:: FRIDAY, AUGUST 21 - THURSDAY, AUGUST 27 ::

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Teinosuke Kinugasa's A PAGE OF MADNESS (Japan/Silent)

Chicago Film Society at the Music Box Theatre — Saturday, 11:30am

Also known as A PAGE OUT OF ORDER or THE CRAZY PAGE, this is, regardless of the title, a madhouse riot of a movie. Traumatic and nauseating, it's easily the most horrifying movie made during the Silent Era, a weird and queasy dance of death directed by former female impersonator/future Oscar and Palme d'Or winner Teinosuke Kinugasa and written by future Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata. Part avant-garde suicide finale, part Lynchian creepshow, this unhinged Japanese contemporary to German Expressionism (a movement A PAGE OF MADNESS's makers were apparently unaware of) would be considered a seminal film if anyone had actually seen it, but it was forgotten and believed lost until the 1970s. The film's simple-yet-somehow-indescribable plot involves a janitor working at the asylum where his wife is a patient. Everything about this movie is borderline insane. Preceded by Don Cooper’s 1968 film SEANCE IV (4 min, 16mm) and with live musical accompaniment by the MIYUMI Project Japanese Experimental Ensemble. (1926, 71 min, 35mm) [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

William Friedkin's THE FRENCH CONNECTION (US)

Siskel Film Center — See Venue website for showtimes

Relentless. Gene Hackman's sensational turn as Popeye Doyle only works because of his foils: jaded, unflappable Roy Scheider and bourgeois, urbane Fernando Rey. And New York City, as much a character as any human being on screen. Friedkin thrusts us into the middle of a hellish, grubby, chaotic city, a place where the glass of beer sitting on the bar gets drugs, cigarette butts, and junkie's works dumped into it so Doyle can mix up his patented milkshake. Handheld, documentary-like camerawork, working hand in glove with jagged, quick cutting; the car chase may never be duplicated for sheer adrenaline, but the little offhand details are what make the film a fully formed world. The bicycle in Hackman's apartment, ugly wallpaper in Weinstock's living room, orange drink in the subway, nighttime steam rising from the pavement. Don Ellis' soundtrack is also key to the atmosphere, rife with spooky horns and percussion. The shootout in a dripping, ruined warehouse serves as an abrupt, almost existential ending. It seems to pose the question: "Is that all there is ... to life?" Screening as part of the Vroom, Screech series. (1971, 104 min, 35mm) [Rob Christopher]

Kent Jones’ LATE FAME (US)

Music Box Theatre — See Venue website for showtimes

If you’ve heard the name Arthur Schnitzler, it’s likely in connection with either his oft-adapted stage play La Ronde or his novella “Dream Story,” the basis for Stanley Kubrick’s EYES WIDE SHUT (1999). Is it a matter of artistic prescience or societal stagnation that Schnitzler’s particular concerns regarding sexual intimacy and class dynamics, dreamt up in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, still speak to us so clearly today? Whatever the reason, it’s in Schnitzler’s recently unearthed novella “Late Fame,” where one societal vice (sex) is traded in for another (art), and matters of class, power, and identity rise right to the surface. Here, in a contemporary film adaptation by screenwriter Samy Burch and director Kent Jones, we find Ed Saxberger (Willem Dafoe), a solitary postal worker living a quiet, contented life, whose world becomes unmoored with the entrance of Meyers (Edmund Donovan), a young upstart of a self-proclaimed poet. In a past life, Saxberger was himself a poet, scraping by in the Boho realm of downtown Manhattan in the 1970s, trading barbs with Amiri Baraka and Robert Creeley before getting his own collection of poetry published (the charmingly titled Way Past Go) that has since vanished into the artistic ether. Meyers, alongside his rambling cohort of fellow wannabe starving artists, have uncovered Way Past Go and have taken it on as  their self-proclaimed mission to provide Saxberger with the societal and cultural acclaim that his work deserves. The delicate balance of Saxberger’s life is disrupted to a disturbing degree, especially when he discovers that his own modest goals as a poet—that is, the pursuit of truth through literary means—is entirely at odds with this current generation of young, privileged, well-off clout-chasers who are more enamored with the status that comes with being a writer than the actual toil that goes into the art of putting pen to paper. This inner tension of revisiting one’s youthful glory days with the harsh wisdom of old age is handled deftly by Dafoe, who gives a tragic and grounded performance that stands in stark contrast to some of his more recent theatrical cinematic output. He dominates the film, present in practically every scene, and Jones and Burch have gifted him a meaningful showcase for his strengths as an actor capable of captivating an audience with nothing more than a brief smile or an askance look. If Schnitzler’s La Ronde wondered whether we can escape the cycles of our own humanity, “Late Fame” (and LATE FAME) asks if it’s even worth it to return to the cycles that defined us lifetimes ago. (2025, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

The Greatest Showman: Five by William Castle

Music Box Theatre — See below for showtimes

William Castle's HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (US)
Friday and Thursday, 9:30pm
Beginning with darkness pierced by blood curdling screams, HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL then presents main characters as floating heads, directly addressing the camera. Eccentric millionaire Frederick Loren (Vincent Price at his very best) explains the film’s premise: he and his wife are hosting a party in an alleged haunted mansion, and anyone who can stay the entire night will win $10,000. His disembodied head breaking the fourth wall, it’s clear he’s not inviting just some assorted group desperate for cash, but the audience, too. We’re asked to participate directly. It’s part of director William Castle’s distinction as a director, known for his low-budget horror films that relied heavily on gimmicks, both on and off screen. HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL was the first of these, promoting something called “Emergo,” in which the audience would experience live effects in the theater. A huge financial success, it proved that horror didn’t need expensive effects to be effective. HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL provides some unsettling moments—including an iconic jump scare—despite its often-campy nature. The campiness comes particularly from Vincent Price’s performance and the relationship between his character, Frederick, and his wife, Annabelle (Carol Ohmart, in impeccable and inscrutable costumes); it’s a dynamic Castle uses again in THE TINGLER, another Price vehicle released the same year in which he also somewhat inexplicably despises his wife. In HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL, Frederick is convinced Annabelle’s tried to poison him, and their back-and-forths are simultaneously vicious, hilarious, and confusing—in fact much of the plot is. But that perplexity ultimately doesn’t matter. Through its visuals and gimmicks, HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL often feels like a carnival ride as it firmly establishes the now-familiar tropes of the haunted house film horror subgenre. The magic of Castle’s filmmaking is that, regardless of whether you get the chance to see this in full, awesome Emergo, HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL still feels like a standout cinematic event. (1959, 75 min, 35mm [Friday show] and DCP Digital [Thursday show]) [Megan Fariello]
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William Castle’s STRAIT-JACKET (US)
Friday, Midnight
During the theatrical run of STRAIT-JACKET, William Castle paraded Joan Crawford as his greatest gimmick. Crawford had already achieved nearly everything Hollywood could offer, but Castle gives her an axe, lets her chop off heads, freak out at George Kennedy, collapse into vulnerability, and briefly transform into the woman she was twenty years earlier. For a film Crawford seemed quick to forget, she made a decent deal: $50K, 15%, and approval of the script and cast. In return, she towered over the production and delivered a fringe career-defining performance that elevates STRAIT-JACKET above the cycle of horror films built around women-of-a-certain-age. Cinematographer Arthur E. Arling (THE YEARLING) photographs Crawford's nightmares in stark chiaroscuro, filling the frame with slats, bars, and other visual divisions that turn seemingly ordinary spaces into psychological prisons. The heavy blacks and whites of Lucy Harbin's solitary scenes externalize her fractured state of mind while acknowledging the horror cycle Castle knew STRAIT-JACKET would be lumped into. The film was dismissed as schlock upon release, but viewed within the evolution of American horror between 1960 and 1968, bookended by PSYCHO and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, it makes perfect sense. PSYCHO opened the door to a strain of psychoanalytic horror in which people, rather than monsters, became the source of terror. It is no coincidence that STRAIT-JACKET follows Hitchcock's film so closely: both were written by Robert Bloch, who seems to have still been working through his mother issues. Give STRAIT-JACKET a mother-son dynamic and it would not be difficult to imagine it as a prequel to PSYCHO. The mother of this subgenre was WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (1962), which launched a wave of low-budget horror films built around Hollywood legends who had been pushed aside by the industry. They have been labeled hagsploitation and psycho-biddy, but the most dignified term remains Grande Dame Guignol. These films revived the careers of Bette Davis, Shelley Winters, Barbara Stanwyck, and others, while simultaneously weaponizing age. Icons were transformed into ravenous, unstable caricatures, reinforcing ageist ideas that elderly women are dangerous simply because they exist. Castle, in his answer to the cycle, reverts Crawford to her vigorous Pepsi-drinking axe-wielding youth and gives her the choice to be proud of her years of growth or throw it all away. Possessed by a version of her former self, Lucy Harbin lights a match on the record player, producing a literal record scratch as she demands attention. The clanking of her bracelets echoes the night she murdered her husband and his girlfriend. She practically yowls with sexual jealousy when her daughter Carol (Diane Baker) brings her boyfriend Michael home. Twenty years in an asylum is a long time, particularly for a woman memorialized in a children's rhyme: "Lucy Harbin took an axe, gave her husband 40 whacks, when she saw what she had done, she gave his girlfriend 41." Beneath the wig and bracelets is someone who has spent those twenty years living with the consequences of her hot-blooded rampage. Lucy's real danger is not that she remembers the past, but that she might return to it without acknowledging the progress she’s made. Eventually, the murders and their inevitable cover-ups bring mother and daughter closer together. John Waters has often discussed his love of the camp in STRAIT-JACKET, paying homage to it by incorporating clips into SERIAL MOM. Castle understood camp before it was defined. Audiences were handed cardboard axes before the film, and the last image of the film is a decapitated Columbia Pictures logo. The often imitated tagline: "Keep saying to yourself, it's only a film..." invited moviegoers to the showmanship of Castle’s films, but STRAIT-JACKET is more than a showcase of his tricks. It is a remarkably controlled piece of filmmaking, with Crawford's performance, Arling's photography, Bloch's psychoanalytic machinery, and Castle's sense of spectacle all working toward the same unnerving conclusion: beneath its gimmicks there is a layered film that knows exactly what it is doing. (1964, 93 min, 35mm) [Shaun Huhn]
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William Castle's THE TINGLER (US)
Saturday, 9:30pm and Tuesday, 7pm
THE TINGLER is, on the surface, a serviceable 50s B-horror, but there’s an abundance to enjoy about the film’s wacky plot and, especially, how it directly engages the audience. Vincent Price stars as a doctor with very questionable morals, who’s discovered that every human has a parasite within them—the tingler. This tingler feeds on fear, attaching itself to the spine and growing larger the more frightened the person becomes. Screaming can send the creature into retreat, something made perfectly clear to the audience as director William Castle introduces the film by urging the viewers not to hold back their fright—or else. With a final set piece in which the creature is set loose in a silent movie theater, THE TINGLER completely immerses viewers in the experience happening on screen. Castle, well-known for his gimmicks, also promoted the film with “Percepto,” a buzzer wired to select theater seats that would go off at corresponding moments, causing a tingling sensation for the audience member. The film also has some bizarrely entertaining performances and subplots—I’m particularly obsessed with deciphering the confusing familial relationships surrounding the doctor and the wife (Patricia Cutts) he seems to inexplicably despise. It’s reminiscent of another Castle-directed Price vehicle released the same year, HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL. The film is also often cited as the first to depict an LSD trip. THE TINGLER is primarily, though, a classic example of Castle’s work as a producer and director. His gimmicky and meta-approach to filmmaking and the theater-going experience are beloved by directors like Joe Dante (his MATINEE is largely a homage to Castle’s work) and John Waters (who got to portray Castle in FX’s Feud). (1959, 82 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]
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William Castle’s 13 GHOSTS (US)
Sunday, 11:30am and Monday, 7pm
In William Castle’s cinema as sideshow attraction, everyone’s here for a good time, niceties of storytelling be damned. His 1960 production 13 GHOSTS promises thrills in “Illusion-O,” which means the spectators get blue-and-red glasses to wear during certain scenes in order to see the title characters. The rest of the movie basically exists to build tension between those scenes; the interstitial material is comparable to the hype man monologues that precede the darings-do of the sword swallower, weight lifter, and snake charmer—superfluous, perhaps, but delivered with gusto and showmanship. When 13 GHOSTS begins, the Zorba family is desperate. Despite Dad’s steady work at the natural history museum, they just can’t stay afloat, and little Buck has to spend his tenth birthday watching the family furniture get repossessed. But as luck would have it, Dad’s recently deceased Uncle Plato has left the family his fully furnished mansion on the outskirts of town, and they can move in immediately. It’s already inhabited by a dozen ghosts, whom occultist Plato “collected” in his strange travels, but given that the mortgage has already been paid, the Zorbas figure they’ll learn to adapt. Sometimes Castle plays this premise for proto-Addams Family-style comedy, as when Mom has to vie for control of the kitchen with a volatile ghost chef who spills flour all over the floor; at other times (generally those shot in Illusion-O), he uses it as the launchpad for ingratiating spooky imagery, like when Dad meets the ghost of the headless lion tamer. The film looks far better than it ought to, thanks to the contributions of Joseph Biroc, Robert Aldrich’s regular cinematographer, and Edwin H. Bryant’s editing is coherent and professional, which is more than you can say about the editing in most of the cinema as sideshow attraction being made today. Castle may fail to rein in the cloying gee-whiz energy of Charles Herbert, who plays Buck (indeed, you might find yourself wanting to throttle the kid), but then, you don’t go to 13 GHOSTS expecting I WAS BORN, BUT… (1960, 85 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
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William Castle’s MR. SARDONICUS (US)
Sunday, 7:15pm and Wednesday, 9:30pm
It feels appropriate that William Castle came across the story on which MR. SARDONICUS is based, written by Ray Russell (who also wrote the screenplay), in Playboy magazine… while on vacation with his family in Hawaii. (I guess some men really do read it for the articles! And on vacation, no less.) Castle seems like one unlikely to pass up a good story, as well as one unlikely to pass up a good gimmick; but, at this point in his career, Castle was reportedly tiring of the gimmicks. “Besieged with the same question from theatre owners and audiences—’What’s your next idea?’—and now being crowned ‘King of the Gimmicks,’ I decided it was time to try to abdicate my throne.” With this film however, the abdication proved to be short-lived, though the gimmick is decidedly less prominent. More on that later. Set in the late 19th century, the story centers on a prominent London physician (Ronald Lewis) who’s requested, at the behest of his former love, Maude (Audrey Dalton), to visit the fictional central European country of Gorslava where she and her husband live. The latter is the titular Mr. Sardonicus (Guy Rolfe), a cruel baron who dons a terrifying mask to hide a ghoulish face—pun intended, as it’s the question of ghouls existing that frames the story, literally, with Castle appearing in person at the beginning to provide a definition of the word, and then within the story itself to introduce the primary horror—which occurred upon the occasion of him grave robbing his own father. Sardonicus has prompted his wife to solicit the doctor in order to see if the man could cure his disfigurement, which has caused his face to be set in an eternal, macabre grin (à la  its horror predecessor, Paul Leni’s THE MAN WHO LAUGHS), resembling that of his father’s withering corpse. The horror here is genuine, with the gimmick being not only secondary within its structure but also to the overall terror of the story and its execution, which is solidified by Burnett Guffey’s atmospheric cinematography. (Guffey shot Castle’s HOMICIDAL from the same year; it also had a lighter gimmick, allowing for patrons to receive a refund if they were too scared and needed to leave the film early.) This film’s gimmick—precede no further if you’d like to be surprised, as it occurs at the end of the film—involves the baron’s comeuppance once his malady has seemingly been cured, after which he’s affected by a new ailment, another psychosomatic condition that prevents him from opening his mouth at all, meaning he can’t eat or drink. The baron’s servant (Oskar Homolka) learns this from the doctor, who tells him to advise the baron that it’s all in his head; the gimmick, then, for which Castle appears on screen to collect votes as to what the servant should do, thus deciding Mr. Sardonicus’ fate. When the film was first released audiences were given glow-in-the-dark cards with a thumb on it (which they could activate using Activation Booths in the theater lobbies), allowing for them to hold it up or down. On screen Castle appears to tally votes, pretending even to interact with the audience. In his autobiography, Castle claims that two endings were shot, inspired by Columbia’s dissatisfaction with the original (and probably ultimate) ending that finds Sardonicus unable to open his mouth, which they deemed too dreary. This prompted the gimmick to allow for audiences to apparently decide Sardonicus’ fate. “Invariably, the audience’s verdict was thumbs down. It’s always amazed me just how bloodthirsty audiences are. Contrary to some opinions (just in case the audience voted for mercy) we had the other ending. But it was rarely, if ever, used." (Also, to lure audiences, theaters would have loudspeakers blaring a recording that asked audiences, “Have you ever envied the thrill-hungry Roman crowds in the Circus Maximum who, with a wave of the thumb, could make life or death decisions that sealed the fate of many a gladiator?” Perhaps the real horror is anyone wanting to wield that kind of power, even imaginarily.) No proof of this merciful ending exists, however, with Dalton even denying so in an interview. It seems everyone had a lot of fun on set, with Castle going so far as to say that the sheer joy of making it also made it one of his personal favorites. From Playboy to sheer joy, it’s kind of hard to believe that so much horror, representative of the human condition, exists in between! (1961, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
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Each screening is preceded by a 5 minute original horror show by Matt Carr.

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Hou Hsiao-hsien's MILLENNIUM MAMBO (Taiwan/France)

Siskel Film Center — See Venue website for showtimes

After its premiere at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, Hou Hsiao-Hsien cut MILLENNIUM MAMBO by about 15 minutes, excising much of the subplot in which the young heroine, Vicky (Shu Qi), travels to northern Japan on a whim. This passage makes a great impression in the subsequent version, even though—or perhaps because—it seems so fleeting. The heroine registers the change in landscape enough to comment on it in her narration, but she doesn’t internalize it; maybe it’s a result of having felt so transient for so long. In any case, the Japanese visit doesn’t interrupt the film’s hypnotic flow, which is tied to both Vicky’s experience (as a passive, drug-addled raver in turn-of-the-millennium Taipei) and the techno music that drives the soundtrack. Hou’s perspective feels detached in MILLENNIUM MAMBO, despite the fact that he shoots much of the action in medium shot and frequently moves the camera to observe people in motion. That he and screenwriter Chu T’ien-wen have Vicky narrate the story from ten years in the future heightens one’s sense of distance. Adding a layer of mystery to the story, Vicky doesn’t divulge what she’s doing in 2011; one simply gathers that she’s a different person at this point and that she views her young adulthood with feelings of loss. Her experience as a young adult is certainly lamentable: a high school dropout, she moves to Taipei with her boyfriend Hao-Hao to immerse herself in the city’s rave scene. Hao-Hao is often high and abusive, driving Vicky to flee their tiny apartment and take solace with an older gangster named Jack (who may care for her, but doesn’t try to convince her to leave her boyfriend for good). She returns to Hao-Hao a few times, however, drawn to him by some mutual self-annihilating impulse. That impulse provides the film with its dark heart—it’s a movie about the desire to lose yourself and the emotional baggage you still can’t get rid of in the process. Screening as part of the 25 For 25 series, revisiting standout titles from the Siskel's State Street history. (2001, 101 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Soi Cheang’s MOTORWAY (Hong Kong)

Siskel Film Center — See Venue website for showtimes

Produced by legendary Hong Kong action director Johnnie To, Soi Cheang’s MOTORWAY is an impressive car chase film, harmonizing energy with a grounded and moving character study. Traffic cop Cheung (Shawn Yue) is an impulsive and car-obsessed rookie who’s working with Lo (Anthony Wong), a seasoned officer who’s ready for retirement. When a criminal from his past escapes prison, Lo’s interest in the job returns as he begins to pass on his knowledge to Cheung. This emotional buddy-cop narrative only serves to make the scenes of action all the more heightened. The bright sheen cinematography typical of this period of action films is tempered by the smokey exhaust of the cars, with some shots unexpectedly artistic. MOTORWAY’s most exciting elements come from Cheang’s use of camera, not just in its capture of the cars themselves but from the cars’ own perspectives. There are arresting POV shots from front and back windshields and the dashboard as well as fixated close-ups of things like the gear stick and the speedometer, all captured with a jittery, drifting energy. The film’s careful, however, never to fully land on a complete fetishization of these vehicles; these cars are tools rather than stand-ins for something more than the characters’ personal drives. This is strikingly evident in the final emotional chase scene, which occurs over a beautiful transition of driving in a cityscape from night into a breaking dawn. Screening as part of the Vroom, Screech series. (2012, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

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

Comfort Film at Comfort Station (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave.) — Wednesday, 8pm

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

Abbas Kiarostami's WHERE IS THE FRIEND'S HOUSE? (Iran)

Alamo Drafthouse — Monday, 12:30pm

Abbas Kiarostami's WHERE IS THE FRIEND'S HOUSE? is compact in it's run-time and narrative range—it's a brief film with few characters and little narrative complexity—but is luxuriant with its poetry, cinematic inventiveness, and grace. The story is simple. Eight-year-old Mohamed keeps forgetting his school notebook, and if he forgets it again the schoolteacher will have him expelled. Our humble hero, Ahmed, accidentally takes Monhamed's notebook after class and has to journey to return the book, facing troubles from the terrain and unsympathetic adults. The little visual and narrative rhymes that pop up throughout the film are typified in the first moment of the film. For many mysterious minutes, the films credits roll over the swinging worn-blue door of the schoolhouse, a little later a handyman installing new doors provides the most frustrating and insensitive conflict for the young Ahmed, then a blue door returns to give Ahmed hope that he has found the right house, and during a nighttime odyssey through the neighboring town those new doors create a beautiful nocturnal light-show on the walls of the strange town. The modest door imagery is heightened with poetic simplicity, and an equally modest shoe is imbued with comedic potential. Ahmed is criticized for his shoes by his exasperated grandmother; he has a bit of naive slapstick getting the shoes on and off throughout, and late in the film one of the kindly adults he encounters is granted a moment of beautifully framed Chaplinesque action as he takes off his shoes to go upstairs. The child's viewpoint is privileged throughout the film, as adults become disembodied behind laundry and mules and brush. All of Kiarostami's considerable strengths are here—getting compelling work from nonprofessional actors, achingly gorgeous and striking landscapes—to create a plainspoken and undeniable masterpiece. A KidsCamp screening. (1987, 84 min, DCP Digital) [Josh B Mabe]

Orson Welles’ F FOR FAKE (France/Iran/West Germany)

The Davis Theater — Tuesday, 7pm

If THE TRIAL (1962) was Orson Welles’ way of telling the world he was the greatest filmmaker when it came to lighting a shot, then F FOR FAKE was the film where he crowned himself Emperor of Montage. A dizzying mix of documentary, self-portrait, and metafiction, the film brings together (almost entirely through editing) an array of fascinating figures: world-famous art forger Elmyr de Hory; his biographer Clifford Irving, who also created the notorious fake interview with Howard Hughes in 1970; Hughes, whom Welles muses on in one of the film’s many digressions; Welles himself, whose early career comes under consideration; Pablo Picasso, who serves as the mysterious man of wealth and power who always turns up in a Welles picture; and Welles’ then-muse Oja Kodar, who gets to model some sexy outfits. It often feels as though Welles is putting the movie together as you watch it (literally—he sometimes appears seated at an editing table), even though F FOR FAKE may be the most intricately plotted thing he ever made. The film’s deceptive simplicity is in keeping with its theme of trickery, with cinema representing the greatest trick you can ever pull on an audience. Welles makes the connection explicit at the start of the film when he performs some magic tricks (he must have been on a roll after making GET TO KNOW YOUR RABBIT [1972]), but it’s implicit in his affectionate portraits of de Hory and Irving, who, like Welles, have a great talent for fooling people. In particular, de Hory’s ability to effectively imitate any number of great artists raises the question of authorship in art, since even museum curators and other so-called experts could be tricked into believing his forgeries were authentic. F FOR FAKE reaches its climax with Welles’ poetic reflections on the cathedral at Chartres, which he argues is the most beautiful work of art in the Western world. No one knows who built the cathedral, he asks, but does that matter if so many people derive meaning from it? It would take way too long to explain how Welles winds up at such profound questions after starting with magic tricks and a silly “girl watching” episode; suffice it to say, the inventive logic that connects these different points is the stuff of art. Screening as part of the Staff Picks series. (1973, 89 min, 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Ben Sachs]

Krzysztof Kieslowski's THREE COLORS: WHITE (France/Poland/Switzerland)

Siskel Film Center — Tuesday, 6pm

The second installment in the Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy takes a lighter tone than the first and third. Following Karol Karol (a bumbling Zbigniew Zamachowski) as he seeks the love and then the downfall of his ex-wife (Julie Delpy), the Polish filmmaker crafts an anti-romance, a series of convoluted situations that aren’t actually that funny. He doesn’t intend to play these moments for laughs, but rather gives the audience a straight-laced version of a dark, absurdist comedy. Though WHITE has become the most forgotten of the trilogy, it lands its affecting blows near the end of the story, never opting for cheap twists or decisions that run contrary to the behavior of its central character. Zamachowski gives a slight performance as Karol, a man destined to lose even as he’s winning, and Delpy fills in the gaps in her limited screen time, always a welcome presence in any movie. But this film is a chance for Kieslowski to once again prove his ability to contort expectations and offer up something new in a vein that many of us can recognize. In WHITE, he’s reshaping our idea of the romantic comedy, putting forward a portrayal of love that’s far different than what was common in hits of the 1990s. WHITE isn’t the funniest film, or the gushiest, but it still has heart and appeal, even in a drab color palette and a disheartening story about the power and perils of love. Screening as part of the Contact Zones: Cinema of Globalization, 1989–2024 lecture series. (1994, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Frank]

Brian De Palma's CARRIE (US)

Alamo Drafthouse — Friday, 3:45pm and Monday, 10pm

The strange CARRIE finds De Palma in a mode of perpetual discovery, movement, and defilement. In the film's now-legendary second scene, Carrie White, High School senior, cleans her thighs in the shower after P.E. class. She drops her bar of soap, and we, but not she, see it bounce off the tiles at her feet only to be replaced by a stream of blood filling her hand. After a moment, she gazes into her palm, and we see her fingers in close-up, cupped and dripping with menses. For Carrie, it is a moment of unspeakable horror—she wails like a beast for someone to help her—a horror of sudden knowledge: her body isn't what she thought it was, is in fact terrifyingly unruly where it ought most be domestic. Her blood has revealed her body to be a thing she cannot recognize, a thing we and Carrie are soon to see has a power that, like her first period, is uncontrollable, bloody in effect, and invisible in source. This moment becomes the structuring conceit for both the film's thematics and its style: nearly every shot finds space operating as on the principle of the jack-in-the-box, showing us what we expect to see but in a different place or way than it ought to be. While punishing her daughter for daring to enter sexual maturity, Carrie's religious fruitcake mother works with an antique sewing machine in a forced deep-focus composition made possible by the split-field diopter. It is a deeply uncomfortable shot, with the mother framed far to the right and a vast and preternaturally focused empty kitchen behind her. Suddenly, Carrie emerges through an unseen door into that kitchen. Two shots later, Carrie is weeping in a medium shot, but in a mirror: De Palma has faded from the woman, still at work making clothes, to her daughter's face in reflection such that Carrie's image has exactly replaced that of her mother's head. These slightly off revelations repeatedly reveal hidden filths, corruptions, or hatefulnesses we hadn't access to before: a hurtful graffito, a murderous parent, a bucket of blood. CARRIE begins and ends not in blood but in bleedings, horrifying transfers of what we keep desperately contained within our bodies at all cost, and as such it is a film that itself metaphorically bleeds, spreading though every crevice of its diegesis, mapping out the creepily familiar and labyrinthine space of monstrosity. (1976, 98 min, DCP Digital) [Kian Bergstrom]

Brian De Palma's BLOW OUT (US)

Alamo Drafthouse — Friday, 10pm and Tuesday, Noon

The tides of auteurist reputation seem to be turning away from BLOW OUT and toward CARLITO’S WAY as De Palma’s finest achievement. Not, as they say, that there’s anything wrong with that; CARLITO is an undersung triumph and is held in special esteem by the director himself. But BLOW OUT remains De Palma’s signature moment, the nexus of so many strains of his directorial temperament: the longstanding fascination with technology blooming into fullest mastery of the filmmaker’s toolkit, the use of lens and angle to force the viewer into a way of seeing; the political bent of his young career metastasizing into a vision of macro- versus micropolitics no less despairing for their couching in pop thriller verities. John Travolta’s Jack Terri, a sound man reduced to working on T&A bloodbath B’s who finds himself front and center in an assassination conspiracy, seems like Keith Gordon’s whiz kid from DRESSED TO KILL now grown up, ostensibly wised up, but marinating in cynicism. He’s too young to be this beaten up, but beaten he is, phoning it in at the job, taking weakish jabs at the political operative who wants him to disappear after fishing escort Nancy Allen out of a river-sunk Presidential candidate’s car. Travolta is marvelous, by turns giving and withdrawn, petty and playful—a wounded romantic if ever there was one. (Vilmos Zsigmond’s cinematography is rightly renowned for its inky blacks, split diopters, and bravura 360-degree moves, but the cherry on the sundae is his lighting of his star’s eyes, which reaches Golden Age heights of expressiveness.) Travolta here embodies an underreported trait of De Palma’s—his deeply felt political sense, a foursquare sense of right and wrong that runs through his career from HI, MOM! to BLOW OUT, the furious CASUALTIES OF WAR, and REDACTED. Travolta processes every deception as a personal affront, and proceeds as such, bringing his technical prowess and sheer cussedness to bear, to the point of finally using Allen as bait to expose the conspiracy. The movie was originally to be called PERSONAL EFFECTS, and it never strays far from that title’s resonance. Travolta and Allen’s give and take, their flirts and terrors, their romance that dies aborning, is among the sweetest and saddest things you’ll ever see. (Allen is every bit the screen presence as Travolta, or at least as nearly beloved of the camera. Her comic timing is impeccable, and her character’s upshot heartbreaking.) BLOW OUT is, along with THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, the finest of modern American romantic tragedies, released at point in time when the moviegoing public had no inclination to buy tickets for such bitter pills, no matter how expert and tantalizing their coating. But what remains is that De Palma-ness: the whiz-bang and the mourning, the fetish and the hard truth, the sex and the lie. With Dennis Franz, John McMartin, and a scarifying John Lithgow. (1981, 108 min, DCP Digital) [Jim Gabriel]

Olivier Assayas' PERSONAL SHOPPER (France)

The 400 Theater — See Venue website for showtimes

PERSONAL SHOPPER continues to explore themes that run throughout Olivier Assayas' oeuvre, especially CLEAN (2004) and CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA (2014). Much like CLEAN, which starred Maggie Cheung, the film centers on an isolated, inward-facing character recovering from trauma in the city of Paris. Much like CLOUDS, the film stars Kristen Stewart, who plays a personal assistant (specifically in this case, a personal shopper) to a glamorous actress entrenched in the world of celebrity and fashion. Unlike CLOUDS, however, PERSONAL SHOPPER delves into the world of the assistant, and the single-name celebrity, Kyra (Nora von Waldstätten), is seen rarely. Kristen Stewart commands almost every second of screen time, much like Maggie Cheung does in CLEAN. Drawing comparisons among these three films is helpful in finding more depth and meaning in PERSONAL SHOPPER, which suffers in some ways from a meandering, underdeveloped screenplay that elicits accidental laughs and does too much juggling of tone to strike a resounding emotional chord. Assayas called the movie a "collage," but unfortunately the collage is uneven in execution, despite an incredibly impressive performance from Stewart. Apart from the unevenness of the screenplay, the movie has many interesting aspects, and one of the most inspired is allowing Kristen Stewart to do things without being highly sexualized and without speaking. She emotes in a subterraneously explosive manner, indicating the enormous tension within her character without overtly emoting. It's surprisingly captivating. PERSONAL SHOPPER vacillates between several genres, from dark comedy to coming-of-age to psychological thriller, and lastly to horror. The reason the film vacillates so much is due in part to the actual plot: Maureen (Stewart) is a personal shopper by day, and a medium on nights and weekends, mourning her dead twin brother who said he would send her a sign from beyond. She is in Paris for an indefinite amount of time, putting off her own life, and existing as something of a ghost herself, just waiting. Because the movie accepts the existence of ghosts as a given, it turns into a psychological thriller (revolving around an exchange of text messages with an unknown number who may or may not be Maureen's brother...it gets old, fast, watching text messages pop up on a screen), and then a spooky horror (by far the weakest element of the movie), while exploring elements of Maureen's character in quieter, sadder, less suspenseful scenes, hinting at depths the movie never quite reaches. Critics have disagreed widely in their reviews of the film, and it is easy to see why, but it is still highly recommended to see the film for yourself and wonder what this could have been with a stronger screenplay, given how fascinating it is to watch already. (2016, 105 min, DCP Digital) [Alex Ensign]

Helen Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s LET THE CORPSES TAN (France/Belgium)

Alamo Drafthouse — Wednesday, 9:30pm

This is the third genre bending feature film by the married writer/director team of Helen Cattet and Bruno Forzani, whose two prior features, AMER (2009) and THE STRANGE COLOUR OF YOUR BODY’S TEARS (2013), upended and de/reconstructed the giallo film. This time we have an absolutely perfect re-imagining of both spaghetti westerns and the poliziottechi films of 1960s and 70s Italy. The filmmakers’ masterful grasp on the mechanics and aesthetics of Italian exploitation cinema makes this film feel like a movie out of time—a Sergio Corbucci or Fernando Di Leo film, but instead of their populist vulgarisms, here there is a conscious attempt at artfulness. The plot of CORPSES is pure poliziottechi: a gang of criminals heist a truck full of gold ingots and then go hide in the remote mountainside dwelling of a hermetic artist and her alcoholic former lover. Once the police get involved, and the thieves’ den is under siege, we start to see the rats scatter with series of double crosses. The film ignores linear storytelling, constantly cross-cutting through time and space, in order to show the reactions of different characters to the unfolding events. To be fair, the plot does get somewhat convoluted. It’s sometimes hard to keep track as to who is turning on whom, especially when jumping back and forth in time. But to make up for this Cattet and Forzani bewitch the audience with some of the most beautiful on-screen imagery in recent years. This film drips with style. Every shot meticulous, every angle calculated, every edit so precise that you completely forget the muddled story line. This movie is cool. It’s cool like BREATHLESS is cool. How Andy Warhol is cool. It’s a cool that is so meticulously combed over and presented that it comes off as completely natural and effortless. It’s a beautiful, beautiful lie. LET THE CORPSES TAN is a movie that Quentin Tarantino wishes he could make. If not Tarantino, at least his cadre of ultra-fans. It borrows the same kind of pastiche/homage of European B-films that Tarantino loves to stitch his films together with, but with far less vulgar winking at the camera and obvious elbow nudging to trash cinema connoisseurs. Thank god. Though in the same style, this film actually has some restraint. And I say that knowing how much blood and urine it puts on the screen. The filmmakers understand that crisp plot was often beside the point of the films that LET THE CORPSES TAN borrows from, so here plot is a device to get you from one gorgeous shot, one breathtaking scene, to the next. A heist leads to a shoot-out, leads to a double cross, leads to violent death. Because we already know all this, we can just sit back and let its lusciousness wash over us. LET THE CORPSES TAN purposely keeps you at arms’ length. It wants you to watch, admire, be seduced by its cruel beauty. If you want a Michael Mann-esque taught, procedural heist, look somewhere else. But if you want to gorge yourself on a Dionysian feast of beauty and style, where blood becomes paint, sand becomes canvas, and aesthetics conquer all, you can’t do much better than this. Screening as part of the Weird Wednesday series. (2017, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s THE SAMURAI AND THE PRISONER (Japan)

The Davis Theater — See Venue website for showtimes

In the winter of 1578, samurai Araki Murashige betrayed the legendary Oda Nobunaga. Murashige fortified his clan within the walls of Arioka Castle as Oda’s grip tightened on surrounding lands. The real-life Oda, the “Great Unifier” of Japan, known more appropriately as “Demon King of the Sixth Heaven,” began a campaign of unification amid the political upheaval of the Sengoku period. At the opening of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s THE SAMURAI AND THE PRISONER, Oda sends his brilliant war strategist Kuroda Kanbei to inform the rogue samurai of his impending doom. Murashige seizes Oda’s man, throwing him in the dungeon to rot. As the samurai continues to strategize his people’s survival, a series of murders amplifies the distrust and superstition. To maintain order, the rebellious nobleman must find the killer. Aggravating nonconformity, Murashige turns from Kanbei’s inquisitor to counselee. Adapting Honobu Yonezawa’s novel, Kurosawa desired to understand the internal motivation of real-life historical figure Araki Murashige. The director expressed, “I was always curious as to why he was compelled to first betray Oda, but then also why he decided to run away.” Historians label Murashige as a coward who abandoned his people in a very un-samurai like fashion. A worthy addition to the canon of Japanese period films, SAMURAI is a remarkably still jidaigeki war drama—with a lengthy runtime consisting largely of people talking in rooms. SAMURAI feels most akin to Umberto Eco’s groundbreaking novel, The Name of the Rose. Much like that book, SAMURAI challenges audiences with countless names, relationships, and cultural references scarcely repeated, conveyed primarily via conversation. Kurosawa consciously adopts the filmmaking of his predecessors, as the genre demands a tableau approach. To situate an audience in Murashige’s world, all the parts must equal the whole. Period films require more suspension of disbelief compared to contemporary; costumes, architecture, and props hold equal weight to an actor’s facial expression. The filmmaking employs wide angle master shots to smoothly marry environment, character, and story as one image—a large reason why Kenzi Mizoguchi and Akira Kurosawa's jidaigeki have so few close ups. While the form may reflect that of 16th century Japanese art, the content reflects contemporary attitudes. Kurosawa stresses filmmakers have no idea what normalcy meant for warriors of the Sengoku period. Contemporary actors deliver lines from a script written by a contemporary filmmaker—the camera captures contemporary behavior and speech. The director compromises through an embrace of period costume (wonderfully constructed by Koji Omura and Michiko Koike), and art direction (beautifully designed by Tetsuo Harada). Already with a filmography against convention, Kurosawa’s approach to jidaigeki contains a lot of talking for a war story. The film milks the dramatic tension for all its existentialism and softcore anarchism. Characters repeat the phrase, “Advance to Paradise, Retreat to Hell,” with crescendos of nihilistic cynicism paralleled to growing iconoclasm. The story evolves from murder mystery to chamber drama atomizing religious and military dogma—displaying the breakdown of a ruling class who have long leveraged the existential dread of an underclass. The immediate crisis on the status quo only becomes further exacerbated by Murashige’s noncompliance with samurai protocol, e.g. his refusal to kill prisoners and turncoats. To recognize Murashige’s unorthodox tendency reveals his moral compass and satisfies Kurosawa’s original curiosity. Masahiro Motoki delivers a graceful rendering of the cornered lord, giving a performance so powerful that the director confessed reluctance about cutting within scenes to savor his lead’s achievement. A pearl in a celebrated filmography, this blends traditional form with modern content, structure, and language to recast a subject that endlessly endures. (2026, 147 mins, DCP Digital) [Ray Ebarb]

Ross McElwee’s SHERMAN’S MARCH (US/Documentary)

Alamo Drafthouse — Sunday, 8:45pm and Monday, 3:15pm

There are things about Ross McElwee’s SHERMAN’S MARCH that shouldn’t work, or, at the very least, might not have aged well. That it’s a documentary centered almost entirely on the white, male, heterosexual filmmaker’s search for romance sounds problematic when put in summary. Yet, through McElwee’s unconventional talent as a non-fiction filmmaker working in a distinctly personal register, it transcends its conceit and emerges as a profoundly empathetic, organically idiosyncratic treatise on life and love, both as it pertains to McElwee and, somehow, universally. Setting out to make a documentary about Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea, McElwee instead—one might say “also,” but the personal comes almost entirely to eclipse the historical, the latter becoming a supplement to the former rather than the other way around—ends up detailing his search for love in the American South, from which he hails. The film becomes a compendium of the women he encounters during this extended period of time, and in turn also brief portraits of the women themselves, whose personalities represent a vast range of interests and temperaments. McElwee depicts them almost ethnographically, though still as people rather than merely subjects, his romantic interest in them existing alongside rather than diminishing his curiosity. (To his credit, McElwee doesn’t completely exonerate himself from stereotypically male tendencies. One woman asks that he document her bizarre but nevertheless titillating anti-cellulite exercises and he readily complies; another, he playfully grills on camera about her history of having had love affairs with her linguistic professors.) Some reviews of the film can be disparaging of the women, citing them as being reflective of a shallowness inherent to the South or just generally nutty in unjustifiable ways. McElwee clearly finds them fascinating, as do I—my favorites, so to speak, are those of the anecdotes cited above. The former, Pat, is an aspiring actress who views herself, though somehow not egotistically, as a sort of female prophet (she describes a prospective screenplay in which her head, having been cut off by her lover, who’s also her toxic boyfriend in real life, dispenses wisdom that resonates with the whole world). The latter, Winnie, could be her exact inverse: a linguist working on her dissertation on a remote island off the Georgia coast near Savannah, where McElwee had obtained permission to film material relating to Sherman's campaign. These women embody the kind of attractiveness you see in old photos of your mother or grandmother, natural beauty that now often feels eclipsed by the pursuit of Instagram Face. Sherman is as much a “character” as they are; in one hilarious and edifying sequence, McElwee, having returned home from a costume ball, drunk and still dressed in a Confederate uniform, waxes poetic about the misunderstood general. Dressing as a Confederate soldier wouldn’t be acceptable in such a film nowadays; politics as they relate to the Civil War aren't expressly broached, only facts conveyed, though there’s a contemporary undercurrent pertaining to nuclear war that’s signaled by the film's subtitle, A MEDITATION ON THE POSSIBILITY OF ROMANTIC LOVE IN THE SOUTH DURING AN ERA OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROLIFERATION. This is evoked by longstanding dreams McElwee has of nuclear disaster, stemming from the rare but perhaps accursed opportunity to witness an overwater nuclear test as a boy. It’s a parallel to the concept of total war that Sherman infamously employed in his march to the sea, something McElwee fears becoming more fully realized in the era of nuclear proliferation. This throughline asserts an unexpected symmetry that's become a hallmark of today's facsimiles of the mode he helped pioneer; all of this feels undergirded by a famous assertion from the film, made by one of its most memorable characters, Charleen. She’s desperate to connect him with eligible women, and in doing so becomes frustrated when he doesn’t stop filming to take seriously her matchmaking, screeching at him, "This isn't art, it's life!” Much like life, the film is the sum of its parts, having aged only inasmuch as time has passed since it was made and first released. (1985, 158 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Ross McElwee’s REMAKE (US/Documentary)

Alamo Drafthouse — Sunday, 10am and Tuesday, 3:30pm

In film, auteurism is the consistent inclusion of the personal into work that might otherwise have been generic; ironically, this label isn't generally applied to, say, experimental and documentary filmmakers, whose work is explicitly, and sometimes interminably, personal. The distinction might lie in the lack of impediment to the filmmaker's personal expression. Even so, the ability to be fully personal doesn't automatically make the result successful. Ross McElwee is among the rare documentarians for whom it does—like Jonas Mekas or, from another mode, Joan Didion, his life experiences transcend the corporeal into the offhandedly existential, inspiring in others journeys and realizations of their own. After an almost 15-year break, McElwee has come back with what might be his most personal work yet. Ostensibly a documentary about the making of the narrative adaptation of his own 1986 documentary SHERMAN'S MARCH, it's actually about the death of McElwee's son, Adrian, from an accidental drug overdose in 2016. (In expanding the connection between McElwee and Didion, the latter's own daughter also died from addiction issues. In an interview with the International Documentary Association, he quotes Didion on her daughter's death: "Memories are what you no longer want to remember," something he challenges himself to do in the film.) Outliving a child is an unimaginable grief that resonates universally, and McElwee embraces the discomfort of it, letting something beautiful, if admittedly very painful, arise from this tension. Much of the film is footage of McElwee's family, much of it shot during the making of his previous films—namely IN PARAGUAY (2008), about the adoption of McElwee's daughter, and PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY (2011), which was partially about Adrian's struggles—creating a throughline in McElwee's oeuvre that connects directly to his relationship with his son. The parts about Adrian eclipse anything about the SHERMAN'S MARCH adaptation specifically, and the film becomes, in effect, about McElwee's filmmaking philosophy overall, looking back in order to qualify the present. Ultimately, it is the emotional weight that makes everything else feel secondary; by the end I felt as if I'd known Adrian and lost him as well. (2026, 116 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

📽️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Alamo Drafthouse
In celebration of its 25th anniversary, Rob Cohen’s 2001 film THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS (107 min, Digital Projection) screens several times this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow's 2016 documentary DE PALMA (108 min, Digital Projection) screens Saturday, 9:30pm, as part of the De Palma Summer series.

Luigi Bazzoni’s 1971 film THE FIFTH CORD (92 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday. 9:30pm, as part of the Terror Tuesday series.

Geetu Mohandas's 2026 film TOXIC: A FAIRY TALE FOR GROWN-UPS (168 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday at 12pm. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ The Beach (1703 E. 55th St.)
Jules Dassin's 1968 film UPTIGHT (104 min, Digital Projection) screens Monday, 7pm, presented by the Monday Night Film Club. Drinks and shareable snacks encouraged. 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.

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

⚫ Cinema/Chicago
Ritwik Pareek's 2022 film DUG DUG (105 min, Digital Projection) screens Saturday, 1pm, at the Chicago History Museum (1601 N. Clark St.), as part of Cinema/Chicago's Free Summer Screenings series. Presented in partnership with the Consulate General of India Chicago. Free admission with RSVP. More info here.

⚫ The Davis Theater
Jay Duplass' 2026 film SEE YOU WHEN I SEE YOU (102 min, Digital Projection) screens Friday, 6:30pm, presented by Crying at the Shed. Writer Cayton-Holland, on whose memoir the film is based, will be in attendance for a post-screening Q&A, preceded by a pre-show acoustic set from Bnny. More info here.

⚫ Eyewash Station
For this week's screenings at Eyewash Station, check the calendar here.

⚫ FACETS
Cold Sweat presents the director’s cut of Lars von Trier’s 2013 diptych NYMPHOMANIAC VOLUME I & II on Friday night. Volume I (148 min, DCP Digital) begins at 6:30pm, and Volume II (178 min, DCP Digital) begins at 9:15pm.

James Bobin’s 2011 film THE MUPPETS (103 min, Digital Projection) screens Sunday at 2pm, followed by a “hands-on puppet workshop” at 3:50pm.

The Reel Film Club presents Marité Ugás and  Mariana Rondón’s 2025 film IT WOULD BE NIGHT IN CARACAS (97 min, Digital Projection) on Tuesday at 7pm, preceded by a reception at 6pm and followed by a discussion. 

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.

⚫ Movies in the Parks
The Chicago Park District's Movies in the Parks series continues throughout the summer, bringing free outdoor screenings of Hollywood classics, family favorites, and local films to parks across the city for its twenty-sixth season. Check the Park District website for the full schedule of dates, locations, and titles. More info here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Jane Schoenbrun’s 2026 film TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA (112 min, 35mm or DCP Digital [See Venue website for format]) and Christopher Nolan’s 2026 film THE ODYSSEY (172 min, DCP Digital) continue. See Venue website for showtimes.

James Ross II’s 2025 film PARASOMNIA (85 min, DCP Digital) screens on Friday and Saturday at 11:45pm.

Professor O’s Producing Festival #5 and #6, events that consist of short films followed by a discussion with the filmmakers, takes place on Saturday and Sunday at 11am.

Jim Sharman’s 1975 film THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (100 min, 35mm) screens on Saturday at Midnight. 

Poh Si Teng’s 2026 documentary AMERICAN DOCTOR (93 min, DCP Digital) screens on Wednesday at 6:30pm, followed by a Q&A with one of the film’s subjects, Dr. Thaer Ahmed. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Siskel Film Center
Jane Schoenbrun’s 2026 film TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA (112 min, DCP Digital) and David Alvarado’s 2026 documentary AMERICAN PACHUCO: THE LEGEND OF LUIS VALDEZ (92 min, DCP Digital) both screen throughout the week; Alavarado will be in attendance for the Friday, 6pm, screening of LUIS VALDEZ. See Venue website for showtimes. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Uprising Theater and Cafe (2905 N. Milwaukee Ave.)
Poh Si Teng’s 2026 documentary AMERICAN DOCTOR (91 min, Digital Projection) screens Friday at 5pm and 7pm; Saturday at 5pm and 7pm; and Sunday at noon, 2pm, and 4pm. More info here.

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, Rob Christopher, Ray Ebarb, Alex Ensign, Megan Fariello, Michael Frank, Jim Gabriel, Shaun Huhn, Ben Kaye, Josh B Mabe, Raphael Jose Martinez, Will Schmenner, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky