:: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 16 - THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 22 ::

📽️ Crucial Viewing

Luis Buñuel's BELLE DE JOUR (France)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Wednesday, 6pm

As he stands on the balcony of his posh apartment, Pierre is shot. Later, confined to a wheelchair and apparently mute, he is told the truth about his wife Séverine's daytime prostitution by his friend Henri. Then, yet later, after Séverine administers his daily medication, he stands up and goes over to join her by the window. They look down upon the film's opening scene: the two of them riding in a carriage through the countryside. By film's end it's impossible to tell reality from fantasy. One of Buñuel's greatest gifts to filmmaking was to demonstrate, indeed to insist, that the two always co-exist and should be treated equally. False dichotomy: is Séverine's secret life in a brothel nothing more than the daydream of a housewife, or are the elegant Yves Saint Laurent clothes and posh apartment simply components of a prostitute's fantasy life? If he knows, or cares, Buñuel is not interested in telling us. He wants only to erase any lines separating the two. He was fond of quoting de Sade: "The imagination is free, but man is not." Elaborating in an interview, he said, "In fact: the imagination is one thing and life something else. No one can teach my imagination anything because I know everything." BELLE DE JOUR, anchored by the perfection of Catherine Deneuve's enigmatic performance, shows us the apogee of his imagination's knowledge. Screening as part of the Hot & Heavy series. (1967, 101 min, 35mm) [Rob Christopher]

David Cronenberg's CRASH (Canada/UK)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday, 8:45pm

Looking at pictures, we're naturally drawn to human figures. We're people, and we like, above all, to watch other people do things. It's difficult to equate a machine and a person in a moving picture. You can do it through editing, but within a single shot, it's difficult to pull off. It's the sound in CRASH that does it. That, and the dispassionate way all of the actors talk, as though making notes into a tape recorder for themselves, like medical examiners. Every sentence seems to have been recorded separately. It sounds less like we're listening in on conversation than that a particular sort of noise made by people is being played for us, like a Chris Watson recording of some forest. And, as when recording animals one inevitably catches the sound of rustling leaves and rain (it is, after all, the animals and the trees together that form a "forest"), it's inevitable that when recording "society," one should have both human voices and city sounds at equal levels. Above all the other elements of the film—the pharmaceutical composition of its images, the clinical editing, Howard Shore's machine shop music—it's the sound mix that makes CRASH David Cronenberg's most fully realized film. Taking the story of a group of people who confuse sex and car crashes (or moans and squealing tires) to its formal extreme, he creates something more effective than the most gruesome special effect—with nothing more than some microphones and a mixing board. Screening as part of the Hot & Heavy series. (1996, 98 min, 35mm) [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

Julius-Amédé Laou FRENCH WEDDING CARIBBEAN STYLE (France)

Film Studies Center (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm

First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes both families quick to disparage! In his second feature FRENCH WEDDING CARIBBEAN STYLE, French-Martinican playwright and filmmaker Julius-Amédé Laou uses the wedding between a young interracial couple (a Black woman and white man) to enact a comedy of manners that explores diasporic intricacies vis-à-vis universally recognized milestone of marriage. Cleverly, the film is shot from the perspectives of various family members wielding a MiniDV camcorder, first the bride’s cocky younger brother and then, after it’s revealed that the bride has starred in a porn video, her younger sister, who takes the camera and provides another vantage point from which to assess the family’s response. Before the reveal, the event is mostly jovial; the bride and groom are happy, and the bride’s people in particular, numerous as they are, bring a distinct rambunctiousness. The groom’s parents are less than thrilled, clearly because of their racism. This becomes more apparent after the aforementioned revelation, when they assume their son, who has fled the party upon seeing the video, will leave his bride as a result. They hurl various racist expletives at her family, putting into action the hateful feelings many white people harbor beneath a facade of gentility. Laou spares no one, however, as the men in the bride’s family are shown to be hypocritical in their response to her indiscretion, concerned as they are with their own reputations rather than their kin’s wellbeing. The film overall is sympathetic to the bride, emphasizing what women—Black women in particular—go through and how their sexuality is often policed. Certain family members also seem to be ashamed of their race, with a few of the younger members claiming to be white and some of the older ones embracing qualities inherent to and insidiously representative of whiteness. Laou communicates all this in a formally ingenious and enormously entertaining manner. Echoes of his playwriting career come through in the ensemble-focused structure, though it doesn’t feel too much like a play; the dramatic rigor of the stage melds seamlessly with the predetermination of cinema to embrace the best of both worlds. Preceded by Laou’s 1985 short MIST MELODIES OF PARIS (27 min, DCP Digital). With an introduction by Rachel Chery, a sixth-year music history doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago. (2004, 89 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Julius-Amédé Laou’s THE OLD SORCERESS AND THE VALET (France)

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

The title characters of this sharp and poignant comedy-drama are a longtime married couple from Martinique who worked for decades as servants in France. Presently enjoying lives of semi-retirement, they spend much of the film reflecting on their past jobs and complicated marriage. Their reflection comprises most of the film’s middle section, when the couple walks around Paris and rehashes personal history, with an emphasis on the wife’s many episodes of infidelity. Writer-director Julius-Amédé Laou is primarily concerned with how these characters have been shaped by living so long in subservience to whites, but what makes the film special is how Laou ameliorates his bitter theme with sweet depictions of the main characters and their relaxed daily routines. In one early sequence, Laou shows the wife with various people who come to her apartment hoping she can use her voodoo powers to aid in their lives. One client is a middle-aged man whose much-younger wife fell in love with him only after the sorceress cast a spell over her and whom he suspects of desiring another man; another is a woman who requests a potion that will kill her husband but make it seem like he died from natural causes. There’s a fun magic-realist vibe to this passage, which dramatizes how the heroine infuses her French life with Martinican traditions; it also clashes ironically with the subsequent revelation that this woman who’s so adept at helping others still experiences such tumult in her own life. The grainy black-and-white cinematography evokes the look of older movies and subtly conveys how the characters remain locked in their memories of the past. At the same time, the film is very much alive to the present moment, as demonstrated not only by the couple’s adorable bickering but by the vibrant images of Parisian street life. Preceded by Laou’s 1983 short OPEN-MIC SOLITAIRE (18 min, DCP Digital). (1987, 81 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

George Sherman’s BORDER RIVER (US)

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

Reportedly the last film shot in three-strip Technicolor, this Universal Pictures Western literally uses the format like it’s going out of style. It may not be as perverse as DUEL IN THE SUN (1946), but it certainly looks as flamboyant. (And really, why even try to out-perverse King Vidor and David O. Selznick?) Joel McCrea stars as a Confederate officer who goes to Mexico in the final days of Civil War; he sets up in a border town known as Zona Libre because it’s a safe haven-cum-marketplace for criminals. McCrea has two million dollars of stolen Union gold, and he’s looking for someone who can sell him exactly two million dollars’ worth of weapons. But what he anticipates as an easy task becomes complicated when the sadistic general who rules Zona Libre (Pedro Armendáriz) gets wind of his plans. Yvonne De Carlo is on hand as a saloon entertainer (which seems to be a popular occupation in George Sherman pictures) who’s involved with the general but falls for McCrea; she wears some tremendous dresses that remind you you’re watching the last film shot in three-strip Technicolor. Despite the time period, settings, and people on horses, BORDER RIVER doesn’t feel like a typical Western; the dramatic emphasis is on interpersonal business like negotiation and persuasion, which makes the genre conventions seem incidental rather than necessary. In the end, it’s an eccentric little film that simply wants to know how criminal activity worked in the past, a precursor to something like Michael Mann’s late ‘80s TV series Crime Story. Screening as part of the Brief Intro to George Sherman series. (1954, 80 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Deborah Stratman's LAST THINGS (US/Experimental)

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

Chicago-based filmmaker Deborah Stratman is one of the most accomplished and diverse experimental filmmakers of the 21st century. Her new film LAST THINGS exists at the edges of possibility, an essay-doc that mostly removes humans from the equation to consider a geological record-sized narrative. The film collects images of chondrules, some of the oldest known geological formations that scientists use to measure the age of the universe itself. They’re primitive objects that haven’t changed since the early solar nebula days. Stratman pairs these rocks with a voiceover that draws from texts by Clarice Lispector and J. H. Rosny as well as nature writing from Eliot Weinberger; they all work together in a speculative sci-fi swirl. The words contextualize the rocks as a link to the past and as maps to other worlds. If other Stratman films have explored the distorting effects of surveillance (IN ORDER NOT TO BE HERE) and the archive (VEVER), this takes passing interest in our systems of observing and categorizing. The full extent of these complicated forms is only conceivable through advanced imaging, augmented technology, and more rudimentary forms of videotaping and drawing. Our relationship to the rocks is always mediated by our present optical and technological means of knowing them. Stratman revels in information, in using these unique and extensive classifications to invent former and future selves. Like the voiceover’s vintage sci-fi narration, the images encourage us to fill in the blanks with our own fictions, expanding our minds regarding what constitutes life, what the core materials that make up our world could do in parallel-world permutations. It’s beautiful work that never gets boring to look at thanks to Stratman’s spoils of colorful and geometrically complicated images. She links diagrams and enhanced microscope footage with more natural settings, including shore lines and homes constructed out of rocks. The beauty exists on a spectrum, it seems, a fluid combination of what we can see and what we can theorize. Stratman’s work is all the richer for these jumping-off points, inviting intellectual flights over the imagery that take the mind in more directions than possible in more straight-ahead narrative work. Though it’s rigorous, it’s likely to be among the most compelling sci-fi this year, period. Screening with Stratman’s 2019 short VEVER (FOR BARBARA) (12 min, Digital Projection). (2023, 50 min, 35mm) [Maxwell Courtright]

