:: FRIDAY, JUNE 13 - THURSDAY, JUNE 19 ::

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Mikio Naruse's WHEN A WOMAN ASCENDS THE STAIRS (Japan)

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

In WHEN A WOMAN ASCENDS THE STAIRS, master director Mikio Naruse cast his muse Hideko Takamine as Keiko Yashiro, a widow who works as a hostess in a bar frequented by wealthy businessmen. However, Keiko is growing too old to remain in her position. To ensure some financial security, she must marry one of her customers or open a place of her own, but she faces repeated setbacks in pursuing either goal. Naruse sets Keiko's story in Ginza, a district in Tokyo that features upscale shopping and entertainment. Through this space, he renders Japan's growing affluence afforded to and enjoyed by its businessmen and denied to Ginza's 16,000 barmaids. Naruse focuses on the details of Keiko's everyday life, in particular her daily climb upstairs to the bar; in fact, he structures the film upon this recurring image to distill all of Keiko's actions. Similar to his other masterworks, WHEN A WOMAN ASCENDS THE STAIRS depicts a woman's struggle to survive in a society that betrays her. Naruse highlights the subtle shifts in Keiko's thoughts and feelings to create a nuanced character study in which her sheer will is the only salvation from despair. The last image of Keiko evokes the famous barmaid of Edouard Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergere. Although this woman lived in a very different time and place, her face expresses the struggle she shares with Keiko. Preceded by Heather McAdams' 1985 short film HOLIDAY MAGIC (7 min, 16mm). (1960, 111 min, 35mm) [Candace Wirt]

Robert Altman Centennial

Gene Siskel Film Center – See below for showtimes

Robert Altman’s BREWSTER McCLOUD (US)
Saturday, 2pm
Let's pretend you're Robert Altman. After the boffo box office of M*A*S*H and its multiple Oscar nominations, what do you do next? Well, because you're a contrarian stoner, you make a deliberately off-putting fable about a peculiar young man (Bud Cort) whose dream is to take flight inside the Houston Astrodome using a giant pair of mechanical wings. And you fill the cast with members of your budding stock company (Sally Kellerman, Michael Murphy, Robert Duvall, Rene Auberjonois, Bert Remsen) rather than any big Hollywood stars. And, because you're an avowed iconoclast, after you meet a striking local woman at a party (Shelley Duvall) you give her the female lead, even though she's not a professional actress. (Also, you cast Margaret Hamilton; but then, because you consider her a pain in the neck on the set, during editing you excise most of her closeups.) You kick off the film with a marching band rendition of the national anthem (complete with a "Title song by Francis Scott Key" credit), interweave a murder investigation storyline that's one long shaggy dog joke, throw in an enigmatic guardian angel, and regularly interrupt the "action" with ornithology lectures. The end result? A film that still mystifies absolutely everyone more than 50 years later, regardless of their cannabis intake. If only the Siskel included Altman's 1965 short film POT AU FEU on the program, which is a sort of a Rosetta stone. (1970, 105 min, 35mm) [Rob Christopher]
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Robert Altman's McCABE & MRS. MILLER (US)
Wednesday, 6pm
Existing in a middle ground between the life-affirming qualities of the Vancouver landscape where it was shot and his own self-loathing, anti-human biases, McCABE & MRS. MILLER is probably Robert Altman's most satisfying work. Roger Ebert, who can be credited with perpetuating much of the film's initial success, called it "an elegy for the dead," but as it progresses McCABE feels more like an elegy for the living; it's a film about misdirected intentions, poorly communicated emotions, and failed opportunities. Warren Beatty is a gambler and Julie Christie a prostitute in the mining town of Presbyterian Church, where they build a brothel as the rest of the infrastructure goes up around them. The town begins to fall apart as a major mining corporation takes interest in the town's financial prospects, and the lives of simple men and women are disrupted. Shot almost entirely in sequential order (by Vilmos Zsigmond, who may have a better feel for the zoom lens than any other cinematographer), McCABE & MRS. MILLER is a slow burning grumble: nobody raises their voice in anger, but Warren Beatty throws his eyes to the ground and worries about the town's lack of poetry, and as everything falls apart, everyone seems more and more helpless. As it moves along, it feels like the shot of Henry Fonda leaning back on a chair in MY DARLING CLEMENTINE (1946), but were he plucked out of Ford's film and thrown into Altman's, Fonda wouldn't be so hopeful, the name Clementine would bring him less solace, and he'd be leaning back in exhaustion. The whole thing suggests that just as the modern world we know is coming into existence, it has already failed. (1971, 120 min, 35mm) [Julian Antos]

THE BALLAD OF SUZANNE CÉSAIRE (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s debut feature THE BALLAD OF SUZANNE CÉSAIRE is a series of little whirlwinds that stir up your dream. They swirl in most electrifying colors and subside swiftly, waking you up and leaving you wondering if the feeling you just felt was really real. Akin to Stanley Kwan’s CENTER STAGE (1991) in the approach of offering an indistinguishable mélange of reality and mise-en-scene to parallel lives across generations and time, but much looser and less linear, BALLAD never attempts to portray Caribbean writer Suzanne Césaire but the absence of her in the history of art and poetry. How do you grasp something so elusive? Suzanne Césaire was born in Martinique and met her husband Aimé when she studied in Paris, where she also met André Breton. Césaire was a writer, a teacher, an activist. Together with her husband, she co-founded a literary magazine where she played an important editorial role but only ever published seven essays, between 1941 and 1945. She destroyed her writings after 1945. "And we are making a film about a woman who wants to be forgotten," says Zita Hanrot, who acts in the film not as Suzanne Césaire but as an actress who tries to understand Césaire. Reality has casted a spell on the realm of fiction. Hanrot, a new mother, nurtures her baby and pushes away a stroller before we hear Césaire say, through Hanrot’s lips, "Proust wrote in his parents’ luxurious house. Very sincerely, make Proust a farm worker from Martinique, I doubt he would have written In Search of Lost Time." Suzanne and Aimé had six children. I cannot imagine how she would have the time to teach and edit, let alone to write. The sound of baby crying often decorates the soundscape of the film. Fragmented stories, through Césaire’s writing with a tad of commentary, are frequently conveyed beyond the picture frame, through sound, songs and dialogs over a crystalized still photograph or a fixed-camera shot of a quiet tropical forest, devoid of human presence as if no one ever existed. It makes sense that footage from this film is shown as an installation in this year’s Whitney Biennial. In many ways, it is an art film that—with the cast’s fraught acting, its fragmentation, and its allusion to theater and performance—would give a stunning wash to a gallery room but somehow fall flat on a big screen. But you’ve got over an hour of lush 16mm colors and eventful sounds, sit back and lose yourself in this tropical reverie. (2024, 75 min, 35mm and DCP Digital [See website for formats]) [Nicky Ni]

