:: FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 25 - THURSDAY, DECEMBER 1 ::

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📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

John Cassavetes' LOVE STREAMS (US)

Chicago Film Society at the Music Box Theatre – Monday, 7pm

John Cassavetes' final film, LOVE STREAMS, is his most fully realized in its portrayal of the fallacy of human connection. Working in front of the camera for the last time, Cassavetes stars opposite his wife Gena Rowlands—a fitting public bow for their long collaboration. They play Robert and Sarah, a dysfunctional brother and sister—he's never learned to love and she loves too much—who lean on each other as their lives fall apart. LOVE STREAMS lacks anything that could be called exposition despite the heaviest use of non-diegetic music and the only use of dream sequences in any of Cassavetes' work. We are dropped into the lives of an aging, drunk, womanizing, and wealthy writer and his clinically depressed, soon-to-be divorced sister, initially by following them separately on parallel paths and downward trajectories. Each sibling has a child that they make genuine but clumsy attempts to bond with, but ultimately they prove unfit as parents. Sarah shows up on Robert's doorstep just as he's taking the 8-year-old son he's never met before on a weekend bender to Las Vegas. When he returns without his son, Cassavetes and Rowlands are left to act out the end of this tragedy. The story is somewhat secondary here, as the film functions as a recap of Cassavetes' previous directorial themes. Cassavetes' lonely artist is colored by his own tinge of personal regret (he had already been diagnosed with the liver cirrhosis that would kill him five years later). His sister, on the other hand, echoes the absurdist antics that Cassavetes was known for as a younger man, going further and further to keep everything cheery in the face of her own depression. Rowlands continually makes us forget her character's mental instability only to unleash it again like a tantrum. As his life was coming to a close, Cassavetes seemed willing to yield a little of his standard formal difficulty in order to be understood more clearly. What he would not yield, though, was an insistence that Hollywood sold the public a false bill of goods regarding love and marriage. It is through understanding the pain of life that Cassavetes depicts on the screen that we gain greater appreciation for the joys of our own lives off it, not the other way around. Preceded by a Cassavetes trailer reel. (1984, 141 min, 35mm) [Jason Halprin]

Tiffany Sia: DO NOT CIRCULATE (Experimental/Shorts)

Conversations at the Edge at the Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 6pm

In DO NOT CIRCULATE (2021, 17 min, Digital Projection), the Hong Kong-born, New York-based artist Tiffany Sia cites the Rashomon Effect, born from Akira Kurosawa’s titular 1950 film, remarking that “dispersed perspectives illuminate more questions and point to the spaces of the unknowable.” This study of perspective and the attempted assimilation of myriad viewpoints into a cohesive, unassailable narrative—and the occasional futility of such a task—marks the three works in this program. Of the three NEVER REST/UNREST (2020, 28 min, Digital Projection) is the purest manifestation of Sia’s goal to query the dominant narrative paradigms, here found in the pernicious 24-hour news cycle. Captured via a hand-held device in the 16:9 vertical video format ubiquitous on platforms such as Instagram and TikTok is a series of protests that unfolded in Hong Kong in the early summer of 2019 and, in Sia’s documentation of it, goes through the end of the year (though the protests lasted into 2020). Footage ranges from the banal, what might seem entirely unrelated to the unrest, to documentation of the political actions themselves, sometimes even as they appear on other modes of transmission. Any subtitles are intentionally omitted “as a means of interrogating the cultural proximity or distance of the viewer from Hong Kong.” Thus we experience a singular viewpoint, likely uninterpretable by many audience members, in direct opposition to the often manipulative images put forth via the news, wherein narratives of crisis and catastrophe are foregrounded over any other. The nuances of documentation are more studiously probed in DO NOT CIRCULATE, which includes the above RASHOMON-adjacent rumination as part of an ongoing narrative voiceover that accompanies the array of images of protestors on August 31, 2019, as they took to the streets following the arrests of pro-democracy activists and lawmakers. The footage, culled from various online sources, attempts to recreate the timeline as it was being published in real time; Sia’s voiceover unnerves as her seemingly impassive tone is belied by the often chaotic imagery being shown simultaneously. She uses the phrase “collective media memory,” examining both the implications of such documentation and its use as a tool for conflicting purposes. The idea of haunting—either by literal ghosts or the ways in which these incidences come to haunt a so-called collective consciousness—also comes into play and is further explored in WHAT RULES THE INVISIBLE (2022, 10 min, Digital Projection), wherein archival travelog footage of Hong Kong across various decades is punctuated by intertitles detailing memories from her mother of her grandmother’s experience during the Japanese occupation of World War II. Ghosts factor into this retelling and also in the footage, with certain motifs being repeated to spectral effect. The dispersion of similar shots across decades signals a certain universal truth that’s nevertheless held up in dispute, coincidence seeming too much to bear. Ultimately, like Kurosawa’s film, Sia’s work offers no easy answers to that which she’s investigating via her dense but still artfully tenuous compositions, leaving viewers with only more questions. Followed by a post-screening discussion with the filmmaker. [Kat Sachs]

