:: FRIDAY, DECEMBER 22 - THURSDAY, JANUARY 4 ::

📽️ Crucial Viewing

Alfred Hitchcock's REAR WINDOW (US)

Music Box Theatre – Saturday, December 30 and Sunday, December 31, 11:30am

Grace Kelly was never lovelier, "the right girl for any man with half a brain who can get one eye open." Thus spoke Thelma Ritter to Jimmy Stewart's sardonic photographer. The three function as a superb trio, as jazzy as Franz Waxman's score; equally matched and indivisible, perhaps the only such formation in any Hitchcock film. Through an alchemy yet to be duplicated, Hitchcock and writer John Michael Hayes got together and somehow fashioned the most perfect screenplay ever created. The characters' dialogue as written and performed meshes seamlessly with Hitchcock's own monologue, one that brilliantly uses camera, editing table, and sound design. Especially the latter. Its diegetic soundscape remains thrillingly unique. And its pacing is flawless; it's tightly conceived and executed yet never seems to be in a hurry. No matter how many times you've seen it, this is one movie that never stops offering up new pleasures. Screening as part of the Hitchcock and Friends matinee series. (1954, 112 min, 35mm) [Rob Christopher]

Edward Yang: Cities and Souls (Taiwan)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See below for showtimes

Edward Yang’s A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY (Taiwan)
Monday, January 1, 1:30pm
Edward Yang’s fourth feature—as well as his longest—is effortlessly lived in, to the point where spending four hours in this world almost feels like too little time to plumb the depths of feeling at play. As with many works of truly great cinema, Yang’s film focuses on the life of one character—an early teenage schoolboy struggling to find himself at his night school—in order to explore an entire world. The protagonist, Xiao Si’r, exists as an entangled ball of confusion and loneliness, and he easily acts as a vessel for feelings of displacement and isolation for a generation dislocated from China to the island of Taiwan, families grasping at cultural straws to establish their own identity. But here, establishing one’s own self often seems  to come in the form of enjoyment of Japanese food or devotion to American pop music (the movie’s title even comes from a lyric in Elvis Presley’s "Are You Lonesome Tonight?," which would be an equally fitting alternate name). Yang recognizes the anger that bubbles up under such conditions of discomfort and displacement, but on screen, this rage only shows up in spurts throughout, his camera preferring to languish, and beautifully so, on large encompassing shots capturing classrooms, fields, restaurants, and other hangouts across Taipei, where Si’r finds himself dragged between romantic entanglements and petty gang warfare. That things end with a grand act of violence should come as no surprise to anyone slowly dragged in by the tendrils of Yang’s bubble, a deep and thorny look at the lives of a youth culture struggling to escape daily despair, be it through school work, mindless brutality, or a classic Elvis tune. (1991, 237 mins, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
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Edward Yang's TAIPEI STORY (Taiwan)
Monday, January 1, 6pm and Wednesday, January 3, 8:30pm
Hou Hsiao-Hsien had an extraordinary year in 1985. Not only did he direct one of his greatest films, the autobiographical A TIME TO LIVE AND A TIME TO DIE; he also co-wrote and starred in Edward Yang’s second feature, TAIPEI STORY. These are two of the crucial films of the Taiwanese New Wave, signaling the movement’s twin interests in history and modernity. If TIME TO LIVE is the great historical film of the Taiwanese New Wave (at least until Hou made A CITY OF SADNESS in 1989), then TAIPEI STORY is the great modern film, a consideration of what it means to be Taiwanese when the identity of Taiwan is always changing. Hou plays a former baseball star now running a fabric store in Taipei and stuck in a contentious relationship with his long-time girlfriend. Pop singer Tsai Chin plays the girlfriend in one of her only film roles; she and Yang married in the year TAIPEI STORY was made, despite the fact it’s a spectacularly unromantic movie. Like his hero Michelangelo Antonioni, Yang employs inquisitive mise-en-scene that renders the characters part of the urban design, alienating them before we come to understand that emotional alienation. “Before studying engineering and gradually finding his way to cinema, Yang contemplated attending Harvard for architecture, a field that would have exercised some of the native gifts that became so evident in his films,” wrote Andrew Chan for the Criterion Collection in 2017, “his methodical approach to structure, his sensitivity to how people interact with (and within) built landscapes, his understanding of how place becomes a conduit for emotionally charged ideas about history and identity. The influence of this abandoned profession is nowhere more pronounced than in TAIPEI STORY, his second feature, which reflects the worldly skepticism of a man who was born in Shanghai and raised in Taiwan, and had studied and worked in the U.S. for more than a decade... As in almost all of Yang’s work, the central tensions arise out of what lovers, friends, and family do not know—and do not care to know—about each other. And the more we see of Chin and Lung in their private moments together, the more bewildered and embarrassed they seem that, despite having known each other since their school days, they’ve spent so many years calling something a relationship that now barely merits the name.” (1985, 110 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Edward Yang's YI YI (Taiwan)
Tuesday, January 2 and Thursday, January 4, 6pm
