Note that this list covers the next two weeks through Thursday, January 5. The calendar date will be noted under the film’s title.
Remember to check venue websites for weather-related 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.
📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING
Black Women Behind the Lens
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, January 5, 7:30pm [Free Admission]
This program is the first in a nine-week screening series being presented under the auspices of the Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts 2023, inspired by the 1976 festival of the same name that was the first ever dedicated to films made by Black women. To say this extended festival is crucial viewing is an understatement; it feels almost mandatory to attend as many events as possible (in addition to the screening series, there’s a symposium in early March). The 1976 festival was organized by Black artists Michele Wallace, Faith Ringgold, Patricia Jones, Margo Jefferson, and Monica Freeman. Per a recent essay in the Feminist Media Histories journal, “[s]creening films by at least sixteen Black women directors, the festival was simultaneously a celebration of the emerging world of Black women’s filmmaking and a radical call for the kinds of socio-political and institutional changes necessary for a Black women’s film culture to thrive.” This first screening is a showcase of sorts, with films by various Black women filmmakers working across an array of genres. An excerpt from Yvonne Welbon’s 2003 documentary SISTERS IN CINEMA opens the show, providing context surrounding Black womens’ struggles in the film industry. Luminaries such as Maya Angelou, Julie Dash, Madeleine Anderson, and Jessie Maple appear, some of whom are represented throughout the festival. Hortense “Tee” Beveridge is notable for being the first Black woman ever admitted to the Editors Union Local 771. EDITING EXERCISES, made while Beveridge was taking night classes in film at New York University in the 1950s, is just that, a short survey of Beveridge’s skills that also illuminates the necessity of the craft itself. MORRIS (1971), on the other hand, is a delightfully bizarre experimental narrative that evades understanding. It seems to center on two men named Morris, one of whom is Black and the other white, and was made with members of the Brownsville Youth Center. We’ve previously covered the next film, Madeleine Anderson’s INTEGRATION REPORT 1 (1960); fellow contributor JB Mabe notes that it’s “generally regarded as the first documentary made by a Black woman.” He continues: “It's an adroit, lucid piece of reportage that is ultimately heartbreaking, when one realizes that the 60-year-old sounds and images of state violence and inequalities could have been shot today.” Anderson’s BEING ME (1975) explores an arts initiative for students in which they were asked to express who they are through a work of art, ranging from such traditional methods as painting and drawing to less familiar mediums like metal and wood. It’s a joyful representation of the impact that art can have not only on a person's understanding of the world but also their understanding of themselves. Pearl Bowser is a veritable Renaissance woman when it comes to cinema and its history; her filmmaking skills in particular are evinced in the horror short THE GUEST (1977), wherein a woman considers the merits of her seemingly slumbering partner while performing chores around the house. It’s beautifully shot in shadowy black and white, with an eye toward composition and editing that underscores the calculated tension. Louise Fleming’s JUST BRIEFLY (1975) centers on a young Black woman having an affair with a married man and seeking a more emotional connection with him. It’s evocative yet almost painfully simple, elegantly depicting this sort of doomed romance. Also screening is Monica Freeman’s VALERIE: A WOMAN, AN ARTIST, A PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE (1975). The screening is presented by the Film Studies Center, Welbon’s non-profit organization Sisters in Cinema, and South Side Projections, founded by former Cine-File contributor Michael W. Phillips, Jr. (Total Approx. 97 min, 16mm and Digital Projection) [Kat Sachs]
Billy Wilder's THE APARTMENT (US)
Music Box Theatre – Saturday, December 31 and Sunday, January 1, 11:30am
For many—including Wilder himself—this was the director's finest hour, the film in which all the elements converged with grace, sass, and a tinge of tragic inevitability. It was inspired by a line that Wilder wrote in his notebook sometime in the 1940s and couldn't forget: "Movie about the guy who climbs into the warm bed left by two lovers." By the time the film was made (during the so-called "New Permissiveness" of the early '60s), the two lovers had multiplied into several men and countless mistresses and the warmth of the bed had turned musty. The guy, however, retained all the bittersweet sympathy of that initial premise. As incarnated by Jack Lemmon, C.C. Baxter is the ultimate schlemiel, a resigned bachelor who lends his apartment to his insurance company superiors because he can't imagine any alternative to advancing in a job that kills him. Shirley MacLaine plays the disabused mistress who turns out to be the girl of his dreams, and she's one of the great creations of the movies: Fran Kubelik is a woman who seems ideal even in her faults: youthful, spontaneous, naive, sexy, resilient—exactly the type who could humanize an office drone like Baxter. The romance between them is so affecting that it's easy to overlook what a superior piece of filmmaking THE APARTMENT is. Wilder remains underrated as a visual artist; and here, working in striking black-and-white 'Scope, he creates some remarkable effects, such as the unforgettable loneliness of the apartment itself and the modernist nightmare of the insurance company office (an image borrowed from King Vidor's THE CROWD), where rows of desks seem to extend into infinity. Wilder also employs small objects with an imaginative economy worthy of Hitchcock. As he explained in Cameron Crowe's book-length interview Conversations with Wilder: "When Baxter sees himself in [Fran's broken compact] mirror, he adds up two and two. He gave it to the president of the insurance company [Fred MacMurray], the big shot at the office, now he knows what we know. And we see it in his face in the broken mirror. That was a very elegant way of pointing it out. Better than a third person telling him about the affair—that we did not want to do. This was better. This gave us everything, in one shot." (1960, 125 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
Chantal Akerman's JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES (Belgium)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, December 27, 6:15pm
