:: FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 22 - THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 28 ::

🏳️‍🌈 REELING 2023: THE 41ST CHICAGO LGBTQ+ INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Reeling, the 41st Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival, continues through Sunday, October 8. The in-person part of the festival, which takes place at Chicago Filmmakers and Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema (2828 N. Clark St.), goes through Sunday, October 1, while the virtual portion starts Friday, September 29 and continues through Sunday, October 8. View the full schedule and more info here.

Theo Montoya’s ANHELL69 (Colombia)
Chicago Filmmakers – Friday, 7pm
As a camera slowly pans around what is assumed to be his childhood bedroom, filmmaker and narrator Theo Montoya states, “I fell in love with the movies because it was the only place where I could cry.” Combining documentary, experimental filmmaking, and personal essay, ANHELL69 is a mesh of styles, free flowing through time. The title references a science fiction B-movie Montoya was working on some years ago, and this contemporary version weaves emotional audition footage with newly shot, dreamlike images of his concept. Anhell69 is also the Instagram handle of Montoya’s intended lead for the film, who passed away very shortly after casting. The original film was about ghosts, as is this new iteration. Rather than the imagined setting of his dystopic fiction, Montoya reflects on the real-world dangers and hardships of being queer in Medellín, Colombia, and the many friends he’s lost due to suicide and drug overdose. ANHELL69 presents an audiovisual diary of his friends and their experiences, which pushes beyond the confines of a narrative feature into something more personal and reflective, particularly of the importance and impact of chosen family. Slow-moving apocalyptic yet contemporary shots of the city interrupt at times, the politics of the moment made completely present. Documentary footage of protests intercut with eerie shots of his red-eyed cinematic ghosts, directly addressing the folding in of reality and fiction. Imagining his own funeral procession throughout the film—the car carrying his body driven by his favorite director, Víctor Gaviria—Montoya reflects throughout ANHELL69 on the importance of documenting his culture and friends. There's a hope that their memory—pieced together through this wide variety of footage—is not a ghostly presence but a real, affecting one. Screening as part of the QuE3R FrAm3s Series, programmed by former Cine-File managing editor Patrick Friel and Levi Sierra. (2022, 74 min, Digital Projection) [Megan Fariello]
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Alice Maio Mackay’s T BLOCKERS (Australia)
Chicago Filmmakers – Friday, 9pm
Lo-fi, grungy, gross, and utterly charming, T BLOCKERS is the underground trans meta-horror comedy you didn’t know you needed. Mackay’s gleeful gorefest of queer filmmakers taking revenge on an army of bigoted parasites is a vehicle for fighting transphobia stuffed inside a story about the circuitous nature of filmmakers inspiring each other. Sophie (Lauren Last), a young trans femme director working at the local cinema, is writing her next screenplay, working on indie film shoots with her friends, watching scary movies with her friend Spencer (Lewi Dawson), and absolutely drowning in the horrid Australian dating scene. The timing couldn’t be worse when she finally does meet a nice guy (Toshiro Glenn), since it happens to be in the midst of a mysterious parasite turning the cis men of the town into feral, blood-thirsty creatures, dripping in black goo, and hungry to attack those different from them. The rise of these queerphobic monsters parallels the election of an Australian politician hellbent on enacting anti-trans legislation, making for a neat and tidy horror metaphor for trans doomerism that's tragically potent. But there is an air of playfulness and anarchic joy in Mackay’s feature; the effervescent colors popping from every set piece, the overflowing goop and gore that accompanies the action sequences, and the thrill of Sophie and her friends reveling in the communal spirit of young DIY filmmakers. Wandering around like the misbegotten punk movie offspring of Ed Wood and Gregg Araki, T BLOCKERS is a much-needed jolt of kickass cinematic pleasure. Screening as part of the QuE3R FrAm3s Series, programmed by former Cine-File managing editor Patrick Friel and Levi Sierra. (2023, 74 min, Digital Projection) [Ben Kaye]
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Trevor Anderson’s BEFORE I CHANGE MY MIND (Canada)
Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema – Saturday, 3pm
A sex education class is taking place in a Canadian school gymnasium, boys on one side and girls on the other, separated by color-coded uniforms. In walks a new student, the androgynous Robin in a rainbow sweater, who draws the befuddled stares of the children before taking a seat in the back, and in the middle, of the gender-segregated class. It’s not long before Robin is approached by a classmate with the dreaded question: “What are you?” Thankfully, BEFORE I CHANGE MY MIND doesn’t attempt to answer that. The film upends expectations by having Robin, a gender nonbinary preteen, already mostly comfortable in their skin. Anderson and co-screenwriter Fish Griwkowsky largely focus on the social insecurities the child brings out in those around them, specifically in troublemaking classmate Carter. Initially at odds, the two children eventually form a close bond during a school band trip to the West Edmonton Mall. Robin is clearly smitten; Carter’s connection is more ambiguous and is further complicated when he starts pining after a female classmate named Izzy, arousing Robin’s jealousy. Within this inchoate love triangle, Robin falls under the sway of both Carter and Izzy, becoming increasingly influenced by their varyingly cruel behavior. Is Robin just trying to fit in? Set in 1987, BEFORE I CHANGE MY MIND often resembles other 21st-century media based on nostalgia for the era, propelled by a colorful pop aesthetic and a reverence for outdated fashion and technology. But what makes it unique is its gentle queering of this most reactionary of decades, the ambiguity and irresolution it offers in place of easy definitions and outcomes. There are scenes of traditional pleasure—a psychedelic rollercoaster ride, a hilarious production of an alt-Webber musical called "Mary Magdalene Video Star"—but what Anderson leaves us with is the enigma of growing up, whatever one’s identity might be. Toward the end of the film, it’s Robin who’s pointedly asking someone else: “What are you?” (2022, 89 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
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Sav Rodgers’ CHASING CHASING AMY (US/Documentary)
Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema – Saturday, 5pm
CHASING AMY (1997) came along at a strange time in the lives of Kevin Smith and Sav Rodgers. Smith, riding high off the critical and commercial fumes of his debut indie darling CLERKS (1994) and subsequently walking with his tail between his legs after his critically lambasted sophomore outing MALLRATS (1996), needed to make a film that was as personal and honest as his first feature but still proved that he had new things to say in the larger film landscape. The resulting feature would inexplicably become the life raft for a young Sav Rodgers, a filmmaker growing up in Kansas whose exposure to this piece of mid-90s queer-adjacent ephemera would change the trajectory of his life forever. After making the film the centerpiece of a TED Residency speech that went viral in mid-2020, Rodgers embarked on chronicling his love for Smith’s third feature by making a documentary that starts out as a fan’s ode to his favorite movie, but slowly becomes something far more complex and revelatory as filming continues. Rodgers’ love for CHASING AMY is shared by many of the cast and crew, and there’s much made of the fact that a mainstream film that dealt with overtly queer themes in the 1990s was joyfully accepted by the public. But these are queer themes filtered through the mind of Kevin Smith, a straight white man, and the arguments begin to pile up as more queer voices are brought in to dissect why it was that Smith’s queer feature was far more embraced than parallel films made by actual queer filmmakers. This all compounds in a startlingly frank interview with the film’s female lead, Joey Lauren Adams, grappling with how the film catapulted her into Hollywood stardom, but balanced that with the film’s central relationship being a blatant stand-in for her own relationship with Smith at the time of filming. Rodgers’ film finally emerges as its own special object outside of the shadow of CHASING AMY as the process of making the documentary begins to parallel with his own journey of further coming out as a trans man in public, and the joys of this deeper gender expression empowering his blooming career as an artist. Rodgers ultimately has made a beautiful tribute to what some might call "problematic art"—art that might not stand the test of time but still speak to something deep within us at the moment we need them most. Even the harshest critics of CHASING AMY will admit that it is nothing if not an honest film, truthful to the heart and mind of Kevin Smith. There couldn’t be a more fitting love letter to CHASING AMY than Sav Rodgers having made just the same. Co-presented with Gerber/Hart. (2023, 95 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
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Georden West’s PLAYLAND (US)
Chicago Filmmakers – Saturday, 7pm
Suggesting Rainer Werner Fassbinder by way of David Lynch, writer-director Georden West’s debut feature isn’t any one type of film. It’s not a documentary, though it centers on Boston’s oldest gay bar, the titular Playland Café, and elements of archival ephemera are incorporated; it’s not a narrative, though wisps of storytelling float through this graveyard of memories. Rather, the film is a confounding hybrid, at once elegy and experiment, depicting a night at this institution of the so-called Combat Zone (the name of the adult entertainment center of Boston in the 1960s) on the eve of its demolition. An opening credits sequence introduces the various epochs contained within: the bar opened in the late 1930s and closed in 1998, and the film spans approximately that duration. It would seem different characters, of differing sexualities and backgrounds, are from different times, though they intersect across eras. There’s no deliberate cohesion to the narrative vignettes, which assume any sort of definitive shape only through the archival audio and footage. In one sequence toward the beginning, two of the cafe’s waiters, positioned toward the camera, appear reading a newspaper called Fag Rag. Over this footage is audio of an interview with one of the paper’s founders. There’s a wry acknowledgement of this oratory by the characters, conveying a bridge between these phantom worlds and setting a tone for the rest of the film. The documentary elements are the most straightforward, while the narrative vignettes recall Fassbinder in their stylized mise-en-scène and Lynch in the situation of the actors amidst the setting and their interaction with offscreen elements. The audience is one of the latter, as sometimes the characters are looking either straight past the camera directly at us or are situated straight toward it, the interplay between the audience and what’s on screen thus drawn into question. Our role as spectators is undeniable from a more neutral viewpoint, both an invitation into this world and its history and a reproach for our role in its destruction (the French phrase casse toi, meaning “go away,” is a recurring motif). The cinematography is striking, maybe even a little too polished; the set looks like that of a play. While the evocations of Fassbinder and Lynch are ultimately positive, there’s also a Kaufman-esque cumulation of inanity that’s a bit overwrought. Still, it’s a unique take on some tired modes, breathing new life into both a place and an approach. Screening as part of the QuE3R FrAm3s Series, programmed by former Cine-File managing editor Patrick Friel and Levi Sierra. (2023, 72 min, Digital Projection) [Kat Sachs]
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Sacha Polak’s SILVER HAZE (Netherlands/UK)
Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema – Saturday, 7:15pm
