Remember to check venue websites for updates and information on safety protocols and other procedures put in place for Covid prevention. We recommend verifying those before every trip to the theater.
🎉 YEAR-END LISTS
Here at Cine-File we like to wait until the year actually ends to publish our “best-of” lists, which abide by whatever rules the contributor chooses. View them on our blog.
📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING
Tribute Paid to Womanist Mentors and Other Artists II
Creating a Different Image: Black Women’s Filmmaking of the 1970s - 90s (US/Shorts)
Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., University of Chicago) – Thursday, 7:30pm (Free Admission)
In the third program of the ongoing screening series connected to the Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts 2023 and the second labeled as a “tribute paid to womanist mentors and other artists,” the films included indeed accomplish just that. Ayoka Chenzira’s SYVILLA, THEY DANCE TO HER DRUM (1975) is, like most of the other films in the program, a short documentary about an artist, here the great Syvilla Fort, a dancer and choreographer who was also a mentor in her own right, having sacrificed the potential for greater fame to instruct others. The film is as expressionistic as her practice, featuring reinterpretations of two of her famed dances (one of which was scored by John Cage). Chenzira, who directed the recently restored feature ALMA’S RAINBOW, displays a tender reverence toward Fort, keeping her spirit alive even as she passed away the same year it was released. Michelle Parkerson’s STORME: LADY OF THE JEWEL BOX (1987) is, in keeping with its subject, a whole vibe; each documentary in the program defies the tone of more traditional entries in the genre, foregrounding a person’s essence over merely conveying information about them. Parker does ground Stormé DeLarverie’s experiences as a queer, androgynous entertainer (she was born a woman but could pass for male or female, as well as Black or white owing to her biracial parentage) in the history of such pioneers; but it’s Stormé’s presence, her own words, that keep it from being didactic, more a portrait than a primer. An extended sequence of Stormé’s working as a club bouncer is decidedly cinematic (and, ironically, meta-referential, as she mentions the filming going on), though it doesn’t paint her as a character. Rather it illuminates her character, independent of any identiying characteristics that might pigeonhole her. It’s also worth noting that Stormé was present at the Stonewall uprising, with some believing her to have been the person whose interaction with authorities ignited the historic event. Iman Uqdah Hameen’s narrative short UNSPOKEN CONVERSATION (1987) was made under the mentorship of filmmaker Kathleen Collins (LOSING GROUND); though not explicitly a tribute to a woman artist, it nevertheless tells the story of what it’s like to be one. The protagonist is a Black woman, the wife of a musician and mother of two children, who goes back to college to pursue a career in filmmaking. She faces resentment from her husband and other challenges like childcare and scheduling. In one moment that speaks to the overall theme of the program, she approaches her female instructor and asks about her own journey in film. The instructor mentions that she’s divorced and her children hate her, but she’s unrelenting in her quest to pursue her vocation. “It’s tenacious, it’s unyielding,” she says about filmmaking. “And it’s my life.” The grainy black-and-white cinematography and shrewd compositions are exceptional, putting the intensity of the film’s artistry on par with its themes. Debra Robinson’s I BE DONE BEEN WAS IS (1984) is one of my favorite documentaries. It centers on four Black women comedians, highlighting both their individual hilariousness and the struggles they face in an industry dominated by white males. I like the film so much because I genuinely like the women in it; I’ve seen this documentary a couple times and still vividly remember each of the subjects, so vividly does Robinson depict them. Of course their superior humor distinguishes each of the women, which is interwoven into the film artfully. Like Parkerson’s documentary there’s information about the history of Black women in comedy; it’s unfortunate that there’s a burden on marginalized filmmakers to instruct, to fill in the average viewer’s gaps about the subject at hand, but these filmmakers do so effortlessly while still making their films engaging and creative. Also screening is Cheryl Fabio’s RAINBOW BLACK: POET SARAH W. FABIO (1976), which wasn’t available for preview, but is about the filmmaker’s mother, who was a poet, literary critic, scholar, and a key figure in the Black Arts Movement. (Total Approx. 157 min, Digital Projection) [Kat Sachs]
F.W. Murnau's SUNRISE: A SONG OF TWO HUMANS (US/Silent)