African Diaspora International Film Festival

FACETS – See below for showtimes

Nadia Fall’s BRIDES (UK)
Saturday, 1pm
It’s revealed within the opening minutes of BRIDES that the main characters—a pair of chatty teenage best friends named Fedoza and Muna—are en route from England to Syria, where they aspire to become the brides of ISIS soldiers. Yet what follows isn’t a dour drama about religious fundamentalism, but rather a bittersweet, LAST DETAIL-style road movie about how these girls enjoy a few days of freedom before they willfully give it up. As Fedoza and Muna navigate their way to and then across Turkey, they prove themselves to be bright, resourceful young women capable of overcoming whatever curveballs life throws at them. Ebada Hassan and Safiyya Ingar are charming in the lead roles; they have a believable chemistry as friends. As the movie proceeds, however, it becomes clear that their funny rapport serves to protect them from how miserable they are without each other. Flashbacks to the girls’ life in England are relentlessly bleak, showing how Fedoza (who’s from Somalia) and Muna (who’s Pakistani) face constant, Islamophobic bullying at school and abusive environments at home. Given how bad things are, their plan to marry into ISIS seems to them like a reasonable way out, though their naivety becomes heartbreaking over the course of the film. That’s because Suhayla El-Bushra’s script succeeds in humanizing these characters as much as the lead performances do, emphasizing moments of levity amidst what is essentially a very sad story. (2025, 93 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Tariq Nasheed’s 1804: THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF HAITI (US/Documentary)
Saturday, 7:30pm
Because I know very little about Haiti, I was very happy to have available 1804: THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF HAITI for viewing. That said, watching any documentary, especially one about the long, fraught history of that Caribbean country, is only a starting point. My cursory research and some odd assertions in the film suggest to me that 1804 may have been designed as some type of propaganda from adherents to melanin theory, a form of Black supremacy. Among a complement of somewhat dubiously qualified talking heads, it features an interview with Leonard Jeffries Jr., a retired professor of Black studies at City College of New York who is an advocate of melanin theory. It is perhaps as an exercise in propaganda that the numerous repetitions of information reinforce the film’s credibility, yet there is tantalizing material throughout the film that helps us understand how and why the Black slave uprising of 1804 succeeded, resulting in Haiti becoming the first country to be founded by former slaves. 1804 discusses not only how enslaved Haitians fought against their European oppressors, but also against the Black slave traders in Africa. We learn about the heroes of the Haitian struggle for freedom and independence, including spiritual leader and voudou priest François Makandal; Dutty Boukman, leader of a 1791 slave revolt; Toussaint Louverture, the Haitian general of 1804 revolution; and influential revolutionary and Haiti’s first ruler Jean-Jacques Dessalines. The documentary asserts the importance of the successful revolution to the initiation and success of other slave revolts and revolutions throughout South America and the Caribbean. It also details the exploitation of Haiti’s natural resources and population by successive colonial powers, from the French and Spanish before 1804 to the British and Americans in modern times. There was enough meat on the bones of this documentary to pique my interest in learning more about this fascinating nation. Followed by a panel discussion with Lynn Toussaint of the Haitian Congress, Cyndee Montes of Daughters of Haiti, and Rachel Chery of the University of Chicago. (2017, 115 min, Digital Projection) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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See full festival lineup here.

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John Huston's THE MISFITS (US)

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

There’s so much extra-textual significance hanging over THE MISFITS that it threatens to drag down the film. Most writers are quick to point out that it was the last movie to star either Clark Gable (who died of a heart attack less than two weeks after production wrapped) or Marilyn Monroe (who died of a drug overdose about a year and a half after its premiere), that Arthur Miller’s screenplay was influenced by his souring feelings toward Monroe (and that his marriage to her was coming apart while the movie was being shot), and that the film’s story of desperate, aging cowboys suggests a death knell for the Western as a popular genre. One might add that, with its pervasive sense of defeat, THE MISFITS also has ties to numerous other films by John Huston, who returned to the subject of failure throughout his long and varied career. Indeed, THE MISFITS often feels like it isn’t about the failings of its characters so much as failure in its abstract, idealized form—the film often seems to be reaching for something very big just beyond its grasp, and this over-ambitious quality can upstage the more human-sized virtues. Yet those virtues are quite real, from Russell Metty’s superb black-and-white cinematography to the nuanced performances from the supporting cast. Montgomery Clift (appearing five years after his near-fatal car crash and five years before his own untimely death) is heartbreaking as the rodeo cowboy suffering from too many blows to the head; Thelma Ritter, as Monroe’s confidante, brings a winning proletarian feistiness to a character who may have otherwise come off as a shrewish caricature; and Eli Wallach, arguably the MVP of the cast, brings a spontaneity that distracts from the schematism of Miller’s writing. (Wallach has a drunk scene that’s particularly memorable for how he underplays it; Huston, no stranger to inebriation, instructed him to try very hard to act like he wasn’t drunk.) THE MISFITS has a classical three-act structure that reflects Miller’s theatrical background: the first concerns Monroe’s character getting a divorce in Reno, where she meets up with the characters played by Wallach and Gable; the second follows them to the rodeo where Clift is angling for quick cash; and the third follows all the major characters as they go to the mountains to round up wild horses to sell them for dog food. The film may teem with wasted machismo, but Monroe’s performance is arguably what holds it together (even though she claimed to have hated her character), playing on her vulnerability to tragic effect. Screening as part of the Neo-Westerns of the ’50s and ’60s series. (1961, 125 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Jim Jarmusch's GHOST DOG: THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI (US)

