:: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16 - THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22 ::

👁️ THE 62ND CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

See below for Venues and showtimes

Erik Shirai’s SUMO: SPIRIT WEIGHS NOTHING (Japan/US/UK/Denmark/Documentary)
AMC NEWCITY 14 (1500 N. Clybourn Ave.) — Friday, 2:30pm
A friend introduced me to the world of sumo wrestling a few years ago and I have been following it ever since. Of course, there’s both a language and cultural barrier to the Japanese sport, but I was happy to say that in watching Erik Shirai’s SUMO: SPIRIT WEIGHS NOTHING—about the current state of the sport—I feel like I’m at least slightly beyond the basics! The documentary itself does a fantastic job presenting the fundamentals to new spectators: essentially, the goal of sumo is to push your opponent out of the ring. There are no weight divisions and every two months wrestlers compete once a day for two weeks straight; whoever has the most successes wins the tournament. A wrestler’s ranking is ever shifting, dependent on maintaining more wins than loses. Following wrestlers at all points along the journey, SUMO highlights the challenges of the sport, concentrating on its physical effects. As noted multiple times in the film, wrestlers have much shorter lifespans on average. The documentary thus focuses on both new and near-retired wrestlers’ struggles with balancing their ambition for the sport with the everyday intensity of life training in a sumo stable as well as a constant worry about how fighting will affect their futures. Shirai presents sumo in a dreamy way, using sepia-toned lighting, the camera immersing the audience among the wrestlers. Avoiding traditional talking head interviews, Shirai instead features wrestlers talking to one another, as well as their own self-reflections. Featured among them is Terunofuji, the sole yokozuna (the highest rank that can be achieved in sumo) at the time of filming. SUMO follows his final few tournaments, as his many health struggles interfere with his drive to keep wrestling. There is also the pressure to wait until another wrestler is promoted, as—due to ceremonial and religious customs surrounding the sport—it’s undesirable not to have a yokozuna among the ranks. Terunofuji’s thoughtfulness in discussing his position and what sumo means is the emotional center of the film, bittersweetly connecting the past, present and future of the sport. Shirai scheduled to attend. (2026, 99 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
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Nicolás Pereda’s EVERYTHING ELSE IS NOISE (Mexico/Germany/Canada)
Siskel Film Center — Friday, 5pm
EVERYTHING ELSE IS NOISE opens with a five-minute static shot of the traffic jam from hell. Cars are trapped in gridlock, horns are blaring with an arrhythmic belligerence, and there’s seemingly no end in sight to the sight of automobiles and bicycles intermeshed with one another. It’s a scene that is, in accordance with the rest of the film, equally harrowing and hilarious. Like a great composer, Nicolás Pereda finds glee in playing with alternating dynamics within a scene, here constructing a feature-length scenario where a documentary team’s attempts to interview a trio of female composers keep getting interrupted by power outages, barking dogs, and beleaguered neighbors. There’s a droll tone underlying the almost sitcom-level hijinks besetting the filmmakers, though they eventually are able to capture the three cellists on film, each given separate moments to expound upon their craft and what it has meant to pursue their passions within an otherwise male-dominated industry. The underlying chaos of the film—alongside Pereda’s casual sense of framing and blocking—helps to cut the tension of what could otherwise be read as a distressing tale of working artists just trying to make a living amidst less-than-ideal circumstances. After a long, winding day, though, EVERYTHING ELSE IS NOISE ends by reminding us that sometimes, in the darkest, most frustrating moments of our lives, all you can do is laugh. (2026, 71 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye] 
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Comedy Shorts: Anxious/Attachments
AMC NEWCITY 14 (1500 N. Clybourn Ave.) — Friday, 5:30pm
Siskel Film Center — Saturday, 12pm
No matter how adamantly late capitalism tries to remove humanity from its systems, or how withdrawn we become in our own bubbles, the truth stands: we are social creatures who need each other. The city dwellers of Anna Mantzaris’s animated PLEASE (9 min) are too meek and dour to admit this, but inside they’re crying out for connection. Like a Roy Andersson film but with felt puppets, it compiles deadpan, carefully-composed vignettes of modern anomie—a man so fixated on his phone he doesn’t notice his date flashing him, another guy weeping in the chips aisle—into a wry urban symphony. Unlike a Roy Andersson film, the apparent key to bringing these sullen souls together is a group of singing Hare Krishnas. In concept and tone, Antonio Donato’s OH BOYS (19 min) is almost a live-action version of PLEASE, except set in a picturesque Italian coastal village. The focus here is on a strain of male alienation born from stubborn pride, afflicting everyone from a cocky British tourist to a taciturn ping-pong player. Once again, it’s music—performed, pointedly, by a young boy—that provides salvation. A differently vexed masculinity is portrayed in Mohamed Taher’s 32B (19 min), about a widowed dad who goes on a panic-fueled quest to buy his newly pubescent daughter a bra. Sensitively acted by Mohamed Mamdouh, the dad’s gesture is motivated by a sweetness that subverts the potentially retrograde premise. Pranav Bhasin’s zany WE WERE HERE (11 min) also mines cringe comedy from middle-aged men’s effortful attempts to be socially engaged, in this case three retired friends who protest technological encroachment by taking jobs away from machines. The sight of a man cosplaying as a “car’s reverse camera” is, quite simply, very funny. Propitious connection is a matter of levity, as well, in Anna Baumgarten’s BALLOON ANIMALS (6 min), which proves there’s no concern too serious to be lightened by a little helium-voice. Equally as colorful as those balloons is the Nigerian wedding in Christopher Chuky’s SPRAY ME (10 min), where two kids who are ignored by their respective families find plucky inspiration in each other. Finally, Elise Kibler’s COLD CALL (13 min) reveals human nature through the guise of non-humans. In this dystopian satire, about a scam call center staffed by aliens who fleece lowly humans so they can return to their planet, a lead caller unexpectedly develops remorse for one of her victims. The lesson: if deceit can be learned from our behavior, so too can empathy. [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
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Paweł Pawlikowski’s FATHERLAND (Poland/Germany/Italy/France)
Siskel Film Center — Friday, 5:30pm
AMC NEWCITY 14 — Saturday, 2:30pm
Having read Colm Tobin’s novel about the twilight years of Thomas Mann, Paweł Pawlikowski became fascinated with a small excerpt about Mann’s return to Germany after sixteen years in exile. The Polish director took liberty with historical events, replacing certain family members with others (for instance, Mann’s daughter Erika stands in for his wife) and altering the chronology with regard to his son Klaus’ suicide and his encounters with actor Gustaf Gründgens (who was Erika’s ex-lover and a friend to Hermann Görring). FATHERLAND is a five-day road movie where Germany’s greatest author tours a chaotic postwar landscape of apprehensive Marxists and defeated fascists. Location scouting for the film took five months solely to find German architecture within Poland’s borders. Sandra Hüller gives a rich performance as Erika; portraying the great writer, Hanns Zischler conjures the ghost of Thomas Mann as a human and great intellectual. The director considers the film a part of a trilogy, after IDA (2013) and COLD WAR (2018). Each film explores identity beyond national borders in a jumbled world of postwar Europe. FATHERLAND stands apart from the other films through its intellectual exploration of mise-en-scene. Mann, while quoted as saying, “Wherever I am, there is Germany”, struggled with his own ideas of the nature of home. It’s presumed that one of the contributing factors for Klaus’ suicide came from not knowing who to write for and in what language—struggling to embrace his German or American identity—all while standing the shadow of his father. As a former conservative (who famously defended Germany in WWI through Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man), Mann became firm against the Third Reich. Art does not recognize borders—even Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe’s art precedes the German state. (2026, 82 min, DCP Digital) [Ray Ebarb]
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Katharina Rivilis’ I’LL BE GONE IN JUNE (Germany/Switzerland/US)
AMC NEWCITY 14 — Friday, 8:15pm
Katharina Rivilis’ first feature as writer-director is a precise evocation of a time, place, and perspective. It suggests a European, female (and more introspective) variation on Linklater’s DAZED AND CONFUSED (1993) and EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!! (2016)—which were, in turn, Americanized takes on European existentialist literature. The film takes place in Las Cruces, New Mexico, between September 2001 and June 2002 and follows a German exchange student named Franny (Naomi Cosma, an outstanding newcomer) as she navigates her final year of high school in a foreign country. This isn’t exactly a coming-of-age story, since Franny already seems pretty grown-up when she arrives in New Mexico. Bookish and open-minded, Franny seems lost among most of her American counterparts—she also has no idea how to react to the Christian conservative family who’s hosting her. (Rivilis never condescends to these characters, whom she presents in anthropologic detail, though she never quite closes the cultural divide between herself and them.) The heads of the family start to exhibit authoritarian tendencies in the days after 9/11, both in their casually bigoted remarks about “terrorists” and in their policing of Franny’s behavior. Rivilis doesn’t play up how these characters anticipate contemporary American fascists; the film is too immersed in its historical moment. (In fact, it often feels like it was made in the early 2000s.) Yet the detached perspective she brings to the situation allows for such observations to shine through. I’LL BE GONE IN JUNE is at its most poignant when it conveys what it’s like to be a teenager in Las Cruces, where the mountainous landscapes and wide-open spaces encourage a sense of liberty but one chafes from having nowhere to go. In these passages, Rivilis transcends her Proustian project of resurrecting memories and achieves something universal. Rivilis scheduled to attend. (2026, 125 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Lee Chang-dong’s POSSIBLE LOVE (South Korea)
AMC NEWCITY 14 (1500 N. Clybourn Ave.) — Friday, 8:30pm
One definition of the word possible is “something that may or may not be true or actual.” Whether the love envisioned, yearned for, expressed, or fantasized can be true is one of the central themes of POSSIBLE LOVE, Lee Chang-dong’s first film in eight years. Not unlike Lee’s last film, BURNING (2018), the impassable class gap that creates a sense of understanding that may never be mutual is once again the question at hand; also like BURNING, the proposition begins as a possibility and remains impossible to prove either way. The story lives and swims in this charged ambiguity, but it keeps you hooked till the end by building complex characters whose next move is difficult to predict. Loosely based on the true story of victims in the 2009 SsangYong Motor strike, it follows Ho-seok, a middle-aged man of few words. He imploded after being laid off from a local factory and was traumatized by the police’s violent crackdown on a union sit-in he took part in. His wife, Mi-ok, struggles to help him heal but sees an opportunity when dilettante filmmaker Ye-ji, who is married into a family of extreme wealth but is making a film about labor issues, wants to make Mi-ok—and especially Ho-seok, if he’ll talk—her primary subjects in a documentary. Over the course of the film, trust between the two families slowly builds up, but so does tension. Every step is precarious, and a collapse seems imminent at every turn. Closeness incubates unwanted intrusion. There’s an unease coming from Ye-ji’s pervasive camera, which intentionally and unintentionally milks shock value from Ho-seok and Mi-ok’s misfortune. Yet wide-eyed dreamer Mi-ok also takes advantage of this affinity, gladly accepting Ye-ji’s patronizing gestures of friendship and sometimes dramatizing her life for film’s sake. It’s impossible to sort these four characters into good and evil, though the director’s disdain for the rich is discernible: they are portrayed as possibly vapid beneath their cool sheen. Ye-ji may come from good intentions, yet she is ignorant of her parachute ethnography and the trauma porn she’s making. Mi-ok weighs her self-worth and dignity as she plays an attraction game with Ye-ji’s husband, Sang-woo, who has as big an appetite for flirting as he does for power. Lee sculpts partially self-aware characters who are products of their respective socioeconomic classes yet who retain a slice of childishness that keeps the situation open to possibility, whether out of curiosity or envy.  (2026, 164 min, DCP Digital) [Nicky Ni]