Chantal Akerman’s JE TU IL ELLE (Belgium/France)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 4:15pm

There’s an impression of aimlessness to many of Chantal Akerman’s films, the often desultory tempo of the images lending a visual rhythm to a feeling of languor. This is expressed most absurdly in JE TU IL ELLE, her picaresque first narrative feature; there’s a sense of impishness here that’s either refined or eschewed in later work, reflecting the youthfulness of its creator. The film was made after Akerman returned to Belgium from her brief sojourn to New York City and just one year before she premiered JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES, which found Akerman evincing a wisdom far beyond her years (compared with the specifically childlike feel of this film). Yet one still finds in both a simultaneously meditative and inscrutable durational impact and rather opaque philosophical inquiries that are neither explicitly stated nor patly elucidated. Akerman (credited at the end simply as “Julie,” though it’s never made clear if that’s the character’s name) plays the nominal protagonist; in the first third she appears by herself, staying in one room for many weeks, moving furniture, dressing and undressing, eating from a bag of sugar (!!!), and writing and rewriting a letter to an unknown recipient. The only dialogue is delivered by Akerman in disembodied voiceover, narrating the film’s limited action, though often in a way that doesn’t match what’s happening on screen. What she does in this section is almost comical, but even where one might be tempted to call something Akerman has done funny, it’s still imbued with an assuredness tha borders on self-seriousness, yet still manages never to encroach upon affectation. Such emphatic impassivity could be called precision, as any vagueness born of it is certainly intentional. Why Julie doesn’t leave her room and subsists on a bag of sugar for several weeks is not explained, nor is why she does eventually leave. In the second part, the stasis of the first is juxtaposed by movement when Julie hitches a ride with a long-haul truck driver (Niels Arestrup). They occasionally stop to eat and drink, and it’s only toward the end of the sequence, after a stilted sexual encounter in the truck’s cab, that the man speaks at length about anything of substance, delivering a monologue about his wife, their lacking sex life, and other personal subjects. In the third and final section, it would seem that Julie has been dropped off at the home of a former lover (Claire Wauthion). This section culminates in an approximately ten-minute sex scene between the two women; it may be supposed that a schism between the two is why Julie had been hiding out and that the lover is the person to whom she was writing the letter, but this part nevertheless feels wholly detached from the first part. The film’s title translates to I YOU HE SHE—it’s presumed that the ‘I’ is Akerman/Julie, and that the ‘he’ and ‘she’ are the truck driver and ex-lover, respectively; it’s thus speculated that the ‘you’ may be us, the viewers, who become participants in these dynamics. Loosely based on Akerman’s own experience hitchhiking across Belgium to visit an ex-girlfriend, the film is an undeniably autobiographical text and a more impenetrable contemplation of things knowable perhaps only to the filmmaker (though, ironically, in denying that it’s either a distinctly queer or feminist film, Akerman has said it’s a “normal love story,” reducing its complexity in such a way only brilliant artists are able to do of their own work). I’ve found it more meaningful to watch without attempting to inflict a narrative, even if there’s proof that one exists; in doing so I immerse myself not in the experience of watching the film but in the experience of the film itself. The aimlessness becomes more meaningful as a result, though not in a quantifiable way that imposes anything on the impassable precision. (1974, 86 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Luke Lorentzen’s A STILL SMALL VOICE (US/Documentary)

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

Mati, the principal subject of A STILL SMALL VOICE, is a woman in training to be a hospital chaplain; the movie follows her over the course of her residency in New York City. While Mati’s training (like her future career) is surely filled with heart-rending interactions with patients and families, director Luke Lorentzen includes only a few of these in the film. His focus, rather, is on the more prosaic aspects of Mati’s professional development: meetings with her fellow interns, one-on-one sessions with her program adviser, moments of much-needed downtime when she learns to dissociate herself from her demanding work. The purpose of Lorentzen’s approach is to show that caregiving isn’t a skill one comes to naturally but arrives at after extensive training; apparently, providing emotional support to people in critical situations is as fine an art as surgery or any other aspect of modern medicine. Lorentzen considers the bureaucratic framework that ensures professionalism amongst chaplains, with scenes in which Mati and other interns review their strategies, take guidance, and consider ways to improve. It can be a little unnerving to think that empathy can be monitored and finessed in such a clinical fashion, that bureaucracy can penetrate some of our most human emotional instincts. A STILL SMALL VOICE presents this phenomenon without directorial comment, leaving all the reflection to the subjects—Lorentzen advances a style that’s fairly clinical itself, with lots of static long takes that make the film occasionally suggest a European arthouse drama. And like many an emotionally withholding art film, A STILL SMALL VOICE offers an eruption in its final act, when the tension between Mati and her advisor reaches its breaking point. Some may leave the film with negative feelings toward the advisor, but I don’t think that was Lorentzen’s intent. Instead, I think the point is to show that people in essential, high-stress jobs are simply human like the rest of us. (2023, 93 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

João Pedro Rodrigues’ WILL-O’-THE-WISP (Portugal)

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

Like many of his compatriotic contemporaries, João Pedro Rodrigues often makes films that irreverently interpret Portugal’s past and present and radically imagine its future. His cinema stands out for its explicit queerness, not only in terms of its unorthodox narrative and formal strategies but for how it centers sexual otherness as a disruptive, transformative, and liberating historical force. WILL-O’-THE-WISP is Rodrigues at his most whimsically surreal as well as economical. The film focuses on Alfredo, the crown prince of Portugal who is first seen on his deathbed in the year 2069. After a brief introduction, we are whisked back to ancient 2011, when Alfredo is a curly-haired blond twink chafing against the bourgeois trappings of his noble family. Hypocrisy abounds, especially from his father, who speaks of the sanctity of the forest even as he nonchalantly tosses his lit cigar to the earth; meanwhile, being surrounded by so much wood stirs something in Alfredo’s pants. In a tableau at the dinner table staged with maximum Brechtian artifice, the young man inveighs—with words borrowed from Greta Thunberg—against the indifference of world leaders to the despoliation of the environment. To fix the problem? He decides to become a firefighter, dropping him into the ranks of the working class. From there, WILL-O’-THE-WISP winds and shimmies through homoerotic tableaux vivant, an electric dance number, and alternately sensuous and comical scenes of Alfredo’s courtship with a black firefighter named Afonso. At just over an hour, the film feels like something of a minor lark, but it’s a strange and inventive one, fizzing with Rodrigues’s signature blend of libidinous energy, postcolonial critique, and anything-goes phantasmagoria. Screening with Jorge Jácome's 2017 short FLORES (27 min, DCP Digital). With an introduction by Professor Corey Byrnes, a scholar of Environmental Humanities, who will speak to the connection with his current course, “Culture in a Changing Climate,“ at Northwestern University. (2022, 67 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]

Fred Halsted's L.A. PLAYS ITSELF (US/Adult)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 8:45pm