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

Were the late 1990s and early 2000s a golden age of cinema, or do I just say this because these were the years when I was a burgeoning young moviegoer? This was a time of reverence for new sights, sounds, and experiences on my impressionable and somewhat growing mind; this was the time I began to turn my eyes and ears to the world stage of new and challenging cinema. I knew EYES WIDE SHUT was important even though I didn’t understand it at the time; I knew YI YI was a life-changing experience that I couldn’t wait to have; and I was deeply convinced I had to immediately clasp looks on some Iranian film called THE WIND WILL CARRY US. It wasn’t just these canonical classics—names like Claire Denis, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Pedro Costa, and others were beginning to percolate in my brain, entire worlds were opening up to me. Even if I couldn’t quite grasp their galactic reach, I still understood their reverence. There was at least one movie I saw during this time that I felt I could get a grip on, and that was Jim Jarmusch’s GHOST DOG: THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI. The film was readymade for my taste buds at the time, with its combined love of LE SAMOURAI and BRANDED TO KILL (both 1967), plus Isaach de Bankolé (who had dominated that last decade of cinema with his memorable roles in CHOCOLAT, NO FEAR NO DIE, NIGHT ON EARTH, and CASA DE LAVA), the great Henry Silva as a terrifying, cartoon-loving mobster, and the RZA-produced soundtrack, featuring tracks performed by Jeru the Damaja and a host of affiliated B characters from the Wu-Tang dynasty. These elements meld into something that, on the one hand, seems deadly serious in its portrait of steeled morality and brutal violence while, on the other, offers a deadpan parody of the hit-man genre and its graveness. In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, the components would combine like oil and water or resemble something closer to Jim Abrahams’ MAFIA! Instead, Jarmusch allows GHOST DOG to pierce the middle ground between heavy and light, making the film another unique entry in its director’s work within various genre formats. Revisiting this film for the first time since it was released, I am more than pleased to say it remains as comically cool as it always was—a gleaming example of what made that era something of a halcyon time for the movies. Screening as part of the Needle Drop: A Hip-Hop Film Sample series. (1999, 116 min, DCP Digital) [John Dickson]

Luís Buñuel's THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE (France)

Alliance Française de Chicago (810 N. Dearborn St.) – Monday, 6:30pm

Along with UN CHIEN ANDALOU and LOS OLVIDADOS, THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE is one of Luís Buñuel’s indisputably canonical works. Just saying the title is to evoke a distinct sensibility—playful, anti-authoritarian, free-associative, erotic—that might be described as the essence of Buñuel’s entire creative project. The film plays like an extended game of that old Surrealist favorite, exquisite corpse, with increasingly absurd variations on a simple (but oh so promising) theme. Six upper-class individuals try to have a meal together, but some unforeseen event prevents them from doing so. In the first episode, the group goes to a restaurant, only to find that the owner has died, his corpse laid out in the kitchen lie a grotesque parody of a buffet. A few days later, the three women of the group go to another restaurant and discover the place is out of all food and beverages; an army lieutenant helps them pass the time by relating a dream about visiting the underworld. Later still, a military platoon breaks up a dinner party at one couple’s home, announcing that they’re plotting maneuvers for an unspecified war that’s taking place just beyond the hosts’ estate. The narrative itself proceeds through false starts and interruptions—some scenes are revealed to be dreams (or dreams within dreams); at other times, Buñuel cuts inexplicably to an eerie shot of the main characters walking down a country road to nowhere. The film’s style is refined, even stately, recalling the button-down surrealism of Rene Magritte (the anti-clerical satire, however, is broad and silly, as per Buñuel’s preference). The allusions to corrupt Latin American regimes and leftist terrorist cells suggest a certain political anger, but that anger is tempered by Buñuel’s unaccountably genial depiction of the filthy rich characters. (The charm of the bourgeoisie may be discreet, but the charm of these characters—as inhabited by Fernando Rey, Paul Frankeur, Jean-Pierre Cassel, and Nouvelle Vague regulars Delphine Seyrig, Bulle Ogier, and Stéphane Audran—is perfectly easy to see.) Buñuel seems to love them because they’re so fun to tease, and he seems to feel similarly about us. Followed by a conversation on Buñuel’s cinematic legacy and his influence on contemporary filmmakers with Charles Coleman, Film Program Director of FACETS. Doors open at 6pm for a complimentary glass of French wine. Program starts at 6:30pm. Enter via 54 W. Chicago Ave. (1972, 102 min, Digital Projection) [Ben Sachs]

Alex Ross Perry’s PAVEMENTS (US)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