Chicago Film Society at Northeastern Illinois University (The Auditorium, Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) – Wednesday, 7:30pm
One of the most imaginative films ever made and probably the greatest ever made about love, but that makes it sound like homework. Murnau's SUNRISE is as much a discovery now as it was in 1927, if not a greater one, since it's no longer common for serious films to believe in universal experience. (As Lucy Fischer noted in her excellent BFI Classics book, the film's subtitle implies that the feelings of men and women are essentially the same.) Murnau's compassion for the central couple seems ever-expanding: their every emotion seems to trigger some new stylistic innovation. The movie's first major passage—depicting the Woman from the City's attempt to seduce the farmer (George O'Brien) away from his wife (Janet Gaynor, adequately filling the role of the Eternal Feminine)—mixes naturalism and expressionism to bring the characters' inner lives vibrantly to life. Murnau famously instructed O'Brien to put lead weights in his shoes during these scenes; there is no mistaking the man's guilt. This section climaxes with a collage of superimposed images—several of them intentionally distended—that illustrates the woman's lure of "Come to... THE CITY!" It is a thrilling effect, principally because it requires the viewer's imagination to complete it: as one's eyes dart around the frame, trying to take it all in, the scene appears luxurious or terrifying depending on where they fall. (Directors of effects-driven spectacles still have a lot to learn from Murnau.) The orchestration of detail is one of the film's many allusions to symphonic music, the most obvious being its three-movement structure, wherein key motifs of the first section (the farm-on-the-lake setting, the theme of love in peril) are contradicted in the second and brought to resolution in the last. The second movement, which could bring any viewer to swoon, may be the film's crowning achievement. It takes place in one of the most beautiful cities in cinema, a setting brought into being by the couple's re-avowal of their love. Here, Murnau's effects (which include a funny freeze-frame at a portrait studio and some great suspense involving a drunken runaway piglet) invite the viewer to share in the characters' joy, reflecting their spontaneity and their astonishment. For all the marvels of the filmmaking, though, the film's transcendental power never seems to be for its own sake. It is Murnau's response to the universal capacity for feeling (and not just romance—but generosity and loyalty and courage) that drove him to create a monumental new art form using the greatest attributes of all the others. Preceded by Ben Harrison's 1936 short GLEE WORMS (7 min, 35mm). (1927, 94 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
Maren Ade's THE FOREST FOR THE TREES (Germany)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Thursday, 9:30pm
Writer-director Maren Ade became the talk of the town with TONI ERDMANN (2016), earning comparisons to Renoir and Cassavetes. Here is an opportunity to see her first feature on the big screen. Ade's films are examinations of behavior—psychological case studies—and connoisseurs of character-focused films will note she was a fine director of actors right out of the gate. This cringeworthy psychodrama traces the breakdown of a naive, awkward, rather square young schoolteacher (Eva Löbau), who moves to a new town in the middle of the school year. Her professed hope of bringing "a breath of fresh air" immediately annoys the seasoned teachers, and the recalcitrant kids greet her nervous, overly solicitous manner with scorn and abuse. She hasn't the gift of authority. Her attempts to befriend the woman next door (Daniela Holtz), who initially humors her, are needy and puppy-like. Ade's camera style evokes the then-contemporary British series The Office, though sometimes she gets such low angles she seems to be down in the floor. Here, the embarrassing situations are not played for laughs. The miserable, lonely teacher can't find the humor and warmth that saves the characters in TONI ERDMANN. Still, the Ade hallmarks are here: the intense collaboration between director and actors yielding rich, precise realism in the performances; the behaviors and anxieties we recognize with a pang; an approach to character that allows us to infer a whole life from glances and gestures. Conflicts in Ade aren't melodramatic. Rather, they arise from people's natural tendency to dissemble, as in life. She refuses to take sides. While we empathize with the shy teacher's yearning for connection—she so wants people to like her—she's also a bitter, self-sabotaging buttinsky, and even a bit unstable, spying on her neighbor and cluelessly bestowing unwanted attention. (All three of Ade's features are marked by uncomfortable "what are you doing here?" situations.) Still, Ade's strategies are aimed at getting as close to this character as possible, and the film has a wonderful, magical ending which I choose to read as a ray of hope for her. It is audacious and open, a mystery, and it announces an important career. Screening as part of Doc's Thursday II series, "Blow Up My Video: Movies Shot on Video, Shown on Film." (2003, 80 min, 35mm) [Scott Pfeiffer]
