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
Check Venue website for all showtimes
Spike Lee’s AMERICAN UTOPIA (US/Concert Film)
Wednesday, 7pm
AMERICAN UTOPIA is a jubilant presentation on the power of human connection, and a celebration of music and art; it’s hard not to sing and dance along, which is encouraged at points by David Byrne himself. Directed by Spike Lee, it was filmed during the late 2019 and early 2020 run of Byrne’s critically acclaimed Broadway stage show, which is in turn an adaptation of his 2018 album of the same name. The show also includes songs from other Byrne projects, including from his time with Talking Heads as well as a particularly affecting Janelle Monáe cover. As a standard for concert films, STOP MAKING SENSE’s iconic status looms large, but the achievement of AMERICAN UTOPIA proves that Byrne continues to evolve as a musical and visual artist. He speaks directly to the audience between songs, using gentle humor to share anecdotes and discuss issues of social justice all through the frame of human connection—a theme that runs throughout his work. Eleven performers join Byrne throughout the show, including dancers, singers, and musicians from around the globe, all barefoot and dressed in identical grey suits and as equally captivating as Byrne. Lee takes advantage of the sparse but clearly defined space of the stage, which changes with the use of lighting and shadows, creating spotlights that highlight the performers—all of whom use wireless instruments in order to move freely. Overhead shots illuminate the avant-garde imagery created by the performers’ movements, while shots of the audience dancing and singing demonstrate the buoyant atmosphere. Lee brings a completely dynamic approach to filming a live performance in a gorgeous collaboration between artists. Commenting on human connection Byrne states, “Looking at people? That’s the best;” AMERICAN UTOPIA’s joyousness abounds, and its themes are especially poignant at this time of yearning for art, theater, and music in spaces where we can gather and experience together. (2020, 105 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
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John Carpenter’s THE THING (US)
Friday and Saturday, Midnight
John Carpenter has always been a minimalist when it comes to framing, using his preferred format of widescreen to create a pronounced sense of negative space and, with it, a pronounced sense of dread. Similarly, he tends to sculpt performances that are understated and direct, much as they are in the work of his favorite director, Howard Hawks. THE THING is a remake of Hawks’ foray into sci-fi horror, THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD (1951), and one can sense Carpenter’s reverence for the original in his Hawksian depiction of the professional community that makes up the principal characters. Yet where Hawks’ film was a portrait of heroism, showing how a group of scientists bands together to fight off a hostile extraterrestrial life form, Carpenter’s is a pessimistic work that shows a community coming apart in the midst of an alien invasion. (It’s widely suspected that the film was a commercial flop on first release because it came out only a few months after E.T. THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL, which presented a much rosier view of human-alien relations; Carpenter’s pessimism just wasn’t welcome at the time.) That breakdown is presented in exquisite, gory detail: Rob Bottin’s special make-up effects are some of the most lauded of their kind in movie history, depicting people and animals as they mutate into hideous half-alien creatures. This was Carpenter’s first major studio film, and he took full advantage of the resources available to him. In addition to the first-rate effects, THE THING features a brilliant mix of studio sets and location shooting (with British Columbia standing in for Antarctica) and an appropriately chilling Ennio Morricone score. (1982, 109 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
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Josef von Sternberg’s SHANGHAI EXPRESS (US)
Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am
