:: FRIDAY, DECEMBER 8 - THURSDAY, DECEMBER 14 ::

📽️ Crucial Viewing

Tom Green’s FREDDY GOT FINGERED (US) and Lars von Trier’s THE IDIOTS (Denmark)

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

The second film to brandish the Dogma 95 stamp of approval, THE IDIOTS (1998, 110 min, 35mm) may be the most outrageous work produced under the aegis of that short-lived cinematic movement-cum-provocation. The title characters are a group of angry young radicals who express their contempt for bourgeois normalcy by attending gatherings of polite society and pretending to have severe developmental disabilities. The group’s goals are never clear, apart from making other people uncomfortable, though they seem to have something to do with sexual hedonism; the idiots engage in open relationships and, in the movie’s biggest set piece, stage an orgy at their commune for lack of anything better to do. In an instance of life imitating art, this piece of cheeky leftist bashing premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where it presumably upset plenty of bourgeois audience members. The whole movie is a purposely hideous, Duchampian art object, shot (with no artificial light) on mini dv and edited so haphazardly as to suggest the work of an amateur. Is the aesthetic one of Lars von Trier’s jokes on artistic purity? Probably, though in hindsight, the use of cheap video and cheaper humor feels more closely related to the contemporaneous MTV series Jackass, Punk’d, and The Tom Green Show, which also got plenty of mileage out of unwitting strangers being made to feel uncomfortable. Fittingly, THE IDIOTS will be preceded by Tom Green’s first directorial feature, the instant cult classic FREDDY GOT FINGERED (2001, 87 min, 35mm). Playing a variation on his TV persona, Green stars as an aspiring cartoonist in his late 20s who still lives with his parents, whom he constantly subjects to weird, embarrassing pranks. Rip Torn and Julie Hagerty play the parents, and their surprisingly rich performances help elevate the film from a simple TV show spin-off into something emotionally nuanced and occasionally moving. (Seeing Torn, then 70, get on Green’s wavelength and even at times out-weird him is surely one of the triumphs of this great actor’s career.) The movie is elevated by other qualities, such as Green’s nimble tracking shots, the Buster Keaton tributes that turn up out of nowhere, and the general sincerity with which the filmmakers approach the theme of adult children striving for parental approval. A.O. Scott, in his famous rave review in the New York Times, likened FREDDY GOT FINGERED to something Ingmar Bergman might have directed for SCTV, and the film warrants this praise with its hard-won insights into family dynamics. Green may offset those insights with gross-out humor, but what imaginative gross-out humor! The scene at the cheese sandwich factory (where Green plays the idiot for a bunch of conveyor belt drones), the antics with an animal corpse, and the disastrous double date at a fancy restaurant are all inspired, boundary-pushing comedy. Whether you find these sequences laugh-out-loud funny or just plain strange will have a lot to do with your personal taste. There’s no denying, however, the film’s singular position in the comedy film canon. [Ben Sachs]

Todd Haynes' CAROL (US)

Music Box Theatre – Wednesday, 4pm and Thursday, 6:45pm

Todd Haynes’ film was nominated for six Oscars and was jobbed out of every last one, including a few that it wasn’t up for. It might seem in questionable taste to bring up awards when talking about a film as rigorous and lavishly emotional as CAROL, but it’s one of those pictures that makes you notice all its artisans’ work, from prop masters to painters, from the masterly concision of the writing to the costumers’ precision, on down the line, every last bit of it, the care taken to recreate this womb-world where people played 78s and drove drunk with their kids in the back seat. You appreciate it so—love it so—that your back tends to get up when you run into someone who doesn’t feel similarly. The leads are pitched just right: Rooney Mara’s lightly tremulous Therese, with her increasing inability to abide men’s demands on her, so much so that she’s nearly jumping out of her skin at their insinuations, is “flung out of space” into the path of Cate Blanchett’s Carol, whose martini-lunch bearing is being shredded by a divorce and a legal fight for her daughter. (Blanchett’s line readings as haunting as a smoke eddy, and when she loses it, never tips over into divadom; when asked if she knows what she’s doing regarding Therese, her quiet response of “I never did” seems the fulcrum of the film’s prevailing mood.) The director’s attunement to the women even extends to the blocking; his keen stratagem of constantly placing figures (mostly men) in Therese and Carol’s way subliminally works on you, and his little visual detours, such as a set of closeups giving way to a montage made of lovely, positively avant-garde out-of-focus dissolves, are plainly beautiful. He’s the perfect director for this material. Time will tell if CAROL has the resonances of a classic, much less a masterpiece, though I suspect it will. In the meantime, any day we can see it in a theater is a happy one, especially when we're seeing the 35mm print Haynes and cinematographer Ed Lachman paid for out of pocket. Screening as part of the Alternative Christmas Features series. (2015, 118 min, 35mm) [Jim Gabriel]

