We will highlight physical screenings at the top of the list for theaters and venues that have reopened, and list streaming/online screenings below.
Remember to check the venues’ websites for information on safety protocols and other procedures put in place. More and more venues are now requiring proof of vaccination or a negative PCR test. We recommend verifying those protocols before every trip to the theater. And, of course, always wear a mask.
🔊CINE-CAST: The Cine-File Podcast
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 podcast's introductory theme is by local film composer Ben Van Vlissingen. Find out more about his work here.
---
Listen to the Cine-Cast here!
📽️ REELING: THE CHICAGO LGBTQ+
INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Selections from the festival are reviewed below. Note that the in-person portion of the festival takes place this week at the Landmark Theater (2828 N. Clark St.), with most titles also available to stream beginning this week; this will be indicated below the blurb where applicable. Some are available to stream starting next week and will be noted as such on next week’s list. More info on the festival here.
Co-Presented by Cine-File: Bruce LaBruce’s SAINT-NARCISSE (Canada)
Friday, 9:15pm
The mythological figure of Narcissus has long been associated with homosexuality, his love of his own reflection translated as a love of others whose bodies match his own. As the film's title lets on, SAINT-NARCISSE is not only preoccupied with this notion, but with how its queer possibilities might intersect with and subvert the sexually repressive institution of the Church. This being a film by cult queercore director Bruce LaBruce, one knows that blasphemous irreverence is in store. The setting is Quebec in 1972. Twenty-something Dominic (Félix-Antoine Duval) has never known his parents; living with his ailing grandmother, he passes the time by getting drunk and habitually taking pictures of himself. One day, he comes across a box in his grandmother’s closet containing a cache of letters addressed to him by a woman who claims to be his estranged mother. Despite foreboding warnings and premonitions (LaBruce uses a heavy hand in his smash cuts to ominous figures), Dominic sets off to the small town of Saint-Narcisse to track down a woman named Beatrice, an alleged lesbian witch living with her immortal girlfriend. If that weren’t enough, Dominic is soon drawn to an abused Trappist monk who bears his exact likeness. Things get more bewildering and knottier from there, as SAINT-NARCISSE transitions into a religious sexploitation thriller featuring autoerotic flagellation, twincest, and all manner of affronts to Catholic dogma. Somehow, none of this feels quite as outrageous as it probably should, especially coming from someone as renowned for taboo-busting as LaBruce; perhaps after all these years we’ve simply grown inured to the wonton perversion of religious iconography. SAINT-NARCISSE still has its campy fun, though, and it’s nothing if not queer in its defiance of the orthodoxies of family, love, and faith. (2020, 101 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
---
Cine-File is the proud Community Co-Presenter of the in-person screening. It will be available to stream beginning Monday through Sunday, October 3. More info here.
---
Mehdi and Mohammad Torab-Beigi’s AT THE END OF EVIN (Iran)
Saturday, 3pm
The directorial debut of Mehdi and Mohammad Torab-Beigi, AT THE END OF EVIN, is a creepy, atmospheric drama in which Amen (Mehri Kazemi), a trans woman before transition, agrees to impersonate the daughter of a wealthy man (Mahdi Pakdel) if he will pick up the tab for her surgery. Lies and betrayal fill her endless days in a characterless, white-on-white mansion as the reasons for this impersonation continue to change. Even after the film is over, it’s hard to know what “really” happened to Amen—or whether she existed at all—in part because we never see more than her hands. Like Robert Montgomery’s failed experiment, LADY IN THE LAKE (1946), all of the action is seen from the main character’s point of view. While this device gaslights us along with Amen, it distances us from the horror of the abyss she is facing. The film, while somewhat intriguing, feels schematic and obvious. For a first effort, however, AT THE END OF EVIN signals the positive potential of its writer-directors. As they gain more experience, the Torab-Beigis may come through with stronger, more fully realized work. (2021, 78 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
---
Available to stream beginning Tuesday through Monday, October 4. More info here.
---
Deal with the Real: Nonfiction Shorts Program
Saturday, 3:15pm
In this series of shorts, themes of creativity, space, and community-building abound. These six films also illuminate ways in which he subjects utilize different technological mediums to connect and create. The joyful FOUR FRUITBITES (2021, 8 min) features interviews with subjects from director Dave Quantic’s podcast Fruitbowl. Focusing on the power of voice and being able to tell your own story in your own space, each interviewee describes their unique experiences with sex and sexuality as queer, trans, and genderqueer individuals. In the heartbreaking French-Canadian work BEYOND THE VOID (2021, 10 min), director Rafaël Beauchamp follows Charles, whose partner, Martin, passed away from AIDS in 2001. Mixing haunting video footage of Martin with interviews of Charles in the present, the short is an unflinching, beautifully shot look at grief and perseverance. Yanyi Xie’s sweet SILVER LINING (2021, 9 min) features Brent Perrotti, better known as his drag persona Alexis Hex, “Chicago’s premier knitting witch drag queen.” The short examines Brent shift during the COVID-19 pandemic from performing live to creating online content, including a knitting tutorial YouTube channel. In DANCING ON MY OWN (2019, 13 min), director Alexandra N Cuerdo uses her personal story as a jumping-off point to explore the importance of a queer Asian community. The film highlights Bubble_T, a radical dance party based in NYC. Jyoti Mistry’s South African short CAUSE OF DEATH (2020, 20 min) is the standout here, an experimental film using black and white archival footage, animation, and spoken-word poetry to address systemic violence against women. An autopsy report describes the physical effects on women’s bodies, but the images and words reveal the larger structural violence that leads to femicide. Its powerful message is embedded in Mistry's stunning use of montage and sound. Finally, Monica Manganelli’s BUTTERFLIES IN BERLIN: DIARY OF A SOUL SPLIT IN TWO (2019, 30 min) tells the story of Alexandra, a post-op transgender woman in Weimar-era Berlin who makes her transition after meeting with sexologist and sexual minorities activist Magnus Hirschfeld. The short uses art deco-style animation to depict Alexandra’s journey and the great risk she takes to be her authentic self and to help others as the Nazis rise to power. While these shorts use a myriad of styles and approaches, they together reflect the diverse ways that film can bring to life these true stories. [Megan Fariello]
---
Available to stream beginning Tuesday through Monday, October 4. More info here.
---
Angelo Madsen Minax’s NORTH BY CURRENT (US/Documentary)
Saturday, 5pm
“If I loved you less,” begins the quotation cited after the end credits of Angelo Madsen Minax’s staggering essay film NORTH BY CURRENT, “I might be able to talk about it more.” Seeing as the filmmaker’s own mother refers to his work as vile—a statement with which I disagree but summarizes the potential for others to view Minax’s subversive output as such—it’s ironic to see a quote from Jane Austen’s Emma; the author and her body of culturally revered opuses, though undoubtedly more radical than given credit for, are often considered the height of respectable, genteel artistry. Nevertheless, it’s a sublime epitomization of what came before this quote appears onscreen: a raw, transcendent depiction of a family, for whom communication is already an issue, tormented by immense grief. The source of that grief, at least as it’s first presented, is the sudden death of Minax’s infant niece, Kalla; a subsequent investigation looks into whether or not her parents, Minax’s younger sister Jesse and her ex-convict husband, had anything to do with it. (I’ll note here that it seems very, very unlikely that they did; if anything, Minax’s sister and brother-in-law are potentially victims of a—surprise, surprise—corrupt legal system that took the easy way out in assuming that an ex-addict and her convicted felon husband were somehow at fault. I say this to distinguish that the film is not a true-crime documentary or anything of the sort, and that the tragedy in question is more a jumping-off point from which to examine larger, more dysfunctional family dynamics.) Shot over several years starting in 2015 (two years after Kalla’s death), with interstitials delineating years 2016 through 2020, the film establishes a loose narrative arc from the aftermath of that tragedy to its conclusion in the present, over which time Minax and his family lament and evolve in equal measure. It would seem that the source of their collective anguish isn’t just the tragedy of a child’s death, but rather the collective hardship born of their individual struggles. Jesse has contended with addiction, domestic abuse, and mental health issues, all while having three kids in as many years following her first child’s death. Minax continues to deal with the reaction of his family to his coming out as a trans man. Their parents, devout Mormons who reside in rural Michigan, are inherently at odds with their kids’ respective journeys, though they appear to be supportive overall. The relationship between Minax and his sister is also complicated: the former acknowledges that he terrorized his younger sibling as a kid, and Jesse confesses she believes that to be the impetus behind her drug problem. Minax’s depiction of his family is radically empathetic; he puts forth his own shortcomings and graciously contextualizes those of others rather than use broad strokes such as good versus bad. Scenes in which Minax and his parents discuss his gender transition are among the most affecting: his parents’ feelings on the matter evolve over the course of the film, and real, honest healing is done before our very eyes. Having primarily worked in experimental film and video, Minax imbues what he considers his most accessible work to date with boundary-pushing motifs that metamorphosize the form. He mines day-to-day life for visual and sonic metaphors—a certain song ironically starts playing on the jukebox, a tree bends toward the light—that hint at a larger meaning to it all; an unidentified child narrator, who’s often in conversation with Minax’s own voice over, helps translate what’s not being said, the ways that this distressed family connects with and loves one another amid all the turmoil. This omnipresent child is the love that resonates between and through them, that which they have trouble putting into words. But they'd have to love one another less to be able to talk about it more. (2021, 86 min, DCP Digital) [Kathleen Sachs]
---
Available to stream beginning Tuesday through Monday, October 4. More info here.