I used to think that Chantal Akerman’s films had more in common with Yasujirō Ozu’s than even those of his most devout disciples. Her use of still, waist-level medium shots (similar to Ozu’s signature “tatami shots,” intended to mimic the perspective of someone kneeling on a tatami mat), stylized settings hyper-respective to her cultural background, and a seemingly detached tone that cloaks rich subtext all recall Ozu’s invariant oeuvre. After rewatching JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES, which she made when she was just 25 years old, I still believe that Akerman’s work exhibits these aspects but to antithetical effect. Where Ozu reveals the calm within chaos, Akerman inveigles chaos out of the calm, and there’s perhaps no better example of this than her 201-minute tour de force depicting three days in the life of its title character, a middle-aged mother played to perfection by the solemn, red-haired Delphine Seyrig. Most of the film is comprised of superlative long takes in which Jeanne does her daily chores, intercut by brief expositional conversations with her 16-year-old son and oblique references to her “job” as a rather apathetic prostitute. Though it evokes experimental cinema in how it ingeniously uses a simple concept to confront the illusion of that simplicity, it’s also a brilliant depiction of real life as narrative; in a 2009 interview with the New York Times, Akerman observed that “in most movies you have crashes or accidents or things out of the ordinary, so the viewer is distracted from his own life…this film is about his own life.” A friend once remarked to me that their response when asked by a filmmaker to provide feedback about a film they didn’t like was to say that it gave them space to think about that very subject. Ironically, the same is true about the masterwork that is JEANNE DIELMAN. The long takes are simultaneously hypnotic and freeing, producing a sensation that’s almost as mindless as the tasks themselves. Akerman’s depiction of these chores, which are certainly banal even if rendered extraordinary by Babette Mangolte’s lens, is often regarded as a feminist interpretation, a label that Akerman rejects. Indeed, she’s said in several interviews that the seemingly monotonous routines were lovingly inspired both by childhood memories of her mother and Jewish ritual; in the aforementioned interview, she also said that “Jeanne has to organize her life, to not have any space, any time, so she won’t be depressed or anxious…she didn’t want to have one free hour because she didn’t know how to fill that hour,” which speaks less to the mundanity of the tasks at hand and more to Jeanne’s general discontent. At the risk of spoiling the film for anyone still unfamiliar with its abrupt ending, the duration doesn’t so much emphasize the monotony as it provides context around the downturn of both character and tone. It doesn’t show three days in a life, but rather the day before the day that cracks start to appear in the foundation, and then the day that it finally crumbles to the ground, out of which something altogether new and different is formed. (On a tangential note, the ending reminds me of these lines from Sylvia Plath’s Holocaust-adjacent poem “Lady Lazarus”: “Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air.” In 1986, Akerman directed an adaptation of Rose Leiman Goldemberg’s off-Broadway play Letters Home, based on Plath’s letters to her mother. So much to unpack there.) Only the late filmmaker’s second feature, JEANNE DIELMAN is almost daunting in its command of the medium—perhaps the only label that can rightfully be attached to it is masterpiece. A 50/50 Rewind Encore screening. (1975, 201 min, DCP Digital] [Kat Sachs]
Sergio Martino’s ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK (Italy)
Music Box Theatre – Tuesday, January 3, 7pm
At his best, Sergio Martino rivals Dario Argento or Mario Bava in terms of style and skill; maybe it’s because he’s made so many disreputable sex comedies that he isn’t as well known here as those other Italian genre directors? In any case, ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK demonstrates how good Martino can be at giallo. It contains so many fun and flamboyant effects that it’s easy to overlook the fact that the plot makes very little sense. (The film’s sexual politics are another story, and as with most Italian genre films of the decade, they’re problematic to say the least.) Giallo queen Edwige Fenech stars Jane Harrison, a well-to-do woman who’s been troubled by bad dreams ever since she was in a car accident that forced her to have a miscarriage. Jane also may or may not be getting stalked by a man who wants to kill her, and her new neighbor Mary wants her to join a Satanic sex cult. Some or all of this may be a dream; either way, Martino delivers plenty of outlandish, wildly sexualized imagery that one would expect from a movie titled ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK. For everything that’s schlocky about the film, there’s something tasteful to it as well. Martino’s aesthetic sensibility is evident in his resourceful widescreen compositions, turning an obvious low budget to his advantage by leaving pockets of interesting negative space around the frames. The attention-grabbing editing that Martino uses to suggest disturbed states of consciousness shows a certain familiarity with the groundbreaking experiments of Godard and Resnais. And the music, by Bruno Nicolai, is pretty hip. It’s hard to name a non-Italian equivalent for a film that so sloppily lurches between highbrow and lowbrow tendencies. Brian De Palma’s DRESSED TO KILL (1980) and Ken Russell’s ALTERED STATES (1980) come close, but they’re ultimately too controlled and personal. Martino churned out five films like this in just three years; the early ‘70s were simply a golden age for cheap, perverse fantasies in Italy. Screening as part of the January Giallo 2023 series, co-presented by Music Box of Horrors and Cinematic Void. (1972, 95 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
Jean Renoir's LA CHIENNE (France)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Tuesday, January 3, 7pm
Reflecting on LA CHIENNE in his autobiography My Life and My Films, Jean Renoir wrote that it was "a turning-point in my career; I believe that in it I came near to the style that I call poetic realism." For Renoir, this style demanded full use of the sounds, spaces, and personalities discovered during filming--in a word, falling in love with the world around him. This rush of emotion yielded significant technical breakthroughs: LA CHIENNE was among the first movies to record sound during shooting rather than in post-production; and the canny framing marked some of the first exercises in what would come to be known as deep-focus photography. For Renoir, the film was a personal milestone because it contained the first role he wrote for the actor Michel Simon, an expressive, boisterous presence who most thoroughly conveyed the director's abundant love of humanity. But, as LA CHIENNE reminds us, Renoir's love was by no means sentimental or forgiving. This tale of a lonely clerk whose life is ruined by the machinations of a prostitute and her pimp is deeply cynical, adoring of its characters in the way a Punch-and-Judy puppeteer might claim to "love" his characters. (As if to emphasize the point, the film is actually introduced by puppets.) According to Renoir, the producers were disappointed that the film was not more of a comedy, but thanks to the lurid subject matter it still became a hit upon release. It went on to inspire no less than Fritz Lang, who remade the film as SCARLET STREET (1945), and Andre Bazin, who regarded it as one of the most important works of early sound cinema. Screening as part of Doc’s Wednesday series, “Jean Renoir: The Grand Reality.” (1931, 95 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Andrei Tarkovsky's STALKER (USSR)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday, December 23, 7pm