Fred Halsted, in his first film, seems to offer conflicting and mutually contradictory representations of intimacy and sexual relations, suspending indefinitely any comfortable escape into mere pleasure or lustful joy. The first scene depicts a pastoral encounter in the undeveloped outskirts of Los Angeles between a wanderer and a cherubic nude he discovers nestled deep into the visual scheme of the natural world. The two coyly flirt with one another, suck each other off, lovingly fuck, and bathe and play in the streams and fields. It is an episode dripping with cliché in its narrative structure, but any predictability or staleness that the situation might risk is neutralized. Utterly without irony or condescension, Halsted films their sex as wholly fulfilling, utopian, and lovingly precious. The flowers, the trees, the dripping, running water are shot stylistically identically to the grappling, pneumatic bodies of the men engaged in their lovemaking, and Halsted's editorial rhythms make clear that rather than two individuals meeting, this is instead only one moment out of an infinite continuum of life, a gloriously pleasurable outpouring of lust not simply for another's flesh but for the dissolving away of any distinction between one's self and one's partner, or even the world itself. A brutal, terrible transition follows: the space of nature and transparent, instant connection is literally bulldozed away, revealing in its stead a disorienting, nightmarishly impersonal Los Angeles proper. Shot in large part through moving windshields and featuring repetitive, non-diegetic dialogue in voiceover, this segment plays a double narrative, simultaneously meandering through an anonymous sea of desperate corner hustlers, run-down storefronts, and grubby streets and aurally following two new characters as an experienced older man is seducing, picking up, or perhaps just playing with a naïve Texan transplant to the city. In the third and surely the most extraordinary scene, the two unseen partners now take the stage. In staccato, upsetting fits and starts, the film undermines and destroys any sense of linear chronology in the sex between these men. Jumping unpredictably from one position and setting to another, Halsted builds the reverse and violent counterpart to the sweet and affirming sex of the first scene as the older man, played by Halsted himself (a man with a ferocious and compelling screen presence—witness his work in Joe Gage's otherwise lackluster EL PASO WRECKING CORP.) repeatedly beats, strangles, imprisons, binds, and fucks the younger one. Finally, after one of the film's exceptionally rare moments of ejaculation, Halsted lubricates his fist with his own semen and energetically fists his partner. But to describe the scene as such is to do the scene a disservice, for it is both a bruising, horrible vision and one of genuine purging, genuine connection on a level that the men in the nature scene could never have approached. Through sex, the film is saying, the inherent loneliness and isolation that characterized the human condition can be combated, and that it is then an act not of pleasure but of shared, reciprocal dwelling, something that could turn two worthlessly alienated and separate people into, at least for a time, a living, shimmering, wholly engaged zone of total contact. The tactility of arousal, the physicality of desire, and the transformations of those arousals and desires within a multiplicity of spaces—these have nowhere else been more beautifully shot or more starkly explored. Screening as part of the Hot & Heavy series. (1972, 55 min, DCP Digital) [Kian Bergstrom]

Peter Strickland’s THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY (UK/Hungary)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 6pm

THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY is the most sumptuous of director Peter Strickland’s visually arresting films, all of which feel like they fit into the same world—familiar but so incredibly strange. This is, in part, due to Strickland’s visual language, one inspired by European genre films of the 70s. THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY pays homage to Jess Franco’s sensual films, including A VIRGIN AMONG THE LIVING DEAD (1973); the film features Monica Swinn, a Franco regular who hadn’t appeared in a film in over thirty years. Set in her stately home surrounded by nature, Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen) is an expert in lepidopterology (the study of moths and butterflies). She is in a romantic relationship with younger student Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna), who is in a subservient sexual position to Cynthia’s dominant taskmaster role. The film follows the recurring routine and growing tensions of their relationship as expectations, needs, and bodies change. It all unravels in a dreamy unhurriedness; Strickland’s camera is sultrily voyeuristic, illuminating the true care between the two even through the shifts in their relationship. Color and textures reign here, predominantly the tactility and power of fabric, something Strickland would revisit more directly in his follow-up, IN FABRIC (2018). This is reflected in the wings of the insects they study—repeating shots of diagrams of their anatomy. Sounds as communication, too, are just as important for the insects as it is for the women, particularly the echoing dialogue of their recurrent sexual encounters. Pop duo Cat’s Eyes provides a melancholic autumnal score. Worth noting, too, is that THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY features only women on screen, even in the few crowd scenes—turning their complex internal world into unwavering cinematic lushness. Screening as part of the Hot & Heavy series. (2014, 104 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Banmei Takahashi’s DOOR (Japan)

Music Box Theatre – Friday, Midnight

Unavailable in the United States until recently, DOOR is a rare '80s Japanese invasion/slasher. Undoubtedly inspired by the plethora of horror films that preceded it, DOOR nevertheless stands out as a particularly well-paced, disturbing, and visually striking example of the genre. Yasuko Honda (Keiko Takahashi) is a housewife living with her husband (Shirô Shimomoto) and young son (Takuto Yonezu) in a high-rise apartment building. Already a bit weary of strangers, she’s startled by an insistent salesman (Daijirô Tsutsumi) at her door. When her refusal to allow him into the apartment causes him to accidentally injure his hand, the salesman begins to terrorize Yasuko, becoming sexually obsessed with her. This primarily occurs through unsettling phone calls, which establish he can see her within the apartment, though she has no idea what he looks like. With her husband away for a few days, Yasuko is left to fend for herself. It remains a straightforward home invasion story until the final slasher act, which unfolds into a bonkers yet truly violent fight scene that includes a bird’s eye view shot of the action. Tension builds in early dialogue-less scenes of modern mundanity, neighbors and technology all posing threats to Yasuko’s homelife. The cluttered, colorful spaces of the Hondas, their home and suburban surroundings, all become more and more menacing; director Bamei Takahashi skillfully moves in and out of these spaces, capturing Yasuko’s limitations in what she can do to control her environment. Scenes are accentuated by an unrelentingly '80s score, sometimes shocking in its disruption. The parade of outstanding '80s colorful, oversized, shoulder padded sweaters that Yasuko wears throughout also must be mentioned. Programmed and presented by the Front Row and Terror Vision. (1988, 95 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Ishiro Honda's DESTROY ALL MONSTERS (Japan)

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

The ninth feature in the extensive Godzilla filmography was originally slated to be the last in the series, so what better way to go out then with an all out, no holds barred, kaiju melee? DESTROY ALL MONSTERS reunites the Toho Showa Era Holy Trinity moviemaking team of director Ishiro Honda, special effects supervisor Eiji Tsuburaya, and composer Akira Ifukube, who are all working at the top of their game. The story itself is fairly straightforward. In the future year 20XX, mankind is working in near harmony, taking frequent trips to the moon and studying all of Earth's kaiju population, who have been corralled to the appropriately named Monster Island. A nefarious alien race, the Kilaaks, places the monsters under mind control and unleashes them across the globe to create destruction, effectively holding the Earth hostage. As with most Godzilla movies, the destruction sequences are the main draw, and DESTROY ALL MONSTERS features some of the most impressive miniatures work the series has to offer. The climactic battle is a glorious cacophony of rubber suits, pyrotechnics, and a driving score as well. Honda's movies frequently feature an optimistic outlook towards the future, envisioning a world where humanity sets aside its differences and global politics to make the Earth a better place for all. To Honda, the betterment for the collective good comes first and foremost. In an era where Godzilla movies had all but lost their initial messages about the horrors of nuclear war and shifted towards children's popcorn movies, DESTROY ALL MONSTERS strikes a balance with its ability to appeal to audiences of all ages and reigns as one of the classic era's very best entries. Screening as part of the Dinosaurs Plus! on Film series. (1968, 88 min, DCP Digital) [Kyle Cubr]

Tran Anh Hung’s THE TASTE OF THINGS (France/Belgium)

Gene Siskel Film Center and Various Other Cinemas – See Venue websites for showtimes

Tran Anh Hung’s seventh feature, THE TASTE OF THINGS, has a lot in common with his first, THE SCENT OF GREEN PAPAYA (1993), despite the fact that the newer film takes place in late 19th-century France and the earlier one took place in 1950s Vietnam. Both are hermetic movies (sometimes comfortingly so), with most of the action restricted to the main character’s home/workplace; this walled-in quality makes the drama feel insulated from whatever larger historical forces exist beyond the frame. In GREEN PAPAYA, the Vietnam War provides an obvious structuring absence (the film ends just a few years before the United States started sending “military advisors” to the country), while in TASTE the looming threat seems to be the entire range of political, social, and industrial upheavals that came with the dawn of the 20th century. In neither film, however, does the exterior threat eclipse the onscreen narrative, as Tran’s exquisite mise-en-scène (which was already superb in GREEN PAPAYA and has only gotten lovelier over time) lures you further and further inward. Though these are quiet films, they’re rarely still; when there isn’t movement within the frame, Tran creates it through subtle pans and tracking shots. His style is most rapturous when he’s depicting domestic rituals, particularly cooking, as he presents seemingly routine activities as whirlpools of little events. Most of the first act of TASTE OF THINGS concerns the creation of a gourmet meal, and Tran renders the process so enveloping that you may wish the entire movie was about the characters preparing food. Yet these early scenes—which, like those of GREEN PAPAYA, feature a tween girl as an audience identification figure—exhibit a progressively rich sense of character; through cooking rituals, stray lines of dialogue, and impeccable body language, the principal characters come into focus. Dodin (Benoît Magimel) is a renowned restaurateur, and Eugénie (Juliette Binoche) is his head chef of 20 years. Their relationship is warm and mutually supportive, but it is chiefly professional. Only when the film leaves the kitchen does Tran slowly reveal that Dodin has pined for Eugénie for years and wishes for her to marry him… but to emphasize this aspect of the film runs the risk of making TASTE OF THINGS sound like a genteel love story when it most definitely is not. Often Tran seems less interested in telling a story than in achieving a Zen-like state through recreating the atmosphere around a gourmand’s kitchen 140 years ago. However soothing it is to watch the film, there’s something a little unnerving about how Tran deploys movie magic to resurrect a dead way of life; but then, the filmmaker acknowledges this, lets it shadow the sense of mystery throughout. The final passages are no less elusive than the opening ones, presenting the characters as they go through multiple changes of heart while severely downplaying (if not completely eliding) the internal developments that make these changes possible. Tran’s faith in images over explanations points to why he’s a great filmmaker, and TASTE OF THINGS finds him at the height of his powers. (2023, 135 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

