:: FRIDAY, MARCH 29 - THURSDAY, APRIL 4 ::

📽️ Crucial Viewing

⭐ Cine-File presents Chantal Akerman's TOUTE UNE NUIT (Belgium/France) ⭐

Onion City Experimental Film Festival at the Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 8:15pm

While taking notes on TOUTE UNE NUIT, I meant to scribble “life is a series of moments,” but, in an awe-inspired delirium as hazy as the bootleg DVD from which I first watched Chantal Akerman’s 1982 film, I accidentally wrote “life is a series of movements.” In retrospect, both are true about what TOUTE UNE NUIT exemplifies—specific moments and expansive movements, the minute and the universal. Set in Brussels over the course of a hot summer night, the film depicts several dozen characters (if one could call them that) on the brink of some kind of romantic expression, from amorous embraces to more nuanced intimations of interpersonal disharmony. Its 90-minute runtime is composed entirely of these connections, all devoid of context—we’re privy only to a few moments of each, some of which lend themselves to more obvious narrative inferences (my favorite from this category being a middle-aged couple that spontaneously decides to go dancing), while others are more oblique (such as a young man and woman who randomly embrace in a cafe, then are shown dancing together in another scene). It’s ultimately an exercise—or, more fittingly, a choreographed dance—in futility, but a joyful sort of futility, in which the inherent meaninglessness of our collective experiences achieves some sort of cumulative significance. Life is indeed a series of moments, made up of seemingly extemporaneous movements, and Akerman reflects back at us what might seem obvious to our eyes but is nevertheless guarded from our hearts. (1982, 90 min, New 2K DCP Digital Restoration) [Kat Sachs]
---
Tickets for TOUTE UNE NUIT, the festival’s opening night presentation, can be purchased in advance here.

Designed by Dmitry Samarov.

John Frankenheimer’s SECONDS (US)

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

SECONDS is probably the only other movie John Frankenheimer directed that’s comparable to THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962) in that it avoids genre classification at nearly every turn, shifting between science fiction, black comedy, horror, and melodrama. Blatantly allegorical, the film ponders the health of the American Dream circa 1966, observing a 60-ish banker who’s given the chance to fake his own death and be “reborn” as a different, younger man through extensive surgery and the assumption of a new identity. Formerly blacklisted actor John Randolph plays the character for the first 40 minutes, until he’s transformed into Rock Hudson—an inspired piece of casting, since Hudson always seemed to be playing another person’s dream of virility anyway. A successful movie star but an underrated actor, Hudson delivers some of his best work in SECONDS; his performance, which serves as a subtle commentary on his career, adds a critical layer of text to the film. The flashiest contribution, however, comes from the great James Wong Howe. Is this ever a DP’s movie. Not only does the stark black-and-white photography set the sense of foreboding throughout; the cinematography all but steals the show. Howe shoots scenes hand-held, executes brilliant, expressionistic lighting schemes, and even straps the camera onto one of the actors to convey his character’s paranoia. That sentiment, already so pervasive in MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE and Frankenheimer’s follow-up, SEVEN DAYS IN MAY (1964), comes to overwhelm the second half of the movie, when Hudson’s character starts suspecting something isn’t right with his new life, despite the fact that it seems to have been engineered to satisfy his deepest desires. (The dramatic irony feels very Twilight Zone, which may well have been an influence on the movie as a whole.) If SECONDS is an energizing, sometimes frightening film to watch, it becomes more melancholy the longer you think about it, when you’re left with the core narrative of a man who’s cursed to be unhappy even when given everything he wants. Preceded by Pat O’Neill’s 1963 short BY THE SEA (10 min, 16mm). (1966, 106 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Lizzie Borden's WORKING GIRLS (US)

Conversations at the Edge at the Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday, 6pm

“John’s here!” “Which one?” This exchange in Lizzie Borden’s WORKING GIRLS—the writer-director’s third feature, made a few years after her influential 1983 film BORN IN FLAMES—encapsulates both its wry humor and distinct perspective on that oldest of professions. The working girls in question, responsible, among many other tasks, for manning (wo-manning?) the phones and facilitating guest relations, announce each visitor as they arrive. In this scenario a man called John comes in, his generic name a euphemism for others of his kind, made into a joke that’s at once perceptive and perverse, thus abbreviating the film’s viewpoint on sex work. Having come to fruition after Borden spent time interviewing sex workers (some of whom had worked on BORN IN FLAMES), the film centers on Molly (Louise Smith), a well-educated photographer who, it’s shown at the beginning, is in a lesbian relationship; from the get-go our perception of sex workers is challenged, Borden providing us images against which later images, of a supposedly heterosexual woman enjoying paid sex with strange men, should be compared. Molly works at an elegantly decorated apartment-style brothel centrally located in Manhattan where this day-in-the-life simulacrum largely takes place. She and several other girls—including Gina (Marusia Zach), Dawn (Amanda Goodwin), and April (Janne Peters)—are employed by a madam named Lucy (Ellen McElduff), a former sex worker who’s promoted herself to middle management. The plot moves among Molly’s sessions between her and the clients, a motley crew of men who run the gamut from lonely to outright creepy, and in-between moments during which the girls commune in the “living” room, discussing all sorts of topics. The women, and even some of the men, are fascinating, but at times it feels like a piece of performance art (not necessarily a play, but something akin to it, meant to act as a microcosm of a macro landscape), or, perhaps more disparagingly, an exhibit at a zoo, a way for us outsiders to gawk at people—some may say animals—whose environments, it might seem, are different than ours. The film’s bemused detachment accounts for its subversiveness; its dispassion manifests in a sort of candor that mimics the intent of the film, which is to show that sex work is, in fact, a job, one that its workers drudge through like the rest of us. Borden once remarked in an interview with CinemaScope: “The greatest compliment I ever got for WORKING GIRLS was when some guy said to me afterwards, ‘I had a boss just like that.’ It really is about capitalism.” Borden also points out that Molly’s eventual desire to leave the profession, brought on by Lucy’s insistence that she work a double shift, isn’t just because of sexual exploitation, but labor exploitation as well. The film was distributed by Miramax; per Borden, Harvey Weinstein had wanted to market it as an “erotic comedy.” Like the aforementioned joke, this contention epitomizes the film’s dichotomy. What the ‘Johns’ might think is a singular, erotic experience—a lark, not unlike those in a sexy comedy—is, in actuality, just one among many for the working girls. Borden in person. (1986, 90 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]

