:: FRIDAY, MARCH 10 - THURSDAY, MARCH 16 ::

🇪🇺 THE CHICAGO EUROPEAN UNION FILM FESTIVAL AT THE GENE SISKEL FILM CENTER

The Gene Siskel Film Center’s 26th annual showcase of new films from the European Union continues this week and runs through the end of March. Below are reviews of select films with showtimes through Thursday. Check back next week for further coverage of the festival. More information and a complete schedule can be found here.

Emanuele Crialese’s L’IMMENSITÀ (Italy)
Friday, 6pm
If Penélope Cruz is the Sophia Loren of her generation, then this may be her TWO WOMEN—the film that lets her deliver an instantly iconic characterization of motherhood. L’IMMENSITÀ is Emanuele Crialese’s autobiographical drama about a well-to-do family coming apart in 1970s Italy, and Cruz anchors the work as Clara, a wife and mother who withstands an abusive marriage in order to be close to her three kids, whom she loves with heroic might. Crialese honors the children’s perspective most of the time, so the episodes of abuse are limited to the few scenes they witness (those scenes are plenty harrowing, however). Generally, it’s one of those bittersweet celebration of childhood movies that the Italians are especially good at making, with naturalistic scenes of kids playing in groups, kids discovering physical intimacy, and kids rebounding from tragedy. There’s at least one good fantasy sequence too, a musical number where Cruz and the kids ham it up for the camera like all those brats in LICORICE PIZZA. The fantasy sequence specifically belongs to Adri, a preteen who’s first starting to assert his gender identity, and one thing that makes L’IMMENSITÀ distinctive is how it acknowledges the character’s imagination as both a talent and an escape from traumatic situations. Clara is wholly supportive of Adri in his gender affirmation and provides him not only emotional support; she downright spoils him whenever she can. Cruz plays the role like a diva, and this seems fitting, given the towering role Clara plays in Adri’s life. Indeed, the film derives so much of its power from the relationship between mother and son that it could be classified as a love story. (2022, 98 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Juraj Lerotić’s SAFE PLACE (Croatia)
Saturday, 7:30pm
The press materials for SAFE PLACE note that writer-director-star Juraj Lerotić drew the story from his own life and plays a fictionalized version of himself in the film. It’s critical to know that going in, because it contextualizes SAFE PLACE as a form of cinematic therapy and meta-cinematic provocation. On one level, the movie—about Lerotić’s and his mother’s efforts to keep his brother from harming himself in the immediate aftermath of a suicide attempt—is a realistic and often moving drama that’s somewhat reminiscent of the Romanian New Wave. It’s easy to get absorbed in Lerotić’s detailed portrait of a family in crisis and the inadequate mental health services that they try to go to for help; their hellacious trek through hospitals and ugly apartments specifically recalls Cristi Puiu’s THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU (2005). On another level, SAFE PLACE asks us to consider why Lerotić has dramatized these particular moments and cast himself in this particular way. And what does he want from us in return for dramatizing these events? Empathy? Forgiveness? General concern for the state of mental health services in Croatia? It’s hard to say, and Lerotić, as a director, avoids the sort of emotional set-ups and follow-throughs that steer audience sympathy toward one character over another. If anything, his predilection for off-center compositions that grant a lot of negative space to the top half of the frame has the effect of making it seem like we’re looking at the characters under a microscope. Perhaps that’s the purpose of Lerotić’s re-enactment: placing himself and his family in a position in which we’re better able to evaluate them. (2022, 102 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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João Pedro Rodrigues’ WILL-O’-THE-WISP (Portugal)
Sunday, 1:30pm
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. (2022, 67 min, DCP) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
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Ruth Beckerman's MUTZENBACHER (Austria/Documentary)
Tuesday, 6pm
Though pretty plain to look at, MUTZENBACHER is difficult work on a conceptual level. The film catalogs 100 men as they audition for a film adaptation of Josephine Mutzenbacher, an Austrian erotic novel attributed to Felix Saiten, author of Bambi. The 1906 book describes the sexual exploits of a girl from the ages of 5 to 13 and is generally considered to be child pornography, albeit of an uncommonly literary variety. As such, the book has a complicated reputation in German literature, being banned periodically and labeled as obscene in both Germany and Austria throughout the 20th century. Paradoxically, as appreciation for the book’s literary merit has increased over time (due, in part, to the stately, of-its-time prose that now leads some passages of the book to read as satire) more judgment has been brought towards its sexual content, and its depiction (by an adult, male author) of a supposedly autonomous and sexually liberated child. Thus, the notion of any filmmaker adapting it would draw suspicion. That so many men answered a fairly anonymous casting call to adapt it is even more suspicious, and therein lies Ruth Beckerman’s real project. The men are the real subjects here; they filter our understanding of the text and provide a cross-section of the male sexual