***Apologies for the delay, life got in the way!***
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
Stanley Kubrick's THE SHINING (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday and Saturday, 9:30pm
Though it had been made famous already by ROCKY, it wasn't until THE SHINING that the Steadicam yielded an aesthetic breakthrough in movies. Garrett Brown's innovation—a gyroscope mounted to the bottom of a camera, which allowed cinematographers to create hand-held tracking shots that didn't record their own movement—became in Kubrick's hands a supernatural presence. The film's justly celebrated Steadicam shots evoke a cruel, judgmental eye that does not belong to any human being, a perspective that's harrowing in its implications. (GOODFELLAS, SATANTANGO, and Gus Van Sant's ELEPHANT, to name just three examples, are inconceivable without the film's influence.) In this regard, the horror of THE SHINING makes manifest one subtext running through all of Kubrick's work: that humanity, for all its technical sophistication, will never fully understand its own consciousness. Why else would Kubrick devote nearly 150 takes to the same scene, as he did several times in the film's epic shooting schedule? With the only exceptions being other movies directed by Stanley Kubrick, no one moves or speaks in a film the way they do in THE SHINING. Everything has been rehearsed past the point of technical perfection; the behavior on screen seems the end-point of human evolution. What keeps it all going? (To invoke another great horror film of the era: the devil, probably.) The demons of the Overlook Hotel may very well be a manifestation of the evil within Jack Torrance, a recovering alcoholic who once nearly beat his four-year-old son to death. They could be, like those Steadicam shots, an alien consciousness here to judge the vulnerabilities of mankind. Kubrick never proffers an explanation, which is why THE SHINING is one of the few horror films that actually remains scary on repeated viewings. Nearly every effect here prompts some indelible dread: the unnatural symmetry of Kubrick's compositions; Shelly Duvall's tragic performance (which suggests that horrible victimization is always just around the corner); and the atonal symphonic music by Bartok, Lygeti, and Penderecki that make up the soundtrack. Screening as part of the Siskel’s Let It Snow and Fringe Benefits series. (1980, 142 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
Ryusuke Hamguchi’s DRIVE MY CAR (Japan)
Gene Siskel Film Center and the Music Box Theatre – See Venue websites 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 – Wednesday, 7:45pm
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.” Screening as part of the Siskel’s Let It Snow series. 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]
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
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)
(Also screening at the Gene Siskel Film Center on Sunday at 4pm and Thursday at 6pm)
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. Screening as part of the Siskel’s Let It Snow series. (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]
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]
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
⚫ Chicago Filmmakers
Agitate Essential Cinema Volume 1, a traveling shorts program featuring film and video work by Nazlı Dinçel, Karissa Hahn, Sylvia Toy St. Louis, Lynne Sachs, Morrison Gong, Gisela Guzmán, Kelly Gallagher, J.E. Sharpe, Xiaoer Liu, Anu Valia and Sara Suarez, screens on Saturday at 7pm. More info here.
⚫ 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. More info here.
⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Benjamin Cleary’s 2021 film SWAN SONG (116 min, DCP Digital) screens beginning this week. See Venue website for showtimes. More info here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
Odd Obsession and Deadly Prey present Amir Shervan’s 1991 cult classic SAMURAI COP (96 min, DCP Projection) screens on Saturday at 10pm.
The Found Footage Festival returns with Tape Trading Classics (95 min, DCP Projection) on Monday at 7pm.
The Windy City Double Feature Picture Show presents two screenings of Nicholas Webster’s 1964 film SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS (81 min, DCP Projection) on Monday at 7:15pm and 9:15pm. More info on all screenings and events 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.
🎞️ 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
⚫ Facets Cinema
Check hold-over titles 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.