James Benning's DESERET (US/Experimental)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Sunday, 8pm

A titan of documentary, James Benning has made some of the most fascinating studies of human history by rarely featuring humans at all. By prioritizing the landscape as subject Benning makes it active, something changing itself and having some amount of agency in the arc of natural history. In his more narrated work, Benning’s added text is in a sense also from the landscape, a sort of diary of the microcosms of the elements’ consciousness: us. In one of his masterpieces, DESERET, the land is Utah, and its mouthpieces are writers for the New York Times covering events in Utah from 1852 through the early 1990s. Given their prevalence in the region, the film becomes a kind-of proxy history of the Mormon church throughout this time, detailing its rise and evergreen conflicts with state government. Brigham Young, longtime president and leader of LDS who brought the church to the region, features prominently as a sort of phantom giant over the lands, one responsible for physically and culturally shaping the space by the brute force of his polygamist drive. Benning’s mixing of the material with contemporary photography of the region makes the film a temporally confounding experience; the land is both older and newer than what we’re hearing, and when he introduces color at the film’s midway point, when we cross into 1900, he introduces further this historically ungrounded feel. Under Benning’s eye, this is a feature of the land, this ability to be from all times at once even through the horrors of our society’s industrial plunder, exemplified by events like the deadly Scofield mining disaster, the reporting of which kicks off the film’s 20th century. The film’s temporal jumble and mix of natural and occasional man-made features on screen makes it seem inconclusive by design, like the images could even be from the distant future, well after humans have populated the land. Though the reporting brings the film up to the present tense, the door is left open for more history and more landscapes to be mapped in Benning’s ongoing project of human exploration. Screening as part of the series, An Artist of Intimate Intent: James Benning. (1996, 82 min, 16mm) [Maxwell Courtright]

Radu Jude’s DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM THE END OF THE WORLD (Romania)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

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 lack of sleep, Angela (a compelling Ilinca Manolache) is a PA working on a multinational corporation’s video about 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 Jude parallels this with 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 it becomes profound when Bratu’s Angela, played by the same actress, shows up as a relative of one of the current Angela’s participants; their interaction makes for the sincerest and most 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 creates TikToks as an Andrew Tate-inspired persona using 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’s also 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]

Charles Chaplin’s A WOMAN OF PARIS (US)

Music Box Theatre – Saturday & Sunday, 11:30am, and Wednesday, 7:15pm

I don’t know if there’s any higher recommendation for a film than it having influenced the most distinguished part of Ernst Lubitsch’s career, that which accounts for his storied “touch.” Not only did the German filmmaker himself refer to A WOMAN OF PARIS as a masterpiece, but filmmaker and critic René Clair wrote, “It may be said that there is not one Lubitsch, but two: one before and one after the appearance of A WOMAN OF PARIS. [Charlie] Chaplin’s masterpiece created a style that inspired Lubitsch, and its mark is to be found in his best comedies.” (It could first be recognized in his 1924 film THE MARRIAGE CIRCLE, which one critic went so far as to call a facsimile of Chaplin’s film.) And that would make sense, right? That history’s most renowned comic actor might have influenced one of its most prestigious directors, who elevated comedy to a level of sophistication previously lacking from Hollywood, is a reasonable assumption. Except that A WOMAN OF PARIS wasn’t like the Chaplin films—such as THE KID (1921), his feature directorial debut—that preceded it; rather, it’s a serious melodrama with Chaplin’s Tramp character nowhere to be found. Produced and distributed under the auspices of United Artists, the company Chaplin co-founded with D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks in 1919, the film opens with a necessary proclamation that, “[i]n order to avoid any misunderstanding,” he wished to announce that he does not appear in the picture. “It is the first serious drama written and directed by myself,” the statement concludes, as auspicious a declaration as Orson Welles’ at the end of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS (1942). Starring Edna Purviance, Chaplin’s friend, collaborator and sometimes lover for whom he undertook the project as a dramatic breakout after years of playing second fiddle to his Tramp, it centers on her character, Marie, first as an innocent young woman hoping to escape her overbearing father and small provincial village with her artist paramour (Jean, played by Carl Miller) and then, later, when the artist has seemingly abandoned her, a savvy woman-about-town who’s kept in luxury by a wealthy businessman (Pierre, played by Adolphe Menjou). Fate intervenes, bringing Jean and Marie back into each other’s lives, and Marie must choose between him—the biggest obstacle to their relationship being his mother’s judgment of Marie’s newfound social status and his own pussyfooting—and the empty but luxurious Pierre. The story is loosely based on circumstances that happened in Chaplin’s real life; the duality of the artist and the businessman may represent his two sides, one in service to art through his filmmaking, the other to glamor and business through his celebrity and production company. Yet the focus is on Marie, with Chaplin breaking ground in his nuanced depiction of a wayward woman whose motives are not probed for their moral dubiousness but instead their human complexity. The subtlety with which Chaplin portrays his characters’ struggles and deficiencies is the film’s most aesthetically radical element, a whisper among the roars of exposition and clear-cut moralizing. Its influence is felt far and wide, and Chaplin himself held it close to his heart despite it being a financial failure; a year before he died he re-edited the film for re-release, and his last act of creativity in this mortal realm was to compose an entirely new soundtrack for it. A WOMAN OF PARIS truly is Chaplin like you’ve never seen him before—because you don’t see him at all, the only indication of the artist's presence is his unmistakable, albeit ahead-of-its-time, touch. (1923, 90 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Kat Sachs]