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Morito Inoue’s HOTSPRING SHARKATTACK 2: GREAT KYUSHU SHOWDOWN (Japan)
AMC NEWCITY 14 (1500 N. Clybourn Ave.) — Friday, 10:30pm
AI-generated images in films will become harder to spot as rivers dry up to feed the next billion-dollar franchise. Soon, the only watermark we’ll have left is imperfection. The digital effects audiences once scoffed at in SyFy Channel originals and the SHARKNADO series can now be embraced as DIY CGI, where resourcefulness and audacity count for more than polish. Morito Inoue’s sharksploitation duology is an entertaining labor of love, drawing inspiration from JAWS, DEEP BLUE SEA, and SHIN GODZILLA. Anyone lining up for HOTSPRING SHARKATTACK 2: GREAT KYUSHU SHOWDOWN knows what they’re getting into. Those of us who missed the first attack receive a generous dose of opening exposition before Inoue launches into a series of increasingly ridiculous effects sequences, eventually culminating in a music video built around Tenma’s shark-soothing voice. A pharmaceutical CEO has discovered the secret to immortality: human energy. To harvest it, he assembles an army of cloned sharks. His operations are based in the landlocked Shark Hot Spring Village, where he has secretly constructed a mecha-king onsen shark to do his bidding. Unfortunately, the mechanical monster develops sentience, and its baby shark clones join it in a campaign to destroy all of Kyushu. Enter Tenma, an aspiring influencer dreaming of making it in Tokyo, who gets tangled in the carnage and discovers that her singing is the only thing capable of calming the king. With help from Macho, returning from the first film, and a new friend, Tenma must save the region from aquatic annihilation. Inoue’s anything-goes approach mixes people wearing shark fins on their backs and stomping through miniature sets with thousands of digitally cloned sharks, 3D-printed mechanisms, conspicuous green screens, and hand puppets. The effects rarely pretend to belong to the same production, and that’s part of the fun. Inoue channels Japan’s miniature-heavy tokusatsu tradition, with ample kaiju references, while throwing in the brightly choreographed absurdity of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and the digital excess of SHARKNADO. The result is a cheerful refusal to let limitations get in the way of spectacle. Inoue also knows when to cut his losses. Long monologues are interrupted by cutaway gags before they can stall the action. When Tenma’s speech threatens to derail the plot, the film cuts to Macho, who inexplicably offers her a sandwich that he clearly wasn’t holding a moment earlier. HOTSPRING SHARKATTACK 2 embraces the handmade, the makeshift, and the gloriously inelegant, delivering a monster movie whose enthusiasm itself is more than entertaining. (2026, 88 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]
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City & State Shorts: Journey Within
Chicago History Museum — Saturday, 12pm
In STRUCTURE, director PJ Fishwick cleverly presents life from the perspective of a ticket-scanning machine. From the machine’s point of view, the audience sees certain characters who visit one parking lot over the course of their lives. In CHOKE, petty propagandist Poppy Sanchez lives in an authoritarian world where those suspected of disobedience must not speak for an entire day—playful girly-pop, this science-fiction horror lures the audience with vibrant color only to leave them in disgust. RADIANT FROST is an exciting new work from Hannah Schrienbeck with lovely ensemble acting. George Ellzey Jr.’s CLOSED MOUTHS brings us into the world and mind of a struggling artist whose expectations have not been met by reality; through stylish images and sound, audiences witness a character torture themselves for not having achieved creative success and face judgement from those around them. Charlie Schmidlin’s VESPERS follows a woman traumatized by a church firebombing as she allows two music promoters to use her basement for their DIY punk gig. Tara Mallen gives a wonderful performance as a woman coming to terms with her own demons. The most experimental of this program, THREE DAYS IN TLAQUEPAQUE feels like a video essay, opening with the image of a naked woman on her bed as the voiceover narrates letters of longing to an unresponsive lover. Poetically shot, capturing the cold Chicago nights as the narrator longs for her lover’s warm embrace. Jet Harris’s BACK SCRATCH depicts two friends exploring intimacy as one visits the other in a remote part of the Southwestern United States. Harris nimbly captures vulnerability within the erotic. A poetic meditation on family origins, Nicholas Leffel’s SKIN OF OLIVES orchestrates mixed mediums to convey a journey of a man in search of his biological mother; a structured narrative humming along with utmost pathos, Leffel’s work brings an exciting new perspective to the local scene. (2026, Total approx. 44 min, DCP Digital) [Ray Ebarb]
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Documentary Shorts: Fault Lines
Siskel Film Center — Saturday, 2:30pm
This exceptional documentary shorts program takes a look at our struggles for mutual understanding. A WOMEN’S PLACE IS EVERYWHERE (2026, 22 min) centers on twin sisters Ona and Emilija, who grew up in Williamsburg and were raised by a single artist mother. The film follows them as they navigate life after their mother’s death and an eviction order that ensues. Mixing still photographs, archival films, and footage that spans years, director Fanny Texier captures sisterhood in its full spectrum: they laugh, cry, fight with each other, and come to terms with losing their childhood home as they fall victim to the inexorable force of gentrification. It’s a celebration of women’s strength and resilience, but also a harrowing swan song for the lifestyle of ‘70s artists’ lofts. Joshua Oppenheimer’s THE REVOLUTION AGAINST DEATH (2026, 23 min) is a revolution around Immortality, the dark star that pulls its zealous martyrs-to-be. This deadpan caricature is composed of vignettes from the RAADfest (Revolution Against Aging and Death Fest): cringy speeches; an elder with Parkinson’s consults a coked-up health coach who smells profit; a couple takes supplement tablets from a few dozen bottles; plus many other odd behaviors that may just be the norms among rich longevity fanatics. Oppenheimer’s efficient film cuts through a cult with a surgeon’s precision and depicts it elegantly with a humanist heart. The clash of images, voiceover, and soundtrack—perfected through anticlimactic cuts that end a vignette abruptly at mid-build-up—is what makes the film so comedic and its irony so crisp and tender. But Oppenheimer extends his sympathy to his subjects too, exemplified by a scene where old ladies discuss their frustration at becoming invisible in the social scenes. There is a stillness that permeates the film, but stillness is one thing that humans seek in vain when it comes to aging. By contrast, the subject in BUCKSKIN (2026, 17 min) faces his own imminent demise with calm and gratitude. He is Carroll B. Williams Jr., nicknamed Buckskin. He is the filmmaker’s grandfather, a Black man with Kiowa lineage, and a forester who has studied trees and reared children. Mars Verrone’s poetic documentary plants a personal story and watches it take root in the discourses of colonialism and racism. They juxtapose oral interviews with their grandpa that are a decade apart, showing his fading memory that loses his Indigenous ancestry. Family photos and 16mm film footage are collaged together, unfolding like an archive thrown open. In the images, symbolism is strong. Against a sublime setting sun, Dylan Thomas is quoted; the 16mm film flares and flares again, as though taking its subject away and into that dying of the light. Elham Ehsas takes a similar bird’s-eye view on familial and national histories in FORGOTTEN SPACEMAN (2026, 16 min), starting with a photograph in which his father, an established reporter, is seen interviewing Abdul Ahad Momand—an Afghan cosmonaut who flew to space on a Soviet space mission. Ehsas puts his father’s story alongside Momand’s. Both men are accomplished in their respective careers, but both had to flee their home country and migrate to foreign soil, with their former glories buried and identities reduced to refugees. Ehsas’ grainy, moiré images trace a resignation shattered into contradictory shards of memory: the celebration of Momand’s return is juxtaposed with the Soviets’ invasion of Afghanistan. What’s left is a dizzying powerlessness, like a lone kite in the sky. Finally, MEMORIES OF A WINDOW (2026, 19 min) is a confession that takes the form of a letter to Shirin Alizadeh—a woman who was killed while driving home during Iran’s 2022 protests. How do we keep protesting without losing our lives to the cause? Chicago filmmakers Mehraneh Salimian and Amin Pakparvar pose a vocational question and practice filming what they see from their windows. These distant videos of various formats, with collated protest videos that circulated online, are presented in diptychs or within a large black frame, as though we, the audience, are seeing them through windows as well. The film ends with a small act that sparks optimism. Even if it isn’t enough to bring down a regime, it draws protesters closer. [Nicky Ni]
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Rubaiyat Hossain’s THE DIFFICULT BRIDE (Bangladesh)
Siskel Film Center — Saturday, 3pm
AMC NEWCITY 14 (1500 N. Clybourn Ave.) — Sunday, 7pm
Judging by the film’s opening passages, the title of THE DIFFICULT BRIDE would seem to be a misnomer. Bride-to-be Zaineen is all too compliant with the rituals she must endure in preparation for her traditional Bangladeshi wedding, spending hours at the salon to purify her skin, hair, and blood. Yet it quickly becomes clear that Zaineen submits to these ordeals not because she wants to but because she has little choice in the matter. An upper-class princess, Zaineen is waited on by servants around the clock, chauffeured everywhere she wants to go, and subjected to surveillance almost any time she leaves her bedroom. Hers is a life spent in virtual captivity; she feels independent only when she takes secret breaks to smoke cigarettes and pot. Rubaiyat Hossain frequently employs static shots, so as to make Zaineen appear confined within the frame, and her exacting sound design adds to the feeling of airlessness. The film’s removed yet quietly aghast perspective brings to mind some of Ulrich Seidl’s docu-fictions, like ANIMAL LOVE (1996) and MODELS (1999), with which THE DIFFICULT BRIDE shares a quasi-anthropological vibe. Hossain presents Zaineen’s rituals in procedural detail, and this grounds the story in a grueling realism. The film departs from realism in its second half, though, when Zaineen starts developing malign outgrowths on her skin as if physically rejecting the culture she’s trapped in. Hossain doesn’t switch the film’s tone when she injects this element of body horror; rather, she presents it in the same understated manner as everything else, and this makes the development more unnerving than had she presented sensationally. There’s a sense of inevitability to Zaineen’s transformation, as though Hossain were saying, “Of course these rituals would make a person unwell!” THE DIFFICULT BRIDE ends on an ambiguous note, since it’s unclear what the future holds for Zaineen after the story stops, but it’s still invigorating, a call for the rejection of women’s subjugation everywhere. Hossain and actor Zaineen Chowdhury Karim scheduled to attend. (2026, 88 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Lisa Forslund’s CLEMENTINE ORANGE (Sweden)
AMC NEWCITY 14 (1500 N. Clybourn Ave.) — Saturday, 6pm and Sunday, 1:30pm
