:: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24 - THURSDAY, MARCH 2 ::

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Larry Gottheim's FOG LINE and HORIZONS (US/Experimental)

Block Cinema (at Northwestern University) – Wednesday, 7pm

Larry Gottheim—who is visiting Chicago this week for this in-person screening and a second screening with the Chicago Film Society on Friday, March 3—is a revered name in experimental film. In a "genre" of the cinematic art where films can be read as excessively esoteric and filmmakers can seem overly academic or potentially exclusionary, Gottheim's work is generous and approachable. The films' descriptions might come off a touch cryptic, but the act of watching them is potentially transcendent. For example, FOG LINE (1970, 11 min, Format TBD) is an 11-minute single-take film of fog clearing. At least that's all that is happening on screen. But Gottheim is allowing the audience into the creative process of assigning meaning, focus, and maybe even a touch of narrative. That being said, what is being offered to view isn't just a cypher. The landscape on display is hauntingly beautiful, and Gottheim slyly uses a telephoto lens to collapse the depth of the landscape with a graceful painterly eye. Gottheim's films from this era of his work anticipate and, in some cases, have directly inspired more recent examples of indie narrative slow cinema. If FOG LINE truly is "avant garde" in leading the way into slow cinema, then perhaps the next film points to an earlier classic period of filmmaking. Now this might be a stretch but for fans of the recent Steven Spielberg film THE FABELMANS, but Gottheim's HORIZONS (1973, 77 min, 16mm) serves as a feature-length manifestation of the visual and narrative resolution of that film, where a salty John Ford educates the young filmmaker as to what makes a good picture (if you don't know the true story related in the film, just google: john ford horizon). Beyond being a collection of beautifully captured horizons arranged for rapt contemplation, the film structures the shots with a poetic form that allows for rigorous readings or spiritual connections. Both readings are equally valid, as are myriad other interpretations of Gottheim's gracious film work. [Josh B Mabe]

Jon Moritsugu's TERMINAL USA (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Tuesday, 7pm

More movies like this should be funded by American taxpayer money. No question. Please, raise my taxes 20% if it means more movies with characters named Fagtoast. Or filled with people like Marvin, a seemingly perfect, straight-A model minority son who secretly calls gay sex chatlines and masturbates to skinhead beefcake pin-up porn. Films where the only normal person is the protagonist Kazumi, the punk rock fuck-up who hates everything because everything is worth hating. While many films attempt transgressiveness, TERMINAL USA couldn't be palatable if it tried. Honestly, it's barely consumable to even the most degenerate scumbags. This is a film where a "wholesome" family happily waits for Grandpa to die so they can cash out his legal claim for being exposed to deadly chemicals at work. Where the only possible happy ending involves potential child sex trafficking. Total scumbag stuff. But even with a crudity that is almost offensive in its mere existence, TERMINAL USA takes on 20th-century Americana with a vitriol that needs absolutely no metaphor in order to land. Directly skewering the ahistorical American nuclear family tropes invented by 1950s-'70s American mass-media culture, Moritsugu throws in the cultural blowback that was '80s American hardcore punk culture (is this the only use of seminal DC cult band Void in a narrative film?) as counterweight to the prevailing idea that cultural order had been somehow restored by Ronald Reagan and f(r)iends. But everything is fair game to Moritsugu. So, while whitewashed Americana is an easy target, he takes equal aim at immigrant/ethnic minority culture, both its perception by the white majority and the lived experience of the groups themselves. And guess what? He's fed up with all that bullshit too. When you hear the father complaining about getting yet another death threat with the dialogue, "Jeez, I can't believe they still think I'm a chink. I am not a chink. I'm a Jap. We are Japs. Chink is not the same as Japanese. Big, big difference," you realize that underneath all the fuck-you sleaze and debauchery, TERMINAL USA actually has some surgically precise critique happening. I'm not Asian, but this scene hit me hard the first time I saw it. I could relate as a Latino growing up in the '80s and being called a beaner and my immigrant family saying, "...but you're not Mexican, you're Cuban-Colombian. Can't they tell the difference?" No, they can't. And even if they could, they wouldn't care anyway. Also, you apparently don't actually care that they hate people just like us; you're just hoping they don't hate us specifically. Moritsugu knows the fundamental truth about America: everybody is absolutely fucked up and only looking out for themselves. It'd be easy to call this a pointless exercise in nihilism by a piece of wet gutter trash who conned PBS (and therefore the American taxpayers) into writing him a check, but that would be embarrassingly dismissive. A quick scan of Moritsugu's background, with his Ivy League education in semiotics and critical theory, absolutely belies TERMINAL USA's patina of disgusting ineptitude. This is true punk rock subversion. An exercise in calculated extremity. And just like the Ramones, our godfathers of punk, TERMINAL USA may be dumb, but far from stupid—and could have been made only in the good ol' US of A. Preceded by Bani Abidi's 2010 short THE DISTANCE FROM HERE (10 min, DCP Digital). Screening as part of Doc’s Tuesday series, “Asian American Media.” (1994, 54 min, 16mm) [Raphael Jose Martinez]