Kinuyo Tanaka’s LOVE LETTER (Japan)

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

Reikichi Mayumi (Masayuki Mori) and his younger brother Hiroshi (Jûzô Dôsan) live together in a small Tokyo apartment. Hiroshi, with high hopes of owning his own business, hustles used books to get by. Reikichi, suffering from anxiety related to his wartime service, counts on his brother to bring him texts to translate from English and French as a way to make a bit of money. He pines for his childhood love, Michiko (Yoshiko Kuga), for whom he searches. One day, he meets a former classmate (Jûkichi Uno), who hires him to write letters to American GIs for the Japanese women they loved and abandoned. The letters are little more than shakedown attempts by sex workers, but they lead Reikichi to reunite with Michiko. The realities of her life during his war service and his idealized view of her create a chasm between them that may be unbreachable. Kinuyo Tanaka, a favorite actor of Kenji Mizoguchi, makes her directorial debut with this romantic melodrama shot on location in Tokyo’s busy Shibuya district. LOVE LETTER certainly seems influenced by Mizoguchi’s depictions of sex workers, but the long shadow of the United States and World War II tinges everything. Hiroshi represents the generation that wants to win the rat race, not a war. Reikichi shows the ruinous hangover of Japan’s aggression, declaring that all Japanese people bear guilt for the war. He also represents the worst of male chauvinism, something director Tanaka must have faced as she moved behind the camera. Still, she saves her soft close-ups for both Michiko and Reikichi, a dubious paean to enduring love. Screening as part of the series Kinuyo Tanaka, Actress and Auteur. (1953, 98 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Douglas Trumbull's SILENT RUNNING (US

Block Cinema (at Northwestern University) – Friday, 7pm

Douglas Trumbull is most famous for being the special effects virtuoso behind 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, BLADE RUNNER, and THE TREE OF LIFE, but he has also taken on the director's role for a small handful of films. Trumbull's SILENT RUNNING is a product of the burgeoning environmentalism movement of the 1970s. The film imagines a bleak future in which the Earth is devoid of any nature, with the remaining plant life housed in Buckminster Fuller-style domes attached to American Airlines space freighters, which are about to be destroyed. The ecologist/botanist of the crew, aptly named Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern), will stop at nothing to prevent the eradication of his mini-forests. Think Duncan Jones' MOON, which also emphasizes the mania induced by isolation in space, rewritten by Rachel Carson. SILENT RUNNING features vague anti-communist undertones, connecting back-to-the-land enthusiasm to a quintessentially democratic ideology. As far as visual wizardry goes, Trumbull attempts to recreate the "Star Gate" sequence from 2001 as the ship passes through the rings of Jupiter, and though he's clearly working with less resources, the effects are dazzling nonetheless. SILENT RUNNING is a cautionary tale more relevant than ever today, resonating with the sustainable/local/organic mentality that has permeated mainstream food culture. It also prefigures the doomsday scenarios put forth by environmental extremists like Derrick Jensen. With an introduction by Irene Kim, PhD candidate in the English department at Northwestern. Screening as part of the SEED TIME film series. (1972, 89 min, 35mm) [Harrison Sherrod]

Edward Yang's YI YI (Taiwan)

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

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 TERRORIZERS (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.” Screening as part of the Board Picks series. (2000, 173 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Elem Klimov's COME AND SEE (Belarus/USSR)

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

The horrors and atrocities of World War II have long been documented in film, and Elim Klimov’s COME AND SEE is one of their most harrowing depictions. Set in 1943, the narrative follows Floyra (Aleksey Kravchenko in his captivating debut role), a young Belarusian boy who’s eager to join the Soviet army in fighting off the invading German forces after he finds an old rifle buried in the sand from some unnamed battle. Floyra’s youthful exuberance, innocence, and hopefulness are soon painstakingly stripped from him bit by bit as the realities of the war are witnessed firsthand. Klimov’s film is not for the weak of heart; it’s extremely unflinching in its presentation of the brutality of conflict. Outright war-games are eschewed; instead, Klimov uses a series of motifs representing an unrelenting descent into inhumanity, and the erosion of Floyra’s spirit. Individual struggles of various characters are juxtaposed as each face their own personal hells and tragedies. Much of the film’s visceral power is due to its phenomenal use of practical effects and sound design, which place the viewer directly in the carnage. This creates a disorienting sense of place at times—compounding the utter confusion and chaos the characters must endure. The only sliver of comfort and familiarity the film provides is through its use of Mozart in its sparse score, but which becomes lost in the general cacophony. COME AND SEE is staunchly anti-war in tone. It is a film both so hauntingly beautiful yet so resolutely bleak that it will stay with its viewers long after. Screening as part of the Programmer’s Picks series. (1985, 142 min, 35mm) [Kyle Cubr]

John Waters' PINK FLAMINGOS (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 10:15pm