David Byrne's TRUE STORIES (US)

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

Among other things, David Byrne's film is simultaneously a satire of television and a celebration of television. Two musical numbers specifically appropriate TV. "Wild Wild Life" has various characters lip synching to the song in front of a giant bank of video monitors, which all show a seemingly endless mélange of stock footage. "Love For Sale" is even more direct, featuring Byrne's band Talking Heads interacting with actual 80's era TV commercials before eventually transforming into chocolate-coated, foil-wrapped treats. Byrne's obsession with capturing striking environmental details is perfectly matched with Ed Lachman's cinematography. Visually, TRUE STORIES evokes the shiny pre-fab face of Texas, where money from oil and microelectronics makes everything look new, as well as the dusty, weird Texas, a result of its funky ethnic mix. Yet, at least according to the film's distributor, it was framed for the 1.37:1 aspect ratio. Perfect for TV. Screening as part of the Revising the Musical series. (1986, 90 min, 35mm) [Rob Christopher]

Steven Shainberg’s SECRETARY (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 2pm

Released two decades ago, SECRETARY is mostly remembered now as the horny movie that brought Maggie Gyllenhaal to the world and showed that James Spader could still get it if he wanted. For the most part, it was tossed aside as a decently made indie film with risque subject matter. Forgettable festival fare with a financially successful arthouse run. Over years it’s become a cult film for the BDSM set, as well as lovers of sexually transgressive cinema. Some people, who love to have the hottest takes possible, would say, “this movie couldn’t be made today” because of its subject matter. To that I say, “Shut up, dork.” If we can live in a world with films like ELLE (2016) or TITANE (2021), we could definitely have SECRETARY. The thing is though, we’d have to engage in profoundly mind-numbing “discourse” with a retrograde generation of puriteens and weirdly asexual Disney adults who currently love bellowing that sex scenes don’t belong in film and they “don’t advance the plot.” It's all overwhelmingly dull and equally idiotic. Honestly, a movie like SECRETARY seems more appropriate for now than it did 20 years ago. This is a film in which a woman discovers her sexuality and self-confidence, grows into it on her own terms (even if it through kink and non-vanilla sexual practices), and comes into a loving relationship of mutual respect with a man who has also learned to balance his desires with his emotions. It's the type of movie that is so desperately needed in a world drowning in pornography. First, to be clear, I’m not anti-pornography. I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t a fan of it. I dig it. Pro-porn, all the way. If for no other reason than that it always delivers on its promise. In fact, that’s all there is to it. It’s completely simple, and because of that I actually have a deep respect for it. Porn doesn’t lie. And of course, there’s the labor that goes into producing it. My god, the respect I have for the people who make it. My concern is that we’re now a generation into a bawdy new world in which purely sexual imagery is available at any point in time by any person. The internet is everywhere now. So porn is everywhere now. You can pluck it out of thin air. Couple that with Hollywood being the most asexual it has been in just as long of a time (Has The Rock ever kissed anyone on screen?) and views of sexuality on screen are so wildly skewed. If the only visual sexual imagery you have is hardcore pornography, you're going to eventually start equating any, and all, sexual imagery with hardcore pornography. A romantically shot sex scene in a movie with soft lighting (and maybe a naked breast) is going to resonate the same as gonzo POV hardcore porn because all sex on screen has been reduced to a level plane—a concept that's both depressing and terrifying. SECRETARY does something that is almost a magic act these days; it gives us sexually charged fetish content without being prurient. When Gyllenhaal crawls on her knees to deliver a letter by mouth to Spader, we get a charge, but we also see the developing relationship between the two, as well as their individual growth. Could you do your thing to it? Sure. But people can have a go to just about anything in any movie if it happens to be their “thing.” The scene isn't made to do that, though. And neither is the film. If anything, SECRETARY's story today is almost a corrective to hardcore pornography. Its story and presentation feels not unlike a film from the “Golden Age of Porn,” when the films still had full film crews and sets and stories. Except it's a '70s porno without hardcore pornography. Ironically, a film that feels extra sexual now would probably be seen as a bummer to the porn-loving raincoat brigade of old. We used to have a word for this: softcore. I’m so happy that this kind of film is having a resurgence lately—especially one that includes the contextualization of the sexuality presented. Yeah, it's horny, but it's not just horny. And that's what people need to remember, that it's okay to be turned on around other people. You don't have to be weird about it. So please, I beg you, stop making it weird. I hope that as adults we can appreciate seeing a real, if non-traditional, romantic and sexual relationship grow in all its awkwardness. That a unique and original story, that just so happens to revolve around sex, can be enjoyed as the story that it is; it’s a considered, yet playful look at sexuality and romantic dynamics. SECRETARY is far better than the sum of its parts. And if you can’t get past the sex, please, pretty please, take a break from the internet. Screening as part of the Hot & Heavy series. (2002, 107 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]

Andrew Haigh's WEEKEND (UK)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 2pm

Andrew Haigh, a longtime assistant editor with a resume that includes three Ridley Scott movies, brings an impressive organizational intelligence and eye for detail to his micro-budgeted second feature--a seemingly homemade talkfest about two guys who hook up at a bar and then end up spending most of a weekend hanging out together. It's a very conscious foray into the long-standing British tradition of astutely-observed, performance-centered realist dramas (the timeframe-defining title was inspired by Karel Reisz's 1960 debut, SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING--which, like WEEKEND, was set in Nottingham), though Haigh's film distinguishes itself from all of the other sad bloke snapshots out there through its remarkable candor and sense of intimacy with the two leads (Chris New and Tom Cullen, both sporting the world's most impeccable three-day beards). WEEKEND was one of two notable 2011 releases to be shot entirely on the Canon 5D Mk II (the other being Monte Hellman's ROAD TO NOWHERE); Urszula Pontikos' shallow-focus-heavy cinematography makes often beautiful use of the tiny camera's capabilities. Screening as part of the Hot & Heavy series. (2011, 97 min, 35mm) [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s AMÉLIE (France)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – See Venue website for showtimes

I'm not quite sure why there's a theatrical re-release of AMÉLIE this year for Valentine's Day, but I'm thrilled nonetheless. This joyous romp of magical realism really should be screened more often as a date night reparatory programmer because if you can't tap into its wellspring of happiness then, I'm afraid to say, you have no heart and are dead inside and most definitely deserve to be alone. Originally released in Europe in 2001, and Stateside in early 2002, this film was a massive sleeper hit. I could present to you the fact that it's still the biggest French-language/French-produced box office success in the history of the US box office, but to contextualize that, a quick anecdote. I  was actually working at the theatre in Chicago that premiered this. And that weekend gave me the scariest moment I've ever had at a job: I had to hand deliver the weekend box office take on foot to the local bank—a half-mile walk with a bag filled with about $20,000 cash. The vast majority being AMÉLIE money. So, yeah, it was massive. Its five Oscar nominations didn't hurt either. With all the magical CGI, Audrey Tatou's instantly iconic (and replicated) hairstyle, its unrelenting demand for a universe of beauty, wonder, love, and whimsy, it's easy to judge the film as being too sentimental and, well, cheesy. But I'll also say that 20 years on it seems low-hanging fruit to accuse the film of being saccharine or too cute by half. Oh, it's twee as hell, no doubt about that. But contextually, this film pre-dated the oversaturation of that aesthetic—arguably helping codify it alongside the other twee barnstormer of 2001, THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS. But what people tend to forget is that this film was specifically made to be an escapist balm. AMÉLIE is a strange film in that it's a period piece set only four years in the past—specifically, it's set on the date of the death of Princess Diana. The film is pointedly born of tragedy. When the titular character learns of Lady Di's death she drops a perfume cap in shock, only for it to reveal a loose bathroom tile covering the hidden toys of a boy's youth. This set's off Amélie's mission to anonymously return the toys to their now-adult owner and spread mysterious joy around the city as both anonymous Cyrano matchmaker and champion of the downtrodden worker, as well as allowing herself to finally find love. Not unlike some of Tarantino's recent films, AMÉLIE seems to have been made specifically to alleviate, and comment on, a collective sociocultural tragedy that people had to endure. When it was being made, and originally released in Europe, AMÉLIE was to be a salve to the tragic loss of The People's Princess. It was a way to reframe this tragedy and give it a much needed, if admittedly fictional, additional positivity. Little did the filmmakers know that by the time this movie landed in America in February of 2002 that it was exactly what the US needed. In the immediate shadow of the 9/11 WTC attacks people in the US were still afraid that it might be inappropriate to laugh, yet alone love. It was an entire culture and country utterly terrified, heartbroken and wondering if things would ever be the same again (they weren't) and if they could ever feel happiness again (they eventually did)—and to a certain extent AMÉLIE allowed for that. The reassurance of hope I saw on the faces of people leaving the theater in 2002 is impossible to put into words. So if a film could help mend the broken soul of America post-9/11 just a tiny bit, then its joy can definitely shoulder a world whose social fabric seems to be fraying evermore each passing day—if only for 2 hours. Still bewitchingly lovely, AMÉLIE holds up much better than some people would like you to think; her radiant charms will have you leaving the theater in pure, wholesome delight. (2001, 122 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]

