☀️ THE 39TH CHICAGO LATINO FILM FESTIVAL
One of the best in the city, the annual Chicago Latino Film Festival continues through Sunday, April 23, at Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema (2828 N. Clark St.) in Lakeview. Below are reviews for select titles playing this week. For more information, including the complete schedule and details about the short films accompanying each feature, visit the festival website here.
Joaquín Mauad’s LIGHT YEARS (Uruguay)
Friday, 6pm and Sunday, 3:45pm
The spirit behind every Uruguayan comedy I’ve seen is so genial and relaxed that I can’t think of one that I wouldn’t watch again. LIGHT YEARS is no exception. As in most films in this little genre that could, the narrative stakes are refreshingly low by North American standards; it may be for this reason that its narrative ebbs and flows feel closer to those of real life than what we find in typical Hollywood comedies. Still, LIGHT YEARS is no “celebration of the everyday.” Cowriter-director Joaquín Mauad aligns his sympathies with the world’s eccentrics and slackers—the everyday life considered here is very much of a Type B nature. In summary, LIGHT YEARS sounds pretty basic: three estranged 30-ish siblings reunite in Montevideo to sell the home in western Uruguay where they grew up; their car breaks down en route, and the three end up settling their differences while they wait for the trip to resume. Yet the film is distinctive for its unpredictable characterizations, which come part and parcel with its accepting attitude. Mateo, one of the siblings, is a schizophrenic and also a very good poet; Belén is the most selfish of the siblings (she moved to Spain right after their mother died, leaving Mateo and their sister Maria to tie up loose ends), but in stressful situations she proves herself level-headed and sympathetic. The family that takes them in when their car breaks down may be the most interesting characters in the film. When they tell the siblings their backstory over dinner, their past seems so fascinatingly complicated that you could easily imagine another movie that's just about them. This development reflects a winning curiosity about how other people live, which is as integral to Uruguayan comedies as their focus on downtime and boredom. LIGHT YEARS maintains this trend by making the siblings’ car trouble seem like a minor miracle because it gives them the time to reflect on what they want out of life. Director scheduled to attend. (2021, 81 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
---
Andrés Ramírez Pulido’s LA JAURÍA (Colombia)
Friday, 8:45pm and Monday, 6pm
Somewhere deep in the Colombian jungle, adolescent male convicts have been recruited into an alternative rehabilitation program. Their “treatment” consists of a combination of manual slave labor and experimental New Age-lite therapy administered by their paternalistic leader. Most of the prisoners are guilty of dealing drugs and other gang-related activity, but one boy, Eliú, commands greater attention from the authorities for murdering a man he wrongly believed to be his abusive father. Eliú’s accomplice in the homicide soon shows up among the newest pack of boys brought into the jungle, and from there, cycles of masculine violence exert their bloody, centrifugal pull on the kids and authorities alike. Winner of the Critics’ Week Award at the 75th Cannes Film Festival, LA JAURÍA tells its story with an elemental simplicity that makes it amenable to multiple allegorical readings; it registers equally as being about government corruption, military hegemony, and the punitive carceral state, especially but not exclusively in the sociopolitical context of modern-day Colombia. Jhojan Estiven Jimenez is a hauntingly stoic, sullen presence as Eliú, and around him and his fellow inmates, Ramírez Pulido renders a verdant yet oppressive atmosphere of shadow and decay where aggression freely festers. With exasperation, but not defeat, LA JAURÍA poetically asks: when will we stop answering violence with more of the same? (2022, 87 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
---
Anaïs Taracena’s THE SILENCE OF THE MOLE (Guatemala/Documentary)
Saturday, 4pm and Wednesday, 6:15pm
Director Anaïs Taracena’s searing documentary, THE SILENCE OF THE MOLE, begins at a historic moment. A frail invalid is wheeled up to a microphone at a tribunal. After he is sworn in, he states his name: Elías Barahona y Barahona. During the late 1970s, he was press officer for Guatemala’s former Minister of the Interior Donaldo Álvarez Ruiz, the monstrous orchestrator of government-sponsored kidnappings, murders, and terror campaigns. Now, only two weeks from death, Barahona testifies that the country’s president, General Romeo García, was behind the notorious 1980 Spanish embassy fire in Guatemala City that killed 37 Indigenous protesters and embassy staff; a survivor who was taken to a hospital was murdered the next day. This horrific story is only one of the many atrocities about which Barahona was aware and that he worked to prevent as a member of the resistance operating as a mole in the belly of the beast for four long and painful years. Guatemala’s official entry in the 95th Academy Awards, THE SILENCE OF THE MOLE offers harrowing details from Guatemala’s 35-year civil war, including the genocide of 250,000 rural, Indigenous people, and the lonely life of silence and rejection Barahona led in order to do his job. In addition to interviewing the handful of people who knew Barahona and were willing to be filmed, Taracena stops in at the National Film Archive of Guatemala to meet with the curator who is trying to save the country’s film history, especially scarce reels from the 1970s and ’80s. As we watch snippets of long-suppressed news coverage and amateur films from this period, we learn that the curator’s father was among the survivors of kidnapping and torture. (2021, 91 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
---
Claudia Sainte-Luce’s LOVE AND MATHEMATICS (Mexico)
Saturday, 6:30pm
Claudia Sainte-Luce’s debut feature, THE AMAZING CATFISH (2013), was one of the most underrated films of the last decade—a funny, original, and resolutely unsentimental take on a potentially mawkish premise. (It’s currently available to watch on Tubi.) One reason why the film was so unique was that after introducing the principal character, a middle-aged single mom dying of AIDS, Sainte-Luce shifted focus to the day-to-day lives of the people around her, which allowed her to find humor and small triumphs alongside the central tragedy. LOVE AND MATHEMATICS, one of two films Sainte-Luce directed in 2022, brings a similarly bittersweet and level-headed sensibility to another potentially mawkish scenario: a middle-aged man who achieved his 15 minutes of fame in the early ‘00s as part of a second-rate boy band learns to adjust to life as a stay-at-home suburban dad. Where THE AMAZING CATFISH used low-key humor to undercut a morbid story, LOVE AND MATHEMATICS introduces morbidity and danger to a story that might have been too lightweight to sustain a feature otherwise. The film kicks into gear when our protagonist, Billy (Roberto Quijano), bonds with his neighbor, another stay-at-home parent named Mónica (Diana Bovio), over a blackly comic development that you’d be better off going into the movie not knowing. Like characters in a Hitchcock film, these two are drawn together by a guilty secret, and they start to spend more and more of their lonely afternoons together. While an affair between the two seems practically inevitable, it’s less certain whether Mónica (a superfan of Billy’s boy band when she was a kid) will convince our schlub of an antihero to start singing in public again. Sainte-Luce, directing a script by Adriana Pelusi, loves these characters too much to make them the butts of easy jokes; there’s genuine pathos to the early scenes of Billy recognizing how unhappy he’s become, and it's more fascinating than funny how Mónica compensates for her obsessiveness with her bland public persona. Though it veers toward Todd Solondz territory, LOVE AND MATHEMATICS never gets truly dark, though you may be shocked by how serious it gets for a comedy. As in THE AMAZING CATFISH, Sainte-Luce works in comedy in order to reflect on what happiness means and what some people will do to find it. In this regard, she has a lot in common with American directors like Geroge Cukor and Blake Edwards. Actor Roberto Quijano scheduled to attend. (2022, 84 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
---
Valentina Maurel’s I HAVE ELECTRIC DREAMS (Costa Rica)
Saturday, 9pm
Valentina Maurel grew up in Costa Rica but studied filmmaking in Paris and Brussels, so it makes sense that her debut feature, I HAVE ELECTRIC DREAMS, feels as much like a European film as a South American one. The seemingly formless way that Maurel presents complicated, potentially off-putting behavior recalls Maurice Pialat and his many followers, while her nonjudgmental depiction of delinquent adolescents evokes a subgenre of French realism that’s at least as old as THE 400 BLOWS (1959). I HAVE ELECTRIC DREAMS is still very much a product of South American culture in its unhurried pacing, tropical ambience, and the way Maurel effortlessly integrates poetry into the narrative. Grounded in two astonishing lead performances (both of which won prizes at the Locarno Film Festival), it covers several months in the lives of Eva, a rebellious 16-year-old, and her ne’er-do-well father, with whom she’s been wanting to live since her parents divorced. Both father and daughter have issues controlling their anger, which occasionally erupts in flares of physical violence directed toward themselves or people around them. This violence (which seems to be passed down from one generation to another, like in Frank Borzage’s MOONRISE [1948]) clearly caused the breakup of the parents’ marriage, yet Eva still adores her father and resents her mother; it’s implied that her affinity with her dad stems from how intimately she understands his problem. She spends more time with him after he gets taken in by an old bohemian friend, and both men are terrible influences on her; in little time, she comes to experiment with drinking, drugs, and sex. Her progression may be familiar from other dramas about at-risk teens, but what distinguishes I HAVE ELECTRIC DREAMS is that the main characters really can’t control their behavior; seeing them get undermined by their worst impulses is practically horrific. Maurel generates a sense of dread that becomes more pronounced the better we know the characters—and given that she shows them in a state of unvarnished sympathy so often (which her exceptional cast seems to have little problem realizing), the movie becomes quite dreadful indeed. (2022, 103 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