David Fincher’s ZODIAC (US)

Music Box Theatre – Tuesday, 7pm and Wednesday, 9:15pm

David Fincher’s finest work to date is one of the few American movies that merits comparison with the epic cinema of Jacques Rivette—no less than OUT 1 or LA BELLE NOISEUSE, ZODIAC is as a daring experiment in long-form storytelling and the cinematic representation of time. But where Rivette’s masterpieces are about drawing out individual moments so that the present seems like it could go on forever, ZODIAC is the opposite, a film in which time is constantly slipping away from the characters in a stream of anticlimaxes. Some of the characters in ZODIAC (namely Mark Ruffalo’s Dave Toschi) develop a kind of tragic dignity in their obsession with finding the Zodiac Killer over the movie’s two-and-a-half-hour and decades-long run time; as their pursuit goes on and on and on, the mission comes to seem as quixotic as trying to stop time itself. Fincher renders these men’s frustration almost palpable by introducing the movie as a suspenseful true-crime mystery, thereby setting up the audience for a catharsis that never comes. But once it becomes clear that the movie isn’t going to deliver the emotional release commonly associated with commercial narrative cinema, you can get entranced in ZODIAC’s unique biorhythm—there’s an ebb and flow to the anticipation, disappointment, and perpetuation that has nothing to do with real time but is rather a reflection of how movies, like obsessive human beings, create their own time. Almost every scene in the film seems to last twice as long as it would in real life; the images are so richly imagined that the spectator is inclined to savor every detail regardless of whether it holds narrative significance (one might say that Fincher does for production design here what Rivette did for acting). Those images are heightened immeasurably by Harris Savides’ cinematography, which ranks with the late master’s best work. Savides was more than capable of evoking the look of movies from the decade when ZODIAC mostly takes place (the pseudonymous critic Uncas Blythe once likened his style to Nestor Almenrdros taking Gordon Willis on a date), yet the 21st-century precision of the lighting casts a preternatural aura. The movie feels haunted, but not by the Zodiac Killer—it’s something else, something beyond human understanding that the killer’s elusiveness epitomizes. (2007, 157 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Allan Dwan’s ROBIN HOOD (US/Silent)

Chicago Film Society at the Music Box Theatre – Thursday, 7pm

Depending on your film tastes and age, your definitive Robin Hood might be Errol Flynn, Kevin Costner, or Taron Edgerton—or even someone else among the many adaptations of the legend. However, if you are very old or very dedicated to the origins of cinematic swashbucklers, there is only one star who embodies this 13th-century outlaw hero—Douglas Fairbanks in 1922’s ROBIN HOOD. Riding the wave of his successful action-adventures THE MARK OF ZORRO (1920) and THE THREE MUSKETEERS (1921), Fairbanks put his own spin on a story that has been spun through centuries of retellings and revisions. Through his production company, Fairbanks spent the then record-breaking sum of $1.4 million on the film, the first feature to have a gala premiere at the newly opened Grauman’s Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. Don’t look for such customary beats as King Richard the Lionheart being held for ransom in the Holy Land or Robin winning the archery contest. He isn’t even called Robin of Locksley. The story Fairbanks tells is of the Earl of Huntingdon, a close friend of Richard (Wallace Beery) who fears women until he meets and falls in love with Lady Marian Fitzwalter (Enid Bennett) after he has bested Sir Guy of Gisbourne (Paul Dickey) in the jousting competition that opens the film. During the celebratory feast following the competition, Richard names Huntingdon as his second-in-command for the Crusade the king will lead in a few days’ time. The feast provides a real showcase for Beery, whose lusty eating scene must have been an inspiration to Charles Laughton in THE PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY VIII (1933), as well as for Sam de Grasse as Prince John, an understated snake in the grass even when drunk. The first half of the film mixes scenes of Richard and Huntingdon marching through France, with Gisbourne plotting their demise, with the kleptocratic cruelty of John and the High Sheriff of Nottingham (William Lowery) that has peasants give up everything of value—even their dogs! When Lady Marian sends word through Huntingdon’s squire (Alan Hale) of John’s treachery, our hero incurs the king’s wrath by leaving the Crusade to save England and bring the story back into familiar territory. Every penny of the money Fairbanks’ production company put into the film is up on the screen in the form of ginormous castles with working drawbridges and battlements that accentuate Fairbanks’ breathtaking feats of daring-do. The teeming band of Merry Men may be the largest ever assembled, and their dancing and prancing, with Fairbanks outdoing them all, are the sorts of gestures that give silent films a bad name. Bennett also lends overwrought melodrama to her portrayal of Marian. Nonetheless, the excellent attention to detail in both the particulars of the drama and the realistic actions of the ensemble make this ROBIN HOOD a satisfying, if somewhat drawn-out experience. Preceded by Silent Serial Trailers (1921-1927, 8 min, 16mm). With live organ accompaniment by Dennis Scott. (1922, 127 min, 35mm) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Howard Hawks' HIS GIRL FRIDAY (US)