If you set aside the implausibility of the storyline, this is a refreshingly humane and concise film, a kind-of modern-day variation on a pre-Code drama like WATERLOO BRIDGE (1931). When it starts, 30-ish Angelica is getting ready to meet John, the prisoner she’s gotten to know through an online program; he’s getting a 24-hour parole, and he wants to spend it with her. Their relationship is already rather intimate (the movie opens with them having phone sex), and Angelica thinks she’s developed serious feelings for him. So imagine her surprise when the muscular gentleman of roughly her age whom she’s been expecting from John’s photos turns out to be a scrawny, gangly thing who’s barely out of his teens. At this point, most viewers would likely expect Angelica to tell John to take a hike, but the heroine—whether motivated by sympathy, pity, or loneliness—decides to spend the day with him anyway, although just as friends. While Angelica’s motivations remain ambiguous, John reveals much of himself, explaining he catfished her only because he felt insecure about his real identity. No hardened prisoner, he’s simply a misunderstood gamer who fell into selling drugs for easy money, and Angelica warms to his sensitive personality. John is such an idealized character that he ends up seeming (like he did at the start) too good to be true—a counter-cliché to go against depictions of prisoners as violent and incapable of reform—but if movies are supposed to offer escapist fantasy, then at least they can be optimistic in doing so. First-time writer-director Lisa Forslund shoots much of the movie in medium close-up, trusting her two leads to carry the action and allowing much of the drama to play out on their faces; to their credit, Gizem Erdogan and Erik Enge prove to be photogenic and relatable presences. Forslund scheduled to attend. (2026, 70 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Tim Blake Nelson’s THE LIFE AND DEATHS OF WILSON SHEDD (US)
AMC NEWCITY 14 (1500 N. Clybourn Ave.) — Saturday, 7:45pm and Sunday, 11:15am
On September 30, 2026, Christa Pike was executed by the state of Tennessee; however, Pike survived after two rounds of pentobarbital failed to kill her. On October 10, 2026, she returned to prison. On December 3, 2026, the Pentagon plans to execute Nidal Hasan with a President-approved death by firing squad to be available for livestreaming. Returning to what Michel Foucault noted as the body becoming the major target of penal repression, THE LIFE AND DEATHS OF WILSON SHEDD marks Tim Blake Nelson’s return to feature filmmaking, after ANESTHESIA (2015). Not unlike his previous film, multiple lives intersect in the wake of violence. WILSON SHEDD, like many films regarding state execution such as THE GREEN MILE (1999) or DEAD MAN WALKING (1995) reflect society’s concerns with the death penalty. Ghastly crimes are committed, situations escalate, there’s a prison escape, people are murdered, and those caught will walk death row until the day they face lethal injection. Amanda Seyfried plays Karen, who gets hired at a maximum-security prison as a creative writing teacher. At home, her husband is either drunk, drinking next door, or asleep from a bender. She sequesters herself to the back yard with her books as company. Karen’s life is “as it is.” Returning to her hometown to be near her father, who she’s just placed in an elder-care home, Karen sees her life as endless repetition and isn’t bothered by it. She has her books. When one of her students at the prison, Wilson Shedd (Scoot McNairy), shows an interest in her and begins writing her letters, Karen starts to envision a different life. Or does Wison see the bruise on her face and manipulate her based on assuming domestic abuse? Nelson allows both answers to be true. Karen admits that she likes Wilson’s attention and in turn wears the color blue upon his request. The developing love story between them is endearing. She needs out of her abusive relationship and Wilson needs her. Karen teaches the writing class that every character wants or needs something; she also teaches them about tripartite structure but could have included a lesson on dual timelines within narrative structures as well. The chain reaction of events begins and ends with a pathetic husband beating his wife—and getting away with it. Every man within Nelson’s film, including himself (as head of security), is ineffective. None of them can save Karen, because they are the problem. The dual timelines add complexity to our perception of the characters and keeps us locked into the story. The narrative threads include the Lawson family preparing for a vacation, escaped convicts seeking refuge in a cabin, and a creative writing teacher falling for an inmate. With its brutal examination of the death penalty and a recreated story of a boy who shot a squirrel repeatedly with a pellet gun, THE LIFE AND DEATHS OF WILSON SHEDD can be an uncomfortable watch. Nelson’s violent and bleak film was twelve years in the making. After acting with Seyfried on Mona Fastvold’s THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE, Nelson had found his Karen. Nelson was also excited to give McNairy the chance to run wild with Wilson, as it’s not the type of character he’s played in the past. He gives Wilson Shedd intelligence, patience, vulnerability, fear, pain, cold violence, and a voice the FCC would immediately ban from radio for being too provocative. WILSON SHEDD shakes your moral compass and lodges its way in your throat, so far that no amount of swallowing can help. Nelson scheduled to attend the Saturday screening. (2026, 121 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]
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Outré Shorts: Deviants and Deviations
AMC NEWCITY 14 — Saturday, 9:30pm and Wednesday, 2:15pm
This program doesn’t comb through the mess of desire but rather embraces it. The best part of THE BOVINE COMEDY (2026, 25 min) is its audacious premise: in the near future, bulls are scarce and their semen is a hot commodity. The owner of Asia’s only bull, a paralyzed man trapped in a loveless heterosexual marriage, is getting rich off a taciturn gay worker he desires—the only man who knows how to brew the aphrodisiac potion that gets the bull going. Director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke is at his best when depicting eroticism, and his off-kilter touches make the film a comedy. The film falls limp when this eroticism is forced into an unexciting story about abuse of power and sexual coercion. It’s uncomfortable to watch not because of brutality; rather, its path to reach the climax—if there is any—is so predictable that it squanders a good foreplay. Leo Černic’s 2D animation COSMONAUTS (2026, 14 min) promises a comedown after ecstasy but never quite delivers it. Think FANTASTIC PLANET where the mating rituals take place, but make it Boschian. A dildo-shaped spaceship takes on board all the lonely beings and flies to space for them to make love. The spaceship’s tongue-in-cheek decor—such as undulating dicks on the cushioned walls and a pulsing neon sign above the captain’s door that reads “cockpit”—makes your eyes smile. For how good the vibe is, the film’s attempt to use loneliness as a thread to unite all characters dissolves into fragmented vignettes that only solicit a patronizing “aw.” The sharpest social critique it has is when a janitor has to clean up the mess while everyone else is partying. The pantless captain would be another example if he didn’t ask for a mimosa while driving. Miguel Ángel Fajardo ups the strangeness a couple of notches with INTO THE CRACKS (2026, 20 min). Germán may be a dad but he gets with much younger guys when he’s on a family island vacation. When he realizes that the thing he claims to detest is actually what he desires the most—anal penetration—this sweaty craving only grows stronger, manifested as a whistling butthole that is his calling. Fajardo reimagines the Colombian folklore figure El Silbón, or The Whistler, as a kinky sex goddess who dominates and fills a void. Two family members spend most of their screen time pointing their wind-muffled mic to literally everywhere, including Germán’s butthole; sound in this perplexing short tells a compelling story too. Anna Ginsburg’s animation HAG (2026, 17 min) pours Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, Medusa, and the Garden of Eden into one cauldron to brew a psychedelic adventure about a 30-something woman finding self-love. Its message of women’s empowerment is clear from the start, but the meandering story can get trapped in oxbow lakes, like a friend at a baby shower lying about how she was proposed to, or the lengthy sequence of the heroine bobby-pinning her snake hair to her head. Ginsburg’s jokes fly freely on a broomstick, but whether they land neatly is less certain. Filmsaaz’s ASHEGETHAM (2026, 21 min), like many fantasy stories, has its good, its evil, and an epic clash between them that ends in tragedy. A young queer couple drives through Tehran, daydreaming a paradise of just the two of them in love, until they run into a monstrous Supreme Leader and his army who swoop in like a flock of Dementors. Live action blends with 3D animation, but with every seam left exposed, the result is a moving collage that shifts between reality and fantasy or layers the two, as if the viewer has been granted augmented vision to witness injustice and its vengeance. A magpie’s nest of cyber maximalism, vlog, anime, and love letters, the film has plenty of play, and just as much smoking. [Nicky Ni]
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James Benning’s EIGHT BRIDGES (US/Experimental)
Siskel Film Center — Sunday, 3:30pm 
AMC NEWCITY 14 (1500 N. Clybourn Ave.) — Monday, 5:15pm
The fifth structure featured in James Benning’s EIGHT BRIDGES is the George Washington Bridge, which connects northern New Jersey to Manhattan. Being from the tri-state area myself, I’ve sat in traffic on this bridge countless times—double decker suspension so associated with human annoyance, anxiety, and frustration. Midwestern filmmaker Benning, known for his “number” films, forces his viewers to slow down, look harder, and see a world both more specific and larger that the experience of being on the bridge itself. Made of eight ten-minute sections, the film holds live shots of eight bridges around the United States. The camera is always still, allowing for life to move in front of it without any interference or commentary. Ambient noises of insects, birds, and cars humming along are the film’s only soundtrack; occasionally a human voice breaks through the environment, and it feels quite strange. EIGHT BRIDGES emphasizes the bridge as a liminal space, not just from one piece of land to the next, but also where nature meets infrastructure and where the mundaneness of everyday life meets something truly beautiful. It’s also inherently meditative, the film’s deliberate pacing creating a distinct rhythm even within its generally stillness. This slow cinema is also an interesting approach to Americana. The collection of bridges and compiled nature of the film reminded me of photographer Ed Ruscha and his own number works, specifically Twentysix Gasoline Stations. Both artists acknowledge a nostalgia for such liminal spaces, while compelling their viewers to think critically about them. The third bridge featured is the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama—named for the US senator and KKK leader—which was the location of the Selma to Montgomery marches during the Civil Rights Movement, a flashpoint of peaceful protest met with police violence. These spaces featured are not just impressive structures or methods of conveyance but represent a contradictory, complex, and ongoing history. Benning scheduled to attend. (2026, 82 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
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Fernanda Salgado’s ANA, EN PASSANT (Brazil/Portugal/France/Animation)
AMC NEWCITY 14 (1500 N. Clybourn Ave.) — Sunday, 3:45pm and Monday, 2:45pm
Ana is a woman in her 20s who was raised in Paris by her grandparents, a Brazilian couple who emigrated to France decades earlier. The recent death of her grandmother (as well as the death of her grandfather a few years ago) has made Ana want to know about her origins. Add a burgeoning quarter life crisis to her predicament, and you’ve got a recipe for wanderlust. And so, Ana impulsively decides to visit her grandparents’ last apartment in Brazil, for which she’s inherited a key. She travels to the city of Belo Horizonte, finds the apartment, lets herself in, and who does she meet there but the current resident, Alice… a woman who happens to look exactly like Ana. That’s the set-up for ANA, EN PASSANT, a charmingly leisurely drama that was animated by Rotoscope à la WAKING LIFE (2001) and A SCANNER DARKLY (2006). The animation serves the material beautifully, as it permits writer-director Fernanda Salgado to move fluidly between Ana’s exterior and interior states, the latter of which inspire some compelling experimental sequences; this fluidity creates an atmosphere in which Salgado can raise metaphysical questions in a fun, casual way. Dramatically, the film is grounded in the relationship that develops between Ana and Alice (both played understatedly by Jéssica Pierina), which would seem like a perfectly natural portrait of female friendship if it were not for the near-supernatural coincidence that initiates it. Like Kieslowski’s THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VÉRONIQUE (1991), ANA, EN PASSANT uses the premise of parallel lives to consider how chance and individual will shape our existence, though Salgado’s approach feels earthier and more playful. In between the scenes of Ana and Alice getting to know each other are stretches in which Ana, armed with a Polaroid camera, explores Belo Horizonte with an artist’s eye and a child’s curiosity. These parts of the film succeed in conveying the wonder one can experience when discovering new parts of the world for the first time. Salgado scheduled to attend. (2026, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Radu Jude’s THE DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID (France/Romania)
