We will highlight physical screenings at the top of the list for theaters and venues that have reopened, newly regrouped in our standard Crucial Viewing and Also Recommended sections, as well as all other physical screenings, 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.
👁️THE CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
The 57th Annual Chicago International Film Festival continues through Sunday. Below are select reviews for films whose physical screenings are taking place through then. There are several locations for the physical portion of this year’s festival: AMC River East 21, Music Box Theatre, Gene Siskel Film Center, Pilsen ChiTown Movies (the drive-in venue), and the Parkway Ballroom. We will indicate venue as well as date and time with each review. Furthermore, there’s a virtual aspect to the festival; information about a film’s virtual availability will be noted where applicable. In this list and the next, films still screening virtually will be listed below the physical screenings. More info on the festival here.
Pablo Larraín’s SPENCER (UK/Germany)
AMC River East 21 – Friday, 8 pm
After her husband gifts her a stunning piece of jewelry, which she knows he also gave to his mistress, Diana laments, “It’s not the pearls’ fault, is it?” SPENCER is in many ways a film about clothing, its personal and symbolic significance, how it’s used to stand out or to hide. A film about Princess Diana focusing on her wardrobe may seem frivolous, but fashion is tension. SPENCER takes her relationship to clothing seriously, and thus challenges the audience’s perception of her as a fashion icon. Director Pablo Larraín knows how to turn that tension into compelling storytelling about real life figures—his 2016 film JACKIE does the same. SPENCER shines a light on the costuming in such a way that it moves beyond the mise-en-scène; costume designer Jacqueline Durran does an amazing job transforming relatively tame early 90s fashions into disruptive, disobedient garments. Clothing is more than ornamental: for Diana it’s equal parts terror and rebellion. SPENCER follows Diana (a dizzyingly powerful Kristen Stewart) as she visits the Queen’s Sandringham Estate over Christmas during the final, unhappy days of her marriage. The film presents the estate as a haunted house, highlighted by Jonny Greenwood’s intense string score. Diana is spied upon by the staff and disturbed by the past, though generally ignored by the family. In some ways, it feels more closely aligned with female-led dramatic horrors like THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE or THE INNOCENTS than a traditional biopic, especially in regards to women’s mental states and actions constantly being questioned. But the film is also grounded in its portrayal of Diana as a woman desperate to get out of an unbearably tragic situation. This is due in no small part to Stewart’s compassionate performance. SPENCER opens with the words, “A fable from a true tragedy.” Stewart convincingly portrays Diana as a woman who’s endured these hardships for a long time—and will continue to—but with brief, shining moments of relief, defiance, and joy. So many of these revolve around the seemingly simple idea that she can make her own choices—like what she wears. (2021, 116 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
---
More info here.
---
Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes’ THE TSUGUA DIARIES (Portugal)
AMC River East 21 – Friday, 8:30pm
THE TSUGUA DIARIES is a thoughtful examination of pandemic lockdown: its repetitiveness and disruptions, the ways in which we keep ourselves preoccupied, and, perhaps most significantly, how we react to and make the best of an ever-changing situation. The film follows three friends (Crista Alfaiate, Carloto Cotta, and João Nunes Monteiro) as they while away the month of August. They work on house projects, play with animals, argue and flirt, and sometimes just laze about doing nothing whatsoever. THE TSUGUA DIARIES, however, presents the narrative in reverse order, starting with day 22 and moving to day one; the result is that married co-directors Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes create a self-aware and very personal cinematic experience, where fiction gradually bleeds into reality to illuminate the filmmaking process during the pandemic. As the film progresses, the curtain is pulled back to reveal a fully metatextual, at times humorous, contemplation on creativity. Gorgeously shot in 16mm, the film emphasizes the verdant colors of nature, blurring indoor and outdoor spaces. It also adds to the haziness of the summer-set film in which both the characters and audience are perplexed by unclear circumstances: the former dealing with the effects of the pandemic in real-time and the latter watching events both fictional and about the film itself unfold out of order. The backwards chronology is not just a gimmick in THE TSUGUA DIARIES, but an exploration of improvisation and a celebration of the resourcefulness and ingenuity of filmmaking at even the strangest of times. (2021, 102 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
---
More info here.
---
Asghar Farhadi’s A HERO (Iran)
AMC River East 21 – Friday, 8:15pm
With such films as ABOUT ELLY (2009), A SEPARATION (2011), and THE SALESMAN (2016), Asghar Farhadi established himself as a master of intricate, morally complex social dramas. Concerned with how seemingly small actions can carry wide-reaching social, economic, and political implications—particularly within and across the stringent societal dictates of Iran—he has cultivated a taut, character-driven style that builds both suspense and intellectual frisson out of snowballing ethical quagmires. After the relative disappointment of his Spanish-language EVERYBODY KNOWS (2018), Farhadi returns to his bailiwick with A HERO. Amir Jadidi plays Rahim, a sign painter in debtor’s prison for failing to pay back a loan to his aggrieved creditor, Bahram (Mohsen Tanabandeh). During a short leave, Rahim comes into possession of what could be his ticket out of jail: a handbag containing 17 gold coins, found by his girlfriend at a bus stop. However, when this turns out to not be worth enough, he decides to return the bag to its owner. For his allegedly altruistic deed, Rahim is hailed as a hero by the media, given a certificate of merit from a prisoners’ charity, and offered a job in the city council. What we see that these groups don’t is that Rahim’s publicized story of civic goodness is not as he claims. Gradually, his relatively minor misrepresentations branch out into a latticework of face-saving lies and ethical predicaments in which nearly everyone, from the prison warden to the leader of the charity, becomes complicit. A HERO continues to prove Farhadi’s adeptness at navigating a sprawling cast of three-dimensional characters with divergent backgrounds and vantages, whose personal stakes he parcels out with a rigor befitting a procedural thriller. He doesn’t make value judgments on their decisions, as there’s always another unexpected wrinkle to complicate the situation, always another (and then another) detail to problematize our sympathies. The RASHOMON-esque perspectives of his dense script are further compounded by the presence of social media, a timely device Farhadi uses to comment on the propagation of fraudulent narratives by opportunistic actors. A HERO may not be as grand as A SEPARATION or have as engrossing a central performance as THE SALESMAN, but it’s just as effective at getting us to look beyond judgment-minded systems and their reductive logics to acknowledge the fallible, multifaceted humanity of which we’re all part. (2021, 127 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
---
More info here.
---
Margaret Byrne’s ANY GIVEN DAY (US/Documentary)
AMC River East 21 – Saturday, Noon
For me, the most difficult part about having a mental illness is not the low periods themselves, but the anticipation of them when things are generally going well. At some point it becomes a learned anxiety, dreading the inevitable downturns that follow weeks, months, and even years of relative contentment. This is compacted by such factors as addiction and socioeconomic misfortune; I’ve been privileged not to experience these things, but many people with mental illnesses unfortunately do. With her 2016 documentary RAISING BERTIE (produced by Kartemquin Films), Margaret Byrne distinguished herself as a likely successor to KTQ’s own Steve James in how she interacted with and subsequently documented a marginalized community; with her second feature-length documentary, ANY GIVEN DAY, Byrne solidifies that connection. She comes into her own as a non-fiction filmmaker adept at blending the stuff of documentary with distinctly personal elements, which uplift the content above just facts. But the facts are harrowing: Byrne focuses on three people, all of whom had recently been in jail because of crimes committed in the throes of their respective mental illnesses. Each subject also participated in a voluntary two-year probation program through mental health court that provides a treatment plan in lieu of typical penalties, one of the last vestiges of state-funded assistance after Mayor Rahm Emanuel unceremoniously closed half the city’s mental health clinics in 2012. Two of the subjects are Black: Angela has several children, including a few younger kids who had been removed from her custody upon her arrest; and Daniel has long-term struggles with substance abuse in addition to mental illness. The Bulgarian-American Dimitar, who’s white, endures intense, schizoid-like episodes and contends with other vices. The film follows the subjects toward the end of the program and afterwards, showing with remarkable compassion the journey, rife with setbacks, of those suffering from mental illness. Byrne herself has had to fight similar demons and includes references to her own breakdowns and hospitalizations, one of which occurred while she was making the film. Her use of graphics to mimic the text messages she exchanged with the participants, about details of their lives and her own, aids in probing the dark crevices of mental illness and the shame and secrecy that often surround it. Also included are scenes of the participants at what might be considered some of their darkest depths; Byrne and her subjects, who generously allowed her to include this footage, don’t shy away from the aspects of mental illness that go overlooked either in abject ignorance or overcompensating acknowledgement. Filmed over the course of several years, Byrne’s film shines a light on issues related to the experience of mental illness, including our flawed justice system; lack of treatment, community support, and stable housing; and the intersection of these issues with substance abuse. The film also implicitly advocates for treatment over incarceration. I wish I could say that the film has a happy ending, but, even though it’s subjectively positive, there still lingers a sense of melancholy that’s part and parcel of our dire social landscape. It’s difficult to say, on any given day, how a person existing with these illnesses may feel. Let’s just hope that, at some point, our system stops mirroring that volatility and becomes a source of stability instead. Director Margaret Byrne in person. (2021, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Kathleen Sachs]
---
Also available to stream for the duration of the festival in the following states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, and Wisconsin. More info here.
---
Ryusuke Hamguchi’s DRIVE MY CAR (Japan)
AMC River East 21 – Saturday, 1pm
How do we deal with misfortunes that arrive when we least expect them? In DRIVE MY CAR, the characters channel their emotions (or lack thereof) into their art, their tools, and their environments. The film follows Yūsuke Kafuku, a theatre director who is known for putting on multilingual productions, a concept you could spend hours discussing. For a large portion of the film, we find him traveling in his car, listening to a cassette recording of his wife reading lines for Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in preparation for a production he's going to put on. The film takes on these various layers (it's a cinematic lasagna, if you will), filled with references, different languages, and emotions that are both explosively expressed and shamefully hidden. This comes as no surprise, given that the film is an adaptation of a short story by Haruki Murakami, whose work is also filled with references and taboo eroticism. Hamaguchi delivers a nuanced film that should only get better with each viewing, as details and subtleties are weaved into things said or left unsaid. This makes sense—Kafuku’s multilingual production raises some interesting questions on the ways we can approach communication. Despite a language barrier, or an unwillingness to say something out loud, intentions and feelings can still seep through with a knowing glance or shy shift of the body. Often, the audience and maybe one or two characters might know the truth of the scenario, but Hamaguchi places us in an awkward position, knowing right next to the main cast. It’s hard to say what's the right way to deal with these scenarios, but delaying the inevitable impact of your feelings will only do you harm in the long run. (2021, 179 min) [Drew Van Weelden]
---
More info here.
