her purse containing 40,000 lire and pushed into a river to drown—Fellini evokes the tension most human beings experience when trying to believe in something beautiful in the face of so much ugliness. With Giulietta Masina as his protagonist/guide, Fellini provides us with the soft place to land that he denies to Cabiria. Masina has been rightly compared to Charlie Chaplin in the way she approaches her role. Her ratty fur jacket, hourglass dresses, and sandals with socks are as much a comic uniform as Chaplin’s Little Tramp outfit, and she uses her body and face with athletic charm: note how she places a jaunty hand on the hip, sits legs akimbo on a bathroom floor, and dances with abandon whenever she has the chance. The titular nights are when the magic happens. A famous actor (Amedeo Nazzari), coming off a quarrel with his gorgeous girlfriend (Dorian Gray), picks up Cabiria for the night and takes her to his palatial home filled with dogs, Roman art, and an endless staircase that cinematographer Aldo Tonti makes the most of. On another night, Cabiria participates in a display of magnetism by a wizard (Aldo Silvani) at a vaudeville house (Fellini leaves no doubt that the magic is real), then meets a man (François Périer) who was enchanted by her innocence on stage and has decided to court her in earnest. But in the harsh glare of day, like Cinderella, Maria comes back to reality and, failing at divine intervention, dreams that a prince will arrive to lift her out of her circumstances. The final scene, which starts during a harsh day and ends at night with Cabiria walking among some young revelers, almost directly parallels the final scene of Chaplin’s CITY LIGHTS (1931), as a clearly artificial, mascara-stained tear on Cabiria’s face stands in for the blossom at the Little Tramp’s cheek. Many commentators have said Cabiria stands as testament to the indomitable human spirit, but I have my doubts. When even Fellini said he still worried about Cabiria, it’s pretty clear that second chances are extraordinarily rare for the likes of her. (1957, 110 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Also showing at the Gene Siskel Film Center are Chicagoland Shorts Vol. 7 (2021, 81 min, Digital Projection), Richard Kelly’s 2001 film DONNIE DARKO (113 min, DCP Digital), Todd Stephens’ 2021 film SWAN SONG (101 min, DCP Digital), Ashley O’Shay’s 2021 documentary UNAPOLOGETIC (86 min, DCP Digital) and Tamara Saviano and Paul Whitfield’s 2021 documentary WITHOUT GETTING KILLED OR CAUGHT (2021, 95 min, DCP Digital). Check Venue website for all showtimes.
Edward D. Wood Jr.’s' GLEN OR GLENDA (US)
Chicago Film Society and Analog Rooftop Cinema at Borelli’s Pizzeria (2124 W. Lawrence Ave. – Outdoor Screenings) – Friday and Saturday, 9pm
As a burgeoning cinephile for whom Tim Burton’s ED WOOD was the height of arthouse cinema, I unduly bought into the hype surrounding the flagrant artlessness of its subject, the Z-movie director whose rough-hewn films topped lists with titles like “Worst Movies Ever Made," who himself is routinely anointed The Worst Director of All Time and whose appreciation amongst fellow cinephiles is neatly coiled within the auspices of cult and kitsch. Everyone loves a winner, but it’s likewise true that people are fascinated with the nominal losers of the world, so do they inspire in us that dual sensation of scorn and hubris, with an abundance of fun to be had at their expense. Ironically, Wood could be considered the winner in that regard; in popular consciousness he’s thought to be a virtuoso of such films often declared so bad that they’re actually good. Upon revisiting GLEN OR GLENDA, Wood’s first film and the making of which comprises part of Burton’s biopic, my assessment of Wood has shifted. Pending further re-examination of his other work, I think it’s possible that Wood isn’t so-bad-he’s-actually-good but maybe just… good. Wood’s first real feature after spending years in Hollywood writing and directing television shows, commercials, and even plays, GLEN OR GLENDA was made in just four days at the behest of exploitation producer George Weiss, who had been inspired by the story of Christine Jorgensen, a transgender woman widely known in the early 1950s for undergoing gender reassignment surgery. (It was incorrectly reported at the time that she was the first person to have the surgery, when it’s likely she was just the first person to have that fact so broadly publicized.) As luck would have