Mariano Llinás’ LA FLOR (Argentina)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 10am
LA FLOR is to 21st-century cinema what Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 is to 21st-century literature: a multi-part, multi-genre, epoch-defining South American epic that incorporates myriad styles and themes to construct a monumental ode to the miracle of storytelling. Its six sections comprise a high-toned monster movie, an off-beat musical interwoven with an even more off-beat conspiracy thriller, a globe-spanning espionage saga, a metafictional pseudo-documentary that somehow ends up involving the memoirs of Casanova, a remake of Jean Renoir’s A DAY IN THE COUNTRY (1936), and a 19th-century settler narrative. Besides sharing the same extraordinary lead actresses—Elisa Carricajo, Valeria Correa, Pilar Gamboa, and Laura Paredes, who had previously performed together in the Buenos Aires theater company Piel de Lava—and writer-director Mariano Llinás’ consistently wry sensibility, the six stories (which were filmed over about a decade) don’t have many obvious similarities. Yet they interact in surprising, provocative ways, some of which may not reveal themselves for days or even months after you’ve seen it. On the one hand, LA FLOR suggests a cavernous mausoleum for various popular epics of the 20th century, among them the rise and fall of cinema as the most vital art form in the world; the development of modernist art and philosophy; the Cold War; the globalization of economics and culture; the birth of the Information Age. On the other hand, it feels both older and newer than that. The winding, blatantly literary structure (which Llinás says he modeled after the shape of a flower, ergo the film’s title) evokes pre-Modern epics ranging from Don Quixote to The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman to Moby-Dick, while the mountainous narrative pile-up feels well-suited to an age of binge watching and endlessness online information searches. Though never laugh-out-loud funny, LA FLOR is continually playful: Llinás spins out random digressions, sometimes just to see where they go; elicits imaginative work from his cast and cinematographer (the versatile AgustĂn Mendilaharzu); and even appears on screen to poke fun at his hubristic endeavor. The mix of erudition (particularly with regards to film history) and freewheelingness might remind you of the French New Wave, and indeed it’s fun to guess what inspired Llinás in each section. Is the first part his take on the B horror movies Val Lewton made for RKO? Is the spy section (the film’s longest part and an epic unto itself, a magisterial lament for the last days of the Cold War) more like Thomas Pynchon or John le CarrĂ©? But as LA FLOR unfurls, the cinephilic insularity of the first hours gives way to a wonderment at simply living in the world. When the audience is released at the end of the film, along with Llinás’ four leads, from the world of fiction back into reality, the mood is deservedly, invigoratingly triumphant. Screening as part of the Settle In series. (2018, 808 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Raphael Jose Martinez’s ALL YOUR SECRETS WILL BE YOUR NOOSE and NOSTRES CARRES (US & US/Documentary)
[REDACTED] Video & Cinema of the Weird — Friday, 8pm (Free Admission)
Filmmaker and Cine-File contributor Raphael Jose Martinez and local critic and programmer Mike Vanderbilt launch their new VHS label, Two/Tree/Video, with a screening of two of Martinez’s short films at a secret venue. (Email us at editors@cinefile.info for details.) The two films also account for the label’s first release. The first, ALL YOUR SECRETS WILL BE YOUR NOOSE (2022, 15 min), is a short giallo set largely in Barcelona, though the cinematic stylization of the Sky’s the Limit music and light installation at O’Hare as the protagonist travels to Spain is particularly inspired. I was impressed at how much story the film communicates in such a short runtime; though obviously not a feature-length giallo, I nevertheless came away with the same overpowering impression of garishness and dread. Throughout are brief moments where a pair of vampish hands superimposed on screen give distinct Jack Smith vibes. Also shot in Spain, NOSTRES CARRES (2022, 5 min) is an atmospheric documentary depicting a 2021 demonstration on the streets of Barcelona. The voice of Juan GarcĂa Oliver, a leading anarchist and Minister of Justice of the Second Spanish Republic, plays over the images. Both are shot on 8mm; the cinematography is exceptional. [Kat Sachs]
---
Followed by a screening of a 3D horror film, which we can’t reveal here, that’s appropriate for the “holiday.”