---
Mahamet-Saleh Haroun’s LINGUI, THE SACRED BONDS (Chad/France/Germany/Belgium)
AMC River East 21 – Saturday, 5:15pm
With the welcome expansion of film offerings from Africa, CIFF has made a wealth of previously unexplored areas of world cinema available to filmgoers in Chicago. Among them is the first film from Chad that I have ever seen, LINGUI, THE SACRED BONDS, from that country’s first feature filmmaker, Mahamet-Salah Haroun. Haroun lives in France and studied film in Paris, but most of his 16 shorts, documentaries, and feature films are set in Africa. His latest, LINGUI (the Chadian Arabic word for “sacred bonds”), is set in Haroun’s hometown of N’Djamena, Chad’s capital and largest city. He opens the film by showing someone cutting ribbons of steel from truck and car tires and weaving them into pedestal baskets for sale as portable barbecues. The industrious worker at the center of this activity and the film is Amina (Achouackh Abakar Souleymane) an observant Muslim who is an outcast from her family and most of society because she had a child, Maria (Rihane Khalil Alio), out of wedlock. Amina and Maria live a barebones lifestyle in the dusty city, but they seem content enough until Maria is kicked out of school for becoming pregnant. Unwilling to live as her mother has been forced to, Maria is determined to have an abortion. The rest of the film revolves around Amina’s efforts to help her daughter terminate her pregnancy. It’s fascinating to see the Chadian landscape and the city streets jam-packed with motorcycles. Haroun effortlessly weaves the various strands of Chadian culture together like one of Amina’s baskets—spoken French from colonial times mixed with creole Chadian Arabic, Islam as the major religion, indigenous rituals that put one young girl in the film in danger of being circumcised, and the dominant belief in the superiority of men. What is clear in this film, economically scripted by its director, is that the sacred bonds forged between women form an almost invisible support system—a lifeline that women all over the world will recognize. (2021, 87 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
---
More info here.
---
Hong Sang-soo's IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE (South Korea)
AMC River East 21 – Saturday, 6pm
It is currently October 14, 2021, as I write this, and we are a little over a year and a half into the COVID-19 pandemic. While many of us are just starting to find a semblance of normalcy, what is South Korean director Hong Sang-soo busy with? Rolling out his second feature film of the year, of course. Hong's work ethic is certainly one to aspire to, and his need to create always proves fruitful. IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE is a minimalist film, like much of Hong's work, but that doesn't mean the film lacks complexity or substance. To those unfamiliar with Hong’s oeuvre, it may appear that there isn't a lot going on in this film. It focuses on a former actress’s visit to her native country of South Korea, and unfolds mainly in two major parts. In the first, the actress visits with her sister to catch up; in the second, she meets with a director who is interested in casting her in a project. It sounds simple enough, but there's in fact a lot at play here. Hong's strength as a filmmaker lies in his ability to elevate everyday occurrences—for example, spilling soup on your pink blouse. This type of sequence could easily occur in any number of films; perhaps a giant, heaping pot of chili gets dumped on a person's chest or someone feels the horror of a stain before the first date. Where Hong excels is in bringing gravity to mundanity, finding a certain joy in the everyday, even in a goofy accident like spilt soup. If there is one blessing I gained from the pandemic, it’s the reminder to appreciate these immensely graceful mundanities, because once the world starts spinning again it will be hard to stop it. (2021, 85 minutes, DCP Digital) [Drew Van Weelden]
---
More info here.
---
Alexandre Koberidze’s WHAT DO WE SEE WHEN WE LOOK AT THE SKY (Georgia)
AMC River East 21 – Sunday, 12:30pm
Pharmacist Lisa and footballer Giorgi bump into each other one ordinary day in the ancient city of Kutaisi, Georgia. The two are instantly smitten, and after another encounter that night, they arrange to meet the next day at a café. Unfortunately, a curse befalls the would-be lovers, and by morning, their faces have changed, making them unrecognizable to one another. This is the fairytale-like premise of WHAT DO WE SEE WHEN WE LOOK AT THE SKY?, but it soon becomes obvious that any conventions of narrative are but pretext for the film’s wandering explorations of Kutaisi, its inhabitants, and the language of cinema itself. Like the football bobbing down the Rioni River at the film’s midsection, Alexandre Koberidze’s sophomore feature floats along languidly, its indulgent runtime set to the rhythms of the quotidian. Koberidze lackadaisically drops in and out of his protagonists’ lives, in no hurry to resolve what would charitably be called their “storyline,” following ambling digressions whenever he sees fit. Often he abandons his fictional narrative entirely to observe the sights and sounds of the city, from the exuberant play of schoolchildren to sidewalks, trees, football-loving stray dogs, and the hands and feet of pedestrians, captured in abstracted closeups Bresson would adore. Meanwhile, World Cup fever is gripping the city, drawing everyone’s attention like some collective dream. The other collective dream here is the cinema, alluded to in a meta-textual subplot about a filmmaker and reinforced by Koberidze’s playful, self-aware manipulations of form, including oblique compositions, zooms and dissolves, and a direct address asking spectators to participate in the film’s illusion by closing their eyes at a specific moment. Much of his aesthetic also harkens back to the era of silent film, with narration (provided by Koberidze himself), a lush, twinkling score (by his brother), and intertitles largely replacing spoken dialogue. Taken with the film’s quasi-magical realist story, the effect is simultaneously meditative, estranging, and bewitching. At a few points, Koberidze’s narrator makes intimations about the violence and other ills plaguing the modern world, and wonders if we’re all focusing on the wrong things. WHAT DO WE SEE… suggests we could do a lot worse than look to cinema and its potential to refocus us. (2021, 150 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
---
More info here.
---
Dominik Graf’s FABIAN: GOING TO THE DOGS (Germany)
AMC River East 21 – Saturday, 4:45pm
Respected in Europe since the 1980s for sophisticated genre pictures like THE CAT (1988) and THE INVINCIBLES (1994), Dominik Graf gained attention in the United States only in the 2010s, with the release of his somewhat uncharacteristic historical drama BELOVED SISTERS (2014). FABIAN: GOING TO THE DOGS is also concerned with history—namely, the end of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Adolf Hitler—but its heady, fast-paced montage makes it feel like an action movie. It specifically resembles Michael Mann’s COLLATERAL (2004) in its artful mix of celluloid and digital photography; it also evokes Mann’s PUBLIC ENEMIES (2009) in the way Graf plays up the anachronistic quality of video to defamiliarize the past. (Highlighting the already distinct difference between film and video, Graf shoots the celluloid passages on Super-8.) That the film proceeds as a rush of sensations seems appropriate, as the backdrop is nothing less than the sexual revolution of the Weimar era. FABIAN presents brothels, passionate affairs, infidelity, and general debauchery, all with the same frolicsome enthusiasm; the movie is exhilarating, but also a little exhausting. Based on the only major work for adults by Erich Kästner (author of Emil and the Detectives), it’s a picaresque story about the misadventures of a 30-ish dandy in 1931 Berlin. Jakob Fabian is an amateur poet who by day works half-heartedly for an advertising agency; at night he’s a hard-drinking, sexually adventurous bon vivant. The looming threat of fascism gives the story dark overtones; so too does the tragic subplot in which Cornelia Battenberg, the love of Fabian’s life, moves in with an older film producer (effectively abandoning the hero) to advance her acting career. With its frequent, deftly handled digressions and epic accumulation of detail, the film earns its three-hour running time. Graf is a master storyteller at this point, and he manages to create a number of striking character portraits without losing his sense of historical scope. (2021, 179 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
---
Also available to stream for the duration of the festival in the following states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, and Wisconsin. More info here.