The first time I watched PAVEMENTS, Alex Ross Perry’s abstract cinematic nesting doll disguised as a music documentary, I was a practical novice concerning the history and discography of the ‘90’s slacker rock group Perry cheekily refers to as “The World’s Most Important and Influential Band.” By the film’s triumphant final montage, I wanted to become Pavement’s biggest fan. Amidst a culture awash in hagiographic film projects dedicated to propping up your favorite musical artist through corporate-approved “truths,” Perry’s sly, introspective approach instead chooses to probe our collective fascination with the myriad ways one attempts to engage with and honor our heroes of the music industry. To call the methodology of accomplishing this task “meta” feels like an understatement; the kayfabe established in PAVEMENTS leads us to believe that, alongside the band’s very real reunion tour, the cultural revival of Pavement has also extended into a museum filled with a vast collection of memorabilia being erected in their honor, a jukebox musical being staged to recontextualize their oeuvre in a new medium, and an awards-bait biopic being filmed to further dramatize and embellish the band’s "sordid" history. As confusing and esoteric as this might appear, the film is refreshingly accessible and entertaining throughout; on a technical level, Robert Greene’s structural editing is unmatched, weaving streams of storylines and archival footage seamlessly through and around each other, creating a collage of film that fits together both linearly and thematically. There’s also heaps of humor in Perry’s skewering (intentional or otherwise) of the various tropes found in the jukebox musical and biopic treatments here, though the latter undeniably achieves the most mileage when it comes to unabashed critique and scorn (in particular, Joe Keery gives a masterful performance as a method actor version of himself going to laughably bizarre lengths to capture the essence of Pavement lead singer Stephen Malkmus). But there’s something worth celebrating at the heart of these artistic tributes, even the corniest and most cringe among them, as they pull apart and put back together how we all experience art in our own unique ways. Somebody might love Pavement because of the band members themselves, or because of the poetry of their lyrics, or because of the atmosphere and energy their music creates, and all of these reasons contain validity. This is a film about one specific rock group, but Perry’s gambit succeeds by extending this into a film about how we all find bizarre, earnest, multifaceted ways of expressing our love for the art that shapes us, as contradictory as it all may be. As Malkmus once wrote, “the stories you hear, you know they never add up.” (2025, 128 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Summer Camp

Gene Siskel Film Center – See below for showtimes

Joseph Losey’s BOOM (UK)
Friday, 8:15pm
Tennessee Williams once said that BOOM was his favorite film adaptation of any of his plays, even though it was derided by both critics and general audiences, but I can see where he was coming from. In opposition to the relatively naturalistic approaches of Elia Kazan, Richard Brooks, and John Huston (who had directed movie versions of Williams’ work prior to this), Joseph Losey advances an over-the-top visual style that matches the great playwright’s language in daring, imagination, and flamboyance. It makes sense that the film has been dismissed as well as embraced as camp (it doesn’t help that its most outspoken defender is John Waters); however, it’s more complex than its reputation has made it out to be. Like the play on which it’s based, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (whose failure in 1963 signaled the demise of Williams’ Broadway career), BOOM is blatantly allegorical, feeling more like a Greek myth than Williams’ Orpheus Descending, which was directly inspired by one. Elizabeth Taylor stars Flora Goforth, an obscenely wealthy woman slowly dying on a private island in the Mediterranean; Richard Burton plays Christopher Flanders, the mysterious interloper who trespasses onto the island and becomes a figure of erotic fascination for both Flora and her assistant; and Noël Coward plays Flora’s frenemy, “the Witch of Capri,” who delights in making Flora suspicious of Christopher. Williams had intended for Flora to be an older woman, Christopher to be a younger man, and the Witch to be female, so the casting has the effect of highlighting how unnatural the material already is. At the same time, Williams never was a naturalistic writer anyway, and so the casting, in drawing attention to this, feels appropriate, just like Taylor’s ostentatious costumes or the baroque camera movements. These latter two aspects of BOOM anticipate Fassbinder’s epochal melodrama THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT (1972), while the general premise, with its mix of morbidity and eroticism, harkens back to Jean Cocteau’s THE EAGLE WITH TWO HEADS (1948). The dialogue, though, is pure Williams—unapologetically overripe yet often breathtaking in its poetic opulence. (1968, 113 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Frank Perry's MOMMIE DEAREST (US)
Monday, 6pm
Among the general public, the rest of Frank Perry's oeuvre pales mightily in comparison to MOMMIE DEAREST, his notorious adaptation of Christina Crawford's memoir. The film's portrait of Joan Crawford, thanks to a no-holds-barred performance/recreation by Faye Dunaway, decades of cable TV repeats and hearsay drag queen re-enactment, has cemented MOMMIE DEAREST's status as a true cult classic. But experiencing it solely as an over-the-top melodrama sells the movie short. Viewed differently, it's actually a vivid and disturbing examination of child abuse, the perils of being a movie star and of being the child of a star. And Perry uses the same cool, clean style as in DIARY OF A MAD HOUSEWIFE (1970). His objective camera, usually at some distance from the action, makes Joan's outbursts of aggression and violence that much more unsettling. This apparent neutrality confounds any easy emotional release on the part of the audience, most notably during the infamous “wire hanger” sequence. It's no wonder that the movie has long been experienced as camp; without using humor as a shield, the events onscreen would be much too disturbing to take at face value. Here is a film that cries out for a re-evaluation. But that will have to wait. (1981, 128 min, DCP Digital) [Rob Christopher]
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Lloyd Bacon's 42ND STREET (US)
Saturday, 12pm
Between this, FOOTLIGHT PARADE, and the inaugural GOLD DIGGERS installment, Busby Berkeley launched a delirious overhaul of the movie musical in 1933, a genre previously dominated by staid Broadway recreations. Following Rouben Mamoulian's lead, Berkeley scrapped the proscenium arch and extravagantly embraced the possibilities of the medium, conjuring enough geometric choreography, bird's-eye camera angles, and endless rows of anonymous pawns to earn a famous (if unfortunate) comparison to Leni Riefenstahl by Susan Sontag. But for all Berkeley's grand indulgence, the let's-put-on-a-show plots propping up his spectacles are mired in the Depression-era desperation that was by now Warner Bros' streetwise trademark (William Wellman crafted WILD BOYS OF THE ROAD and HEROES FOR SALE there that same year). While Ernst Lubitsch's contemporaneous Paramount confections promised audiences all-encompassing escapism, 42ND STREET's show-stoppers were an ecstatic release for the characters and spectators alike, an 11th-hour liberation Berkeley neatly subverted with the audaciously morbid finale of GOLD DIGGERS OF 1935. (1933, 89 min, DCP Digital) [Mike King]
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Also screening as part of the Summer Camp series are Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s 1933 film KING KONG (100 min, DCP Digital) on Saturday at 8:30pm and David Maysles, Albert Maysles, Ellen Hovde, and Muffie Meyer’s 1975 documentary GREY GARDENS (95 min, DCP Digital) on Sunday at 2pm.

