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.
🔊CINE-CAST: The Cine-File Podcast
NEW! — EPISODE #20
To kick off Episode #20 of the Cine-Cast, Associate Editor Ben Sachs talks with contributors John Dickson and Steve Erickson about a wide range of new releases and upcoming revival screenings. The conversation touches on everything from Fritz Lang's RANCHO NOTORIOUS (screening on 35mm at the Music Box Theatre the first weekend in October) to James Wan's MALIGNANT (now playing in general release), then settles into a far-reaching discussion of WIFE OF A SPY, the first period piece by Cine-File favorite Kiyoshi Kurosawa (that film opens at the Gene Siskel Film Center on September 24). Next, Associate Editor Kathleen Sachs and contributor Megan Fariello interview experimental filmmaker Jennifer Boles about her short THE REVERSAL (2020, 11 min), which will play on a loop on the limestone wall of the McCormick Bridgehouse and River Museum on the Chicago Riverwalk on the night of September 30 from 6:30-8pm. The introductory theme is by local film composer Ben Van Vlissingen. Find out more about his work here.
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Listen to the Cine-Cast here!
📽️ REELING: THE CHICAGO LGBTQ+ INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Opening Night! – Peeter Rebane’s FIREBIRD (Estonia/UK)
Music Box Theatre – Thursday, 7pm
The words “Based on a true story” take on deeper meaning whenever they’re used in the telling of stories about marginalized communities. Here, they apply to Estonian director Peeter Rebane’s sweeping romantic drama, based on Sergey Fetisov’s memoir The Story of Roman. This handsomely shot and sturdily directed feature—Rebane’s first narrative after years spent directing documentaries, TV specials, and music videos—depicts the clandestine Cold War love affair between Sergey (Tom Prior, who co-wrote the script with Rebane and also co-produced), a Soviet private, and a dashing fighter pilot, Roman (Oleg Zagorodnii). It’s a simple story, but heartbreaking nonetheless: under Article 121 of the Soviet Union’s criminal code, which was annulled as recently as 1993, sexual relationships between men were punishable by up to five years imprisonment. Thus, Sergey and Roman have to navigate their relationship under secrecy, constantly fearful of discovery. Also complicating things is Luisa (Diana Pozharskaya), a childhood friend of Sergey’s who’s also in love with Roman. Still, the romance between the men at the air force base in Soviet-occupied Estonia is idyllic, as Roman encourages Sergey to pursue his dream of acting after introducing him to Shakespeare and the ballet (the film takes its name from the Stravinsky ballet), and the two plan for a tentative future in which they might both end up in Moscow. That future is compromised after a commanding officer’s suspicions against Roman become too great for the pilot to bear, putting at risk both his career and Sergey’s safety. The rest of the film chronicles the next several years in the characters’ lives, during which Roman and Luisia marry and have a child. Unable to forget Sergey, Roman takes a post in Moscow, where Sergey has realized his dream of attending drama school. The two achieve moments of happiness, but they’re bittersweet, as a normal relationship between them is impossible and an inevitable conclusion looms. FIREBIRD is a fitting tribute to a beautiful love story that’s conveyed with the sense of romance and poignancy it deserves. Crisp cinematography and colorful, yet still realistic, production design help prevent it from becoming too dreary, aptly reflecting the snippets of joy the two men find with one another in a world that doesn’t yet understand their affection. (2021, 107 min, DCP Digital) [Kathleen Sachs]
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Reeling goes from September 17 – October 7, with both in-person and virtual screenings. The festival opens with the in-person screening of FIREBIRD, which will then stream online between September 27 and October 3, available to Illinois residents only. Selections from the festival screening in-person and virtually (most, if not all, will be offered in both ways) after Thursday will be reviewed in the next two Cine-Lists. Check festival website here for more information and to purchase tickets.
📽️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS
Facets - Now Re-Open!