---
Vivian Kleiman’s NO STRAIGHT LINES (US/Documentary)
Saturday, 5:15pm
The documentation of queer people throughout history, especially the unsung weirdos in the margins, is crucial to maintaining an exhaustive and ever-changing picture of ourselves. Vivian Kleiman’s delightful deep-dive into the gay comic book scene is necessary because it canonizes the heroes who have documented queer rage and joy for decades. Inspired by an all-queer comic anthology of the same name, NO STRAIGHT LINES chronicles the lives and careers of five legendary cartoonists—Alison Bechdel, Jennifer Camper, Howard Cruse, Rupert Kinnard, and Mary Wings—as they navigate queer identity and the stark divide between the freedom allowed by zines and the more rigid expectations of the publishing industry. A longtime collaborator with filmmaker Marlon Riggs, Kleiman takes a less experimental approach than that of TONGUES UNTIED, but this serves a comprehensive look at the intersection of art and queerness from the 1970s onward. The particularly illuminating interviews are with Wings, whose groundbreaking Come Out Comix is largely responsible for the scene’s meteoric rise, and Bechdel, easily the most mainstream figure here with the success of Fun Home and Dykes to Watch Out For. Kleiman's use of comic book panel-style backgrounds sometimes feels overly stylized, but the movie finds its footing when it gets real with its subject matter, providing welcome moments of rage and sadness that can’t be ignored. There’s a striking scene where Camper, who's raunchy and unapologetic in both her art and her onscreen interviews, breaks down while talking about people she lost during the AIDS crisis. NO STRAIGHT LINES provides a history of this artistic revolution, and it makes a point to feature interviews from the newer generation of queer comics authors to show the impact of those who paved the way. (2021, 78 min) [Cody Corrall]
---
Available to stream beginning Tuesday through Monday, October 4. More info here.
---
Jeffrey Schwarz’s BOULEVARD! A HOLLYWOOD STORY (US/Documentary)
Sunday, 2:30pm
In an early moment of BOULEVARD! A HOLLYWOOD STORY, one interviewee—having been told of the existence of an early attempt at a SUNSET BLVD. musical—inundates documentarian Jeffrey Schwarz with excited questions. What Schwarz’s latest film does best is convey the exhilaration of discovering little known film histories: there are always new, fascinating stories to be told, even about films that seem so thoroughly discussed. BOULEVARD! tells the story of songwriting and romantic partners Dickson Hughes and Richard Stapley, who worked directly with Gloria Swanson on a musical adaptation of Billy Wilder's SUNSET BLVD in the 1950s. When Swanson falls for former Hollywood heartthrob Stapley, their working relationship begins to mirror the story they’re adapting. Video calls with archivists and film experts mark the era in which this film is made, but these lend themselves well to Schwarz’s focus on legwork. BOULEVARD! brings attention to the research process, the importance of archives, and the people behind the archives, who keep histories from being forgotten. The film at times hesitates to leave behind Swanson, distracting from the more interesting story of the musical itself. BOULEVARD! finds its stride, however, when it shifts focus to Hughes (and his indignation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s lauded 1993 musical version of SUNSET BLVD.) and especially to Stapley, who has a fascinating story of continual reinvention. Their individual experiences in Hollywood and their relationship with each other are the most striking aspects of BOULEVARD! Also noteworthy is the welcome appearance of the late Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne as one of the interviewees. (2021, 85 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
---
Available to stream beginning Wednesday through Tuesday, October 5. More info here.
---
Mari Walker’s SEE YOU THEN (US)
Sunday, 5pm
It’s been a decade since Kris and Naomi last saw each other, and a lot has changed. Since their sudden breakup, Naomi (Lynn Chen) has traded her life as a provocative performance artist for a stable job and the more comforting role of a wife and mother. Kris (Pooya Mohseni), on the other hand, has undergone medical transition and is now adjusting to life as a trans woman. Mari Walker’s thoughtful debut feature explores what happens when two souls reconnect and, for better or worse, find a greater understanding of one another. SEE YOU THEN uses the laissez-faire sensibility of the “walk and talk” film to present conversations about past heartbreak, what the characters missed in each other's lives, and who they are 10 years removed from their romance. A trans filmmaker herself, Walker writes Kris with refreshing authenticity, showing how she navigates the intricacies of social and medical transition and the less glamorous nuts and bolts of the trans experience. Things have clearly changed for the both of them, but there’s a warm familiarity between the two that propels them through the night, even when the conversation isn’t always the most inviting for either party. As more things are revealed throughout the evening, there is a looming sense that a significant secret will be exposed, but the most compelling parts of SEE YOU THEN are not the explosive moments, but rather the quiet breaths when things are left unsaid. SEE YOU THEN is a cathartic showcase of unresolved emotions, buoyed by strong dialogue and heartbreaking performances from the leads. (2021, 74 min, DCP Digital) [Cody Corrall]
---
Available to stream beginning Wednesday through Tuesday, October 5. More info here.
---
Getting Familiar: Gay Shorts Program
Sunday, 6:30pm
To know someone deeply—particularly at the level necessary to sustain a romantic relationship—is to suspend many of one’s inhibitions. Partners must be willing to open themselves up, embrace their vulnerabilities, and be receptive to one another’s needs. As the shorts in this program remind us, the greatest intimacy is more than mere physical closeness. This is gradually learned by the two men in Christian Jacob Ramon’s aptly named HARD (2021, 11 min, Digital Projection); a double entendre, the title primarily refers to what one of the men has trouble getting while in bed with his first-time partner. In lieu of sex, they end up engaging in a warm, meandering conversation, which leads to the realization that the biggest turn-on for them is emotional connection. Ethan Roberts’ stylish, black-and-white GETTING CLOSER (2021, 6 min, Digital Projection) posits dialogue as a path to literal climax, as a couple’s pot-influenced repartee becomes powerful foreplay fuel. Mostly alternating between two camera setups, one for each man, Roberts creates an appealing staccato rhythm that builds to satisfying release. Sometimes it’s the first blush of romance that’s the most tantalizing. In Tavo Ruiz’s pastel-colored EDEN (2021, 15 min, Digital Projection), a young twink wistfully recounts falling for his best male friend; this sensuous, elliptical film suggests both the pleasures and limits of desiring. Rejecting the allure of the ripe Edenic apple, Jake Kolton’s BRUISED FRUIT TASTES SWEETER (2020, 10 min, Digital Projection) locates value in weathered produce—namely, a couple whose rocky relationship is rejuvenated by a minor accident on the road. It’s no CRASH, but it is a tersely macabre reminder that we sometimes need to be jolted out of our doldrums to see ourselves (and each other) anew. Miguel Melo’s VALIENTE (2020, 8 min, Digital Projection) is also concerned with bodily revelations, as a man trepidatiously prepares to reveal his HIV diagnosis to his partner. The program’s three remaining shorts consider hook-up culture, spanning the promiscuous days of pre-Internet cruising to the surreal terrain of virtual connections. In Dave Quantic’s STEPHEN & JAMES: BEST GIRLFRIENDS (2021, 4 min, Digital Projection), an adaptation of a podcast interview, the titular men narrate their halcyon days in '90s New York City; their escapades range from backroom dalliances to surprising, donut-themed threesomes. With palpable frustration and earnestly, hopelessly foolish optimism, Cam Owen’s IN[APP]LICABLE (2020, 11 min, Digital Projection) takes a cockeyed look at the digital meat market that is the modern dating app. Finally, in Sasha Argirov’s PERSONALS (2021, 12 min, Digital Projection), a neurotic young man ends up at a glory hole after answering a Craigslist ad, only to discover that sex is not what he or his solicitor most craves. Unfolding in hushed tones that are alternately unsettling, funny, and melancholic, the film uses a simple setup—two figures on either side of an opaque tarp—to highlight our tendency to deny ourselves the closeness we so desperately seek. [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
---
Available to stream beginning Wednesday through Tuesday, October 5. More info here.