---
Shorts 1: Expanding Sensibilities (City and State)
Available to stream for the duration of the festival in the following states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, and Wisconsin; more info here
This program focuses on talent in Chicago and elsewhere in Illinois. Per the synopsis: “This eclectic showcase highlights the vibrancy of the Chicago and Illinois filmmaking communities across an array of forms and genres.” The first short, WINNING IN AMERICA (2021, 11 minutes) looks at a young girl’s experience participating in a spelling bee. The pressures of the father, who seems to be living through her daughter, are evident as she struggles to balance her own desires with what is expected of her. In CLOSE TIES TO HOME COUNTRY (2021, 15 minutes), a quirky immigrant dog walker sits for some annoying Instagram influencers who are going to vacation in the main character's home country. While the dog's owners are painting hearts on elephant’s foreheads, our lead Akanksha Cruczynski (who also directed) struggles to see her sister again after years apart. SINK (2021, 17 minutes) is a horror short that's shot entirely from above a bathroom sink and concerns how a man’s life quickly spirals out of control after a chance encounter with evil. In a nice switch of tone, MONOCHROMATIC DREAMS (2021, 7 minutes) is a documentary short about the art of Yvette Mayorga; her giant, pink canvases, accompanied by lovely music, make for a pleasant experience. GET WELL SOON (2021, 5 minutes) features a young woman on the phone with her sister after their father falls ill. Without giving too much away, you will leave this one with a therapeutic sense of relief. SPECK OF DUST (2021, 6 minutes) is a poetic exercise that feels steeped in nostalgia and memories. In THE YEAR I WENT LOOKING FOR BIRDS (2021, 10 minutes), Danny Carroll assembles archived footage into a meditation on the limitations of living during a pandemic. Finally, BY THE TIME I REACH HIM (2021, 4 minutes) shows firsthand the struggles of a daughter caring for her father who has progressing Alzheimer's Disease. All of these directors share a similar location, but they also share integrity and honesty. Their vulnerability is vital, and I would expect nothing less from our wonderful region. [Drew Van Weelden]
---
Shorts 2: Shifts and Rifts (Animation)
Available to stream for the duration of the festival in the following states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, and Wisconsin; more info here
In Renee Zhan’s SOFT ANIMALS (2021, 3 min), two former lovers who haven’t seen each other in years meet again by chance. They sniff each other out like feral creatures before their bodies melt into a swirling, undifferentiated sea of oil paint and smeared charcoal lines. This elastic, liberating use of the animated medium to reconfigure bodies and their spaces runs throughout many of the excellent shorts in this year’s animation program. SOFT ANIMALS can also be read as an allegory of COVID-era derealization, something more explicitly tackled in two of the other shorts: Ayce Kartal’s I GOTTA LOOK GOOD FOR THE APOCALYPSE (2021, 4 min) and Alex Cardy, Tali Polichtuk, and Kitty Chrystal’s ARE YOU STILL WATCHING? (2021, 6 min). The former, which juxtaposes rotoscope-painted scenes of isolated pandemic life with the emancipatory space of virtual reality, poignantly captures the longing for connection and release that so many felt during quarantine. The latter film, meanwhile, irreverently diagnoses the psychological state of a queer woman whose endless hours of lockdown binge-watching have resulted in her having erotic fantasies about iconic LGBTQ characters of film and television. Its neon-hued comic book style is echoed and exaggerated in Kristian Mercado’s NUEVO RICO (2021, 16 min), a Latinx cyberpunk fable that mixes folklore, reggaeton music, and futurist Miami Beach aesthetics. Another music-oriented pastiche, Christopher Chan’s stop-motion CHAMPION EDITION (2021, 3 min), draws on hip-hop iconography and uses toy figures. Kim Kang-min’s KKUM (2021, 9 min) employs a more unlikely material, Styrofoam, to tell the Freudian story of a mother whose nightly dreams protect her son from danger. Intimate familial and romantic bonds are the subjects of the program’s remaining three shorts. In Paulina Ziółkowska’s colorful, wistful 3 GENARRATIONS (2021, 8 min), three (soon to be four) generations of women negotiate their roles as mothers, daughters, and wives. Lina Kalcheva’s claymation film OTHER HALF (2021, 13 min) takes place in a Greek myth-inspired land where people are considered complete when they physically merge with their significant others. Finally, Joanna Quinn’s whimsical AFFAIRS OF THE ART (2021, 16 min) centers on a family united by their various eccentric obsessions, from taxidermy to counting the threads on screws. The narrator, a harried British artist and housewife named Beryl, lends the film a drollness matched by the Bill Plympton-esque illustration style. Both in its themes and by its formal example, it’s a tribute to the power of creativity to transform our surroundings—and maybe ourselves. [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
---
Shorts 8: Discursive Proclivities (Experimental)
Available to stream for the duration of the festival in the following states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan,
Minnesota, Missouri, and Wisconsin; more info here
Progressing from the nonrepresentational to the searingly personal, the films in this year’s experimental shorts program showcase a myriad of ways image-making is a socially, culturally, and historically situated practice, albeit one that also has the ability to transcend boundaries of time and space. Kwa’s PANTA RHEI (EVERYTHING IS IN FLUX) (2021, 9 min) is by far the most abstract of the group; a kaleidoscope of undulating, deliquescing blobs and streaks of color, it recalls 1960s psychedelia and the perceptual projects of such experimental filmmakers as Jordan Belson and Stan Brakhage. A different sort of sensory play is in operation in Michael Robinson’s narrative/found-footage hybrid POLYCEPHALY IN D (2021, 23 min). Centered on two men who telepathically communicate their love in the aftermath of a major earthquake, it weaves around them a collage of video games, music videos, film and television clips, memes, sporting events, and nature footage to create an epic supercut that suggests the possibility of some kind of post-humanist evolution from the cultural detritus of our media-consumed world. Wang Yuyan’s ONE THOUSAND AND ONE ATTEMPTS TO BE AN OCEAN (2021, 12 min) employs a similar deluge of found footage to represent the excesses of the world, with a particular emphasis on ecological disaster and the proliferation of viral videos. The soundtrack, which cryptically loops, manipulates, and eventually transmutes the phrase “hurt you tonight,” gives the film a hauntingly incantatory rhythm. Scaling back from such macro visions of the world is Tulapop Saenjaroen’s SQUISH! (2021, 18 min), an idiosyncratic portrait of a female Thai animator who proclaims herself an “unfinished sketch.” Throughout the anarchic and somewhat precious film, she uses her imagination as an act of resistance, refusing to have her work, body, or identity be defined by anyone but herself. Also preoccupied with the body, Allison Chhorn’s supremely moving BLIND BODY (2021, 14 min) profiles the filmmaker’s grandmother, Kim Nay, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge who’s losing her eyesight. Chhorn embodies her perspective through out-of-focus shots that frustrate our desire for clarity; she also links her grandmother’s failing vision with the burgeoning vision of her own infant daughter, conveying national memory as something carried through the body across generations. Sahar al-Sawaf and Thomas Helman’s SHADOW OF PARADISE (2021, 7 min) closes the program with a focus on another national trauma, the Gulf War. Sahar al-Sawaf, who escaped from Iraq with his parents and eventually found refuge in California, juxtaposes George H.W. Bush’s speech announcing Operation Desert Storm with glitching, distorted images of military aircraft and views through bomber cameras. It’s a damning condemnation of US military interventionism that will sadly never lose its timeliness. [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
---
Isidore Bethel and Francis Leplay’s ACTS OF LOVE (US/Documentary)
Available to stream for the duration of the festival in the following states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan,
Minnesota, Missouri, and Wisconsin; more info here
For many people, a breakup may spark a brief period of pain and melancholy, ideally followed by some modest reflection. For deeply introspective, obsessive creative types like Isidore Bethel, a breakup is an occasion to make art—specifically, a self-reflexive essay film that probes the slippery natures of love, communication, intimacy, and modern gay culture. To do this, the Chicago-based Bethel set up a casting call for gay men living in the city; after interviewing them, he chose four to star in a fictional film based on the conversations they had. ACTS OF LOVE documents this process from its inception, beginning with the interviews and proceeding through the scripted encounters, where the protective cover of fiction gives way to candid dialogue and behavior (one subject, unable to hide his desire for Bethel, constantly insists that they both undress). Meanwhile, Bethel also focuses on the interstitial moments in which he, with frequently humorous over-the-phone counsel from his mother, expresses doubt about the direction of the project. Among the many things it’s not shy about addressing, ACTS OF LOVE openly questions its own ethics and intent. Is this just a navel-gazing vanity project assuaging Bethel’s relationship anxieties? Is Bethel exploiting his subjects’ subordinate positions—and horniness—for his own personal and artistic ends? In many ways, it’s hard to say no to some of these questions. Yet ACTS OF LOVE is very much about its own searching, uncertain tack, about the nebulous, even dubious ways relationships can form and mutate, particularly in the digital era. Underneath its more esoteric or academic qualities, the film reflects a common, ongoing process of self-discovery and redefinition. In one of Bethel’s most quietly resonant gestures, he periodically displays montages of mobile phone images sent between him and the ex who served as the catalyst for this film. Bethel fixates on the number of photos: 1,877. By the end of the film, it’s 1,878, and most likely still growing. (2021, 71 min) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
---
Sergei Loznitsa’s BABI YAR. CONTEXT (The Netherlands/Ukraine/Documentary)
Available to stream for the duration of the festival in the following states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, and Wisconsin; more info here
Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa frequently exhumes archival footage to fashion historical narratives that unfold in present tense. BLOCKADE (2006) used bits of newsreels and home movies to revisit Leningrad during the Nazi siege of World War II; more of an impressionist poem than a narrative, the film succeeds in conveying the Soviets’ unworldly reality during the war. THE TRIAL (2018), a shockingly engrossing reconstruction of a 1930s Stalinist show trial, showcased Loznitsa’s brilliant editing skills and keen understanding of totalitarian rhetoric. STATE FUNERAL (2019) found Loznitsa working on an epic scale, incorporating footage of tributes to Stalin from across multiple Communist countries to reflect the epic fiction that was the Stalinist “utopia.” That film ended on a note of grave moral seriousness, with a reminder of how many millions were murdered or starved to death under Stalin’s rule; with BABI YAR. CONTEXT, Loznitsa continues his necessary meditation on the atrocities of the 20th century. The film centers on the Nazis’ slaughter of nearly 34,000 Ukrainian Jews over two days in September 1941, but as the title alerts us, it's also about the culture of Kiev (where the atrocity took place) in the time before, during, and after the tragedy. Loznitsa approaches his subject from multiple angles, but principally in terms of the widespread anti-Semitism that took root in Ukraine in the period leading up to World War II—a key detail in the film is of Ukrainians cheerfully putting up posters around Kiev in support of the anti-Semitic government. Loznitsa incorporates newsreel footage of the round-up of Kiev’s Jews, and these scenes are some of the most harrowing depictions of the Holocaust in cinema. Shot with the Nazis’ full (and, from the looks of it, sickeningly prideful) participation, the footage shows the lead-up to atrocity with almost unbelievable matter-of-factness. This passage occurs about halfway into BABI YAR. CONTEXT; the rest of the movie considers the aftermath of the massacre, with an emphasis on shots of the citizens of Kiev going about their daily business as though everything were normal. Like Romanian director Radu Jude in some of his recent films (THE DEAD NATION, I DO NOT CARE IF WE GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS BARBARIANS), Loznitsa confronts the complicity of some of his countrymen in the Jewish Holocaust of World War II. That’s not an easy project, and BABI YAR. CONTEXT isn’t easy viewing, but it is crucial. (2021, 121 min) [Ben Sachs]
