:: FRIDAY, JANUARY 31 - THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 6 ::

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

The Worlds Of Wiseman

Gene Siskel Film Center – See days and showtimes below

Frederick Wiseman’s BELFAST, MAINE (US/Documentary)
Saturday, 2:15pm
Of all of Frederick Wiseman’s chronicles of the wheels of society, both domestic and foreign, BELFAST, MAINE may be his most literary and perhaps his most cinematic. Wiseman’s 360-degree look at the titular port city unfolds like a novel. Establishing shots form the background in which we picture the various denizens of this corner of Waldo County and lace through the film like Ozu pillow shots or, if you will, chapter breaks. Wiseman draws us in by revealing each of his characters and their activities slowly. We see workers in a potato processing factory toiling on an assembly line. I couldn’t parse the various machines and steps involved in what they were making, which made the whole sequence all the more intriguing. More self-evident jobs, like packing smoked salmon slices in individual packages or lobster fishing, are made more engaging by revealing how low-tech and hands-on so many activities in the town are; far from seeming quaint, the artisanal quality of the work draws us in and personalizes the experiences. Of course, it wouldn’t be a Wiseman film without municipal meetings and social services, and his patented ability to be a fly on a wall during such vulnerable moments as young women talking with a city counselor, including allusions to incest. But unusual are some truly gorgeous shots of a glowing-red sunset and extreme close-ups of a gas burner on an oven being used to cook fudge. If Wiseman scored his documentaries, BELFAST, MAINE would move to the strains of Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, as the film reveals the complexity and artistic soul of a working-class town celebrating its beliefs. One sequence involves two amateur actors rehearsing a scene from Death of a Salesman, and a high school literature teacher discussing how Moby-Dick is the heir to King Lear, but in a distinctly American way by centering an ordinary fisherman as its tragic hero. There is so much to explore in this surprisingly delicate film (though vegans and animal rights activists will be horrified by the hunting and butchering scenes). It is the connection Belfast, Maine has to the natural world for its life and livelihood that makes watching this masterpiece a timeless experience. (1999, 245 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Frederick Wiseman’s DOMESTIC VIOLENCE (US/Documentary)
Sunday, 1:15pm
Given its graphic depictions and extended descriptions of abuse, DOMESTIC VIOLENCE has got to be one of the most harrowing films ever made. At the same time, it speaks to how much of a humanist Frederick Wiseman had become by this point in his career that the film also contains some of the most uplifting portraits of human decency in cinema. Most of it takes place at a domestic violence shelter in Tampa, Florida (the largest in the state, per one of the employees), and Wiseman grants about as much time to the victims of abuse who reside there as he does to the case managers, social workers, and other professionals who work with them. The residents we see are remarkably forthright and eloquent in recounting the horrors they’ve lived through; what makes the film such an overwhelming experience is the way each testimony builds upon the others until you realize that Wiseman is considering what amounts to a pandemic. One employee of the shelter confirms the societal nature of the issue when she informs a group of elderly women on a tour of the facility that between one in three and one in two women will be assaulted during their lives. On a related note, the residents we see reflect a range of ages, classes, and education levels, which effectively lays waste to the myth that domestic violence only takes place in a particular social milieu. The scope of the problem—reflected in the film’s epic duration—can make it seem at times unconquerable, but then Wiseman will remind you of the good that exists in the world in the form of shelter staff informing new residents of their rights, listening patiently to histories of abuse, or engaging children in play therapy. These are some of the most heroic figures in Wiseman’s oeuvre, up there with the doctors of NEAR DEATH (1989) and the teachers and administrators in HIGH SCHOOL II (1994). They have made it their life’s work not simply to help others, but to help others take agency over their own lives, a process that Wiseman presents as virtually miraculous. (2001, 196 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Ben Sachs]
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Frederick Wiseman’s THE LAST LETTER (US)
Monday, 6:15pm
It makes sense that Frederick Wiseman’s two forays into fiction filmmaking—this and his 2022 film A COUPLE—are epistolary in form. What are his documentaries, if not letters from himself to us, the viewers, about any number of subjects of interest to him and about which he hopes to communicate, the anticipated response merely our rapt attention to his supplication. But, Wiseman told IndieWire in 2003, “It’s different. A fiction film, in one sense, is the reverse of a documentary. In fiction film you have to plan. It’s not that you don’t change from what you plan, but you have to plan everything in advance. It is very hard to improvise. Whereas in a documentary, you find the story and themes in the editing. You have 80 or 100 hours of material. It’s completely formless, except insofar as I find and impose a form in the editing. Here, I didn’t know exactly what the form was going to be, but I knew that I wanted to shoot it a certain way.” The certain way being in exquisite chiaroscuro, with Comédie-Française doyenne Catherine Samie (with whom Wiseman worked on a stage adaptation of the same material) as a Russian Jewish physician, Anna Semionova, who’s narrating her final letter to her son as she awaits her fate in a Ukrainian ghetto following the Nazi occupation. Based on a chapter from Vasily Grossman’s 1959 novel Life and Fate, it’s a rather hermetic take on the horrors of the Holocaust, condensing into one woman’s ruminations the hopes and fears of a people confronted with the depths of humanity. It’s profundity made breathtaking by Samie’s performance, Wiseman’s exquisite close-ups of her hands and face—evincing at once a singularity and a universality, the face both a panorama and a canvas—and the shadowy mise-en-scene surrounding the lone performer. Where perhaps this work of fiction becomes too close to documentary is its chilling resonance today; what Anna writes to her son about the lead-up to the extermination of herself and millions like her is eerily reminiscent of the not-so-calm before the storm many of us may be feeling (and, as time may soon come to reveal, outright experiencing) nowadays. The entire film is a build-up to the unthinkable—a crescendo to the nadir of human depravity. (As Wiseman notes in the interview, such depravity is specific not just to the Holocaust but any number of places on Earth and in time that life has been devalued to such a degree.) One experiences so poignantly the feelings of despair and resolve; Anna’s simultaneous resilience and melancholy themselves may be works of fiction but the reality from which they’re derived is not. (2002, 62 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Kat Sachs]
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Also screening this week are new 4K DCP Digital restorations of Wiseman’s DOMESTIC VIOLENCE 2 (2002, 160 min) on Sunday at 5:15pm and STATE LEGISLATURE (2006, 217 min) on Wednesday at 5:30pm.

Alan Rudolph's CHOOSE ME (US)

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

Alan Rudolph is one of the most idiosyncratic directors ever to work in this country. His best films are unique amalgams of film noir atmospherics, screwball-style dialogue, sinuous camerawork reminiscent of classic musicals, and a profound sense of romantic longing. CHOOSE ME is not just Rudolph’s most characteristic film, but also one of the best American films of the 1980s, a romantic roundelay infused with mystery and danger. It shows the influence of Rudolph’s one-time patron Robert Altman in its juggling of multiple characters, who include a former sex worker-turned-bar owner (Lesley Ann Warren), a lonely housewife (Rae Dawn Chong) who suspects her husband of having an affair, and a radio talk show host who lives a double life (Genevieve Bujold). Keith Carradine plays the handsome, wide-eyed stranger who romances each of these women and whose true identity is the film’s central mystery. Is he a CIA agent, a mass murderer, or a pathological liar? (At times, he seems like he could be any of these things—or maybe all three.) Carradine’s wistfulness and boyish charm have rarely been put to better use. You can understand what makes the other characters fall for him in spite of (or perhaps because of) the risk of getting close to him. Even when he’s not onscreen, the film conjures an intoxicating, amorous mood, the bold neon colors and balletic camera movements evoking a world where love is always in the air. Alternately funny, seductive, and unnerving, CHOOSE ME channels the chaotic rush of emotions that comes with falling in love as few other movies do. Preceded by a 10-minute Alan Rudolph trailer reel (35mm). (1984, 106 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Arthur Penn's BONNIE AND CLYDE (US)

Music Box Theatre - Wednesday, 4:15pm and 9:30pm

Writing about Nicholas Ray’s REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, Cine-File contributor Kyle A. Westphal shrewdly asserted that it “has had more lives than many auteurist causes… [it’s] a genuine popular classic sustained by an endless supply of James Dean posters, magnets, t-shirts, and tchotchkes.” Along those same lines, BONNIE AND CLYDE belongs as much to popular consciousness as it does to the insiders who’ve championed it. Over fifty years later, no facet has gone unexamined—moviegoers and theorists alike have since diminished it to archetype, reducing nuances to aphoristic criteria or hollow fad. Directly influenced by the French New Wave (screenwriters David Newman and Robert Benton greatly admired Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, and they were both approached to direct before Arthur Penn, whose earlier films THE LEFT HANDED GUN and MICKEY ONE exhibited elements of the style and tone so favored by the young writers), BONNIE AND CLYDE didn’t just synthesize aspects of that movement, but helped to create a different one altogether. Even with a New Hollywood on the horizon, however, the film was widely misunderstood upon its release, due in part to graphic violence that audiences were unaccustomed to at the time. It defies any preconceived notions about what a criminal-lovers-on-the-run movie should be, expectations set by such precursors as Fritz Lang’s YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE (1937) and Nicholas Ray’s THEY LIVE BY NIGHT (1948). Penn’s realization of the Bonnie and Clyde mythos—from a Lubitschian meet-cute to the bloody, balletic death scene—is at once judicious and grandiloquent, relishing as much in the real-world implications of their egregiously violent ways as it does in Warren Beatty’s id-laden mannerisms and Faye Dunaway’s whimsical sociopathy. In her staggering review for The New Yorker, Pauline Kael brilliantly details why the film is important and how it achieves its status as a singular work; her piece is a must-read for anyone interested in the film’s lasting influence on the medium. Her assessment also portends contemporary cinema and perhaps even current events; “[i]nstead of the movie spoof, which tells the audience that it doesn’t need to feel or care, that it’s all just in fun, that ‘we are only kidding,’ BONNIE AND CLYDE disrupts us with ‘And you thought we were only kidding.’” Penn and company may owe their vision to the enfants terribles of the Nouvelle Vague, but much recent cinema is indebted to Penn’s au courant provocation. Presented by Crying at the Shed. (1967, 111 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]

Eduardo Williams' THE HUMAN SURGE (Argentina/Brazil/Portugal/Documentary) and the Eduardo Williams' THE HUMAN SURGE 3 (International)

Block Cinema (at Northwestern University) – Wednesday, 7pm (THE HUMAN SURGE) and Thursday, 7pm (THE HUMAN SURGE 3)

An exciting debut feature, THE HUMAN SURGE is full of bold formal decisions that reflect an avid curiosity about making movies. Eduardo Williams, the director, divides the movie into three parts, each one in a different format: the first part, shot in Buenos Aires, was shot on Super 16; the second, was shot on digital video and transferred to Super 16; and the third was shot on the RED. The shifts in format are combined with jarring shifts in content, and the surprising transitions (it would be a shame to give them away here) are some of the most impressive components of the whole film. “Williams is interested in how, as a filmmaker, you can pull off sudden shifts in format, tone, movement, and scale,” wrote Max Nelson in Film Comment, “how you can turn from a scene of inertia to one of shattering momentum, or move from the microscopically small to the majestic and wide, or pass from continent to continent in a matter of seconds.” The film is tangible and accessible from moment to moment, yet it’s elusive in terms of its core theme. Williams follows groups of young people in each location as they alternately work at unfulfilling jobs and idle away their free time. When his subjects are still, the director favors tableau-like shots that create a sense of their environments; when they’re active, Williams tends to follow them from about 15-to-20 paces away, inviting viewers to feel like voyeurs peering into strange lives. These approaches elicit some compelling observations about the day-to-day impact of globalization, but Williams is more interested in using cinema to forge connections between different people and places. The film is more poem than prose, which in documentary filmmaking is never a bad thing. (2016, 99 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Eduardo "Teddy" Williams is a filmmaker possessed of a remarkable purity and consistency of vision. So distinctive are his directorial trademarks—quotidian snapshots of disaffected queer youth adrift in the margins, long-winded tracking shots that privilege continuity of motion even as they follow characters through abrupt ruptures in spacetime, a dogmatic commitment to handheld camerawork, a penchant for exquisite corpse plot digressions, and free-associative dialogue that elevates mundane chatter to a rarefied stratum of posthumanist inquiry—that all of his work, dating back to his first short film (2011's magnificent I COULD SEE A PUMA), unfolds almost as an unbroken continuum of expression; a slow and stalwart refinement of a radical reshaping of narrative cinema's very core. In THE HUMAN SURGE (2016), the first feature-length iteration on the premise, Williams presented three discrete capsule narratives, following a trio of characters in Argentina, Mozambique, and the Philippines. In each of the film's trifurcate segments, an arduous search for wifi connection motivated the characters, and the filmmaker drew explicit connections between the protagonists along the lines of chance online encounters, labor exploitation and relation to complex forces of global capital. In a daring maneuver, Williams has dispensed with the majority of that didactic ideological glue for his go-for-broke follow-up film, once again filming across multiple continents (this entry is principally set in Peru, Taiwan, and Sri Lanka) but constantly intercutting between the locations and taking the small cast of non-professional actors along with him. Even more gonzo: THE HUMAN SURGE 3 was shot on a 360-degree camera and later framed by the director directly using a VR headset, a technological advance so extreme that it seemingly necessitated skipping directly to the third installment (hilariously, there is no HUMAN SURGE 2). The resulting footage is remarkable for any number of reasons. Its rounded, conformal field of distortion warps the film's locales—many of which were astutely chosen to accentuate this exact effect, think winding roads and steep precipices—to an extreme degree, often recalling the woozy obliquity of Sokurov's MOTHER AND SON (1997). The glitchiness that results from the camera, which boasts 8 lenses and creates distinct points of articulation where the images are stitched together, feels like the missing ingredient for Williams' peculiar mode of video game-inflected cinema. While recent films, namely AGGRO DR1FT (2023) and HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS (2022), have ironically tapped the medium of gaming for its narrative tropes, Williams instead lifts from it the uncanny tenor of open-world exploration and the ultra-globalized vibe of online matchmaking, all while savvily forging a connection between the fixed perspectives of in-game cameras and the durational longueurs of the slow cinema. The film I've spent the most time thinking about, however, following my viewing of THE HUMAN SURGE 3 is Gus Van Sant's unimpeachably brilliant GERRY (2002), another emancipatory queer genre-shredder that was likewise staged in a composite landscape spanning multiple continents and purportedly drew influence from Béla Tarr's threnodies and the Tomb Raider games franchise in equal measure. You will see THE HUMAN SURGE 3 and Williams' body of work in turn referred to as dystopian, but to my eye this is a bravura act of queer utopian filmmaking. Teddy's commitment to exploding the technological frontiers of cinema reveals an abiding (and infectious) sense of optimism, but it's the grace and generosity extended to his cast of characters by conducting this jet-setting flight of fancy, wherein they can vent about their frustrations (the existence of billionaires, mostly) and wax poetic about their dreams in a context totally unmoored from conflict, that I find the most stirring. (2023, 121 min, DCP Digital) [David Whitehouse]
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Williams in person for a post-screening Q&A.

Raoul Ruiz’s LOVE TORN IN A DREAM (France/Portugal/Chile)

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

One of the most Ruizian titles also belongs to one of the most Ruizian movies. LOVE TORN IN A DREAM is all about playing with narratives as though they were toys; the first several minutes even set up rules for the game the movie is about to play. The film starts by introducing nine different premises, whose settings range from the 17th century to the present. Not only will Ruiz cut between these nine stories; he will sometimes have characters interact with characters from other stories, and, to make matters even more complicated, the same actors will play multiple characters across multiple plots. The deliberate formal construction of LOVE TORN IN A DREAM recalls Julio Cortázar’s postmodern novel Hopscotch as well as various plays by Alan Ayckbourn (e.g., Bedroom Farce, Home and Garden), but the tone and content are pure Ruiz, touching on perennial themes of religion, fantasy, and outrageous coincidence. One of the stories involves a magic mirror that has curative powers for whoever looks at it; another involves a ridiculously protracted debate between two theologians. Pirates, cannibals, and erotic temptresses also factor into the proceedings; the sole storyline set in the present—about a man who discovers a website that tells him everything that will happen in his life the next day—feels like an update of something in Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales. Though he made it with mostly French actors, Ruiz shot LOVE TORN IN A DREAM in Sintra, a municipality in the greater Lisbon region that’s known for its castles and other architectural marvels dating back to the 12th century. My guess is that producer Paulo Branco (who’s Portuguese) suggested he shoot there, but it’s clear how Sintra would appeal to Ruiz’s literary imagination. It doesn’t take much movie magic to make the area seem like something out of a fairy tale or Gothic fiction; still, Ruiz takes full advantage of the locations to make all the narratives feel like they exist out of time altogether. Special mention, as always, should be made to Ruiz’s collaborator and wife Valeria Sarmiento, who edited the picture. How in the world does this make any sense, let alone flow so poetically? (2000, 122 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Olivier Assayas’ BOARDING GATE (France)

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

One of Olivier Assayas’ most New Wave-ish films, BOARDING GATE finds the former Cahiers du cinéma critic riffing on various films and film genres in order to communicate his feelings about the state of the world. The overarching subject, as was often the case for Assayas in the 2000s, is life under late capitalism, while the creative points of reference are Abel Ferrara (namely his theme of navigating a life based on sin) and Hong Kong action films. Asia Argento stars as a likely continuation of her character from Ferrara’s NEW ROSE HOTEL (1998), a onetime sex worker who used to collude with corporate bigwigs by seducing their business rivals and stealing their secrets. When BOARDING GATE opens, Argento’s Sandra is now employed in the world of fashion import-export and living in Paris; she finds herself drawn to a former employer/lover (played with Ferrara-esque intensity by Michael Madsen) when he enters into dealings with her current business partners. For most of its first half, the movie is a dark chamber drama in which these two characters confront their sick past as well as the erotic charge that brought them together. Assayas presents abusive, sadomasochistic sex as a matter of course with these late-capitalist power players, as if to say that their inhuman worldview (which permits any action, no matter how immoral, in the name of making money) has prevented them from being able to love normally. Though shooting in widescreen, Assayas often works in closeup, creating an uneasy (and perhaps unwanted) sense of intimacy, particularly when BOARDING GATE turns violent around its midpoint. It’s also around here that the location shifts to Hong Kong and Assayas starts taking cues from such local masters as John Woo and Tsui Hark. When Sandra loses her trust of all the people around her and has to run for her life, the violence is as quick and striking as you’d expect from any action movie shot in Hong Kong, and Assayas achieves a genuinely upsetting sense of peril. (And just when you think the movie couldn’t get any more exciting, Kim Gordon shows up, yelling in Cantonese to a group of gun-toting henchmen!) The overall brutality of Sandra’s situation may approach that of Woo’s movies—or even Ringo Lam’s—while certain shots evoke the poetry of Tsui or Johnnie To. One view of a high rise’s daunting edifice recalls the classic set piece of Tsui’s TIME AND TIDE (2000), and I’m sure Assayas could name at least a dozen other Hong Kong masterpieces he had on the brain when he was making BOARDING GATE. Yet all the cinephilia on display doesn’t overshadow the director’s moral seriousness, even when BOARDING GATE becomes a full-on action film; Sandra’s fight for her life simply represents the end point of a system in which people are considered disposable. Screening as part of the Lust & Intrigue: Erotic Thrillers series. (2007, 106 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

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Rob Zombie's HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES (US)

Music Box Theatre – Wednesday, 7pm

HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES serves as the directorial debut by Rob Zombie, the heavy metal musician arguably better known today for his forays into the world of cinema. Initially shelved by its studio out of fear for an NC-17 rating, the film was finally released to almost unanimously negative reviews; however, like many of the most beloved horror films, HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES found an audience after its initial theatrical run and outside the reach of mainstream critics. Two major points of criticism leveled at the film are its lack of plot and its excessive gore—ironically, two reasons why the film is still revered today. Horror fanatics who frequent the cinema for sadism and bright, disgusting imagery will find a lot to love, whether it’s the brutal torture and murder of now-mainstream comedians in some of the film’s leading roles or just the overall feeling of hopelessness that lingers until all the characters meet their end. With an aesthetic clearly inspired by the splatter films of the ‘70s and a sense of humor that would almost certainly send any 14-year-old boy to their school’s guidance counselor, HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES epitomizes a certain type of nihilistic, grotesque filmmaking. Co-presented by the Horror House. Bill Moseley in person for a post-screening Q&A and a meet and greet starting at 6pm. (2003, 88 min, 35mm) [Michael Bates]

Yuen Woo-Ping's DRUNKEN MASTER (Hong Kong)

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

DRUNKEN MASTER, one of Yuen Woo-Ping’s first directorial efforts, is essentially a showcase for his breathtaking martial arts choreography, with very little narrative filler in between the rousing fight sequences. Jackie Chan stars as Fei-Hung, the spoiled son of a martial arts schoolmaster. When the story begins, Fei-Hung is already an impressive kung-fu fighter—he can even beat up some of the teachers at the school—but he lacks the discipline required of a master. Enter the itinerant Beggar So (the drunken master of the title), who arrives to train Fei-Hung for a year. What follows is a formulaic kung-fu comedy, with Fei-Hung learning concentration, inner strength, and the secret moves that comprise So’s kung-fu of the Eight Drunken Gods. It would be passable if not for the choreography—of which there is plenty—and for Chan’s joyful performance. Like Buster Keaton or Fred Astaire, Chan in his best vehicles uses his body and the world around him to create an ongoing physical music; even when he loses a fight, it’s entertaining to watch him put up the effort, engage with his partner, and take the hits like a pro. The world of DRUNKEN MASTER is tailored perfectly to Chan’s screen persona; everyone is irritable and skilled at kung-fu, and everyone uses fighting to resolve any imaginable issue. The wacky sound effects and score make it feel even more like an old Popeye cartoon, as do character names like Stick King and Iron Head. Screening as part of the “Martial” Arts series. (1978, 111 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Tobe Hooper's THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2 (US)

Music Box Theatre – Tuesday, 7pm

Tobe Hooper was not just a prodigious scaremeister; he crafted some of the most intricate mise-en-scene in the horror genre and possessed a sly wit to boot. THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2 showcases all sides of his talent—equally frightening and hilarious, the film is one of the great funhouse rides of 1980s cinema. (It’s as much a follow-up to Hooper’s 1981 THE FUNHOUSE as it is the original TEXAS CHAINSAW.) Integral to its stomach-churning appeal are the vivid sets and make-up effects, the latter designed by George A. Romero’s regular collaborator Tom Savini (who considered this his best work). The villainous family is memorably grotesque, each member given a distinctive look of decay. And the lair where they trap and torment their victims is a fascinating, expressionistic environment—full of caverns and tunnels, the space seems to grow larger and more unusual as the movie proceeds. Robin Wood and other critics praised the original TEXAS CHAINSAW as a satiric commentary on U.S. values, with the cannibal villains representing a distorted version of the ideal American family: Not only do they stick together no matter what, they’re the ultimate consumers. The sequel pushes that satirical element to the forefront. The humor is broad, even overstated, but it fits perfectly with the exaggerated visual design. The script is credited to L.M. Kit Carson (who also penned Jim McBride’s remake of BREATHLESS), but the comedy is definitely a reflection of Hooper’s sensibility. Perhaps the more valuable collaborators here are producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, the adventurous team behind Cannon Films. In addition to backing this and Hooper’s LIFEFORCE and INVADERS FROM MARS, Cannon also bankrolled around this time Cassavetes’ LOVE STREAMS and Godard’s KING LEAR. All of these exemplify uncompromising personal expression in cinema. Co-presented by the Horror House. Bill Moseley in person for a post-screening Q&A and a meet and greet starting at 6pm. (1986, 101 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Howard Hawks' HIS GIRL FRIDAY (US)

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

"Walter, you're wonderful, in a loathsome sort of way." This line, tossed out by Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) to her ex-husband, Walter Burns (Cary Grant), is just one of the many iconic lines that pepper the rapid-fire dialogue in HIS GIRL FRIDAY, one of the best screwball comedies and an exemplary film in Howard Hawks' body of work. HIS GIRL FRIDAY, a remake of former Chicago reporters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s THE FRONT PAGE (1931), is barely a romance in the traditional sense, but very much a love letter to the morally ambiguous profession of newspaper journalism. The story begins with Hildy announcing to Walter that she is leaving the newspaper business to marry a normal guy: a slow-talking, dependable, and chivalrous insurance salesman named Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy). Bruce is clearly the opposite of Walter (a slimy, fast-talking rascal), and as soon as Walter takes Bruce's measure, he realizes he can win Hildy back to the newspaper (and incidentally, to himself) with some creative scheming. Hilarity ensues as Hildy takes the bait and screws up everything in her plans to get married the next day by chasing a dramatic story, saving a life, and exposing some uniquely Chicago-style corrupt politicians. HIS GIRL FRIDAY differs from THE FRONT PAGE by switching the gender of Hildy Johnson to remake the plot into a screwball comedy, and enables Hawks to sculpt one of his "Hawksian women" with Russell's character. Russell excels as her side-talking, eye-rolling, slapstick character, and it's easy to revel in just how acerbic Hildy and Walter act with each other with their one-upping one-liners. Russell, in fact, was so worried about having enough good lines that she hired her own personal writer to help her think of good lines to ad-lib. Hawks encouraged spontaneity, ad-libbing, and simultaneous dialogue on set, so the characters not only speak more quickly than any other film in history (an average of 240 words per minute!), but they talk over each other constantly. (This was a nightmare for the sound techs to manage, incidentally, and required some innovation.) The result is marvelous, and inspired many filmmakers to follow, including Robert Altman, who made overlapping dialogue one of the trademarks of his own auteur style. Strong women, ad-libbing, breaking the fourth wall, exploring moral ambiguity, and embracing "loathsome" characters make HIS GIRL FRIDAY a delight to watch and a wonderful introduction to tropes of Hawks' film style that run through BRINGING UP BABY, THE BIG SLEEP, RIO BRAVO, and many others. Screening as part of the Silver Fox: Howard Hawks Matinees series. (1940, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Alex Ensign]

Adam Carter Rehmeier’s DINNER IN AMERICA (US)

Music Box Theatre – Monday, 7pm and 9:45pm

Throughout DINNER IN AMERICA, characters repeatedly state, “You need to take it down a notch.” It’s a diegetic nod to the film’s punk rock energy, belligerent in its approach, but sincere in its empathy for its main characters. Simon (a standout Kyle Gallner) is a chaotic punk rock musician on the run from the cops in a Midwest city. Complete with a snarl, a threatening gait, and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, Simon runs into Patty (Emily Skaggs), a punk rock fan trying to find her purpose. Simon ends up hiding out at her family’s home, and his aggressiveness gives way to Patty’s curiosity and eagerness—and genuine joy. The romantic comedy element never overshadows the film’s earnestness in letting both Patty and Simon equally develop their own identities and desires, letting their relationship support their individual goals in sticking it to the establishment; the result is an authentically sweet and unpretentious love story. Music, too, is so much at the center of the film and their relationship, with a pulsing score by John Swihart, whose early film work includes NAPOLEON DYNAMITE (2004), perhaps a spiritual precursor to this. DINNER IN AMERICA, however, never enters fully into the surreal. It balances its humor in its script (also by director Adam Carter Rehmeier) and performances, as much as its mise-en-scène of fast-food primary colors and its editing—some cuts are disarmingly clever. Littered with scenes distorting the typical family meal, DINNER IN AMERICA doesn’t just twist American iconography but presents a clever examination of the ways in which food organizes both the monotony of the everyday and life’s big moments—it’s necessary, but can it be punk rock? Patty and Simon certainly think so. Rehmeier and actors Emily Skeggs and Kyle Gallner in attendance for a post- screening Q&A. (2020, 108 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

James Foley’s FEAR (US)

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

There’s something almost hypnotic about the way FEAR lulls you in. It masquerades as a teenage romance while hinting at something darker beneath its polished surface. James Foley, known for his exploration of desperate men (AT CLOSE RANGE, GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS), takes the well-worn girl-meets-boy narrative and warps it into something grotesque and uncomfortably real. At its core, FEAR is about control—who has it, who loses it, and who is willing to destroy everything to get it back. Reese Witherspoon’s Nicole, an innocent sixteen-year-old, is the daughter of Steve (William Petersen), a domineering father grappling with his own wounded masculinity. Enter Mark Wahlberg’s David, a bad boy with carefully curated sensitivity, a predator in heartthrob packaging. From his first appearance, David feels too good to be true, and Foley masterfully lets the audience linger on his charm long enough for it to sour. Wahlberg’s performance balances charm and menace with unsettling fluidity. David isn’t a caricature of evil; he’s the kind of person who might briefly convince you of his sincerity. His whispered promises are laced with control and his smile is just a touch too rehearsed. By the time he carves “Nicole 4 Eva” into his chest, he becomes a figure of pure terror. Wahlberg’s transition from Marky Mark to serious actor began with FEAR, as he embraced a role demanding both charisma and darkness. (There’s still a Marky Mark song on the soundtrack just in case.) Witherspoon matches him, portraying Nicole’s teenage defiance alongside a growing realization of her powerlessness. Foley builds tension meticulously, with the infamous roller coaster scene epitomizing the film’s blend of desire laced with danger and pleasure wrapped in control. The suburban setting, a Seattle suburb recreated in Vancouver, shifts from a symbol of safety to a suffocating trap. The early ‘90s grunge undercurrent, reflected in the soundtrack featuring Bush and other post-grunge acts, mirrors the film’s themes of rebellion and alienation while never feeling like a tie-in cash grab. When David and his gang invade Nicole’s home in the climactic act, it’s pure Peckinpah-lite—a suburban STRAW DOGS (1971) for the MTV generation. Petersen’s Steve Walker echoes Dustin Hoffman’s David Sumner in STRAW DOGS, both men attempting to shield their families through control, only to confront violence they’re unprepared for. While Hoffman’s intellectual passivity makes his transformation unsettling, Petersen embodies a quieter but equally flawed paternalism. The thematic parallels to STRAW DOGS—outsiders disrupting stability, toxic masculinity, and the home as a battleground—feel deliberate, but also reflect the lasting impact of Peckinpah’s film. Foley decided to strip away moral ambiguity found in STRAW DOGS. By the time you realize the boyfriend is actually a menace and not equal to Nicole’s father in demanding control of her agency, FEAR races toward its home invasion ending. There’s no question of whether David might be redeemed; there’s only the certainty that he must be destroyed. Proven further by the original ending that left David’s future up for interpretation. The script by Christopher Crowe was inspired by real-life stalking cases, especially the stalking and murder of Rebecca Schaeffer in 1989. Audiences at the time were not interested in an ominous ending where a stalker may move on to another pursuit, they wanted the wrong in the world put right. The supporting cast, including Alyssa Milano as Nicole’s best friend and Amy Brenneman as her stepmother, adds depth, showcasing how easily David’s charm ensnares those around him. FEAR has aged into a cult classic not for its originality but for its primal exploration of fear—of losing control, of being watched, owned, and consumed. Foley understood that his film wasn’t just about an obsessive boyfriend—it’s about the dangers lurking beneath desire, the way passion and terror can become indistinguishable when the wrong man whispers the right words. And more importantly, when the person you’re dating beats up your friends and gives you an “accidental” black eye, they should be tossed out a window. Screening as part of the Lust & Intrigue: Erotic Thrillers series. (1996, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]

Ate de Jong’s DROP DEAD FRED (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Wednesday, 9:30pm

For all its gleeful success within its singular mode of tonal disarray, DROP DEAD FRED likely exists for most people more as the bizarre mirror image of other, more memorable films. Its bouncy, youthful antics—in this case, accompanied by Randy Edelman’s non-stop barrage of a score—might put you in the mind of other ‘90’s kid-focused comedies like HOME ALONE (1990) or MATILDA (1996). Its eponymous imaginary figure, a fast-talking, crude, obnoxious shapeshifter, might give you whiplash to other works like BEETLEJUICE (1989) or ALADDIN (1992). And even Rik Mayall’s dedicated performance constructed from rubber-faced chicanery and endlessly contorting physicality seems similarly attuned to the stylings of Jim Carrey’s ‘90s output. But for all that seems awkward and derivative about DROP DEAD FRED, there’s an inescapable draw to its particular brand of darkly humorous antics and potent dramatic themes dressed up in juvenile clothing, like the smartest kid in class choosing to sit in the back row and shoot spit wads at the teacher. If there’s a cognitive dissonance between the film’s driving plot concerning repressed childhood trauma and its devotion to front-loading a lanky British comedian with fiery red hair and snot-colored attire, then who’s to say that wasn’t the point all along? Ate de Jong’s work here, a mix of inconsistent special effects and genuinely impressive stunt work and production design, might be brushed aside as  “Diet Tim Burton,” but it feels wrong to completely dismiss his commitment here to a genuinely exciting outsized mode of performance and presentation that is, no doubt, oddly comforting in its perverse way. When I recently mentioned to a few friends that I had watched this film, the cries of nostalgic terror grew louder and louder, as if the titular Fred had, just like in the film, suddenly reared his ugly head yet again to wreak havoc for a new generation. I say, let him. Screening as part of Weird Wednesday. (1991, 103 mins, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Walerian Borowczyk’s THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MISS OSBOURNE (France/West Germany)

Alamo Drafthouse – Tuesday, 9:30pm

A perverse twist on the oft-adapted story, Walerian Borowczyk’s THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MISS OSBOURNE is heavy on lush imagery, while characters run chaotically through Victorian spaces, violence lurking around every corner. Dr. Jekyll (Udo Kier) is engaged to Miss Osbourne (Borowczyk's frequent collaborator and muse, Marina Pierro), and both are over eager to consummate the relationship. The doctor is hosting guests to celebrate their upcoming nuptials, but stolen kisses and deep conversations about Jekyll’s notion of “transcendental chemistry” get interrupted by acts of sexual violence, first outside the home and then enacted within. In the Robert Louis Stevenson novella, women are mostly relegated as background victims of violence; here, they still are the primary victims of violence but are also depicted playing an active role in spurring on Jekyll’s deviant alter ego Mr. Hyde (interestingly cast as a completely different actor, Gérard Zalcberg), joining him in his viciousness—particularly Miss Osbourne herself. Another notable change is the sexual nature of the transformation, as Jekyll bathes naked in his metamorphosing chemicals rather than drinking an elixir. What is most prominent about this depraved adaption, however, is its stunning visuals. Costume adornments and diamond jewelry sparkle through picturesque, haze-filled scenes, Jekyll’s stately home filled with dreamy pastels. Borowczyk creates a real sense of dark versus light, with softly lit rooms juxtaposed by void spaces of nothingness that mimic the duality of the tale at hand. At times, the camera voyeuristically steals glances through cracked doors. There is a striking, prolonged scene of Miss Osborne peering from a hiding place, her face beautifully framed in close-up, as Jekyll transforms into Hyde. While the camera may hide at times, when violence and perversion is at hand, it doesn’t look away. Screening as part of Terror Tuesday. (1981, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Bernard Rose’s CANDYMAN (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Monday, 10:15pm

While Chicagoans are quick to recall the location shooting of CANDYMAN in the Near North Side's Cabrini-Green public housing community, few seem to remember just how highbrow this low-budget Clive Barker adaptation really was: the main characters are UIC folklore/anthropology PhD students studying (via ethnographic interviews) the urban legends on which the film's plot is itself based, and the soundtrack is an elegant, metronomic fugue for electric organ, strings, and chorus by Manhattan minimal don Philip Glass. The story, conflating the by-then nearly universal Anglo-American folktales of "Bloody Mary" and "The Hook" (regarding menstruation and castration, respectively) with some vague Shakespearean allusions, a touch of hypnotism, and a lot of bees, centers on the real-world locus of imagined terror for a generation of city residents and journalists: the intersection of Division and Larabee. In a twist which seems rather insightful even for the early 90s, the post-colonialist "Indian burial ground" cliché is displaced onto the contemporary process of gentrification then occurring in Old Town: Virginia Madsen's character's high-rise condo is itself revealed to be part of a redeveloped former housing project. The resulting film oscillates widely and sometimes uncomfortably between clever meta-horror and quotidian actual-horror, but remains an underrated snapshot of the city's pre-"Plan For Transformation" unconscious, in the shadows of the towers which (as of May 2011) no longer exist. (1992, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Castelle]

David Fincher's SE7EN (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Saturday, 9:30pm and Tuesday, 2:30pm

SE7EN has all the typical strengths and weaknesses of a great artist's early work. In it we see all the hallmarks of Fincher's mature style already expressed to a masterful degree: the intense scrutiny of the cruelty and eroticism of male power dynamics, the aching pessimism underlying heterosexual romance, and the abstraction of the human being to mere physicality. This is a crushingly well-composed movie, one that moves to a brutal rhythm, that creaks and groans and drips and cries out without mercy. The obvious theme, notoriously, is sin: a serial killer murders a person every day over the course of the film's week-long narrative, each death staged as an illustration of one of the deadly sins. But that is to read the film as mere illustration of the well-crafted but cliché-addled script by Andrew Kevin Walker. The real concern here is not one of theology but, as is so often the case for Fincher, of ethics. In this case, the question is the largest of Fincher's career to date: is cinema evil? Which is another way of asking, is there a line film cannot cross, or is it, by its very existence, unforgivable? This isn't a new question, though it is one that lacks a satisfying answer. One of my favorite early opponents of cinema, the art and food critic Elizabeth Robins Pennell, believed that cinema was a kind of special perniciousness that threatened to destroy civilization through its thought-numbing evil. "The movies," she wrote, "are worse than a sedative—they are dope, pure dope, the most deadly ever invented," adding that film was an "unpardonable sin" that destroyed the morals of its viewers by "the stifling of all tendency to thought." Pennell, writing in 1921, was part of a large-scale ideology of panic over the movies. Only six years earlier, Joseph McKenna had pronounced a withering unanimous Supreme Court opinion that noted that motion pictures are "capable of evil, having power for it, the greater because of their attractiveness and manner of exhibition." Movies, in other words, were under suspicion: so magnetic and captivating were they, so addictive and worthlessly pleasurable, that they constituted a danger, real and immediate, for the morals of America. Cinema was after our very souls. SE7EN's antagonist sees the world as having already lost that moral war, as having already surrendered its soul. He moves in a world that has been neutralized of meaning, and so he tries, through his horrifying crimes, to restart our outrage, our righteousness, our lives, so that the devilish spectacle of modern media can be destroyed.  SE7EN's form, like its villain, sees evil in every shadow, creeping all around its characters, but recognizes that the mesmeric force of its imagery has its own moral value. We cannot look away from the grotesqueries that the killer's staged for us, his real audience, and in that weakness we damn ourselves, but SE7EN, for all its darkness, presents a vision of absolute moral clarity: there's nothing that can't be shown, but there are some things that even when shown can't be seen. (1995, 127 min, DCP Digital) [Kian Bergstrom]

George Miller's MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (Australia

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

There's no shortage of films set in a distant future gone horribly awry, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a dystopia as colorful and horrific as the gory Australia George Miller present in MAD MAX: FURY ROAD. The third sequel to MAD MAX (1979) and an effective reboot of its franchise, FURY ROAD felt inescapable upon its release in 2015; it was on the radar of anyone who even mildly identified with nerd culture. After grossing $375 million at the box office and winning plenty of accolades, it still holds up as a raw, relentless depiction of an oppressive, post-apocalyptic world—and a blast from start to finish. Tom Hardy makes his debut here as Max Rockatansky, a role held in the late '70s and early '80s by Mel Gibson. While his brooding performance is captivating, Hardy's real function is to act as the eyes through which we meet Furiosa, portrayed by Charlize Theron. In a wasteland ruled by cult-leader Immortan Joe and his militia of "war boys," Furiosa, Max, and a truck full of Joe's escaped wives must fight for bodily autonomy, basic human rights, and, as Furiosa replies to Max's question of intent, redemption. For fans of the original trilogy, this offers a new world that's true to the aesthetics of its predecessors but unlimited by '80s special effects; for first-timers, it delivers a unique action-adventure universe free of Marvel-style tropes and overbearing cameos. FURY ROAD feels too huge to be contained by any single screen, but with something of this magnitude, finding the biggest one you possibly can is paramount. Screening as part of the Inner Voyages series. (2015, 120 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Bates]

Pedro Almodóvar’s THE ROOM NEXT DOOR (Spain/US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 8pm and Thursday, 6pm and 8:15pm

Pedro Almodóvar has cited Ingmar Bergman’s chamber dramas as primary influences on THE ROOM NEXT DOOR, his first feature film in English, and the connection to those touchstones could not be plainer. Like those films, it features few characters and concentrates with unwavering intensity on the themes of death and identity; it’s also, like many of Bergman’s films, an actors’ showcase. Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton, and (to a lesser extent) John Turturro are called upon to channel complicated, even painful emotions, and because there’s little to distract from their performances, one really gets to savor their efforts. But while Almodóvar may admire the Swedish master, he seems constitutionally incapable of making a film as cold as PERSONA (1966) or CRIES AND WHISPERS (1972). THE ROOM NEXT DOOR still feels like the work of the director of THE FLOWER OF MY SECRET (1995) or ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER (1999): the colors, whether expressed through Bina Daigeler’s costumes or Inbal Weinberg’s production design, are vibrant and varied; the film regards sex as part of life and thus something to be enjoyed, like cooking or fashion; and Almodóvar inspires warm, grateful feelings about friendship. Indeed, camaraderie is often presented as the ultimate reason for living in the Spanish master’s films; in THE ROOM NEXT DOOR, he argues that it is a necessary part of dying as well. Swinton plays a former war correspondent who’s dying of stage III cervical cancer; Moore plays the novelist friend whom she turns to when she wants assistance ending her life. Almodóvar introduces the premise with hardly any exposition—however quietly, the film plunges us into characters’ experience, refusing to talk around Swinton’s impending death. There’s a fascinating narrative digression into Swinton’s estranged grown daughter and her memories of her daughter’s father, but this too feeds into the larger concern of the character’s preparation for dying. Moore’s character is just as important, as she has to process her friend’s decision and stand as a totem of emotional support; Almodóvar gives her as much, if not more, screen time than Swinton, balancing the theme of death with an equally important theme of living. There’s another, more urgent theme to THE ROOM NEXT DOOR, and it’s given voice eloquently by Turturro, who plays Moore’s climate activist friend and former lover—that is, the foreseeable decline and possible end of the human race due to climate change. Almodóvar intertwines the considerations of humankind’s collective suicide with the central narrative of Swinton’s suicide, arguing that our species as a whole might learn something from how her character approaches death: without fear and emboldened by the love of others. (2024, 107 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Brady Corbet's THE BRUTALIST (US/UK/Hungary)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

Poised high atop the crest of a wave of giddy anticipation and propelled onwards by a swell of rave festival reports, a clean sweep of major awards at the Golden Globes, as well as the most eyebrow-raising trailer in recent memory, THE BRUTALIST is finally set to come crashing into a theater near you, clocking in at a whopping thirteen reels of 70mm film stock. Seven years in the making, three and a half hours in length (featuring an intermission, to boot), shot on an improbable budget of less than ten million dollars, and boasting a sprawling narrative that spans more than three decades of American history, this is a rare feat of megalithic classical ambition: a capital "A" Art film, a capital "E" Event film, something like a capital "F" Film per its own maddening sense of self-assurance and exaggerated scope of vision. It is difficult not to evoke THERE WILL BE BLOOD (2007) and THE MASTER (2012), Paul Thomas Anderson's black-hearted oil rush parable and his mystifying examination of quackery and spiritual devastation in post-war America, respectively, in the course of evaluating Corbet's latest. Those kindred American epics—one, an authentic western epic, the other, a crass parody of one—represent not only the clearest antecedent for THE BRUTALIST in terms of their sweeping scale and material fetishism, but also the raw material from which the film is forged, as Corbet has nimbly synthesized the two modes of period filmmaking into a final product that is alternately dingy and lavish; crude and grandiloquent; didactic and frustratingly ambiguous. Adrien Brody stars as László Tóth, a formerly-renowned Hungarian-Jewish architect who, in a subversive visual riff on László Nemes' SON OF SAUL (2014), survives the horrors of the Holocaust and washes ashore in New York in the film's opening minutes. While he waits for his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), to secure her immigration papers, he plans on supporting himself working for a distant cousin's furniture store in Pennsylvania. Through several accidents of fate, his life will soon be dominated by his arduous relationship with a wealthy industrialist (Guy Pearce) who recognizes Tóth's talent and recruits him to design a monumental city center, one whose elegant Brutalist design sensibility will gradually be disfigured by the competing demands of the local township and the patron himself, who demand in turn that the building fulfill the function of library, church, gymnasium, and town hall simultaneously. An aspiring enfant terrible, or at the least a burgeoning provocateur (lest we forget that Corbet's previous film VOX LUX [2018] opens with the Columbine massacre and breezes through the events of September 11 in rapid succession), Brady Corbet has produced in THE BRUTALIST a film that will likely generate white-hot discourse about its precise political intentions. Against the more conventional backdrop of an immigrant being led to the desert in search of the always-illusory American Dream, the film, much like Jonathan Glazer's recent THE ZONE OF INTEREST (2023), examines the ideological foundation—the raw historical material—that underpins Zionism and informed the creation of the Jewish state, reflecting on the immense trauma of wayward survivors of the Shoah and centering a harsh dilemma: endure relentless othering abroad and toil under the tyranny of American capitalist enterprise, or attempt a rebellion against history itself by heeding the call of a fledgling Israel. (2024, 215 min, 70mm) [David Whitehouse]

Mike Cheslik's HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS (US)

Music Box Theatre – Friday, 11:15pm

A largely silent film that draws on Looney Tunes aesthetics as well as video game logic, HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS balances slapstick, sight gags, and sound effects with a genuinely arresting visual aesthetic, combining live action with animated elements. While all the features are familiar, together they create an imaginative modern approach and clever take on cinematic comedy. Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, who also co-wrote the film) is a popular applejack salesman, but when he loses his business in an explosion, he’s forced to find a way to survive in the snowy Midwestern wilderness. Desperate to find food, Kayak must learn the ways of a northern fur trapper, receiving help from some locals, though mostly struggling on his own to succeed; his goal to earn better equipment—and ultimately the hand of a local merchant’s daughter—​by selling pelts is where HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS draws on a video game style, including recognizable sound cues, animations of how many pelts earn him which tools, and Kayak’s sneaking into the beavers’ hideout; it all adds to the uniqueness of the film’s storytelling. The cunning animals themselves are an annoying barrier to Kayak’s success. Larger creatures (such as the titular beavers) are performed by actors in mascot costumes, but director and effects designer Mike Cheslik also rounds out the animal residents with animation, puppets, and stuffed animals—​which themselves are filled with stuffing guts; there’s a constant concurrence of the adorable, the gross, and cartoonish violence. Shot in black and white in both Wisconsin and Michigan, the film also looks striking, the backdrop of the forest landscape grounding the silly antics that ensue. Due its silent nature, the jaunty score by Chris Ryan is also an important driving force in the film, demonstrated in its first few moments with a catchy theme song about Kayak’s popular applejack. (2022, 108 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

📽️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Shūji Terayama’s 1974 film PASTORAL: TO DIE IN THE COUNTRY (101 min, 35mm) screens Saturday at 7pm. Imported print courtesy of The Japan Foundation. 

Vadim Kostrov’s 2021 film WINTER (91 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday at 4pm.

Michael Snow’s 1969 films BACK AND FORTH <---> (52 min, 16mm) and ONE SECOND IN MONTREAL (18 min, 16mm) screen Sunday, 7pm, as part of the Back and Forth, Around and Around: Michael Snow on 16mm series. 

Raoul Walsh’s 1942 film DESPERATE JOURNEY (107 min, 35mm) screens Monday, 7pm, as part of the Raoul Walsh: Adventures in Filmmaking series. 

William Klein’s 1969 documentary THE PAN-AFRICAN FESTIVAL IN ALGIERS (110 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday as part of the Pan-African Cinema series. More info on all screenings here. 

⚫ FACETS Cinema
The Big Teeth Small Shorts Film Festival takes place Thursday at 7pm. More info here. 

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Walter Salles’ 2024 film I’M STILL HERE (136 min, DCP Digital) continues screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

The Architecture & Design Film Festival and Chicago Architecture Center, in collaboration with the Film Center, present ADFF:CHICAGO 2025 through Sunday. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Richard Pryor’s “concert” film RICHARD PRYOR: HERE AND NOW (83 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) screens Saturday, 10:15pm, as part of the Melanin, Roots, and Culture series. Preceded by a pre-screening comedy set. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts (at the University of Chicago, 915 E. 60th St.)
ROOTS AND BLUES, a documentary celebrating Muddy Waters and the cultural significance of the MOJO Museum, screens Thursday, 6:30pm, followed by a post-screening Q&A. Free admission ($25 suggested donation). More info here. 

⚫ VDB TV (Virtual)
Bobby Abate's SYLVANIA (2005) and Barry Doupé's AT THE HEART OF A SPARROW (2006) stream for free on VDB TV. Programmed by Emily Martin. More info here. 

CINE-LIST: January 31, 2025 - February 6, 2025

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Michael Bates, Kian Bergstrom, Michael Castelle, Alex Ensign, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Kalvin Henley, Shaun Huhn, Ben Kaye, David Whitehouse