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

"Walter, you're wonderful, in a loathsome sort of way." This line, tossed out by Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) to her ex-husband, Walter Burns (Cary Grant), is just one of the many iconic lines that pepper the rapid-fire dialogue in HIS GIRL FRIDAY, one of the best screwball comedies and an exemplary film in Howard Hawks' body of work. HIS GIRL FRIDAY, a remake of former Chicago reporters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s THE FRONT PAGE (1931), is barely a romance in the traditional sense, but very much a love letter to the morally ambiguous profession of newspaper journalism. The story begins with Hildy announcing to Walter that she is leaving the newspaper business to marry a normal guy: a slow-talking, dependable, and chivalrous insurance salesman named Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy). Bruce is clearly the opposite of Walter (a slimy, fast-talking rascal), and as soon as Walter takes Bruce's measure, he realizes he can win Hildy back to the newspaper (and incidentally, to himself) with some creative scheming. Hilarity ensues as Hildy takes the bait and screws up everything in her plans to get married the next day by chasing a dramatic story, saving a life, and exposing some uniquely Chicago-style corrupt politicians. HIS GIRL FRIDAY differs from THE FRONT PAGE by switching the gender of Hildy Johnson to remake the plot into a screwball comedy, and enables Hawks to sculpt one of his "Hawksian women" with Russell's character. Russell excels as her side-talking, eye-rolling, slapstick character, and it's easy to revel in just how acerbic Hildy and Walter act with each other with their one-upping one-liners. Russell, in fact, was so worried about having enough good lines that she hired her own personal writer to help her think of good lines to ad-lib. Hawks encouraged spontaneity, ad-libbing, and simultaneous dialogue on set, so the characters not only speak more quickly than any other film in history (an average of 240 words per minute!), but they talk over each other constantly. (This was a nightmare for the sound techs to manage, incidentally, and required some innovation.) The result is marvelous, and inspired many filmmakers to follow, including Robert Altman, who made overlapping dialogue one of the trademarks of his own auteur style. Strong women, ad-libbing, breaking the fourth wall, exploring moral ambiguity, and embracing "loathsome" characters make HIS GIRL FRIDAY a delight to watch and a wonderful introduction to tropes of Hawks' film style that run through BRINGING UP BABY, THE BIG SLEEP, RIO BRAVO, and many others. Screening as part of Doc’s Monday series, “Wonderfully Loathsome: Screwball Romance Through the Ages.” (1940, 92 min, 35mm) [Alex Ensign]

Lucio Fulci's THE BEYOND – Composer’s Cut (Italy)

Music Box Theatre – Wednesday, 7pm

Lucio Fulci is one of the grand masters of over-the-top and ridiculous gore. THE BEYOND is no exception, for the gore is plentiful, but Fulci wisely throws in enough bizarre plot twists and genuinely creepy moments to make this the director's strongest work of the 1980s. Set in a sleepy bayou of Louisiana (continuing Fulci's obsession with "Old America"), a young woman has just inherited an old hotel, which she soon discovers is, according to local legend, built on one of the seven doorways to hell. With the help of a visiting pathologist and a strange blind woman, she tries to stop the forces of evil from coming through the gateway and destroying the world. Fulci's not-so-subtle commentary on class and race conflicts makes its presence felt throughout the film, though it is most apparent in the opening lynching scene. THE BEYOND is, at its heart, an Italian outsider's look at the "corrupt" American south—where better to put a gateway to hell? The film also features the best 'Scope cinematography of Fulci's career. Billed as the “Composer’s Cut,” this screening features a new score by the film’s original composer, Fabio Frizzi. Presented by Grindhouse Releasing and Fabio Frizzi. (1981, 87 min, 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Joe Rubin]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Mike Leigh’s LIFE IS SWEET (UK)

