:: FRIDAY, JULY 5 - THURSDAY, JULY 11 ::

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Robert Bresson's PICKPOCKET (France)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 8:30pm

PICKPOCKET, a brief, existentialist date movie (filmed in the same Parisian Summer of 1959 as BREATHLESS) is—with its emphasis on glances, gestures, cafés, and other material ephemera—certainly a cinephiliac classic. Constrained by a truly minimal plot (with familiar elements from both Camus and Dostoyevsky), Bresson produces an extraordinary quality of dreamlike estrangement via deliberately awkward stage direction (to the usual assortment of unfamiliar non-actors); shots of doors and other passageways that linger just a little too long before and after the characters' entrance and exit; and (especially) an obsessive attention to sound design which heightens the impact of every slight movement, above a perpetually noisy background of urban clatter. The result is a laid-back erotic thriller (ironically set to the aristocratic Baroque compositions of Jean-Baptiste Lully) that sees everyday life under capitalism—for a movie director, or anyone else—as a sequence of audacious, small-scale robberies whose aggregate karmic debt must ultimately be repaid in appalling tragedy. The "erotic" aspect is, of course, derived from the pickpocket's perpetual state of being: an intimate touching, with or without explicit recognition—like two arms resting by each other in a movie theater. Screening as part of the Last Shot series. (1959, 75 min, 35mm) [Michael Castelle]

Andrei Tarkovsky's SOLARIS (USSR)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 12pm

In Tarkovsky’s luminescent and beautiful adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s novel, Kris Kelvin, a psychologist, has been sent to a space station orbiting the mysterious planet Solaris, which is covered entirely by a potentially sentient ocean. Kelvin is to take charge of the station and either close it down or take drastic, violent measures against the ocean in order to generate scientific data. When he arrives, though, he discovers that the station is regularly populated with ‘visitors,’ people seemingly generated out of thin air while one sleeps, who are manifestations of one’s own memories and dreams. In adapting Lem’s book, Tarkvosky develops a complex structure of flashbacks, dream sequences, and fantasies that are at times indistinguishable from the ‘actual’ events of the plot, and alternates between color and black-and-white cinematography to further alienate us from the narrative flow. The way he shoots Natalya Bondarchuk, uncannily incandescent in nearly every shot as she ethereally wafts through the sets, is in direct conflict with the staid, weathered and deeply conflicted Donatas Banionis, questioning her very existence. While the novel is set solely on the space station, Tarkovsky developed a crucial prologue set on Earth, in which the philosophical and aesthetic issues are introduced that will later play out in dramatic form. It is there that Burton appears, a retired scientist who is the only one we meet to have actually returned from the mysterious planet. It is Burton who gives voice to a potential thesis of the film, that “knowledge is only valid when it is based on morality,” when he learns of the potentially destructive nature of Kris’ mission. Burton’s shadow hangs low over the film, over the violence that the story heaps on the body of Hari, Kelvin’s lost love reborn. If Burton is right, what are we to make of Kelvin’s own understanding of his relationship with her, which is based on betrayal and pain?  What conclusions are we to draw on the apparent attempts by Solaris itself to study the scientists by means of the ‘visitors,’ when their inevitable result is heartbreak?  Late in the film, the camera lingers on a print of Breughel’s “Hunters in the Snow,” a painting that seems to imply that the titular hunters, instead of returning home empty-handed, are instead on the trail of the ice-skating children in the distance. It is an invocation of the untamable nature of violence, which once released can never be controlled. Kelvin’s reaction to his first ‘visitor,’ the first appearance of Hari, is to attempt to destroy her. Breughel’s hunters with their ambiguous target are mocking commentaries on Kelvin’s own predetermined failure as a scientist and as a human being. Like them, his inability to come to terms with his own nature leads him to lash out against those closest to him, and in so doing to destroy himself. When, in the end, he returns to a heavily ironic homecoming with his surely deceased father, it is with a sense not of a journey completed, but of a cycle repeated, with inevitable tragedy and with inescapable loss that he can never come to terms with. Screening as part of the Last Shot series. (1972, 166 min, 35mm) [Kian Bergstrom]

Lloyd Bacon's FOOTLIGHT PARADE (US)

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

Busby Berkeley, Lloyd Bacon, and company have a lot on their minds with FOOTLIGHT PARADE, the Pre-Code musical spectacular most concerned with the idea of what place, if any, theatrical productions have within cinema. James Cagney, hoofer extraordinaire, stars as an ex-stage director, now tasked with developing movie prologues—live performance spectacles to be put on prior to film screenings. The order is a tall one, and the setbacks pile on, but with the help of Berkeley mainstays Joan Blondell, Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell and Guy Kibbee, three lavish musical numbers emerge from all the shenanigans. Two of these alone are worth the price of admission: the geometric water dance "By A Waterfall" and Cagney's barstool ballad of lost love,"Shanghai Lil." The former ranks perhaps as Berkeley's definitive number, the screen awash with shower-capped sirens synchronized in a mind-bending water ballet. The display may be the logical extension of Berkeley's famed work as a Broadway choreographer, but his eye on the whole extravaganza is nothing if not cinematic. He shoots his chorus of mermaids with a restless camera, and in the moments where it assumes a bird's eye view of the proceedings, lovely ladies and narrative structure alike fall by the wayside and a purely psychedelic experience overwhelms the screen. And no sooner has "By A Waterfall" carved out a niche for the stage spectacle on film then along comes "Shanghai Lil," making the case that musical numbers were born for the movies. It fittingly starts offstage, as Cagney trips through the curtain and finds himself before an audience, assuming the role with a coolness that's only bolstered by Berkeley's slow-tracking reveal. Here's a number that owes its very conception to movie lore (Sternberg's SHANGHAI EXPRESS had topped the box-office the year before, with Marlene Dietrich turning heads as Shanghai Lily), and FOOTLIGHT PARADE's grand finale escalates from a clever barroom riff on the Shanghai Lil' mythology to a grand musical march sporting every cinematic tool in the book, from tracking shots to animation. It may just be the best musical number of the 1930s, which is no small feat because it's only barely the best musical number in the film. Screening as part of the Public Enemy: Cagney on Film series. (1933, 104 min, 35mm) [Tristan Johnson]