Check Venue website for showtimes
Kazik Radwanski’s ANNE AT 13,000 FT. (Canada)
Like the films of the great Maurice Pialat, the Canadian drama ANNE AT 13,000 FT. barrels forward through time, employing jump cuts to create a sense of arhythmic flutter within scenes and spontaneous propulsion from one scene to the next. You’re never certain when narrative will leap forward and, when it does, whether it will skip ahead seconds, minutes, or days in the characters’ lives. Pialat constructed movies this way to communicate his own uncontrolled passion and restless search for artistic truth; Kazik Radwanski, on the other hand, seems more interested in communicating the subjective experience of his protagonist, a young woman whose unspecified mental illness makes it difficult for her to control her emotions. The titular Anne works at a daycare center in Toronto and yearns to fall in love like her best friend and coworker Sarah. In a subtle bit of characterization that hints at the heroine’s jealousy without stating it outright, Radwanski structures the movie around the friend’s life rather than Anne’s—the story begins at Sarah’s bachelorette party (where Anne goes skydiving for the first time), begins to come undone at her wedding, then progresses further when Anne enters recklessly into a romance with a man she meets at the ceremony. In between these developments come scenes of Anne’s struggles to stay afloat at her job (these passages convey the same queasy helplessness as Maren Ade’s THE FOREST FOR THE TREES, another brutally honest movie about the travails of a young teacher) and to present herself as emotionally stable around her family and peers. Radwanski’s knack for narrative construction sometimes verges on being heavy-handed (the central metaphor of Anne free-falling through the sky is a little too on-the-nose), yet the nuanced performances make almost all the creative choices feel natural. Deragh Campbell is especially brilliant as Anne, conveying the character’s pathology even in small moments so that her eruptions don’t come off as histrionic. (2019, 75 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Music Box Theatre
Check Venue website for all showtimes
Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s AKIRA (Japan/Animation)
Friday and Saturday, Midnight
A cataclysmic explosion rips through Tokyo in 1988, reducing it to rubble. Within one minute, Katsuhiro Ôtomo sets the stage for his masterpiece AKIRA, which arguably would become one of the most—if not the most—influential anime films of all time. After the opening, Ôtomo jumps ahead to 2019. Neo Tokyo has been built next to the ruins of the old city, which is now a playground for biker gangs, troubled youths, and corrupt hands of the law. Despite a period of patriotism and rebuilding, the new city has plunged into chaos, reminiscent of the blast that destroyed what once stood before. Our protagonist, Kaneda, and the eventual antagonist, Tetsuo, are up to shenanigans with their motorcycle crew when they get tangled in a web of politics, money, and supernatural abilities. After Tetsuo’s chance encounter with a psychic child who miraculously appears to be decrepitly aged, Ôtomo shows how quickly power can corrupt. Tetsuo himself begins to exhibit these psychic powers, his surge in ability causing unstable hallucinations and agonizing pain. We slowly learn these abilities derive from a mysterious being named Akira. Some say Akira is a God, bringing about a cleansing of the Earth; others say Akira is pure energy that should be controlled and used as a weapon for the military. If Akira is, as some aver, a God meant to bring about a new world, what is the catalyst necessary to bring about its arrival? Tetsuo becomes the necessary vessel, an amalgamation of flesh and cold steel that has been corrupted by the cruel world around him. Speed is constant force throughout the film, and it's driven by Shoji Yamashiro’s haunting soundtrack. The world keeps spinning, unrelenting for any person or thing. Thankfully for Kaneda, he and his bike are constantly ahead of the capital steamroller, his taillights leaving a beautiful blur for the rest of the world to stare at in envy. AKIRA is necessary viewing for any fans of anime or the cyberpunk genre, and it gets better with every revisit. (1988, 124 mins, DCP Digital) [Drew Van Weelden]
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George Marshall’s DESTRY RIDES AGAIN (US)
Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am
It’s hard enough to believe that a star the magnitude of Marlene Dietrich could ever have been referred to as box-office poison. It’s harder still to believe that the phrase originated in connection with the iconic actress, in a 1938 newspaper advertisement taken out by Independent Theatre Owners of America president Harry Brandt. In the ad, Brandt declared that the box-office draw of a number of now-legendary performers was “nil,” further opining that “Paramount showed cleverness and consideration for exhibitors by buying off Dietrich’s contract… [she], too, is poison at the box office.” Her last picture at Paramount, Ernst Lubitsch’s underrated ANGEL (1937), was a flop, and the studio where Lubitsch himself was a renowned loss-leader divested themselves of the unparalleled enchantress. Sojourning in the south of France on the precipice of World War II (with her family and director Josef von Sternberg in tow), Dietrich was