Because so many films suffer from a lack of realistic detail, it’s refreshing to find one with a surfeit of realistic detail. Nearly every character in SILVER HAZE, whether large or small, has such a complicated backstory that I felt as though writer-director Sacha Polak could pan away from the heroine at any moment and continue making the movie about someone else. I’m not sure if that’s a strength, but then, I had similar feelings about Kenneth Lonergan’s MARGARET (2011) on first viewing and time has revealed that to be a great movie. As with MARGARET, one of the main satisfactions of SILVER HAZE is exploring the jungle of neuroses on display, so it may be best to go in without too much of a map. Suffice it to say, the diverse cast of characters, each with their own issues and coping mechanisms, spans a range of religions, races, sexual orientations, and mental health issues—this is a decidedly 21st-century take on British kitchen sink realism. The film earns its realist bona fides in the presence of Vicky Knight, a real-life nurse who suffered severe burns over much of her body when she was eight years old; her backstory explicitly inspired aspects of her onscreen character. Franky lives unhappily in a working-class neighborhood of Southend, a coastal city in Essex, with her mother and sister. Her father abandoned them to start another family when Franky was eight, around the same time the family’s house burned down. Now in her 20s, she continues to brood on these events, losing herself, alternately, in work and getting high. Her life changes when she falls in love with Florence, a young woman she treats in the emergency room after a suicide attempt, and the two enter into a passionate and impulsive romance. The heroine has never been involved with a woman before, though as in André Téchiné’s films, sexuality in SILVER HAZE is fluid and unpredictable, leading people to reroute their lives for reasons they can’t quite explain. The film depicts family in a similar way in the third act, when Franky finds herself living with two strangers whom she comes to love like relatives. In this development, Polar spins a different, more poignant kind of love story. (2023, 103 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Stephen Winter’s CHOCOLATE BABIES (US)
Chicago Filmmakers – Saturday, 9pm
A remarkable political satire of the New Queer Cinema era, CHOCOLATE BABIES is an unapologetically madcap celebration of Black Queer power and community. A group of HIV-positive radical activists (Suzanne Gregg Ferguson, Dudley Findlay Jr., Michael Lynch) take on the city’s conservative, harmful policies with a plan involving a closeted councilman (Bryan Webster). The romantic relationship between Max (Claude E. Sloan) and the councilman’s office worker, Sam (Jon Kit Lee) is at the heart of CHOCOLATE BABIES, underscoring the importance of love, both within the group and as a larger theme. The individual stories of each of the characters, their hardships and joys, are highlighted throughout as they battle against the political landscape that is threatening their very existence. Director Stephen Winter’s camerawork is so distinct, beginning with his kinetic depiction of New York in the '90s. He also emphasizes personal interactions between characters, often seated right next to one another as the camera pans back and forth—through these connections the film instantly feels lived-in. The close quarters in which the frame contains these characters reflect the themes of community, depicting both the arguments about how this group should best fight for their cause and the group's constant sense of humor despite their disagreements. Characters speak over one another, poke fun at each other; the excellent performances combined with the stylistic filmmaking guide the film between its lighter moments and much more serious commentary on the effect of the AIDS crisis on Black communities. These movements are at times purposely jolting, as CHOCOLATE BABIES forces the audience to face the reality of this crisis and its effect on marginalized groups. It’s a film that is completely bold in its purpose, equally solemn and funny, tragic and joyful. Followed by a post-screening Q&A with Winter. Screening as part of the QuE3R FrAm3s Series, programmed by former Cine-File managing editor Patrick Friel and Levi Sierra. (1996, 83 min, Digital Projection) [Megan Fariello]
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Colby Holt and Sam Probst’s GANYMEDE (US)
Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema – Saturday, 9pm
“There’s no such thing as a homosexual.” So says closeted teenager Lee Fletcher, repeating the bromide of his church pastor. Raised in the American South by well-heeled, white, God-fearing Christian parents—his father being a local government official—Lee has always been taught to reject homosexuality as a sickness. But when he violently, impulsively defends an openly gay classmate, Kyle, from some school bullies, he begins feeling an attraction he’s unable to deny. The more Lee attempts to suppress his desires, the greater their intensity becomes, and the more they threaten to tear apart his parochial household and his cultivated identity as a good straight Christian boy. That’s where the pastor steps in. Asserting that Kyle is actually a "Ganymede"—an "unrepentant" homosexual, named after the eponymous hero of ancient Greek myth, attempting to corrupt Lee with same-sex desire—he subjects Lee to electroconvulsive therapy to cure him of his demons. There is a demon amid the Southern Gothic horror of GANYMEDE, a rotten, skeletal creature conjured by Lee’s imagination, but he is only a manifestation of real and actually deadly monsters: repression, homophobia, and the religious ideology that supports them. Among the uniformly strong performances, Robyn Lively is terrific as Lee’s doctrinaire mother, while David Koechner imbues his pastor with both chilling menace and melancholy; both characters have surprising histories that make their bigoted delusions especially devastating. As directors, Colby Holt and Sam Probst show a keen sense for expressionism, drenching Lee’s home in dungeon-like shadows and signifying the eruption of his repressed feelings through subjective flashbacks and grisly hallucinations. And in a moment of delicious camp levity, there’s the zombie apparition of a dead gay man, who answers his sister’s demand that he go back to hell with the damn truth: "You’re in hell, girl!" Followed by a post-screening Q&A with filmmakers Holt, Sam Probst and Steve Stanley and stars Jordan Doww and Pablo Castelblanco. (2023, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
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Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren’s 20,000 SPECIES OF BEES (Spain)
Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema – Sunday, 3:30pm
Sofía Otero, who’s around 10 years old, won an acting prize at the Berlin Film Festival for this understated family drama, and one can appreciate why she was given the award: the whole movie hangs on her performance, which requires her to explore the most intimate aspects of her identity on screen. That’s a tall order for an actor of any age, let alone one so young, yet Otero is consistently graceful and unself-conscious in the role. 20,000 SPECIES OF BEES takes place over the course of a summer in which Otero’s character comes to realize she identifies as a girl during an extended visit to her grandmother’s home in the Basque country. Also along for the vacation are her mother (a sculptor who’s taking some time apart from her husband), two older siblings, aunt, and cousins. While the mother, brother and sister love Otero unconditionally from the start, the other members of her family are slower to accept her; the movie charts their development as well as Otero’s. The overall arc of the story recalls that of another recent European film, Emanuele Crialese’s L’IMMENSITÁ (2022), which also considered the maturation of a transgender child. The key difference is that Crialese observed his protagonist in early adolescence, when children are far more articulate about their needs than they are at eight or nine; the protagonist of 20,000 SPECIES reaches an understanding of her identity more through intuition. Sticking largely with this character’s perspective, Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren (making her feature debut as writer-director) emphasizes her physical, immediate experiences—going swimming, playing with her siblings and cousins, learning about her grandmother’s bee colony—and presents the adults in her life mostly when she overhears their conversations. The filmmaker’s naturalistic approach has the effect of normalizing an experience with which many spectators remain unfamiliar; the movie serves as a reminder of how cinema can dismantle social taboos simply by refusing to acknowledge them as such. Co-presented with Instituto Cervantes of Chicago. (2023, 128 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Meghan Weinstein’s HEALED (US)
Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema – Monday, 7:15pm
Considering that so many people have willingly given over their lives to their cellphones, it doesn’t seem so outlandish that an evil cabal would use cellphone technology to control other people’s lives. That’s one of the premises behind HEALED, which contains enough narrative turns to hold your interest over the course of its breezy 92 minutes. Shantell Yasmine Abeydeera, who wrote the script, also stars as a former pop singer who had one hit song in the 2000s and has since relaunched her career as the host of a successful podcast. Her pregnant wife is also popular online in some way or another; both characters seem to enjoy flexible work schedules that give them plenty of time to reflect on the state of their marriage. In one moment of reflection, the couple decides to take part in an experimental therapy retreat in the hope of freeing themselves of stress before their child is born. Veteran indie screenwriter and actress Guinevere Turner plays the therapist of the retreat, and as always she’s a welcome onscreen presence, adding to her characterization a sense of mysterious yet suave sophistication. The early, vaguely flirtatious conversations between Abeydeera and Turner are nicely paced and well played; you kind of miss them when the movie takes a turn into allegorical horror, as the couple discovers that their experimental therapy retreat is a literal psychological experiment and they’re being experimented on. In this development, HEALED touches on the unholy alliances between big tech companies and right-wing political interests, which are plenty scary without the genre plotting. (2023, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Tom Gustafson’s GLITTER & DOOM (US)
Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema – Thursday, 9pm
Tom Gustafson, a director forever gunning for the title of “The Baz Luhrmann of Independent Cinema,” has returned after his previous musical outing—the neon-infused, time-traveling sex epic that was his screen adaptation of Michael John LaChiusa’s HELLO AGAIN (2017)—to craft another piece of visually overstimulating, queer-as-hell, earnest-to-the-high-heavens musical fantasia. Using the catalog of the Indigo Girls, Gustafson and creative collaborator Cory Krueckeberg have put together a cinematic jukebox musical telling a simple story of two men falling in love while they struggle with their respective artistic processes. Glitter (Alex Diaz) is a clown trying to get into a prestigious French clown school, even though his mother (Ming-Na Wen) wishes he had a real job. Doom (Alan Cammish) is an aspiring musician who can’t write happy songs to save his life; he's also haunted by the demons left behind by his ex-con mother (Missi Pyle). There’s no attempt at subtlety in GLITTER & DOOM, which goes so far as to have these eponymous lovers carry names intrinsically tied to their character traits. The art of music and performance pervades every frame, with lyrics popping up onscreen from Doom’s notebook scribblings, and audition tapes for Glitter’s clowning become musical sequences in and of themselves. It all flows together like a series of loosely connected music videos that happen to be peppered with cameos from such varied performers as Lea DeLaria, Beth Malone, Peppermint, and Tig Notaro. It all leads to, what else, a performance of "Closer to Fine" that, if not as memorable as when it was deployed in the more mainstream BARBIE, is certainly a tad more emotionally resonant. (2023, 114 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Celluloid Now (International/Experimental)