AMC NEWCITY 14 — Monday, 5:15pm
Radu Jude churns out social critique with the highest artistic prowess, an eastern European Godard for our times. Conceived in six weeks, this second-tier adaptation of the classic DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID follows Gianina, a Romanian immigrant working as a nanny for an upper-class French family in Bordeaux. During her off hours, she acts in a university production of Diary of a Chambermaid and facetimes WITH her daughter, who lives with her bunică in a rural region of Romania. The film captures the struggles faced by working class immigrants: in one scene, Gianina’s scene partner in the stage production gets deported over a suspicious visa; in another, the French family insists on Gianina standing before their dinner party, presenting a thoughtful take on the Ukraine War from a Romanian perspective. Jude regulars such as Ilinca Manolache breathe comedic life into a film that carries heavy themes in its frames. Much like the young Swiss film critic, the Balkan cineaste continues to deconstruct and reconstruct what cinema can be by weaving moving images from theatrical performance, diaries, fairytales, video calls, and archival fragments. Within each of these modes, the audience sees images of an impoverished, pastoral Romania contrasting the wealth of urban Bordeaux. The audience comes away with its own conclusions as one family carries on their days in pointless intellectual debates about the world while the other longs to be united under the same roof and liberated from debt. Jude stays attuned to the political climate of the EU, the ways technology can expand our definition of cinema, and the voices of victims of western European exploitation. (2026, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Ray Ebarb]
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Meritxell Colell Aparicio’s FAR FROM THE TREES (Spain/Peru/Italy)
Siskel Film Center — Monday, 7:45pm
AMC NEWCITY 14 (1500 N. Clybourn Ave.) — Tuesday, 12pm
Sound bridges liminal spaces in ways the visual cannot, traveling through both space and time. It also is so often—perhaps more than any sense—connected to memory, able to bring the past into sometimes shocking dialogue with the present. Meritxell Colell Aparicio’s FAR FROM THE TREES is a meditation on sound, following artist Adela (Angélica Castelló) as she traverses Peru, gathering Indigenous languages and music while recalling her own personal and family histories. Raised by her grandparents (Catalan exiles living in Mexico), Adela is now based in Europe, having traveled extensively. Her grandfather has passed, and during this trip she discovers her grandmother’s health has taken a turn for the worst. Apart from her family, Adela befriends the Peruvians assisting her, especially Lucho (Jose Luis López Cama), who enjoys discussing music and sound. Meandering in its narrative, FAR FROM THE TREES is most fascinating when it leans into the experimental, wandering between past and present, fiction and a grounded historical reality. Its visuals are striking, but the film remains fixated on language: language as a tool to explain nature and nature itself a form of communication. As Adela struggles to communicate across time and space with those both present and absent, the film is constantly reminding us that there are persistent messages to be found, even in the silence. (2026, 121 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
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Jesse Eisenberg’s THE DEBUT (US)
Music Box Theatre — Tuesday, 6pm
Jesse Eisenberg has written a love letter to community theater. In his second directorial effort, he crafts the story of an underappreciated housewife, Mona Friedman (Julianne Moore), who wants more in her life. Leaving her comfort zone, she auditions for a local production of a musical called “Noisy Neighbors,” which is being directed by New Jersey community theater legend Jerry Blankenbuehler. She’s cast in a supporting role, and her dedication to the part begins to upend the rest of her life. Eisenberg wrote the part for Moore, and the director-actor duo capture the beauty of someone pursuing the arts for the love of the game. Eisenberg's vision convincingly depicts a group of people not having the ambition to make their craft their sole income but enough that rehearsals consume their nights and their thoughts at their day job. Drawing on his early experiences growing up in theatre, he creates this discovery and terror in the form of a middle aged woman. Aside from showing that you're never too old to begin, the movie captures the essence of what brings "amateurs" to the stage and what makes late night rehearsals, long tech days, and difficult directors worth it: the community. In an age when the attention economy, hyper individualism, isolation, and profitability seem to drive our society, Eisenberg depicts a microcosm where characters are left with each other and their audience—forming strong emotional bonds while lovingly making art the art they desire. (2026, 105 min, DCP Digital) [Ray Ebarb]
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Gabe Klinger’s ISABEL (Brazil/France)
AMC NEWCITY 14 (1500 N. Clybourn Ave.) — Wednesday, 5:15pm
Gabe Klinger’s sophomore narrative feature represents a charming leap of faith, one that mirrors the film’s eponymous protagonist, a struggling sommelier wasting away her ambitions in São Paulo. Looking around at a world that seems to be moving along without her, Isabel (the charisma machine that is Marina Person) imagines a world where the natural wines of Brazil can be appreciated alongside their European counterparts and that her dream of opening up her own wine bar could somehow become a reality. She attempts to court a potential American investor (John Ortiz), who’s enraptured by her devotion to the art of good wine above all else, and as she moves forward with her dream—her new wine bar is charmingly named Os Rejeitados (The Rejects)—her willingness to dive head first into the unknown soon clashes with the realities that come with such a risky business proposition. Aided by vivid 16mm photography and an infectious score by Umberto Smerilli, Klinger paints a vivid character study that isn’t afraid to focus on the painful mistakes that we often make as well as the selfish acts and passionate impulses that make us all human. It’s a terrifying thing to take a chance on yourself, knowing that failure is just around the corner, but sometimes even the very act of betting on what you believe in, even if you end up hitting a dead end, is a noble act. ISABEL is a work with dramatic heft that succeeds in moving with nimble confidence, fully aware that even in the aftermath of failure, there is still so much to give to those around you. Klinger scheduled to attend. (2026, 85 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
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Andrew Haigh’s A LONG WINTER (Canada/UK)
AMC NEWCITY 14 (1500 N. Clybourn Ave.) — Wednesday, 7:30pm
Family festivities in the living room before a tragedy; a woman consumed by an icy landscape; homosexual longing and nostalgia for a unity that never was—these are elements from previous Andrew Haigh films that poignantly recur in A LONG WINTER. Adapted from a Colm Toíbín short story of the same name, the film centers on Mike (Fred Hechinger), the eldest of two in a farming family high in the Colorado Rockies. The views are enchanting, but domestic life is not. Haigh wastes no time revealing the fissures in the family unit: Mike’s brother Tommy (Kit Connor) is heading off to fight in the Korean War, and matriarch Louise (Caitríona Balfe) is suffocated by her hard-ass husband Lester (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), a New York City transplant who seems to have moved to the boonies just to show off his macho bona fides. Haigh and DP André Turpin shoot the home and adjoining farm in deep, threatening shadows pierced by cold light, and often show the family members distorted through dimpled glass windows. Inevitably, a breaking point comes, and Louise disappears without warning amid a blizzard. Her absence compounds the volatility of a household now solely occupied by two disparate types of masculinity: the gruff authoritarianism of Lester and the recessive sensitivity of Mike, who’s awakening to his homosexuality in scenes that astutely highlight his furtive desiring gaze. It’s easy to imagine the early 1950s-set A LONG WINTER as an Elia Kazan or Douglas Sirk melodrama, its masculine agonies and Oedipal drama translated into florid theatrics. But Haigh prefers emotional restraint, and in letting moments play out in relative quiet—whether as big as a search mission in white-out conditions or as small as Mike’s curious glances at the new handsome house assistant, Jimmy—he conveys a sense of placidity curdling into inertia, then into sharp, unspoken discontent. Louise and Tommy got away from it, likely tragically. Mike will still be up there on that frigid mountain, picking at golden memories and idealized dreams the way a vulture chews over a carcass. Haigh scheduled to attend. (2026, 117 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
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Louise Weard’s CASTRATION MOVIE ANTHOLOGY III. JUNIOR GHOSTS—PREMORPHIC
DRIFT (Canada)
AMC NEWCITY 14 — Thursday, 10:30pm
At nine and a half hours into Louise Weard’s CASTRATION MOVIE ANTHOLOGY, we finally learn what became of the “Incel Superman.” When we left Turner Stewart (Noah Baker) at the end of Weard’s first anthology segment, he was plunging himself into the darkness of 4chan, beating up street performers, swimming in alcoholism, and limp with impotence. In the latest installment, CHAPTER III. JUNIOR GHOSTS—PREMORPHIC DRIFT, Weard opens in the immediate aftermath of a fatal stabbing at a support group called Born Angels (a group for grieving parents). Then we settle in with Izzy (Avalon Fast), a women’s crisis hotline operator, and her partner Trent (Henri Gillespi). Weard introduced Izzy and Trent in the first anthology segment as middle school friends of the incel. Chapters converge here when Izzy takes a call from a Born Angels survivor. In the first long, naturalistic take—which Weard is known for—Izzy tries to empathize by revealing that she has also lost someone, referring to Turner. Weard’s choice of using a dead name for the incel character only amplifies the hyperbolic journey of Turner’s transformation, from stubborn repression to a woman-harming misogynist. There’s a question embedded in JUNIOR GHOSTS: what could influence someone to do something horrific? Each entry in Weard’s sprawling, shot-on-Hi8 epic examines rhetoric that shapes behavior, from online misogyny groups to hot dog eating cults to the ideological machinery of gender politics. Here, Trent tells Izzy that she is transitioning and will go by Tiffany. Izzy’s initial frustration is almost understandable: after nine years together, she learns on their actual ninth anniversary that her partner has discussed transitioning with her family before telling her. She may have every right to feel blindsided, but what follows, however, is a slow spiral into hostility. Izzy refuses to respect Tiffany’s name or pronouns and begins reaching for arguments that increasingly resemble anti-trans rhetoric. Fast has the difficult job of making Izzy’s grievances legible without excusing any of the microaggressions and outright verbal abuse that follows. Weard holds us in Izzy’s perspective. Any sympathy for Izzy wanes fast, but for some watching, mileage may vary as Izzy’s resentment curdles. A comparatively compact, standalone chapter in Weard’s anthology, JUNIOR GHOSTS rewards newcomers while gaining resonance from its connections to Volume I, including a return of Michaela and an appearance by Jane Schoenbrun. Weard’s overarching project continues to be an increasingly interconnected examination of gender, alienation, and stories people tell themselves to justify their behavior. In JUNIOR GHOSTS, Tiffany may be the one transitioning, but the scariest form of self-actualization comes in the form of Izzy’s descent into transphobic hate. Weard scheduled to attend. (2026, 127 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]
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For more information, including a complete schedule and list of guests attending, visit the festival website here.

