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 CRITICS FILM FESTIVAL
The Chicago Critics Film Festival, a product of the Chicago Film Critics Association, starts Friday and goes through Sunday; it takes place at the Music Box Theatre. Below are select reviews of several features. More info on the festival and its screenings here.
Cine-File contributor Rob Christopher’s ROY’S WORLD: BARRY GIFFORD’S CHICAGO (US/Documentary)
Saturday, 2:30pm
If the name Barry Gifford rings a bell to Cine-File readers, it’s likely for his contributions to what you might call “David’s world”: David Lynch’s, that is. Lynch’s WILD AT HEART (1990) was an adaptation of a Gifford novel, and they co-wrote LOST HIGHWAY (1997) together. Until I saw ROY'S WORLD: BARRY GIFFORD'S CHICAGO, a dreamy, immersive documentary by Cine-File contributor Rob Christopher, I was unfamiliar with his Roy stories. Roy is the character Gifford invented as an alter-ego as a boy, a movie-loving street kid whose coming-of-age adventures Gifford has been chronicling in works of autobiographical fiction for nearly 40 years now. “Roy’s World” is a specific time and place—Chicago, mostly, in the 1950s and early ‘60s. This documentary celebrates these writings by adhering to a strict no-talking-heads policy. Christopher eschews entirely the standard on-screen interview in favor of voice-over narratives: reminiscences from Gifford himself provide context for readings from the work. For these, Christopher and producer Michael Glover Smith (also a Cine-File contributor) scored a coup: they got Willem Dafoe, Matt Dillon, and Lili Taylor to read, and their distinctive timbres and tough-but-tender personas embody the texts. Gifford/Roy’s Chicago is a wintry, working-class world. His father ran an operation called Lake Shore Pharmacy, across from the old Water Tower. It was a 24-hour joint, ostensibly a drug store; showgirls would drop by on their breaks and repair to the basement, where he’d administer some kind of pep shot. The people who hung around the store, including Gifford’s own family, were “not people to mess around with”; some had been gangsters during Prohibition. The film pulses with the seamy romance of the town’s jazzy nightlife, enhanced by a cool, atmospheric score by jazz vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz. Still, a young boy experienced the corruption of organized crime—and the intertwined iron fist of Richard J. Daley’s machine—as just part of the atmosphere. Hard-boiled as it was in attitude, the town nevertheless seems like it must have been a hell of a place to grow up. Gifford’s mom was from Texas, a former beauty queen, 20 years younger than his dad. The marriage didn’t stick, and her struggles—during an era when being a “divorcee” was still a scandal—are poignant. In fact, Gifford confides in us that one of his chief motivations for creating Roy was to remember the time he had with his mother. The story “Chicago, Illinois, 1953” recalls a humiliating incident when a shopkeeper mistook his mom, bronzed from a season under the tropical sun, for a Black woman, and refused to serve her. It is illustrated by shimmering black-and-white animated drawings. When young Roy later asks his shaking mom why she didn’t simply tell the man she was white, she replies, “It shouldn’t matter, Roy.” The story “Bad Girls,” set during the early ’60s and illustrated by rotoscoped footage from Graceland Cemetery, nicely evokes the feeling of teenage discovery, as Roy and a new female friend roam our fabled “city of neighborhoods.” Christopher’s design also includes found footage in striking black-and-white and eye-popping saturated color, and archival materials ranging from Gifford’s home movies to neighborhood newspapers. Zooming carefully into photographs from a bygone world, patiently waiting for them to reveal their secrets, Christopher encourages us to imagine the individual lives and stories spilling outside the frame. For locals, the film transforms Chicago into a fascinating palimpsest, allowing us to trace the former lives of buildings and neighborhoods behind our contemporary cityscape. While the film is deliberately unhurried, its open-all-night vibe will cast a spell on anyone open to its urban jazz-noir mood. Gifford’s Roy stories work as history and as autobiography, but above all they’re a form of make-believe. It required almost an equivalent act of imagination for Christopher to conjure up a world that opens up as richly as his inspiration, but that’s what he’s done with ROY’S WORLD. I emerged from this sensory experience as if from a waking dream, blinking and momentarily disoriented, though with a heightened alertness. It was as if I’d visited a land of phantoms—but of course, these were really only the shades of men and women just like us. ROY’S WORLD made me feel as if the past never really goes anywhere, if only we look for it closely enough. (2019, 75 min, DCP Digital) [Scott Pfeiffer]
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Lauren Hadaway’s THE NOVICE (US)
Saturday, 5pm
I have never been convinced that competition was all that healthy—particularly in athletics—and it seems as though experienced sound editor and first-time feature director Lauren Hadaway agrees. She draws on her experiences as a competitive rower at Southern Methodist University in Texas to tell the story of Alex Dall (Isabelle Fuhrman), a first-year student and novice on the rowing team who, when an opportunity arises for the novices, becomes obsessed with making the Varsity 1 team in her first year. We notice Alex’s tremendous amount of energy from the start, as we see her running to her first novice meeting after being the last person to finish an exam in her physics class. She fumbles like the other novices at the rowing machine, but soon gets into her rhythm. She isn’t the natural athlete that her teammate Jamie (Amy Forsyth) is, but she works incredibly hard. The heavy breathing, the mechanical drone of the rowing machines, the sweat-soaked exhaustion of both young women when they flop together on the floor after practice envelop the viewer in this painfully focused activity. Hadaway reveals Alex’s psychological dysfunction gradually. When she finds out she has made the varsity team, which is short of members, because another woman turned it down, her stricken face and self-punishment are unnerving. Her drive to be the best, to conquer difficult obstacles, is the kind of thing our society rewards, and woe betide those who admit to weakness or fail to live up to expectations—Olympic gymnast Simone Biles and tennis star Naomi Osaka learned that lesson when they chose mental health over their fans’ reflected glory. Cinematographer Todd Martin creates an inky, watery world that mirrors the darkness in Alex, and Hadaway and Matthew Lessall’s lean, kinetic edit expresses Alex’s jittery instability and single-minded focus that eschews anything but her essential tasks. Fuhrman digs deep to offer a multifaceted performance that generates sympathy and a start at understanding her alienating character. (2021, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Michael Mann’s THIEF (US)