contacted by Universal producer Joe Pasternak, who was remaking a 1932 Tom Mix western and had already cast Jimmy Stewart in the lead. The actress initially balked upon learning that it was a Western—and a comedy at that—but she was encouraged to take it in part by von Sternberg, the virtuoso director rremarking: “I put you on a pedestal, the untouchable goddess. Pasternak wants to drag you down into the mud, very touchable. A bona fide goddess with feet of clay.” Dietrich stars in the film as Frenchy, an impudent saloon singer apparently lacking in that requisite heart of gold. Stewart is Destry, the son of a famous lawman, who gets invited back to help whip a rowdy Western hamlet into shape. Anticipating his later role in John Ford’s THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE, Stewart’s Destry is a great shot who nevertheless believes in the power of the law to affect change. Taking on the town’s head honcho, Destry attempts to find the body of the previous sheriff, presumed to have been murdered by said honcho and his cronies, in hopes of leveraging that crime against his other, more insidiously wrought terrors. Frenchy is the boss’s girl, a garishly made-up siren who holds her own among the town’s men, inviting the scorn of their wives. Naturally—as film law dictates—Frenchy falls in love with Destry; in further allegiance with the mores of the movies, she must atone for her sins, ultimately sacrificing her life for the boyishly handsome peacemonger. This development is disappointing, to say the least; it has none of the sublime oblation that marks her character’s actions at the end of von Sternberg’s MOROCCO. But up until then, the film, directed by Chicago-born journeyman George Marshall (for whom it might be said that this is his crowning achievement), is humorous more than anything else, with Dietrich something of a Mae West-lite and Stewart delivering his aw-shucks one-liners with a marked subtlety, which renders them even more potent. Of note is an extended barroom brawl between Dietrich’s Frenchy and the wife of one of her gambling buddies, who lost his pants to her in a bet; the two women reportedly performed the scene themselves, rather than use stunt doubles. It’s an electric sequence, rife with the attenuated corporeality of cinema. This was both Dietrich and Stewart’s first film in the genre, and it was a stand-out one in a year that brought the resurgence of the critically acclaimed Western, specifically with John Ford’s STAGECOACH, now regarded as a pinnacle of its kind. For Dietrich, this was an antidote; for cinema as a whole, it was one of several jolts that revived one of its most beloved institutions. (1939, 95 min, 35mm) [Kathleen Sachs]
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Sion Sono’s PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND (US/Japan)
Check Venue website for showtimes
The films of Japanese provocateur Sion Sono tend to fall into one of two categories: formally ambitious puzzles that interweave lots of small, thematically connected narratives (NORIKO’S DINNER TABLE [2005], LOVE EXPOSURE [2008], RED POST ON ESCHER STREET [2020]) and free-for-all splatter comedies that exude the sort of unabashed crassness one associates with adolescent punk bands (SUICIDE CLUB [2001], WHY DON’T YOU PLAY IN HELL [2013], TAG [2015]). Sono has made good and bad movies in both modes, but he’s yet to make one that doesn’t flaunt its contempt for social taboos. This unwavering spirit of defiance grants Sono a certain underground credibility; even when his movies are artistic failures, they remain energizing in their anti-establishment sentiment. Such is the case with Sono’s English-language debut, PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND. The film is sloppy, sophomoric, and generally lazy, but it’s also undeniably sincere in its appeals to schlock aficionados. Nicolas Cage stars as a bank robber who’s recruited by the reigning warlord of a place called Samurai Town to rescue his missing granddaughter. To ensure that the bandit won’t renege on his task, the warlord affixes nuclear warheads to the bandit’s body (including one on each testicle) and sets them to detonate in five days if he doesn’t deliver his bounty. Just about everything is loud in PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND: the colors, the violence, many of Cage’s line readings. Likewise, the mix of western-movie and samurai-movie tropes comes off as the cinematic equivalent of an auto collision. But as far as mindless entertainment goes, this is preferable to most Hollywood superhero movies in that it openly acknowledges how immature it is; further, the cheap effects (particularly the sprays of viscera) exhibit more imagination than the soulless CGI of GHOSTLAND’s blockbuster counterparts. If you see this, try to go with an inebriated, late-night crowd, as that’s likely the intended audience. (2021, 103 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Also showing at the Music Box Theatre are Bassam Tariq’s 2021 film MOGUL MOWGLI (89 min, DCP Digital), co-written by and starring Riz Ahmed, and, starting this week, Bill Benz's 2021 film THE NOWHERE INN (92 min, DCP Digital), starring St. Vincent and Carrie Brownstein. Jake Scott's 2021 concert film-documentary hybrid OASIS KNEBWORTH 1996 (108 min, DCP Digital) screens on Thursday at 9:45pm. Check Venue website for all showtimes and the Music Box Garden Series line-up.
