🤘THE 32ND CHICAGO UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL
See below for venues and showtimes
Dennis Cooper & Zac Farley’s ROOM TEMPERATURE (US)
Siskel Film Center – Wednesday, 8:15pm
Familial dysfunction can be a source of both humor and horror, and ROOM TEMPERATURE walks a fine line between the two. The film contains numerous unsettling revelations that are typically followed by awkward silences, and it’s never clear as to whether they’re meant to inspire nervous laughter or creeping dread. The story follows a family in the California desert who each year turn their home into a haunted house and charge admission to their amateur attraction. The project is a labor of love for the father of the family, but it’s clear from the start that his wife and children no longer share in his passion. The premise suggests a WAITING FOR GUFFMAN-style comedy about amateur theatrics, but writer-directors Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley dash easy laughs early on when the father casually tells a stranger that he hits his children. (The stranger, a local janitor whom the father has recruited to help with the attraction, has a habit of underreacting to anything he hears, making him something of a surrogate for the filmmakers, with their dead-pan visual approach.) As ROOM TEMPERATURE progresses, the possibility of child abuse hangs over many of the scenes, the father’s monomania seems symptomatic of a violent need for control, and the quirks of the other family members suggest the sublimation of anger or trauma. The family has two children plus an adolescent foster child from France named Extra; in an absurdist twist, the film provides no explanation for how or when Extra came to live with them. The French youth gets most of the best lines in ROOM TEMPERATURE, including a monologue in which he pontificates on why the family’s haunted houses routinely disappoint their visitors. He concludes that the problem lies in the fact that the scares require spectators to play along with the performers in order for them to work, which is an unreasonable demand given that the scenarios aren’t that frightening to begin with. This is plainly obvious to anyone except the father, who comes to resemble a would-be cult leader in the strict demands he makes on the people around him. Like the haunted house, his behavior is so pathetic as to inspire embarrassment; unlike the haunted house, it’s actually frightening. (2025, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
---
Shorts 1: Sub Rosa Insurrectio
ACX Harper Theater – Thursday, 4:30pm
The first shorts program of this year’s CUFF introduces a markedly somber aspect to the festival; most of the inclusions are downbeat in some way. The major exception is Mark Street’s all day, and all of the night (2025, 13 min), which kicks off the program. An abstract city symphony, the work comprises various shots of New York City street life, alternating between daytime and nighttime views. At a few points in the collage, Street superimposes over the urban views shots of pools of ink slowly shifting shape, and these add further texture to the rich tableaux. One might call this a piece of classical experimentalism, as it invokes a filmmaking tradition best associated with the late silent era. New York City figures again in Elana Meyers and Katie Heiserman’s rousing documentary SURVIVAL WITHOUT RENT (2025, 22 min), which uses archival VHS footage to chronicle the squatters movement on the Lower East Side in the 1980s and early ‘90s; but first, the program considers the bombing of Hiroshima with Chi Jang Yin’s I WAS THERE, PART II (2024, 10 min). The second in a three-part series of short documentaries, the piece centers on an archival testimony of a German priest who survived the bombing. He raises concern about both Japan’s employment of total war and the United States’ use of the atomic bomb over images of destruction, which only underscore his points. For its first half, SURVIVAL WITHOUT RENT makes for a good palate cleanser after something as despairing as I WAS THERE, PART II, as the filmmakers look at the efforts of New York squatters to independently rehabilitate abandoned buildings and create functional, supportive, anarchistic communities. But as always, Rudolph Giuliani emerges as the villain, and the documentary shifts focus to the former Mayor’s 1995 efforts to “clean up” the Lower East Side by forcibly removing squatters from their homes. The program continues with a call to arms in the form of Kelly Sears’ THE CALL (2025, 7 min), which imagines a coordinated effort by the birds of the world to take down the airline industry. Sears combines footage from airport surveillance cameras with narration delivered by an unidentified bird, who describes the movement to defend airspace and wildlife from the encroachment of planes and airports. However fantastical, the work is clearly motivated by urgent concern for our natural habitat; its effect is surprisingly chilling. Next up is Erica Sheu’s IT FOLLOWS ON IT PASSES ON (撿起放下墜落提起) (2022, 5 min), which proceeds largely in the form of beams of light against black backgrounds. The filmmaker describes the work as “a personal ritual bridges generations and geographies, channeling echoes from Kinmen during the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis.” Cheri Gaulke’s OLD GIRL IN A TUTU: SUSAN RENNIE DISRUPTS ART HISTORY (2025, 7 min) is a short documentary about feminist scholar Susan Rennie and her second career as a visual artist. Gaulke profiles Rennie’s recent exhibit, which consists of classic paintings that she’s doctored by digitally inserting her own image into them. This prankish attack on the male gaze seems to have been performed in a spirit of good fun; the tone of the documentary is casually celebratory. The program takes a sharp left turn with the final selection, Kabir Mehta’s experimental documentary NIGHT OUT WITH RONNIE (2024, 21 min), about the filmmaker’s relationship with a 70-year-old teller of tall tales whom he met at the gym. Now based in Mehta’s hometown of Goa, Ronnie talks of having lived in England and the European continent, where he played polo and drove expensive cars. This seems to be an amusing character study until Mehta inserts a scripted scene in which Ronnie follows a woman he met at a bar, breaks into her home, and strips naked. The short concludes on an even more unsettling note when Mehta learns sobering information about Ronnie that makes him decide to discontinue the project. It’s a strange note to end on, but then, we live in strange times. [Ben Sachs]
---
Dave Markey's THE SECRET LIVES OF BILL BARTELL (US/Documentary)
ACX Harper Theater – Thursday, 7pm
The newest film by legendary LA underground filmmaker Dave Markey (THE SLOG MOVIE, DESPERATE TEENAGE LOVEDOLLS, REALITY 86’D, 1991: THE YEAR PUNK BROKE) stays within his wheelhouse of expertise: punk rock. Bill Bartell is not a name most people know, but in certain worlds it’s a name that anyone worth knowing knows. The film opens with an interview clip of Kurt Cobain describing how his friend Bill Bartell runs a cool record label; we immediately understand that this guy was someone. Despite being in one of the most cult bands of the already cult ‘80s LA punk scene (White Flag), Bartell never got much recognition outside of his immediate scene. This film, made years after his death, attempts to piece together the life of a man who seemed to know everyone but no one knew much about. Markey attempts to create a biography of Bartell via interviews with family and friends, many of which are legends in underground/independent arts. Members of such bands as Sonic Youth, the Germs, the Adolescents, Redd Kross, Black Flag, the Muffs, the Fastbacks, NOFX, Frightwig, and even Os Mutantes relate their stories of Bartell. Interestingly, every single person admits that they only knew a part of his life—and that they were very much aware of that. Markey manages to pull off something incredible by making a posthumous film about someone he had a longstanding personal relationship with without it having any kind of preciousness, hagiography, or agenda. The moments where the film feels like it might be slightly deferential to Bill Bartell are only because it's clear everyone who met him was in awe of him, for better or worse. Markey seems to have been in an incredibly lucky position of coincidentally having known one of the most interesting behind-the-scenes characters in the history of 20th century underground rock music and having access to others who did as well. The film shows us highly compartmentalized sides of Bill Bartell: fan and champion of artists, uncharacteristically powerful taste and culture maker, closested queer man, annoying pest, punk rocker turned cop turned rodeo cowboy, teetotaler Diet Coke addict. And while this film is most decidedly about Bill Bartell as a person, it's also about what he represented—the bratty, obnoxious, unrelentingly self-driven, humorous side of punk that disappeared between the machoness of ‘80s hardcore and the performative earnestness of ‘90s alt/indie rock. Bill Bartell was the last of the funny punks. While this might be a bit too in the weeds for a film watcher with no previous knowledge of ‘80s/’90s underground American rock music, it offers multitudes for those that do. Like Andrew Horn’s 2004 documentary on Klaus Nomi, THE NOMI SONG, this film illuminates the life of someone who changed everyone they ever met, but that the average person—even a super fan of the world they existed in—may have never known about otherwise. Dave Markey has given us a cinematic fanzine about underground rock’s biggest fan. Cheers to that. (2025, 102 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