The highest-grossing American film of 1932, SHANGHAI EXPRESS remains a sterling illustration of cinema as the great cultural equalizer, a medium in which high and low art can exist hand in hand. The plot, as Gary Giddins noted in an essay for the Criterion Collection, is essentially a vulgar update on Guy de Maupassant’s short story “Boule de Suif,” with the sexual element amplified and rendered especially tawdry (this is a pre-Code film, after all); the setting is a flagrantly artificial version of China, dressed up with enough bric-a-brac to suggest that Josef von Sternberg and company raided Paramount Pictures’ entire props department when making the movie. Yet SHANGHAI EXPRESS transcends Orientalist kitsch through consummate artistry, which elevates the phoniness to the point where it seems a testament to how far the imagination can reach. As in most of von Sternberg’s films, the lighting is so vivid and sculpted that it seems to make a fetish object of everything onscreen, the people included. (Lee Garmes is the credited cinematographer, though von Sternberg claimed to have dictated the majority of Garmes’ work.) The performances (which were also closely supervised by the director) exhibit the gestural specificity one associates with silent-era masterpieces, and they’re buoyed by Jules Furthman’s effervescently witty dialogue. Von Sternberg crafted the whole movie like a piece of music, tailoring the rhythms of the dialogue and editing so that the pacing evoked the movement of a train. Given that SHANGHAI EXPRESS is simultaneously base and transcendent, how is it that the film’s eroticism is so relatable and eye-level? The answer probably lies in Marlene Dietrich’s exceptional lead performance (her fourth for von Sternberg); she counterbalances the director’s tendency towards iconization with something indescribably human. (1932, 82 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
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THE YEAR OF THE EVERLASTING STORM (Various Countries)
Check Venue website for showtimes
Comprised of seven short films by seven different filmmakers, THE YEAR OF THE EVERLASTING STORM is an impressionistic portrait of life during the COVID-19 pandemic and an experiment in film production restricted by circumstance. The contents range from linear narratives of lockdown life to tangential riffs on isolation and grief. Favoring a straightforward approach are Anthony Chen’s “The Break Away” and Dominga Sotomayor’s “Sin Titulo, 2020,” both of which create a languid sense of domestic living. The latter film’s image of an umbrella suspended in a turbid pool serves as an apt emblem of the stagnancy felt by so many during the early stages of the pandemic. A more playful, documentary approach to quarantine existence is found in “Life” by Jafar Panahi, whose experiences as a political prisoner under house arrest make him acclimated to being shut indoors. The setting, Panahi's Tehran apartment, will be instantly familiar to anyone who’s seen THIS IS NOT A FILM; so too will his iguana Iggy, who shares ample screen time with Panahi’s elderly mother. Documentary is the mode of two other segments: Malik Vitthal’s “Little Measures” and Laura Poitras’ “Terror Contagion.” The former concerns a California man whose three children, taken from his custody, have been placed in separate foster homes; through video calls and animation, it illustrates how crucial, if imperfect, modern telecommunication has been in bridging distances between us. Technology is far more insidious for Poitras, who spent much of her quarantine investigating NSO Group, an Israeli cyber weapons company implicated in myriad state attacks on journalists and political dissidents. Poitras’ study takes on another frightening dimension in light of how government surveillance has profited from COVID and contemporaneous social unrest. THE YEAR OF THE EVERLASTING STORM finishes with its two best segments. David Lowery’s “Dig Up My Darling” is a haunting, almost Poe-esque fable that merges taciturn realism with the metaphysical to ruminate on time, memory, and mortality. Then there’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Night Colonies,” which surveys an array of winged insects as they buzz around a fluorescent-lit mattress. Evoking a host of ideas related to human absence and activity, invasion and natural cohabitation, it’s a multivalent, immersive sensory work that closes THE YEAR OF THE EVERLASTING STORM on a note of pensive ambiguity. (2021, 121 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
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Also showing at the Music Box Theatre are Andreas Koefoed’s 2021 documentary THE LOST LEONARDO (100 min, DCP Digital) and, starting this week, Bassam Tariq’s 2021 film MOGUL MOWGLI (89 min, DCP Digital), co-written by and starring Riz Ahmed. Peter Collins Campbell’s 2021 film DIMLAND (74 min, DCP Digital) screens on Tuesday at 7pm, with Campbell and some cast members in person for a post-screening Q&A. Max Martini’s 2021 horror film THE MANSON BROTHERS MIDNIGHT ZOMBIE MASSACRE screens on Thursday at 7pm, with writer and executive producer Chris Margetis and writer-actor Mike Carey in attendance for a post-screening Q&A. Check Venue website for all showtimes and the Music Box Garden Series line-up.