Loosely based on the Soviet novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Tarkovsky's STALKER creates a decrepit industrial world where a mysterious Zone is sealed off by the government. The Zone, rumored to be of alien origin, is navigable by guides known as Stalkers. The Stalker of the title leads a writer and a scientist through the surrounding detritus into the oneiric Zone—an allegorical stand-in for nothing less than life itself—on a spiritual quest for a room that grants one's deepest subconscious wish. Tarkovsky composes his scenes to obscure the surroundings and tightly controls the audience's view through long, choreographed takes. Shots run long and are cut seamlessly. Coupled with non-localized sounds and a methodical synth score, sequences in the film beckon the audience into its illusion of continuous action while heightening the sense of time passing. The use of nondiegetic sounds subtly reminds us that this may be a subjective world established for the Stalker's mystical purpose. Where sci-fi films tend to overstate humanity's limitless imagination of the universe, Tarkovsky reappropriates the genre's trappings to suggest the cosmos' deepest truths are in one's own mind. STALKER posits—perhaps frighteningly—that, in this exploration of the self, there is something that knows more about us than we know ourselves. The writer and scientist, both at their spiritual and intellectual nadir, hope the room will renew their métier; the Stalker's purpose, as stated by Tarkovsky, is to "impose on them the idea of hope." But STALKER is a rich and continually inspiring work not for this (or any other) fixed meaning but rather for its resistance to any one single interpretation. A 50/50 Rewind Encore screening. (1979, 163 min, DCP Digital) [Brian Welesko]
Claire Denis' BEAU TRAVAIL (France)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, December 29, 6:15pm
Claire Denis's BEAU TRAVAIL is a film of sweltering, oppressive heat; a sun-drenched rendering of Melville's BILLY BUDD that unfurls across the deserts of Djibouti, where a troop of French legionnaires perform a dance of drills and exercises as daily ritual. The men are soldiers, athletes, and the embodiment of physical perfection, and Denis venerates their physique with framing that recalls Leni Riefenstahl's ode to human beauty, OLYMPIA. Day in and day out, they adhere to strictly choreographed routine, their mechanized motions made downright hypnotic by the operatic overtones of Benjamin Britten. At the center of this tightly wound fever dream is Sergeant Galoup (Denis Lavant), whose own unflappable façade begins to crack upon the arrival of a new legionnaire, whose inherent beauty and goodness marks him as an object of obsession. It's here that the film's stifling (yet eloquent) discipline begins to clash with deeply repressed desire, and Galoup sets events in motion that will that will bring about his own undoing. Most notable is the unshakable denouement, where one tragic soldier at the end of his rope at last finds his ideal form of expression. Suddenly, Galoup is dancing a very different dance, and as the periodic flashes of local nightlife foreshadow, salvation may just lie in the universal escape of pop music. A 50/50 Rewind Encore screening. (1999, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Tristan Johnson]
Wim Wenders' WINGS OF DESIRE (West Germany/France)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, December 24, 1:15pm
In 1971, Wim Wenders and other luminaries of New German Cinema (including Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, and Alexander Kluge) founded the famous Filmverlag der Autoren to produce and distribute their own films, and Wenders and Austrian novelist and playwright Peter Handke completed their first feature film collaboration, THE GOALIE'S ANXIETY AT THE PENALTY KICK (1971). Nearly twenty years later, they co-wrote WINGS OF DESIRE, a beautiful film in the tradition of the German fairytale and dedicated to the angels and to master directors Yasujiro Ozu, François Truffaut, and Andrei Tarkovsky. Wenders tells the story of an angel, Damiel (Bruno Ganz), falling in love with trapeze artist Marion (Solveig Dommartin), who flies through the air at the Circus Alekan (named in honor of the film's cinematographer, Henri Alekan). Damiel fervently desires to abandon his spiritual existence to become a human being and experience the pleasures and pains of life, particularly that of love, which can be both. He and the other angels experience the world in black and white, but Wenders uses bursts of color to indicate the magnificent difference in the way humans see it. WINGS OF DESIRE is also an ode to Berlin, recalling the city films of the early twentieth century, such as Walter Ruttmann's BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY (1927) and Dziga Vertov's MAN WITH THE MOVIE CAMERA (1929). The original German title is DER HIMMEL UBER BERLIN, meaning ‘The Sky, or Heaven, over Berlin.’ Wenders begins shooting the city from an angel's point of view in the sky, and his camera later descends to the streets, looking at or out of cars, buses, and trains. He concerns himself with Berlin's history and the stories of its people, particularly since World War II. Recurring shots of the Berlin Wall covered in decorative graffiti figure prominently as does old war footage of air raids and of the victims they claimed lying amidst the rubble. Ultimately, WINGS OF DESIRE is a story about time—as longed for by angels, as lived by Berliners, and as experienced by us in watching the film unfold. A 50/50 Rewind Encore screening. (1987, 128 min, DCP Digital) [Candace Wirt]
Laura Poitras' ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED (US/Documentary)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
Never underestimate the reach and power of a tenacious, iconoclastic artist. If you’re feeling hopeful, that might be a takeaway from Laura Poitras’s latest multifaceted documentary. Her subject is photographer Nan Goldin, whose provocative portraits of her friends and associates in New York City’s hedonistic, drug-fueled underground made her a star of the scene in the late 1970s and '80s. Goldin’s confrontational, often explicitly sexual photographs—many focused on the LGBTQ community before and during the AIDS crisis—were fueled by an activist’s ethos to preserve the lives of those cast to the margins by society, a position she related to as both a lifelong misfit and a forthright woman in a male-dominated field. Essentially co-authored by Goldin, who narrates the film, ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED takes us up to her present-day involvement with P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), an advocacy group she formed in 2017 in response to her battle with opioid addiction. Her work with the group has a surprising connection to the art world via the Sackler family, former owners of OxyContin producer Purdue Pharma. The Sacklers have donated millions that they made from the distribution of deadly opioids (over 450,000 American casualties) to arts and cultural institutions around the world to launder their reputation, and Goldin has made it her mission to have the family’s name removed from wings in the Met, Guggenheim, Tate, and Louvre, and other museums. The cohesiveness with which Poitras pulls together the film’s myriad threads—biography, sociocultural chronicle, advocacy, and art display (excerpts of Goldin’s famed slideshows punctuate the film’s chapters)—evinces the inextricability of art and lived experience from politics and economics, and highlights the frequently vexed relationship between subversive creators and the establishment interests they depend on to culturally enshrine their work. Poitras also posits a fascinating connection between art and the legacy of medical science, as she continually shows how various health stigmas, from mental illness to HIV, have been catalysts for artists to transform pain and erasure into social action. With ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED, Poitras and Goldin vibrantly demonstrate the real and very visible change such action can affect. (2022, 117 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO (Poland/UK/Italy)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