🎞️ ADDITIONAL ONLINE SCREENINGS
Alonso Ruizpalacios’ A COP MOVIE (Mexico)
Available to stream on Netflix (subscription required)
Yibran Asuad won an “Outstanding Artistic Contribution” prize at the 2021 Berlin Film Festival for his editing of Alonso Ruizpalacios’ third feature, and you can understand within minutes of A COP MOVIE why Asuad deserved the award. The film proceeds at a breakneck pace, which the filmmakers maintain largely through exciting, complex montage. Rarely do Asuad and Ruizpalacios cut within scenes; rather, they cut from one location to another, but they maintain a sense of narrative flow by carrying narration and dialogue across settings (and to keep things complicated, they alternate between voiceover narration and narration delivered directly to the camera). A COP MOVIE also alternates between fiction and nonfiction, naturalism and high stylization, cynicism and sincerity, but what’s most remarkable is that the progression always feels fluid—the filmmakers’ control over tone is masterful. Ruizpalacios and Asuad’s first two features, GÜEROS (2014) and MUSEO (2018), were similarly ambitious in their construction, jumping between different perspectives and genre reference-points in a manner that invited comparison to various ‘60s New Waves. A COP MOVIE advances on those achievements by streamlining the myriad ideas (about art, entertainment, and the reality of police work) into an engrossing character study that moves forward with shark-like ferocity. The film’s first two chapters introduce a couple of Mexico City police officers, Teresa and José, the latter “known in public life as Montoya.” In the first of several surprises (I won’t spoil the rest), A COP MOVIE reveals at the start of chapter three that not only are Teresa and Montoya partners on the force, they’re also married to each other. Nicknamed “the Love Patrol” by their fellow cops, the duo projects toughness and sensitivity in work and love alike; sometimes they project both at once, as in a bravura overhead long-take that shows the couple wrestling on the floor of their apartment like lion cubs at play. Ruizpalacios recognizes the humor of the Love Patrol’s existence—given the state of the world, who would imagine any big-city police force inspiring such romanticism? At the same time, he regards his subjects with the same tender sympathy that animated his first two features. The good cheer he engenders makes you especially unprepared for the intrusion of cold reality in the movie’s second half, when Ruizpalacios and company turn a spotlight on pervasive police corruption in 21st-century Mexico. Yet this is hardly the sort of Mexican art movie that the heroes of GÜEROS so memorably derided, the sort that make an aestheticized spectacle out of Mexican suffering. A COP MOVIE acknowledges the moral, loving people who thrive in Mexico despite its unfortunate social problems, and it pays tribute to these valiant souls through a vibrant, even musical aesthetic. (2021, 107 min) [Ben Sachs]
Jiří Trnka’s THE HAND (Czech/Animated Short)
Streams free on Daily Motion here
In 2018, I became a fan of the magical, subversive animation of Jiří Trnka when the Gene Siskel Film Center screened “The Puppet Master: The Complete Jiří Trnka,” a large, traveling retrospective of his works that included six features and 20 shorts. Through a masterful blend of stop-motion animation, live action, and illustration, Trnka told folk tales that gradually began to assert cleverly shrouded protests against the communist regime that took control of his country in 1948. While the censors often didn’t detect his nose-thumbing, Trnka increasingly came under scrutiny and had some of his works banned. By 1965, his final productive year and only three years before his death, Trnka didn’t bother to camouflage his disdain. His short film THE HAND literalizes the iron fist of Soviet oppression. Our protagonist is a simple potter whom we meet at the start of an ordinary day in his one-room home. He tends lovingly to a rose in one of the terracotta pots he makes both for his own enjoyment and, presumably, to sell. That day, a white-gloved hand intrudes on his work, squashing the pot he is forming and remolding it into a hand. When the potter declines the suggestion that he should makes hands instead of pots, the hand grows increasingly aggressive, offering money, dressing in a lace glove to seduce him, and eventually capturing him and forcing him to sculpt a giant hand out of marble while the hand manipulates him like a marionette. Intimate details, like focusing on the potter’s feet as he spins his wheel and attempts to shield his plant from harm, humanize the voiceless, frozen-face puppet and put us in deep sympathy with his plight. Conversely, the live-action hand’s evil intent, first signaled by its breaking the pot in which the rose resides, feels as soulless as it is relentless. In less than 20 minutes, Trnka pours out his heart for the arts of his country that have been straitjacketed and stripped of personal meaning in service to the state. (1965, 18 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
CINE-LIST: December 17 - December 23, 2021
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Marilyn Ferdinand, Michael Frank, J.R. Jones, Scott Pfeiffer, Michael Glover Smith, Drew Van Weelden