Gene Siskel Film Center
Check Venue website for all showtimes
Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (Italy)
Saturday, 3pm and Tuesday, 6:30pm
Life imitates art and art imitates life in Federico Fellini’s 1963 masterpiece, a thinly disguised autobiographical study of an Italian filmmaker, Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni, naturally), fighting director's block while making a science-fiction epic. 8 1/2 proved to be exactly the right movie for its cultural moment, as cinematic new waves were cropping up all over the world and the auteurist notion that a film could be (and indeed should be) seen as the personal expression of a single individual was filtering down from critics to the general moviegoing public. Of course, an intuitive director like Fellini wasn't consciously trying to capture the zeitgeist but merely throwing his own confusion about life, love, and art up on the screen (the film's original title, THE BEAUTIFUL CONFUSION, would have been apt). Fellini also had no way of knowing that the innovative way he showed the collision of his protagonist's fantasies, dreams, and childhood memories—most of which pertain to Guido’s struggles with religion and/or the women in his life—would exert such a massive influence on future filmmakers. Everyone from Woody Allen (STARDUST MEMORIES) to Bob Fosse (ALL THAT JAZZ) to Paul Mazursky (ALEX IN WONDERLAND and THE PICKLE) unofficially remade it (while, ironically, the official remake, the Hollywood musical NINE, proved to be an impersonal work-for-hire for director Rob Marshall). As Dave Kehr perceptively noted, "There's something about the concept (stuck for an idea for his new movie, a director takes a long, hard look at his own life) that appeals irresistibly to the ego of the professional filmmaker. For directors frustrated by the eternal obscurity of life behind the camera, the 8 1/2 formula gives them a way to step forward and grab the spotlight they've trained so long on others." Fellini may never again have ascended to the level of greatness he displayed here, even though he repeatedly mined similar subject matter, but 8 1/2 remains a dizzying career high. (1963, 138 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]
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Ebs Burnough’s THE CAPOTE TAPES (US/Documentary)
Check Venue website for showtimes
At some point in his life, Truman Capote began to find writing difficult. He’d get up, position himself in front of the yellow legal pads on which he’d start to write, by hand, whatever he was working on, and then immediately seek some kind of distraction. This is just one of many insights about the infamous scribe imparted to viewers by first-time director Ebs Burnough, former senior advisor to Michelle Obama in brand strategy and communications, who uses as the basis of his engaging documentary recordings of interviews that gentleman-journalist George Plimpton conducted with Capote’s social circle in preparation for his 1997 biography about the openly gay, Lilliputian iconoclast. I knew about most everything included—what kind of cinema-loving journalism student would I have been if I hadn’t read Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood, and then all about these books, the movies, and their author?—but still what’s discussed, and at times revealed, is intriguing. Capote himself was the ultimate gossip, and Burnough’s film aptly reflects the salaciousness and tenebrosity associated with that genteel pastime. In that vein, the film focuses heavily on Capote’s fabled, unfinished novel, Answered Prayers, only three chapters of which were published. Perhaps most interesting about the film is speculation from the featured interviewees, which include writers Colm TĂłibĂn, Jay McInerney, and Dotson Rader; former Vogue editor AndrĂ© Leon Talley; talk-show host Dick Cavett; and Capote’s former, beloved personal assistant, Kate Harrington, with whose father he had an affair, about why Capote did what he did. For example, it’s suggested that Answered Prayers wasn’t intended to be a scathing gotcha to his so-called Swans (the society women who adopted him into their circle), but either a vengeful reprimand toward the facet of society that beguiled his mother, resulting in her death by suicide (it’s also suggested that Holly Golightly is based on her), or, rather, showing the society women as being victims, frequently outshone and treated poorly by their bigwig husbands. There’s no doubt that Capote was a complex figure, but Burnough considers him more as a complex person, whose more egregious behaviors, including those attributable to his drug and alcohol addictions, were reflective of his pathos. Less despairingly, it’s good fun to hear about Capote’s Studio 54 days and, before that, his legendary Black and White Ball, attended by a veritable who’s who of society at the time. (Leon Talley discussed the impact of this party on his formative years; he also reveals that he owns the couch on which Capote took a now-legendary photo that appears on the book jacket for Other Voices, Other Rooms. A regret of his? Not buying a tin of gingerbread cookies made by Capote’s favorite cousin, which he carried with him throughout his life.) This bears some trappings of most documentaries of its kind, but Burnough imbues it with stylishness and a sense of piquancy that makes it enjoyable as well as edifying. (2019, 91 min, DCP Digital) [Kathleen Sachs]
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​​Jessica Beshir’s FAYA DAYI (Ethiopia/US/Experimental)
Check Venue website for showtimes