Saturday, Midnight
Is Michael Mann the greatest working American director? It's true that Frederick Wiseman exerts a greater influence over world cinema on the whole and Clint Eastwood is more valuable on a national level for his ongoing critique of the American character. Yet Mann inspires greater reverence than either of them due to the sheer beauty of his aesthetic. An artist with an acute sense of the fleeting moment, the unnatural pace of contemporary life, and myriad variations of artificial light (tellingly he's likened himself to a photorealist painter), Mann is simply our greatest living image-maker. Shot primarily in Chicago, THIEF builds its atmosphere around the city's proletarian feistiness; it may be the native Southsider's most autobiographical work. In the first of many idiosyncratic takes on realism, Mann cast actual Chicago cops to play criminals and actual former criminals as cops. In doing so, he achieved the first significant iteration of his major theme: the uncanny leveling of human behavior under modern professionalism. James Caan plays a successful life-long thief who wants to get married and settle down. He discovers his own humanity too late (there's always One Last Score), but he makes other, smaller realizations on the way to grand failure. Caan considers this his best performance, and he's probably right: several of the most important scenes are two-person conversations between Caan and a costar that reach Bergmanesque levels of intimacy and recrimination. These moments of heightened self-doubt alternate with bloody gunfights and meticulously observed crimes; unlike Howard Hawks or Anthony Mann—two of his thematic forbearers—Mann seems deeply ambivalent about the macho attitudes that tend to accompany these subjects. In lives increasingly defined by professional obligation, Mann regards the decline of traditional gender roles with seriousness and surprising sympathy. (In this sense, his films have affinities with those of Tsai Ming-liang.) THIEF is the first of Mann's elegies for professional masculinity, and it's sharpened greatly by the film's harsh night photography. (1981, 122 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
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Robert Greene’s PROCESSION (US/Documentary)
Sunday, 2:30pm
To say that Robert Greene’s documentaries blur the line between fact and fiction would be accurate but reductive nevertheless—with his last several features, Greene has proven himself to be a master of the idiosyncratic truth, embracing the delicate space between objectivity and subjectivity that defines the human experience. This latest is his most audacious yet, and not just because of its harrowing subject matter. By embracing a mode of fiction, several victims of childhood sexual abuse within the Catholic church are able to explore and realize the truth of their experiences, which, due to the trauma involved, are often shrouded in a haze of perturbation. Upon seeing a televised press conference in 2017, during which several victims of clergy sex abuse in Kansas City, Missouri, spoke out about their experiences, Greene (a professor at the University of Missouri) was inspired to contact the group’s attorney, Rebecca Randles, who specializes in representing such clients. Out of this came an idea to have a select group of survivors work with a drama therapist and subsequently act out their traumas. Forgoing a simplistic narrative structure and embracing the unwieldiness inherent to trauma, Greene exhibits radical empathy toward his subjects, all of whose remembrances and current interpretations of them are fraught with convolutions of time, recollection, and hurt. The six men include among them: the blisteringly angry Mike Foreman, who blames the church and their reliance on the statute of limitations to suppress victims as much as he does the priest who assaulted him; amiable Dan Laurine, a location scout in real life who aids his fellow performers in finding places to film their segments and quash some demons in the process; and the conspicuously urbane Ed Gavagan, a sharply dressed, New York-based contractor whose guileless likening of the collaborative process to that of the Avengers will bring a tear even to the most comic book-averse snob’s eye. Each has his own heart-wrenching story, some elucidated more explicitly than others; each has also sought retribution via the church, the legal system, or both, often to disappointing effect. The drama therapy involves the men scripting, directing, and sometimes performing in a segment, their own or another's, that embodies his respective neuroses surrounding the abuse. One boy, a young professional actor named Terrick, is the stand-in for each survivor in all of the shorts; his presence becomes as therapeutic as it is necessary, with Terrick at times consoling the men as they direct him in their stead. Greene has always focused on the collaborative aspects of filmmaking and storytelling, and that practice is even more pronounced here. Particularly striking is a scene where one of the men, the soft-spoken Michael, chastises Greene (calling him Rob, denoting a level of intimacy between the filmmaker and his subject) about a situation that triggers one of the men. In this way Greene acknowledges his own complicity—and, by extension, ours—in their continued retraumatization and the care we all must take to be mindful of their feelings. The filmmaking on display in both the straightforward documentary parts and the narrative segments is superlative. Sporadic medium close-ups of the men give them both focus and space, the camera thus involved in the healing process by way of those apportionments. Really, the film is not so much for us as it is for them (and by them—its understated commentary on authorship is as prevalent and significant as anything else in it); that we’re privy to such pain and healing is ultimately a gift bestowed on us by this group of extraordinary survivors. (2021, 116 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
📽️ BLACK HARVEST FILM FESTIVAL
The 27th Annual Black Harvest Film Festival continues through December 2; it takes place at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Below are reviews of select films playing as part of the festival, with more to come in future lists. Furthermore, select programs are available to rent virtually. More info here.