Chicago Film Society at the Gene Siskel Film Center and the Chicago Cultural Center through Sunday – See website for complete schedule

This year, CFS’ Celluloid Now program purports to bring people together for a sort-of communion of physical cinema. Since the medium of film allows for us to directly commune with what’s captured and to more directly engage with the artistic manipulations that connect our two worlds, the event takes on a mythic quality each year, existing to outline these basic contours of cinema itself. In its focus on contemporary analog film, the festival prioritizes experimental work and covers plenty of brand-new material alongside recently canonized highlights by the likes of Daïchi Saïto and Rose Lowder. Jodie Mack is one of these luminaries, and her typically dazzling M.U.S.H. (2022) anchors the Forest for the Trees program on Saturday at 1:30pm, continuing Mack’s gradual introduction of organic forms to her maximalist stroboscopic style. Other programs find lesser-known filmmakers like CFS’ own Cameron Worden utilizing the frame-fixed specificity of the medium, strobing in a way that (as any screener for these films takes pains to tell you) cannot be experienced digitally. Worden uses the style in his DIGITAL DEVIL SAGA (2023) to explore polarized internet ephemera at an only-slightly-faster rate than we consume it, each frame cramming in information ranging from Michael Snow YouTube rips to Rule 34 porn while the digitized images are re-physicalized on film via the computer screen’s light. There are simpler pleasures on offer too, like the gorgeous natural photography of Kathleen Rugh’s LIGHT’S RETURN (2021) and Anna Kipervaser’s NEXT HER HEART (2023). But even with more streamlined works, the added context of CFS’ expertise is always useful, especially given how many films rely on more technical structural film manipulations that might not read as artistic interventions to the average viewer. This is especially the case in the Light Signals program on Saturday at noon, where films like Kioto Aoki’s FOR BUCKY FULLER (2019) engage directly with the semiotics of image production and perception. Along with these educational qualities, the festival’s highlights are, as always, the things you could never hope to see anywhere else. Sure, celluloid screenings (especially ones focusing on challenging experimental work) are increasingly rare outside of specialty events like this, but there’s likely no other film festival in the country taking pains to always include a screening of Super 8 films, all prints which are one-of-a-kind direct artefacts of the filmmaker’s practice. This year’s mini showcase of the mini-gage (on Saturday at 6pm) is as good as ever, with Blanca Garcia’s THAT THIS IS (2023) standing out with its focus on “nowness” and humans’ near-instantaneous perception of light, a focus especially suited to the intimate format. Between oddities like this and the genuine majesty of something like Saïto’s ENGRAM OF RETURNING (2015), whose intensity and theatrical immersion is on par with anything you’ve seen in IMAX this year, Chicago is certifiably spoiled with some of the best that cinema has to offer this weekend. [Maxwell Courtright]