On the one hand, FAYA DAYI is very much a film of its time. A mix of ethnographic and avant-garde filmmaking techniques, it would play well alongside some of Ben Rivers’ recent work, and the affectless yet dignified onscreen presences (none of whom had any film experience prior to this) recall those in Pedro Costa’s movies. On the other hand, Jessica Beshir’s debut feature harkens back to the late silent and early sound eras in how the images and soundtrack seem to function as discrete entities; moreover, Beshir’s employment of a modernist aesthetic to contemplate early modern (if not premodern) ways of living suggests a kinship with something like Alexander Dovzhenko’s EARTH (1930). FAYA DAYI also straddles the contemporary and the timeless in its thematic concerns. It’s organized around the growing, harvesting, and consumption of khat, a plant with narcotic properties that’s long been part of Sufi rituals in Ethiopia (where Beshir was raised) and which has become that nation’s primary cash crop over a three-decade period of economic stagnation. “Khat affects everyone differently in the society,” Beshir told Filmmaker Magazine in a February 2021 interview. “First of all, I’m focusing on the rural Oromo society, a community of farmers who grow and use it, then those in the labyrinthian city of Harar who consume it too.” Behir’s mission to trace the entire khat economy guides the fragmentary structure of FAYA DAYI, which moves fluidly between myriad human subjects; as the director notes, the narrative form reflects Ethiopia’s cultural makeup as well. “Ethiopia is made of over 80 ethnic groups, each with their own languages, cultures, and traditions,” she said in the same interview. “It’s counterproductive to ever have a single narrative about a country that encompasses so much, so I made a specific decision to have this wide focus as a way to contribute to the narrative of the country, because there are so many voices that are not necessarily represented at all.” FAYA DAYI indeed imparts the many of voices of Ethiopia, but more importantly, it relates innumerable sensations particular to the country; the impressionistic editing, richly textured black-and-white photography, and unpredictable changes in film speed contribute to an overwhelming sensory experience. (2021, 118 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Martin Scorsese's HUGO (US)
Saturday, 5pm
When HUGO was released a decade ago, it already felt like an anachronism, a movie with a screw loose: here was a $150-million Georges Méliès biopic that stood alongside the first THOR and CAPTAIN AMERICA movies, the second iteration of FOOTLOOSE, the third TRANSFORMERS and PARANORMAL ACTIVITY installments, and the fourth MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE entry on the Paramount Pictures release slate. Who knew that a Caldecott Medal conferred instant bankability and IP cred upon its source material, a recent YA novel by Brian Selznick? If ever a project exemplified folie du grandeur, surely it was HUGO. When the final product—a movie as ornate, ridiculous, and delicate as a Fabergé egg—was released over Thanksgiving weekend, it was received in hushed tones. It was the first Martin Scorsese picture for the whole family, a deceptively subdued advancement in stereoscopic photography, a moving tribute to a cinema pioneer, and a slab of homework masquerading as fun for kids who would never sit still for over two hours anyway. With its lightly sketched subplots and supporting characters, its plot-stopping flights of visual fancy, its densely imagined milieu, and its technical novelty, HUGO also played like a movie not long for this world: an impossibly precious, reserved-seat roadshow that would soon be edited down for general audiences, only to be reconstructed decades later by The Film Foundation. Luckily, we still have HUGO, largely intact and no less strange than it first appeared. (Seeing it in 2D is still quite enjoyable, but the snouts of Sacha Baron Cohen and various pooches are funnier in 3D. Either version ranks among Scorsese's very finest works.) The inherent sentimentality of the material—the familial longing of orphans, the veneration of old books and movies, the triumphant restoration of an artist in winter—dominates the proceedings, but HUGO is a darker work than immediately evident. After all, when the story begins Hugo Cabret's only friend is a broken-down, dead-eyed automaton that can't even deliver the message it's been programmed to impart. There's much talk of magic and dreams in the text, much emphasis on cinema as something wondrous and unruly, but HUGO has a coldly rationalist heart, content to compare a disabled war veteran to a machine that might reclaim its social value with a quick tune-up. This is a movie with grease and oil in its veins, with the notion that we're fabricated by our creator with just enough parts to get by. This fanciful invention of cinema emphasizes the nuts-and-bolts aspect above all, with a Maltese Cross casually re-purposed from an obsolete automaton to fashion a projector's intermittent movement. At a time when cinema itself was increasingly slipping into digital simulacrum, HUGO argues for a particular interpretation of the mechanical past, one that values the causality, functionality, and coherence of the machine world. It venerates tinkering and understanding yourself through the systems surrounding you. HUGO professes a moving belief in the purposefulness of things—and people, too. Part of the Chicago Favorites series, with an introduction from Ashley Wheater, the Artistic Director of the Joffrey Ballet. (2011, 126 min, DCP Digital) [K.A. Westphal]
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Wes Anderson’s RUSHMORE (US)
Monday, 7pm