Jack Sholder's A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 2: FREDDY'S REVENGE (US)
Music Box Theatre – Saturday, 10pm
Freddy Krueger: one of the few horror villains so iconic that he got a crossover movie in the mid-2000s. Oft-imitated but never replicated (even within the series), Robert Englund’s Krueger is as rock-solid a slasher villain as there is, peppering his phantasmagoric killing streaks with puns and murder methodology borrowed from Looney Tunes. The series persists partly because of the iconic villain at the center, but mostly because of its reliance on finding novel ways to fold Freddy into the fabric of the characters’ minds. In a series that plays fast and loose with how Freddy works, the second entry perhaps plays the loosest, with Krueger essentially hijacking the corporeal form of one person rather than hopping between the minds of a group, as he does in most entries. This ups the allegorical potential especially in how it centers Mark Patton’s raw-nerve central performance, a turn that’s anchored the film as a queer cult classic. Despite its departures, the film opens right where the previous one’s abrupt cliffhanger left off, with a busload of teens careening in an uncertain dreamspace. This introduces us to Jesse (Patton), a teen whose dreams have become haunted by our murderous melty-faced friend since he moved into the house where the previous NIGHTMARE took place. As inexplicable occurrences and dead bodies begin to pile up, it becomes clear that Freddy is not only in Jesse’s mind but moving through him to dispatch everyone around him. Based in the realm of dreams, all ELM STREET films revel in being two things at once. The viewer never feels firmly in reality or the dream world, the two often collapsing, overlapping, and prefiguring one another. The unique alchemy is something both broadly entertaining and as cerebral as you want it to be, which is especially where this film’s status as an LGBT horror staple has germinated; while Jesse’s battle with a repressed inner desire could be read a few ways, it’s scaffolded by occasional dips into softcore and S&M aesthetics and an unconventional bully-nerd frenemy-ship between Jesse and his occasional wrestling partner Grady (Robert Rusler). And as with all great '80s horror, the film is also a repository for fun SFX ideas that build out the requisite gore with pyrotechnics, matte paintings, and a few ravenous dogs with the faces of human babies. Director Jack Sholder, for his part, infuses the proceedings with a Real Film stateliness, widescreen compositions and loads of steam grounding an emotional through line that heightens the horror of each set piece. Forget the Johnny Depp blood geyser; Freddy’s physical exit through Jesse’s body deserves its place on any highlight reel of horror effects. There’s really something for everyone in this thinking-gorehound’s coming-of-age nightmare, but horror fans in particular should recognize it for the essential work that it is. Co-presented by the Horror House; director in attendance for a post-screening Q&A. (1985, 87 min, 35mm) [Maxwell Courtright]
Howard Hawks' BALL OF FIRE (US)
Music Box Theatre – Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am
In Howard Hawks’ screwball comedy BALL OF FIRE, Professor Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper) is a grammarian who is studying modern slang. He lives with seven other professors who are all working together to produce an encyclopedia of all human knowledge. While out researching, Bertram finds himself at a nightclub where he meets performer Sugarpuss O’Shea (Barbara Stanwyck). Her colorful vocabulary is exactly what he needs for his project but she’s hesitant to assist him until it is revealed she needs a place to hide from the authorities because they want to question her about her mobster boyfriend. Shades of SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARVES are felt here as the professors and their idiosyncratic personalities learn to live with the saucy Sugarpuss. BALL OF FIRE was the last film written by Billy Wilder before his own foray into filmmaking and working under Hawks on this film had an immense influence on Wilder’s career. Because of the strong writing and even-handed directing, Stanwyck is a perfect example of the quintessential Hawksian woman here. Her quick wit and cool demeanor allow her to assimilate into the professors’ home quite easily and her character is often cool under pressure. Sugarpuss stands tall amongst a cast full of offbeat characters. With an oeuvre as long and celebrated as Hawks’, BALL OF FIRE might not be one of the first titles that springs to mind when thinking of the director but it assuredly carries all the hallmarks of his finest comedic works. Screening as part of the Nobody’s Perfect: Billy Wilder Matinee series. (1941, 111 min, 35mm) [Kyle Cubr]
Alice Diop’s SAINT OMER (France)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