Billy Wilder's THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES (US)

Music Box Theatre – Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am

Billy Wilder stages his foray into Holmesiana in luxurious exactitude, excited at any opportunity to linger on a dusty track, a bit of new-old-fashioned machinery, or an obsolete article of clothing. Subtle anamorphic compositions perform elaborate suspension acts, refusing to reveal their secrets not to heighten suspense but to tease out yet another big-hearted joke within the mise-en-scene, while Wilder's Holmes is a figure not just of cliché genius but of genuine filthiness, a leering, metrosexual detective inhabiting a world staged and shot as though every shadow contains a clue, and every clue a dirty pun. Holmes purists tend to loathe Wilder's revisionist reading, for it turns every convention from the A. C. Doyle stories entirely inside-out and renders the Great Detective not just a fool but very nearly a precipitator of the First World War. Wilder purists tend to view it with despair, as nearly an hour was excised over Wilder's strenuous objections by the studio, never to return. But even in mutilated form, this is Wilder's crowning achievement, a work that deeply reimagines an indelible character by treating his historicity more seriously than any other Sherlock Holmes film. Screening as part of the Nobody’s Perfect: Billy Wilder Matinee series. (1970, 125 min, 35mm) [Kian Bergstrom]

Jacques Demy's THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (France)

Block Cinema (at Northwestern University) – Thursday, 6:30pm

Jacques Demy is a cinematic alchemist. Ever present in his body of work is an uncanny ability to transform standard, even banal, elements of various genres into 'gold'—or, rather, something so luminous and rarefied that it can only be Demy who's created it. THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG is arguably the best of his films, and almost certainly the first film of his to so fully bend genre and style convention. Demy was a member of the French New Wave and, like several of his peers, he had an unabashed love for Hollywood studio musicals of the era. Demy's most 'New Wave-ish' films preceded THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG; LOLA (1960) and BAY OF ANGELS (1962) were shot in black and white, and dealt more straightforwardly with themes inherent to the movement. Both hinted at Demy's progression, but THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG, when viewed in the context of his first three features, certainly stands out. (For example, it’s his first film in color.) In an essay about the film for the Reader, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum admitted that he originally considered it to be a commercial sellout, comparing it to other "corny pretenders" allegedly borne of the New Wave but merely ascribing the label where it didn't belong. Demy's vision is understandably confounding, as he uses elements that, when mixed, shouldn't create something this spectacular. Virtually undefinable, THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG is neither just a musical nor entirely an opera. The film's narrative is completely conveyed through song, with a jazzy score by longtime Demy collaborator Michel Legrand providing the music against which the sung dialogue is set. It's about a young couple, Guy and Genevieve; she's the too-young daughter of an overbearing mother who owns an umbrella shop in Cherbourg, he's a mechanic who hasn't yet served his time with the French military. Their courtship is shown in the first part of the film, titled "Departure." Naturally, he's drafted to fight in the Algerian War and soon thereafter Genevieve learns she is pregnant. In this part, titled "Absence," Genevieve's mother compels her to consider the overtures of a well-to-do jeweler while Genevieve wonders if her and Guy's love is waning. (It was common among the New Wave filmmakers to reference other films in their work, and here Demy references himself. The jeweler, Roland Cassard, was a suitor of Lola's in LOLA, and Lola herself returns in Demy's 1969 film MODEL SHOP.) Genevieve soon gives in to Roland, who accepts that she is pregnant with another man's child. In the third and final part, "Return," Guy is back from the war and spiraling out of control, likely due to Genevieve's desertion. The ending is bittersweet and surprisingly cynical, two hallmarks of Demy's romantic pragmatism. It has this in common with his previous films, and somewhat separates it from his 1967 film THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT, in which all is happy in the end despite Demy's overall tone of deceptively joyful endurance. This and THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT are noted for their use of color, but the schemes are distinct. In the latter, the fluffier of the two, sunny pastels and bright whites obscure any hint of grimy realism. In THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG, which is more operatic in tone and structure, Demy utilizes bolder, more primary colors. This further allows for hints at the film's fateful bitterness. All that glitters is gold in Demy's world, but his is a gold that illuminates the screen while revealing its own artifice. Preceded by James Hill's 1960 short GIUSEPPINA (32 min, 16mm). Screening as part of the Crude Aesthetics: Oil on Film series. (1964, 91 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]

Harmony Korine's TRASH HUMPERS (US/Experimental)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Thursday, 9:30pm

