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.
📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING
Woodie King Jr.’s BLACK THEATER: THE MAKING OF A MOVEMENT (US/Documentary)
South Side Projections and the Bronzeville Historical Society at the Parkway Ballroom (4455 S. MLK Dr.) – Saturday, 2pm (Free Admission)
The foment of the Black civil rights movement of the mid-20th century created revolutionary fervor in all aspects of society, including the arts. With New York City as the epicenter for theater in the United States, then as now, Black playwrights and actors from all over moved to Harlem and Greenwich Village to join the burgeoning Black theater scene of the late 1950s and 1960s. Woodie King Jr., founder of the New Federal Theatre on New York’s Lower East Side, wanted to tell the history of this movement. The result, BLACK THEATER: THE MAKING OF A MOVEMENT, leaves very few stones unturned in its survey of the movers and shakers of New York’s Black theater scene. A dizzying array of luminaries—Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Amiri Baraka (then known as LeRoi Jones), Lorraine Hansberry (in archival footage) and her playwright cousin Shauneille Perry, James Earl Jones, Ntozake Shange, Lonne Elder III, Michael Schultz, and many others—discuss the founding of such theaters as the Negro Ensemble Company (NEC), the Chelsea Theatre Center, the Urban Arts Corps, and the National Black Theatre to fill “the crying need,” as NEC founder Douglas Turner Ward put it, for African Americans to have independent theaters where playwrights, actors, and audiences could be developed. The film shows excerpts from Hansberry’s ground-breaking, award-winning A Raisin in the Sun and offers an in-depth consideration of Robert Lowell’s adaptation of Herman Melville’s novella, Benito Cereno, about a slave rebellion aboard a Spanish merchant ship and the approach taken in portraying the slaves as African kidnapping victims who were not yet African American. The discussions of so many productions from those who launched their careers in New York’s Black theaters make this film a valuable document of a fertile time and place in African American history and the arts. The generally serious-minded tone of the film gives way to the amusing remembrances of the founder of the New Lafayette Theatre, Robert Macbeth, who recalls rejecting someone for the company, only to have his theater promptly burn to the ground. Despite the all-encompassing title of the documentary, it should be noted that aside from Ed Bullins, former minister of culture for the Black Panther Party, who began his playwriting career in San Francisco, this film ignores numerous regional Black theaters of the time, like Chicago’s eta Creative Arts Foundation (1971 – present) and Kuumba Theater (1968 – 1986). Nonetheless, anyone who is interested in theater, African American arts history, or New York in the 1960s will enjoy this thorough, multipronged exploration by Woodie King Jr., himself a key member of the Black theater movement. With a post-screening Q&A led by film and theater producer Maséqua Myers. (1978, 114 min, Digital Projection) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s A CUBAN FIGHT AGAINST THE DEMONS (Cuba)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) — Wednesday, 7pm (Free Admission)
Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s follow-up to his storied 1968 masterpiece MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT is punk as hell. One might watch it and be reminded of Ken Russell’s films, so does it simultaneously challenge conventions of form and philosophy. A co-founding member of the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) following the Cuban Revolution, Alea used cinema as a means of mutiny, exploiting its natural unwieldiness to radical effect. That’s certainly on display in A CUBAN FIGHT AGAINST THE DEMONS, based on ethnologist Fernando Ortiz Fernández’s 1959 book-length study of Remedios, a city on the northern coast of Cuba colonized by the Spanish in the early 1500s. Alea’s interpretation is less an academic rendering than it is a polemical vociferation, one in which he takes a particularly no-holds-barred approach. Taking place in 17th-century Cuba, the tone is set straight away as pirates attack a gathering of the city’s Spanish artistocrats and their families; the barrage and a harrowing rape of an especially devout bureacrat’s wife not-so-subtly alludes to the plunder and pillage of colonialism. At the center of the mayhem is Juan Contreras, an