Acclaimed documentary filmmaker Alice Diop (whose non-fiction work I am not familiar with) made her narrative feature debut with this complex and beautiful character study about two women of Senegalese descent living in contemporary France. Pregnant Rama (Kayije Kagame), a successful novelist and professor of literature, attends the trial of—and becomes obsessed with—Laurence (Guslagie Malanga), a college student of limited means who stands accused of murder after abandoning her baby on a beach at night. The film, which daringly asks viewers to sympathize with a character who has committed a monstrous crime, is based on the true story of Fabienne Kamou, who was arrested for infanticide in 2013 and whose 2016 trial Diop attended. The dialogue is based in part on transcripts from Kamou’s real-life trial, which lends the extended courtroom scenes a rare verisimilitude, but what really impresses here is Diop’s mise-en-scène. Diop shoots Laurence from a different camera angle during each day of the trial, although she never deviates from this angle within each individual scene, lending a near-Bressonian formal rigor to the proceedings. While the technique of shot/reverse shot editing has become synonymous with lazy filmmaking in the modern era (because of how it often removes creativity from the process of shot selection, turning dialogue scenes into simple ping-pong matches), Diop imbues this technique with a fresh relevance: she refuses to show reverse angles when viewers are most likely to expect them, a strategy that eventually pays emotionally devastating dividends during a climactic exchange of glances where one character smiles while another silently weeps. Diop’s final masterstroke is to end the film before the verdict is reached, an unusual touch that recalls the denouement of Fritz Lang’s M (1931). Diop is wise enough to know that hearing a judge proclaim “Guilty” or “Not guilty” would put viewers in the position of agreeing or disagreeing with the judgment, when her real interests have lain elsewhere all along. As Jonathan Rosenbaum remarked on his website, the director has generated enough questions by the end in order “to make a verdict seem either impossible or superfluous.” (2022, 122 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]
Jean Renoir’s TONI (France)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Wednesday, 9:30pm
In LA CHIENNE (1931), Jean Renoir shot several key scenes with three cameras simultaneously, thereby anticipating one of Akira Kurosawa’s signature moves by about two decades. For TONI, made a few years later, Renoir pioneered several techniques that would later be associated with the Italian neorealists: location shooting, non-professional actors, a seemingly spontaneous visual style. The film anticipates the neorealist movement in other significant ways, namely its earthy, sympathetic view of working-poor characters. (The film was deemed sufficiently socialist in its outlook for Renoir to be invited to screen it in the Soviet Union.) The plot’s turn to high tragedy in the final act also seems particularly Italian, like something out of a verismo opera; until then, however, TONI is airy and vivacious in the finest French realist tradition. Renoir shot the film in Marseille, partly at Marcel Pagnol’s production studio and partly in town and the nearby countryside, and the director’s refusal to romanticize southern France results in a distinctive visual poetry all its own. “I think it should be rule number one in any art—allowing ourselves to be conquered by elements in our surroundings,” Renoir said in 1967 when he was reflecting on making the film, expressing the generosity and curiosity inherent in his poetic realism. His receptivity to the world around him enhances the film’s portrait of Marseille’s immigrant laborer community; watching TONI, you feel like you’re sweating alongside the characters as they work, woo, sing, and buckle under the weight of life’s unfairness. What unbelievable sadness in the scene where Toni marries Maria at the same time that Josefa, the woman he really loves, is forced to marry the man who raped and impregnated her. The film abounds with sadness, and yet Renoir’s affection for his characters always shines through. Few filmmakers were so enamored by the complexity of life. Screening as part of Doc’s Wednesday series, “Jean Renoir: The Grand Reality.” (1935, 85 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
Ingmar Bergman's WINTER LIGHT (Sweden)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Thursday, 7pm
Beginning in 1955, the Swedish film studio Svensk Filmindustri gave Ingmar Bergman complete creative freedom, allowing him to write and direct anything his heart desired. The subsequent successes of SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT (1955), THE SEVENTH SEAL (1957) and THE VIRGIN SPRING (1960) established him as an adored international filmmaker, leading him to receive fan mail from artists such as Stanley Kubrick. In the 1960s, Bergman set forth to revisit certain existentialist themes in a cinematic trilogy consisting of THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY (1961), WINTER LIGHT (1963), and THE SILENCE (1963). This film follows Tomas (Gunnar Björnstrand), a priest struggling with his faith in the nuclear age. After another poorly attended service, a practitioner named Jonas (Max Von Sydow) confesses his despair to Tomas over the news of China developing a nuclear bomb. Tomas admits to Jonas (after his attempts to console the practitioner fail) that he has no faith in God and that there is no logical way to explain the horrors of mankind. This declaration leads to Jonas’ suicide, which in turn inspires Tomas to resolve to continue