With its creepy atmosphere, toilet bowl aesthetic, and anarchic mise-en-scène, TRASH HUMPERS is like some kind of mutant that grew out of a puddle of vomit from a dark, East Coast alley in a Lloyd Kaufman Troma movie. It's bound to test your tolerance for how much vulgarity you can handle. But while a lot of shock cinema puffs up and stretches out bad taste to make it more cartoonishly palatable, TRASH HUMPERS seems more interested in tuning into the ghoulishness and eeriness that exists at the lower frequencies of bad taste. TRASH HUMPERS isn't a movie that singles out and shines a light on something that's disgusting (like when John Waters had us watch Divine eat fresh dog shit); it lets its grossness find its own way to you, like a smell that slowly appears under your nose or some slime that you gradually notice is causing your shoe to stick. While TRASH HUMPERS has its obvious acts of indecency, it doesn't employ clarity to offend you but, rather, vagueness to unsettle you. Because of the way it likes to roll itself in its own lo-fi VHS-aesthetic muddiness, its sharpest points and roughest angles have become dampened and rubbed out. It's like meeting a monster that's already dead. It's not really scary, but it is pretty creepy and it's unthreatening enough for you to wonder at it. Screening as part of Doc's Thursday II series, "Blow Up My Video: Movies Shot on Video, Shown on Film." (2009, 78 min, 35mm) [Kalvin Henley]

McG’s CHARLIE’S ANGELS (US)

Music Box Theatre – Friday and Saturday, Midnight

Though it's a continuation of the iconic '70s television classic, CHARLIE’S ANGELS couldn’t feel more Y2K. Director McG’s previous music video credits included some of the most iconic ska punk/pop rock songs of the late '90s: Sublime’s “Santeria,” Barenaked Ladies’ “One Week,” and Sugar Ray’s “Every Morning,” just to name a few. In the heyday of MTV’s Total Request Live, his bright and kinetic aesthetic inarguably helped drive the popularity of the music as much as anything else. All that’s here in CHARLIE’S ANGELS, a film that clips along like a series of music videos strung together. It’s exhilarating, though, with plenty of slo-mo, cutaways and freeze frames; it’s impossible to be bored. There’s a humor and looseness to it as well, evident by the amount of dancing the film features—including some impressive moves by supporting star Sam Rockwell—and the extended bloopers over the end credits. While there's a plot, CHARLIE’S ANGELS is more concerned with elaborate action set pieces and providing a rollercoaster of a good time. All this fun is reliant on the Angels themselves. Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz, and Lucy Liu play a group of accomplished private investigators working for an unseen benefactor named Charlie. Their latest assignment, however, may be their most important as they begin to realize the case hits very close to home. The three leads are contagiously enthusiastic with an easy chemistry as they peppily change costuje and disguise their way through this investigation. There’s also a solid supporting cast and a ton of cameos. Most memorable is Crispin Glover as the mysterious “Thin Man,” in an unnerving performance that feels wildly out of place and yet completely works. It’s emblematic of the film itself; it’s a lot of energy and tone to throw at the wall, but it all sticks, making for an entertaining ride and 2000 time capsule. Perhaps it's no surprise that CHARLIE’S ANGELS includes a notable soundtrack, which features Destiny Child’s “Independent Women Part I,” originally released for the film. Featuring a pre-show vinyl DJ set by Gaudy God starting at 11:30pm. (2000, 98 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Giulio Questi’s DEATH LAID AN EGG (Italy)

Music Box Theatre – Saturday, Midnight

This comic giallo scores serious points for originality. Jean-Louis Trintignant stars as the manager of a high-tech poultry farm that’s trying to breed headless chickens in order to lower the costs of production. He’s married to a bombshell played by Gina Lollobrigida, having an affair with another bombshell played by Ewa Aulin, and frequently visiting sex workers either to murder them or play-act scenes of murder. I don’t want to say whether the murders are real, as the filmmakers keep it vague for much of the runtime as to the nature of Trintignant’s intentions—and, for that matter, their own. DEATH LAID AN EGG may be an arcane satire of capitalist ruthlessness or just a wacky romp about things that Giulio Questi and cowriter Franco Arcalli found funny. Whatever the movie is, it’s extremely colorful and modish, with style readily winning out over substance. Like Elio Petri’s near-contemporaneous and comparably batty genre film THE 10TH VICTIM (1965), EGG raises questions about where society may be heading mainly to have fun with the scenarios these questions give rise to. There’s plenty of memorably grotesque imagery (needless to say, the headless chickens make an appearance), and the leads generate more sex appeal than the material probably deserves. Trintignant is also ridiculously serious as the elusive antihero, who works overtime to hide his fetishes from the people closest to him. Has anyone ever programmed this on a double bill with Bertolucci’s THE CONFORMIST (1970)? Presented by the Front Row and Secret Cinema School. (1968, 86 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Juraj Herz's THE CREMATOR (Czechoslovakia)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Sunday, 7pm