---
Shorts 2: Corpus Subterraneum
ACX Harper Theater – Thursday, 7:30pm
Three of the seven shorts in this program boast Chicago connections—fans of local culture and history are strongly encouraged to check this out. Finn O’Connell’s 90 DEGREES (2025, 4 min) kicks things off with a burst of energy. The film is a shot-on-16mm portrait of the city’s punk and skateboarding scenes, and the texture of the celluloid cinematography blends perfectly with the gritty activity on display. Appearing in the middle of the program is Cine-File contributor Josh B. Mabe’s AMERICAN ALTERNATIVE: KURT HEYL (2025, 11 min), a documentary profile of the titular experimental filmmaker and former Chicago resident. Over a montage of shots taken from his body of work, Heyl recounts growing up on the West Side, attending the School of the Art Institute, becoming friends with Jon Jost, and making films here in the city before he relocated to California. Heyl is candid about the dissolution of his marriages and his wayward years in the 1970s, but these subjects are overshadowed by his pioneering work in underground cinema. The short takes its title from a documentary Heyl made about Chicago’s skid row area using nonsync sound, but it also sums up his concern for life outside the mainstream in this country. Closing the program is another documentary, Carson Parish’s MR. BOUND & GAGGED (2025, 36 min), which was largely shot at the Leather Archives & Museum in Rogers Park. This consists of interviews with Bob Wingate, publisher of the now-defunct gay BDSM magazine Bound & Gagged, and Lee Clauss, his partner of three decades. They recount some of the challenges of publishing the magazine as well as favorite moments in its history; they also reflect on their personal relationship and their efforts to combat censorship and anti-sex attitudes in the national culture. Despite the outré subject matter, this is ultimately a tender and thoughtful piece. More documentary shorts round out the program; the exception to the trend is Paul Tarragó wacky MAGIC WITH SMALL APPARATUS (2025, 8 min), which combines live action and animation in surprising ways. The throughline of the work involves the filmmaker finding the journal of a magician-ventriloquist who performed in London in the 1930s. Tarragó interweaves entries from the journal with shots of South London and rudimentary animated effects; the results are beguiling and highly amusing. In THERE’S A SMALL HOTEL (2024, 19 min), director Michael Grodner catches up with one-time Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro, who left the limelight long ago and now manages a storied hotel, the Brevoort, in Los Angeles. Much like the Chelsea Hotel in New York (to which it’s often compared), the Brevoort is something of a way station for various artists and eccentrics; Dallesandro speaks fondly of living amongst them. The former actor also shares revealing anecdotes about his film career and some touching recollections about his relationship with his wife (whom he’s married three times). Jenny Stark’s THE RINK (2024, 6 min) profiles another Californian, a Sacramento resident named Michael Love who earned his Master’s degree while he was incarcerated. Love now spends much of his free time at a popular roller rink; Stark intersperses stories from his difficult past with shots of him blissfully skating, images of happiness that stand in relief against his upsetting memories. Finally, Ryan Steel’s experimental work FORT GARRY LIONS POOL (2024, 6 min) presents the titular Winnipeg hangout through a variety of filmic devices. The short is impressionistic, moody, and evocative of fun times. Like the Chicago-oriented works in the program, FORT GARRY LIONS POOL exhibits pride in its sense of place and local character. [Ben Sachs]
---
Michael Almereyda & Courtney Stephens’ JOHN LILLY AND THE EARTH COINCIDENCE CONTROL OFFICE (US/Documentary)
ACX Harper Theater – Thursday, 8:30pm
Following EXPERIMENTER (2015) and TESLA (2020), the reliably interesting filmmaker Michael Almereyda looks at another unusual scientist with countercultural bona fides, John Lilly, an American neuroscientist who invented the sensory deprivation chamber, studied the consciousness and communication of dolphins, and consumed a lot of psychedelic drugs; Courtney Stephens (THE AMERICAN SECTOR, TERRA FEMME) cowrote and codirected. The film proceeds mainly through pre-existing footage, much of which reveals Lilly to have been a regular on television in the 1970s and ‘80s. Almereyda and Stephens make little attempt to portray Lilly as a creditable scientist; rather, he comes across as a modern-day mystic whose experiments seem designed to impact his own consciousness before anyone else’s. (Also in the audiovisual mix are clips of Allen Ginsberg on television, and the filmmakers invite parallels between him and Lilly.) The film reveals that Lilly was a significant influence on pop culture during his lifetime, as Almereyda and Stephens link him to the TV show Flipper, the movies THE DAY OF THE DOLPHIN (1973) and ALTERED STATES (1980), and the Sega video game Ecco the Dolphin—the overarching theme might be described as the tenuous distinction between science fiction and science fact—and they suggest that his work with dolphins directly inspired the formation of dolphin advocacy groups. These accomplishments are interwoven with tales of Lilly’s extensive drug use and tumultuous love life. On the whole, this contains more outlandish details than a good number of fiction films. (2025, 87 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
---
Eleanor Gaver’s TRIPOLAR: THE MOVIE (US)
ACX Harper Theater – Thursday, 9pm
Eleanor Gaver, who has directed a film each decade since the 1980s, returns again thwith the sense of passing the torch to a younger generation. Absurdist comedy has long been her terrain: her 1998 film LIFE IN THE FAST LANE told the story of a street artist who mails himself to his crush, only to be fatally stabbed when she opens the package. Gaver’s previous film, HERE ONE MINUTE (2015), was made on a shoestring budget and under her full control—casting performers she found on the street alongside students from the Stella Adler Studio. Working with them, she rewrote and improvised until the dialogue sounded raw and lived-in. One of those students, Schuyler Quinn, impressed enough to earn a producer’s credit, and soon after she and Gaver launched Invincible Film. What began as a web series about making a movie together eventually mutated into a feature: TRIPOLAR THE MOVIE. The result is a THC-infused odyssey about getting an independent film made in New York. But more than that, TRIPOLAR is a stoner comedy with pedigree, standing proudly alongside HAROLD AND KUMAR GO TO WHITE CASTLE (2004) and PINEAPPLE EXPRESS (2008). Like its Cheech and Chong ancestors, it thrives on skits only loosely tethered to a plot, the spirit closer to vaudeville chaos than traditional storytelling. Gaver laces the film with moments worthy of 1970s John Waters, pushing the genre past cheap gags into a delirious, transgressive playground. We follow a cast of gloriously unhinged and morally bankrupt characters, all eager to escape reality through a haze of weed, pills, and psychedelics while trying to make a movie on less money than an Ed Wood production. An Ex-Lax induced race for a toilet becomes the thesis for the film as a whole: life’s just shit! Life is chock full of golden showers, drugging your friends, setting up your film crew as Islamic terrorists, prison sentences, fornicating around pot plants, and drinking bong water laced with LSD; but who would want it any other way? With little to no plot to get in the way, the characters, ridiculous situations, and drug use take center stage. While popping Ambient, Klonopin, Xanax, hits of acid, and a constant rotation of joints, our leads battle film financiers, ageism, racism, gender politics, and attempt remaking THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939). Divine would be honored by dog-shit yellow brick roads. The great and powerful Oz is depicted as Trump asking to be called God. Oz’s voice is created completely from edited Trump soundbites. Gaver herself plays Lana Cockburn, the matriarch of a house full of misfits—though “matriarch” here means handing out drugs to her daughter’s best friend and then kicking her own child out in favor of the new recruit, Daphne (Quinn). Gaver and Quinn riff with the kind of rhythm usually reserved for seasoned comic duos like Abbott and Costello or Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy. To call TRIPOLAR plotless would be missing the point. Stoner comedies, after all, are less about narrative momentum than about vibe, invention, and the delirious freedom to derail. Gaver carries that tradition forward with a no-budget punk sensibility, reminding us that these films endure not despite their messiness, but because of it. Trying to track a linear story here is like reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas just to find out who won the Mint 400. That’s not why we’re here. We’re here for the drugs, the chaos, and the joy of watching performers leap headfirst into absurdity. TRIPOLAR doesn’t just pass the torch to a younger generation, it sets the damn thing ablaze, puffs twice, and asks if you want in on this. (2025, 85 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]
---
For a complete schedule, visit the festival website here.
📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING
Erich von Stroheim's BLIND HUSBANDS (US/Silent)
Chicago Film Society at the Music Box Theatre – Sunday, 11:30am
Few filmmakers have matched von Stroheim's ability to imbue a glance, a gesture, or a simple physical feature with limitless depths of perversion and cynicism, and while BLIND HUSBANDS, his first directorial effort, is neither his most extraordinary nor his most alarming film, it is nonetheless a prototypical film, showing all of his viciousness and languorous villainies to their unvarnished fullest. Amidst the Dolomites, a married couple arrives at a resort hotel at the same time as the sophisticated and sexually malevolent Lieutenant von Steuben (played by von Stroheim himself, of course). Von Steuben, a serial seducer and expert at cuckoldry, takes an interest in the wife, all but raping her on multiple occasions, his gropes and leers matched in their audacity only by the erotic blindness and stupidity of her husband, a man of singular and ill-founded faith in the sanctity of his wife's vows. Von Stroheim's been called 'the man you love to hate,' an appellation deriving from his early roles playing monstrous German swine, raping and slaughtering their way through fields of red-blooded American boys. BLIND HUSBANDS shows him to be a keen and subtle visual moralist, taking the glee and fascination in evil he cultivated as an actor and parlaying that into a stunning sense of the possibilities of cinema to make claims about the physical world. Existence itself is perverse here, and the only distinctions between the good and the bad are that the bad see the shell-games of social convention more clearly. The German title of the film translates to THE REVENGE OF THE MOUNTAINS, a less poetic but far more appropriate name for this nasty tale of contrasts between the majesty of nature and the grubbiness of mere desire. The climax of the film, set on a mountain's craggy and sublime peak, is a masterpiece of form, a scary and violent and cathartic explosion of human force. Preceded by Screen Snapshots No. 10 (1922, 3 min, 35mm). With live piano accompaniment by Dave Drazin. (1919, 92 min, 35mm) [Kian Bergstrom]
Robert Altman’s COOKIE’S FORTUNE (US)
Chicago Film Society at the Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 6pm
Though Robert Altman would direct another four features and a TV miniseries after COOKIE’S FORTUNE, the film exudes a sense of contentment that gives it the glow of a final statement. It takes place in a utopian Mississippi town where almost everyone gets along and almost everyone is some kind of a kook. The story includes a suicide, a murder investigation, and a blossoming love affair, but none of these developments are granted much urgency—for the most part, Altman is satisfied just to luxuriate in his characters and their offbeat behavior. The title character (Patricia Neal, in one of her last performances) is an elderly White widow who lives with her best friend, a middle-aged Black man named Willis (Charles S. Dutton). Altman intercuts their cheerful daily existence with scenes from the more contentious lives of Cookie’s nieces, a control-freak community theater director (Glenn Close, relishing her chance to play an Altman cartoon villain) and her dim-witted sister (Julianne Moore), and Cookie’s wayward, 20-ish granddaughter (Liv Tyler), who’s recently returned to town after some time away. On the day before Easter (when Willis plans to make catfish enchiladas, something that assumes the significance of a major plot point), Cookie is overtaken by a sense of longing for her dead husband and shoots herself in the head. Her nieces find her corpse, and Close’s character immediately starts tearing up the place to make her suicide look like a murder because she can’t accept that anyone in her family would take her own life. Willis becomes the chief suspect in the ensuing case, but practically everyone in town rallies to his defense, and the investigation proceeds leisurely while he and the sheriff (Ned Beatty) play Scrabble in the county jail. COOKIE’S FORTUNE was written by one of Altman’s long-time friends, a veteran script supervisor named Anne Rapp, and the film has the feel of an extended hang-out between old pals. That’s not just because the theme of friendship is central to the film (and Willis’ camaraderie with Cookie and her granddaughter is particularly heartwarming), but because everyone in the cast seems genuinely happy to be performing together. Preceded by a 10-minute Altman trailer reel on 35mm. (1999, 118 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
Shinji Sômai’s THE FRIENDS (Japan)
Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
Arguably the greatest director of children after Yasujiro Ozu, Shinji Sômai not only elicited complex performances from child actors; he also suggested (often to eerie effect) that children have access to an entire emotional landscape that adults can no longer reach. His filmography abounds with young characters more mysterious than most grownups, starting with the adolescent protagonists of his debut THE TERRIBLE COUPLE (1980) and reaching its apex with the headstrong preteen Ren in his masterpiece MOVING (1993). In THE FRIENDS, Sômai follows three middle school-aged boys who become fascinated by a solitary old man who lives in their neighborhood. They express their fascination at first by stalking him but then develop empathy and decide to renovate his dilapidated home. This trajectory, on paper, suggests a more straightforward, if not to say sentimental, narrative than Sômai typically delivered, but such a reductive summary neglects the film’s pronouncedly morbid streak, which keeps it from ever becoming conventional family fare. The story kicks into gear when one of the friends, Yamashita, comes home after attending his grandmother’s funeral in another part of Japan; another one of the title characters, a precocious nerd named Kawabe, is obsessed with death as a result of his father having died when he was a baby. There’s a terrifying scene in the first act when Kawabe holds a discussion with his friends while walking on the ledge of an expressway overpass—the sense of danger all but overwhelms the dialogue. Later, Kawabe taunts the old man by saying they’re only following him so they can watch him die (a statement he quickly regrets), and Kiyama, the third friend, gets lost in a morgue when trying to track down their mark during a stalking expedition. Given all these dark elements, the resulting friendship between the boys and the old man feels genuinely uplifting… that is, until the old man opens up to the kids about having committed atrocities during WWII. His revelation changes THE FRIENDS completely, turning the film into a meditation on national responsibility for war crimes. Sômai doesn’t telegraph the narrative shift; his direction remains poker faced throughout, emphasizing his career-long theme of the unknowability of others. (1994, 113 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Gillo Pontecorvo's THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (Italy/Algeria)
Siskel Film Center – Friday, 6pm
One of political cinema's enduring masterpieces, THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS is also a world-historical document, an essential piece in the puzzle of a violent and hopeful time. No film before or since has conveyed the drama of insurrection with such intensity or precision. Depicting the bloody clash for Algerian independence waged against French colonial powers in the late 1950s, THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS is defined by dualities, beginning with the central spatial dichotomy between the “European City” and the Casbah, which serve as the film’s primary locations. The use of these real locations, like the stark, hand-held cinematography, show director Gillo Pontecorvo absorbing the techniques of Neorealism, but his masterful control of suspense and emotion owes just as much to the clockwork thrillers of Hitchcock and Lang. Like the latter's M, the film is also a study in the diverging methodologies of the underground and the police, with a particular interest in organizations of power and technologies of surveillance, detection, and terror. BATTLE OF ALGIERS is legendarily detailed and unflinching representation of the violence committed by both French colonial and Algerian radical forces, which has made the film an invaluable primer on guerrilla warfare to Black Panthers and Pentagon pencil-pushers