---
Jacob Gentry’s BROADCAST SIGNAL INTRUSION (US)
Available to stream for the duration of the festival in the following states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, and Wisconsin; more info here
In our current digital age, fascination with analog technology abounds, as seen in referential shows like Stranger Things or in the sale of audio cassette tapes at places like Urban Outfitters. I’ve argued elsewhere that this fascination represents both a nostalgic pull and a longing for the physical, both in terms of objects and the community they engendered. While Jacob Gentry’s BROADCAST SIGNAL INTRUSION adds to the contemporary obsession with outdated media technologies, it also explores this intriguing idea about the vacillating of technology as a tool for human connection and as an isolating force. In Chicago in 1999, archivist and AV whiz James (Harry Shum Jr.) stumbles upon on video of a cryptic hacker who interrupted a local television channel in the late 1980s; the film loosely references a real-life Max Headroom signal hijacking that occurred in Chicago in 1987 and for which no one was ever caught. As James digs further into these enigmatic acts of video piracy, he discovers they may be related to a series of disappearances, including his wife’s from years earlier. BROADCAST SIGNAL INTRUSION leans heavily on inspiration from 70s paranoid thrillers; it’s here where the film gets bogged down in a convoluted plot rather than focusing on the compelling psychological horror at its core. It works best when it directly engages with its dark thematic questions about media and communication; the fetishization of technology throughout the film feels compulsive, as James easily utilizes innumerous formats in his quest for answers. Gentry uses a few fascinating techniques to draw the audience into the unnerving use of technology; at moments, characters begin to speak before their mouths can be seen moving, highlighting the ways audio/visual technology can create temporal and spatial disruptions—not just for James, but the viewer as well. Director Jacob Gentry and star Harry Shum Jr. in person. (2021, 104 min) [Megan Fariello]
---
Semih Kaplanoğlu's COMMITMENT HASAN (Turkey)
Available to stream for the duration of the festival in the following states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, and Wisconsin; more info here
Turkish writer-director Semih Kaplanoğlu might be described as a post-Tarkovsky filmmaker in that his work often aspires to a meditative quality through reverential depictions of natural landscapes. COMMITMENT HASAN, the second film in Kaplanoğlu's "Commitment" trilogy, feels less contemplative at first glance than most of his previous movies (or, for that matter, Tarkovsky's), since it forgoes his usual long-take style in favor of shorter shots that maintain the flow of the story and character development. It's still designed for patient audiences—the pacing is relaxed, and most of the substantial revelations don't occur until the final third—but it suggests that the filmmaker is beginning to sublimate his tonal and aesthetic concerns into more accessible pursuits, similar to how his countryman Nuri Bilge Ceylan evolved starting with ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA (2011). As the title suggests, the subject under consideration is commitment, whether it's commitment to one's homestead, family, or faith. Hasan is a middle-aged landowner who grows fruits and vegetables on the 20-acre farm he inherited from his parents. Early in the film, a representative from a power company arrives to propose the construction of a new electrical tower on Hasan's land; the farmer rejects this proposal, but the company man insists that the tower will benefit the surrounding rural community and ominously pledges to return to continue the conversation. Kaplanoğlu seems to be setting up a fable about the eternal battle between tradition and progress, but he gradually reveals that he has something else in mind. As concerns over the electrical tower fade into the background of the story, a sense of Hasan's entire life begins to take shape; Kaplanoğlu considers the character's complicated relationships with his wife and son, his religion (much of the movie considers Hasan and his wife's upcoming pilgrimage to Mecca), and his business associates. Hasan emerges as a complex figure, more like the protagonist of an epic novel than a typical feature film. Noble in some respects but callous in others, Hasan resists simple interpretations, and this reflects the complexity of adulthood and the challenges of living in the world. (2021, 148 min) [Ben Sachs]
---
Gordon Quinn and Leslie Simmer’s FOR THE LEFT HAND (US/Documentary)
Available to stream for the duration of the festival in the following states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, and Wisconsin; more info here
In 1949, at the age of 10, Norman Malone lost the use of his right hand when he and his two brothers were attacked while they slept by their hammer-wielding father, who intended to kill them all. His father died by suicide after the attack, leaving Norman’s brothers severely disabled and Norman’s dream of becoming a pianist seemingly as lost to him as his father. FOR THE LEFT HAND chronicles Norman’s burning desire to continue to make music, his accomplishments as a music teacher at Chicago’s Lincoln Park High School, and his growing concert career made possible by the exposure he got from Chicago Tribune music critic Howard Reich, who told his story in the newspaper in 2015. Director and Kartemquin Films co-founder Gordon Quinn and Reich first teamed up to tell the story of Reich’s mother, a Holocaust survivor suffering from delayed PTSD, in PRISONER OF HER PAST (2010). Now, they and co-director Leslie Simmer have created another moving look at a person who has had to endure trauma and go on with his life. In Malone’s case, his affliction became a quest for piano pieces written for the left hand. So far, he has rediscovered more than 300 such pieces and had a rag composed for him by Reginald Robinson, which we see him perform in the film. He also had a chance to play part of his favorite piece, Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, on the very piano of his hero, Paul Wittgenstein, a pianist who lost his right arm in World War I and commissioned Ravel to compose the piece for him. Reich walks us through the elements of the concerto as the 79-year-old Norman prepares to play it for his first-ever performance with an orchestra. I was struck by a comment of Reich’s, who said he has seen note-perfect performances of the difficult Ravel piece, but that only Malone’s interpretation revealed to him what the concerto means to a person who has lost the use of a hand. These and many other moments from Norman Malone’s full, well-lived life make FOR THE LEFT HAND a treasure. (2021, 74 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
---
Panah Panahi’s HIT THE ROAD (Iran)
Available to stream for the duration of the festival in the following states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, and Wisconsin; more info here
Panah Panahi’s debut as a writer-director bears resemblance to his father Jafar Panahi’s recent feature 3 FACES (2018) in that it’s a seriocomic road movie that considers the difficulties of being a young adult in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The film approaches its concerns obliquely, however, making it an open-ended allegory more in line with certain films by Mohsen Makhmalbaf (THE CYCLIST, THE SILENCE) and Mohammad Rasoulof (IRON ISLAND, THE WHITE MEADOWS). Most of the story follows a family of four on their road trip across a remote, mountainous region of the country. Panahi generates winning humor from the familiar situation of family members trapped with each other’s quirks, and he provides the principal characters with memorable idiosyncrasies. The father, mother, and 20-ish older son each get moments in the dramatic spotlight, but they’re all overshadowed by the family’s six-year-old younger son, a hyperactive brat who goes unpredictably (yet always believably) from being endearing to being obnoxious. Like a lit firecracker, he doesn’t seem to belong inside a moving car—he really ought to be doing sprints up and down the mountains the family keeps passing. The little boy’s liberty stands in sharp contrast to the fate awaiting his older brother, which Panahi starts to intimate around the half-hour mark of HIT THE ROAD, continues to allude to, but never reveals outright. All we ever learn for certain is that the family is delivering him to some group of people—maybe good, maybe bad—in the middle of nowhere. That the character’s future is literally unwritten brings an air of dread to this superficially pleasant movie, and it inspires alarm about whatever hangs in the balance for all of Iran’s young people. Yet in keeping with the poetic tradition of much Iranian art cinema, Panahi buoys the proceedings with plentiful moments of childlike wonder, most vividly in a late sequence that finds father and bratty tyke literally floating through the cosmos. (2021, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
---
Luiz Bolognesi’s THE LAST FOREST (Brazil/Documentary)
Available to stream for the duration of the festival in the following states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, and Wisconsin; more info here
Yanomami leader Davi Kopenawa receives co-writing credit on THE LAST FOREST, a film about his endangered Indigenous culture residing in the Amazon. The presence of director Luiz Bolognesi (EX SHAMAN) is only really felt in the camera itself. Bolognesi avoids fetishizing the Yanomami people or patronizingly explaining their culture. Instead, he interferes as little as possible, relying on the Yanomami to illuminate the viewers in their own unique way, with their own voices and actions. This is particularly felt through Davi’s consistent narration. He tells of his people’s mythology, leading to filmed reenactments of these important stories by the Yanomami themselves. Significant, too, is Davi’s discussion of his relationship to white people and the constant threat they impose on the Yanomami’s way of life. With a new government installed in 2019, a rush of gold prospectors was emboldened to invade their lands, poisoning water sources and bringing disease—something which occurred in the 80s and led to devastation for the Yanomami. Davi’s passionate determination to fend off these invaders, protect his culture, and fight for continual survival is the driving force of THE LAST FOREST; the sweet, detailed focus on the daily life of the women of the Yanomami is its heart. The cinematography is gorgeous, highlighting the lush, colorful beauty of the Amazon and its Indigenous peoples. Perhaps more interesting is the sound design, in which the score blends seamlessly with the noises of the forest and the Yanomami’s voices, drawing the audience even further into this engrossing documentary. (2021, 76 min) [Megan Fariello]
---
Francesco Zippel’s OSCAR MICHEAUX – THE SUPERHERO OF BLACK FILMMAKING (Italy/Documentary)
Available to stream for the duration of the festival in the following states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, and Wisconsin; more info here