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

Mike Leigh’s films have the distinction of simultaneously embracing and being critical of the conventions they depict. For instance, the convention of the nuclear family, factoring with various intensity into Leigh’s first several feature films from BLEAK MOMENTS (1971) through LIFE IS SWEET, after which the range of his exploration widened significantly (consider the wild departure that is his next film, NAKED). It’s in these early cinematic endeavors that the familial structure serves as a microcosm through which to examine life in general. In fact, it’s a microcosm of a microcosm, as within the “larger” framework of the family itself is an arrangement of individual characters whose proclivities speak unto themselves. Where Leigh approached this subject dolefully in MEANTIME (1983) and HIGH HOPES (1988), LIFE IS SWEET exudes a more genial perspective toward the societal construct. Thus it follows that the film centers on a family: parents Andy and Wendy (Jim Broadbent and Leigh’s then-wife Alison Steadman) and their grown-up twin daughters, Natalie and Nicola (Claire Skinner and Jane Horrocks, respectively). Andy is a chef and Wendy works in a children’s clothing store; Natalie is a plumber, while Nicola, a troubled young woman suffering from eating disorders, stays at home without a job. As in many of Leigh’s films, there’s no fundamental conflict. Rather it’s comprised of a series of small events, some humorous and others less so. In the former category is Andy’s purchasing of an old, worn-down food truck and Wendy’s going to work at their friend’s (played by Timothy Spall) bizarre French bistro. (I have to quote this excellent description from Wikipedia of the type of food it offers: “His singularly grotesque interpretation of the excesses of nouvelle cuisine includes dishes such as saveloy on a bed of lychees, liver in lager, and pork cyst.” Yuck.) In the latter is Nicola’s struggles with eating disorders and intimacy, both of which manifest in scenes between her and her secret boyfriend (played by David Thewlis) wherein she eschews a meaningful relationship, instead preferring to be bound naked with scarves and covered in chocolate. Leigh has a process of collaborating with his cast over a long period of time before shooting, developing the characters in tandem. This likely accounts for the specificity of such situations, though that doesn’t prevent one from being able to extrapolate the universality of their circumstances. One can also extrapolate it out politically (a condition here represented on-screen most directly by Nicola’s leftist—if underutilized—ideals): the film was released mere days before Margaret Thatcher resigned as prime minister in November 1990. Thatcherism and its impact on lower-middle-class Britons plays an important part in Leigh’s ‘80s films, though this nevertheless feels like a salve on the burn that is MEANTIME, for example. It’s this dual view of life as having the potential for misery and joy that distinguishes Leigh’s oeuvre among similarly accomplished filmmakers who tend to focus on one or the other, rarely blending the two so keenly. Screening as part of the Music Box Staff Picks! series. (1990, 103 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Satoshi Kon's PERFECT BLUE (Japan/Animation)

Music Box Theatre – Friday and Saturday, 11:30pm

Many consider PERFECT BLUE to be Satoshi Kon's magnum opus—and for good reason. The film’s impact on culture reaches far beyond that of most other anime films, arguably rivaling the work of contemporaries like Hayao Miyazaki and AKIRA creator Katsuhiro Otomo. Those filmmakers regularly utilize the format to explore new, colorful worlds of fantasy and science fiction, which was also true of Kon. However, his work in the late '90s and early 2000s was more grounded in reality, exploring a dreamy aesthetic instead through his characters’ psychoses and fractured senses of self; Kon's approach led him to adapt Yoshikazu Takuchi’s novel of the same name, its story acting as a vehicle through which he could explore these themes. The film introduces us to Mima Kirigoe, a pop singer who leaves her idol group to become an actress. Between disappointed fanboys, mysterious deaths in her agency’s circle, and an acting role that increasingly mirrors her struggle to self-identify, Mima begins to lose herself in the horrors around her. This film would not be the last time Kon used cinema to tackle a character’s identity; he further explored the concept in his next original screenplay, MILLENNIUM ACTRESS, which he penned with frequent collaborator and PERFECT BLUE screenwriter Sadyuki Murai. Where that film uses cinema as a positive additive, heightening a tale of lost love and legacy to dramatic peaks, PERFECT BLUE hones in on the anxiety of performance, depicting an actress who loses herself both on camera and in the public eye. To categorize this film as a great work in anime is to do it a disservice; it's a masterclass in psychological horror that holds its own in one of the latter genre’s most memorable decades. Preceding the screening at 11:10pm, there will be a music video pre-show honoring the work of Susumu Hirasawa, the musical composer behind Kon’s other works, MILLENNIUM ACTRESS, PAPRIKA and PARANOIA AGENT. (1997, 81 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Bates]