Even by today’s more desensitized standards, PINK FLAMINGOS retains its shock value. Babs Johnson (Divine) wears her tabloid-branded moniker “Filthiest Person Alive” with great pride. Living in a trailer park with her toddler-like mother Edie (Edith Massey), son Crackers (Danny Mills), and roommate Cotton (Mary Vivian Pearce) somewhere in the sticks just outside Baltimore, Babs is hiding from society and authorities due to her countless crimes, which includes murder. Meanwhile, perverted couple Connie and Raymond Marble (Mink Stole and David Lochary) are outraged by Babs’ title—deeming themselves to be the filthiest—and set out to usurp her dubious designation. In a series of ever-escalating scenes more revolting than the last, the Marbles and Babs and her cohorts engage in a battle of one-upmanship. Waters’ film subverts damn near all societal norms and employs an almost cinéma vérité style of filmmaking, particularly in shots of Babs/Divine walking around town with onlookers gawking. No topic is too taboo here. Besides the infamous dog-poo scene, scenes featuring cannibalism, fetishes of all varieties, and rape also feature. This is a film not for the faint of heart—like a pig rolling around in its own filth and loving every second of it, PINK FLAMINGOS knows that it is trash, but glorious, artful trash. It’s not surprising that this is the film that brought John Waters (and Divine) out of underground cinema obscurity and into a broader collective consciousness. Preceded by Pat Rocco's 1968 short film STRIP STRIP (5 min, Digital Projection). Screening as part of Inside Outsider Cinema. (1972, 93 min, 35mm) [Kyle Cubr]

Billy Woodberry's BLESS THEIR LITTLE HEARTS (US)

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

Charles Burnett’s KILLER OF SHEEP has long been recognized as a landmark of African-American cinema, but BLESS THEIR LITTLE HEARTS—a film whose thematic and stylistic concerns seem to grow directly out of SHEEP’s—is not as well-known, probably because it’s been a lot harder to see. Hopefully this new digital restoration is a step towards building the film’s reputation. Written and shot by Burnett, HEARTS takes a sensitive and sympathetic look at a black family in working-poor Los Angeles, much like SHEEP did. But where the patriarch of SHEEP held down a job, the father of HEARTS is unemployed. Not coincidentally, HEARTS (which is structured around the hero’s efforts to find work) is deliberately lacking in the sort of lyricism that defined SHEEP. There’s not much levity here, either; Burnett and Woodberry present the fate of unemployed black men as the stuff of quiet tragedy. Yet HEARTS is not difficult to watch; the non-professional actors are too sympathetic to resist one’s attention, and Woodberry’s inventive direction is commanding as well. Woodberry works in a mode of poetic realism that mixes the gritty detail of direct-cinema documentary with the cadences and relaxed candor of jazz and blues. The film culminates with a shot lasting several minutes that depicts the lengthy argument between the main character and his wife. It’s masterful in writing, acting, and staging. The argument builds in intensity without ever seeming to go anywhere—a brilliant dramatization of how poverty can trap people in emotional stasis. Screening as part of Apparitions: An Assemblage of Black Independent Films. (1984, 86 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Melvin Van Peebles' THE STORY OF A THREE-DAY PASS (France)

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

THE STORY OF A THREE-DAY PASS, the first feature by influential independent Melvin Van Peebles, inspires comparisons with Jean-Luc Godard’s BREATHLESS with its intercontinental romance and jazzy montage, but a more fitting point-of-reference may be the films of William Klein, another American expatriate working in France when this was made. Like Klein, Van Peebles shifts frequently between naturalism and cartoonish exaggeration, and he exhibits a chic visual sensibility throughout. (The black-and-white cinematography is by Michel Kelber, whose long filmography includes Jean Renoir’s FRENCH CANCAN and Nicholas Ray’s BITTER VICTORY.) The three-day pass in question belongs to Turner, a Black American soldier who’s stationed in France. The white superior officer who grants the leave makes clear that he’s doing so to reward Turner for his obsequious behavior; in fact, he promises Turner a promotion when he gets back. The protagonist has mixed feelings about all this, and Van Peebles dramatizes the character’s ambivalence through scenes where he talks to another version of himself in the bathroom mirror, the mirror-image raising doubts and even calling his double an Uncle Tom. Turner manages to put his concerns aside when he leaves his base for Paris, enjoying himself first as a tourist and then as a paramour, entering into a romance with a white Frenchwoman named Miriam. Van Peebles presents their relationship in a freewheeling, Nouvelle Vague-like style, though the aesthetic doesn’t distract from the obstacles they face in finding happiness. Everywhere the couple goes, they’re met with dirty looks, insidious questions, and even physical confrontations; things reach their worst when Turner runs into some suspicious fellow (white) soldiers when he and Miriam are on the beach. The impediments to interracial romance are portrayed, alternately, as scary and comic. In one of the more inspired visuals, Van Peebles cuts from the couple’s first time in bed to a shot of Miriam being surrounded by a group of Africans in traditional tribal garb. This sort of bold imagery points ahead to Van Peebles’ incendiary classic SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSSS SONG (1971), the film with which the writer-director would cement his reputation. Preceded by Terrence Dixon's 1970 short film MEETING THE MAN: JAMES BALDWIN IN PARIS (26 min, DCP Digital). Screening as part of the Americans in Paris: After the Dance series. (1967, 88 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Paul Flaherty’s CLIFFORD (US)

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

CLIFFORD is a nightmare. That’s not a negative value judgment, by the way, just more of a frank observation of the film at hand. Nightmares are frightening and horrifying, but they can also be intellectually illuminating and surprising, bringing our deepest, darkest truths to the surface through methods we could never comprehend. What better way is there to describe the twisted machinations on display, all telegraphed through an early '90’s comedy artfully engineered to be as cheekily off-putting as possible? Born of impulses both ambitious and treacherous, CLIFFORD primarily looks to Martin Short and Charles Grodin for comedy gold and—every now and then—strikes it rich. Caught halfway between treacly, feel-good family film and anarchic comedy experiment, the tale of the eponymous ten-year-old boy (played by a then-forty-year-old Short) finding himself at odds with his anger-prone city-planning uncle (an ever-wiry Grodin) is most successful when it lets its two leading men take hold of the steering wheel. The young Clifford, a well-off dinosaur-obsessed young lad, is something of a demon incarnate, Short’s vocal outbursts drilling a hole through any scene he’s in, turning this young boy into a shrieking, cross-eyed shameless imp. Grodin is as mighty a comedic foil as they come, the immovable object to Short’s unstoppable force, forever trying to hide his sheer hatred for Clifford from the eyes of his love interest, Sarah (Mary Steenburgen, eternally relegated to mothering the egos of men with arrested development in studio comedies). A scene late in the film where Grodin interrogates the young miscreant Clifford at the dining room table is a masterclass in two comedic titans go toe-to-toe, Short’s whimpering and wailing combatting Grodin’s commandeering sneers and snarls (Grodin yelling at Short “Look at me like a human boy!” is as tour-de-force of a cinematic moment as they come). It all comes to a head at a grand finale in a dinosaur themed park that must be seen to be believed, elevating the semi-grounded comic stakes to a massively demented level. Audiences in 1994 didn’t know what to do with CLIFFORD, and thirty years on, the tide has somewhat turned, with many identifying the film as something of a precursor to our contemporary form of anti-comedy. To the lucky few out there, it’s the stuff that dreams, and nightmares, are made of. (1994, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Michael Haneke's FUNNY GAMES (Austria)