---
Intensities (Shorts Program)
Sunday, 8:30 PM
More than a means of scaring our socks off, the horror genre is particularly powerful at illuminating the anxieties we often bury deep within ourselves. In ways both eerie and darkly humorous, the shorts in this program utilize conventions of the genre to examine everything from oppressive families to the unknowability of romantic partners. In Sam McConnell’s THE HUNTER (2020, 14 min, Digital Projection), a shy man in mid-80s New York City gets thrown for a loop when his date, a black performance artist named Rose, pulls a revolver on their cab driver for no apparent reason. What ensues is a disarmingly tender, hard-nosed conversation about claiming agency in a world hostile to your identity. The film’s two leads are exceptional, as is THE LIGHTHOUSE cinematographer Jarin Blaschke’s nocturnal lensing. Unlike THE HUNTER, there’s no productive bonding or consciousness-raising taking place in C.J. Arellano’s sardonic GRIFFICA (2021, 11 min, Digital Projection). The only mode of thought depicted here is deranged speculation, as a diffident man starts to believe his new, too-perfect boyfriend is a literal demon trying to harvest his brain. With its increasingly feverish, unreliable first-person narration, the film shrewdly points up both the absurdity and real emotional weight of the distorted images we often create of others. Another, less dangerous obsession is the focus of Hayley Bensmiller’s FEMME FOLLE (2020, 15 min, Digital Projection), about a young woman who becomes enamored of an enigmatic female photographer, only to be confronted with her own feelings of inadequacy. Personal vulnerability carries over to the protagonist of Safi Jafri’s 75 CENTS (2021, 9 min, Digital Projection), who’s struggling to escape the shadow of his estranged, homophobic family. Parents take on especially monstrous appearances in the program’s final two films, Mark J. Parker’s FAMILY HISTORY (2020, 16 min, Digital Projection) and Derek August Elliott’s MEMENTO MORI (2020, 15 min, Digital Projection). In the former, a man nervously brings home his boyfriend to meet his conservative father; all the while, the specter of his mysteriously deceased mother looms as a supernatural threat. The death of the maternal superego is also the subject of the latter film, which sees variously LGBTQ family members waiting with bated breath for their bigoted, abusive matriarch to croak. Awash in garish pinks, yellows, and pearls, it’s a knowingly grotesque, deadpan vignette that thumbs its nose at the heteronormativity of the nuclear family while lamenting the damage it often leaves in its wake. [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
---
Available to stream beginning Wednesday through Tuesday, October 5. More info here.
---
Thomas Wilson-White’s THE GREENHOUSE (Australia)
Monday, 7:15pm
Like Christophe Honoré’s ON A MAGICAL NIGHT (2019) but in a more serious register, THE GREENHOUSE employs a time-traveling premise to consider how we perceive intimate relationships at different stages of our lives. The heroine, Beth, is a twenty-something single woman who’s never left the small town where she was raised. She and her siblings were social outcasts growing up, since they were raised by two mothers and their community didn’t look kindly on same-sex couples. But while Beth’s family was ostracized in public, they were often blissfully happy at home, cherishing each other’s company and emotional support. Writer-director Thomas Wilson-White reveals this backstory gradually, focusing instead on a reunion of the siblings in adulthood (all of whom, save Beth, have moved away from home) on the occasion of one mother’s 60th birthday. The celebration prompts Beth to reflect on her life thus far; so too does the unexpected return of her true love from childhood, the proverbial one who got away. As if these events weren’t enough to make Beth look to the past, one night she finds that entering the family greenhouse grants her the power to go literally back in time. Beth quickly grows obsessed with spying on her childhood, becoming increasingly nostalgic for bygone times; eventually, however, she realizes she has to learn to live in the present. Wilson-White makes the most of his low budget by keeping the action almost entirely on the family estate, which he makes into different locations based on when in time Beth visits them. He also works well with his ensemble cast, generating sympathy for every character, not just the heroine. One recognizes early on why Beth is so attached to her family—they come across as lovely, idiosyncratic people. Because Wilson-White doesn’t show any scenes of homophobic bullying, Beth’s trauma and emotional stagnation never seem as vivid as her compassion or longing, and as a result, the dramatic stakes feel relatively low. Yet THE GREENHOUSE makes up for any shortcomings through its warmth and earnest philosophizing. (2021, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
---
Available to stream beginning Thursday through Wednesday, October 6. More info here.
---
T.J. Parsell’s INVISIBLE: GAY WOMEN IN SOUTHERN MUSIC (US/Documentary)
Wednesday, 7pm
If ever there was a case to be made against allowing Ken Burns to be the premier chronicler of the American Experience, it’s T.J. Parsell’s look at the dark underbelly of the Nashville music industry, INVISIBLE: GAY WOMEN IN SOUTHERN MUSIC. Just as Burns erased the lesbian singer/songwriters from his facile documentary series Country Music, so too did the country music establishment disappear the careers of gifted lesbian performers, many of whom made their living writing songs for other people to perform. For example, Bonnie Baker was always more comfortable writing megahits for other singers, like Reba McEntire and Hunter Hayes, because it was safer than performing them herself; coming to terms with the physical and psychological abuse she suffered growing up in a deeply religious family, as well as her own shame about her lesbianism, was many years delayed. Kye Fleming, a member of the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, was not out and proud; that simply was not done in the 1970s and ’80s. The biggest waste of potential was Dianne Davidson, a singer/songwriter with a miraculous voice and presence who quit the music business at the tender age of 21 because she was unwilling and unable to hide her sexual identity. It is dizzying how many untold stories Parsell delves into, and, as such, the film has a tendency to wander. But once Parsell reaches the story of Chely Wright, a pretty Nashville creation who was named Top New Female Vocalist at the 1995 Academy of Country Music Awards, the film clicks into high gear. On the edge of suicide, Wright decided instead to come out on NBC’s The Today Show and in People magazine in 2010; the attacks on her by the all-powerful country music radio stations ended her career. INVISIBLE honors both the pain and the triumphs of the women (and one trans man) who may not have cracked country music’s homophobic barrier, but who made a large dent in its thinning armor by working outside the mainstream of its rigid code of conduct. (2021, 107 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
---
Global Trans Stories (Shorts Program)
Thursday, 8:45pm
These four short films showcase the complexities of gender transition around the world, while also showing that we still have shared experiences even across different cultures. Tsuyoshi Shoji’s THE FISH WITH ONE SLEEVE (2021, 34 min, Digital Projection) is a clear visual standout, even with it being filmed on a smartphone with a scaled-down COVID-19 crew. Based on a poem by Yumi Fuzuki, the short utilizes the setting of a boutiquey fish store to explore themes of a young woman’s isolating transition and her journey to confront her past. Arantza Ibarra Basañez’s harrowing documentary EKAI (2021, 20 min, Digital Projection) shines a light on a young trans man’s suicide—bolstered by the painful and tenuous process of getting prescribed gender affirming hormones—and where we go from here. A student of Asghar Farhadi, Mahtab Pishghadam’s OUR PAIN (2021, 9 min, Digital Projection) depicts the violence and tension between a trans man and his unsupportive father as he and his partner try to seek asylum and get gender affirming surgery. DUSTIN (2021, 20 min, Digital Projection), the first short film from French DJ Naïla Guiguet, starts as a drug and sex-filled club outing among trans and queer friends. But when they step out of the club and into another environment, the film morphs into a thorny but honest conversation about misgendering, desire, and chasing the fundamental desire of being seen. [Cody Corrall]
📽️ HOLLYWOOD ON HOLLYWOOD:
PRESENTED BY MUBI
The Music Box Theatre and the online streaming platform MUBI present a series of movies about movies, most of which are screening on celluloid. Reviews of most films below. Also showing is Frank Oz’s 1999 film BOWFINGER (97 min, 35mm). Check Venue website for showtimes.