An illuminating and accessible survey on Oscar Micheaux—the first Black filmmaker of note, whose lasting influence echoes throughout the sprockets of moving image history—Francesco Zippel’s OSCAR MICHEAUX – THE SUPERHERO OF BLACK FILMMAKING (ill-titled though it may be) provides much-needed insight into the life and artistry of the cinematic great. Where Zippel excels in this straightforward documentary is in letting the artist and his disciples speak for themselves, with little in the way to distract from details of Micheaux’s pioneering brilliance. I laud the filmmakers in their choice of interviewees; there are few overly enthusiastic talking heads (as is now the fashion) and more scholars and artists whose practices connect to the subject. Prominent among them is Chicago’s own Jacqueline Stewart, now chief artistic and programming officer at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and recent recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant. She contextualizes, with grace and good humor, details of Micheaux’s life and the circumstances under which he became one of the most important directors of all time. Stewart herself declares Micheaux to be “the most important Black filmmaker who ever lived,” an assertion confidently elucidated throughout this compact primer. What I love about this biography is that it highlights the ways in which Micheaux was a tenacious visionary whose success (relative at the time but certainly enduring) was due in large part to a perseverance that even the most privileged artists often don't exhibit. The film traverses Micheaux’s life from his birth in Metropolis, Illinois, and later stint in Chicago (where he was a Pullman operator) to his time out west and finally to his creative endeavors as an author and filmmaker. As various interviewees point out, Micheaux embodied the independent/DIY spirit on both fronts, self-publishing his books and selling them door to door, then starting to make films after a producer became interested in adapting his first book but wouldn’t let Micheaux have complete creative control. And thus a legend—or, as the title would suggest, evoking Metropolis’ decision to erect a Superman statue as a way of distinguishing the small midwestern town (as apparently they couldn’t think of anyone else better to represent their legacy)—was born. Other insightful interviewees include Micheaux’s biographer Patrick McGilligan, film historian Richard Peña, and filmmakers John Singleton and Amma Asante, who speak extensively of his influence. Also included are Haskell Wexler, who worked with Micheaux, and Melvin van Peebles; between Singleton and van Peebles, the film also serves as a tribute to recently departed Black luminaries who carried on MIcheaux’s tradition of intransigent filmmaking. There are some animated sequences, which is par for the course in most documentaries nowadays, as well as footage from Micheaux’s films. The latter are artfully curated, highlighting choice elements of Micheaux’s artistic mastery and social significance. I suspect the film will succeed in what should be its greatest aim: enticing audiences previously unfamiliar with Micheaux’s films to seek them out and revel in what they are, what they mean, and how they inspired what came after. (2021, 80 min) [Kathleen Sachs]
---
Jacques Audiard’s PARIS, 13TH DISTRICT (France)
Available to stream for the duration of the festival in the following states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, and Wisconsin; more info here
Though it’s adapted from three works by American cartoonist Adrian Tomine, Jacques Audiard’s generational portrait PARIS, 13TH DISTRICT couldn’t feel more French in terms of its filmmaking. The exacting black-and-white photography frequently recalls Philippe Garrel’s films, while the drift-like narrative structure, which reflects the way the characters float in and out of sexual relationships, resembles those favored by André Téchiné. (The second similarity can’t be coincidental; Céline Sciamma, who cowrote this, also worked on the script of a recent Téchiné feature, BEING 17 [2016].) This isn’t to say that Audiard’s film is derivative; it just falls into a very French tradition of movies that comment or expand on other movies. Audiard marries his creative reference points to his own ongoing concerns—principally, the makeup of contemporary, multicultural France—and in this regard the film plays like a follow-up to A PROPHET (2009) or DHEEPAN (2015). One of the main characters, Camille, is of African descent; another, Émilie, is Chinese. Audiard regards their intense, short-lived affair as a sociologically fascinating, only-in-Paris phenomenon, and the sex scenes manage to be erotic in spite of this. After the two protagonists split up, the plot shifts focus from Camille and Émilie to consider another character who lives in the neighborhood: Nora, a thirty-something woman just entering law school who discovers she resembles a popular webcam sex performer. How Nora’s story intersects with the other characters’ is best experienced without reading about it first; this is the sort of movie where half the fun is watching the puzzle pieces of the script fall into place. Audiard and his cowriters are interested in how the sexual habits of a particular generation reflect their general ideas about love, responsibility, and social engagement—somewhat like what director Mike Nichols and cartoonist-cum-screenwriter Jules Feiffer did in CARNAL KNOWLEDGE (1971), although PARIS, 13TH DISTRICT feels much less tormented by comparison. (2021, 105 min) [Ben Sachs]
---
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY (Japan)
Available to stream for the duration of the festival in the following states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, and Wisconsin; more info here
HAPPY HOUR, the intimate epic that established Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's international reputation, achieves a novelistic density through the uncommonly detailed way it plumbs the emotional lives of its quartet of lead characters. WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY, the first of two 2021 releases by the director (followed by DRIVE MY CAR), resembles a short-story collection in how it depicts three narratively unrelated vignettes that are formally separated by their own chapter headings and credit sequences. Hamaguchi proves to be equally adept at the short-film format as he was with a 5-hour-plus run time: the mini romantic dramas that comprise WHEEL are gratifying to watch as self-contained episodes, but when one contemplates how they might be linked on a thematic level, the entire project attains a profound resonance (it wasn't until the morning after my first viewing that I realized the magnitude of Hamaguchi's deceptively modest approach). The first section, “Magic (Or Something Less Assuring),” begins with an extended Rohmerian dialogue between two female friends, one of whom regales the other about a "magical" date with a man she has fallen in love with, unaware that he is also her friend's ex-lover. It ends with a chance encounter between all three characters, punctuated by a brief but daring fantasy sequence. The title of the second section, "Door Wide Open," refers to a literature professor's policy of avoiding scandal by always keeping his office door open when meeting with students. One day he receives an unexpected visitor, a woman who is attempting to ensnare him in a trap. Or is she? The final section, "Once Again," is the best: two women who haven't seen each other in 20 years meet providentially on a train-station escalator before spending the day together and eventually realizing that neither is whom the other had thought. Hamaguchi himself has said that "coincidence and imagination" are the movie's main themes and, indeed, as the title indicates, each of the stories involves the intersection of the free will of the individual and the fickle nature of fate. But WHEEL is also about the inexorable pull of the past and how the characters' regrets over roads not taken have keenly shaped who they are. This latter aspect is the key to understanding how a film so charming on the surface can also contain such a melancholy undertow and how characters with only a small amount of screen time can seem so fascinatingly complex and believable. Hamaguchi shows the psychological underpinnings of everyday human behavior in a manner rarely seen in the movies. He knows how to pierce your heart. (2021, 121 min) [Michael Glover Smith]
📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING
Andrei Konchalovsky’s SHY PEOPLE (US)
Chicago Film Society at the Music Box Theatre – Monday, 7pm
Andrei Konchalovsky has had an interesting career, to say the least; his credits range from co-writing Tarkovsky’s unimpeachable masterpiece ANDREI ROUBLEV (1966/1971) to directing the highly impeachable Sylvester Stallone-Kurt Russell action movie TANGO & CASH (1989). Somewhere in between those two achievements lies the idiosyncratic drama SHY PEOPLE. Produced by the similarly unaccountable Cannon Films—whose output in the 1980s ranged from exploitation fare like MISSING IN ACTION and BREAKIN’ to art films like Cassavetes’ LOVE STREAMS and Godard’s KING LEAR—SHY PEOPLE meditates on the universal conflict between urban and rural life with beautiful cinematography (by Chris Menges), evocative music (by Tangerine Dream), and a literate script (written in part by Roman Polanski’s regular cowriter Gérard Brach). Jill Clayburgh stars as a New York-based writer for Cosmopolitan Magazine who decides to profile some long-lost cousins living on the Louisiana bayou. After some economical exposition, Clayburgh and her daughter (Martha Plimpton) arrive in the deep South, where they’re met by the locals with a mix of confusion, skepticism, and contempt. Barbara Hershey (who won the Best Actress prize at Cannes for her performance) plays Clayburgh’s Louisiana counterpart, a steely matriarch who refuses to engage with town life and who lords over her grown sons with an iron fist, going so far as to lock one misbehaving offspring in a cage. The widescreen compositions are at once expansive and claustrophobic, communicating wonder and dread in their depiction of the small island where Hershey and her clan live. Anyone who’s seen DELIVERANCE or Walter Hill’s underrated SOUTHERN COMFORT will guess that the family reunion will not end well for the city slickers, and the film encourages such predictions through its relentlessly creepy atmosphere. Yet SHY PEOPLE isn’t about backwater folk terrorizing urbanites, but rather the eternal tension between these two populations—think of it as a very, very tense variation on a Kiarostami film like THE WIND WILL CARRY US. Both the New Yorkers and the bayou family reflect the most provincial attitudes of their respective communities, and in presenting both peoples at their worst, Konchalovsky and company speak to the eternal irreconcilability between them. Preceded by Marjorie Anne Short's 1977 short film KUDZU (16 min, 16mm). (1987, 118 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
Anthony Mann’s THUNDER BAY (US)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) — Saturday, 1pm (Free Admission)
As Jeanine Basinger notes in her book on Anthony Mann, “[w]hat works best in THUNDER BAY is Mann’s mastery of physical space.” It has this in common with King Vidor’s 1949 adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, both of which are interesting (if, in the case of Mann’s film, not exactly good) in spite of their abhorrent subject matter. In the former, that’s Rand’s disturbed obsession with individualism, writ large via Vidor’s exquisite mise-en-scene; in the latter, it’s the notion put forth that the pursuit of oil in the Gulf Coast is more noble than the locals’ devotion to their natural and socioeconomic landscapes. In both, a man looks out onto the vast, unencumbered world and decides that his ego trumps (pun intended) natural order, that his phallic structure must be erected for all to bear witness. Here it even gushes fluid from down below, a veritable consummation of said man’s desire. THUNDER BAY was one of three films that Mann made at the behest of star Jimmy Stewart, with whom he’d made great westerns before and after, and who at that time had a personal interest in oil, having invested in the stuff and partnered with an oilman from Texas. It wasn’t a favorite of Mann’s among his own films; he felt the script was weak but undertook the project anyway because Stewart asked him to. What the resulting effort lacks in the studied psychological complexity of Mann’s best films (whatever the genre) it makes up for in its accidental inquiry into the banal depravity of capitalism. Stewart stars as Steve Martin, an amiably hapless oil prospector who struts into a small Louisiana fishing town and convinces an investor, impressed by his stubborn pursuit of the natural resource, to fund the first offshore oil rig, which he’s designed to withstand unforgiving weather conditions. Along with his colleague Johnny Gambi (Dan Duryea), Martin approaches a local in search of a boat, soon meeting a fisherman’s daughter, Stella (Joanna Dru), who immediately distrusts the wanton outsiders. At first most everyone disagrees with her; eventually, after Steve and his crew begin blasting holes in the floor of the gulf, causing the local fisherman—among them Stella and her sister’s husbands-to-be—to become afraid that they might kill the shrimp that are crucial to the local economy. It’s Martin’s belief that the discovery of oil would help not only him and his investors, but the townspeople as well, with no effect on the environment. These assertions mirror Stewart’s; he hoped that the film would convince audiences that such activities were not ecologically harmful. The rig is built, and the townsfolk rebel against the oil men, against what they’re doing and what they represent. Meanwhile, Stella warms to Martin, though their burgeoning romance is complicated by the contentious goings-on. All this happens in stunning Technicolor, evocative of the regions’ natural beauty and a sprightly, somewhat eerie foil to the propaganda at play. Writing about the film for Turner Classic Movies, Jeremy Arnold notes that, though shot in the standard 1:37:1 aspect ratio, it was “Universal Pictures’ entry into the widescreen format craze of the day… ,” and that “the film’s New York premiere featured the first use of 1:85:1 aspect ratio projection and a new three-speaker stereophonic sound system.” It was even originally planned to have been photographed in 3D. All this befits the subject and showcases Mann’s prodigious ability to shoot on location (including on an actual oil rig), though it also serves to valorize the activity and corresponding attitudes. It comforts this Mann fan to know his heart really wasn’t in it, even if that makes this handsome, rarely screened drama a minor effort in the director’s oeuvre. But like Vidor’s provocative interpretation of a bad object, Mann’s translation of Stewart’s dubious whimsy reveals to us something of its affliction. (1953, 103 min, 35mm) [Kathleen Sachs]
