:: FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 29 - THURSDAY, DECEMBER 5 ::

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Howard Alk's THE MURDER OF FRED HAMPTON (US/Documentary)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6:30pm

While many documentaries hold true to their genre and ‘document’ history, very few actually capture its substance as it unfolds. Examples that come to mind are the Maysles brothers and Charlotte Zwerin’s GIMME SHELTER and, more recently, Laura Poitras’ CITIZENFOUR and RISK. In the former, the filmmakers caught the stabbing death of Meredith Hunter while filming the Altamont Free Concert; in the latter, Poitras depicts real-time revelations from and about Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. Howard Alk's THE MURDER OF FRED HAMPTON is most certainly  another, one with an especially germane timelessness, its themes as urgent as ever. Originally intended as a more straightforward examination of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party and its chairman Fred Hampton, the documentary, produced by the Chicago Film Group, evolved into something much more pressing and investigative after Hampton was killed during an early-morning raid while the project was underway. It’s effective as it details both the Black Panther ideology and the events surrounding Hampton’s horrific death; the dichotomy created by the unfortunate circumstances is a compelling one. In this way it was a much-needed antithesis to accounts of the crime touted at the time—to quote Howard Zinn from his seminal A People's History of the United States, "the mountain of history books under which we all stand leans so heavily in the other direction… that we need some counterforce to avoid being crushed into submission." In his review of the film for the New York Times, A.H. Weiler opened with the declaration that “history is, or should be, recorded after exhaustive contemplation.” Who says? THE MURDER OF FRED HAMPTON was ahead of its time in its propinquity, reflecting history as a stimulus that demands immediate response. (Weiler eventually concedes this, but let’s reconsider his leading sentiment anyway.) The footage of a prostrate Hampton covered in blood after being dragged off the bed he’d been sleeping in just moments before is much more affecting than the FBI reenactments, however illuminating they may be in their homiletic significance. Fred Hampton was murdered, and this film demands its viewer bear witness to that in such a way that’s just now reaching critical saturation. Presented by the Chicago Film Archives, with an introduction by Leila Wills, director of the Historical Preservation Society of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and civil rights attorney Flint Taylor, co-founder of the People’s Law Office. (1971, 88 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]

Ernst Lubitsch's THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER (US)

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

"The Lubitsch Touch" is a piece of publicity copy that's been lazily and loosely promoted to a critical credo—pointless shorthand that attempts to describe pleasures that resist consolidation and compression, summation or synopsis. The phrase also implies something singular and proto-auteurist about Lubitsch, a director who willed into existence an urbane, continental oasis amidst the nouveau riche yokels of Culver City and Burbank. This profile downplays the contributions of Lubitsch's collaborators and also makes the man himself notably less interesting: one of the first European émigrés successfully assimilated into Hollywood and the only studio-era director to be 'promoted' (disastrously) to the rank of production chief, Lubitsch stood within the industry as both a master to emulate and a talent to scorn. Was he a front office manager, or just another employee on the factory floor? This dynamic, this ambiguity is at the heart of THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER. If there's a richer film out there about the invisible fault lines of the working world, the subtle and precarious gradations of class and position, the shape of solidarity, and the perpetually disarming, cussed strangeness of human relationships, I've never seen it. (In fact, I would be frightened if such a film existed.) Although it's realized deftly enough to avoid any sense of claustrophobia, THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER unfolds across about three and a half sets, with the show room and stock closets of Matuschek & Co. predominating. The store becomes a character unto itself—a nexus of camaraderie and terror, empathy and misunderstanding, business and romance. It's a combative but sentimental paragon of small-town values, a fact that points to one of film's most obscure achievements—successfully transplanting the aw-shucks, patriarchal Republican fantasyland of Louis B. Mayer's M-G-M to points east. (As Frank Morgan informs the audience in the trailer, "Of course, my shop may be a little far away for some of you—it's in Budapest, Hungary, just around the corner from Balta Street. But I'm sure that the bargains you get here will more than make your trip worthwhile.") Apolitical on its surface, THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER nevertheless plays as an elegy for a vanishing idea of Europe—not the swank salon of earlier Lubitsch pictures, but the cozy, middle-class environs of Lubitsch's youth. Talk about world events catching up with Hollywood: the film proved popular enough upon its January 1940 release for M-G-M to promote the next Stewart-Sullavan-Morgan vehicle—Frank Borzage's devastating Holocaust drama THE MORTAL STORM—as an improbably cheerful follow-up to THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER. Preceded by Dave O’Brien’s 1951 short film BARGAIN MADNESS (9 min, 35mm). (1940, 99 min, 35mm) [K.A. Westphal]