Sidney Lumet's DOG DAY AFTERNOON (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 3pm and Wednesday, 6pm

In DOG DAY AFTERNOON, Sidney Lumet exploited his theatrical background to electrifying effect, building consistent dramatic tension from the essential mise-en-scene of a few stark locations and ramped-up performances. AFTERNOON has been justly canonized for Al Pacino's star turn, a product of genuine exhaustion and second-wind adrenaline (Pacino nearly turned the film down because it began shooting immediately after the epic schedule for THE GODFATHER PART II had wrapped); yet it's only one bright spark among a uniformly wired cast. Going against his usual loyalty to the written word, Lumet encouraged his actors to improvise after rehearsing Frank Pierson's script for seven weeks. The process yielded a unique performance style—which was, on the whole, perhaps Lumet's greatest contribution to movies—that combined the specific, spontaneous gestures of film acting with the internalized characterizations common to stage drama. The film depicts an infamous Brooklyn bank robbery of 1972, committed by a married man who wanted to raise the money for his male lover's sex change operation. The botched robbery devolved into a highly publicized hostage standoff, and under Lumet's direction, the events play out as a series of escalating, acutely realized crises. Thanks to the extended rehearsal period, everyone on screen seems confident in their daily business—be it running a bank or negotiating for the FBI—yet the demands of improvisation make everyone visibly, and convincingly, nervous. The film generates great suspense as well as comedy (note the scene where John Cazale's ad lib about Wyoming nearly makes Pacino crack up), often at the same time, as in Pacino's impassioned and ultimately exhausting phone conversation with his lover (Chris Sarandon). It's also worth noting that the exterior shots present some exciting snapshots of New York in the mid-70s and that the film's sexual politics don't feel particularly dated. Screening as part of the Sidney Lumet Centennial series. (1975, 125 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Michael Curtiz’s THE BREAKING POINT (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6pm

Ernest Hemingway thought this to be the best film adaptation of any of his work. It was the second adaptation of To Have or Have Not, made by Warner Bros. only six years after Howard Hawks’ film of the same name starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall (though that was a much looser adaptation of the novel). This time directed by Hungarian-born journeyman Michael Curtiz and starring John Garfield, it’s less any one person’s movie (as Hawks’ film is most definitely a Howard Hawks film) than it is an exemplification of the commonality of its co-auteurs’—in this case, Curtiz, Garfield and, to a degree, Hemingway—their disillusionment with two tenets of then-contemporary American life, post-war malaise and the so-called American dream that was promised in its wake. It’s appropriate, then, that THE BREAKING POINT is a “sunshine noir,” taking place adjacent to and on dazzling coastal waters. Here the sunshine doesn’t obfuscate (say, by way of an enshrouding glare) but rather illuminates the choking oppression of groundless hope. Garfield stars as Harry Morgan, a WWII veteran trying to make it as a sport-fishing captain. He’s underwater on his boat (pun intended), however, so when he’s swindled by a customer (and left with his fiance, Leona, played by Patricia Neal; Morgan, though, is happily married with two kids and for the most part resists her seduction) he takes an illegal job transporting Chinese immigrants into the states from Mexico. When the job goes bust and Harry falls under suspicion, he finds himself in a downward spiral that threatens to upend the modest life he’s built for his family. What he once hoped to be his salvation, the water, becomes a prison of his own making; even the mobility he has there is no further upward than he can seem to get in life. As Harry’s wife, Lucy, Phyllis Thaxter conveys a quiet strength that underlies their unusually solid marriage. That Harry is only momentarily tempted by Leona’s advances speaks to Harry’s base conviction and belief in that most fulfilling of aspirations: love. But the film is more than what one sees on screen. It’s notable also for being Garfield’s penultimate film, suppressed by Warner Bros. because of his involvement after he was included inRed Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television and subsequently blacklisted under the banner of Hollywood’s Red Scare. Harry is a man frustrated by society, having always been good and realizing it only pays to be bad, but who ultimately has the courage of his convictions. Garfield likely shared that frustration, having been painted as bad in a world obsessed with the illusion of good, which was really a smokescreen for hypocrisy. (Not for nothing, Thom Andersen labeled it as being a film gris, a “grey film,” a more cynical and ultimately more leftist iteration of the film noir. Garfield appeared in many such films.) Harry is lost, and Garfield was, too. The reason for its inclusion in the Last Shot series will become evident, wholly separate though it may be from the film's obvious preoccupations but biting nevertheless, an indictment of even a potentially happy-ish ending. Someone, it seems, is always left behind. Screening as part of the Last Shot series. (1950, 97 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]

Spike Lee's SCHOOL DAZE (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday, 8:15pm

For his sophomore film, Spike Lee followed his low-budget melodrama SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT (1986) with SCHOOL DAZE, a barrage of vignettes and musical numbers set at the white-funded Black university, Mission College. At the time of its release, SCHOOL DAZE depicted Black middle-class Americans and integrated all Black colleges in a new light, with a level of indifference to a white audience. From the script down to the casting, it appeared that Lee had no interest in how white America viewed the film. In it, Julian (Giancarlo Esposito) insists on being called "Big Brother Almighty" by his troops at Gamma Phi Gamma and has a pronounced taste for the paramilitary, swinging a billy club to terrorize pledges. Julian, whose life is dedicated to Gamma, and Dap come to represent different polarities of Black consciousness, with runt-of-the-litter Half-Pint caught between them. In many ways, SCHOOL DAZE marks the antithesis to Lee’s debut feature. Coming from a low-budget independent film financed by quarters in soda cans to a deal with Columbia, this is a bigger, messier, more ambitious film, even as Lee returns to themes of sex and sexism between young Black men and women. Wrapped together by the director’s feelings towards contemporary black society, SCHOOL DAZE collects musical numbers, dramatic episodes, attempts at parody, and cinematic wild cards. In the number “Straight and Nappy,” light-skinned and darker black-skinned women express their feelings for each other. Lee’s choice of a musical production number to consider these emotionally charged subjects is brilliant; the film labels these factions ''wannabees'' (as in ''wanna be better than me'') and, to give some indication of its level of bitterness, ''jigaboos.'' SCHOOL DAZE stars an ensemble of Black actors who would appear in his masterpiece, DO THE RIGHT THING (1989), and into his nineties work as well. Screening as part of the Last Shot series. (1988, 121 min, 35mm) [Ray Ebarb]