Yann Gonzalez's KNIFE + HEART (France)

Alamo Drafthouse – Monday, 9:45pm

KNIFE + HEART, the second feature by French filmmaker Yann Gonzalez, is surprisingly gorgeous and tender for a horror film about gay porn. Anne (Vanessa Paradis), a porn director in 1979, is balancing her recent breakup with editor Lois (Kate Moran) with the production demands of her new film, one hitting increasing roadblocks as her film’s men are knocked off one at a time by a masked killer who stabs people with a huge dildo-knife. Anne is the type of movie-character creative who’s addicted to making autofiction, so naturally both the murders and her breakup start to inspire material for the film, an alternately silly and gorgeous erotic police procedural of sorts. While KNIFE + HEART is categorically a horror film, that’s largely because that genre tends to swallow everything around it; it really operates in several modes, splitting time equally being a breakup movie, hangout movie, and slasher. Reducing KNIFE + HEART to just a horror film does a disservice to the specific formal take Gonzalez has on his material, pushing back on the momentum usually mandated by the genre and letting things breathe like a much gayer Larry Fessenden. It’s rare to find a slasher this leisurely and unconcerned with scaring you (on purpose, at least), and the killer tends to disappear from the film for long stretches. When the kills do happen, the movie luxuriates in the moment and lets the lush score by M83 (Anthony Gonzalez, brother of the filmmaker) guide the viewer toward a softer landing. The film’s milieu with its leather gear, sex clubs,  and porn sets contributes to this destabilizing quality, with things that are often scarily branded in genre work presented more ambiguously. The first victim invites the leather-masked and extremely killer-coded killer over to tie him up, despite him screaming “bad news” by most horror conventions. But within the cruising bar he’s less distinct, another lonely soul offering a chance for transcendence for the night. Every character’s actions and gaze are clouded by desire; the various risks of a loose murderer and a gay life under capitalism are all mitigating factors, but not things that zero out someone’s need for love and fulfillment. By the end of the film, you’re not even annoyed that you’ve spent so much time watching a breakup drama in your slasher. Gonzalez’s specific and pleasurable approach to the slasher rests in his emotional investment in characters and their jumbles of motivations, with pleasure and pain always existing as two sides of the same coin. Or dildo, as it were. (2018, 103 min, DCP Digital). [Maxwell Courtright]

Jennie Livingston's PARIS IS BURNING (US/Documentary)

Davis Theater – Monday, 7pm

More than three decades have passed since the release of PARIS IS BURNING and Jennie Livingston’s poignant documentary is still deeply relevant. Following drag queens and performers in the New York City ballroom scene, Livingston gives her subjects the space to do the bulk of the talking, walking, and posing. It’s both intimate and unobtrusive—managing to strike an exceptionally difficult balance for a debut documentary feature. PARIS IS BURNING captures the enthusiasm and character of “house” balls: from the many kinds of performance competitions, to the costumes, and the energy that exudes from everyone in front of the lens. But PARIS IS BURNING does not paint an overly gaudy portrait, either. There is glitz and glamour, sure, but there is also immense pain—often from the loss of loved ones to the AIDS crisis and transphobic, homophobic violence. While PARIS IS BURNING has been critiqued over the years, it is still a fundamental text in the queer cinematic canon; both as an authentic documentation of queer life and as an introduction to vital fragments of queer history and culture that should not be forgotten. (1991, 71 min, Digital Projection) [Cody Corrall]

Sean S. Cunningham’s FRIDAY THE 13TH (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Friday, 10pm

