:: FRIDAY, AUGUST 8 - THURSDAY, AUGUST 14 ::

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

The Music Box 70mm Festival 2025

See below for showtimes

Ryan Coogler's SINNERS (US)
See Venue website for showtimes
What is a film like this doing on Cine-File? While our mission is to champion what I like to call “offroad movies,” SINNERS, I believe, needs our attention. Ryan Coogler, one of the most gifted director-screenwriters working today, has garnered popular acclaim by offering original stories that are wildly entertaining while providing the kind of food for thought that cinephiles used to chew on with every new release. That in itself makes the film an outlier in this age of mostly vacuous retreads and superhero movies. The filmmaker also has come under attack for negotiating a supposedly “extinction-level event” for Hollywood studios by securing final cut, a percentage of box office, and ownership of his film after 25 years. There is nothing unprecedented about this deal, that is, if you’re white. The racist hysteria aimed at Coogler, however, emphasizes the more serious point behind SINNERS—the need for Black Americans to have agency over their own lives and intellectual property. This need is the motivation that propels Coogler’s story. Twin brothers Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan), World War I veterans and Chicago bootleggers, return to their hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1932 after finding that the North was little more than Jim Crow with tall buildings. They make a deal to buy an empty mill to set up their own juke joint, recruit their cousin Sammie (Miles Caton) to play guitar and sing, sign up a local musician legend Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) with the promise of all the food and drink he wants, pluck a large cotton picker (Omar Miller) out of the field to act as bouncer, and line up food and a venue sign from a Chinese couple (Li Jun Li and Yao). With everything set in place, the brothers prepare to open their venture the same night. Little do they know that a trio of white vampires, drawn to Sammie’s music, will show up at their club to “assimilate” them. Coogler takes his time settling us into life in the Mississippi Delta, slowing us down to the pace of life in a hot, rural environment. His return of the prodigal sons shows off the pride they feel and inspire in others, as well as the ruthlessness they learned as war veterans and Capone associates. The no-fuss deals Smoke strikes with his juke joint employees are as efficient and amusing as the touching reunion of Stack with his wife, Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), and grave of their infant son, which Annie sets with a bottle of milk almost daily. His elements of magic realism move beyond vampire manifestations to include a dance floor peopled with Black musicians from every place and era, from Africa to the Bronx, in a celebration of Black creativity and joy that the juke joint revelers easily tap into. The failure of the vampires to gain permission to enter the juke joint thus separates them from that which they hoped to appropriate. SINNERS is teeming with the joy of Black life even in its sorrow and the obstacles faced by its characters in just trying to live their lives with purpose and dignity. The always interesting Jordan differentiates his dual roles beautifully. Caton is a skilled musician and surprisingly affecting actor who has a huge future ahead of him. A final, personal delight for me was seeing Buddy Guy play the elderly Sammie in his own club, named for the woman he got busy with at the juke joint, as he contemplates that fateful night. Having the rare movie that is an authentic cultural expression wrapped in an ever-satisfying horror and revenge fantasy is something to celebrate and encourage. (2025, 137 min, 70mm) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (UK/US)
See Venue website for showtimes
For many, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is not simply a masterpiece, but the apotheosis of moviegoing itself. In no other film is the experience of seeing images larger than oneself linked so directly to contemplating humanity's place in the universe. Kubrick achieves this (literally) awesome effect through a number of staggering devices: a narrative structure that begins at "the dawn of man" and ends with the final evolution of humankind; one-of-a-kind special effects, the result of years of scientific research, that forever changed visual representations of outer space; a singular sense of irony that renders even the most familiar human interaction beguiling; and blasts of symphonic music that heighten the project of sensory overload. It isn't hyperbolic to assert, as film scholar Michel Chion has in his book Kubrick's Cinema Odyssey, that this could be the most expensive experimental film ever made; it's certainly the most abstract of all big-budget productions. As in most of Kubrick's films, the pervasive ambiguity—the product of every detail having been realized so thoroughly as to seem independent of an author—ensures a different experience from viewing to viewing. Much criticism has noted the shifting nature of "thinking" computer HAL-9000, the "star" of the movie's longest section, who can seem evil, pathetic, or divine depending on one's orientation to the film; less often discussed is the poker-faced second movement, largely set in the ultra-professional meeting rooms of an orbiting space station. Is this a satire of Cold War diplomacy (something like a drier follow-up to DR. STRANGELOVE)? An allegory about the limitations of scientific knowledge? Like the "Beyond the Infinite" sequence that makes up most of the film's final movement—an astonishing piece of abstract expressionist art every bit the equal of the Gyorgy Ligeti composition that accompanies it—one can never know concretely what it all means, nor would one ever want to. (1968, 142 min, 70mm) [Ben Sachs]
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Stanley Kramer's IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD
Saturday, 2pm
Bigness does not usually equal greatness. It does, however, in the case of Kramer's gargantuan comedy. It may not be the "comedy to end all comedies" that some of its cultists claim (and why would we want to end all comedies anyway?) but it certainly is an unparalleled achievement; and its vulgar vastness can only really be appreciated on a huge screen. (And a formidable sound system; Ethel Merman was scientifically engineered to put tweeters and woofers through their paces.) During Saul Bass's opening credits, a cartoon hand mischievously shuffles and reshuffles the names of the cast. It's this sheer conglomeration of star power and the ways in which the comedians are continuously rearranged into new star clusters that are the movie's chief delights. Milton Berle and Terry-Thomas slugging it out. Jim Backus and his devotion to Old Fashioneds. The brief moment of sweetness between Edie Adams and Spencer Tracy at the water fountain. And though some of the special effects are showing their age, the spectacular stunt work and practical effects still hold their own. Yes, they really flew a plane through a billboard. Ernest Laszlo's bold, sun-splashed cinematography evokes early '60s Southern California better than any movie outside of Frankie and Annette. Finally, two words: gas station. (1963, 205 min, 70mm) [Rob Christopher]
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Walt Disney's SLEEPING BEAUTY (US/Animation)
Sunday, 2pm [SOLD OUT]
An oversized, underdeveloped outlier among Walt Disney Productions' animated features, SLEEPING BEAUTY finds its studio at a crossroads with a thorny bramble on one side and a siren's spindle on the other. Over the course of SLEEPING BEAUTY's protracted eight-year production, the American animation business changed radically. The ornate background work that we admire in the earlier Disney features and the shorts from the mid-1930s or the Chuck Jones "Looney Tunes" of the late 1940s had given way to economical imperative of upstart studio UPA: a slanty, stripped-down style that rounded its grubby thriftiness up to an act of modernist non-conformity. The story of studio animation in the 1950s is the struggle to assimilate the lessons of UPA into the house styles that had developed when inkers, painters, and in-betweeners were as plentiful (and as abused) as medieval laborers. It's a tension that's literalized in the very form of SLEEPING BEAUTY—it's Disney's Chartres, built from the blueprints of a post-war bungalow colony. In a "4 Artists Paint 1 Tree," a production featurette that the company finished and released before SLEEPING BEAUTY's completion, Walt himself manfully struggles with the contradiction of celebrating the individual personalities of the artists he's hired to build an assembly-line animation empire. He values their unique creativity, but gently reminds the audience that his employees will always need to sacrifice their flights of creative fancy if they hope to fashion a work of aesthetic-corporate harmony. Alas, SLEEPING BEAUTY brought this formula to its breaking point. The character animation (save Maleficent and her enchanted alter egos) plays as rote and flat as any in the post-UPA landscape. The narrative flow is pokey, too: the antics of the three fairies—color-coded like Huey, Dewey, and Louie, and no more grown-up—achieve the supernatural feat of slowing down a movie that only comes out to an hour and fifteen minutes. But, sweet mother of God, the backgrounds! Largely the work of Eyvind Erle, a painter and greeting card designer sacked from Disney before this feature was finished, SLEEPING BEAUTY's widescreen vistas are among the studio's most durable accomplishments—full-bodied, beautiful, and a winsome justification of the Super Technirama 70 process. Erle's work simply overshadows everything else in the movie—including the score adapted from Tchaikovsky. The characters in the foreground move while the objects in the background remain still, but it's the latter here that embodies the promise of animation. The film begins to resemble a medieval remnant—a collective work whose individual signatures have been worn away with the years—or chiseled off by a jealous taskmaster. Please note this screening is sold out. (1959, 75 min, 70mm) [K.A. Westphal]
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Christopher Nolan's DUNKIRK (UK)
Sunday, 5pm and Tuesday, 7:30pm
Christopher Nolan’s 10th feature film finds the director delving into the past to tell the story of Dunkirk, a moment during World War II in which 400,000 British and French soldiers found themselves cornered along the shore of the Strait of Dover with German forces closing in from all sides. Focusing on the extraction of the British soldiers, the film’s narrative is split into three timelines, from the perspectives of those on land, on the sea, and in the air. The most unique feature here is the differences in time dilation that each of these plot threads experiences—the time scale covering a week, a day, and an hour, respectively. Much like the structuring of Steven Soderbergh’s TRAFFIC, these scenarios are differentiated from one another via distinct tones. Despite being a war film and covering so much material, the film is relatively light on dialogue. Instead, Nolan seeks to create impact through visually stunning detail and intimate camera work. Cameras are strapped to planes, on boats, and to cameraman in the water, creating a deeply immersive experience. As seen throughout his oeuvre, in which he’s been a proponent of on-location shooting and practical effects, the vast beaches coupled with huge warships create a daunting sense of scale. This immensity also helps to create isolation; some of the characters seem but a drop of rain in a storm—an impression accentuated by the use of soft focus during long shots. Hans Zimmer’s score creates foreboding and suspense. Rising and swelling like the sea itself, the music is underlined with the tick-tock of a pocket-watch, driving home the theme of elapsing time. Drawing inspiration from films as diverse as SUNRISE (1927) and SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1998), and building on ideas explored in Nolan’s own films MEMENTO (2001) and INCEPTION, DUNKIRK immerses its audience with its complex, interweaving storylines. (2017, 106 min, 70mm) [Kyle Cubr]
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Jim Henson & Frank Oz's THE DARK CRYSTAL (US)
Thursday, 6:30pm
Though not as charming or funny as any of the GREAT MUPPET movies or its successor, LABYRINTH, THE DARK CRYSTAL is an impressive and immersive feature that still accomplishes a good bit of cinematic alchemy. Henson and Oz decided with this feature to shoot a somber, epic high-fantasy story with not a single human actor. It would be impossible to shoot a movie with Muppets and not inject a little silliness in here and there, though, and the credit for that silliness goes to the character designs and sensational voice acting (most notably by the Chamberlain, a sycophantic and especially grotesque villain). THE DARK CRYSTAL tells the story of Jen, a gelfling (an elf-like creature) who was orphaned by the evil skeksis, hilarious bird-like grotesques that rule the land since the dark crystal was sundered 1000 years ago. The costuming and character design of the skeksis are just perfect. Such an intricate amount of detail went into every nook and cranny of this film, but especially the wrinkles and hideous folds of the withered, avaricious faces of the skeksis. Though the prophecy foretold that a gelfling would bring about the end of the skeksis, they have tried to battle their fate by wiping out the entire race. Little did they know, Jen survived and was rescued by the mystics, many-armed and humpbacked creatures reminiscent of Buddhist monks. A convergence of three suns is foretold and the mystics send Jen on a journey to find the shard to repair the dark crystal and heal the land. Jen's journey takes him through magical landscapes that take full advantage of Brian Froud's art design and the then-flashy technique of optical printing to enhance the enchanting experience. Though the story is not very original, and the script is not witty like LABYRINTH or some of the other later Muppet movies, the charm and splendor of this movie really lies in the painstaking attention to detail. A very dear film from my childhood, as an adult I can return to it and appreciate the care and creativity and joy that was clearly expressed in creating fantastically weird and majestic Muppets, villages, castles, miscellaneous forest creatures and plants, backstory, mystical pictographic language and hieroglyphics, and hideous villains. Like many dark fantasies of the 1980s (RETURN TO OZ and THE SECRET OF NIMH jump to mind), THE DARK CRYSTAL struck a sharp contrast to saccharine Disney animations. Henson and Oz instead drew on the tone and archetypes of The Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, and the result is horrifying and thrilling, as any traumatized 1980's child will testify. The mere fact that Henson was able to make Muppets terrifying and their tragedy heart-wrenching is reason enough to watch this film, but the gorgeous detail in every frame is the real reason to watch it at the 70mm Film Festival. Bring your children with you so that you can traumatize a new generation of loyal Muppet fans. (1982, 93 min, 70mm) [Alex Ensign]