Wang Bing’s Youth Trilogy

Gene Siskel Film Center – See showtimes below

Wang Bing's YOUTH (SPRING) (China/Documentary)
Saturday, 10am
Chinese documentarian Wang Bing shot over 2,500 hours of footage for his latest film, YOUTH (SPRING), compared to only—only—300 hours for his 2002 masterpiece (and directorial debut) WEST OF THE TRACKS, which clocks in at over nine hours. SPRING, however, is the first in a trilogy that may be just as long but won’t exceed more than ten hours in length, per Wang. Considering such a scope, one is then prompted to consider not just what is happening in any given scene, but why it was chosen from such a breadth of footage. Frederick Wiseman’s films inspire similar consideration, yet in dealing primarily with institutions, a logical pattern usually emerges. Wang’s films, however, when concerned with such sprawling subjects, are generally more fitful, even feeling loose and unfocused. Yet it’s with studied intent that Wang employs his deceptively haphazard approach, one that particularly befits the subject of his latest film. Shot between 2014 and 2019, YOUTH centers on young migrant workers from rural provinces around China who go to work in Zhili, a district of Huzhou City in the Zhejiang province (where Wang also shot his 2016 film BITTER MONEY; the initial footage he shot there became that film, which has a similar premise but focuses less explicitly on young people), producing children’s clothes at run-down, privately owned sweatshops. There are over 18,000 such shops in this area, and they employ around 300,000 migrant workers; Wang communicates all this in a single interstitial at the end of the film. During the three-and-a-half hours before that, however, the only information we’re given outright is the name of the specific worker being featured, their age (most are in their teens and early-to-mid 20s, some in their 30s), and the province they came from, as well as the name and address of whatever workshop they’re in. (Ironically, several are located on Happiness Road.) Otherwise we’re thrust into their day-to-day lives, slowly becoming familiar with the long hours they spend in the workshops, hunched over sewing machines; we also get to know their “personal lives,” if that’s an appropriate name for such living, in the attached dormitories, no more than cinder block structures crammed with small beds and littered with trash. Aside from discussions with bosses over pay, no one involved comments on the injustice of these conditions. Instead, we mostly see the young people acting as young people do, lazing around, scrolling on their phones, socializing, and, of course, flirting. Some are married, others dating. Toward the beginning we see a 20-year-old woman who’s pregnant; she, her co-worker and boyfriend, her family, and even the workshop bosses discuss a potential abortion. Wang dangles the suggestion of a potential narrative throughline and just as provocatively drops it unceremoniously. “When you concentrate the action and importance on one character, you feel you’re getting a 360-degree view of their life, but it’s an illusion; there are all kinds of things you don’t see,” Wang said in an interview with Dennis Lim for Film Comment. “I use a piecemeal approach because I think that’s how things are: dispersed and fragmented.” From the disjunction emerges, paradoxically, a clearer picture of a distinct socioeconomic landscape. As for an emotional terrain, few things are more opaque than the embryonic philosophies of young people; at times this feels akin to a Maurice Pialat film, the indecorum of youth resulting in “immediate emotion and irrepressible impulse, of the vital force of the moment,” as Richard Brody wrote in a 2015 essay on the French filmmaker. Wang balances this with a pragmatism that, again like Pialat’s films, negates any movement toward sentimentality. “There’s also something specific to China: in the mid-20th century, during the revolutionary fervor, especially in art, there was an enormous overuse of the word and the idea of youth, to represent a revolutionary spirit,” Wang said in the aforementioned Film Comment interview. “I wanted to reclaim it from that use and that meaning. The fact is that this sector relies very heavily on this production force—the physical labor of young people.” It would seem that Wang’s editing process (which he undertakes with others; he’s not credited as an editor in the film) is more instinctive and perhaps even reactive than it is strategic, out of which a most honest representation of these young peoples’ lives—personally, professionally, and politically—emerges. (2023, 215 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
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Wang Bing’s YOUTH (HARD TIMES) (China/Documentary)
See Venue website for showtimes
Each film of Wang Bing’s YOUTH trilogy is composed of 20-minute segments, each one centered on a particular subject. Sometimes the subjects reappear in episodes about another person, but more often, Wang will introduce someone only to abandon them before resolving whatever crisis their episode is about. This narrative strategy recalls Michelangelo Antonioni’s historic decision to have Anna, the ostensible protagonist of L’AVVENTURA (1960), simply disappear from the picture after an hour and never return. Antonioni’s film, one of the defining works of modernist cinema, conveys a profound sense of alienation when it uproots the main character from her own story. In repeating this tactic over and over across three films totaling ten hours, Wang normalizes it, suggesting that anyone in the hyper-capitalist economy it depicts is susceptible at any time to being uprooted by forces beyond their control. When you realize in YOUTH (SPRING), the first feature in the trilogy, how the films are going to be structured, the effect is devastating. YOUTH (HARD TIMES), the second film, continues on this track as a matter of course. As such, it’s the toughest to watch of the three—and, not coincidentally, the longest. For its first half, HARD TIMES makes its predecessor look like a romantic comedy; notably lacking are the moments of camaraderie, flirtation, and plain ol’ goofing off that one would expect to see in an exhaustive work about young people. Wang focuses instead on the drudgery of sweatshop labor: some scenes feel like they were pulled from a Dickens novel, like the ones showing groups of workers arguing with their bosses over wages, which have gotten lower over the past few years, only to achieve nothing or else the most meager increase. HARD TIMES reaches its dramatic peak in its third hour, when it follows the workers of a few sweatshops whose bosses have left town with everyone’s wages just before payday. Wang presents the workers’ futile efforts to get the Zhili police to do anything about it (another Dickensian moment), then continues their story just long enough to watch fate hand them another indignity. Speaking about this passage in an interview with the New York press around the time of HARD TIMES’ American premiere, Wang explained that in China, the law does not protect individuals, only power. It’s a sobering truth that few Chinese filmmakers are able to deliver so bluntly, and it accounts for why Wang has never even tried to get his movies exhibited in his native country. For those of us who are privileged to see them, Wang’s films provide invaluable lessons not only about contemporary China, but about the dangers of unchecked capitalism. The YOUTH trilogy, in its epic duration, comes across like a definitive generational portrait; how upsetting that its central section should feel like a prison. (2024, 226 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Wang Bing’s YOUTH (HOMECOMING) (China/Documentary)
See Venue website for showtimes
The final installment in Wang Bing’s Youth trilogy is as sprawling as its predecessors, also spanning a several-year period and involving many young garment-factory workers, yet it ultimately reveals the trilogy’s circular narrative, beginning with the relatively carefree nature of YOUTH (SPRING); reaching a zenith with the struggles respective to the young workers in YOUTH (HARD TIMES); and ending with them going home, representing an ascent into another stage of adulthood that finds them starting families of their own. (Wang said in an interview with Screen Slate that he’d wanted to show where his subjects come from, also revealing “a sense of dignity” for his subjects in the process. “Although their hometowns were very remote and the living standards there were not superb,” he continues, “they expressed a sense of confidence as free individuals whose humanity was symbolically represented.”) As indicated in this installment’s title, it centers largely on some of the young workers as they go back to the rural villages from which they emigrated to Zhili, a manufacturing town in Huzhou City up the Yangtze River Delta, for the New Years break. Among the prominent vignettes explored are a couple as they take a monotonous train ride back home; interactions with the workers’ families, who fare no better than they; two weddings involving some of the workers; and the circle of life continuing with a baby being born. It’s the circle of life both literally, as the young people undertake the milestones that pepper most peoples’ lives, and figuratively, as, toward the end, Wang reverts back to the more playful atmosphere of the first installment, featuring new young workers as they begin their time at the factories, not as yet burdened by the drudgeries of their labor. It’s a rather simple revolution both over time and amidst society, ultimately mirrored by the intended trajectory of the trilogy, which, as Wang said in an interview with A Good Movie to Watch, was “to capture the reality of China since it implemented major economic reforms in the 1980s.” It’s largely also a depressing one, though the filmmaker doesn’t constrict the so-called “simple narrative” to an explicitly political apogee, rather letting the personal supersede the political as opposed to being level with it. As Wang said in the aforementioned Screen Slate interview, “We did not use editing to express the author’s opinion, mentality, or desire for control. The author took a back seat and, in this way, the power of the filmmaker is weakened.” Wang’s films are more impactful because of this, putting faces but above all complicated emotions, both of subjects and viewers, around situations to which us unfamiliar with these peoples’ day-to-day reality think of mostly as overarching concepts that therefore don’t resound as personally. In rejecting a clear message and showing things more broadly through long, uncut sequences and even longer running times, Wang provides space for viewers to assemble and process their own feelings in response to those of others. (2024, 152 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
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Wang Bing in conversation following the screenings of YOUTH (HOMECOMING) on Friday and Saturday.