Edward Yang’s final film—one of the indisputable masterpieces of the Taiwanese New Wave, if not the culminating achievement of the entire movement—contains one of my favorite moments of any narrative film. It occurs during a business dinner between the film’s hero, middle-aged businessman NJ (Nien-Jen Wu, a key figure of the New Wave who collaborated on numerous screenplays with Hou Hsiao-Hsien), and a Japanese entrepreneur named Mr. Ota (Issei Ogata). Prior to this scene, Yang had presented Mr. Ota as something of a caricature, a nerdy computer whiz with limited social skills. But as the character opens up to NJ about his personal philosophy, something extraordinary happens: Mr. Ota transforms before one’s very eyes into a three-dimensional human being worthy of sympathy and respect. It’s an exemplary use of the long-take—not flashy, but wise, playing on duration to manipulate the audience’s understanding of character and interpersonal relationships. It also represents in microcosm what Yang accomplished with his small, but extraordinary body of work, employing a rigorous sense of form to better understand people, the social structures they inhabit, and how they can transcend those structures through a shared sense of humanity. YI YI is full of humanist epiphanies akin to the one at the business dinner, whether Yang is following NJ, his wife, his teenage daughter, or young son. (Many have commented on how this last character, pointedly named Yang-Yang and who’s interested in taking pictures, serves as an autobiographical stand-in for the director.) The accumulation of these assorted character portraits feels literary, as one comes to understand the family’s problems both intimately and on a societal level—their feelings of loneliness, disappointment, and aspiration speak to universal human experiences as well as the anxieties felt by many urbanites at the end of the 20th century. “At first glance,” wrote Kent Jones for the Criterion Collection in 2011, “YI YI appears to be a serene and becalmed film, in pace and spirit, a movie made by a director who has shed his youthful anger and made peace with the assorted confusions of ‘late capitalist’ Taiwanese life. On close scrutiny, it becomes something else again. Yang has set his city symphonies in a variety of emotional keys—the doleful lament of TAIPEI STORY (1985), the grid-like coolness of THE TERRORIZER (1986), the comic hysteria of A CONFUCIAN CONFUSION (1994), the carefully modulated fury of MAHJONG. In YI YI, he brings all of these moods together, never allowing any one of them to take precedence over another. Which is to say that this is a grand choral work, with a panoptic majesty and an emotional amplitude worthy of George Eliot or late Beethoven, whose ‘Song of Joy’ is quoted with the greatest delicacy in Kaili Peng’s piano score.” (2000, 173 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Edward Yang’s A CONFUCIAN CONFUSION (Taiwan)
Wednesday, January 3, 6pm
Engaging with the understated satire of Edward Yang’s A CONFUCIAN CONFUSION is akin to being a kid and watching a movie or TV show about young urban professionals trying to make it in the big city. The self-containment of the world feels at once representative of the purported reality yet exists in stark opposition of how one might understand it, a deceptive microcosm that solicits engagement while still befuddling in its abstracted contrivance. A surprising turn for the Taiwanese filmmaker, whose previous movies considered the rapid development of the island’s economy (otherwise known as “the Taiwan Miracle”) during the back half of the twentieth century in rather dour terms, A CONFUCIAN CONFUSION presents almost like a run-of-the-mill urban comedy of its time, though it’s no less affecting because of that. The film centers on an interconnected group of Taiwanese yuppies and their respective (yet still enmeshed) professional and romantic predicaments. The affluent Molly owns a media company, gifted to her by her similarly well-off fiancé, Akeem; she’s pragmatic and hyper-focused on the flailing enterprise, while he yearns for a genuine romantic connection (the two’s relationship was arranged by their families). Meanwhile Molly’s having an affair with Akeem’s second-in-command, who’s himself having a tryst with one of her beautiful young employees—Molly’s best friend and assistant, Qiqi (played by Tsai Ming-liang regular Chen Shiang-chyi), the character onto whom the potential for honest self-realization is later foisted, comforts the young woman after she’s unceremoniously fired by the suspicious executive. Of course the film is less about what exactly is happening amongst the characters and more about what each relationship represents in the context of Yang’s postmodern appraisal. The film’s title comes from the estranged writer husband of Molly’s older sister, who married the scribe for love rather than money; his titular manuscript is about a reincarnated Confucius who comes back to find that in the society he helped create, people admire him not for his ideas but for his successful “put-on” job, as if the ancient Chinese sage were Tony Robbins and not a revered philosopher. In contrast to the writer husband is Birdy, a playwright friend of Molly and Qiqi’s, who, in opposition to the writer, has recently transitioned to comedies (the sister’s husband having begun writing more serious novels after a spate of lighter, albeit more lucrative, fare). The film opens with Birdy at a press conference, rollerblading around a table of reporters. In a question that could have been directed at Yang himself, one of them asks, “Why are you doing comedy now?” “Because I’m an optimist,” the playwright replies. “Everyone’s having a good life, why spoil it?” The metatextual irony sets the tone, the film’s apparent hypocrisy it’s very consideration. At sporadic intervals intertitles with a phrase in both Taiwanese and English—there’s one at the beginning of the film as well, though it more so establishes the connection between Confucius and contemporary Taiwan—break up the narrative; the text is an idea or line that hasn’t yet been said but will be introduced in the following section. They become dictums of this self-contained world, a logic unto themselves. “Why are you suddenly taking me to lunch?” one asks. The titular confusion lies in what meaning may be ascribed to such de facto aphorisms, either where it’s undue or unrealized. Yang’s uncharacteristic deviation confounds in its trenchant aspersions of a post-modern, capitalist society, reminiscent of the perplexity one might have felt as a child when confronted with something that is simultaneously too abstract to discern yet too true to reject. (1994, 125 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Kat Sachs]

Carlos Aured’s HOUSE OF PSYCHOTIC WOMEN (Spain)

Music Box Theatre – Monday, January 1, 6:45pm

Released under a few titles—the other, more prominent being BLUE EYES OF THE BROKEN DOLL—HOUSE OF PSYCHOTIC WOMEN is a giallo from Spanish horror icon Paul Naschy, who both stars in and wrote the film. Gilles (Naschy) is a drifter who’s taken in by Claude (Diana Lorys), who wears a prosthetic hand due to a mysterious accident. She lives with her two sisters, the seductive Nicole (Eva León) and invalid Ivette (Maria Perschy), who’s attended by a very involved doctor (Eduardo Calvo) and nurse (Inés Morales). The chauvinistic Gilles begins to work as a handyman while blue-eyed women are being murdered in town. Naturally, Gilles is suspected as the serial killer, though the strange goings-on are not quite what they seem. While Gilles starts off as the main character, the story shifts focus at will, creating even more confusion as to exactly what’s going on. It’s effective in its sloppiness, never landing but always suggesting more under the surface and providing a few wild twists. Director Carlos Aured shoots the outdoor scenes particularly well, with gorgeous landscapes in which to set this bizarre tale; the final indoor set piece is unexpectedly astonishing as well. Aured also makes some interesting camerawork choices, particularly in the scenes of violence, highlighting impossibly bright red gore. The intensely groovy score from Spanish artist Juan Carlos Calderón feels at times more sitcom than horror, only impressing further HOUSE OF PSYCHOTIC WOMEN’s distinctly odd yet intriguing vibe. Screening as part of the January Giallo series. (1973, 89 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

François Ozon’s THE CRIME IS MINE (France)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

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]

Be Kind, Rewind

Gene Siskel Film Center – See below for showtimes

Aki Kaurismäki’s FALLEN LEAVES (Finland)
Friday, December 22, 8:30pm and Sunday, December 31, 3:15pm
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]
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Raven Jackson’s ALL DIRT ROADS TASTE OF SALT (US)
Saturday, December 23, 12:45pm and Wednesday, December 27, 3:15pm
Mack (Charleen McClure) sits on the porch of her rural Mississippi house with her niece, Lily (Robin Crudrup), watching rain pour down. Lily is afraid of it, thinking it might hurt if it fell on her. Mack tells her that it doesn’t and then lets her in on a secret. “It doesn’t end or begin. It just changes form. All these drops might be a river someday. Might be snow. Might be you.” Transformation is the undercurrent of first-time feature film director/screenwriter Raven Jackson’s visual poem, ALL DIRT ROADS TASTE OF SALT. Jackson takes us through the stages of Mack’s life, from childhood through adulthood to old age, in nonlinear fashion, subtly outlining a story of love and loss. But this film is best understood as focusing on the ties that bind, not only between family members, but also to the land and the lore that harkens back to Africa. The images of ALL DIRT ROADS, as beautifully realized by cinematographer Jomo Fray, miss nothing in the verdant landscape. A worm escaping from the earth during a downpour gets as much attention as a long-held shot of trees and the river that runs through them. Most haunting and beautiful are the human faces Jackson and Fray examine, particularly at a church service where the Black congregants stare unabashedly into the camera. One face, that of Sheila Atim as Mack’s mother, is so startlingly magnetic that one longs to see it again and again. The film also privileges the tactile, from the opening shot of Mack running her finger across the scales of a fish she caught and, in kindness, releases to a scene late in the film of an elderly Mack (Zainab Jah) running her hands through the mud of a riverbed. ALL DIRT ROADS can be considered slow cinema, but more in an attempt to communicate deep feeling rather than to silence our busy minds. Indeed, one three-minute scene of Mack reuniting with and hugging her one-time lover, Wood (Reginald Helms Jr.), communicates such intimacy that one might be tempted to turn away discreetly. (2023, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Georgia Oakley's BLUE JEAN (UK)     
Saturday, December 23, 2:45pm and Friday, December 29, 6pm
Seeing that we're in the midst of yet another moral panic, it's important to remember that while this hellscape of anti-queer and trans outrage is awful, it isn't new. And it isn't even original. Set in Thatcher's England in 1988, which saw the passage of Section 28 (a law prohibiting "the promotion of homosexuality," aka "Don't say gay") BLUE JEAN is an incredibly personal story about a lesbian teacher who has to balance protecting her job with teenage students and her personal life as a queer woman. Oakley, who also wrote the film, brilliantly uses the ‘80s as both the grounded reality of history and a dreamspace of nostalgia. In western pop culture, the ‘80s have reached this mythological state of un-time. It's an era that was both nearly half a century ago but also just yesterday. In some cases—as in music, film, fashion—it still exists. The eternal kick drum of New Order's "Blue Monday" in this film serves to bridge the gap between the terrifying realities of the AIDS crisis and last night's dance floor debauchery. The easy route for a film like BLUE JEAN would be to have it be a condemning view of the past. Movies like this often look down on the past as a disreputable place, that we've all since moved onward and upward. Oakley doesn't care to do that. BLUE JEAN is the embodiment of Faulkner's adage, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." This is a story of survival in the midst of a moral panic that can kill livelihoods and actual lives. Because 1988 is 2023. The tint of melodrama in the film gives the stakes, already high, a sense of personal depth and urgency. The visuals of the movie (shot deliciously on 16mm) only add to the atmosphere of oppressive confusion. Everything is pastels and soft. Everything's rosy and lovely. But with the titular Jean, and her window twitching neighbors, suspicious colleagues, and the problem of one of her students starting to spend time at her one lesbian safehaven haunt, this softness becomes an oppressive expression of gender rigidity. Everything about BLUE JEAN is perfectly measured. To create a character study about a messy person in the midst of crisis is hard to pull off without it falling into cliche or pure melodrama, and Oakley pulls it off. This may be a film that is distinctively about the lesbian experience, but it's expressed as a universal story about anyone, or any group, that is systematically marginalized and oppressed. And often the finest of points make the broadest of statements. (2022, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
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Kelly Reichardt's SHOWING UP (US)
Saturday, December 23, 5:15pm and Saturday, December 30, 3:15pm
Far away from posh corporate fairs and Insta glamor lifestyle-influenced meta-worlds, our globe is dotted with pocket communities of painters, sculptors, and multimedia artists quietly going about the esoteric, sometimes inchoate business of making art day to day. It is one such alcove—set in director Reichardt's home town of Portland, Oregon—that is the focus of her eighth feature. Throughout her 30-year career Reichardt has consistently avoided the peak-valley conventions of traditional narrative film. Her work is often described as quiet, but I think that shortchanges its slow-burn intensity. Just because her characters avoid cliché conflict points doesn't mean they lack passion or anger. In fact, by often underplaying moments that might be treated as cataclysmic in a Hollywood picture, Reichardt imbues real human friction with a much longer echo. She has a knack for staging low-key, seemingly mundane scenes that linger in the mind. Lizzy (Michelle Williams), a frustrated put-upon sculptor is waging stealth passive-aggressive war against Jo (Hong Chau), her more successful, extroverted colleague/landlord/frenemy. She complains about being without hot water to take a shower and cares for the injured pigeon Jo "discovered" in the yard after Lizzy's cat nearly ate it. She watches enviously as Jo gets accolades for her work, takes men home, has parties, and generally lives the embodied, actualized life Lizzy can't even bring herself to dream of. Williams anchors the film with a performance seemingly inspired by the lumpy, not-quite-formed figures Portland artist Cynthia Lahti has provided to stand in for Lizzy's work. Wearing only earth-toned outfits designed not to reveal a thing about the wearer, her hair a mousey brown, Lizzy is a vague peripheral being who nevertheless hints at depths. She's not the typical movie hero and her challenges are not usual movie problems. The thing Reichardt's film nails most precisely is how ill-suited artists are to deal adequately with quotidian problems but how gracefully they can let intractable differences roll off their backs. Mental illness is treated as a possible mark of genius rather than a symptom to be corrected, and baffling behavior of every kind is accepted with bemused humor. The final scene of Jo and Lizzy wandering away from Lizzy's art opening, trying to track the once-injured pigeon who's flown away is graceful, funny, and a little melancholy all at once. A perfect coda to a movie that celebrates the value of detours and left turns. (2022, 108 min, DCP Digital) [Dmitry Samarov]
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Wes Anderson's ASTEROID CITY (US)
Saturday, December 23, 7pm and Wednesday, December 27, 5:45pm
Through ten feature films made over nearly thirty years, Wes Anderson has honed an exacting Lionel Model Train set aesthetic in which human history and emotions often play second banana to design considerations and deadpan humor. Especially since his first stop-motion animation film, FANTASTIC MR. FOX (2009), Anderson's movies have mostly dispensed with any pretense of naturalism in favor of a strictly controlled environment in which the puppeteer's hand often invades the frame to rearrange the furniture or to recast his doll-like charges' fates. Depending on your tolerance for his near-autistic compulsion to demonstrate mastery over his domain, these films can be either an unbearable slog or a charming detour from humdrum reality. I'm an admirer of Anderson's steadfast dedication to his vision but often find that not much about his toy constructions follow me out of the theater after the credits roll. Though he often puts his characters in fraught world-historical settings and programs them to emote after heartbreak or other traumas, these feelings and reactions rarely break through the symmetrical compositions and wind-up gizmos buzzing about in the background. The need to deflect and distract oneself from pain through obsessive hobbyism is a time-honored strategy, especially for men, or, more precisely, boys who refuse to grow up. Anderson's latest has all the hallmarks of his previous work but adds a layer of present-day resonance. Though set in the 1950s, in a small western town on the edge of a nuclear testing site, and featuring a cascade of major and minor movie stars and even an alien landing, the references to COVID lockdown life are everywhere. This time the unreality, panic, and erratic behavior—while still often played for laughs—is not cribbed from beloved short stories or arcana, but from the very recently experienced every day. This gives the film a gravity the previous ones lacked. We all lived through a thing even a control freak like Anderson can't ignore by descending into his basement tinkerer's kingdom and his work is all the better for it. (2023, 105 min, DCP Digital) [Dmitry Samarov]
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Celine Song's PAST LIVES (South Korea)
Tuesday, December 26, 3:15pm and Sunday, December 31, 1pm
There is a lyric from a Little Feat song that has stuck with me all the years since I first heard it: "All the love that you missed / All the people that you can’t recall / Do they really exist at all?" In one sense, this is an egotistical way of looking at past relationships, using oneself as the only reference point. On the other hand, who we and those we knew were in the past no longer exist in the present. We move on. We change. We slough off our old skins, year after year. This idea informs director/screenwriter Celine Song’s debut feature, PAST LIVES. As children in South Korea, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) and Na Young (Greta Lee) were very close. Then, Na Young’s family emigrated to Canada. As many of us have done, Hae Sung and Na Young, now called Nora, used the internet to reconnect. But the strain of holding onto the past and trying to forge an adult life and career proves too much for Nora, and she backs away. Still, what Koreans call in-yun—a personal bond that can connect souls through lifetimes—pulls Hae Sung and Nora back together. What Song does in PAST LIVES is not indulge the Western concept of soul mates, but rather honors the important connections we make during our lives that do not overcome our circumstances, but rather give us the good memories that sustain us. Yoo and Lee convince us of their bond, even across wonky Skype calls, but delicately show that their characters have plans and commitments that are more important to them than a future together based on a long-ago love. In some ways, this film reminded me of CASABLANCA (1942), and that’s a high compliment indeed. (2023, 106 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Léa Mysius’ THE FIVE DEVILS (France) 
Tuesday, December 26, 8pm and Friday, December 29, 8:30pm
Léa Mysius is one of the most in-demand screenwriters in French cinema today, having worked with Arnaud Desplechin, Jacques Audiard, André Téchiné, and Claire Denis between 2017 and 2022. On the basis of the two films she’s directed, AVA (2017) and THE FIVE DEVILS, it’s easy to see why she’s so popular: here is an artist with a boundless imagination who balances an enthusiasm for genre storytelling with a sensitive understanding of the lives of young people. In THE FIVE DEVILS, these concerns are perfectly in tandem—it’s a coming-of-age story in which the young heroine gains understanding of the world through the help of some unique superpowers. Vicky (newcomer Sally Dramé) is an eight-year-girl who lives in the south of France with her mother (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and father (Patrick Bouchitey); she has a curiously advanced sense of smell, which allows her to re-live experiences when she’s stimulated by distinctive scent. She finds new use for her talent when her aunt Julia comes to visit for the first time. Vicky’s parents haven’t seen Julia since before Vicky was born, and her arrival leads Vicky to ask questions about the pasts of all the adults in her life. Through time travel, our heroine witnesses the events leading up to her birth and discovers that her parents are not exactly the people she assumed them to be. THE FIVE DEVILS recalls David Mamet’s play The Cryptogram in that it shows an adult world gradually coming into focus for a child, employing a creative device to dramatize this process. The movie doesn’t feel schematic, however, because Mysius as a director displays such interest in random moments—the movie has a living, breathing quality. Interspersed with the primary narrative are winning scenes involving a teenage gymnastics team, the cooking of an octopus, and the view of a mountainous terrain from a helicopter. These moments don’t always advance the story, but they give the movie a flowing, expansive quality that suggests a fully inhabitable world. (2022, 96 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Paul Schrader's MASTER GARDENER (US)
Tuesday, December 26, 8:30pm and Friday, December 29, 8:15pm
MASTER GARDENER is unequivocal in its critique of macho hunter types in general and American fascists in particular. That’s a little surprising, considering that Robin Wood once wrote that “the position implicit in Paul Schrader’s work… can be quite simply characterized as quasi-Fascist… crucial in its sinister relation to all this [is] the glorification of the dehumanized hero as an efficient killing machine.” Joel Edgerton’s wonderfully named Narvel Roth is another of Schrader’s penitent heroes, and what he’s penitent about is having been a dehumanized killing machine—it’s gradually revealed that this monk-like gardener was once the member of a murderous white supremacist gang; his present-day ascetic lifestyle is borne out of atonement. In another pleasant surprise, the first half of MASTER GARDENER reflects the influence not only of Schrader's usual point-of-reference Robert Bresson, but also of Yasujiro Ozu (another subject of Schrader’s film criticism book Transcendental Cinema yet rarely a touchstone in his films) in its serene pacing and beatific tone; there are some wonderful scenes of Edgerton rhapsodizing about gardening that make you feel how therapeutic this vocation is for him. As the film progresses, it becomes clear that Schrader is meditating on a most urgent question: is it possible to reform the worst of Donald Trump’s supporters, people like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers? Schrader invokes the concepts of redemption and forgiveness, approaching this issue as a spiritual matter. It’s one of the most audacious moves in this unpredictable auteur’s filmography. (2022, 111 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Saim Saddiq’s JOYLAND (Pakistan)
Thursday, December 28, 2:45pm and Saturday, December 30, 8:30pm
Early on in Saim Saddiq’s directorial debut JOYLAND, the protagonist, Haider (Ali Junejo), is tasked with slaughtering a goat for his family, but finds himself—weapon in one hand, bleating goat neck in the other—unable to do so. It’s left to his wife, Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq) to take the weapon and do the dirty deed herself, leaving nothing for us but the image of goat’s blood pooling across the floor, the masculine expectations of this marriage literally draped around Haider’s feet. It’s evocative of a film beaming with imagery and story beats concerned with the restrictive nature of societal gender norms, both within a marriage and within one’s day-to-day life. Haider, jobless from the get-go while his wife supports their livelihood, finds work as a backup dancer at an erotic dance theater (the eponymous Joyland), keeping the details of his new employment under wraps. This new development forces Mumtaz to give up her employment, bringing patriarchal “balance” back to the home, and hurling the lives of this couple into further disarray, with Mumtaz finding sexual pleasure from watching the exploits of her neighbor, Haider growing intimately closer with lead dance Biba (Alina Khan), a trans woman fighting her own fight against the shackles of gender in Pakistani culture. With shades of queer exploratory narratives seen in cinema over the past few decades, JOYLAND exceeds as a congregation of lives tethered to expectation, working to break free and fight against an ever-constrictive culture. It’s only fitting that one of the final images on display is Haider surrounded by liquid yet again, this time a body of water he has chosen to swim in, submerging himself and coming ashore, now as a man defined by his own terms. (2022, 126 mins, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Hayao Miyazaki’s THE BOY AND THE HERON

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

The anticipation of seeing a new film directed by Hayao Miyazaki is two-fold: there is a set expectation of whimsy, magic, and complex thematic exploration inherent in his work, but this is tied to the mystery of not knowing how specifically these traits will play themselves out. So it is with his (seemingly) final film, THE BOY AND THE HERON, a film rooted in familiar themes that Miyazaki has been dwelling on for decades of artistry. As with many of his works, Miyazaki provides another story of a youthful protagonist; here, the teenage Mahito—buried within heavy emotional armor to navigate the grief of losing his mother in a hospital fire the year before—finds himself navigating an unknown mystical world that sits somewhere between the afterlife and his own subconscious, after he's lured there by a deliriously antagonistic gray heron. The fantastical elements of Miyazaki immediately float to the surface, from new imaginative creatures like the Warawara—adorable floating balls that ascend to the heavens to be born as humans—to the bizarre amass of pelicans and parakeets that threaten to swallow up any frame they inhabit. Mahito‘s quest to find closure for his mother’s death results in a journey, ever joyous and sumptuous to watch, that ponders the nature of a world built upon loss, destruction, and chaos. Without spoiling too much, the film leaves us on something of an abrupt note, left to ponder the work of an undisputed master of cinema who was unafraid to bare his mortality before us, letting us sit in the knowledge that to live with the chaos of grief is still a beautiful life in and of itself; to know that there is no escaping pain, and there is something beautiful to carry on towards. Maybe a book your mother left behind for you, maybe a new, unknown journey waiting on the other side of a doorway. (2023, 124 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

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]

Michael Mann's THIEF (US)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Tuesday, December 26, 7pm

Is Michael Mann the greatest working American director? Frederick Wiseman may possess a greater influence over world cinema on the whole and Clint Eastwood is more nationally valuable for his ongoing critique of the American character. Yet Mann inspires greater reverence than either of them due to the sheer beauty of his approach. An artist with an acute sense of the fleeting moment, the unnatural pace of time in contemporary life, and myriad variations of artificial light (he's likened himself to a photorealist painter), Mann is simply our greatest living image-maker. Shot primarily in Chicago, THIEF builds its atmosphere around the city's proletarian feistiness; it's certainly the native South Sider's most autobiographical work. In the first of many idiosyncratic takes on realism, Mann cast actual Chicago cops to play criminals and actual former criminals to play cops. In doing so, he made first steps toward the great theme of his work: the uncanny leveling of human behavior under modern professionalism. James Caan plays a successful lifelong thief who wants to get married and settle down. He discovers his own humanity too late (there's always One Last Score), but there are great realizations on the way to failure. Caan considered this his best performance, and he was probably right. Several of the most important scenes are two-person conversations that reach Bergmanesque levels of intimacy and recrimination. These moments of heightened self-doubt alternate with bloody gunfights and meticulously observed crimes; unlike Howard Hawks or Anthony Mann—two of his thematic forbearers—Mann seems deeply ambivalent about the macho attitudes that tend to accompany these subjects. In lives increasingly defined by professional obligation, Mann regards the decline of traditional gender roles with serious curiosity and surprising tenderness. (In this sense, his films have affinities with those of Tsai Ming-liang.) THIEF is the first of Mann's elegies for professional masculinity, and it's sharpened greatly by the film's harsh night photography. (1981, 122 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Billy Wilder's THE APARTMENT (US)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Monday, January 1, 11am

For many—including Wilder himself—this was the director's finest hour, the film in which all the elements converged with grace, sass, and a tinge of tragic inevitability. It was inspired by a line that Wilder wrote in his notebook sometime in the 1940s and couldn't forget: "Movie about the guy who climbs into the warm bed left by two lovers." By the time the film was made (during the so-called "New Permissiveness" of the early 60s), the two lovers had multiplied into several men and countless mistresses and the warmth of the bed had turned musty. The guy, however, retained all the bittersweet sympathy of that initial premise. As incarnated by Jack Lemmon (in the most tolerable performance of his career), C.C. Baxter is the ultimate schlemiel, a resigned bachelor who lends his apartment to his insurance company superiors because he can't imagine any alternative to advancing in a job that kills him. Shirley MacLaine plays the disabused mistress who turns out to be the girl of his dreams, one of the great creations of the movies: her Fran Kubelik is a woman who seems ideal even in her faults—youthful, spontaneous, naive, sexy, resilient: exactly the type who could humanize an office drone like Baxter. The romance between them is so affecting (to say nothing of the dialogue, which pops as only Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond's writing can) that it's easy to overlook what a superior piece of filmmaking THE APARTMENT is. Wilder remains underrated as a visual artist; and here, working in sparkling black-and-white 'Scope, he creates some remarkable effects, such as the unforgettable loneliness of the apartment itself and the modernist nightmare of the insurance company office (an image borrowed from King Vidor's THE CROWD), where rows of desks seem to extend into infinity. Wilder also employs small objects with an imaginative economy worthy of Hitchcock. As he explained in Cameron Crowe's book-length interview Conversations with Wilder: "When Baxter sees himself in [Fran's broken compact] mirror, he adds up two and two. He gave it to the president of the insurance company [Fred MacMurray], the big shot at the office, now he knows what we know. And we see it in his face in the broken mirror. That was a very elegant way of pointing it out. Better than a third person telling him about the affair—that we did not want to do. This was better. This gave us everything, in one shot." (1960, 125 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Stephane Aubier & Vincent Patar's A TOWN CALLED PANIC (France/Animation)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Thursday, January 4, 9:30pm

2009 witnessed a welcome pushback against the traditional children's movie with WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE by Spike Jonze and Wes Anderson's THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX. Both films rely heavily on nostalgia, using well-loved children's books for content and outmoded techniques to create their visual worlds. The resulting films are clever and engaging but they are films for adults that children might like. The ingenious A TOWN CALLED PANIC also partakes in this pushback but its real strength lies in its divergence. The zany world of this film is a constant chaotic chase. The plot takes absurd nonsensical shifts that resemble more a story told by a child rather than winking adult irony. It is reinless, funny, and whimsical. Commonplace plastic toys Horse, Cowboy, and Indian are the main characters. They are roommates who inadvertently bring their small town to the brink of destruction and must scramble to save it. The solution takes them to wild house parties, an underground ocean, and arctic landscapes where mad scientists travel in giant mechanical penguins, and back again. (2009, 75 min, DCP Digital) [Christy LeMaster]

🎞️ 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.

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Chen Kaige’s 1993 film FAREWELL, MY CONCUBINE (170 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, December 26 at 5pm and Saturday, December 30 at 5:30pm as part of the Be Kind, Rewind series. More info here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Sean Durkin’s 2023 film THE IRON CLAW (132 min, DCP Digital) begins screening. See Venue website for showtimes. More info 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 Otake (2016-2019, Total approx. 49 min) screens for free on VDB TV. More info here.

CINE-LIST: December 22 - January 4, 2024

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Rob Christopher, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Ben Kaye, Christy LeMaster, Raphael Jose Martinez, Scott Pfeiffer, Dmitry Samarov