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Shirley Clarke's PORTRAIT OF JASON (US/Documentary)

Block Cinema (at Northwestern University) — Thursday, 7pm [Free Admission]

In 1966, Jason Holliday was a 33-year-old Black gigolo and aspiring nightclub headliner, a man of tremendous physical presence and sensuality. Shirley Clarke's fascinating documentary, made over the course of a grueling, alcohol-fueled and drug-addled twelve-hour shoot, presents him as a loquacious, charismatic, self-described 'male bitch' projecting a stunning immediacy, as though every aspect of his life, his feelings, his tragedies and achievements is open to us without reservation, and he seemingly has nothing but desire to reveal to the camera the entirety of his history. Clarke filmed him in her apartment with a minimal crew and two 16mm cameras as he reminisced, drank, smoked joints the size of my thigh, and in general ripped into everyone and everything in his life with candor and glee. But the very first words spoken are to reveal that 'Jason Holliday' was not his real name, that he was born instead Aaron Payne, and a mere four minutes into the movie, Holliday announces his ambition in life: 'What I really want to do is what I'm doing now, is to perform.' And so, from the very start, PORTRAIT OF JASON is insistent that we remember all we see here is illusion and fakery. Performance is the major theme of Clarke's film: the performances of Holliday himself, both of the celebrities he impersonates at various points and, more deeply, of the Holliday persona itself; the stories Holliday tells of his employers, friends, lovers, and enemies, all in various crises of identity; the ambiguous presences of the off-screen Clarke and collaborator Carl Lee, whose voices are heard but whose faces are never seen; and that of the film itself, which has been crafted in the most artificial and patently alienating manner. Filled with jarring, out-of-focus compositions, perpetually mobile camerawork, zooming, panning, capturing and losing Holliday's face, PORTRAIT is a film of unparalleled artifice: there's not a moment that doesn't call attention to itself as constructed, as at least somewhat false, as deliberately foreign. Lauren Rabinovitz has claimed that Holliday's work in the film is done “in order to make himself an object of art,” arguing that the film has two mutually contradictory endgames in mind, both to endorse and enable Holliday's transmutation of the raw material of his existence into beauty and at the same time to reveal that very transformation to be founded on nothing but an elaborate network of fictions and deceit. His “self-aware expertise at playing the victim and at manipulating his position,” she writes, “puts in doubt his role as the unassuming object of the camera's gaze.” Indeed, there's nothing unassuming at all about Holliday. Within the film, he's a figure of almost purely unadulterated assumption: playing with our assumptions about what life as a gay Black hustler would mean, playing with the conventions of the documentary form that lead us to assume his stories, his tears, his soul-bearing is all real. The film is incredibly moving throughout, a masterpiece of affective manipulation, and just as strongly is an elaborate self-critique, continually stressing at every turn that nothing we see is unadorned, no story we hear can be trusted, no sob not at the same time a back-handed chuckle. Has Holliday been lying all along? And would that really diminish the power of his words? The central triumph of the film is that it shows truth as something strange to itself, a side-effect of the narratives we concoct to make sense of our lives and a consequence of the incessant self-doubt that at every second threatens to collapse all those narratives into despair. Followed by a discussion between filmmaker Stephen Winter and Justin Mann, Associate Professor of English at Northwestern. (1967, 105 min, 35mm) [Kian Bergstrom]

Ken Russell's THE DEVILS (UK) [Restored Director’s Cut]

Music Box Theatre — See Venue website for showtimes

Ken Russell thought big and made big gestures, overloading most of his movies with historical references, psychedelic stylization, and outsized acting. He’s the sort of director you love or hate but never accuse of holding back. THE DEVILS comes from the middle of Russell’s most productive period as a director of feature films (he had been a prolific director of TV documentaries for years before that), when over a four-year period (1969-1972) he released five of his strongest films, which cover the full range of his style and themes. Perhaps the most extreme of that lot, it maintains an unrelenting air of hysteria that makes the bold, psychosexual imagery seem that much more provocative. The story, taken from true events, deals with power struggle and religious persecution in 17th-century France, but the design—as is often the case with Russell—is brazenly anachronistic. (Derek Jarman, who would become an uncompromising director in his own right, is the credited production designer.) Past and present bleed into each other to hallucinogenic effect, while Russell’s sincere interest in religious and political history vies with his strong desire to gross people out. Oliver Reed, in the role he was born to play, is a morally corrupt priest with a large flock of loyal followers; Vanessa Redgrave is the mad nun who desires him and wants to destroy him. (1971, 114 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Pedro Almodóvar's LAW OF DESIRE (Spain)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) — Saturday, 9:30pm