affluent landowner (and smuggler) who shirks convention, galling the church and his more conversative associates. A galvanic priest attempts to strongarm the villagers into moving inland, allegedly because the town is overrun with demons who are influencing the pious settlers. (In real life, the priest on whom this character is based was motivated by material gain, as he owned a hacienda in the desired region.) Contreras and others resist the relocation, which the priest compels with a range of absurd, ex officio actions. Throughout, the woman who’d been assaulted, along with a female African slave, wanders about in a reverie, clearly driven to insanity by her ordeal. She’s an almost mythical figure, representing the fundamental suffering of colonized people. The African woman who accompanies her is loyal, helping the woman—even performing an abortion on her—where the priest and other men will not; though a power balance between the two is implicit, their banding together reflects the power of solidarity among those below the ruling class. Everything comes to a head when the priest loses his own tenuous grip on reality, going to severe lengths to quash those who hold out against his tyrannical aims. What makes this such a potent film is Alea’s use of varied aesthetic methods, merging an at-times documentary approach with experimental techniques that, like Contreras, resist the dominant order. Indeed, as Paul A. Schroeder writes in his book on Alea, “[t]his challenge to Spanish control… is one of the first recorded attempts by Cubans to assert their sovereignty, and as such is an early precursor of the Revolution itself.” In revitalizing a history of dissent through a collective mode of filmmaking (a hallmark of films emerging from the ICAIC), Alea created a text belonging to the past and its present, and even now, as its incendiary spirit may arouse contemporary audiences. Screens as part of the Retelling Resistance series. Cuban historian and Northwestern professor Julio César Guanche Zaldívar will introduce the film. (1972, 120 min, DCP Digital) [Kathleen Sachs]
Penny Allen’s PROPERTY (US)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) — Saturday, 1pm (Free Admission)
One of cinema’s indefinable qualities is its uncanny conveyance of energy—its ability to transmit and sustain the perception of dynamism via the illusion of the moving image. Activist-filmmaker Penny Allen’s 1978 film PROPERTY, an unsung achievement of American independent filmmaking that’s been compared to Alain Tanner’s JONAH WHO WILL BE 25 IN THE YEAR 2000, is described on the filmmaker’s website as being “[r]aunchy, unpredictable, and populated with characters so real they threaten to pop off the screen.” At first glance, this sounds like any number of exaggerated loglines that overinflate the content in question, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t a germane abstract of Allen’s spirited monument to the gaiety and anguish of cooperative living amidst urban revitalization. The film’s swift pacing mirrors that of grievous economic amelioration, undertaken at the expense of systematically underserved communities. It opens with several inhabitants of a well-loved (if only in spirit rather than practice) block in Portland, Oregon, that’s being sold and its residents evicted. The neighbors are a motley crew of bohemian archetypes, the kind later skewered on the sketch show Portlandia. But their earnest anarchism and amiable eccentricities, clinched by genuine adversity in the case of several of the residents, distinguishes them from spurious crunchy types, making this less about the nuances of their nonconformity and more about the forces at play against those who dare not to conform. But even the word ‘dare’ implies an intentionality that’s at odds with the sincerity of these gentle outcasts. Their problem isn’t so much a world that doesn’t understand or accept them but instead a society that’s relinquished responsibility for their basic needs. The group—ranging from a surly poet (played by Walt Curtis, Portland poet and author of Mala Noche, later adapted by Gus Van Sant, who worked on Allen’s film as a sound person) to a Lilliputian provocateur (comic actor Cork Hubbert) to a convivial sex worker (Lola Desmond, the City of Roses’ answer to Shelley Duvall)—bands together in attempt to buy the block, hoping to achieve that most tenuous of reveries. The American Dream soon becomes a nightmare as the group attempts to organize their funds, then wade together through piles of bureaucratic bullshit. There’s trouble