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]
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez's THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (US)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Thursday, January 5, 9:30pm
Twenty years on there is no question that THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT has entered the pantheon of horror films. It’s a generational watershed film: for Millennials (and some Gen Xers) it has become the equivalent of the Baby Boomer’s THE EXORCIST in terms of being, debatably, the scariest movie ever made. Its release in 1999 occasioned a haze of guerrilla marketing, misinformation, and outright lying, but the publicity worked: the film made $250 million on a budget of under $1 million. To call it a cultural phenomenon would be an understatement. There is modern horror cinema before THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and after; it led the way for an inundation of “found footage” or “mondo” style horror/exploitation film. The plot and premise are incredibly simple: in 1994 three filmmakers set out to make a documentary about the Blair Witch, a legendary local boogeyman that supposedly lives in the woods of Burkittsville, Maryland. During the filmmaking process things go from strange to terrifyingly deadly as the filmmakers find odd stick figures hanging from trees and cairns lying about. As the nights go on, they find themselves terrorized in their tents by an unseen force. Eventually a member of the crew, Josh, has a breakdown after realizing they’ve been walking in circles and disappears. The following day pieces of blood-soaked clothes are found. As night falls, the remaining two hear Josh’s screams and follow them into the darkness. An appropriately horrifying outcome results. What made, and makes, THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT such an interesting film is that the entire movie is allegedly put together from the film that this film crew shot before disappearing. The use of both 16mm film and Hi8 video adds to the feeling of authenticity and amateurism of the “found” footage; it’s very easy to believe that the unnerved and distressing confessions and outbursts that the characters make are real. THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT is a film that could never be made again. It came out at a time when the nascent internet was utilized by only the most-savvy and the 1.0 bubble had yet to pop. It was easy to create a fake website for the missing filmmakers, send the guerrilla marketing crew around the country to put up fake flyers for the missing filmmakers (something they did at the video store I was working at in the suburbs of Chicago) and trick people into seeing what was, if taken at face value, a supernatural snuff film through the strength of media manipulation. In the IMDB, Twitter, and Reddit driven film culture of today, such tactics would never fly. The closest thing we’ve seen to THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT was this year’s MURDER DEATH KOREA TOWN, a film far more directly indebted to BLAIR WITCH than any other found footage film—proof that more than two decades later BLAIR WITCH is still the gold standard for found footage horror. You might find it to be the scariest movie ever made, you might not. But at a brisk 81 minutes, you have nothing to lose—except perhaps the map that can lead you out of the woods. Screening as part of Doc’s Thursday II series, “Blow Up My Video: Movies Shot on Video, Shown on Film.” (1999, 81 min, 35mm) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
Sergio Corbucci’s DJANGO (Italy)
FACETS Cinema – Thursday, December 29, 9pm
The first in Italian director Sergio Corbucci’s unofficial Mud and Blood trilogy (followed by THE GREAT SILENCE and THE SPECIALISTS), DJANGO certainly has a lot of both. Corbucci was noted for his violent Westerns—this one especially, as it was banned in several countries for its excessive brutality—hence the latter substance of the trilogy’s fitting sobriquet. The former is also prevalent in the film, as the setting along the border between the US and Mexico is caked in muck. It’s through the sodden mud that the titular gunslinger (Franco Nero, who was to become as iconic as the film itself), a former Union soldier still donning his uniform pants, drags a wooden coffin; a poetic touch, inspired by a comic book the director had seen on a newsstand. The film opens with Django, coffin in tow, coming across a prostitute, María (Loredana Nusciak), as she’s assaulted first by a group of Mexican revolutionaries and then by some Confederate Red Shirts. The film’s opening foreshadows the conflicts faced by Django himself, who’s targeted by the leader of the Red Shirts and eventually enters into a tentative, albeit illusory, partnership with the Mexican revolutionaries, whom he convinces to steal some Confederate gold. Django is ultimately loyal only to himself, though he also has begrudging affection for the lovestruck María. There are economical shootouts involving Django’s machine gun, which comprises the contents of his ubiquitous coffin; the leader of the Mexican revolutionaries cuts off a Red Shirt’s ear and feeds it to him; and the final showdown, the details of which I won’t reveal here, is hands down one of the most violent set pieces I’ve ever seen. The political violence is caustic too, from the Red Shirts’ Klan-like racism to the nebulous characterization of the Mexican revolutionaries (Corbucci made a few Zapata Westerns, so presumably he was sympathetic to them, but the Mexican characters are nevertheless complicit in the pervasive violence here) to the way the female characters, María and the other prostitutes, are treated by the men. No one is spared, and no one is saved. Luis Bacalov and Rocky Roberts’ theme song asks questions of the Kurosawa-esque protagonist, offering up only a hollow adage that life must go on. While many spaghetti Westerns were shot in Technicolor, this was shot on Eastmancolor; aesthetically the film’s sober color palette complements the dispiriting tone. (1966, 92 min, Digital Projection) [Kat Sachs]
---
Preceded by FACETS Film Trivia at 7pm, hosted by critic, programmer and Cine-File contributor Raphael Jose Martinez and local programmer Mike Vanderbilt.
