:: FRIDAY, JULY 26 - THURSDAY, AUGUST 1 ::

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Haskell Wexler's MEDIUM COOL (US)

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

How many times have you gone somewhere expecting a massive riot? And if you did go, did you also expect to come away with cinematic gold? That's pretty much what Chicago native Haskell Wexler did in 1968 when he decided to shoot footage of protesters outside the Democratic National Convention. Already an Oscar-winning cinematographer for his work on WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?, he set a fictional film about the ethics of a TV news cameraman amidst the actual chaos in the city. In MEDIUM COOL he used what was essentially a documentary crew (operating the camera himself), and had the actors intermingle with real protesters and police as all hell broke loose in Chicago. Other documentary footage was repurposed and additional narrative scenes were shot to fill in the gaps of the superficial plot, and Wexler used these elements to walk the line between fact and fiction while addressing the political climate of the times. Perhaps more than any other filmmaker, Wexler is responsible for the shooting style used in films by directors like John Cassavetes, John Sayles, and Kelly Reichardt, who all seem to have taken his advice: “If your film can reflect areas of life where people feel passion, then it will have genuine drama.” Preceded by the Film Group's 1969 short film THE PEOPLE'S RIGHT TO KNOW: POLICE VS. REPORTERS (14 min, 16mm). (1969, 111 min, 35mm) [Jason Halprin]

Nicholas Ray's BIGGER THAN LIFE (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 8pm and Saturday, 7pm

While Douglas Sirk was busy picking at the veneer of 1950s American society—finding trouble in paradise via his biting melodramas and his darkening of Rock Hudson’s romantic image—Nicholas Ray attacked the decade’s complacency and social ills more directly. BIGGER THAN LIFE feels like it should be included among the mad rush of anxiety-ridden science fiction films of the time. Just as overblown and beautiful as Ray’s perverse western JOHNNY GUITAR, BIGGER THAN LIFE is its own kind of perversion—it’s what would happen if The Dick Van Dyke Show had been left to rot. James Mason plays an overworked schoolteacher on his way from nausea to Middle American insanity. Given an experimental drug intended to cure his irregular blackouts, Mason's Middle American mores are set on overdrive (mass consumerism, wife hating, and hyper-enthusiasm for sports). This was Ray's third film shot in 'Scope and it's here that he masters the art of telling two stories at once. The film's characters and its contrived society close in and give way at the same time, balancing a world of cartoons with a world of people, and emulating the dizzy feelings of its leading man. Screening as part of Nicholas Ray’s Heyday series. (1956, 96 min, 35mm) [Julian Antos]

Orson Welles' CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (Switzerland/Spain)

FACETS Cinema – Friday, 7pm

A thoroughly thrilling experience, inspiring on every conceivable level, and one of the saddest films ever made. Orson Welles made a life-long study of Shakespeare, adapting him on stage many times and making, in MACBETH and OTHELLO, two of his best movies. As a very young man, he attempted a mammoth adaptation he called Five Kings, combining scenes from the eight history plays revolving around the War of the Roses and The Merry Wives of Windsor, a project that here, transformed from a youth's ambition to a mature artist's melancholy, forms the seed for CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, a sprawling, strange, and deeply big-hearted melodrama of love and death, honor and betrayal, cowardice and duty, profligacy and desperation. In his films he has always demonstrated a fascination with texture, with visual patterning, with the complex choreographies of incoherent human figures made possible through spaces of grotesque and labyrinthine depth. This is nowhere more apparent than here. In a series of grand kinetic dances, Welles arranges haunting specters of death, swirling amongst and engulfing the lusty, hot-blooded, and imminently life-loving commoners and nobles that populate Shakespeare's version of history. There is no-one so ignoble not to deserve the adoration of Welles's camera, or the dignity of Welles's staging. As Hal, the wastrel son of the usurper King Henry IV, Keith Baxter deserves particular note: he is as affectionate and as cruel as can be borne by one mere character, and his masterful portrayal of Hal's contradictions mirror the contradictions at the heart of the film. No one for more than a moment here is what he or she seems, no space is wholly trustworthy, and no plot truly secret, for the most serious of all games, and the most pleasurable, is that which is played with one's own life as the stake and with no hope of surviving to collect the winnings save in the songs of our loved ones. In short, this film is magic itself, a celebration of cinema as the grandest of tricks, that which alone can transform the past into the present as palpable as memory and the whole of the material world into the effervescence of poetry. The greatest film by the greatest director. Preceded by a pre-show cocktail party featuring Sack, the Portuguese sherry wine favored by Falstaff, and an introduction from Jonathan Rosenbaum. Followed by a post-screening Q&A with Rosenbaum and film restorer Michael Dawson. (1966, 119 min, New 6K DCP Digital Restoration) [Kian Bergstrom]

Ann Hui's JULY RHAPSODY (Hong Kong)