on both sides of the equation, within the faction’s own ranks and with the range of Kafkaesque organizations that decide their fate. The central drama stems from the apparent futility of their endeavor, limited as they are by a lack of job security and financial stability. Lest this sound like it’s a stuffy, pedantic treatise on the pitfalls of property ownership, Allen infuses into the film a certain je ne sais quoi that renders the horrors of capitalism humorous without downplaying its insidiousness. Simply, the characters seem like fun people to be around, easily winning viewers’ sympathies. The performances are electric, giving vibes of Albert Brooks meets The Real World, toeing that fine line between social satire and social realism. In some sense it’s also socialist realism, but only in how it subtly highlights various struggles respective to intentional communities; that’s evident here in how the group members are reluctant to assume the roles of leader and organizer. Inspired by an experience she had in Portland and homing in on issues respective to the city (notably that it’s predominantly white, and that the block in questions is one of few that are historically Black), Allen created both a scathing satire and an intimate parable that’s as implacable as it is engaging. (1978, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Kathleen Sachs]
Jacques Tourneur's CAT PEOPLE (US)
Music Box Theatre – Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am
CAT PEOPLE was the first release from Val Lewton's legendary B unit at RKO Pictures—which, through nine films made over five years (1942-46), more or less created psychological horror as we know it today. Making the most of low budgets, Lewton turned screen horror inward, focusing on the lives of frail men and women who end up the victims in horror-movie plots. He found his greatest collaborator in Tourneur, a gifted director of actors capable of drawing rare psychological nuance from his players. CAT PEOPLE stars Simone Simon as a timid young Serbian émigré who fears she will become a predatory cat if she consummates her marriage. For Martin Scorsese, who featured it prominently in his PERSONAL JOURNEY THROUGH AMERICAN MOVIES (and paid muted tribute to it in his SHUTTER ISLAND), the film was a breakthrough for its integration of subtext into genre storytelling. In this regard, it's "as influential a movie as CITIZEN KANE." Even though this is quite clearly "about a woman's fear of her own sexuality" (Scorsese again), it remains evocative as horror—in part because Simone is so believably vulnerable that we fear for her no matter what happens. (1942, 73 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
Wes Anderson's THE FRENCH DISPATCH (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Check venue website for showtimes
Wes Anderson's intricate compositional sensibility is on full display in THE FRENCH DISPATCH, his 10th feature film and the first to focus on the practice of journalism. Anderson lends his idiosyncratic style to a new fixation, meticulously crafting each moment as he explores another way of life. His style has lost luster for some audiences, yet this compendium of stories from a newspaper's single issue—told through three long vignettes and a travelogue—cements Anderson's storytelling as more than whimsy, his style more than schtick. His films are more than just dollhouse frames slammed together, despite protestations from detractors. His curiosity fills each scene here; one senses his love and admiration for journalism, a profession widely seen as on the brink of death. The writer-director brings together another giant cast, with Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Benicio del Toro, and Léa Seydoux standing out; the latter two appear in the most effective of the vignettes, "The Concrete Masterpiece." Following an artist prisoner, his guard, and his muse, the mini-narrative finds meaning in the ethereality of art. It finds del Toro, Seydoux, and Adrien Brody in top form. Anderson wants to amaze, educate, intrigue, and sift through an abundance of information, characters, plots, and emotions—the film is sure to reward on third, fourth, and fifth viewings. It's a treat to spend time with an artist like Anderson, a filmmaker unperturbed by box office showings and corporate intellectual properties, even though he's working with a $25 million budget and a never-ending procession of movie stars. He still finds catharsis, political meaning, and myriad themes, creating something that deepens with time, analysis, and conversation. (2021, 103 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Frank]
Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, Robert Hamer’s DEAD OF NIGHT (UK)
Doc Films at the University of Chicago – Saturday, 7pm
Though not the very first horror anthology film, DEAD OF NIGHT remains one of the best examples of the genre. It also established some of its recurring tropes—most memorably in the final, standout story about an evil ventriloquist’s dummy, but there are also haunted mirrors, a creepy ghost child, and unavoidable fates. A rare release due to Britain’s ban on the production of horror films during World War II, the film contains five haunting tales. The framing story (directed by Basil Dearden) concerns an architect, Walter Craig (Mervyn Johns), visiting a country cottage filled with guests, only to realize he’s experienced this all before in a terrible dream. Each guest shares an uncanny account of their own, each segment made by a different director. The guests initially find the stories amusing, and their jaunty demeanors as they entertain with personal tales of horror add to the strangeness of the evening. Yet DEAD OF NIGHT is effective at building dread despite its moments of levity, checking in with the framing story between each segment as the plot moves toward the end of Craig’s prescient nightmare finale—which is preceded by the film’s creepiest story (directed by Alberto Cavalcanti) about ventriloquist Maxwell Frere (Michael Redgrave) and his possessed doll Hugo. It’s easy to see why directors like Martin Scorsese hold this film in high regard and why its influence can be felt in the continuing popularity of horror anthology films. Perhaps the wildest trivia about DEAD OF NIGHT concerns its circular framing plot: it was inspired by the steady-state model of the universe, an alternative to the Big Bang theory developed by cosmologists Fred Hoyle, Hermann Bondi, and Thomas Gold. Though now widely disproven, it argued that the universe has no beginning and no end. (1945, 103 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
Joe Dante’s THE HOWLING (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday and Saturday, 9:30pm
THE HOWLING may be Joe Dante’s least characteristic film in that the darker elements tend to outweigh the director’s ingratiating humor. The early scenes contain moments of sexual violence that are unlike anything else in Dante’s filmography, and the grisly make-up effects (designed by Rob Bottin one year before his breakout work on John Carpenter’s THE THING) can be genuinely repellent. This isn’t to say that THE HOWLING lacks for satire or movie-buff in-jokes—in fact, there’s enough of both to make this a must-see for horror-comedy aficionados. The supporting cast is filled with veterans of classic B movies like Kevin McCarthy, John Carradine, Slim Pickens, and Dante regular Dick Miller (whose character here, Walter Paisley, is named after the immortal nebbish Miller played in A BUCKET OF BLOOD); there’s also a humorous cameo by B movie kingpin (and Dante’s old boss) Roger Corman. Further, Dante tips his hat to classic werewolf movies by featuring them on TVs in the background throughout the film (the director’s fondness for incorporating clips of cult classics—a habit that began with his first film, THE MOVIE ORGY—never fails to suggest a master DJ sampling beloved old records). And then there are the scenes at the new age-y retreat where the heroine encounters the coven of werewolves that eventually spell her doom; these passages allow Dante and screenwriter John Sayles (who also turns in a funny cameo) to gently send up West Coast cultural trends of the late 1970s. Sayles’ memorably script is ambitious in its structure, which recalls that of Hitchcock’s FAMILY PLOT. Like that film, THE HOWLING alternates between two separate couples whose stories seem at first to run parallel to each other but gradually converge. The movie may lack for a consistent identification figure, but it makes up for that in how it steadily builds narrative momentum, drawing viewers ever deeper into its depraved, pulpy mystery. (1981, 91 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY (Japan)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Check venue website for showtimes
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, DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]
Jessica Kingdon’s ASCENSION (US/China/Documentary)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Check Venue website for showtimes