---
Mariano Biasin’s SUBLIME (Argentina)
Monday, 8:30pm and Wednesday, 8:15pm
A common experience for many queer people growing up is hopelessly pining after a straight, same-sex friend. The trepidation and confusion of that experience are captured in SUBLIME, which hinges on 16-year-old Manuel’s burgeoning love for his childhood best friend Felipe. Manuel (Martín Miller in an endearing performance) isn’t quite sure of his sexuality yet; when we first see him as a teenager, he’s being assisted by Felipe in setting up a van in the woods for a rendezvous with a girl name Azul. But when Manuel and Azul get intimate, the former can only think of his best friend, shirtless and nuzzling him in bed. That fantasy becomes a recurring dream for Manuel throughout the film, an erotic tease that always ends before the moment of embrace. Repeatedly denying both him and the audience the satisfaction of romantic reciprocation, SUBLIME aptly communicates the frustration of harboring an unrequited desire, especially for a nervous, reserved teenage boy afraid of ruining his greatest friendship. Much of the film is devoted to the rock band Manuel and Felipe play in with two other friends; as they jam together, Biasin draws out a naturalistic sense of both tension and bonhomie among the boys, finding in their homosocial group dynamic an intimacy that doesn’t require classification. SUBLIME may not reach the heights of its titular superlative, but in its denouement—a belated instant of quiet, euphoric fulfillment—you could swear it comes close. Director scheduled to attend. (2022, 100 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
---
Juan Pablo Richter’s 98 SECONDS WITHOUT A SHADOW (Bolivia)
Tuesday, 5:45pm and Thursday, 8:15pm
Genoveva Bravo (Iran Zeitun) is an outcast teenager at her girls-only Catholic school with a vivid imagination, a near-catatonic mother (Patricia García) who forgets she’s breast-feeding her newborn son, and a father (Fernando Arze Echalar) whose death she fervently prays for. The bright moments in her life are attending to her dying grandmother (Geraldine Chaplin), who is a witch, and spending time with her best friend, Inés (Florence Ramirez), dreaming of escape to outer space from the town they call Shithole. When Genoveva meets her mother’s handsome, young spiritual advisor (Quim del Rio), the possibility of real escape finally presents itself. Director Juan Pablo Richter’s adaptation of writer Giovanna Rivero’s 2014 novel 98 segundos sin sombra shows a real sensitivity for the mostly female world of Rivero’s story. The dynamics of teenage girls and their changing alliances, the bonds they can form with their elderly relatives, and the understanding they can have for the sadness of a bad marriage that leaves them to deal with their troubles alone are illustrated not only with daydreams and nightmares, but also with clear-headed straightforwardness. In her first feature film, Iran Zeitun brings her character to vivid life, earning our trust in her decisions by demonstrating human understanding well beyond her years. 98 SECONDS WITHOUT A SHADOW stands alongside Diane Kurys’s PEPPERMINT SODA (1977) as arguably the best film about teenage girls I have ever seen. Director scheduled to attend. (2021, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
---
Jose Gomez De Vargas and Julietta Rodriguez’s JUPÍA (Dominican Republic)
Thursday, 5:45pm
Jupía, shape-shifting, earthbound spirits that figure in the cosmology of the Indigenous Taíno peoples of the Greater Antilles, are at the center of the mysterious drama JUPÍA, from director Jose Gomez De Vargas and first-time director Julietta Rodriquez. According to Taíno legend, jupía exist largely on their own, eating guava and clinging to the places they frequented when alive. But they can be invoked by the living for various purposes. When police detective Tomás García (David Maler) seeks answers to the disappearance of his daughter, he encounters the troubled and cancer-riddled head of a nursing home (Karina Noble) who is using the power of the Taíno creator goddess Atabey, personified as a nurse by Rodriguez herself, to return her dead daughter, now one of the jupía, through supernatural means. Gomez De Vargas and Rodriguez deliberately evoke the atmosphere and musical motifs of horror films to suggest the horrifying consequences of trying to reverse the flow of life and death. At the same time, they form part of the growing popular and scholarly movement to revivify the traditional wisdom and culture of the Taíno, a people once thought extinct. For those unfamiliar with this culture, JUPÍA may seem opaque. Those with curiosity and an interest in this hidden civilization will find the lush and luminous cinematography of Pedro Juan López and the intuitive energy of the performances intriguing. Co-director and actress Julietta Rodríguez will be present at this screening. (2022, 79 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
---
Laura Baumeister’s DAUGHTER OF RAGE (Nicaragua)
Thursday, 6pm
Per Variety, Laura Baumeister’s DAUGHTER OF RAGE is “the first fiction feature shot by a female Nicaraguan-born director”; another source, the Tribeca Film Institute, noted during the film’s development that it would “be the first feature to be shot in Nicaragua by a Nicaraguan born female director.” Regardless of whether or not it being shot in the country is a differentiator, it’s nevertheless an assured first feature from an emerging talent. Set partially at La Chureca, the largest landfill in Central America, the film follows 11-year-old María (Ara Alejandra Medal) after she and her mother are compelled to leave their home on the edges of the dump when María accidentally poisons the purebred puppies her mother had been hoping to sell. They typically make a living selling items foraged from the dump, representative of the approximately 500 families who in real life do just that. But the focus of Baumeister’s film isn’t this particular aspect of Nicaragua’s socio-economic makeup; rather, it’s more akin to something like René Clément’s FORBIDDEN GAMES (1952) in how it assumes a child’s perspective of oppressive circumstances, dwelling not in the nitty-gritty details of María’s misfortune but instead the ways she makes sense of the unfathomable. This becomes more pronounced after her mother drops her off at a recycling center where she’s made to work for her keep, albeit with a relatively amiable family structure in place among the plant owners and the kids who illegally work there. She meets a young boy, Tadeo (Carlos Gutierrez), with whom she has an innocent enchantment (similar to FORBIDDEN GAMES). Though it has a linear narrative structure the film eventually becomes looser in how it approaches a denouement, forgoing a logical conclusion for one steeped in María’s quixotic prowess. Sadly, what she imagines isn’t the stuff of innocent childhood fantasy. Baumeister has said she’s influenced by Lucrecia Martel and Jane Campion (specifically THE PIANO, which also explores an unconventional mother-daughter dynamic), and that comes through in how the film handles María’s unique hardships. Baumeister eschews sentimentality for a rawer—but still somehow tender—evocation of life’s sad realities, while incorporating an outrightly fantastical element via effectuations of the mother character having found new life in the form of a chimera. (2022, 87 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
🧭 CRACKERJACK COMPASS: THE WORKS OF ROBERT ZEMECKIS
Programmed by Will Morris and Cine-File contributor John Dickson (both of whom host the Oscarbate podcast), “Crackerjack Compass: The Works of Robert Zemeckis” continues through Wednesday at the Music Box Theatre. This series contains nearly all of the features Zemeckis directed, one that he cowrote but didn’t direct, one that he produced but didn’t write or direct, a program of Zemeckis-related shorts, and a “secret screening” of some kind.
On the Music Box website, Morris and Dickson frame Zemeckis as a serious artist hiding behind the veil of popular entertainment; they liken him to Alfred Hitchcock, who was also perceived as “just an entertainer” until he was reevaluated by French critics in the 1950s. Also like Hitchcock or his mentor Steven Spielberg, Zemeckis is a master technician who’s always shown interest in the latest special effects; in fact, his 21st-century output has been made with some of the most sophisticated computer technology yet developed for movies. But behind Zemeckis’ slick technical wizardry there often lies a profound cynicism (which isn’t too surprising when you learn he grew up on the South Side under the reign of the first Mayor Daley). This comes through most clearly in his early, blatantly satirical work (I WANNA HOLD YOUR HAND, USED CARS, the script for 1941), but it informs almost all of his films, even the mainstream favorite FORREST GUMP (see below). More information about the series can be found here.