Gene Siskel Film Center
Check Venue website for all showtimes
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 Tóibín, Jay McInerney, and Dotson Rader; former Vogue editor André 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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Federico Fellini’s JULIET OF THE SPIRITS (Italy)
Saturday, 3pm and Tuesday, 6:30pm
Poor Giulietta Masina. In the five films she made with her husband, Federico Fellini, he saw fit to cast her, variously, as a prostitute, a slave, and a hausfrau—all of whom are abused and deceived by the men in their lives. In their last collaboration, JULIET OF THE SPIRITS, Masina is an older, wealthier, more embittered version of the bourgeoise she played in IL BIDONE (1955). In that film, her thieving husband lies to her about how he gets his money and promises to reform when she finds out—another lie she chooses to believe because they're still in love. In JULIET OF THE SPIRITS, however, Masina’s character (also called Giulietta) tries to blind herself to her husband’s infidelities but finally hires investigators to uncover the truth. She then sets out, much like Tom Cruise’s provincial OB/GYN in EYES WIDE SHUT (1999), to see what she’s been missing in her conventional life. With his own marriage in trouble, Fellini said this film was a gift to Masina. But like other director-actor spouses who made films together in times of marital strife—Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman (JOURNEY TO ITALY [1954]), Alexander Payne and Sandra Oh (SIDEWAYS [2004]), Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt (BY THE SEA [2015])— Fellini found a way to air his grievances with his long-suffering star. The film, Fellini’s first in color, is bedazzling. The rich, bold hues help the director present his iconic circus imagery in a way he never could before. The spirits that tempt and taunt Giulietta include figures from her strict Catholic upbringing and a hedonistic neighbor played by Fellini’s lover, Sandra Milo. While no one in the outrageous ensemble surrounding Masina seems even remotely as sincere or interesting as they think they are (like most characters in psychedelic films of the ’60s), Giulietta hardly represents a strong core for the film. She seems almost naïvely lost in a world she must know very well, and that's a contradiction that neither Masina nor Fellini can pull off. By trying to showcase his wife’s virtue, Fellini only manages to scold her for her ordinariness, creating a rather sour atmosphere in the process. Although, like most dreams, this dreamlike film fades rather quickly from memory, it is worth seeing as a crucial link between Fellini’s earlier, more realistic films and the excessive artifice of the later films in his oeuvre. (1965, 137 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Edmond T. Gréville’s PRINCESSE TAM TAM (France)
Saturday, 6pm
The legendary Josephine Baker appeared in roughly a half-dozen movies between 1927 and 1935, despite the fact that she disliked working in cinema; she claimed she was unsure of how to perform without being able to feed off the energy of a live audience. Watching Baker in PRINCESSE TAM TAM (the last of her big-screen starring vehicles), you can almost see what she meant—her outsize gestures and expressions suggest a yearning for immediate laughter and applause. Nevertheless, her performance is so grandly entertaining that it’s hard to believe she was having a truly bad time when she made the picture. TAM TAM is a dated, if still enjoyable variation on George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion that features Baker in the Eliza Doolittle part. The premise finds a wealthy French author and his ghostwriter traveling to Tunisia to find ideas for a new novel; there, they meet the jaunty young servant Alwina (Baker), whom they conspire to disguise as an Indian princess and parade in front of gullible high-society types back in Paris. Many have noted that Alwina’s transformation into the toast of Paris mirrors Baker’s own rise to stardom; further, the way the author and his French colleagues fetishize Alwina’s Otherness reflects the patronizing, colonialist attitudes that predominated French culture at the time the movie was made (if not long afterward as well). Though the film is all about exploitation, Baker exudes a sense of autonomy in her exuberant and highly confident presence; needless to say, her dance numbers are worth cherishing regardless of the story that surrounds them. Edmond T. Gréville’s direction is pleasant too, for what it’s worth, maintaining an effervescent vibe that’s well-suited to the comedy. This isn’t on the level of what Sacha Guitry was making around the same time, but it still highlights how strong French movie comedy was in the 1930s. Part of the Chicago Favorites series, with an introduction from cultural historian, radio DJ, and archivist Ayana Contreras. (1935, 78 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Also showing at the Gene Siskel Film Center are Paul Schrader’s 2021 film THE CARD COUNTER, and, starting this week, Ted Bogosian's 2021 documentary LIVE AT MISTER KELLY'S (83 min, DCP Digital), about the legendary Rush Street club, with filmmaker and guest Q&As happening at most screenings. Dash Shaw's 2021 animated film CRYPTOZOO (95 min, DCP Digital) screens on Friday and Saturday at 9:30pm, as part of the Fringe Benefits series. Check Venue website for all showtimes.