Two men in a Chinese factory are surrounded by a mountain of metal parts, their welding rigs casting a bright white light from offscreen. You begin to wonder, Are they assembling car jacks or some other piece of automobile equipment? They start to test their creation, assuring that everything is properly attached and tightened. At this point, they have stood their work upright and it appears to be some sort of metal frame for a robot or animatronic. Director Jessica Kingdon cuts to another factory where a handful of women are assembling, trimming, and lubricating giant silicone sex dolls. Surprisingly, this is not even one of the most absurd scenes in ASCENSION. Kingdon provides us with a gorgeous fly-on-the-wall-style film, bouncing around as an omniscient observer all over China. That is, until one of the subjects gets stung by an insect and the perspective is broken for a second, but that's bee-sides the point. If anything, that moment is a testament to the compassion that Kingdon brings to the subject matter. There is no doubt that China gets slammed by propaganda on the daily in our American 24-hour news cycle. While the nation's not perfect, it faces similar problems that we do domestically. Unfortunately, the majority of those problems weigh heaviest on the lower- to middle-class, something that we as Americans are all too familiar with. The film features its fair share of absurd moments, but they are not any more absurd than the “Not The Onion” headlines we see in the United States. Whether it's Amazon workers having to skip bathroom breaks, or Chinese laborers having to fabricate jiggly sex dolls, workers are pushed to their limits and demeaned around the globe. Hopefully this film gets some attention with the right crowd, and this type of passive, yet focused filmmaking could change others' worldviews for the better. (2021, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Drew Van Weelden]
Rene Laloux's FANTASTIC PLANET (France)
Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts) – Friday, 7pm
In this Dali-esque animation, based on the Cold War-era novel Oms en Serie (1957) by Stefan Wul, the earth is ruled by the "Draags," a giant race of blue neutered technocrats with a passion for meditation. Domestic humans known as "Oms" are the "little animals you stroke between meditations" while wild humans/Oms are hunted like cockroaches. The surreal and perilous world of FANTASTIC PLANET (originally LA PLANETE SAUVAGE) is rendered in beautiful (very 70s) cut out stop motion. Highlights include a glow-orgy induced by an aphrodisiac communion wafer and a cackling anthropomorphized Venus flytrap. The soundtrack is a near-constant synth jam that oscillates from moody and spacey to raunchy porn funk. The film was begun in Czechoslovakia but finished in France for political reasons, and the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union looms over the story. Themes of repression, rebellion, and the dangers of technocracy permeate FANTASTIC PLANET. The film seems to suggest that excessive rationality can make the ruling class blind to its cruelty, but also that solidarity can flourish in the midst of persecution and degradation. (1973, 72 min, 35mm) [Mojo Lorwin]
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
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, showing in a new 4K digital restoration. 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]
Michael Sarnoski’s PIG (US)
Doc Films at the University of Chicago – Friday, 7pm and Sunday, 4pm
As Rob—a disheveled man living off the grid with his truffle pig— Nicholas Cage delivers a performance that overrides most of his 21st-century filmography. PIG is a reminder of Cage’s talent and commitment, transcending both the expectations and limits that audiences have placed on him since his Academy Award win for LEAVING LAS VEGAS. Making his directorial debut, Michael Sarnoski fashions a story about the death of dreams as brought about by the deaths of people we know and by other people taking over our stories. Rob goes on a journey to find his pig after she’s kidnapped; he’s accompanied by Amir (Alex Wolff), a young supplier in Portland’s high-end restaurant industry who exhibits little concern for his son. Shifting between the cutthroat supplier business and the culinary scene, PIG never falters in its twisted vision, considering how loss can force us to change, how food can trigger memories, and how a single man can impact an entire community. Sarnoski gives some fine actors (Cage, Wolff, Adam Arkin) nuanced moments to marinate in; the film’s emotions feel earned, not forced. An ode to food, memory, and mourning, PIG is also a welcome reminder that Cage can command a film when paired with the right director. (2021, 92 min, Digital Projection) [Michael Frank]
