:: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 13 - THURSDAY, OCTOBER 19 ::

🎉 THE 59TH CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

The 59th Chicago International Film Festival continues this weekend at multiple venues (noted below) and runs through Sunday, October 22. See below for reviews of select titles, chosen in part based on pre-screening availability, and check back next week for our coverage of the final weekend. For more information, including all titles, venues, showtimes and ticket prices, check out the festival website here.

Ninna Pálmadóttir’s SOLITUDE (Iceland)
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Friday, 5:30pm
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 3:15pm
Ninna Pálmadóttir’s SOLITUDE continuously finds ways to shrink down the life of its central figure, Gunnar (the simultaneously stoic and nakedly emotional Þröstur Leó Gunnarsson) in a story that reflects the horrifying effects of loneliness on levels both personal and political. Presented against the backdrop of a controversial rejection of Afghan refugees entering Iceland, Gunnar similarly finds himself in a place of relative isolation; the farm that’s been in his family for generations is facing ecological damage in the form of an impending flood, and thus, the government is willing to pay Gunnar a massive sum to vacate his property and upend his entire reality. Moving away from his desolate farm life to a smaller apartment within Reykjavik, Gunnar finds his new life even more solitary in its ways; the shock of being surrounded by so many people presents its own force of isolation, a nightmare of social anxiety that forces him to retreat even further into himself. The open kindness of a neighbor boy, Ari (Hermann Samúelsson), begins to get Gunnar out of his shell, with Ari seeking a parental figure amidst the lives of his distant parents. This creates a generational kinship built on chess, pizza, and dance parties that is at once charming and bewildering to Ari’s relatives and even inspires Gunnar to donate an obscenely large portion of his income to a local refugee support center. A late-in-the-film grave misunderstanding pushes Gunnar and Ari’s relationship into further disarray, taking away the one true friendship Gunnar was able to establish and leaving him even more alone than before. Pálmadóttir provides moments of topographical variety throughout, between the beauty and horror of Gunnar’s flooded farm, Iceland’s expansive countryside, and Gunnar’s new cramped apartment lifestyle. It’s a world that begins to feel almost intentionally cruel, where those seeking connection and friendship are constantly kept in isolation by the angry and fearful, who usually happen to be the ones with the most power. Palmadóttir and producer Elli Cassata are scheduled to attend. (2023, 75 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
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Devashish Makhija’s JORAM (India)
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Friday, 8:15pm
If you’re a fan of the last half-hour of John Woo’s HARD BOILED (1992), you’ll probably get a kick out of JORAM, an innocent-man-on-the-run thriller in which the hero spends the whole movie with a three-month-old baby strapped to his chest. One foot chase that takes place on board a passenger train must be seen to be believed, and there are moments of brutality that go beyond Woo’s standard for onscreen violence and approach Ringo Lam levels of suffering. If JORAM evokes Hong Kong action cinema in its stylization, the particulars are distinctly Indian. At the start of the story, Dasru and his wife Vaano move from their village in the landlocked state of Jharkhand to Mumbai in search of work; they end up on a large-scale construction site where employees and their families squat in compartments of the unfinished buildings. (Their living conditions provide one of the first of many striking images of poverty in the film.) One night, masked men assault Dasru and Vaano while they’re asleep; she ends up dead, and Dasru kills one of the assailants. Fearing he’ll be arrested and separated from his infant, he hits the road, baby in tow, in an effort to clear his name. From here JORAM divides its focus between Dasru, the police inspector on his trail, and the head of the political party that’s a front for the criminal network responsible for Vaano’s death. The last of these subplots is the most serious in tone as well as the least entertaining, while writer-director Devashish Makhija successfully mines comic relief from the police inspector’s misadventures in Jharkhand once he follows Dasru back there. Both men’s discovery of the conspiracy between the political party, construction company, and organized crime syndicate occasions some fairly blunt sermonizing about corruption in Indian society, though the nimble action sequences more than make up for it. Devashish Makhija and producers Ashima Avasthi and Bhumika Tewari scheduled to attend. (2023, 139 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Nikolaj Arcel’s THE PROMISED LAND (Denmark/Germany/Sweden)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 12pm
Conquest seems to be a given in our compulsions and desires as humans. In contemporary times, we have ways to reframe this drive. I can’t go a week without the satisfaction of crushing someone in a video game, and, as Nicole Kidman proclaims in the AMC theater’s intro, the cinema can leave us “not just entertained, but somehow reborn.” Then in the 1775 of THE PROMISED LAND, it would make sense for our protagonist, Mads Mikkelsen’s Ludvig Kahlen, to obsessively strive to shape the land to his will. In the desolate heath of the Jutland, Ludvig wishes to cultivate the land in exchange for a title of nobility, an outrageous and humorous yet hesitantly agreed upon request. Ludvig is a complicated man, and the film’s Danish title BASTARDEN, literally THE BASTARD, does far more justice to this complicated portrait. The film does take a while to find its footing, but once the complex cast of characters begin to dig in and root themselves to the stubborn land, a compelling tale begins to sprout forth. However, the viability of the ground is not the only concern as local landowners and ruthless cutthroats look to take advantage of anyone they can. Ludvig, a former military captain, isn’t necessarily out of his element but at what cost does his quest yield fruitful? While bodies stack up and traumas are repeated, the vision can easily be soiled. But perhaps Ludvig’s conquest is different, one of revitalization and agency rather than destruction for the sake of the status quo. (2023, 127 min, DCP Digital) [Drew Van Weelden]
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Shorts 1: City & State – Revelations (US/Japan)
Chicago History Museum – Saturday, 1:30pm
This program will be available to stream here from Monday at 12pm CT to Sunday, October 22 at 11:59pm CDT
This year's City & State shorts program starts strong, with Dustin Nakao-Haider’s ETHAN LIM: CAMBODIAN FUTURES (17 min). This documentary follows Chicago chef Ethan Lim as he explores the intersection of food, culture, and memory. Both touching and informative, the short presents Ethan working with Cambodian cuisine while also delicately navigating the tragedy inseparably linked to its history. McKenzie Chinn’s A REAL ONE (16 min) focuses on the lives of two high school girls as they struggle with approaching adulthood. Things get a bit turbulent between the two, and Chinn manages to achieve moments of sentimentality in a taboo situation, which can be a tough tightrope to walk. The success here is in no doubt thanks to the great performances Chinn elicited from all the talent on screen. In VIDEO FUNERAL (21 min), Linh Tran impresses again with a short that shows both growth and confidence. Here we have two sisters grappling with the death of their father, one being unable to attend the funeral due to it being back in their home country. Tran successfully navigates the fringes of slow cinema, a feat that requires a certain intuition of the unique language of the medium. In BEFORE ANYONE ELSE (20 min), Tetsuya Mariko uses tracking shots and a variety of formats like security cameras and cell phones to make a world that feels truly lived in. In the film, two delinquent skaters find an abandoned child in a car, which causes issues for everyone involved. The 20-minute runtime is used carefully as every scene is packed with compelling developments that deliver a fully formed experience. Finally, there is SOFT LIGHTS AND SILVER SHADOWS (15 min), an animated film that beautifully commemorates filmmaker Ian Kelly’s grandfather. Through use of archival footage and audio interviews, Kelly takes old memories and makes new, not to erase or replace but rather uplift and preserve. The sound design here must also be called out; I certainly felt transported to another place and time. At the end of these City & State programs, I’m always struck by the talent here in the Midwest, and I urge festival goers to seek out the important work being done by our community members. Also screening: Brian Zahm’s PHOTOSYNTHESIS (7 min). Various filmmakers scheduled to attend. (2023, Total approx. 95 min, DCP Digital) [Drew Van Weelden]
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Lucy Kerr’s FAMILY PORTRAIT (US)
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Saturday, 3:15pm 
Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 6:15pm
Lucy Kerr’s deceptively simple tale of a family preparing to pose for their yearly Christmas card photo is an intriguing look at the distortion of reality. This experimental, pseudo-documentary film opens on an extended sequence of Katy (Deragh Campell) and her family haphazardly moving to a spot near a river backing their Texas compound where previous Christmas photos have been taken; sound only gradually filters into the action. The film then cuts to the home Katy shares with her Polish boyfriend Olek (Chris Galust) on the morning of the photo session. Katy recounts a disturbing dream in which she repeatedly encounters her mother Barbara (Silvana Jakich), only to be faced with Barbara’s vacant, unknowing eyes. Olek responds with his own frustration that Katy’s family doesn’t understand that Poland is not Russia, which they seem to think is his home country. Once they arrive at Katy’s parents’ house, her father (Robert Salas) shows off a photo of his father taken at the moment he was killed in World War II—a photo that has become such a symbol for all fallen American soldiers that it was co-opted for a t-shirt honoring the dead of the Vietnam War. When Barbara vanishes, confounding the photo shoot, Katy goes in search of her in the woods and waters of her childhood home. The sound design of this film reflects an eerie world of garbled communication and unbridled nature, perhaps evoking obliquely the elemental threat and family absences caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. For me, the film was heir to the mystery of Peter Weir’s PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK (1975) and the futile endeavors in Luis Buñuel’s THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE (1972). This oddly transfixing feature debut makes Kerr a talent to watch. Actors Deragh Campbell and Robert Salas scheduled to attend on Saturday and Campbell again on Monday. (2023, 73 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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João Canijo’s BAD LIVING (Portugal)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 1:45pm and Monday, 3:45pm