The slasher film has long stirred debate over its true origin. PSYCHO and PEEPING TOM (both 1960) are often credited as early blueprints, while HALLOWEEN (1978) is widely seen as the genre’s formal birth. Yet FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980) deserves recognition as the moment the slasher crystallized—a commercially potent formula with a modular structure that would spawn twelve films and a spin-off TV series. It all began with a fake ad in Variety. Director Sean S. Cunningham had no story, just a title: FRIDAY THE 13TH. But once the cameras rolled, the formula took shape—and a legend was born. Jason Voorhees, the drowned boy in the lake, would become horror royalty. But in the beginning, it was his mother, Pamela, who did the killing. The first film opens in 1958 at Camp Crystal Lake. Two counselors sneak off to hook up while their peers sing “Kumbaya.” The killer’s perspective stalks them, echoing the voyeuristic menace of PEEPING TOM. A fade to white, then: smash—the title crashes through the screen as if through glass. Harry Manfredini’s shrieking score recalls PSYCHO, and Tom Savini’s name in the credits signals the arrival of a new era in gore. Cut to present day: hitchhiker Annie is headed to the camp, which is being reopened despite a troubled past: a drowning in ’57, a double murder in ’58, poisoned water in ’62. “It’s got a death curse,” warns Crazy Ralph, the town’s doomsayer, pedaling through the story like a mad chorus. At camp, we meet our victims: Alice, Bill, Brenda, and a young Kevin Bacon as Jack. The counselors flirt, banter, and skinny-dip—unaware they’re being watched. Annie is the first on-screen kill, her throat slashed in close-up. Then Neddie, the prankster, vanishes off-screen. His corpse later looms over Jack and Marcy mid-coitus—a grim omen. Marcy, moments before her death, recalls a dream of rain turning to blood. Prophecy fulfilled: Jack dies with an arrow through the throat, blood spilling from above. A game of strip Monopoly delays the inevitable. One by one, the counselors fall. Then Alice is alone. The tension tightens. A body crashes through a window. The final act begins. Enter Pamela Voorhees—smiling, maternal, and utterly unhinged. She reveals herself as Jason’s mother and the killer, her grief metastasized into murder. In a twist borrowed from PSYCHO, the true monster isn’t masked but maternal. Her madness is theatrical, her motive tragically human. Alice fights back, finally decapitating Pamela with a machete. But just as calm settles, Jason erupts from the lake in a final shock. Is it a dream? A curse? Or the start of something worse? Camp Crystal Lake isn’t just haunted—it’s caught in a loop. Trauma recycles, violence repeats, and memory is ritual. FRIDAY THE 13TH didn’t just follow a trend. It locked the slasher into place: sin is punished, innocence offers no protection, and the past never stays buried. Jason Voorhees wasn’t born a monster. He was made—scream by scream, cut by cut—into a myth that refuses to die. (1980, 95 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]

Paul Verhoeven's SHOWGIRLS (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Saturday, 10pm; Monday, 6:15pm (SOLD OUT); and Tuesday, 12:15pm

Beautiful as money, Nomi Malone hitches a ride to Las Vegas in this film's opening moments, vividly asserting, switchblade at the ready, that she's going to be a dancer. Already she's a commodity, a body circulating through a network of temporary owners for a price, though this won't be fully clear until her past is revealed near the end of the narrative. Vegas proves exactly her equal, a hometown for people rejecting their origins, a city that Verhoeven shows to thrive precisely on the dissemination of dashed dreams and rude awakenings. Any sense of what a “real” Vegas might look like, how an actual dancer's career trajectory might be completed, is jettisoned in favor of a variegated torrent of imagery drenched in kitsch, in expertly ham-handed appeals to emotional response, in intricate and deadening formal maneuvers. But SHOWGIRLS isn't interested in characters, in narrative, but in glamour, in work, and in the tremendous effort that sexual entertainment takes to produce. 'You like her? ... I'll buy her for you,' the film's substitute Svengali says of Nomi, watching her gyroscopic breasts and buttocks slide around a stripper pole. This is of the falsest of films, constructed out of a series of intersecting surfaces utterly evacuated of substance. Its performers blandly dissemble wide, desperately erotic smiles, force their bodies into simulations of arousal, sweat through humiliating routines of grunt-and-thrust choreography, paint and festoon themselves with lacquer-thick make-up and acres of rhinestones. Verhoeven has always been a master of the physical object, at understanding human relationships as systems of conflicting and merging material engagements, but there has elsewhere always been the underlying hope that reason could see its way clear to an unmediated, somehow genuine connection between real people, could abolish, could transcend the mere appearances of things and give us access to ourselves as whole. Robocop finding, recuperating his family. Doug Quaid claiming interplanetary heroism. Nick Curran catching the killer. SHOWGIRLS will have none of this. It is the ne plus ultra and culmination of Verhoeven's cinema, a film that allows us no escape, that finds beneath every skin and layer nothing other than yet more sequins, glitter, ejaculate, and grime. No film takes American mass culture more seriously, or skewers it more dispassionately. (1995, 132 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Kian Bergstrom]

Wes Craven's SCREAM 2 (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Tuesday, 9:30pm

The movie app I used to revisit SCREAM 2 this week described the plot as, simply, “Murders result from killer wearing mask.” While this isn’t wrong, it also feels like a dismissive throwaway line about the slasher genre as a whole—a genre that has proven time and again to be worth a second look. Released less than a year after the first film and plagued by production issues (including one of the first online script leaks), SCREAM 2 could easily have been a disastrous sequel. Instead, it builds on the original’s examination of slasher tropes by playing into the film’s complete metanarrative. It opens at a premiere screening of the fictional film "Stab," based on events that happened to Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) during the first SCREAM. After the iconic villain Ghostface returns to murder two people at the theater, Sidney and the survivors of the Woodsboro Massacre, along with a new group of college friends (including a plethora of ‘90s stars, including Sarah Michelle Geller, Elise Neal, Joshua Jackson, with Timothy Olyphant and Portia de Rossi as standouts), become targets in the killing spree. SCREAM 2 is a self-parody analysis of the pitfalls of the slasher sequel while still managing to be a successful slasher sequel. (1997, 120 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Andrew DeYoung’s FRIENDSHIP (US)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