it, when Jorgensen declined to collaborate with Weiss on the project, Wood was able to fill in the gaps with his own experience as someone who would then have been referred to as a transvestite. I’ll pause here to say this film trades in some ideologies that we today would find distasteful at best and offensive at worst. It uses the word transvestite, for example, and indulges in homophobia as well; Wood was avowedly heterosexual and seemed to resent the assumption that because he liked to wear women’s clothing, he must have been gay. But because the film—a near docudrama/educational expose in its deliberation on “transvestism”—is so obviously personal to Wood (who stars as Glen/Glenda, though credited as Daniel Davis), its problematic elements can be read within the context of its maker, an imperfect human yearning to be accepted by the world for his proclivities. Many of the film’s conversations among perplexed civilians center on whether people should be “allowed” to engage in non-gender-essentialist behavior or even transition their gender altogether. Endearingly, but perhaps fantastically, the conversations often conclude with those civilians deciding that people should be allowed to be their true selves. This takes on further gravitas considering the time during which it was made; the idea of post-war America then positively reconsidering the roles of men and women in its theretofore strictly binary society has a certain charming naivete. (Wood was nothing if not an optimist.) Horror legend Bela Lugosi infamously appears as “The Scientist,” an omniscient narrator whose bizarre framing imbues the film with its bewildering volatility. The core of GLEN OR GLENDA takes place by way of another framing device, a psychiatrist speaking with a policeman seeking his perspective on a man who’s died by suicide after being arrested several times for dressing as a woman in public. Before delving into the case of Glen/Glenda, the psychiatrist-narrator embarks on a lengthy lamentation on the current state of the public’s perception of crossdressers and transsexuals. The accompanying imagery is born of economy but evocative nonetheless. As Glen/Glenda, Wood gives a surprisingly nuanced performance; opposite him as Barbara, Glen/Glenda’s finacée, is his then-real-life girlfriend, Dolores Fuller, occasionally adorned in an angora sweater (another of Wood’s real-life passions). Soon follows the aforementioned scene of two men discussing the subject of sex change in voiceover as stock footage of an iron foundry plays, the narration vaguely reminiscent of the conversation between the angels in Frank Capra’s IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE. It may feel as if the foundry footage is Wood’s unintentional trademark of using random stock footage to flesh out his low-budget phantasms. And some of it is—but much of the imagery is keenly symbolic of the subject that it’s representing. Here the iron foundry reflects the sensation of being transformable, to which I’m sure Wood (and by extension, Glen/Glenda) could relate. Truly arbitrary, however, is a series of sequences depicting Glen/Glenda, Barbara, and various other non-characters in scenes of emotional, physical, and sexual distress. These bizarre vignettes were necessitated by Weiss so as to fulfill the demands of the exploitation genre; some are more relevant to the film than others, but all are extraordinary, almost avant-garde in their execution and haphazardness, bringing to mind the films of Luís Buñuel and Maya Deren. Toward the end, the psychiatrist tells the story of another person’s case, presumably a stand-in for Jorgensen, who goes the distance in surgically changing their sex. Glen/Glenda’s situation is again distinguished from that of the other, with Barbara coming to terms with her fiance’s true nature and hoping to “cure” him of it via a sense of motherly affection that Glen/Glenda had lacked. One gets a sense of wish fulfillment during this part, as if Wood is grasping at the bendy straws of psychology to resolve an internal conflict between personal fulfillment and an adherence to society’s restrictive mores. To that end, GLEN OR GLENDA is a mess—a mess of contradictions, messy the way people often are, beautiful and perverse all the same. Preceded by James Parrott’s OPENED BY MISTAKE (1934, 19 min, 16mm). (1953, 74 min, 16mm) [Kathleen Sachs]
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Tickets cost $20 cash, which includes a drink.
