:: FRIDAY, JANUARY 12 - THURSDAY, JANUARY 18 ::

🎉 Year-End Lists

Here at Cine-File we like to wait until the year actually ends to publish our “best-of” lists, which abide by whatever rules the contributor chooses. View them on our blog here.

📽️ Crucial Viewing

Wang Bing’s DEAD SOULS (China/Documentary)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 11am

Of the Wang Bing films I’ve seen, DEAD SOULS is the most similar to the experience of sitting and listening to someone tell a story. And that’s essentially what Wang did in the process of making the film, patiently observing elderly survivors of the Jiabiangou work camp as they recall their experiences; for the most part his camera is static, fixed on the elderly survivors. Wang eschews any sense of style, instead focusing on the substance of their testimonies. China’s Anti-Rightist Campaign began in 1957, after Mao grew tired of the criticism the government received during a brief period of “enlightenment” (called the Hundred Flowers Movement, gleaned from a Chinese poem that includes the lines, “Let a hundred flowers bloom/let a hundred schools of thought contend”) when Mao had gone so far as to encourage citizens to vocalize their criticisms of his government. When he began to feel threatened by the response, he ordered that alleged dissidents be rounded up and either executed or sent to re-education camps, where many perished due to hunger. The estimated number of victims of the Anti-Rightist Campaign ranges from approximately 500,000 (the official number) to as many as 1.3 million. Three thousand of them were interred at Jiabiangou; of those, only 500 survived. With just a few exceptions (a victim’s son and a former camp guard) the film is composed entirely of survivors or those who were close to them at the time of their internment, such as a survivor’s wife. There’s a method to Wang’s madness—the madness here being the task of boiling 120 interviews and 600 hours of footage down to eight hours—in how he sequences the interviews, starting with a survivor whose story reveals the way people were accused, the second who introduces the work camps, others who then take us further into the collective experience of prisoners in the reeducation-through-labor doctrine, and so on and so forth. In one interview, Wang noted that he took care not to have any one testimony stand apart from the others; his films aren’t like many contemporary documentaries that seem to be working toward a dramatic apex similar to narrative cinema, foregoing what many consider the form’s central aim, to witness rather than construct. As a result, the film has an oddly meditative flow, like serenely flowing water—but there are riptides below the surface, violence beneath the calm. In one’s reverie to the steady rhythm of Wang’s singular documentary filmmaking style, difficult truths about history and humanity arise. Screening as part of the Settle In series. (2018, 493 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Yakov Protazanov’s AELITA, QUEEN OF MARS (USSR/Silent)

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

The title may suggest some sexed-up Soviet precursor to FLASH GORDON, but AELITA, QUEEN OF MARS is actually much odder and more subdued than that. Most of the film takes place on Earth and concerns the misfortunes of an engineer named Los, whose life provides the basis for some funny satire about the early days of the Soviet Union. Los grows jealous after his wife attracts the attention of a low-level state functionary (who, we learn from a flashback, used to be a decadent bourgeois); in response to his marital crisis, Los escapes into fantasies about life on Mars. The Martian sets are alone worth the price of admission, as they showcase the constructivist visual style that was in vogue in the Soviet arts world when this was made; moreover, their wildly imaginative design stands in stark contrast to Los’ drab reality. The court intrigue on Mars is also more interesting than the drama Los has to deal with at home, though as the hero loses his sanity, his life starts to intertwine with his fantasies, so it’s never clear what’s happening for real. Until then, however, AELITA, QUEEN OF MARS nicely balances real-world disappointment with campy space opera. Seen today, the film (adapted from a 1923 novel by Alexei Tolstoy, a distant relative of Leo) seems like a precursor to the grungy, earthbound science fiction of Jacques Sternberg, Philip K. Dick, or the Polish filmmaker Piotr Szulkin, whose 1980s sci-fi features spoke to the much graver disappointment that marked the final years of the Soviet era. The director of this feature, Yakov Protazanov, isn’t the most famous of early Soviet filmmakers, though some of the 80-odd movies he directed in the 1910s are considered masterpieces of pre-Revolutionary Russian cinema. The constructivist sets aside, Protazanov’s aesthetic doesn’t seem that radical compared with what other Soviet filmmakers were doing in the mid-1920s; that doesn’t harm the movie so much as foreground the zanier elements. Preceded by the Fleischer Studios’ 1924 cartoon TRIP TO MARS. (7 min, 16mm). (1924, 110 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

George Sherman’s LARCENY (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Sunday, 4pm