In addition to the films reviewed below, the series also includes two screenings of the romantic adventure comedy ROMANCING THE STONE (1984, 106 min, 35mm), the film that gave Zemeckis his first big popular success, on Friday at 9:30pm and Sunday at 11:15am. Two of Zemeckis’ hotly contested forays into motion-capture animation screen as late-night and morning programs: BEOWULF (2007, 114 min, 35mm) plays Friday at midnight, and THE POLAR EXPRESS (2004, 100 min, 35mm) is on Saturday at 11:30am. Zemeckis’ modern-day update on Robinson Crusoe (and second collaboration with Tom Hanks), CAST AWAY (2000, 143 min, DCP Digital) screens on Saturday at 6:30pm. Two screenings are being devoted to ALLIED (2016, 114 min, DCP Digital), Zemeckis’ overlooked meditation on artifice, performance, and World War II movies that Kiyoshi Kurosawa essentially remade as WIFE OF A SPY (2020); those are on Saturday at 9:25pm and Wednesday at 4pm. Zemeckis’ Hitchcock tribute WHAT LIES BENEATH (2000, 130 min, 35mm) screens on Sunday at 9:15pm. THE WALK (2015, 123 min, DCP Digital), his fictionalized remake of the documentary MAN ON WIRE (2008), is on Monday at 4pm. The Carl Sagan adaptation CONTACT (1997, 150 min, 35mm), starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConnaughey, is on Monday at 6:30pm. The Tuesday night screenings focus on Zemeckis’ early career; both will be followed by Q&As with actor Bobby Di Cicco. His feature directorial debut I WANNA HOLD YOUR HAND (1978, 98 min, 35mm) is at 6:45pm; a delightful live-action cartoon about youth culture run amok, it satirizes Beatlemania with a tale of American teenagers desperate to get on The Ed Sullivan Show on the day of the Fab Four’s arrival in the US. Made the next year, 1941 (1979, 146 min, DCP Digital) was directed by Steven Spielberg from a script Zemeckis wrote with his longtime writing partner Bob Gale. More than just a variation on IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD, this divisive comic spectacular is a satirical free-for-all about American war hysteria in the early days of US involvement in World War II. The script eviscerates numerous American sacred cows, and Spielberg matches its attitude with a MAD Magazine-like aesthetic, scattering silly details all around the widescreen frames. Rarely revived, this should look especially good on a big screen.
Robert Zemeckis' USED CARS (US)
Friday, 4:30pm and Wednesday, 9:30pm
Olivier Assayas once told me that film history is defined as much by absences as it is by presences; case in point, one finds a compelling and frequently disturbing body of work in various movies that Steven Spielberg produced but didn’t direct. POLTERGEIST (1981), GREMLINS (1984), the remake of CAPE FEAR (1991), and FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS (2006) speak to feelings of cynicism and disdain that Spielberg generally avoids in the films he signs, suggesting that the world’s most beloved filmmaker can acknowledge these feelings only by proxy. USED CARS, directed by Robert Zemeckis from a script he wrote with Bob Gale, is an early and revealing entry in the Evil Spielberg canon—its satire of the American success ethic is so bitter that it often edges into out-and-out disgust. Mercilessly spoofing the nice-guy persona he developed in live-action Disney comedies, Kurt Russell stars as Rudy Russo, an amoral used car salesman whose one goal in life is to get elected to the Arizona state senate so he can live comfortably off bribe money for the rest of his life. In order to do so, he must first raise $60,000 himself to bribe the party boss willing to put him on the ticket. Rudy’s mission gets complicated when his desert rat of a boss (Jack Warden) dies unexpectedly, forcing our hero and his equally amoral coworkers to keep up the pretense that he’s still alive in order to keep the boss’ malicious twin brother Roy L. (Warden again) from inheriting the lot. These developments, as well as the comically exaggerated sales competition that erupts between Rudy and Roy L., sometimes feel like a New Hollywood update on Preston Sturges. The difference (apart from the curse words and explicit nudity of USED CARS) is that Sturges exhibited clear affection for his characters—and even for the all-American ideals he exposed as fraudulent—while Zemeckis and Gale regard their characters as grotesques and their characters’ lack of values as contemptible. Rudy and company are corrupt, petty, sexist, immature, and brazenly selfish. Gremlins of capitalism, they cheerfully and maniacally sell garbage because it allows them to take other people’s money. The visual style of USED CARS may not be as cartoonish or (to borrow a favorite Jonathan Rosenbaum reference point) as redolent of early MAD magazine as that which Spielberg brought to 1941 (1979), another misanthropic satire written by Zemeckis and Gale. Still, the influence of animated movies can be felt in the meticulous timing of the gags and suspense-building. Squint and you can see seeds of the thoroughly dehumanized set pieces of Zemeckis’ unwatchable motion-capture animated features of the 21st century. (1980, 113 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
---
Robert Zemeckis' WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT (US)
Friday, 7pm
It's been a long, long time since we've seen a blockbuster as singular as WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT. The second-highest grossing film of 1988, the subject of endless critical hosannas, the recipient of a special Academy Award for its wondrous animation—all for a coarse, allusion-heavy valentine to bygone studio cartoons. (If you haven't seen it since you were a kid, marvel at the unapologetic alcoholism, the prostate jokes, the tragic flaccidity of Baby Herman--and how it all flew over your head once upon a time.) It's a big-budget movie created for people who'd otherwise congregate in basements and watch 16mm MERRIE MELODIES prints and bemoan the a.a.p. replacement titles. For animation buffs, ROGER RABBIT is a very specific act of revisionary nostalgia—recalling a moment from the late '40s, before budget cuts and the influential mid-century modern contours of United Productions of America pushed the cartoon studios toward simpler backdrops, sparser character work, jankier movement, and stricter formulas. The imagined legacy of cartoon superstar Roger Rabbit ransacks the violent antics of Warner Bros, the z-axis freedom of the Fleischer Studios, the wanton, buxom carnality of Tex Avery's RED HOT RIDING HOOD—and animation buffs salivated at the prospect of Donald sharing a frame with Daffy Duck, Droopy and Betty Boop inhabiting the same material universe. (For kids, of course, this forbidden co-mingling represented not an epic act of intellectual property horsetrading, but a run-of-the-mill Saturday morning lineup.) But this would all be trivia if ROGER RABBIT wasn't suffused with a yearning for an alternative history of postwar Los Angeles. For '80s Angelenos, the throw-away line about the city having the best public transit system in the world surely inspired chuckles, albeit the dread-of-recognition kind, with visions of the 405 looming after the show's end. With more remove, we can appreciate the longing for a different kind of urbanism, distinct from the discredited, freeway-lovin' theory of urban renewal. (The beleaguered toons in ROGER RABBIT effectively stand in for the soon-to-be-displaced working-class denizens of neighborhoods like Bunker Hill.) And it's all wrapped up within a noir framework that suggests the conspiratorial designs of a non-racist James Ellroy, or perhaps a less self-serious Robert Towne. Watch CHINATOWN again fresh after ROGER RABBIT and tell me which movie really leans toward the cartoonish in its costume design, set decoration, and overall atmospherics. (1988, 104 min, DCP Digital) [K.A. Westphal]
---
Peter Jackson’s THE FRIGHTENERS (US)
Saturday, Midnight
Originally meant to be a spin-off of Tales from the Crypt, Robert Zemeckis hired Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh to write a script for THE FRIGHTENERS, based on an idea by the duo, with all intentions to direct himself. Zemeckis decided it was best for Jackson to direct, though he stayed on to executive produce. THE FRIGHTENERS truly does feel like a combination of the two blockbuster directors, with macabre elements you can find in both their oeuvres: the dark comedy and saturated purple-toned color palette is reminiscent of DEATH BECOMES HER (1992) while a ghostly creature is a clear precursor to the Ringwraiths in the LORD OF THE RINGS series–there’s no shortage, too, of striking camera angles and bizarre movements. There’s a Zemeckis/Looney Tunes wild comedic vibe and impressive, outside-the-box special effects, done by Jackson’s Weta Digital. It’s got some surprisingly dark elements but balances them skillfully with zany moments. Frank Bannister (Michael J. Fox) is a conman who poses as a ghost hunter, all while using his unique skills at communicating with the dead to scam locals. This coastal town, however, is truly haunted by its fair share of tragedy, including a horrible murder spree committed by a hospital orderly (Jake Busey) in the 1960s. Now strange deaths are occurring around town and only Frank can see that the cause is a mysterious creature who resembles the grim reaper and who marks their victims with a number carved into their foreheads. When Frank himself is accused of these deaths, he teams up with local doctor Lucy Lynskey (played by Trini Alvarado named for HEAVENLY CREATURES [1994] star Melanie Lynksey, who also has a cameo) to solve these murders and clear his name. Frank’s ghost pals (including memorable performances by John Astin and Chi McBride) provide much of the comedic levity in a film that wrestles with a lot of darkness. It does so, though, with a surprising amount of depth, thanks in no small part to the performances, which bring an emotional sincerity to both the frenzied and murkier elements. It’s no surprise the film has garnered a cult status in its tightrope act of balancing immoderations in tone, visual effects, and story–something exemplary of both Jackson and Zemeckis at their best. (1996, 110 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]