Pedro Almodóvar's LAW OF DESIRE is a fascinating early entry point into the Spanish director's wonderfully twisted cinematic universe and a film that already contains many of the obsessions he would revisit in later works, often to increasingly uncomfortable depths. There's the complicated web of queer relationships, jealousy, and betrayal that would reappear in ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER (1999); the trauma of sexual abuse within Catholicism explored in BAD EDUCATION (2004); and, perhaps most memorably, romantic obsession leading to morally reprehensible behavior, a theme Almodóvar would revisit in TIE ME UP! TIE ME DOWN! (1989) with the same gloriously unhinged Antonio Banderas. Here Banderas plays Antonio, a young man whose infatuation with gay filmmaker Pablo (Eusebio Poncela) turns increasingly dangerous, complicating Pablo's relationship with his younger lover Juan (Miguel Molina) and his transgender sister Tina (Carmen Maura), who has a rather extraordinary and troubling romantic history of her own. To say that the relationships in this film are complicated would be a spectacular understatement, but Almodóvar treats even the most outrageous developments with an earnestness that makes the characters' desires, however misguided or destructive, strangely sympathetic. Equally fascinating is the film's exploration of artistic obsession, fandom, and the complicated relationship between creators and the people who adore them, themes that would resurface in THE FLOWER OF MY SECRET (1995) and ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER. Almodóvar himself has always seemed enamored with actresses, especially Carmen Maura, who would give one of the great comic performances of the 1980s in his subsequent WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN (1988). Maura is magnificent here, too, balancing broad comedy with genuine pathos in a role that could easily have become a caricature in less sympathetic hands. One of the great pleasures of Almodóvar's films is the way he pivots between comedy and disturbing tragedy, sometimes so abruptly that it's difficult to know whether to laugh or recoil in horror (and often the appropriate response is both). His devotion to camp, kitsch, theatrical excess, and dizzyingly loud fashion choices reminds us that what we're watching is deliberately artificial, even as the emotional stakes become almost unbearably real. Somewhere between the somber melodramas of Douglas Sirk and the outrageously artificial queer fantasies of Ulrike Ottinger, LAW OF DESIRE uses its formal elements not to distance us from its characters, but to draw us closer to their most intimate and irrational passions. The result is a film that manages to be hilarious, horrifying, deeply moving, and occasionally all three at once. Almodóvar would go on to make more polished and arguably more profound films, but there's something particularly exhilarating about watching him discover just how far he can push his characters, his audience, and the boundaries of good taste. Screening as part of the Mapping Melodrama series. (1987, 102 min, 35mm) [Alex Ensign]

Ousmane Sembène’s MANDABI (Senegal)

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

By the time Ousmane Sembène directed his second feature at the age of 45, he was already a legend. Sembène had been a war veteran, a labor organizer, the author of several book-length works of fiction, and the first sub-Saharan African to release a feature film. One might expect a movie by such an accomplished individual working at the height of his renown to display a certain grandeur or sweeping perspective, yet the greatness of MANDABI (as with most of Sembène’s films) lies in its humility. The story unfolds so plainly that it could be understood by a child, while the imagery, however bright and engaging, tends to be organized around such basics as character and locale. In short, MANDABI feels like a folktale; and like many folktales, the apparent simplicity serves as a conduit to deep wisdom. Dieng, the film’s put-upon hero, is an unemployed, but big-talking man who lives on the outskirts of Dakar with his two wives and seven children. Near the start of the story, Dieng receives a money order from a nephew living in Paris (in a bittersweet montage, Sembène illustrates what the young man has had to do to earn the money), who asks his uncle to cash the order, set aside most of the money, and keep some for himself. Dieng sees this windfall as a chance to pay off his debts, but cashing the money order (or mandabi in Wolof) opens up all sorts of new problems. He learns he lacks the proper documentation required for any banking transaction—and that acquiring this documentation means tangling with an especially messy local bureaucracy. Dieng also finds himself besieged by strangers and acquaintances coming out of the woodwork and asking for loans. But the biggest setback of all comes in the form of a “New African” businessman who promises to help Dieng solve his problems. Sembène characterizes the businessman with the same bitter, satirical sensibility he’d later flesh out in his novel Xala (and his film adaptation of it), but for the most part, the writer-director reserves his anger for institutions rather than individuals. MANDABI condemns the societal factors that keep people in poverty while maintaining, against all odds, an ingratiatingly cheery tone. When seen from the proper perspective, Sembène asserts, injustice is nonsensical enough to seem funny. Screening as part of the Heteroglossia: Languages and Translation series. (1968, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Frederick Wiseman's TITICUT FOLLIES (US/Documentary)

Mouse Arts and Letters (555 W. 31st St.) — Sunday, 12pm

Acclaimed documentarian Frederick Wiseman's career focus has been the documentation and analysis of institutions, be it high school, the hospital, Army training, or the Idaho state legislature. TITICUT FOLLIES, his first film, exposes the dire workings of a Massachusetts mental institution in the late 1960s. This unflattering portrayal landed the film in a legal struggle for general distribution, blocked as it was by the State of Massachusetts, which was finally resolved in 1991. Though the film unfortunately missed out on the political punch it could have had were it widely released in 1967, it still manages to shock and appall audiences with the graphic mistreatment of the inmates. What could and should have been a whistle-blowing film is now merely a document of past abuses. It is compelling nonetheless. Even though it is mostly remembered as a harrowing exposé, it isn't all doom and gloom. The title of the film shares its name with the play the inmates put on for their guards and nurses. It is a swirling, bizarre pageant that casts light, however dim, on the inmates' lives. This is Wiseman's signature move as a documentarian: to show that institutions, even flawed and failing ones, are a complicated web of good and bad with no easy solutions. Screening as part of Wise Man Weekends, a new monthly series programmed by Cine-File co-managing editor Kat Sachs, presenting the films of Frederick Wiseman in chronological order. Followed by a conversation with Matt Bodett, founder and director of the Center for Mad Culture. (1967, 84 min, Digital Projection) [Doug McLaren]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Youssef Chahine’s THE OTHER (Egypt/France)

Siskel Film Center — Tuesday, 6pm

Like multiple films by Jean-Luc Godard or Spike Lee, THE OTHER finds its director checking in on the state of the world at the time of its making, dramatizing hot-button issues and reflecting on matters of personal, ethnic, and sexual identity as they’re impacted by current events. The movie all but opens with a Godardian cameo by Edward Said, who meets with one of the protagonists and speaks with guarded optimism about globalization. If the world becomes more interconnected, Said muses, then maybe Westerners will stop thinking of Arabs as the Other; as the film progresses, however, it becomes clear that a number of social issues need to be addressed before any kind of utopian planning can occur. The protagonist who meets with Said, Adam (Hani Salama), is currently pursuing a postgraduate degree in California but returns home to Egypt to spend time with his wealthy parents. On his trip, he crosses paths with a journalist named Hanane (Hanan Turk), and the two fall instantly in love. (This passage suggests the influence of classic Hollywood musicals, for which Chahine long had great affection.) Though Adam’s mother (Egyptian superstar Nabila Ebeid) dislikes Hanane upon meeting her, she soon pours herself into preparing her son’s wedding as a means of maintaining control over his life. The mother is also part of a team that wants to build a multi-faith worship center in the Egyptian desert, which Chahine presents as a symbol of “end of history” hubris and which Hanane, investigating the project, discovers to be a front for money laundering. While corruption has infected Egypt’s official channels, the peril of religious extremism threatens to infect other parts of the population, as evidenced by the growing radicalization of Hanane’s brother. (Not coincidentally, Adam is writing his thesis on fundamentalist terrorist groups.) The docudrama stuff, family melodrama, and romance between Adam and Hanane combine to form an at-times unwieldy creation—THE OTHER feels overstuffed, but in a good way, as if Chahine were trying to embrace the entire world circa 1999. Screening as part of the Contact Zones: Cinema of Globalization, 1989–2024 lecture series. (1999, 106 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Arkady Boytler's THE WOMAN OF THE PORT (Mexico)

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

For countries whose screens had long been dominated by Hollywood films, the dawn of the talkies also promised a second chance, a re-nationalized cinema. All the capital, production expertise, and star power in the world couldn't disguise Hollywood's tacky condescension towards its international audience. The Spanish-language films that Hollywood turned out for the Latin American market were often made under the supervision of "no habla español" journeyman directors. They featured third-rate actors like Carlos Villarías and cluelessly mixed Mexican, Cuban, Chilean, and Argentine accents. The imports were so feeble that local producers could compete with features made for twenty- or thirty-thousand pesos. Among the twenty-one features made in Mexico in 1933, LA MUJER DEL PUERTO (THE WOMAN OF THE PORT) was positioned as the model for future productions. The trailer proclaimed it "the best film ever made in Spanish... a prodigy of drama and spectacle that bears honor upon the Spanish-speaking cinema," while the critic Luz Alba described it as "the first national movie which truly deserves the qualification of excellent." This for a film directed by a Russian expatriate and adapted from an incest-scented Maupassant story that might just as well be laid in Osaka, Porto, or Marseilles. If there's something intrinsically Mexican about LA MUJER DEL PUERTO, it looks pretty muted next to the indigenous pride that's front and center in the films of Emilio "El Indio" Fernández  (MARIA CANDELARIA). Like Gustav Machaty's salacious contemporary EKSTASE, LA MUJER DEL PUERTO is chiefly notable as a synthesis of experimental techniques plucked from disparate strands of the nascent international art cinema. A sprinkle of Dovzhenko here, a nod to Eisenstein there, the shadow of Pabst throughout. Not that all the influences are so high-minded: when an elderly man is thrown down a staircase by his daughter's cheating fiancé, we're firmly in remorseless pre-Code territory, like a licentious programmer from Warner Bros., but with more nudity and much less dialogue. There's a pronounced Sternberg element here, too, mostly in the cultivated longueurs. (The magnificent lead actress, Andrea Palma, had worked in Hollywood as Marlene Dietrich's hat and make-up advisor, and clearly models her performance on Dietrich's Amy Jolly.) The whole film is a rough-seamed pastiche that nevertheless manages to conjure its own slippery but credible atmosphere. Screening as part of the Mapping Melodrama series. (1933, 76 min, DCP Digital) [K.A. Westphal]

Michelangelo Antonioni's ZABRISKIE POINT (US)