Screenwriters Herb Margolis, Lou Morheim, and especially renowned script doctor William Bowers take the honors in this pallid noir that waits until nearly its end to bump off one of its characters and then lets decency triumph. John Payne plays handsome confidence man Rick Maxon who, working with a crew led by Dan Duryea’s Silky Randall, sets out to fleece the inhabitants of Mission City, Calif., a virtue-signaling name if ever there was one. This Mayberry of the West Coast has a boys club run (perversely for noir fans) by Percy Helton as “just Charlie” Jordan, the proprietor of the hotel where Rick is staying. Rick is in town to romance Deb Clark (Joan Caulfield), a long-grieving and chaste war widow, and separate $100,000 from her and the townspeople to pay for a community center/war memorial that will never be built. The fly in the ointment is Tory, a good-time girl played with an abundance of sneer and sass by Shelley Winters. She wants Rick and will stop at nothing to get him. Things go pretty much as we expect them to, so forget about suspense, even though the writers insert a former victim of the gang at one point to throw us for a loop. Aside from Caulfield, the actors seem to be sleepwalking. What distinguishes LARCENY is the vast number of snappy one-liners that add much amusement to the proceedings. Rick and Tory’s combative relationship gets some of the best lines. For example, Tory says, “Does the back of my neck fascinate you, dear?” Rick replies, “Yeah. I’m just trying to work out where to break it.” In another exchange, he accusingly says to her, “If you could buy a cheap horse, you’d rent your mother out as Lady Godiva.” A dishy secretary (Dorothy Hart) at a real estate firm tells Rick how she, a native New Yorker, ended up in Hicksville. She says, “I read a slogan in the subway once—‘Go west, young man’—so I went, but I haven’t been able to find any young men who did.” LARCENY lacks the bite noir fans want, but there are enough verbal delights to justify a viewing, and Orry-Kelly’s gowns are an added treat. Screening as part of the A Brief Intro to George Sherman series. (1948, 89 min, 35mm) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Brian De Palma's BLOW OUT (US)

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

The tides of auteurist reputation seem to be turning away from BLOW OUT and toward CARLITO’S WAY as De Palma’s finest achievement. Not, as they say, that there’s anything wrong with that; CARLITO is an undersung triumph and is held in special esteem by the director himself. But BLOW OUT remains De Palma’s signature moment, the nexus of so many strains of his directorial temperament: the longstanding fascination with technology blooming into fullest mastery of the filmmaker’s toolkit, the use of lens and angle to force the viewer into a way of seeing; the political bent of his young career metastasizing into a vision of macro- versus micropolitics no less despairing for their couching in pop thriller verities. John Travolta’s Jack Terri, a sound man reduced to working on T&A bloodbath B’s who finds himself front and center in an assassination conspiracy, seems like Keith Gordon’s whiz kid from DRESSED TO KILL now grown up, ostensibly wised up, but marinating in cynicism. He’s too young to be this beaten up, but beaten he is, phoning it in at the job, taking weakish jabs at the political operative who wants him to disappear after fishing escort Nancy Allen out of a river-sunk Presidential candidate’s car. Travolta is marvelous, by turns giving and withdrawn, petty and playful—a wounded romantic if ever there was one. (Vilmos Zsigmond’s cinematography is rightly renowned for its inky blacks, split diopters, and bravura 360-degree moves, but the cherry on the sundae is his lighting of his star’s eyes, which reaches Golden Age heights of expressiveness.) Travolta here embodies an underreported trait of De Palma’s—his deeply felt political sense, a foursquare sense of right and wrong that runs through his career from HI, MOM! to BLOW OUT, the furious CASUALTIES OF WAR, and REDACTED. Travolta processes every deception as a personal affront, and proceeds as such, bringing his technical prowess and sheer cussedness to bear, to the point of finally using Allen as bait to expose the conspiracy. The movie was originally to be called PERSONAL EFFECTS, and it never strays far from that title’s resonance. Travolta and Allen’s give and take, their flirts and terrors, their romance that dies aborning, is among the sweetest and saddest things you’ll ever see. (Allen is every bit the screen presence as Travolta, or at least as nearly beloved of the camera. Her comic timing is impeccable, and her character’s upshot heartbreaking.) BLOW OUT is, along with THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, the finest of modern American romantic tragedies, released at point in time when the moviegoing public had no inclination to buy tickets for such bitter pills, no matter how expert and tantalizing their coating. But what remains is that De Palma-ness: the whiz-bang and the mourning, the fetish and the hard truth, the sex and the lie. With Dennis Franz, John McMartin, and a scarifying John Lithgow. Screening as part of the Hitchcock and Friends series. (1981, 108 min, DCP Digital) [Jim Gabriel]

Paul Vecchiali’s THE STRANGLER (France)