Jacques Tati's PLAYTIME (France)
Doc Films at the University of Chicago – Thursday, 7pm
Jacques Tati's psycho-geographical treatise par excellence, PLAYTIME, begins in a pedagogical mode: for the first hour, working entirely in and around a multimillion-dollar parody of contemporary skyscrapers constructed in the outskirts of Paris, he teaches the viewer a new way to watch a film. The primary use of long shots and deep focus suggests a Bazinian spectatorial freedom, but the meticulously dubbed, panlingual audio is constantly in close-up: from the cacophony of American tourists to the analog buzzing of an office intercom, from the crash of Mr. Hulot's umbrella to the comic deformation of a squeaky leather chair. By the time we reach a long sequence set outside an apartment with soundproof glass, we have learned that the ear can lead the eye as often as the reverse. And none too soon, for the next 40 minutes--detailing the opening night of the posh "Royal Garden" restaurant and its progressively chaotic, visually and aurally exhausting demolition at the unconscious hands of a repressed, consuming tourist society--is what Jonathan Rosenbaum calls "one of the most staggering accomplishments on film." Here, Tati inscribes an intricate, painterly progression on his enormous canvas: from a restrictive, rigid grammar of straight lines and orthogonal angles to the continuous sweeps of French curves, expressed most directly in the movement of his characters' bodies--progressively intoxicated and compelled not just by alcohol and the increasingly frantic music but by an inevitable collective camaraderie--as they travel through an overplanned and overheating environment that, in a series of destructive sight gags, has lost its organizational power to constrain human desire. Once a disastrous critical flop, PLAYTIME is an odd and striking masterpiece of urban studies that absolutely must be seen on the big screen. (1967, 124 min, Digital Projection) [Michael Castelle]
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 Sunday at the Chi-Town Movies Drive-In. Rounding out the month-long event are Robert Lieberman’s 1993 sci-fi “bio-pic” FIRE IN THE SKY (109 min, Digital Projection) and Dean Alioto’s 1989 film THE MCPHERSON TAPE (66 min, Digital Projection) screening on Friday starting at 9:30pm as the Friday Night Double Feature; Sam Raimi’s 1987 horror classic EVIL DEAD II (84 min, Digital Projection) and Salim Raza’s shot-by-shot Hollywood remake of it, BACH KE ZARAA (99 min, Digital Projection) screen on Saturday starting at 9:30pm as part of Rip-Off Saturdays; and, finally, Michael Dougherty’s 2007 film TRICK ‘R TREAT (82 min, Digital Projection) screens on Sunday, Halloween proper, at 9:30pm. Check Music Box’s website for more information and to buy tickets.
🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
Also Screening
⚫ Doc Films at the University of Chicago
Per Doc’s website, “[a] recording of the 2019 landmark production of Les Indes Galantes [200 min, Digital Projection] at the Opéra-Bastille in Paris, followed by a live Q&A with choreographer Bintou Dembélé” will take place on Saturday at noon; additionally, “[t]his screening is for a specific class, but we also invite those not taking the course to this special event, which is free and open to the public. All COVID-19 policies are still in place, except for this screening in which non-UChicago ID holders do not need to purchase a quarterly pass and may simply attend with proof of a COVID vaccine.”
Additionally, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 film THE BIRDS (119 min, 35mm) screens on Saturday at 9:30pm; Brad Bird’s 1992 animated feature THE IRON GIANT (86 min, 35mm) screens on Sunday at 1:30pm; and Peter Collinson’s 1969 heist film THE ITALIAN JOB (99 min, Digital Projection) screens on Thursday at 9:30pm. More info on all films here.
⚫ Facets Cinema
Alexis Gambis’ 2021 film SON OF MONARCHS (97 min, Digital Projection) screens through Sunday, with several showtimes each day. More info here.
⚫ Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts)
“Dreaming at 24 Frames Per Second,” featuring several short student films made in the Departments of Cinema and Media Studies and Studio Art’s 16mm production courses, screens on Thursday at 7pm. More info here.
⚫ Humboldt Park Cinema Club (1138 N. California Ave.)