Vincente Minnelli's THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL (US)
Friday, 2pm; Sunday, 1:45pm; and Monday, 4pm
Though justly celebrated for his musicals, Vincente Minnelli also directed some of the most powerful American melodramas of the 1950s. THE COBWEB (1955), LUST FOR LIFE (1956), and SOME CAME RUNNING (1958) combine Minnelli's genius for composition and decor with a no-less-perceptive understanding of neuroses and emotional vulnerability. Douglas Sirk may be more widely admired now for this kind of thing (probably because his Brechtian critical distance makes him appealing to academics), but Minnelli's melodramas command respect with their sympathy, intelligence, and maturity. THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL is remarkably precise in its depiction of Hollywood power dynamics; the film cuts through movie-industry mythopoeia while displaying none of the cynicism or disingenuous outrage of Billy Wilder's contemporaneous SUNSET BLVD (1950). Like the Wilder film, it's told in flashback, charting the rise of cutthroat producer Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas) through the testimonies of three people he wronged on his way to the top: director Fred Amiel (Barry Sullivan), actress Georgia Lorrison (Lana Turner), and novelist-turned-screenwriter James Lee Bartlow (Dick Powell). Shields' story is a composite of legends about such luminaries as Val Lewton (in one passage, Shields ideates a new approach to the horror genre that's basically what Lewton did on CAT PEOPLE), David O. Selznick (whom Shields most closely resembles when he stakes his reputation on a costly Civil War epic), and Orson Welles (not coincidentally, THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL was produced by John Houseman, a one-time Welles associate), and the movie is particularly fun for classic Hollywood buffs, who usually have a good time identifying which famous personality inspired which part of the story. Yet the film is more than two hours of inside baseball; it's an incisive account of how collaborative art-making can be fueled and undone by individual egos. Charles Schnee—whose illustrious screenwriting career includes RED RIVER and THEY LIVE BY NIGHT—won an Oscar for the script, which provides Minnelli with myriad psychological insights to elucidate through fine points of performance and camera movement. Befitting a movie about Hollywood's golden age, THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL is rife with gorgeous tracking and crane shots, and the cast (which features a memorable supporting turn by Gloria Grahame, who also won an Oscar) is uniformly magnetic. (1952, 118 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
---
Robert Townsend's HOLLYWOOD SHUFFLE (US)
Friday, 7pm; Saturday, 2pm; and Tuesday, 5pm
In Public Enemy's 1990 song "Burn Hollywood Burn," guest rapper Big Daddy Kane says "So let's make our own movies like Spike Lee/Cause the roles being offered don't strike me." Three years earlier, Robert Townsend had written, directed, starred in, produced, funded with his credit cards, and shot on scraps of unused film from other shoots—a model for following Kane’s modest proposal. Essentially a series of sketches tied together by a slim plot about a struggling black actor, the film is fueled by equal parts hilarity and the righteous anger of a skilled actor and comedian whose job prospects seemed limited to playing drug-dealing thugs or servants. The skits, structured as Townsend’s daydreams as he attends endless humiliating auditions and works a dead-end job, are the main attraction; they attack the long history (and present, and future) of Hollywood’s mistreatment of black actors, and if a MANDINGO reference might go over the heads of younger audiences, much of the film hits as hard today as it did when it was released. (1987, 78 min, 35mm) [Michael W. Phillips, Jr.]
---
Robert Zemeckis' WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT (US)
Saturday, 4:30pm; Sunday, 6:45pm; Monday, 9:45pm; and Thursday, 4pm
It's been a long, long time since we've seen a blockbuster as singular as WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT. The second-highest grossing film of 1988, the subject of endless critical hosannas, the recipient of a special Academy Award for its wondrous animation—all for a coarse, allusion-heavy valentine to bygone studio cartoons. (If you haven't seen it since you were a kid, marvel at the unapologetic alcoholism, the prostate jokes, the tragic flaccidity of Baby Herman—and how it all flew over your head once upon a time.) It's a big-budget movie created for people who'd otherwise congregate in basements and watch 16mm MERRIE MELODIES prints and bemoan the a.a.p. replacement titles. For animation buffs, ROGER RABBIT is a very specific act of revisionary nostalgia—recalling a moment from the late '40s, before budget cuts and the influential mid-century modern contours of United Productions of America pushed the cartoon studios toward simpler backdrops, sparser character work, jankier movement, and stricter formulas. The imagined legacy of cartoon superstar Roger Rabbit ransacks the violent antics of Warner Bros, the z-axis freedom of the Fleischer Studios, the wanton, buxom carnality of Tex Avery's RED HOT RIDING HOOD—and animation buffs salivated at the prospect of Donald sharing a frame with Daffy Duck, Droopy and Betty Boop inhabiting the same material universe. (For kids, of course, this forbidden co-mingling represented not an epic act of intellectual property horsetrading, but a run-of-the-mill Saturday morning lineup.) But this would all be trivia if ROGER RABBIT wasn't suffused with a yearning for an alternative history of postwar Los Angeles. For '80s Angelenos, the throw-away line about the city having the best public transit system in the world surely inspired chuckles, albeit the dread-of-recognition kind, with visions of the 405 looming after the show's end. With more remove, we can appreciate the longing for a different kind of urbanism, distinct from the discredited, freeway-lovin' theory of urban renewal. (The beleaguered toons in ROGER RABBIT effectively stand in for the soon-to-be-displaced working class denizens of neighborhoods like Bunker Hill.) And it's all wrapped up within a noir framework that suggests the conspiratorial designs of a non-racist James Ellroy, or perhaps a less self-serious Robert Towne. Watch CHINATOWN again fresh after ROGER RABBIT and tell me which movie really leans toward the cartoonish in its costume design, set decoration, and overall atmospherics. (1988, 104 min, DCP Digital) [K.A. Westphal]
---
E. Elias Merhige’s SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE (US)
Saturday, 9:30pm; Sunday, 4:30pm; Tuesday, 7pm; and Wednesday, 4pm
SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE boldly puts forth the question, What if the most iconic monsters of classic horror cinema were real? The film presents itself as a true, historical look at the making of F.W. Murnau’s silent classic NOSFERATU, but supposes that the lead actor, Max Schreck (Willem Defoe) is actually a bloodthirsty creature. Murnau (played by John Malkovich) is hellbent on creating a masterpiece built not on cinematic artifice but on authenticity; if this means risking his cast and crew’s life by keeping them in the dark about Schreck’s true nature, so be it. The others believe that Schreck is simply a devoted student of Stanislavski, completely committed to his character—so committed that he only appears at night and snatches bats out of the sky for a quick snack. Of course, the consequences of Murnau’s obsession and his pact with Schreck are dire. SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE boasts an impressive supporting cast including Cary Elwes, Udo Kier, Catherine McCormack, and Eddie Izzard, who's especially funny re-creating the exaggerated performance of NOSFERATU actor Gustav von Wangenheim. More than anything, it’s a pure delight watching Malkovich and Defoe try to top each other’s bizarre—yet fitting—acting choices. The tone of the film is frenzied, moving continually from comedy to horror and back to historical drama. Despite these constantly clashing aspects, the film succeeds from its opening moments with a stunning Expressionist-inspired credit sequence to the horrifying final scene, which has long stuck with me as one of the most unsettling movie endings I’ve seen. (2000, 92 min, 35 mm) [Megan Fariello]
---
David Lynch’s MULHOLLAND DRIVE (US)
Wednesday and Thursday, 7pm