Michael Glover Smith’s RELATIVE (US)

Analog Cinema (email us at editors@cinefile.info for details about the screening location) – Saturday, 8pm

In his writing on movies, both here at Cine-File and elsewhere, Michael Glover Smith has advanced an acute understanding of how the framing of performers in narrative cinema can underscore the emotions they express and how camera movement (or, put another way, the re-framing of performers in time) can develop viewers’ relationships to onscreen characters. Smith’s features as writer-director seem to grow directly out of his insights in this area—deceptively “dialogue-driven,” they express their greatest eloquence not with words but with mise-en-scène. It matters in RELATIVE whether the principal characters are together in the same shot or whether they’ve been individuated by close ups; it matters whether we can distinguish who’s in the background of a shot or whether those characters have been obscured. These things matter because the film is ultimately about the competing forces of community and individuality that shape our identities in 21st-century life and how we navigate between them almost constantly. The action in RELATIVE covers a few days before, during, and after a young man’s college graduation party on Chicago’s far north side, a celebration that draws his two older sisters from out of state and his older brother (a divorced Iraq War veteran who’s been slowly self-destructing for the past four years) out of seclusion in their parents’ basement. Smith gracefully interweaves the lives of all four siblings, their liberal Baby Boomer parents, and a handful of other characters as they come together amiably and unhurriedly, employing the time-honored scenario of the big family gathering to consider how many of us live at the dawn of the 2020s. Not surprisingly, the internet factors into things (though thankfully not too much); so too do food co-ops, queer-straight alliances, and the social normalization of weed. Yet Smith has more on his mind than enumerating aspects of the zeitgeist; RELATIVE is also concerned with the legacy of the Baby Boom generation and, more generally, how each generation honors the previous one while taking a seemingly opposite approach to life. Yasujiro Ozu is an obvious reference point for this sort of laidback family portrait, though I was reminded more of critic-turned-filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier’s A SUNDAY IN THE COUNTRY (1984) in the low-key sociological thrust of the drama and of the first episode of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s recently rediscovered miniseries EIGHT HOURS DON’T MAKE A DAY (1972-’73) in the polyphony of the extended graduation party sequence. For all its international flavor, however, RELATIVE is a local production first and foremost, reflecting its maker’s deep affection for the neighborhoods he calls home. Admission is $5; cash only. (2022, 97 min, Digital Projection) [Ben Sachs]

Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart's WOLFWALKERS (Ireland/Animation)

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

I am always happy for the release of a Tomm Moore animated film, ever since his stunning feature debut, THE SECRET OF KELLS (co-directed with Nora Twomey) and his heartrending sophomore film, SONG OF THE SEA. WOLFWALKERS—co-directed with Ross Stewart, the art director for Moore’s previous films—is likewise an emotionally poignant and beautifully animated coming-of-age family film inspired by Irish folklore. In the 17th century, Robyn (Honor Kneafsey) has relocated from England to the Irish village of Kilkenny with her father, Bill Goodfellowe (Sean Bean), a hunter who’s been hired by the cruel Lord Protector (Simon McBurney) to rid the area of wolves. Overly eager to help her father in his task, Robyn ventures into the woods and meets a Wolfwalker, Mebh (Eva Whittaker)—a magical girl with healing powers who transforms into a wolf while sleeping. Her infectiously playful nature charms the English girl, and they quickly become friends. Her encounter with the Wolfwalkers, however, has a profound effect on Robyn—not only in a change of heart, but a supernatural one—and complicates her father’s precarious position. The animation captures a dreamlike magic, with softly lit earth tones that made me gasp at times at the expressiveness and intricacy of the imagery. The scenes of Robyn and Mebh spiritedly exploring the forest are particularly enchanting and stand out as they juxtapose the harsher colors and lines seen in Kilkenny. The backgrounds and characters are rendered in such a way that they feel traditionally inspired yet surprise with movement and emotion, such as the use of triptychs to show multiple scenes on screen at once. WOLFWALKERS features arresting animation, but with an equally touching tale of friendship and family, creatively steeped in folklore, art, and history. Screening as part of Doc’s Thursday II series, “Myths, Legends, and Folk Tales: A Brief History of Animation.” (2020, 103 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Lee Chang-dong's BURNING (South Korea)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 6pm