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

If you’ve heard of Michael Haneke’s polarizing experiment FUNNY GAMES, it’s likely in the context of how shocking or unpleasant it is, which is likely because that’s all it was designed to do. Haneke shows his hand early in the film when, in the film’s opening scene when Georg (Ulrich Mühe) and Anna’s (Susanne Lothar) charming guessing game about the classical music they listen to on their drive to their vacation home is suddenly replaced on the soundtrack by Naked City’s grindcore. It’s the first sign that Haneke is working on a fine formal level to destabilize the viewer, but only without straying too far from the respectability of a name like John Zorn’s. The film’s two eventual home invaders, Paul (Arno Frisch) and Peter (Frank Giering), are similarly mannered psychopaths, their first meeting with the family feeling like a cringe comedy play on THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL (1962) before the film settling into its more protracted stretch of misery. Even while playing out their torture scenarios at feature-length, the captors can’t help but get academic and loop the audience in by breaking the fourth wall to explain that their motives are largely narrative-driven, and are the audience’s fault. Haneke (and by extension his mouthpiece assailants) is conversant in horror and thriller tropes, and while he himself has referred to the project as "pointless," its purpose is to turn the masses’ desire for violence back on itself. With a little distance from the project now, it’s a fair question to ask where Haneke himself, a maker of frequently violent (but never pleasant) films is meant to fit into this equation and what the purpose is of watching a film that basically negates its own existence by punishing its viewer for participation in a mass demand for violent entertainment. The film still endures as a landmark of transgressive cinema probably because its reputation baits the opposite of what it really ends up being. People primed for the intensity of endless psychological torture aren’t granted that release when every injury and death is calculated for maximum anticlimax. The film is maybe best understood as a sort-of exquisite Rube Goldberg machine geared to disappoint. Ticket holders will be able to see CACHÉ as well. Screening as part of the Programmer’s Picks series. (1997, 109 min, Digital Projection) [Maxwell Courtright]

Lee Won-hoi’s MY FAVORITE LOVE STORY (South Korea) and Yutaka Tsunemachi’s DRIFTING FLOWERS, FLOWING DAYS (Japan)

Asian Pop-Up Cinema at Block Cinema (at Northwestern University) – Wednesday, 5:30pm (LOVE STORY) and Thursday, 5:30pm (DRIFTING FLOWERS)

Of the two films screening as part of the Asian Pop-Up Cinema this week at Block, one is futuristic and the other realistic, with little similarity between them. They present an interesting duo nevertheless. Korean filmmaker Lee Won-hoi’s 2023 film MY FAVORITE LOVE STORY (96 min, DCP Digital) is a sci-fi musical; set in Seoul sometime in the future, it centers on two helper bots, Oliver (Shin Joo-hyup) and Claire (Kang Hye-in), as they meet and soon thereafter set out on a journey to find Oliver’s owner, who’d left him several years prior. As the title would indicate, they fall in love, but their romance is impossible because they’re robots with increasingly outdated technology, which signals their eventual demise. Though it’s understandable that one might balk at it being a musical (last year, for example, brought double the disappointment when audiences realized that WONKA and MEAN GIRLS were in fact musicals), the songs are pretty good and integrate seamlessly into the story. As robots Shin and Kang are excellent; their performances really pull together an ambitious concept that could have failed at many levels. Instead, it has a lot to offer anyone intrigued by its premise. The complete opposite of such a film might be encapsulated by Japanese filmmaker Yutaka Tsunemachi’s 2022 film DRIFTING FLOWERS, FLOWING DAYS (85 min, DCP Digital), which is almost mumblecore-ish in nature and centers exclusively on the present. Three protagonists—a young woman who works in a flower shop; her boyfriend, who works at a construction company; and his childhood friend, who works in design—contend with various struggles such as the inertia of adulthood and more personal issues like family and romantic relationships. The film does look toward the future, that being the cloud which hangs overhead, yet defies its own seeming preoccupations by being so firmly set in the characters’ present. This results in an elliptical style of storytelling rooted in the dialogue between them, with some loose ends going untied. Perhaps that which takes place in MY FAVORITE LOVE STORY is what they have to look forward to. [Kat Sachs]

Michael Haneke’s CACHÉ (France)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Wednesday, 9pm