psyche. Though a range of ages is represented, the bulk of the subjects are middle-aged or older, and many speak with a nostalgic quality about their own sex lives. As they opine on contemporary sexuality, some say they feel sexual free-spiritedness is linked with their own ability to do what they please, and the film takes on a queasy, post-#MeToo relevance as the men complain about the nebulous “nowadays,” where prudish censorship reigns supreme, apparently. As far as the actual literature is concerned, some of the men feel the text justifies the content because of its acuity as literature. This is key for understanding Beckerman’s focus on legitimizing contexts, as the men feel an extra comfort with the material not only because it is “great” literature, but because this project is being led by a woman director. On a sickly pink casting couch that calls to mind internet porn, there’s a reversal of the gendered power dynamics. The men show up in good faith for an audition, trusting the director’s vision, only to be ambushed by personal and literary discussion that reveals their true opinions on the text. While Beckerman’s thesis beyond setting up this sandbox isn’t clear, it’s a fascinating project that’s provocative in its deceptively relaxed context, a reflective space where viewers may find themselves asking similarly difficult questions. (2022, 100 min, DCP Digital) [Maxwell Courtright]
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László Csuja and Anna Nemes’ GENTLE (Hungary)
Wednesday, 6pm
I’ve been a fan of body-building since before Arnold Schwartzenegger gracefully flung his massive arms through a port de bras at the ballet barre in the 1977 documentary PUMPING IRON. While Schwartzenegger certainly took the world by storm, the esoteric art in which he competed did not. Looked on as something freakish, especially when women take it up, body-building doesn’t garner massive fan bases, billion-dollar media deals, multimillion-dollar salaries, and all the other perks that other sports enjoy. Perhaps the most understandable reason for people to compete in body-building at an elite level is voiced by Ádám (György Turós), a former Mr. Olympia and the trainer and boyfriend of GENTLE’s central character, Edina (Eszter Csonka): being “the best in the world at something.” When we first meet Edina, she is panting with fright at having to compete in a qualifying event for Ms. Olympia. Ádám calms her down and leads her toward the stage, where her poses bring cheers from the audience and a decisive win. From that point on, her life will be spent in heavy aerobic and anaerobic training, denying herself food she wants, and trying to find the money to pay for the expensive drugs and supplements she uses to stay bulked up. While Ádám fails to land a side gig as an exotic dancer to earn the money they need and quickly falls out of the narrative when he is not with Edina, Edina pursues a similar approach as a sex worker (no penetration) who fulfills the fantasies of men who like bodies like hers. Surprisingly, GENTLE is just that—a delicate film that carries a heavy message. Edina and Ádám have a genuinely loving relationship, but we feel that she may have become a bodybuilder to please him and help him relive his former glory days. Her favorite client prefers to interact with her as his mother and playmate, beginning their arrangement with a game of hide-and-seek in a forested area. This kink seems to appeal to the maternal nature she reveals when she visits her family. Edina is a people pleaser, which can cause problems for anyone; in her case, it is actually life-threatening because of what she is doing to her body. All of the performances in GENTLE are excellent (Turós is an actor who was a competitive bodybuilder and is a trainer in the sport), but special kudos go to Csonka, a first-time actor who lends veracity to her portrayal not only because she is a real bodybuilder, but also because her understated emotional life comes through to us and gains our affection and concern. Her quiet humanity is the very antithesis of what most people think when they think of women bodybuilders. Highly recommended. (2022, 91 min, Digital Projection) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Ove Musting’s KALEV (Estonia)
Thursday, 8:15pm
Ove Musting’s debut feature dramatizes the days leading up to the Estonian basketball team’s victory in the last-ever championship of the USSR league in 1991. Faced with public pressure not to compete with their nation’s imminent declaration of independence, the coaches and players must grapple not only with where they stand politically, but also economically and personally. The film effectively portrays the paltry conditions and beggars’ wages these men dealt with in the waning days of a dying empire. The coach sells vodka on the black market to keep the stadium lights on as his players dream of earning millions in the West. When the team brings in an aging player from the US for one stretch of the playoffs, he comments that he thought he was poor growing up in a Detroit ghetto until he came to the Eastern Bloc. The crumbling Brutalist architecture and low-level grifting is evoked much more vividly than anything happening on the court. The seismic societal changes away from the stadium hold much higher stakes than the cheap crystal trophy the players hoist in the end. When it shatters into pieces after being dropped moments later, the symbolism is beyond heavy-handed. But in view of Russia’s current desperate attempt to Krazy Glue the fragments of the Soviet Union back together, perhaps the obvious message is what’s necessary at this moment. (2022, 91 min, DCP Digital) [Dmitry Samarov]