Super-Horror-Rama! [Miranda + Laura] Double Feature

FACETS Cinema – See showtimes below

Peter Weir's PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK (Australia)
Friday, 7pm
In 1967, Australian author Joan Lindsay published her popular novel Picnic at Hanging Rock, and it soon provoked the belief that its subject is a true, but undocumented event. Eight years later, Peter Weir and screenwriter Cliff Green adapted the novel into Weir's second feature film to explore this new subject of national folklore. In the film, several young women and their teachers from Appleyard College picnic at Hanging Rock near Mount Macedon, Victoria on Saint Valentine's Day in 1900. During the afternoon, Irma, Marion, and Miranda quietly leave their classmates to further explore "the geological marvel," and they never return. In time, the disappearance of the girls leads to greater tragedy at the college. Similar to his contemporary Terrence Malick's attention to American landscapes, Weir focuses his camera on the natural landscape of the Australian bush and its dynamic animal and plant life. Often shot from varying low angles, Hanging Rock appears to be very powerful and possibly dangerous. It arrests the sight of the small men and women who climb its steep slopes in search of an answer. While many films encourage viewers to solve their mysteries, PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK asks them to accept it. In contrast, the film's characters cannot face the unknown, and their reactions in turn obscure them from each other and from us. For Weir, Hanging Rock holds the last memory of Irma, Marion, and Miranda, yet no one can interpret what nature recounts. In the interview "Picnic under Capricorn" published shortly after the film's release, Weir described his uncommon aim: "We worked very hard at creating a hallucinatory mesmeric rhythm, so that you lost awareness of facts, you stopped adding things up, and got into this enclosed atmosphere. I did everything in my power to hypnotize the audience away from the possibility of solutions...There are, after all, things within our own minds about which we know far less than about the disappearances at Hanging Rock. And it's within a lot of those silences that I tell my side of the story." (1975, 115 min, DCP Digital) [Candace Wirt]
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David Lynch's TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (US)
Friday, 9:30pm
I once knew a survivor of childhood sexual abuse who told me that David Lynch's TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME is the only film that ever really got it right. The way incest deranges you, the unprocessable betrayal, the PTSD. Describing her abuse, she said she'd had her own personal Freddie Krueger, and Lynch portrays Laura Palmer's final days as a horror movie—scarier than most, and truer. Critics missed the thrust of this baffler, calling it the worst thing Lynch ever did, if not one of the worst films ever made. Today, it looks like a flawed masterpiece, exhausting and exhilarating. It's a singular portrayal of "garmonbozia" (pain and sorrow), the cream corn of evil—with all the Lynchian disjunctures that sentence implies. It's abrasive at every level, from Lynch's screaming, whooping sound design to the punishing immersion into Laura's hell. But its extremism is the source of its hypnotic power, and Lynch's corybantic surrealism fits the theme. Sheryl Lee is astonishing as doomed, anguished Laura; Ray Wise is terrifying (and, in deranging moments, loving) as her molester father. Then there's that first 35 minutes, which play like a savage parody of the TV show, with Chris Isaak and Keifer Sutherland investigating a murder in Deer Meadow, a negative image of our favorite Pacific Northwest town. Here, the coffee's two days old, the diner is seedy, the small-town cops are jerks, and the dead woman is not exactly the homecoming queen. (One suspects that the cherry pie would be damn poor.) The "Lil the Dancer" scene is a delightful thumbnail illustration of semiotics, and Harry Dean Stanton is on hand as Carl, manager of the Fat Trout trailer park. Angelo Badalamenti's score is creamy and dreamy, mournful and menacing. Actually, I suspect that if you're not already well-versed in the lore of Bob, Mike, the One Armed Man, The Arm a.k.a. The Man From Another Place, Mrs. Tremond and her grandson, and the Owl Cave ring, then you might have stumbled upon this site by accident. I'd guess our readers share my excitement that the stars, and the passage of 25 years, have aligned so that we are actually poised to reenter the Black Lodge. If you haven't boned up on this prequel, then hie to this revival. (Or even if you have: you'll see something new every time.) (1992, 135 min, DCP Digital) [Scott Pfeiffer]

2024 Oscar-Nominated Live-Action Shorts

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

In this year’s theatrical package of Academy Award-nominated shorts, it’s perhaps disappointing (or unsurprising, depending on your vantage point) that the most exciting film in the bunch is the one helmed by an already established director. That would be Wes Anderson’s stunning cinematic adaptation of Roald Dahl’s THE WONDERFUL STORY OF HENRY SUGAR (37 min), a triumph of visual splendor, pathos, and boundary-pushing experimentation. Anderson retells the cheeky tale of a selfish gambling addict who attains transcendental powers that allow him to cheat at poker before steering his life towards altruism and charity, bringing it all to life through his now-signature style of theatrically realized artifice and storybook-like production design and presentation. Dahl’s text is read almost entirely verbatim to the camera, as if the actors (a star-studded bunch including Benedict Cumberbatch, Dev Patel, Richard Ayoade, and Sir Ben Kingsley) were in the room with us, telling us this story first-hand. It’s perhaps the most presentational work in Anderson’s filmography, but no less emotionally rich, plumbing the depths of the lives of men striving to achieve greatness, yet wondering what their true legacies will be once they’re gone. Consider Anderson’s short (no doubt more wondrous on the big screen than trapped within the confines of Netflix) a forty-ish-minute confection waiting for you at the end of this carousel of miniature movies, most of them more concerned with thematic messaging than with creating fully realized cinematic realms. There are works on either side of the emotional spectrum exploring grief; with THE AFTER (18 min), a father (David Oyelowo) grapples with how to keep living in the aftermath of losing his wife and daughter in a vicious act of violence. For those seeking a film carrying similar themes but perhaps with a bit more levity, KNIGHT OF FORTUNE (25 min) is a welcome jolt of dark comedy, finding a man mourning the death of his wife somehow entangled with a fellow widower traveling the labyrinth of a local morgue. There are also films centering political urgency like RED, WHITE AND BLUE (23 min), where a mother (Brittany Snow) travels with her young daughter across state lines to an abortion center, the horrors of contemporary American life roaring to the forefront in a work that often sacrifices character and atmosphere for more didactic goals. The struggles of youth spring to life in INVINCIBLE (30 min), one of the more artful shorts on display, inspired by a true story of a young boy’s too-short life within the walls of a juvenile detention center, yearning to be heard in a world of adults refusing to listen. Director Vincent René-Lortie’s poetic imagery (an early match cut involving a character diving into water practically made my jaw drop) leaves a charming and memorable impression in a short practically begging to be expanded to feature length; it's one of the only shorts on display that trusts the audience to wrestle with artful visual language. In the realm of short-form filmmaking, these five films prove—in one way or another—that less is certainly more. [Ben Kaye]