Part mind-bending mystery, part hair-raising thriller, part tear-jerking break-up soapfest, David Lynch’s MULHOLLAND DRIVE evokes an aura of nocturnal wonder and dread, a realm caught between the parameters of waking life and dreams, achingly poignant in its emotional core, absolutely hypnotizing in it’s formal ambiance, and sometimes-frustratingly labyrinthine in its thorny construction. Addressing the cult of personality that is David Lynch’s public persona, it’s hard to look past the hovering cloud that is his semi-comical presence as a cult figure. His fan base certainly gives the impression that Lynch has been, and will always be, the only director who can tap into the idea of dreamworlds and existential cinematic strangeness. Even though this is severely not the case, it isn’t enough to diminish an artist who frequently operates at the height of his powers behind the camera. MULHOLLAND DRIVE contains many elements of his previous work and re-contextualizes them into a concise, epic investigation into the landscape of a shifting personality, that moves with the weight of a person waking and falling into a series of dreams, contrasted with possible realities imagined and lived in. Naomi Watts plays “Betty,” who comes to Hollywood hoping to achieve stardom as an actress in the movies. She catches the attention of a young director played by Justin Theroux, who has been told by a shady, ultra-powerful group (led by Twin Peaks’ “The Arm”) to cast a different actress in his movie. This actress, first glimpsed being driven along the spiraling and ink-black road of the film’s title, suffers a near-assassination attempt, and is left an amnesiac. When she wakes, she believes her name is “Rita”, eventually running into “Betty,” where together they try to solve the mystery regarding “Rita” and her true identity, falling into a romantic obsession in the process. Over the course of the movie, the characters’ identities begin to shift, leading to possible alternate realities in the film’s story and timeline, where Lynch plays with the illusion of the cinema as a false construction that occasionally evokes deep emotional responses from those witnessing it. This idea is fleshed out in the “Silencio” scene, where the two women stumble upon a nightclub with a singer, Rebecca Del Rio, performing a Spanish version of a famous Roy Orbison song. As she sings, the two women begin to cry uncontrollably at the performance, which is eventually revealed to be false, as the singer isn’t even singing and the music is pre-recorded. When the music stops, so does the singer, as she collapses on stage and is dragged off. Lynch pulls a cinematic magic trick on his viewers, engulfing them in the emotions of these two women, who are witnessing something that is a construct and not real, while simultaneously being emotionally swept up in its power and beauty, crying to an illusion that is revealed to be false. One of the most powerful scenes of the last several decades, the rest of the film is a testament to a director operating at peak levels of his matured artistry. Twin Peaks: The Return has much in common with this bewitching work, even in its production history. MULHOLLAND DRIVE started originally as a TV pilot, later to become a series, but never actually materialized into one, so it was changed to a feature film, while Twin Peaks: The Return is a television show that feels more like a long movie in the spirit of Jacques Rivette (who once remarked that the feature film TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME, very much the origin to MULHOLLAND, left the French filmmaker “floating” when he left the theater). Much like his recent work with Peaks, characters tend to appear and vanish without trace, while identities twist and morph into sometimes wholly different characters. Like the devastating, yet cathartic ending of his recent 18-hour masterwork, digging deeper into an obsessive mystery can sometimes bring you further and further from the reality of what it is you began searching for in the first place. (2001, 147 min, 35mm) [John Dickson]
---
Featuring a pre-show musical set and post-film Q&A with singer/songwriter Rebekah Del Rio, who appears in the film. There will also be an autograph session.
📽️ MORE PHYSICAL SCREENINGS
Music Box Theatre
Check Venue website for all showtimes
Michael Mann’s THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS (US)
Chicago Film Society at the Music Box Theatre – Monday, 7pm
Nowhere else in his filmography is Michael Mann’s debt to Howard Hawks clearer than in THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. As with Hawks, Mann's protagonists are men who have struggled, who have sacrificed much, to gain an expertise pretended to by many. Here, we have this protagonist in a most rarefied form: the central character, Natty ‘Hawkeye’ Bumppo, is a preternaturally capable man surrounded by fools and incompetents who alternately scorn his advice and depend on his skills for their very lives. He can exist as a hero only because he stands apart from the colonizers, but he can be heroic only to the extent that he remains within their shadow, their domain. It’s no coincidence that Mann’s second-order adaptation of the 1936 film of James Fenimore Cooper’s atrocious novel of 1826 opened in the year of the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas. Indeed, it is difficult to avoid thinking of the film as taking foundational myths of American identity to task. Daniel Day-Lewis’s inhabitation of the frontiersman Bumppo lopes and stalks through a deeply articulated space, fierce and wild nature rotting from an incursion, an infection spreading from Europe of advanced weaponry and accompanying genocide in the name of civilization. It is a commanding, impossible performance, one perhaps only an actor of Day-Lewis’s caliber could pull off, for he must be at once the emotional, romantic heart of the film and also an icon of the horrors that Mann is marshalling his considerable powers to condemn. Where Cooper’s Hawkeye is presented as the noble, honorable white man who deserves America, Mann and Day-Lewis give us a Hawkeye inflected through the Black Hawk War, through the Arikawa War, through the Creek Alabama Uprising, through the Chickamauga Wars, through the Indian Removal Act of 1830. In short, they turn Hawkeye into a race traitor, a man who both cannot deny and cannot abide the power his skin has given him in the all-too-manifest destiny of white supremacy. Mann plays a delicate game: his film both valorizes European colonialism and shows white society as inherently deceitful, treacherous, indefensible. In THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS, we are given a corrupt mythology, a darkling legend of blood and filth and misery accompanying the gory birth of a nation—ours. (1992, 112 min, 35mm) [Kian Bergstrom]
---
Josef von Sternberg's MOROCCO (US)
Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am
Every generation has its own Sternberg. Though he's never been unfashionable exactly, the Sternberg cultists are ignited by the thrill of discovery and a sense of total ownership. The attachment is intense and inscrutably private—a mirror of the emotional space mapped out over and over again in the Sternberg films. Of course archivist James Card would take it upon himself to save THE DOCKS OF NEW YORK—and take almost equal pride in the fact that Sternberg's film was misunderstood by Iris Barry and ignored by the Museum of Modern Art. (In Card's world, they didn't deserve it anyway.) For the first generation of American auteurists, Sternberg represented a oasis of personal poetry in a sea of glassily glossy Hollywood fare convalescing on late nite TV—a posture that provoked critic William K. Everson to complain that "[m]ore and more attention is being paid to the 'rediscovered' classics of the '30s, and I think I shall go berserk if one more film magazine discovers von Sternberg, and does an 'in depth' piece on him ... [O]ne can only assume that the current re-discovers are in their 20s, and, bowled over with youthful exuberance, presume that 'their' discoveries of the values of Sternberg, Sturges, et al. are being made now for the first time." Pauline Kael was aghast when Andrew Sarris decreed SHANGHAI EXPRESS a misunderstood, stealthy serious film in a monograph published by (irony of ironies) the Museum of Modern Art. (Kael contended that SHANGHAI EXPRESS had been correctly understood as slick trash in its day.) BLONDE VENUS, the only Sternberg-Dietrich vehicle dismissed as an outright misfire by the auteurists in the '70s, became an academically respectable text in the whirl of early '90s cinema studies—an essential intersection of motherhood, melodrama, and bestiality. Sternberg's final film, THE SAGA OF ANATAHAN has never received a home video release, but its cinephile (and Cine-File) reputation only grows. Perhaps it will take a generation or two to restore MOROCCO to the top tier of the Sternberg canon. To look upon MOROCCO today, one cannot help but be astonished by its queerness, sexually and narratively. That this movie—with a proudly androgynous Dietrich flouncing around in a tuxedo, the whole thing unfolding with the debilitating slowness of Hou Hsiao-hsien or Tsai Ming-liang—was one of the very most popular attractions of 1930 challenges our received image of the past. It's also notable as one of the few 'exotic' Hollywood productions that doesn't rest upon a fulcrum of embarrassing colonialist triumphalism. (Sternberg isn't much interested in the real Morocco or its citizens, but he didn't seek out the authentic America in BLONDE VENUS, either. Every landscape may as well be rendered in canvas and paper mache—a dream that Sternberg didn't completely achieve until ANATAHAN.) MOROCCO would look modern and forward-leaning in any era. Today it still points the way to something else, just over the sands. (1930, 92 min, 35mm) [K.A. Westphal]
---
Sion Sono’s PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND (US/Japan)
Friday, 9:30pm and Saturday, 11:30pm
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]
---
Also showing at the Music Box Theatre are Betsy West and Julie Cohen’s 2021 documentary MY NAME IS PAULI MURRAY (91 min, DCP Digital), which starts this week, and Bill Benz's 2021 film THE NOWHERE INN (92 min, DCP Digital), starring St. Vincent and Carrie Brownstein. Check Venue website for all showtimes and the Music Box Garden Series line-up.