Music Box Theatre – Monday, 7pm

David Hudson has my number. He begins his 2023 piece on French filmmaker Paul Vecchiali and his film THE STRANGLER for The Daily on Criterion by noting that “Vecchiali’s beguiling 1970 oddity… is so steeped in cinephilia that it seems to compel reviewers to cite the references it’s brought to mind.” Indeed, my first thought when viewing this singular anti-giallo was that it’s akin to a filmic lovechild of Jacques Demy and Dario Agento, popular comparisons among other critics as well, along with specific films such as Michael Powell’s PEEPING TOM, Claude Chabrol’s THE CHAMPAGNE MURDERS, and Jean-Pierre Melville’s LE SAMOURAÏ. It does have a direct relationship to Demy in that its titular character, Émile, is played by Jacques Perrin, who starred in THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT; here he’s a chipper young sociopath targeting lonely women whom he can strangle them with a white, crocheted scarf, presumably liberating them from the melancholy of singlehood. His foray into murder is explained only by a cryptic opening sequence in which Émile, as a child, is shown accompanying a strange man who commits the very same murder that Émile will go on to replicate as an adult. Inspector Simon Dangret (Julien Guiomar) appeals to him on national television, hiding his identity as a cop in an attempt to draw him out as a potential confidant, while Anna (Eva Simonet, Perrin’s real-life sister), a beautiful young university student, approaches Dangret to offer herself up as bait. Émile’s killings are near-dreamlike affairs, with the women seeming almost to welcome the reprieve from their lonesomeness. Are these murders or mercy killings?, one might wonder. Perhaps best known outside of France for co-producing Chantal Akerman’s JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES, Vecchiali was also an auxiliary member of the French New Wave, having written for Cahiers du Cinéma in the mid-’60s. He later founded the production company Diagonale, whose films have in common “an acute sense of class relations, a taste for heartrending lyricism inherited from Pagnol and Grémillon, an affection for actors as eccentric as they are brilliant… a confidence in the endless unfolding of dialogue, a love of popular chansons of the 1930s, a loathing for the routine screenplay, and an infinite trust in mise-en-scène, which ‘does everything’,” per filmmaker Axelle Ropert’s piece on Vecchiali for Screen Slate. This latter quality is evident in THE STRANGLER, as damn near every composition tells a story unto itself. Vecchiali’s film often defies narrative logic, such as when Dangret is talking to a fellow detective and the scene cuts back and forth to and from the first and a second location, the same conversation ostensibly taking place. What purpose does this serve? Does it matter? In the logic of this uncommon film, no. Nor do the more peculiar aspects of its plot, like the burglar who follows the strangler to rob his victims after they’re dead and who later becomes the strangler’s final foe, or the slight twist concerning Anna at the very end. Perhaps another comparative figure might be Michael Mann, whose film HEAT has an extraneous subplot about one of the characters also being a serial killer (way more incidental here than in Vecchiali’s film) with seemingly little-to-no connection to what it’s about overall. But as with Mann’s films, it stops being “why?” and instead becomes “why not?” This skillful aimlessness in THE STRANGLER ultimately reflects the trajectory of its characters, making the most sense where it doesn’t. Screening as part of the January Giallo 2024 series in a new restoration from Altered Innocence. (1970, 96 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Andrei Tarkovsky’s NOSTALGHIA (Italy/USSR)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Though not Andrei Tarkovsky’s most personal film (that distinction belongs to his 1975 film THE MIRROR, which is the most blatantly autobiographical), it may be fair to say that NOSTALGHIA is his second-most personal endeavor, considering that it’s about men torn between their native countries and the outside world. His first film made outside the USSR (it was shot in Italy), it explores, in addition to the titular theme of nostalgia, or homesickness, the consummate themes of boundaries—both literal and figurative—and alienation that tinge most of Tarkovsky’s films. As much as any Tarkovsky film can be said to follow anything, NOSTALGHIA follows a Russian writer called Andrei Gorchakov (Oleg Yankovsky, who appeared as the father in THE MIRROR) as he travels from the USSR to Italy to research the life of fictional 18th-century Russian composer Pavel Sosnovsky, whose own, more dire travails resembled those of Andrei’s. Accompanying him is a beautiful, young translator, Eugenia (Domiziana Giordano), who desires Andrei as much as she perturbs him. At the beginning of the film, the two visit Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto fresco in Tuscany. Andrei declines to enter, and, in what sounds like a voiceover rather than direct dialogue, says, “I am fed up with all your beauties.” Both the sentiment and its ambiguity set the tone for the film, which is teeming with sublime yet cryptic imagery. After visiting the fresco, Andrei and Eugenia go to stay at a hotel next to a hot mineral bath, where they meet Domenico, a local eccentric who’d once kept his family locked away for several years in order to shield them from the fabled apocalypse. After being released from an asylum, as he tells Andrei, he became obsessed with trying to cross the pool with a lit candle. Throughout, there are enigmatic flashbacks, shot in a grayish black-and-white as opposed to the muted color used in the rest of the film, depicting a family in the Russian countryside, presumed to be Gorchakov’s wife, children, and dog. These and other asides—including interludes featuring the release of Domenico and his family from their home-prison and some featuring Eugenia, with Andrei’s wife and her boyfriend—succeed in imbuing the film with a dreamlike quality and in alienating it from its tenuous narrative, a strategy that drives home a sense of nostalgia or homesickness, which are ultimately forms of alienation derived from real or imagined boundaries. After completing the film, Tarkovsky and his wife made the decision to defect West, convinced that he’d no longer be able to make films in his home country; his resolve was likely solidified by the fact that the Soviet delegation campaigned against his being awarded the Palme d’Or for NOSTALGHIA. Yet even in retrospect, Tarkovsky did not consider it an “emigration” film. In an interview, he asked, in reference to it being about nostalgia, “How can someone live normally, fully, if he breaks with his roots? In Russian, ‘nostalghia’ is an illness, a life-threatening disease.” Ultimately, the film is a simple transference of internal feeling to an external source, the screen, one boundary in all this that could be said to have been successfully traversed. In another interview, Tarkovsky said, “I had not expected my psychological state to be capable of such clear embodiment in a film.” The final shots culminate with an almost nine-minute take of Andrei, instructed by Domenico, successfully carrying a lit candle across the baths; what follows is a scene of Andrei with his family in the countryside, which ends with the camera pulling back to reveal some Italian ruins surrounding them. It’s a personal film, but also an object simultaneously broader and more significant, a light, like the candle, that could be said to, as Tarkovsky put it, “display an entire human life… from beginning to end, from birth to the very moment of death.” (1983, 125 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) ​[Kat Sachs]