Satoshi Kon’s TOKYO GODFATHERS (Japan/Animation)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

Of the quartet of feature films that Satoshi Kon directed in a revelatory career tragically cut short, TOKYO GODFATHERS remains the most fascinating outlier. Unlike the reality-bending dramatic thrillers that came to define his career—PERFECT BLUE (1997), MILLENNIUM ACTRESS (2001), and PAPRIKA (2006)—TOKYO GODFATHERS is Kon’s only film that can unabashedly be categorized as a comedy, if a highly melancholic one. The Christmastime tale about three unhoused miscreants—the drunkard Gin, the matriarchal Hana, and the runaway teenager Miyuki—who happen upon an abandoned baby is less interested in the formal experimentation of Kon’s other works than in pushing the boundaries of what kinds of mature, emotionally layered stories can be told in the medium of animation. An episodic wild goose chase ensues through the snow-littered streets of Tokyo, with the heroes encountering mob bosses, drag queens, and mystery after mystery of who left this young child behind, the ever-unfurling backstory leaving breadcrumbs of resonance with the hidden tales of our central trio; each united in isolation, shutting themselves off from a world that has rejected them, or vice versa. The quest for found family amidst a cruel and confusing world shines a beam of thematic potency through an otherwise maniacally comic outing, with Kon’s expert skills as an editor and weaver of imagery working together for wonderfully comic purposes here. It’s a testament to Kon's mastery of storytelling that this delightful holiday excursion still packs a wallop two decades later, standing as continued proof of the open curiosity of Kon’s vision of animation as a medium of boundless narrative potential. (2003, 93 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Paris Zarcilla’s RAGING GRACE (UK)

Music Box Theatre – Friday - Thursday, 9:15pm

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]

Holiday Detour

FACETS Cinema – See below for showtimes

Wong Kar-wai's 2046 (Hong Kong)
Friday, 7pm
When it was in production (for what felt like a decade), swarms of rumors surrounded Wong Kar-wai’s 2046, the most popular being that the film would be Wong’s first foray into science fiction. That’s a plausible notion, given the film’s title, which refers to the final year that China promised to let Hong Kong remain as it is before the mainland government assumed greater control over the island. But while the finished film does contain passages set in the year 2046, for the most part it’s a period piece set in the mid to late 1960s. Moreover, the film that Wong completed turned out to be a sequel to his beloved IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (2000), with Tony Leung reprising his character of Chow Mo-wan. The previous film ended with Chow leaving Hong Kong for a job in Singapore, where he hoped to forget about his longing for the married Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung); this one opens with him returning to Hong Kong and resuming his work as a newspaper writer there. Whereas Chow was a quiet introvert in LOVE, in 2046 he’s a bon vivant and ladies’ man, proceeding through a succession of one-night-stands with blithe indifference. Wong seems to be saying that unfulfilled romance and unfulfilling sex are two sides of the same coin—both result in feelings of melancholy and loneliness. Chow channels his feelings into a sci-fi serial he writes about the year 2046, when people have romantic relationships with androids and high-speed train lines unite the globe. These stories about connection betray Chow’s feelings of disconnect from most other people, which are ameliorated through fleeting relationships with women who are just as lonely as he is. The film is divided into episodes centered on different women, who are played magnificently by Carina Lau, Zhang Ziyi, Faye Wong, and Gong Li. (As in LOVE, the women are all magnificently dressed too.) This was Wong’s first film in widescreen, though he shot most of it in medium close-up—the film transpires in an intimate space where it seems that sex (or, possibly, a deeper connection) is only a breath away. With an introduction from local filmmaker and Cine-File contributor Michael Glover Smith. (2004, 129 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Tim Burton's BATMAN RETURNS (US)
Saturday, 7pm
No one else captures the nostalgic kitsch and dark melancholy of Christmastime with perfect balance like Tim Burton. His first feature after one of his other Christmas classics, EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (1990), BATMAN RETURNS shifts the gloomy holiday cheer from the suburbs to Gotham City. The constructed sets and detailed production design have produced some of the most iconic images in a career filled with memorable visuals. The story involves Gotham industrial businessman Max Shreck (Christopher Walken) teaming up with twisted crime lord Penguin (Danny DeVito), who’s searching for his origins. Superhero vigilante Batman (Michael Keaton) is out to stop them, but everyone’s plans are complicated by Selina Kyle (Michelle Pfeiffer), Shreck’s meek secretary who seeks revenge against her boss as the formidable, whip-brandishing, latex-wearing Catwoman. It's hard to argue that this isn’t Pfeiffer’s movie, as the submissive cat lady violently transforms into the dominant Catwoman, one of the great cinematic femme fatales. Her early scenes, set in her baby pink apartment, where Selina talks to herself to cope with the loneliness of her life are unexpectedly moving, so much so that her story looms over the other characters'. Through her, the film presents complex themes about duality and female sexuality. She also helps to make the film more noir than anything else, despite its titular superhero; like its conflicted approach to the holiday season, BATMAN RETURNS is funny and morbid, beautiful and grotesque, ridiculous and sincere—one of Burton’s best. With an introduction from Cine-File contributor Megan Fariello. (1992, 126 min, Digital Projection) [Megan Fariello]
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Douglas Sirk's ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS (US)
Sunday, 5pm
Though originally intended by Universal to be a Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman vehicle—building upon their popularity in MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION rather than Sirk's popularity as a director—ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS is every bit as personal, even if only because of Sirk's hefty allowance (both artistically and economically). Wyman plays the pussyfooting Cary Scott, a recent widow in a tight knit, high strung, upper class American town. She falls in love with her gardener, Rock Hudson, and her children object and buy her a television to replace him. It's a film about people making things difficult for themselves and others because they have nothing more pressing to attend to. They impose tragedy on themselves as a matter of course, but Sirk is sympathetic. In all the stunning grandeur of his heavily saturated colors and Superscope composition, Sirk never lets his characters become washed out, or treats them as secondary elements to his visual style. His sympathies save films like ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS from their own absurdities, and the more ridiculous his storylines and intricate visual compositions become (take note of the way he frames characters within things like window frames and television sets), the more beautiful his films seem. With an introduction from Cine-File co-managing editor Kat Sachs. (1955, 91 min, Digital Projection) [Julian Antos]

The 40th Annual Music Box Christmas Sing-A-Long & Double Feature

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

Frank Capra's IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE (US)
Like Steven Spielberg today, Frank Capra was associated more with reassuring, patriotic sentiment than with actually making movies; but just beneath the Americana, his films contain a near-schizophrenic mix of idealism and resentment. In this quality, as well as his tendency to drag charismatic heroes through grueling tests of faith, it wouldn't be a stretch to compare Capra with Lars von Trier. There's plenty to merit the comparison in IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE alone: The film is a two-hour tour of an honest man's failure and bottled-up resentment, softened only intermittently by scenes of domestic contentment. Even before the nightmarish Pottersville episode (shot in foreboding shadows more reminiscent of film noir than Americana), Bedford Falls is shown as vulnerable to the plagues of recession, family dysfunction, and alcoholism. All of these weigh heavily on the soul of George Bailey, a small-town Everyman given tragic complexity by James Stewart, who considered the performance his best. Drawing on the unacknowledged rage within ordinary people he would later exploit for Alfred Hitchcock, Stewart renders Bailey as complicated as Capra himself—a child and ultimate victim of the American Dream. Ironically, it's because the film's despair feels so authentic that its iconic ending feels as cathartic as it does: After being saved from his suicide attempt (which frames the entire film, it should be noted), Stewart is returned to the simple pleasures of family and friends, made to seem a warm oasis in a great metaphysical void. (1946, 130 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Michael Curtiz's WHITE CHRISTMAS (US) 

Critics agree that Mark Sandrich's HOLIDAY INN (1942), the first musical comedy to feature Bing Crosby, an inn, and Irving Berlin's "White Christmas," is a better film than this partial remake. Yet it turns out that it's the revivals of this Technicolor, VistaVision version that people look forward to this time of year. WHITE CHRISTMAS incorporates the history of its own title song, which, while it would go on to become perhaps history's largest-seller, actually seemed a flop at first. Music historians Dave Marsh and Steve Propes note, "What saved 'White Christmas' were requests made by GIs to Armed Forces Radio around the world. Soldiers away from home, many of them in the South Pacific or North Africa, uncertain of whether they'd ever again see family and friends, let alone a snowfall, responded passionately to Berlin's understated evocation of the mythic romance of Christmas Past." This history is folded into the opening scene: it's Christmas Eve, 1944, somewhere on a World War II battlefield, and Crosby sings the song to fellow troops amidst some very fake rubble, as bombs explode in the background. The movie's got Crosby and Danny Kaye as music-and-lyrics team Wallace and Davis, and Vera-Ellen and Rosemary Clooney as sister act the Haynes. They're a treat to watch even just sitting around a railroad passenger car singing "Snow," bound for Pine Tree, Vermont, where the inn turns out to be run by ex-General Waverly (Dean Jagger). When people gather for a screening of this movie, I doubt they worry that it may not rank with Michael Curtiz's best work (CASABLANCA, YANKEE DOODLE DANDY, MILDRED PIERCE). They come to mark the change of years together. If there's a season for nestling in the warmth of nostalgia, it's this one. Plus, there's the camp appeal of Crosby and Kaye doing "Sisters." (1954, 120 min, DCP Digital) [Scott Pfeiffer]

Lucrecia Martel's ZAMA (Argentina)

Instituto Cervantes of Chicago (31 W. Ohio St.) – Monday, 6pm

“I know it seems like the inexplicable, but it’s just a boy in that box,” says a man to the film’s namesake character, Diego de Zama, as he watches a wooden crate move by itself on the floor outside his room. This supernatural facade haunts the stagnate title character, and us the viewer, who is explicitly implicated in the film’s first bit of opening dialogue. Zama (wonderfully portrayed by Daniel Giménez Cacho) conspicuously watches a group of indigenous women covering their naked bodies in mud; he is spotted by the women, who tease him by yelling, “Voyeur!" Lucrecia Martel places Zama in the lower-right corner of the frame, drawing a direct line between the accusatory womens’ pointed glance and the viewer. As he runs away, one of them catches this leg, to which he turns around and slaps her, twice. Zama, a functionary of the King of Spain, is awaiting a transfer out of the land he helped colonize, in hopes to return to his wife and newborn son in Buenos Aires. Meanwhile, he suffers one indignity after another, first by the innkeeper’s daughters who bathe and sleep with him in his temporary home, then by a blue-blooded seductress of nobility. He’s constantly humiliated by his superiors (the surrounding slaves silently mock him at every turn), his vapid manhood dissolving slowly all around him. As he nervously awaits the transfer papers, he is thrown out of his temporary furnishings by a new governor recently arrived on the scene. Zama then drags his belongings to a possibly haunted inn on the edge of town, as he waits for the very same governor to sign off on a letter to the King, imploring his long-gestating transfer to his family. The knotty corridors of bureaucracy delay the letter further, so he takes it upon himself to hunt down the phantom-like bandit that has been pestering local authorities for years, in hopes of speeding up his transfer process. It is this journey which makes up the second half of the film, in which Zama and a few men plunge into the heart of the surrounding savannah in search of this elusive figure. Martel took up ZAMA after five years of toiling away on a sci-fi feature that resulted in nothing, most likely due to financier dead-ends. This led her to Antonio Di Benedetto’s 1957 novel, which she read while recovering from exhaustion and illness. It then took three years to turn ZAMA into her latest cinematic gem, which deceptively breaks with her “Salta Trilogy” (her previous feature films, LA CIENAGA, THE HOLY GIRL, and THE HEADLESS WOMAN), in that the earlier films followed multiple women, while ZAMA follows just one man. Despite the reversal of gender roles, her latest wholly embodies, and even properly contextualizes, her three previous films. All four deal with the implications of a bourgeois, almost sleepwalking society whose actions and motives directly influence the indigenous populations they live amongst, resulting in simmering hotbeds of unacknowledged racism that refuse to be uprooted, no matter how hard some may try. Like the main character of THE HEADLESS WOMAN, Zama is at the will of forces higher and above, both within the upper-echelons of society they hail from, while also from inside the cognitive anxieties and doubts that swim laps around his mind. Martel’s characters listen to voices, real and imagined, as they try to create meaning and narrative to their trancelike states of existence. As always with Martel, off-screen sounds, layered in hallucinatory power, achieve a hypnotizing spell of insects buzzing, birds crying, and animals screaming, that meld into the film’s visuals like distant figures blurring out of perception under a hot sun. Martel reportedly avoided the use of candles and torches to light the atmosphere, bucking the tradition of lighting schemes intended to induce one into a 17th-century world (a la BARRY LYNDON, with which ZAMA shares a kindred spirit). The result is one of unnerving possession and complete immersion into a nightmare brought on by Zama himself, who resists any attempt to go with the flow of his circumstances, thrashing against the powers of red-tape, lust, and sunstroke in his attempts to arrive at a sense of complacency with his current state of affairs. It’s impossible to avoid succumbing to the film’s atmosphere and somnambulistic gaze, especially when you realize suddenly you are in the presence of one of the absolute masterworks of the last ten years. Screening as part of the 40 Years of Democracy series. (2017, 115 min, Digital Projection) [John Dickson]

Aki Kaurismäki’s FALLEN LEAVES (Finland)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

The “feel-good” movie is often tossed aside as mere cinematic distraction, something flimsy and fleeting to avoid the ever-constant drudgery, chaos, and misfortune of the modern world. But Finland’s Aki Kaurismäki, assembling what is maybe the most morosely joyous film of 2023, offers up an alternative for how feel-good cinema can operate: stories fully cognizant of the world’s inherent misery, injustice, and destruction, and yet striving to find hope and joy and love regardless. Kaurismäki’s trademark style—deadpan performances navigating brightly colorful, impeccably designed surroundings—presents a droll world of intentionally composed scenarios, transporting us between various bars, small homes, movie theaters, hospitals, and workplaces, where work is fleeting, the pay is never enough, and news of constant warfare and hospital bombings is enough to want to shut yourself off from the world for as long as humanly possible. Within this mess, a familiar romantic-comedy formula emerges: Ansa (Alma Pöysti) is oscillating between various low-paying workplaces run by cruel and incompetent bosses. Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) works as a laborer but can barely function without a flask of alcohol tight in his grasp. These two embittered lost souls of the working class have a delightful meet-cute at an absurd night of karaoke, fall in love, and fall apart due to seemingly irreconcilable differences, but anyone who has seen enough romcoms in their lifetime might be able to guess where things go before the music swells and the credits roll. Kaurismäki’s world is distant yet familiar, the paint a bit brighter and the tone of dialogue a bit stiffer, but the feelings of overbearing dread, and the feelings of humor and passion that arise within that dread, are all too palpable and relatable. The romantic comedy is often bemoaned as a dying object at the multiplex, but here, the genre is brought into the present day, startlingly, heroically, and with life-affirming intensity. (2023, 81 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s MONSTER (Japan)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

For Hirokazu Kore-eda, one of contemporary cinema’s preeminent humanists, people are seldom all bad. If they do something unscrupulous, as in the director’s Palme d’Or-winning SHOPLIFTERS (2018), it is usually not out of malice but symptomatic of systemic inequities beyond their control. Understanding and empathy can be achieved through a change in perspective, which is the overarching theme of MONSTER. The Cannes-laureled script, by Yuji Sakamoto, is structured as a triptych, with each section assuming a different character’s point of view. The first focuses on Saori (Sakura Ando), a single mother raising a surly, taciturn boy named Minato (Soya Kurokawa). Discovering that her son’s erratic behavior could be the result of alleged abuse by his schoolteacher, Saori conducts a heated meeting with the school staff to address the wrongdoing. The film then shifts to the perspective of the accused teacher, Hori (Eita Nagayama), who reveals a different version of events. MONSTER concludes by focusing on the feelings and experiences of those society is often most ill-equipped to understand: children. Through Minato and his burgeoning relationship with an effeminate, bullied classmate named Hoshikawa (Hinata Hiiragi), the film elucidates the truth behind its spiraling dramas, surfacing the social prejudices and repressive cultural attitudes that lead a boy to act out, or a teacher to be vilified, or a parent to pass the blame. Sakamoto’s script risks didacticism in how it preaches the pitfalls of making assumptions; it’s so precisely engineered to elide or disclose perception-shifting information at just the right moments that it can feel overly rigged for effect. On the other hand, we could all use a reminder—especially one as warm as this—that none of us have all the knowledge, and that we’d be wise to interrogate even our smallest judgments before they grow into the real monsters. (2023, 125 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]

Sofia Coppola’s PRISCILLA (US)

Multiple Venues – See Venue websites for showtimes

In 1959, rock ‘n’ roll icon Elvis Presley was perhaps the most famous person in the world. It was in that year, during his military service in West Germany, that the 24-year-old superstar met 14-year-old Army brat Priscilla Beaulieu and began courting her. After several visits to Graceland after his discharge, Priscilla would move to Graceland permanently in 1963 and marry Elvis in 1967. The marriage produced a daughter, Lisa Marie, and was dissolved in 1973. It is this period in Priscilla Presley’s life, adapted for the screen from her 1985 autobiography Elvis and Me, that forms Sofia Coppola’s latest entry on the dynamics of fame that confuse the lives of those who are caught up in it, particularly the lives of women who suffer under male domination. Coppola emphasizes Priscilla’s innocence at the beginning, putting her in a ribbon choker from which a silver heart dangles, a subliminal cry for love. The approach of one of Elvis’ Army buddies, who invites her to a party Elvis is throwing, looks like a grown man offering a child some candy. Indeed he is, but her homesickness, excitement about meeting Presley, and the promise of responsible chaperoning eventually overcome her parents’ objections. Coppola handles the romance tentatively, suggesting its creepiness while giving plausibility to the underpinnings of the relationship: the pair’s feelings of disruption and their mutual need for love. The rest of the film proceeds in an episodic way, which works not only to telescope the yearslong action, sometimes to a confusing extent, but also to emphasize the lack of coherent forward movement in Priscilla’s undramatic life. She’s not allowed to get a job to fill her empty hours waiting for Elvis to return to Graceland from wherever he’s working. She’s not allowed to have sex with him until he decides the moment is right, even though the fan magazines are filled with his romantic escapades. She can’t even play outside with the puppy he got her because it would attract attention from the fans who flock at the compound gates. Cailee Spaeny is as good as the buzz surrounding her award-winning performance has made her out to be. She very believably moves from ninth-grader to adult woman, getting increasingly frustrated and frightened by Elvis’ erratic behavior once his drug use is firmly entrenched. Jacob Elordi adopts Elvis’ vocal mannerisms and posture to such a degree that I came to accept him as the man he plays. Coppola focuses on the pair intensely in most scenes, somewhat undercutting the feeling that Priscilla was often alone. She also is far too discreet about Priscilla’s intimate life, from failing to shoot Elvis and Priscilla having sex for the first time to barely suggesting her affair with her martial arts instructor (perhaps concessions to Priscilla Presley, her executive producer). The period detail in PRISCILLA is precise, as is the recreation of attitudes under which women suffered, and her mix of camera stocks to suggest home movies and news footage adds a nice touch. Coppola’s signature use of needle drops throughout the film are fun, if a bit obvious, such as Dolly Parton singing “I Will Always Love You” as Priscilla drives away to a different life. PRISCILLA does not rank with the best of Sofia Coppola’s work, but her meticulous mise-en-scène and excellent direction of actors are sharper than ever. (2023, 113 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
ALSO SCREENING

⚫ 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.

⚫ FACETS Cinema
Join FACETS and Chicago Danztheater Ensemble for the Rankin/Bass films THE YEAR WITHOUT A SANTA CLAUS (1974, 60, Digital Projection) and RUDOLPH’S SHINY NEW YEAR (1976, 60 min, Digital Projection) on Saturday and Sunday at 1pm and 3pm, respectively. Doors open at 12:30pm with a dessert bar; there will also be Reindeer Games and a dessert bar between the screenings. Tickets include access to Reindeer Games and one complimentary dessert item. 

FACETS Anime Club presents a members-only screening of the Japanese OVA anime series Gunbuster (1988-1989) on Thursday at 7pm. Must be a FACETS Film Club member to attend.More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Hayao Miyazaki’s 2023 film THE BOY AND THE HERON (124 min, DCP Digital) begins screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes. 

Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1990 film THE SHELTERING SKY (138 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday at 2:30pm and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2015 film THE REVENANT (156 min, DCP Digital) on Sunday at 2:30pm, both as part of the Sounds of Ryuichi Sakamoto series. 

Nightingale Projects and Live to Tape Artist Television Present: As, Is, a program of short film and video artworks organized by Jesse Malmed, on Monday at 6pm.

Sanaz Sohrabi’s 2020 film ONE IMAGE, TWO ACTS (45 min, Digital Projection) and Daniel Eisenberg’s 2011 film THE UNSTABLE OBJECT (69 min, Digital Projection) 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. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Goethe-Institut Chicago (150 N. Michigan Ave.)
Masha Kondakova’s 2021 documentary INNER WARS (68 min, Digital Projection) screens Monday, 6pm, as part of a EUNIC Chicago Ukrainian Film Series. More info here. Co-presented with the Institut français. More info here. 

⚫ Music Box Theatre
The Chicago Film Society presents the 16mm Centennial Celebration, featuring a program on short works all on 16mm, on Monday at 7:30pm. 

Found Footage Fest Volume 10: Popcorn Classics screens Wednesday at 7:15pm. 

Rated Q and Ramona Slick present Catherine Hardwicke’s 2008 film TWILIGHT (122 min, DCP Digital) on Thursday at 9:45pm. There will be preshow drinks and a DJ in Music Box Lounge at 9pm, and a dragshow performance in the Main Theater at 9:45pm with the film screening to follow. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ School of the Art Institute
Two job opportunities! The Department of  Film, Video, New Media and Animation (FVNMA) at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) is conducting a double search—two tenure-track positions hiring concurrently this year. They are jointly listed for artists with an expertise in "experimental film and video." The priority application deadline is January 8, 2024. More information about the role and how to apply here. 

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

🎞️ ONLINE SCREENINGS/EVENTS

⚫ VDB TV
As VDB welcomes the Eiko & Koma and Eiko Otake collections, they are presenting a three-month series of programs that highlight representative works from them. Eiko & Koma (1976-2012, Total approx. 45 min) screens for free on VDB TV. More info here.

CINE-LIST: December 8 - December 14, 2023

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Julian Antos, John Dickson, Megan Fariello, Jim Gabriel, Ben Kaye, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Scott Pfeiffer