---
Robert Zemeckis' BACK TO THE FUTURE (US)
Sunday, 1:45pm
Back in the mid-1980s, the white, suburban, heterosexual American male was in crisis, threatened on all sides: globally, by the Middle East's control of oil production; culturally, by the emergence of chart-topping R&B and rap that imperiled the perceived hegemony of heavy metal and unspirited blues-rock; and locally, in the unrelenting crime waves of urban gangs, emerging from a dissolved patriarchy and reportedly expanding ever-outwards from the city centers. The successful reconstitution of this masculinity was produced primarily by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale's BACK TO THE FUTURE, an admittedly glorious genre-crossing inversion of the Oedipus mythology (protagonist Marty must overcome not a present, unconscious desire for his mother and rivalry with his father, but instead must overcome his mother's desire for him and actively facilitate the transformation of his milquetoast father into a confident figure of authority). The conflict is enacted in the oneiric space of small-town 1955 California, primarily through the repeated ritual humiliation of the seemingly-invincible Teutonic drive-creature Biff, but also through Marty's requisition—on behalf of wimpy caucasians everywhere—of the heritage of both civil rights (encouraging the local malt-shop busboy to become mayor) and rock n' roll (producing, for Chuck Berry and an audience of bewildered squares, "the sound you've been looking for"). All of this (including the role of the Benjamin-Franklin-esque Doc Brown) is then not simply in the service of some trite, individualist Protestant ethic ("if you put your mind to it, you could accomplish anything": murmured mantra-like from start to finish); for those voters still baffled by the persistency of conservative politics, why look any further? (1985, 116 min, 35mm) [Michael Castelle]
---
Robert Zemeckis’ BACK TO THE FUTURE PART II (US)
Sunday, 4:15pm
Beginning immediately after the end BACK TO THE FUTURE, this sequel takes Doc’s return from the future as a jumping off point for a whole new set of time travel quandaries. Or are they new? In his only film franchise, Robert Zemeckis uses repetition and reflection to examine history doomed to forever echo. While BACK TO THE FUTURE PART II loses the magic of the effortlessness of the original, it’s still a rowdy and often contemptuously biting look at the Reagan era. Doc (Christopher Lloyd) has urged Marty (Michael J. Fox) and his girlfriend (Elisabeth Shue) to join him in traveling to the future to help with their floundering son (also played by Fox). The future here is what you’d expect from an '80s vision of 2015, all bright neons and holographs—it doesn’t feel too far off, though. Perhaps this is due to our current nostalgic trends, and the film portentously captures that as well, when Marty finds himself in an '80s themed diner. Zemeckis has an uncanny knack for making historical connections. Marty returns to 1985 from the future to find his father dead, the town destroyed, and his mother (Lea Thompson) remarried to Biff (Thomas F. Wilson), who here resembles a not-so-thinly-veiled Donald Trump. Biff, discovering the time machine, has found a way to make a lot of money and take over Hill Valley for himself. Now this means Marty must go back to 1955 to fix everything–again. Like much of Zemeckis’ work around this time, it's full of zaniness and excess, particularly the future sequences which includes an incredible hoverboard chase scene. The repetitiveness of the sequences, as Marty’s adventures through time always seem to mirror each other, don’t feel stale. Rather, the darker nature of Marty’s task–and its larger, dire historical ramifications—suggests that the first movie, despite its magic, wasn’t enough to ensure that history is safe from the likes of Biff. (1989, 108 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]
---
Robert Zemeckis’ BACK TO THE FUTURE PART III (US)
Sunday, 6:45pm
Produced immediately after BACK TO THE FUTURE PART II, this third and final film of the series is Zemeckis’ foray into the Western. It’s a big leap from the second film, which largely mirrored the first. BACK TO THE FUTURE PART III also uses some of the cyclical history storytelling, but its themes make this film stand out in the series. Picking up, again, right after the events of the second movie, Marty (Michael J. Fox) must now figure out how to bring Doc (Christopher Lloyd) back from 1885. Marty makes his way back to the old west, but finds that getting home may be near impossible, especially now that a local schoolteacher (Mary Steenburgen) has captured the interest of Doc. Of course, a Biff counterpart, Griff Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson) is there in 1885 to make things even more challenging for Marty. In PART II, it's somewhat oddly established that Marty’s biggest pet peeve is being perceived as cowardly, which follows through this film—though this subplot does include cameos by Flea in both films, so no complaints. If the second film is a showcase for Thomas F. Wilson’s Biff characters, it's Christopher Llyod’s turn here. The friendship between Doc and Marty is at the heart of this third installment, something that tracks throughout the trilogy, but feels the most emotionally examined here; it grounds a now spiraling premise with a sincerity that perhaps was waning in the second film. Why go back to the old west? It’s not hard to feel how much fun Zemeckis is having with the setting, playing more with Hollywood Western conventions than anything decidedly historical. Of course, no BACK TO THE FUTURE is complete without a chase sequence or two, and this final one featuring the DeLorean and a giant steam engine train is a standout amongst the whole series. (1990, 118 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]
---
Robert Zemeckis' WELCOME TO MARWEN (US)
Monday, 9:30pm
WELCOME TO MARWEN was one of the biggest flops of the 2018: its worldwide gross came out to around $13 million, just over a quarter of its $40 million budget. In the public’s defense, however, you can’t really blame anyone for staying away. A fictionalized remake of a documentary, MARWENCOL (2010), not even a decade old, Robert Zemeckis’ film seemed to have little reason to exist, and to make matters worse, it starred Steve Carell. The cutesy ad campaign didn’t help, and aside from longtime Zemeckis champion Dave Kehr (who likened the movie to VERTIGO on Twitter), it garnered barely any critical defenders. But love it or hate it, this is a deeply personal film that has a lot to say about why we make and watch movies; it’s worthy of serious consideration. Carell plays Mark Hogancamp, a divorced alcoholic in upstate New York who must start his life over again after he’s attacked by a group of men and loses his memory. To help cope with his trauma, he retreats into a fantasy world, a fictional WWII-era Belgian village he calls Marwen; Mark becomes so invested in his fantasy that he starts buying dolls to enact and photograph scenes from it. In a surprising turn of fate, a gallery owner in NYC sees the photographs, loves them, and offers Mark a show—and thus an outsider artist is born. Zemeckis, who also cowrote and coproduced the film, clearly sees a lot himself in Mark. After all, he’s a creator of intricate fantasy worlds himself, and he also understands the dark side of escapism; it isn’t a coincidence that many of his protagonists struggle with alcoholism. WELCOME TO MARWEN is full of references to other Zemeckis movies, as if to say that there’s little difference between the fantasies that he and Hogancamp create: Mark’s fantasy world is realized with state-of-the-art motion-capture animation à la THE POLAR EXPRESS (2004), BEOWULF (2007), and A CHRISTMAS CAROL (2009), and when one character shows up in a time machine, it looks a lot like the one from BACK TO THE FUTURE PART II (1989). These in-jokes are at once fun and self-deprecating; it’s as though Zemeckis is saying, You have to be a little disturbed to make movies like mine. At the same time, the film doesn’t make light of Mark’s trauma; it’s actually quite sensitive in how it characterizes it. WELCOME TO MARWEN may be refreshingly unconcerned with narrative development for a Hollywood film in 2018, though Zemeckis generates some genuine suspense in the scenes leading up to the trial of Mark’s attackers, which serves as the makeshift climax. Mark is too frightened to attend the trial, even though he could deliver valuable testimony in court. The film lets Mark’s fear overpower the narrative to show how trauma reshapes one’s perception of life. It registers as a show of respect from one storyteller to another. (2018, 116 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
---
Robert Zemeckis' DEATH BECOMES HER (US)
Tuesday, 4pm