Arie and Chuko Esiri’s EYIMOFE (THIS IS MY DESIRE) (Nigeria)
Friday, 5:45pm
The feature-length directorial debut by brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri is thoroughly understated and all the more devastating for it. Almost every scene of EYIMOFE (THIS IS MY DESIRE) plays out in a modest medium distance from the camera, which comes to assume the role of a curious but unobtrusive observer. The perspective never feels impassive, however; this isn’t one of those movies where the camera makes a point of never moving. (The film’s occasional panning and tracking shots are simple yet effective.) In fact, the calmness with which the Esiris present their tragic stories communicates a wide range of emotions. Sometimes it suggests reflective wisdom; other times it connotes a blasé attitude, implying that the sad events here are so commonplace in Lagos that there’s no use getting worked up over them. EYIMOFE unfolds in two parts, and while at least one character from the first reappears in the second, the stories are connected more by theme than by specific details. Both tales center on a hardworking Nigerian trying and failing to raise money to emigrate to Europe. The first, titled “Spain,” follows middle-aged electrician Mofe, a single man who lives with his grown sister and her two young boys. I won’t reveal the tragedy that befalls these characters, but suffice it to say, it tightens Mofe’s ties to life in Lagos more than he ever expected. The second story, “Italy,” presents a few weeks in the life a 20-something hairdresser named Rosa, who’s struggling to support her pregnant teenage sister. She plans to move to Italy after her sister gives birth, but again, circumstances force the protagonist to change course at the last minute. Because the Esiris refuse to underscore the narrative developments, they create the impression that misfortune is simply part of life in Lagos. (Too bad Hou Hsiao-Hsien already named a movie A CITY OF SADNESS.) And because they shot this on Super-16, the present-day setting looks significantly older than it really is, as if the people of Lagos were grappling with some eternal weight. (2020, 116 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
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Rodrick F. Wimberly and Senuwell Smith's THE WOODSTOCK OF HOUSE (US/Documentary)
Friday, 8pm
Serving as a foundation for mainstream hits we love today, house music first evolved out of disco. Named after the club Warehouse, where legendary DJ Frankie Knuckles spun tracks night after night, house quickly spread around the globe and continues to influence millions. This documentary focuses on “The Woodstock of House,” which takes place at the Chosen Few DJ’s Picnic in Jackson Park—a massive event that brings in over 40,000 house fans from all over the world. The film takes us through a history of disco, then tells of disco's retreat following the infamous “Disco Demolition Night” at Comiskey Park and the subsequent creation of the house genre. Directors Rodrick F. Wimberly and Senuwell Smith show that house, with its thumping pulse and evocative flips on old favorites, is not just about having fun. The music was a response to the hatred and bigotry of the era; it promoted peace and love and sought to uplift, not unlike the original Woodstock Music and Art Fair of 1969. This pulse that beats throughout the music is something we all share on an instinctual level, and on those grounds, we can connect with one another. The interviews with important house music figures are great, and the knowledge they impart will make you appreciate this city even more. Be sure to have your weekend free, though, because after the credits roll, you will want to grab your friends for a fun night out dancing. (2021, 98 mins, DCP Digital) [Drew Van Weelden]
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Udi Aloni and Ayana Stafford-Morris’ WHY IS WE AMERICANS? (US/Documentary)
Saturday, 5:30pm and Monday, 5:45pm
WHY IS WE AMERICANS? gets its name from a poem by Amiri Baraka that argues for reparations for oppressed people of color. Baraka, born LeRoi Jones in Newark, N.J., and his entire family are the subjects of this documentary, which plumbs the Black Power movement of the 1960s and the roles Baraka and his wife, Amina, played in forwarding its goals. Through archival footage we hear him recite his poetry and watch his activism in action. Amina shares much about her husband, including his move from Newark to Greenwich Village, his loving marriage to a white woman, and his friendships with white artists such as Allen Ginsberg. She ponders his move to Harlem and his divorce as what he felt he needed to do to “be Black.” We see footage of the violent Newark rebellion of 1967, and Amina narrates in chilling detail the destruction of Spirit House, a playhouse and artists’ residence she and Amiri established, and her narrow escape from death during the violence. The filmmakers spend a lot of time with the Barakas’ son Ras, an accomplished poet, activist, and mayor of Newark, whose uplifting speeches and actions have a preacher’s fervor to them. The other Baraka children get their due, particularly Shani, who was murdered by the violent partner of a friend she was trying to protect. The mourning community established the Shani Baraka Women’s Resource Center in Newark in her memory to help abused women and other women in need. The stories of the Barakas are related in a somewhat discursive way that feels as though the directors wanted to make two different films—one a personal biography of the Barakas and the other a motivational film. I would have liked more information about Amiri’s creative life, but all told, WHY IS WE AMERICANS? helped me to understand a great deal more about this gifted man, his accomplished wife, and those they influenced. (2020, 102 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Gordon Park’s LEADBELLY (US)
Monday, 7:45pm