Werner Herzog's HEART OF GLASS (West Germany)

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

This perplexing and eerily beautiful narrative from Herzog's ‘70s peak begins with one of the best scenes of prophetic vision on celluloid: an apocalyptic montage of wide-angle mountainscapes cut with telephoto closeups of lava, clouds and waterfalls, the soundtrack veering all the while from yodeling to psychedelia. The story which follows hovers somewhere between an 18th-century German Twin Peaks and Moby Dick with red glass instead of a white whale. The actors, famously, were all hypnotized before every take, which probably accounts for the intensity and slowness of their performances. And the film is definitely slow and sleepy, a melodrama at quarter speed. Like much of Herzog's work, it can be read literally, in this case as a somber exploration of the madness and desperation of a people deprived of their economic livelihood, or it can be taken as a kind of poker-faced joke where the actors are being mocked for their preposterous earnestness and we are being mocked for taking them seriously. Like much of Herzog's work, it works fine either way. Screening as part of the Conquistador of the Useless: The Films of Werner Herzog series. (1976, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Mojo Lorwin]

Todd Haynes’ MAY DECEMBER (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 9:30pm and Saturday, 6:30pm

There’s something so invigorating about watching a film like Todd Haynes’ MAY DECEMBER, a work that gleefully antagonizes its audience with seeming contradictions at every turn. From the moment the glaring and inexplicable score by Marcelo Zarvos pounds onscreen—itself a work of reorchestration and adaptation of Michel Legrand’s score for THE GO-BETWEEN (1971)—a wall of tension is immediately erected, daring the audience to reconcile the prestige of the craft on display with the heightened elements of melodramatic exploitation underlining the work. Haynes' film is built for an audience inundated with true-crime podcasts and pulp documentaries on streaming services, all garishly summarizing tabloid stories and sensationalized tragedies for public consumption in a way that strips away all shreds of humanity. In turn, we are hypnotically sucked into this particular story—clearly inspired by the real-life story of May Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau—and forced to reckon with what makes these works of scandalous recreation so beautiful and so ugly. The Letourneau counterpart here, Gracie (Julianne Moore), is gleefully naive, living a life with her husband Joe (Charles Melton) whom she met when she was in her thirties and he was but thirteen years old. An actor (Natalie Portman) tasked with bringing Gracie’s story to the screen is committed to the act of honest reinterpretation to a fault, obsessively collecting mementos and anecdotes and physical mannerisms in pursuit of crafting a performance built upon a structure of self-satisfying imitation. It all comes to a head as Melton drags us through a minefield of emotional vulnerability, his lumbering adult body carrying with it intense childlike insecurity as he finally reckons with Gracie’s decades-long control over his elongated state of arrested development. If there is discomfort to be found in watching MAY DECEMBER, it’s fairly easy to argue that the text encourages that, questioning the methodology and "ethics" behind any work that attempts to grapple with real-world complexity for entertainment’s sake. It all adds up to a film that might connect with you, or might create bad memories for you, or perhaps even make you admit that, often, there’s not much of a difference between the two. Screening as part of the New Releases series. The Saturday screening is also part of the ongoing Night Owls series, with a  post-screening discussion with professors Arnold Brooks and Agnes Callard. (2023, 117 mins, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Ingmar Bergman's PERSONA (Sweden)

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

Along with CITIZEN KANE (1941), PERSONA remains the one of the most written about films in the canon (Raymond Bellour, Jacques Aumont, Robin Wood, Roger Ebert, Paisely Livington, P. Adams Sitney, Susan Sontag, Andrew Sarris, to name a few, all waxed famously on it). In a career of countless theatrical productions and 48 feature films, PERSONA remains Ingmar Bergman’s crowning achievement. After his trilogy (THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY, WINTER LIGHT, THE SILENCE), the Swedish auteur had plans for a major work titled THE CANNIBALS, but the project fell through. The image of two women sitting together comparing hands became the seed for his next film, with a working title of "Kinematography." Recruiting the striking Bibi Andersson and not-yet legendary Liv Ullman, the director collaborated to make a new vision with constant experimentation and evaluation (three quarters of the film would be reshot). At this point in the '60s, directors across Europe were wading in the cinematic revolution brought on by Godard and others of the French New Wave. The then-48-year-old theater director affirmed the developments of the cinematic revolution to further build his craft. To paraphrase Susan Sontag, the film opens in darkness before the arc light of a projector is kindled and a rapid progression of images overwhelms the viewer: an erect penis, a silent film cartoon, or nails driven through hands, images that were deeply personal to Bergman’s psyche. The chamber drama begins in a hospital. A nurse, Alma, is assigned to care for a now mute stage actor, Elisabet. For her recovery, the two travel to an isolated cottage on the sea. Alma regales the mute with her life story, speaking of her darkest regrets. Elisabet writes a note to the doctor, telling of all Alma has disclosed. When Alma reads the letter, tensions begin to rise. The more time spent together, the women’s identities intertwine. “Persona” translates to mask, a hiding of the face. In the film, only through time do the characters reveal their true selves. Alma uses her supposedly normal life to mask her past traumas and fears while Elizabet hides behind her illness. As is often the case, neither use their mask for malicious reasons, but for survival. Alma can pursue a happy life by way of a bright deposition. Because of her condition, Alma never has to reveal herself directly and confront her past. Although muteness takes her away from the stage, the malady becomes her haven. Bergman asserts, “She finds she can no longer use words. She becomes violently disturbed; loses her ability to express herself.” In cinema, language does not have to be trusted, nor should it be. As spectator, the quest for truth is scaled through an index of image, sound and edit to measure against "the word." As an auteur who kept a day job as a theatre director, Bergman often depended on the spoken word in his work. While there is some cinematic experimentation in his trilogy (monologues addressed to camera, long sequences of silent images, and the infamous "Bergman close up"), PERSONA is a slap in the face from the get-go. By way of a conversation started by Jean-Luc Godard, he ascends the form for both the New Wave and himself. Screening as part of the Mirroring series. (1966, 84 min, DCP Digital) [Ray Ebarb]