My first exposure to DEATH BECOMES HER, which came long before watching the film itself, was from seeing images in a coffee table book about the history of Industrial Light & Magic. Directed by the special effects-attentive Robert Zemeckis, it holds up as a visual marvel 30 years after its release: a stunning combination of practical and groundbreaking digital effects. It remains relevant as a camp classic, however, from its shrewd blending of genres and over-the-top performances; all combined, DEATH BECOMES HER, while maybe not flawless, is like the best of Zemeckis’ films, a perfectly satisfying watch. A biting commentary on aging in Hollywood, the film stars Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn as frenemies waging war for the attention of a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon played by Bruce Willis. Driving their rivalry and need for revenge is a desperation to find the secret to everlasting youth. They each discover a mysterious socialite (Isabella Rossellini) who claims to have a magic potion to reverse the aging process, but its side effects come at quite a disturbing cost. DEATH BECOMES HER’s combination of dark comedy and body horror is balanced seamlessly by the added melodrama of the four main performances—it's hard to argue a standout when they're all so great. The clever, slow-revealing camerawork and giant set pieces never let the iconic special effects scenes fall completely into the cartoonish, balancing the absurd and the grotesque. The film’s fun is in its constant teetering on the edge; DEATH BECOMES HER manages to express complete uninhibitedness with precise visual filmmaking. (1992, 104 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]
---
Robert Zemeckis’ FORREST GUMP (US)
Wednesday, 6:45pm
It’s rare that a movie so laden with Oscar gold could be in need of serious reevaluation, but Robert Zemeckis’ FORREST GUMP may just be that movie. Caught between warring poles of early '90s politics, the film was thoughtlessly embraced by the Clinton left for its maudlin sentimentality while right-winger Newt Gingrich falsely championed its "conservative values" to help bolster his shitty campaign. Despite these two idiot winds hellbent on turning FORREST GUMP into last-minute campaign weaponry, FORREST GUMP remains a film operating at the height of cinematic power. It may have seemed like a major sea change for Zemeckis, who made it coming off the acidic black comedy DEATH BECOMES HER (1992), but in reality, it's anything but: the director's satirical worlds are now just papered wall to wall with lovely and airy Alan Silvestri music, which only camouflages the pointed barbs. On inspection, GUMP is something closer to Voltaire’s Candide or John Ford’s THE LONG GRAY LINE (1955). This insanely misjudged movie, a cracked masterpiece, rises above its detractors’ accusations of "small-minded American conservatism" or "liberal boomer wet dream" to reveal itself as a film of impeccable craft and downright nastiness. Just take a look at any interview with Zemeckis during the awards season rush of this movie—the guy seemed positively confused as to its reception. Not that it didn’t have the heart and Hollywoodisms necessary to sweep the awards and clean up at the box office, but because of them, the film's indictment of an entire generation’s passive engagement with the world didn't quite catch on. Forrest exists as a proxy for the US and its citizens, blindly stumbling into situation after situation, unknowingly taking credit for things they had nothing to do with, and sometimes benefiting financially from these things in a major way—see what happens to Forrest after the devastating destruction of an entire Black shrimping operation in New Orleans. And yet, Forrest never seems to notice or care about this, placing faith in God and country rather than recognizing his highly privileged position in society. FORREST GUMP is linked to a long line of Zemeckis satires, yet it finds the director reaching for a new, classical style with which to capture the madness on screen. This film has less to do with any perceived folk wisdom from a simple-minded wanderer and more to do with the brain-dead ideologies that get spouted by one seriously lucky multi-millionaire, wholly unaware of anything outside himself. (1994, 142 min, 35mm) [John Dickson]
📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING
John Ford’s KENTUCKY PRIDE (US/Silent)
Chicago Film Society at the Music Box Theatre – Saturday, 2pm
Of the four films that John Ford directed in 1925, only two survive: a comedy called LIGHTNIN' and this offbeat sports drama, which is noteworthy for being narrated by a horse. All four were quick, low-budget productions compared with THE IRON HORSE, the epic (and huge hit) that Ford made for Fox Film Corporation the year before, and based on the summaries alone, it seems that the return to smaller-scale storytelling allowed him to indulge his freewheeling side. KENTUCKY PRIDE proceeds in a loping, almost surrealistic manner: the characters gain and lose fortunes in sudden turns of fate, families are separated and reunited just as randomly, and then there's the whole horse POV thing. Set in the elite racing world of Kentucky, the film considers two generations of horses and their owners in just over an hour. The narrator, Virginia's Future, is a racehorse who’s retired after she breaks her leg in a race but is later redeemed when her daughter grows up to be a champion. Richard Brody has noted that the heroine "assumes the archetypal role of a self-sacrificing mother—a career-long trope of Ford's," and the film is also characteristic of its director in its sentimental drama and bawdy comedy (there are, of course, comic Irish stereotypes thrown around with cheerful abandon). Although KENTUCKY PRIDE ends with an exciting race that resolves all the intergenerational conflicts, the film seems to arrive at this classical conclusion almost by accident. It was never a priority for Ford to move a narrative from point A to point B; in fact, some of his best later films (e.g., SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON, THE LONG GRAY LINE) are great because of how much they digress from their supposed purpose. This movie features a few lovely digressions that hint at the masterful poetry of later Ford, but mostly it's an entertaining lark. Live musical accompaniment by Jay Warren. (1925, 70 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
Lizzie Borden's WORKING GIRLS (US)
Chicago Film Society at Northeastern Illinois University (The Auditorium, Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) – Wednesday, 7:30pm
“John’s here!” “Which one?” This exchange in Lizzie Borden’s WORKING GIRLS—the writer-director’s third feature, made a few years after her influential 1983 film BORN IN FLAMES—encapsulates both its wry humor and distinct perspective on that oldest of professions. The working girls in question, responsible, among many other tasks, for manning (wo-manning?) the phones and facilitating guest relations, announce each visitor as they arrive. In this scenario a man called John comes in, his generic name, a euphemism for others of his kind, made into a joke that’s at once perceptive and perverse, thus abbreviating the film’s viewpoint on sex work. Having come to fruition after Borden spent time interviewing sex workers (some of whom had worked on BORN IN FLAMES), the film centers on Molly (Louise Smith), a well-educated photographer who, it’s shown at the beginning, is in a lesbian relationship; from the get-go our perception of sex workers is challenged, Borden providing us images against which later images, of a supposedly heterosexual woman enjoying paid sex with strange men, should be compared. Molly works at an elegantly decorated apartment-style brothel centrally located in Manhattan where this day-in-the-life simulacrum largely takes place. She and several other girls—including Gina (Marusia Zach), Dawn (Amanda Goodwin), and April (Janne Peters)—are employed by a madam named Lucy (Ellen McElduff), a former sex worker who’s promoted herself to middle management. The plot moves among Molly’s sessions, between her and the clients, a motley crew of men who run the gamut from lonely to outright creepy, and in-between moments during which the girls commune in the “living” room, discussing all sorts of topics. The women, and even some of the men, are fascinating, but at times it feels like a piece of performance art (not necessarily a play, but something akin to it, meant to act as a microcosm of a macro economy), or, perhaps more disparagingly, an exhibit at a zoo, a way for us outsiders to gawk at people—some may say animals—whose environments, it would seem, are different than ours. The film’s bemused detachment accounts for its subversiveness; its dispassion manifests in a sort of candor that mimics the intent of the film, which is to show that sex work is, in fact, a job, one that its workers drudge through like the rest of us stiffs. Borden once remarked in an interview with CinemaScope: “The greatest compliment I ever got for WORKING GIRLS was when some guy said to me afterwards, ‘I had a boss just like that.’ It really is about capitalism.” Borden also pointed out that Molly’s eventual desire to leave the profession, brought on by Lucy’s insistence that she work a double shift, isn’t just because of sexual exploitation, but labor exploitation as well. The film was distributed by Miramax; per Borden, Harvey Weinstein had wanted to market it as an “erotic comedy.” Like the aforementioned joke, this contention epitomizes the film’s dichotomy. What the ‘Johns’ might think is a singular, erotic experience—a lark, not unlike those in a sexy comedy—is, in actuality, just one of many for the working girls. Preceded by a 35mm trailer for Mike Nichols’ 1988 film WORKING GIRLS. (1986, 90 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]
Fred Halsted's L.A. PLAYS ITSELF (US/Adult)
Music Box Theatre – Saturday, Midnight
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. Programmed and co-presented by Henry Hanson and The Front Row. (1972, 55 min, DCP Digital) [Kian Bergstrom]
---
Screening with another 1972 Halsted production, THE SEX GARAGE (35 min, DCP Digital).
Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne’s TORI AND LOKITA (Belgium/France)
Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes
Two children who meet on a migrants’ ship from Africa to Belgium form a family bond to withstand a cold, predatory world that only values them as chattel in the Dardennes’ latest hyperrealist fiction feature. Their uncanny knack for making actors—whether professional or untrained—portray lived situations naturally is on full display in a story that might strain belief in less capable hands. The nerve and ingenuity of two young people who sense the precariousness of their every interaction with a society that’s looking for any excuse to send them from whence they came—or not bat an eye when they disappear—is so visceral, so immediate, that I felt my own heart rate quicken just taking it in from the comfort of my very secure home. Through a very specific story of two migrant kids, the Dardennes are able to explore themes of economics, culture clash, racism, family dynamics, and more without ever spelling them out didactically. More than their great skill in nailing place and everyday human behavior, perhaps this is their greatest skill: to reveal the universal through the personal. They pull no punches and rarely traffic in the kind of wish-fulfillment that is the meat and potatoes of most movies. They make the viewer fall in love with their characters but don’t let that love turn the movie into a fairy tale. If your heart doesn’t break at the end, you might not have one. (2022, 88 min, DCP Digital) [Dmitry Samarov]
Joana Pimenta and Adirley Quieros' DRY GROUND BURNING (Brazil)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
Finally! Someone (or, in this case, someones) figured out how to properly blend slow cinema with genre filmmaking. Have you ever thought to yourself 'Man, I love the films of Pedro Costa, but I sure wish there were more dystopian motorcycle gangs"? Or have you watched some Chantal Akerman and thought, "This is cool, but it would be a lot cooler if it was about female gangsters stealing oil from the government and selling it on the black market?" Do you think Béla Tarr could use some George Miller/MAD MAX vibes? Well, boy oh boy, is there finally a film for you. But despite my giddy glibness, DRY GROUND BURNING really is a profoundly striking film. The blend of scripted footage with documentary footage creates an otherworldly feel that makes this film impossible to categorize—which is the hallmark of any great piece of art. All taking place against the backdrop of what ended up being the tail end of Jair Bolsonaro's rule, this film paints a uchronic-like alternate reality. The tough gang leader Chitara brings her queer sister Lea (just out of prison) into the fold to help level up the crew's illegal refinery business. Together they have to deal with not only the police and government trying to take them down but navigate fragile alliances in the criminal underground. While it seems like there is a lot going on, DRY GROUND BURNING takes its time to unfold, to bring us into this world of the forgotten and ignored underclass. So many films use the slums or the ghetto as a backdrop, as set pieces. The purposefully slow pacing of this film really shows us how time passes. There is no glamor for these gangsters. No fineries or fast living. We see the drudgery and monotony of favela life. The women here aren't becoming oil runners for glamor or riches—they want opportunity. A chance to have something, anything, for themselves. We see how hard they have to work, and in truly dangerous circumstances, just to be able to scratch out a small something for themselves. This is a powerful film, steeped in gender and class politics. Everything here is political. Brutally so. Honestly so. The patina of sci-fi only adds to this. Dystopia is so often seen as the futuristic result of sudden catastrophe, when in fact one could easily see elements of our current geopolitical reality as more than dystopian. This is the first film I've seen in a while that left me feeling truly emotional. What emotion, though, has been impossible to pin down. I was excited, upset, inspired, exhausted, charmed. But truthfully, I was mostly awestruck. I have never seen a film quite like DRY GROUND RUNNING before and I sincerely don't think I ever will again. (2022, 153 mins, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
David Cronenberg's THE FLY (US)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Thursday, 9:30pm
David Cronenberg may have finally shed the moniker of "former midnight-movie director," but it's worth noting that the major themes of his recent work have been present all along. This revival of THE FLY is a reminder of how much Cronenberg has always been in control of his ideas—and, as importantly, how he could use them to truly unsettle an audience. The film was a potentially thankless project (a remake of a 50s sci-fi/horror item affectionately remembered as camp), but Cronenberg transformed it into something wholly personal, an existentialist allegory about growing alienated from your own body. It's discomforting filmmaking from literally the first shot, a classic Cronenbergian close-up that isolates the main character (Jeff Goldblum, in the performance of his career) in a frame purposely devoid of context: the surrounding milieu (in terms of both space and time) is rendered unclear, and the overly technical sci-fi jargon, delivered with deadpan assurance, only complicates things further. It takes a few minutes to determine that, no, we're not in a dream; the rest of the film can be seen as a deepening of that initial uncertainty. As Goldblum's scientist transforms into a giant insect (an extremely nuanced process, thanks to Cronenberg's scientific imagination and some of the finest make-up of any movie), the more sympathy he arouses in the journalist who's fallen for him. Some critics have read the film as an AIDS metaphor; and on that level, it ranks with the best of Derek Jarman and Todd Haynes. But the central romance—in which love is strengthened by the impossibility of love—resonates in a number of directions, sustaining the film across multiple viewings. Screening as part of Doc’s Thursday II series, “Skin Under Skin: A Retrospective of David Cronenberg.” (1986, 95 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
Pim de la Parra's ONE PEOPLE [aka WAN PIPEL] (Suriname/Netherlands)
Film Studies Center (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm
Made the year after Suriname's independence, Pim de la Parra's 1976 drama serves as an affecting call—for a return home for the Surinamese diaspora and for an embracing of the country's rich multi-ethnic heritage and make up. The story is of Roy, a young black Surinamese student studying in Amsterdam (The Netherlands is the colonial power Surinam broke away from), who returns home to visit his dying mother. There, after many years away, Roy finds himself re-discovering his country and it's simple joys. He also finds Rubia, a Hindustani nurse, with whom he begins an affair—ignoring his relationship with his white girlfriend in The Netherlands and upsetting relatives on both sides, who hold to entrenched prejudices. De la Parra's film is subdued and visually flowing—once Roy returns to his homeland the camera is in nearly constant motion with tracking shots and pans, almost caressing the landscape and city life. Roy has come back to a country in motion, a country changing, moving into the future. The question he faces is whether he remains, aiding in that change, or returns to his studies in Amsterdam; whether he embraces an identity comingled with that of his newly-liberated land, or returns to the urbanity and intellectual pursuits he had in the diaspora. Introduction by Kaneesha Parsard, Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature. (1976, 111 min, DCP Digital) [Patrick Friel]
Dziga Vertov's MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA (USSR/Silent)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm
“This experimental work aims at creating a truly international language of cinema based on its total separation from the language of theatre and literature,” proclaims a title card at the start of Dziga Vertov’s silent masterpiece. In fact, it’s one of the only titles that appears in the film—MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA conveys meaning almost entirely through images and cinematic effects like split-screens, sped-up and slowed-down motion, and some of the most astonishing montage ever. The film proceeds as an avalanche of details; some are profound, but many are banal, and the unpredictable way that Vertov races between them suggests a superhuman effort to catalogue everything that happens in a city (in this case, Odessa) over the course of a single day. In this overarching creative mission as well as its nonstop formal invention, MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA resembles such other Modernist touchstones as James Joyce’s Ulysses and the poetry of William Carlos Williams, and as with much Modern art, the name is the game is defamiliarizing the ordinary. Vertov’s inspired visual rhymes locate humanity within inanimate objects and occasionally make people seem like machines. In one characteristic passage, Vertov cuts from a car traveling down a road to the bare neck of a sleeping woman, presenting both lines at the same angle so as to imply a continuity between the images. In another sequence, a woman opening her legs to give birth gets intercut with a chasm created between two skyscrapers. Appearing throughout the film is the unnamed title character (played by Vertov’s brother, Mikhail Kaufman, the film’s actual cinematographer), who pops up all over town to record the events of the day; his tripod, with its long, skinny legs, looks like a giant grasshopper accompanying him on his rounds. The man with the movie camera seems to be everywhere at once—a stirring metaphor for cinema’s ability to enter into any area of worldly experience. That sense of possibility has obvious ties to the triumphalism of the Soviet Union’s early days. When Vertov started making MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA, the Russian Revolution was only about a decade old; the film’s theme of discovering a new world was not metaphorical. Seen after the fall of the USSR, Vertov’s call to arms still resounds on an abstract level, signaling that anyone anywhere can transform the world through art. Preceded by Maya Deren's 1943 experimental classic MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (14 min, DCP Digital). Screening as part of Doc’s Friday series, “Sight & Sound: The Greatest?” (1929, 68 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme's LE JOLI MAI (France/Documentary)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Sunday, 7pm