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's BEWARE OF A HOLY WHORE (Germany)

Chicago Film Society at Northeastern Illinois University (The Auditorium, Building E 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) – Wednesday, 7:30pm

In an essay for the Criterion Collection, Michael Koresky points out that Rainer Werner Fassbinder divided his early films (i.e., those made released between 1969 and 1971) into categories of “cinema films,” which played with conventions of other movies, and “bourgeois films,” which critiqued conventions of German middle-class life. Koresky also notes that while BEWARE OF A HOLY WHORE takes place on a movie set, it really belongs to the second category. The film, Fassbinder’s tenth feature, depicts an independent movie crew as a deformed version of a bourgeois nuclear family, with a tyrannical patriarch (Lou Castel, playing a stand-in for Fassbinder), subservient “children” (i.e., the rest of the crew), and lots of incestuous sex. Very little filming gets done during HOLY WHORE (there’s always some delay: the crew is out of film stock, the director’s experiencing creative block), and so the characters, left to it around, drink, and gossip, enact power games with each other. Someone’s always trying to bed someone else or else a relationship is coming apart. And there’s yelling, lots of yelling. The obsession with sloth and libertine behavior recalls Warhol’s films, though the camerawork is not at all Warholian. Working with the great Michael Ballhaus, Fassbinder executes long, snakelike dolly shots, which render cavernous and vertiginous the Spanish chateau where the film-within-a-film is being shot. Fassbinder also achieves indelible effects with pop music, often playing songs in their entirety so that they draw out underlying emotions of a scene. Fassbinder’s use of The Songs of Leonard Cohen is particularly inspired, the songs from that record calling attention to the characters’ unspoken vulnerability and longing to be loved. But the most explosive musical cue is Ray Charles’ “Let’s Go Get Stoned,” which plays over the climactic long take. One of the most dynamic moments Fassbinder ever shot, the scene conveys sadness, anger, resignation, and aesthetic beauty all at once. The writer-director’s cynicism here about the creative process anticipates the imminent breakup of Antiteater, the theater company he cofounded in 1967; at the same time, the film’s intoxication with the possibilities of mise-en-scene is rapturous. Fassbinder later claimed that this was his favorite of his own films; it’s certainly his most furious. Preceded by five minutes' worth of German safety films. (1971, 104 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Ringo Lam’s PRISON ON FIRE (Hong Kong) and John McTiernan’s ROLLERBALL (US)

Highs & Lows at the Music Box Theatre – Wednesday, 7pm

Though stylistically quite different, these two action films maintain spaces that are constantly on the verge of violence, everyone on a teetering edge. In Hong Kong director Ringo Lam’s PRISON ON FIRE (1987, 101 min, 35mm), young and naive ad designer Lo Ka Yiu (Tony Leung Ka Fai) is sentenced to three years in jail for manslaughter. He finds himself a pawn in the midsts of triad conflict and warden corruption. Yiu befriends the affable and protective Chung Tin Ching (Chow Yun Fat), and the film follows their time together in prison, violence threatened at every moment, leading to a gruesome climax. The film focuses on the difficulty and danger of everyday activity in the prison, the constant cleaning and manual labor, often in the grossest of circumstances. Unremarkable objects, too, become incredibly significant, from the banned items that could come in handy in a payoff or a fight to the limited food they're served, that can also be used to negotiate a position of power. Lam’s office-like prison space is dull and ordinary, as well, highlighting the monotony punctured by violence. It’s a vastly different color palette than ROLLERBALL (1996, 98 min, 35mm), all bold with reds and green - including an entire scene shot in infrared. A remake of the 1975 film, John McTiernan’s ROLLERBALL is set contemporarily. A violent new sport—part roller derby, part living pinball machine—is making waves and Americans Jonathan (Chris Klein) and Ridley (LL Cool J) travel to Central Asia to join. Jonathan becomes a star player, making good money, partying, and having a secret fling with his teammate, Aurora (Rebecca Romijn). He soon discovers, however, that violence is what draws the most viewers; promoters of the sport orchestrate extremely gory accidents of lesser players to keep viewers watching. ROLLERBALL’s critique and portrayal of global media is perhaps its wildest and most assertively satirical move—viewership of the sport is tracked by some impossible and indecipherable instantly televised ratings system. Set to early aughts nu metal bands like P.O.D. and Slipknot, who play at the rollerball arena, Jonathan’s revolution is quite a bit wackier and effective than Yiu and Ching’s. But both films explore control through a sinister combination of reward and violence—the prisoners of Lam’s film are often asked about democratic "requests," despite being completely powerless, and Jonathan is spoiled with gifts to placate his growing suspicion. Both films, in their own distinct ways, grapple with the responsibility of the individual, male friendship and group dynamics, and the use of the most effective forms of defiance. [Megan Fariello]

George A. Romero's NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (US)

Music Box Theatre – Friday & Saturday, 9pm and Sunday, 9:15pm

George Romero would go on to make better films than NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD—movies that suggest the unlikely fusion of Mark Twain’s all-American satire, Michael Powell’s fanciful curiosity, and John Cassavetes’ intimate, handmade aesthetic within the confines of the horror genre. But his debut is still an object lesson in independent filmmaking: Rather than cover up his distance from Hollywood (budgetary and geographical), Romero embraces it. The resulting film boasts a sharp sense of location—the suburbs and rural areas outlying Pittsburgh—and an understanding that the banal makes the horror all the scarier when it arrives. Much has been written about the radical implications of casting a black actor to play the heroic, gun-toting lead in 1968, though Romero (one of the few popular US filmmakers so consistently open about his radical politics) claims to have no political motivation in this decision. More focused is the film’s pointed anger at middle-class conformity, which gives the film its enduring bitter rage. Screening from a new 35mm print struck from the 2016 4K digital restoration by MoMA and the Film Foundation, taken from the original camera negative and overseen by George A. Romero. (1968, 96 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Ang Lee's CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON (International)