2024 Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

More than the other shorts categories, the Academy-Award nominated animated shorts are often where you find the greatest variety of storytelling, in content and especially in form. Make no mistake; each work in this quintet of nominees is each its own singular world, waiting to be explored intensely and allowing their visual vocabularies to explore themes vast and unknowable, intimate and familiar. Yet the unintended connective tissue between films is always intriguing to seek out. War is certainly on the mind of a lot of artists, no more evident than in Dave Mullins’ WAR IS OVER! INSPIRED BY THE MUSIC OF JOHN AND YOKO (11 min), taking the Lennon/Ono song and crafting a narrative around two enemy combatants in the throes of war who are unknowingly playing chess against each other with the aid of a carrier pigeon. The short is perhaps the most “traditionally” animated of the bunch—in contemporary terms, at least—with CGI realism shaping the aesthetic, albeit with slight squiggle lines around characters to connote the illusion of pencil lines, all the better to convey its simple but meaningful “War is Bad” message. A more impressionistic response to the atrocities of war comes in LETTER TO A PIG (17 min), Tal Kantor’s exploration of grief, revenge, and memory told through the eyes of a Holocaust survivor sharing the story of how a pig saved him from being captured by Nazis. Kantor’s short exists in ink strokes, with characters' faces and arms extending from negative space, their empathy towards others the only thing to aid them in extending further and further as they begin to question how their concept of revenge might strip them of their own humanity. A young girl questions the systems around her in OUR UNIFORM (7 min), which brilliantly crafts a conceit around the characters and narrative taking place on and around various items of clothing. The topography of shirts and dresses and hijabs provides the architecture of scenes, the shape of characters and motion, the emotional barriers for a young girl who wants nothing more than the freedom to express herself and her personality in the ways she sees fit. The intimate PACHYDERME (11 min), another slice-of-life story of a young girl, finds the protagonist staying with her grandparents and learning to face her fears during her visit, from the utterly mundane (noises that go bump in the night) to the deathly existential (the loss of a loved one). It’s a slight short, filled with lush storybook-esque two-dimensional images that take on an uncanny nature  when set in motion, but it finds beauty in small, still moments. For a more humorous and lush take on the inevitability of death, look no further than the incisive NINETY-FIVE SENSE (13 min) a wonderfully adventurous short directed by Jared Hess and Jerusha Hess of NAPOLEON DYNAMITE (2004) fame. Here, an elderly man (voiced by Tim Blake Nelson) on death row examines each of his five senses, and how they guided the choices he made through life. Each sense is animated by a different team, providing singular textures for each segment; sight morphs from shape to shape, drooping down absorbing new environments. Hearing feels like a newspaper comic come to life, flat colorful shapes enveloping the frame as the camera zooms further inwards, examining how his senses let him down at a crossroad in life where he needed them the most. Of the five Oscar-nominated entries on display, it’s perhaps the one that finds the best marriage between story and expression, displaying what it is about the animated arts that can be so breathtaking when stretching a story past the confines of reality. Also included in this presentation are two short films that were “highly recommended” from the Oscars shortlist: WILD SUMMONS (14 min), which examines the life of salmon through a humanizing twist, and the short but charming I’M HIP (4 min), directed and animated by veteran Disney animation director John Musker. It’s a perfect cap to this eclectic collection of animated films, filling the screen with noise and color and vibrancy, a testament to the power of what animation can do with such limited time. [Ben Kaye]

Werner Herzog's GRIZZLY MAN (US/Documentary)

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

Cine-poet (and bona fide wild man) Werner Herzog's GRIZZLY MAN follows the life of Timothy Treadwell, an advocate for Alaskan bears, who lived among them for thirteen consecutive summers, believing himself to be protecting them from poachers, until he and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, were killed and eaten by one on October 5, 2003. A ferocious defender of grizzlies, Treadwell, Herzog suggests, fundamentally misunderstood the foreignness of bears, taking the enormous, untamable carnivores to be his friends and developing strange, one-sided relationships with families of grizzlies over the years. Treadwell actively videotaped himself, and was a master self-promoter, and Herzog mines Treadwell's video diaries with characteristic ruthlessness, brutally dissecting Treadwell's inane anthropomorphisms, delusions, and recklessness in the face of obvious danger. At the heart of GRIZZLY MAN is a blank spot, an aural obscenity: when Treadwell and Huguenard were attacked, their camera was recording audio, and the tape survives, a trace of death too horrible to be played and too crucial to be excluded from the film, the last living moments of the Grizzly Man himself. It is an obscenity and cannot be endured, and so Herzog gives it to us in a sonic off-screen moment of haunting power and horror. Screening as part of the Conquistador of the Useless: The Films of Werner Herzog series. (2005, 100 min, 35mm) [Kian Bergstrom]

Jim Jarmusch's GHOST DOG: THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI (US)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Saturday, 10am and Wednesday, 7pm

Were the late 1990s and early 2000s a golden age of cinema, or do I just say this because these were the years when I was a burgeoning young moviegoer? This was a time of reverence for new sights, sounds, and experiences on my impressionable and somewhat growing mind; this was the time I began to turn my eyes and ears to the world stage of new and challenging cinema. I knew EYES WIDE SHUT was important even though I didn’t understand it at the time; I knew YI YI was a life-changing experience that I couldn’t wait to have; and I was deeply convinced I had to immediately clasp looks on some Iranian film called THE WIND WILL CARRY US. It wasn’t just these canonical classics—names like Claire Denis, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Pedro Costa, and others were beginning to percolate in my brain, entire worlds were opening up to me. Even if I couldn’t quite grasp their galactic reach, I still understood their reverence. There was at least one movie I saw during this time that I felt I could get a grip on, and that was Jim Jarmusch’s GHOST DOG: THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI. The film was readymade for my taste buds at the time, with its combined love of LE SAMOURAI and BRANDED TO KILL (both 1967), plus Isaach de Bankolé (who had dominated that last decade of cinema with his memorable roles in CHOCOLAT, NO FEAR NO DIE, NIGHT ON EARTH, and CASA DE LAVA), the great Henry Silva as a terrifying, cartoon-loving mobster, and the RZA-produced soundtrack, featuring tracks performed by Jeru the Damaja and a host of affiliated B characters from the Wu-Tang dynasty. These elements meld into something that, on the one hand, seems deadly serious in its portrait of steeled morality and brutal violence while, on the other, offers a deadpan parody of the hit-man genre and its graveness. In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, the components would combine like oil and water or resemble something closer to Jim Abrahams’ MAFIA! Instead, Jarmusch allows GHOST DOG to pierce the middle ground between heavy and light, making the film another unique entry in its director’s work within various genre formats. Revisiting this film for the first time since it was released, I am more than pleased to say it remains as comically cool as it always was—a gleaming example of what made that era something of a halcyon time for the movies. (1999, 116 min, DCP Digital) [John Dickson]

David Cronenberg's eXistenZ (Canada)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Saturday, 11:20pm and Monday, 7pm (MONDAY SHOW IS SOLD OUT)

Viewers of late-night television may have noticed a recent influx of advertisements for supplements that promote some nebulous, unnamed “natural male enhancement” called ExtenZe. One can only wonder if the ad’s creators had ever seen David Cronenberg’s excellent rumination on human supplementation, naming their pill in homage. Both the pill and the film offer, in addition to creative capitalization, experiential augmentation: the pill with the reintroduction of virility, the film with the introduction of a haptic interface for video games. eXistenZ, the titular video game, hardwires itself into the gamer’s nervous system, taking over key functions of the body, in order to synthesize a fully realistic game experience. Sex and violence, as well as film theorist Noël Carroll’s musings on horrific exploitation of interstitial conceptual schemata, all figure heavily in Cronenberg’s work. Indeed, for Cronenberg, sex and violence are inexorably linked. In addition, questions of un/reality and the limits of physicality are all raised when the film begins exploring bodily enhancement. Considering this, what might it mean for our world and ExtenZe? Well, let’s hope those new, artificially-virile men never feel a flush of rage and take up arms in revolution. (1999, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Doug McLaren]

Daisy von Scherler Mayer's PARTY GIRL (US)

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

PARTY GIRL is the mid-'90s incarnate. The first person on screen is legendary New York City drag queen, Lady Bunny, seen as the camera wobbles up the stairs in a point of view shot to the entrance of a rave; it’s an immediate demonstration of the sincere homage to the downtown queer club scene in NYC in the 90s. Daisy von Scherler Mayer’s independent classic is also known for being the first ever film to make its premiere on the internet. Its costume design, too, is a bold exemplification of '90s aesthetic, all layered outfits of tights and jackets, with clashing colors and metallics. These fashions, never settling between grounded and whimsical, work so well because of Parker Posey’s iconic turn as carefree Mary, who spends her time clubbing and throwing house parties. When she’s thrown in jail for helping to organize an underground rave, Mary reaches out to her godmother, Judy (Sasha von Scherler), a librarian. Judy gets Mary a job as a clerk in exchange for posting her bail. At first, Mary is annoyed by the work, but slowly starts to dedicate herself to the Dewey Decimal System. The eventual clash of her two worlds, however, threatens her place in both and Mary needs to decide which path to take. Filled with engaging side characters, von Scherler Mayer spends enough time with each to build out a lived-in and complex world surrounding Mary and her journey. PARTY GIRL, with humor and sincerity, ingeniously celebrates career club goers and librarians alike. Screening as part of the Computer Vision: Experiments in Digital Cinema series. (1995, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Sofia Coppola’s THE VIRGIN SUICIDES (US)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Sunday, 11am