as town priest despite all his doubts. As in many of Bergman’s philosophical explorations, we hear his voice behind all the characters, debating with himself on the subjects of death and whether God exists (and, if He does, why He’d create such a brutal world). Von Sydow recounted many theological debates he had on set with his director throughout their work together; posing these questions at the height of the arms race made the characters’ nightmares more relatable for contemporaneous audiences, particularly given that the film's release fell on the same year as the Cuban Missile Crisis. Regardless of whether he was communicating to atheists or devout Christians, Bergman pushed his audience to choose between optimism and pessimism with regards to the future of civilization; this subject proved an endless well, given the sheer amount of films he made exploring the topic. Paul Schrader updated the film's motifs in the context of climate anxiety in his masterpiece, FIRST REFORMED (2017), openly citing WINTER LIGHT as its biggest inspiration. By asking the big questions, this film will never expire, continuing to influence generations to come. Screening as part of Doc’s Thursday I series, “Splicing of the Atom: Nuclear Taboo in Cinema.” (1963, 81 min, DCP Digital) [Ray Ebarb]
Ingmar Bergman's THE SEVENTH SEAL (Sweden)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Sunday, 7pm
Whenever I revisit THE SEVENTH SEAL, what hits me hardest isn’t the heavy symbolism or the theological discourse, but rather the material involving the traveling players. Along with the romance in SUMMER WITH MONIKA, these passages epitomize the earthiness and sensuality that course through the first decade or so of Ingmar Bergman’s filmmaking career, communicating not just fascination with but also enthusiastic love for other people. The middle-aged actor and his young wife are bright, hearty, and endearing characters; the cheery way they go about life and work provides a sharp contrast to the angst and spiritual suffering of Max von Sydow’s knight. They also serve to illuminate just what von Sydow is suffering for—that is, some feeling of contentment with being alive. The actors’ pleasure in raising a child feels timeless, no less than the knight’s struggle to understand his purpose on earth, and these recognizable experiences make the medieval setting feel intimate and knowable. (Not for nothing is THE SEVENTH SEAL one of the most popular of medieval films.) As for the stuff involving chess and Death, it’s been parodied so often as to lose some of its aesthetic power, but the questions the film raises about mortality remain ever relevant. Screening as part of Doc’s Sunday series, “Facing Life, Meeting Death.” (1957, 96 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Paul Thomas Anderson's MAGNOLIA (US)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm
Paul Thomas Anderson's MAGNOLIA is a well-meaning rip-off of Robert Altman's SHORT CUTS, which is itself based on a collection of Raymond Carver's short stories. Though Anderson confuses the meaning of homage with plagiarism, the film is still intriguing as a philosophical counterweight to its prototype. Both follow an ensemble of seemingly unrelated characters as their lives haphazardly intersect over the course of one day in Los Angeles. This narrative structure can be found as early as 1932 in Edmund Golding's GRAND HOTEL and inherently poses questions about fate and happenstance. While Altman's film embraces an absurdist outlook, Anderson rejects chance and coincidence, favoring divine intervention in the form of magical realism. The cynicism and irresolution of SHORT CUTS is ultimately replaced in MAGNOLIA by an epiphanic clarity and optimism. Anderson further imitates Altman's style by employing music as a theme. Instead of using the improvisational mode of jazz, Anderson plays with the operatic form, splitting his film into three separate acts. Stylistically, Anderson works in the idiom of Scorsese and Renoir, using fluid long takes that emphasize the interconnected nature of his characters. MAGNOLIA is worth viewing exclusively for Tom Cruise's performance as Frank T.J. Mackey, a misogynistic motivational speaker, whose self-help system "Seduce and Destroy" encourages the sexual conquest of women by any means necessary. The character is something of an alter ego for Cruise's role as Dr. Bill Harford in EYES WIDE SHUT. Screening as part of Doc’s Friday series, “Philip Seymour Hoffman: A Retrospective.” (1999, 188 min, Digital Projection) [Harrison Sherrod]
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s BROKER (South Korea)
Gene Siskel Film Center and Music Box Theatre – See Venue websites for showtimes