Christiane Cegavske’s BLOOD TEA AND RED STRING (US/Animation)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Tuesday, 12pm and Wednesday, 7pm

There’s something inherently alchemical about stop-motion animation, the illusory nature of real objects being manipulated into motion sitting somewhere between technological mastery and magic. The puppetry of the inanimate made animate carries with it haunting vibes that have granted atmosphere to works by mainstream directors like Henry Selick and arthouse favorites like Jan Švankmajer. Christiane Cegavske fits right in with these artists, her thirteen-years-in-the-making dreamscape of a feature taking full advantage of the nightmarish world of stop-motion animation. Cegavske’s creations—among them, tribes of aristocratic mice and forest-dwelling bat-like creatures—rarely if ever feel truly "alive," their motions herky-jerky and contorting in such ways to never really convince the eye that there’s true life in them. But this haunting dissonance, the garish gray area between puppetry and full-on sentience, only brings you closer into the otherworldly story at hand, a tale of warring societies fighting over their own hand-crafted doll brought to life. The dialogue-free story of Cagavske’s surprisingly lore-packed film may often leave you asking more questions than the film can bother to answer, but the artistry on display, of frog monks and human-faced spiders and diabolical acts of violence within nature, is enough to pull you into a world of surreality that's entirely transfixing. It is, in short, the magic of stop-motion in its most base and charming form. (2006, 70 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Walt Disney's FANTASIA (US/Animation)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Saturday, 1pm

Arguably the only movie from the Walt Disney Animation Studios that could be labeled a full-on Art Film, FANTASIA is perhaps the crowning artistic achievement of the company’s history, try as they might to continue their tightening grip on the dominant culture to this very day. A gorgeous marriage of the formal possibilities of animated filmmaking and orchestral music, Disney’s grand vision of cinematic artistry is expressed through a series of short films, each underscored by a canonical piece of classical music. Music critic Deems Taylor acts as the emcee, introducing each segment and guiding the audience through the various styles on display. We begin with Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, paired with the most abstract piece of animation of the program: billowing pools of light streaming through clouds to accompany the cascading strings and bombastic horns of Leopold Stokowski’s orchestra. This is followed by the Nutcracker Suite, removed from the Christmas iconography that is familiarly attached to Tchaikovsky’s piece to instead showcase a ballet set in nature, where mushrooms, thistles, fish, and fairies are free to cavort amongst the shadows of trees and the cobwebs glittering under the moonlight. The most famous and most narrative-bound segment follows: Paul Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, where a young apprentice (portrayed onscreen by, who else, Disney’s lovable mascot Mickey Mouse) gets caught up in the power-hungry possibilities of his master’s spell book. The rest of the segments broadly feature various creatures parading around to the whims and wants of each respective musical piece. The early days of creation, from single-celled organisms to towering dinosaurs, evolve alongside Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. A paean of Greek mythical life regales in bacchanalian activity, rejoicing amidst Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. A full array of ballerina-clad animals, from ostriches to hippos to elephants to alligators, bombard an idyllic palace setting amidst the frantic mania of Ponchielli’s Dance of the Hours. The program culminates with the Devil himself in Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, where a demonic cabal rejoices in carnal delight before being blinded out by the lights of the heavens, slowly transitioning into Schubert’s Ave Maria, where beacons of light transport themselves across the hillsides. FANTASIA ends as it began, with light, color, and music intermingled poetically, the rarest of occasions where profound, adventurous artistry found room to shine within one of the most commercial entities on the planet. (1940, 125 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Hayao Miyazaki’s THE BOY AND THE HERON (Japan/Animation)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

The anticipation of seeing a new film directed by Hayao Miyazaki is two-fold: there is a set expectation of whimsy, magic, and complex thematic exploration inherent in his work, but this is tied to the mystery of not knowing how specifically these traits will play themselves out. So it is with his (seemingly) final film, THE BOY AND THE HERON, a film rooted in familiar themes that Miyazaki has been dwelling on for decades of artistry. As with many of his works, Miyazaki provides another story of a youthful protagonist; here, the teenage Mahito—buried within heavy emotional armor to navigate the grief of losing his mother in a hospital fire the year before—finds himself navigating an unknown mystical world that sits somewhere between the afterlife and his own subconscious, after he's lured there by a deliriously antagonistic gray heron. The fantastical elements of Miyazaki immediately float to the surface, from new imaginative creatures like the Warawara—adorable floating balls that ascend to the heavens to be born as humans—to the bizarre amass of pelicans and parakeets that threaten to swallow up any frame they inhabit. Mahito‘s quest to find closure for his mother’s death results in a journey, ever joyous and sumptuous to watch, that ponders the nature of a world built upon loss, destruction, and chaos. Without spoiling too much, the film leaves us on something of an abrupt note, left to ponder the work of an undisputed master of cinema who was unafraid to bare his mortality before us, letting us sit in the knowledge that to live with the chaos of grief is still a beautiful life in and of itself; to know that there is no escaping pain, and there is something beautiful to carry on towards. Maybe a book your mother left behind for you, maybe a new, unknown journey waiting on the other side of a doorway. (2023, 124 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Kleber Mendonça Filho & Juliano Dornelles' BACURAU (Brazil)