Derek Jarman's BLUE (UK/Experimental)

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

“‘How vain a thing is painting,’” André Bazin wrote in his seminal book What is Cinema?, paraphrasing Blaise Pascal, “if underneath our fond admiration for its works we do not discern man’s primitive need to have the last word in the argument with death by means of the form that endures.” One could also apply this deliberation to Derek Jarman’s BLUE, his final feature-length film before he died of AIDS-related complications in 1994. I’d argue that Jarman didn’t just have the last word—he won the argument; BLUE not only endures, it perseveres. Made as Jarman was losing his eyesight, it consists entirely of a static, monochrome blue “shot,” meant to mimic his evanescent vision, over which he and others (including Tilda Swinton and Nigel Terry) discuss life and art, both his personally and in general, to a haunting score by Simon Fisher Turner. Inspired by the monochrome work of French artist Yves Klein, specifically his painting IKB 79, Jarman achieves with this effect something at once intimate and immense. According to the Tate Modern’s website, Klein considered his monochrome work “to be a way of rejecting the idea of representation” and thought that blue “had a quality close to pure space and he associated it with immaterial values beyond what can be seen or touched.” The latter sentiment resonates with Jarman’s tragic predicament, while the former is at war with the Bazinian dilemma of effigial mortality. Perhaps by eliminating straightforward representation, one can focus on the soul rather than its vessel. In this regard, it’s unique in how it merges experimental and narrative qualities. What may at first seem alienating for viewers unfamiliar with Jarman soon becomes inviting in its courageous closeness. BLUE is the essence of cinema as ontological study, a staggeringly afflictive experience that illuminates film’s most transcendent qualities. Screening as part of the Subversive Histories: A Snapshot of Queer Cinema series. (1993, 79 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]

Vincente Minnelli's MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 12pm

Produced by MGM’s immortal Arthur Freed unit at a time when Technicolor made every shot look like an oil painting come to life, MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS would have looked gorgeous even if Vincente Minnelli hadn’t directed it. Yet he did, and the world is a better place as a result. This is the movie (only Minnelli’s third as director) where the former Marshall Field’s window dresser became the American Max Ophüls; the balletic camera movements invoke, alternately, intoxication with rediscovering the past and a skeptical interrogation of the past. Comparably, the dense mise-en-scène is filled with countless little observations about how people lived in a particular time and place (specifically, an upper-middle-class St. Louis neighborhood in 1903-04), and remarkably, the imagery always feels in harmony with the emotional content, which is Chaplinesque in how it can be appreciated by small children and wizened adults for pretty much the same reasons. The onscreen world of MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS was only four decades old when the movie was made, but given that this was during the worst days of World War II, the rosy images of the past probably seemed as distant then as they do today. (Notably, when the characters speak of different nations interacting, they’re talking about the strictly benign spectacle of the coming World’s Fair.) The film continues to triumph as escapist entertainment: Who doesn’t swoon over the exuberance of “The Trolley Song” sequence, grin beamingly at the expertly timed light comedy of the family interaction, or get misty-eyed during Judy Garland’s soulful rendition of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”? Yet what makes MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS endure as art are the countless ways that Minnelli and company complicate their project of escapism. Consider the anecdotal narrative structure, which recognizes the banality and commonness of life in its focus on everyday events; or consider the film’s groundbreaking integration of songs into the story (before MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, the songs in most American musicals were distinctly separate entities from the narratives), which grants unprecedented depth to familiar emotions. These emotions are not always pretty or easily contained—Minnelli generates a surprising amount of anxiety from the Smith family’s impending move, and the scene of Margaret O’Brien’s Tootie taking her anger out on her snowmen is always more unnerving than you expect. Robin Wood once suggested, only half-jokingly, that MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS could be categorized as a horror movie, with Tootie being the monstrous personification of her family members’ repressed emotions, and no less than John Carpenter took inspiration from the Halloween section of the film in his design of the original HALLOWEEN. Apparently, there’s something about the forced perfection of all-American town life that lends itself to the horrific imagination. Screening as part of the Heartland series. (1944, 113 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Alan Rudolph's REMEMBER MY NAME (US)

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

The first time I ever saw DOUBLE INDEMNITY, I assumed it would climax with the murder that's discussed, analyzed, and rehearsed at length by Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck; when that act occurred half-way through the picture, leaving the rest of the runtime to untangle the aftermath, I was surprised and overjoyed that I'd guessed wrong. It's so rare to encounter a film with such an organic and disciplined narrative logic, to admire a film for the wit of its construction alone, for the twists and turns that are unpredictable but wholly earned, consistent, and thought through. Alan Rudolph's Stanwyck-inspired domestic thriller REMEMBER MY NAME is like that, too. I'd suggest going into it cold, which shouldn't be much of a problem as it's practically a lost film. (Sony Pictures Repertory maintains an absolutely superb 35mm print, but the music rights to Alberta Hunter's blues score have allegedly kept REMEMBER MY NAME unreleasable on home video for the past four decades.) Right when a conventional movie would be grinding to a climax, you realize that Rudolph is only getting started and nowhere near done with these characters. Though REMEMBER MY NAME is set largely in confined, claustrophobic, and economically marginal spaces (alleyways, thrift stores, dank bars, prison cells), each character's fate remains expansive and unwritten. Produced by Rudolph's mentor Robert Altman while he enjoyed a particularly flexible deal with 20th Century Fox (which yielded the likes of QUINTET and HEALTH, alas), REMEMBER MY NAME is more disciplined, focused, and purposeful than anything that Altman had directed himself up to that time. (During the same stretch, Altman also managed to produce features from Robert Benton and Robert M. Young, so it was hardly an artistic rut.) All of the performances are good (Anthony Perkins strives earnestly to convince us he's a hard hat family man and almost pushes Norman Bates aside entirely), though Geraldine Chaplin's star turn as an ex-con is exceptional: fierce, frightening, and flammable. Screening as part of the Columbia Pictures in the 1970s series. (1978, 94 min, 35mm) [K.A. Westphal]

Brian De Palma's PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE (US)

Music Box Theatre – Friday and Saturday, 11pm

A hit only in Winnipeg (a city then and now of exquisite good taste), PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE seems to have everything going against it. Music by the anti-cool songsmith Paul Williams, who also plays one of the leading roles, an alienating, mannered, downright strange performance by William Finley in the title role, a visual scheme exuberant with kitsch, gaudy colors, and off-putting compositions, and a tone of jokiness and self-mockery resolutely at odds with the deadly seriousness of the subject matter: at first glance, there's nothing about the movie that's not at odds with itself. It's the same with the plot line, which is so absurdly constructed and disconcerting as to fairly defy summary. Winslow Leach, bespectacled composer of a cantata about Faust, has his music stolen by the Svengali-esque Swan, a producer and nightclub owner. Framed as a heroin dealer, Winslow is sent to Sing Sing, where all his teeth are extracted in an experimental medical procedure. He soon escapes, however, when he hears his own songs on the radio being butchered and breaks in to Swan's record-pressing plant, only to have his head trapped in the machinery. Now with the grooves of the hated record inscribed on his face, and his own voice destroyed, he determines to destroy Swan's nightclub, disguising himself as a cybernetic owl, only to be waylaid in his quest for revenge when he falls in love with the ingénue Phoenix, played by the great Jessica Harper. And that's just the first two reels. There are a dozen musical numbers, elaborately staged and hilariously parodic, and a series of terrible murders, committed grotesquely by the otherwise sympathetic hero, Winslow, all of which work to prevent any attempt on our part figure out what in the world we're watching. PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE never lets us get comfortable, and this is not merely on the level of plot. The film's strange, distracting style and other-worldly sights and sounds are just artificial enough to suggest that the work is wholly within a fantasy land, the fairy-tale world of the classic Hollywood musical, and just nasty, explicit, and corporeal enough to indicate that we're seeing a version of reality. After Winslow becomes the Phantom, he plants a time bomb in the trunk of a prop car about to be rolled onto a stage crowded with his enemies. It's is a dead ringer for the bomb we see in the opening seconds of TOUCH OF EVIL, and what follows is nothing less than a stunning one-upping of that film's luxurious and deadly first shot. Not content with one mobile camera, De Palma shoots his car-bombing in split-screen and during a song-and-dance routine. On one level, it's an exercise in audacity and confusion and suspense, a great director showing off. But, as in all aspects of PHANTOM, the segment serves to unnerve the viewer tonally, preventing us from fully enjoying the technical mastery of the style or from enmeshing ourselves within the story and feeling unmitigated suspense and horror, from either condemning or identifying with the characters and their actions. Hilarious, horrifying, mortifying, embarrassing, engrossing, and delirious all at once, PHANTOM's masterful control over every aspect of cinema makes it impossible to truly come to terms with, but makes it one of the most profoundly pleasurable experiences in American cinema. (1974, 94 min, 35mm) [Kian Bergstrom]

Paul Vecchiali's ROSA LA ROSE, PUBLIC GIRL (France)

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

In Paul Vecchiali's ROSA LA ROSE, PUBLIC GIRL, Rosa (Marianne Basler) is a glowing beacon of lust to all the men (and some women) in Les Halles, Paris. She treats her job as a prostitute with anthropological fascination. Her inclination to study the people that fawn for her company turns her into a blank slate on which to project desire. Rosa receives these men with an openness and radiance that is irresistible to all that cross her path, including the viewer. Even the other prostitutes that walk the streets alongside her fall under her spell. The earth spins when she moves and stops when she's still. Her world is vibrant and fascinating, alight with various characters, and she is happy with her job and herself. That is, until she meets Julien (Pierre Cosso), when he walks into the celebration of her 20th birthday. The party is staged as a Last Supper banquet with Rosa at the center, filmed with Christ-like reverence. As Rosa and Julien feel pulled toward each other, Rosa begins to question all that she has grown to prosper within. Their romance blossoms and they must make sacrifices to be together. Even before Julien enters, Vecchiali treats this material as a love story, bright and beaming, flamboyant, teeming with life. It is a love story not about Rosa falling in love, but about falling in love with Rosa. She is all things, monuments and buildings, cities, flowers, color, movement. It's as if the world is built around her, but in challenging the structure within which she lives and thrives, her world starts to crumble. With the introduction of love, suddenly the vitality surrounding her seems chaotic and the abundance of character overwhelming. Vecchiali's cinema is at once painful and oddball, its low-budget vibrancy a chiffon veneer for the torment of the human condition. The camera glides, floats, unobtrusively allowing the rhythms of the film and its characters to glide along with it. And Rosa, throughout her trials and tribulations, preserves her glow to the remarkably bitter end. Screening as part of the Paul Vecchiali and Diagonale series. (1986, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Olivia Hunter Willke]

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Robert J. Kaplan’s SCARECROW IN A GARDEN OF CUCUMBERS (US)

Music Box Theatre – Tuesday, 7pm

After languishing in relative obscurity for about half a century, the twisted artifact that is SCARECROW IN A GARDEN OF CUCUMBERS has been lovingly restored by the Academy Film Archive, ready once more to confound and delight future generations of—I say this lovingly—cinephilic sickos. Crafted as something akin to the episodic travels of THE WIZARD OF OZ or ALICE IN WONDERLAND but transplanted to Andy Warhol’s Factory and the adjacent New York underground art scene of the 1970s, we’re thrown immediately into the camp-adjacent deep end with an opening first-person scene of our plucky protagonist, Eve Harrington (the stunning and uproarious Holly Woodlawn), saying goodbye to her small-town parents before heading to the Big City to become a star. The kicker to the scene comes soon after when her parents (seen solely from the waist up previously) turn to head to the door, revealing they’ve both been buck naked the entire time, their ass cheeks now bidding us farewell too. It’s about as succinct an opener for Eve’s journey as we could get; a well-worn trope of this kind of “small town girl moves to the Big Apple” story, mixed in with a crude and absurdist twist, the exact flavor of which permeates the entire work. Film-literate audience members might note that Eve is named after another fame-hungry powerhouse of the silver screen, Anne Baxter’s titular titan from ALL ABOUT EVE (1950). She’s just the first of many characters named after silver screen icons from the Hollywood of yesteryear, from Mary Poppins (a scene-stealing Tally Brown) to Joe Buck (Sonny Boy Hayes) to Rhett Butler (Woodlawn again, in a hilarious piece of drag dual performance). Amidst a film full of ice cream fights, wrestling matches, and musical numbers veering from cabaret-lite to variety show bombast to gorgeous melancholy laments (accompanied by Bette Midler, no less), our one constant is the standout comic performance of Woodlawn, her gorgeous gangly body contorting through each scenario with humor and panache, treating each scene with both the seriousness and stupidity it deserves. Woodlawn’s work here, an early and almost forgotten example of a trans actress in a leading role in a motion picture, is a work of genuine artistic and historical regard, capturing a joyous piece of queer cinema that is altogether unserious and inane. The lack of self-importance is genuinely what’s important here, now back from near-oblivion to shake us loose for years to come. Presented by Oscarbate, followed by a post-screening Q&A with critic/author Caden Mark Gardner and Willow Catelyn Maclay.(1972, 82 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Carlos Reygadas' JAPÓN (Mexico)

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

From the opening moments of Carlos Reygadas' inaugural feature—themselves constituting a near direct citation from an early passage of SOLARIS (1972)—the nascent Mexican auteur's aesthetic milieu and artistic ambition are laid completely bare. Here is a formally daring and monstrously accomplished debut film, soaked to the bone with transcendental style, that directs its gaze to a remote village in the state of Hidalgo and, as though tuned precisely to a just temperament of divine omniscience, fills its ultra-widescreen 16mm widescreen compositions with humanity, luminous landscape, and scenes of animal life in near-equal measure. Reygadas exercises extraordinary patience in observing his cast of non-professional actors, allowing the film ample space to unfold almost like an ethnographic portrait of rural Mexican life, and yet his film functions most convincingly as a philosophical treatise on Thanatos and the extraordinary fragility of life, vying for nothing less than sublime universality in its portrait of a fatally resigned artist (Alejandro Ferretis) who is searching for a suitable location in which to kill himself—think of the film's confounding title as a distancing device meant to unmoor the narrative from its literal setting and to re-situate it in the realm of total allegory. Narratively and stylistically, the film splits the difference between the primordial blood-and-guts jungle odyssey of Lisandro Alonso's LOS MUERTOS (2004) and the pitch-black suicide meditations of Abbas Kiarostami's A TASTE OF CHERRY (1997), following the deliberately unnamed man as he rooms with an elderly woman named Ascención (Magdelena Flores) and charting his will to live as it slowly flickers back into being, driven at once by an awakened carnal desire for the woman and mounting outrage over her exploitation at the hands of a callous young relative. The film ultimately adopts a stance on the bestial nature of man's desire that is so cynical (gesturing towards a total incompatibility of men and women), it compels me to want to place the film in transatlantic dialogue with its contemporaries in the New French Extremity—certain works of Bruno Dumont and Catherine Breillat come to mind most immediately. Reygadas would reach even greater heights with his subsequent films, but his debut remains an impressive achievement, heralding the arrival of a colossal cinematic talent. (2002, 134 min, DCP Digital) [David Whitehouse]

Michael Schultz’s COOLEY HIGH (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 8:30pm

“I grew up in the Cabrini–Green housing project,” said the Chicago-born writer Eric Monte, “and I had one of the best times of my life, the most fun you can have while inhaling and exhaling.” Monte’s assertion is, of course, antithetical to the general conception of the storied public housing projects as being a terrifying place out of which it would seem joy is unlikely to emanate. COOLEY HIGH, which Monte wrote and Michael Schultz (CAR WASH, WHICH WAY IS UP?) directed, revels in the elation of youth, apolitical inasmuch as children and young adults themselves usually are but still evincing a message similar to Monte’s above, resisting any kind of bourgeois pity. It’s the final weeks of high school for Preach (Glynn Turman) and Cochise (Lawrence Hilton Jacobs) at Cooley High (the film was inspired by Monte’s childhood and his time at Cooley Vocational High School, near Cabrini–Green); the story takes place over the course of several days, during which Preach (a bad student but one who nevertheless reads poetry and history books for fun) falls in love and Cochise finds out he received a full basketball scholarship. All of this is seemingly incidental as the boys and their friends hang out at the local dive, go to a party, take a joy ride in a stolen car (where they partake in an impressive car chase through warehouses on Navy Pier), and see a movie (GODZILLA VS. MOTHRA, though it’s the fight in the theater that really grabs the audience’s—both in the film and out— attention), normal things young people do, the memories of which are often bright spots among the relative dimness of subsequent adulthood. Preach and Cochice eventually find themselves in trouble for the joy ride, though an encouraging teacher (played by Saturday Night Live cast member Garrett Morris) helps get them out of trouble with the cops. That, however, sets into motion the events that lead to the film’s heartbreaking conclusion. It’s been compared to George Lucas’ AMERICAN GRAFFITI, which was released the year prior, but, as Keith Corson notes in Trying to Get Over: African American Directors after Blaxploitation, 1977-1986, “While Lucas’s portrait of high school graduates in the San Fernando Valley relies heavily on on feelings of nostalgia, COOLEY HIGH remains grounded in the realities of urban transformation and decline.” Though not political in nature, the stakes in Schultz’s film are naturally higher than that of any predominantly white corollary, as is evidenced by the dramatic climax and sobering aftermath. The film has gone on to inspire many a Black filmmaker (e.g., Spike Lee, John Singleton) yet still stands on its own as an auspicious entry into the coming-of-age subgenre and a necessary corrective to pervasive assumptions. (1975, 107 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]

F.W. Murnau's NOSFERATU (Germany/Silent)

Music Box Theatre – Wednesday, 7pm

Like his contemporary Jean Vigo, F.W. Murnau died far too soon. His death in an auto accident cut short the career of a great talent who was reaching new artistic milestones after his arrival in the U.S. He died having directed only three films for Hollywood (not including TABU) and, while he is celebrated among auteurists and cinephiles, his popular reputation never reached the level of other European émigrés like Fritz Lang. David Thomson writes that Murnau had an unparalleled talent for "photograph[ing] the real world and yet invest[ing] it with a variety of poetic, imaginative, and subjective qualities. The camera itself allowed audiences to experience actuality and imagination simultaneously." In the case of NOSFERATU, the result is a vampire story of startling realism. This is no fantasy, nor is it a lush period piece. This is mania, creeping fear, disease, and plague. Perhaps no film better illustrates the difference between dreams, which inhabit the margins of our world, and fantasies, which we each manufacture. Thanks to Murnau's pioneering style here and in later films, directors as diverse as Douglas Sirk and David Lynch have continued to practice a similar alchemy of melodrama, movement, desire, and fateful circumstance. With an original score performed live by Jozef Van Wissem. (1922, 94 min, Digital Projection) [Will Schmenner]

Morton DaCosta’s THE MUSIC MAN (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Wednesday, 6:30pm

A con man drumming up business in small-town America mesmerizes the people he meets, convinces them that their way of life is under dire threat, and proposes they part with a considerable amount of their own money for a fix he never intends to make good on. No, this is not the United States circa 2016­­–24, but rather the fictional town of River City, Iowa, in the year 1912, and our crook is Prof. Harold Hill, the title character of the hit musical The Music Man. The show, with book, music, and lyrics by Meredith Wilson, premiered on Broadway in 1957 and captured a slew of accolades, including the Tony Award for Best Musical. Inevitably, Hollywood grabbed for a piece of the show’s lucrative pie by adapting it for the screen. Helmed by theatre veteran Morton DaCosta, THE MUSIC MAN is a cornucopia of wholesome nostalgia scored with memorable, clever songs set in motion by the fluid choreography of Onna White and the gadfly energy of Robert Preston reprising the title role he originated on stage. From the opening scene of traveling salesmen bemoaning the multi-aliased Hill’s effect on their legitimate business in a capella syncopation to the final fantasy of an endless marching band, THE MUSIC MAN delivers dazzling, rose-colored vignettes of a bygone way of life. Meredith, a conductor who put all his knowledge into composing his first musical, chose a mixture of styles—marches, four-part harmonies, contrapuntal melodies, barn dance folk tunes—that scream Americana. Once touched by Hill, the characters surrender to the dream of harmony (quite literally in the case of the squabbling River City councilmen who form a barbershop quarter) to counter the pernicious effect of the town’s new pool table on their impressionable children. Great performances, especially from Hermione Gingold as River City first lady Eulalie Mackechnie Shinn and crystal-voiced Shirley Jones as Marian Paroo, the woman for whom Hill gets his foot caught in the door, elevate this corny material. The choreography, particularly the demented dance through the library of “Marian the Librarian,” keeps the film humming along. But it is Preston who steals the show with his tour de force performance that seduces the movie-going audience along with the citizens of River City. With such first-class entertainment on screen, it’s easy to forget the underlying illusion THE MUSIC MAN is peddling, an illusion that comes back with force during the closing number, “Seventy-Six Trombones.” By then, we hardly care. Part of the Heartland film series. (1963, 151 min, 35mm) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Robert Redford’s ORDINARY PEOPLE (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 3pm

Judith Guest’s 1976 debut novel Ordinary People is a profound exploration of grief, survivor’s guilt, and generational trauma while ascribing to a Lake Forest, Illinois, view of societal normality. These complex themes are masterfully transposed in Robert Redford’s 1980 film adaptation, his directorial debut. Departing from the lighthearted or action-oriented roles he was known for, Redford chose Guest’s somber material, resonating deeply with his own experience of loss—his first son, Scott, died of sudden infant death syndrome at just three months old. This personal connection lent authenticity to his work, making the story of a middle-class family grappling with tragedy all the more poignant. Despite initial skepticism from studios, Redford’s clout as an actor-producer prevailed and the project moved forward. His risk was richly rewarded when ORDINARY PEOPLE earned six Academy Award nominations, ultimately winning Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay (Alvin Sargent), and Best Supporting Actor (Timothy Hutton). While Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore were overlooked for their performances as Calvin and Beth Jarrett, their portrayals remain strikingly relevant. The film begins with Conrad “Connie” Jarrett (Hutton) singing Canon in D Majorduring choir practice, only to be jolted awake as if it were a recurring nightmare. The tension is immediate—something is clearly wrong with Connie. As the story unfolds, we learn that Connie recently returned home from a psychiatric hospital following a suicide attempt, triggered by survivor’s guilt after his brother Bucky accidentally drowned in Lake Michigan. These events leave Connie emotionally fragile and struggling to reconnect with his perfectionist mother, Beth (Moore), and his sensitive father, Calvin (Sutherland). At Calvin’s insistence, Connie begins seeing a therapist, Dr. Berger (Judd Hirsch), whose unconventional methods help him confront his guilt and pain. (It's a narrative blueprint for Gus Van Sant’s GOOD WILL HUNTING [1997].) As therapy progresses, Connie starts to heal; a budding romance with Jeannine (Elizabeth McGovern), also helps. Calvin, observing his son’s progress, begins his own sessions with Berger, seeking clarity in his strained marriage. However, Beth remains an obstacle to the family’s healing journey. Fixated on societal appearances, she refuses to confront her grief or acknowledge Connie’s pain. Her emotional distance stems from seeing Bucky as her favored child, and Connie’s survival—marred by his suicide attempt—only complicates her need for control and perfection. Clinging to tradition and an air of composure, Beth shields herself from the vulnerability required to process her loss. Redford’s direction captures these dynamics with understated precision, turning ORDINARY PEOPLE into an enduring study of familial disconnection and the silent weight of tragedy. Over forty years later, its themes remain profoundly resonant, offering a haunting yet hopeful lens on the complexities of grief and healing. Screening as part of the Heartland series. (1980, 124 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]

Martin Scorsese's AFTER HOURS (US)

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

AFTER HOURS conveys, like nothing else in the director’s body of work, the sheer joy that Martin Scorsese derives from making movies. It’s funny, playful, and invigorating, with a style that positively whooshes you through the action. Working with cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (best known at the time for his run of films with Rainer Werner Fassbinder), Scorsese executes breathtaking camera movements indoors and outdoors alike, creating a sense of furious activity that betrays the film’s limited playing space. Most of it takes place in the Manhattan neighborhood of SoHo, where Griffin Dunne’s lonely office drone goes to meet the alluring woman (Patricia Arquette) whom he picked up at a cafe. Searching for easy sex, Paul winds up in a nightmare. His long night consists of one misadventure after another, as he gets bounced around the neighborhood (and into other parts of the borough) like a pinball; the story culminates with Dunne getting mistaken for a wanted criminal and hunted down by an angry mob. As twisty and as witty as Scorsese’s direction, Joseph Minion’s script (originally written for an NYU screenwriting class taught by Dusan Makavejev) operates under a calculated illogic that many have compared to the writing of Franz Kafka. And like a Kafka protagonist, Dunne has the misfortune of living in a universe that just doesn’t like him; his bad luck seems almost cosmic in nature. Adding to his misfortune, almost everyone Dunne meets is some kind of kook, and the colorful supporting cast plays those kooks for all they’re worth. Of special mention are Teri Garr, who plays a flaky artist, and John Heard, who reveals a deep reservoir of angst in his brief turn as a bartender. Screening as part of the Decoding Kafka: A Cinematic Interpretation series. (1985, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Joel Coen's FARGO (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 6:15pm

Inarguably pivotal in the Coen brothers’ oeuvre, FARGO is a midwestern fable. It’s not based on a true story, as the opening text claims, and only the first scene takes place in Fargo, North Dakota; it’s primarily set in Minnesota, which is fitting for a film about things never being exactly as they seem. It’s also about how evil isn’t always calculated, but often completely, hilariously inept—which doesn’t make it any less destructive. In desperate need of money, bungling car salesman Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) hires two criminals (played with perfect bizarre chemistry by chatty Steve Buscemi and the mostly silent Peter Stormare) to kidnap his wife and petition his wealthy father-in-law for the ransom. It doesn’t go well, and after some violent mishaps, Brainerd police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) becomes involved in solving the crimes. Seven-months pregnant Marge, who doesn’t appear on screen until more than 30 minutes in, stands out as a unique, impactful cinematic hero; we watch her slowly realize how mundanely insidious the world can be beyond her kind, no-nonsense demeanor. Well-known for its comedic juxtaposition of Minnesota nice accents and snow-covered landscapes with violence, FARGO is ultimately about Marge’s resilience to search for good in the world, despite the messy horrors she witnesses; her final scenes expressing this are heartbreakingly unassuming. Influential on the black comedy genre for decades after, the film’s best successor is the FX series of the same name. Inspired by FARGO and all the Coen brothers’ works, the anthology series excellently expands and complicates the film’s themes and its fascinating side characters. Screening as part of the Heartland series. (1996, 98 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Andrea Arnold's AMERICAN HONEY (US/UK)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 6pm

Reviews of Andrea Arnold’s AMERICAN HONEY, from those found in such notable publications as The New York Times, The Guardian, and The A.V. Club, as well as smaller outlets like local newspapers and little-known blogs, are rife with the phrase “at once.” According to these reviews, the film, its characters, and even its director, are “at once” any number of paradoxical adjectives, an assessment that’s as accurate as it is hackneyed. The first American feature from the extolled British director, AMERICAN HONEY is an epic film shot almost exclusively handheld and in 4:3; a coming-of-age proclamation that’s uncannily wise beyond its years; a road movie that eschews genre clichés. The young protagonist, Star (played by Sasha Lane, who Arnold discovered while she was on spring break from college), takes care of two young children, who may or may not be her siblings, while enduring sexual abuse from a man she calls ‘Daddy’ but whose exact relationship to her is unclear. The ambiguous exposition is reminiscent of much of Arnold’s oeuvre, down to the gritty details—her Academy Award-winning short film WASP (2003) and narrative feature FISH TANK (2009) are both about disenfranchised families whose circumstances are less than desirable. Having previously witnessed her dumpster diving for food, Star’s lot seems to improve when she unexpectedly meets Jake (Shia LaBeouf in a role that benefits from his ignominious intensity) and his band of roving misfits, otherwise known as Team 071, a group of young magazine sales people from similarly proletarian backgrounds. The ensuing two and a half hours (Arnold’s audacity in regards to length would be worthy of praise even if the film wasn’t so adroit, if not plain masterful) focuses as much on this wily lifestyle as it does the emerging romance between Star and Jake, with a few violent non sequiturs that both pull us from our reverie while likewise evincing the realities of the characters’ socio-economic status. “I grew up with a lot of Hollywood films,” Arnold told The A.V. Club in an interview. “Cozy farm houses, cowboys, nice flats in New York. Especially as a kid, those things have a huge impression on you. If you see films like that all the time, you think that’s how it is.” She later explained: “I think the film became the mix of my leftover fantastical ideas—you know, I grew up seeing farmhouses on the prairie. Then when we go there, a lot of the farmhouses are run down, and that’s how it is now.” Much of the criticism towards AMERICAN HONEY is directed at her depiction of working-class youth. In his review of the film for The New Yorker, Richard Brody writes that “[p]erhaps the most distressing cliché that afflicts many movies about poor people is that they’re depicted as being poor in language, poor in thought—as if people who don’t have money talk about their lives any less, or any less well, than people who do." This critique is similarly cavalier in its assumption that Arnold is necessarily striving for authenticity, or that people with money actually talk about their lives in any meaningful way. And perhaps it’s silence that unifies us more than words—or maybe music. Not only is the film named after a Lady Antebellum song (“Nothin' sweeter than summertime/And American honey…”), but it features a wide array of contemporary American pop music, with songs from the likes of Banky W, Bruce Springsteen, and Rihanna, to which the characters know every word. Their reverence for this music is almost fanatical, reflecting relationship with the medium rivaling that of any “person with money.” Winner of the Jury Prize at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, AMERICAN HONEY seems to have mostly flown under the radar following its early fall release. For me, it’s tied with Kelly Reichardt’s CERTAIN WOMEN as my favorite film of 2016; both are about women from small places who lead small lives, but with big hearts. That people are wary of Arnold’s film shows that perhaps we’re uncomfortable with the idea that an outsider, whether that status for her is defined by gender or country of origin, sees us better than we see ourselves. Screening as part of the Heartland series. (2016, 163 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Raoul Peck's ERNEST COLE: LOST AND FOUND (France/Documentary)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Raoul Peck has made a career out of accessible portraits of the radical. Covering wide ground with films about Marx and Baldwin and two about Patrice Lumumba, he’s become one of our leading chroniclers of the ills of the last few hundred years via the great men who’ve articulated them. Entering the fray is the comparatively lesser-known Ernest Cole, the South African photographer who, despite (or maybe because of) his status as a leading documenter of apartheid South Africa, struggled with marginalization throughout his career and had his archive of negatives lost for years before being rediscovered in a bank vault in Sweden in 2017. Peck uses a multimodal approach to document the man, drawing largely on Cole’s own photographs but supplementing them with other historical materials and a voiceover by Lakeith Stanfield acting as the man. The archival approach is a wise one by Peck, allowing Cole’s words and images mostly to speak for themselves. We see the work that formed his most popular collection, the 1967 book House of Bondage, as well as his follow-up attempts to document life in the Jim Crow south that were largely ignored by publications at the time. But there’s a sadness embedded in this approach too, in the way that we largely come to understand the man through the images of poverty and racial strife that defined much of his output. He laments this in his letter seeking refuge outside of the United States, saying that this was only one of his interests and not how he wanted to define his career. While the work presented in the film is varied, this is still a defining feature, and the portrait is one of a poet trying to break the molds made for him by a racist and xenophobic public. This may be why the film opens up a bit in the latter half, documenting his estate’s attempts and ultimate success in tracking down his archive in the present day. It’s here that the film’s political text becomes even more explicit, cataloging the more contemporary history of South Africa following the end of apartheid and the emergence of the ANC. These final moments offer some bit of triumph after the obscurity of Cole’s later life and eventual death in exile in 1990. Mixed within Peck’s encyclopedic and angry montage, Cole’s work is ultimately reclaimed as the invaluable archive it is. (2024, 105 min, DCP Digital) [Maxwell Courtright]

Payal Kapadia’s ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT (France/India/Italy/Netherlands/Luxembourg)

Gene Siskel Film Center - See Venue website for showtimes

Premiering as the first Indian film in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in thirty years, Payal Kapadia’s sophomore feature—and her first official foray into fiction filmmaking—dazzles with a confidence of voice and spirit that continues her emerging canon of poetic and politically charged narratives. Kapadia’s vision of feminine perseverance through lives of longing crafts a sprawling and complex vision of Mumbai as a nocturnal city that shines menacingly with wonder and opportunity. Voices that open the film tell us of the entrancing promise of money and stability that can be found in Mumbai, yet such gifts can only realistically be bestowed on the lucky few. For everyone else, you may end up like Prabha (Kani Kusruti) or Anu (Divya Prabha), two women living together and working together at the same hospital, each with varying levels of dedication to their work. Kapadia’s slice-of-life storytelling mode often finds these two at their most intimate and vulnerable in silent moments alone, each desperately working to take in the overwhelming world and circumstances around them. Prabha is stuck in time, her husband working abroad in Germany, with no attempts to contact her in months, save for a recent delivery of a rice cooker; Anu is conversely fixated on the promise of future love, with her nights spent with her new love—the charming Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon)—embarking on that most epic of quests: trying to find a place to hook up. Just like her previous film A NIGHT OF KNOWING NOTHING (2021), the repressive politics of mainstream Indian society find themselves hideously seeped into the fabric of the story, most prominently with Shiaz’s Muslim faith becoming a roadblock for any future life with Anu in an overtly Hindu nationalist society. Yet love, lust, and independence fight their way through to Kapadia’s hopeful ending, where a trip away from Mumbai literally uproots our protagonists from the horrors of living lives of passivity, and provides them each with opportunities to finally move forward in their respective lives. The gift of Kapadia’s film is in how major of a work it feels even with such slight and understated tools, the power of these emotional bubbles filling up to the point of bursting in ways cathartic and mystical and joyously communal. (2024, 110 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Rodgers & Hammerstein's THE SOUND OF MUSIC Sing-A-Long

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

Of all the epic musicals to emerge from 1960s Hollywood, THE SOUND OF MUSIC is arguably the grandest. The much-awarded film (five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director for Robert Wise) is based on the much-awarded stage production (five Tony awards, including Best Musical) that was the last collaboration between composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein. Of the seven stage-to-screen adaptations of their works, THE SOUND OF MUSIC, shot on location in glorious 70mm Todd-AO color is the most successful transfer. Through the method Rodgers and Hammerstein invented, this film effortlessly tells the story of the real-life Von Trapp Family Singers through songs that advance the story and reveal the state of mind of its characters. The nuns foretell a different life for their lively postulant in “Maria,” Maria earns the trust of the obstinate Von Trapp children in “My Favorite Things,” and the family bids Austria good-bye in “So Long, Farewell.” In between, director Wise makes the most of Austria’s natural and built environments, a soaring opening shot of the Alps affirming the glories of the homeland lovingly proclaimed later in “Edelweiss” and snapshots of Salzburg accompanying Maria and the children as she teaches them to sing in “Do-Re-Mi.” There are wisps of another epic, GONE WITH THE WIND (1939), as Maria makes play clothes for the children out of curtains and war intrudes on a prosperous, aristocratic family. But the villains remain mostly offstage in this family film that seeks to inspire and gently provoke reflection about duty, loyalty, love, and sacrifice. (1965, 172 min, DCP Digital Projection) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

🎞️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Alamo Drafthouse
Jack Hill’s 1974 film FOXY BROWN (80 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday, 9:30pm, as part of the Alamo Time Capsule 1974 series.

Charles Sellier’s 1984 film SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT (85 min, DCP Digital) screens Monday, 9pm, as part of the Graveyard Shift series.

Javier Aguirre’s 1973 film COUNT DRACULA’S GREAT LOVE (72 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 9:30pm, as part of the Terror Tuesday series.

Hugh Sullivan’s 2014 film THE INFINITE MAN (85 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday, 9:30pm, as part of the Weird Wednesday series. More info on all screenings here. 

⚫ Chicago Film Archives
The Chicago Transit Authority, in partnership with CFA, presents a new, one-of-a-kind temporary art installation at the Cicero Green Line station (4800 W. Lake St.). The installation, called we love, is a filmic exhibition of home movies and amateur films selected from collections housed and preserved at CFA. The video will be projected onto a wall in the mezzanine area of the station and will run day and night through March 15, 2026. More info here.

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

⚫ Davis Theater
The Oscarbate Film Collective presents the next Trust Fall screening on Thursday at 8:30pm. More info here.

⚫ FACETS Cinema
The Women Make Movies: A Social Awareness Screening Series takes place Sunday from 11am to 2pm with a donut and coffee hour starting at 11am and a screening of short films taking place thereafter. More info here. 

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
A free members-only screening of Paul Schrader’s 2024 film OH, CANADA (91 min, DCP Digital Projection) takes place Saturday at 6pm, though it’s sold out.

Cinema Interruptus, a series of communal film criticism centered around a single movie—in this case, Paul Thomas Anderson’s PHANTOM THREAD (2017)—takes place from Tuesday through the following Friday, with several events spanning those four days. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Jukka Vidgren and Juuso Laatio’s 2024 film HEAVIER TRIP (96 min, DCP Digital) begins screening and Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ 2024 horror film HERETIC (110 min, DCP Digital) and Sean Baker’s 2024 film ANORA (139 min, DCP Digital) continue screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Pilsen Community Books (1102 W. 18th St.)
THE PALESTINE EXCEPTION, a short film by Al Jazeera English’s award-winning documentary program, Fault Lines, screens Wednesday, 7pm, followed by a discussion featuring the director, Amina Waheed, as well as Chicago-based journalist Deanna Othman and Palestine Legal’s Rifqa Falaneh. More info here.

⚫ Sideshow Gelato (4819 N. Western Ave.)
SUPER-HORROR-RAMA! presents Welcome to Primetime: Holiday Edition. On Thursday three surprise TV Christmas specials around the theme of Existential Dread will screen starting at 7pm, with a social hour starting at 6pm. Every social hour includes a live set by local DJ Leah Lachesis Lazuli; two limited edition pinback buttons included with every ticket, with new designs each week; and every screening is preceded by additional giveaways donated by House of Movie Monsters and The Shadowboxery for people who answer trivia questions correctly. More info here.

⚫ Sweet Void Cinema (3036 W. Chicago Ave.)
Monear Shaer’s 2024 documentary GAZA IS OUR HOME (93 min, Digital Projection) screens on Saturday and Sunday at 7pm. It also screens at Nabala Cafe (4660 N. Broadway) on Monday at 8pm. 

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

CINE-LIST: November 29 - December 5, 2024

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, Maxwell Courtright, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Shaun Huhn, Ben Kaye, Will Schmenner, K.A. Westphal, David Whitehouse, Olivia Hunter Willke