There are moments where you almost feel bad for Craig Waterman, the chaotically average protagonist of Andrew DeYoung’s FRIENDSHIP, as he plods through life, struggling to maintain any kind of stable relationship, be it platonic, professional, or romantic. The problem, however, is that Craig is played by Tim Robinson, one of contemporary comedy’s premier lunatics, a man known for yelling, growling, and stink-facing his way through any and all social interactions to the point of sheer absurdity. Robinson’s comedic voice has solidified over the past decade, primarily through his Netflix sketch-comedy series I Think You Should Leave, but FRIENDSHIP represents something sharper and sadder, a prime leading-man vehicle for Robinson that wholly succeeds by keeping one foot firmly planted in crushing reality and the other maniacally flailing for its life. Stemming from the similar strains of comedic DNA that birthed last year’s RAP WORLD (2024)—along with sharing some of the same cast members—DeYoung’s debut feature is a potent examination of toxic masculine culture’s erosion of traditional male friendship dynamics, a system of aggression and dominance that leaves men like Craig with nowhere to turn but inward, toward chaos and anxiety and constant, unending fear. Craig’s seemingly voluntary isolation is put to the test when he meets his new neighbor, Austin (Paul Rudd, making a triumphant return to theatrical comedy after years in the Marvel superhero desert), an effortlessly cool and collected weatherman who takes Craig under his nurturing wing of friendship by way of adventures like exploring the underground sewer system and foraging for mushrooms. Naturally, things go the way of FATAL ATTRACTION (1987) as Austin realizes that, to put it simply, Craig’s just not that great of a hang. The repercussions of this friend break-up prove fatal, as Craig’s feelings of inadequacy infect every facet of his pathetically mundane existence, most notably his relationship with his oft-neglected wife, Tami (a brilliantly committed Kate Mara, in what might otherwise be a thankless role). Whenever the overall structure of FRIENDSHIP threatens to become nothing more than loosely collected sketches, each scene evolves into a deeper dive into Craig, a character brought to life by Robinson’s gripping traits as a performer, his physical and emotional instincts birthing new expressions of comedic id and ego with every passing moment that oscillate between hilarious and nightmarish (of particular note, a mid-film sequence centered around a drug trip unlocks newfound vistas of comedic potential I never thought possible). It would be unfair to reveal the specifics of FRIENDSHIP’s final scenes, but DeYoung and co. let this tale of unrequited brotherhood lead to its logical conclusion, where loose ends tie up in the most rip-roaring fashion possible, and Craig—for better or worse—learns what it means to be a friend. (2025, 100 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Ryan Coogler’s SINNERS (US)

In wide release – See Venue websites for showtimes

Popular hit SINNERS, still going strong after several weeks of wide release in movie theaters across the country and around the world, has already earned back its $90 million cost five times over and has garnered a tankerful of positive ink, including 10 reviews, articles, and podcasts from the United States’ so-called paper of record. So, what is a film like this doing on Cine-File? While our mission is to champion what I like to call “offroad movies,” SINNERS, I believe, needs our attention. Ryan Coogler, one of the most gifted director-screenwriters working today, has garnered popular acclaim by offering original stories that are wildly entertaining while providing the kind of food for thought that cinephiles used to chew on with every new release. That in itself makes the film an outlier in this age of mostly vacuous retreads and superhero movies. The filmmaker also has come under attack for negotiating a supposedly “extinction-level event” for Hollywood studios by securing final cut, a percentage of box office, and ownership of his film after 25 years. There is nothing unprecedented about this deal, that is, if you’re white. The racist hysteria aimed at Coogler, however, emphasizes the more serious point behind SINNERS—the need for Black Americans to have agency over their own lives and intellectual property. This need is the motivation that propels Coogler’s story. Twin brothers Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan), World War I veterans and Chicago bootleggers, return to their hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1932 after finding that the North was little more than Jim Crow with tall buildings. They make a deal to buy an empty mill to set up their own juke joint, recruit their cousin Sammie (Miles Caton) to play guitar and sing, sign up a local musician legend Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) with the promise of all the food and drink he wants, pluck a large cotton picker (Omar Miller) out of the field to act as bouncer, and line up food and a venue sign from a Chinese couple (Li Jun Li and Yao). With everything set in place, the brothers prepare to open their venture the same night. Little do they know that a trio of white vampires, drawn to Sammie’s music, will show up at their club to “assimilate” them. Coogler takes his time settling us into life in the Mississippi Delta, slowing us down to the pace of life in a hot, rural environment. His return of the prodigal sons shows off the pride they feel and inspire in others, as well as the ruthlessness they learned as war veterans and Capone associates. The no-fuss deals Smoke strikes with his juke joint employees are as efficient and amusing as the touching reunion of Stack with his wife, Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), and grave of their infant son, which Annie sets with a bottle of milk almost daily. His elements of magic realism move beyond vampire manifestations to include a dance floor peopled with Black musicians from every place and era, from Africa to the Bronx, in a celebration of Black creativity and joy that the juke joint revelers easily tap into. The failure of the vampires to gain permission to enter the juke joint thus separates them from that which they hoped to appropriate. SINNERS is teeming with the joy of Black life even in its sorrow and the obstacles faced by its characters in just trying to live their lives with purpose and dignity. The always interesting Jordan differentiates his dual roles beautifully. Caton is a skilled musician and surprisingly affecting actor who has a huge future ahead of him. A final, personal delight for me was seeing Buddy Guy play the elderly Sammie in his own club, named for the woman he got busy with at the juke joint, as he contemplates that fateful night. Having the rare movie that is an authentic cultural expression wrapped in an ever-satisfying horror and revenge fantasy is something to celebrate and encourage. (2025, 137 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Kevin Smith’s DOGMA (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – See Venue website for showtimes