Akira Kurosawa’s STRAY DOG (Japan)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday, 8:30pm

Everyone is begging for things to cool down in this early detective thriller from one of cinema’s undisputed masters, Akira Kurosawa. In some cases, this is extremely literal; barely a scene goes by without a character hectically fanning themselves, seeking the cooling winds of a desk fan or the soothing sensation of a popsicle, anything to control the profuse sweat and exhaustion weighing down their minds and bodies. Throughout his career, Kurosawa would use the weather and climate to literalize emotion and themes. Here, the building panic festering within Detective Murakami (Toshirō Mifune, in one of the first of many collaborations with Kurosawa) manifests as a heatwave affecting all of Tokyo, more characters finding themselves pulled into Murakami’s quest to find the gun that's been stolen from under his nose. Even as his emotional state casts a humid shadow across the city, Murakami often finds himself isolated within the frame, resting in the background or on the sidelines of scenes, his obsession over his mistake casting him aside from even those trying to help him. The spikey energy of Mifune’s character is matched by his crime-solving partner, Detective Sato (Takashi Shimura, another brilliant Kurosawa regular) a veteran of the police force offering a grounded energy to the shaggy dog, episodic quest. Sato assures Murakami that the longer he works as a detective, any and all emotional attachment to the work will drift away, a lesson learned too late in the film’s inevitable violent ending. (1949, 122 min, 35mm) [Ben Kaye]