Made soon after Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s landmark documentary CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER (1961), LE JOLI MAI offers another pop sociological survey of postwar French life. It’s specifically about Paris in May 1962, the month the French government called a ceasefire in Algeria, thereby signaling the first time in almost 25 years that the country wasn’t involved in an armed conflict. Based off the numerous man-on-the-street interviews presented throughout the film, it seems like Parisians weren’t sure of what to do with their newfound peace and prosperity. The mood is generally guarded, though the eloquent, ruminative narration calls attention to the underlying existential uncertainty. This was the first feature directed by the great Chris Marker (the codirector, Pierre Lhomme, was a noted cinematographer whose credits included Melville’s ARMY OF SHADOWS [1969], Bresson’s FOUR NIGHTS OF A DREAMER [1971], and Eustache’s THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE [1973]), and while the interview sequences feel less like Marker’s later work than they do contemporaneous cinema verité docs, the associative, non-chronological structure hints at the philosophical essay films for which he’s most renown. The interviews can be prosaic at times, as most of them consist of working-class and petit bourgeois people describing their work and home lives; however, it quickly becomes clear that each subject projects certain deep-seated views about class, politics, and race relations that speak to the character of the society as a whole. Not surprisingly, given when this was shot, the relationship between France and Algeria enters into numerous conversations and provides the film with its specific sociopolitical context. It also grants the film its sense of urgency. LE JOLI MAI climaxes with an extended interview with a young man from Algeria who’s trying to support his parents and six sisters, none of whom work. After he describes how he’s faced discrimination in navigating French society, the offscreen interviewer asks him if he considers going back to Algeria; the interviewee replies that he will never leave France. It’s a complicated moment that communicates both determination and pessimism, much like LE JOLI MAI on the whole. Screening as part of Doc’s Sunday series, “The Decisive Moment: Photographers Turned Filmmakers.” (1963, 145 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Guillermo del Toro's PAN'S LABYRINTH (Mexico/Spain)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Sunday, 4pm
Once upon a time, long before he was cursed by some all-powerful demon to make only overblown and unnecessary remakes of others’ movies, Guillermo del Toro channeled his boundless love for all things oozing, fantastic, and macabre into his own allegorical fairy tales. This story of a young girl who escapes into an underworld of fairies, fauns, and, most memorably, the Pale Man, with his detachable eyeballs that must be fastened into his palms for him to see, draws on folk traditions from all over the globe, as well as the artwork of Francisco Goya and Arthur Rackham, but combines all the disparate influences into a unified vision. Most of del Toro’s work dwells in a cut-and-dry moral universe—no matter how elaborate the make-up, effects, or sets, the good guys are good and the bad guys are bad. What sets PAN’S LABYRINTH apart is the understandable longing to escape into fantasy to block out the twin horrors of Franco’s Spain and the prospect of life with a hateful step-parent. However deep the girl dives into realms of magic and make-believe, what awaits when she resurfaces is no happily ever after. Rewatching del Toro’s crowning achievement 16 years after its release made me hope wholeheartedly that one day soon the spell will be lifted and he’ll be able to make something even half as memorable as this, rather than continuing to raid the dusty corners of Hollywood storage lockers for old monsters to reanimate. Screening as an encore of Doc’s Thursday I series, “The Three Amigos.” (2006, 119 min, 35mm) [Dmitry Samarov]
Jia Zhang-ke's A TOUCH OF SIN (China)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6pm
Expectations of something boldly different followed word from overseas that Jia Zhang-Ke, perhaps mainland China's greatest filmmaker, had begun work on his first commercial feature. The rumors were of a late Qing martial arts drama with sets, costumes, professional actors--the works. All this from a filmmaker whose oeuvre up to now might be said to constitute a wholesale rejection of the sort of glamorous historical fantasy fifth generation filmmakers like Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige have come to live by. The rumors were true in part. The film that premiered at last year's Cannes Film Festival was boldly, indeed thrillingly, different, but it was not a Qing set period epic. That production had been put on hold in order to make a different film, contemporary set yet no less epic in terms of the rich expanse of emotional and geographical territory it would cover. This film would address itself more directly to the exigencies of China's present condition in four true stories of violence, both physical and psychological, both structural and interpersonal, that together would form a portrait of a society brutalized by outlaw capitalism. What this abrupt gesture alone reaffirms about Jia is his earnest sense of duty as a social artist whose work always places the needs and concerns of his people above his own, or rather one for whom that distinction does not exist. While, in 2013, several American filmmakers, from Harmony Korine to Sophia Coppola, from Ridley Scott to Michael Bay and Martin Scorsese, released films that addressed what seems to have emerged, finally and thankfully, as a signal theme for the current cinema, it would take a filmmaker like Jia in a country as blasted as China to bring that issue--inequality, of course—its proper sense of urgency, scale and context. Where the Americans have emphasized the excesses of the haves, Jia has zeroed in on the destitution, not only material but spiritual, of the have-nots and, in the process, achieved something exceedingly rare in the movies: a just explanation, without a shred of speculative self-indulgence, of why people sometimes do horrible things. Screening as part of SAIC professor Daniel R. Quiles’ Gore Capitalism lecture series. (2013, 133 min, DCP Digital) [Edo Choi]
Hayao Miyazaki's PORCO ROSSO (Japan/Animation)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday and Sunday, 11am
It's the age of aviation in the Adriatic and even pigs are flying, or at least one pig, an ace pilot of the Great War cursed to live out his days as a swine protecting the skies. PORCO ROSSO is hardly the odd man out in Hayao Miyazaki's canon—in fact it's entrenched in his sense of moral ambiguity and vivid visions of flight—but the silly central conceit coupled with an unlikely adult protagonist has left this one easily dismissed. More's the pity, as the animation grandmaster has seldom painted a clearer picture than this antiwar parable set upon a magnificent Mediterranean canvas. Curiously, the film is not an origin story. The pilot known as Porco Rosso has long since been resigned to his condition, and the world itself has accepted him as just another unfortunate byproduct of World War I. He has an old love, the glamorous Madame Gina; a moustache twirling rival, the debonair American pilot Curtis; and eventually, a plucky young sidekick in the over-eager Fio. In the course of his high-flying adventures, he contends with a scrappy band of pirates, goes head-to-head with Curtis for Gina's affections, and witnesses the beginnings of Italian fascism, all while reluctantly keeping Fio in tow. It's all appropriately thrilling, and the seaside vistas are as breathtaking as the dogfights, but Miyazaki saves the best for last as an aerial duel devolves into the best fist fight since THE QUIET MAN, pounding home the futility of all this mechanized aggression. Screening as part of the Kid Flix series and preceded by a short media-literacy introduction by Film Center staff. (1992, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Tristan Johnson]
Michael Haneke's AMOUR (France/Austria)
Alliance Française (810 N. Dearborn St.) — Thursday, 6:30pm
One day an elderly couple is having breakfast in the kitchen of their Parisian apartment the way they clearly have so many times before that it's become rote; on this day, the woman, Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), freezes in place, utterly confounding her husband, Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant). He thinks at first she's putting him on, but she isn't; it's a stroke. What follows is a series of scenes in which Anne's health steeply declines and Georges quickly becomes her caretaker. One might say he becomes her jailor, because when she can still sense her lifeforce slipping away, Anne tells Georges she doesn't want to keep living. He ignores her wish to exit with dignity and continues to keep her breathing, largely for selfish reasons. He can't conceive of his life without her. As he watches her regress to an infantile, then vegetative state, he continues under the delusion that she will one day recover and the life they shared for so long will resume and continue as it had before. The great horror of this film is not the clinical, distanced view of the passage from life into death but the desperation with which humans cling to life far past any reason. Other animals know to crawl away from the herd and expire naturally, whereas we go above and beyond to maintain the delusion of immortality. If you yourself are elderly or have friends or family who are, Haneke's film will not make for a pleasant watch. He has specialized throughout his career in pointing his camera at human flaws and frailties and holding it steady no matter how uncomfortable it makes his audience. His is a necessary and rewarding art, though sometimes a bit removed, like that of a creature observing an alien species through a next-generation apparatus. He's telling us how we are but sometimes doesn't seem like one of us. I'm grateful to him, though I can see how some wouldn't be. A glass of Bourgogne Louis Jadot included. (2012, 127 min, Digital Projection) [Dmitry Samarov]