Wong Kar-wai's IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (Hong Kong)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, December 24, 4pm
Taking place in 1960s Hong Kong or in the memory of 1960s Hong Kong—that city deemed too modern, many of the film's exteriors were shot in Bangkok, after all—Wong Kar-wai's film is a beautiful rumination on its title. Much has been made of IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE's restraint, and there is that: a couple, married to other people who are themselves having affairs, become intimate in every way but physical—save for slight, loaded gestures and tight spaces. The film is pregnant with the overwhelming feeling of infatuation, executed in a lusciousness that recalls something from a dream. But for every restraint there is a counterpoint in excess: Maggie Cheung's many gorgeous dresses are as flamboyant as they are confining; the musical score is both pitch-perfect and overwhelming, familiar and foreign; the cinematography is so rich and meticulous that its multitude of color is evocative of Douglas Sirk's melodramas. IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE has hit upon such acclaim because of its local particularity—a commemoration of sorts for Hong Kong's transfer of sovereignty that had not yet happened—as well as its thematic universality as a transnational melodrama. As characters move through Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines, Cambodia, and the film shifts forward and backward in time, we are reminded of the fluidity of borders, time, and memory. The moment is paramount, and Wong Kar-wai gives us a series of beautiful, sumptuous moments that we can live in forever. A 50/50 Rewind Encore screening. (2000, 98 min, DCP Digital) [Brian Welesko]
Hype Williams' BELLY (US)
FACETS Cinema – Saturday, December 31, 5pm
There are multiple filmmakers who started as music video directors—David Fincher, Michel Gondry, and F. Gary Gray—but Harold “Hype” Williams is something special, not just for what his work meant to Black culture, but for what it did for mass culture. While the others went on to be more conventional filmmakers, Hype made only one feature, and it is so consistent with his pioneering music video style that there is no change in aesthetic from the earlier work. He didn’t choose one or the other; he pushed his language further, possibly to its limits. Generally, hip hop videos before Hype featured mostly dudes in junkyards next to barrel-fires (a la F. Gary Gray’s "Natural Born Killers"). Hype had tried his hand with that world with "Wu-Tang Clan Aint Nuthing ta F' Wit," but it seems around the time of Missy Elliot's “Supa Dupa Fly” in 1997 that he really nailed his style: the fish-eye lens; the saturated colors; light glistening off skin, clothing, and objects; the almost abstract use of the widescreen ratio; and split screens (both length- and width-wise). Hype’s cinema (and it is certainly that) was a significant part of most mornings sat watching MTV or BET. Not to downplay the producers and musicians whose work he helped visualize, but Hype presented a generation of songs in a way that made the videos almost indistinguishable from the songs themselves. They're some of the few examples where music videos actually compliment the music, rather than distract from it: the wild surrealism of Busta Rhymes and Janet Jackson’s "What's It Gonna Be," the minimalist perfection of TLC’s “No Scrubs” (and TLC's own T-Boz stars in BELLY), the bombastic use of red and BELLY-adjacency in Mobb Deep’s remix for "Quiet Storm," which featured Lil’ Kim in her prime. BELLY, made the year after "Supa Dupa Fly," is a kind of a gangster film. Hype was no stranger to that genre—given his videos for Usher’s "Nice & Slow," Biggie’s "Warning," and R. Kelly’s "Down Low"—but BELLY is closer to Pop Art for the big screen. The film’s plot is nothing to get too excited for, as it leans heavily into familiarity with SCARFACE and every cliched plot mechanism the genre can muster, but that isn't the point of appreciating BELLY. The late DMX (in a fantastic performance) and Nas (in a so-so performance) are two friends trying to make it in the drug game; as priorities and morals change, they find themselves at a crossroads in their personal lives, not to mention squaring off against a smoked-out Jamaican drug lord (the movie also features maybe the most blunt-smoking of any movie to date, as nearly every scene has someone blazing up). From the hair-raising, much-discussed opening scene to Method Man’s first-person shooter moment to the hypnotic re-rendering of SCARFACE’s infamous finale (transposed to 3/4 of the way in the plot), the movie gives viewers enough to admire, even though the story may leave a lot to be desired. The released version is heavily compromised, with Hype and his team having battled the money people left and right throughout the production; as a result, the movie can feel off-kilter and disorienting on first viewing. None of this takes away from the singular experience of BELLY’s intoxicating rush of hallucinatory visuals and sounds, an experience truly fit for 35mm. (The Blu-ray transfer of the movie significantly lightens the film’s intentional hypnotic contrast; Hype apparently fought with executives over their insistence that he use a film stock that "lightened" Black skin.) Yet Hype’s moviemaking, aside from BELLY, has been non-existent, which is astounding. He was attached at one point to the SPEED RACER remake, and most tantalizingly of all, was developing a 3-D reggaeton zombie film set in Jamaica. BELLY provides ample justification that Hype remains a premier artist of our time, and we should be thankful for whatever bits and pieces of his imagination we get. Screening as part of the Holiday Detour film series. (1998, 92 min, Digital Projection) [John Dickson]
Park Chan-wook's THE HANDMAIDEN (South Korea)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Wednesday, December 28, 6:15pm