Kevin Smith's fourth film stands as one of the most audacious pieces of mainstream Hollywood auteur filmmaking of the 20th century. His career began on a rollercoaster. He had two wildly successful films—CLERKS (1994) and CHASING AMY (1997)—with a giant bomb in between, MALLRATS (1995). By this point the critics have mostly agreed that he had a good deal of talent, if unfocused and not fully realized, and he already had a diehard cult of fans. With this kind of cache and zeitgeist, he was finally able to get his dream film made, DOGMA. A surprisingly devout and practicing Catholic, Smith had always wanted to make a film about God through a very Catholic lens. An admittedly audacious project, he cashed in every chip he possibly could and got a rogue's gallery of actors on board: Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Alan Rickman, Chris Rock, Salma Hayek, George Carlin, Janeane Garafolo, and Linda Fiorentino. The high concept fantasy comedy involves two fallen angels (Affleck and Damon) who have found a loophole to get back into heaven via a demon. An abortion counselor in suburban Chicago, who unbeknownst to herself is the last descendant of Christ, is visited by an angel and sent on a mission to stop the fallen angels. Along the way she teams up with Smith's stoner avatar Silent Bob and his obnoxious hetero life mate Jay, also Rufus, the Black 13th apostle written out of the Bible due to racism, and the physical embodiment of serendipity, who is now a stripper. You can easily understand why this film was heavily protested by Christians. It's clear that everyone thought Smith, with his offensive stoner comedy past, would be gleefully reveling in being as offensively blasphemous as possible. But, oddly enough, it stands tall alongside Scorsese's THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST (1988) as a deeply considered exploration and questioning of both faith and religion by someone who actually goes to church. A lot. Still, it is surprising to see the man who coined the nonsense phrase "snootchie bootchies" waxing almost rabbinically about the theologically legalistic intricacies of plenary indulgences. Yes, it's a bit of armchair/stoner theology going on here, with Smith taking from Judaism, Islam, early post-schism Catholicism, and what seems to be the religious fiction of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens, but holding a man who has a literal giant shit demon in his film to a high theological threshold would also be disingenuous. It feels as the irreverence here comes from Smith's being steeped in the uniquely American version of Catholicism with its slight patina of cultural Protestantism. There's a little bit of Martin Luther in all Americans in our inability to fully believe in anything unquestioningly and our penchant to turn dissatisfaction into public spectacle. With this in mind, it's hard not to see DOGMA as a genuine exercise of a Catholic's faith in art. Just one equally filled with theological pontifications and dated gay jokes. It's exactly how you'd imagine a Catholic Gen X slacker from New Jersey would wrestle with God. By far the most commercially successful, and notorious, of the films Smith made in his View Askewniverse (the cinematic universe in which 9 of his film take place), it's now being re-released in theaters because after a long dark period in which the film was owned by Harvey Weinstein. Since the 2008 BluRay went out of print, DOGMA has been commercially unavailable in any manner until now, when Iconic Events bought the rights and are putting it back in theaters for an ersatz 25th anniversary celebration. Hopefully it'll hit streaming soon too because I'm definitely interested to see the current cultural response to this toilet humor testament to the Catholic divine. (1999, 128 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]

📽️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Alamo Drafthouse
Menahem Golan’s 1980 film THE APPLE (100 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday, 9:30pm, as part of the Weird Wednesday series. More info here.

⚫ Chicago Filmmakers
Uli Edel’s 1981 film CHRISTIANE F. (138 min, Digital Projection) screens Friday, 7pm, in collaboration with the Goethe-Institute Chicago as part of the Berlin Nights series. More info here.

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

⚫ Cinema/Chicago
Nóra Lakos’ 2020 film CREAM (89 min, Digital Projection) screens Monday, 6:30pm, at the Chicago Cultural Center (78 E. Washington St.). Free admission, though standby only at this time.

Jon S. Baird’s 2025 film EVERYTHING’S GOING TO BE GREAT (95 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 7pm, at the AMC NEWCITY 14. Free to attend for Cinema/Chicago members.

Itsaso Arana’s 2023 film THE GIRLS ARE ALRIGHT (85 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday, 6:30pm, at the Chicago History Museum (1601 N. Clark St.). Free admission. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Consignment Lounge (3520 W. Diversey Ave.)
Jan de Bont’s 1996 film TWISTER (113 min, Digital Projection) screens Monday at 7pm. More info here.

⚫ The Davis Theater
John Waters’ 1988 film HAIRSPRAY (92 min, Digital Projection) screens Thursday at 9:30pm. More info here.

⚫ FACETS
“Mates for Life: Whooping Crane” takes place on Tuesday, June 17 at 7pm. Experience a unique intersection of art and nature in this short dance film set in a Midwest tallgrass prairie and inspired by the dances of Whooping Cranes. Director Tim Whalen of Big Foot Media, Joffrey Ballet dancer and “Mates for Life” choreographer Xavier Núñez, and the International Crane Foundation’s Brittany Mullins appear in-person for this special event. Free admission with reservation. More info here.

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Celine Song’s 2025 film MATERIALISTS (113 min, DCP Digital) begins screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes. More info here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
It’s officially Music Box Garden Movies season! See Venue website for lineup and showtimes.

Wes Anderson’s 2025 film THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME (101 min, DCP Digital) continues screening. See Venue website for showtimes.

Joel Schumacher’s 1995 film BATMAN FOREVER (121 min, 35mm) screens Friday and Saturday at midnight. Arrive early to the Friday screening for a preshow performance by Grelley Duvall starting at 11:40pm.

Tony Scott’s 1995 film CRIMSON TIDE (116 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday, 11:30am, as part of the Films of Gene Hackman series.

The fourth iteration of Life Within the Lens, a short film series celebrating Black Chicago filmmakers, screens Wednesday, 7pm, followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers.

Esteban Arango’s 2024 film PONYBOI (103 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday at 7pm. Hosted by Pidgeon Pagonis and co-presented by Gerber/Hart Library & Archives. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ VDB TV (Virtual)
Selections from the Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive, in conjunction with the announcement of the Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive Collection, streams free on VDB TV. More info here.

CINE-LIST: June 13, 2025 - June 19, 2025

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS //  Julian Antos, Kian Bergstrom, Rob Christopher, Cody Corrall, Maxwell Courtright, John Dickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Shaun Huhn, Ben Kaye, Mike King, Raphael Jose Martinez, Nicky Ni, Candice Wirt