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

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s three features to date—NEIGHBORING SOUNDS (2012), AQUARIUS (2016), and now BACURAU (co-directed by Juliano Dornelles)—are all blatantly ambitious in their narratives and aesthetics, with complex plot structures and expansive widescreen imagery. But where his first two films (both novelistic in feel) suggested he was something of a Brazilian Arnaud Desplechin, the no-less-commanding BACURAU takes its cues from the American genre movies of George Romero and John Carpenter. The Carpenter influence is more overt, and not only in the powerful widescreen compositions; BACURAU employs Carpenter’s signature font for its credits, and it even uses a piece of music written by the horror master. But the film’s underlying concerns—namely, how societies are made and broken—are distinctly Romero-esque, and it’s this panoramic vision that makes the film feel epic even when the action and dialogue are stripped-down. It’s best not to reveal too much of the plot, as one of the chief pleasures of the film lies in how you gradually put together the fictional world that Mendonça Filho and Dornelles have imagined from the clues that they give you. Suffice it to say, though, the influence of genre cinema doesn’t become fully apparent until the second half of BACURAU; for almost the first hour, the film generally wades in the environment, introducing character after character and fleshing out what life might be like in an isolated, northern Brazilian village during a dystopian future “a few years from now.” These passages advance a bifocal vision, dramatizing individual lives and the collective spirit of the community with comparable pungency. (The rural setting notwithstanding, you may be reminded of the social portraiture of NEIGHBORING SOUNDS.) Sonia Braga, the star of AQUARIUS, returns as the town doctor, who’s a sweetheart when she’s sober and a terror when she’s drunk; her performance is the film’s showcase, but every community member gets a few distinctive moments apiece. Mendonça Filho and Dornelles also bring lots of flavor to their characterization of the North American visitors who start to arrive in the title village near the end of the first half of the movie. The malign presence of these characters can be read as a metaphor for the ravages of international capitalism on Brazil, but the film derives its raw power from the sheer dread of its violence. Screening as part of the Antropofagia: Reinventing Class and Race in Brazilian Cinema series. (2019, 131 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Aki Kaurismäki’s FALLEN LEAVES (Finland)

FACETS Cinema – See Venue website for showtimes

The “feel-good” movie is often tossed aside as mere cinematic distraction, something flimsy and fleeting to avoid the ever-constant drudgery, chaos, and misfortune of the modern world. But Finland’s Aki Kaurismäki, assembling what is maybe the most morosely joyous film of 2023, offers up an alternative for how feel-good cinema can operate: stories fully cognizant of the world’s inherent misery, injustice, and destruction, and yet striving to find hope and joy and love regardless. Kaurismäki’s trademark style—deadpan performances navigating brightly colorful, impeccably designed surroundings—presents a droll world of intentionally composed scenarios, transporting us between various bars, small homes, movie theaters, hospitals, and workplaces, where work is fleeting, the pay is never enough, and news of constant warfare and hospital bombings is enough to want to shut yourself off from the world for as long as humanly possible. Within this mess, a familiar romantic-comedy formula emerges: Ansa (Alma Pöysti) is oscillating between various low-paying workplaces run by cruel and incompetent bosses. Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) works as a laborer but can barely function without a flask of alcohol tight in his grasp. These two embittered lost souls of the working class have a delightful meet-cute at an absurd night of karaoke, fall in love, and fall apart due to seemingly irreconcilable differences, but anyone who has seen enough romcoms in their lifetime might be able to guess where things go before the music swells and the credits roll. Kaurismäki’s world is distant yet familiar, the paint a bit brighter and the tone of dialogue a bit stiffer, but the feelings of overbearing dread, and the feelings of humor and passion that arise within that dread, are all too palpable and relatable. The romantic comedy is often bemoaned as a dying object at the multiplex, but here, the genre is brought into the present day, startlingly, heroically, and with life-affirming intensity. (2023, 81 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

François Ozon’s THE CRIME IS MINE (France)