Laura Poitras’s ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED (US/Documentary)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 4:30pm
Never underestimate the reach and power of a tenacious, iconoclastic artist. If you’re feeling hopeful, that might be a takeaway from Laura Poitras’s latest multifaceted documentary. Her subject is photographer Nan Goldin, whose provocative portraits of her friends and associates in New York City’s hedonistic, drug-fueled underground made her a star of the scene in the late 1970s and '80s. Goldin’s confrontational, often explicitly sexual photographs—many focused on the LGBTQ community before and during the AIDS crisis—were fueled by an activist’s ethos to preserve the lives of those cast to the margins by society, a position she related to as both a lifelong misfit and a forthright woman in a male-dominated field. Essentially co-authored by Goldin, who narrates the film, ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED takes us up to her present-day involvement with P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), an advocacy group she formed in 2017 in response to her battle with opioid addiction. Her work with the group has a surprising connection to the art world via the Sackler family, former owners of OxyContin producer Purdue Pharma. The Sacklers have donated millions that they made from the distribution of deadly opioids (over 450,000 American casualties) to arts and cultural institutions around the world to launder their reputation, and Goldin has made it her mission to have the family’s name removed from wings in the Met, Guggenheim, Tate, and Louvre, and other museums. The cohesiveness with which Poitras pulls together the film’s myriad threads—biography, sociocultural chronicle, advocacy, and art display (excerpts of Goldin’s famed slideshows punctuate the film’s chapters)—evinces the inextricability of art and lived experience from politics and economics, and highlights the frequently vexed relationship between subversive creators and the establishment interests they depend on to culturally enshrine their work. Poitras also posits a fascinating connection between art and the legacy of medical science, as she continually shows how various health stigmas, from mental illness to HIV, have been catalysts for artists to transform pain and erasure into social action. With ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED, Poitras and Goldin vibrantly demonstrate the real and very visible change such action can affect. Screening in partnership with EXPO CHICAGO. (2022, 117 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
Luis Buñuel's BELLE DE JOUR (France)
Leather Archives & Museum (6418 N. Greenview Ave.) – Saturday, 7pm
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 Fetish Film Forum. (1967, 101 min, Digital Projection) [Rob Christopher]
Lise Akoka and Romane Gueret’s THE WORST ONES (France)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
When the Cannes Film Festival bestowed the 2022 Un Certain Regard award on THE WORST ONES, it fulfilled its purpose in recognizing both young talent and innovative and daring filmmaking. First-time film directors Lise Akoka and Romane Gueret and their cast of first-time actors from the working-class, Channel-hugging town of Boulogne-sur-Mer have produced a work of dizzying metafiction that is as sly as it is affecting. Gabriel (Johan Heldenbergh), a Belgian director in his mid-50s, is making his first film in the town—the bizarrely titled “Pissing into the North Wind.” He and Judith (Esther Archambault), his production assistant, audition teens at the local school and cast “the worst ones,” in the words of one townswoman who worries that the film will further cement Boulogne’s reputation as a miserable place to live and visit. The film Gabriel is making is as pretentious as his auteurist outbursts are comical in their unearned entitlement. A sex scene he is trying to film with Jessy (Loïc Pech), a greasy JD, and unfairly slut-shamed Lily (Mallory Wanecque) is wince-inducing and a challenge to Gabriel’s control over his production. The real interest in THE WORST ONES is in the film outside Gabriel’s film. The stories of the cast and crew members are wonderful slices of life, from Lily’s grief over the loss of her kid brother to cancer to the difficulty Ryan (Timéo Mahaut) has controlling his temper and his torn feelings about his unstable mother, who has lost custody of him to his sister. Akoka and Gueret avoid clarifying the line between the “real life” film and “North Wind,” which is confusing. But the film’s exhilarating, go-for-broke attitude hooked me from the get-go. THE WORST ONES owes much to Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne both in its subject matter and documentary-like execution; indeed, Mahaut reminded me in appearance and performance of Thomas Doret, the child star of A KID WITH A BIKE (2011). Mahaut and Wanecque are major talents who could have acting careers if they so choose, but all of the players in the film impress. At the last, Akoka and Gueret pay tribute to their French artistic forbears with a final frame that asserts the wonder of the movies. (2022, 99 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
ALSO SCREENING
⚫ Asian Pop-Up Cinema
The extensive Asian Pop-Up Cinema series continues its sixteenth season. Their in-person and virtual offerings are too many to list; visit here for more information.
⚫ Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
Olivia Peace’s 2020 film TAHARA (77 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday at 7pm, followed by a post-screening discussion with Peace, Eric Patrick and Kyle Henry, Associate Professors of Radio, Television, and Film at Northwestern.
As part of the Science on Screen series, Hanns Walter Kornbum’s silent 1925 masterpiece OUR HEAVENLY BODIES (91 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 7pm, with live accompaniment by Stephan Moore, Scott Smallwood, and Rives Collins, and an introduction by Dr. Katherine Buse, postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for the Formation of Knowledge at University of Chicago. Free admission for both. More information on all screenings and events 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 now playing at the Cicero Green Line station (4800 W. Lake St.). The installation, known as we love, is a filmic exhibition of home movies and amateur films selected from collections housed and preserved at CFA. The video, which has a runtime of approximately 48 min, will be projected onto a wall in the mezzanine area of the station. The video will run day and night through mid-March next year. More info here.
⚫ Comfort Film at Comfort Station (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave.)
Donald W. Thompson’s 1976 film A STRANGER IN MY FOREST (75 min, 16mm) screens Wednesday at 8pm. Presented by Jason Coffman, curator of Church Basement Cinema. Free admission. More info here.
⚫ Doc Films
Steven Soderbergh’s 2023 film MAGIC MIKE’S LAST DANCE (112 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, 8pm, as part of the Dóc: New Releases series.
Marguerite Duras’ 1977 French film BAXTER, VERA BAXTER (91 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday, 7pm, as part of the Delphine Seyrig, More Than a Muse series.
Alfonso Cuarón’s 2018 film ROMA (135 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 7pm, as part of the Three Amigos, Doc’s Thursday I series. More info on all screenings here.
⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Cauleen Smith’s 1998 film DRYLONGSO (86 min, DCP Digital) opens this week. See Venue website for showtimes.
Another sneak peek screening of Larissa Behrendt’s 2022 documentary YOU CAN GO NOW (82 min, Digital Projection) takes place on Saturday, 7pm, with artist Richard Bell in attendance for a post-screening discussion with Cay Sophie Rabinowitz, Director of OSMOS. Presented with support from and in collaboration with OSMOS and EXPO CHICAGO. Also screening in partnership with EXPO CHICAGO is Judd Tully and Harold Crooks’ 2022 documentary THE MELT GOES ON FOREVER: THE ART AND TIMES OF DAVID HAMMONS (101 min, Digital Projection).
Marwa Arsanios’ WHO IS AFRAID OF IDEOLOGY, PART 1 and PART 2 (2017, 51 min, Digital Projection) screen Wednesday at 6pm, and PART 3 and PART 4 (2020 and 2022, 66 min, Digital Projection) screen Thursday at 6pm. Both screenings followed by a discussion with the artist. More info on all screenings and events here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
Léa Mysius’ 2022 French film THE FIVE DEVILS (96 min, DCP Digital) begins screening this week, and Mark Jenkin’s 2023 horror film ENYS MEN (96 min, DCP Digital) continues. See Venue website for showtimes. More info on all screenings here.
⚫ Sweet Void Cinema
Find information on the Humboldt Park microcinema, including its screening and workshop schedule, here.
CINE-LIST: April 14 - April 20, 2023
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, Michael Castelle, Edo Choi, Rob Christopher, John Dickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Patrick Friel, Tristan Johnson, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Raphael Jose Martinez, Dmitry Samarov, K.A. Westphal