:: FRIDAY, AUGUST 23 - THURSDAY, AUGUST 29 ::

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Victor Erice’s CLOSE YOUR EYES (Spain/Argentina)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Victor Erice’s first feature in over three decades, CLOSE YOUR EYES, is an epic eulogy for cinema as it was originally produced, exhibited, and preserved. Set in 2012—the year most theaters converted from 35mm to DCP projection—it frames the death of cinema as already a thing of the past; the pervading tone, though frequently enlivened by moments of levity and beauty, is extremely melancholic. The plot is reminiscent of such Paul Auster novels as Leviathan and The Book of Illusions: Miguel Garay, a reclusive writer and one-time filmmaker, embarks on a journey to track down the actor who walked off the set of his movie in 1990 and disappeared. It’s a decidedly laidback journey, though, which allows the hero plenty of time to reminisce with old friends and colleagues and reflect on whether the work he’s produced will leave any impression after he’s gone. The film might be best summed up in the moment when Miguel wanders upon a used book stand in a town he hasn’t visited in decades and finds a collection of stories he wrote that he inscribed for an old lover—every scene has this bittersweet sense of loss. Sometimes that loss is personal: Miguel never finished his second feature, his lead actor (who was also his best friend) vanished, and he’s very conscious of the fact that he’s living alone in his 60s. But more often, CLOSE YOUR EYES is concerned with the universal loss of cinema as it was experienced in the 20th century, which is to say as a world discrete from our own. Yes, it’s sad that analog film is no longer the norm in terms of exhibition (and the movie certainly touches on this), but the greater deprivation is that general audiences no longer grant images the magic power they used to. “Miracles haven’t existed in movies since Dreyer stopped making them,” a character says at another critical moment, and while he may be speaking hyperbolically, he gets at the spiritual crisis that CLOSE YOUR EYES is addressing. What does it mean to live in a world where not only are there no more miracles, but nobody even seems to want them? There are few filmmakers better equipped to tackle this question than Victor Erice, arguably Spain’s most important director after Luis Buñuel. Though Erice directed just three features prior to CLOSE YOUR EYES, they are three of the greatest Spanish films. Every shot of THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE (1973), EL SUR (1983), and THE QUINCE TREE SUN (1992) exhibits the utmost care and refinement, drawing viewers into the delicate private words of their central subjects. These movies are testaments to the cinema’s ability to render even the tiniest moments larger than life; compared to them, CLOSE YOUR EYES can feel at times disappointingly life-sized. But I suspect the film’s casualness is merely deceptive and that it will give way to many riches over time—making the film a descendant of Howard Hawks’ RIO BRAVO (1959), a movie that Erice quotes at length here. The quotation is significant, as it reminds us of how films can take root in our memories, their power carrying over into our real lives. CLOSE YOUR EYES may end on a sad, anticlimactic note, but not before Erice has exhorted his viewers to keep this film—and the spirit of cinephilia—alive within us. (2023, 169 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Cameron Worden's YOU’RE DANCING THIS DANCE ALL WRONG (US)

Chicago Film Society at the  Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 6pm

Chicago Film Society celebrates one of their own with this screening from CFS staff member, projectionist, and filmmaker Cameron Worden. In keeping with the CFS mission, all of Cameron's work is presented on celluloid film, but the originating formats vary wildly. His work shares a preoccupation with the nature of film and filming of nature, with quotidian images blurred and mushed, and with narratives driven by dialogue captured wild and delivered elliptically. FRONTAGE RD (2021) was conceived as a projector performance of-sorts to experiment with frame rates while Worden was a projectionist at the Gene Siskel Film Center. It combines YouTube travelog footage and Super 8 home movies shot with a dying camera of the beloved Kenosha institution Mars Cheese Castle. The dying camera slips away from a steady frame rate and similarly the projectionist is allowed to project the film at whatever speed they want. The ruddy vernacular landscapes of middle-American roadways and parking lots at dusk sets up the rest of the show's fixation on the everyday experienced through celluloid surfaces. TODAY (2024) is an entry in a new series of "ephemeral works" that Worden is creating while working on a larger new film piece. The outtakes consist of blurred abstractions and light stuttering and bleeding across the screen. LEAVES FOR A REEL (2022) kicks off with a wonderfully absurdist opening credits sequence of '90s computer graphics, then shifts into Super 8 nature footage cataloging leaves in a forest while the soundtrack documents the films making, with the filmmaker and friends discussing film stocks and focal lengths and how to capture the sounds from a visual phenomenon. The bulk of the program is filled with the feature-length YOU'RE DANCING THIS DANCE ALL WRONG (2021), which is making its local debut after premiering at the Cinémathèque Française last year. It's a lyrical documentary about the daily turmoil experienced by denizens of Kansas City, MO. The imagery is largely offhanded Super 8 shots of small details of life and the fluorescent-lit environs of people discussing relationship drama, drinks and drugs ingested and survived, and wounds received through conflict and desperation. The narrative is almost solely relayed through the audio while the visuals hardly ever focus on a person except for some occasional poetic asides. The shaggy style is perfectly suited for the shaggy story, and the final images veer into the recognizable with a celebration of friendship in drunken revelry and bad decisions reckoned with together. Also screening is SHEEBOP! SHEBOPP! SHEEBOPP! (2018), co-directed with Jiayi Chen. (2018 - 2024, 99 min, 35mm) [Josh B Mabe]