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

Like SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, which came before, and BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, which came after, Ang Lee's CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON both transcends and thoroughly embraces genre to illustrate astonishingly relatable characters who chafe against their constrictions and struggle to convey restrained romantic longing and unfulfilled passions. This exciting retrospective of Lee's work at Doc Films presents an opportunity to experience the wide variety of films that this successful filmmaker of the Taiwanese diaspora has directed since the early 1990s. CROUCHING TIGER is considered by many to be Lee's masterpiece. In every way, this is an almost flawless film. The acting, choreography, cinematography, soundtrack, production design, and the script weave together an absorbing blend of narrative and spectacle that appealed to both eastern and western audiences, launching a worldwide hunger for the wuxia genre. On its surface a martial arts film, CROUCHING TIGER is, more accurately, another Jane Austen novel in disguise. Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh) and Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-fat) are two venerated warriors who have simmered with unspoken feelings for each other for decades due to an obscure obligation of honor, and moments of quiet longing between them provide an opportunity for western audiences to draw parallels between SENSE AND SENSIBILITY and CROUCHING TIGER, despite the exotic landscape and customs. The addition of Jen Yu (Zhang Ziyi in her breakout role), a rebellious young noblewoman who refuses to settle down and get married, catapults the plot into elegant and sometimes dizzying motion, with some of the most gorgeously choreographed fight scenes ever recorded, including a famous sword fight between Li Mu Bai and Jen Yu atop a forest of bamboo trees. Acclaimed fight choreographer Yuen Woo-ping outdid himself with CROUCHING TIGER, having just completed THE MATRIX. What truly distinguishes CROUCHING TIGER from other thrilling wuxia films that preceded and followed and makes this film such a lasting masterpiece is clearly the emotional core and quietude of the narrative. This film is not afraid to linger in quiet moments, just as it is not afraid to erupt into raucous (and sometimes deftly comical) fight scenes to break the emotional tension. The action sequences, while undeniably a thrilling spectacle in their own right, advance the narrative and character development, allowing feelings to overflow when they are otherwise confined—especially for the ever-restrained Shu Lien, making CROUCHING TIGER more like a musical than a martial arts novel brought to life. The evocative score and cello solos by Yo Yo Ma round out this enduring adventure and haunting love story. Film nerds may enjoy this 35mm screening even more by imagining several Arriflex 435 cameras suspended by cranes and wires among the treetops to capture that iconic fight sequence; they'll also admire the artistry of the martial arts stars, who performed all their own fight sequences and delicate wire work so that we could appreciate long, hypnotic shots and close-ups of their faces as they battle to rescue the mystical Green Destiny sword. Screening as part of the Films of Ang Lee series. (2000, 120 min, 35mm) [Alex Ensign]

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Charles Laughton's THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (US)

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

Though now considered a classic, at the time of THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER's release in 1955 the American critics and public rejected it; Laughton's wife Elsa Lanchester later remembered, "It just broke his heart." In 1954, the great author and film critic James Agee adapted Davis Grubb's bestselling novel The Night of the Hunter, which is loosely based on a series of actual crimes in rural West Virginia during the Great Depression.  In Laughton's Southern Gothic film, the dangerous Reverend Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) meets a condemned man named Ben Harper in prison, who accidentally reveals that he hid $10,000 in stolen money somewhere in his home. After he gets out of jail, the preacher seeks out Ben's widow Willa (Shelley Winters) and her children John (Billy Chapin) and Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce); he even seduces Willa into marrying him. But Powell shifts his attention to John and Pearl when he suspects they know the money's location, and the children in turn flee in fear from their home. As Laughton crafted his story and its imagery, the work of the American cinematic pioneer D. W. Griffith primarily influenced him. For this new filmmaker, Griffith mastered a heightened, poetic melodrama, and Laughton aspired to recapture the power of his silent cinema. At the same time, Laughton and cinematographer Stanley Cortez also applied the techniques of German Expressionism to render this strange fairy tale of the Deep South. In his review of THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER in the Chicago Reader, critic Dave Kehr specified, "Laughton's direction has Germanic overtones—not only in the expressionism that occasionally grips the image, but also in a pervasive, brooding romanticism that suggests the Erl-King of Goethe and Schubert.  But ultimately the source of its style and power is mysterious—it is a film without precedent and without any real equals." Screening as part of the False Preachers series. (1955, 93 min, DCP Digital) [Candace Wirt]

Bethann Hardison and Frédéric Tcheng’s INVISIBLE BEAUTY (US/Documentary)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Without thinking about it, name some Black high-fashion models. Naomi Campbell, Tyson Beckford, Tyra Banks, and Iman made my list. There are others, but the one who probably didn’t make any of our lists is the one who made all of their careers possible—Bethann Hardison. The Brooklyn-born Hardison was working in New York’s garment district in 1967 when she met Black fashion designer Willi Smith. The pair struck up a friendship, and he introduced her to modeling. Her first walk down the runway, for designer Chester Weinberg, was an eye opener for an industry that was used to seeing white, bland models parading expressionlessly in front of them. The androgynous Hardison brought flare, movement, and personality to her walking and photo shoots. At the end of her successful modeling career, she saw the industry backslide into its Wonder Bread world, and that is when her real contribution began. Through the modeling agency specializing in people of color she founded, she would be the catalyst for enduring diversity in the fashion industry. In INVISIBLE BEAUTY, co-directors Hardison and Frédéric Tcheng break from the conventional documentaries about fashion designers, including several by Tcheng himself, we’ve seen in recent years to provide a forceful, engaging look at how the industry was pulled into the 21st century by the will of one woman. There is much to learn about and admire in INVISIBLE BEAUTY, though the film largely avoids getting close to Hardison’s personal life and feelings. The one exception is the inclusion of her son, actor Kadeem Hardison, who, unlike the models who looked at Hardison as a second mother, was intermittently estranged from his career-focused, activist, single mom. INVISIBLE BEAUTY is a vital addition to the story of Black image-making in the United States and beyond. (2023, 115 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Linh Tran's WAITING FOR THE LIGHT TO CHANGE (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Linh Tran’s debut feature is a slow-burn drama about the frustrations and sticky relationships of twenty-somethings as they find themselves in a new stage of life. The film follows a group of friends as they vacation for a week on a beach in Michigan. Amy recently lost a substantial amount of weight and navigates unresolved feelings for her friend, Kim, as she launches a successful career while dating the man Amy has unresolved feelings for. Recent college graduates, the friends enjoy their week in pure isolation as young adults on the edge of self-discovery with their entire lives ahead of them. While in this sanctuary, each member in the group expresses their troubles, whether it’s the death of a parent, job searching, or the end of love. As affection grows between Jay and Amy, consequences follow. For Amy and Kim, their fractured relationship is revealed from the get-go and only becomes exasperated. Tran presents one of the more emotionally volatile moments in life (mid-20s) not as a flashy, stylized flick but as a still life. David Foy’s cinematography complements a script focused on character, silhouettes of the young human psyche, with slow and often static camerawork sharpened by a naturalistic lighting that never upstages its subjects. WAITING FOR THE LIGHT TO CHANGE delivers a snapshot of a time where we’ve all been: biding time until a path in life presents itself, eager to discover our adult selves yet trying to hold onto youthful friendships. As someone who recently left this stage of their life, I would describe it as a purgatory on earth where you teeter on hope and fear on any given day—a mood accurately illustrated in the film. With Chekhovian sensibility, the director-writer explores human behavior. Even when it seems like some live their dreams, no one ever ends up completely satisfied with their outcomes. Followed by a post-screening Q&A with the director at the Saturday, 6pm; the Sunday, 3pm; and the Wednesday, 6pm screenings. (2023, 89 min, DCP Digital) [Ray Ebarb]

Billy Wilder’s THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH (US)