alike. Indeed, with alternating scenes of reciprocal bloodshed, Pontecorvo proves himself as expert an architect of ethical complexity as of narrative tension. But his even-handedness is hard to mistake for pure ambivalence—the film’s heart undoubtedly lies with the revolutionary spirit of the Algerian people. For one, the FLN freedom fighters are much more sharply individuated than the French occupiers, with the crucial exception of Colonel Mathieu, the focused and methodical leader of the French counterinsurgency. Himself a composite of several historical figures, Mathieu often serves as a mouthpiece to rationalize the brutality of their repression effort; Pontecorvo contrasts his chilling detachment with scenes stressing the emotional and physical impact of the anti-colonial struggle on the Algerians. In a sense, the question of the film’s political sympathies may ultimately be a question of the viewer’s inclination towards empathy. If you receive the film as the dispassionate exercise in pseudo-reportage it’s often characterized as, you may take more from its overtures to impartiality; if you experience THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS as the gripping, devastating, and ultimately rousing work of art I think it is, you’ll know which side it's on. (1966, 121 min, 35mm) [Michael Metzger]
Tsui Hark x2
See below for venues and showtimes
Tsui Hark’s PEKING OPERA BLUES (Hong Kong)
Music Box Theatre – Saturday, 11:30am
Quentin Tarantino has long considered PEKING OPERA BLUES a favorite, and it’s easy to see why: the film prefigures his own work in the way it plays fast and loose with touchy historical subject matter while delivering a boisterous action comedy. The political upheaval in China’s capital circa 1913 provides a backdrop for 105 minutes of bravura filmmaking that moves frenetically between farce, suspense sequences, and all-out gun battles. The plot comes at you so rapidly that it requires multiple viewings to unravel; suffice it to say, it concerns three young women from different backgrounds whose lives converge at the Peking Opera after the city is taken over by a warlord. All three end up working for the revolution that aims to overthrow him, and their daring-do involves smuggling information, hiding from authorities, and assuming false allegiances. Sometimes, Tsui Hark plays the material for humor (the sequence involving several people trying to hide behind the same blanket is a classic bit of physical comedy), while at other times, he ratchets up the sense of imposing doom to the point where things are just too intense to laugh at. PEKING OPERA BLUES suggests the work of Tsui’s hero King Hu in hyperdrive, and not just because it plays like THE FATE OF LEE KHAN (1973) at twice the speed. The shifts in tone are more unpredictable, and the action, however kinetic and carefully orchestrated in the Hu tradition, evokes the energy of a runaway train. Thanks to the detailed Peking Opera set, this has some of the best mise-en-scène of any Tsui production, and the director makes the most of it, conveying a world of wonder and deception on the stage and surrounding areas. One of the unexpected delights of PEKING OPERA BLUES is that it’s also one of the great movies about theater. (1986, 105 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
---
Tsui Hark's SHANGHAI BLUES (Hong Kong)
The Davis Theater – Wednesday, 7pm
When he was about 10 years old and still known as Tsui Man-kong, future filmmaker Tsui Hark started telling stories by drawing his own comic books. There seems to be a direct connection between this formative experience and Tsui’s work as a director and producer—most of his films feel like moving comic books in their cluttered mise-en-scène, emphatic emotions, and forceful sense of movement between shots. They also reflect childlike enthusiasm for the medium, trading in action and slapstick set pieces that can be appreciated by kids of all ages. The characteristically joyful SHANGHAI BLUES features all this and musical numbers too, confirming Tsui as the heir to Stanley Donen as well as King Hu. Indeed, the film tells the kind of charmingly silly story that motored many MGM musicals in the 1940s and ‘50s, following a ne’er-do-well musician and sometimes clown named Gwok-man (Kenny Bee) as he seeks fortune as well as his true love in the bustle of postwar Shanghai. In his pursuits, he gets entangled with a wacky woman known as Stool (Sally Yeh) and her roommate Shu (Sylvia Chang), a nightclub performer who dreams of becoming a famous entertainer herself. Most scenes in SHANGHAI BLUES start with one amusing idea, then snowball into sweet chaos, as more characters enter into the proceedings and the trajectories of various objects and wills inevitably intersect. Often the results are grin-inducing, such as during Shu’s hilarious botched song-and-dance numbers, but Tsui occasionally steers the action into hair-raising suspense, as when a convergence of characters at a homeless encampment unexpectedly turns violent. The first feature Tsui produced for his company Film Workshop, SHANGHAI BLUES was clearly a labor of love—every shot exhibits such hardworking showmanship that it’s easy to lose track of the story and get wrapped up the invigorating cutting and camera movements, which suggest, as usual with Tsui, the aesthetic equivalent of a sugar rush. (1984, 99 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Lucrecia Martel's THE HEADLESS WOMAN (Argentina)
Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6pm
Lucrecia Martel’s films demand your attention to infinitesimal details and then upbraid you—albeit thoughtfully, like a sage imploring you to reconsider all your preconceived notions—for caring too much about them. Her 2008 film THE HEADLESS WOMAN, the last in her de facto Salta Trilogy (called as such because all three, with LA CIÉNAGA from 2002 and THE HOLY GIRL from 2004, are set in the eponymous Argentine province, also her hometown) and her most recent film before ZAMA, is the preeminent example of this tactic within her oeuvre. The plot is deceptively simple: before the title card even appears, a well-to-do Argentine woman, Verónica (referred to as Vero and played in a masterful performance by María Onetto), gets distracted by her phone while driving and hits something—possibly a dog, possibly a child. Rather than verify and, if necessary, help the victim, she drives on, presumably stopping only to get out and seek assistance for herself. The film’s Byzantine trajectory is rendered dreamlike via Martel’s perversely epical perspective (and real-life inspiration; she reportedly conceived of the film in a dream)—nothing is what it seems, neither for the protagonist nor the viewer. Although this is a recent trend in world cinema of late, considering some noteworthy films born of the Iranian and Romanian New Waves such as Asghar Farhadi’s A SEPARATION (2011) and Călin Peter Netzer’s CHILD’S POSE (2013), Martel’s disembodied approach is less tactical and more intrinsic than others’ use of such means. It may be trite to say that Martel challenges viewers to question what they see (and hear—her use of sound is exquisite), but it’s a logical assumption. After Vero hits whatever it is, I was almost sure that, when the film shows the casualty in the car’s rear window (movie pun unintended, though many critics reference its Hitchcockian overtones) as she drives away, it was in fact a dog; but when her family starts quietly helping cover up the accident following a series of disconcerting events—a servant’s child goes missing and is then found drowned in the canal next to the road where the accident occurred—I wondered what it was I think I saw, this newfound confusion mirroring Vero’s while likewise reinforcing the flimsy impudence of the very sense most crucial to film viewing. Martel’s sound design is similarly dumbfounding, the acousmatic dialogue further distancing us from already removed figures, practically unable to be called characters in how little is revealed about them. This distance, then, makes us question our own complicity, thus positioning the role of spectator, a seemingly passive viewpoint, as an active, if not political, stance. Martel said in an interview that “[t]here is a relationship between the dead body you never see and the desaparecidos,” referring to when a military junta disappeared tens of thousands of political dissidents during Argentina’s 'Dirty War' of the 1970s. This context reframes the scenario, prompting one to wonder if there’s any real difference between what one thinks they see and what one, either naively or maliciously, wants to see. There’s also an intriguing motif involving Vero’s hair, dyed blonde, making her bourgeois status even more prominent against the darker-skinned, lower-class people who serve her, that ties all this together. It’s another element that confronts one’s perceptions—what seems like a clever embodiment of the film’s central metaphor is, when Vero dyes her hair dark brown towards the end, further indictment of one’s connivance. Where Martel challenges her viewer’s preoccupation with minute narrative details, she impugns for what is confessed in that very absorption. If there’s no detail too small, how do we miss—or, better yet, ignore—so many big ones? Screening as part of the Interiority on Screen lecture series. (2008, 87 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