“It’s a metaphor.” Spoken by the inexplicably wealthy, smugly superior Ben (Steven Yeun) after he equates cooking at home to making offerings to the Gods, this line, like so much of the teasingly elusive BURNING, hints that we’re in delicately self-reflexive territory in Lee Chang-dong’s latest. It’s one of a tantalizing series of moments, mostly generated by Yeun’s perpetually smirking and vaguely otherworldly character, that draws us ever deeper into the film’s porous reality, where our unreliable narrator Jongsu’s (Yoo Ah-in) confounded perspective makes us question the veracity of what we’re seeing. The mysteries start accruing early, when Jongsu, a barely employed, young aspiring writer, happens upon Haemi (Jeon Jong-seo), a girl from his childhood neighborhood whom he can’t remember. Haemi is off to Africa, and she’ll need Jongsu to feed her cat while she’s away, but like the phantom tangerine she pantomimes over dinner, there is no trace of the cat. For a while, anyway, Haemi seems to offer the romantic companionship Jongsu has been missing, but when she returns from Africa with Ben in tow, the rich, possibly sinister interloper unleashes in Jongsu a cascade of latent anxieties, desires, and resentments that are as socioeconomically based as they are libidinal. In the thorny, unmistakably homoerotic relationship between the sullen working-class Jongsu and the suave new-moneyed Ben, Lee articulates a dynamic underpinned equally by class antagonism and envy, by a disdain for a callous power elite as well as by the aspirations of a young generation, evident especially in eastern Asian countries such as South Korea, to assimilate the goals of global capitalism. Like Haemi, who oscillates (perhaps uneasily) between economically desperate millennial and male sexual fantasy projection, Ben is a slippery subject, a recognizable brand of entitled affluent hotshot who nevertheless appears like a kind of taunting phantasm. It is a mark of Steven Yeun’s sneaky performative prowess that he can make Ben feel like both a plausibly malicious person and a free-floating metaphor for modernity and toxic masculinity, every ingratiating grin and forced yawn an invitation to confront the banally seductive face of evil. BURNING refers, most denotatively, to Ben’s avowed habit of burning down abandoned greenhouses, but what it really describes is the psychological unease that smolders in places both rural and urban, sparked by the conditions of a society pervaded by inequality and disaffection. We can’t be sure if everything Jongsu thinks happens literally does. Then again: it’s a metaphor. Screening as part of 50/50, the Siskel’s year-long series including a film from each year the theater has been open. (2018, 148 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]

Robert Wise’s THE SOUND OF MUSIC (US)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

Of all the epic musicals to emerge from 1960s Hollywood, THE SOUND OF MUSIC is arguably the grandest. The much-awarded film (five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director for Robert Wise) is based on the much-awarded stage production (five Tony awards, including Best Musical) that was the last collaboration between composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein. Of the seven stage-to-screen adaptations of their works, THE SOUND OF MUSIC, shot on location in glorious 70mm Todd-AO color is the most successful transfer. Through the method Rodgers and Hammerstein invented, this film effortlessly tells the story of the real-life Von Trapp Family Singers through songs that advance the story and reveal the state of mind of its characters. The nuns foretell a different life for their lively postulant in “Maria,” Maria earns the trust of the obstinate Von Trapp children in “My Favorite Things,” and the family bids Austria good-bye in “So Long, Farewell.” In between, director Wise makes the most of Austria’s natural and built environments, a soaring opening shot of the Alps affirming the glories of the homeland lovingly proclaimed later in “Edelweiss” and snapshots of Salzburg accompanying Maria and the children as she teaches them to sing in “Do-Re-Mi.” There are wisps of another epic, GONE WITH THE WIND (1939), as Maria makes play clothes for the children out of curtains and war intrudes on a prosperous, aristocratic family. But the villains remain mostly offstage in this family film that seeks to inspire and gently provoke reflection about duty, loyalty, love, and sacrifice. Screening as a "Sing-a-Long" event. (1965, 172 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Charlotte Wells’ AFTERSUN (UK/US)

Music Box Theatre – 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]

Park Chan-wook's DECISION TO LEAVE (South Korea)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

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]

Ali Abassi’s HOLY SPIDER (International)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