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

THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH is an utterly anticlimactic film (both literally and figuratively) that nevertheless provided one of cinema’s most famous images, when Marilyn Monroe stands atop a subway grate, the skirt of her white dress billowing as trains pass underneath, her lacquered-red lips cooing in delight over the “delicious” sensation. Chicagoans, especially, will know something of the image’s acclaim, considering Richard Seward’s eight-foot Forever Marilyn sculpture, which graced Pioneer Court on the Magnificent Mile for approximately two years; it was generally considered in poor taste, by some because of what it depicts—one could walk behind the statue and see up the figure’s skirt, a perspective which isn’t even visible in the film—and by others who thought it tacky as a supposed work of art. The statue was maybe more divisive than its source, as Billy Wilder’s adaptation of George Axelrod’s 1952 play endures more as a testimony to this lasting image than as any sort of cinematic marvel. Wilder himself was ambivalent about the film; he’d originally been sold on adapting Axelrod’s play when hearing it referred to in the press as “The Lust Weekend,” but he later referred to the final product as a “nothing film.” “It was a nothing picture because the picture should be done today without censorship,” he said, referring to the major difference between the play and the film, that its protagonist, Richard Sherman (played by Tom Ewell in both), in the former sleeps with the object of his desire but in the latter, where she’s portrayed by Monroe, does not. Having seen his wife and young son off to the country for the summer, Sherman commits himself to being good—not smoking, not drinking, and, as is the wont of many other summer bachelors, not cavorting with beautiful, young unmarried women. This last part proves to be particularly difficult, especially as Monroe’s The Girl (names are for wives, apparently) has sublet the apartment upstairs from his. After the Girl knocks a tomato plant down onto Sherman’s patio, his resolve quickly dwindles; the majority of the film is Sherman contending with his intentions, a loquacious inner-monologue expounding on his desire and his guilt, both of which manifest in various fantasy sequences. Legend (read: Wilder’s own recollections) has it that, as a young journalist in Vienna, Wilder had tried to interview Freud only to be summarily ejected from the famed psychoanalyst’s presence. As a result, it’s said, Wilder had it out for psychiatry in his films; yet what are his neurotic male characters if not prime candidates for analysis? What is THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH if not an expose of the male psyche in all its delusions of grandeur? It’s not for nothing that the Girl doesn’t have a name—she’s not even a person to Sherman, but rather a representation of his yearning for that to which he believes he’s entitled. His wife fares no better, a woman who at all of 31 years old would supposedly be right to feel insecure over other women’s lust for her milquetoast breadwinner. The whole film is an analysis of the mediocre white man; it’s ironic, then, that Wilder apparently felt it was the lack of consummation between the bombshell and the bore that made it a “nothing” film. I’m not necessarily arguing otherwise, as I certainly don’t see much in the way of it being a film that does have something. But as it stands it’s altogether a more honest text about its purported aims, a humorous look at the male psyche and, as its title refers to, the tedium of marriage. Monroe is effervescent as always, yet I’d say this falls under a tier of her films, those such as NIAGARA, where it’s only her beauty that the narrative is utilizing and thus makes her little more than an object to its success or lack thereof. Even the famous subway grate scene is underwhelming, awkwardly framed and edited (perhaps owing to its having been shot both on location, where thousands of passersby hooted and hollered, and on set, footage of which was apparently combined; another legend has it that Monroe and then-husband Joe DiMaggio were driven to divorce by the scene). But maybe, subconsciously, Wilder made exactly the film the text deserved—maybe the male fantasy really is nothing more than the “nothing film” of a deluded psyche. Screening as part of Nobody's Perfect: Billy Wilder Matinees Part 2. (1955, 105 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Nicole Holofcener's YOU HURT MY FEELINGS (US)

FACETS Cinema – Thursday, 7pm

There’s a painful, and somewhat hilarious, terror that accompanies the characters of Nicole Holofcener’s YOU HURT MY FEELINGS. Not the terror you’d find from watching a good horror film, but rather that curdling in your gut that accompanies encountering characters in fiction that far too eerily mirror people you recognize in your own life. Yes, Holofcener’s characters are primarily upper-middle class, middle-aged, predominantly white people living in New York City, whose problems are—in the grandest sense—as small stakes as they come. But it’s still entirely possible you’ve met someone like Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), an insecure writer who equates someone hating their art with hating them as a human being. Or someone like Don (Tobias Menzies), a therapist whose own baggage is slowly beginning to infiltrate his work. Or even Eliot (Owen Teague), an early 20-something managing a weed dispensary who keeps mentioning he’s a playwright but keeps procrastinating finishing that one play he keeps telling you about. You might have even found yourself in a situation like the one that thrusts Holofener’s film into motion: Beth eavesdropping on a conversation where her husband, Don, admits that he’s been lying about enjoying the latest draft of her novel (he thinks it stinks, even). Films have been built upon less dramatic tension than this, yet there’s an entirely relatable sense of trust being broken, an innately human breakdown of the clumsiness of building a relationship with someone that makes this particular story feel weightier than it has any right to be. Even when it feels like the world of movies keeps expanding and expanding, there will forever be a simple joy in spending time with a small group of characters navigating the intense banality of the day to day, especially when it’s as funny as this. (2023, 93 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

David Fincher's THE SOCIAL NETWORK (US)

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

In his essay for the Criterion Collection DVD release of David Fincher's THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON, critic Kent Jones had this to say about the film whose protagonist defies time: "Just as in [Fincher's] ZODIAC, there is an extremely precise sense of what it's like to be alive in a certain place, during a certain time, from moment to moment. It's not just the curtains and the clothing and the music and the cars that are right, but the gestures, the sounds, the blending of the public and the private, the way that every sign of this or that zeitgeist...is filtered through personal experience." Though he's primarily talking about a film in which a man ages backwards and referencing a film about a serial killer from several decades past, his remarks ring especially true for one of Fincher's more recently released films. THE SOCIAL NETWORK is an "extremely precise" representation of that which it is portraying, and as with most Fincher films, there's a catch: it isn't a story about bygone times or set in the typical alternate universe of narrative cinema, but instead is based on true events that took place within the last decade. In 2004, Harvard freshman Mark Zuckerberg revolutionized the way we communicate, operating from his dorm room with only his peers as guidance. Just six years later, Fincher made this film about the origins of his creation, the now-ubiquitous Facebook, and those who helped bring it to fruition. Fincher's distinct style of filmmaking has worked wonderfully with those previously mentioned bygone times, but his styling of such recent events exemplifies Fincher's status as a current master of American cinema. One could argue that it is more difficult to capture the essence of a time still fresh in an audience's memory, and Fincher's technical expertise, along with his excellent choice in cinematographer (Jeff Cronenweth), exhibit Fincher's ability to overcome that dilemma. One scene in particular feels oddly out of place—Edvard Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King", performed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for the film's soundtrack, crescendos as the infamous Winklevoss twins participate in the prestigious Henley Royal Regatta. This scene feels more like an ode to yesteryear rather than a depiction of modern-day life, complete with a concert band and men in boater hats. It feels most alien in its focus on physical activity, with the Winklevoss' arduous rowing providing a strict contrast to the seemingly inactive lifestyles of the programming clan. But despite their athleticism and go-getter attitudes, the Winklevoss twins lose the race, and while in real life they would eventually go on to win the lawsuit, they are shown in Fincher's film to be continually skimming the surface of genuine success. Zuckerberg blended the public and the private to recast modern communication as we know it, and Fincher uses both of those perspectives of the real-life events to filter out the zeitgeist. And not dissimilar to ZODIAC, it's a scary one in which fresh air is passé and pernicious obsession is all the rage. Screening as part of the In the Club: 90s Electronic Music and Beyond series. (2010, 120 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Stanley Kubrick's BARRY LYNDON (UK)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Sunday, 11am (SOLD OUT) and Tuesday, 3pm