Alejandro Jodorowsky's EL TOPO (Mexico)
Music Box Theatre – Sunday, 7pm
"I ask of film what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs," said Mexican-Chilean-Jewish writer/director/actor/iconoclast Alejandro Jodorowsky in 1970. "The difference being that when one creates a psychedelic film... he needs to manufacture the pill." For the psychedelic concoction that is EL TOPO, Jodorowsky combines Bunuel, Leone, and Chinese mythology in a brew seasoned with blood, sex, and cryptic maxims. At the time of its release, the film was not shown at all in its native country because "All Mexico was against it, they wanted to kill me—they thought I was making a black mass!" And indeed, EL TOPO's characters seem capable of anything no matter how lurid, from covering a corpse in dead rabbits and playing Russian roulette in a church to forcing a mime and a dwarf to put on a live sex show. One viewer who was not turned off by the depravity was John Lennon whose intense advocacy for the film led to a lucrative distribution deal between Jodorowsky and Apple Records impresario Allen Klein. The relationship soured quickly, by one account because the director discovered feminism (EL TOPO is decidedly pre-feminist) and refused to work on an adaptation of Pauline Reage's masochistic novel The Story of O, by another account because he insisted that George Harrison show his asshole to a hippopotamus in his next film. Screening as part of the Crucemos al Otro Lado series. (1970, 125 min, 35mm) [Mojo Lorwin]
Hal Hartley’s WHERE TO LAND (US)
FACETS – Saturday, 5pm & 7pm, and Sunday, 6:30pm
Hal Hartley only makes a film about once a decade now, and one of the running jokes of his latest, WHERE TO LAND, is that a Hartley surrogate keeps having to explain to people that he’s not dying. Bill Sage plays Joe Fulton, a filmmaker who, like Hartley, is around 60 and has been unable to get a film financed for a long time. When the movie begins, he’s seeking employment as an assistant groundskeeper at a church graveyard because he doesn’t have much else to do (thankfully, he isn’t in want of money, either). After an interview with the senior groundskeeper, he visits his lawyer to begin drawing up his last will and testament because it seems like something he should do and, again, he has plenty of time. Various people in Joe’s life catch wind of his recent activities, and soon a rumor starts that he’s going to die. But before Joe can set things straight, he meets with a writer who’s working on a book about him, a centenarian friend who discusses her past work as a political activist, and a young man who thinks Joe may be his father, but probably not really. Even for a farce, WHERE TO LAND is pretty lightweight—very little is at stake here dramatically—but Hartley spins out the dramatic complications charmingly, and his trademark dialogue (fast-paced, deadpan, full of non-sequitur jumps between the profound and the banal) remains forever witty. Moreover, the day-in-the-life plot is essentially a vehicle for Hartley to express his feelings about subjects ranging from the fate of independent art in America to the future of life on this planet. (In this regard, the film it resembles most is Jean-Luc Godard’s JLG/JLG: SELF-PORTRAIT IN DECEMBER [1994].) He doesn’t seem optimistic about either of those things, and the grim prognostications at times threaten to disrupt the film’s cheery surface tone. Still, the jokes continue, and WHERE TO LAND ends happily—reminders to keep calm and carry on, as it were. (2025, 74 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Walter Lang and Dorothy Davenport’s THE RED KIMONO (US/Silent)
Northbrook Public Library (1201 Cedar Lane, Northbrook) – Wednesday, 2pm and 7pm
Social reform films were quite the rage in the early days of cinema. Lois Weber’s SHOES (1916) and George Loane Tucker’s TRAFFIC IN SOULS (1913) are two of the better-known films of this genre. To them, we can add THE RED KIMONO, based on the true story of former prostitute and accused murderer Gabrielle Darley, whose 1915 trial was sensational newspaper fodder. Writer Adela Roger St. Johns published “Gabrielle of the Red Kimono” in a 1924 edition of Smart Set, and this nonfiction story prompted Mrs. Wallace Reid (aka, Dorothy Davenport) Productions to hire first-time and future director of such classics as CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN (1950) and the KING AND I (1956) Walter Lang and prominent screenwriter Dorothy Arzner to fashion the story into a film. Darley’s circumstances could have been molded several ways—consider man killer Roxie Hart, in CHICAGO (1927 and 2002)—but THE RED KIMONO uses a framing device of Davenport looking through a volume of newspapers inexplicably dated 1917 to solicit help for the unfortunates of the world. The tale begins in New Orleans, where Gabrielle (Priscilla Bonner) has been abandoned by her husband, Howard Blaine (Carl Miller), who has moved to Los Angeles and taken up with another woman. She follows and finds him. In a blind rage, Gabrielle shoots him dead and is soon arrested and put on trial. We get her backstory of a loveless family life, illusory escape to a faithless Howard, and then forced prostitution. Following an acquittal, Gabrielle becomes the project of a rich woman (Virginia Pearson) and the sweetheart of Freddy, the chauffeur (Theodore von Eltz). Again abandoned, this time by her patron, and unemployable, Gabrielle decides to return to New Orleans with hopes of redeeming her honor to be worthy of Freddy’s love. Amidst these Victorian notions of charity and love, but only for those who deserve it, is a surprisingly effective drama led by Priscilla Bonner, an actress previously unknown to me whose work here is revelatory. Besides being luminously beautiful, with eyes reminiscent of Greta Garbo’s, her performance is understated and, therefore, genuinely moving. Von Eltz, another discovery for me, is very appealing and quietly earnest. Bonner and von Eltz have a marvelous chemistry, which makes the scenes of them just missing each other during Freddy’s pursuit feel frustrating and near tragic. Lang pays attention to detail, such as showing finger marks on Gabrielle’s arm to indicate the rough treatment she’s experienced with Blaine. Then, of course, there is Gabrielle’s red kimono, a capital “A”, and a globe street lamp that are hand-tinted red. The effect is a bit sloppy, but must have been evocative for audiences of the time. Interestingly, Darley’s invasion of privacy lawsuit against Davenport for using her real name in THE RED KIMONO has become a bedrock case for other such legal actions. With live piano accompaniment by David Drazin. (1925, 77 min, Digital Projection) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Andrea Arnold’s RED ROAD (UK)
FACETS – Sunday, 3pm