Nobuhiko Obayashi’s LABYRINTH OF CINEMA (Japan)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Check venue website for showtimes
Even after two viewings, I couldn’t tell you the plot of LABYRINTH OF CINEMA on a scene-to-scene level. Quite deliberately, it’s an overwhelming film. The second film Nobuhiko Obayashi was able to direct after his 2016 diagnosis of terminal lung cancer (to which he succumbed last year), it crams in everything he had left to say on the intersecting subjects of war and cinema. Drawing on the vocabulary of silent movies—with monochrome-tinted shots and irises—as well as gaudily bright artificial colors and modern green-screen technology, it’s the fourth film in a row he based on Japan’s experiences during WWII. As in his preceding war trilogy, Obayashi seems to be searching for formal means to depict war while defusing cinema’s power to glamorize it. In this case, it means a postmodern approach full of deliberate anachronisms and movie references (including turning John Ford and Yasujiro Ozu into characters and naming one of his protagonists Mario Baba); continuing his frequent use of cheap, unrealistic special effects, he represents bullets with thin flashes of hand-drawn yellow light. On a movie theater’s final night, a group of people—including a teenage girl, a film historian and a gangster—go to a program of war movies. The film they watch begins as a musical, but they find themselves entering the screen and participating in it (while still watching from the audience at times). The tone swiftly changes, and they find themselves living out a story about Japan’s experience fighting WWII that’s difficult to summarize. The story’s density and film-within-the-film spiral are akin to the films of Raoul Ruiz, but Ruiz's work was never this direct about its intentions. LABYRINTH OF CINEMA explicitly tells the audience “A movie can change the future, if not the past! We make our happy endings!” and urges us to embrace pacifism. But it feels passionate, not preachy. Obayashi’s hope is far from naive—it comes from a full reckoning with the ugliness of the past and serious thought about how to represent it. (One character’s death is depicted by having her image begin to flicker and decay.) An old, dying man’s faith that young people can turn around humanity’s tendencies towards violence is deeply touching. (2019, 179 min, DCP Digital) [Steve Erickson]
Elia Suleiman’s IT MUST BE HEAVEN (France/Qatar/Germany/Canada/Turkey/Palestine)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 7pm
Gael Garcia Bernal, who is meeting with a U.S.-based producer who wants the Mexican actor to make a film about the conquest of Mexico in English instead of Spanish, introduces the star and director of IT MUST BE HEAVEN: “Let me present you to my very good friend, Elia Suleiman. He’s a Palestinian filmmaker, but he makes funny films. He’s doing a comedy right now about peace in the Middle East.” Without missing a beat, the producer says, “That’s funny already.” Of course, that film is the one we’re watching, and it is indeed funny, with the nonplussed sense of humor that is needed to survive in a homeland that is under the thumb, both politically and militarily, of another nation. Suleiman fills his film with vignettes of life in and around his hometown of Nazareth—a man taking lemons from his neighbor’s trees and deciding to prune them while he’s at it, a father and son sitting back-to-back on a balcony trading insults, a Bedouin woman patiently leapfrogging two heavy water tubs through a grove. He takes particular delight in highlighting the arbitrary and ineffectual policing to which Palestinians are subject, and then starts globalizing the heavy boot of authoritarianism and violence in trips to Paris and New York City through the workings of his wry imagination. His fanciful excursions into French and American life spill into his script, giving a socially conscious French producer no choice but to refuse to make his movie because it now takes place everywhere but Palestine. I’m glad that Suleiman made his film his way, with charming vignettes (I especially liked the wild bird that flies into his Paris apartment and bothers him repeatedly while he is writing at his computer) and crazy commentary on French fashion and Americans’ love of guns. In the end, Suleiman returns to Nazareth, and his final scene inside a disco full of young, energetic Palestinians sounds a note of optimism that life will somehow, inevitably go on. Screening as part of the Chicago Palestine Film Festival. Preceded by John Rizkallah’s 2020 short film HABIB (2020, 6 min, Digital Projection). (2019, 109 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Anocha Suwichakorpong’s MUNDANE HISTORY (Thailand/Experimental)
Conversations at the Edge at Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 5pm
Anocha Suwichakornpong’s first feature, MUNDANE HISTORY, isn’t as formally daring as the director’s subsequent work, but the film’s patient, sympathetic perspective is audacious in its own way. For much of the running time, Suwichakornpong observes the relationship between a quadriplegic man in his early 20s and the slightly older man hired as his caretaker. The long, quiet takes reflect the characterization of the nurse, who withstands his charge’s coldness and gradually wins his respect. Suwichakornpong’s meditative visual style, which is subtly heightened by a detailed sound design, often gets compared to that of fellow Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and like him, Suwichakornpong employs this aesthetic across reveries about the mundane and meta-cinematic ruminations alike. MUNDANE HISTORY comes to question its own standing as a film through some surprising turns in the second half; one of the final shots, of a magnificent starscape, takes the director’s existential concerns to a cosmic level. Philippe Garrel may also be a good point-of-reference for what Suwichakornpong does here—like the French master, she exhibits faith in cinema’s ability to capture moments of delicate intimacy and seems ever-attenuated to the physical uniqueness of her performers. Preceded by Suwichakornpong’s 2016 short NIGHTFALL (15 min, DCP Digital), which was co-directed by Tulapop Saenjaroen. (2009, 82 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
---
Streaming virtually on Friday at 6pm, join Anocha Suwichakornpong, Tulapop Saenjaroen, and Pom Bunsermvicha for a conversation, per the Conversations at the Edge website, “about their collaborative projects, self-reflexive approach to media, and engagement with the history and politics of Thailand,” moderated by local filmmaker Melika Bass. More info here.
Andrzej Zulawski's POSSESSION (France)
Music Box Theatre – Check Venue websites for showtimes
Originally hacked down for American release to a schlocky—and downright absurd—ninety-minutes, POSSESSION has been restored to Zulawski's original cut in a new 4K digital restoration, showing in a new 35mm print. The added footage doesn't necessarily make the infamous tentacled-monster sex thing any less nuts, because it still is a shocking sight to behold. But its purpose is more nuanced and creepy when the film really goes off the rails. Drawing from his own divorce, Zulawski's film follows the collapse of Mark and Anna's marriage and the impossibility of Mark ever fully knowing, or possessing, his wife in love. Largely set in an apartment near the Berlin Wall, Mark is confronted with divorce and descends into severe depression. He emerges in a near-psychotic state intending to reclaim Anna and their son. He soon becomes aware of Anna's lover, but after confronting him, both men realize Anna is seeing someone—or something—else. Zulawski keeps the camera in almost constant motion, pushing in and pulling back during confrontations between Mark and Anna as their fights escalate to bloody moments that are somehow both expected and completely terrifying. In one scene, Anna grinds meat as Mark maniacally berates her. The noise of the kitchen rises with the tension and Anna, tired of the diatribe, takes an electric knife to her neck. Paired with scenes of their individual genuine tenderness toward their son, POSSESSION is filled with mirrors. Mark meets his son's school teacher, a benevolent doppelganger for his wife, and a double of Mark appears with Anna at the end. Even the setting is exploited for an otherworldly nothingness and an exactness in East and West Germany, itself perversely mirrored. The unrestrained acting—Anna thrashing hysterically could describe many scenes—adds to a heightened reality where Anna's possession is not demonic, but love can be. (1981, 124 min, DCP Digital) [Brian Welesko]
Frank Oz’s LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (US)
Doc Films at University of Chicago – Thursday, 9:30pm
Originating from a 1960 film directed by Roger Corman, Frank Oz's LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS is in turn based on Howard Ashman’s off-Broadway musical. It’s one of the rare films based on a stage show that holds on to its theatrical roots while successfully engaging with the cinematic format; Oz keeps the settings simple but uses striking camera angles and edits to make it distinctly filmic. Set in New York in the early 60s, the film is narrated by a doo-wop girl group acting as a Greek chorus. From moment one, the music is incredibly catchy and lyrically sharp; LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS maintains a gentleness without diminishing the underlying dark humor. The story follows timid flower shop employee Seymour (Rick Moranis), who’s desperately in love with his co-worker Audrey (Ellen Greene, reprising her role from the original stage show). Seymour’s fortunes change when he acquires an unusual plant with a taste for human blood—and Audrey’s abusive dentist boyfriend (Steve Martin) makes for a choice first victim. Despite the stellar main cast and delightful cameos (including Christopher Guest, John Candy, and a memorable Bill Murray as the sadistic dentist's masochistic patient), Greene shines brighter than anyone. Her performance of “Somewhere That’s Green” is equal parts devastating and hilarious; the song epitomizes the film's send-up of '80s obsession with mid-century American culture without minimizing the heartbreaking stories and sincere desires of its main characters. Ashman—who also wrote the script—would go on to pen some of the most iconic Disney songs along with composer Alan Menken; THE LITTLE MERMAID’s “Part of Your World,” is a clear descendant of “Somewhere That’s Green.” (1986, 94 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
Jean-Luc Godard's BREATHLESS (France)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 7:30pm and Tuesday, 6pm
The cinematic equivalent of "Like a Rolling Stone," Jean-Luc Godard's first feature was a near-unprecedented marriage of pop culture and intellectual sensibilities, breaking numerous rules of the form and paving the way for a good deal of art in the 1960s. The film's stylistic breakthroughs have been so influential as to seem familiar now—particularly the newsreel-like cinematography and randomly employed jump-cuts (which Jonathan Rosenbaum has compared to "a needle skipping gaily across a record"). But beneath the carefree attitude is a rich poetic sensibility, arguably the one consistent trait throughout Godard's varied body of work. In BREATHLESS' justly celebrated centerpiece—an extended lovers' interlude between Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg--Godard mixes literary quotations and frank sexual dialogue across a romantic depiction of time being gloriously wasted. All three elements were revolutionary in 1960, though the explicit use of citation may have attracted the most attention at the time. This was, after all, the film that marked the explosion of the French New Wave, the first filmmaking movement presided over by film critics. And from the opening title card (a dedication to B-movie studio Monogram Pictures) to the climactic shoot-out, BREATHLESS is fascinated by the cinema's influence over real life. Belmondo's petty thief tries to act like Humphrey Bogart, and Seberg was cast, according to Godard, as a continuation of her role in Otto Preminger's BONJOUR TRISTESSE. Five years after the film was released, Godard would make the famous proclamation that a director must put everything into a film; but BREATHLESS—which combined storytelling, criticism, autobiography and formal experimentation more boldly than any narrative film before it—was the first glimpse of what this may look like. (1960, 90 min, DCP Projection) [Ben Sachs]
Stanley Kubrick's THE SHINING (US)