Widely known for his Revenge Trilogy, which includes the seminal OLDBOY, Park Chan-wook's films have frequently employed the use of retribution. His latest work, although less violent than some of his previous outings, finds the Korean director swimming in familiar waters. In THE HANDMAIDEN, a swindler is hired by a Japanese heiress (set to inherit an exorbitant amount of priceless books) to be her handmaiden; but she is secretly planning to steal her employer’s fortune by having the heiress committed to an insane asylum through the help of her partner, who plans to marry her. The film is divided into three parts, with each part building upon the previous as new twists and wrinkles are exposed through perspective shifts. The resulting web is complex and mischievous. The love story is equal parts passionate and perverted. Love of all kinds is explored and Park does not shy away from sensual moments. From gorgeous cherry blossom trees to rolling fog over a river, the cinematography captures everything in a large depth of field. This added clarity helps to show off what's at stake (such as the heiress's gigantic estate) as well as to provide the audience with more screen real estate in which to catch clues. THE HANDMAIDEN finds Park in peak creative form thanks to its captivating source material, dynamic cast, and beautiful undertones. A 50/50 Rewind Encore screening. (2016, 144 min, DCP Digital) [Kyle Cubr]
Hayao Miyazaki's HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE (Japan/Animation)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, December 26, 6:15pm
Hayao Miyazaki’s films were one of the first things my brother and I bonded over. He’s just shy of a decade older than me, so when I was growing up I desperately wanted his seal of approval. I often found myself spending hours on end watching animated movies and cartoons with him in an attempt to know what the cool older kids were talking about. He first showed me Miyazaki’s folklore-heavy SPIRITED AWAY, albeit at far too young an age for either of us to really understand it. But even still, we both knew that there was something about it that was magical. Every time I watch a Miyazaki film, I feel like a kid again. Wide-eyed and brimming with a child-like wonder as I marvel at the distinct worlds he’s able to create time and time again. The one that sticks with me the most in adulthood, though, is HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE. Sophie, a young and soft-spoken hat-maker, gets swept up by a charming wizard named Howl. A vengeful witch jealous of Sophie’s beauty and newfound relationship with Howl turns her into her worst fear: a 90-year-old woman. Howl and Sophie then embark on a journey to reverse the curse, a journey filled with kitschy side characters and a magically mechanical moving castle, and set against a backdrop of a kingdom at war. In many ways Sophie feels like an audience surrogate, falling into Miyazaki’s weird and fantastical world with the same curiosity as those watching. In addition to its intricate beauty, HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE is a deeply political work, with strong anti-war sentiments directly inspired by Miyazaki’s opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Miyazaki’s films cover a lot of ground, and HOWL’S may be especially hard to keep up with at times, but it would be a mistake to pass up the chance to revel in all of its complexities. A 50/50 Rewind Encore screening. (2004, 119 min, DCP Digital) [Cody Corrall]
Twisted Fairy Tales Double Feature
FACETS Cinema – See Venue website for more information
Neil Jordan’s THE COMPANY OF WOLVES (UK)
Friday, December 30, 7pm
THE COMPANY OF WOLVES feels very much in line with the numerous dark fantasy films released in the 80s, though it doesn’t have the nostalgic staying power of something like LABYRINTH (1986) or even LEGEND (1985). Perhaps it’s because Neil Jordan’s take on Little Red Riding Hood via werewolves is darker than most; it focuses on the complexity of girls coming of age as they grapple with their sexuality and desires and how often manipulative and abusive men threaten that autonomy. It’s heavy stuff but presented in such visual lushness—nestled within a layered story structure. Initially set in the present day, it shows young Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson) falling asleep and dreaming she resides in a 19th-century fairytale with her parents (David Warner and Tusse Silberg) and sister Alice (Georgia Slowe). After Alice is killed in the woods by a pack of wolves, Rosaleen goes to stay with her Granny (Angela Lansbury). The rest of the film unravels in a series of stories: ones that Granny tells Rosaleen and ones that Rosaleen herself tells after leaving the safety of Granny’s house. The stories all involve wolves and tales of warnings about strangers; Rosaleen, however, begins to shift the narrative with her stories, becoming more and more empowered. THE COMPANY OF WOLVES is a wildly dreamy film, as stories weave in and out of stories; this is best perhaps visualized in the fantastical early sequence transitioning into Rosaleen’s dream, where Alice running through a cobwebbed covered forest filled with oversized childhood toys before wolves run her down. It’s also an unsettling film, with grotesquely affective special effects—the practical werewolf transformations are riveting. THE COMPANY OF WOLVES’ otherworldly qualities are somehow grounded by its complex themes, as it surreally, and uniquely, examines the everyday implications of this well-trodden fairytale. (1984, 95 min, Blu-ray Projection) [Megan Fariello]
---
Agnieszka Smoczyńska's THE LURE (Poland)
Friday, December 30, 9pm
As with most fairy tales, it is easy to go back to the source material to envision a more terrifying adaptation than the Disney-fied ones to which we’ve become accustomed. THE LURE does just that with Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid, drawing on the original tale’s darkness and turning sweet mermaids into vampiric sirens. Set in the 1980s in the colorful club-scene of Warsaw, this isn’t just a horror, but a full-blown musical. Two mermaid sisters, Golden (Michalina Olszańska) and Silver (Marta Mazurek) join up with a rock band, eventually starting their own singing act. It gets messy, however, when Silver falls for the bass player and, oh yes, the sisters have a thirst for blood. It is as bizarre as it sounds, as the film contains scenes like a musical number set at a shopping mall but also obsessive shots of the sisters’ tails, which are not beautiful emerald fins, but fleshy, realistic fish appendages. The film also doesn’t