Throughout her distinguished directorial career, Sofia Coppola has used her position as a Hollywood insider to examine the life of privilege and pleasure into which she was born and reveal the silly ordinariness that the envious masses rarely see. She particularly takes aim at the menchildren who don’t seem to know how to handle their good fortune or the women in their lives with any great degree of self-awareness or grace. The men in her films LOST IN TRANSLATION (2003) and SOMEWHERE (2010) wear their fame and fortune variously with giddy wonderment, entitled hedonism, and wistful longing for youth—anything but maturity. But the first men on whom she trained her sights are the unreliable narrators of her directorial debut, THE VIRGIN SUICIDES, which she adapted from the florid novel by Jeffrey Eugenides. In voiceover, the men recount the fateful year in high school when the five Lisbon sisters, renowned beauties in their Michigan suburb, became the stuff of legend when the youngest, 13-year-old Cecilia (Hannah Hall), killed herself. The boys become entangled with the sisters and their religious, clueless parents (James Woods and Kathleen Turner) as witnesses to Cecilia’s demise, and then as companions the girls’ parents reluctantly allow to take them to the homecoming dance. The predictably disastrous results—cause for a two-week grounding in any normal family—becomes life in prison for the girls. The only way out, it would appear, is suicide. Coppola tells the story with a great deal of sympathy for the boys who remain marked for life by their encounters with the Lisbons, while nonetheless revealing their ongoing delusions with wit and insight. Edward Lachman’s lensing lends a light distancing to this mid-1970s period piece redolent of nostalgic music and corny sexual suggestiveness. Kirsten Dunst, Coppola’s muse through several films (MARIE ANTOINETTE [2006], a cameo as herself in THE BLING RING [2013], THE BEGUILED [2017]) is first fetishized here as the most beautiful and provocative of the sisters, 14-year-old Lux. Coppola’s slo-mo, soft-focus shots of the enticing Lux offer the image that dances through the memories of the boys, especially the one boy, Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett/Michael Paré), who loved and abandoned her. I suspect that the unfortunate seducer in Coppola’s THE BEGUILED, once again disappointing Dunst, is Trip finally getting his comeuppance. (1999, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Michel Gondry’s ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (US)

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

Museums and mugs and food and flannels, everyone has mementos and memories they cherish. The cult classic ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND asks what if you could rid yourself of these treasures, or rather, what if you could rid yourself of these burdens. The concept which originally comes from conversations had by director Michel Gondry is expertly fleshed out by writer Charlie Kaufman, who brings that realness you can always expect from him. Kaufman suffuses the cast of characters with quirks and traits that round them out and make them almost lovable despite some of their moral failings, and perhaps that is because Kaufman isn’t afraid to say the things that we really feel and show the way we really are. Without this humanist touch, some of Kaufman’s high concept ideas and stories would likely fall flat without that grounding connection. Throughout the film, our protagonist Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) desperately races through his own memories searching for a way to keep himself connected to his beloved Clementine (Kate Winslet) after irreversibly walking down a path of forgetting. Gondry excels here as he shifts the viewer between sweet, intimate moments and terrifying, half-aborted recollections of some of Joel and Clementine’s worst times. Maybe after going down that rabbit hole, it would be easy to see that the relationship is just not worth it, with the lacerating remarks, corrosive jealousy, unfounded distrust. But, there’s also the way her hair smells, the shy smiles beneath the sheet, how she looks in her flea market find. I’m not sure any of us really know the answer. (2004, 118 min, DCP Digital) [Drew Van Weelden]

Robinson Devor’s THE WOMAN CHASER (US)

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

Used car salesman Richard Hudson (Patrick Warburton) moves from San Francisco to Los Angeles and takes over the business and inventory of a car lot kissing distance from the now-landmark Capitol Records building in Hollywood. Boredom, a desire to make something more than money, and the assistance of his failed filmmaker stepfather (Paul Malevich) vault him into the movie business, where his intense artistic temperament ends in disaster. Adapted by director/screenwriter Robinson Devor from crime novelist Charles Willeford’s The Woman Chaser, the 1950s-set film has the feel of a 1990s film school graduate’s intellectual, ironic take on life: in other words, a perfect match with Devor, who has a BFA in film from Southern Methodist University and applied to study poetry with James Dickey. The film has almost nothing to do with the title, though not having read it, I can’t say whether that holds true for Willeford’s book. The black-and-white film works a lot of noir tropes like skewed camera angles and self-reflexive narration from Hudson, though his apocalyptic disillusionment feels pretty modern. The film isn’t really funny, at least to me, but it does seem inspired by Willeford’s credo: “Just tell the truth, and they’ll accuse you of writing black humor.” (1999, 90 min, Digital Projection) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Todd Haynes' MAY DECEMBER (US)

FACETS Cinema – See Venue website for showtimes

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 If We Picked the Oscars series. (2023, 117 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Wim Wenders' PERFECT DAYS (Japan/Germany)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

There is peace to be found in routine. That’s what Hirayama—and perhaps director Wim Wenders—would have you believe. Exquisitely brought to life by Koji Yakusho, Hirayama, an employee of the "Tokyo Toilet," guides us day by day through Wenders’ latest fiction endeavor, a leisurely diary of a film. The world of PERFECT DAYS follows its own internalized rhythms, lulling the audience into a network of patterns in navigating Hirayama’s days, perfect or otherwise, that unwind before us. The sun will always rise in a purple-orange sky, a can of coffee will always pop out of the vending machine, the plants will always get their morning mists of water, the leaves will always be brushed to the side, the public toilets spread throughout Tokyo will always receive Hirayama’s careful and rigorous cleaning, and the day will always end with dreams. Hirayama’s dreams—at least as Wenders shares them with us—are always in black-and-white, layered fragments of the day, coated in leaves and shadows, an abstracted reset of the film’s internal clock. Days blend into each other in a way that feels intricate yet inevitable, with the most glaring piece of conflict arising more than halfway through the runtime, Hirayama’s niece having run away from a life of affluence and loneliness. She prefers her uncle's life, which she sees as simple and noble. But unbeknown to most around him, Hirayama’s life is an iceberg, the solid routine of the day hiding depths of passion and loneliness underneath. There is constant reflection on his past, especially upon the mass of cassette tapes he has collected over the years and refuses to part with, there is the yearning towards the future with his voracious consumption of literature. But where does that leave the Hirayama of the present? In one moment of conversation (one of the few times Hirayama feigns to utter dialogue in the entire film), he offers up that "the world is made up of many worlds. Some are connected, some are not." In a moment of potent vulnerability near the film’s end, Yakusho offers up a rare moment of the bottom of the iceberg peeking out, the tough exterior of Hirayama breaking apart ever so briefly, as the sun rises on yet another day. Just like every other day, and still brand new. (2023, 123 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Wim Wenders' ANSELM (Germany/Documentary)

Music Box Theatre – Saturday, 11:15am

Of the auteurs who have ventured into the realm of 3D filmmaking, Wim Wenders is surely among the most astute in utilizing the format’s unique aesthetic properties. This should perhaps come as no surprise considering the august German director’s proven, decades-long mastery of fluid camerawork and dynamic mise-en-scène. Like PINA (2011), Wenders’ first 3D film and another documentary about a German artist, ANSELM features immersive images that don’t so much showcase the art as produce a specifically cinematic experience of and around it. The subject is Anselm Kiefer, a painter, sculptor, and photographer best known for creating monumental structures and mixed-media paintings incorporating such materials as straw and lead. Born toward the end of World War II and raised in the bombed-out city of Donaueschingen, Kiefer often grapples in his work with the legacy of Nazism and national memory as he confronts viewers with devastated landscapes, fascist visual motifs, Judeo-Christian symbols, and various signifiers of decay. Wenders and cinematographer Franz Lustig use 3D to emphasize the sheer scale of Kiefer’s work, as in an ingenious establishing shot in which the magnitude of one of his hangar-sized studios suddenly becomes clear when Kiefer enters the bottom of the frame the size of an ant. At other times, Wenders takes advantage of 3D’s dioramic rendering of depth by layering the screen with multiple planes, whether through cross-dissolves, superimpositions, or foreground/background juxtapositions. The material diversity and tactility he evokes—especially in his prismatic use of water, glass, smoke, and light beams from projectors—forms a continuity with the work of Kiefer. As we’re taken through the artist’s increasingly elephantine studios and exhibition spaces, culminating with a tour of his 200-acre compound in Barjac, France, the line between art, the environment, and our lived spaces dissolves; so too does the one between Kiefer’s and Wenders’ work. ANSELM may be skimpy to a fault on biographical detail, but it’s an entrancing sensory experience born from the cinematic alchemy of these two singular artists. (2023, 93 min, 3D DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]

Molly Manning Walker’s HOW TO HAVE SEX (UK)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – See Venue website for showtimes