In every aspect, Slovak filmmaker Juraj Herz’s soot-black satire THE CREMATOR is exemplary, beginning with the central performance by Rudolf Hrusínský. His Kopfrkingl is a glib, ambitious mortician, driven by familial piety and dubious moral rectitude to spread the gospel of cremation (and, bizarrely, of Tibetan Buddhist theories of reincarnation) among his fellow countrymen in the months leading up to the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939. A teetotaler, a lover of music, and a friend to animals, Kopfrkingl is a self-styled “sensitive soul,” initially indifferent to the growing influence of the Nazi party in his community; he’s also a perv and a scoundrel, lured away from his “blissful” marriage towards fascism by the promise of topless Teutonic blondes. To this revolting specimen of bourgeois sanctimony, kitsch, and prurience, Hrusínský brings unflagging intelligence, gestural precision, and buried wit, offering a far more textured study of fascism’s flat affect than the pantomime of Bertolucci’s similarly-themed THE CONFORMIST. Adapted from a novel by Ladislav Fuks, THE CREMATOR retains a literary quality, but Herz does more than cinematically embalm the letter of Kopfrkingl’s self-flattering monologues; the film is a wall-eyed carnival of style, with brilliant montages, shrewd zooms, innovative sonic effects, and thickly sedimented mise-en-scene. With these effects, Herz seeks always to reveal character rather than to demonstrate mastery for its own sake. Even the film’s most glaring artifices—the ingenious linkages that pivot from scene to scene around spatial ambiguities and repeated motifs—heighten our sense of confinement within Kopfrkingl’s deluded psyche. Films of the Czech New Wave exist on a spectrum from surreality to satire to sobriety; in some ways, the stylistic delirium of THE CREMATOR shares more with fantasias like Věra Chytilová’s DAISIES and Jaromil Jireš’ VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS than with other Holocaust-themed character studies like Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos’ THE SHOP ON MAIN STREET. But the anarchic exuberance of DAISIES and the authoritarian grotesque of THE CREMATOR are best understood as mirror expressions of the driving force behind the Czech New Wave: the irruption of desire as a function of politics. The New Wave was the effect of a post-Stalinist cultural “thaw” in the Eastern Bloc, an astonishing (if painfully brief) outpouring of personal expression that unleashed both dreams and nightmares—often, stories about the delightful and horrifying effects that unrepressed desires can have when brought into the open. Coming at the very end of the thaw—shooting began before, and was completed in secret after, the arrival of Soviet forces in Prague in 1968, the event which marked the end of the Prague Spring and the return of brutal repression—THE CREMATOR understands, and plays brilliantly upon, the political ambiguity of Kopfrkingl’s conflicted desires for respectability, authority, and uninhibited depravity. How else could a man justify genocidal mass murder as an act of Buddhist benevolence—and believe it? Screening as part of Doc’s Sunday series, “Facing Life, Meeting Death.” (1969, 95 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Metzger]

Samuel Fuller's FORTY GUNS (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Monday, 7pm

FORTY GUNS is a hardboiled feminist Western and one of the most progressive films about female agency coming out of a Hollywood studio at a time when Father Knows Best had a firm grip on the airwaves. In a post-McCarthy America, mass media emphasized the importance of the nuclear family and expectations of female subservience. Fuller cultivates a female outlaw (“a high-riding woman with a whip”) who's unapologetic for her position of power or how she got there. The film opens in an America reaching the end of the frontier. Federal marshal Griff Bonnell (Barry Sullivan) rolls into an Arizona town looking for two men from Jessica Drummond’s (Barbara Stanwyck) gang of 20 gunslinging male outlaws. Romance ensues between the lawman and the lawless woman, leading to the death of both their siblings. In Fuller’s original script, Bonnell was supposed to execute his girlfriend to avenge his brother, but the studio pushed him to a more optimistic ending, concluding the film with forgiveness between the two lovers. A longtime member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals and self-identified conservative Republican, Stanwyck lends iconic screen presence and fortitude to this progressive exploration of a woman holding her own in the Wild West. Having won the title for highest paid woman in America in 1944, the movie star was at a unique moment in her career, a former starlet making bold career moves. Fuller began his career as a crime reporter and entered into filmmaking with I SHOT JESSE JAMES (1949) when he was in his late 30s. Shooting low-budget features gave him some liberty in storytelling—he famously shot the principal photography of THE STEEL HELMET (1951) in ten days. While Fuller had a larger budget to work with on this film, $300,000 was still small for an action-packed Western starring Stanwyck at Twentieth Century Fox. Engineering grit and sentiment, FORTY GUNS glides from utmost tension through its fight sequences and moving vulnerability. Taking full advantage of CinemaScope, Fuler overwhelms the audience with stylized shots of action (paired with impeccable editing) and close-ups of actors. Even in still moments, whether the storm sequence or the heart-melting interludes sung by Jidge Carroll, the work is never dull. In Jean-Luc Godard’s PIERROT LE FOU (1965), Fuller makes a cameo to tell Jean-Paul Belmondo film is “like a battleground. It’s love, hate, action, violence, death… in one word, emotion." As Australian film critic Adrian Martin notes, Fuller's stylistic tics marked the first signs of a personal cinema possible within the System. Screening as part of Doc’s Monday series, “Baby Face: The Films of Barbara Stanwyck.” (1957, 80 min, DCP Digital) [Ray Ebarb]