Though it's set solely on the grounds of a family-run hotel, you can sense that the world of João Canijo’s BAD LIVING is much larger than it appears. It helps that hotels in and of themselves are prime fodder for dramatic unraveling; a home away from home, a location where people from all walks of life can escape to face their problems head on or else run away from their problems for a brief respite. It’s this potent setting that, alongside the accompanying feature LIVING BAD (2023), Canijo has crafted a vibrant pair of films that neatly fit into each other; each is perfectly functional on its own, but they're improved by being taken in together—t​wo faded images that come into focus when combined. On its own, BAD LIVING is a patient, simmering pot of multi-generational trauma, told in a linear, sometimes clinical fashion. The camera favors wide and medium shots, capturing the expanse of scenes containing the central emotional dilemma alongside everything on the margins. Our focus here is hotel owner Piedade (Anabela Moreira), who resists the control of her mother, Sara (Rita Blanco), and constantly distances herself from her adult daughter, Salomé (Madalena Almeida). Among all this, the lives of fellow hotel staff and guests drift in and out of the frame, their dialogue intermingling with the histrionics of our central trio. The questions that arise concerning the inner lives of the hotel guests provide an additional layer of narrative intrigue, adding to the constructed world Piedade has made for herself in this hotel where the pain of the real world can’t hurt her. Not the damaged relationship with her daughter, not the devastating loss of her husband, nor the dire financial situation of the hotel itself. It all comes to a head, and the film ends on a sour note, leaving a family in disarray, with no easy answers, with nothing to do but to sit in the muck of it all, trapped in a home that isn’t truly a home to anyone. Actor Anabela Moreira scheduled to attend. (2023, 127 mins, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
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Erik Gandini’s AFTER WORK (Sweden/Italy/Norway/Documentary)
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Sunday, 3:45pm and Monday, 8:15pm
The subject of labor is more prevalent than ever. Partly for constructive reasons: the pandemic forced us to reevaluate the way we work, with WFH allowing for more flexibility, which in turn had positive effects on mobility and work-life balance. Recent years have also found labor movements resurfacing in a momentous way, from teachers and Starbucks workers to, as we’ve seen recently, writers, actors and autoworkers. But it’s the negative reasons that are unprecedented, namely the rise of artificial intelligence and the disruptive, as yet fully recognized ways it will impact not just how we work but how society will operate when AI supplants the majority of jobs. Accordingly, Italian-Swedish filmmaker Erik Gandini’s documentary explores a panorama of issues and viewpoints pertaining to labor, with some surprising revelations. The son of an aristocrat, for example, rejects leisure and instead prefers to rigorously landscape his family’s lush gardens; an office worker in Kuwait—where, apparently, anyone who wants a job is given one, resulting in as many as 20 people assigned to the same role—is deeply dissatisfied with their circumstances, which involves sitting at work with nothing to do except read and watch movies while still making a good salary. (A dream to many, but perhaps a nightmare in reality, given how humans yearn for meaning.) A wealthy Italian woman revels in not having to work, saying she never gets bored. A worker at a recycling center compares some jobs to modern-day slavery, while an Amazon delivery driver, who generally likes what she does and how she brings people joy, says the day she urinates into a bottle is the day she quits. There’s a spate of more straightforward interviewees, from Noam Chomsky and other academics who analyze the history of the work ethic to a consultant brimming with facts about how much vacation time Americans leave on the table each year and a managing partner of Gallup who claims that Hitler was effective at engaging his “employees” as he considers the percentage of workers who are disengaged from their jobs. While I appreciate the sentiments and situations examined, the filmmaking itself is glib, aiming ultimately to entertain (à la Adam McKay’s jocular didacticism) even as it conveys a rather urgent message. There’s irony here, to be sure, but it’s more grim paradox than amusing mystification. Gandini scheduled to attend. (2023, 81 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
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Vera Egito’s THE BATTLE (Brazil)
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Sunday, 4pm and Monday, 7:45pm
THE BATTLE is so ambitious—and frequently stunning—on a visual level that you might wish that writer-director Vera Egito had taken more risks in her script. The film is an immersive recreation of the events leading up to the violent overthrow, in October 1968, of the left-leaning National Union of Students’ Congress by São Paulo’s police and paramilitary thugs, both of them acting in support of Brazil’s reigning military dictatorship. Each scene plays out as an unbroken shot with lots of ostentatious camera movement; Egito numbers the scenes/shots backward from 21 to zero, literally counting down to the awful conclusion. Despite the mounting dread, THE BATTLE is generally lively and invigorating, as the mostly young cast successfully channels the energy of revolutionaries past (though everyone still seems to be working hard to keep pace with the roving camera). Egito, for her part, achieves an entrancing terror through her careful selection of events—it feels as though the tension increases with each new scene. The horror starts with “idle” threats from the well-dressed fascists across the street from the philosophy hall where the student leftists meet, builds with the introduction of paranoia to the proceedings inside the movement, then erupts with physical violence and the students having to barricade themselves inside the hall. THE BATTLE occasionally veers from its through line of political atrocity to consider the love lives of some of the student activists and their professors, and it’s in these detours that Egito regrettably evokes Bernardo Bertolucci’s THE DREAMERS (2003) and movies where characters say things like “We didn’t change the world, but we did end up changing ourselves.” The cliched romantic subplots distract from the vivid realism of the black-and-white 16mm photography, which clearly intends to recall ground-level documentaries like Patricio Guzmán’s THE BATTLE OF CHILE (1975-’79) and often does good by their example. Egito scheduled to attend. (2023, 84 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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João Canijo’s LIVING BAD (Portugal)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 4:30pm and Monday, 1pm
As opposed to the isolated narrative of its counterpart film, BAD LIVING (2023), LIVING BAD takes full stock of the expansive worlds and lives that can come through the crumbling halls of a hotel. The film is a fascinating triptych focused on the elation and tragedy that comes with building relationships. Each of the segments is inspired by a short play by August Strindberg, modernized to reflect contemporary anxieties around fame, sex, love, and family, all staged in a family-run hotel whose staff seem to be as anxiety-ridden as the guests. "Playing With Fire" brings us the clashing extramarital affairs of a womanizing playwright and his Far Too Online wife, whose infidelities come into collision. "The Pelican" brings about the havoc that occurs when a married man is secretly sleeping with his own mother-in-law. The final segment, "Motherlove," is also the most emotionally rewarding, centering around a young poet and her partner whose acting aspirations become intertwined with the desires of her lover. The controlling specter of motherhood is a recurring theme throughout, the matriarchal desire to retain control over your children’s livelihoods cropping up throughout each story and unexpectedly becoming a larger shadow of thematic dominance when paired with BAD LIVING. (2023, 125 mins, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
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Radu Jude’s DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM THE END OF THE WORLD (Romania)
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Sunday, 7:15pm
DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM THE END OF THE WORLD is completely unhinged with an overwhelming sense of immediacy; it also feels impressively controlled in its chaos. It’s humorous, in large part due to its main performance, but also wholly serious. It’s generally a biting political satire of the current state of things, but it focuses on the struggle of everyday people, the horrors of modern technology, and the damaging effects of work culture. Overworked and suffering from a lack of sleep, Angela (a remarkably compelling Ilinca Manolache) is a PA working on a multinational corporation’s video promoting work safety; her task is to drive around Bucharest interviewing potential participants. She spends most of her time in her car—she also works for Uber on the side—and this is paralleled by the inclusion of moments from ANGELA MOVES ON, a 1981 film by Romanian director Lucian Bratu. The earlier film is about a taxi driver also named Angela (Dorina Lazar), also driving the streets of Bucharest. It’s an interesting internal comparison, but becomes more profound when the character of Angela, played by the same actress, shows up as a relative of one of current Angela’s participants; their interaction makes for the sincerest and illuminating moments of the film. It's also the most striking example of how DO NOT EXPECT travels across time, challenging the audience’s ideas about fiction, non-fiction, and the filmmaking processes in general. Current Angela also constantly performs an Andrew Tate-inspired persona through an AI filter, streaming the crudest of material from her phone; the streams are presented in full color, while our dystopian present is in black and white. She also is not afraid to question the state of things around her, shining a light on how those in power place the blame for any injustices on the workers, leaving them to deal with the fallout of unsafe work conditions. DO NOT EXPECT ends with a nearly 40-minute uninterrupted shot of the filming of the work safety promotional video. It’s impossible to fully flesh out everything this film presents, just as it contains so many instances of screens within screens, stories within stories, reflected and refracted, asking “to what end?” (2023, 163 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