Once upon a time I could have more than two drinks and still enjoy being alive the next day. Now even the thought of alcohol is enough to give me a headache, so I’ve more or less come to terms with my party days being properly behind me. But I sometimes see a piece of media that does make me miss the uninhibited fun I had during that time, and Molly Manning Walker’s HOW TO HAVE SEX is the latest such work to add a wistful sheen to those otherwise hazy recollections. Sixteen-year-old Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce) and her best friends Skye (Lara Peake) and Em (Enva Lewis) travel from Britain to the resort town of Malia, on the Greek island of Crete, for a party holiday following year-end exams; at their hotel they befriend some guys staying next door, and it seems Tara may have found a candidate or two to help with her goal of losing her virginity on the trip. The partying scenes, wherein the girls drink, dance and laugh in such a way that one only can when their future looms long in front of them, are infectious. It’s hard to take your eyes off McKenna-Bruce in particular, whose beaded necklace spelling out the word angel seems more to be a description than an accessory, her big eyes and roundish face epitomizing the ebullient innocence of youth, even as she chain smokes. The parts of the film in which the girls and their new friends party uninhibitedly are pure mise-en-scene, the coming-of-age film given frenetic, kaleidoscopic, haphazardly wrought compositions worthy of the complexities therein. Reminiscent of Harmony Korine’s SPRING BREAKERS during its first half, HOW TO HAVE SEX initially seems rather light-hearted, consumed, like a young person, with its own corybantic existence. This is to say the stakes feel relatively low, and I think it’s better during these parts wholly consumed with its own atmosphere. It may be because Manning Walker, in a feature debut inspired by her own teenage girls’ trips, had to this point worked as a cinematographer. The film is all style, which as a result becomes its substance; when it tries to introduce actual gravitas by way of Tara’s sexual encounters with one of the neighboring party boys—the first of dubious consent at best, the other full-on assault—the tone understandably shifts, but the film overall becomes enervated, not fully committing to the accordant intensity perhaps necessitated by this latter half. But maybe that’s the point and, for whatever reason, it just doesn’t resonate with this critic specifically. Far be it from me to tell anyone exactly how such traumatic experiences should be depicted. But the joie de vivre evinced beforehand, especially when juxtaposed with the cruel realities of life and adulthood, and the patriarchal culture that threatens to snuff out its light for women in particular, is stunning. (2024, 91 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Jonathan Glazer’s THE ZONE OF INTEREST (UK/US/Poland)

Various Cinemas – See Venue websites for showtimes

The term “the zone of interest,” the designation the Nazis applied to the Auschwitz extermination camp and adjacent areas, might as well apply to the robust activity surrounding this ultimate human evil by artists and the larger cultural community. The late British writer Martin Amis used the term for his 2014 novel, and now we have director/screenwriter Jonathan Glazer’s very loose adaptation of Amis’ book as a major motion picture. Whereas Amis focused on personal relationships between pseudonymous and fictional versions of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, his wife Hedwig, and an SS officer, Glazer chose an observational approach to the historical Höss family, imagining what living in a villa directly abutting Auschwitz might have been like for them and those who worked for them. Filmed at Auschwitz primarily in an accurate reconstruction of the villa the Höss family occupied, Glazer and cinematographer Łukasz Żal eschewed conventional shooting techniques. They instead operated static, hidden cameras that could be manipulated remotely, and used natural light whenever possible. They also had no interest in giving us the usual horror show. Instead, Glazer leaned on Johnnie Burn’s sound design of gunfire, screams, and dogs, and only what camp structures could be seen from the Höss villa, to evoke the Holocaust. For example, the Höss family is hosting a children’s party in the vast garden of which Hedwig is so proud. As the children play, a cloud of steam moves in a line across the top of the camp wall—yet another train transporting victims to the slaughter. What Glazer concentrated on what he thought mattered to Rudolf (Christian Friedel) and Hedwig (Sandra Hüller)—career success and the good life—and if they had to live near and work in a human abattoir, well, that was the price of admission. Höss was reportedly a cold-blooded, hands-on killer early in his career, but Christian Friedel didn’t play this side of his character. Here, Rudolf seems like a loving father who reads to his daughters at night, is a good companion to his wife, and is well regarded by his fellow SS officers. His deeper depravity comes though chillingly during a late-night phone call with Hedwig. He eagerly shares his excitement that the deportation of up to 700,000 Hungarian Jews for extermination and slave selection will bear the name Operation Höss. Sandra Hüller as Hedwig projects a prosaic personality motivated by greed and social position. She seems like a Mother Courage pushing heedlessly through every circumstance to get what she wants, and is convinced that their living arrangement is doing nothing to harm her “strong, healthy, happy” children, despite the film’s ample evidence to the contrary. Little is known about the real Hedwig Höss, so this depiction seems like another example of demonizing mothers for fun and profit and the only questionable choice in an almost flawless movie. The remarkable score by Mica Levi is a haunting mélange of electronic and choral music. Glazer uses her score sparingly, however, in attempts to foreground the murdered at moments when we may be lulled by the mundane screen action. (I highly recommend you watch through the credits to listen to her audaciously beautiful score in its fullness.) In the end, a final, puzzling scene takes place largely in the present. I’ll leave its meaning to your own interpretation, but the familiar bourgeois lives Glazer has shown offers us a chance to reflect on our own unknowing callousness in the face of the suffering others endure for our convenience. (2023, 105 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

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

Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 6pm

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]

🎞️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ B-Fest
B-Fest, a 24-hour marathon of b-movies held by A&O Productions at Northwestern University's Norris University Center McCormick Auditorium (1999 Campus Dr.) in Evanston, Illinois, takes place Friday to Saturday from 6pm to 6pm. More info here.

⚫ 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 Filmmakers
The Art Out of Time multimedia program takes place Friday and Saturday, 7pm, as part of Chicago Filmmakers’ special series of 50th anniversary retrospective programming. More info here. 

⚫ Chicago Film Society at Northeastern Illinois University
Phil Karlson’s 1962 Elvis Presley boxing picture KID GALAHAD (96 min, 35mm) screens Wednesday, 7:30pm, preceded by a 10-minute Elvis trailer reel (35mm). More info here.

⚫ Chicago Public Library
View all screenings taking place at Chicago Public Library branches here.

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Xavier Dolan’s 2014 film MOMMY (139 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday, 7pm, as part of the Mommy Issues: Freudian Relationships in Film series.

Gregg Araki’s 2004 film MYSTERIOUS SKIN (105 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday, 9:30pm, as part of the Mirroring series.

Eduardo Coutinho’s 1984 film TWENTY YEARS LATER (119 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday, 7pm, as part of the Antropofagia: Reinventing Class and Race in Brazilian Cinema series.

Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1991 film THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONIQUE (98 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 7pm, also as part of the Mirroring series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
The 2024 Oscar-Nominated Documentary Shorts begin screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

Ang Lee’s 2007 film LUST, CAUTION (158 min, 35mm) screens Sunday, 4:15pm, also as part of the Hot & Heavy series.

Bong Joon-ho’s 2013 film SNOWPIERCER (127 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 6pm, as part of the Cli-Fi lecture series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Tommy Wiseau’s 2003 cult classic THE ROOM (99 min, 35mm) screens Friday at midnight, and Jim Sharman’s 1975 cult classic THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (100 min, 35mm) screens Saturday at Midnight.

Antonio Margheriti’s 1970 spaghetti Western AND GOD SAID TO CAIN (101 min, DCP Digital) also screens saturday at midnight. Programmed and presented by the Front Row and Oscarbate.

Nisha Pahuja’s 2022 documentary TO KILL A TIGER (127 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday at 11:30am.

Tim Story’s 2002 film BARBERSHOP (102 min, 35mm) screens Tuesday, 7:15pm, as part of the Melanin, Roots, and Culture series.

Teresa Sutherland’s 2023 horror film LOVELY, DARK, AND DEEP (87 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday at 9:15pm. 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

⚫ Media Burn Archive
Modern Farm and Magic: Bonnie Ora Sherk and 1970s San Francisco, a virtual screening/discussion featuring the work of Bonnie Ora Sherk (1945-2021), takes place Thursday at 6pm. Presented in conjunction with an exhibition of her work at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture and including a discussion with the exhibition’s curator Tanya Zimbardo and Steve Seid (retired curator, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive). Registration required. More info here.

⚫ VDB TV
Beyond the Dust: Colonial Legacy in the Desert, programmed by Martí Madaula Esquirol, 2023 - 2024 Graduate Curatorial Fellow at the Video Data Bank, and School of the Art Institute of Chicago MFA candidate in Film, Video, New Media, and Animation, screens for free on VDB TV. Includes short works by More info here.

CINE-LIST: February 16 - February 22, 2024

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, Rob Christopher, Maxwell Courtright, Kyle Cubr, John Dickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Ben Kaye, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Raphael Jose Martinez, Doug McLaren, Scott Pfeiffer, Drew Van Weelden, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Candace Wirt