Dušan Makavejev’s THE COCA-COLA KID (Australia)

Chicago Film Society at Northeastern Illinois University (The Auditorium, Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) – Wednesday, 7:30pm

Imagine a Bill Forsyth film made by anarchic Serbian auteur Dušan Makavejev, complete with an advertising jingle that’ll get stuck in your head for days to come. Well, you don’t have to imagine it, as it exists. THE COCA-COLA KID, based on several short stories by Frank Moorhouse, feels like Movie Mad Lib, with an overall dotty plot made up of elements that might have been shouted out from the audience at an improv show; the anarchy is evident even where it appears sentimental, these disparate modes convening to form an object at once simpering and turbid. Eric Roberts stars as Becker, a proto-Matthew McConaughey former marine turned Coke executive who’s sent to Australia to revitalize its fledgling market. Shot on location in Sydney and the Blue Ridge Mountains, the latter is where Becker encounters T. George (Bill Kerr), owner of a local soft drink factory who has theretofore satisfied his customer’s needs and staved off encroachment from the insidious Coke empire. Coke as a symbolic entity is obvious here, clearly representing the rise of globalization and the subsequent cessation of truly “small-town” living, with its hyper-local miscellany being unreproducible owing to its singular charm. “Coca-Cola” is shorthand for the American way, a totem of imperialism that infects the minds just as it delights the taste buds. THE COCA-COLA KID feels of a kind with Billy Wilder’s ONE,  TWO, THREE (1961), starring James Cagney as a Coke exec endeavoring to introduce the beverage into East Germany. But where Wilder’s film is in part a witty reproach on American consumerism, Makavejev seems content to stupefy, having produced a somewhat aimless satire nevertheless appreciable for its incidental humor. Greta Scacchi stars as Becker’s secretary, who’s also an embodiment of that certain style of Australian quirkiness—think of the characters in Jane Campion’s SWEETIE or HOLY SMOKE. The whimsicality initially discomfits Becker, though he ultimately succumbs to the people’s (and specifically Scacchi’s) capricious allure. The film was shot by Dean Semler, cinematographer for the second and third MAD MAX movies; in total it very much feels like an Australian film, just one made by a key figure in the Yugoslav Black Wave. I’d accept arguments about why and how the film doesn’t work, my biggest defense for it being a devotion to its oddity à la something akin to Elaine May’s ISHTAR (1987). But it doesn’t have to work, I think. it just has to keep doing what it’s doing and eventually it will all continue to not make sense. And just try getting that Coke jingle out of your head! Preceded by vintage soda advertisements (approx. 10 min) on 35mm. (1985, 98 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]

Larisa Shepitko’s HEAT and THE ASCENT (USSR)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 6pm (HEAT) and 8pm (ASCENT)