This gripping and often grueling Persian-language drama by Ali Abassi (BORDER) fictionalizes the true story of Saeed Hanei, a construction worker, family man, and religious extremist who murdered as many as 19 sex workers in the Iranian city of Masshad in 2000 and 2001. Like Hanei, Abassi’s killer (Mehdi Bajestani) tools around on a motorcycle picking up women, takes them to the family home, strangles them to death, and dumps their bodies. “My intention was not to make a serial killer movie,” Abassi has explained. “I wanted to make a movie about a serial killer society.” For a movie attacking misogyny, this offers more close-ups of women piteously choking until their eyes go dim than I’ve seen in a long time. Welcome relief from this death porn comes in the form of an invented subplot about a Tehran journalist (Zar Amir Ebrahimi in a flinty, Cannes-award-winning performance) tracking the killer and navigating her own rocky way through Iran’s religious codes. This is all pretty schlocky for an art house film, but after the Spider is apprehended the story deepens considerably as Abassi turns to the killer’s wife and son and the religious militants who rally to his defense in the streets outside the courtroom. Especially disturbing is Abassi’s treatment of the school-age son, whose shame over his father’s crimes is so intolerable that his only escape is to embrace his father’s wicked ideology. (2022, 117 min, DCP Digital) [J.R. Jones]

🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
Néjia Ben Mabrouk’s 1988 Tunisian film THE TRACE (SAMA) (90 min, Blu-ray Projection) screens on Wednesday at 7pm. Free admission. More info here.

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Yung Chang’s 2007 film UP THE YANGTZE (93 min, 35mm) screens on Tuesday, 7pm, as part of the “After the 5th: China and the 21st Century” series. 

Siu-Tung Ching and Johnnie To’s 1993 Hong Kong action film EXECUTIONERS (97 min, DCP Digital) screens on Wednesday, 7pm, as part of the “Center Stage: The Films of Maggie Cheung” series.

Andy Fickman’s 2006 film SHE’S THE MAN (105 min, DCP Digital) screens on Thursday, 7pm, as part of the Thursday I series, “Shakespeare Remixed.” More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Alysa Nahmias’s 2021 documentary ART & KRIMES BY KRIMES (85 min, Digital Projection) opens this week. See Venue website for showtimes. Director Nahmias, artist and subject Jesse Krimes, and Faylita Hicks, Chicago writer and multidisciplinary artist and member of the ART & KRIMES BY KRIMES Artists Bureau all in attendance for a post-screening Q&A moderated by Robyn Farrell, Associate Curator in the Art Institute of Chicago's Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, on Sunday at 6pm.

The 2022 National Theatre Live production of Anton Chekhov’s THE SEAGULL (180 min, DCP Digital), directed by Jamie Lloyd, screens on Saturday and Sunday at 2pm.

Thomas L. Neff’s 1999 documentary short LOUISE DAHL-WOLFE: PAINTING WITH LIGHT (25 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday at 6pm. Free admission. Followed by a 30-min, visually immersive talk with SAIC Fashion Resources Center Director Alex Aubry and director and producer Neff and co-producer Madeline Bell. More info on all screenings and events here. 

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson’s 2022 stop-motion animated film GUILLERMO DEL TORO’S PINOCCHIO (111 min, 35mm and DCP Digital [Check specific showtime for film format] continues this week. More info here.

🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS

Black Harvest Virtual Fest Week

The virtual component of the 28th Black Harvest Film Festival continues through Sunday. More info here.