Borrowing many of the 18th century costumes directly from European museums and selecting his score after listening (allegedly) to every piece of 18th century music ever recorded, Stanley Kubrick brought an unprecedented level of verisimilitude to the historical drama with BARRY LYNDON. But rather than revel in the details for their own sake, Kubrick used them to create the eerie effect of a past existing autonomously from us as something like an alien planet—which may explain why Jonathan Rosenbaum has called the film a follow-up of sorts to 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Rosenbaum has singled out "John Alcott['s] slow backward zooms" as key to the movie's impact, since they "distance us, both historically and emotionally, from its rambling picaresque narrative." Kubrick manages another great distancing effect with the film's wry, clinical-sounding narration (read by Michael Hordern), which often explains the action before it occurs. This has the immediate impact of making the spectacular, pageant-like mise-en-scene feel anticlimactic: It would be a fine nose-thumbing gesture in itself, but the movie is more complicated than that. Beneath the pomp and technical perfection (This is also the film for which Kubrick developed a special lens that allowed him to shoot scenes entirely by candlelight) is a fable about one man's rise and fall along the conventions of his time. Since the conventions themselves remain just beyond comprehension, Ryan O'Neal, as the title character, seems less of an antihero upon repeated viewings and more of a tragic figure—every bit the victim of systems beyond his control as Dave Bowman in 2001. (1975, 184 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Stanley Kubrick's FEAR AND DESIRE (US)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Saturday, 6pm

For decades, FEAR AND DESIRE was known only as Stanley Kubrick's suppressed film: embarrassed by its amateurish faults and pretensions, he pulled it from distribution, and the few prints that existed were exhibited against his will, rarely and even furtively. In my youth, Kubrickophile as I was, I had to content myself with a bootleg VHS dupe, so many generations removed from whatever illicit scan produced it that its images glowed, and its soundtrack was little more than a permanent, serpentine hiss. There was no telling what secrets lurked within that impenetrable lacquer of static and NTSC bloodbath. Seeing it now in this beautiful restoration, produced by the Library of Congress, it is clear that Kubrick's first feature wears its influences too much on its sleeves. Often, this clumsy effort, made for too little money and without a single professional crewmember, reads like half-baked Vsevolod Pudovkin, served over a bed of Samuel Fuller, with a watered-down T. S. Eliot dressing. The cuts are severe, alienating, disruptive, confusing and jarring the narrative flow like hiccups. The wartime allegory is forced, the soldiers are a group of penny-ante philosophers, and the drama smothered in atmosphere. The script is laden, wet with languorous monologues dragged out of the post-synchronized voices. And yet, there is more to love here than in many of Kubrick's other early films. The photography, honed by Kubrick's years as a photojournalist, is exquisite, and its roughness and silly, over-ambitious grasps at meaning-with-a-capital-M read less as the work of hapless wannabes, mumblecoring their way to an affected cultural relevance, than as the earnest and terrified work of a filmmaker on borrowed time, going-for-broke on what could be his only chance to make his mark. Kubrick threw everything he had into FEAR AND DESIRE, and much of what stuck ended up tracing forward through to his mature works: the awkward, vicious sexual madness of Paul Mazursky's character as he attempts to seduce his prisoner; the rapid-fire, awful night-time attack on a pair of enemy soldiers just trying to eat their dinner; Frank Silvera's great performance, groaning with the weight of his need to matter to the world. After another, and somewhat more accomplished, self-financed film, Kubrick would enter Hollywood, making a series of increasingly slick and soulless films with James B. Harris and Kirk Douglas, films with infinitely more subtlety and considerably less interest than this, and with the release of DR. STRANGELOVE, he would suddenly emerge as perhaps the finest director of his generation. FEAR AND DESIRE is far from a great film, but its flaws are more telling and moving than the empty successes of the Harris/Douglas productions, showing a Kubrick already fascinated by the power of careful composition and expert control over the timing of images and motion, of the brilliant use of unexpected transitions and visual juxtapositions. Kubrick's first feature makes a grand promise, one his career cashed out in spades. Preceded by Kubrick's 1953 short THE SEAFARERS (1953, 30 min, DCP Digital). (1953, 62 min, DCP Digital) [Kian Bergstrom]

Stanley Kubrick's THE KILLING (US)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Saturday, 3:15pm

As a genre, film noir has typically been hallmarked by straightforward, pulpy storytelling. Stanley Kubrick, on the other hand, has typically employed ambiguity and open-endedness with regards to adaptations in his own filmmaking. In THE KILLING, Kubrick displays his versatility as an auteur to create a noir based on Lionel White’s novel Clean Break that satisfies the former. Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) is a career con ready to make one last score before retiring. His plan is simple, rob a racetrack during a huge race and ride off into the sunset. To accomplish this task, he enlists a host of accomplices—from a corrupt police officer to a betting teller from the track—who will all serve as distractions and assistants in the process. The film runs at a rapid pace, a rarity for Kubrick titles, and flows exceptionally well, thanks in part to the whip-crack script and the fluidity of the cinematography. The film features a strong ensemble cast, including many actors Kubrick had admired from other noirs; in particular, Elisha Cook Jr. and Marie Windsor as the bickering couple whose marital troubles lead to serious complications for the heist’s plan. The film’s multiple-perspective narrative also adds to its overall intrigue, rewinding the plot to depict facets that are all transpiring simultaneously. Even more than his first feature, KILLER’S KISS, THE KILLING announced Stanley Kubrick’s strong capabilities as a director. It’s a noir that has aged like a fine wine. (1956, 85 min, DCP Digital) [Kyle Cubr]

John Landis' THE BLUES BROTHERS (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Monday, 6:30pm

The unofficial "official movie of Chicago." Originally released in 1980, THE BLUES BROTHERS is the only other thing piped into Chicagoland homes as much as fluoridated water. There is something so charming about this movie that, no matter that it’s screened locally every 3 months on average and everyone, at some point, owned a copy on physical media, the theater will always fill up when it's programmed. For those of you unlucky souls that have yet to catch this (or perhaps you lucky souls that get to see it for the very first time!), let me set out the adventure. After serving three years in prison, Jake Blues (John Belushi) reunites with his blood brother Elwood Blues (Dan Aykroyd) to reform their old band so they can raise enough money to save the orphanage that took them in as children. There’s Point A for you. To get to Point Z involves some lying, some cheating, a handful of rednecks and Nazis, and a whole lot of cops. It's an anarchic road movie-cum-musical that's also a love letter to blues, jump, and R&B, and the city of Chicago itself. The list of musicians who perform in the film is staggering: Ray Charles, Cab Calloway, John Lee Hooker, James Brown, Chaka Khan, Carolyn Franklin, and Pinetop Perkins. I choose to give Aretha Franklin her own mention because she not only steals the film the moment she appears, but because this movie paved the way for her career comeback. Even the Blues Brothers Band has half of Booker T and the MGs and various other blues/R&B sidemen with far-than-better-than average pedigrees. And this pool of talent doesn't even count the supporting cast, which features everyone from John Candy to Steven goddamn Spielberg. Everything about this movie is cranked to 10 and somehow nothing suffers from that. The delightful anarchy of THE BLUES BROTHERS taps into the rebel inside everyone—this is a punk rock movie for people who would never actually consider themselves punk. Or even fans of punk. But here we have a glib disdain for any kind of authority except a sacred morality of goodness. The Blues Brothers are “on a mission from God” to save an orphanage, and they won't let anyone get in the way. They crash 103 cars (mostly cop cars) making this film, a world record at the time (and now held by Chicago filmmakers the Wachowskis for MATRIX RELOADED). There's an anticapitalist/anti-consumerist lens in the film's wanton destruction of a mall—so much so that John Landis was jokingly upset that George Romero got his “anti-mall” film, DAWN OF THE DEAD, into theaters before he could release this one. The Blues Brothers also take a couple jabs at hillbilly type as well as neo-fascists, nearly killing an entire parade of "Illinois Nazis." Again, so very punk. But most importantly, THE BLUES BROTHERS is a musical about the power of music itself. Music isn't just a means of communication—it's the end all, be all of communication. So many musicals use music to advance the plot; the plot of THE BLUES BROTHERS is used to advance the music. Everything leads to The Big Concert, where the band needs to put on a show so big that they can save the orphanage. It’s an admittedly hacky trope that somehow feels honest and heartfelt. On top of the sentimentality, this film makes the City of Chicago a character in its own right. New York may have multiple great directors, like Martin Scorsese and Abel Ferrara, to give their town a cinematic soul, but Chicago needs only one movie to capture its essence fully, and that movie is THE BLUES BROTHERS. Asking me how many times I've seen this film is like asking me how many shots of Malort I've had. A Night Owls Event, with professors Agnes Callard and Daniel Morgan. (1980, 133 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]

🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
ALSO SCREENING

 ⚫ Aladerri International Film Festival
The Aladerri International Film Festival takes place at FACETS Cinema through Sunday. More info here.