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Working, Weaving, Filming (Mexico/Colombia/Shorts)

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

These are labor films—films that depict labor. One might hear that phrase and think of films about labor struggles—and that applies to these works as well, as struggle is too often poised with labor in our capitalistic society and therefore near synonymous—but the three shorts in this program center on the act itself and the fruits of such endeavors. Two short-ish films delineate the program: Naomi Uman’s LECHE (1988, 30 min, 16mm) and Laura Huertas Millán’s LA LIBERTAD (2017, 30 min, Digital Projection). LECHE abstrusely depicts a family of dairy farmers in Aguascalientes, Mexico, with whom Uman worked and lived for a year while making the film. A hallmark of Uman’s work is an intense, personal relationship with both its subject and its being; she hand processed the film while making it, hanging it to dry on a clothesline. Divided into vignettes, the film merges biographical information about its filial subjects with stark depictions of their endless laboring and a pragmatic appreciation for the land they work on (plus the many cows that yield their bounty). The cloudy black-and-white cinematography and chicken-scratch intertitles add a dreamlike quality, but the voiceover narration—occasional silence-breaking orations from the family and the detailing of whimsical yet functional information (such as the cows’ names)—help bring it back down to earth. Uman delicately balances the burden of extensive physical labor and the weathered joy of self-sustainment. Her short film HAND EYE COORDINATION (2002, 10 min, 16mm) also screens in the program. A film that “tells the story of its own making,” it visually interprets the physical processes of this specific act of creation. The collagelike amalgamation of original and found footage evokes a sense of disembodiment, as if the film is being made on an assembly line. Lissom images of different hands partaking in its creation speak to the collaboration that goes into making a film, the efforts of many faceless people whose handiwork allows a select few to shine. A distinct product of handiwork is the focus of Millán’s LA LIBERTAD, borne of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab and centered on a group of indigenous weavers in Mexico who work with a pre-Hispanic technique—the backstrap loom—to create intricate pieces of textile art. This film explores the ecstasy of creation, a seeming evolution of labor; the featured artists discuss creation as freedom, a rather simple concept that epitomizes a base level of autonomy owed to every human being. A type of labor, then, is being viewed almost as an act of subversion, embracing it as having the potential to bring out what burns inside. There are labor struggles, yes, but there are labor joys as well. The films in this program interrogate a breadth of sensations respective to the act and the ways it permeates our lives, big and small. With an introduction by Cordelia Rizzo (Ph.D. in Performance Studies at Northwestern University). [Kat Sachs]

Orson Welles' THE TRIAL (International)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

Casting a glib and voluble Anthony Perkins in the role of Josef K., a man compelled to court by a nebulous governmental authority who is ignorant of any crime, provides for a decidedly strange and personal adaptation of Kafka's unfinished story. At times a confounding film, Orson Welles' loose adaptation offers an unsettling and haunting expression of the modern experience. By putting K—and by extension the audience—into byzantine governmental systems, nightmarish and anonymous spaces, and contact with people sometimes better described as moving bodies, Welles "confronts the corruptions and self-deceptions of the contemporary world." Iconic images abound through Welles' aesthetic mastery, using sets and later (when the money ran out) abandoned locales in Paris, Zagreb, and Rome; the scale of an office floor the size of an airplane hangar is astonishing. Welles himself—also appearing as K's lawyer—is monumental in scale as well, looming over the picture in all his anxiety and discontent. (1962, 118 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Brian Welesko]

Walter Hill’s 48 HRS. (US)

Music Box Theatre – Friday and Saturday, Midnight

One of the biggest hits of Walter Hill’s career, 48 HRS. is constructed around a series of tensions and compromises. It’s a mix of two genres, the action movie and the comedy; the tone is a cross between the slick despair of ‘40s and ‘50s film noir and the gritty cynicism of post-‘60s exploitation cinema; viewer sympathy is frequently divided between the two leads; and the central relationship embodies (and is largely informed by) interracial strife in society at large. The film’s production history all but ensured that it would wind up an incoherent text: the script, which was in development for years, underwent multiple rewrites before Hill and company decided to make the lead characters a cop and a criminal (as opposed to just two cops), and rewrites continued throughout the shoot. Nick Nolte claims that he and Eddie Murphy improvised most of their dialogue, and that doesn’t sound like much of a stretch, given that the filmmakers didn’t commit to making the movie funny until around the time photography began. That 48 HRS. holds together as well as it does says a lot about Hill’s talent as a director and the power that Nolte and Murphy held over audiences at this point in their careers. A scholar of American genre cinema, Hill channels some aspect of the best of postwar US crime movies in practically every scene: an early confrontation between Nolte and his girlfriend, in which the two debate and break down certain macho stereotypes, feels like a 1980s update on the kind of political interruptions the punctuate Samuel Fuller’s groundbreaking ’50s work; the parade of masculine character actors giving colorful turns as policemen and crooks harkens back to Robert Siodmak’s ‘40s output; and Murphy’s big scene in a redneck bar delivers the kind of bracing racial confrontation one associates with ‘70s blaxploitation classics. (Hill films that scene, like an early showstopper in a police station, in a complicated yet unostentatious long take worthy of Howard Hawks.) This was Murphy’s first film, and it’s easy to see why it made him a star, though one reason why he impresses as much as he does is because of how he holds his own against Nolte, whose performance as a post-Popeye Doyle brutalist is so believably ugly that it’s cathartic to see Murphy undermine it with humor. (1982, 96 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Sofia Coppola's LOST IN TRANSLATION (US/Japan)

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

LOST IN TRANSLATION is to some early-2000s indie film aficionados what certain Yo La Tengo and Wilco albums are to record store clerks and Gen Z vinyl collectors: a piece of art which exemplifies the era in which it was made, advancing an aesthetic that can be appreciated by viewers who were college-aged at the time of its release and younger cinephiles obsessively posting screen grabs of Scarlett Johansson in a wig with Bill Murray. If the film’s beautiful photography of scenic Tokyo isn't enough of a selling point, then Sofia Coppola’s expertise in crafting emotionally driven narratives makes this essential viewing. Coppola is uninterested in her characters' everyday activities; she opts instead to explore their shortcomings, their unattainable expectations, and other disappointments that have bubbled to the surface of their lives. For Johansson fans, the film contains one of her earliest and most impressive leading roles as Charlotte, an unemployed graduate of Yale’s philosophy program who aimlessly wanders Tokyo, trying to develop a better understanding of her mixed feelings about her marriage and career. For Murray fans, this delivers another classic character of his: former movie star Bob Harris, who spends his trip drowning both familial problems and dissatisfaction with successes in Suntory, the alcohol that he's promoting in Japan. Coppola’s writing really excels in the unspoken, awkward chemistry that fills each scene. The platonic nature of the film’s central relationship seems like it could tip at any time; one wonders how things could have been different for the characters had they met under different circumstances, in a different place, or in a different time. As this relationship unfolds, Coppola invites us to explore our own feelings of self-doubt and regret through the lens of two hyperspecific, yet endlessly relatable characterizations—a technique which earlier melancholic filmmakers passed down to her and which younger filmmakers she's influenced have tried with mixed results to borrow. Screening as part of the Sofia Coppola March Matinees. (2003, 120 min, 35mm) [Michael Bates]

David Cronenberg's VIDEODROME (Canada)

Music Box Theatre – Wednesday, 9:30pm

Since his first feature, 1975's SHIVERS, David Cronenberg has focused on the concept of "body horror"—the idea that the human body is not a self-sustaining entity, but rather a portal capable of being penetrated by both physical and metaphorical "diseases" that reduce the human to his basic animalistic desires for sex and power. VIDEODROME is the culmination of the theme of sexual frenzy interlaced with violence that Cronenberg had explored in both SHIVERS and his subsequent film, RABID (1977). While both of those earlier works deal with "real" events (disease epidemics), VIDEODROME takes a more metaphorical and overtly intellectual approach. James Woods stars as Max Renn, the owner of a sleazy cable station that specializes in hypersexual and violent programming. Renn has discovered a low-fi broadcast feed of a show called "Videodrome," in which women are tortured and killed by cloaked men. Renn decides that "Videodrome" is exactly what his audience craves and sets out to find the producer. Although warned by his assistant that "Videodrome" is much more sinister than it seems, Max continues his search and becomes obsessed with watching the show. Soon the world of "Videodrome" starts to become all too real, and Max's body begins to undergo a series of changes, including developing a VCR in his stomach. The film was released a year before the home video craze swept North America, but it serves as a haunting prediction of how video would revolutionize home entertainment and, more importantly, the way in which people would become increasingly dependent on audio/video technology. Video became the first organic technology; it allowed for personalized "controlled viewing" (stop, pause, rewind) and thus the perfect device for Cronenberg to exploit. The same video could be watched in completely different ways by different people, making it a wholly different experience for each viewer. The video itself would become a literal extension of the viewer's interests. Cronenberg's use of this concept in VIDEODROME is both obvious (Max literally becomes the VCR) and subversive: Cronenberg's criticism doesn't lie with a general dislike or fear of how video can impact the sense of the individual; rather that the connection that is able to be forged between man and machine disconnects him from the conscious linear world. The technologies in his films (such as the teleport machine in THE FLY, the video game system in eXistenz, and the videotape in VIDEODROME) all represent a late 20th century obsession with excess and escapism; his horrors are the dangers that come from living in a "reality" that is a product of technological obsession. Renn's transformation into a piece of technology, whose only purpose is to execute commands programmed into him by the insertion of a videotape, is a modern-day cautionary tale; the audience is forced to reflect on Renn's failure to distinguish between "Videodrome" as a product and "Videodrome" as life. Cronenberg cleverly confuses those two opposites to the point that they become fused. The hope is that the audience can again separate them. Presented by The Brewed, an Avondale coffee shop, in celebration of their one-year anniversary. (1983, 89 min, DCP Digital) [Joe Rubin]

Michael Morris' TO LESLIE (US)

FACETS Cinema – Friday, Saturday, and Sunday; See Venue website for showtimes

Winning $190,000 in a lottery might seem like the luckiest break most people could have. When combined with a serious addiction, however, heartache and ruin are likely to follow. This is the premise of director Michael Morris’ affecting film TO LESLIE. Andrea Riseborough gives a stunning and complex performance as a West Texas single mom whose sudden windfall evaporates in six short years in a haze of booze and drugs. Her fed-up and deeply hurt son and relatives refuse to take her in off the streets, and her return to the hometown where she bought her winning lottery ticket is greeted with vengeful cruelty. The characters created by screenwriter Ryan Binaco are brought believably fleshed out by the talents of Allison Janney, Marc Maron, Andre Royo, Stephen Root, and a raft of skillful supporting actors who create an entire world that is so specific yet so relatable. Morris favors Riseborough with several close-ups during moments when Leslie is faced with confusing decisions, and you can practically hear the thoughts in her head, so completely does Riseborough breathe life into her. There is a bit too much short-handing and tidying up at the end, but I can’t say I was sorry to experience some much-needed uplift. Leslie didn’t start out having a plan for the money she won, but in the end, losing everything helped her forge a life worth living. (2022, 119 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Ninja Thyberg's PLEASURE (Sweden)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6pm

Centered around an excellent main performance, PLEASURE is most striking for its bluntness about its subject matter. It’s essentially a familiar Hollywood story about reinventing yourself and finding stardom. But mapped onto the adult film industry, that story develops a lot of thematic nuances about power dynamics, not just in relation to a woman’s precarious position in a predominantly male-run industry, but also an industry grounded in capitalism—and how those two things are intricately connected. Landing in LA from Sweden with an alias at the ready, Bella Cherry (Sofia Kappel) is keen to become a famous porn star. She jumps right into the industry but quickly realizes she has a lot to learn, especially about the extreme misogyny she faces. She’s ambitious, though, and shifts her expectations, finding ways to stand up for herself, even if that means breaking with her personal limitations. While it isn’t a documentary, PLEASURE often feels like one—it even features real-life porn stars in the cast. Shot with bright reality show lighting, it reflects the cinematography of the adult film industry—even using those camera styles in explicit scenes featuring porn shoots. This documentary feel is also baked into the narrative, which follows Bella’s journey in vignettes that gradually build on one another, complicating the film’s themes right up until the final moment. Director Ninja Thyberg does an amazing job balancing a deceptively straightforward plot with compelling undertones. Sofia Kappel is a revelation, effortlessly shifting emotions as Bella Cherry experiences empowering moments as well as horrifyingly abusive ones; it’s a subtle performance, but it’s never unclear how the character is feeling at any given point. She’s rarely not onscreen and, especially for a first performance, impressively carries the film. Screening as part of professor Daniel R. Quiles’ Gore Capitalism lecture series. (2021, 105 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Hayao Miyazki’s LUPIN III: THE CASTLE OF CAGLIOSTRO (Japan/Animation)

FACETS Cinema – Thursday, 7pm

The first theatrical feature for which the great Hayao Miyazaki received directorial credit, THE CASTLE OF CAGLIOSTRO grew out of Miyazaki’s work on the Lupin III TV series (1971-72), an animated spin-off of Monkey Punch’s hugely popular manga series, which in turn was inspired by the Arsène Lupin stories by French author Maurice Leblanc. Given how far into global popular culture the film’s roots extend, it’s remarkable how much it feels like a Miyazaki work proper. The glorious set pieces demonstrate the director’s distinctive talents for building and sustaining suspense (tellingly, Steven Spielberg has long expressed admiration for them), while the winning humor reflects his good-natured humanism. In fact, Miyazaki received some flak for softening the edges on the character of career thief Arsène Lupin, who was typically portrayed as a cynical rogue but in this film emerges as a rake with a heart of gold. Yet the focus of CAGLIOSTRO isn’t really on Lupin (or Wolf, as he’s called here), but rather on the intricate settings and narrative twists, which conjure up an imaginary version of Europe to get lost in. Western culture is full of fantastical visions of the East; Miyazaki’s fantastical visions of the West (which arguably reach their apotheosis in HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE) provide fascinating counterparts to the Orientalist tradition. CAGLIOSTRO begins in medias res, as Lupin and his sidekick flee a casino on the Riviera in a car full of stolen money, the police following closely behind. During a rousing chase along mountain roads, the hero realizes the stolen money is counterfeit. He deduces that the phony bills were made in the small, fictional country of Cagliostro, then decides to head there and take advantage of the counterfeit printing presses. Lupin’s travels lead him to the title location, an immaculately designed fortress on the water marked by towering edifices, narrow spires, and lots of secret passages. Once inside, he encounters a princess who’s being forced to marry a devious count (one of the few purely evil characters in Miyazaki’s filmography); this news awakens the chivalrous hero in Lupin, and he plots to stop the wedding while seeking the castle’s fabled treasure. Naturally, he succeeds on both counts, but as Miyazaki has shown throughout his career, great storytelling has little to do with whether the outcome is surprising and much more to do with the emotional significance granted to every object, complication, and bit of characterization. Screening as part of the FACETS Anime Club, a perk of the Film Club membership. (1979, 102 min, Format TBD) [Ben Sachs]

Colm Bairéad’s THE QUIET GIRL (Ireland)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

I was a quiet child. Out of some combination of shyness, sullenness, and the preference for private experience, I preferred keeping to myself. Other formerly (or currently!) introverted viewers should be able to find some part of themselves reflected in THE QUIET GIRL, which speaks the language of childhood reticence. While I grew up in a loving family, the same cannot be said for nine-year-old Cáit (ethereal newcomer Catherine Clinch), who is ignored and belittled by both her parents and her gaggle of siblings. With another child on the way, her parents send her to live with a pair of middle-aged cousins on their farm. Cáit finds herself under the guardianship of Eibhlín (Carrie Crowley), whose compassionate, patient, and attentive care seems alien compared to how the girl is treated by her callous mother. Cáit’s new, more nurturing environment is delineated by production designer Emma Lowney and cinematographer Kate McCullough through the use of warm yellows, soft sunlight, and the emerald green of the nearby woods, evoking an almost magical bucolic haven unlike the dimly-lit interiors of Cáit’s family home. Although she’s showered with affection she’s never felt before, Cáit can’t quite shake her melancholy, especially after she discovers a secret her caretaker has been concealing from her. THE QUIET GIRL contains few surprises, and its alignment with Cáit’s point of view dictates its modest scope and affect. Still, Bairéad finds virtue in simplicity, tenderness, and pain in placid images. His understated style and narrative minimalism lead to a finale that is all the more potent for being relatively emotionally eruptive, as reservoirs of unspoken feelings come crashing, gently but emphatically, to the surface. (2022, 95 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]

Oscar-Nominated Documentary Short Films

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 12:30pm

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

Oscar-Nominated Live Action Short Films

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 5:30pm and Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

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

🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
ALSO SCREENING

 ⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Inés Toharia Terán’s 2022 documentary FILM, THE LIVING RECORD OF OUR MEMORY (120 min, DCP Digital) opens and the Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts continues. See Venue website for showtimes.

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

The National Theatre Live presentation of Lyndsey Turner’s 2023 production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (170 min, Digital Projection) screens on Saturday and Sunday at 2pm. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Davy Chou’s 2022 South Korean film RETURN TO SEOUL (115 min, DCP Digital) continues. See Venue website for showtimes.

Edward Berger’s 2022 British film ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT (148 min, 35mm) screens on Friday at 1pm; Saturday at 6:20pm; and Sunday at 1:45pm.

Music Box of Horrors presents Richard Loncraine’s 1977 film THE HAUNTING OF JULIA (98 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) on Friday at 9:30pm and Lamont Johnson’s 1972 film YOU’LL LIKE MY MOTHER (92 min, New DCP Digital Restoration) on Saturday at 9:30pm, both with introductions from author/filmmaker Kier-La Janisse.

A new HD remaster of Fabrice du Welz’s 2004 horror film CALVAIRE (88 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday and Saturday at midnight.

Hayao Miyazaki’s 2001 animated film SPIRITED AWAY (125 min, 35mm) screens Monday, 7pm, as part of the Clean Plate Club: A Food and Film series. Note that the ticket with entrée option is sold out. Ang Lee’s 1994 film EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN (124 min, 35mm) screens Tuesday, 7pm, as part of the series, with a ticket and entrée option (Chef's Special Cocktail Bar serving cashew chicken) still available.

David Frankel’s 2006 film THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA (109 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday at 9:45pm. Presented by Rated Q and Ramona Slick - A Celebration of Queer, Camp, & Cult Cinema, with a preshow drinks and DJ in the Music Box Lounge at 9pm. More info on all screenings and events here.

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

CINE-LIST: March 10 - March 16, 2023

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Michael Bates, Maxwell Courtright, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Joe Rubin, Dmitry Samarov, Brian Welesko