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Elene Naveriani’s BLACKBIRD BLACKBIRD BLACKBERRY (Georgia/Switzerland)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 7:30pm
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Tuesday, 7:45pm
A near-death experience while considering some of life’s simple pleasures prompts 48-year-old Etero (Eka Chavleishvili) to reevaluate her denunciation of life’s more complex pleasures, namely romantic relationships. After almost falling into a ravine while picking blackberries and admiring a beautiful blackbird, she suddenly starts a torrid affair with the delivery man (Temiko Chinchinadze) who brings items to restock the village general store she runs. After their first coupling, Etero reveals, through a remark said aloud to no one in particular, evocative of the way Georgian writer-director Elene Naveriani subtly develops the character throughout, that she’d been a virgin. Though she had theretofore eschewed male companionship, she has a small group of friends, some more genuine than others; they wonder at her solitude, revealing that her mother died shortly after she was born and that her father and brother, whose absences are never explained, had been overbearing toward her, a potential reason for her having not found a man. It’s just as likely, however, that she’s reluctant to give up her freedom from such domination. Still, her friends pity her, going so far as to be cruel to her because she’s single. “If marriage and dicks brought happiness, many women would be happy,” she says when a random old man teases her for being alone as she enjoys a delectable Georgian pastry while in town (an extraneous detail, but the dessert looks delicious). “But look around, who’s happy?” She’s right—the friends who harangue her don’t seem particularly happy; their anger is perhaps indicative of their jealousy over Etero’s freedom, contrasted with the stilted relationships they have with their neglectful husbands and disaffected children. In fact Etero gets along better with the younger people around her, such as a friend’s teenage daughter and two young women who own a larger store in town and who appear to be in a relationship. Like them Etero values not just her independence, but freedom, to be who she is even as the world around her questions those who do so. Chavleishvili is a revelation as Eterno, a rare talent who communicates as much with her body—which Naveriani showcases in all its natural glory with uncommon tenderness and from a distinctly female gaze—as her words. Naveriani and cowriters Nikoloz Mdivani and Tamta Melashvili adapted their script from Melashvili’s first-person novel of the same name; the language is at once prosaic and poetical, not too far removed from the language of daily life but still infused with a droll and reflective lyricalness that contours Etero’s otherwise deadpan sensibility with glimpses into her whimsical soul. There’s some Kaurismäki-style caprice to certain scenes and compositions, but it’s otherwise a movingly earnest character study, with an aesthetic that reflects the colorful world surrounding them, seeming to pop with Etero’s newfound appreciation of it. (2023, 110 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
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Mika Gustafson’s PARADISE IS BURNING (Sweden)
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Tuesday, 5pm and Wednesday, 8:30pm
The title of Mika Gustafson’s PARADISE IS BURNING can be read in two ways. The first evokes the bittersweet moment when you know something beautiful has to end, like a weekend retreat surrounded by trees and wine and companionship. The other reading depicts a more nuanced view of the perceived paradise. The nature may be beautiful, but it's hot and everyone stinks, and that wine conjures up some nasty spats with words you immediately regret as they leave your mouth. Gustafson here has crafted a beautiful, funny, charming, heartbreaking film that fully utilizes both these sentiments. The story is of three sisters who have apparently been abandoned, again, by their mother. The age gap between the three creates some tension, as the youngest probably needs supervision, the middle sister has just had her first period, and the oldest, despite never saying it out loud, wants to be free. Their fights feel real, rational, and unfortunate, as you watch knowing their scenario needs to change, but dreading the Social Services visit looming over their heads. The nuance here is carefully laid out by Gustasfon, who leaves one rooting for the sisters, but not sure on how they can actually win. The charm here reflects some of the wonderful scenes from Hirokazu Kore-eda’s SHOPLIFTERS (2018), with which this would easily make a great double feature. There are a few departures from reality that I found odd; however, they somehow made more sense after seeing Gustasfon’s taste in full view with Andrei Tarkovsky’s STALKER (1979) playing on a television set in the girls' home. (2023, 108 min, DCP Digital) [Drew Van Weelden]
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Cristóbal Valenzuela Berríos’ ALIEN ISLAND (Chile/Italy)
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Tuesday, 5:15pm
Gene Siskel Film Center – Wednesday, 2pm
Say hello to your new rabbit hole. In the south of Chile there was supposedly a place called Friendship Island, where, in the late 1980s, some believed that an alien race with extraordinary healing capabilities had set up shop to make contact with select humans. The chosen ones were brought into the fold via their ham radios and an elaborate, Wellesian narrative (think War of the Worlds); adding to the belief that aliens were on the island was a recent, widespread UFO sighting in the skies above Santiago. Cristóbal Valenzuela Berríos’ inventive documentary ALIEN ISLAND covers this and much, much more, crafting its own clever narrative out of this stranger-than-fiction story. Those not already in the know (which I assume is most people, unless global ufology is your area of interest) will be thoroughly engrossed in its twists and turns, each seemingly more far-fetched than the last—until, at some point, it begins to make more sense than it should, situated as it eventually is into the context of Pinochet’s military dictatorship. Without giving too much away, it involves an elusive figure with a finger in every pie—including, of all things, the films of ​​Raúl Ruiz. Valenzuela Berríos filters all this through a black-and-white, deliberately cheesy, quasi-1950s sci-fi aesthetic that recalls The Twilight Zone. There’s not just one but two Chilean films this year that employ black-and-white cinematography in service to parables—the other, Pablo Larrain’s EL CONDE, a bit more obvious, at least initially, than this one—about Pinochet and his reign of terror. It’s a surprisingly effective gimmick, complemented by dramatic, artfully lit talking-head interviews and reenactments, which help to conceal the “twist” and provide an air of levity as it probes a dubious facade. It doesn’t become too heavy, however, with the filmmaker allowing viewers to extrapolate as to the impetus behind the ruse. Both Larrain and Valenzuela Berríos’ films are unique explorations of Pinochet’s impact on Chile; the former is a lyrical interrogation while ALIEN ISLAND looks at the fictions we create to ignore cold, hard facts. Valenzuela and producer Diego Breit scheduled to attend. (2023, 87 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
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Jesse Moss & Amanda McBaine’s THE MISSION (US/Documentary)
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Tuesday, 7:30pm and Wednesday, 1:30pm
I’m surprised it took as long as it did for a documentary to be made about John Allen Chau, a Chinese-American missionary who, in 2018, was killed by the Sentinelese after traveling to North Sentinel Island (one of the Andaman Islands, an archipelago in the Bay of Bengal between the Indian subcontinent and the Indochinese peninsula) in hopes of spreading the gospel. The Sentinelese are a notoriously reclusive tribe, having long rejected contact with the outside world; though some have gotten close—Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine’s THE MISSION features those who’ve accomplished this—it’s generally understood that one shouldn’t venture to the island (it’s technically illegal) and, if they do, that it’ll be at their own risk. Chau not only knew this but seemed to believe that the island was Satan’s last stronghold, where the word of Christ had yet to be introduced. He also believed that only upon the total proliferation of the gospel would Christ return as promised, which was why this remote indigenous population was so attractive to him. Moss and McBaine’s documentary is a relatively straightforward recounting of Chau’s life, much of which was in service to worship and adventuring, as he was an avid outdoorsman. Chau’s father had written a long letter that a voice actor reads to narrate parts of the film, while another voice actor recites John’s diary and passages of his formal plan to infiltrate the island. Animated sequences (a tired, tired documentary trope) illustrate certain aspects of the story, while interviews and archival ephemera help to contextualize not just Chau’s mission but information about the Sentinelese in total. To me, the latter part is what’s most interesting, as Chau’s motivations seem cut from a pretty traditional cloth, though he claimed not to want to be a colonizer and mandated to himself that it must be the Sentinelese people’s choice to accept the word of God, should it get to that point. He seems earnest and well-intentioned, but one still wonders whether it was the adventure aspect that partly appealed to him or if something else was going on beneath the surface. Ultimately it’s what I learned about the Sentinelese that appealed to me the most, as their reasons for wanting to stay secluded—like disease, fear of their women and children being taken, which they knew had happened to other tribes, etc.—are extremely justified. A most affecting interviewee is another missionary (now an academic) whose own 30-year experience living among an indigenous population and failing to convert any of them caused him to question his faith and reject the idea of mission work in general. Underneath the story’s sensationalism are real considerations of religious, anthropological, and imperialistic questions; John Allen Chau’s doomed mission is just scratching the surface. Moss scheduled to attend Tuesday screening. (2023, 104 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
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Ramata-Toulaye Sy’s BANEL & ADAMA (Senegal/France/Mali)
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Wednesday and Thursday, 5:30pm 
“Banel e Adama. Banel e Adama. Banel e Adama.” The couple’s names fill the notebook of 19-year-old Banel like an incantation, an attempt to will her relationship with Adama into impossible permanence. Living in a small village in Senegal, the two have just been married following the death of Adama’s father and brother, the latter of whom was Banel’s previous husband. Talk of destiny abounds. Were Banel and Adama meant to be together? They certainly think so: blissfully in love, they plan to leave their homes and families to live together in an abode outside the village, with Adama shirking his prescribed hereditary role as the new village chief. Banel, too, sees a way out of her own societal constrictions as a woman forced to bear a male heir. While they map out their shared future, a deadly drought befalls their village. Is this plague punishment for their recalcitrance, as the village elders believe, or a needed upheaval of an oppressive social order? BANEL & ADAMA stands firmly on the side of its rebellious titular characters—played beautifully and without sentimentality by Khady Mane and Mamadou Diallo—even as their headstrong ways court danger. In earthy images that poetically return to mythical motifs of water, sun, sand, trees, and animals, Sy conjures a world beyond societal dictates, where the distant call of freedom makes even the most perilous storm worth weathering. Sy scheduled to attend. (2023, 87 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
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Roger Ross Williams’ STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING (US/Documentary)
Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts (915 E. 60th St.) – Wednesday, 6pm
One interviewee states early on in STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING that this is a battle over ideas, ideas that promote continuing inequality and violence of anti-Black racist beliefs in America. Directed by Roger Ross Williams and based on Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s book of the same name, the film addresses racist ideas that began before the existence of United States, to the fact that white supremacy has been embedded in this country since its founding, to the criminalization of Black people in the twentieth century, to the ways in which these concepts are deeply embedded in contemporary popular culture. Starting with an examination of the historical construction of race, its ongoing justification, and particularly how visuality disseminates and continues this history, it is an investigation of popular culture, myth, and power. What is most effective about the structure of STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING is how it presents historical images alongside contemporary ones, not maintaining a strict chronology and instead highlighting how insidious these concepts are, how they are perpetuated, and how little things have changed. Alongside is a focus on resistance, particularly through the writings and voices of Black women throughout American history, including Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs, and Ida B. Wells. Often depicted through animated sequences, they’re powerful, illuminating, and likely lesser-known perspectives to thread through the film. With a conclusion on what anti-racism looks like, STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING is important, forceful, and timely. Producer Alisa Payne and subject Dr. Ibram X. Kendi scheduled to attend. (2023, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
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François Ozon’s THE CRIME IS MINE (France)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Wednesday, 8pm
AMC New City 14 – Thursday, 5:15pm
In his continuing excavation of film genres and styles, French director and screenwriter François Ozon has turned his attention to Hollywood’s screwball comedies of the 1930s. With exquisite period detail, costuming, and casting, THE CRIME IS MINE offers a madcap look at how the crime of murder pays for destitute actress Madeleine Verdier (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) and her roommate, Pauline Mauléon (Rebecca Marder), a struggling attorney. The plot most closely resembles the musical Chicago, but tips its hat to the silent CHICAGO (1927) by casting Isabelle Huppert as silent screen star Odette Chaumette. With her fright wig of red hair and clothing from the turn of the last century, her rapid-fire line deliveries (she's the only cast member who really achieves the screwball rhythm), and a rapacious disregard for male prerogatives (watch her chew off the end of a sausage with gusto), Huppert offers audiences a master class in comedy. Ozon’s suggestion that Mauléon is a lesbian is intensified by having her wardrobe resemble clothes Katharine Hepburn favored, and Huppert plays with this notion as well. Everything about this film is sheer delight, but Ozon manages to address sexual harassment in the entertainment industry with surprising gravity. And while this may have been accidental, Chaumette’s lament of “Who hides 300,000 francs in a cigar box?” points to former Illinois Secretary of State Paul Powell, who stashed $750,000 in a shoebox in a Springfield hotel room. (2023, 102 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Bas Devos’ HERE (Belgium)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 5:30pm
A lithe and hushed film, HERE is refreshing to watch and bittersweet to think about. Plot generally takes a back seat to mood, though that isn’t to say the film is plotless—in fact, it’s quite sophisticated in how it interweaves two distinct narrative threads. In the first, a construction worker from Romania visits various friends and family members around Brussels as he prepares to make a visit home between assignments; in the second, a Chinese botanist, also living in Brussels, navigates her daily life as she studies mosses, teaches college classes, and hangs out at her aunt and uncle’s restaurant. The principal characters don’t cross paths until halfway into HERE, and their one meaningful interaction doesn’t occur until 20 minutes before it ends. You leave the film wondering (as the characters might) what could have been if they had met each other sooner, what they could have done with more time together. You may also start thinking about the transient nature of contemporary life or the international makeup of European cities today. Writer-director Bas Devos doesn’t force these concerns; he’s more interested in observing how they play out in individual moments and shape the atmosphere of Brussels. That atmosphere is rendered vividly, thanks to an immersive sound design and 16mm images with a pronounced sense of height and depth. In its patience and tactility, HERE is often redolent of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s work (the fact that one of the main characters is a botanist specifically evokes MEMORIA [2021]), though Devos’ concerns are more social than spiritual. He also advances a strong romantic sensibility in spite of the film’s beatific quietude. (2023, 84 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Hong Sang-soo’s IN WATER (South Korea)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 8:30pm
Spoiler alert: IN WATER is drenched—and I mean it literally: everything is blurry and might go slightly more out of focus as the film progresses, even into the end credits. Non-diegetic subtitles reassure that your eyesight is intact. It is a film that, upon finishing, you reflect back and wonder if you have really seen it at all; you might simply have dreamed it up. It’s probably Hong Sang-soo’s most intimate, experimental take yet—so intimate that he produced, wrote, directed, photographed, edited and composed for the film. It is also a meta-film, a film about filmmaking with its distress, boredom, and serendipity. Young actor Seoung-mo (Seok-ho Shin) has decided to make a short film true to his heart; he brings young actress Nam-hee (Seung-yun Kim) and cinematographer Sang-guk (Seong-guk Ha) to the chilly seaside of the Jeju Island, chewing up his personal savings as days go by without a concrete idea of what to shoot. He explores his surroundings but not without some anxiety about the cost of idling, until he sees a lone stranger by the sea and decides to talk to her. And everything starts to make sense. Hong has the talent of flattening every concept—however mundane, awkward, complicated or difficult to articulate—through unhurried conversations that are sprinkled with polite aloofness but can give punches of honesty. The discussion about whether to have sashimi for dinner is treated in the same way as when Seoung-mo talks about how he wishes he was never born. When images retreat to the back seat, sound takes command. The sounds of the waves, the wind, and the voice of Kim Min-hee (who never shows her face but only voice-acts as Seoung-mo’s possible former love interest), will absorb you into this film like soft, impressionist reverie. Preceded by Pedro Costa’s THE DAUGHTERS OF FIRE (9 min, DCP Digital). (2023, 61 min, DCP Digital) [Nicky Ni]
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Paris Zarcilla’s RAGING GRACE (UK)
Music Box Theatre – Thursday, 9:45 pm
In a large estate in London, there are signs of colonialism everywhere, both subtle and explicit. There is a shampoo bottle with the brand name of Rudyards, for example, along with other objects that reflect a history still quite present. This is the major setting for writer-director Paris Zarcilla’s horror RAGING GRACE. Undocumented Filipina immigrant Joy (Max Eigenmann) is finding work around London as a housekeeper, trying to earn money for a visa. She is also mother to the mischievous Grace (Jaeden Paige Boadilla), and they often use empty large mansions as temporary housing; Grace loves to innocently mess with objects around the houses, much to Joy’s alarm. Desperate for cash, Joy takes a long-term, live-in job as a housekeeper for Katherine (Leanne Best), who’s caring for her comatose, dying uncle (David Hayman). Katherine icily moves between contrived concern for Joy and a complete sense of superiority over her. Having to hide the ever-wandering Grace, Joy’s position is further at risk when it becomes clear that the situation within the house is far more dire than it first appeared. Like most of the houses shown before, this one is cold, but its abandoned state hides some horrific secrets. Throughout the film, Grace provides most of the jump-scares and acts as the ghost-like figure within these spaces; it’s an interesting take on this trope, positioning Grace from the beginning as powerful in her ability to traverse and spy. RAGING GRACE provides an effective and at times quite horrific look at the immigrant experience. The film is an impressively built horror as it slowly reveals more and more threatening layers of patronizing, patriarchal control. Even as Joy and Grace begin to pull apart the secrets of the house, they become trapped in this insidious and continuing history of racism and colonialism. There’s a particular focus on the effect on immigrant women, as well as how they find their voices and power in these terrible situations. Despite its darkness, RAGING GRACE counters the colonialist imagery by highlighting objects, food, and other aspects of Filipino culture and ultimately ends with a hopeful moment of strength, family, and community. (2023, 99 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Yasujiro Ozu's I WAS BORN, BUT... (Japan/Silent)