Wes Anderson’s sophomore feature remains his best work. RUSHMORE establishes the distinct tones and textures of the director’s oeuvre in its mix of whimsicality and earnestness; it also marks the auspicious start of Anderson’s ongoing collaboration with Bill Murray. Perhaps most notably, it boasts one of the greatest soundtracks of all time, chock-full of energetically curated jams from the British Invasion that underscore the volatility and sincerity of Max Fischer’s exploits. Affectedly framed throughout, RUSHMORE feels at times like a storybook, telling the tale of the passionate, eccentric tenth-grader Max (a remarkable Jason Schwartzman), who attends the titular private school. Despite being a terrible student, he loves his school and dedicates himself to extracurriculars, among them a theater club (the Max Fischer Players) that stages amateur productions of R-rated films like SERPICO. Max's situation is rocked by his growing friendships with two melancholy adults: Herman Blume (Murray), a wealthy Rushmore father whose marriage is falling apart, and Rosemary Cross (Olivia Williams), a widowed first-grade teacher whose late husband attended the school. The odd love triangle that develops between these three spawns a number of complications, including Max’s expulsion from Rushmore. The film defines its characters through humorous slow-motion sequences and close-ups of text and objects; Anderson foregrounds the style with an early sequence, set forcefully to the Creation's "Making Time," that depicts the many (and oddly specific) clubs in which Max participates. Anderson is a master of exploring relationships through onscreen space, visually expressing emotions not just through the physical performances, but through how characters are situated in the frame in relation to one another. Despite the sense of heightened reality, Anderson's precise construction of scenes adds to RUSHMORE’s striking themes of loneliness, grief, and the bittersweetness of growing up. It all culminates in one of the most sentimental cinematic endings, set to the Faces' “Ooh La La,” that never fails to make me tear up. The performances are all excellent, but Murray stands out as the gloomy Blume. Look out, too, for his interactions with the younger actors that populate Rushmore; they provide some of the film's sweetest and funniest moments. Part of the Chicago Favorites series, with an introduction from Ed Siskel, the nephew of critic Gene Siskel. (1998, 93 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
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Also showing at the Gene Siskel Film Center is Paul Schrader’s 2021 film THE CARD COUNTER (109 min, DCP Digital). Check Venue website for all showtimes.
Asian Pop-Up Cinema
AMC River East – Check program website for more information
Opening this year’s edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema is Jessica Kingdon’s 2021 documentary ASCENSION (97 min, DCP Digital) at AMC River East on Wednesday at 7pm. Per Asian Pop-Up Cinema, it’s “a documentary observing China’s growing class divide through labor, consumerism, and wealth.” Kurosaki Hiroshi’s 2020 Japanese film GIFT OF FIRE, about Japan’s covert nuclear bomb program during World War II, also screens at AMC River East, on Thursday at 7pm. More info and tickets available here.
🎞️ 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]
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]
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]
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Also Screening/Streaming
âš« Black World Cinema
bwcTV.tv, a program of Black World Cinema curated by Floyd Webb and Imani Davis, presents a free online screening of Oscar Williams’ 1972 blaxploitation film THE FINAL COMEDOWN (83 min), produced by and starring Billy Dee Williams, on Sunday at 3pm. There will be an introduction by writer and filmmaker Dennis Leroy Kangalee, best known for his 2002 film AS AN ACT OF PROTEST, and an audience discussion following the screening. More info here.
âš« 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 Jung-chi Chang’s 2019 Taiwanese film WE ARE CHAMPIONS (118 min), with a livestream Q&A with the director on the streaming platform at 8:45pm CT following the film. More info here.
⚫ Facets Cinémathèque
Yamina Benguigui’s 2020 French/Algerian film SISTERS (90 min) is available to rent starting this week through September 23. More info here.
âš« Music Box Theatre
Check here for hold-over titles and the Music Box Garden Series line-up.
âš« Racial Equality Week 2021
This weeklong event includes Virtual Screenings with the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project (QWOCMAP). Per the event website, “[t]hese programs of short documentary films delve into the specificity of identity and experience for Black Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) individuals in the LGBTQ+ community. Each 60-minute program will be available to view from Monday, September 13 – Wednesday, September 15 at the viewer’s leisure. One program will focus on Black stories and another will focus on Latinx, Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI), and Indigenous stories. Find details and RSVP to receive a vimeo link for both screenings here.”
On Wednesday, there will be a Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project Moderated Discussion. Again, per the event website, you can “[f]ind details and RSVP to receive a vimeo link for both screenings here. A 60-minute moderated panel discussion on My Beautiful Resistance: Queer Native, API, and Latinx Films from QWOCMAP with Cook County and filmmakers will be held on Wednesday, September 15 at 6pm CT. RSVP here.”
CINE-LIST: September 10 - September 16, 2021
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // John Dickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Michael Glover Smith, K.A. Westphal