Music Box Theatre – Sunday, 11:15am

In his continuing excavation of film genres and styles, French director and screenwriter François Ozon has turned his attention to Hollywood’s screwball comedies of the 1930s. With exquisite period detail, costuming, and casting, THE CRIME IS MINE offers a madcap look at how the crime of murder pays for destitute actress Madeleine Verdier (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) and her roommate, Pauline Mauléon (Rebecca Marder), a struggling attorney. The plot most closely resembles the musical Chicago, but tips its hat to the silent CHICAGO (1927) by casting Isabelle Huppert as silent screen star Odette Chaumette. With her fright wig of red hair and clothing from the turn of the last century, her rapid-fire line deliveries (she's the only cast member who really achieves the screwball rhythm), and a rapacious disregard for male prerogatives (watch her chew off the end of a sausage with gusto), Huppert offers audiences a master class in comedy. Ozon’s suggestion that Mauléon is a lesbian is intensified by having her wardrobe resemble clothes Katharine Hepburn favored, and Huppert plays with this notion as well. Everything about this film is sheer delight, but Ozon manages to address sexual harassment in the entertainment industry with surprising gravity. And while this may have been accidental, Chaumette’s lament of “Who hides 300,000 francs in a cigar box?” points to former Illinois Secretary of State Paul Powell, who stashed $750,000 in a shoebox in a Springfield hotel room. (2023, 102 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Pedro Almodóvar's ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER (Spain)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Saturday, 2pm

In a review of Pedro Almodóvar’s recent film, PARALLEL MOTHERS, New York Times critic A.O. Scott refers to the Spanish writer-director as being perhaps the “most prodigious world builder” among living filmmakers, employing a phrase that’s typically used to describe sci-fi, fantasy, and superhero narratives. Nevertheless, it’s true that Almodóvar has created a world entirely his own, where characters—whose identities are fluid, changeable at a moment’s notice, and whose facades run the gamut from the highest of high fashion to the lowest of whatever low life has subjected them to—live in large, meticulously decorated apartments and encounter problems that even soap operas wouldn’t dare broach. Almodóvar’s ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER involves a degree of overlap sometimes present in his films, suggesting an inter-awareness among the seemingly disparate endeavors. In his earlier film, THE FLOWER OF MY SECRET (1995), there figures a nurse called Manuela, who appears in a training video for doctors on how to communicate with family members of potential organ donors; in ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER, Almodóvar regular Cecilia Roth stars as Manuela, an organ procurement coordinator who herself must decide whether or not to have her son’s organs donated after he dies in a car accident. The two Manuelas are not the same exact character, but it’s emblematic of the potential for the characters and locations in Almodóvar’s films to exist in the same raffish universe. For its part, ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER is an encapsulation of all that’s particularly wondrous about the Spanish master’s kaleidoscopic sphere, one that also earned him his first Oscar. After her son dies, Cecilia leaves Madrid for Barcelona in hopes of finding his father, now a transgender woman called Lola; there she reunites with an old friend, another transgender woman named Agrado (Antonia San Juan), and makes new friends with a young nun named Rosa (Penélope Cruz) and the actress Huma (Marisa Paredes), who had been performing as Stella in the production of A Streetcar Named Desire that Cecilia and her son had gone to see the night of his death. That play and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s ALL ABOUT EVE factor heavily into the film: the former because it marks Cecilia’s life at two crucial junctures and the latter because, in addition to being a film that Cecilia and her son had watched together, the plot of this movie at times recalls that of the other. Like many of Almodóvar’s films, this is a long, magnificently rambling love letter to the things and people he loves most, namely cinema, theater, actresses, women, and above all, his own mother. (An epigraph at the end declares exactly this.) In Cecilia’s decision to take Rosa and eventually Rosa’s son under her wing, the film emanates the rapture of selfless love that, like other facets of Almodóvar’s pellucid auteurism, permeates the enveloping ostentation of his bittersweet melodramas. (1999, 101 min, DCP Digital) [Kathleen Sachs]

Paul Thomas Anderson's PHANTOM THREAD (US/UK)

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

More often than not, modern movies are endlessly clogged with flimsy and cardboard cutouts of the “classic love story,” a trend hopefully being seared away entirely, given that they seem more offensive in a cavernous last year of cynicism and bitterness. The genre has been in desperate need of a refurbishing to allow for a better understanding of what’s embedded inside its own fragile construction. Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest and possibly greatest achievement isn’t without a mind of its own; it is a wonderfully conceived cinematic dream, wrapped in the lush, evergreen imagination of an artist working closely within the inner representation of his creations, much like Daniel Day-Lewis’ dress-making main character, Reynolds Woodcock. Anderson achieves something much closer to the actual emotions and feelings that echo throughout a relationship between two people, avoiding many of the stale and dry trends found in the modern romance movie. These lifeless morality lessons, usually soaked in a pale blue sadness, seem too bitter and lazy to have much real purpose and functionality, allowing Anderson to spin a delightedly deceptive chamber piece instead. Given the film’s advertising, championing PHANTOM THREAD as a brooding sure-fire contender in the race for awards-season gold, you might be surprised to discover a strange rom-com hiding in the lining of its framework. The plot involves a dressmaker (Daniel Day-Lewis) and his closely-curated daily home and work life, right as another of his romantic relationships is beginning to dim out. As another unfulfilled and lifeless relationship goes, Woodcock decides to retreat to one of his favorite restaurants (it is here I’d like to heavily underline the film’s ideas about taste and hunger, given new literal and metaphorical life in a way that is shockingly unpretentious). It is at this place of dining that he meets Alma, played by newcomer Vicky Krieps, that leads to an intimate portrayal of love’s inherent mystery, built inside an almost hermetic world of imagination that conjures up visions of the classical Hollywood era, while simultaneously managing to subvert the work of “tradition.” straddling the lines of the modern and classical film structure/form with the skill of a master operating at the height of their creative abilities. Despite taking place in Great Britain, this is far from the British-ness on display in BBC dramas and endless droves of Oscar bait. Beginning with its suggestive point-of-view, then unwinding between not two points of view, but a shared point of view, the personal nature of this film for Anderson is evident, with Anderson not only writing the script, but also shooting nearly every frame of film himself (though he appears uncredited in that role). The everyday gestures, glances, embraces, arguments, and alluring atmosphere between two people seeps through every frame, delivering unexpected surprises carefully yet unabashedly. This is one of the few films in recent years that is really essential to witness in 70mm. The projection’s colors and light are captured in spellbinding luminosity, the sounds and images pushing forth the relationship of one woman and one fragile male ego, across a tapestry of sensual pleasures with hardly a hint of on-screen sex in sight. The results trace the lines around eroticism, rather than circling it directly, letting them blossom into a rare achievement in recent American cinema, a precious gift inside the fabric of its own design; one to keep close through the next several years. Screening as part of the Mommy Issues: Freudian Relationships in Film series. (2018, 130 min, DCP Digital) [John Dickson]