Angela Schanelec's MUSIC (Germany/France/Greece/Serbia)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

The plots (or what exists of them) of Angela Schanelec’s films usually feel like pretexts for exploring her particular set of rules with regard to narrative problematics, pushing her plots to avant-garde levels of abstraction. You’re left with less information than you need, and indeed the characters often are too, with Schanelec linking communication breakdown in both form and life. When a fog rolls over a hill in the opening shot of her newest feature MUSIC, it feels almost like a self-aware joke acknowledging her usual narrative opacity as she jumps into the music-free opening 40 minutes of the film. The film follows Ion (Aliocha Schneider), a man orphaned as a baby after an accident that leaves his parents dead on a hillside. In adulthood, jailed after killing a man in an altercation, Ion strikes up a friendship and later a relationship with a prison employee, Iro (Agathe Bonitzer), who records music for him to nurture his passion for singing. Despite its overall stillness and disaffection, this is one of Schanelec’s more emotionally open films just by virtue of Jon’s music, a sort of plainspoken chamber pop. A contrast with Schanelec’s otherwise withholding tone, the film’s sparsely deployed but warm sound cues are the main deviation from the film’s muted, symbolic retelling of the Oedipus myth. It’s this art-within-art that’s the locus of her usual play with interpretation, providing an extra layer of obfuscation wherein the music can be critically judged in a way independent of its purpose in the script. It seems, given her track record and the title, like this is maybe the point, this presentation of art as the only truly ineffable thing as the same narratives play out repeatedly through history. But it makes for something difficult to read both in meaning and intention, with even Schanelec’s Bressonian symbols stumbling over each other, as disembodied hands occupy the full spectrum of action and similarly still bodies are alternately dead, injured, and sleeping. Anyone familiar will know to expect this challenge of meaning-creation, but there are still conventional pleasures to be found for the uninitiated too, especially in DP Ivan Marković’s framing of Greece’s craggy hills and seasides. The beautiful lands function similarly to the film’s music, adding something to the mix that’s less within Schanelec’s control, suggesting graciously that she herself may be searching alongside the audience this time. (2023, 108 min, DCP Digital) [Maxwell Courtright]

George Stevens' A PLACE IN THE SUN (US)

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

A PLACE IN THE SUN, like its leading man Montgomery Clift, is conflicted. Adapted by George Stevens from An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser’s corrosive epic of social-climbing and callow careerism, the film’s narrative contours should track as a straightforward challenge to bootstrap capitalism; indeed, none other than Marxist monteur Sergei Eisenstein once sought to make his American debut with a screen version. The tale follows George Eastman (Clift), a rogue of limited means and enormous ambition, who parlays a distant family connection into an assembly-line job. As he rises in the company, his designs are thrown in jeopardy by the unwanted pregnancy of fellow factory-worker Alice, played by Shelley Winters for maximum faiblesse. Alice’s antithesis comes in the glittering form of Elizabeth Taylor—more than rising to the occasion of her first adult role—as Angela Vickers, a debutante who extends to George the compound allure of newfound wealth and unconditional love. Even after we witness George’s horrific solution to his predicament, it’s hard—impossible, really—not to share Angela’s burning infatuation: Clift’s unearthly gorgeousness radiates in every monumental closeup Stevens blesses us with, and the rapturous romantic scenes between him and Taylor make even the most sordid of crimes seem trivial. (On the strength of their chemistry alone, the film is legendary—it wouldn’t need to be half as great as it is to be one of the most iconic films of the 1950s). Though troubled by the growing distance and gnawing guilt she senses within George, Angela maintains her devotion, mirroring our own desire to exculpate, even to sanctify him. That’s precisely the nature of Clift’s beauty. As in both THE HEIRESS and I CONFESS, the dramatic crux here is whether or not the truth can remain suppressed behind the delicate lamina of Clift’s face. These three films are littered with scenes of interrogation, of cross-examination, of courtrooms and confessionals, their intensity escalating as a function of his paradoxically thin-skinned stoicism. Clift’s micro-expressive performance style and his slender frame, which rewrote the rules of screen masculinity, suggest a fragility wholly incommensurate with the weight of the secrets he guards. Regardless of his guilt or innocence, we want to shield him from the violence of the truth-seekers’ prying gaze, and yet fans, scholars, and armchair psychologists of Montgomery Clift have tried for decades to puncture that mystery. Invariably, the inscrutability of his desires solicits and inflames our own, until we want to punish him for it. Eisenstein imagined his AMERICAN TRAGEDY as a vehicle for “inner monologue,” a montage form that would penetrate inside the mind of the protagonist to capture the “inner debate behind the stony mask of the face.” That’s precisely what Stevens doesn’t do: the whole edifice of the film is constructed to avoid rupturing the ambiguity buried beneath George’s countenance. And that’s what makes the film such an object lesson in the hard limits of Hollywood anti-capitalism: within the studio system, our desire for justice pales in the luster of intoxicating illusion, the naked violence of class divisions is enshrouded by the promise of a love beyond the shadow of the law. I can’t help but think that this explains why the courtroom scenes in A PLACE IN THE SUN’s third act rank as some of the cinema’s most ludicrous. Clift’s sublime fathomlessness defies all judgment, his immaculate moral ambivalence makes a farce of the very concepts of guilt or innocence. Recalling another absurd courtroom drama, the glamorous rot of A PLACE IN THE SUN does illuminate one thing, which holds both for our conflicted attempt to understand Montgomery Clift and for Stevens’ conflicted attempt to challenge the mores of American society: we can’t handle the truth. Screening as part of the Liz & Monty Matinees series. (1951, 122 min, 35mm) [Michael Metzger]

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René Laloux's FANTASTIC PLANET (France/Animation)

Music Box Theatre – Saturday, Midnight

In this Dali-esque animation, based on the Cold War-era novel Oms en Serie (1957) by Stefan Wul, the earth is ruled by the "Draags," a giant race of blue neutered technocrats with a passion for meditation. Domestic humans known as "Oms" are the "little animals you stroke between meditations" while wild humans/Oms are hunted like cockroaches. The surreal and perilous world of FANTASTIC PLANET (originally LA PLANETE SAUVAGE) is rendered in beautiful (very '70s) cut-out stop motion. Highlights include a glow-orgy induced by an aphrodisiac communion wafer and a cackling anthropomorphized Venus flytrap. The soundtrack is a near-constant synth jam that oscillates from moody and spacey to raunchy porn funk. The film was begun in Czechoslovakia but finished in France for political reasons, and the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union looms over the story. Themes of repression, rebellion, and the dangers of technocracy permeate FANTASTIC PLANET. The film seems to suggest that excessive rationality can make the ruling class blind to its cruelty, but also that solidarity can flourish in the midst of persecution and degradation. Arrive early for a Drink and Draw and create your own Fantastic Planet in the Music Box Lounge between 9:30pm - 11:30pm. (1973, 72 min, 35mm) [Mojo Lorwin]

Nicholas Ray's JOHNNY GUITAR (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Thursday, 5pm

The western is an odd beast, a genre bound only by location, easily shaped into something as desolate or as crowded, as stark or vivid, as is required. They come more varied than science fiction films, expanding the West into something more complex than outer space, and creating dozens of different landscapes out of the same mold—Anthony Mann's West, John Ford's West, Budd Boetticher's West. Nicholas Ray's West, at least as created in JOHNNY GUITAR, is one of the most bizarrely beautiful. From Peggy Lee's desperate title song and Victor Young's score, hanging over the film like a sympathetic vulture, to the unearthly two-strip Trucolor, which seems to bind the film's characters into their environment as if they're bleeding into one another, it's Ray's most aesthetic film. But it's every bit as personal as IN A LONELY PLACE or WE CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN. Joan Crawford and Sterling Hayden don't seem fit for the west, and the same could be said of their gender roles, but it's their complete discomfort that gives the film its tense and uneasy beauty. Ray has a knack for finding poetry where others would surely fumble, and here he's at his most poetic. Screening as part of the Nicholas Ray’s Heyday Series. (1954, 110 min, DCP Digital) [Julian Antos]

Yasujiro Ozu's AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON (Japan)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 12pm

The Japanese title of Yasujiro Ozu’s last film translates as “Taste of Mackerel,” so you can understand why it was renamed AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON for western audiences. An invocation of fall seems befitting for a final work, particularly one about a 60-ish gentleman taking stock of his life to date and preparing for his last decades on earth. Yet the original title is no less appropriate for Ozu, one of the greatest chroniclers of everyday life in cinema. In his untouchable postwar masterpieces, the writer-director constructed stories around quotidian sensations and routines, finding beauty in experiences most of us take for granted. So it goes with AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON, which reaches its poignant insights about aging, disappointment, and loss through observations of the protagonist (played by Ozu’s favorite actor, Chishu Ryu) as he goes to his white-collar job, meets his buddies for drinks after work, and dines at home with his grown children. The film also considers Ryu’s character’s mission to find a husband for his daughter before she becomes an old maid, but this never assumes the urgency that Ozu brought to a similar search in LATE SPRING (1949). Rather, one comes to sense—through a characteristically subtle network of allusions and behavioral cues—that most of the major events in this character’s life have already taken place, namely his military service, his experience of raising children, and the death of his wife. The pervasive feeling of important events having already happened makes AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON one of Ozu’s most melancholy films; and in one critical scene, when Ryu encounters a man who’d served under him in the war (and who still experiences nostalgia for the Japanese military), that sense of melancholy takes on national proportions. The theme of defeat becomes obvious only in hindsight, however, as the movie is by and large a cheerful one. Building on the pleasant comedy of their recent GOOD MORNING (1959), Ozu and his longtime cowriter Kogo Noda fill AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON with humorous scenarios and charming character portraits. A key subplot involves Ryu and his friends catching up with their old middle-school teacher and discovering that he loves nothing more than getting blissed-out drunk; one motif involves the drinking buddies playing practical jokes on the barmaid at their favorite watering hole; and one of Ryu’s grown sons begins to sulk like the little boys of GOOD MORNING when his wife won’t let him buy new golf clubs. Such details contribute to a sweet (or, better, mackerel-flavored) appreciation of the day-to-day in which every encounter provides something to savor. Screening as part of the Last Shot series. (1962, 113 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Bob Fosse's CABARET (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 8pm

CABARET starts off with a bang—it’s got one of the best opening sequences in the New Hollywood canon. Bob Fosse synthesizes a stunning range of influences: the ironic, modernist songs of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht; the circus-like atmospherics of Federico Fellini; the immersive camerawork and editing of direct-cinema documentaries (Fosse conveys the high of performing like few other directors); and the richly detailed yet subtly melancholy depiction of a past era that one finds in Bernardo Bertolucci’s THE CONFORMIST and in Luchino Visconti’s films from THE LEOPARD on. And all this in the service of reviving the Hollywood musical, one of the great popular genres. Fosse’s choreography is astonishing in its forthright eroticism; the dance numbers draw out the film’s themes of sexual liberation and exploitation in a way the conversations can only suggest. The subsequent musical numbers sustain the energy of the introductory number, and they comment on the drama in a Greek chorus-like fashion. The story follows the relationship between Brian (Michael York), a closeted gay British writer who’s moved to Berlin in 1931, and Sally (Liza Minnelli), an American expat who performs at a burlesque club. They fall in love, but the relationship, like the liberated Weimar era, can’t last. Brian says can’t adjust to Sally’s libertine ways, but really he can’t respect her for the moral compromises she makes for show business. It’s still remarkable that a serious, two-hour consideration of sexual revolution under the Weimar Republic could get released with a PG rating. I wonder how many kids learned about threesomes, cross dressing, and queer-positive attitudes from CABARET. The film won eight Academy Awards, including Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Cinematography (for Geoffrey Unsworth, who also shot 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and Polanski’s TESS). Screening as part of the Last Shot series. (1972, 124 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Jim Abrahams, David Zucker & Jerry Zucker’s TOP SECRET! (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Sunday, 12pm

TOP SECRET! stands tall among movie spoofs because its narrative logic is as clever as any of the gags. It isn’t just a send-up of spy movies (as the purposely generic title promises), but also Elvis movies, prison escape movies, THE BLUE LAGOON (1980), and films about the French resistance, and a lot of the fun comes from seeing which title or genre is coming up next for parody. In his screen debut, Val Kilmer plays an Elvis-like singing sensation who falls, Hitchcock-style, into an espionage plot in East Germany that culminates in rescuing a scientist who’s being held captive by the state. The plot is essentially a framework for a smorgasbord of visual, verbal, and even sonic jokes that play out so rapidly that it doesn’t matter if some of them aren’t funny. Paul Thomas Anderson cited the film as an influence on INHERENT VICE (2014), noting how he drew from the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team’s tendency to stage gags in the margins or background of shots; others have likened the frames to MAD Magazine panels come to life. At its best, TOP SECRET! feels like the lowbrow equivalent of Jacques Tati’s PLAYTIME (1967) in that the filmmakers use every inch of the shot to advance their comic vision; just like Tati’s masterpiece took place in a dream city that could only exist in the movies, so too does TOP SECRET!, with its dreamlike flow between genres, conjure up a wholly cinematic space. Some of the gags might be described as more ambitious than funny, like the scene that was shot backwards or the underwater barroom fight at the movie’s climax, yet these retain the ingratiating, vaudeville-style showmanship that motors the whole thing. Screening as part of the Alamo Time Capsule 1984 series. (1984, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Billy Wilder's SUNSET BOULEVARD (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 6pm

Drenched in cynicism, Billy Wilder's SUNSET BOULEVARD ranks up there with Robert Altman's THE PLAYER and David Lynch's MULHOLLAND DR. as one of the best critiques of Hollywood's toxic narcissism and cruelty. The last collaboration between Wilder and screenwriter Charles Brackett, SUNSET BOULEVARD centers on Norma Desmond (played with maniacal intensity by Gloria Swanson), a forgotten silent star who spends her days cooped up in her gothic tomb/mansion, obsessing over her glory days and penning the script which will launch her revival. By chance she encounters Joe Gillis, a down on his luck screenwriter. Their working relationship mutates into a strange sexual dynamic, with Gillis eager to escape; however, he ultimately finds himself contaminated by the greed and disillusionment of Hollywood. Wilder enlisted the help of master cinematographer John F. Seitz, who also photographed DOUBLE INDEMNITY, to lend the film a chiaroscuro, noir-ish look. This is notable during one of the film's most memorable scenes, in which an entranced Desmond watches her celluloid self on the movie screen, the light from the projector flickering over her face creating a kind of literal fusion of reality and fantasy. Look for a cameo from silent film icon Buster Keaton (referred to by Gillis as a "waxwork"), as well as Cecil B. DeMille playing himself. Screening as part of the Last Shot series. (1950, 110 min, 35mm) [Harrison Sherrod]

Claire Denis' BEAU TRAVAIL (France)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 8:15pm

Claire Denis's BEAU TRAVAIL is a film of sweltering, oppressive heat; a sun-drenched rendering of Melville's BILLY BUDD that unfurls across the deserts of Djibouti, where a troop of French legionnaires perform a dance of drills and exercises as daily ritual. The men are soldiers, athletes, and the embodiment of physical perfection, and Denis venerates their physique with framing that recalls Leni Riefenstahl's ode to human beauty, OLYMPIA. Day in and day out, they adhere to a strictly choreographed routine, their mechanized motions made downright hypnotic by the operatic overtones of Benjamin Britten. At the center of this tightly wound fever dream is Sergeant Galoup (Denis Lavant), whose own unflappable façade begins to crack upon the arrival of a new legionnaire, whose inherent beauty and goodness marks him as an object of obsession. It's here that the film's stifling (yet eloquent) discipline begins to clash with deeply repressed desire, and Galoup sets events in motion that will bring about his own undoing. Most notable is the unshakable denouement, where one tragic soldier at the end of his rope at last finds his ideal form of expression. Suddenly, Galoup is dancing a very different dance, and as the periodic flashes of local nightlife foreshadow, salvation may just lie in the universal escape of pop music. Screening as part of the Last Shot series. (1999, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Tristan Johnson]

M. Woods' COMMODITY TRADING: DIES IRAE (US/Experimental)

Comfort Film at Comfort Station – Wednesday, 8pm

If "Dies irae" in the title of M. Woods's fourth experimental feature COMMODITY TRADING: DIES IRAE refers to the medieval Latin poem "The Day of Wrath" that describes the Last Judgement, in this film, any sense of grandeur of such an apocalyptic event is collapsing into a state of zombie consumption and hurtful pleasure-seeking—capitalism in a nutshell. COMMODITY TRADING is a strange autofictional thriller that loosely interweaves the hypnotic journeys of two protagonists, M. Woods and Joshua, attempting to enter what is called "The Numb Spiral" through different entry points as they are haunted by Trump's America. The Numb Spiral, which in the film is neither heaven nor hell but what akin to a virtual insatiable void that devours authentic experience and meaning—a nauseous simulacrum, if you will, is also representative of M. Woods's painful research into our contemporary sub-human existence twisted and twirled by capitalism, corporate superpowers, socio-political atrocities, overflown information, internet intimacy, and surveillance. M. Woods calls their work "media drugs," which is hardly an exaggeration given the amount of extremely psychedelic images and hallucinatory scenes there are to ingest from this film. The apt use of a GoPro camera's wide lens makes mundane life bulge with surrealness. Meshing togethers analog photography, screen recordings of FPS games, TV news, and some years of footage recorded on various mediums that have then gone through some outrageous editing, COMMODITY TRADING is political, personal, visceral, almost gory. Disturbing? Maybe, but you see, you sometimes learn more from a bad trip. Followed by a post-screening Q&A. (2024, 80 min, Digital Projection) [Nicky Ni]

Justine Triet's SIBYL (France)

Cinema/Chicago at the Chicago Cultural Center – Wednesday, 6:30pm [Free Admission]

SIBYL is going to infuriate viewers who go to films to gain insight into the reasoning behind people’s behavior, and delight viewers who get off on puzzling out the logic that guides the construction of a work of art. The interplay between these two processes—the bad judgment that promises to tear lives and careers apart, the erratic impulses that improbably guide artists towards successful creation—is vividly, even ludicrously dramatized in Justine Triet’s film, which follows an established psychotherapist, Sibyl (Virginie Efira), as she abandons her practice to return to creative writing. Unable to extricate herself from Margot (Adèle Exarchopoulos), one of her needier clients, Sibyl begins surreptitiously recording their sessions, drawing on her patient’s drama for her own writing. Triet’s go-for-baroque plotting finds room to explore her heroine’s fraught relationships with her underemployed sister, AA group, son, partner, her other patients, and her own therapist, while multiple flashbacks peer into Sibyl’s reawakened memories of a passionate love affair gone sour. And that’s before things go fully meta, as Margot’s crisis—she’s an actress, pregnant from an affair with her co-star, and unable to decide whether to keep or terminate the pregnancy—gradually ensnares Sibyl as well. Once the therapist is called to help her patient make it through a tense film shoot on—get this—the volcanic island of Stromboli, the film’s lower-key comic elements erupt, thanks especially to the welcome midway addition of TONI ERDMANN’s Sandra Hüller as the disconcertingly pragmatic film director whose partner has been fooling around with Margot. The willful improbability of the second act will throw viewers for a loop, but it’s entirely in keeping with a film about the pleasures of breaking rules and taking license as a woman and as an artist. In this, I was reminded of two other recent films which contemplate female empowerment by dramatizing the pitfalls of the creative process, Greta Gerwig’s LITTLE WOMEN and Céline Sciamma’s PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN ON FIRE; like those films, SIBYL proposes that the social boundaries of acceptable behavior for women are inextricably linked to the boundaries of how art should or shouldn’t be composed. In all three films, narrative unfolds towards the fulfillment of creative desire, defiantly leaving a trail of broken rules behind—SIBYL just breaks more than the rest. Screening as part of Cinema/Chicago’s Summer Screenings series. (2019, 100 min, Digital Projection) [Michael Metzger]

Neil Jordan’s THE COMPANY OF WOLVES (UK)

Alamo Drafthouse – Friday, 9:30pm

THE COMPANY OF WOLVES feels very much in line with the numerous dark fantasy films released in the 80s, though it doesn’t have the nostalgic staying power of something like LABYRINTH (1986) or even LEGEND (1985). Perhaps it’s because Neil Jordan’s take on Little Red Riding Hood via werewolves is darker than most; it focuses on the complexity of girls coming of age as they grapple with their sexuality and desires and how often manipulative and abusive men threaten that autonomy. It’s heavy stuff but presented in such visual lushness—nestled within a layered story structure. Initially set in the present day, it shows young Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson) falling asleep and dreaming she resides in a 19th-century fairytale with her parents (David Warner and Tusse Silberg) and sister Alice (Georgia Slowe). After Alice is killed in the woods by a pack of wolves, Rosaleen goes to stay with her Granny (Angela Lansbury). The rest of the film unravels in a series of stories: ones that Granny tells Rosaleen and ones that Rosaleen herself tells after leaving the safety of Granny’s house. The stories all involve wolves and tales of warnings about strangers; Rosaleen, however, begins to shift the narrative with her stories, becoming more and more empowered. THE COMPANY OF WOLVES is a wildly dreamy film, as stories weave in and out of stories; this is best perhaps visualized in the fantastical early sequence transitioning into Rosaleen’s dream, where Alice running through a cobwebbed covered forest filled with oversized childhood toys before wolves run her down. It’s also an unsettling film, with grotesquely affective special effects—the practical werewolf transformations are riveting. THE COMPANY OF WOLVES’ otherworldly qualities are somehow grounded by its complex themes, as it surreally, and uniquely, examines the everyday implications of this well-trodden fairytale. Screening as part of the Alamo Time Capsule 1984 series. (1984, 95 min, Digital Projection) [Megan Fariello]

John Cassavetes' LOVE STREAMS (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Saturday, 3pm

John Cassavetes' final film, LOVE STREAMS, is his most fully realized in its portrayal of the fallacy of human connection. Working in front of the camera for the last time, Cassavetes stars opposite his wife Gena Rowlands—a fitting public bow for their long collaboration. They play Robert and Sarah, a dysfunctional brother and sister—he's never learned to love and she loves too much—who lean on each other as their lives fall apart. LOVE STREAMS lacks anything that could be called exposition despite the heaviest use of non-diegetic music and the only use of dream sequences in any of Cassavetes' work. We are dropped into the lives of an aging, drunk, womanizing, and wealthy writer and his clinically depressed, soon-to-be divorced sister, initially by following them separately on parallel paths and downward trajectories. Each sibling has a child that they make genuine but clumsy attempts to bond with, but ultimately they prove unfit as parents. Sarah shows up on Robert's doorstep just as he's taking the 8-year-old son he's never met before on a weekend bender to Las Vegas. When he returns without his son, Cassavetes and Rowlands are left to act out the end of this tragedy. The story is somewhat secondary here, as the film functions as a recap of Cassavetes' previous directorial themes. Cassavetes' lonely artist is colored by his own tinge of personal regret (he had already been diagnosed with the liver cirrhosis that would kill him five years later). His sister, on the other hand, echoes the absurdist antics that Cassavetes was known for as a younger man, going further and further to keep everything cheery in the face of her own depression. Rowlands continually makes us forget her character's mental instability only to unleash it again like a tantrum. As his life was coming to a close, Cassavetes seemed willing to yield a little of his standard formal difficulty in order to be understood more clearly. What he would not yield, though, was an insistence that Hollywood sold the public a false bill of goods regarding love and marriage. It is through understanding the pain of life that Cassavetes depicts on the screen that we gain greater appreciation for the joys of our own lives off it, not the other way around. Screening as part of the Alamo Time Capsule 1984 series. (1984, 141 min, Digital Projection) [Jason Halprin]

Brian De Palma's BODY DOUBLE (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Wednesday, 7pm

The 80s were a heady time: Apple released the Macintosh, Eli Lilly brought you Prozac, and Brian De Palma was constantly inventing new and exciting ways to fail the Bechdel test. BODY DOUBLE (1984) had the unenviable task of following up the director's DRESSED TO KILL (1980), BLOW OUT (1981), and SCARFACE (1983). Say what you will about those films--I think the horse is still breathing--but in the waning days of New Hollywood they occupied a certain place in its pantheon. Caine, Travolta, Pacino. Add to that mononymous list: Wasson. "Nobody's perfect" is the De Palma mantra though, and BODY DOUBLE manages to transcend its flaws en route to realizing its unique vision of Reagan-era Los Angeles. Craig Wasson plays Jake Scully, underemployed actor and amateur claustrophobic. When we meet Scully he's just suffered a series of unfortunate setbacks: he has a fit on the job, he catches his wife cheating on him, and is thus booted from their home. Temporarily adrift, an acting acquaintance offers him a plush housesitting gig high, high in the Hollywood Hills. From this lofty vantage point Scully makes a habit of spying on exhibitionist neighbor, Gloria, and under the flimsy pretense of chivalry the practice eventually evolves into outright stalking. No points for catching the Hitchcock nods; De Palma's allusions to (or outright theft of) works like REAR WINDOW and VERTIGO are so overt as to signal jumping off points rather than ends in themselves. In a surreal segue toward the end of the film, a lip-synching Holly Johnson of the band Frankie Goes to Hollywood leads Scully, suddenly decked out in thick-rimmed glasses and argyle, onto a porno set to the tune of "Relax." The sequence functions as a movie-within-a-movie; it's De Palma's "Broadway Melody Ballet," if you will, except Gene Kelly didn't find Cyd Charisse behind a door labeled 'SLUTS.' The "Relax" scene marks a tonal crossroads in BODY DOUBLE. Soon after, the proceedings begin to accelerate at an almost nightmarish rate and the tightly plotted thriller De Palma fashioned in the film's first half starts to unravel as the limits of internal plausibility are pushed to the extreme. If you're on De Palma's wavelength though it's a worthy tradeoff, as tension gives way to near mania. When the film was released, Roger Ebert characterized BODY DOUBLE as having De Palma's "most airtight plot" yet—an assertion it's hard to imagine Ebert leveling without cracking a slight smile. The virtue and, dare I say, greatness of BODY DOUBLE come not from bulletproof narrative or even rudimentary character development, but instead from a messier place. De Palma synthesizes a multitude of disparate references into a scathing critique of nice-guy chauvinism, critical Puritanism, and countless other -isms, all under the guise of mindless genre fare. Screening as part of the Alamo Time Capsule 1984 series. (1984, 114 min, Digital Projection) [James Stroble]

Agnieszka Holland’s GREEN BORDER (Poland)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Wednesday, 7pm
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

To say that one can’t see the forest for the trees is to suggest that they’re too focused on the details, unable to see the bigger picture in question. Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland’s latest does the opposite, positioning Europe’s refugee crisis as the forest and those suffering through it as the trees, prioritizing them rather than the macro-level issue of immigration that can sometimes obfuscate the faces of those involved. This inverted metaphor is echoed in the beginning of GREEN BORDER, as an audacious tracking shot glides over the tops of trees, their near-gothic verdancy both ravishing and prescient; much of the film takes place in the forest, its sprawling landscape an innocent cover for the specific tragedies it conceals. As the title appears on screen, the image turns to black-and-white and stays that way for the rest of the film. Holland has said she made this aesthetic choice to give the film a timeless quality, perhaps a knowing reference toward the cyclical nature of history, which Holland, whose oeuvre is defined by films addressing critical junctures in the 20th (and now 21st) century, such as the Holocaust, that risk repetition should they remain only broad subjects, all too easily brushed off by the ignorant and impressionable alike and therefore not acknowledged for their devastating nuance. Written by Holland, Maciej Pisuk and Gabriela Łazarkiewicz-Sieczko, the film is divided into three parts. The first centers on a Syrian family and Afghan teacher flying to Belarus at the behest of Belarus’ president, Aleksandr Lukashenko, who promoted the Belarus-Polish border as a way for refugees to enter the EU in order to flood the countries with immigrants and simultaneously undermine their purportedly humanistic views and stoke right-wing aggression. (Holland faced much backlash and even censorship, with the country’s interior minister requiring theaters showing the film to screen a government-produced video beforehand that challenges the film’s portrayal of events.) These characters are initially strangers but later band together, as they enter the EU via Poland in hopes of obtaining asylum. The frustrated game of ping-pong played by the two governments, in which Polish border guards force the refugees back into Belarus, continuing to do so as they attempt over and over again to get into Poland, accounts for much of the film; Holland highlights through this dilemma the Kafkaesque nature of asylum-seeking. The second section focuses on the border guards, one in particular, though the previous characters’ stories continue even as the film shifts its attention to this other facet of the refugee paradigm. The border guard contends with the reality of his job, eventually, it would seem, coming to gain more empathy toward refugees, whom he sees being treated badly by his colleagues firsthand and whose experiences he knows to be brutal. It’s cliché to explore the notion that there are good people in the world and that sometimes minds can be changed, but Holland does so in such a forthright way as to make it seem undeniable, a pearl of truth in a sea of misery. The third section follows a widowed psychologist who’s pulled into the fray after she attempts to help some refugees in the woods behind her house, witnessing one die in the process. This radicalizes her, and she subsequently becomes an activist, taking a more hands-on approach than some of those she works with. Holland’s epic approach to the subject covers many of the experiences of and attitudes toward refugees, and as such doesn’t necessarily conclude in a pat fashion, though there’s both a hint of optimism and unequivocal admonishment, the latter by way of an epilogue that shows border police welcoming Ukrainian refugees with none of the vitriol they showed those coming from the Middle East and Africa. It’s not a concise text by any means—its running time is a solid two-and-a-half hours—yet somehow Holland manages to distill both a perennial and timely issue (here in the United States as well, obviously), that of people seeking refuge from persecution, into a precise narrative that conveys the indisputable facets of goodness and the complicated nuances of reality. Screening as part of the Agnieszka Holland's Poland series at Doc Films. (2023, 152 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Annie Baker’s JANET PLANET (US/UK)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Annie Baker understands the power of silence, and all it contains. As one of the most prolific and lauded playwrights of the 21st century, her onstage worlds have navigated back alleys, writer’s rooms, and, yes, movie theaters to discover the volume that exists in between the devastating sentences we utter into the universe. In her seamless shift into the world of filmmaking as writer and director of JANET PLANET, Baker brings those silences with her, alongside her accomplished brand of understated maximalism—characters whose outer shell of mundanity plants the seeds for inner truths that yearn to blossom—while taking advantage of the expanse of realism that can be fully accomplished on the big screen. In propelling her artistry forward, Baker looks backward to the early 1990s, when the young Lacy (a one-of-a-kind Zoe Ziegler) spends the late summer months with her mother, the eponymous Janet (Julianne Nicholson, fitting eerily well into the Annie Baker oeuvre) in the rural woods of Massachusetts. Lacy views Janet not just as mother but as lifelong companion, eternal caregiver, all-seeing, all-knowing deity of the universe. "Janet Planet" is the name of Janet’s home acupuncture clinic, but more thematically sums up how Lacy sees her; a world in and of herself, an entire celestial body that all else revolves around. Indeed, the film unravels episodically based around the various friends, lovers, and guides who enter and exit Janet’s life, themselves floating bodies of matter that enter Janet’s orbit but find themselves floating away after such little time. Lacy and Janet have a bounty of meaningful conversations throughout Baker’s extraordinary debut feature, but it’s really in those moments of silence where the inner workings of these two burst off the screen, as the torrid summer days transition into cool autumn nights, and Lacy, without uttering a word, finally realizes that her mother is not a planet, but is something even more mysterious; a person, just like her. (2024, 110 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Josh Margolin’s THELMA (US)

Music Box Theatre – Friday, 1pm and Saturday, 11:15am

Some say that age is just a number. While it’s true that old people can have young attitudes (and vice versa), nobody ages without experiencing functional decline. Take Thelma Post (a feisty June Squibb), the title character of actor Josh Margolin’s directorial debut. Thelma is 93 years old, lives alone in the house she shared with her husband until he died two years earlier, and is first seen exploring the wonders of the internet after a tutorial from her 24-year-old grandson, Daniel (Fred Hechinger). Thelma is determined to be as active and up-to-date as possible, but her judgment fails her when a scammer cheats her out of $10,000 by pretending to be Daniel calling to get bail money after getting into a car accident involving a pregnant woman. With law enforcement unable to help her, she decides to get her money back herself with the assistance of Ben (Richard Roundtree), a friend with a two-seat electric scooter she needs to get around. I admit I approached this film with some trepidation. Comedies centered on old people typically like to make fun of the infirmities and perceived randiness of people who presumably can’t have sex anymore. However, THELMA surprised me by looking at the elderly without ridiculing or pathologizing them. The comedy is gentle, but the reality that most of Thelma’s friends are dead and that Ben moved to assisted living because he couldn’t hear his wife fall down their staircase and die is sobering. Hechinger is very engaging as her loving grandson who can’t seem to get his life in gear; his interactions with Squibb are among the best in the film. Parker Posey provided me with most of the laughs as Daniel’s mother, swinging from California correct to hectoring spouse of emotionally vague Clark Gregg. A short scene in which Bunny Levine plays Thelma’s homebound friend Mona is brilliantly played and incredibly sad, as we see the disorder of Mona’s roach-infested home and the effects of memory loss on her ability to interact with the world. Staring down old age is no picnic, but Margolin provides a wonderful grace note at the very end of the film. The dialogue Squibb utters as she and Daniel drive away from a cemetery comes word for word from Margolin’s grandmother, seen in a video before the closing credits remarking on the resilience of the trees she sees. This film is a cleverly constructed act of love I’m happy to have seen. (2024, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

🎞️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Alliance Française de Chicago (810 N. Dearborn St.)
Virginie Verrier’s 2023 French film MARINETTE (96 min, Digital Projection) screens Thursday, 6:30pm, as part of the French Women Filmmakers series. Includes a complimentary glass of Bourgogne Louis Jadot and a post-screening discussion with Nick Davis, Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at Northwestern University. More info here.

⚫ Chicago Film Archives
The Chicago Transit Authority, in partnership with 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.

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Alfred E. Green's 1931 film SMART MONEY (81 min, 35mm) screens Friday, 5pm, as part of the Public Enemy: Cagney on Film series, and Henry Koster's 1950 film HARVEY (104 min, DCP Digital) screens at 8pm. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ FACETS Cinema
La Gialloholique presents a Modern Horror Retro Vibes all-day double feature of Ti West’s PEARL (2022, 102 min) and X (2022, 105 min) on Friday starting at noon.

Premieres of Park Jung-woo’s DERANGE and NEVER STOP TALKING take place on Saturday starting at 6pm. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Ariane Louis-Seize’s 2024 Canadian film HUMANIST VAMPIRE SEEKING CONSENTING SUICIDAL PERSON (92 min, DCP Digital) begins screening this week.

Mystery Movie Monday takes place Monday at 6pm. More info on all screenings here. 

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Ti West’s MAXXXINE (101 min, 35mm) begins and Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2024 film KINDS OF KINDNESS (165 min, DCP Digital) continues screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

Tommy Wiseau’s 2004 cult classic THE ROOM (99 min, 35mm) screens Friday at midnight. More info on all screenings here. 

⚫ Sweet Void Cinema (3036 W. Chicago Ave.)
The first public screening of Shi Jian and Chen Jue’s 1991 eight-part (and eight-hour) documentary TIANANMEN (Digital Projection) takes place Sunday beginning at 1pm, with an introduction by critic and programmer Sam C. Mac. More info here. 

Find more information on the Humboldt Park microcinema, including its larger screening and workshop schedule, here.

🎞️ ONLINE SCREENINGS/EVENTS

⚫ VDB TV
Saif Alsaegh: Bittersweet Landscape, a program of three short films by Alsaegh, screens for free on VDB TV. More info here.

CINE-LIST: July 5 - July 11, 2024

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Julian Antos, Kian Bergstrom, Michael Castelle, Maxwell Courtright, Ray Ebarb, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jason Halprin, Tristan Johnson, Ben Kaye, Mojo Lorwin, Michael Metzger, Nicky Ni, Harrison Sherrod, James Stroble