Alan Crosland’s 1927 film THE JAZZ SINGER (89 min, Digital Projection) screens on Thursday at 7:30pm, as part of a pop-up series titled “Optimism Onscreen: The Birth of Sound, The End of the Depression, and the Movie-Musical Golden Age.” Get more info and RSVP here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
Edgar Wright’s 2021 film LAST NIGHT IN SOHO (116 min) begins this week, with most screenings on 35mm, except for the 11:45pm screenings on Friday and Saturday, when it will be projected on DCP Digital. Robert Yapkowit and Richard Peet’s 2021 documentary KAREN DALTON: IN MY OWN TIME (86 min, DCP Digital) screens on Saturday and Sunday at 11:45am, and E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s 2021 documentary THE RESCUE (108 min, DCP Digital) continues.
As per tradition, Jim Sharman’s 1975 cult classic ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (100 min, 35mm) screens on Friday and Saturday at midnight and Sunday at 10:30pm. More info on all films here.
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS –
New Reviews
Todd Chandler's BULLETPROOF (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through Facets Cinema here
BULLETPROOF doesn't reveal anything new about the problem of American school shootings and our reaction to them, but it adopts a cool distance that makes the exploitation and fear it shows all the more infuriating. In the vein of the late Harun Farocki's films, Todd Chandler approaches the institution of school systems through a deep chill. The camera almost never moves, and BULLETPROOF uses B-roll long shots of fields and playgrounds for punctuation. The film could have been more focused—while quite a short feature, it still feels padded. But it diagnoses a problem where the threat of violence is blown out of proportion—for instance, when his class is interrupted by a shooter drill, a math teacher tells his students that they're far more likely to get hit by a car walking to the cafeteria than face gun violence at school—in order to make money and exert tighter control over students. It avoids turning the subjects into characters or explaining where the film was shot, but the one person to whom it returns is a woman who grew up in a dangerous neighborhood and now manufactures bulletproof hoodies. Inspired by an incident in her neighborhood, she set out to keep her mother safe. But her business grew from sewing a few hoodies a week herself to running a factory with the help of an investment from gun manufacturers. She justifies her business by saying that she can now donate some hoodies to poor children. It's a microcosm of the large-scale problem shown in BULLETPROOF: putting a bandage over the problem of violence instead of searching for true root causes and solutions, especially if one can make money traumatizing children and profiting from a community's fears instead. (2020, 82 min) [Steve Erickson]
Morgan Quaintance’s SOUTH (UK)
Virtual Talks with Video Activists through Media Burn Archive – Thursday, 3pm
British writer and artist Morgan Quaintance’s SOUTH considers similarities between civil rights demonstrations in Chicago in 1968 and anti-apartheid demonstrations in London in 1986. Quaintance situates both cities historically and geographically, bringing in personal narratives as well; one personal digression (which I won’t spoil here) closes the film, and the content is so unlike what’s come before that its inclusion seems like an enigma. The montage is sweeping, bringing together a trove of detail about personal lives and public movements. How appropriate that a movie about making history should feel like a history in miniature. The event is free; the filmmaker will appear virtually in conversation with art historian Rebecca Zorach for a post-screening Q&A. (2020, 28 min) [Ben Sachs]
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS –
Also Screening/Streaming
⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Two Conversations at the Edge programs are available to stream through November 4: Pom Bunsermvicha’s 2021 short film LEMONGRASS GIRL (17 min) and two short films by Thai filmmaker Tulapop Saenjaroen, A ROOM WITH A COCONUT VIEW (28 min) and PEOPLE ON SUNDAY (21 min). More info on the CATE programs here.
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 (85 min) is available to rent through November 12. More info on all films here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
Emir Ezwan’s 2019 Malaysian film ROH (83 min), which recently played at the Music Box of Horrors: Dawn of the Drive-In, is available to rent starting this week. More info and hold-over titles here.
⚫ VDB TV
To celebrate the launch of the Hans Breder archive at the Video Data Bank, five short videos by the artist and filmmaker are available to stream for free on VDB TV. More info here.
CINE-LIST: October 29 - November 4, 2021
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Michael Castelle, Kyle Cubr, Steve Erickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Michael Frank, Mojo Lorwin, Michael Glover Smith, Drew Van Weelden, Brian Welesko