Photographer and artist Gordon Parks helped inaugurate the blaxploitation genre with SHAFT in 1971; five years later, he took on the life and times of singer Huddie Ledbetter, a man who influenced everyone from Bob Dylan to George Ezra. LEADBELLY follows the folk legend through a roughly 25-year period, one permeated with spells in prison and horrible decision-making. Given his violent tendencies and the deeply racism of the South, Ledbetter (played by Roger E. Mosley in what the actor later called his favorite role) spends the majority of Parks' film incarcerated. Yet his spirit—and the movie's— never changes, as the biopic straddles themes of perseverance and pain. Parks gives the title character time to laugh, sing, dance, fall in love (multiple times), meet friends, and subsequently kill some of those same friends. He finds freedom and loses it over and over again. LEADBELLY is often brighter than the circumstances it depicts, partly due to the charisma that beams off of Mosley's smile. With two outstanding supporting performances from Paul Benjamin as Ledbetter's father and Art Evans as blues singer Blind Lemon Jefferson, the drama moves smoothly, humming along even in the direst of situations. The film serves as a reminder that biopics can thrive in small moments, whether joyous or melancholic, not just in splashy musical numbers or heightened conflicts. Musical biopics of the last decade have tended to rely on flashy style and actors singing at the top of their lungs; how refreshing to take in Ledbetter's easy strumming and smooth voice. Parks didn't make too many films during his life (he chose to explore other art forms), but the ones he did make, especially LEADBELLY, are more than worth your time. The film elevates an often-routine genre with care and gentle realness, making humane choices instead of the Oscar-pandering ones. Parks told stories just like he took photographs, with a cool sense of understanding. And LEADBELLY is full of understanding. (1976, 126 min, 35mm) [Michael Frank]
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Wendell B. Harris Jr’s CHAMELEON STREET (US)
Thursday, 6pm
The protagonist of CHAMELEON STREET (which Wendell B. Harris Jr. wrote, directed and stars in, as its title character) is heavily based on con artist William Douglas Street Jr., with whom Harris became familiar after reading an article on the prolific scammer in the Detroit Free Press. ”I think therefore I scam,” says Harris as Street in voiceover, just one of many almost stream-of-consciousness riffs that accompany the film’s equally associative images. Harris injects the film with an experimental flair that renders the thoughts, speech, and actions of the prodigious social chameleon more esoteric than one might expect from a loose adaptation of a notorious scammer’s life and crimes. It exists in stark contrast to something like Steven Spielberg’s CATCH ME IF YOU CAN (2002), about Frank Abagnale Jr., though the protagonists of each have more in common than the respective interpretations of them. Perhaps the most significant (and most egregious) commonality is that both Street and Abagnale briefly pretended to be lawyers and doctors, even going so far as to undertake complex medical procedures (here Street may have outdone Abagnale, having performed upwards of 40 hysterectomies with no official medical training). But where Spielberg’s bright paean evinces an aura of tomfoolery, Harris’ ode, made by a Black man about a Black man, trades in much higher stakes than those of a lucky white guy. Street’s scams take on social significance in how they reflect the imposed limitations and misappropriated potential of a heretofore (and even still) oppressed person. Spurred by his dissatisfaction working for his father’s business in Detroit (Harris himself hails from Flint, Michigan), Street’s scheming lifestyle begins when he attempts to blackmail a Detroit Tigers baseball player with allegations of an extramarital affair; he then leverages the publicity from this endeavor to become a local folk hero, pretending that he just wanted an opportunity to try out for the team. From there, his succession of exploits play out as randomly as they likely did in real life, with Street trying everything from journalism (basketball star Paula McGee stars as herself in this sequence, during which Street abruptly asks “Have you ever had an orgasm?” revealing a problematic facet of Street’s otherwise nuanced persona) to the aforementioned turns as a doctor and lawyer. In between he spends brief stints in jail and navigates fraught relationships with his wife, Gabrielle (Angela Leslie), and mistress (whom he reconnects with while pretending to be a student at Yale). A charming through line is his and Harris’ marked cinephilia, an addendum to his overall urbane cultural predilections. Street attends a costume party dressed as the Beast from Jean Cocteau’s LA BELLE ET LA BÊTE, and Harris evinces his own affection for the movies in multiple homages to Orson Welles, from his manner of speech (an almost Falstaffian bent, vis-à-vis CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT) to an end-credits riff on the frog-and-scorpion fable recounted in MR. ARKADIN. As an actor Harris is an imposing presence—intense, smooth, and even sexy, all in equal measure. The subtlety with which he conveys the underlying racial tension is masterful, especially in a distributing sequence where a white man accosts Street and his wife while they're eating dinner at a restaurant. All this is to say nothing of what Harris experienced in real life after the initial success of the film—his first and still only—at Sundance; perhaps worse than outright racism is the relegation of this work and his own potential to the annals of forgotten film history, a fate from which it’s been saved only recently through a restoration and subsequent revival at the New York Film Festival and now Black Harvest. It stands up as a film of note in several regards, from a bastion of independent filmmaking to a feather in the cap of Black cinema. (1989, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING
Sky Hopinka’s MAŁNI - TOWARDS THE OCEAN, TOWARDS THE SHORE (US/Documentary)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) – Saturday, 1pm (Free Admission)
Feature-length movies by Indigenous filmmakers of North America are rare, but thanks to the efforts of the Sundance Institute, more stories of our native peoples are finding their way onto screens. Among them is Sky Hopinka’s MAŁNI - TOWARDS THE OCEAN, TOWARDS THE SHORE, the Ho-Chunk/Pechangan’s first full-length documentary. It centers on two Native Americans, Sweetwater Sahme and Jordan Mercier, living in Oregon. Sahme is expecting her first child and wondering about the experience of motherhood as she reflects on her own mother’s teachings and inability to keep her from life’s negative temptations. Mercier discusses why he decided to grow his hair long and how it makes him feel. Mercier speaks only in chinuk wawa, an Indigenous language of the Columbia River Basin of the Pacific Northwest in which Hopinka is fluent; Sahme speaks in English. Both are subtitled in either English or chinuk wawa. Woven through these two threads, Hopinka relates Indigenous myths about the life cycle as images of the lapping ocean, lush forests, and winding rivers pass before our eyes. Hopinka also records a large tribal gathering in a somewhat haphazard fashion. MAŁNI is awash in visual effects, many of which seem like Hopinka is just playing around to see what his camera can do. Where the film really excels is in its sound design. From the drumming and singing of the tribal gathering to electronic droning and rushing waterfalls, scorer Thad Kellstadt, sound recordist Drew Durepos, and music supervisor Jennie Armon create an immersive, hypnotic environment. Most touching for me was listening to Mercier, an expectant father, sing a song he hopes to pass on to his child as it was passed on to him. Director Sky Hopinka will be in attendance for a post-screening conversation. (2020, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Joanna Hogg’s THE SOUVENIR: PART II (UK)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
If we don’t get stuck in the process, we often grow through grieving. When last we heard from English director Joanna Hogg, she was recounting in fictional form a painful period in her life—her love affair in the 1980s with a charismatic British diplomat who was addicted to heroin and died of an overdose. That recounting, THE SOUVENIR (2019), used the emotion-filled script she wrote in the 1980s, notes, photos, diaries, and letters to inform many of the improvised actions of her professional and amateur actors, particularly those of Honor Swinton Byrne, who played her alter ego, film student Julie Harte. THE SOUVENIR: PART II, which retains many of the original cast members, picks up the story where the first film left off. Julie is staying with her rich parents (Tilda Swinton and James Spencer Ashworth) at their country estate as she goes through the throes of her very fresh grief over Anthony’s (Tom Burke) death. Hogg skips most of Julie’s recovery time, bringing us to the point where Julie is ready to get back to London and renew her film studies. She has jettisoned her original graduation film script and written a new one that recounts her romance with Anthony. As in the first film, the all-male advisory committee don’t like the script; this time, however, they refuse to fund it at all, sending Julie back to her mother for a loan—though this time it will not be fueling Anthony’s drug habit. Much of PART II is taken up with the production of Julie’s film, also titled The Souvenir, after the painting by Jean-Honore Fragonard that played a role in the first film as a symbol of undying love. The Julie of PART II, however, is not the passive woman who let Anthony tell her what to do. She risks alienating a friend by not casting her in the film and refuses to change her instinctual and spontaneous directing style to assuage the confusion and anger of the cast and crew. When, at last, the film is ready to premiere at the graduation showcase, one of the advisors continues to cast doubt on her future. She merely dedicates the film to absent friends and sits down to watch her film—a grand, experimental departure from the film we have been watching and a clue to Hogg’s early influences and mature confidence in her abilities. As in the first film, Swinton Byrne subtly but convincingly portrays her character’s journey through pain and uncertainty to a deeper understanding of herself, her feelings for Anthony, her developing artistic voice, and her place in the world. It’s delightful to see her play a scene in Julie’s newly redecorated apartment with Tilda Swinton, the actor’s real mother, and watch two masters working on a story that must, in some ways, parallel their own. The final scene in Julie’s apartment, which echoes the opening scene of PART I, brings Hogg’s saga full circle and indicates that she has found closure on this part of her life. As a viewer, I found the entire cycle satisfying and loaded with the kind of humanity that makes cinema so worthwhile. (2021, 106 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Joanna Hogg’s THE SOUVENIR (2019, 120 min, DCP Digital) is also playing Saturday at 1pm, Sunday at 2:45pm, and Tuesday at 5:45pm. Seeing both parts is recommended for a more complete experience of Hogg’s autobiographical masterworks.
Thirza Cuthand's NDN SURVIVAL TRILOGY and Other Works (Canada/Experimental)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) – Wednesday, 7pm (Free Admission)
Indigenous Canadian filmmaker Thirza Cuthand's short films share a sense of closeness. With voiceover by Cuthand, the DIY-style shorts range between 5 and 20 minutes, with the filmmaker delivering personal, political, and social statements. In the five films in this Block Cinema program, Cuthand looks at her heritage, her sexual tendencies, her future, and most often, her relationship to the land she inhabits. The voiceover often feels like the reading of a diary, with words splashing into one another in a rapid succession of thought, feeling, and confusion. Cuthand's films also exude a sense of nakedness, both physical and emotional, as the artist puts herself in front of the camera. THIRZA CUTHAND IS AN INDIAN WITHIN THE MEANING OF THE INDIAN ACT finds artist's body covered in dirt; LESS LETHAL FETISHES finds her wearing only a gas mask; and JUST DANDY finds her in a relationship with an evil queen. Her other films consider the positivity of a future without white people and the extreme nature of extractions from the ground, from communities, and from the people that came before us. Cuthand's films contain more comedy than you might expect and a keen sense of the crumbling world around us. These shorts exhibit a singular, personal voice of someone willing to share all of herself with those willing to listen. You never know what will happen next or how the films will relate to your life (it's often more than you think). It's always special to feel like you're discovering someone through a filmmaker’s work, especially when that someone is as intimate with her audience as Cuthand. Artist Thirza Cuthand will be in attendance for a post-screening conversation. (2013-2021, Approx. 54 min Total, Digital Projection) [Michael Frank]
Alfred Hitchcock’s THE LODGER: A STORY OF THE LONDON FOG (UK/Silent)
Music Box Theatre – Monday, 7:30pm
One of the most important and revelatory film restoration projects of recent years has been the British Film Institute’s ambitious digital refurbishing of the “Hitchcock 9” (the nine extant films that Alfred Hitchcock made in England during the silent era), re-releases of which first toured the U.S. in 2014. The crown jewel of this series is 1927’s THE LODGER, which, in spite of being the master of suspense’s first thriller and thus arguably the first true “Hitchcock film,” still hasn't gotten its due in many quarters for being the great movie that it is. It probably hasn’t helped matters much that Hitch himself practically dismissed it in the seminal interview book Hitchcock/Truffaut by discussing it primarily in terms of pulling off the neat technical trick of shooting through a glass floor. But THE LODGER is much more interesting than that. The narrative intertwines two of what would soon become the director’s trademark plots: the story of a murderer and a “wrong man” plot (in which an ordinary man is accused of a crime he didn’t commit). THE LODGER is also, unforgettably, a love story. Daisy (June Tripp), the daughter of a married couple who run a boarding house, falls in love with the eponymous but unnamed title character (matinee idol Ivor Novello), who is also the chief suspect in a series of grisly stranglings of young blonde women. The way Hitchcock laces these elements with a potent eroticism as well as a sense of humor is impressive, notably in a scene where the lodger and Daisy play chess (the context of which gives his line “I’ll get you yet” a delicious triple meaning). When the lodger picks up a blow-poke just as Daisy bends over to pick up a chess piece that’s fallen to the floor, the viewer is left to wonder if he intends to bash her brains in. That he ends up merely stoking the fireplace nearby is both the film’s darkest and funniest joke—one that calls to mind Truffaut's remark that Hitchcock filmed love scenes like murder scenes and vice-versa. THE LODGER was also a clear influence on Fritz Lang’s M, both in its depiction of how murder can drive a community into a lynch mob-like hysteria and in terms of its visual style: Hitch used triangle shapes as a recurring visual motif in much the same way that his German counterpart would employ spirals. Even more significantly, I never realized the extent of how expressionistically lit THE LODGER was until I viewed the BFI’s restoration, which gloriously reveals many previously unseen details in the sublime, high-contrast cinematography. Featuring a live musical score by Maxx McGathey and his trio. (1927, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]
M. Night Shyamalan’s OLD (US)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm and Sunday, 4pm
With M. Night Shyamalan entering his fourth decade of filmmaking, it’s interesting to note that he’s somehow become one of Hollywood’s most beloved and detested filmmakers. The writer-director burned public favor and trust through the ‘00s with one deserved flop after another—THE VILLAGE notwithstanding (this is a hill I am ready to die on)—after the mega-success of THE SIXTH SENSE, getting to the point where he had to turn to extreme financing methods in order to get his work made. By 2015, no one would fund his films, so he borrowed $5 million against his own home and struck a deal with Blumhouse Productions and Universal to help distribute the film he made with the money. Forced to work within limitations once again, Shyamalan made THE VISIT—and raked in almost $100 million at the box office. After two pictures to round out his UNBREAKABLE trilogy, he went back to his suspense roots with OLD. It’s here we have Shyamalan at his absolute best. Years of financial excess and commercial failure followed by the years of taut budgets and commercial success: all this has taught him how to hone a story incredibly tightly. So, while OLD’s premise is incredibly simple, it features the kind of visual storytelling you’d expect from a craftsman like Spielberg or Hitchcock. It also feels like a short-form TV thriller from the mid-20th century (The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Alfred Hitchcock Presents). Shyamalan has learned that he works best when he gives himself limitations and rules to follow. In place of meandering character development and a one-time-payoff twist ending, we get the sort of immaculate camerawork and masterful mise-en-scene that seem to be getting lost in the post-MCU Hollywood films in the past 20 years. Regardless of how you feel about the acting or dialogue, the movie tells a visual tale better than nearly any film I've seen in the past 5 years. And I’ll be honest—the first time I saw this film I hated it. But on the second time, I fell deeply in love with it. There’s a low level of camp to it that's exemplified by Shyamalan's self-inserted cameo, which I will go on record saying is the best director cameo in any film ever; it adds a layer to the film that is simply delicious. I hope and believe that OLD is ushering in a new chapter of Shyamalan’s career, one that marries his visual mastery with a playfulness that his earlier films only hinted at. This movie is fun, something a lot of filmmakers have forgotten to, or have chosen not to, make a priority. Instead of trying to be the cleverest or the showiest guy in the room, Shyamalan has decided to try to tell the best story. Some think he succeeded; others cry failure. If for nothing else, seeing OLD is worth it just for the conversations you have with others who have seen it afterwards—because OLD is not a film that people have casual opinions about. It may be one of the most divisive films of 2021, and that fact alone makes it worthwhile to see in the theater. (2021, 108 min, Digital Projection) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
Archival Screening Night Roadshow
Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., University of Chicago) – Thursday, 7pm (Free Admission)
Presented by the Association of Moving Image Archivists—an international confederation of people who preserve filmic ephemera—this now-annual program reminds us that the history of moving images extends well beyond cinema, even beyond film. This year’s program contains one work transferred to digital media not from celluloid, but from paper: DEYO, aka GAIETY DANCE (a short loop of a 17-year-old girl dancing that was shot in 1897) had survived as a paper print at the Library of Congress since, prior to 1912, it wasn't possible to copyright a motion picture and so film companies would reproduce their movies on strips of paper and submit that for copyright under the provision for photographs. Some of the other memorable selections out of the 20 contained here were shot on video, like the early-1990s interview with trailblazing experimental filmmaker Marlon Riggs from the UCLA Film and Television Archive (in which Riggs says some eloquent and critical things about American social relations) and the breakdancing competition from 1984 that once aired on local television in Baltimore. The program contains several advertisements and industrial films, which range from clever (such as the riff on James Whale’s THE INVISIBLE MAN made for Mexican TV in the ‘60s) to the crass (see the late-’60s promotional film for the Bobcat industrial loader that bears a passing resemblance to the contemporaneous work of Russ Meyer). The most poignant selections tend to be the home movies. From Thailand comes some bits of 8mm shot furtively by TV news cameraman Tavisak Viryasiri during the historic student demonstrations of the early 1970s; from the Tribesourcing Southwest Film Project comes some intimate shots of a Navajo family living near Monument Valley around 1960. Two Chicago-based archives factor into the program: the South Side Home Movie Project shares a preserved home movie from Detroit after the riots of 1967, and the Chicago Film Archives shares a clip of an amateur variety show shot at the Palace Theater in Peoria in 1934. None of the selections is very long (although quite a few end promoting websites where you can watch longer versions of the material); still, the cumulative effect is impactful—a Cornell-like collage that suggests the wonder of cinema through the bits and pieces deemed either too ordinary or arcane for regular movies. (Approx. 103 min Total) [Ben Sachs]
Joel Coen’s FARGO (US)
Music Box Theatre – Tuesday, 7pm
Inarguably pivotal in the Coen brothers’ oeuvre, FARGO is a midwestern fable. It’s not based on a true story, as the opening text claims, and only the first scene takes place in Fargo, North Dakota; it’s primarily set in Minnesota, which is fitting for a film about things never being exactly as they seem. It’s also about how evil isn’t always calculated, but often completely, hilariously inept—which doesn’t make it any less destructive. In desperate need of money, bungling car salesman Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) hires two criminals (played with perfect bizarre chemistry by chatty Steve Buscemi and the mostly silent Peter Stormare) to kidnap his wife and petition his wealthy father-in-law for the ransom. It doesn’t go well, and after some violent mishaps, Brainerd police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) becomes involved in solving the crimes. Seven-months pregnant Marge, who doesn’t appear on screen until more than 30 minutes in, stands out as a unique, impactful cinematic hero; we watch her slowly realize how mundanely insidious the world can be beyond her kind, no-nonsense demeanor. Well-known for its comedic juxtaposition of Minnesota nice accents and snow-covered landscapes with violence, FARGO is ultimately about Marge’s resilience to search for good in the world, despite the messy horrors she witnesses; her final scenes expressing this are heartbreakingly unassuming. Influential on the black comedy genre for decades after, the film’s best successor is the FX series of the same name. Inspired by FARGO and all the Coen brothers’ works, the anthology series excellently expands and complicates the film’s themes and its fascinating side characters. Todd Melby, author of A Lot Can Happen in the Middle of Nowhere, a new book on the making of FARGO, will be in attendance for a post-screening Q&A. (1996, 98 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
Pablo Larraín’s SPENCER (UK/Germany)
Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema – Check Venue website for showtimes
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]
Seijun Suzuki’s TOKYO DRIFTER (Japan)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Thursday, 7pm
Two shapes diverge on a snowy plain. One, a shadow cast at an almost 90-degree angle. The other, a curvilinear trail of footprints. The titular character stumbles along the latter, away from the rigid darkness. This scene in TOKYO DRIFTER embodies Seijun Suzuki's last years at Nikkatsu, Japan’s oldest major movie studio, where he both shirked convention and exploited it, making films that are at once singular and familiar, all their own but still owing to a wide range of studio auteurs whose paths he was following. Something of a send-up of the "giri-ninjo" conflict, which pits duty against emotion, TOKYO DRIFTER could be as much about Suzuki as it is Tetsuya, the powder-blue-suit-clad former yakuza whose displaced loyalty proves deadly. It's debatable as to whether or not Suzuki felt any sense of obligation to Nikkatsu, but it's inarguable that he was among their most talented (and most underappreciated, at least internally) directors, just as Tetsu is regarded as the most uniquely skilled and thus most threatening yakuza. Having recently gone straight along with his father-figure boss, Tetsu finds himself back in the midst of gang warfare when another yakuza boss comes after them for some valuable real estate. Like the rest of Suzuki's films leading up to his being fired from Nikkatsu, TOKYO DRIFTER doesn't follow a linear trajectory; it often jumps ahead inexplicably, thus mimicking the attention span of someone passively engaging seemingly disposable entertainment. (Though this is a hallmark of his style, one can't help but wonder what happened on those train tracks!) This effect doesn't take away from the story so much as it adds to the general absurdity of Suzuki's quasi-surrealist landscape, which is enveloped in exaggerated genre convention. It's a veritable pop-art extravaganza, complete with James Bond flare, Vincente Minnelli-esque musical numbers, a Western-inspired saloon straight out of Pioneertown, and mordant product placement...for hair dryers. The contention between Suzuki and Nikkatsu came to a head after his 1967 film BRANDED TO KILL, which he was forced by the studio to make in black and white. Suzuki's emotive aesthetic certainly seems to outweigh whatever obligation he had to Nikkatsu, as even his monochrome films are 'colorful' in their distinction. But TOKYO DRIFTER is representative of Suzuki's individualism in all its vibrant glory, and perhaps most personally so. (1966, 83 min, Digital Projection) [Kat Sachs]
Stanley Kubrick’s THE KILLING (US)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Thursday, 9:30pm
As a genre, film noir has typically been hallmarked by straightforward, pulpy storytelling. Stanley Kubrick, on the other hand, typically employed ambiguity and open-endedness with regards to adaptations. In THE KILLING, Kubrick displays his versatility as an auteur to create a noir based on Lionel White’s novel Clean Break that satisfies the former. Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) is a career con ready to make one last score before retiring. His plan is simple: rob a racetrack during a huge race and ride off into the sunset. To accomplish this task, he enlists a host of accomplices—from a corrupt police officer to a betting teller from the track—who will all serve as distractions and assistants in the process. The film runs at a rapid pace, a rarity for Kubrick titles, and flows exceptionally well, thanks in part to the whip-crack script and the fluidity of the cinematography. The film features a strong ensemble cast, including many actors Kubrick had admired from other noirs; in particular, Elisha Cook Jr. and Marie Windsor as the bickering couple whose marital troubles lead to serious complications for the heist’s plan. The film’s multiple-perspective narrative also adds to its overall intrigue, rewinding the plot to depict facets that are all transpiring simultaneously. Even more than his first feature, KILLER’S KISS, THE KILLING announced Stanley Kubrick’s strong capabilities as a director. It’s a noir that has aged like a fine wine. (1956, 85 min, Digital Projection) [Kyle Cubr]
Stanley Donen’s FUNNY FACE (US)
Humboldt Park Cinema Club (1138 N. California Ave.) — Saturday, 7:30pm
During one of the ideological arguments that forms the backbone of the conflict between Jo (Audrey Hepburn) and Dick (Fred Astaire) in FUNNY FACE, Jo admonishes Dick’s adherence to “outmoded social conventions.” The movie doesn’t side with her, of course; the narrative is, in accordance with the rules of the classical Hollywood romance, one of societal integration, forcing the initially recalcitrant woman to yield to such patriarchal conventions. Through the pairing of Astaire and Hepburn, this assimilation takes on a certain generational tension. As underlined by the aforementioned dialogue, Astaire (then 58) was a veteran, starring in one of his final musicals. Hepburn (then 28) was, by contrast, a relative newcomer. Astaire plays a fashion photographer for Quality Magazine who is looking for the next big trend. Hepburn is the mousy, bohemian bookshop clerk for whom he falls, and who becomes the new face of the magazine. Much pushing and pulling between the two occurs, but there is never a doubt that Jo will find actualization through Dick’s love and guidance, allowing her to transform from callow beatnik into Audrey Hepburn, Beauty Icon (in Paris, of course), when she will come to realize that Givenchy, and not Sartre, is a girl’s best friend. Despite its focus on haute couture, FUNNY FACE can’t help but feel, well, kind of outmoded, its awkward politics and mid-century cultural commentary leaving it less fresh than classics such as SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN or even much earlier fare like SWING TIME. But. But! For lovers of the capital “M” Movie Musicals that were once a Hollywood staple, there is much to admire. The colors are as radiant as those in any Arthur Freed MGM production. The Paris locales are resplendent. The costumes, courtesy also of Edith Head, drip with glamour. Astaire gets in a couple of all-time soft-shoes, while Hepburn’s underground bar slink is rightfully iconic. And Kay Thompson, making a rare and juicy onscreen appearance, is an absolute riot as a Diana Vreeland-like impresario. To borrow from its most famous Gershwin tune: these things are s’marvelous. (1957, 103 min, Digital Projection) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
Andrzej Zulawski’s POSSESSION (France)
Music Box Theatre – See Venue website 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]
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]
🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
Also Screening
⚫ Asian Pop-Up Cinema
Jun Li’s 2021 Chinese thriller CLOUDY MOUNTAIN (115 min, Digital Projection) screens on Saturday at 5pm at ChiTown Movies Drive-In (2343 S. Throop Street). The screening is sponsored by the Consulate General of the People’s Republic of China in Chicago. More info here.
⚫ Chicago Filmmakers
Presented in partnership with Black World Cinema, France Štiglic’s 1956 Slovenian war film VALLEY OF PEACE (82 min, Digital Projection) screens on Saturday at 7pm. More info here.
⚫ Doc Films at the University of Chicago
Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson and Hamilton Luske’s 1951 animated classic ALICE IN WONDERLAND (75 min, Digital Projection) screens on Saturday at 7pm. More info here.
⚫ Facets Cinema
The 38th Annual Chicago International Children’s Film Festival continues through Sunday, with in-person and virtual screenings. More info here.
⚫ Film Studies Center
Ari Aster’s 2019 horror film MIDSOMMAR (145 min, Digital Projection) screens on Wednesday at 7pm as part of the Film Studies Center’s Open Classroom series. Admission is free. More info here.
⚫ Humboldt Park Cinema Club (1138 N. California Ave.)
Lloyd Bacon’s 1935 film IN CALIENTE (84 min, Digital Projection) screens on Sunday at 4pm, 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) continues this week, with all showtimes now screening on DCP Digital. Jane Campion’s 2021 film THE POWER OF THE DOG (125 min, DCP Digital) begins its run on Wednesday.
⚫ South Side Projections
In partnership with the Bronzeville Historical Society and Media Burn Archive, “Video Profiles of Black Chicago” screens on Saturday at 2pm, at the Parkway Ballroom (4455 S. King Dr.). Per the event description, “Sara Chapman of the Media Burn Independent Video Archive presents a small sampling of their wide array of videos highlighting Black life in Chicago.” There will be a post-screening Q&A with Chapman, journalist/producer John Owens, and Bronzeville Historical Society director Sherry Williams. More info here.
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS –
Held Over/Still Screening/Return Engagements (Selected)
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]
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS –
Also Screening/Streaming
⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Select programs from the Black Harvest Film Festival are available to rent virtually. More info here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
Check 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: November 12 - November 18, 2021
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS //