We will highlight physical screenings at the top of the list for theaters and venues that have reopened, grouped 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
Vincente Minnelli’s MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS (US) / Joe Dante’s GREMLINS (US)
(Meet Me in St. Louis) Chicago Film Society at Music Box Theatre – Monday, 7pm
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(Gremlins) Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes
This week the Music Box is presenting 35mm revivals of two of the greatest American films: Vincente Minnelli’s MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS (1944, 113 min, 35mm) and Joe Dante’s GREMLINS (1984, 106 min, 35mm). These movies represent the best that Hollywood has to offer, delivering fun-for-all-ages genre pleasures with impeccable craftsmanship, boundless visual imagination, and the finest sets, costumes, and effects you can find at the major studios. More importantly, these qualities are all in the service of cinematic visions that are both deeply personal and highly collaborative, knowingly artificial and achingly sincere. Produced by MGM’s immortal Arthur Freed unit and filmed at a time when Technicolor made every shot look like an oil painting come to life, MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS would have looked gorgeous even if Minnelli hadn’t directed it. Yet he did, and the world is a better place for it. This is the movie (only Minnelli’s third as director) where the former Marshall Field’s window dresser became the American Max Ophüls; the balletic camera movements invoke, alternately, intoxication with rediscovering the past and a skeptical interrogation of the past. Comparably, the dense mise-en-scène is filled with countless little observations about how people lived in a particular time and place (specifically, an upper-middle-class St. Louis neighborhood in 1903-04), and remarkably, the imagery always feels in harmony with the emotional content, which is Chaplinesque in how it can be appreciated by small children and wizened adults for pretty much the same reasons. The onscreen world of MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS was only four decades old when the movie was made, but given that this was during the worst days of World War II, the rosy images of the past probably seemed as distant then as they do today. (Notably, when the characters speak of different nations interacting, they’re talking about the strictly benign spectacle of the coming World’s Fair.) The film continues to triumph as escapist entertainment: Who doesn’t swoon over the exuberance of “The Trolley Song” sequence, grin beamingly at the expertly timed light comedy of the family interaction, or get misty-eyed during Judy Garland’s soulful rendition of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”? Yet what makes MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS endure as art are the countless ways that Minnelli and company complicate their project of escapism. Consider the anecdotal narrative structure, which recognizes the banality and commonness of life in its focus on everyday events; or consider the film’s groundbreaking integration of songs into the story (before MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, the songs in most American musicals were distinctly separate entities from the narratives), which grants unprecedented depth to familiar emotions. These emotions are not always pretty or easily contained—Minnelli generates a surprising amount of anxiety from the Smith family’s impending move, and the scene of Margaret O’Brien’s Tootie taking her anger out on her snowmen is always more unnerving than you expect. Robin Wood once suggested, only half-jokingly, that MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS could be categorized as a horror movie, with Tootie being the monstrous personification of her family members’ repressed emotions, and no less than John Carpenter took inspiration from the Halloween section of the film in his design of the original HALLOWEEN. Apparently, there’s something about the forced perfection of all-American town life that lends itself to the horrific imagination, as GREMLINS would demonstrate 40 years after MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS came out. Filmed on backlots in homage to IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE and styled after Norman Rockwell illustrations, GREMLINS creates a memorable nightmare of the wholesale destruction of its settings by the titular monsters. The movie can be genuinely scary, but it’s also a laugh riot, thanks in part to the adolescent glee that Dante and company take from laying waste to such cherished American institutions as Christmastime, Walt Disney, and suburban architecture. A product of ’60s counterculture and ’70s exploitation cinema, Dante has always maintained his outsider bona fides no matter how mainstream his productions have gotten, and one of the wonderful things about GREMLINS is how it feels like a bunch of weirdos successfully crashing the ultra-square party that was Reagan-era Hollywood. The movie’s subversive humor reaches its strongest expression in Phoebe Cates’ sickly funny Santa Claus monologue (which would have been cut from the finished film had not executive producer Steven Spielberg intervened with Warner Bros. studio bosses), but the sentiment can be found even in the premise—that inside every cuddly Spielbergian creation is a destructive monster desperate to come out. Both Dave Kehr and Jonathan Rosenbaum have likened Dante to Frank Tashlin, the Warner Bros. cartoonist who carried over the rubbery reality of Looney Tunes into his work as a director of live-action satires. Like Tashlin, Dante makes fun of his subjects with an air of gee-whiz affection. But Dante’s electrifying shifts between humor and horror show the influence of directors who came before Tashlin: James Whale, who was mixing the two genres in the early 1930s and after, as well as the pop-obsessed auteurs of the French New Wave. Indeed, GREMLINS is so rich in knowledge of film history that it requires several viewings to catch all the references Dante hides around the frames, which are as visually packed in their way as Minnelli’s. [Ben Sachs]
František Vláčil's MARKETA LAZAROVÁ (Czechoslovakia)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 6pm
MARKETA LAZAROVÁ is much revered by the Czech people (and by many others lucky enough to have seen it). You will hear from nearly every Czech national you ask that this is simply the best Czech film of all time—a claim that is bolstered by an official nation-wide vote in 1998. Its heady, disarming structure helps engender this reverence. During the film, there is hardly any space for reflection or distraction within its nearly three-hour-long barrage of stunning, immersive images that depict life (and, just as frequently, death) in 13th century Bohemia. Based on Vladislav Vančura's novel of the same name, this medieval epic is not some delicately spun tapestry of castles, moats, and courtly love. Instead, the characters wander, forge, and fight their way through each frame caked in dirt and blood and shit, sometimes haphazardly and sometimes with frightening deliberation. It is extreme historical accuracy taken to simultaneously surreal and hyperreal effect; Jaroslav Boček called it "baroque, barbaric and antique." Vláčil began filming with the single-minded intention of realizing his cinematic vision through extreme measures, which included forcing the cast to live in the Šumava forest for two years—experiencing the same conditions their characters would have. He spent most of that period hovering on the brink of a nervous breakdown, but his efforts paid off: the resulting work would seem to match his vision of the ideal film, in which there is "no dialogue, everything is clear, comprehensible from the picture alone." The lack of dialogue and narrative makes for an unusual literary adaptation, although the film does retain certain literary elements, such as chapter headings with ornately printed text. Without any prior exposure to the source material, it's nearly impossible to extrapolate backwards and imagine how Vančura's novel must read; in Vláčil's film the image reigns supreme and sequence is largely inconsequential, leading to a pervasive feeling of disorientation and awe. The only semblance of a narrative we are given is a series of brutal conflicts between dueling elements, which could have been broken down rather neatly (Christianity vs. paganism, man vs. nature, clan vs. clan) but in Vláčil's hands, are presented through constantly shifting perspectives that defy allegiance. (1967, 163 min, 35mm) [Anne Orchier]
Ryusuke Hamguchi’s DRIVE MY CAR (Japan)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
How do we deal with misfortunes that arrive when we least expect them? In DRIVE MY CAR, the characters channel their emotions (or lack thereof) into their art, their tools, and their environments. The film follows Yūsuke Kafuku, a theater director who is known for putting on multilingual productions, a concept you could spend hours discussing. For a large portion of the film, we find him traveling in his car, listening to a cassette recording of his wife reading lines for Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in preparation for a production he's going to put on. The film takes on these various layers (it's a cinematic lasagna, if you will), filled with references, different languages, and emotions that are both explosively expressed and shamefully hidden. This comes as no surprise, given that the film is an adaptation of a short story by Haruki Murakami, whose work is also filled with references and taboo eroticism. Hamaguchi delivers a nuanced film that should only get better with each viewing, as details and subtleties are weaved into things said or left unsaid. This makes sense—Kafuku’s multilingual production raises some interesting questions on the ways we can approach communication. Despite a language barrier, or an unwillingness to say something out loud, intentions and feelings can still seep through with a knowing glance or shy shift of the body. Often, the audience and maybe one or two characters might know the truth of the scenario, but Hamaguchi places us in an awkward position, knowing right next to the main cast. It’s hard to say what's the right way to deal with these scenarios, but delaying the inevitable impact of your feelings will only do you harm in the long run. (2021, 179 min, DCP Digital) [Drew Van Weelden]
Mehdi M. Barsaoui’s A SON (Tunisia)
Facets Cinema – See Venue website for showtimes
This gripping debut feature from writer-director Mehdi M. Barsaoui takes place in 2011, just after the Jasmine Revolution toppled Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and the country’s rocky transition to democracy heavily informs the film’s tightly focused story of a young family in crisis. Tooling around a mountain road in their Land Rover during a family vacation, free-thinking professionals Fares (Sami Bouajila) and Meriem (Najla Ben Abdallah) and their 11-year-old son, Aziz, stumble upon an Islamist terrorist attack on a military vehicle, and both their car windshield and their lives are shattered by a bullet that strikes the boy. At the nearest hospital, a sympathetic doctor tells the couple that Aziz will need a new liver and requests DNA samples so they might donate an organ; later, he pulls Meriem aside to deliver the startling news that Fares is not the boy’s biological father. || This revelation would rock any family, and in Tunisia, where women are still prosecuted for adultery, it has legal and social implications as well. But in A SON, these issues play out largely in the critical matter of saving the boy. Because he has no siblings and Meriem’s blood type makes her incompatible, she must track down her old lover and persuade him to become a partial organ donor (in a country whose Muslim community frowns on the practice). Meanwhile, a shady character haunting the hospital seduces Fares into pursuing a black-market liver. || Occasionally Barsaoui allows Fares to escape into the dramatic yellow sandscapes of the Tunisian desert, but the majority of the action plays out in cramped, fluorescent-lit hospital spaces where the betrayed husband grapples with his rage and the wife with her shame (both actors are superb). What distinguishes their conflict from that of a million soap opera couples is Barsaoui’s sly observation of how easily anger and resentment drive the cosmopolitan Fares back into the repressive sexual codes he and Meriem claim to have rejected. “You know I could send you and your scumbag to jail,” he spits at his wife, who finally slaps him. Popular rule may have survived in Tunisia, but this marriage is another matter. (2021, 96 min, DCP Digital) [J.R. Jones]
Charles Chaplin’s THE GOLD RUSH (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 5:45pm
THE GOLD RUSH contains some of Chaplin’s most beloved sequences: the “dance” of the dinner rolls, the Tramp eating his shoe, the ramshackle house nearly falling over a cliff, and more. It also contains some of the most spectacular images of his filmmaking career, namely the scene near the beginning of the film that shows a great mass of prospectors (played by 2,500 extras!) marching up a mountain. The character of the Tramp was always struggling to survive, but in no film was his struggle as intense as it is here. A good deal of the film concerns the Tramp trying not to starve to death, and the aforementioned sequence involving house and cliff achieves a sense of white-knuckle suspense rarely encountered in Chaplin’s filmography. Yet THE GOLD RUSH is still hilarious in spite of its despair, as Chaplin manages to find humor in even the most desperate situations—a talent derived, no doubt, from growing up in abject poverty. This also holds the distinction of featuring what is perhaps Chaplin’s best performance as the Tramp. To quote Mordaunt Hall’s 1925 New York Times review: “Chaplin obtains the maximum effect out of every scene, and a fine example of this is where he stands with his back to the audience. He is watching the throng in a Klondike dancing hall, garbed, in his ridiculous loose trousers, his little derby, his big shoes and his cane. He is lonely, and with a bunch of the shoulders and a gesture of his left hand he tells more than many a player can do with his eyes and mouth. He is just thinking of the girl Georgia, the dancing hall queen, who is not even conscious of the little man who adores her.” Please note that the Film Center will be screening Chaplin's preferred 1942 version of THE GOLD RUSH, which contains the director's original score and narration. (1925/1942, 72 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
Douglas Sirk's ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Wednesday, 8:15pm
Though it was intended by Universal to be a Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman vehicle—building upon their popularity in MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION, rather on than Sirk's popularity as a director—ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS is every bit as personal as its predecessor, even if only because of Sirk's hefty allowance (both artistically and economically). Wyman plays the pussyfooting Cary Scott, a recent widow in a tight-knit, high-strung, upper-class American town. She falls in love with her gardener (Hudson), and her children object and buy her a television to replace him. It's a film about people making things difficult for themselves and others because they have nothing more pressing to attend to. They impose tragedy on themselves as a matter of course, but Sirk is sympathetic. For all the stunning grandeur of his heavily saturated colors and Superscope compositions, Sirk never lets his characters become washed out, nor does he treat them as secondary to his visual style. His sympathies save films like ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS from their own absurdities, and the more ridiculous his storylines and intricate visual compositions become (take note of the way he frames characters within things like window frames and television sets), the more beautiful his films seem. (1955, 89 min, 35mm) [Julian Antos]
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
Kogonada's COLUMBUS (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Wednesday, 6pm
I cherish Kogonada's COLUMBUS for what it values, and questions, in architecture and cinema both. At the same time, it's a thoughtful, moving story of a budding friendship that becomes a form of love, and a middle-aged man contemplating a parent's mortality. Kogonada is a justly celebrated video essayist; I highly recommend you visit his site, kogonada.com, and check out his beautiful, exhilarating video essays on the likes of Ozu, Godard, Bresson, Bergman, Malick, Kubrick, Hitchcock, Tarkovsky, and Kore-eda. He wrote, directed and edited this dramatic feature debut, and he's filled it with compositional homages: Kubrick's one-point perspective, Ozu's passageways, Bergman's mirrors. It's about a pensive, melancholy middle-aged man (John Cho) who arrives in Columbus, Indiana, from Seoul, after his estranged father, a noted professor of architecture, falls into a coma. Columbus is a small, rural midwestern town that also happens to be a kind of open-air museum, where some of the greatest figures in Mid-Century Modern architecture created masterpieces of the form. (Just for starters, there's First Christian Church by Eliel Saarinen, North Christian Church by his son Eero, and Michael Van Valkenburgh's beautiful Mill Race Park, with its covered bridge and lookout tower.) While waiting on the fate of his father, Cho forms a friendship with a bright, young working-class woman (Haley Lu Richardson), an "architecture nerd" who's stayed in town a year after high school because she's essentially a mother for her own mother, a recovered meth addict (Michelle Forbes). He also gets reacquainted with his father's protégé (Parker Posey), who's just a couple years older than he. We only see his father, truly, at the beginning: from a distance, standing with his back to us in the gardens of Eero Saarinen's famous Miller House. (Watch for, and think about, how this sequence is mirrored later in the film.) Yet his father's absence is seen and felt throughout, as Cho moves through the man's vacated rooms at the historic Inn at Irwin Gardens: in a game of Chinese checkers with the absent man, in his hat on a chair. (Kogonada frequently deploys still-life views, absent of the people who were present before, or will be later.) The movie features beautifully-played interaction by the actors, as they circle and discover one another and make, or miss, connections. (As in Bresson, Kogonada's characters express feelings beyond words with hands: a squeeze, a caress.) Previously known for comedy, Cho gives a fine dramatic performance. Richardson is amused by other people, and I enjoyed watching that amusement break over her face, as well as the wonder when she engages the buildings, tracing their contours with her hand. She's also good at showing the wrenching burden for a young person of carrying the world on her shoulders. At the local library, designed by I.M. Pei, she shelves books alongside her co-worker, a thoughtful grad student who's not quite her boyfriend (Rory Culkin, who tickled me, as he does her, with the earnest way he engages ideas.) At the Republic newspaper offices, a historic building designed by Myron Goldsmith, Richardson applies for a newsroom job; this also happens to be where her mother cleans at night. This gets to the crux of Kogonada's concerns. What is the effect of these buildings, if any, on contemporary everyday life? What is the legacy for modern human beings of the modernists' promise that architecture could change the world? That, as Polshek believed, architecture is the healing art, the one that has the power to restore? If the buildings are just the unnoticed, almost unseen, places where people live and work, whose failure is it, if anyone's? As shot by Elisha Christian, Columbus is a magical place, but there's something forlorn about it, as well, as if the buildings are telling their own story about the way their spirit has been abandoned. For her part, Richardson likes to park her car in the middle of the night and sit in front of Deborah Berke's Irwin Union Bank, glowing ghostly in the darkness. She tells Cho the story of how she'd probably seen it a thousand times, until the day, near her darkest hour, when she finally saw it. Suddenly, the place she'd lived her whole life felt different. There is a vision here, of art as comfort, and maybe even life-saver, that at least begins to answer some of the questions the film’s asking. This screening is part of the three-part Modernism as Character series, co-organized by the Film Center and Docomoco Chicago; it will be followed by an exclusive, pre-recorded Q&A with the director.(2017, 104 min, DCP Digital) [Scott Pfeiffer]
Wendell B. Harris Jr’s CHAMELEON STREET (US)
Black World Cinema at Chicago Filmmakers – Saturday, 7pm
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, Digital Projection) [Kat Sachs]
Luchino Visconti’s WHITE NIGHTS (Italy)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Sunday, 1:30pm
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novella White Nights has spawned at least three great movies: James Gray’s TWO LOVERS (2008), Robert Bresson’s FOUR NIGHTS OF A DREAMER (1971), and Luchino Visconti’s eponymous 1957 adaptation. (I can’t speak for the Iranian feature nor the five Indian films it inspired.) The reason it’s been adapted so frequently probably has to do with the fact that it’s the most concentrated of Dostoevsky’s major works, taking place over just a few days and containing relatively few characters. That it also concerns one of the most cinematic of subjects—unrequited love—makes it a wellspring for audio-visual splendor. Of course, White Nights wouldn’t be a Dostoevsky story without despair, and this dark undercurrent gives the tale a tonal complexity that filmmakers can translate to screen simply by preserving the central dramatic conflict. The hero is a benign variation on Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, a lonely urbanite longing for human connection. He finds it in the form of a young woman who’s desperate for the return of her lover, who’s been gone for a year. These two characters meet randomly and become friends, and just as the isolated hero blossoms out of love for the woman, the lost paramour reappears. The story exemplifies the axiom that it’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all, narrativizing the brief spell during which these two sad people find solace in each other. In his adaptation, Visconti taps into the story’s romanticism, employing an opulent style that builds upon that of his previous film, SENSO (1954), and which anticipates his baroque masterpieces of the 1960s and 70s. “Abandoning his usual habit of shooting on location, [Visconti] filmed the entire project in a studio,” Geoffrey Nowell-Smith wrote for the Criterion Collection in 2005. “To achieve the tight geographical focus needed, the director and his crew had one large set and various smaller ones constructed, roughly modeled on the Tuscan city of Livorno... Whereas in SENSO the settings were real but managed accidentally to look artificial, here the setting is both artificial and clearly intended to be seen as such. This is partly due to the photography and lighting, which produce an unexpectedly dreamy look, with unusually graduated contrasts reminiscent of the poetic realism of Marcel Carné. But it is also due to the disjunctive presentation of the characters in relation to their surroundings.” The gorgeous black-and-white photography, by the way, is by the great Giuseppe Rotunno, who would go on to shoot Visconti’s THE LEOPARD, as well as numerous Fellini titles, ALL THAT JAZZ, and Robert Altman’s POPEYE. (1957, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Nuri Bilge Ceylan's WINTER SLEEP (Turkey)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Wednesday, 5:45pm
Nuri Bilge Ceylan follows up his 2011 masterpiece ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA with this impressive companion piece, a Chekhovian chamber drama that focuses on dialogue-driven interior scenes as much as the earlier movie did on its majestically filmed journey through the barren Turkish landscape at night. The central figure here is Aydin (Haluk Bilginer), a retired, middle-aged actor who runs a hotel in rural Anatolia with his pretty young wife, Nihal (Melisa Sözen), and his combative, recently divorced sister, Necla (Demet Akbag). The verbal sparring which Aydin frequently engages with both women serves to mask the disappointment he feels with himself over his inability to start his long-cherished dream project of writing a non-fiction account of the history of the Turkish theater. Some critics complained that the Jane Campion-led Cannes jury was only recognizing the longest film and not the best by bestowing Ceylan with the Palme d'Or, but these complaints do a disservice to his achievement. WINTER SLEEP does indeed require each one of its three hours and 16 minutes in order to fully illustrate Aydin's predicament in both its tragedy and ridiculousness (the film is at times surprisingly funny), and no contemporary director has a better compositional eye than Ceylan, who was a professional photographer before he turned to filmmaking. Perhaps not as formally perfect as ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA, this is nonetheless a spellbinding experience—masterfully written, directed and performed. (2014, 196 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]
Radu Jude's BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN (Romania)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN, which won the Golden Bear at the 2021 Berlin Film Festival, is hardly the first non-pornographic feature to contain hardcore sex; however, the non-simulated sex scene that opens the film still feels significant, even groundbreaking. Presented in the aspect ratio of a smartphone screen—which distinguishes it visually from the widescreen images that follow—the sequence acknowledges the ubiquity of images of hardcore sex in 21st-century life even as it defamiliarizes them by putting them in the context of arthouse cinema. Radu Jude isn’t trying to shock his audience here; if anything, his recognition of how banal hardcore sex has become yields some surprisingly genial humor. (The offscreen argument between two unidentified relatives that almost derails a husband and wife’s sex tape may well be an intentional parody of Romanian New Wave filmmaking.) The laughs that Jude engenders are cathartic in the tradition of Lenny Bruce—this is comedy that forces into the open uncomfortable secrets that lie just beneath the veneer of polite society. By opening the movie this way, Jude prepares his audience to laugh at anything, but especially at hypocritical moralizers who attempt to heap shame on things we all accept in private. BAD LUCK BANGING unfolds in three sections, and the great Romanian filmmaker saves his most lacerating humor for the third, in which a group of self-righteous “concerned citizens” stage a modern-day witch trial for the high school teacher whose personal sex tape (which opened the film) got leaked onto the internet by a malicious computer repairman. The third section also marks a thematic continuation of the first, which follows our unfortunate heroine over a wearying afternoon when she’s rudely accosted by seemingly everyone she encounters while running errands around Bucharest. Both sections suggest what the world might be like if the worst aspects of online culture exploded onto “real life.” Most of the people we see come off as judgmental and combative, and to make matters worse, every physical environment is congested with large, insulting advertisements. In the first section of the film, Jude often pans away from his human subjects to consider groups of billboards displaying garish corporate logos. The director has said these tableau shots were inspired by the final image of Jean-Luc Godard’s early masterpiece TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER, but they’re critically different from their point of reference. In 1967, Godard had to assemble his widescreen-filling logo collage himself; in 2020 (when BAD LUCK BANGING was shot), this kind of thing is an accepted part of any urban landscape. In this soul-sucking, hypercapitalist context, the sex tape that opens the movie seems far less obscene than it may have otherwise; it even seems a little endearing, representing a moment of intimate pleasure in a world where everything exists either to be sold or antagonized by angry mobs. Like Godard (or Oshima or Pasolini) in the ‘60s, Jude is not just a filmmaker, but a public intellectual who introduces new cinematic forms in order to examine the zeitgeist he inhabits, and the novel structure of BAD LUCK BANGING reflects the ways that the internet has altered how we think and communicate. Not for nothing does the movie start with a scene of amateur pornography: Yes, being online (which more or less means being in the world circa 2020) offers the near-constant distraction of hardcore sex; more importantly, it involves putting oneself at risk of having one's most intimate feelings and experiences held up for public scrutiny. The witch trial in the movie’s third part feels rather like the dramatization of any website’s comments section, with civil discourse quickly giving way to vapid sloganeering, ad hominem attacks, and political conspiracy theories. Jude sustains a strikingly rapid pace during this part, reflecting how one’s attention darts between multiple trains of thought while browsing the web; in doing so, he builds upon the tone of BAD LUCK BANGING’s essayistic second part, a brilliant and chilling send-up of online information searches that starts with facts about pornography, then proceeds to consider misogyny, the Romanian Orthodox Church, neofascist movements, and the connections between all three. Jude arrives at the same alarming conclusion that Adam Curtis reached in his masterful BBC documentary series ALL WATCHED OVER BY MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE (2011) and HYPERNORMALISATION (2016)—that the internet is accelerating the spread of a dangerous far-right ideology in addition to making us more impatient and mean. There's one significant difference between BAD LUCK BANGING and Curtis’ work—it's often hysterically funny. For all his importance as a thinker, Jude is also capable of some of the funniest moments in contemporary cinema. The breathless dialogue of the witch trial sequence evokes screwball comedy as much as it does Bertolt Brecht. Moreover, the shocking, transgressive sequence that concludes the film recalls Dušan Makavejev’s groundbreaking intellectual comedies about sex and politics, WR: MYSTERIES OF THE ORGANISM (1971) and SWEET MOVIE (1974). Even more cathartic than the one that opens the movie, this sequence offers a cheerful and unsubtle suggestion that everyone might begin to rectify the social ills wrought by the internet by simply shutting the fuck up for a while. (2021, 106 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Paul Verhoeven’s BENEDETTA (France/Netherlands)
Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes
Rolling off of a year choked by disposable offerings, from State Department-backed muck to the latest slabs of stale Oscar bait (promoted, as usual, by the sugary buzz of press-agent dribble), a movie like BENEDETTA stands out from the stinking heap, with elements that challenge the loftier positions of bad "art" as well as the lowliest, flea-bitten examples of cinematic exploitation. Paul Verhoeven, the Dutch-cum-Hollywood pop satirist of such beloved classics as ROBOCOP (1987), TOTAL RECALL (1990), SHOWGIRLS (1995), and his masterpiece, BASIC INSTINCT (1992), released his last movie in 2016, ELLE, which brought him back to audiences for the first time in close to a decade (setting aside his “user-generated” short TRICKED from 2012). Missing the sensitivity of the #MeToo movement by barely a year, where the film risked being severely misunderstood, the filmmaker and its stars still had to go on the defense to the press. ELLE's lead actress, Isabelle Huppert, had this to say about the bubble of controversy surrounding the film: “I had no doubt about the integrity of [my] role. Of course, if you just circle the story around the rape and a woman being attracted by the man who raped her, I mean, that really makes the whole purpose very, very narrow and limited. I think it's a lot more than this. She's a really interesting character because she's always against predictable definitions of what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a man. Obviously, the movie's about a woman. But it's also about men, you know, and the men are sort of fading figures, very weak, quite fragile. So, it's really also about the empowerment of a woman.” Verhoven’s latest, BENEDETTA, did fall prey to “journalists,” who pressed the director during a Q&A at Cannes on the sex and nudity he injected into a purportedly true story about a lesbian nun in 17th-century France. (Someone should have related the aforementioned Huppert quote to these wall-eyed members of the press who, either in mistaken goodwill or intentional bad faith, were more than likely poking the filmmaker at the behest of their publishers and editors, on the prowl for those sweet clicks.) Whatever the case may be, Verhoeven’s latest film is a thought-provoking one, with its most sought-after answers lying somewhere within the murky interiors of the characters, where the cause of the actions can contrast their effects. Verhoeven doesn't follow the sort of classical model that someone like Clint Eastwood still employs (in Eastwood's films, dialogue usually contradicts the onscreen action); rather, he takes a more sarcastic approach, in which harmony is usually undercut by an inescapable ugliness that threatens to scrape open the production's glossier surface. Entire events and sequences in BENEDETTA side-step stock ideas about the past—chief among them that period films should depict historical eras in lofty, grit-and-grime-drenched seriousness, as if the past is immune to mockery (Ridley Scott is a director who epitomizes this latter approach). Grittiness and griminess certainly play a part in BENEDETTA, but they're embedded in the narrative specifically, rather than caking the movie. Consider the very premise, which finds a young girl being sold by her parents into a convent for the steep price demanded by the Abbess, played by Charlotte Rampling. Admitted to the nunnery, nine-year old Benedetta goes to pray in front of a bust of the Virgin Mary until it falls on her; what follows could be a scene out of Buñuel’s L’AGE D’OR (1930), as the girl decides to put the statue’s wooden breast in her mouth. As she grows older, Benedetta (played as an adult by Virginie Efira) begins to experience visions of Jesus, and Verhoeven's renderings of Christ come closer to characters from FLESH + BLOOD (1985) or STARSHIP TROOPERS (1997) than traditional representations of the Lord and Savior. Soon, Benedetta’s body is stricken with strange stigmata; this convinces those around her that she's a vessel for God, though a couple of nuns have doubts. As she ascends to the role of Abbess, snatching power within the nunnery, she enters into a sexual relationship with another young woman in the convent, Bartolomea (hauntingly portrayed by Daphne Patakia), who had been purchased by Benedetta’s parents at the beginning of the film as a “gift” for their daughter. It seems intentional on Verhoeven's part to use the sexual relationship as a smokescreen for more serious issues; after all, he made the main characters of STARSHIP TROOPERS the film’s secret, but true, fascists. Didn't Verhoeven graphically advance this idea of visual distraction in BASIC INSTINCT, in which viewers risked stepping into the role of Wayne Knight's sweat-soaked assistant district attorney as he fails to properly analyze and interrogate Sharon Stone's Catherine Trammel? Not only is the provocation the purpose—Verhoeven’s rendering of his main character keeps alive a trajectory that begins with his 1977 banger, KEETJE TIPPEL (a film that, along with THE FOURTH MAN, BENEDETTA considerably resembles) and continues to his characterizations of Carice van Houten’s Rachel Stein in BLACK BOOK (2006) and Isabelle Huppert’s Michèle Leblanc in ELLE. These are characters whose motivations defy our stock expectations, or as Huppert put it, “the predictable definitions of what it means to be a woman.” Who could miss the parallels between Benedetta and Bartolomea, in their Tuscan convent, laughing on the toilet while one of them wildly farts, to Elizabeth Berkley and Gina Gershon discussing the delights of eating dog food under a false Venetian sky, in SHOWGIRLS? The salvation in this convent is far from holy, but if you do seek out BENEDETTA, you may be lucky enough to encounter the Catholic leagues protesting in front of your local arthouse theater. Rather than jeer at their well-worn moralizing, remember what this really means for you, me, and the rest of the world: movies are back, baby. (2021, 126 min, DCP Digital) [John Dickson]
Jane Campion’s THE POWER OF THE DOG (US/UK/Australia/New Zealand/Canada)
Music Box Theatre – Saturday, 11am
It’s been 12 years since Jane Campion’s last feature film, BRIGHT STAR. That movie stays with me for containing one of the rawest scenes of a character crying in grief I’ve ever witnessed; I still get chills thinking about it. THE POWER OF THE DOG is darker, but no less emotional, unhurriedly revealing the devastating and murky inner lives of its characters with astonishing skill and empathy. The film is demarcated by roman numeral chapters, each building tension by slightly shifting audience expectations. It’s clear this growing anxiety is leading to a dark, violent end, but I was constantly reconsidering what that end might be and consistently taken aback by Campion’s twisting complexity of the characterization onscreen. The story takes place in 1920s Montana, following the Burbank brothers: quiet and clean-cut George (Jesse Plemons) and rough yet charismatic Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch). For years they've run a prosperous cattle ranch, but their situation is upended when George marries sweet Rose (Kirsten Dunst), a widow who brings along with her scholarly son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Phil is enraged by this change, and his immediate cruelty to Rose and Peter is distressing. It’s slowly revealed his unbridled rage is complicated by his past; most notably he had a deeply meaningful relationship early in his life with a cowboy mentor who’s long since passed. Though never onscreen, Bronco Henry’s presence looms as large as the Montana mountains. And, oh, those mountains. Ari Wegner’s cinematography is breathtaking and true to the Western genre, but it also feels alien. The landscape seems both impossibly picturesque and quietly full of terrors. Shots of wide-open spaces are juxtaposed with tight quarters, driving the characters fears and desires: the camera captures scenes through windows and doors (à la THE SEARCHERS), the brothers’ cold ranch house, and Phil’s secret sanctuary in the nearby woods. We witness the characters as they navigate not only the setting, but their own troubled existence within it. They dance around each other as they grapple with overwhelming loneliness fueled by constantly needing to assess the intentions of those around them. Cumberbatch is powerfully unsettling, but the film belongs to Dunst, who masterfully portrays Rose’s emotional shifts with crushing compassion. Smit-McPhee, too, is incredible as Peter, whose motives are skillfully inscrutable until the final, quietly shocking moments. (2021, 125 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
Music Box Christmas Sing-A-Long and Double Feature
Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes
Frank Capra's IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE (US)
Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes
Like Steven Spielberg today, Frank Capra was associated more with reassuring, patriotic sentiment than with actually making movies; but just beneath the Americana, his films contain a near-schizophrenic mix of idealism and resentment. In this quality, as well as his tendency to drag charismatic heroes through grueling tests of faith, it wouldn't be a stretch to compare Capra with Lars von Trier. There's plenty to merit the comparison in IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE alone: The film is a two-hour tour of an honest man's failure and bottled-up resentment, softened only intermittently by scenes of domestic contentment. Even before the nightmarish Pottersville episode (shot in foreboding shadows more reminiscent of film noir than Americana), Bedford Falls is shown as vulnerable to the plagues of recession, family dysfunction, and alcoholism. All of these weigh heavy on the soul of George Bailey, a small-town Everyman given tragic complexity by James Stewart, who considered the performance his best. Drawing on the unacknowledged rage within ordinary people he would later exploit for Alfred Hitchcock, Stewart renders Bailey as complicated as Capra himself—a child and ultimate victim of the American Dream. Ironically, it's because the film's despair feels so authentic that its iconic ending feels as cathartic as it does: After being saved from his suicide attempt (which frames the entire film, it should be noted), Stewart is returned to the simple pleasures of family and friends, made to seem a warm oasis in a great metaphysical void. (1946, 130 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Michael Curtiz's WHITE CHRISTMAS (US)
Critics agree that Mark Sandrich's HOLIDAY INN (1942), the first musical comedy to feature Bing Crosby, an inn, and Irving Berlin's "White Christmas," is a better film than this partial remake. Yet it turns out that it's revivals of this Technicolor, VistaVision version that people look forward to this time of year. WHITE CHRISTMAS incorporates the history of its own title song, which, while it would go on to become perhaps history's largest-seller, actually seemed a flop at first. Music historians Dave Marsh and Steve Propes note, "What saved 'White Christmas' were requests made by GIs to Armed Forces Radio around the world. Soldiers away from home, many of them in the South Pacific or North Africa, uncertain of whether they'd ever again see family and friends, let alone a snowfall, responded passionately to Berlin's understated evocation of the mythic romance of Christmas Past." This history is folded into the opening scene: it's Christmas Eve, 1944, somewhere on a World War II battlefield, and Crosby sings the song to fellow troops amidst some very fake rubble, as bombs explode in the background. The movie's got Crosby and Danny Kaye as music-and-lyrics team Wallace and Davis, and Vera-Ellen and Rosemary Clooney as sister act the Haynes. They're a treat to watch even just sitting around a railroad passenger car singing "Snow," bound for Pine Tree, Vermont, where the inn turns out to be run by ex-General Waverly (Dean Jagger). When people gather for a screening of this movie, I doubt they worry that it may not rank with Michael Curtiz's best work (CASABLANCA, YANKEE DOODLE DANDY, MILDRED PIERCE). They come to mark the change of years together. If there's a season for nestling in the warmth of nostalgia, it's this one. Plus, there's the camp appeal of Crosby and Kaye doing "Sisters." (1954, 120 min, DCP Digital) [Scott Pfeiffer]
Blerta Basholli’s HIVE (Kosovo/Switzerland/Albania/Republic of Macedonia)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
One of the most difficult things for people to face is having a loved one vanish without a trace. Filmmakers are attracted to the inherently dramatic stories of the disappeared, particularly when political turmoil is the cause. For example, THE KILLING FIELDS (1984) rages over the mass murders of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and Patricio Guzmán’s NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT (2010) deals in part with the attempts of Chileans to find the remains of those disappeared by the vicious Pinochet regime. Now, from Kosovo, we have HIVE. First-time feature director Blerta Basholli has chosen to tell the true story of Fahrije Hoti, a mother of two living in Krusha e Madhe, where one of the largest massacres of the war in Kosovo (1998–99) took place. The film is set in Krusha in 2006. Fahrije (Yllka Gashi) and many of the other villagers whose husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers were taken are living in ramshackle homes after their own homes were burned to the ground. As Muslim women, they are not allowed to work outside the home or drive, and they rely on pooled income to make ends meet. When a supermarket in Mitrovica offers to sell their homemade avjar (a roasted red pepper spread), Fahrije defies convention—and suffers for it—by getting a driver’s license, starting a company, and trying to convince the village women to work with her. While watching HIVE, I was reminded of Aida Bejić’s marvelous SNOW (2008), a magic-realist tale of grieving widows of the Bosnian War. Despite the story similarities, the films are quite different, with HIVE planted squarely in the real world. It’s infuriating how the “rules” make it impossible for these Muslim women to survive without a man, and sadly predictable how the villagers seek to intimidate Fahrije and those who have joined her. Led by a grounded performance by Gashi and a great supporting performance by Çun Lajçi as Fahrije’s father-in-law, HIVE admirably highlights how Fahrije did what she had to do and inspired others to face their losses courageously and build a new future. (2021, 84 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
CICFF38 Award Winning Shorts (International)
Facets Cinema – Saturday and Sunday, 1pm
This collection of favorites from the 38th Chicago International Children’s Film Festival is organized around the theme of embracing difference. If it weren’t for the relatively fast-paced subtitles in several of the shorts, this would be ideal viewing for younger kids; still, older children should appreciate the unifying messages of overcoming prejudice and learning to accept people unlike ourselves. The first short in the program, Eric Montchaud’s stop-motion French animation A STONE IN THE SHOE (2020, 11 min, Digital Projection), is in some ways the best. With its colorful design and imaginative use of found objects, the piece makes a lasting impression in just 11 minutes. The simple story of a shy frog making friends with a classmate feels like something out of a small child’s daydream, especially because the characters look like they were assembled out of small, common objects (pebbles, bits of clay) that adults generally overlook. Small children appear onscreen in American director Sally Rubin’s MAMA HAS A MUSTACHE (2021, 10 min, Digital Projection), but they take the form of animated cut-out photographs. This short may be the most explicit in the program in terms of promoting tolerance; on the soundtrack, Rubin talks with grade-schoolers about how it’s okay to be a transgender or non-binary human being. The last animated short in the program, the Canadian piece FREEBIRD (2021, 6 min, Digital Projection), doesn’t contain any dialogue, though its message—that people with Down syndrome can enjoy significant, fulfilling lives—comes through loud and clear. The live-action selections tend to be subtler in their approach, the subtlest being German documentarian Nele Dehnenkamp’s SEAHORSE (2020, 16 min, Digital Projection). This piece profiles Hanan, a preteen girl from the Middle East who teaches swimming lessons in her free time. Only in the final moments does Dehnenkamp reveal how important swimming is to the girl, who came to Europe with other refugees in a rubber boat, but it’s to the director’s credit that one can intuit this significance before the film spells it out. Also from Germany is Lydia Bruna’s THE WOLF PACK (2020, 15 min, Digital Projection), a charming narrative about a lonely preteen girl who meets her new best friends at a weekend camping retreat. Like MAMA HAS A MUSTACHE, this work also promotes trans acceptance (one of the heroine’s new friends is a transgender boy), but it does so almost in passing, as if to say that befriending trans people shouldn’t require a moment’s thought. In this regard, it may be the more progressive of the two shorts. The most affecting work in the program may be the Mongolian narrative STAIRS (2020, 12 min, Digital Projection), directed by Zoljargal Purevdash. Understated, yet movingly acted, it tells the story of a little girl who provides emotional support to her older brother, who uses a wheelchair, as he strives to realize his dream of becoming a hairdresser. The funniest short (which is also the last in the program) is Ethosheia Hylton’s narrative DOLAPO IS FINE (2020, 15 min, Digital Projection), about a Nigerian teenager at an elite British boarding school who learns to overcome her anxiety about how she’s perceived by white native Brits. Doyin Ajiboye gives a charismatic performance as the title character, grounding Hylton’s broad, satirical humor in recognizable feelings of insecurity. [Ben Sachs]
Pablo Larraín’s SPENCER (UK/Germany)
Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema – See 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]
Wes Anderson’s THE FRENCH DISPATCH (US)
Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema – See 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
⚫ Facets Cinema
Bragi Thor Hinriksson’s 2021 Icelandic children’s film BIRTA (85 min, Digital Projection), part of Facets’ CICFF Encore Matinees series, screens on Saturday and Sunday at 11am.
Joe Swanberg’s 2014 film HAPPY CHRISTMAS (88 min, Digital Projection) screens on Saturday at 2:45pm, as part of Facets’ Holiday Detour series. Swanberg will appear in person to introduce the film and for a Q&A afterwards with series programmer Emma Greenleaf. More info here.
⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Sergio Corbucci’s 1968 spaghetti Western THE GREAT SILENCE (105 min, DCP Digital) screens on Friday at 5:45pm; David Lean’s 1965 film DOCTOR ZHIVAGO (197 min, 35mm) screens on Sunday at 4pm; and Sidney Lumet’s 1974 film MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (128 min, 35mm) screens on Tuesday at 6pm, all part of the Siskel’s Let It Snow series. More info here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
Another sneak preview of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2021 film LICORICE PIZZA (133 min, 70mm) screens on Saturday at 7:15pm but is again sold out.
Jim Sharman’s 1975 cult classic THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (100 min, DCP Digital) screens on Saturday at 10:15pm, with a shadowcast of performers from Midnight Madness. More info here.
As part of the Alternative Christmas Double Feature with GREMLINS (reviewed above), Jeremiah Chechik’s 1989, John Hughes-penned holiday lark CHRISTMAS VACATION (97 min, 35mm) screens on Tuesday at 7pm, Wednesday at 9pm, and Thursday at 4:30pm.
Dancemaker Ashwaty Chennat and drag performer Abhijeet’s 2021 short film MOODS OF NAYIKA (32 min, Digital Projection) screens on Wednesday at 7pm, with a themed cocktail hour, live music, dance and drag performances, and a Q&A and panel discussion following the screening.
The Joe Bob Briggs Christmas Horror Double Feature, which includes Charles Sellier’s 1984 film SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT (85 min, 35mm) and David Steinman’s 2009 film SANTA’S SLAY (95 min, 35mm), screens on Thursday starting at 7:15pm, with Briggs in person. The event is sold-out. More info on all these screenings and events here.
⚫ Nightingale Cinema
“Danny Carroll: The Trajectory of the Pendulum,” a screening of six short video works by the Chicago-based filmmaker, takes place on Saturday at 7pm, with Carroll in person. More info here.
⚫ South Side Home Movie Project
“Home Movies for the Holidays: A Pop-Up Installation,” which includes beloved holiday home movies from the South Side Home Movie Project Archive and is sound-tracked with new scores from DJ Tess and Rob McKay, is available to view from the sidewalk outside the Arts Incubator (301 E. Garfield Blvd.) through January 2. More info here.
⚫ South Side Projections
Presented by South Side Projections and the Bronzeville Historical Society, Andrew L. Stone’s 1943 film STORMY WEATHER (78 min, Digital Projection), starring Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and Lena Horne, and an all-Black cast supporting cast, screens on Saturday at 2pm, at the Parkway Ballroom (4455 S. MLK Blvd., Suite 103). More info here.
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS –
Held Over/Still Screening/Return Engagements (Selected)
Radu Jude’s UPPERCASE PRINT (Romania)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here and through the Music Box Theatre here
UPPERCASE PRINT is an adaptation of a “documentary play” by Romanian theater director Gianina Cărbunariu, but it’s hardly filmed theater. Radu Jude, one of the most inventive filmmakers working today, doesn’t present a production of the play or even a filmic re-staging of it; rather, the movie represents a dialogue between Cărbunariu’s art and Jude’s—and, by extension, between theater and cinema. Much of the film transpires on a soundstage, where actors deliver passages from the production, which recounts an episode of Romanian history from the early 1980s. Jude intersperses these passages with archival footage of things that appeared on Romanian TV around this time, and the material alternately provides context for and ironic counterpoint to the stage show, resulting in a rich, tonally complex montage. The narrative centers on Mugur Călinescu, then a high school student in the city of Botoşani who took to the streets to express discontent about food shortages, the lack of free labor unions, and the totalitarian government’s suppression of civil liberties. Little did Călinescu know that as soon as he started writing his protest statements on public buildings, the state secret police opened a file on his activities and began an intricate manhunt to discover who he was. Much of Cărbunariu’s play derives from secret police files and official testimonies; in a Brechtian spirit (which also animated Jude’s 2018 film I DO NOT CARE IF WE GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS BARBARIANS), the material isn’t performed so much as recited, spotlighting the inherent dramatic power of political rhetoric. In this context, the TV footage takes on a rhetorical quality as well—programs that might seem innocuous otherwise (like scenes of adults singing to children) register as metaphors for the Ceaușescu regime’s efforts to distract or lull the restless population, while news reports of widespread unrest in Soviet Bloc countries seem to grow directly out of Călinescu’s protests. One reason why Jude is so valuable to contemporary cinema is that he uses filmmaking to confront dark aspects of his country’s history that many of his fellow Romanians would prefer to forget. More importantly, he recognizes that history repeats itself—his movies are ultimately warnings for the present. Late in UPPERCASE PRINT, Jude incorporates an archival news broadcast about the rise of neo-Nazi groups across western Europe. He just as easily could have included a contemporary report on the Proud Boys or any number of 21st-century blackshirt organizations. The threat of totalitarianism isn’t going away, which makes this film as necessary as it is stirring and intellectually provocative. (2020, 128 min) [Ben Sachs]
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY (Japan)
Available to rent through Facets Cinema here
HAPPY HOUR, the intimate epic that established Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's international reputation, achieves a novelistic density through the uncommonly detailed way it plumbs the emotional lives of its quartet of lead characters. WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY, the first of two 2021 releases by the director (followed by DRIVE MY CAR), resembles a short-story collection in how it depicts three narratively unrelated vignettes that are formally separated by their own chapter headings and credit sequences. Hamaguchi proves to be equally adept at the short-film format as he was with a 5-hour-plus run time: the mini romantic dramas that comprise WHEEL are gratifying to watch as self-contained episodes, but when one contemplates how they might be linked on a thematic level, the entire project attains a profound resonance (it wasn't until the morning after my first viewing that I realized the magnitude of Hamaguchi's deceptively modest approach). The first section, “Magic (Or Something Less Assuring),” begins with an extended Rohmerian dialogue between two female friends, one of whom regales the other about a "magical" date with a man she has fallen in love with, unaware that he is also her friend's ex-lover. It ends with a chance encounter between all three characters, punctuated by a brief but daring fantasy sequence. The title of the second section, "Door Wide Open," refers to a literature professor's policy of avoiding scandal by always keeping his office door open when meeting with students. One day he receives an unexpected visitor, a woman who is attempting to ensnare him in a trap. Or is she? The final section, "Once Again," is the best: two women who haven't seen each other in 20 years meet providentially on a train-station escalator before spending the day together and eventually realizing that neither is whom the other had thought. Hamaguchi himself has said that "coincidence and imagination" are the movie's main themes and, indeed, as the title indicates, each of the stories involves the intersection of the free will of the individual and the fickle nature of fate. But WHEEL is also about the inexorable pull of the past and how the characters' regrets over roads not taken have keenly shaped who they are. This latter aspect is the key to understanding how a film so charming on the surface can also contain such a melancholy undertow and how characters with only a small amount of screen time can seem so fascinatingly complex and believable. Hamaguchi shows the psychological underpinnings of everyday human behavior in a manner rarely seen in the movies. He knows how to pierce your heart. (2021, 121 min) [Michael Glover Smith]
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS –
Also Screening/Streaming
⚫ Media Burn Archive
As part of their “Virtual Talks with Video Activists” series, filmmakers Tom Poole and Art Jones, members of the Black Planet Productions collective who were involved with the collective’s cable access show, Not Channel Zero, will appear virtually for a screening of an episode of the show (“The Nation Erupts,” from 1992) and a discussion moderated by filmmaker Louis Massiah. The event is free; more info here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
Check hold-over titles here.
⚫ South Side Home Movie Project
“Home Movies for the Holidays: A Pop-Up Installation,” which includes beloved holiday home movies from the South Side Home Movie Project Archive, is available to stream virtually for free through January 2. The first of two programs, “Home Movies for the Holidays Mix #1” by DJ Tess, is available to view through December 17, after which “Home Movies for the Holidays Mix #2” by Rob McKay will be available through January 2. More info 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.
🎞️ ADDITIONAL ONLINE SCREENINGS
Penny Lane’s LISTENING TO KENNY G (US/Documentary)
Available to stream on HBO Max (subscription required)
Penny Lane’s previous films have covered Richard Nixon and Satanists, but Kenny G, the subject of her latest documentary, may be the most despised of all. Produced by Bill Simmons as part of his series of music docs for HBO, LISTENING TO KENNY G gets a surprising amount of access to the Seattle-based saxophonist. The film works as a Rohrshach test, as reviews have offered completely different perspectives on the way it presents its subject. Building around a lengthy interview with the musician, Lane also solicited the viewpoints of several music critics and scholars. Kenny G ladles on the charm whenever he's onscreen, but his personality also feels like a forced construct. His affect does not suggest a secret asshole, but Kenny does come across more like a businessman who stumbled onto music as a way to get rich than someone who’s truly passionate about music (despite the fact that he says he practices the sax three hours a day). In fact, LISTENING TO KENNY G reveals that he was one of Starbucks’ early investors. Kenny G’s music is so aggressively innocuous that it infuriates many people—to demonstrate this, one critic reads out Pat Metheny’s furious response to his fame. LISTENING TO KENNY G offers damning suggestions that the smooth jazz radio format is a way for businesses to numb their workers through the day, but it strikes more sparks when it examines Kenny’s relationship to race and genre. He claims that he’s not actually playing jazz, and he seems fairly ignorant of its past. (His recent concerts show him trying to make up for that, speaking to his audience about Stan Getz and John Coltrane before playing Coltrane’s “Naima.”) While he may have a point, smooth jazz is now part of the genre’s history. Kenny also seems shockingly ignorant about his own white privilege, claiming he never thought about how it benefited him till Lane asked. One of the film’s strengths lies in bringing recent debates about the merits of pop music, the snobbery of taste, and cultural appropriation back to the artist himself, who remains blissfully Zen about the way he’s perceived, at least when the camera is on. (2021, 97 min) [Steve Erickson]
CINE-LIST: December 10 - December 16, 2021
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Julian Antos, John Dickson, Steve Erickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Michael Frank, J.R. Jones, Anne Orchier, Scott Pfeiffer, Michael Glover Smith, Drew Van Weelden