 ⚫ Asian Pop-Up Cinema
The extensive and inimitable Asian Pop-Up Cinema series continues its seventeenth season this weekend. Their in-person and virtual offerings are too many to list; visit here for more information.

⚫ Bedsheet Cinema
Forugh Farrokhzad’s 1963 short film THE HOUSE IS BLACK (22 min, Digital Projection) and Chris Marker’s 1983 essay film SANS SOLEIL (100 min, Digital Projection) screen Sunday, 8pm, as part of Bedsheet Cinema’s 10-year anniversary celebration. See the organization’s Instagram stories for venue address. More info here.

⚫ Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
Luminous Encounters: Expanded Cinema of Emily Chao and arc, featuring shorts films and an expanded cinema performance by artists Chao and tooth, takes place Thursday at 7pm. Chao and tooth will appear for a post-screening discussion about the relationship between their creative practice and the multiple dimensions of underground and independent artmaking and cinema-work in the Bay Area. Free admission. More info here.

⚫ Chicago Film Archives
The Chicago Transit Authority, in partnership with the Chicago Film Archives (CFA), presents a new, one-of-a-kind temporary art installation now playing at the Cicero Green Line station (4800 W. Lake St.). The installation, called we love, is a filmic exhibition of home movies and amateur films selected from collections housed and preserved at CFA. The video, which has a runtime of approximately 48 minutes, 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. 

⚫ Cinema/Chicago
A community screening of Michelle Garza Cervera’s 2022 horror film HUESARA (93 min, Digital Projection) takes place Friday, 6:30pm, at the Harrison Park Fieldhouse (1824 S. Wood St.). Free admission. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis and is limited to theater capacity. More info here.

⚫ Comfort Film at Comfort Station (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave.)
Jules Victor Schwerin’s 1960 film INDIAN SUMMER (28 min, Digital Projection) and Charles Cadkin’s 2023 film THE FALL OF CANNONSVILLE (21 min, 16mm) screen Wednesday at 8pm. Free admission. More info here.

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Larry Cohen’s 1976 classic GOD TOLD ME TO (91 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday at 9:30pm as part of Doc’s Thursday II series, the Depths of the Grindhouse. More info here.

⚫ FACETS Cinema
Stephen Winter’s 1996 independent feature CHOCOLATE BABIES (see our review above as part of our Reeling coverage) screens Thursday at 9pm, preceded by FACETS Film Trivia at 7pm, hosted by Cine-File contributor Raphael Jose Martinez. More info here.

⚫ Festival au Cinema
Haven Chicago presents Festival au Cinema, featuring over 20 films, talkbacks, and filmmaker mixers, through Sunday at the Den Theatre (1331 N. Milwaukee Ave.). More info here.

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Bob Hercules’ 2012 documentary JOFFREY: MAVERICKS OF AMERICAN DANCE (82 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday at 3pm, followed by a post-screening discussion with Hercules; former Joffrey dancer and Arpino Foundation board member Michael Anderson; and additional Joffrey dancers to be announced.

The 9th Annual Advertising Community Night at the Midwest Film Festival takes place on Monday at 7:30pm. The event will start with a networking reception at 6:30pm, followed by the screening and a filmmaker Q&A at 7:30 pm, and then an after-party.  

Daniel Eisenberg’s 1981 film DISPLACED PERSON (10 min) and 1987 film COOPERATION OF PARTS (40 min) screen Tuesday, 6pm, as part of the Times, the Chronicle, the Witness, and the Observer: Three Decades of Film/Video Inquiry at SAIC lecture series.

Video Data Bank presents Roundabout, a new screening series in which the Chicago-based video art distributor invites fellow moving image archives and distributors to collaborate on a conversational program of short experimental works, prompted to respond to a selection of works from VDB’s collection with a selection from their own. The first participant is Electronic Arts Intermix, and the screening takes place on Thursday at 6pm. More info on all screenings and events here.  

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Music Box Garden Movies continue. See Venue website for films and showtimes. 

George Nicholas’s 2023 film LÍMITE (38 min, DCP Digital) and Vuk Lungulov-Klotz’s 2022 film MUTT (87 min, DCP Digital) open this week, while Charlotte Regan’s 2023 film SCRAPPER (84 min, DCP Digital) and Babak Jalali’s 2023 film FREMONT (91 min, DCP Digital) continue. See Venue website for showtimes.

Jim Sharman’s 1975 cult classic ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (100 min, 35mm) screens Friday and Saturday at midnight. Both screenings have a shadowcast of the film (that’s actors acting in front of the screen during the film) performed by Midnight Madness.

Ian White’s 2023 documentary MUTINY IN HEAVEN: THE BIRTHDAY PARTY (98 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday at 7pm. 

This year’s edition of Destroy Your Art takes place on Tuesday at 7pm. This year’s participants include Cine-File contributor Michael Glover Smith, Ines Sommer, Richard Song, and Blair St. George Wright. 

Maria Schrader’s 2022 film SHE SAID (129 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday at 6:45pm. Programmed and presented by Chicago Headline Club and Foundation with a post-screening Q&A with investigative reporter Megan Twohey moderated by Chicago reporter Carol Marin. This fundraiser screening is being held to benefit the Les Brownlee Memorial Scholarship and media grants for Chicago journalism internships. More info on all screenings and events here. 

⚫ Reel Film Club
The International Latino Cultural Center of Chicago presents the 2019 Central American anthology film DAYS OF LIGHT (88 min, Digital Projection) as part of their Reel Film Club series on Monday at the Instituto Cervantes (31 W. Ohio St.). A reception with food and a glass of wine starts at 6pm and the screening will begin at 7pm followed by a post-screening discussion. More info here.

⚫ Sideshow Gelato (4819 N. Western Ave.)
The Sideshow Gelato shop presents Sideshow Sinema!, during which they will screen films connected to the shop theme, every Thursday. More info here.

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

🎞️ ONLINE SCREENINGS/EVENTS

 ⚫ Media Burn Archive
The Work of Video Preservation, a discussion and demonstration with archivists from Media Burn and Visual Studies Workshop about how to preserve videotapes, takes place Thursday, 6pm, as part of the ongoing Virtual Talks with Video Activists series. Register for free and learn more info here.

 ⚫ VDB TV
The shorts program Germán Bobe: Dreaming in the Gardens of Love (1988 - 1991, 28 min) screens for free on VDB TV. More info here.

CINE-LIST: September 22 - September 28, 2023

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, Maxwell Courtright, Kyle Cubr, Ray Ebarb, Alex Ensign, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Ben Kaye, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Raphael Jose Martinez, Candace Wirt