Siskel Film Center — Tuesday and Thursday, 6:15pm

Michelangelo Antonioni's most divisive work, his only one in widescreen and a response to the US counterculture of the late 60s, ZABRISKIE POINT is something far different—and more elusive—than its detractors have made it out to be. Like a number of European artists ranging from Franz Kafka in Amerika to Bruno Dumont in TWENTYNINE PALMS (2003), Antonioni regards the United States as something like a poetic construct. Its spirit of debate and varied topography (particularly the Arizona mountain range of the title) elicit awe, while Antonioni reserves his characteristic dread for police and consumer culture. But even this last subject becomes a source of arresting compositions. Early on, there's an eerie montage of billboard ads that's equal parts Pop Art and experimental cinema; it sets the stage for the final sequence, a series of slow-motion explosions that leaves audiences dead silent. As in L'ECLISSE (1962), Antonioni is contemplating a world taken over by consumer goods, though there are moments of refuge here—namely, the dialogue of student radicals (directed with cinema verité excitement) and blissful communal lovemaking. Screening as part of the 25 For 25 series, revisiting standout titles from the Siskel's State Street history. (1970, 113 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Mario Bava’s BLACK SUNDAY (Italy)

Music Box Theatre — Tuesday, 9:45pm

Mario Bava’s official directorial debut showcases his previous talents as a cinematographer and special effects artist. BLACK SUNDAY starts in 1630 with the execution for sorcery of Asa Vajda, a witch (played by Barbara Steele), and her lover by her brother. Just prior to her death (a particularly brutal for a 1960 film), she places a curse on her brother and all of his descendants. Two hundred later, the aforementioned curse reenters the story when two traveling doctors mistakenly disturb the witch’s tomb and happen to meet Katia Vajda (also Barbara Steele). Bava’s film is a gorgeously photographed gothic horror full of witch and vampire mischief. His usage of camera trickery and practical effects allow for visceral depictions of violence and the macabre. The film’s most memorable feature is its elaborate set design. With much of the story transpiring inside of a sprawling castle, a graveyard, and crypt, the necessity to create set pieces that are typical of gothic horror yet unique with each variation is strong. Bava does this expertly; they create a pervasive atmosphere of foreboding dread that ultimately heightens the film’s central themes of fear. Barbara Steele’s dual performance showcases her considerable talent, as she becomes both victim and instigator of fright. Her presence commands the camera in every scene. BLACK SUNDAY signaled Bava as a singular artist, one who would become a great influence for generations of filmmakers who followed. Screening as part of Music Box of Horrors: The Final Chapter. (1960, 87 min, DCP Digital) [Kyle Cubr]

Harold P. Warren's MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE (US)

Alamo Drafthouse — Wednesday, 9:30pm

The sadness that washed over me the first time, many years ago, that I ever saw an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 remains a bitter ache that, like a cut inside your mouth, seems to reopen and refresh itself every time you notice it. Lovely, idiosyncratic, intensely felt, and deeply strange films were unearthed on that show, movies that in their inimitable misunderstandings of classic Hollywood idioms and troubled relationships with narrative were like mysterious blind alleys branching off the tedious main thoroughfares of cinema. Delirious, visionary, and transformative, movies like BRIDE OF THE MONSTER, THE INDESTRUCTIBLE MAN, THE AMAZING TRANSPARENT MAN, and NIGHT OF THE BLOOD BEAST, movies that I treasure, movies that are among the greatest of their times, were made into mere setups for cruel mockery on the part of comedians whose interest in cinema was apparently limited to finding hilariously wanting anything that didn't look like the anonymous productions of well-paid professionals. In January, 1993, Mystery Science Theater 3000 aired one of its most notorious episodes when the cast set up to piss all over a largely-forgotten horror film from 1966, made by a cast and crew who were almost all complete amateurs and produced by an insurance salesman merely so as to win a bet. It was MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE, directed, produced, written by, and starring Harold P. Warren. Much has been written on MANOS, nearly all of it supporting the proposition that it is not merely bad but amazingly bad, a film admirable and remarkable precisely because it is a contender for the worst film ever made. It is not the worst film ever made. In fact, it is extraordinary, a mesmerizing and precious piece of film history. The bare plot line is easily summarized, though to do so, as with all great cinema, is to miss everything of note in the film. A married couple and their young daughter lose their way and end up at a decrepit old house manned by a disturbed cripple named Torgo. The house is the home of the Master, a priest of some sort, endowed by the god Manos with undisclosed powers that may include mental domination. The Master rules over a cult of scantily-clad and in-fighting women, his brides, and contends with Torgo for sexual access to them. The family finds themselves turned into unwilling battlegrounds for this contest between Torgo and the Master. What matters, though, is not the silly erotic mysticism of the story but the movie's rhythms, its style, its camerawork, which in their outsider brutishness combine to form nothing less than a window into an alternative conception of cinema itself. Where many movies strive for a rough continuity between our experience of the world and the constructed phenomenology of the art world, MANOS jettisons any coherence of character or theme, all but the slightest glimmer of narrative structure, and the rudimentary foundations of cinematic convention. One's experience of time and space, critical philosophy recognizes, is not found within that which we perceive but in fact structures the very act of perception. Ingrained within the very fabric of reason, the intuitions of space and time allow for, shape, and control the kinds of sensations we're capable of having. To watch MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE is to encounter a direct assault upon those representations. It's a project doomed to fail, a doom echoed by the overarching doom that the ever-approaching, never appearing god Manos himself represents in the film. But it's a film that in its failure is nothing less than astonishing. Screening as part of the Weird Wednesday series. (1966, 69 min, Digital Projection) [Kian Bergstrom]

Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO (US)

Alamo Drafthouse — Monday, 7:30pm

So much ink has been spilled over PSYCHO that it might have been best if nothing had been written about it at all. More than any other Hitchcock film it deserves a fresh pair of eyes (perhaps the kind we'd find in a kid with hands that barely reach the ticket window and then cling to the armrest as he loses the main character less than half way in, as a lucky few recount). Even if the infamous shower scene has lost its surprise and shock value (but watch it closely anyway), there's still a great deal to enjoy: a black and white pallet fine-tuned down to Vera Miles' bra; Hitchcock's bizarre infatuation with the Oedipus Complex; Bernard Herrmann's superb score. From the outside it's a film we've become accustomed to, but in a dark theater it becomes hauntingly unfamiliar again. Free Victory screening. (1960, 109 min, DCP Digital) [Julian Antos]

Maya Annik Bedward’s BLACK ZOMBIE (Canada/US/Documentary)

FACETS – Saturday, 5pm and Sunday, 1pm

A most discerning aspect of BLACK ZOMBIE is its measured focus on the cultural impact of cinematic depictions of the zombie, not the films or filmmakers themselves. It’s not that they go unmentioned; director Maya Annik Bedward weaves an insightful history from the pre-code WHITE ZOMBIE through George Romero’s seminal NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD to THE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW in the 1980s and beyond. What she presents here, however, is not a shallow survey of horror history, but rather a cycle of disconnect, a lack of intention, and appropriation. The figure of the zombie is used as a tool of justification, performing cultural work to continue systemic oppression; its recurring revival in American culture reflects white fears about Black power, resistance, revolution, and retribution. Bedward grounds this exploration not in a study of cinema, but of Haiti and its often-misunderstood—and outright suppressed—culture and history. She focuses on the real spiritual tradition of Vodou, its importance to enslaved peoples, and its ongoing practice. Zombies, here, are presented not as mindless monsters, but as tragic; a gut-wrenching reading of the prominence of zombie horde imaginary at the end of the film emphasizes how this lack of cultural understanding of the monster’s origins continues to reflect colonizing oppression. Incorporating her own cinematic portrayal of the zombie within BLACK ZOMBIE, Bedward’s questioning of whether she herself is contributing to the problematic representations the film is itself critiquing shows an insightful self-reflexiveness often missing in approaches to media history and culture. Screening as part of the Must-Watch Indies series. (2026, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Jim Jarmusch's ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE (US)

The Davis Theater — Thursday, 7pm

ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE continues Jim Jarmusch's habit of ruminating on familiar topics at a glacial pace with a witty character study and touching love story that just happens to be about two vampires who may or may not have birthed all of humanity. Tom Hiddleston plays Adam, a musical genius and tinkerer with a deep love for antiquated instruments and technologies. Unfortunately, Adam is mired in the throes of a deep depression and can only seem to compose funeral music of late. Sensing something is amiss, Eve (played by Tilda Swinton with her offhandedly strange and serene otherworldliness) calls Adam from her book-laden apartment in Tangier, Morocco. After a brief and tender conversation, she resolves to pay a visit and cheer him up, although she loathes traveling. Eve prepares herself for a night flight to Detroit, where Adam lives in a dilapidated Victorian home. Like most Jarmusch films, the plot meanders in an unhurried fashion and remains peripheral at best. The viewer's enjoyment of ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE relies instead on lovingly and carefully crafted aesthetics, niche jokes and references, and maddeningly cool characters. The film lingers on numerous elements of the mise-en-scène that characterize the abode of each vampire, the treasures that they hoard over centuries, and their vintage wardrobes, indicating that the vampires are as maximalist in their aesthetics as Jarmusch is minimalist in his narratives. The soundtrack, composed mostly of Jarmusch's band SQÜRL, also features key songs like "Funnel of Love" by Wanda Jackson and an arresting scene with Lebanese singer/songwriter Yasmine Hamdan provides waves of sonic pleasure and engrossing atmosphere. Monologues and asides in honor of Nikola Tesla, Christopher Marlowe (who, by the way, is also a vampire and may or may not have penned all of Shakespeare's works), Franz Schubert, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others provide waves of allusive pleasure. And small-but-mighty roles played by John Hurt, Jeffrey Wright, Mia Wasikowska, and Anton Yelchin round out the humorous and morbid character study, dosing us with delightfully comedic and soberly tragic asides in a careful rhythm that maintains a lighter and perversely more optimistic tone than one would expect for a vampire movie. One special pleasure in viewing ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE, indeed, is the joy of observing ways in which Jarmusch adheres to generic conventions around vampires (crossing thresholds, sleeping during the day, drinking blood) and deviates from generic conventions (sucking blood "is so 15th century"), or creates new vampiric rituals of his own. In this way, he upends the genre of vampire movies in the same way that STRANGER THAN PARADISE and DOWN BY LAW subvert road trip films and GHOST DOG and DEAD MAN reimagine narratives of an alienated, lone wolf protagonist. ONLY LOVERS may be one of Jarmusch's slighter films, but it is (for a 10,000-year-old love story about the undead) oddly enough, one of his most accessible and optimistic. Come for the moody soundtrack; stick around for affectionate, knowing banter that makes you believe that true love can last an eternity. (2013, 123 min, DCP Digital) [Alex Ensign]

📽️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Alamo Drafthouse
Tony Randel’s 1988 film HELLBOUND: HELLRAISER II (95 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday at 7pm.