Éric Rohmer x 2

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – See showtimes below

Éric Rohmer’s PAULINE AT THE BEACH (France)
Friday, 7pm
In 1966, Serge Daney wrote that the chief quality of Éric Rohmer’s early films was “patience… As if the world were nothing but an immense repertoire of lessons of things we’ve never really fully explored.” By the time of his Comedies and Proverbs cycle, Rohmer was best known for his films about attractive youth entrapped in romantic quandaries, particularly in his signature series, the Six Moral Tales, but never beholden to a genre formula. Where the Moral Tales had each followed a simple narrative line, in which a man attached to one woman would stray toward another but finally return to where he began, the Comedies and Proverbs films instead took a single idea each as their point of departure. PAULINE AT THE BEACH opens with the epigraph "Qui trop parole, il se mesfait", a line attributed to the Arthurian poet Chrétien de Troyes that translates as "A wagging tongue bites itself.” This film has a proverb but no moral, for this opening line could be attributed to its title character (Amanda Langlet), a teenager vacationing at the beaches of Manche with her statuesque blonde cousin Marion (Arielle Dombasle). Herself undergoing a divorce and eager to reclaim her freedom, Marion quickly winds up in a love triangle between a heartsick ex, Pierre (Pascal Greggory), and the more sophisticated but manipulative Henri (Féodor Atkine). Very little happens in the course of the plot, which consists mainly of the lead up to and fallout from a single moment of betrayal. When the local boy (Simon de la Brosse) who takes an interest in Pauline gets roped into one of Henri’s deceptions, the film’s dialectic between age and wisdom comes alive, framed by repeat cinematographer Néstor Almendros as a series of deceptively plain blockings and power relations. Patience is Pauline’s chief quality; she watches and waits out the adults around her while their moral justifications and self-flattery reveal themselves as only just. As gorgeous to look at as any of Rohmer and Almendros’ color films, PAULINE AT THE BEACH acts less as a pressurized romantic battlefield than as a lens through which ideals are transformed into experience. Having positioned her from the beginning as a figure of naive yet firm resolve, Rohmer’s philosophical exercise is to question exactly what has happened to his heroine in this period of suspended time: whether her loss of innocence is the beginning of maturity or simply the formation of cynicism. (1983, 94 min, 35mm) [Brendan Boyle]
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Eric Rohmer's THE GREEN RAY (France)
Thursday, 4pm
It's unclear if Rohmer's 1980s Comédies et Proverbs series could have been an improbable influence on Studio Ghibli, but there are more than enough points of comparison with Takahata's ONLY YESTERDAY in the sunny, improvisational, and surprisingly tense LE RAYON VERT (the title is a reference to the optical "green flash" phenomenon sometimes seen on the horizon at sunset). Rohmer here takes the perspective of the antisocial Parisian depressive Delphine (Marie Rivière) during her July vacation, unconsciously seeking a moment of transcendence, constantly struggling to engage with the dismissive conversations and interests of secular urbanity. No other metropolitan auteur has shown more interest in the countryside's tourist economy of recreation and aleatory romance; in SUMMER the seasides stay in the background, as Delphine attempts to transcend the ennui of heteronormative superstition. (1986, 98 min, 35mm) [Michael Castelle]
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Both screen as part of the Éric Rohmer: Four Summer Films series.

Ray Enright & Busby Berkeley's DAMES (US)

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

For those longing for the days when the movie musical was as commonplace as a superhero flick, something like DAMES feels pretty exemplary of what the genre does best; it's a frothy, silly, charming piece of low-stakes entertainment committed to the genre in both its narrative leanness and its visual excess. The comedic setup is both bizarrely knotty and dubiously simple, involving a wealthy conservative benefactor who despises the “immoral” world of musical comedy diverting his $10 million inheritance away from his theatrically-inclined descendant, Jimmy Higgens (Dick Powell), and towards a distant relative who ends up—surprise surprise!—investing said inheritance into Jimmy’s new show, "Sweet and Hot." The hour-or-so leading up to the performance is delightful enough, with director Ray Enright keeping the action light and brisk, Delmer Daves’ screenplay filled with zippy one-liners and enough comic foibles to keep the feature floating along (a particular segue involving trying to procure a rare form of medicine is perhaps the most needlessly diverting). But once we get to the show itself, we find ourselves in musical comedy heaven thanks to the tremendous staging of Busby Berkeley and his commitment to spectacle-driven performance. The songs filling this section are rather thin, a surprise since they come from the songwriting team of Harry Warren and Al Dubin, reuniting with Berkeley after previous collaborations on the previous year’s 42ND STREET (1933) and FOOTLIGHT PARADE (1933). Only the tune "I Only Have Eyes For You" is able to dig its way into your skull as a bona fide ear worm, aided by its accompanying number, where leagues of cutout faces of the actor Ruby Keeler flood the screen. Berkeley’s innate sense of how to use the human body as a canvas for explosive movement and shape is fully realized in the closing number—titled, of course, "Dames"—where chorus girls shed their clothing to fill the screen with innumerable patterns of eye-catching sensational choreography. It’s silly, it’s inane, and it’s just what the movies were made for. Screening as part of the Pre-Code Musicals on Film series. (1934, 91 min, 35mm) [Ben Kaye]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Lawrence Kasdan’s BODY HEAT (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 8:30pm

In BODY HEAT, everything sweats. Not just bodies, tumblers filled with cool iced tea perspire, glass fogs, reflections seem slicker. The film itself looks so hazy, it's as if condensation had gathered on the camera lens during production. Inspired by DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944), BODY HEAT takes place during a Florida heatwave. Shyster lawyer Ned Racine (William Hurt) and Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner), wife of a wealthy businessman (Richard Crenna), cross paths on a boardwalk one evening. They immediately strike up an affair and soon hatch a wicked scheme to do harm to the husband and run away with his money; but as the plan unfolds, double-crosses abound. BODY HEAT remains a quintessential erotic film. Kathleen Turner’s confident film debut, the chemistry that drips between her and Hurt pools into one of the sexiest on-screen pairings since the invention of film. The camera roves over their bodies pressed against one another, it evokes heightened sensation—the type of lust, attraction, and sexual alchemy that makes one feel they might lose their mind in the throes of passion. You know, the type of sex that makes you feel crazy, the type of woman you would risk it all for... Its structure is that of a dream that slowly shifts into a nightmare it's too late to wake up from. BODY HEAT is about the things our bodies do in the wake of extremes: sweat, embrace, come, and sometimes, even kill. Screening as part of the Scorchers series. (1981, 113 min, 35mm) [Olivia Hunter Willke]

Olivier Assayas’ COLD WATER (France)

FACETS – Sunday, 3pm

Olivier Assayas’ study of teen disillusionment COLD WATER ruminates in the liminal spaces of rebellion, with only music as a conduit of unspoken expression. Quiet hums of waiting, disappointed pauses, exasperated sighs, the meagerness and insufficiency of words to explain, all accentuated by a meticulous yet freewheeling playlist. The film follows Christine (Virginie Ledoyan) and Gilles (Cyprien Fouquet), troubled teenage lovers whose insubordination threatens to tear them apart. Despite having different home lives and financial circumstances, they each have a deep well of despondency and little hope for the future. After Christine’s father sends her away to a mental institution after a shoplifting incident, she escapes one night and takes shelter at a high school party in an abandoned building. Commissioned by a French television studio to create an hour-long installment for an anthology titled Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge (All the Boys and Girls of Their Age), Assayas opted to cut an additional feature-length version. Inspired by his own teenage years growing up in the 70s, the film relies heavily on music of that era as cinematic propulsion. The opening scene depicts Gilles and his younger brother fussing with a radio antenna before landing on Roxy Music’s “Virginia Plain,” the inciting incident involves stealing records, and the lightning-in-a-bottle party sequence has kids drunkenly swaying to Leonard Cohen’s “Avalanche” and smoking a pipe to Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out for Summer.” Filmed with a sense of exigency, the camera hovers in medium shots and closeups, fixed on faces. The textured Super 16mm photography captures the greasy hair, clear skin, and pouty lips of the beautifully unkempt, wayward suburban French youth. It's melancholic and wispy realism, a fragile mode to elucidate the internal dissonance of floating through degenerate adolescence. COLD WATER deeply understands the dangerous mixture of longing, urgency, and powerlessness that afflicts the teen mind and the hopelessness of dependence on adults who are powerless themselves. Screening as part of the 50th Anniversary: 5 Films/5 Decades/5 Critics series. After the screening, film critic Patrick Z. McGavin joins FACETS Film Program Director Charles Coleman to discuss the historical and cultural impact of COLD WATER, with a brief audience Q&A. (1994, 92 mins, New 2K DCP Digital Restoration) [Olivia Hunter Willke]

Marcell Jankovics' SON OF THE WHITE MARE (Hungary/Animation)

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

SON OF THE WHITE MARE, the landmark 1981 feature by Hungarian animation prodigy Marcell Jankovics, belongs to an elite echelon of films that includes Lotte Reiniger’s THE ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ACHMED, Walt Disney’s FANTASIA, and Hayao Miyazaki’s SPIRITED AWAY: personal, utterly singular works by visionary artists, which nonetheless tap into something axiomatic about the life-bestowing art of film animation. Though Jankovics is venerated in Hungary with the same intensity as Disney and Miyazaki, SON OF THE WHITE MARE has never been distributed in the United States, until the Los Angeles-based distributor Arbelos Films partnered this year with the Hungarian National Film Institute to present this 4K restoration from the original camera negative. It’s a cause for celebration and an invitation to awestruck contemplation. SON OF THE WHITE MARE is a Modernist fairy tale, a horny Hungarian creation myth, but first and foremost, it is high-calorie eye candy, a showcase for sublime orchestrations of sound, color, and movement. So great are the film’s sensory rewards that, in the first ten minutes, I found myself completely absorbed in the abstract drama of light and shadow, scarcely conscious of the mythological groundwork being laid. (I’d probably love the movie just as much if I watched it upside down by mistake.) A supreme colorist, Jankovics sends pools of bold monochrome around the frame with unlikely elegance, favoring symmetrical compositions that sometimes resemble pop-art altarpieces. His figures are big, flat masses of blue, yellow, red, and green whose contours throb with activity even while at rest. Shading and texture are reserved mostly for the backgrounds, built up with layers of supple watercolors, washes, and aerosols; pause on almost any frame, and you’ll encounter an image whose beauty, ingenuity, and material economy are harmoniously unified. Jankovics claims to have animated a third of the film himself, and his wit and sensibility are stamped unmistakably throughout. But the distinctive aesthetics of SON OF THE WHITE MARE are not quite sui generis: beyond the immediate influences from the world of animation (Disney, the Hubleys, and, yes, YELLOW SUBMARINE), Jankovics draws deeply on decorative and folk-art traditions, as well as on the 20th-century geometric and chromatic innovations of the Bauhaus. This lively tug-of-war between folk and modernist styles extends to the brilliant soundtrack, where dialogues drawn from 19th-century narrative poems of László Arany are treated electronically, accompanied by sound design and a score composed entirely with synthesized sound by István Vajda. While other animated films with electronic soundtracks (like René Laloux’s FANTASTIC PLANET and Piotr Kamler’s CHRONOPOLIS) can feel dated today, there’s something incredibly fresh about the juxtaposition of traditional fairy-tale forms and abstract sound here. Less contemporary-feeling is the narrative itself—a masculinist fable about three dragon-slaying human sons of a divine horse, bound together in a quest to liberate a captive princess and restore order to the world. Jankovics’ treatment of the material distills the cosmological essence of the source material, but regular flashes of phallic symbolism prove that his interest isn’t strictly spiritual per se. Playing on the proximity of the sacred and profane, SON OF THE WHITE MARE reaches back to Hungary’s pagan roots, pointedly braiding its narrative around symbols and totems such as animals, trees, and personifications of natural phenomena. While outwardly nationalistic, this animist appeal also unites Jankovics with Disney and Miyazaki, natural philosophers whose gift for bringing still frames to life has the aura of magic. Sergei Eisenstein observed, in regards to the work of Disney, “the very idea, if you will, of the animated cartoon is like a direct embodiment of the method of animism.” (More colorfully, art critic Dave Hickey called Disney “a freaking pagan cult... promoting a primitive, animist religion dedicated to investing everything with life, to animating everything from teacups to trees, from carpets to houses, from ducks to mice, with the pulse of human aspiration.”) If Jankovics is a great animator, it is not only because he is a peerless stylist and technician; it is because his gift brings him, and us, closer to this Promethean essence of the animated form. Hungary’s pagan history seems like an unlikely subject for a state-sponsored film from a Soviet Bloc country. SON OF THE WHITE MARE was produced under the auspices of the Pannonia Film Studio, the state-run animation studio where Jankovics began working as a teenager in the early 1960s. (Pannonia produced Jankovics’ debut feature, 1973’s delightful JÁNOS VITÉSZ, which was the first feature-length Hungarian animated film, and which is also newly available from Arbelos). Like Poland and the Czech Republic, Hungary was a major exporter of prize-winning animated films to festivals around the world at this time. These works offered an appealing image of state socialism’s creative fertility, suggesting possibilities of form freed from the commercial demands that hindered many artists in the West; they also frequently belied the repressive conditions faced by artists working under Communism. Such is the case with SON OF THE WHITE MARE. As the director explained, his original concept for the film “explored the concept of the recurring nature of time and space. But the studio manager wouldn’t allow [him] to make it because of its anti-Marxist interpretation of time! According to Marxism, time is irreversible.” Yet this instance of censorship simply goes to prove how provocative, or even revolutionary, Jankovics’ pagan symbolism might have felt at the time. Astonishingly experimental and perceptually disorienting, SON OF THE WHITE MARE has frequently been described as “psychedelic,” but I believe the term “shamanic” is more apt. After all, the practice of “taltosism,” or native shamanism, began to reemerge in Hungary in the 1980s not long after its release, significantly gaining in momentum after the collapse of Communism by the decade’s end. Might it be that Jankovics summoned an incipient pagan spirit building up in the Hungarian soul at the time? Perhaps it’s an outlandish thought, but to see SON OF THE WHITE MARE is to be reminded that great works of film art don’t just animate characters on screen—they also animate us. Screening as part of the Animation Adventures series. (1981, 86 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Michael Metzger]

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's CLOUD (Japan)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Genre master Kiyoshi Kurosawa (PULSE, CURE) revisits familiar territory with a modern twist in his latest film, an anti-capitalist techno-horror that criticizes the rising gig economy with a combination of dark humor and violence. Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda) is trying to make some quick money reselling items online at markup. Some success leads him to quit his factory job and he, his girlfriend, Akiko (Kotone Furukawa), and a loyal assistant, Sano (Daiken Okudaira), relocate to a remote mountain home to continue business. But his new life is interrupted by strange visitors; many of Yoshii’s items were fakes or faulty, and his buyers are not happy. His handle, "Ratel," is being called out on online message boards as untrustworthy and a ragtag gang of disgruntled customers are rallying to enact vengeance for being duped in person. The seemingly impersonal internet transaction is suddenly taken very personally. It’s a slow build with a few uncanny moments to start, but CLOUD becomes more intriguing as its themes come into focus. It is a film about the gamification of internet-based commerce, and how that plays out in real life. Repeating shots of Yoshii staring blankly at his computer screen as he waits for his posted items to sell are the most unnerving and effective moments; he appears hypnotized, suggesting both the allure and emptiness of his endeavors. While Kurosawa’s cinematography is steely blue and gray, reflecting the coldness of the internet, Yoshii’s stare implies the online space is also always being internalized by the user, with real-world consequences. (2024, 123 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Christian Petzold's TRANSIT (Germany/France)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6pm

An antifascist German’s desperate flight from Paris to Marseilles as the Nazis start to overrun France becomes a metaphysical journey in which his very identity is subsumed to the needs of the wife (Paula Beer) of a writer who, unbeknownst to her, committed suicide when she abandoned him in Paris. The man (Franz Rogowski) assumes her husband’s identity and lets go of self-interest to secure her transit documents to escape Marseilles, where other refugees are waiting fruitlessly to be delivered from evil. There is much in TRANSIT that will remind viewers of CASABLANCA (1942), thus continuing director Christian Petzold’s riffs on cinematic history—Herk Harvey’s CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1962) and Georges Franju’s EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1960) are clear inspirations for his YELLA (2007) and PHOENIX (2014), respectively. However, Petzold’s source material is Anna Seghers’ Transit, a renowned 1944 novel based on her own experience as a German exile trapped in Marseilles in 1940–41. His recurring themes of the permeability of identity, betrayal, the complex nature of love, and the ghosts that haunt humanity are married to a sympathetic examination of the current refugee crisis in Europe by setting his film in the present and populating it with Arab refugees. By straddling the present and the past, he effectively renders history and our willful amnesia accomplices to atrocity. Screening as part of the Chicago International Film Festival Presents: The (Usual) Auteur Suspects series. (2018, 101 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

David Lean's THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI (UK/US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 12pm

THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI is the original Lean blockbuster, if not the quintessential Lean movie. It certainly embodies the themes and structures that would preoccupy him for the rest of his career. The overwhelming Britishness that is always at the heart of a Lean film is excitingly challenged by the presence of two outsider characters: a rugged, cynical American soldier (William Holden, in a superb performance which ranks alongside his turns in SUNSET BOULEVARD and NETWORK) and a rigid, taciturn Japanese commander (Sessue Hayakawa, using silence more eloquently than dialogue). The trifecta helps the film maintain a perfect balance; sprawling yet tightly told, obsessed with character shading as much as with the lush brutality of the jungle locale, beautifully captured by Jack Hildyard in CinemaScope. It's a damn good action picture that's also as existential as RUNAWAY TRAIN. Screening as part of the Scorchers series. (1957, 161 min, DCP Digital) [Rob Christopher]

Robert Altman Centennial

Gene Siskel Film Center – See below for showtimes

Robert Altman's THE PLAYER (US)
Saturday, 2pm and Monday, 6:15pm
Robert Altman, having successfully brought QUINTET, HEALTH, and O.C. AND STIGGS to the big screen, was perhaps overly familiar with the very special interaction ritual known as the Hollywood Pitch, whose unformalized rules permeate nearly every other scene in THE PLAYER. The prevalence of these consistently awkward interrogations (pragmatically asking: why should your movie exist?) become inevitably redirected to the material on screen, and part of the elegance of THE PLAYER is how it cues into and channels this spectatorial recursiveness. For while there has been many a movie about making a movie, this is the only one firmly lodged inside some scumbag studio VP's (Tim Robbins) head: with nary a camera crew in sight but many, many celebrity faces milling about and making awkward, backstabbing small talk in the background. Thomas Newman's oneiric score of extended dissolve cues, in particular, successfully transforms the narrative into a psychological study, like the fever dream an exec might have on his deathbed, after a career's worth of speed-reading by-the-numbers screenplays penned by anxious, balding dudes in their late 20s. Perpetually ironic and thoroughly unsubtle mise-en-scène provides a steady flow of chuckles, but the film's other theoretical subject—the Hollywood Ending—manages to refer not just (as Hollywood Endings do) to the century past of Hollywood Endings but to the entire structure of the film itself. This is Altman's ANSIKTET—morally ambiguous, self-reflexive in the extreme, questioning the very social foundations of the endeavor of film production—but somehow it can keep the audience grinning as they leave the theater. The cast is primarily a Who's Who ass-kissing orgy, but Richard E. Grant (WITHNAIL AND I) and Cynthia Stevenson are exceptional as a director and young executive who respectively attempt, unsuccessfully, to keep it real in the land of the hyperreal. A unique tradition returns to the Film Center with Cinema Interruptus: THE PLAYER, four days of communal film criticism centered around a single movie. The series will once again be led by Josh Larsen, author and co-host of Filmspotting. After screening Altman’s THE PLAYER in its entirety on August 11 at 6:15PM, participants will gather again at 3:15pm on August 12, 13, and 14 to revisit the movie scene by scene, interrupting with comments and questions along the way. (1992, 124 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Castelle]
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Robert Altman's SHORT CUTS (US)
Wednesday, 6pm
Robert Altman, the great purveyor of omnibus character dramas, reached a pinnacle of a self-styled form in 1993 with SHORT CUTS. Nominally based on nine of Raymond Carver's short stories and a poem ("Raymond Carver soup," as Altman once described it), SHORT CUTS consists of twenty-two L.A. locals who intersect in plots of Carver-esque realism. Where some of Altman's early films like NASHVILLE contained interwoven characters and narratives, these films felt less tightly controlled than SHORT CUTS. The freedom of those earlier films conjured an image of a director on his characters' level, deeply curious about them but indifferent to their choices and outcomes. (Contrast this with Paul Thomas Anderson's heavy-handed MAGNOLIA—a film greatly indebted to SHORT CUTS—where his characters are dealt one cynical blow after another.) Altman's evolution in SHORT CUTS shows more of the tinker--not necessarily superior to his characters but quietly orchestrating them to certain places on certain cues. Characters are less inclined to spontaneity and instead are freighted with a kismet (read: contrived) interconnectedness that is, more than less, natural for the world of the film. Disasters, natural and otherwise, touch everyone in the film and serve as unifying devices, providing thematic resonance to the characters' scattershot, middling lives. At three hours, SHORT CUTS is epic in scale and subject matter, showcasing Altman's brute force brilliance: it isn't always pretty, but damn if it doesn't work. (1993, 187 min, 35mm) [Brian Welesko]

Alice Diop's SAINT OMER (France)

Logan Center for the Arts (at the University of Chicago) – Sunday, 1pm

Acclaimed documentary filmmaker Alice Diop (whose non-fiction work I am not familiar with) made her narrative feature debut with this complex and beautiful character study about two women of Senegalese descent living in contemporary France. Pregnant Rama (Kayije Kagame), a successful novelist and professor of literature, attends the trial of—and becomes obsessed with—Laurence (Guslagie Malanga), a college student of limited means who stands accused of murder after abandoning her baby on a beach at night. The film, which daringly asks viewers to sympathize with a character who has committed a monstrous crime, is based on the true story of Fabienne Kamou, who was arrested for infanticide in 2013 and whose 2016 trial Diop attended. The dialogue is based in part on transcripts from Kamou’s real-life trial, which lends the extended courtroom scenes a rare verisimilitude, but what really impresses here is Diop’s mise-en-scène. Diop shoots Laurence from a different camera angle during each day of the trial, although she never deviates from this angle within each individual scene, lending a near-Bressonian formal rigor to the proceedings. While the technique of shot/reverse shot editing has become synonymous with lazy filmmaking in the modern era (because of how it often removes creativity from the process of shot selection, turning dialogue scenes into simple ping-pong matches), Diop imbues this technique with a fresh relevance: she refuses to show reverse angles when viewers are most likely to expect them, a strategy that eventually pays emotionally devastating dividends during a climactic exchange of glances where one character smiles while another silently weeps. Diop’s final masterstroke is to end the film before the verdict is reached, an unusual touch that recalls the denouement of Fritz Lang’s M (1931). Diop is wise enough to know that hearing a judge proclaim “Guilty” or “Not guilty” would put viewers in the position of agreeing or disagreeing with the judgment, when her real interests have lain elsewhere all along. As Jonathan Rosenbaum remarked on his website, the director has generated enough questions by the end in order “to make a verdict seem either impossible or superfluous.” Screening as part of the Mothering on Screen: Film + Discussion series. (2022, 122 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]

Francis Ford Coppola’s THE OUTSIDERS: THE COMPLETE NOVEL (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Monday, 7pm

THE COMPLETE NOVEL version of THE OUTSIDERS is both a restoration and a reevaluation. Released in 2005, this version isn’t just a “director’s cut,” it recovers Coppola’s original vision and delivers a more faithful adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s 1967 novel. With over 20 minutes of reinstated footage, the film has room to breathe, drawing viewers into its adolescent emotional rhythms. The additional scenes expand the domestic life of the Curtis brothers, reframe the soundtrack, and let the story unfold with a focus on character over plot. Set in 1960s Tulsa, Oklahoma, the narrative follows 14-year-old Ponyboy Curtis, a sensitive Greaser coming of age after the death of his parents. Alongside his older brothers Darry and Sodapop and a tight-knit group of friends, he navigates a harsh class divide: the Greasers, working-class and rough around the edges, are constantly in conflict with the privileged, reckless Socs (short for socialites). When a confrontation turns deadly, Ponyboy and his friend Johnny go on the run. Themes central to Hinton’s novel, including grief, identity, class violence, and found family, are given time and weight in this cut. Shot on location in and around Tulsa, the film gains a tactile authenticity: natural light, familiar neighborhoods, and a lived-in Curtis home enhance the realism and ground the performances. The young cast, many of whom would become major stars, perform with striking intensity and emotional honesty. C. Thomas Howell’s Ponyboy is thoughtful and raw; Matt Dillon’s Dallas simmers with wounded pride and rage; and Ralph Macchio’s Johnny carries the quiet trauma of an abusive home. Each actor hints at a larger inner world even when the script doesn’t spell it out. Coppola’s connection to the story began with a group of seventh graders who wrote to him in the early 1980s, asking him to adapt their favorite novel. After meeting them, he agreed. Though Coppola emerged from Roger Corman’s school of fast-and-cheap genre cinema, he approaches THE OUTSIDERS with reverence, treating Hinton’s text as sacred rather than sensational. Every major scene is intact. The character arcs are honored. Even the stylized violence feels mournful instead of thrilling. Coppola resists the impulse to modernize or reinterpret—instead, he amplifies what’s already there, drawing out the vulnerability of Ponyboy, Johnny, Darry, and Sodapop. These aren’t just kids facing economic hardship; they’re adolescents shouldering the weight of grief and responsibility and building a makeshift family out of loss. The class conflict with the Socs isn’t just about money; it’s about visibility, belonging, and dignity. The film’s emotional core is crystallized in its most iconic line, “Stay gold, Ponyboy,” which was drawn from Robert Frost’s poem "Nothing Gold Can Stay" that Johnny recites. It’s more than a poignant farewell; it’s the film’s entire thesis. Those brief, golden moments of purity like the smell of summer’s freedom, a lingering sunset, or bare feet in grass are all fleeting, but worth holding onto. Teens living on the "wrong side of the tracks" is a theme that dates back to the first adolescent-targeted films. It echoes the tendency of Corman’s films to frame teen hijinks and exploitation as morality tales. OUTSIDERS contains a literary depth that places it in the same lineage as REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955), WEST SIDE STORY (1961), OVER THE EDGE (1979), and STAND BY ME (1986). These are films that treat the complexities of youth with philosophical weight and cinematic care. (1983, 114 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]

Bruno Mattei’s HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD (Italy/Spain)

Alamo Drafthouse – Tuesday, 9:30pm

Sometimes you have to ask yourself, why reinvent the wheel? It’s certainly something Hollywood nowadays asks itself way too often, resulting in myriad sequels, remakes and reboots that lack any semblance of originality, and not just because they’re riffing on already existing “IP.” It’s hardly a new phenomenon, however, though to varying degrees of success; for example, Italian horror during the 1980s was a “cinema of imitation,” with many of its films being remakes of American genre movies. Bruno Mattei’s HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD is one such example, among several films of its era that were either unofficial sequels, such as Lucio Fulci’s ZOMBI 2 (1979), or, like this, loose remakes of George Romero’s popular 1978 film DAWN OF THE DEAD. In terms of quality, it would be hard to claim this is technically better than anything one might see nowadays—the original vision by Claudio Fragasso and Rossella Drudi was apparently much more ambitious but the eventual budget was only a fraction of what would be needed to realize it (though apparently Mattei had also initially envisioned it as a being lighter in tone than Romero’s original)—yet one can’t deny its idiosyncrasies. Obviously similar to DAWN OF THE DEAD (and also featuring music by Goblin, but not an original score; rather it’s a mash-up of existing music from Romero’s film and Luigi Cozzi’s CONTAMINATION, among other sources), it’s largely set in Papua New Guinea amidst an accident at a top-secret chemical research facility that results in the workers turning into flesh-eating zombies. A team of Interpol commandos, fresh off an assignment to eliminate a group of eco-terrorists who had been protesting the research facilities, goes to Papua New Guinea thinking that base has also been compromised and come across a journalist and her cameraman, all eventually having to fend off the zombie uprising. Perhaps the film’s most uncanny quality is the stock footage used to create the effect of it having been shot in Papua New Guinea rather than Spain, including preternatural imagery of wild animals and footage from a documentary about cannibal tribes from the area. Now available in 4K from the original camera negative and in UHD for the first time in the U.S., what’s been called “Euro-trash cinema at its finest” might not necessarily be reinventing the wheel but it does do something altogether different with it. Screening as part of the Terror Tuesday series. (1980, 100 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Toshiya Fujita's LADY SNOWBLOOD (Japan)

Alamo Drafthouse – See Venue website for showtimes

LADY SNOWBLOOD is an enduring classic within a campy genre of blood-gushing Japanese action films from the 1970s and 1980s. Several factors make LADY SNOWBLOOD stand out among these tales of vengeance that mostly chronicled contemporary Yakuza rivalries: it was directed by Toshiya Fujita, who more typically made soft-core films (called "pink films" in Japan) for a major Japanese studio; it starred actor and singer Meiko Kaji, who had starred in several of Fujita's romances; and it was produced independently, which gave both the director and cinematographer free reign to exercise their creativity. Their only constraint was the shoestring budget, which meant that they shot the entire production on only 20,000 feet of film, or a little under four hours. By contrast, most major Hollywood productions were shot on a 10:1 ratio. Filmed on 35mm in Tohoscope (a response to Cinemascope developed by Toho, a Japanese studio), the kinetic and lush cinematography brings high drama and emotional resonance to scenes full of fake blood and drawn-out deaths. LADY SNOWBLOOD was adapted from manga of the same name and tells the tale of a woman raised from birth to be an asura, a demon trained to balance the karma generated by the murder of her family and rape of her mother. Kaji (who also sings the mesmerizing theme song of the film) delivers a steely performance as an assassin trained to subsume all her feelings into her karmic duty. With gritty determination, she hunts down the men and woman responsible for her family tragedy, an unstoppable force set against the 19th-century Meiji era society and stunning coastal landscapes. Many will recognize the film's theme song and Lady Snowblood's character as clear inspiration (or, as some, including this reviewer, would say, shamelessly pilfered) for KILL BILL, which Quentin Tarantino directly referenced and showed to the cast and crew between takes. In addition to re-igniting interest in LADY SNOWBLOOD for a western audience, KILL BILL revitalized Kaji's musical career and encouraged her to put out her first studio album in three decades. Fans of Japanese cinema, good revenge stories, or gratuitously gorgeous epics in the 2.35:1 ratio must see LADY SNOWBLOOD at least once. (1973, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Alex Ensign]

Braden Sitter's THE PEE PEE POO POO MAN (Canada)

FACETS – Monday, 7pm and 9pm

Consider browning out in decadent, idiotic style at a positively ectopic screening of this deranged no-wave transmission from the Toronto indie scene. I would just advise you bring a bucket, a change of clothes, and possibly a trip-sitter for good measure, noting that this film contains sequences that may prove hazardous to your psychic wellbeing if you are squeamish, generally uptight, schlock-averse, emotionally well-adjusted, prone to acid flashbacks, or, in the absolute worst-case scenario, a recovering victim of the MKUltra project. Not unlike Gus Van Sant with his ELEPHANT (2003), Braden Sitter Sr. (who, I feel compelled to mention, does not appear to have a son) has produced a work of speculative true-crime fiction that turns its gaze towards a scene of senseless carnage in a desperate (and likely futile) attempt to situate any meaning within it whatsoever. The film is a shamelessly schizoid inquiry into the case of Toronto's real life Pee Pee Poo Poo Man, who terrorized the city over the course of four days in 2019 by tossing buckets of liquefied feces on random passersby. At first, it seems as though the film is hellbent on fabricating possible answers to the most pressing question posed by the whole debacle: what on earth would possess a man to do this? Was it the overwhelmingly nihilistic result of one too many failed job interviews? Perhaps a life-changingly bad tab of acid? Could it have been a garbled message from God? Or a shockingly straightforward message from the CIA agent who seems to intermittently possess the Pee Pee Poo Poo Man's TV set? Eventually, I did begin to sense a coherent message churning in the deepest recesses of this scatological field of nightmares. Any one of us—cowering subjects of late-capitalism, all—who are more often than not desperately clinging to our sanity, could be one catastrophically bad day away from embarking on a similar crusade of total fecal armageddon. In what proved to be a terrific source of clarity and critical insight, insider sources informed me that Sitter financed his film more or less exclusively by enrolling himself in paid medical experiments at local universities. Make of that information what you will. In the massively unlikely event that any readers are still currently on the fence about seeing THE PEE PEE POO POO MAN, I feel as though I should nod to the film's delightfully Canada-centric cameos from Spencer Rice (of Kenny vs. Spenny fame) and Paul Bellini (from Kids in the Hall). (2024, 79 min, DCP Digital) [David Whitehouse]
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The screening is part of a fundraiser for the upcoming film, LODGERS OF EUCLID, a short film about an occult motorcycle club taking contracts from an unnamed government agency, performing macabre rituals across an industrial port city. T, directed by Tanner D. Masseth and produced by Cine-File contributor Elise Schierbeek.

Kevin Smith's DOGMA (US)

FACETS – Friday, 7pm

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

Amy Heckerling's FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH (US)

Davis Theater – Monday, 7pm

FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH is often remembered for its beyond-iconic imagery and early performances from future movie stars–Sean Penn, Forest Whitaker, and Nicolas Cage, just to name a few. But director Amy Heckerling and writer Cameron Crowe’s first feature is, at heart, an honest and sweet portrayal of sex-obsessed teens just trying to figure it all out. Set to a classic early 80s soundtrack, the film takes place during a year at a San Fernando Valley high school, following a group of teens as they experience lots of firsts. These aren't just sexual firsts, but also first jobs, first loves, first heartbreaks. At the center of the circling narratives is serious Brad (Judge Reinhold), who’s hilariously struggling through his final year of high school, and his younger sister, Linda (a standout Jennifer Jason Leigh) who’s navigating dating and sex for the first time. FAST TIMES stands out among '80s teen comedies through its earnest and unprejudiced representation of a teenage girl’s interest in and experiences with sex. This is grounded by the relationship between Stacy and her best friend, the more worldly Linda (Phoebe Cates), who openly share their experiences with each other; in these scenes the film establishes their interest in sex is as strong and as normal as that of their horny guy counterparts. This continues to be a refreshing take on the coming-of-age film, and still extremely relevant. FAST TIMES’ nonjudgmental depiction of legal abortion was the first I had ever seen portrayed in pop culture. That’s stuck with me more than the music, iconic scenes, and 80s fashions; way beyond its archetypal influence, FAST TIMES remains essential 40 years after its original release. Screening as part of the Big Screen Classics and Spotlight on Women series. (1982, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Francois Ozon's THE CRIME IS MINE (France)

Northbrook Public Library (1201 Cedar Lane, Northbrook) – Thursday, 7pm

In his continuing excavation of film genres and styles, French director and screenwriter François Ozon has turned his attention to Hollywood’s screwball comedies of the 1930s. With exquisite period detail, costuming, and casting, THE CRIME IS MINE offers a madcap look at how the crime of murder pays for destitute actress Madeleine Verdier (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) and her roommate, Pauline Mauléon (Rebecca Marder), a struggling attorney. The plot most closely resembles the musical Chicago, but tips its hat to the silent CHICAGO (1927) by casting Isabelle Huppert as silent screen star Odette Chaumette. With her fright wig of red hair and clothing from the turn of the last century, her rapid-fire line deliveries (she's the only cast member who really achieves the screwball rhythm), and a rapacious disregard for male prerogatives (watch her chew off the end of a sausage with gusto), Huppert offers audiences a master class in comedy. Ozon’s suggestion that Mauléon is a lesbian is intensified by having her wardrobe resemble clothes Katharine Hepburn favored, and Huppert plays with this notion as well. Everything about this film is sheer delight, but Ozon manages to address sexual harassment in the entertainment industry with surprising gravity. And while this may have been accidental, Chaumette’s lament of “Who hides 300,000 francs in a cigar box?” points to former Illinois Secretary of State Paul Powell, who stashed $750,000 in a shoebox in a Springfield hotel room. (2023, 102 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

📽️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Chicago Filmmakers
Group 312 Films, a not-for-profit artists’ collective of digital video directors, presents the 2025 Annual Report, featuring a curated selection of 15 short films by six different filmmakers, on Saturday at 7pm. More info here.

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

⚫ Cinema/Chicago
Pooja Kaul’s 2024 film THE UMESH CHRONICLES (134 min, Digital Projection) screens Monday, 6:30pm, at the Chicago Cultural Center.

Delphine Lehericey’s 2022 film LAST DANCE (84 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday, 6:30pm, at the Chicago History Museum. Both screenings are free to attend but are currently standby only. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Comfort Film at Comfort Station
Lupu Pick’s 1921 silent film SHATTERED (SCHERBEN) (50 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday, 8pm, with a live musical score by Mauricio López F. as part of the Silent Films and Loud Music series and in partnership with the Goethe Institut. Free admission. More info here.

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Leo McCarey’s 1932 film THE KID FROM SPAIN (96 min, 16mm) screens Friday, 4pm, as part of the Pre-Code Musicals on Film series. More info here.

⚫ FACETS
Eva Victor’s 2025 film SORRY, BABY (103 min, DCP Digital) and Celine Song’s 2025 film MATERIALISTS (109 min, DCP Digital) screen this weekend. See Venue website for showtimes.

On Thursday starting at 7pm, Anime Club honors the legendary all-women manga collective CLAMP with a double feature showcasing two of their most visually striking and thematically rich works. Free and exclusive to Film Club Members. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Amy Berg’s 2025 documentary IT’S NEVER OVER, JEFF BUCKLEY (106 min, DCP Digital) begins screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

The 2024 National Theatre Live production of Noël Coward’s Present Laughter (180 min, DCP Digital), directed by Matthew Warchus and starring Andrew Scott, screens on Saturday and Sunday at 2:15pm.

The Chicago Palestine Film Festival Short Films Event takes place Sunday at 6pm.

The August Mystery Movie Monday takes place on Monday at 6pm. More info on all screenings here. 

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

Keizô Murase’s 2024 film BRUSH OF THE GOD (74 min, DCP Digital) begins screening and Ari Aster’s 2025 film EDDINGTON (148 min, DCP Digital) continues. See Venue website for showtimes.

The 2025 edition of CatVideoFest (73 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday at 2:30pm and Saturday and Sunday at 11:45am. 10% of all ticket proceeds will be donated to Red Door Animal Shelter. 

Joseph Kosinski’s 2022 film TOP GUN: MAVERICK (131 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday at 4pm. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts (915 E. 60th St.)
“The Act of Recording is an Act of Love: The South Side Home Movie Project” exhibition is on display in the Gallery through Sunday, August 24. More info here.

⚫ Tone Glow
Tone Glow presents The Body Electric: Six Films By Paul Sharits at the International Museum of Surgical Science (1524 N. Lake Shore Dr.) on Thursday at 7pm. More info here.

⚫ VDB TV (Virtual)
“Dog Days: Superimposing the Canine,” programmed by Cine-File contributor Elise Schierbeek and with films by Jesse McLean, Ken Kobland, and Matthew Lax, streams free on VDB TV. More info here.

CINE-LIST: August 8, 2025 - August 14, 2025

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Brendan Boyle, Michael Castelle, Rob Christopher, Kyle Cubr, Alex Ensign, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Shaun Huhn, Ben Kaye, Raphael Jose Martinez,  Michael Metzger, Michael Glover Smith, Brian Welesko, K.A. Westphal, David Whitehouse, Olivia Hunter Willke