Videos by Renée Green (US/Experimental)
Conversations at the Edge at the Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 6pm
Dearly missed during the Siskel Center’s closure, the ongoing experimental screening series Conversations at the Edge finally returns with this program of short works by multidisciplinary artist Renée Green. All three selections concern the relationship between the past and the present, specifically how contemporary individuals bear the weight of past atrocities. The earliest piece in the program, PARTIALLY BURIED (1996, 20 min, DCP Digital), takes its title from a site-specific work that artist Robert Smithson installed at Kent State University not long before the National Guard’s notorious massacre of students demonstrating on campus in May 1970. Green was living in Kent, Ohio, at this time, as her mother was working at the university; the narration in PARTIALLY BURIED intertwines Green’s memories of Kent with questions of how she can memorialize the massacre in 1990s America, a far more conservative place than the one where the massacre took place. PARTIALLY BURIED CONTINUED (1997, 36 min, DCP Digital) expands upon these questions by considering the legacies of the Korean War and the South Korean government’s violent crackdown on protestors in 1980. Green examines photographs taken by her father (who was serving in the U.S. military during the War), news footage of the 1980 demonstrations, and a variety of artworks to create a multifaceted historical inquiry; she also incorporates interviews, voiceover narration, and onscreen text to add even more textures to her cinematic quilt. The most recent work in the program, MISE-EN-SCÈNE: COMMEMORATIVE TOILE (2020, 6 min, DCP Digital), looks at literal pieces of fabric, 18th-century French decorative fabrics depicting scenes of the slave trade. Again, Green employs a mix of narration and onscreen text to suggest a multitude of perspectives, bringing a sense of ambiguity to what seems at first like a straightforwardly heinous artifact. [Ben Sachs]
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Green will also deliver a virtual lecture about her work on Monday, September 27 at 6pm. Register for the event here.
Clint Eastwood’s CRY MACHO (US)
The Logan Theatre and Various Multiplexes – Check Venue websites for showtimes
If RICHARD JEWELL (2019) was Clint Eastwood's FRENZY—a dark, angry movie that revisited some of the director's pet themes in a more disturbing fashion than ever before—then CRY MACHO is his FAMILY PLOT—a surprisingly sweet and gentle about-face that feels like a career summation while showing the old master has a few new tricks up his sleeve. Like MILLION DOLLAR BABY (2004) and GRAN TORINO (2008), CRY MACHO tells the story of an older man haunted by his past who finds redemption in becoming a surrogate father to a wounded younger person. The relationship unfolds on a picaresque road trip similar to the ones in BRONCO BILLY (1980), HONKYTONK MAN (1982) and THE MULE (2018), and Eastwood also throws in a cross-generational romance (a la BREEZY [1973] and THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY [1995]) for good measure. Most of all, CRY MACHO is quintessentially Eastwoodian for how the filmmaker finds new ways to interrogate and subvert his own macho persona as an actor, even though (or perhaps precisely because) he was a physically frail 90-year-old at the time it was shot. Jonathan Rosenbaum once balked at the reception of Manoel de Oliveira's CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS - THE ENIGMA (2007) because he was convinced that some fans of the then-98-year-old director valued the film only because Oliveira could be seen in it driving a car. There will no doubt be similar skepticism in some quarters towards the neo-western CRY MACHO for containing images of the now-ancient Eastwood riding a horse, punching someone in the face, and dancing with a much-younger señora (the wonderful Natalia Traven). But Eastwood's performance here is genuinely and subtly moving: there's a scene where his character, a retired rodeo star, cries while talking about mistakes he’s made, and it's filmed in such a daringly offhanded manner, with the actor's cowboy hat slung low over his eyes, that many viewers likely won't even notice the single tear that streams down his face while he's reminiscing. The low-key, no-fuss approach is characteristic of both the director and the movie as a whole. CRY MACHO features perhaps the most beautiful widescreen landscape shots that Eastwood has ever composed (with New Mexico credibly standing in for Mexico), even though, typical for a director famed for his visual economy, he refuses to linger on any of them for a second longer than necessary. A small masterpiece that deserves to be seen on the big screen. (2021, 104 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]
Asian Pop-Up Cinema
Check program website for more information
There are three Asian Pop-Up Cinema screenings this week: Cao Jinling's 2021 Chinese film ANIMA (120 min, Digital Projection) at the Davis Theater (4614 N. Lincoln Ave.) on Tuesday at 7pm; Ryoo Seung-wan's 2021 South Korean film ESCAPE FROM MOGADISHU (121 min, Digital Projection) at AMC River East (322 E. Illinois St.) on Wednesday at 7pm; and Ruslan Pak's 2020 Kazak/South Korean film THREE (112 min, Digital Projection) at AMC River East on Thursday at 7pm. More info and tickets available here.