Lasse Hallström’s HILMA (Sweden)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Wednesday, 6pm

In the past few years, the interest Scandinavian filmmakers seem to have in illuminating the lives and accomplishments of women artists has borne entertaining fruit. The formative years of Finnish artist Tove Jansson made for the lively Swedish-Finnish production TOVE (2020), and now, Swedish director Lasse Hallström and his family have made HILMA, a biopic about Swedish abstract artist Hilma af Klint that hews quite closely to her actual life story. In it, Hallström’s wife, the remarkable Lena Olin, plays Hilma in old age, and their daughter, Tora Hallström, plays Hilma as she embarks on an unconventional art career. Hilma’s early loss of her beloved sister, Hermina (Emmi Tjernström), leads to her embrace of the spiritist movement of the 19th century. Forming a group of women artists and fellow spiritists called The Five, Hilma channeled through séances what she called the High Masters’ wishes in mapping out the images the group would create. The images slightly predated the work of Wassily Kandinsky, who has long been considered the father of modern abstract art, but they were not shown publicly, partly because the art world was not ready for them and partly because Hilma believed the negative critique of her “soul mate,” Anthroposophical Society founder Rudolf Steiner, when he visited Stockholm. Hallström’s film tries to suggest Hilma’s worlds-expanding mind with repetitive scenes of interactions with her sister and dizzying dreams during the first part of the film, but this strategy is confusing and largely unsuccessful. Much better are the later scenes with The Five, which capture their almost ecstatic experiences and beliefs. Olin is mesmerizing in the few scenes in which she appears. Tora Hallström is rather less convincing in putting flesh on the bones of her character, though her possibly speculative affair with one of The Five, Anna Cassel (Catherine Chalk), adds much to both of their roles. The film ends with a 2018-'19 exhibition of af Klint’s work at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, a building that eerily resembles the schematic for a temple she designed to house her work. Frank Lloyd Wright began designing the museum in 1944, the year af Klint died, so one may wonder whether her spirit might have spoken to him, as so many spoke to her. Opening night of the Chicago European Union Film Festival, with actresses Lena Olin and Tora Hallström in person. Followed by a reception hosted by the Honorary Consulate of Sweden. (2023, 120 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Check back next week for more coverage of the Chicago European Union Film Festival.

James Bridges’ THE CHINA SYNDROME (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Thursday, 7pm