Doc Films at University of Chicago – Thursday, 7pm
Though it had been made famous already by ROCKY, it wasn't until THE SHINING that the Steadicam yielded an aesthetic breakthrough in movies. Garrett Brown's innovation—a gyroscope mounted to the bottom of a camera, which allowed cinematographers to create hand-held tracking shots that didn't record their own movement—became in Kubrick's hands a supernatural presence. The film's justly celebrated Steadicam shots evoke a cruel, judgmental eye that does not belong to any human being, a perspective that's harrowing in its implications. (GOODFELLAS, SATANTANGO, and Gus Van Sant's ELEPHANT, to name just three examples, are inconceivable without the film's influence.) In this regard, the horror of THE SHINING makes manifest one subtext running through all of Kubrick's work: that humanity, for all its technical sophistication, will never fully understand its own consciousness. Why else would Kubrick devote nearly 150 takes to the same scene, as he did several times in the film's epic shooting schedule? With the only exceptions being other movies directed by Stanley Kubrick, no one moves or speaks in a film the way they do in THE SHINING. Everything has been rehearsed past the point of technical perfection; the behavior on screen seems the end-point of human evolution. What keeps it all going? (To invoke another great horror film of the era: the devil, probably.) The demons of the Overlook Hotel may very well be a manifestation of the evil within Jack Torrance, a recovering alcoholic who once nearly beat his four-year-old son to death. They could be, like those Steadicam shots, an alien consciousness here to judge the vulnerabilities of mankind. Kubrick never proffers an explanation, which is why THE SHINING is one of the few horror films that actually remains scary on repeated viewings. Nearly every effect here prompts some indelible dread: the unnatural symmetry of Kubrick's compositions; Shelly Duvall's tragic performance (which suggests that horrible victimization is always just around the corner); and the atonal symphonic music by Bartok, Lygeti, and Penderecki that make up the soundtrack. (1980, 142 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
François Ozon’s SUMMER OF 85 (France)
Doc Films at the University of Chicago – Friday, 7pm and Sunday, 4pm
The summer fling is a staple of coming-of-age narratives, showing up in everything from SUMMER OF ’42 to CALL ME BY YOUR NAME and the works of Éric Rohmer. With SUMMER OF 85, François Ozon adds his own take to the mix; while it doesn’t exactly reinvent the proverbial wheel, it more than stands apart thanks to the director’s sizzling eroticism, macabre wit, and emphatically queer sensibility, all on ravishing display in a Highsmith-esque suspense tale that should please fans of Ozon’s earlier, hotly hormonal thrillers. Sidestepping expectations from the start, SUMMER OF 85 opens with a grim prologue before sending us out to a more familiar scene of pop-scored, sunny coastal France (The Cure, naturally, provides Ozon’s music cue of choice). What we are about to see, 16-year-old Alex (Félix Lefebvre) warns us while in police custody, is the story of a corpse. Relating his indelible summer from the present day, the boy goes on to detail his intense romance with the 18-and-one-month-old David (Benjamin Voisin), who rescued him from a capsized boat one fateful day. David, whom we’re told will end up as the corpse, is a shimmering, quixotic Adonis, mischievous and mysterious, prone to reckless motorcycling and brazen games of seduction. Obviously, this can’t end well. But Ozon, viscerally capturing the heady rush of first love and the reality-disavowing, ego-dissolving spell of infatuation, has us as bewitched as Alex. It helps that SUMMER OF 85 is itself a delectably crafted play of sensuous surfaces, from the lapis lazuli waters sparkling through Hichame Alaouié’s 16mm lensing, to the jean jackets, poofy hair, and poster-limned bedroom walls of its beachside mid-80s milieu. In a centerpiece sequence, Ozon sets a montage of Alex and David’s cresting passions to Rod Stewart’s elating “Sailing,” and for more than a moment, we can feel ourselves floating. It’s a picture of idealized, frictionless, naive love, the kind that can exist before reality has to make its harsh intrusion. In the movies, thankfully, it can last a little longer. (2020, 100 min, 35mm) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
Nicolas Roeg’s DON’T LOOK NOW (UK)
Facets Cinema – Thursday, 8pm
Nicolas Roeg may have achieved fame as a cinematographer (shooting, among other films, François Truffaut’s FAHRENHEIT 451 and Richard Lester’s PETULIA), but his most important contribution to cinema may be as an editor. Roeg’s fragmented, non-chronological narratives, while clearly influenced by the work of Alain Resnais, achieve a strange allure all their own. Resnais was influenced by the workings of memory and spontaneous thought; Roeg was interested in the plasticity of cinema itself, how the medium could distort reality and create patterns out of experience. DON’T LOOK NOW, one of Roeg’s most successful films, uses fragmentary editing to conjure feelings of disorientation and dread—it merits its reputation as one of the masterpieces of the horror genre. The dread engendered by the film isn’t just supernatural; the film considers a marriage in jeopardy, and watching the film, you’re always afraid that the protagonists’ union will come apart. Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie play the couple; they travel from England to Venice after the accidental death of their young daughter, hoping to forget about their recent tragedy. In little time, however, they’re plunged into a supernatural mystery that involves an old psychic and paranormal sightings. Roeg makes brilliant use of Venice’s architecture and design, rendering the city a fantastic, maze-like world. (The eerie, mood-enhancing score is by Pino Donaggio, who would go on to be Brian De Palma’s regular composer.) The leads are superb, playing off each other brilliantly and sexily; the film’s centerpiece is a complexly edited sex scene that aroused no small controversy upon first release. Screening as part of Facets’ Alternative Horror Essentials series. (1973, 110 min, Digital Projection) [Ben Sachs]
Mia Hansen-Løve’s BERGMAN ISLAND (France/Sweden)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Check Venue websites for showtimes
Shortly after Ingmar Bergman died in July 2007, the critic, programmer, filmmaker, and onetime Cine-File contributor Gabe Klinger organized a weekend program of Bergman titles at the Chopin Theatre. Jonathan Rosenbaum introduced a revival of SAWDUST AND TINSEL (1953), then led a post-show discussion; the conversation yielded some of the most constructive thinking about Bergman I’ve yet encountered, in large part because Rosenbaum acknowledged what makes the Swedish writer-director such a difficult filmmaker at times. Noting that Bergman was inspired to make SAWDUST AND TINSEL by the dissolution of one of his marriages, Rosenbaum called out the film’s central allegory as being too personal to achieve the sort of universal impact the filmmaker was going for. “One definition of pretension,” Rosenbaum suggested, “might be pretending that something is universal when it’s really not.” I bring up Rosenbaum’s insight not to devalue Bergman, but to honor him. How many filmmakers before him attempted to give voice to the full range of their psyches, good and bad? Bergman almost single-handedly brought to narrative cinema the idea that a movie could be the expression of a filmmaker’s soul, and this makes him one of the indisputable giants of the medium. At the same time, Bergman was a complicated human being; as more than one character in Mia Hansen-Løve’s BERGMAN ISLAND points out, he was great artist but also a self-centered jerk whose relationships with his nine children by six mothers ranged from nonexistent to psychologically abusive. Because Bergman plays such a crucial role in the development of movies, reconciling with his personal contradictions feels like confronting certain contradictions inherent to movies as a whole. Like all the major art forms, cinema can be a vehicle for unbridled self-expression, in all that implies—it can give rise to soul-searching and narcissism, and Bergman certainly indulged in both. BERGMAN ISLAND is an appropriately personal tribute to the Swedish master: it’s the kind of soul-bearing, self-regarding art film that could not have been conceived without Bergman’s influence. Plainly inspired by Hansen-Løve’s longtime relationship with fellow French director Olivier Assayas, the movie charts a short vacation that two married filmmakers (Vicky Krieps, Tim Roth) take to Fårö, the small island where Bergman spent the last several decades of his life. The first half of the movie follows the couple as they tour the island and run into other cinephile tourists (including Gabe Klinger, who’s credited as “American Man”); Hansen-Løve delivers a semi-autobiographical account of a marriage falling part that can’t help but recall certain passages of Bergman’s SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE (1973). The second half, which largely consists of the movie that the female filmmaker is currently writing, recalls some of Bergman’s narrative experiments like PERSONA (1966). Both stories center on a woman who’s unhappy in her longtime relationship; the major difference is that the first shows the woman remaining unhappy in her plight and the second shows her having an affair with an old flame she re-encounters at a wedding. The concentration on female psychology is Bergmanesque, but the sensitivity and understatement shown by Hansen-Løve, a great director in her own right, are very much in keeping with her previous films (particularly GOODBYE FIRST LOVE [2011], which the second half of BERGMAN ISLAND most resembles). As usual, Hansen-Løve elicits exacting performances from her leads (including Mia Wasikowska and Anders Danielsen Lie as the stars of the movie-within-a-movie), and she uses Fårö to memorable, if characteristically subtle, effect. This may be too inside-baseball for many viewers (even fans of Hansen-Løve’s other films), but it succeeds in stirring debate about Bergman—and making a passionate case for why he still matters. (2021, 113 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Julia Ducournau’s TITANE (France)
Music Box Theatre – Check Venue website for showtimes
Julia Ducournau’s TITANE is difficult to summarize without revealing too much of the wild and twisted plot. It centers on Alexia (Agatha Rousselle), a woman with a deep predilection for cars and violence and who's had a titanium plate in her skull since a vehicular accident in childhood. Did the accident awaken her perversions? Or did the piece of metal implanted in her head do it? The film cares not to say. One thing that is certain is that many of Alexia's motivations seem to come from someplace deep within herself. She expresses them in an animalistic fashion, focusing on her baser urges and her will to survive. Much like Ducournau's first film, RAW (2016), TITANE takes body horror to a shocking extreme, and the brutalities it depicts again tie into the animal side of human nature. Body horror isn't relegated to violence; it also explores the ideas of the body as status symbol and personal prison. There comes a point in the film where Alexia finds herself living with fire captain Vincent (Vincent Lindon), and their relationship takes on a father-daughter dynamic. The interactions between these two are surprisingly touching, offsetting the film’s more gnarly moments. Like the inhabitants of the Island of Misfit Toys, Alexia and Vincent find solidarity and comfort from a lonely world in each other’s presence. Visceral and thought-provoking, TITANE demonstrates Ducournau’s ability to weave a story that is batshit crazy yet grounded in fully realized characters. (2021, 104 min, DCP Digital) [Kyle Cubr]
📽️ MUSIC BOX OF HORRORS: DAWN OF THE DRIVE-IN
The Music Box of Horrors: Dawn of the Drive-In series, presented by Shudder, takes place through October 31 at the Chi-Town Movies Drive-In, with films playing every night of the week. In addition to the films reviewed below, Jaume Collet-Serra’s 2005 film HOUSE OF WAX (113 min, Digital Projection) and Anthony Hickox’s 1998 film WAXWORK (96 min, Digital Projection) screen on Friday starting at 9:30pm as the Friday Night Double Feature; John Pieplow’s 1998 film STRANGELAND (85 min, Digital Projection) screens on Monday at 9:30pm as part of Nü-Metal Mondays; Video Brain Blender, described as a “cranium-cracking concoction of VHS era insanity that explores the depths of home camcorder obscurity and video store oddities,” featuring the work of filmmakers Mike Savino and Mark Veau and presented by Lunchmeat & Strange Tapes, takes place on Tuesday at 9:30pm; and Michael Rymer’s 2002 film QUEEN OF THE DAMNED (101 min, Digital Projection) screens on Thursday at 9:30pm as part of Thirsty Thursdays. Check Venue website for more information and to buy tickets.