In 1953, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev began the Virgin Lands campaign, during which he sought to allay food shortages by encouraging workers—especially young volunteers to whom it was presented as a “socialist adventure”—to cultivate the steppe lands of Western Siberia and Northern Kazakhstan. ‘Heat’ is thus an appropriate name for Ukrainian-born Soviet filmmaker Larisa Shepitko’s first feature, her graduate project at Moscow’s esteemed All-Union Institute of Cinematography, or VGIK (where she studied under Alexander Dovzhenko), as during the campaign the heat was on, so to speak, not only to provide food for a rattleboned populace and achieve self-sufficiency but also to exceed the United State’s grain export and become a global competitor in that market. It’s also appropriate considering the climate in these areas, greatly oppressive for the workers and no less so for filmmakers; during the filming of HEAT (1963, 75 min, DCP Digital) it got so hot that the film stock would melt, though Shepitko persevered in spite of the conditions and having contracted hepatitis, which led to her having to direct parts of the film from a stretcher. It’s unfortunately all too appropriate that her films about great struggle were made under great struggle, an unavoidable fealty to reality being one of the filmmaker’s most affecting qualities. The film centers initially on a young man, Kemel, who’s gone to the Kazakh Steppe for a plow-operating job. There he meets the small group of workers already at the farm: a foreman, an older couple, a beautiful young woman and one other man who is a prize-winning tractor driver and whose attitude toward the newcomer is markedly territorial. While working in the fields one day, Kemel encounters another beautiful young woman on horseback; the two meet in silent interludes throughout the film, providing a stark contrast to the physical and mental brutality of the labor amidst such a contentious dynamic. Based on a story by Kyrgyz author Chinghiz Aitmatov, the film provides a stark contrast also to more idyllic representations of the campaign, not just in terms of interpersonal relations but the farming itself. It’s a futile endeavor here, the possibility of fertile terrain dubious and eclipsed by the human conflict—capitalism’s most enduring side effect—that finds the exemplary worker to be a cruel tyrant and the starry-eyed youth primed for disillusionment with the transformative agriculture he once so believed. The austere beauty of Shepitko’s compositions either emphasizes or juxtaposes any apparent brutality of man or landscape, the filmmaker more than adept at using the latter as a narrative device as effectively as any line of dialogue. This is evident also in her last film, THE ASCENT (1977, 111 min, DCP Digital), for which Shepitko became the second woman to win a Golden Bear at Berlinale.  Based on Belarusian author Vasil Bykaŭ’s 1970 novel Sotnikov, the film centers on two Soviet partisan soldiers during World War II as they first leave their outfit in search of food and eventually are captured by German soldiers in Nazi-occupied Belarus. What emerges from these dire circumstances is an allegory rooted in the utmost of allegories, but also reality based in another, similarly dire reality, that of Jesus and Judas, prophet and betrayer. Despite having been a key cultural figure in the post-Stalinist Thaw and End of Stagnation eras, Shepitko still faced censorship during her career. THE ASCENT was targeted due to its religious aspects, which Shepitko defended by asserting that such symbolism resonates as part of the human experience and the moral dilemmas contained therein. According to Shepitko’s husband, Elen Klimov, the film was only able to circumvent harsher censorship due to a Soviet official being so moved during a preview screening that it was not only accepted without any changes, but the official, himself a partisan fighter during the war, gave a long speech about the film’s veracity and praised Shepitko for capturing it. Again she conveys so much by way of image, the harsh wintry landscape a pristine canvas against which to tell the story, almost as if she were handling shadow puppets. Indeed, Sheptiko’s unwavering dedication and precise vision by way of rigorous direction are evident at every turn. “All motion pictures are personal but the desire to film THE ASCENT was almost a physical need,” she said. “If I had not shot this picture it would have been a catastrophe for me. I could not find any other material with which I could transmit my views on life, on the meaning of life.” Screening as part of the Entrances and Exits series. [Kat Sachs]

Bogdanovich x 2

Gene Siskel Film Center – See showtimes below

Peter Bogdanovich's TARGETS (US)
Saturday, 6pm
THE LAST PICTURE SHOW and PAPER MOON are both wonderful, but Bogdanovich's best is the one people rarely mention. Like few films before or since, TARGETS successfully combines a critique of Western consumerism and mass media saturation with a cracking good story. And it does so succinctly. Faded horror star Byron Orlok (played by Boris Karloff) decides to retire, deciding that his brand of gothic horror is embarrassingly out of date; meanwhile Bobby, a clean-cut young man, suddenly goes off the deep end and starts putting his personal arsenal of shotguns to deadly use. The result is sort of like a collaboration between Samuel Fuller (the nerve-jangling suspense of the film's final third) and Antonioni (the all-blue color scheme of Bobby's relatives' house and wardrobe). Even better, it functions as an extraordinarily moving valentine to Karloff, arguably giving him his best role since Frankenstein's monster. It's all the more astonishing for being shot so quickly and cheaply. Its inventive sound design and nonchalant audacity make it the equal of the more-celebrated BONNIE AND CLYDE. (1968, 90 min, 35mm) [Rob Christopher]

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Peter Bogdanovich's THE GREAT BUSTER: A CELEBRATION (US/Documentary)

Saturday, 8:15pm

The life and career of Buster Keaton are celebrated in Peter Bogdanovich’s new documentary. From his formative years as a vaudeville performer with his family, to his initiation to film as a protégé under Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, to his shorts, features, and later life, no stone lays unturned in this portrait of the lauded silent era star. The film is full of talking-head interviews from stars new and old—Mel Brooks to Bill Hader—that showcase Keaton’s influence on comedy over the past century. Bogdanovich does not shy away from less-glamorous parts of Keaton’s life and career, such as his struggles with alcoholism and ill-advised time with MGM. The archival images and sequences utilized provide a candid look at his daily life and provide a humanizing aspect. Bogdanovich’s narration provides a sense of his deep reverence and admiration. It is as thorough a documentary on Keaton’s complete body of work as could be. A must see for Buster Keaton fans everywhere, THE GREAT BUSTER captures the zest for life, innovation, and supreme talent of one of early Hollywood’s greatest pioneers. (2018, 102 min, DCP Digital) [Kyle Cubr]
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Both screening as part of the Entrances and Exits series.