Gene Siskel Film Center
Check Venue website for all showtimes
Andreas Fontana’s AZOR (Argentina/France/Switzerland)
Mariano Llinás cowrote the script for the political thriller AZOR, and fans of this groundbreaking Argentine filmmaker will quickly recognize his touch when they watch it. Like Llinás’ first three features as director—the documentary BALNEARIOS (2002) and the multipart narrative features EXTRAORDINARY STORIES (2008) and LA FLOR (2018)—AZOR is divided into chapters, and it boasts a digressive, anecdote-filled structure as well. Numerous critics have compared the film to books by John Le Carré and Graham Greene, probably because it considers the minutiae of international political intrigue, and Melissa Anderson, writing about AZOR for the website 4Columns, invoked Joan Didion’s 1983 essay collection Salvador, as it confronts one of the dirty wars of the 1970s and ‘80s. (Personally, I was reminded of Don DeLillo’s novel The Names in that the film also dramatizes the displacement felt by a privileged man conducting shady business in a faraway country.) But no matter what books you see in AZOR, there’s no debating its literary pedigree; the film invites you to burrow into it as you do with literature. Because of this hermetic quality, it isn’t immediately apparent that AZOR is going to be about widespread atrocity, but that works in the movie’s favor—the horror sneaks up on you. Set in 1980, the plot centers on Yvan, a prominent Swiss banker who goes to Argentina in search of a partner who’s recently disappeared. Yvan and his wife spend much time among the high society of Buenos Aires, gradually learning about Argentina’s horrific political situation from subtle hints they pick up from the milieu. Andreas Fontana—a Swiss-born, Argentine-based director making his feature debut—favors tight medium shots that give little impression of the world outside the frame, and it’s an appropriate aesthetic choice, given how little Yvan knows about that world. The deadpan style recalls Llinás’ directorial efforts, but AZOR is no shaggy dog story like the ones Llinás is so fond of telling. When Yvan learns the truth about the Argentine government’s violent crackdown on political enemies—and the role played by so-called neutral Switzerland in financing that oppression—the film’s meandering stops dead in its tracks. The effect is supremely unnerving. (2021, 100 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
---
Edward Sedgwick’s THE FIRST DEGREE (US/Silent)
Wednesday, 7pm
Recovery of a presumed-lost silent film is always a cause for celebration. More than a few of these films have ridiculous stories and static cinematic technique, but silent film fans put up with these limitations for the love of the form. How much sweeter it is to rediscover a film that not only bristles with drama and suspense, but also features evocative lighting, set-pieces, and attention to detail—all packaged in a brisk running time. THE FIRST DEGREE, a rural melodrama made under the aegis of Universal Pictures and Carl Laemmle Sr., is just such a silent film. Director Edward Sedgwick, whose portfolio includes mainly westerns and comedies, elicits strong performances from his entire cast, but especially from Frank Mayo as Sam Purdy, the main protagonist whose Job-like misfortunes are caused by his jealous, unscrupulous half-brother, Will (Philo McCullough). From the moment Purdy steps into the room where his town’s grand jury is meeting, we, like the jury members themselves, are transfixed by his confession of murder and the recollections of the events that led up to that foul deed. Sedgwick builds suspense as he toggles between Purdy’s tortured confession and flashback scenes, but it is the murder scene that really reveals the interesting choices Sedgwick and cinematographer Benjamin H. Kline made. Purdy is sitting in his farmhouse, alone with his collie. The fireplace illuminates the sparsely furnished room as a lonely Purdy clings to his nuzzling dog. Purdy shuts the dog in the kitchen when there is a knock at the door. It’s Will, and a cat-and-mouse game ensues between the men that ends in a dramatic fight to the death. After Purdy disposes of Will’s body, he returns to his home and sits in the lone chair that wasn’t destroyed in the fight. Light streams through some slats—an effective nod to German Expressionist technique—while an electric chair is superimposed in the space next to Purdy’s head. Throughout the scene, Sedgwick repeatedly cuts to Purdy’s frantic dog trying to get to its master, ginning up the excitement of the entire scene. According to Chicago Film Archives, which discovered the film among its holdings during the work slowdown brought on by the pandemic, Universal films have the poorest survival rate of all the Hollywood studios because the studio destroyed all of its silent film negatives in 1948. We are fortunate to have this remnant from a great era of filmmaking back in circulation. (1923, 65 min, Digital Projection) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
---
Tom Gunning, professor emeritus of art history, cinema, and media studies for the University of Chicago, will introduce the film. The Chicago-based band Quasar Wut-Wut will perform the score they were commissioned to write for the film by Chicago Film Archives.
---
Beth Levinson and Jerry Risius' STORM LAKE (US/Documentary)
Storm Lake, Iowa, population 11,269. Storm Lake has all the fixings of a small rural city: mom and pop shops, a Pork Queen (with diapered pig on display), corn as far as the eye can see, and, most important of all, a dedicated and dependable newspaper. The film STORM LAKE shows us what life looks like for the Cullen family as they juggle the Storm Lake Times, a biweekly newspaper that has proven to be a cornerstone of the community. Many of us (myself included) are guilty of opening Facebook or Twitter to get our daily dose of news, of relying on sound bites and misleading headlines to inform us without really digging into a piece. In the '90s, editor Art Cullen left this type of journalism behind, saying, “I was sick of working for corporate newspapers… without a soul.” He returned to his hometown where his brother John had founded a newspaper, and it quickly became a family affair. If a family member is not currently working for the paper, they most likely were at one point or another. One theme stands out in STORM LAKE, and the Cullen family exemplifies it: community. The Storm Lake Times has a strong structure where family members can readily support one another. Art can lean on his wife Dolores and son Tom, who can lean on John, and so on and so forth. This type of symbiotic relationship is seen multiple times in the film, not just at the Storm Lake Times, but throughout the town. Whitney Robinson, the Sales and Circulation Manager at the Storm Lake Times, is shown trying to sell advertising space to the local mom and pop shops. “I think it looks good for a newspaper to have all the ads from downtown in there, then you can see that all the businesses also support you,” she says. “I mean how else do you make a small community survive?” Tom Cullen interviews Tom Lane, a local man running for city council after having saved his trailer park from being shut down. Lane now spends his time keeping the trailers up to code and distributing food to members of his community. STORM LAKE is a perfect example of the importance of community and how we can not only support one another, but also keep each other honest—something the Storm Lake Times has never backed down from. (2021, 85 mins, DCP Digital) [Drew Van Weelden]
---
Director Beth Levinson and subject Art Cullen will be in attendance for a post-show Q&A after the screening on Friday at 5:30pm, and a panel discussion with local journalists will take place after the screening on Monday at 6pm.