Edgar Wright's SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD (US/UK/Canada)

Music Box Theatre – Friday & Saturday, Midnight

SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD has undeniably stood the test of time, having influenced music, video games, and other facets of popular culture for well over a decade. Despite a poor box office performance, Wright’s adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novels left its mark on a rapidly growing internet subculture surrounding DIY music scenes—so much so that a new generation of guys you wish you didn’t start talking to at a party were introduced to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope through Ramona Flowers, the title character’s romantic interest whose name will now forever be attributed to girls with brightly colored hair by boys who just bought their first indie rock album. Despite the film’s continued success, some may still write off SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD as a product of its time. After all, there was plenty of nerd-chic to go around in 2010 as the Marvel Cinematic Universe continued to build hype, and TV shows like The Big Bang Theory framed nerd subcultures in a more flattering light for the masses. But to dismiss the film as just having come out at the right time would be to ignore the gripping romance and slapstick humor that have endeared it to audiences for years. Michael Cera and Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Scott Pilgrim and Ramona Flowers have a chemistry that does not feel like it should work on paper, but is electric on film. The two carry an awkwardness that really brings the quirks and discomfort of the early stages of a relationship to life. The film’s supporting cast, a revolving door of actors soon to make their big break, also bring their A-game as effective caricatures of what ex-partners and friends in your 20s are really like. For example, Chris Evans plays one of Ramona’s exes, an overconfident, pompous hunk who became an action star, and Brie Larson plays Scott’s ex-girlfriend, the snobby front woman of Toronto’s hottest indie band who changed her entire personality to fit the role. The plot follows Scott as he fights a league of Ramona’s ex-partners in comic book fashion in order to win her over, learn from his own shortcomings, and grow past the stagnation their daily lives have settled into. While the film doesn't reinvent the wheel, it recontextualizes the tropes of modern drama, action, and comedy films through frameworks that are easily relatable to younger millennial and Gen Z audiences alike, making for an entertaining cult classic and must-see experience for anybody with a nose ring or stick-and-poke tattoo. (2010, 112 min, 35mm) [Michael Bates]

🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Chicago Film Archives
The Chicago Transit Authority, in partnership with the Chicago Film Archives (CFA), presents a new, one-of-a-kind temporary art installation at the Cicero Green Line station (4800 W. Lake St.). The installation, called we love, is a filmic exhibition of home movies and amateur films selected from collections housed and preserved at CFA. The video will be projected onto a wall in the mezzanine area of the station and will run day and night through mid-March. More info here.

⚫ Chicago History Museum
CHM members are invited to explore the relationship between the city of Chicago and Polish film through a panel discussion featuring Zbigniew Banas, instructor of Polish and European Cinema at Loyola University Chicago; Michael J. Kutza, filmmaker, graphic designer, and founder of the Chicago International Film Festival; and Jan M. Lorys, historian at the Polish Museum of America and followed by a moderated Q&A. Free admission; RSVP required. More info here.

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Jacques Demy’s 1982 film A ROOM IN TOWN (90 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday, 7pm, as part of the Revising the Musical series.

Hendel Butoy and Mike Gabriel’s 1990 Disney animation THE RESCUERS DOWN UNDER (77 min, 35mm) screens Thursday, 9:30pm, as part of the Computer Vision: Experiments in Digital Cinema series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Steve McQueen’s 2023 documentary OCCUPIED CITY (262 min, DCP Digital) and Jim Wickens and Pete Chelkowski’s 2023 documentary ONE WITH THE WHALE (83 min, DCP Digital) begin screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Andrew Haigh’s 2023 film ALL OF US STRANGERS (105 min, DCP Digital) continues screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes. More info on all screenings here. 

⚫ Sweet Void Cinema (3036 W. Chicago Ave.)
Find more information on the Humboldt Park microcinema, including its larger screening and workshop schedule, here.

🎞️ ONLINE SCREENINGS/EVENTS

⚫ VDB TV
As VDB welcomes the Eiko & Koma and Eiko Otake collections, they are presenting a three-month series of programs that highlight representative works from them. Eiko Otake (2016-2019, Total approx. 49 min) screens for free on VDB TV. More info here.

CINE-LIST: January 12 - January 18, 2024

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Michael Bates, John Dickson, Ray Ebarb, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jim Gabriel, Ben Kaye, Mojo Lorwin