In Austrian writer-director Michael Haneke's CACHE, an unidentified person films aspects of the daily lives of a married Parisian couple, Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche), without their knowledge. This person sends the videotapes to the couple, who interpret them as "a campaign of terror." Before long, the tapes lead Georges back to the massacre of two hundred Algerians in Paris in 1961 and to his short relationship with one of its indirect victims. CACHÉ centers not only on the unknown filmmaker, but also, and more importantly, on the unknown image. In addition to the series of tapes that structure the film, such images include news footage, public television programs, photographs, drawings, memories, dreams, and the film itself. In watching CACHÉ, the viewer does not always know when he sees a tape in contrast to Haneke's film. (Although, in fact, he can see both.) For instance, both the real filmmaker (Haneke) and his anonymous fictional filmmaker shoot in high-definition video. Often, a television set does not frame a tape, but Haneke's camera occasionally pulls back to reveal Georges and Anne watching it on their TV. Due to the frequent lack of framing and other devices, the viewer questions who captures what and why. With CACHÉ, Haneke constructs a film in which we distrust him, and ultimately ourselves. Does an image hide its meaning from us? For Haneke, we must find what we hide from ourselves to see the world around us. Ticket holders for FUNNY GAMES will be able to see CACHÉ as well. Screening as part of the Programmer’s Picks series. (2005, 117 min, 35mm) [Candace Wirt]

Doris Wishman’s DEADLY WEAPONS (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Thursday, 9:30pm

Doris Wishman’s films work largely because they don’t. They’re moviemaking at its most haphazard, to which viewers shouldn’t ask ‘why’ but rather ‘why not?’ A fan favorite amidst her expansive career (Wishman is not just the most well-known woman to have directed exploitation films, but also one of the most prolific women filmmakers in American cinema overall), DEADLY WEAPONS has at its core two very big breasts, those of Polish-born stripper Chesty Morgan, credited here in her acting debut by her original stage name Zsa Zsa. The film’s poster flaunts her measurements: 73-32-36, and, as legend has it, all real. Morgan plays Crystal, whose mobster boyfriend is killed by his own faction after he swipes an important address book that he uses to go rogue. Crystal seeks to avenge his death, going after the men who killed him (one of whom is played by Harry Reems of DEEP THROAT fame); this takes her to Las Vegas and Miami, where her natural assets come in handy. The film’s title refers not to any standard weapon a mobster or a revenge-driven girlfriend might use to eliminate someone. The weapons in question are her size KK breasts, which she uses to suffocate the offending gangsters. Even if, as one user on IMDb asserts, “Morgan’s novelty breasts is [sic] all this film has going for it,” those are still two huge reasons. There’s more to appreciate, though, in Wishman’s confident direction. While parts of it may not cohere—who’s watching for the plot, anyway?—the cinematography, close to something out of a Sirk melodrama, provides just as much to look at as Chesty does. The ending is perhaps incongruously nihilistic, but maybe the stakes were always higher than we thought. A clip from the film is seen playing on a television screen in John Waters’ SERIAL MOM. Naturally Wishman was one of Waters’ influences; in an interview with RogerEbert.com, Waters, who’d seen her in person presenting some of her films, said “she looked like Godard in drag.” One might take that to mean that below a surface of capriciousness exists genius. Preceded by John Hawkins’ 1965 short film LSD WALL (7 min, 16mm). Screening as part of the Inside Outsider Cinema series. (1974, 75 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING! (UK)

Comfort Film at Comfort Station – Wednesday, 8pm

A rebuke of materialism and the wonton acquisition of wealth, Powell and Pressburger's atmospheric romance is also a soft-sell for British wartime bonhomie. Set in the Hebrides of Scotland, a determined woman intends to meet her industrialist fiancé on the Island of Kiloran, but is held on shore by fate and bad weather. When the woman meets the Laird of Kiloran—an upstanding man on leave from active duty, unconcerned with the value of his land—her faith in upper class wealth is undermined. The film plays like a parable, with the Laird acting as the romantic lead and a model for its war-weary audience: honorable, selfless, moralistic, and satisfied with what he has. I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING! is never didactic and its precisely paced romance leads its characters gently to its theme. Complete with its own mythology of curses and legends, the film uses the island's people to mirror the woman's conflict. Gaelic is spoken casually and an affecting Scottish dance ritual celebrating a couple's enduring marriage provokes her further. Both picturesque and portentous, the Hebrides' fog gives way to gales, then to heavy seas and a massive ocean whirlpool. Through an enveloping sound design and striking photography, Powell and Pressburger's mastery of the elemental is on full display. The effect is a profound diagnosis of their audience's restlessness with war's humbleness and sacrifice, and a lyrical romance that simultaneously allows them to escape. A Film Programmer Mentorship screening; programmed by Emma Engelbrecht. (1945, 88 min, Digital Projection) [Brian Welesko]

Saul Williams & Anisia Uzeyman's NEPTUNE FROST (US/Rwanda)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6pm

“The movie has a plot that defies common sense,” wrote Roger Ebert upon revisiting Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS some years back, “but its very discontinuity is a strength.” I watched Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman’s NEPTUNE FROST the night before I left on a trip to Berlin; the film came to mind as I read informational placards at an exhibit about Lang’s visionary achievement at the Deutsche Kinemathek’s Museum für Film und Fernsehen. Much like METROPOLIS, Williams and Uzeyman’s inspired Afrofuturist disquisition addresses a contemporary moment from so far into the future (spiritually if not in actuality; it's not made clear when it takes place) that solutions of the present look positively prehistoric by comparison. It’s the current juncture that the filmmakers interrogate through a meticulously constructed albeit intriguingly opaque narrative, rapidly confronting all means of social issues in such a way that defies "common sense" and is all the better for it. The film centers on two characters—Neptune (Elvis Ngabo/Cheryl Isheja), an intersex runaway who miraculously transitions from male to female toward the beginning of the film, and Matalusa (Bertrand "Kaya Free" Ninteretse), a coltan miner spurred by the death of his younger brother—and the impact their eventual coupling has on the remote Burundi hideaway where a radical cyberpunk hacker collective later endeavors to seek retribution from an unjust world. In summary it sounds cohesive enough, but in practice Williams (a multi-hyphenate talent who wrote the film’s script) wastes no opportunity in adding layer after layer to an already dense political mythology; the persistent refrain of the phrase “unanimous goldmine” used as a greeting is just one example. NEPTUNE FROST is also a musical, with memorable, politically charged songs written by Williams and performed as outré set pieces reminiscent of the cannily exuberant numbers in Bruno Dumont’s two Joan of Arc films. The costumes and production design are similarly memorable; both were created by Rwandan artist Cedric Mizero, who utilized recycled materials and what might otherwise be termed trash to create an out-of-this world, but still decidedly of this world, DIY milieu. Rwandan actress and filmmaker Uzeyman, who looked to shooting in her home country due to Burundi being too unstable, is also the film’s cinematographer, responsible for the nimbleness with which beautiful African landscapes and hacker dance parties both evince a similar halcyon beauty. NEPTUNE FROST is part of a larger project, titled MartyrLoserKing after the hacker collective; there’s reportedly more to come, a few more albums and even a graphic novel. The sheer ambition of its intent and the sublimity of its realization, marked by that brazen discontinuity, are what set it and others of its ilk—those films ahead of their time yet still very much of their time—definitively apart. Screening as part of Shawn Michelle Smith and Oliver Sann’s Cli-Fi lecture series. (2021, 105 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Cameron Cairnes and Colin Cairnes’ LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL (US/United Arab Emirates/Australia)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