shy away from engaging directly with the constant sexual objectification the young mermaids face as they become a part of the club scene. Olszańska and Mazurek expertly navigate the emotional themes of this dark coming-of-age story, primarily through their singing. It doesn’t hurt, either, that some of the musical performances featured throughout are genuinely great. Director Agnieszka Smoczyńska marries outwardly disjointed styles together seamlessly; the whole film is an ingenious work of imagination, that leans into both the delight of an 80s mermaid club act, and the melancholy reality of life beyond the safety of the water, especially referencing the chilling tragedy of Anderson’s original story. THE LURE would make a fantastic double-feature with Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 cult-classic HOUSE—both genre-distorting horrors about adolescence, bursting with unabashed girlish-whimsy while still delivering on the terror. (2015, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
Katsuhiro Ôtomo's AKIRA (Japan/Animation)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, December 26, 8:15pm
A cataclysmic explosion rips through Tokyo in 1988, reducing it to rubble. Within one minute, Katsuhiro Ôtomo sets the stage for his masterpiece AKIRA, which arguably would become one of the most—if not the most—influential anime films of all time. After the opening, Ôtomo jumps ahead to 2019. Neo Tokyo has been built next to the ruins of the old city, which is now a playground for biker gangs, troubled youths, and corrupt hands of the law. Despite a period of patriotism and rebuilding, the new city has plunged into chaos, reminiscent of the blast that destroyed what once stood before. Our protagonist, Kaneda, and the eventual antagonist, Tetsuo, are up to shenanigans with their motorcycle crew when they get tangled in a web of politics, money, and supernatural abilities. After Tetsuo’s chance encounter with a psychic child who miraculously appears to be decrepitly aged, Ôtomo shows how quickly power can corrupt. Tetsuo himself begins to exhibit these psychic powers, his surge in ability causing unstable hallucinations and agonizing pain. We slowly learn these abilities derive from a mysterious being named Akira. Some say Akira is a God, bringing about a cleansing of the Earth; others say Akira is pure energy that should be controlled and used as a weapon for the military. If Akira is, as some aver, a God meant to bring about a new world, what is the catalyst necessary to bring about its arrival? Tetsuo becomes the necessary vessel, an amalgamation of flesh and cold steel that has been corrupted by the cruel world around him. Speed is a constant force throughout the film, and it's driven by Shoji Yamashiro’s haunting soundtrack. The world keeps spinning, unrelenting for any person or thing. Thankfully for Kaneda, he and his bike are constantly ahead of the capital steamroller, his taillights leaving a beautiful blur for the rest of the world to stare at in envy. AKIRA is necessary viewing for any fans of anime or the cyberpunk genre, and it gets better with every revisit. A 50/50 Rewind Encore screening. (1988, 124 mins, DCP Digital) [Drew Van Weelden]
Steven Spielberg’s THE FABELMANS (US)
Various Multiplexes – See Venue websites for showtimes
Per Steven Spielberg's largely autobiographical bildungsroman THE FABELMANS, all movies have the power to create an intimate connection between filmmaker and spectator. One of the through lines of Spielberg’s film is that cinema not only serves as a bond between auteur and audience; it has the potential to serve as a secret between them. (The most opulent gift a filmmaker has given the Freudians since the heyday of Bertolucci, THE FABELMANS argues that the ideal spectator is always the filmmaker’s mother.) This association of pleasure with guilt and responsibility makes Spielberg’s film, which he wrote with Tony Kushner (the most valuable collaborator he’s had after Janusz Kaminski), feel supremely Jewish, in spite of the fact that it’s also a film about Jews’ assimilation into secular American society. It’s complicated. I can’t explain how Spielberg makes the gentile actors Paul Dano and Michelle Williams seem acceptable, even lovable as Jews; it must have something to do with how all the little details of the world they inhabit speak to a socially aspirational mid-century Jewish-American mentality. (For me, the movie inspired visceral memories of the homes of elderly relatives I visited as a boy.) Sammy’s interest in filmmaking as a technical process he can master reflects his father’s interest in early computing systems; the folkloric quality of a son inheriting his father’s scholasticism is one of the most Jewish things about THE FABELMANS. In the movie’s third act, Spielberg and Kushner hone in on another truth any Jew can confirm: that antisemites don’t care what you or your parents look like; their ignorance makes them hate you as they hate all Jews. Thanks to Spielberg’s extraordinarily rich visual language, he’s able to deliver dark observations about both cinema and secular Jewish life in a manner that’s never less than breathtaking. The director has described the film as being like therapy in that it forced him to relive some of his most painful memories; he even makes the connection early in the film, when Sammy’s mother lets him recreate a train wreck on film so he stops having nightmares about them. Yet in rendering those memories through cinematic means (and how—it’s the sort of film where every lighting cue, prop, and focal length tells you something about the characters or their creator), he ends up revealing the psychological complexes behind a range of cinematic devices, including many he all but created. Why has Spielberg always shot his most personal films in the aspect ratio of 1.85:1 (this one included)? Because, as the first scene of THE FABELMANS reveals, this is the most appropriate ratio for presenting a middle-class Jewish-American kitchen circa 1952. The film’s formal and thematic concerns coalesce in an audacious set piece that feels like something out of Michael Powell’s PEEPING TOM (a film with which THE FABELMANS has a surprising amount in common), an unholy communion between a young man and his mother that only cinema could have made possible. [Ben Sachs]