Alamo Drafthouse –​ Tuesday, 6:30pm

There are two recurring images, those of an expensive sailboat idly drifting in sun-dappled harbor water as well as of Hong Kong's aptly named flame trees (Delonix regia) in vibrant crimson seasonal bloom, that lend a poetic charge to Ann Hui's JULY RHAPSODY, the story of Lam Yiu-Kwok (Jacky Cheung), a stoic high school literature teacher who, in a moment of all-encompassing doubt regarding his stalled career and strained family life, embarks on a sordid love affair with one of his students. While the ship at rest evokes the comfortable stasis of middle-age, it also pointedly represents a life that has eluded Lam, a humble salaryman at a mid-tier school who is repeatedly shown to have been left in the dust by childhood friends who have made names for themselves in business and finance. The red flowers, while providing a visual analogue to a certain brightly colored and plot-relevant hair tie, principally gesture towards a universalization of Lam's plight. Their primacy suggests that his moment of crisis and eruption of passion are merely a part of a season of his life, and it foreshadows that much of the film will concern the reemergence of resentments and family secrets that account for his lackluster career and have eroded the foundation of his marriage for years. Ivy Ho's screenplay is melodramatic to the extreme, and the film would be in danger of feeling like a soap opera were it not for the nuanced performances from Cantopop luminaries Jacky Cheung and Anita Mui (in her final role prior to her death) as well as Ann Hui's extraordinarily sensitive direction, which finds its most lyrical expression in scenes of tense domestic life. JULY RHAPSODY emerges as a quintessential turn-of-the-millennium picture, playfully integrating its depiction of midlife crisis into a broader exploration of generational transformation. The two parental leads upend the apartment hunting for a VHS tape to illustrate one of Lam's poetry lectures, only to be mocked by their children in short turn for not understanding the concept of a digital camera. On the subject of poetry, much of the film concerns Lam's dawning realization that the world has a waning interest in the traditional Chinese poetry that brings him closer to his wife and son and gives his life purpose. It is worth noting that the film, despite being heavily lauded in Hong Kong and India on its initial release, is currently receiving its first-ever (and very timely, at the end of July) North American release as a brand new 4kK restoration courtesy of Cheng Cheng Films. Noting that Ann Hui is a stylistic chameleon who has produced some thirty feature films over the course of her career, it is easy to ascribe her exclusion from the broader auteur conversation and marginalization relative to contemporaries like Wong Kar-wai or Fruit Chan to that uneasy marriage of intense prolificacy and genre agnosticism which would suggest—at least at face value—something of a director-for-hire sensibility. But in the wake of last week's Claire Denis restoration, an unveiling of an unsung and seldom-seen early triumph from one of our greatest directorial talents, I'm compelled to think about the abysmal stewardship and repertory oversight extended to the works of bold woman directors, particularly in the Asian canon. I wish you the best of luck finding a dignified way of watching early works from Naomi Kawase or Anocha Suwichakornpong or Sylvia Chang. Better to see this film late than never at all. (2002, 103 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [David Whitehouse]

Agnieszka Holland’s FEVER (Poland)

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

In late 1981, the Polish People's Republic instituted martial law, primarily to suppress political opposition in the form of the Solidarity Movement. The government was under pressure from the Soviet Union to maintain communist control; as a result, Agnieszka Holland’s FEVER was banned because of its portrayal of Soviet forces. But the film wasn’t set in the contemporary present. Holland’s controversial film, evocative of that which her mentor Andrzej Wajda was primarily concerned, is set between 1905 and 1907, during a period of revolution against the Russian Empire. Based on socialist writer Andrzej Strug’s 1910 novel The Story of a Bullet, Holland’s film is no concise overview of the historical moment in question. Rather, it looks at the idea of revolution and the dynamics at play within it. There is no main character, but a succession of characters, each one considered for their roles in the revolution and their attitudes toward it. One man is ruthless in his pursuit. Another, a woman in love with him, goes mad after he prevents her from sacrificing her life for the cause, less out of affection than disdain for her romantic ideals. Another character is a simple peasant, who learns the hard way that he shouldn’t have trusted others so easily. A recurring motif is the bomb that one of the characters retrieves at the beginning of the film; it goes from person to person, treated as a fetishized object among the revolutionaries, symbolizing more than just its ruinous power. Its eventual detonation is decidedly and, considering the tone of the film, duly anticlimactic. “I decided to make this film because, after the experience of Czechoslovakia [A reference to the long “Normalization” period following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, which also crushed a dissident movement –ed.], I was sensitive to the bitter experience of a revolution that was ‘sold out,’” Holland has said. “Otherwise, I would probably not have an interest in this subject.” She then expressed frustration that the film was being connected with the events of August 1980, when the Solidarity Movement began to take shape. “And this is irritating,” she continued. “One makes a film about something which is historically distant, and then one sees that this converges with something happening currently. Then one can realize how silly history is.” Screening as part of the Agnieszka Holland’s Poland series. (1981, 122 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Abel Ferrara’s MS. 45 (US) and Jack Hill’s COFFY (US)

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

On the heels of screening at Anthology Film Archives’ Zoë Lund retrospective this month, MS. 45 (1981, 80 min, 35mm) presents the enigmatic actress, musician, writer, and activist in her earliest and most iconic screen role, her first collaboration with BAD LIEUTENANT (1992) director Abel Ferrara. The titular character of MS. 45 is a mute New York City seamstress named Thana who turns ruthless feminist vigilante, armed with the .45 pistol of her brutal assailant, after she's sexually assaulted twice on a return home from work. With the murder of one of her attackers, Thana is abruptly launched into a rape and revenge thriller now considered to be a cult classic and among the most influential of its kind on film. Gaining the full confidence of a righteous wrath on behalf of fellow women, Ms. 45’s identity is transformed from drab garment worker to achingly beautiful Angel of Vengeance (the film’s alternative title). This revenge journey quickly loses sight of any simple victim-perpetrator catharsis in favor of a nihilistic, flashback-fueled rampage against the abstract male predator, who in turn takes shape as a pimp, bar patron, sleazy photographer, businessman, and so on. Vampiric in her often-seductive encounters, Thana emanates a blank and insatiable rage with the clear implication that post-trauma atonement is forever out of the question. Ferrara’s plot simmers with a radicalization arc inspired by TAXI DRIVER (1976), wherein Ms. 45 gets her own wordless ‘You talkin’ to me?’ scene. She brandishes her gun with precision and applies her lipstick with the same exactitude only for it to become increasingly smeared across her visage when she descends into some kind of joker mode as the disruptive party guest in a stunning slow-motion finale. MS. 45 is a glamorously deranged, low-budget genre blend where grindhouse picks up the torch from its giallo counterparts in too-red gore, playful prog rock digressions, and even a punctuating invocation of witchery. Such iconography of female revenge only gets grittier with COFFY (1973, 91 min, DCP Digital)—​a perfect companion piece by all means—which casts a stunning and audacious Pam Grier as the titular Nurse “Coffy” Coffin, a working-class woman who turns femme fatale and vengeful infiltrator into both LA’s seedy underbelly and upper echelons when her sister is irrevocably compromised by drug dealers. It's no surprise that COFFY launched Grier as a mainstay of ’70s blaxploitation cinema, where she is notably considered the first Black woman action lead in film history. While MS. 45’s crime spree is uniquely unfettered by bustling policemen, detectives, or otherwise agents of the state, COFFY weaves a web of the protagonist’s strategic seductions, implicating a good guy cop and bad boy councilman as each try to make sense of the violent and clandestine wake of Coffy’s shotgun. Against an inventive acid-jazz soundtrack from Roy Ayers, the film is an absolute riot of bizarrely choreographed brawls that play out over surreally sparse sound (including a campy girl vs. girl sex worker smackdown involving a party size Caesar salad and a domino effect of ripped dress nip-slips, of which the film has an excess). COFFY is a gnarly object, laced with no holds barred portrayals of racism and countless gendered and racialized stereotypes. But the screenplay surprises with monologues on systemic corruption and white power structures, as well as glimmers of a nuanced Black political consciousness, albeit in dueling cynicisms. Presented by Oscarbate and Hopewell Brewing. [Elise Schierbeek]

Raoul Walsh's THE ROARING TWENTIES (US)

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

A manic Looney Tune, where soldiers hop into trenches like rabbits and two men can be knocked out with a single punch, transforms into a post-Expressionist drama (watch out for the METROPOLIS references!) charting the rise and fall of Jimmy Cagney, a bootlegger who uses a taxi service as a front. Raoul Walsh's Tommy Gun opera has the distinction of being funny enough to qualify as a comedy and epic enough to qualify as a tragedy. Conceived by Warner Bros. as a throwback to their scuzzy pre-Code gangster pictures, this pastiche (literally: some of B-roll shots are outtakes from the studio's early '30s movies) functions both as a downer the-world-moves-on ending to the genre and, aesthetically, a new beginning for both Walsh and American cinema (Martin Scorsese's filmography, for one, seems unimaginable without it). Jarring changes in tone, deep-focus shots, sight gags, rushing dolly-ins: this is primal, potent Walsh. The cast is pretty gully, too; third-billed Humphrey Bogart's image is so firmly entrenched in his later cynical good-guy roles that seeing him play an irredeemable douchebag packs a wallop. Screening as part of the Public Enemy: Cagney on Film series. (1939, 104 min, 35mm) [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

Varda x 2 at the Film Center

Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 6pm (LA POINTE COURTE) and 8pm (BEACHES OF AGNES)

Agnès Varda’s LA POINTE COURTE (France)
In my estimation, Agnès Varda’s first film, LA POINTE COURTE, is comparable to Orson Welles’ CITIZEN KANE as an especially auspicious debut feature deserving of the label 'masterpiece,' even as the filmmakers were just starting out in their long and influential careers. Of course, many first features are extraordinary, but LA POINTE COURTE doesn’t generally receive the same level of recognition as some of its peers, which is odd given its distinction of anticipating the “official” start of the French New Wave by several years. (That Varda achieved this intuitively—having not seen many films before making one, as she claimed, putting her outside the realm of the New Wave critics-turned-filmmakers—makes it even more astounding.) Yet the film is more than an assured inceptive effort; Varda’s background as a photographer lends itself to a cinematographic style that effortlessly brings those pictures to life, and, having been inspired by William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms, she employs an ambitious narrative structure that intertwines two disparate but similarly expansive stories. Set in the eponymous fishing village in the south of France, the film partly follows a Parisian couple (Philippe Noiret and Silvia Monfort) who are at a crossroads in their marriage, determining whether or not to stay together or separate; it also looks at the townspeople as they contend with the joys and misfortunes of daily life, focusing on their battle with the local bureaucracy over fishing rights in a polluted lagoon. The sequences with the townspeople were born out of Varda’s collaboration with the non-actors whose stories inspired these parts of the film; with her photographer’s sensibility she captures the rhythm of quotidian life, with a marked focus on the village’s feline population. In contrast, the scenes between the couple feel unnatural—intentionally so. One shot of the couple, with the man facing forward while the woman’s profile obscures half his face, predates a similar image from Ingmar Bergman’s PERSONA (1966); such self-conscious abstractions may feel out of place in a Varda film, but even these experiments (that aren’t as much a part of her later work) feel integral. The scenes of the townspeople feel more organic, though Varda manages to find in the everyday a certain mise-en-scène that pulls cinema out of reality, which is perhaps her greatest skill as a filmmaker. Varda was also masterfully economical—nothing is wasted here, as each shot, even a cutaway to a stray cat, is in service to its cohesive whole. Fellow Left Bank New Wave filmmaker Alain Resnais edited the film. Andre Bazin championed it, saying, “There is a total freedom to the style, which produces the impression, so rare in the cinema, that we are in the presence of a work that obeys only the dreams and desires of its auteur with no other external obligations.” Indeed, it’s a near anarchic style that nevertheless still feels inviting. When we think of Varda, we should always start here. Screening as part of the Entrances and Exits series. (1955, 80 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
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Agnès Varda's THE BEACHES OF AGNÈS (France/Documentary)
Agnès Varda looms over French cinema. She is the mother of the French New Wave, wife of and partner with the late Jacques Demy, and a powerful, challenging feminist filmmaker. No one else could do justice to her biography, so we are fortunate that Varda turned the camera inward to explore her own wrinkled hands. A genuine eccentric, Varda uses her charming quirks to tell her life story, from photographer in the early 1950s to filmmaker for over fifty years. Her deepest emotions are explored in her examination of her romance with and subsequent loss of her husband, filmmaker Jacques Demy. Nearly 20 years after his death, reminiscing of their life together still brings Varda to tears. Though Demy was a significant part of her life it was certainly never defined by him, so it is not surprising that she does not dwell on him—in fact, she only obliquely mentions that his death was due to complications from AIDS, a detail that less-capable filmmakers would have focused for sympathy. Ultimately, Varda’s life is wrapped up in the history of French cinema. To watch her be so thoughtfully self-reflexive is evidence that she has become the embodiment of her national cinema. France was lucky to have such a charming ambassador. Screening as part of the Entrances and Exits series. (2008, 109 min, DCP Digital) [Doug McLaren]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

David Hinton’s MADE IN ENGLAND: THE FILMS OF POWELL AND PRESSBURGER (UK/Documentary)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

It’s hard to think of any independent filmmakers who have created more masterpieces than Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The British-born Powell and Hungarian immigrant to England Pressburger had an almost mystical creative connection that birthed such wild and wonderful dreamscapes as I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING! (1945), BLACK NARCISSUS (1947), and THE RED SHOES (1948) through their production company, The Archers, influencing countless future directors. Most famously, Martin Scorsese credits THE RED SHOES with his approach to the boxing scenes in his RAGING BULL (1980), and it is Scorsese who takes us through the careers of these two men in a combination documentary/essay film that samples from their collaborations and a couple of movies that Powell made on his own, notably his career-killing PEEPING TOM (1960). Of great interest are the films the team made during World War II as their contribution to the war effort. At Pressburger’s suggestion, THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP (1943) features Deborah Kerr playing three women in the life of Clive Candy (Roger Livesey), the embodiment of the comic character of Colonel Blimp made noble through this undying love, as well as his decades-long friendship with a German officer (Anton Walbrook). In A CANTERBURY TALE (1944), using the superimposition of an airplane over the image of a bird in flight connects the spiritual seekers of Chaucer’s pilgrims with the present-day Britons trying to reawaken the peace of their green and pleasant land. The power of love dominates another wartime effort, A TALE OF LIFE AND DEATH (1946), in which the innovation of picturing the living world in color and the dead in heaven in black and white offered a vision of renewal to a scarred people. Scorsese analyzes the various thematic and technical achievements of The Archers, and compares some of them with scenes from his own films as rather egotistical examples of their influence. Archival photos and footage of the men on set and in interviews adds a bit of color to the proceedings, though little real information is given. We learn about their great and then difficult partnership J. Arthur Rank, the disastrous meddling of Hollywood studios they teamed with, and the schism that broke them up. Scant biographical information is given, though Scorsese’s reminiscences about meeting Powell and gaining his friendship and encouragement in the last years of the older man’s life (not to mention that Scorsese’s regular film editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, married Powell in 1984) help to personalize the film. MADE IN ENGLAND should have a permanent berth in film schools. For the rest of us, just basking in the glorious scenes from some of their finest films is reward enough. (2024, 131 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Carol Reed's THE THIRD MAN (UK)

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

Carol Reed and Graham Greene's THE THIRD MAN stars Joseph Cotton as Holly Martins, an American writer of "cheap novelettes" such as Oklahoma Kid and The Lone Rider of Santa Fe. In 1949, Martins goes to Vienna to visit his old friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) and soon finds out that he is dead. In an international zone designated for police at the center of the city, the British Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) and his officers investigate Lime's recent death and his role in selling diluted penicillin on the black market. Martins also begins to look into whether the death was an accident or murder only to inadvertently discover that Lime is alive and hiding out in the Russian sector. (Although Welles spends very little time on screen, Harry Lime is his most celebrated performance after Charles Foster Kane; in fact, André Bazin said that the role made Welles into a myth.) Similar to Vittorio De Sica's THE BICYCLE THIEF (1948) and Jean Cocteau's ORPHEUS (1950) in its semi-documentary quality, THE THIRD MAN captures Europe in ruins after the second war to end all wars. Following the February 1948 coup that brought the Communists to power in Czechoslovakia, the film's producer Alexander Korda asked Greene to go to Vienna and write a screenplay on the city's occupation by the Americans, Russians, British, and French. According to Lime's associate "Baron" Kurtz (a reference to the corrupt ivory trader in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness), all of the Viennese are now at the mercy of the black market. Robert Krasker's camera often catches their faces in close-up as they watch what happens on the city's streets; they rarely, if ever, make the mistake of speaking about it. Toward the end of the film, Martins meets Lime at an empty carnival in Prater Park. While going around on the Ferris wheel, Lime reveals to his friend, "You're just a little mixed up about things in general. Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't. Why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat. I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It's the same thing.  They have their five-year plans, so have I." THE THIRD MAN is one of the great works of British film noir that considers what, if anything, is left of morality for those who were spared by the Second World War. (1949, 104 min, 35mm) [Candace Wirt]

Sidney Poitier's BUCK AND THE PREACHER (US)

Logan Center for the Arts (915 E. 60th St., University of Chicago)  – Sunday, 1pm (Free Admission)

Sidney Poitier made his directorial debut on the comic Western BUCK AND THE PREACHER when he realized the story needed to be told by a Black artist and decided, as one of the film’s producers, to fire director Joseph Sargent after one week of production. His direction is never awe-inspiring, but it’s perfectly competent—like many actors who take up directing as a second or side career, Poitier emphasizes character over everything else, and most of his shots have a purely functional quality, existing primarily to guide our enjoyment of the characterization. That said, the characters here are wonderful: the title duo derives its easygoing appeal from the real-life close friendship between Poitier (who plays Buck) and Harry Belafonte (who plays the preacher), and there is fine supporting work, as per usual, by Ruby Dee (who plays Poitier’s wife). The film came out during the height of the blaxploitation cycle, and while it offers rousing scenes of heroic Black characters taking violent revenge on racist whites, it also provides insight into the largely forgotten history of the “Exodusters,” former slaves who traveled west in the years after the Civil War to settle in Kansas. Poitier’s Buck is a wagon master who guides groups of Exodusters across the country; the difficulties of life on the trail are compounded by the constant threat of mercenaries who follow Black wagon teams and threaten—or sometimes force—the migrants into returning to work on southern plantations. (The film might be read as a revisionist take on one of John Ford’s greatest films, WAGONMASTER [1950].) Belafonte’s “Reverend” Willis Oaks Rutherford is a nervy con man with gold teeth who crosses paths with Buck and ends up becoming his partner. Their adventures are good fun to watch, but the film is ultimately quite serious about exposing the legacy of racism on the American frontier. Screening as part of the Screening Acts series, a free film series celebrating Black independent cinema. (1972, 102 min, Digital Projection) [Ben Sachs]

Martin Scorsese's GOODFELLAS (US)

Music Box Theatre – Tuesday, 7pm

This widely favored bildungsroman, which often seems to clasp the key to understanding (second-generation, male) America in an unattainable 1.85:1 crucible, remains a worthy artifact of interrogation in these cold days before, for example, the semi-inevitable Oscar crowning of the comparatively meaningless domestic allegory TRUE GRIT. While that latter film's ahistorical confrontation between isolated orphans and arbitrarily evil cowboy bandits might satisfy a sophisticated sixth-grader's definition of justice, GOODFELLAS rewrites the much-maligned "gang" (and its most infamous, yet imaginary superstructure: "The Mafia") into something understandable or even deeply familiar. For Sicilian immigrants were unknown peasants in an alien world. And as it turns out, reciprocal networks of both the threat and implementation of violence can become sustainable—even thriving—subcultures in the absence of feudal tyranny; the requisite decline of state-sponsored physical coercion slowly became a reality in 19th-century Sicily and it was certainly a reality on the streets of Depression-era East New York. The film is a mid-20th-century cross-section of this phenomenon: a charting of the coming to power of one man in this mafioso style (a style that might seem offensive to those who believe that social order is a product of police men). Ray Liotta's Henry Hill holds our hand, seducing us at every stage of (juvenile) development: at first by those things that "fall off of trucks," and then by the preposterous excesses of social capital (after a mythical one-take palm-greasing journey through the back door of the Copacabana, confiding to his girlfriend that he's "in construction"). At maturity, the insatiate id and the hyperrational ego (Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro) erupt in violent chaos: unable to negotiate with an increasingly juridically-minded state apparatus, our unreliable narrator must race to dispatch his extended family to the gallows. Scorsese's crucial narrative achievement is the meticulous setting of each sequence to diegetically appropriate pop music as if it were an arranged marriage, and vividly portrays Hill's climactic coke/ziti-fueled breakdown as the ultimate Stones/Nilsson megamix. Screening as part of the Clean Plate Club: A Food and Film series. The ticket and food option is currently sold out, but other ticket options are still available. (1990, 146 min, 35mm) [Michael Castelle]

Michael Curtiz’s ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES (US)

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

The prolific director Michael Curtiz wholeheartedly leans into the inherent moral thematics of ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES, a tale of good men and bad men and how even the smallest circumstances can affect our lives in the grandest of fashions. Two young no-goodniks growing up in their tenement neighborhood effectively stand in as representatives for the duality of man: one grows up to be the kindly priest Jerry Connolly (Pat O’Brien), while the other becomes the scheming, gambling gangster Rocky Sullivan (James Cagney). They zigzag through each other's lives, with Jerry offering Rocky a glimpse at what a better life can look like, only for Rocky to be continuously pulled back into the dark underbelly of the criminal world he’s crafted for himself. You can practically guess where this all ends up, but the familiar story beats are offset by Cagney’s domineering performance throughout, living in a zone between vicious and cuddly, his squeaky tone and baby face equally menacing and inviting. Almost a century on, his performance here cements him as undeniable leading man material, injecting the fairly grounded tone of the picture with notes of surprise, comedy, and heart. Even amidst a film of slowly paced scenes and backstabbing character moments, it’s the final moments with Cagney that will stay with you; all the villainy of the previous ninety-minutes falling away, reverting back to that kid we first saw at the movie’s start, courage swiftly abandoned, eyes drowning in fear. It’s a moment that does away with the good vs. bad messaging of the film and provides a complex man at the end of his rope, wondering at his last possible moment where it all went wrong. Screening as part of the Public Enemy: Cagney on Film series. (1938, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Chris Skotchdopole’s CRUMB CATCHER (US)

Music Box Theatre –​ See Venue website for showtimes

For those morbidly curious enough to investigate a film based on the premise “Shark Tank meets FUNNY GAMES,” Chris Skotchdopole’s debut feature might be just what you’re looking for. Skotchdopole’s scatterbrained home invasion thriller is in constant fear of disassembly, though this seems to be a feature rather than a bug, as the cozy honeymoon of newlyweds Shane (Rigo Garay) and Leah (Ella Rae Peck) is in constant threat of further chaotic derailment at the hands of a psychotic, nervous wreck of a salesman (the scene-stealing John Speredakos) and his duplicitous wife Rose (Lorraine Farris). John, who just happened to work as a waiter at Shane and Leah’s wedding the night prior to his deadly pitch meeting, has come to the unsuspecting couple’s door to convince them that his latest invention—​the eponymous device designed to catch crumbs—​will sweep the nation, literally and figuratively, and secure his legacy as entrepreneurial royalty. There’s some sick irony in John’s invention being designed to eradicate mess being a central component of a film submerged in nothing but mess, with narrative subplots (marriages on the brink of collapse, book deals about to go up in flames, rampant familial alcoholism) sprinkling crumbs across the film’s runtime with no sense of tidiness or cohesion in sight. Yet film lovers who like their horror movies messy, stylish, and off-the-wall might be in heaven here, with Adam Carboni’s cinematography alternating between still, sumptuous images and erratic, pulsating camera movement (a car chase late in the film is particularly eye-catching and heart-pounding), and Ethan Startzman’s discordant score constantly throwing you off your toes. At the Saturday, 6:30pm screening, Skotchdopole, producers Larry Fessenden andChadd Harbold, and actor Rigo Garay will be in attendance for a post-screening Q&A, moderated by filmmaker Jennifer Reeder. (2023, 103 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Lila Avilés’ THE CHAMBERMAID (Mexico)

Cinema/Chicago at the Chicago Cultural Center (78 E. Washington St., 2nd Floor) – Wednesday, 6:30pm (Free Admission - Rush Tickets Only)

There’s little camera movement in THE CHAMBERMAID and relatively little cutting within scenes, so that often, the action seems to be playing out in a museum diorama. (The careful sound design, with its frequent low, industrial humming, also plays a role in creating this effect.) The presentational approach invites scrutiny, not only of the title character, but of the unequal class system in which her role is most sharply defined. A domestic worker at a fancy Mexico City hotel, Eve spends all day catering to the whims of super-rich guests and the demands of her bosses; in every encounter, she is quiet and deferential—a consummate chambermaid. Eve takes some steps toward self-definition by entering into friendships with a few coworkers and enrolling in night classes for hospitality workers trying to get their GEDs, but she has trouble shaking the competitive mentality drilled into her by her profession and continues to obsess over beating her peers to a promotion. To underscore how much the heroine has been shaped by her job, THE CHAMBERMAID never shows her outside the hotel where she works—there aren’t even any exterior shots. (Sadly, this means we never get to see Eve’s family, the people for whom she’s working so hard.) But the film is not so schematic as to be without levity, nor are the other characters as dour as Eve. The scenes of the heroine’s burgeoning friendships are sweetly performed, and some of the social observations are delivered with wry humor. As for the never-leaving-the-hotel business, it becomes clear that writer-director Lila Avilés is less interested in exposing the ravages of capitalism than in dramatizing the modest yet unpredictable moments that happen around or in between the lives of “important” people, a predilection she would further explore in her second feature, TÓTEM (2023). (2018, 102 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Catherine Breillat's LAST SUMMER (France/Norway)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

LAST SUMMER is very much a movie of its moment, and not just because it deals in hot-button issues about power dynamics in sexual relationships. The film’s third act (which deviates significantly from that of QUEEN OF HEARTS, the 2019 Danish film it’s based on) relates the heroine’s protracted, knowing deception of the people around her—in other words, her distortion of reality to make it play out in her favor. The character’s self-serving actions are nothing new, yet her methodicalness and thoroughness suggest an exaggerated version of what people do on social media every day, manipulating the facts of their lives in order to create the most attractive versions of themselves. What Catherine Breillat achieves with this section of the film is comparable to what Radu Jude achieves in another great movie of 2023, DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM THE END OF THE WORLD, with the extraordinary 40-minute shot that shows the real-time manipulation of reality that occurs during the making of a public safety video. In both cases, a major filmmaker is assessing the zeitgeist using the cinematic mode in which they operate best: for Jude, that mode is presentational, Brechtian, and ironically distanced, while for Breillat, it’s inquisitive, wry, and discomfitingly intimate. The French auteur has long shown interest in challenging sexual taboos (indeed, her filmic perspective seems to have grown out of it), and she does it again in LAST SUMMER, a film about what happens when a middle-aged woman enters into a sexual relationship with her 17-year-old stepson. Yet the onscreen sex is relatively brief (especially when compared with some of the director’s other films), as the consequences of the affair take up far more screen time than the affair itself. Breillat uses a similar approach to delineate both the sexual relationship and the heroine’s efforts to cover it up, employing closeups and highly specific sound design to bring viewers into a sense of confidentiality with the characters. Most of the scenes are structured around seduction, persuasion, or argument, which makes the film feel oddly Shakespearean; the classical grounding brings a timeless gravitas to the contemporary concerns. (2023, 104 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Osgood Perkins’ LONGLEGS (US)

Various Theaters and the Music Box Theatre – See Venue websites for showtimes; Thursday, 9:15pm, at the Music Box

LONGLEGS has an unanticipated fairy tale quality about it. Though maybe one shouldn’t be too surprised, as horror director Osgood Perkins has trod into that arena before with his previous film GRETEL AND HANSEL. His most recent film is dreamy, focusing on imprints left by objects and images and their role in creating and warping memories. The physicality of objects is important, too; they have meaning and magic in a way that at times feels like a nebulous commentary on the importance of physical media—​its '90s setting with '70s flashbacks contributes to this as well. LONGLEGS is a procedural, often reminiscent of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and ZODIAC. Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is a young FBI agent working on a decades-spanning case concerning a serial killer known as Longlegs (Nicolas Cage), who targets families with young girls and leaves behind coded messages wrought with satanic imagery. Lee is naturally—​perhaps supernaturally—​intuitive, but she may have an even deeper connection to the case than she realizes. This all feels very familiar, but Perkins' distinct style gives an added layer. Lee is shot in warped close ups, as if the camera is trying desperately to get inside her head; Monroe’s strained expressions and reserved anxiety also adds to the sensation that she’s silently screaming. Subliminal, satanic imagery flashes on screen as both Lee and the audience try to piece together what evil is at work here. Cage’s performance is simultaneously what you expect and yet still so unsettling and funny in surprising ways—​despite the lack of visuals in promotional material, Perkins doesn’t hold back from ultimately showcasing this performance. Longlegs is more Twin Peaks' Bob than anything else, a very real threat shrouded in a bizarre supernatural element. The film does however feel cold in its cool-toned settings and the way it keeps the audience at an arm’s length from the details of the evil that’s occurring. Wide shots combined with overcrowded interiors suggest there’s a worse monster lurking just off screen, perhaps captured in a letter or photograph, hidden in the past somewhere. What is most disturbing and resonate about LONGLEGS is what’s left beneath the surface, a fairy tale disguised as a procedural horror, thematically reminiscent with something like THE COMPANY OF WOLVES about the terror of growing up; Lee’s religious mother (a haunting Alicia Witt) even repeatedly mentions a big bad wolf in reference to her childhood. LONGLEGS is impressive in that it’s suggestive without being exploitative: that surviving girlhood is a dangerous minefield that often takes a lot of sacrifice and rarely leaves one unscathed. (2024, 101 min, DCP Digital and 35mm at the Music Box) [Megan Fariello]

🎞️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ 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 Filmmakers
An in-person open screening takes place on Friday at 7pm. Free admission. More info here.

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

⚫ Comfort Film at Comfort Station (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave.) 
Erica Benedikty’ 1995 film PHOBE: THE XENOPHOBIC EXPERIMENTS (81 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday at 8pm. Programmed by Jason Kauffman. Free admission. More info here.

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Thomas Napper’s 2023 film MADAME CLICQUOT (89 min, DCP Digital) continues screening. See Venue website for showtimes.

The 2019 National Theatre Live production of Phoebe Waller-Bridges’s one-woman show FLEABAG (80 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday and Sunday at 2pm.

Sidney Lumet’s 1981 film PRINCE OF THE CITY (196 min, 16mm) screens Saturday, 3pm, and Wednesday, 6pm, as part of the Sidney Lumet Centennial series. Please note: The Film Center will be showing the network TV edit, which excludes profanity but includes 19 additional minutes not seen in the theatrical cut.

The Midwest Film Festival’s networking reception takes place Monday at 6:30pm. More info on all screenings here. 

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Music Box Garden Movies continue. See Venue website for films and showtimes.

Monia Chokri’s 2023 film THE NATURE OF LOVE (111 min, DCP Digital) begins and Ti West’s MAXXXINE (101 min, 35mm) continues screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

Renny Harlin’s 1999 film DEEP BLUE SEA (105 min, 35mm) screens Friday at midnight. Hosted by Miss Toto with a pre-show party in the lounge from 9:30pm -  11:30pm.

Jim Sharman’s 1975 cult classic ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (100 min, 35mm) screens Saturday at midnight, with a shadowcast of the film performed by Midnight Madness. 

Risto Jarva’s 1969 film A TIME OF ROSES (108 min, Digital Projection) screens Sunday, 11am, with an introduction and post-screening discussion from independent film programmer Stephanie Sack.

Oscarbate presents Conner O'Malley and Danny Scharar’s 2024 film RAP WORLD (56 min, DCP Digital) on Sunday, 7pm and 9:15pm, with a post-screening cast/crew Q&A moderated by Aidy Bryant. Note that both showtimes are sold out. More info on all screenings and events here. 

⚫ Sideshow Gelato (4819 W. Western Ave.)
SUPER-HORROR-RAMA! presents Norman Apstein’s 1995 horror-comedy film ICE CREAM MAN (100 min, Digital Projection) on Wednesday, 7pm, as part of new weekly horror gathering and screening series. There’s a social hour starting at 6pm. More info 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
Saif Alsaegh: Bittersweet Landscape, a program of three short films by Alsaegh, screens for free on VDB TV. More info here.

CINE-LIST: July 26 - August 1, 2024

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Julian Antos, Kian Bergstrom, Michael Castelle, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jason Halprin, Ben Kaye, Doug McLaren, Elise Schierbeek, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, David Whitehouse, Candace Wirt