Comfort Station
Check program website for more information
Bill Condon's 1995 horror film CANDYMAN: FAREWELL TO THE FLESH (95 min, Digital Projection) and Roger Corman's 1959 comedy-horror film A BUCKET OF BLOOD (65 min, Digital Projection) screen on Friday starting at 6pm as part of a program called "Art Kills." The Chicago-based, Trinidad-born artist Sherwin Ovid will lead a discussion before the screening. More info 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]
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]
🎞️ 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 Rafael Martínez Moreno’s 2018 Colombian film THE MISSED ROUND (89 min), featuring a livestream Q&A with the director on the streaming platform at 8:15pm CT following the film. More info here.
⚫ Facets Cinémathèque
Yamina Benguigui’s 2020 French/Algerian film SISTERS (90 min) and Paul Felten and Joe DeNardo’s 2020 screwball thriller SLOW MACHINE (72 min) are available to rent through September 23. More info here.
⚫ HotHouse
On Saturday at 7pm, HotHouse hosts a virtual benefit screening of Wagner Moura's 2019 film MARIGHELLA (159 min) in support of the Paulo Freire series. Get tickets here.
⚫ Media Burn
On Thursday at 6pm, Media Burn will host a virtual screening of Cai Thomas‘s 2021 documentary short CHANGE THE NAME (20 min), moderated by Sisters in Cinema’s Joyy Norris. Register here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
Check here for hold-over titles and the Music Box Garden Series line-up.
🎞️ ADDITIONAL ONLINE SCREENINGS
Ignacio Aguero’s THIS IS THE WAY I LIKE IT (Chile/Documentary)
Available to stream on Ovid.tv here (Subscription required)
Made under the Pinochet dictatorship, THIS IS THE WAY I LIKE IT circles around the unstated, treating the ambient brutality as negative space. It addresses a very specific form of repression, dropping by five Chilean film shoots between May 1984 and December 1985. At each shoot, Ignacio Aguero asks the directors, “Who are you making films for?” The answer is rarely “a large Chilean audience.” THIS IS THE WAY I LIKE IT begins at a movie theater showing THE COTTON CLUB and SANTA CLAUS: THE MOVIE (both advertised on huge posters) and decked out with photos of glamorous stars like Joan Collins. The reality for Chile’s own filmmakers is much more difficult than for their American or European peers. While only one of the directors Aguero talks with, a documentarian filming street protests, is working on a project that might get him arrested, all the subjects take the marginalization of Chilean cinema for granted. Aguero shoots his interviews outside, standing in the same frame as his subjects. More than the film's explicit politics, what resonates today are the questions about how to get independent cinema financed and distributed at a level where its creators can make a living from it. Ditto the evidence of Hollywood overshadowing national cinemas in most of the world--many of the directors with whom Aguero talks have little hope of finding an audience for their work or seeing any money from it. More than 30 years later, Aguero returned to this subject for the feature-length doc THIS IS THE WAY I LIKE IT II, which is also streaming on Ovid. (1985, 28 min) [Steve Erickson]
CINE-LIST: September 17 - September 23, 2021
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // John Dickson, Steve Erickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Michael Glover Smith, Drew Van Weelden