The 39th Annual Music Box Christmas Sing-A-Long & Double Feature
Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes
Frank Capra's IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE (US)
Like Steven Spielberg today, Frank Capra was associated more with reassuring, patriotic sentiment than with actually making movies; but just beneath the Americana, his films contain a near-schizophrenic mix of idealism and resentment. In this quality, as well as his tendency to drag charismatic heroes through grueling tests of faith, it wouldn't be a stretch to compare Capra with Lars von Trier. There's plenty to merit the comparison in IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE alone: The film is a two-hour tour of an honest man's failure and bottled-up resentment, softened only intermittently by scenes of domestic contentment. Even before the nightmarish Pottersville episode (shot in foreboding shadows more reminiscent of film noir than Americana), Bedford Falls is shown as vulnerable to the plagues of recession, family dysfunction, and alcoholism. All of these ills weigh heavy on the soul of George Bailey, a small-town Everyman given tragic complexity by James Stewart, who considered the performance his best. Drawing on the unacknowledged rage within ordinary people that he would later exploit for Alfred Hitchcock, Stewart renders Bailey as complicated as Capra himself—a child and ultimate victim of the American Dream. It's because the film's despair feels so authentic that its iconic ending feels as cathartic as it does: After being saved from his suicide attempt (which frames the entire film), Stewart is returned to the simple pleasures of family and friends, made to seem a warm oasis in a great metaphysical void. (1946, 130 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
---
Michael Curtiz's WHITE CHRISTMAS (US)
Critics agree that Mark Sandrich's HOLIDAY INN (1942), the first musical comedy to feature Bing Crosby, an inn, and Irving Berlin's "White Christmas," is a better film than this partial remake. Yet it turns out that it's the revivals of this Technicolor, VistaVision version that people look forward to this time of year. WHITE CHRISTMAS incorporates the history of its own title song, which, while it would go on to become perhaps history's largest-seller, actually seemed a flop at first. Music historians Dave Marsh and Steve Propes note, "What saved 'White Christmas' were requests made by GIs to Armed Forces Radio around the world. Soldiers away from home, many of them in the South Pacific or North Africa, uncertain of whether they'd ever again see family and friends, let alone a snowfall, responded passionately to Berlin's understated evocation of the mythic romance of Christmas Past." This history is folded into the opening scene: it's Christmas Eve, 1944, somewhere on a World War II battlefield, and Crosby sings the song to fellow troops amidst some very fake rubble, as bombs explode in the background. The movie's got Crosby and Danny Kaye as music-and-lyrics team Wallace and Davis, and Vera-Ellen and Rosemary Clooney as sister act the Haynes. They're a treat to watch even just sitting around a railroad passenger car singing "Snow," bound for Pine Tree, Vermont, where the inn turns out to be run by ex-General Waverly (Dean Jagger). When people gather for a screening of this movie, I doubt they worry that it may not rank with Michael Curtiz's best work (CASABLANCA, YANKEE DOODLE DANDY, MILDRED PIERCE). They come to mark the change of years together. If there's a season for nestling in the warmth of nostalgia, it's this one. Plus, there's the camp appeal of Crosby and Kaye doing "Sisters." (1954, 120 min, DCP Digital) [Scott Pfeiffer]
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]
🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
ALSO SCREENING
⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Loni Ding’s 2001 film ANCESTORS IN THE AMERICANS, PART 1 (62 min, Digital Projection) and Ric Burns and Li-Shin Yu’s 2017 film THE CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT (162 min, Digital Projection) screens on Tuesday, January 3, at 7pm, as part of the Asian American Media series.
Isao Takahata’s 1988 animated film GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES (89 min, DCP Digital) screens on Thursday, January 5, at 7pm, as part of the Splicing of the Atom: Nuclear Taboo in Cinema series. More info on all screenings here.
⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Alfonso Cuarón’s 2001 Mexican film Y TU MAMÁ TAMBIÉN (106 min, DCP Digital) screens on Thursday, December 29, at 8:15pm, as part of the 50/50 Rewind Encore series.
Alon Schwarz’s 2022 Israeli documentary TANTURA (85 min, DCP Digital) begins screening Friday, December 30, with showtimes scheduled through Thursday, January 5. See Venue website for showtimes. More info on all screenings here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
Sarah Polley’s 2022 film WOMEN TALKING (104 min, DCP Digital) begins screening Friday, December 23, with showtimes scheduled through Thursday, January 5.
Scott Cooper’s 2022 film THE PALE BLUE EYE (128 min, DCP Digital) begins screening Sunday, December 25, with showtimes scheduled through Thursday, January 5.
Stacey and Michael's Showcase of Shorts III (80 min, DCP Digital), a collection of short films programmed by Stacey Miner and Michael Holub, screens on Thursday, December 29, at 7pm.
Tommy Wiseau’s 2003 cult classic THE ROOM (99 min, 35mm) screens on Friday, December 30, at midnight. More info on all screenings and events here.
⚫ South Side Home Movie Project
Home Movies For The Holidays: A Pop-Up Exhibition goes through Friday, December 30, at the L1 Retail Store (319 E. Garfield Blvd.). Swing by to watch the home movies, sound-tracked with a new score by DJ Raven Wright, inside or from the sidewalk as part of L1’s line-up of holiday activities. More info here.
🎞️ 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: December 22 - January 5, 2022
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Cody Corrall, Kyle Cubr, John Dickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Tristan Johnson, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Raphael Jose Martinez, Scott Pfeiffer, Drew Van Weelden, Brian Welesko, Candace Wirt