---
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s WIFE OF A SPY (Japan)
Kiyoshi Kurosawa loves to play around with genre conventions, a practice he adopted from American filmmakers like Robert Aldrich, Don Siegel, and Clint Eastwood. As Kurosawa explained in an interview with Shimon Tanaka, Eastwood's movies in particular showed him that a director is “able to work within a genre and then stretch the definition of that genre in a new direction—to, in effect, destroy the very genre they started with and create almost a new category of film.” In that same interview, Kurosawa identified what he felt was a shortcoming in a lot of American movies: characters are usually represented too simplistically. But directors like Aldrich, Siegel, and Eastwood, “have a particular knack for injecting meaning into the space between scenes. In other words, a character may do something in one scene and then when you see them in the next scene, you don’t know what’s happened in the interim—what decisions they’ve made, for instance—that space gives you the element of mystery that creates a fuller character.” With his first period film, WIFE OF A SPY, Kurosawa seems to dial into this idea whole hog, with characters’ relationships to one another shifting into increasingly confusing puzzles. This narrative choice is not unfamiliar to the spy genre, and yet, this has to be one of the most enigmatic spy films of the last 20 years, carrying heaps of ambiguity that would've made Ben Hecht and Howard Hawks, circa THE BIG SLEEP, blush profusely. Co-written with filmmaker Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (ASAKO I & II, DRIVE MY CAR), WIFE OF A SPY starts in 1940, around the time Japan was entering the Second World War after signing the Tripartite Pact along with Italy and Germany. Yūsaku (Issey Takahashi) runs an import-export business in Kobe; one day upon entering his office, military police burst in to question him about his involvement with a British silk trader who's been arrested on charges of espionage. Because of the merchant's preference for Western clothing and goods, the head officer warns Yūsaku that they will be keeping a close eye on him. Additionally, this officer reveals himself to be a childhood friend of Yūsaku's wife, Satoko (Yū Aoi). Yūsaku also makes amateur films with his cousin; his latest, starring Satoko, is about a jewelry heist. He journeys to Manchuria to shoot additional scenes for his heist film—or so he claims. As Satoko patiently awaits her husband's return, she discovers that while he has been in Manchuria, he has kept close company with a strange woman. This woman is later found dead, and soon other perplexing events mount, leading Satoko to suspect that her husband might be a spy for the United States. As it turns out, Yūsaku documented footage on his trip to Manchuria of biological experiments being performed on humans. (Japan's seizure of Manchuria was accomplished as the result of a false-flag operation carried out by top Japanese military brass and a far right-wing ultranationalist group called the Black Dragon Society; these groups detonated an explosion on a Japanese railway, then blamed it on Chinese dissidents as pretext for the invasion of Manchuria in 1931, where they proceeded to establish the puppet-state of Manchukuo.) From here, WIFE OF A SPY carefully plays with our understanding of these characters’ inner machinations, slowly escalating the tension and becoming one of Kurosawa’s more suspenseful films in recent memory. This is not to suggest (contrary to the popular opinion as expressed by the world's more humdrum critics) that Kurosawa has been slouching over the last several years. Though not in the mold of his earlier ghost films, JOURNEY TO THE SHORE (2015) was a devastating emotional experience; CREEPY (2016), DAGUERROTYPE (also 2016) and his alien-invasion-diptych (BEFORE WE VANISH and FOREBODING, both 2017) were more than formidable experiments in the thriller, gothic romance, and sci-fi genres, respectively; and TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH (2019) was a fascinating comic re-working of Kurosawa's own SEVENTH CODE (2013). The director continues to push his art forward, and WIFE OF A SPY finds him spinning a vast web out of traditional spy movie elements. It's not for nothing that Kurosawa includes a quick glimpse of Sadao Yamanaka’s PRIEST OF DARKNESS (1936), a dazzling film and one of the first great examples of a filmmaker playing with artifice and genre. (Yamanaka died tragically in 1938, after he was drafted into the Japanese Imperial Army and sent to Manchuria.) Kurosawa deftly shifts between concealing and revealing, in small moments, what his movie may really be about, much in the way his characters bury and expose the truth from one another. Kurosawa has so much to say—and such a complex story to tell—that his ambition threatens to run the movie aground, yet he manages to keep the suspense climbing, a show of accomplished filmmaking from one of modern cinema’s most tireless pioneers. (2021, 115 min, DCP Digital) [John Dickson]
---
Also showing at the Gene Siskel Film Center are Federico Fellini’s 1972 film ROMA (120 min, DCP Digital) on Saturday at 3pm and Tuesday at 6:30pm, and three films as part of the 7th Annual Irish American Movie Hooley. Check here for all showtimes and more information about the films.
Facets Cinémathèque
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 the 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]
Rooftop Cinema @ 2124 W. Lawrence
Chicago Film Society at Rooftop Cinema (2124 W. Lawrence) – Friday and Saturday, 8pm
Allen Fong’s AH YING (Hong Kong)
Director Allen Fong barely gets talked about today (at least not in this country), but in the 1980s, he was considered one of the leading lights of the Hong Kong New Wave along with Ann Hui and Tsui Hark. AH YING was Fong’s second theatrical feature as well as the second for which he won the Best Director prize at the Hong Kong Film Awards; more than a critical success in its native country, the film was also a minor art house sensation abroad. It may seem a little surprising today that AH YING was so popular, given how low-key it is, but then again, it comes from an era when art house audiences were making hits out of stuff like LOCAL HERO (1983) and MAN FACING SOUTHEAST (1986), “small” movies made big by a winning attitude, regional color, and a subtly sophisticated sense of cinematic form. AH YING is at once guileless and self-reflexive, telling the story of how Hui So-Ying, a young actress playing herself, pursued her career in acting to escape the drudgery of her working-class life. She first hits on the idea of becoming an actress when she gets a part-time administrative job at the Hong Kong Film Culture Center, an institution that offers affordable screenings and filmmaking classes, much like Chicago Filmmakers. Like many a nonprofit organization, the HKFCC doesn’t have the money to pay its employees, so the center lets Ah Ying take free classes in exchange for her labor. (Fong reveals that Ah Ying won’t get paid with a knowing affection that’s sure to induce smiles of recognition in anyone who’s ever worked at a nonprofit.) The heroine falls in love with movies, partly through learning how to act in them and partly through the influence of a cinephilic teacher from the Chinese Mainland (Peter Wang, who also co-wrote the script). Fong presents the filmmaking classes no differently than he presents the fish market that Ah Ying’s family owns and operates; like Hui’s later masterpiece A SIMPLE LIFE (2011), the movie asks us to regard cinema as no bigger or smaller than life itself. This ground-level view of the seventh art has a bit in common with Kiarostami’s films, and like Kiarostami, Fong often creates the illusion that he’s assembling the film effortlessly from scraps of real life. (1983, 111 min, 16mm) [Ben Sachs]
---
Tickets cost $20 cash, which includes a drink.
Comfort Film at Comfort Station
Comfort Station (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave. – Outdoor Screening) – Wednesday, 7pm [Free Admission]
Solidarity Cinema presents Lizzie Borden’s WORKING GIRLS (US)
“John’s here!” “Which one?” This exchange in Lizzie Borden’s WORKING GIRLS—the writer-director’s third feature, made a few years after her seminal BORN IN FLAMES—encapsulates both its wry humor and distinct perspective on the oldest profession. The working girls in question, responsible, among many other tasks, for manning the phones and facilitating guest relations, announce each visitor as they arrive. In this scenario, a man called John comes in, his generic name, a euphemism for others of his kind, made into a joke that’s at once perceptive and perverse, thus abbreviating the film’s viewpoint on sex work. Having come to fruition after Borden spent time interviewing sex workers (some of whom had worked on BORN IN FLAMES), the film centers on Molly (Louise Smith), a well-educated photographer who, it’s shown at the beginning, is in a lesbian relationship; from the get-go, our conception of sex workers is challenged, Borden providing us images against which later images, of a supposedly heterosexual woman enjoying paid sex with strange men, should be compared. Molly works at an elegantly decorated apartment-style brothel centrally located in Manhattan where this day-in-the-life simulacrum largely takes place. She and several other girls—including Gina (Marusia Zach), Dawn (Amanda Goodwin), and April (Janne Peters)—are employed by a madam named Lucy (Ellen McElduff), a former sex worker who’s promoted herself to middle management. The plot oscillates between sessions, with Molly and whichever client has selected her, a motley crew of men who run the gamut from lonely to outright creepy, and in-between moments during which the girls commune in the “living” room, discussing all sorts of topics. The women, and even some of the men, are fascinating, but at times it feels like, in the best possible way, a piece of performance art (not necessarily a play, but something akin to it, meant to act as a microcosm of a macro economy), or, perhaps more disparagingly, an exhibit at a zoo, a way for us outsiders to gawk at people—some may say animals—whose environments, it would seem, are different than ours. The film’s bemused detachment accounts for its subversiveness; its dispassion manifests in a sort of candor that mimics the intent of the film, which is to show that sex work is, in fact, a job, one that its workers drudge through like the rest of us white-collar schleps. Borden once remarked in an interview with CinemaScope: “[T]he greatest compliment I ever got for WORKING GIRLS was when some guy said to me afterwards, ‘I had a boss just like that.’ It really is about capitalism.” Borden also pointed out that Molly’s eventual desire to leave the profession, brought on by Lucy’s insistence that she work a double shift, isn’t just because of sexual exploitation, but due to labor exploitation as well. The film was distributed by Miramax; per Borden, Harvey Weinstein had wanted to market it as an “erotic comedy.” Like the aforementioned joke, this contention epitomizes the film’s dichotomy. What the ‘Johns’ might think is a singular, erotic experience—a lark, not unlike those in a sexy comedy—is, in actuality, just one of many for the working girls. (1986, 90 min, Digital Projection) [Kathleen Sachs]