Andrew Fleming’s 1996 film THE CRAFT (101 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday at noon and Wednesday at 11:30am.

Kim Jee-woon’s 2003 film A TALE OF TWO SISTERS (114 min, DCP Digital) screens Monday at 4:15pm and Wednesday at 6:30pm as part of the Sad Girl Cinema Club.

José Ramón Larraz’s 1988 film EDGE OF THE AXE (91 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 9:30pm, as part of the Terror Tuesday series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
Kimberly Reed’s 2018 documentary DARK MONEY (99 min, Digital Projection) screens Friday, 7pm, preceded by her 2024 documentary short SEAT 31: ZOOEY ZEPHYR (15 min, Digital Projection), with Reed in person. Free admission; RSVP required. More info here.

⚫ Chicago Cultural Center
Boots Riley’s 2026 film I LOVE BOOSTERS (113 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday, 6:30pm, in the Claudia Cassidy Theater as part of the Cassidy Theater Film Club x Art is Labor series, presented by DCASE and the Chicago Film Office. Free admission; RSVP required. More info here.

⚫ Chicago Film Society
An Evening with Jim Trainor, featuring five of Trainor’s films presented on 16mm, takes place Wednesday, 8pm, at Constellation (3111 N. Western Ave.), with Trainor in person. More info here.

⚫ Chicago Public Library
The Chicago Public Library's Community Cinema program presents free film and TV screenings at dozens of neighborhood branches throughout the week. See the full schedule here.

Leslie Buchbinder’s 2023 documentary WESTERMANN: MEMORIAL TO THE IDEA OF MAN IF HE WAS AN IDEA (86 min, Digital Projection) screens Saturday, 2pm, at the Harold Washington Library Center’s Video Theater on the Lower Level, followed by a Q&A with National Veterans Art Museum Executive Director Giselle Futrell and artist Nate Juncer. Presented by Pentimenti Productions in partnership with NVAM and the Chicago Public Library as part of CPL’s America 250: Chicago’s Story programming. Free admission. More info here.

⚫ ChiTown Drive-In (2343 S. Throop St.)
ChiTown Movies screens outdoor films throughout the week. More info here.

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
David Fincher’s 2014 film GONE GIRL (159 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday, 7pm, as part of the Behind the Mask: Femininity as Fabrication, Performance, and Identity Crisis series.

Lisa Cholodenko’s 2010 film THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT (106 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, 4pm, preceded by two short videos from the It Gets Better Project (also 2010). Kevin Jerome Everson’s 2011 film QUALITY CONTROL (71 min, DCP Digital) and Steven Soderbergh’s 2012 film MAGIC MIKE (110 min, DCP Digital) screen together Sunday at 7pm. Both screenings are part of the There Is No Center: Screening the Obama Era, 2009–17 series.

Olivia Wilde’s 2026 film THE INVITE (107 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, 7pm, as part of the New Releases and Restorations series.

Carlos Hugo Christensen’s 1952 film IF I SHOULD DIE BEFORE I WAKE (67 min, DCP Digital) screens Monday, 7pm, as part of the Golden Age of Argentine Noir series.

Helke Misselwitz’s 1982 film AFTER WINTER COMES SPRING (116 min, 35mm) screens Tuesday, 7pm, as part of the Films of Thomas Plenert series.

Ken Russell’s 1975 film TOMMY (111 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 9:30pm, as part of the Ken Russell’s Pitch-Perfect Perversions series. More info on all screenings here. 

⚫ Dorothy (2500 W. Chicago Ave.)
Jane Schoenbrun’s 2026 film TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA (112 min, Digital Projection) screens Monday, 7pm, as part of the Queer Movie Monday series. More info here.

⚫ Eyewash Station
Herschell Gordon Lewis’ 1963 film BLOOD FEAST (75 min, Digital Projection) screens Friday at 7pm; his 1970 film WIZARD OF GORE (95 min, Digital Projection) screens at 8:15pm.

Frank Henenlotter’s 1990 film FRANKENHOOKER (85 min, Digital Projection) screens Sunday at 8pm.

Lambert Hillyer’s 1936 film DRACULA’S DAUGHTER (71 min, Digital Projection) screens Monday at 6pm.

Donald Farmer’s 1995 film RED LIPS (77 min, Digital Projection) screens Monday at 7:30pm.

Sion Sono’s 2015 film TAG (85 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday at 8pm.

Kasper Meltedhair’s 2025 film GARCHASTER’S CORNBLADE (2026, 109 min) screens Thursday at 7pm. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ FACETS
Cold Sweat presents a double feature of Sion Sono’s 2016 film ANTIPORNO (79 min, DCP Digital) and Peter Vack’s 2024 film WWW.RACHELORMONT.COM (83 min, DCP Digital) on Friday. ANTIPORNO begins at 7pm; RACHELORMONT begins at 8:45pm.

Jane Schoenbrun’s 2026 film TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA (112 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, 2:30pm, and Sunday, 3pm, as part of the Must-Watch Indies series. The Saturday screening will be introduced by series programmer Marya E. Gates.

Lucky McKee’s 2002 film MAY (93 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, 7pm, following an edition of FACETS Film Trivia (at 4pm) and a costume contest (at 5:30pm).

Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2026 film HER PRIVATE HELL (100 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday, 5:30pm, also as part of the Must-Watch Indies series.

Sweet Void Cinema presents a screenwriting workshop on Wednesday from 6pm to 9pm in the Facets Studio. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Gallery 400 (400 S. Peoria St.)
Camille Billops & James Hatch’s 1991 film FINDING CHRISTA (55 min, Digital Projection) and Maren Hassinger’s 2005 short film BIRTHRIGHT (12 min, Digital Projection) screen Thursday, 5:30pm, followed by a conversation between curator Allie Tepper and researcher Ethel Renia, moderated by Denny Mwaura. Free admission. More info here.

⚫ Mouse Arts and Letters Club (555 W. 31st St.)
The closing reception for the El Barrio Está Vivo! exhibition features short film screenings and an open mic on Saturday from 6–9pm. Screenings begin at 6:30pm with works by Allan Ayala Hernandez, Mono Feo, Hugo Zelada-Romero, Daniela Morales, and Jesse Vela. More info here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Cristian Mungiu’s 2026 film FJORD (146 min, DCP Digital) begins screening and Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s 2026 documentary NAZA (80 min, DCP Digital) and John Wilson’s 2026 documentary THE HISTORY OF CONCRETE (102 min, DCP Digital) continue. See Venue website for showtimes.

Also screening as part of Music Box of Horrors: The Final Chapter are: Toyoo Ashida’s 1985 anime film VAMPIRE HUNTER D (80 min, DCP Digital) on Friday at midnight; Tina Krause’s 1999 film LIMBO (55 min, DCP Digital) on Saturday, 9pm, with Krause in person for a post-screening Q&A; Jordan Downey’s 2026 film THE CYCLE (112 min, DCP Digital) on Sunday at 9pm; Kôji Shirais hi’s 2025 film ABOUT A PLACE IN THE KINKI REGION (103 min, DCP Digital) on Monday at 9:45pm; Andrew Fleming’s 1996 film THE CRAFT (101 min, 35mm) on Wednesday, 9:45pm, co-presented by Rated Q and Ramona Slick; Rufus Butler Seder’s 1984 film SCREAMPLAY (91 min, DCP Digital) on Thursday, 6:30pm, followed by a Q&A with Rufus Butler, art director Cheryl Hirshman, and film historian Elizabeth Purchell; and Chris LaMartina’s CORPSE REVIVER NO. 3: POSSESSIONS, also on Thursday, 9:15pm, accompanied live by an original score from The Marshmallow Ghosts. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Siskel Film Center
Jim Shea’s 2010 documentary HOW LUCKY CAN ONE MAN GET (92 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday and Thursday at 8:30pm.

Conversations at the Edge presents An Evening With Lilli Carré, a program of short animated works made between 2013 and 2025 (Total approx. 50 min), on Thursday, 6pm. Carré in attendance for a postshow conversation. More info on all screenings here. 

⚫ Uprising Theater & Cafe (2905 N. Milwaukee Ave.)
Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s 2026 documentary NAZA (80 min, DCP Digital) screens this weekend. More info here. 

⚫ The Watermelon Woman @ 30
“We’ve Been Here: 30 Years of Chicago Queer Black Lesbian Filmmaking,” a screening of works by Chicago queer Black lesbian filmmakers curated by Sisters in Cinema director Yvonne Welbon, takes place Friday, 4pm, at the Logan Center for the Arts (5211 S. Woodlawn Ave.) as part of the two-day Alternative Endings: The Watermelon Woman @ 30 program honoring the film’s legacy. The program continues Saturday from 9:30am to 6:30pm with a daylong symposium at Northwestern’s Downtown Campus bringing together scholars, filmmakers, actors, and community members to discuss the film’s making and legacy. More info here.

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Julian Antos, Kian Bergstrom, Kyle Cubr, Ray Ebarb, Alex Ensign, Megan Fariello, Shaun Huhn, Ben Kaye, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Doug McLaren, Nicky Ni, K.A. Westphal