Television has traditionally been a more participatory medium than film—​more urgent and invasive. GHOSTWATCH, the 1992 BBC special that scarred a generation through a convincingly staged televised haunting investigation, captured this so effectively within the genre of horror. Its influence on the found footage genre is massive, something now more associated with film. LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL ties both together as a film about a found-footage television program. A voiceover opening complete with documentary footage explains the rise of Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian), a late-night talk show host whose show, Night Owls, began in the early 70s—​coinciding with a rise in a cultural obsession with the occult. At first competing well with the likes of Carson, Delroy never quite finds the same success even after years on the air. He resorts to more sensational guests and material and is devastated by the tragic loss of his wife (Georgina Haig). Desperate to please the sponsors with better ratings, he puts together a Halloween show that relies on increasingly dramatically spooky guests: a psychic (Fayassi Bazzi), a magician turned skeptic (Ian Bliss), and a parapsychologist (Laura Gordon) and the subject of her recent book, a teenager (Ingrid Torelli) she claims is possessed by a demon. LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL is a depiction of the found master tape footage from the live taping of that 1977 Halloween episode. What’s most impressive about the film is its commitment to the aesthetic, not just the grainy video footage, but its overall earth-toned aesthetics. Even the practical special effects remain true to the period. It’s also a great showcase for Dastmalchian, who’s mostly seen in supporting roles; he brings a nervous energy to the performance that is both convincing and foreboding. The horror of it all will feel familiar, but LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL brings up interesting ideas about format, highlighting the difference between engaging with television versus film by engaging with both. It also illuminates a shifting media landscape: while this kind of visceral, analog televisual experience is no longer accessible, can it be found dispersed in contemporary digital media? (2023, 93 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Giuseppe Tornatore’s ENNIO (Italy/Documentary)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

By the time composer Ennio Morricone died on July 6, 2020, at the age of 91, he had amassed a body of work it would take mere mortals three lifetimes to achieve. IMDb lists contributions he made to 533 film scores, including those from his enduring creative partnership with former classmate Sergio Leone. He also wrote more than 100 classical works and won a boatload of awards from around the world, including an Oscar for lifetime achievement in 2007. Triumphantly, he went on to earn his first competitive Oscar for THE HATEFUL EIGHT (2015), a full-blown symphony that was his “revenge” on the Westerns that started his career in film. Director Giuseppe Tornatore, who was blessed with a luminous Morricone score for his film CINEMA PARADISO (1988), set himself the very difficult task of trying to survey a life jam-packed with genius works and experiences within a reasonable running time. On the whole, I think he succeeds in showcasing some of the best of Morricone’s work, as well as his formative life experiences and his struggles to accept his destiny as a film composer. We learn of the musician father who made his son give up ideas of becoming a lawyer to follow in his footsteps as a trumpeter. We learn how much Morricone’s wife of 64 years, Maria Travia, contributed to his career. We learn how he chose his mentor, Goffredo Petrassi, and how Morricone was a lifelong creator and supporter of experimental music from which he learned to use sounds as well as musical notes to create his scores. There are clips of the famous films most of us know, as well as lesser-known Italian films for which he created interesting scores that drew on his deep knowledge of classical and folkloric music. There is a very moving montage of film clips from the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center interspersed with Morricone conducting his searing “Voci dal silenzio.” And there are many, many talking heads (Bruce Springsteen, Bernardo Bertolucci, Liliana Cavani, and Pat Metheny among them) talking about his music and process, and offering laudatory blurbs that could have been dispensed with to either shorten the running time or add in more information. Most illuminating of all are the interviews with Morricone himself talking about his ideas and methods in a way that even a non-musician like myself could understand. There have been many great film scorers, but there was never one as ground-breaking and singular as Morricone. (2021, 156 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

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

Music Box Theatre – Saturday, Midnight

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]

Robert Zemeckis’ FORREST GUMP (US)