Asian Pop-Up Cinema
Check program website for more information
King Hu’s DRAGON INN (Taiwan)
ChiTown Movies Drive-In (2343 S. Throop St.) – Tuesday, 8:30pm
After the popular success of his second feature, COME DRINK WITH ME, King Hu left Hong Kong and the Shaw Brothers studio, went to Taiwan, and directed an even bigger wuxia hit, DRAGON INN. The film has much in common with its predecessor: as in DRINK, the action is largely confined to a lodge and tavern, the drama concerns the life-and-death struggle between authoritarian forces and rebel fighters, the tone moves confidently between rousing comedy and nail-biting suspense, and a strong (and decidedly not sexualized) female fighter figures prominently among the heroes. Formally speaking, DRAGON INN is even more accomplished than DRINK. One could argue that it was with this film that Hu fully realized his potential as a master of the widescreen frame. No matter whether the shot is long or close, the viewer feels overwhelmed with a sense of spectacle; Hu sets action against sweeping mountain ranges, employs crafty low-angle shots to make interior spaces seem cavernous, and lines the playing space with players. The montage is no less impressive. Hu is widely credited with introducing western-style editing to Asian cinema, and DRAGON INN showcases this style at its finest. You get sucked into the action, the cutting communicating a rhythm so subtle that it’s barely noticeable. (The more ostentatious editing effects—like the shock cuts that punctuate certain action sequences—are plenty satisfying too.) These formal strategies wouldn’t be worth scrutinizing, however, if DRAGON INN weren’t one of the most entertaining films of all time. Even before the action takes off, Hu gets you rooting for the good guys and jeering the baddies, setting up the characters and their rivalries with an expert knack for building tension. The story is fairly simple: Sometime during the Ming dynasty, a wicked warlord sends troops to the remote title outpost to assassinate the exiled grown children of his political opponent, whom we see executed at the start of the film. But unbeknownst to the warlord, a goodhearted martial arts expert, Xiao, is already at the inn, ready to protect the targets. (It also turns out that the targets are pretty adept at defending themselves.) Once all the characters are in place, DRAGON INN becomes a martial arts extravaganza; the second half of the film is defined by almost constant fighting, all of it beautifully choreographed and impossible to look away from. (1967, 111 min, Digital Projection) [Ben Sachs]
---
There are five other in-person Asian Pop-Up Cinema screenings this week: Seo Eun-young’s 2020 South Korean drama GO BACK (98 min, Digital Projection) at the Korean Cultural Center of Chicago (9930 Capitol Dr., Wheeling) on Friday at 11am; Jia Zhangke’s 2020 documentary SWIMMING OUT TILL THE SEA TURNS BLUE (112 min, Digital Projection) at the Illinois Institute of Technology (10 W. 35th St.) on Saturday at 2pm; the world premiere of Shum Shek Yin’s 2021 Hong Kong film THE DISHWASHER SQUAD (100 min, Digital Projection) at the ChiTown Movies drive-in (2343 S. Throop St.) on Monday at 8:30pm; Erica Li’s 2021 Hong Kong romance JUST 1 DAY (97 min, Digital Projection) at the ChiTown Movies drive-in on Wednesday at 7pm; and Kan Eguchi’s 2021 Japanese film THE FABLE: THE KILLER WHO DOESN'T KILL (131 min, Digital Projection) at AMC River East (322 E. Illinois St.) on Thursday at 7pm. Asian Pop-Up Cinema also offers a variety of films to stream on their website. More info and tickets available here.
Doc Films at the University of Chicago – Reopening This Week!
Check venue website for more information
Quentin Tarantino’s PULP FICTION (US) and Steven Soderbergh’s OCEAN’S 11 (US)
Thursday, 7 and 9:30pm
Doc Films is back with two stalwarts of repertory film exhibition, both screening on 35mm.
Jennifer Boles’ THE REVERSAL (US/Experimental)
The limestone wall of the McCormick Bridgehouse and River Museum on the Chicago Riverwalk – Thursday, 6:30pm
Per the event description: “Completed in 1900, the reversal of the Chicago River is a landmark in the history of civil engineering. It is a story of industry, labor, ecology, and power. Drawing on thousands of archival photographs depicting every phase of the project, filmmaker Jennifer Boles exposes the harsh conditions and human costs of this monumental undertaking. THE REVERSAL offers a visually and sonically potent evocation of Chicago life at the turn of the 20th century, while tracing the violent forces of capital and influence that shaped the landscape we inhabit today. For this special outdoor audiovisual installation, THE REVERSAL will play on a loop on the limestone wall of the McCormick Bridgehouse and River Museum on the Chicago Riverwalk.” Listen to an interview with Boles on our podcast here. (2020, 11 min)
ICYMI (In Case You Missed It) at The Davis Theater
The Davis Theater (4614 N. Lincoln Ave.) – Monday, 7pm
Quentin Dupieux’s MANDIBLES (France)
As part of his new series, ICYMI (In Case You Missed It), Joe Swanberg presents this 2020 film from French director Quentin Dupieux. “Independent films released in 2020 and 2021 have faced an even more difficult uphill battle than usual,” Swangberg writes. “ICYMI is a series of modern classics that were released during the pandemic and that I think deserve some extra attention and profile because they are great!” Also per the event description, MANDIBLES is about “two simple-minded friends [who] find a giant fly stuck in the trunk of a car and decide to capitalize on their luck by training it to perform… This absolutely hilarious and surprising film from Quentin Dupieux is a crowd-pleaser that features some of the most memorable sequences in modern comedy, as well as lovable and winning performances from the lead actors and BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR's Adele Exarchopoulos in a supporting role.” More info and tickets available here. (2020, 77 min, Digital Projection)
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Held Over/Still Screening/Return Engagements (Selected)
Pablo Larraín’s EMA (Chile
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
EMA is an immersive aesthetic experience in the vein of certain films by Jean-Luc Godard, Wong Kar-wai, or Claire Denis, where to watch it is to get swept up in a swirl of ideas, formal devices, movement, and music. The movie raises provocative questions about love, art, and sexual politics, but you may find it difficult to reckon with them until after it’s over. Pablo Larraín creates the impression that the film is discovering its identity as it goes along, that it’s capable of changing its shape on a whim. You don’t watch it so much as chase after it. EMA is a classical work in that the form mirrors the content: the title character (played by Mariana Di Girolamo in a larger-than-life performance) spends the film in an existential free-fall, and Larraín’s unpredictable filmmaking feels driven by her unpredictable behavior. The film begins with a spectacular passage that introduces the contemporary dance troupe Ema belongs to before it introduces her character fully. Larraín interweaves dance and bits of drama brilliantly, cutting between different kinds of camera movement and multiple choreographed routines. Nicolas Jaar’s electronic score is constant for almost the first 15 minutes; as it does later on in EMA, it guides the flow of the action, making it seem trancelike. Only after the music stops does Larraín reveal the cause of Ema’s unrest: she and her choreographer husband (Gael García Bernal) recently changed their mind about raising an adopted boy after he set fire to their apartment. Ema still loves the boy despite having rejected him; her obsession baffles her husband, and their marriage quickly breaks down along with their creative partnership. Ema responds to the chaos in her life through dance, setting things on fire, and sex, lots of sex, seducing every principal character and is shown making love to them all in a ravishing montage that manages to top the one at the start of the film. Larraín’s depictions of sex are at once frank and highly aestheticized; they also give way to allegorical readings. Is Ema’s sexual quest selfish or is it, like Terrence Stamp’s in Pasolini’s TEOREMA, some magical process by which she radically transforms everyone around her? Could it be both? (2019, 107 min) [Ben Sachs]
Videos by Renée Green (US/Experimental)
Available through Thursday as part of the Conversations at the Edge series via the Gene Siskel Film Center here
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), 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) expands upon these questions by considering the legacies of the Korean War and the South Korean government’s violent crackdown on protests 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), 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]
---
Green will also deliver a virtual lecture about her work on Monday at 6pm. Register for the event here.
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Also Screening/Streaming
⚫ Black World Cinema
bwcTV.tv, a program of Black World Cinema curated by Floyd Webb and Imani Davis, presents a free online screening of Robert Kramer’s 1970 thriller ICE (91 min) on Sunday at 3pm. A VIP guest will introduce the screening, and a discussion and Q&A session will follow it. More info here.
⚫ 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 Tora Mårtens’ 2016 Swedish film MARTHA & NIKI (90 min). More info here.
⚫ Facets Cinémathèque
Jeanette Nordahl’s 2020 Danish film WILDLAND (88 min) is available to rent through October 21. More info here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
Ruthy Pribar’s 2020 Israeli film ASIA (85 min) and Aneil Karia’s 2020 British film SURGE (105 min) are available to rent beginning this week. Check here for hold-over titles and the Music Box Garden Series line-up.
CINE-LIST: September 24 - September 30, 2021
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, Cody Corrall, John Dickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Drew Van Weelden, K.A. Westphal