Lucrecia Martel's LA CIÉNAGA (Argentina)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6pm

LA CIÉNAGA is one of the most distinctive directorial debuts in cinema, standing alongside CITIZEN KANE, BREATHLESS, THE THIRD PART OF THE NIGHT, and SWEETIE. Every shot announces a fully developed authorial voice and a mastery over the medium—there was never anything quite like it before, and even Lucrecia Martel’s subsequent films don’t repeat its singular power. It’s a film about the seductive allure of inertia, following two privileged families in the remote Argentine town of Salta (where Martel herself is from) as they laze away a summer. Everyone lives on top of each other, often only half-clothed, in a vaguely sexualized sloth; and since Martel doesn’t make it clear for most of the film how the characters are related (a narrative strategy that defines all four of features), you’re often unsure whether the relationships are truly or only metaphorically incestuous. The film’s structure is elusive as well. I’ve seen the film several times now, and I’m always surprised by how it develops—every event, every revelation of character comes as a surprise, because Martel carefully maintains the illusion that nothing’s happening. “Rather than building up to a dramatic crescendo,” she wrote in a director’s statement, “the film proceeds through an accumulation of innocuous situations, which often lead to nothing but sometimes end fatally.” Martel’s camera often snakes around and through the locations, making it feel as though the moments are being stolen and granting the insights—about sex, family, and class privilege—a certain stinging power. The settings are immersive yet vaguely alien. “All the characters in LA CIÉNAGA feel extremely uneasy in the presence of nature. I wanted to film landscapes that had no picturesque qualities. The natural surroundings are neither pleasant nor welcoming. I refuse to accept the commonly held romantic idea that nature rhymes with harmony... The film depicts a society that has lost its traditions but which cannot afford the security that could make up for it.” Screening as part of the Chicago International Film Festival Presents: Before They Were Big series. (2001, 103 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

F. W. Murnau’s FAUST (Germany/Silent)

Comfort Station (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave., Lawn) – Wednesday, 8pm [Free Admission]

Humanity’s struggle to reconcile the good and evil in our nature has long been a source of religious and philosophical debate. A test of religious faith is the starting point for the tale of Faust, a man who gains vast earthly knowledge and pleasures by selling his soul to the devil. This much-adapted story attracted one of the great masters of the silent film era, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, who used the play written by Johann Goethe as the basis for his final German film before emigrating to the United States. A production of Germany’s famed UFA film studio, FAUST was a lavish box-office bomb that only gained its reputation as a masterpiece of German Expressionist filmmaking in subsequent decades. Its opening sequences show the reputation is well-earned, with depictions of the otherworldly forces shaping human existence. The four horsemen of the apocalypse, ragged on their skeleton-horses ride through the air, heralding a doughy-faced devil festooned with enormous, black wings who confronts the glowing-white figure of Archangel Michael (Werner Fuetterer) and wagers for control of the universe that he can turn the elderly scholar Faust (Gösta Ekman) away from God. The scene of the devil nearly enveloping Faust’s town with his wings and releasing the Plague is justly famous and as frightening today as it must have been in 1926. The townspeople turn to Faust to find a cure, but when he fails to do so through science and prayer, he becomes vulnerable to Mephisto (the great Emil Jannings), the devil’s emissary, who offers him a trial day and secures his signature in blood. Faust effects a miracle cure, but when his pact with the devil becomes known as he shrinks from a crucifix, the townspeople shun him. It is then that Mephisto is able to make their arrangement permanent, as Faust chooses youth and the pleasures of the flesh. Faust’s ultimate redemption through the love of Gretchen (Camilla Horn), an innocent, young woman he seduces, is rather drawn out and pedestrian, but it is a delight to see Jannings ham it up as Mephisto, wreaking havoc as a proper trickster must do in “service” to his master. I was unpleasantly surprised to catch more than a whiff of the underlying sentiments of Nazism when the script equates the Black Death with the plague that struck down the first-born of Egypt in the name of Jewish freedom, as well as the völkisch feeling Faust longs for as he commands Mephisto to take him “home.” The long-bearded, elderly Faust, surrounded by his books and potions, presents as Jewish as well. The image of him burning books, with his singed Christian bible turning into a book of the dark arts reminiscent of the kabbala, sealed the deal for me. Nonetheless, the special effects are first-rate, the images highly memorable, and the performances generally effective. Presented with the Goethe-Institut Chicago as part of the Silent Films on the Lawn series, with live musical accompaniment by Echo Haus. (1926, 106 min, Digital Projection) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

India Donaldson’s GOOD ONE (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

It would be incredibly easy, and painfully reductive, to label India Donaldson’s debut feature GOOD ONE as a movie where "nothing happens." In the traditional sense, one could concede that, sure, not a lot "happens"; a father and daughter—accompanied by the father’s oldest friend—go on a hiking trip, have awkward conversations, gaze at nature, and then complete said hiking trip. No grand revelations are unveiled, no lengthy monologues are delivered, and the surface-level stakes remain at a particularly modest level. But visually, emotionally, and atmospherically, worlds are uncovered and scavenged throughout, as relationships between this central trio are tested in tiny but momentous ways. As our center, Sam (Lily Collias) is an ecstatically confident teenager, but moments of disbelief poke through her self-assured visage, finding herself shaken by the frequent childishness of her middle-age companions. Her father, Chris (James Le Gros), and his friend, Matt (Danny McCarthy), bicker and banter like siblings—or perhaps more appropriately, an old married couple—as they each contend with shattered hopes, loves lost, and futures that remain painfully unclear. It’s a film of glances between father and daughter, deep sighs between friends, dumb jokes and painfully creepy asides, of humans simply living within the bounty of nature. GOOD ONE thrives in its pastoral environment (aided by Celia Hollander’s earworm of a score), the rocks and trees painting the frame, the rivers flooding our eardrums with calm, instilling a whole world into the lives of these wandering lost souls. In one of the final moments, Chris presents a rock to Sam, slamming it on the dashboard. A gift, a peace offering, a token of his appreciation; whatever this may be, in this moment, everything happens. (2024, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Sylvia Chang's MURMUR OF THE HEARTS (Taiwan)

Cinema/Chicago at the Chicago Cultural Center (78 E. Washington St.) – Wednesday, 6:30pm [Free Admission]

A pregnant painter and a morose tour guide walk into a Starbucks... Wait, wait—let me restart. A talentless boxer walks into an ophthalmologist's office and says... Hang on, let me try another one. So there's this mermaid, right? I really ought to start this whole thing over. MURMUR OF THE HEARTS, perhaps too easily mistaken for the near-identically titled Louis Malle flick owing to a particularly daring localization (the film's original Mandarin title might more accurately be interpreted as "Reading Aloud," per this writer's best estimation), relays the story of the four aforementioned figures in sweeping melodramatic form. Yu (Isabella Leong) is a frustrated artist slogging through therapy to work through her resentments towards her mother. Hsiang (Joseph Chang) is the aspiring boxer with whom she reservedly falls in love and whose lifelong aspirations of professional fighting begin to crumble as he progressively loses vision in one of his eyes. Nan (Lawrence Ko Yu-Luen) is Yu's estranged brother who conducts tour guides on Green Island, a penal colony turned tourist trap off the coast of Taiwan that the siblings called home before their mother fled to Taipei with only a young Yu in tow, ripping the family asunder. Through tender snapshots of their collective melancholy and a litany of grueling flashbacks, each backwards glance bathed in sepia-graded film grain, the film therapeutically attempts to triangulate their stunted desire and unshakeable discontent within this matrix of formative family tragedy and adult-onset disappointment. An overwhelming sense of cosmic error colors the proceedings; cruel jokes with no punchlines abound as the wayward characters dodge moments of serendipitous connection by the narrowest of margins. And of course there's the mermaid, the protagonist of a favorite bedtime story read nightly by Yu's mother (Angelica Lee) who sets off from her underwater palace filled with optimism and then... the rest is up in the air really—she changes the ending of the story every time she tells it, leaving her children unsure of how to reconcile their childhood experiences with an increasingly uncertain future. This is a sorrowful piece of work, but there's unbridled joy and whimsy in the way Sylvia Chang colors outside the lines of her bitter family saga, breaking up the byzantine narrative action with dazzling scenes of her storybook mermaid traversing oceanic chasms and myriad other fantastical hallucinations. In spite of Yu's voice-over assertion that the film constitutes a "story with no ending," closure will find these characters, new bedtime stories will be written and three hearts might very well find a way to beat as one. Screening as part of Cinema/Chicago’s free summer screening series. (2015, 119 min, DCP Digital) [David Whitehouse]

Nathan Silver’s BETWEEN THE TEMPLES (US)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

The very first sound you hear in Nathan Silver’s BETWEEN THE TEMPLES is a shofar, the ram’s horn traditionally used during Jewish high holidays, blaring underneath production company logos popping up on screen to shake us alert before we even get to the first frame; the distraught face of one Benjamin Gottlieb (a tremendous Jason Schwartzman). As the spiritually and emotionally lost cantor at the local synagogue, Schwartzman is at the height of his powers as a performer, expertly navigating high-stakes comic set pieces with appropriate dramatic stakes, his religious and emotional states in equal modes of distress. The one thing that can potentially shake Ben loose is the sudden reemergence of his grade school music teacher, Carla Kessler (the divine Carol Kane), here seeking a late-in-life bat mitzvah (traditionally reserved for those in their early teen years) as a means of spiritual and personal realignment. To support the naturally comedic oddball circumstances of the premise, Silver and cinematographer Sean Price Williams create a frenetic visual vocabulary, iris shots honing in on important details, horrifically close-up faces and hands cluttering up the frame, and even moments of narrative and visual mysticism to terrify us even more. The film is undeniably a successful comic tale, most notably in its specificity of Jewish lore and minutiae: Ben accidentally eating a non-kosher burger, him kissing his yarmulke after it has fallen on the floor, the sense memory of hearing the tunes of davening (prayer) sung at synagogue. To speak frankly here, part of what I’ve found so wonderful about my own Judaism is the ways in which the quest for a “correct” answer about anything ultimately becomes futile, the very act of questioning and not-knowing of life being a reward in itself. To this end, the hand grenade of an emotional truth that eventually detonates in the final third of Silver’s feature may read as either false or unmotivated or perhaps even just plain wrong for many viewers, but for me it came off as nothing short of that very same eager spirit of not having the answers to solve one’s life, and here, desperately clutching to the only joyful things in your life through the only means you know how. In its best moments, Silver’s work is altogether beautiful and messy in concurrence—​as Jewish a descriptor as I can come up with—​and a loving reminder that no matter where we are in life, it’s never too late to have your own coming-of-age story. (2024, 111 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

​​​​​​​Shinji Sômai’s MOVING (Japan)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 1:15pm

Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi (and a good number of Japanese critics) all consider Shinji Sômai the most important Japanese filmmaker of the 1980s and ‘90s, though he still doesn’t have much of a reputation outside his home country two decades after his death. Case in point, almost none of his 13 features are available in the US, which means this short of run of MOVING at the Film Center constitutes a major event. MOVING is filmmaking of the highest order: innovative, surprising, beguiling, and, yes, moving. It’s one of those rare movies—like MURIEL (1963), A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE (1976), POSSESSION (1981), or L’INTRUS (2004)—that seems to be discovering itself, and cinema, as it goes along, devising new approaches to storytelling in response to how its volatile characters engage with the world. The film begins as a naturalistic drama about the impact of a couple’s separation on their preadolescent daughter, a headstrong fifth-grader named Renko. But as Renko, or Ren, grapples with the dissolution of her family (as well as her subsequent problems at school, where her parents’ separation makes her a target for bullying), her behavior becomes increasingly unpredictable and reckless—and so too does the story. Gradually everyone around Ren starts behaving impulsively too, as though her tumultuous inner life were being made manifest in the real world; to shake things up more, Sômai frequently makes shocking advances in time, which raise more questions than they answer about the consequences of the characters’ actions. And just when you think MOVING couldn’t get more ambiguous, it starts to become unclear whether what we’re watching is a dream. Per Kurosawa (who served as assistant director on Sômai’s first two features), Sômai favored narratives that progress from order to chaos, and MOVING certainly fits that description. At the same time, Sômai is always in complete control over his art as a filmmaker, trading in impassive long takes that Kurosawa has likened to those of Theo Angelopoulos and Edward Yang. The formal mastery exists in constant tension with the characters’ out-of-control lives, with each one rendering the other strange. It wouldn’t work at all if the actors weren’t up to snuff, and the cast here is extraordinary; everyone seems like a relatable person even when they do things they themselves can’t explain. Tomoko Tabata, who plays Ren, deserves special mention, exhibiting a complexity and mysteriousness that would be astonishing in a performer of any age. (1993, 125 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Ben Sachs]

Catherine Breillat's LAST SUMMER (France/Norway)

FACETS Cinema – Friday, 9pm and Thursday, 6:30pm

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 discomfortingly 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]

Annie Baker's JANET PLANET (US/UK)

FACETS Cinema – Friday, 6:30pm and Sunday, 6pm

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]

Francis Ford Coppola's THE CONVERSATION (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – See Venue website for showtimes

If Francis Ford Coppola only made films between 1972 and 1979, he would still be considered one of the greatest American directors of the second half of the twentieth century. And THE CONVERSATION would still be (arguably) his crown jewel. Made in between his landmark first two GODFATHER films, THE CONVERSATION still stands as Coppola's most fully realized project of his heroic era. Conceived in the ‘60s but not realized until the richly paranoid Watergate era, there’s a prescience to this film that made it hit harder on its release than Coppola could have imagined. THE CONVERSATION, loosely inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni’s BLOW-UP (1966), is about San Francisco surveillance expert Harry Caul. An incredibly taught, genuinely terrifying paranoid thriller, it revolves around a job Caul takes on to record a couple’s mid-day conversation in a busy public downtown square. Caul is the kind of guy who takes a job but doesn't ask questions. He’s into the work, the technology, how to get the job done, not who's hiring him and why. Unfortunately, the realities of wiretapping and surveillance don't lend themselves to such clean-cut separations; also, Caul’s Catholic guilt begins to eat away at him and affect his work. This is a masterful mystery thriller that goes deep into the American psyche of paranoia that was so prevalent at the time it was made. But it holds an even more interesting view on privacy and surveillance culture in our present times, when we live in a world with no expectation of privacy. Once there was a time when a man like Caul, who made sound recordings of people who never expected it, was a rarefied expert. Now, we happily turn the cameras on ourselves, and everyone behind us is collateral surveillance damage. The irony of THE CONVERSATION lies in the fact that, while its main character snoops on people for a living, he tries to maintain as private a life as possible. He goes so far as to not even have a phone in his house, using only public payphones to communicate when not face-to-face. This makes the ending of the film ever more delicious. Just as Caul inadvertently captured a conversation with implications beyond what he expected, the film itself inadvertently anticipated the zeitgeist of 1974. It was released just a few months before President Richard Nixon’s resignation, an event bound up in wiretaps and surveillance. To Coppola’s shock, some of the actual equipment and techniques used in the film were used by the Nixon administration. Because of this, Coppola had to deny any real-world influence by pointing out that the film had been written before Nixon was in office and completed before his paranoid transgressions were made public. But besides the strange real-world coincidences and the weaving, mysterious plot, THE CONVERSATION is one of the most technically inspired films ever made. The sound editing here is beyond brilliant. In our age of YouTube clickbait-oriented “film criticism,” the term masterclass gets thrown about to the point of it being near meaningless. But when confronted with what may be the pinnacle of sound design in film, I’d say it's actually appropriate in this case. The sound was created by Walter Murch, who would later be the first person ever to be credited as sound designer on a film (for APOCALYPSE NOW). It is no exaggeration to say that sound itself not only plays a key role in this film; it's actually a character. Perhaps the main character. Seeing this film on a new 35mm print will only show off how insanely ahead of its time and, yes, masterful it really is. In our world of doorbell cameras, red light cameras, ATM cameras, ShotSpotter, and those super creepy Facebook recommendations that seem to come just minutes after you mentioned to a friend how you were thinking of maybe getting some Thai food later, THE CONVERSATION distills our still deep-seated paranoia of being watched (even if now we know we are) into a powerful, timeless, piece of art. (1974, 113 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]

Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz’s THE TOXIC AVENGER (US)

Alamo Drafthouse –​ Friday, 9:30pm

As anticipation builds for the high-profile remake of THE TOXIC AVENGER directed by Macon Blair and featuring Jacob Tremblay, Kevin Bacon, and Peter Dinklage, it is important to trace the roots of Toxie and the empire he built. Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman, the founders of Troma Entertainment, established the company in 1974. As a Yale University alumni, Herz had a small role in Kaufman’s debut feature THE GIRL WHO RETURNED. A few years passed before they collaborated on SUGAR COOKIES in 1973, which marked the beginning of a 50-year partnership. In the 1970s, Herz and Kaufman explored various cinematic genres, but it was their foray into R-rated sex comedies that proved commercially successful. This trend was catalyzed by the widespread acclaim of Universal Pictures' NATIONAL LAMPOON’S ANIMAL HOUSE (1978). Troma Entertainment capitalized on this success by producing a series of low-budget comedies characterized by nudity and the pursuit of sex, including WAITRESS!, STUCK ON YOU!, SQUEEZE PLAY!, and THE FIRST TURN-ON!. By 1980, Troma expanded into the horror genre by producing Charles Kaufman's MOTHER’S DAY. This pivot was driven by diminishing returns from their earlier comedies, prompting the company to explore horror as a new avenue for satirical and critical commentary. Kaufman and Herz decided their first horror project would comment on environmental issues while lambasting corrupt politicians, masochistic gym culture, and the prevailing media image of teens as violent predators. Their superhero against these societal wrongs would not be one wearing a cape; instead, he’s a six-foot mutant monster wearing a leotard and a singed tutu. The film's central character, Melvin Junko—a janitor transformed into a mutated superhero—embodies this critique through his fight against societal wrongs in Tromaville. THE TOXIC AVENGER’s aesthetic, characterized by its deliberate use of low-budget special effects, onscreen nudity, gore, and graphic violence with over-the-top acting and absurd situations, reflects a deliberate engagement with surrealist exploitation cinema. For instance, the use of a watermelon injected with corn syrup and red dye to simulate gore exemplifies the film’s innovative approach to special effects within budget constraints. Despite the film's overtly politically incorrect content, even by 1984 standards, its maximalist style and exaggerated excess serve to accentuate its satirical intent. The result of this experiment was instant cult fame, three sequels, an animated Saturday morning cartoon, action figures, and the forthcoming remake. Troma Entertainment’s approach is encapsulated in their slogan, "50 years of disrupting media," reflecting the company's commitment to challenging conventional media norms through provocative and boundary-pushing content. Screening as part of the Alamo Time Capsule 1984 film series. (1984, 82 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]

Martin Bell's STREETWISE (US/Documentary)

Alamo Drafthouse – Sunday, 3:30pm

Every year, untold numbers of well-meaning young academics embark on solitary, condescending projects to "give a voice" to "those who cannot speak" who are in fact speaking all the time—leaving the real work to visual ethnographers (like Martin Bell, Cheryl McCall and Mary Ellen Clark) who here (shooting on the streets of Downtown Seattle in the Summer of 1983) produce a 90-minute sequence of non-stop proverbial pictures-worth-a-thousand-words. With surprisingly good camera coverage and exceptional, occasionally-covert sound recording, this unflinching vérité portrait of Pike Street teen runaways—begging for change, dumpster diving, turning tricks and providing uncensored, in-depth interviews, set to the sidewalk boom-box top-40 of Eurythmics, Talking Heads, and Spandau Ballet—is the staggering and voyeuristic pop-operatic portrayal of underclass youth that Harmony Korine and Larry Clark's patently preposterous KIDS (1995) once purported to be. The movie's professional production values—which, for some, raised the possibility that certain scenes were overtly staged—also provide a possible reading of the entire film as an unconventional fiction: a perspective from which STREETWISE would have become a legendary exemplar of cinema. Instead the film's stories—and, one suspects, its subjects—have been long forgotten. Screening as part of the Alamo Time Capsule 1984 film series. (1984, 91 min, DCP Digital ) [Michael Castelle]

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

⚫ FACETS Cinema
Pablo Berger’s 2023 animated film ROBOT DREAMS (102 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday and Sunday at 3pm. The Sunday screening will be followed by a Q&A with Sara Varon, author of the graphic novel on which it’s based, led by Deidre Searcy, director of the Chicago International Children's Film Festival.

The Queer Expression Film Fest presents Gabriel Carrubba’s 2023 Australian film SUNFLOWER (84 min, Digital Projection) on Wednesday at 7pm.

FACETS Film Trivia takes place on Thursday at 7pm, followed by a screening of Kinji Fukasaku’s 2000 Japanese film BATTLE ROYALE (113 min, Digital Projection), presented in partnership with Anime Club. More info on all screenings and events here. 

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat’s 2024 documentary SUGARCANE (107 min, DCP Digital) continues screening. See Venue website for showtimes. More info here. 

⚫ Music Box Theatre
***The main theater is currently closed for renovations. All in-theater screenings will take place in theater 2.*** Music Box Garden Movies continue. See Venue website for films and showtimes.

Sean Wang’s 2024 film DIDI (93 min, DCP Digital) also continues screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes. More info on all screenings here. 

⚫ The Reel Film Club
Alberto Lecchi’s 2023 film LET’S TAKE A WALK, VALENTINA (103 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday, 7pm, at the Instituto Cervantes (31 W. Ohio St.) with a reception at 6pm with appetizers and wine and followed by a post-screening conversation. More info here.

⚫ Sideshow Gelato (4819 W. Western Ave.)
SUPER-HORROR-RAMA! presents Mark Rosman’s 1982 slasher film THE HOUSE ON SORORITY ROW (91 min, Digital Projection) on Wednesday, 7pm, as part of a weekly horror gathering and screening series, with 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 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: August 23 - August 29, 2024

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Michael Castelle, Marilyn Ferdinand, Shaun Huhn, Ben Kaye, Josh B Mabe, Raphael Jose Martinez, David Whitehouse