Jo Rochelle’s JASMINE IS A STAR (US)
Available to rent virtually here
16-year-old Jasmine (Iyana LeShea) aspires to be a model, and she seems to have what it takes: the looks, the dedication, the drive. Writer-director Jo Rochelle’s auspicious debut feature delicately balances Jasmine’s dreams with a crucial aspect of her reality—Jasmine has albinism, which results in a lack of pigment in her hair, skin, and eyes. The film opens with Jasmine and her mother (Sha Cage) attending an IEP meeting at her school, as Jasmine, like many people with albinism, is legally blind and needs to be accommodated accordingly. Rochelle conveys the nuances of Jasmine’s experiences with expert subtlety. When she defiantly sits at the back of class in order to be near a boy she likes (she’s supposed to sit in the front), one understands the social limitations she experiences as a person with albinism; when she dons a pair of thigh-high boots and walks around a picturesque Minneapolis sculpture park, one gleans the seriousness with which she’s pursuing her dreams. This is also conveyed via audio of podcasts and other interviews with models that are intermittently heard over sequences of Jasmine thinking silently, further reflecting the internal journey underway. Eventually she’s booked for a local shoot, where, in galaxy print athletic wear, she’s made up as a beautiful, otherworldly alien. In another instance of the film’s sense of nuance, Jasmine’s father rightfully balks at the implication of the creative direction, that his daughter is only otherworldly as a result of her albinism; it does, however, seem standard for fashion, yet Rochelle’s framing of the scenario causes one to check their bias and consider the industry’s exploitative nature. Still, Jasmine’s passion endures in the face of such dilemmas, and it’s suggested that her motivation and ingenuity ultimately win out in the end. Rochelle’s direction is assured, and both LeShea and Cage deliver outstanding performances. (2022, 58 min) [Kat Sachs]
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Jennifer Holness’ SUBJECTS OF DESIRE (Canada/Documentary)
Available to rent virtually here
As the title of Jennifer Holness’ documentary suggests, the Black women who are the focus of SUBJECTS OF DESIRE are telling their own stories about their relationships to beauty and the stereotypical roles that white society set aside for them. Framed around the 50th anniversary of the Miss Black America beauty pageant, begun in 1968 to celebrate the Black beauty that was totally absent from such contests as Miss America and Miss USA, the film offers a penetrating look at how Black women have been characterized in media of all sorts during and after slavery as nurturing, loyal Mammies, angry Sapphires, and sexually voracious Jezebels, the latter image a staple in rap music videos. (“Sex sells,” singer-songwriter India Arie proffers ruefully.) Ryann Richardson, who won the Miss Black America pageant featured in the film, explains how pageants were her way of paying for a great post-secondary education and how she was advised to look less “ethnic” if she wanted to have a chance to win the various beauty contests she entered that were not exclusive to Black contestants. Ironically, we learn that the hair-straightening products developed by Black entrepreneur Madame C. J. Walker in the early 20th century helped their users feel liberated from the hair policing they previously endured and that continues in fits and starts today. Passing-for-Black pariah Rachel Dolezal is interviewed extensively. While she has been roundly condemned for her actions, particularly in the Black community, I thought that her feeling of Blackness from an early age had a certain resonance with the gender dysphoria numerous young people feel and wondered if there might be something to it that didn’t smack of appropriation. Holness brings up the issue of colorism in the Black community, and one of her interviewees says that Black men are the only ones who reject their own women in favor of a different race, a patently false and limiting statement. Nonetheless, the contestants, researchers, entertainers, and commentators interviewed in SUBJECTS OF DESIRE are encouraged to speak their truth—a truth that, despite its contradictions, needs to be heard. (2021, 101 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Derek Grace’s WHAT'S YOUR STORY? THE COMMUNITY FILM WORKSHOP'S 50 YEAR JOURNEY (US/Documentary)
Available to rent virtually here
The Community Film Workshop is an invaluable part of local history. Founded in 1971, it’s one of several Chicago-based organizations that have recently celebrated or are nearing golden anniversaries, a testament both to the tenacity of the organizations’ leaders and the community that supports them. Derek Grace’s WHAT'S YOUR STORY? THE COMMUNITY FILM WORKSHOP'S 50 YEAR JOURNEY is a love letter to the storied organization, the beneficiaries of its offerings, and the hardworking people who have kept it going all these years. Now housed on the South Side, the Community Film Workshop’s mission has always been to bring educational resources and equipment to underserved aspiring filmmakers. The documentary spans the organization’s history, starting with its founding as part of a nationwide effort to establish local film workshops. Here in Chicago the honor of leading up the project was bestowed to Jim Taylor, also known as JT, a photographer and filmmaker who had trouble finding work because he was Black and who then wanted to help others in his community. (He passed away in 2000.) Crucial to his and the workshop’s success is Taylor’s wife, Margaret Caples, the organization’s longtime executive director. She appears frequently in the film, both in archival footage and interviews shot specifically for the film; she’s always excelled as an advocate, helping to secure funds and promote the importance of media arts. Grace’s documentary also looks at the nuts and bolts of how the workshop functions, from class curricula to the hurdles a nonprofit must jump over to continue operating. The workshop has a dual mission of helping disenfranchised community members tell their stories—a privilege denied to them by society at large—and preparing its students for jobs in the industry. There’s also footage from the workshop’s fiftieth anniversary celebration, where, among others, Kartemquin’s Gordon Quinn elaborate on the organization’s impact on the Chicago filmmaking community. (2022, 30 min) [Kat Sachs]

🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS –
ALSO SCREENING/STREAMING

⚫ 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: November 25 - December 1, 2022

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Michael Bates, Ray Ebarb, Alex Ensign, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jason Halprin, J.R. Jones, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Joe Rubin