An underrated skill for an actor is making the act of looking feel exciting. Kate Dickie has this facility in spades. In RED ROAD, she plays Jackie, a CCTV operator in Glasgow who spends her days sitting alone in a dark room staring at live surveillance footage, monitoring the area around the Red Road Flats for any potential wrongdoing. We intuit a lot about Jackie based on how she responds to the subjects on her screens, arrayed in a grid that evokes the voyeuristic scopic regime of Jeff in REAR WINDOW (1954). Her face alights at a dancing female janitor; betrays emotional investment in a man and his ailing bulldog; tenses up into concerned focus at a girl being bullied; and cracks into nervous erotic curiosity at a man and a woman screwing against a wall. These are people Jackie comes to know vicariously, under an illusion of omniscient control that allows her to escape the emotional baggage of lived experience. Her safe distance, however, is disrupted when she surveils a traumatic male figure from her past, spurring her to cross the threshold and pursue him in real life. Because Arnold refrains from revealing the exact nature of their connection—or from telegraphing just what Jackie wants from this man—until the end, we spend the majority of RED ROAD in a position like Jackie’s at the CCTV station, watching closely for hints of motivation, trying to read body language and posture but inevitably coming up short. To some detriment, the politics of this gaze in the contexts of class and state power go unexamined. Arnold favors a classical character arc focused on themes of grief and emotional closure, elevated by Dickie’s captivating performance and Robbie Ryan’s moody shallow-focus cinematography. The tremulous atmosphere they create builds to one of the rawest and most psychologically charged sex scenes in contemporary cinema, a collision of libido, rage, pleasure, and shame Arnold refuses to make easily palatable. She punctuates the scene with a reflection of lava lamp wax in the window, glowing crimson over the city that Jackie is slowly learning to reenter. Screening as part of the 50th Anniversary series: 5 Films / 5 Decades / 5 Critics series. After the screening FACETS Film Program Director Charles Coleman and film critic Marya E. Gates will appear for a post-screening conversation and audience Q&A. (2006, 113 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
Barbara Loden's WANDA (US)
Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 12pm
Inspired by Jean-Luc Godard's BREATHLESS, the little-known, but very talented actress Barbara Loden wrote and directed her first and only film, WANDA, in 1970. Although she cast mostly nonprofessional actors for other roles, Loden herself stars as Wanda Goronski, a coal miner's wife who leaves her husband and children because she's "just no good." Put down as "Lover" and "Blondie" by other men she meets afterward, Wanda eventually takes up with a married bank robber (Michael Higgins) who tells her to call him Mr. Dennis, and they kill time on the road, running from the law through a landscape colored by distinctly American poverty. From a distance, the often expressionless, yet beautiful Wanda may appear like one of the lifeless mannequins that cinematographer Nicolas Proferes shoots in a department store; but Wanda is aware that she is a lost soul. Loden later described her partly autobiographical character: "She's trapped and she will never, ever get out of it and there are millions like her." Throughout this slow film of long takes, Wanda is always with some man or another, believing that she cannot take care of herself, that she is not a self. She finds herself in the hands of a criminal who only tolerates obedience, the same demand made of her by society. Loden's Wanda is both an impenetrable cipher and a fully embodied human being. She tells Mr. Dennis, "I don't have anything. Never did have anything, never will have anything." He bitterly responds, "That's stupid. You don't want anything, you won't have anything. You don't have anything, you're nothing. May as well be dead. You're not even a citizen of the United States." But while Wanda means nothing, it's not because she doesn't try. Society never gave her a chance. WANDA is a masterpiece of independent filmmaking that portrays what is rarely found onscreen—the true experience of a woman's life. Screening as part of the Interiority on Screen lecture series. (1970, 102 min, DCP Digital) [Candace Wirt]
Lizzie Borden's BORN IN FLAMES (US)
Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 8:45pm
With a concept, style, and politics that are still radical and relevant, Lizzie Borden's 1983 film gets a revival screening that is all-too-timely. Railing against the patriarchal and racist structures that remained in even the most progressive corners of American Society after the '60s and '70s, we are thrust into a feature length narrative of critique. Borden is able to place her ideology front and center, but also let the story sneak up around it. Embracing the gritty look of both 16mm film and the more battered parts of New York City in the early '80s, and combining them with an objective camera, she uses her low-budget as a storytelling asset. The world in which the anarchist movement dubbed the Women's Army carries out its counterrevolutionary campaign of pirate radio and direct action is rendered complete through a skillful combination of narrative and documentary modes. Artificial news clips about the progress of the current Socialist government and covert operations of the Women's Army's are mixed with observational shots of unemployed men and women on the streets, and we are constantly reminded of the veiled nature of the allegory. Other fictional scenes feel like we're watching the unedited negotiations between rival factions in a civil war as shot by an embedded cameraperson. When the pirate radio DJ—who acts as the film's voiceover—declares that the true nature of socialism is constant revolution, it seems a natural reinforcement of the film's message, rather than a didactic add-on. Managing to tow the line between preaching and pandering is not an easy task when taking on the very fiber of our society, and rarely has a film done it with such ease. Screening as part of the Cinema of Resistance series. (1983, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Jason Halprin]
Lamberto Bava’s A BLADE IN THE DARK (Italy)
Alamo Drafthouse – Tuesday, 9:30pm
Lamberto Bava, a horror nepo-baby, occupies a peculiar but significant place in Italian genre cinema. As the son of Mario Bava, his apprenticeship began at home, where he worked as an assistant director throughout the 1960s and '70s. By working with Ruggero Deodato, he absorbed industrial pragmatism, and he inherited a sense of aesthetic bravura from Dario Argento. His solo debut, MACABRE (1980), announced his predilection for uncanny atmospheres and narrative perversity. Soon after, Bava was moving fluidly between television and theatrical projects, alternating fairy-tale fantasy with grisly horror. This period proved his most productive, coinciding with a transitional moment when Italian horror was recalibrating in response to shifting domestic and international markets. A BLADE IN THE DARK (1983) represents Bava’s most fully giallo-inflected theatrical project. Written by Elisa Briganti—whose prior credits include Fulci’s ZOMBIE (1979) and THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY (1981)—and Dardano Sacchetti, the prolific architect behind works such as Argento’s THE CAT O’ NINE TAILS (1971) and Mario Bava’s A BAY OF BLOOD (1971), the film boasts a pedigree steeped in Italian horror tradition. Featuring Andrea Occhipinti, Anny Papa, and filmmaker Michele Soavi, it was originally commissioned as a four-part television miniseries, each 25-minute segment designed to conclude with a cliffhanger murder. Television censors balked at the graphic violence, leading producers to reconfigure the project and its 16mm origins blown up to 35mm. This unusual trajectory explains both the film’s episodic rhythm. The narrative centers on Bruno, a composer hired to score a horror film. Confined to a hilltop villa by a secretive director who withholds the final reel of footage, Bruno becomes entangled in a series of violent intrusions, as women arrive at the villa only to meet spectacular deaths. His curiosity collapses into paranoia, propelling him toward revelations of buried trauma and deceit. Particularly inventive is Bava’s use of Bruno’s score: at times it bleeds into the diegesis, transforming the process of composition into a suspense mechanism itself. Structurally, the film recalls classic giallo formulas, with an amateur investigator, secluded setting, roster of attractive victims, and fetishized staging of murder. Bava organizes his action around staircases, locked doors, and withheld knowledge, reinforcing the tension between what can and cannot be seen or heard. The episodic construction accentuates the rhythm of suspicion, confrontation, and revelation. Visually, Bava draws on inherited techniques while adapting to contemporary demands. Echoes of his father appear in chiaroscuro lighting and lurid splashes of color, but his emphasis is on protracted depictions of mutilation. Each killing becomes a surgical set piece, aligning the film more with the American slasher cycle than the puzzle-oriented gialli of the 