“In order to be admitted to the Hollywood cinema at all,” wrote Robin Wood in an essay titled “Images and Women,” “feminism had to undergo various drastic changes, the fundamental one, from which all the rest follow, being the repression of politics.” He continued: “In Hollywood films—even the most determinedly progressive—there is no ‘Women’s Movement”; there are only individual women who feel personally constrained.” I can’t argue that THE CHINA SYNDROME isn’t about one woman who feels repressed within her particular social framework (in this case, a television station), but there’s no denying that politics are at its forefront—one might say it’s all the more subversive in how it filters a movement through character progression. Jane Fonda stars as Kimberly Wells, an ambitious TV reporter whose fluff piece on nuclear energy turns into a dangerous investigation after she and her crew go to a local power plant and witness a near-meltdown (also characterized as the China Syndrome, a hypothetical situation where the core could ostensibly burn through the reactor and the earth below, eventually hitting China). It’s not just Fonda’s subtly impassioned performance that invests this already engaging thriller with shrewd political/feminist fervor—her production company, IPC Films, had been gestating the idea of a movie with a similar subject long before Columbia suggested Michael Douglas, who ended up producing and co-starring, approach her with the script. She’s even credited with almost single-handedly making global warming worse because of the film’s significance following the precipitous accident at Three Mile Island just 12 days after its release. (That last part is hyperbole, but it’s not hard to exaggerate when a 2007 New York Times Magazine article, pithily titled “The Jane Fonda Effect,” says, “If you were asked to name the biggest global-warming villains of the past 30 years, here’s one name that probably wouldn’t spring to mind: Jane Fonda. But should it?” The actual answer isn’t quite as damning as the article’s lede might imply, but still. Consider this against other articles from around the time the film came out; you’d think Fonda and Douglas were tree-hugging hippies rather than descendents of Hollywood royalty.) The director, James Bridges, whose other film credits include THE PAPER CHASE and URBAN COWBOY, was chosen by Douglas, though his influence on the film is decidedly less pronounced than either Fonda’s or Douglas’s—even Jack Lemmon’s performance as a shift supervisor who discovers falsified safety records eclipses any auteurist ambitions, assuming Bridges had them at all. In his review for the Chicago Reader, Dave Kehr wrote that “the film looks like a hack job...but it's a very good hack job: strong, simple, and perfectly paced, until the last reel flounders in a bit of overkill.” Though Douglas and Lemmon are compelling in their respective roles, it’s Fonda’s performance and Kimberly’s characterization that make it more than just a “cautionary melodrama that succeeds or fails at the box office for reasons that have almost nothing to do with its quality,” as Pauline Kael noted in her review, referencing the aforementioned, quasi-fortuitous timing. The way it confronts sexism is also interesting—in one scene, Kimberly is told outright that she’s only successful because of her looks. That her climactic broadcast involves her breaking into tears is another respectable element of the film’s narrative; Kimberly’s unwavering femininity is an asset to both the character and the story. Screening as part of Doc’s Thursday I series, “Splicing of the Atom: Nuclear Taboo in Cinema.” (1979, 122 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Albert Serra’s PACIFICTION (France/Spain/Germany/Portugal)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Like Bertrand Bonello or Tsai Ming-liang, Spanish director Albert Serra seems less interested in telling stories than evoking a particular state of mind. PACIFCTION is worth seeing—and on the biggest screen possible—for this reason alone; it’s as environmental a moviegoing experience as any IMAX nature documentary. The film harkens back to the fabled era of LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD, L’ECLISSE, PLAYTIME, and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, when art movies created a sense of boundless possibility with every shot. However, once you figure out what PACIFICTION is about (it takes about an hour), that sense of possibility develops a fairly revolting aftertaste. For not only is Serra’s new movie a work of hit-for-the-rafters art filmmaking, it’s also something of the slow cinema WOLF OF WALL STREET. The hero is a French wheeler-dealer based in Tahiti, something of a cross between Ben Gazzara in SAINT JACK (1979) and those frighteningly hollow nationless contractors in Don DeLillo’s novel The Names. Played by Benoît Magimel in an electric performance, this guy seems so intent on making a deal with everybody he meets that he comes off as gross even before you know what he’s wrapped up in. That he enjoys a life of sleazy luxury (through his connections to the local tourism industry) and wears just two variations on the same loud suit only thicken the toxic aura around him. In his previous films STORY OF MY DEATH (2013), THE DEATH OF LOUIS XIV (2016), and LIBERTÉ (2019), Serra presented the hedonistic pleasures of aristocracies past with such museum-piece airlessness as to make them seem like rituals from an alien planet; here, he brings the same approach to a contemporary milieu, and the effect can be entrancing, funny, disgusting, or just plain dull, depending on how you look at it. Is this a movie about the cult of Donald Trump? Why not? (2022, 165 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Jerzy Skolimowski's EO (Poland/UK/Italy)

FACETS Cinema – Sunday, 1pm, 3pm, and 5pm

In 2022, Steven Spielberg retrofitted JAWS for IMAX theaters, transforming a classic film into a towering, visceral experience. One might say that Jerzy Skolimowski did the same thing that year with Robert Bresson’s AU HASARD BALTHAZAR (1966); his quasi-remake EO (a prizewinner at Cannes) is a big screen experience par excellence, with large-scale imagery and booming sound design that make you feel the titular donkey’s suffering in your bones. Some might balk at Skolimowski’s decision to put his spin on Bresson’s allegorical masterpiece—which is beyond question one of the greatest films ever made—yet such an audacious move is in keeping with this major artist, who first came to prominence in the early 1960s as an acclaimed poet and a figurehead of Poland’s postwar youth culture. The director’s ‘60s work remains astounding in its freewheeling energy and inspired visual metaphors (it’s worth noting that, after Bresson, he was one of the European filmmakers that Cahiers du cinéma championed the most in that decade); this period culminated with the blunt social critique of his 1967 production HANDS UP!, which was so incendiary that it more or less got him exiled from his native country (moreover, he wasn’t able to complete the film until 1981). After that, Skolimowski made movies in several other countries (including the US) before returning to Poland in the 1990s. The handful of films he’s made since then feel less indebted to his work as poet than his work as a painter, which has occupied much of his time in the past several decades. Indeed, EO contains an abundance of striking images, and these drive the film more than the loose narrative, which follows a donkey in his travails after he leaves the circus where he’s performed. The animal’s misfortunes mirror those of contemporary Europe; the most upsetting episode is probably the one that concerns the violent activity of a thuggish group of modern-day nationalists. A late episode in the film with guest star Isabelle Huppert works in some anticlerical sentiment that feels more akin to Buñuel than Bresson, while the final episode approaches the apocalyptic feelings of Bresson’s last two features, THE DEVIL, PROBABLY (1977) and L’ARGENT (1983). It’s a grim work, to be sure, yet Skolimowski’s immersive camerawork alleviates the proceedings, reminding us (as Bresson did) how miraculous the cinematic form can be. (2022, 86 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Oscar-Nominated Documentary Short Films