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

It’s rare that a movie so laden with Oscar gold could be in need of serious reevaluation, but Robert Zemeckis’ FORREST GUMP may just be that movie. Caught between warring poles of early '90s politics, the film was thoughtlessly embraced by the Clinton left for its maudlin sentimentality while right-winger Newt Gingrich falsely championed its "conservative values" to help bolster his shitty campaign. Despite these two idiot winds hellbent on turning FORREST GUMP into last-minute campaign weaponry, FORREST GUMP remains a film operating at the height of cinematic power. It may have seemed like a major sea change for Zemeckis, who made it coming off the acidic black comedy DEATH BECOMES HER (1992), but in reality, it's anything but: the director's satirical worlds are now just papered wall to wall with lovely and airy Alan Silvestri music, which only camouflages the pointed barbs. On inspection, GUMP is something closer to Voltaire’s Candide or John Ford’s THE LONG GRAY LINE (1955). This insanely misjudged movie, a cracked masterpiece, rises above its detractors’ accusations of "small-minded American conservatism" or "liberal boomer wet dream" to reveal itself as a film of impeccable craft and downright nastiness. Just take a look at any interview with Zemeckis during the awards season rush of this movie—the guy seemed positively confused as to its reception. Not that it didn’t have the heart and Hollywoodisms necessary to sweep the awards and clean up at the box office, but because of them, the film's indictment of an entire generation’s passive engagement with the world didn't quite catch on. Forrest exists as a proxy for the US and its citizens, blindly stumbling into situation after situation, unknowingly taking credit for things they had nothing to do with, and sometimes benefiting financially from these things in a major way—see what happens to Forrest after the devastating destruction of an entire Black shrimping operation in New Orleans. And yet, Forrest never seems to notice or care about this, placing faith in God and country rather than recognizing his highly privileged position in society. FORREST GUMP is linked to a long line of Zemeckis satires, yet it finds the director reaching for a new, classical style with which to capture the madness on screen. This film has less to do with any perceived folk wisdom from a simple-minded wanderer and more to do with the brain-dead ideologies that get spouted by one seriously lucky multi-millionaire, wholly unaware of anything outside himself. (1994, 142 min, DCP Digital) [John Dickson]

Wim Wenders' PERFECT DAYS (Japan/Germany)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Saturday, 7pm and 9:30pm

There is peace to be found in routine. That’s what Hirayama—and perhaps director Wim Wenders—would have you believe. Exquisitely brought to life by Koji Yakusho, Hirayama, an employee of the "Tokyo Toilet," guides us day by day through Wenders’ latest fiction endeavor, a leisurely diary of a film. The world of PERFECT DAYS follows its own internalized rhythms, lulling the audience into a network of patterns in navigating Hirayama’s days, perfect or otherwise, that unwind before us. The sun will always rise in a purple-orange sky, a can of coffee will always pop out of the vending machine, the plants will always get their morning mists of water, the leaves will always be brushed to the side, the public toilets spread throughout Tokyo will always receive Hirayama’s careful and rigorous cleaning, and the day will always end with dreams. Hirayama’s dreams—at least as Wenders shares them with us—are always in black-and-white, layered fragments of the day, coated in leaves and shadows, an abstracted reset of the film’s internal clock. Days blend into each other in a way that feels intricate yet inevitable, with the most glaring piece of conflict arising more than halfway through the runtime, Hirayama’s niece having run away from a life of affluence and loneliness. She prefers her uncle's life, which she sees as simple and noble. But unbeknown to most around him, Hirayama’s life is an iceberg, the solid routine of the day hiding depths of passion and loneliness underneath. There is constant reflection on his past, especially upon the mass of cassette tapes he has collected over the years and refuses to part with, there is the yearning towards the future with his voracious consumption of literature. But where does that leave the Hirayama of the present? In one moment of conversation (one of the few times Hirayama feigns to utter dialogue in the entire film), he offers up that "the world is made up of many worlds. Some are connected, some are not." In a moment of potent vulnerability near the film’s end, Yakusho offers up a rare moment of the bottom of the iceberg peeking out, the tough exterior of Hirayama breaking apart ever so briefly, as the sun rises on yet another day. Just like every other day, and still brand new. Screening as part of the New Release (+ More) series. (2023, 123 mins, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

🎞️ ALSO SCREENING

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

⚫ 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 March 15, 2026. More info here.

⚫ Chicago Public Library
View all screenings taking place at Chicago Public Library branches here.

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping’s 2023 British film FEMME (99 min, DCP Digital) continues screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

Film Center Volunteer Interest Meeting takes place Wednesday at 7pm.

THIS IS MY PLACE, a fictional documentary about the itinerant life and conceptual artwork of artist David Lamelas, whose sculpture Situación de cuatro placas de aluminio (Four Changeable Plaques) (1966), is currently on view in Endless at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, screens Wednesday, 6pm, with a post-screening conversation with Lamelas, the MCA’s Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator Carla Acevedo-Yates, and MCA Assistant Curator Nolan Jimbo. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Ivan Sen’s 2023 film LIMBO (108 min, DCP Digital) begins screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

Tim Burton’s 1998 film BEETLEJUICE (92 min, 35mm) screens Friday, 10:30pm, with FX artist Ve Neill in person for post-screening Q&A. Arrive early for a Horror House pop-up and meet and greet with Ve Neill in the Music Box Lounge starting at 8pm. Co-presented by the Horror House. 

Umberto Lenzi’s 1974 film ALMOST HUMAN (99 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday at midnight. Programmed and presented by the Front Row.

BUILDING BOMBS and HONEYMOON IN OAK RIDGE screen Sunday, 4:30pm, as part of the International Uranium Film Festival. Followed by a post-screening  panel including filmmakers Mark Mori and Susan Robinson in person.

Sarah Kambe Holland’s 2023 film EGGHEAD & TWINKIE (103 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday, 7pm, as part of the Film Girl Film Festival.

The 2024 Sound of Silent Film Festival takes place Thursday at 7:30pm. More info on all screenings and events 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
Beyond the Dust: Colonial Legacy in the Desert, programmed by Martí Madaula Esquirol, 2023 - 2024 Graduate Curatorial Fellow at the Video Data Bank, and School of the Art Institute of Chicago MFA candidate in Film, Video, New Media, and Animation, screens for free on VDB TV. Includes short works by More info here.

CINE-LIST: March 29 - April 4, 2024

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Maxwell Courtright, Kyle Cubr, John Dickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Ben Kaye, Harrison Sherrod, Brian Welesko, Candace Wirt