1970s. This stylistic hybrid underscores the transformations of the decade. By the early 1980s, giallo had lost its commercial dominance, displaced by the immediacy of the American slasher and the rise of home video. Shrinking budgets pushed Italian directors toward television, co-productions, and hybrid genre experiments. Consequently, the giallo’s labyrinthine plotting yielded to shock and spectacle. A BLADE IN THE DARK vividly illustrates this transition. It preserves visual stylization and voyeuristic camerawork while adopting the serialized rhythms and explicit gore that anticipate international horror sensibilities. The film endures as an artifact of giallo’s late period, a case study in how economic pressures reshape genre production without erasing its vitality. Though subsequent projects after A BLADE IN THE DARK may have faltered, DEMONS (1985)—produced by Argento—catapulted Bava to international recognition. Ultimately, A BLADE IN THE DARK proves that even in decline, giallo refused to go quietly. It screamed, bled, and dragged its audience through every locked door and stairwell, insisting that if the genre was to die, it would at least die stylishly and take a few beautiful corpses with it. Screening as part of the Terror Tuesday series. (1983, 108 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Shaun Huhn]
Jess Franco’s SHE KILLED IN ECSTASY (West Germany/Spain)
The Davis Theater – Sunday, 7pm
Though camera movements are present in a lot of Jess Franco's films, they stand out most in SHE KILLED IN ECSTASY. Franco zooms in and out like undulating waves, often to closeups on faces and bodies, the characters often quite still as the camera shifts. It’s dance-like, and it maintains a sensuality even beyond the explicitly sexual scenes. A follow-up to Franco’s VAMPYROS LESBOS (1971), SHE KILLED IN ECSTASY uses much of the same cast and crew. Stunning star Soledad Miranda continues to shine in as the vengeful Mrs. Johnson. A scientist doing unconventional experiments with human embryos, Dr. Johnson (Fred Williams) commits suicide after his research is terminated by a medical committee. Seeking revenge for her beloved husband’s death, Mrs. Johnson dons a series of wigs to hide her iconic raven hair, then seduces and kills each of the committee members involved; she imagines, as she does so, being intimate with Dr. Johnson once again. The murder victims include Dr. Crawford, played by Ewa Strömberg, also featured in VAMPYROS LESBOS. Her death scene is particularly memorable, as Mrs. Johnson beguiles and then suffocates Dr. Crawford with an inflatable, plastic, see-through pillow. The use of décor, even the objects not used for murder, is illustrative of the leftover '60s vibes that bleed into this early 70s moment. That's also evident in the pink opening credits, which in turn reflects in Mrs. Johnson’s plush aubergine cape that she wears throughout. A story of murderous vengeance and sex grounded by Miranda’s striking performance and the film’s arresting mise-en-scene, SHE KILLED IN ECSTASY presents the exquisiteness of feminine fantasy and longing. Presented by Severin Films and the Oscarbate Film Collective with a Severin Films pop-up shop before and after the show. (1971, 77 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Megan Fariello]
Edward Yang's YI YI (Taiwan)
Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 11am
Edward Yang’s final film—one of the indisputable masterpieces of the Taiwanese New Wave, if not the culminating achievement of the entire movement—contains one of my favorite moments of any narrative film. It occurs during a business dinner between the film’s hero, middle-aged businessman NJ (Nien-Jen Wu, a key figure of the New Wave who collaborated on numerous screenplays with Hou Hsiao-Hsien), and a Japanese entrepreneur named Mr. Ota (Issei Ogata). Prior to this scene, Yang had presented Mr. Ota as something of a caricature, a nerdy computer whiz with limited social skills. But as the character opens up to NJ about his personal philosophy, something extraordinary happens: Mr. Ota transforms before one’s very eyes into a three-dimensional human being worthy of sympathy and respect. It’s an exemplary use of the long-take—not flashy, but wise, playing on duration to manipulate the audience’s understanding of character and interpersonal relationships. It also represents in microcosm what Yang accomplished with his small, but extraordinary body of work, employing a rigorous sense of form to better understand people, the social structures they inhabit, and how they can transcend those structures through a shared sense of humanity. YI YI is full of humanist epiphanies akin to the one at the business dinner, whether Yang is following NJ, his wife, his teenage daughter, or young son. (Many have commented on how this last character, pointedly named Yang-Yang and who’s interested in taking pictures, serves as an autobiographical stand-in for the director.) The accumulation of these assorted character portraits feels literary, as one comes to understand the family’s problems both intimately and on a societal level—their feelings of loneliness, disappointment, and aspiration speak to universal human experiences as well as the anxieties felt by many urbanites at the end of the 20th century. “At first glance,” wrote Kent Jones for the Criterion Collection in 2011, “YI YI appears to be a serene and becalmed film, in pace and spirit, a movie made by a director who has shed his youthful anger and made peace with the assorted confusions of ‘late capitalist’ Taiwanese life. On close scrutiny, it becomes something else again. Yang has set his city symphonies in a variety of emotional keys—the doleful lament of TAIPEI STORY (1985), the grid-like coolness of THE TERRORIZER (1986), the comic hysteria of A CONFUCIAN CONFUSION (1994), the carefully modulated fury of MAHJONG. In YI YI, he brings all of these moods together, never allowing any one of them to take precedence over another. Which is to say that this is a grand choral work, with a panoptic majesty and an emotional amplitude worthy of George Eliot or late Beethoven, whose ‘Song of Joy’ is quoted with the greatest delicacy in Kaili Peng’s piano score.” (2000, 173 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Ben Sachs]
John Frankenheimer's SECONDS (US)
FACETS – Friday, 7pm
SECONDS is probably the only other movie John Frankenheimer directed that’s comparable to THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962) in that it avoids genre classification at nearly every turn, shifting between science fiction, black comedy, horror, and melodrama. Blatantly allegorical, the film ponders the health of the American Dream circa 1966, observing a 60-ish banker who’s given the chance to fake his own death and be “reborn” as a different, younger man through extensive surgery and the assumption of a new identity. Formerly blacklisted actor John Randolph plays the character for the first 40 minutes, until he’s transformed into Rock Hudson—an inspired piece of casting, since Hudson always seemed to be playing another person’s dream of virility anyway. A successful movie star but an underrated actor, Hudson delivers some of his best work in SECONDS; his performance, which serves as a subtle commentary on his career, adds a critical layer of text to the film. The flashiest contribution, however, comes from the great James Wong Howe. Is this ever a DP’s movie. Not only does the stark black-and-white photography set the sense of foreboding throughout; the cinematography all but steals the show. Howe shoots scenes hand-held, executes brilliant, expressionistic lighting schemes, and even straps the camera onto one of the actors to convey his character’s paranoia. That sentiment, already so pervasive in MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE and Frankenheimer’s follow-up, SEVEN DAYS IN MAY (1964), comes to overwhelm the second half of the movie, when Hudson’s character starts suspecting something isn’t right with his new life, despite the fact that it seems to have been engineered to satisfy his deepest desires. (The dramatic irony feels very Twilight Zone, which may well have been an influence on the movie as a whole.) If SECONDS is an energizing, sometimes frightening film to watch, it becomes more melancholy the longer you think about it, when you’re left with the core narrative of a man who’s cursed to be unhappy even when given everything he wants. This special Staff Pics screening includes a sci-fi novel popup shop by Open Books and a post-screening discussion led by programmer Lee Kepraios. (1966, 106 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Jay Duplass’ THE BALTIMORONS (US)