Japanese writer-director Hirokazu Koreeda puts the “human” back in human trafficking with this quiet, gently comic road movie about the little family that forms around two men who sell abandoned infants on the black market. In South Korea some charities maintain “baby boxes” where reluctant mothers can anonymously abandon their newborns; Dong-soo (Gang Dong-won), a young volunteer working the night shift at a Christian church in Busan, swipes the occasional baby thus left and, with the help of his friend Ha (Song Kang-ho), brokers its sale to some eager married couple. Kore-eda works overtime to sentimentalize this criminal enterprise: Dong-soo steals only those infants whose mothers have included notes promising to come back for them, because he knows such a promise condemns a child to grow up in an orphanage, as he did. (Of course, all he needs to do to spare a child this fate is to destroy the note.) Caught red-handed by Moon So-young (Lee Ji-eun), a young sex worker who dropped her baby to the church, the men are forced to cut her in on the sale and bring her along as they drive from town to town vetting prospective parents. Completing the crooks' nuclear family is a wisecracking seven-year-old urchin who's stowed away on their van during a stop at Dong-soo’s old orphanage, and Kore-eda adds another poignant stroke in the form of a lonely police detective (Bae Doona) closing in on the traffickers. (2022, 109 min, DCP Digital) [J.R. Jones]
Joshua Tsui's INSERT COIN (US/Documentary)
Music Box Theatre – Wednesday, 7pm
An interviewee calls Midway Games the “punk rock” of video game companies and while INSERT COIN is a fairly straightforward documentary, its approach offers a detailed history. The Chicago-based company became well-known for its coin-operated arcade games and development of photorealistic graphics using video digitization, especially in its most famous title: Mortal Kombat. As the documentary addresses, this opened up a lot of discussion—and disagreements—about showing realistic violence, both between those working at Midway and in larger conversations about the cultural effects of video games. With no narrator, the interviewees share their personal experiences, and director Joshua Tsui (a former game developer at Midway) provides structure through an arcade-style credit countdown as the film progresses chronologically. The interviews have an informality about them, and none of the personalities overpower the others, emphasizing the collaborative—and at times very competitive—aspect of game development and programming. A clever feature are the chyrons under interviewees’ names, that change according to which company they’re with at the time or on which specific game they’re working; it’s a subtle way to address the instability of the video game business. While footage of the games is featured throughout, with a fun video game-style soundtrack by electronic artist Savant, INSERT COIN is most interested in the people behind the scenes and their effect on gaming history. It benefits from that focus, letting the story of Midway speak to video game culture as a whole. The film isn’t just a glowing celebration, but an honest look at the inner workings of one company in a competitive and ever-changing business. It’s clear from the many Chicago barcades that Midway has had a continuing influence, and INSERT COIN made me miss those unique arcade spaces even more. Followed a post-screening Q&A moderated by Tim Kitzrow (the voice of NBA Jam and NFL Blitz) with Tsui, Eugene Jarvis, and George Petro. (2020, 101 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
Park Chan-wook's DECISION TO LEAVE (South Korea)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Saturday, 7pm
When the 59-year-old South Korean artist Park Chan-wook sat down to write a neo-noir for the modern age, he knew he wanted to write a love story. While it may seem like a story of the detective and femme fatale descending into tragedy, there is much more at play in the drama and technique of this one-of-a-kind filmmaker. In both writing and cinematography, it’s clear that Park is experimenting with his tools in the hopes of reaching a broader audience, much like Bong Joon-ho did with PARASITE (2019). Cinematographer Ji-yong Kim creates gorgeous visuals of a colder palette and close-ups of a Sven Nykvist sensibility; Park, meanwhile, is a great defender of his actors, having known to be more upset when they aren’t nominated for international accolades than himself. He provides the groundwork for both stars here to commit to their characters. The audience falls for Tang Wei’s great performance as a suspiciously indifferent widow the same way her male counterpart does. As the investigator and her soon-to-be lover, Park Hae-il wins audiences over as a charismatic leading man. Park has always been known for extreme violence with films like OLDBOY (2003) but even he has stated in interviews this film is separate from the rest of his filmography. As a police procedural, DECISION TO LEAVE takes influence from Billy Wilder’s DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944) and Alfred Hitchcock’s VERTIGO (1958). While many detective noirs have been made in the history of cinema, DECISION TO LEAVE is enthrallingly enigmatic even among Park's own filmography. He interweaves genres and an unusual love story; it’s sexy yet asexual, as scarce intimacy is shown between lovers. There are few police procedurals that successfully integrate modern technology into the storytelling, making not only scenes more relatable to adding to the greater cause of having a film speak to the modern times of communication and connection. Park’s film breathes fresh air into the detective film through its inventiveness and manages to express profound thoughts on love in the new age of social media and smartphones. (2022, 139 min, DCP Digital) [Ray Ebarb]
Charlotte Wells' AFTERSUN (UK/US)
FACETS Cinema – See Venue website for showtimes