Gene Siskel Film Center and the Music Box Theatre – See Venue websites for showtimes

Never underestimate the sentimental appeal of cute animals. The orphaned elephant calves of Kartiki Gonsalves’s THE ELEPHANT WHISPERERS practically come with their own soundtrack of “aww”s. They eat, bathe, and gambol about under the aegis of human guardians Bomman and Belli, who raise the abandoned pachyderms in South India’s Mudumalai National Park, home to one of the world’s largest elephant preserves. Bomman and Belli speak of the calves with religious reverence and often explicitly liken them to their kids; cutaways to the verdant landscape and its myriad other inhabitants reinforce a deep-seated spiritual connection with nature. It’s a soothing, unchallenging film that seems mostly content with providing warm fuzzies via anthropomorphized animals. In contrast to such sentimentalism is Maxim Arbugaev and Evgenia Arbugaeva’s HAULOUT, which regards its animal subjects with a scientific remove. Set on Cape Serdtse-Kamen in Arctic Siberia, it chronicles the seasonal work of marine biologist Maxim Chakilev as he observes the area’s walrus population and its dwindling numbers in a warming world. The sheer material magnitude of the images captured here—including a reveal so profoundly surprising and spectacularly shot it will leave you slack-jawed—starkly testifies to the reality of climate change. From the geologically epic-scaled to the personally intimate, Jay Rosenblatt’s HOW DO YOU MEASURE A YEAR? charts the director’s 17-year experiment of filming his daughter on each of her birthdays from the age of two to 18. Asking her the same series of questions every year, he condenses her physical, emotional, and intellectual maturation into 30 minutes that feel more self-indulgent and exploitative than illuminating. Similarly dubious is Joshua Seftel’s STRANGER AT THE GATE, about a white former US marine who returned home from the Middle East so instilled with Islamaphobia that he planned to blow up his local mosque. Without giving the whole story away, let’s just say it privileges the palliating narrative of a bigoted white man’s redemption over an exploration of systemic racism. There’s more nuance in Anne Alvergue and Debra McClutchy’s THE MARTHA MITCHELL EFFECT. Focused on the titular socialite’s gaslighting by the Nixon administration during the Watergate scandal, it uses a range of archival footage to show Mitchell as a complicated public figure who was done dirty by both the government and the media, which discredited her as a delusional harpy. Ultimately, the film saves her from that misogynistic reputation, positioning her as a central figure in exposing the corruption of Nixon and his circle and her story as a cautionary tale of the consequences of political dissent even in so-called democratic countries. (2022, Total approx. 165 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]

Oscar-Nominated Live Action Short Films

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

One of the things that stands out about this year’s Oscar slate for Best Live Action Short Film is its diversity, with each nominee coming from a different country and representing a specific experience of identity or culture. The highlight of the field is also the longest film nominated: Alice Rohrwacher’s LE PUPILLE. Set during Christmastime at an all-girls’ Catholic boarding school in Fascist Italy, it’s a social-realist fable of youthful amenability shading into the stirrings of rebellion, as the girls learn the art of chipping away at the religious dogma of their head nun (played by one of the director’s go-to actors, her sister Alba). Lambently shot on Super 16, the film is further enlivened by some whimsical formal flourishes, including hand-written intertitles, sped-up action, and freeze-frames. A more severe form of doctrinaire oppression is found in Cyrus Neshvad’s THE RED SUITCASE, about an Iranian girl sent to Luxembourg by her father for an arranged marriage she utterly dreads. Neshvad turns the film into a kind of monster movie as the girl ducks around corners and climbs into tight spaces to evade her stalking suitor; he also makes potent use of the Luxembourg airport’s large-scale fashion advertisements, their images of commodified women underscoring the plight of the protagonist. Because Oscar likes to broadcast its social conscience, another nominee, Anders Walter and Pipaluk K. Jørgensen’s IVALU, turns on the theme of female abuse. However, that point is not the primary focus of the film, which instead honors an Inuit girl’s abiding spiritual connection with her lost sister. Soaring wide-angle shots of the Greenland wilds makes this one a visual stunner. There’s another Scandinavian nominee: Eirik Tveiten’s NIGHT RIDE. In it, a woman with dwarfism forges an unexpected alliance after she spontaneously decides to commandeer a city tram on one frigid Norwegian night. The category is rounded out by Tom Berkeley and Ross White’s AN IRISH GOODBYE, which makes an interesting counterpart to one of this year’s most nominated features, THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN. Like McDonagh’s work, it’s an irreverent treatment of mortality and fraternal conflict; however, it quickly doffs its sardonic Irish edge to embrace something more earnestly life-affirming. Many will smile, and many others will feel their teeth tingling—which means it’s probably going to win. (2022, Total approx. 110 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]

🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós’ 2022 documentary and science-fiction hybrid DRY GROUND BURNING (153 min, Digital Projection) screens Friday, 6pm, as part of the Crude Aesthetics: Oil on Film series. Pimenta to appear virtually for a post-screening discussion. 

Open-caption screenings of Dario Robleto's THE AORTA OF AN ARCHIVIST (2019, 51 min, Digital Projection) and THE BOUNDARY OF LIFE IS QUIETLY CROSSED (2021, 53 min, Digital Projection) take place Sunday from 2 to 4pm. Screening in conjunction with Block Museum's exhibition, The Heart's Knowledge: Science And Empathy In The Art Of Dario Robleto. More info on all screenings and exhibitions here.

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Spike Lee’s 2002 film 25TH HOUR (135 min, 35mm) screens Friday, 7pm, as part of the Philip Seymour Hoffman: A Retrospective series. 

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2022 film BARDO, FALSE CHRONICLE OF A HANDFUL OF TRUTHS (159 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, 7pm, as part of the Docshees of Idasherin: New Releases series. More info on all screenings here. 

⚫ FACETS Cinema
Michael Montenegro’s 2023 directorial debut APPARATICUS screens Friday at 7pm. Doors open at 6:30pm for appetizers and a multimedia lobby display. Presented by Theatre Y; followed by a panel with former members of the Prisoner Review Board (PRB) Lisa Daniels and Max Cerda, formerly incarcerated activist Celia Colon, WBEZ Senior Producer and Theatre Y Board President Steve Bynum, and Montenegro. More info here.

⚫ Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts)
“The Root & The Bloom: Where Could We Go—A Map of Finding Home,” featuring Echaka Agba’s documentary THE ROOT: LOOKING FOR ANCESTORS IN MY FATHER’S GARDEN (COORDINATE 1) and Kristina Valada-Viars’ documentary THE BLOOM (COORDINATE 2), screens Friday at 7pm. Free admission. Filmmakers in person. (2020-21, 40 min, Digital Projection)

“Interior Lives,” the ninth in the ten-week series that’s part of the Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts 2023, screens Thursday at 7pm. Includes films by S. Pearl Sharp, Zeinabu irene Davis, Melvonna Ballenger, Fronza Woods, Aarin Burch, Yvonne Welbon, and Cauleen Smith. Please note, the event is sold out, but you can stream the discussion with the filmmakers by reserving a streaming ticket here. More info on all screenings and events here. 

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Hlynur Pálmason’s 2022 film GODLAND (143 min, DCP Digital) and the Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts open this week. See Venue website for showtimes. 

“Digging Deeper Into Movies with Nick Davis,” presented by the Chicago International Film Festival, takes place on Saturday at 11am. This particular event considers the best films of 2022 and the Oscar nominations. Free admission. RSVP here. 

The Midwest Film Festival presents John Mossman’s 2022 film GOOD GUY WITH A GUN (108 min, Digital Projection) on Monday at 7:30pm. Please note, the event is sold out.

Natalia López’s 2022 film ROBE OF GEMS (118 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 6pm, as part of professor Daniel R. Quiles’ Gore Capitalism lecture series. More info on all screenings and events here. 

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Maryam Touzani’s 2022 film THE BLUE CAFTAN (118 min, DCP Digital) opens and  the Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts and Lukas Dhont’s 2022 film CLOSE (105 min, DCP Digital) continue this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

Amanda Kramer’s 2022 film GIVE ME PITY! (80 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday at 9pm. 

Filmmaker, record producer and artist newest_latest a.k.a. Che money programs and presents Cheo Melendez’s WORDS AREN’T ENOUGH (94 min, Digital Projection) on Wednesday at 7pm. More info on all screenings and events here. 

⚫ Sweet Void Cinema
Find information on this Humboldt Park microcinema, including its screening and workshop schedule, here. 

CINE-LIST: February 24 - March 2, 2023

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, Ray Ebarb, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Kalvin Henley, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Josh B Mabe, Raphael Jose Martinez, Michael Metzger