Music Box Theatre and The Davis Theater – See Venue websites for showtimes
Returning after more than a decade away from directing features, Jay Duplass—one of the more prominent figures in the unfortunately-named “Mumblecore” movement—returns with a charming entry in the micro-genre of “Sad Christmas” cinema. Written in collaboration with comedian Michael Strassner, THE BALTIMORONS is a comedy about loneliness as disease, how the crushing weight of self-doubt and depression intensifies when we find ourselves in isolation and the only cure is, naturally, other people. If that sounds too intense for a film that is ostensibly a comedy, this is only hammered home by the morbidly amusing sequence where our central figure, Cliff Cashen (Strassner) blunderingly fails at a suicide attempt in his attic. Fast forward six months, and Christmas Eve becomes the setting for the newly sober Cliff, aiming to avoid both alcohol and the toxic improv scene where Cliff once reigned supreme. However, like any good improv scene, a series of escalating embarrassing scenarios begins to compound upon each other, where a broken tooth and an emotionally closed-off dentist (the note-perfect Liz Larsen) provide the backdrop for a tale of two wandering souls attempting to drown out the drone of isolation with each other’s respective odd couple personalities. To match their melancholy holiday setting, Duplass and Strassner clearly have Peanuts on the mind, their sad sack protagonist embodying some kind of sad wish fulfillment of a grown-up Charlie Brown, complete with a jazzy yuletide score by Jordan Seigel that channels Vince Guaraldi. There are few narrative surprises afoot in THE BALTIMORONS, the “enemies-to-lovers” tropes being met perfectly beat by beat, but Duplass’ particular brand of melancholic lo-fi storytelling still radiates humanity and quirk, crafting a charming vessel for feelings of despair to head towards a destination filled with hope and redemption. In other words, THE BALTIMORONS is good grief. (2025, 99 mins, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
Jonathan Demme's STOP MAKING SENSE (US/Documentary)
Music Box Theatre – Friday, Midnight
In nearly every shot, STOP MAKING SENSE makes the case that Jonathan Demme was the greatest director of musical performance in American cinema. It isn't difficult to convey the joy of making music, but Demme's attention to the interplay between musicians (and, in some inspired moments, between the musicians and their crew) conveys the imagination, hard work, and camaraderie behind any good song. And, needless to say, the songs here are very, very good. By this point (the performances are culled from three concerts from 1983), Talking Heads were the headiest American band to achieve their degree of success, and they made the most of it, doubling their line-up to include back-up singers and a few instrumentalists from the golden years of George Clinton's Funkadelic. It's never openly acknowledged that the five new members are Black and the Heads are white; the sheer creativity of the music, which fuses everything from soul to traditional African rhythms to then-advanced electronic effects, is fully utopian in its spirit. (1984, 88 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Wong Kar-wai's IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (Hong Kong)
Alamo Drafthouse – See Venue website for showtimes
Taking place in 1960s Hong Kong or in the memory of 1960s Hong Kong—that city deemed too modern, many of the film's exteriors were shot in Bangkok, after all—Wong Kar-wai's film is a beautiful rumination on its title. Much has been made of IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE's restraint, and there is that: a couple, married to other people who are themselves having affairs, become intimate in every way but physical—save for slight, loaded gestures and tight spaces. The film is pregnant with the overwhelming feeling of infatuation, executed in a lusciousness that recalls something from a dream. But for every restraint there is a counterpoint in excess: Maggie Cheung's many gorgeous dresses are as flamboyant as they are confining; the musical score is both pitch-perfect and overwhelming, familiar and foreign; the cinematography is so rich and meticulous that its multitude of color is evocative of Douglas Sirk's melodramas. IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE has hit upon such acclaim because of its local particularity—a commemoration of sorts for Hong Kong's transfer of sovereignty that had not yet happened—as well as its thematic universality as a transnational melodrama. As characters move through Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines, Cambodia, and the film shifts forward and backward in time, we are reminded of the fluidity of borders, time, and memory. The moment is paramount, and Wong Kar-wai gives us a series of beautiful, sumptuous moments that we can live in forever. (2000, 98 min, DCP Digital) [Brian Welesko]
📽️ ALSO SCREENING
⚫ Alamo Drafthouse
Robert Butler and Sidney J. Furie’s 1980 film NIGHT OF THE JUGGLER (101 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday, 9:30pm, as part of the Weird Wednesday series. More info here.
⚫ Chicago Public Library
View all screenings taking place at Chicago Public Library branches here.
⚫ The Davis Theater
Martin Brest’s 1988 film MIDNIGHT RUN (126 min, Digital Projection) screens Monday, 7pm, as part of the Big Screen Classics series. More info here.
⚫ FACETS
Boris Lokjine’s 2024 film SOULEYMANE’S STORY (94 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday at 3pm and Sunday at 1pm. More info on all screenings here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
It’s Music Box Garden Movies season! See Venue website for lineup and showtimes.
Kareem Tabsch, Dennis Scholl’s 2023 film NAKED AMBITION (73 min, DCP Digital) begins screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes.
Graham Mason’s 2025 film REVERIES: THE MIND PRISON (79 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday at 9:30pm and Saturday at 7pm.
The Chicago Japan Film Collective presents Suzuki Taichi’s 2024 film LAUGH, EVERYONE! (105 min, DCP Digital) on Saturday at 11:30am.
Jim Sharman’s 1975 cult classic THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (100 min, 35mm) screens Saturday at midnight. Every screening has a shadowcast of the film (actors acting in front of the screen during the film) performed by Midnight Madness.
Noémie Merlant’s 2024 film THE BALCONETTES (104 min, DCP Digital) screens Monday and Tuesday at 9:30pm.
The 2025 Chicago 48 Hour Film Project Award Screening takes place Tuesday at 7pm.
The Making of THIS IS SPINAL TAP with Rob Reiner, presented by WBEZ Chicago, takes place Wednesday at 7:30pm.
Live to Play presents the Banff Centre Mountain Film Festival World Tour on Thursday at 7pm. More info on all screenings and events here.
⚫ Siskel Film Center
Karim Aïnouz’s 2024 film MOTEL DESTINO (115 min, DCP Digital) begins and Rachaeal Holder’s 2025 film LOVE, BROOKLYN (97 min, DCP Digital) continues screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes. (Saturday’s 5:15pm screening of LOVE, BROOKLYN is sponsored by the Black Film Club Collective.)
Also screening as part of the Cinema of Resistance series are Ken Loach’s 2006 film THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY (127 min, DCP Digital) on Saturday at 7:15pm; Spike Lee’s MALCOLM X (202 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) on Sunday at 2:15pm; and George Lucas’ 1977 film STAR WARS: EPISODE IV - A NEW HOPE (121 min, DCP Digital) on Monday at 8:30pm.
Sam Feder’s 2025 film HEIGHTENED SCRUTINY (85 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 5:45pm, with Feder in attendance.
A sneak preview of Neo Sora’s 2024 film HAPPYEND (113 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 8:45pm, with Sora in attendance. More info on all screenings here.
⚫ VDB TV (Virtual)
“Dog Days: Superimposing the Canine,” programmed by Cine-File contributor Elise Schierbeek and with films by Jesse McLean, Ken Kobland, and Matthew Lax, streams free on VDB TV. More info here.
CINE-LIST: September 12, 2025 - September 18, 2025
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jason Halprin, Shaun Huhn, Ben Kaye, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Mojo Lorwin, Michael Metzger, Brian Welesko, Candace Wirt