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

Yasujiro Ozu was only 29 years old when he directed I WAS BORN, BUT... More remarkable is that he had nearly 30 features to his credit at this point. As a result, the film embodies a breezy, youthful quality (of both the filmmaker and the Japanese studio system, which put even the productivity of early Hollywood to shame) while advancing a sophisticated understanding of film style. Those who know Ozu solely from his subdued postwar movies will be surprised by how lively this is. Though the subject matter is Ozu's favored realm of middle-class family life, he approaches it with some out-and-out sarcasm and tracking shots as ambitious as those in contemporaneous movies like King Vidor's THE CROWD and Mizoguchi's SISTERS OF THE GION. Jonathan Rosenbaum has written of the film: "Though regarded in Japan mainly as a conservative director, Ozu was a trenchant social critic throughout his career, and the devastating understanding of social context that he shows here is full of radical implications." Just as radical is the film's undifferentiated depiction of children and adults, which suggests a utopian approach to family dynamics. With live musical accompaniment by MIYUMI Project Japanese Experimental Ensemble. Preceded by a very special short subject recently preserved by CFS, DOLL MESSENGERS OF FRIENDSHIP (1927, 9 min, 35mm). (1932, 100 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Charles Walters' SUMMER STOCK (US)

Music Box Theatre – Saturday, 11am

No Hollywood genre has been as consistently self-reflexive as the musical, particularly the backstage musical, in which the dramatization of “putting on a show” evokes the production process of the film itself. As Jane Feuer has noted, these musicals operate ideologically to present mass entertainment as if it were as spontaneous and communal as folk performance, in effect effacing the capitalist labor conditions behind the work. SUMMER STOCK, the third and final onscreen pairing of Judy Garland and Gene Kelly, exemplifies this paradigm. Garland stars as Jane Falbury, a farmer whose bucolic existence is rudely interrupted by the arrival of a city theater troupe at her property. The troupe, led by Kelly’s Joe Ross, has been invited to rehearse at the barn by Falbury’s snooty actress sister Abigail (Gloria DeHaven). Although Falbury is engaged to the wimpy Orville Wingait (Eddie Bracken) and none too pleased with the hijacking of her farm, she eventually falls for Joe and becomes the star of his revue. With its title cleverly conflating artistic and agricultural labor--and with its valorization of the communal, “amateur” efforts of putting on a show--SUMMER STOCK promotes a romanticized image of mass entertainment as for and by the people. The insidiousness of such an illusion is particularly pronounced here due to the presence of Garland, who knew tragically well the actual costs of working in the industry (Kelly’s retort that her character doesn’t know what it’s like “rehearsing all day, knocking yourself out with the same routines” feels like a grim meta-textual joke). At the same time, the magic and magnetism of Garland and Kelly is very real, evident here as it was in their previous two paeans to show business, FOR ME AND MY GAL (1942) and THE PIRATE (1948). Against the simultaneously rustic and artificial sets by the great Cedric Gibbons, the pair get to perform a range of memorable numbers. Garland rides a tractor while singing “(Howdy Neighbor) Happy Harvest”; Kelly does a solo soft-shoe with some newspapers and a squeaky floorboard; and in the film’s most iconic scene, Garland dons a tuxedo jacket and nylons to belt out “Get Happy” amid a fawning circle of male dancers. SUMMER STOCK would be Garland’s final picture for MGM, as her worsening mental condition and the backstage dramas that compounded it led to the termination of her contract. Keep this in mind while the film asks you to “forget your troubles, come on, get happy.” Before the screening, film historians David Fantle and Tom Johnson will give an in-person talk on their latest book, C’mon, Get Happy: The Making of Summer Stock. Followed by a post-screening Q&A moderated by Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune and a book signing with the authors. (1950, 109 min, 35mm) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]

Park Chan-wook's THIRST (South Korea)

Music Box Theatre – Wednesday, 9:45pm

THIRST is l'amour fou taken to its grotesque extreme, the two lovers ripping out each other's throats, breaking necks, biting into each other's veins. Childhood acquaintances brought together by chance: he (Song Kang-ho) is a likeable Catholic priest, Belmondo's Leon Morin without a sense of purpose, turned into a vampire by a blood transfusion; she (Kim Ok-vin) works in her mother-in-law's dress shop and wants nothing more than to murder her infirm husband. The plot, as has been pointed out numerous times, is from Zola's Thérèse Raquin, with the writer's preface (which assigns the lover the sanguine temperament) taken literally. She is guiltless; he has only his guilt to give the world. He blasphemes; she simply acts. Across gray hospitals, empty streets, and dull apartments, they fuck, plot, fight, and finally kill, over and over again, until the white floor of their apartment is covered in blood. There's an innocence to their sin. Screening as part of Bride of Music Box of Horrors. (2009, 134 min, 35mm) [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

Oscar Micheaux's BODY AND SOUL (US/Silent)

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

BODY AND SOUL is a silent "race" film—one of the movies made by and for segregated black audiences in the 1910s-50s. It is a tale of the dangers of blind faith set mainly in a rural Georgia community. In his landmark study Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, historian Donald Bogle, an admirer, writes, "In most cases the Micheaux feature was similar to the Hollywood product, only technically inferior. His films resembled the best B pictures of the time. Lighting and editing were usually poor, and the acting could be dreadful. Still, the standards of the Micheaux feature were far above those of the other black independents." I don't know about the poor editing bit. While the first thing you notice about BODY AND SOUL is the erratic or eccentric editing, to my mind it displays a pretty nimble, if somewhat incontinent, absorption and deployment of Edwin S. Porter's strategies of parallel and contrast editing. The rhythm is jazzy. (Some edits to Micheaux's films, it must be said, were made by the "artists" over at local censorship boards.) In his first screen performance, the mighty Paul Robeson clearly relishes playing the part of a hard-drinking thief passing himself off as a pastor—stealing in the name of the lord, as it were. Bogle seems to feel Robeson is a bit wasted on a silent film: "Robeson without his voice was merely beautiful and mysterious." Still, his famous smile radiates hypocrisy, and there is sly comedy in the play of glances with his hustler frenemies. Robeson also plays the con-man's humble twin brother. This is the man the girl (Julia Theresa Russell) truly loves, but instead she is wrecked "body and soul" by the cruel, corrupt "pastor." Mercedes Gilbert plays the girl's hardworking, devout mother, torn between believing in the "man of god" and crediting her daughter's protestations that he is abusing her. Though a fake, the pastor really does outdo himself with the showcase "Dry Bones in the Desert" sermon, bobbing with the spirit, even hauling off and pasting the deacon a couple times. Bogle notes that "to appreciate Micheaux's films one must understand that he was moving as far as possible away from Hollywood's jesters and servants. He wanted to give his audience something 'to further the race, not hinder it.' Often he sacrificed plausibility to do so." Accordingly, and as is sometimes the case with silent movies, modern viewers must adjust to the film's rhythms and accept some melodramatic plotting and acting. But if you can, you will find moments of great beauty, as well as an elemental, timeless story with near-operatic emotions. Screening as part of the False Preachers series. (1925, 80 min, DCP Digital) [Scott Pfeiffer]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Marcel Carné's LE JOUR SE LÈVE (France)