There’s something about the quality of DV home-movie footage that feels particularly, singularly fragile. Maybe it’s the tendency of the image to pixelate at relatively slight movements, or the fact that the format now exists in hindsight as a consumer video relic that experienced only the briefest of heydays before being usurped by HD and smartphones. Whatever the case, writer-director Charlotte Wells employs DV to poignant effect in her debut feature. The film opens in the low-resolution format, presented as video taken by 11-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) of her father Calum (Paul Mescal). The pair, whom we soon learn are sharing a motel room near a resort in Turkey, are spending one last summer vacation together before Sophie heads back to live with her divorced mother in Scotland. Wells will return to the girl’s video diaries throughout, although it takes one a while to situate them in time: are they sweet documents of the present or fragmented representations of the past? What’s the difference? Such temporal indeterminacy gradually reveals itself to be central to the meaning and effects of the film, which regards memory as always a hazy refraction of the then, now, and never-quite-was, an equation that, as it so happens, finds expression in the ontology of moving images. Not unlike the work of Wells’s compatriot Lynne Ramsay, AFTERSUN comes at its characters and events from oblique angles that delay or preclude our apprehension. In visual terms, this sometimes manifests as a darkness in which figures are barely or fleetingly perceptible; at other moments, Wells composes shots using various reflective surfaces, such as when we see Sophie’s live video playing on a tube television in front of a mirror, the source of the action never glimpsed directly, just as Calum’s unspoken inner turmoil remains elusive to Sophie. Based on Wells’ relationship with her own father, who passed away when she was an adolescent, AFTERSUN both diegetically depicts the splintered, wistful process of remembrance and evokes it through a nonlinear, diaphanous formal construction. During the climax, an outsize emotional crescendo set to “Under Pressure,” the film snaps into focus as a kind of spiritual bridge from daughter to father, through which their “last dance” leaves a perpetually echoing afterimage. (2022, 101 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
ALSO SCREENING
âš« The Call Sheet Magazine Launch Party
Celebrate the launch of the first edition of The Call Sheet, a brand new film magazine from Cinema Femme and Camera Ambassador, on Thursday, 7pm, at Camera Ambassador (2425 W. 14th St.) More info here.
âš« Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Wayne Wang’s 1982 film CHAN IS MISSING (76 min, DCP Digital) screens on Tuesday, 7pm, as part of the Asian American Media series.
Lukas Dhont’s 2022 film CLOSE (105 min, DCP Digital) screens on Wednesday at 6pm; note that this is a special preview screening, followed by discussion and Q&A with the director moderated by CMST Professor Aurore Spiers. Note that the Renoir film’s start time has been pushed back to 9:30pm. See review above.
Tassos Boulmetis’ 2003 Greek film A TOUCH OF SPICE (108 min, DCP Digital) screens on Thursday at 4:30pm, sponsored by the UChicago Hellenic Students Association. More info on all screenings and events here.
âš« Gene Siskel Film Center
Carla Simón’s 2022 Spanish film ALCARRÀS (120 min, DCP Digital) continues this week. See Venue website for showtimes. More info here.
âš« Music Box Theatre
Sarah Polley’s 2022 film WOMEN TALKING (104 min, DCP Digital) continues this week, and Lyle Edward Ball’s 2022 horror film SKINAMARINK (100 min, DCP digital) opens. See Venue website for showtimes.
John McTiernan’s 1987 film PREDATOR (107 min, DCP Digital) screens on Friday at 10pm, featuring an introduction and post-film Q&A with author Ander Monson, writer of Predator: A Memoir, a Movie, an Obsession. There’s a ticket option that includes the book, with a special edition slipcase.
Umberto Lenzi’s 1969 Italian horror film SO SWEET… SO PERVERSE (93 min, DCP Digital) screens on Tuesday, 7pm, as part of the January Giallo 2023 series, with a Severin pop-up shop in the lounge before, between, and after the films! More info on all screenings and events here.
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS –
ALSO SCREENING/STREAMING
âš« Media Burn Archive
As part of their Virtual Talks with Video Activists series, Media Burn presents a free virtual screening of Steven J. Walsh’s documentary SOUTHEAST: A CITY WITHIN A CITY, described as “shed[ding] light on th[e Southeast] neighborhood’s near-mythic tale,” on Thursday at 6pm, followed by a discussion with the filmmaker moderated by Christine Walley, a professor of anthropology at MIT. Free with registration. More info here.
âš« Video Data Bank
TJ Cuthand's NDN Survival Trilogy, comprised of EXTRACTIONS (2019, 15 min), LESS LETHAL FETISHES (2019, 9 min) and RECLAMATION (2018, 13 min), is available to stream for free on VDB TV. More info here.
CINE-LIST: January 13 - January 19, 2023
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Maxwell Courtright, Kyle Cubr, Ray Ebarb, Megan Fariello, J.R. Jones, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Scott Pfeiffer, Ben Sachs, Harrison Sherrod, Michael Glover Smith