Luchina Fisher’s MAMA GLORIA (US/Documentary)
Gill Park (825 W. Sheridan Rd.) as part of the Chicago Park District’s Chicago Onscreen Local Film Showcase – Tuesday, 8pm
MAMA GLORIA is a deeply personal documentary that illuminates a larger history of transgender people of color in Chicago. Gloria Allen, now in her 70s, is an icon of the community, having started a charm school for transgender people at the Center on Halsted. The charm school inspired Chicago playwright Philip Dawkins’ Charm, and Gloria became known for her maternal support for and engaged work with transgender youth. The charismatic Gloria narrates her own story, which is filled with traumatic moments of violent abuse and loving acceptance from her family and friends, especially her mother. Allen begins by telling how her grandmother worked as a seamstress for drag performers in the early 20th century; she’s aware of how her personal history intertwines with a broader one, framing her story against historically significant moments and people, from the Civil Rights Movement and Emmett Till to the Stonewall Riots and Marsha P. Johnson. MAMA GLORIA emphasizes the power of Gloria sharing her story, not just directly with the film’s audience, as she recounts her personal history into the camera, but also with others, most compellingly with the queer youth she inspires. Gloria mentions, in a lovely scene where she shares a meal with her friends from high school, that she was voted “most friendly,” and the camera captures her welcoming nature. Gloria is also aware that her older age signifies survival, as she mentions losing so many friends; MAMA GLORIA notes that only 14% of transgender identifying adults in the U.S. are seniors. Gloria’s story is compelling not just in its engagement with history, but in its acknowledgement of contemporary struggles, as transgender rights are threatened and incidents of extreme violence against transwomen of color continue. MAMA GLORIA is an optimistic film that also recognizes there is still a lot of work to be done. This screening also includes the short films A GALAXY SITS IN THE CRACKS (dir. Amber Love) and KENYA’S SYMPHONY (dir. Carlos Douglas, Jr.). (2020, 76 min, Digital Projection) [Megan Fariello]
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More info here on all in-person screenings through Saturday, September 4. All sixteen of the 2021 Official Selections will be available for unlimited, any time viewing for three weeks after the in-person screenings.
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – New Reviews
Timothy Covell’s BLOOD CONSCIOUS (US)
Available to rent through Facets Cinematheque here
Jordan Peele’s GET OUT and US have cast a very long shadow over contemporary horror. This isn’t to say that BLOOD CONSCIOUS is a rip-off of Peele’s horror-noire social commentary films, but that, thanks to him, we have more films like BLOOD CONSCIOUS. The film is about a grown brother and sister who, along the sister’s fiancé, head out to a cabin to meet up with the siblings’ parents, only to find themselves stuck in a situation far beyond their control. Playing on the classic horror trope of the campground massacre, BLOOD CONSCIOUS creates a sense of dread that’s enhanced by the fact that the principal characters are people of color. Despite using the conceit of Black outsiders entering into a white world, BLOOD CONSCIOUS borrows more from John Carpenter than anyone else (even the music evokes Carpenter). There’s a taut paranoia in this film that channels some of Carpenter’s best works. Somehow race is both a non-factor and the dominant factor in this film, making it quite an interesting watch. One wonders if the white characters are reacting the way they do to the protagonists because of the color of their skin or because of something truly supernatural. BLOOD CONSCIOUS is a good first feature for writer-director Timothy Covell, who previously had made only a handful of horror shorts. While the film is somewhat by-the-numbers horror, it’s definitely an auspicious start. (2021, 81 mins) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Held Over/Still Screening/Return Engagements (Selected)
Jamila Wignot’s AILEY (US)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
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) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Agnieszka Holland’s CHARLATAN (Czech Republic)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Handsomely wrought, Agnieszka Holland’s biopic of Czech herbalist and faith healer Jan Mikolášek continues the director’s ongoing exploration of people operating within oppressive political regimes. The renowned Mikolášek (played by lauded Czech actor Ivan Trojan), whose career spanned the mid-20th century, is a curious subject for biopic treatment; his practice of healing patients through herbal remedies, prescribed after examining their urine, doesn’t lend itself to one’s idea of compelling cinema. But because of Marek Epstein’s curious script and Holland’s disquisitive direction, the film becomes a wry study of loyalty, passion, orthodoxy, and dissent. The story is framed by Mikolášek’s arrest in the late 50s, when he was accused by the Czech communist government of deliberately poisoning two high-ranking party members. Through flashbacks, we see Mikolášek as a brusque young soldier-cum-gardener, played by Trojan’s son Josef; he becomes an herbalist after he cures his sister’s gangrenous leg using plants. The story then follows him as an older man as he sets up practice in a dilapidated mansion and helps (per his count) millions of people over the course of his career, his patients ranging from peasants to Nazis to communist party officials. It’s been speculated that Mikolášek was gay; his marriage was an unhappy one, and his assistant (here called František, played by Juraj Loj) lived with him for decades. The filmmakers indulge that idea, using the fraught relationship between Mikolášek and František to emphasize the complexity of the faith healer and his unusual engrossment with a largely unsubstantiated practice. He treated basically whomever, even if he did not agree with their politics, though he also rejected their systems (his practice, for example, was privately held, and he made a lot of money doing it, both contrary to communist ideals) and was subjected to admonishment by both the Nazis and the communists despite having treated officials in each group. Naturally, some people believed that since Mikolášek wasn’t a licensed doctor, he was in fact a charlatan, yet another reason he was targeted by the authorities. As in many of her films, most famously the 1990 tour de force EUROPA EUROPA, Holland probes the narrative convolutions with stunning aplomb, likely influenced by the circumstances under which she grew up and started making films in post-war and communist Poland. The story sometimes lags, focusing too much on the speculative relationship between Mikolášek and his assistant, but Holland makes up for it with compelling visuals that add a sense of profundity. Mikolášek was a complicated man with natural gifts; whether they were for healing or deception (of himself as well as others) is left for us to decide. (2020, 118 min) [Kathleen Sachs]
Jonathan Wysocki’s DRAMARAMA (US)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
On the last day of summer in 1994, a group of theater-obsessed friends gather to celebrate the end of high school by dressing up as their favorite Victorian literary figures, drinking Martinelli’s, and daring each other to give the middle finger on camera—not the typical exploits of a teen movie. In Jonathan Wysocki’s coming-of-age film, DRAMARAMA, Gene (Nick Pugliese) is pulling away from his friends, struggling to come out to them, and questioning the Christian upbringing that has tied them all together. Leader of the group, Rose (Anna Grace Barlow), is leaving for NYU and hosts a murder mystery slumber party for Gene and their group of friends (Nico Greetham, Danielle Kay, and Megan Suri) to say goodbye. At first, the atmosphere is frenzied, as the group revel in Rose’s planned evening of games, filled with literary and theatrical references. The night is interrupted by the appearance of J.D. (Zak Henri), the pizza delivery man and friend of Gene’s, who also happens to be a recent high school dropout. J.D. immediately brings a more familiar vibe to the gathering, spiking the Martinelli’s with liquor and explaining why dropping out was the best decision he ever made. Despite leaving soon after, his presence haunts the rest of the evening, as the group faces their sheltered upbringing. It is easy to see why Gene gravitates more towards the open-minded J.D. than his current friends, who ridicule the idea of sex before marriage and play games that highlight their homophobia. In between the moments of bickering and tension, writer and director Wysocki also scatters in sincere fun, as the group quotes Mel Brooks films and dance to They Might Be Giants—an earnest portrayal of wavering friendships on the verge of profound change. While the group is well cast, Pugliese gives an especially touching performance, demonstrating the simultaneous love Gene has for his friends and the complete fear of their rejection should he come out to them. Danielle Kay, as the slightly wilder member of the group, Ally, also stands out, particularly as she anchors the emotional moments towards the end of the film. The promise of a traditional boisterous high school party hangs over the film, but ultimately DRAMARAMA is about the dynamics of the group—J.D. is the only outsider seen onscreen—and both how comforting high school friendships can be and knowing when it is time to let them go. (2020, 91 min) [Megan Fariello]
Quentin Reynaud's FINAL SET (France)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theater here
It seems that boxing has been the subject of more substantial narrative films than any other sport. This makes it all the more surprising that tennis, which has been concisely and accurately described as "boxing from a distance," has been the subject of so few. The best tennis movies have been documentaries centered on Roland Garros (the tournament more colloquially known as the French Open), such as William Klein's eye-opening behind-the-scenes account THE FRENCH (1982) or Julien Faraut's JOHN MCENROE: IN THE REALM OF PERFECTION (2018), a quirky portrait of the great American player's French Open campaign in 1984. Tennis fans should therefore make it a point to catch FINAL SET, a fiction film set at Roland Garros that was made by someone who clearly knows and loves the sport. This isn't to say that FINAL SET is without conventional aspects. It's a familiar underdog story in many respects: the story focuses on an aging French player, curiously named Thomas Edison (Alex Lutz), who makes a final bid for glory by attempting to qualify for his country's most prestigious tournament, in spite of the fact that his best years are behind him. Edison's most formidable obstacles aren't physical (e.g., the chronic blisters on his racquet hand or his thrice surgically-repaired knee); rather, they come in the form of opposition from his wife (a terrific Ana Girardot), who sees his waning days on tour as a money-losing proposition, and from his mother (Kristin Scott Thomas, doing her best in a stereotypical domineering-mommy part), who publicly chastises him for not being mentally tough enough. To his credit, writer-director Quentin Reynaud is never guilty of dumbing down the logistics of the game in order to appeal to a broader audience. Instead, he allows 20 minutes of real-time match play, a thrillingly shot and edited sequence, to serve as the film's climax; and Lutz, in addition to turning in a compelling performance as an athlete raging against the dying of the light, is also a genuinely fine tennis player himself, utterly convincing as a pro (something that can't be said about, say, Kirsten Dunst in WIMBLEDON or Shia LaBeouf in BORG VS. MCENROE). (2021, 105 min) [Michael Glover Smith]
John Gianvito’s HER SOCIALIST SMILE (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here
Across the ever-shifting terrain of streaming and "content," documentaries occupy a significant amount of digital space on our TVs and computers. Outside the work of a small handful of filmmakers, the documentary style has fallen on hard times, creatively and spiritually, with directors grasping at any intelligible way to approach the form, despite the abundance of options available. Of the hundreds of titles littered across Netflix and Hulu, it would be close to a miracle to land blindly on a few, let alone one, that doesn’t resemble the next two. So, in a time of worldwide confusion, it's reassuring to see one sail past the usual mediocrity and deliver a Zen-like immediacy that's urgent but calm, angry yet thoughtful. (The film is an independent production that undoubtedly will never be on any of the streaming titans’ sites). HER SOCIALIST SMILE is the rare occasion where form and subject are wholly integrated, enveloping both into a sensuous wellspring of serious-minded agitprop. John Gianvito continues on the trajectory of his previous documentary, PROFIT MOTIVE AND THE WHISPERING WIND, juxtaposing images of serene nature with a narrative centered around unjustly forgotten American figures and events. He uses the same stillness and hushed volumes of the earlier film to hypnotize viewers, forging an engagement with the material that serves the actual subject, rather than having the subject serving its makers and whatever their cagey instincts may be. Not only is this a welcome change of pace within the current trend of documentary filmmaking; it's a radical re-evaluation of the life and work of Helen Keller. Gianvito skims past the usual images and stories that usually comprise her place in the history books: her work for the blind, her relationship with Annie Sullivan and the water pump, plus that one image of her standing with Chaplin. Those clichéd short-cuts underwhelm and inexcusably ignore Keller’s most important accomplishments: her humanitarian work, helping establish the ACLU, and her passionate engagement with socialism and the plight of workers. In Keller’s time, however, she had to contend with shady figures like President Woodrow Wilson, who once celebrated her accomplishments, but turned on her the moment she publicly let slip her socialist beliefs and ideas. Keller's blindness and deafness suddenly became a tool for newspapers and politicians to discredit her ideas. No longer a hero for overcoming her disabilities, she was now portrayed as radically out of touch because of them. Wilson, who destabilized Latin America more than any other sitting U.S. President, recast individuals like Keller and Emma Goldman as enemies of the state that “poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life.” HER SOCIALIST SMILE shares a fair amount of Keller’s writing from this period, so there's no reason to recount them here, yet her words remain staunchly clear-headed, sober, and thorough: “Are not the dominant parties managed by the ruling classes, that is, the propertied classes, solely for the profit and privilege of the few?” When Keller was asked what the most important question for a President would be, she responded, “How [do you] keep the people from finding out that they have been fooled again?” Keller also spoke to her being discredited in the press, claiming, “So long as I confine my activities to social service and the blind, they compliment me extravagantly… but when it comes to burning social or political issues, especially if I happen to be, as I so often am, on the unpopular side, the tone changes completely.” Thankfully, Gianvito doesn't lazily insert these words into a lesser documentary swarming with talking heads and bland wall-to-wall music motivated less by feeling than by their creators’ lack of trust in their audience’s emotional intelligence. Gianvito respects his audience, but he respects his subject even more. For a film covering events and characters from over 100 years ago, there isn’t another documentary around that better understands our now routinely-caricatured times. (2020, 93 min) [John Dickson]
Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert’s NEVER GONNA SNOW AGAIN (Poland)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here and the Music Box Theatre here
A Ukrainian masseur arrives in Warsaw and uses his (possibly magical) powers of suggestion to convince a steely bureaucrat to approve his work visa. This opening scene—with its almost humorous, vaguely Cronenbergian vibe—sets the stage for everything that follows in NEVER GONNA SNOW AGAIN, a magic realist drama with hints of allegory and social satire. Writer-director Małgorzata Szumowska and writer-director-cinematographer Michał Englert advance a poker-faced perspective, declining to provide authorial comment on the strange turn of events; like Cronenberg, they suspend the illusion that they didn’t create this fantasy, but are rather uncovering some dark secret that already exists in the world. Following the puzzling introduction, Szumowska and Englert jump forward in time to when their hero, Zhenia, has become hot property in a gated community outside the city. His wealthy clients can’t get enough of his touch; they eagerly strip for his massages and just as eagerly confess their personal secrets to him, even though he remains a closed book. The plot feels indebted to Pasolini’s TEOREMA, with Zhenia standing in for Terence Stamp’s mysterious stranger and massages taking the place of actual sex. But while NEVER GONNA SNOW AGAIN considers the longing for transcendence within a cloistered, upper-class milieu, it’s too wrapped up in the political reality of contemporary eastern Europe to feel derivative of Pasolini. As Guy Lodge noted in Variety, Zhenia’s mysterious otherness has a lot to do with his being Ukrainian: to his clients, who aspire to be like western Europeans, Zhenia represents an eastern culture they’d prefer to keep alien. (The filmmakers also raise the possibility that the hero gained his supernatural powers from growing up near Chernobyl.) Whatever it all means, the movie sustains fascination with its beguiling tone and striking widescreen compositions. (2020, 116 min) [Ben Sachs]
Ira Deutchman’s SEARCHING FOR MR. RUGOFF (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Most of those of us who are devoted to arthouse films and the venues that show them have no idea how they came to be in the first place. SEARCHING FOR MR. RUGOFF provides the kind of entertaining history lesson that cinephiles like us need to learn—the story of Donald Rugoff, founder of Cinema 5, the New York City movie chain and distribution company that began the arthouse cinema movement and spawned such companies as Miramax, New Line Cinema, and New Yorker Films. Director Ira Deutchman—who worked for Cinema 5 until he was laid off when Rugoff closed down the distribution arm of the financially distressed company—hadn’t thought about his former boss until his name came up at a Gotham Awards ceremony. Distressed to hear that Rugoff had died penniless and was consigned to a pauper’s grave, Deutchman searched out the truth about the impresario’s last years. Deutchman keeps the excursions into his investigation short, preferring to take a deep dive into Rugoff’s life and cinephilia. The number of major directors who first played the United States in one of Rugoff’s exquisitely designed theatres is legion: Jean-Luc Godard, Costa-Gavras, Francois Truffaut, Lina Wertmüller. Indeed, Rugoff’s campaign to promote Z (1969) led to an unheard-of number of Oscar nominations and awards for a foreign film. Wertmüller, who is interviewed in the film, was courted by many distributors, but chose to sell SWEPT AWAY (1974) to Rugoff. In turn, he made her reputation in the United States. The film discusses his marketing ideas, which ranged from having employees promote MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975) by walking through Midtown Manhattan wearing chain mail to running ingenious ads in the newspapers. When a Cinema 5 employee said the ad for Robert Downey Sr.’s PUTNEY SWOPE (1969) was better than the movie, he was told in no uncertain terms never to repeat that statement again. Deutchman succeeds in his quest to track Rugoff down to his final resting place on Martha’s Vineyard, but the real show is the incredible film culture he resurrects—one that will make cinephiles nostalgic for a time when a movie opening was an exciting event every single week. (2019, 94 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Mariam Ghani’s WHAT WE LEFT UNFINISHED (US/Afghanistan/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
Now that Afghanistan is once again in a state of crisis, the local premiere of WHAT WE LEFT UNFINISHED provides welcome insight into that nation’s contentious modern history. The title refers explicitly to five films begun in Afghanistan between 1978 and 1991 and which were never completed due to government interference. Yet the title also hints at the unfinished nation-building efforts during this period by multiple organizations in Afghanistan: the Soviet Union, the People’s Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (which staged a coup in April 1978), and the mujahideen fighters of the 1980s. Mariam Ghani (daughter of the recently deposed Afghan president Mohammad Ashraf Ghani) deftly interweaves the cinematic history lessons with the political ones, creating a portrait that seems towering despite the short running time. WHAT WE LEFT UNFINISHED recounts the enthusiasm felt by Afghan filmmakers at the time of heightened Soviet intervention into the national culture. As one interviewee notes, the Soviets recognized cinema’s power to indoctrinate audiences in the political outlook they hoped to spread, and they lavishly financed Afghan cinema in the hope of convincing viewers to embrace a pro-Communist worldview. Ghani expresses her skepticism of this project from the start, however, with an early title card that succinctly reads, “These movies imagine an ideal Afghan Communist Republic that only exists on film.” Her critical view of the Soviet Union carries over to her portrayals of the other political bodies, which seem just as blatant as the Soviets in their aim to use cinema as a political tool. (The various groups also seem to share in the view that history must be written in blood.) Even in the short clips presented, it’s clear who are the heroes and villains of the unfinished films, yet Ghani is careful not to disparage the artists who made them. WHAT WE LEFT UNFINISHED is highly sympathetic in its depictions of the actors and directors employed by the state film agency. They come across as creative individuals in spite of the state-serving messages they were forced to propagate. (2019, 71 min) [Ben Sachs]
Hong Sang-soo's THE WOMAN WHO RAN (South Korea)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
The films of prolific South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo have become steadily more oriented around their female protagonists since he began working with Kim Min-hee in 2015’s RIGHT NOW, WRONG THEN. This mighty director/actress combo has reached a kind of apotheosis in their seventh and latest collaboration, THE WOMAN WHO RAN, a charming dramedy about three days in the life of a woman, Gam-hee (Kim), who spends time apart from her spouse for the first time after five years of marriage. When her husband goes on a trip, Gam-hee uses the occasion to visit three of her female friends—one of whom is single, one of whom is married, and one of whom is recently divorced—and Hong subtly implies that Gam-hee’s extended dialogue with each causes her to take stock of her own marriage and life. Gam-hee also comes into contact with three annoying men—a nosy neighbor, a stalker, and a mansplainer—while visiting each friend, situations that allow Hong to create clever internal rhymes across his triptych narrative structure. Hong’s inimitable cinematographical style has long favored long takes punctuated by sudden zooms and pans, but rarely have the devices felt as purposeful as they dohere. Notice how his camera zooms, with the precision of a microscope, into a close-up of a woman’s face immediately after she issues an apology to Gam-hee during the film's final act, and how the tears in this woman's eyes would not have been visible without the zoom. This is masterful stuff. (2020, 77 min) [Michael Glover Smith]
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Also Screening/Streaming
⚫ Chicago International Film Festival Summer Screenings
Summer Screenings is a free weekly film series that celebrates sports and games from around the world. This week’s selection is Tamas Almasi’s 2009 Hungarian film PUSKÁS HUNGARY (115 min). More info here.
⚫ Facets Cinémathèque
Marisol Gómez-Mouakad’s 2016/2021 film ANGÉLICA (100 min) is available to rent through September 2.
Paul Felten and Joe DeNardo’s 2020 screwball thriller SLOW MACHINE (72 min) is available to rent through September 3.
Yamina Benguigui’s 2020 French/Algerian film SISTERS (90 min) is available to rent starting this week through September 23. More info on all films here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
Check here for hold-over titles and the Music Box Garden Series line-up.
CINE-LIST: August 27 - September 2, 2021
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Kyle Cubr, John Dickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Raphael Jose Martinez, Michael Glover Smith