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

Widely considered a masterpiece of French poetic realism, Marcel Carné's LE JOUR SE LÈVE is noted as much for its narrative structure as it is for its place within the cryptic prewar style. It opens with a bang—literally. From there on out, languid dissolves take the viewer from the tortured protagonist's present to his recent past, revealing the events that led up to the film's first fateful moment. Based on a story thought up by one of his neighbors and adapted to the screen by poet Jacques Prévert (with whom Carné collaborated for more than a decade), the construction is what first attracted Carné; its flashback structure, now taken for granted, was among the first of its kind and has since become a commonly used device. The bang we hear is a gunshot, that of François (played by Jean Gabin) killing an as yet unidentified character. As the police surround his apartment and attempt to either arrest or kill him, François thinks back to the events that led him there. Of course his dilemma involves a woman—two in fact: the sweet, young Françoise (Jacqueline Laurent) and the more experienced, more embittered Clara (Arletty). As romantic tragedy is a defining factor of poetic realism, it suffices to say there's no happy ending in store for François. But romance aside, would there ever have been? François is a foundryman who had been employed in hazardous jobs his entire life. Poetic realism is distinct from straightforward realism (and the movements associated with it) in how the work embodies cinematic verisimilitude. It's suggested that François's unhealthy working conditions would have eventually led to his early demise, but it's not the trappings of his social class that kills him, it's his doomed romance. The ill-fated affair is representative both of his unfortunate lot in life as a member of the petite bourgeoisie and the way in which poetic realist directors conveyed their socio-political leanings. The film was released in 1939, the last year of the poetic realism "movement" before the war handicapped the French film industry altogether. Combined with imagery that evokes German Expressionism and would later inspire film noir, Italian neorealism and the French New Wave, the movement and the films born of it combine the atmospheric capabilities inherent to cinema and the lyrical persuasion of poetry. Screening as part of the Proto-noir: The Roots of the Film Noir Movement series. (1939, 93 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

John Cassavetes' A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm and Saturday, 4pm

Was John Cassavetes a realist? Yes and no. By the director’s own admission, Cassavetes conducted next to no research on mental illness or the Italian-American community before making his masterpiece, A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE, even though both are key components of the heroine’s identity. And as Jonathan Rosenbaum has pointed out, it seems dubious that the heroine’s husband and children never visit her in the mental hospital between the time she’s committed and when she’s released; the events of the film’s galvanic final section would likely be far less catastrophic in real life. One could nitpick at Cassavetes films all day with qualms like these, yet they’re rendered pretty much irrelevant by the films themselves, which convey worlds of emotion with such amazing precision that one never questions the authenticity of what the characters are feeling. Cassavetes didn’t build upon cinematic realism—he invented a cinematic hyperrealism that was no less revolutionary than Chantal Akerman’s and which has become more influential in the 21st century than it ever was when he was working. Where Akerman heightened cinematic reality by drawing attention to the sheer duration it takes routine behaviors to unfold, Cassavetes exaggerated the range of feelings, sensations, and insights that anyone can experience within a short passage of time, making everyday life seem exhaustive. (An achievement of Cristi Puiu’s AURORA [2010], one of the more revolutionary films of the 21st century, is that it marries these two extremes of hyperrealism.) A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE takes Cassavetes’ artistic concerns as far as they go, into the realm of madness, emotional breakdown, and devastation. It is simply one of the most wrenching American films. At the same time, it’s never less than exhilarating; Gena Rowlands’ landmark performance as a working-class housewife snapping under the strain of her responsibilities is so exuberant that you feel more alive by watching her. Peter Falk, playing her husband, is almost as good, creating a monumental portrait of a man who, in Kent Jones’ words, “believes so passionately in his idea of perfect happiness, no matter how wrongheadedly, that he’d rather destroy everyone around him than see it compromised.” Given the richness of the characterizations, it isn’t surprising that the acting in A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE (by a seamless mix of experienced and inexperienced performers) tends to dominate conversations about the film. Yet the way Cassavetes constructs a symphony out of his actors’ gestures is what makes the film much more than a performers’ showcase. And like a symphony, its themes are elusive to the end. To quote Jones again: “[I]t’s about… what? Men and women? Family life? The difficulty of distinguishing between your real and ideal selves? Male embarrassment? All of the above, none of the above. Tagging a movie like WOMAN with something as neat as a ‘subject’ is a fairly useless activity. ‘John had antennae like Proust,’ Peter Falk once wrote. A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE and FACES, probably his two greatest films, are both ultimately as impossible to pin down as In Search of Lost Time. Like Proust before him, Cassavetes rode the whims, upsets, vagaries, and mysterious impulses of humanity like a champion surfer.” Screening as part of the Amour Fou series. (1974, 147 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Jordan Peele's GET OUT (US) and Brian Yuzna's SOCIETY (US)

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

Between the post-racial and the colorblind, evil festers in GET OUT (2017, 104 min, DCP Digital). Released at the beginning of 2017, no film more effectively and immediately tapped into our cultural moment or provoked more conversation throughout the year than Jordan Peele’s feature film debut (now an Oscar winner for Best Original Screenplay). Its frequent revival suggests its breakthrough significance and continued importance as a cultural object. GET OUT is a horror story about cultural appropriation, gaslighting, and—most cleverly—the weaponization of social norms and etiquette to enforce strict hierarchies. It also followed an intriguing trend from 2017 of love stories that uneasily shift between scenes of intimacy and scenes of horror, where sentimental attachments are used to manipulate and ensnare (PHANTOM THREAD, MOTHER!, and THE SHAPE OF WATER are other titles that come to mind). GET OUT is also highly successful as a comedy (as the Golden Globes controversially categorized the film, to Peele’s dismay), and yet it is reductive to describe the movie merely in those terms. While it is irreverent, blistering, and funny in a way that frequently stings, a deep strain of melancholy runs throughout it. What story about the pernicious lasting effects of human hate could be otherwise? The film’s premise is simple but compelling: Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a young photographer, goes to meet his girlfriend Rose’s parents at the Armitage family estate in the country. Chris is nervous from the start—he is Black, the Armitages are white, and Rose has neglected to fill her parents in on this (to her, inconsequential; to him, crucial) detail. (Note the stroke of brilliance in casting the Armitage clan: are there any actors more recognizable as “good white liberal” indie stars than Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford?) The weekend begins for Chris with an initially warm, if awkward, welcome from the parents, followed by uncanny run-ins with the Black household help. But Chris’s visit becomes increasingly hostile as the weekend wears on, and more guests arrive at the estate for the Armitages’ annual garden party. From there, Chris is made to suffer a series of small indignities and becomes the center of an increasingly uncomfortable attention. White partygoers insist on giving him their uninvited opinions about the African-American experience, cast objectifying glances over his body, and make fetishizing remarks about his “genetic make-up.” Like another horror film from 2017, Aronofsky’s MOTHER!, horror here is brilliantly imagined at first as simply the nightmare of having to deal with people who don’t understand social cues, and grows into the danger of not seeing the right time to get out of someone’s house. If the horror in GET OUT feels stark, real, and vivid, it is because of the way the movie builds this gradually from small moments of disquieting tension. The film’s important intervention is in showing how seemingly little instances of casual racism are never really little, but rather are stepping-stones to bigger, uglier transgressions to come. Seemingly small slights, off-hand remarks, and micro-aggressions are already toxic because they pave the way for larger, suffocating patterns of dehumanization like slavery, lynching, or the mass incarceration of Black men—all of these initial thoughtless actions are already symptoms of a failure to recognize another person as fully human. “Sometimes, if there’s too many white people, I get nervous.” This decisive line of dialogue is delivered as just a whisper in the film, but it expresses an intensely personal, un-PC, and painful truth. There are many things left unsaid in GET OUT, too, but the conversations that the film has started and the contemporary racial tensions it has helped bring to light are well worth revisiting. Wherever monsters and mold grow, sunlight is the best disinfectant. [Tien-Tien Jong]
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The horror-fantastical director Brian Yuzna has carved out a fine career. Among his films are low-budget gems of the body horror subgenre, the most extreme of which is his 1989 debut, SOCIETY (1989, 99 min, DCP Digital), which didn’t see a release until 1992. The story has to do with Billy (properly William Whitney, for those who like to keep track of their cinematic references), a Beverly Hills prep-schooler with a therapist, a crumbling relationship with his parents, and incestuous feelings for his sister. His alienation from his family plays pretty straight at the beginning (except for Billy hallucinating worms), then, twenty minutes in, takes a turn for the extravagantly paranoid—or… is it? Ensuing are murders, softcore porn (the T&A often displayed, physiologically, every which way, due to the work of the savagely effective prosthetic makeup artist Screaming Mad George), people expelling hairballs, and surreptitious taping of Billy’s family engaging in the most vile of rituals. Billy thinks he’s not a biological part of his clan; as it turns out, he doesn’t know the half of it. There’s some residue of ROSEMARY’S BABY here, but even though SOCIETY hits all the exploitation beats, it’s not the kind of film you want to spoil overmuch. The twists tend to elicit “You did not go there” responses from the uninitiated, and Yuzna’s genuinely fearless in putting the screws to you; he’s not afraid to up the horrific and rhetorical ante. People have been pressing SOCIETY on friends for years, and not a one of them didn’t wait on tenterhooks wanting to know what you thought of the ending, which is a legend of sorts in horror circles. You hate to throw around “vision,” but Yuzna’s really got one; the last half-hour of this film means no good, philosophically—underneath all the delivering of genre goods is a genuinely pissed-off movie. Yuzna in person. [Jim Gabriel]

Philip Kaufman's INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (US)

Music Box Theatre – Monday, 9:30pm

Perhaps the most adapted of any 20th century science fiction novel, Jack Finney's The Body Snatchers has found a cinematic home no less than eight times, with directors as diverse as Don Siegel and Abel Ferrara. However, no screen-interpretation of the novel has been more directly political than Phillip Kaufman's 1978 version. Set in San Francisco, Donald Sutherland plays a health inspector who becomes unwittingly involved in an alien plot to replace all humans with physically identical, though emotionally void, beings. The only way to prevent oneself from being "snatched" by the alien force is to avoid thinking or expressing any emotion. The allusions to anti-communist and anti-conformist rhetoric are less than subtle but, thanks greatly to Michael Chapman's icy cinematography and tremendous performances by Sutherland and supporting players Jeff Goldblum and Brooke Adams, Kaufman's INVASION is a haunting and striking proclamation about our desire for individuality. Screening as part of Bride of Music Box of Horrors. (1978, 108 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Joe Rubin]

Edgar G. Ulmer's THE BLACK CAT (US)

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

The biggest budgeted film of his career, Edgar G. Ulmer's virtually in-name-only adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe's classic story is an incredibly stylish and haunting study of the power struggle between two friends, which, accidentally or intentionally, mirrors the vicious jealousy between the film's two stars, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. A young American couple, traveling in Eastern Europe, gets stranded at the mysterious villa of a world-famous architect (Karloff) and his visiting friend, Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Lugosi). Soon Karloff begins to psychologically torment the doctor with dark secrets from each of their pasts. Full of clear visual allusions to both Murnau and Lang, Ulmer presents a dark portrait of post-war trauma set in a world that only looks modern, but is actually still fighting decades-old moral demons. If nothing else, THE BLACK CAT is a masterpiece of lighting, with many scenes cloaked half in darkness, allowing only fragments of the "truth" to be seen. Karloff and Lugosi's intense hatred for each other adds such a powerful undercurrent of unease to the film that one wonders if they were cast in opposing roles for just that reason. (1934, 65 min, DCP Digital) [Joe Rubin]

Jonathan Demme's STOP MAKING SENSE (US/Documentary)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

In nearly every shot, STOP MAKING SENSE makes the case that Jonathan Demme was the greatest director of musical performance in American cinema. It isn't difficult to convey the joy of making music, but Demme's attention to the interplay between musicians (and, in some inspired moments, between the musicians and their crew) conveys the imagination, hard work, and camaraderie behind any good song.  And, needless to say, the songs here are very, very good. By this point (the performances are culled from three concerts from 1983), Talking Heads were the headiest American band to achieve their degree of success, and they made the most of it, doubling their line-up to include back-up singers and a few instrumentalists from the golden years of George Clinton's Funkadelic. It's never openly acknowledged that the five new members are Black and the Heads are white; the sheer creativity of the music, which fuses everything from soul to traditional African rhythms to then-advanced electronic effects, is fully utopian in its spirit. (1984, 88 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO (US)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Sunday, 1:15pm and Monday, 4pm

So much ink has been spilled over PSYCHO that it might have been best if nothing had been written about it at all. More than any other Hitchcock film it deserves a fresh pair of eyes (perhaps the kind we'd find in a kid with hands that barely reach the ticket window and then cling to the armrest as he loses the main character less than half way in, as a lucky few recount). Even if the infamous shower scene has lost its surprise and shock value (but watch it closely anyway), there's still a great deal to enjoy: a black and white pallet fine-tuned down to Vera Miles' bra; Hitchcock's bizarre infatuation with the Oedipus Complex; Bernard Herrmann's superb score. From the outside it's a film we've become accustomed to, but in a dark theater it becomes hauntingly unfamiliar again. (1960, 109 min, DCP Digital) [Julian Antos]

William Friedkin's CRUISING (US)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Monday, 7:30pm

This movie that once caused the gay community to protest its making and release is now something of a cult sensation amongst today's generation. At the time, the film was deemed controversial for the way it seemed to correlate homosexual attraction and serial killing and for its mainstream coverage of S&M bars, a rather marginal part of gay life. Today, after AIDS, the movie has found new appreciation in the queer community and beyond. Its new fans are curious about the life it portrayed, its ethos as much as its dress codes, the latter of which has to an extent even been appropriated by today's hipster scene (the bandanna as a signifier of sexual solicitation transformed into a signifier of irony). Al Pacino gives a bizarre performance as a cop who increasingly begins to identify with the gay world he was sent out to cover after a series of killings in the community. CRUISING has its faults, in its plotting and other aspects, and many ambiguities, but today those deficiencies are either forgiven in favor of its strengths or are seen as meaningful mysteries to ponder over. Part of its incomplete feel is accounted for by the 40 minutes cut out to appease the MPAA, who then dropped the initial X rating to an R (the missing footage mostly consisting of more scenes at the S&M bars). The print shown should include the infamous disclaimer that was dropped from the DVD release: "This film is not intended as an indictment of the homosexual world. It is set in one small segment of that world, which is not meant to be representative of the whole." (1980, 102 min, DCP Digital) [Kalvin Henley]

Ivan Reitman's GHOSTBUSTERS (US)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Wednesday, 4:30pm

GHOSTBUSTERS: a film that once wittily inscribed a bourgeois, rationalist ideology onto an inestimable cross-section of Generation X. Amateur occultist Dan Aykroyd's screenplay, a contemporary updating of the corny Abbott & Costello and Bob Hope comedy-horror features of his youth, is sustained by an ingeniously savvy understanding of Reaganomic mythology that makes Frederic Jameson look like Dave Barry. The titular expelled Columbia University parapsychology postdocs get in on the ground floor of an emerging urban economy: the containment of the psychic energy of investment capital, sublimated into ludic, phantasmic form. Manifesting in historic arenas of the old-money upper class (Ivy League libraries, Upper West Side apartments, posh turn-of-the-century hotels), these gilded ghouls rise from the grave to celebrate industrial deregulation and income-tax cuts (Slimer in particular representing a ravenous and futile hyperconsumption), but unsurprisingly bring chaos to the liberal, environmentalist enclave of Manhattan. As the protagonists' success ushers in an era of celebrity entrepreneurship (see THE SOCIAL NETWORK), the infantile collective Ghostbusters id repeatedly transgresses the demands of a variety of old-fashioned academic, bureaucratic, or municipal-juridical superegos to now-classic comic effect. Like the College, GHOSTBUSTERS is suffused with a particular heteronormative, ascetic intellectual machismo from start to finish. Feminine promiscuity, for example, is definitively linked here to demonic possession, and the absurd Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man (unleashed by the secular unconscious as a direct result of the Ghostbusters' attempt to physically mediate between an empirical positivism and occult theology) is defeated only through the violation of a puerile "stream-crossing" taboo, with our heroes simultaneously jizzing nuclear-powered laser beams into the glammy, gender-ambiguous Gozer's icy ziggurat. A very serious diversion. (1984, 105 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Castelle]

Joel Schumacher's THE LOST BOYS (US)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Tuesday, 7:30pm

In addition to being the first movie where Corey Feldman and Corey Haim (R.I.P.) appear together, THE LOST BOYS is also a darn good time. In a rarity for a horror film from the '80's, the comedic elements work to lighten the mood without bringing too much cheese. Much as with Schumacher's previous movie targeted towards teenagers, ST. ELMO'S FIRE, the production team doesn't cut corners. Recently pubescent vampires (Keifer Sutherland, Jason Patric, and Jami Gertz) and soon-to-be pubescent comic store geeks (Haim and Feldman) get the adult treatment as realistic characters, without a comic foil in the bunch. Though the film was shot in and around Santa Cruz, the fictional location of San Carla, CA, is adeptly rendered as a dark and downtrodden small town, and feels like it could exist on the edge of the Salton Sea. With its run-down boardwalk, gang problems, and mysterious disappearances, this is not the "Sunny California" that was (and is?) a staple of the movies. Though the film lags a bit during the third act, the night-time scenes of the amusement park and the vampires' lair are dead on, and the soundtrack features an excellent cover of "People are Strange" performed by Echo and the Bunnymen. (1987, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Jason Halprin]

🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
ALSO SCREENING

 ⚫ Art Institute of Chicago
Leslie Buchbinder’s WESTERMANN: MEMORIAL TO THE IDEA OF MAN IF HE WAS AN IDEA (2023, 86 min, DCP Digital), a new 3-D documentary about the artist, marine, and acrobat H.C. “Cliff” Westermann, screens Thursday, 6pm, with opening remarks beginning at 5:30pm. Admission is free, but registration is required. More information and a link to register here.

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

⚫ Comfort Film Halloween at Comfort Station (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave.)
Bhooshan Lal’s 1999 Indian film SON OF DRACULA (92 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday at 8pm. Programmed by Jason Coffman. Free admission. More info here.

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson’s 2023 animated film SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE (140 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, 7pm, as part of the New Releases series.

Danny Boyle’s 1996 film TRAINSPOTTING (93 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday, 4:30pm, as part of the In the Club: 90s Electronic Music and Beyond series. 

Sara Gómez’s 1977 Cuban film DE CIERTA MANERA (73 min, DCP Digital) and Ruy Guerra’s 1979 Mozambican film MUEDA, MEMORY AND MASSACRE (80 min, DCP Digital) screen Sunday, 6:30pm, as part of the Open Veins: Postcolonial Cinema of the Luso-Hispanic World series.

Ang Lee’s 2012 film LIFE OF PI (127 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday, 7pm, as part of the Films of Ang Lee series. 

François Ozon’s 2003 French film SWIMMING POOL (102 min, 35mm) screens Thursday at 7pm.

Joseph W. Sarno’s 1966 sexploitation film RED ROSES OF PASSION (80 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 9:30pm, as part of the Depths of the Grindhouse series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Elastro A/V
Elastro A/V presents a two-day festival of durational audio and video installations and performances from a wide range of local audiovisual Chicago artists. The Saturday schedule, starting at 6pm, includes a 16mm installation by Sara Sowell, and the Sunday schedule, starting at 7pm, includes a drawing on celluloid and projection, as well as live stop motion. More info here. 

⚫ FACETS Cinema
SUPER-HORROR-RAMA!, three days of must-see horror obscurities, begins Friday and goes through Sunday. 

On Friday, Rufus Butler Seder’s 1985 film SCREAMPLAY (91 min, Digital Projection) screens at 7pm and Eric Parkinson, Michael Rissi, and Stephen Sommers’ 1988 film TERROR EYES (90 min, Digital Projection) screens at 9pm. This opening night double feature is offered at a special price of $12, with 20% of all net ticket profits donated to the SAG-AFTRA foundation. 

On Saturday, John Llewellyn Moxey’s 1960 film THE CITY OF THE DEAD (76 min, Digital Projection) screens at 5pm; Raúl Artigot’s 1972 film THE WITCHES MOUNTAIN (80 min, Digital Projection) at 7pm; and Sidney Hayers’ 1962 film BURN, WITCH, BURN (90 min, Digital Projection) at 9pm. All with an introduction by practicing occult specialist Evelyn Spear.

On Sunday, James Bryan’s 1981 film DON’T GO IN THE WOODS (82 min, Digital Projection) screens at 5pm; Jorge Grau’s 1974 film DON’T OPEN THE WINDOW (95 min, Digital Projection) at 7pm; and Joseph Ellison’s 1980 film DON’T GO IN THE HOUSE (92 min, Digital Projection) at 9pm. All with a preshow by Bill Van Ryn of Drive-In Asylum.

Also with a Horror Pop-Up Market on Saturday and Sunday from 4 to 10pm. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
The Short Films of Stefani Jemison screen Tuesday, 6pm, as part of Eisenberg’s fall SAIC lecture series, the Times, the Chronicle, the Witness, and the Observer: Three Decades Of Film/Video Inquiry. 

Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film PERSONA (83 min, DCP Digital) and Wong Kar-wai’s 2000 film IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (99 min, DCP Digital) screen Tuesday at 6pm and 8:30pm, respectively, as part of Member Appreciation Night. This screening is free for Film Center members only, but registration via their website or the Film Center box office is required. Individual members are limited to one RSVP, and dual members are limited to two RSVPS. Active membership is required to attend. More info on all screenings and events here.  

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Richie Adams’s 2023 UK film THE ROAD DANCE (117 min, DCP Digital) and Karen O’Connor, Miri Navasky, and Maeve O’Boyle’s JOAN BAEZ: I AM A NOISE (113 min, DCP Digital) begin screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes. 

Also screening as part of the Bride of Music Box of Horrors month-long series are Sisworo Gautama Putra’s 1981 Indonesian film SRIGALA (88 min, DCP Digital) on Friday at 10pm, co-presented by Terror Vision with Terror Vision in the Music Box Lounge beginning at 8:30pm selling blu-rays, records, and horror memorabilia and tattoos by Chloe in the lounge between 8:30pm and 10pm; James Cameron’s 1986 film ALIENS (137 min, 35mm) on Saturday at 10pm; Cameron Cairnes and Colin Cairnes’ 2023 film LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL (93 min, DCP Digital) on Sunday at 9:15pm, presented by the Chicago International Film Festival with David Dastmalchian in attendance for a post-screening Q&A; Jonas Middleton’s 1976 film THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS (91 min, 35mm) on Tuesday at 9:30pm, sponsored by Distribpix and hosted by programmer and archivist Liz Purchell (AGFA, Ask Any Buddy); and Paris Zarcilla’s 2023 film RAGING GRACE (100 min, DCP Digital) on Thursday at 9:45pm, presented by the Chicago International Film Festival.

Jason Wise’s 2023 documentary SOMM: CUP OF SALVATION (90 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday at 2:30pm and Sunday at 6pm with cast and crew in attendance for a post-screening Q&A after both screenings. Each general admission ticket comes with one glass of wine. VIP Tickets for the Sunday screening include a tasting of wines from the SOMM Film series and the new film CUP OF SALVATION with the director and cast. The VIP reception starts at 4:30pm in the Music Box Lounge.

A sing-a-long to Michael Gracey’s 2017 film THE GREATEST SHOWMAN (105 min, DCP Digital) takes place Sunday at 11:30am. 

Wakefield Poole’s 1977 film TAKE ONE (98 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday at 9:30pm. Programmed and presented by the Front Row and Henry Hanson. More info on all screenings and events 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. 

⚫ South Side Home Movie Project
The Spinning Home Movies series returns with Rhythm and Love, drawing upon audiovisual fragments of historic Black life—ragtime tunes, rare clips of early Black cinema (including SOMETHING GOOD—NEGRO KISS [1898]), scenes from the Roberts Show Lounge, and house music beats—to present a unique mix of film and music, both historic and contemporary, on Saturday at 7pm. Free admission with registration. 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

⚫ 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: October 13 - October 19, 2023

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Julian Antos, Michael Castelle, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jim Gabriel, Jason Halprin, Kalvin Henley, Tien-Tien Jong, Ben Kaye, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Nicky Ni, Scott Pfeiffer, Joe Rubin, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Drew Van Weelden