David Fincher’s SE7EN (US)
Sunday, 9:30pm
Rain pounds down on a gloomy day. Detective William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) heads out on a case with his newly transferred partner David Mills (Brad Pitt). Seven more days until Somerset is free, a quiet life of retirement just out of reach. The city has begun to change; the people are full of evil or else complacent. Perhaps things have always been this way, the police chief tells Somerset; either way, a career of exposure to this reality would wear the most headstrong person down. Unfortunately for both of our detectives, this first crime they investigate together is the start of a ride they have no hope of escaping. Something that distinguishes SE7EN from its counterparts in the crime-movie genre is that there is no way to predict where it goes. This genre can be hard to work in, as many people who watch crime movies are trying to solve the mystery at the same time as the protagonists. As such, if you happen to figure out the answer before the film arrives at the same point, the impact can be lessened. Alternatively, sometimes the film tries too hard to trick the audience in favor of a big reveal, and as a result, will neglect putting in the work to make us truly understand the characters. SE7EN is a masterpiece because it manages to do all these things—the crimes are impossible to predict, the characters are well-developed, and the plot twist is crazy. The killer in SE7EN bases their crimes on the seven deadly sins, and the clues they leave don’t serve as hints to their identity, but merely lead Somerset and Mills to where they can find the next body. The days countdown—7, 6, 5, 4 and so on, while the bodies stack up. Somerset realizes at the beginning that if he takes on this case he won’t retire on time, but he does it anyway. Because even if the world is not a good one, it’s still one that deserves to be fought for. (1995, 127 mins, Digital Projection) [Drew Van Weelden]
---
Wes Craven’s SCREAM 2 (US)
Wednesday, 9:30 pm
The movie app I used to revisit SCREAM 2 this week described the plot as, simply, “Murders result from killer wearing mask.” While this isn’t wrong, it also feels like a dismissive throwaway line about the slasher genre as a whole—a genre that has proven time and again to be worth a second look. Released less than a year after the first film and plagued by production issues (including one of the first online script leaks), SCREAM 2 could easily have been a disastrous sequel. Instead, it builds on the original’s examination of slasher tropes by playing into the film’s complete metanarrative. It opens at a premiere screening of the fictional film "Stab," based on events that happened to Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) during the first SCREAM. After the iconic villain Ghostface returns to murder two people at the theater, Sidney and the survivors of the Woodsboro Massacre, along with a new group of college friends (including a plethora of ‘90s stars, including Sarah Michelle Geller, Elise Neal, Joshua Jackson, with Timothy Olyphant and Portia de Rossi as standouts), become targets in the killing spree. SCREAM 2 is a self-parody analysis of the pitfalls of the slasher sequel while still managing to be a successful slasher sequel. (1997, 120 min, Digital Projection) [Megan Fariello]
🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
Also Screening
⚫ Block Cinema (Northwestern University)
The Living and the Dead Ensemble’s 2020 film OVERTURES (132 min, DCP Digital) screens on Wednesday at 7pm. Admission is free. More info here.
⚫ Doc Films at the University of Chicago
Victor Fleming’s 1939 classic THE WIZARD OF OZ (102 min, 35mm) screens on Saturday at 7pm. More info here.
⚫ Facets Cinema
Alexis Gambis’ 2021 film SON OF MONARCHS (97 min, Digital Projection) screens this week; check Venue website for showtimes. Mitchell Lichtenstein's 2007 film TEETH (94 min, Digital Projection) screens on Thursday at 10pm as part of the Alternative Horror Essentials series. More info here.
⚫ Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts)
Two films by French filmmaker Sarah Maldoror, SAMBIZANGA (1972, 102 min, DCP Projection) and MONANGAMBÉ (1969, 18 min, DCP Projection), screen on Friday starting at 7pm. Admission is free. More info here.
⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Evgeny Ruman’s 2021 Israeli film GOLDEN VOICES (88 min, DCP Digital) continues with showtimes this week. More info here.
In addition to the Conversations at the Edge program reviewed above, Anocha Suwichakornpong’s third feature, KRABI 2562 (2019, 90 min, DCP Digital), made in collaboration with Ben Rivers, screens on Sunday at 5pm, with Suwichakornpong’s 2007 short film JAI (14 min, DCP Digital). “Tulapop Saenjaroen: Short Films,” including four short films by the Bangkok-based filmmaker, screens on Thursday at 6pm; he’ll also be participating in the discussion mentioned above, along with Suwichakornpong. More info on the CATE programs here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s 2021 documentary THE RESCUE (108 min, DCP Digital) continues this week. Bobcat Goldthwait’s 2021 film JOY RIDE, co-presented by the Chicago Critics Film Festival, screens on Friday at 7:30pm, with Goldthwait and co-star Dana Gould in attendance for a post-screening Q&A.
Music Box of Horrors 2021 begins on Saturday at noon and goes until Sunday around the same time. Screening are William Castle’s 1964 film STRAIT-JACKET (93 min, 35mm); William Crain’s 1976 film DR. BLACK, MR. HYDE (87 min, 35mm), with Crain in attendance for a post-screening Q&A; Robert Wiene’s 1924 film THE HANDS OF ORLAC (93 min, Format TBD), with a live score by Maxx McGathey; Lesley Manning’s 1992 TV movie GHOSTWATCH (91 min, DCP Digital); the world theatrical premiere of Luca Bercovici’s 1995 film THE GRANNY (85 min, Format TBD); Dasha Nekrasova’s 2021 film THE SCARY OF SIXTY-FIRST (81 min, 35mm), with Nekrasova in attendance for a post-screening Q&A; Curtis Matzke’s 2021 short film SINK (17 min, DCP Digital); Robert Rodriguez’s 1998 film THE FACULTY (104 min, 35mm); Dario Argento’s 1982 film TENEBRE (110 min, 35mm); Fabrice du Welz’s 2004 film CALVAIRE (88 min, 35mm); Tom Savini’s 1990 film NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (92 min, 35mm); Don Coscarelli’s 1988 film PHANTASM II (97 min, 35mm); and Frank Marshall’s 1990 film ARACHNOPHOBIA (109 min, 35mm). Tickets to the full marathon are sold out; however, tickets to a “half marathon,” starting at 12:15am with SINK, are still available. More info here.
Jesse Lauter’s 2021 music documentary LEARNING TO LIVE TOGETHER: THE RETURN OF MAD DOGS & ENGLISHMEN (111 min, DCP Digital) screens on Tuesday at 7pm, and Edgar Wright’s 2021 film LAST NIGHT IN SOHO (116 min, 35mm) has two early screenings on Thursday at 7 and 9:45pm before opening fully the next week. More info on all screenings here.
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS –
Held Over/Still Screening/Return Engagements (Selected)
Anocha Suwichakornpong’s BY THE TIME IT GETS DARK (Thailand/Experimental)
Available through Thursday as part of the Conversations at the Edge series via the Gene Siskel Film Center here
BY THE TIME IT GETS DARK drifts from one narrative premise to another like an extended dream, and the pace is fittingly languorous. It begins as a straightforward story about a filmmaker who goes to a secluded cabin with the older woman she intends to make a movie about, a one time leader in the student protests against Thailand’s dictatorship in the mid-1970s. Those protests prompted a brutal government backlash in 1976, and the film is haunted not only by this period of state violence, but by the way Thai society failed to deal with it afterwards. “BY THE TIME IT GETS DARK is my attempt to deal with the impossibility of making a historical film in the place where there is no history,” the director wrote in an artist’s statement. “What begins as a single narrative soon becomes fragmented, and ultimately devours itself.” To wit, the interviews between the filmmaker and her subject give way to scenes from the movie the filmmaker is going to make—and these scenes are followed by a few unrelated narrative strands. Suwichakornpong doesn’t alter the film’s quietly inquisitive mood even when it changes form; that she manages to sustain this delicate feeling makes the film seem a bit like a moving glass sculpture. (2016, 106 min) [Ben Sachs]
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS –
Also Screening/Streaming
⚫ DePaul University
The Horror of the Humanities IX: Dante's Inferno takes place on Thursday from 6 – 9pm. Presented by the DePaul Humanities Center, the event is described as such: "Guests will explore our online haunted mansion with rooms curated by artists and scholars whose spirits will haunt you as they explore horror’s relation to the arts and humanities and “the everyday” (including marking the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri). Moving their avatars freely through the space, guests will be able to chat with other attendees, look for secrets, participate in making some art, show their skills on the dance floor, and generally explore the live and pre-recorded music, magic, dance, art, performances, films, photography, story-telling installations, and more." More info and RSVP here.
⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Connie Hochman’s 2021 dance documentary IN BALANCHINE’S CLASSROOM (88 min) and Ted Bogosian’s 2021 documentary LIVE AT MISTER KELLY’S (83 min) are available to rent through November 4.
Michael Caplan’s 2014 documentary ALGREN (96 min) is available to rent through November 12. More info on all films here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
More info and hold-over titles here.
CINE-LIST: October 22 - October 28, 2021
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Kyle Cubr, Steve Erickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, JB Mabe, Scott Pfeiffer, Michael Glover Smith, Drew Van Weelden, Brian Welesko