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📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING
Vincente Minnelli’s THE BAND WAGON (US)
Chicago Film Society at Northeastern Illinois University (The Auditorium, Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) – Wednesday, 7:30pm
THE BAND WAGON may be described as a synthesis of the two Vincente Minnelli features that preceded it, AN AMERICAN IN PARIS (1951) and THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL (1952). Like the former, the film is a splendiferous Technicolor musical that ends in an extended ballet sequence; as in the latter, Minnelli plays on his standing as a show business insider to craft a wry, if ultimately positive portrait of the entertainment industry. Fred Astaire stars as a character very much like himself, a famous musical comedy performer who hasn’t had a hit in theaters in about 15 years. (The film begins at an auction of his old film props where no one will buy his iconic top hat.) He goes to New York with a plan to return to his stage revue roots and star in a Broadway show that will revive his career. Helping him out is a married scriptwriting team he’s known for years (Nanette Fabray and Oscar Levant, playing fictionalized versions of the film’s screenwriters, Betty Comden and Adolph Green), who in turn bring in a renowned actor/director (Jack Buchanan) modeled after José Ferrer and Orson Welles. While Astaire may balk at the idea of collaborating with a serious theater artist, the auteur assuages his doubts by telling him how much he loves musical theater, arguing there’s no difference between high and low art if the work makes some sort of impact on the spectator. He may well be speaking here for Minnelli, who brought newfound seriousness and refinement to the movie musical without abandoning the genre’s crowd-pleasing qualities—the scene ends, fittingly, with a breathtaking performance of “That’s Entertainment.” This number is just one of several standouts, each of which features remarkable choreography and mise-en-scène; an early song-and-dance at a penny arcade, the set agog with lit-up attractions, anticipates the climax of Minnelli’s masterful melodrama SOME CAME RUNNING (1958). The piece de la resistance is the concluding “Girl Hunt” ballet, a witty send-up of film noir in which Astaire plays a Mickey Spillane-like detective and Cyd Charisse plays two dangerous dames. It’s in keeping with the film’s attitude toward Hollywood that the ballet isn’t a critique of noir but rather a genial parody that just makes the genre’s conventions seem silly. Indeed, THE BAND WAGON is too enamored with the process of making entertainment for any of the cynical jokes to stick in one’s throat—Minnelli’s optimism casts a shine over the film that’s irresistible. Preceded by Tex Avery’s 1955 cartoon FIELD AND SCREAM (7 min, 35mm). (1953, 112 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
Jacques Rivette's LE PONT DU NORD (France)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Saturday, 3pm and Sunday, 4pm
Two women, a chance connection and two-plus hours of time in which to flesh out the endless possibilities—a task that has been taken on by Jacques Rivette at least twice in his acclaimed career. Though CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING is the more well known of such films by Rivette, LE PONT DU NORD is it's thought-to-be-lost sibling: Marie and Baptiste, just enough alike to be compatible and just different enough to provide for some tension, embark upon a city-wide adventure after being enticed by the likes of a mysterious briefcase and its labyrinthine documents. Despite their similarities, CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING was almost entirely a silly spoof while LE PONT DU NORD tackles a more serious tone. In an article for the Village Voice, Scott Foundas remarked that the latter film embraces "the conspiratorial overtones of film noir standing in for Henry James," a hallmark of the former film's absurdist storyline. Much like many of Rivette's films, LE PONT DU NORD is highly improvisational and representative of his democratic filmmaking tendencies; the actresses who play the main characters had a substantial role in developing the script and turning the pre-production material into its extemporized result. Shot on 16mm, the film also consists entirely of exterior shots. Some sources say this was deliberate, while others say that it was merely cost effective. The answer likely lies somewhere in between, because while Rivette may have had to be conservative with his budget, he certainly never scrimped on quality—or length. Screening as part of the Board Picks series. (1981, 129 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]
Kenji Mizoguchi’s THE STORY OF THE LAST CHRYSANTHEMUM (Japan)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm
Kikunosuke (Shôtarô Hanayagi), the adopted son of famous kabuki actor Kikugoro Onoue (Kinnosuke Takamatsu), is expected to carry on the long line of Kikugoro kabuki masters, but his acting leaves a lot to be desired. Feeling seen and appreciated by Otoku (Kakuko Mori), the wet nurse of Kikugoro’s newborn son who encourages him to perfect his art, Kiku seeks to marry her. When his father forbids the union and Otoku is sent away, Kiku leaves Tokyo to learn his craft. Otoku eventually joins him in his hard life as an itinerant actor and helps him prove to his family that he is ready to be the next Kikugoro. Sadly, Otoku does not live to see this goal realized. That, in a nutshell, is the plot of Japanese film giant Kenji Mizoguchi’s first masterpiece, THE STORY OF THE LAST CHRYSANTHEMUM. Based on a fictionalized version of a true story that was adapted as a popular shinpa play, the film indulges the shinpa ethos of combining traditional material with whiffs of Westernization that came about during the Meiji era of the 1880s, the period during which the story is set. Fittingly for a film about the theatre, one feels as though one is watching a play. This feeling is literal during the film’s three kabuki performances, most famously the eight-minute-long excerpt of a seventeenth-century kabuki drama during which Kiku is triumphant as a female courtesan who is transformed into a cherry tree who must avoid a woodcutter’s axe. But Mizoguchi’s choice to eschew cuts and shoot almost the entire film using medium shots, tracking shots, and out-of-frame action that mimics how one might pan across a stage to catch various moments creates the sense of watching the story in real time. To modern eyes, this shooting style is both ingenious and a bit tedious, though the distancing effect one would experience with, say, a work in the epic style of Bertolt Brecht never really takes hold. The story’s emotionalism is riveting, which I attribute to the immediacy of the way the tale unfolds and to Mori’s compelling performance as one of Mizoguchi’s trademark determined, but doomed women. He also gives the film a lived-in feel that brings us closer to the characters by taking his time with commonplace actions, such as folding a jacket, tying a robe on, or cutting a watermelon. LAST CHRYSANTHEMUM was hailed at the time of its release as a perfect embodiment of Japanese culture. That this film appealed to the tastes of censors and propagandists while somehow offering a sympathetic view of the difficult lot of Japanese women is something of a minor miracle. More compelling is the final scene in which Otoku’s dead form is juxtaposed with Kiku’s triumphant appearance in a riverboat parade, pain etched across his guilt-ridden face. Because of the almost panoramic shooting style and the innovative ways Mizoguchi used it in many scenes, viewing on a big screen is highly recommended. Screening as part of the Driving Towards the End: An East Asian Perspective series. (1939, 143 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Philippe Lesage’s WHO BY FIRE (Canada/France)
FACETS Cinema – Sunday at 1pm and 5pm
There’s a lazy line of criticism that pops up every now and then, calling a certain kind of film “too theatrical,” or saying that it “feels too much like a play.” This is usually lobbed at films set in single locations and focused on heated dialogue in close quarters, entire worlds filled with outsized emotions caged within a location that could, in theory, fit on an off-Broadway stage. Putting aside how expansive the medium of theater is to limit it to just one kind of play being described here, if the filmmakers at hand have done their work right, isn’t there something thrilling to being gripped by nothing more than bodies and words in close concert with one another? This particular label of theatricality, rather, can be embraced with fervor and attention and, above all else, meaning. Perhaps this is a roundabout way of saying that WHO BY FIRE, with its daunting two-and-a-half-hour runtime, sprawling ensemble of characters, and haunting relationship with space and time, feels more akin to an Anton Chekhov play than anything else, and maybe that’s not a bad thing. Certainly, frustrated writer Albert Gary (a note-perfect Paul Ahmarani) would appreciate the comparison, a man practically daring to namedrop one of the canonical literary classics into a conversation, to the point where one of his own children, Aliocha (Aurélia Arandi-Longpré), is named after a character from The Brothers Karamazov. Albert has brought his family, along with his son’s friend Jeff (a complex and eager Noah Parker) to the middle-of-nowhere cabin home of his old filmmaking collaborator, Blake Cadieux (Arieh Worthalter), who has switched to non-fiction filmmaking and thus, has no use for Albert’s words anymore. Naturally, tensions flare, words are flung like daggers, and secrets are unearthed, all in an atmosphere built upon pastoral cinematography and longing gazes filtered through cinematographer Balthazar Lab’s mesmerizing long takes. Though Albert and Blake’s semi-feud fuels much of the film’s conflict, the real engine here is the dual coming-of-age narratives for Jeff and Aliocha, each in their respective fashions shedding away their youth to try and embrace adulthood, even with the less-than-ideal role models they’ve found themselves surrounded by. Director Philippe Lesage has constructed something that floats along with energy and passion while still feeling ethereal and open, brimming with youthful energy while bursting to embrace more mature environs. Yes, WHO BY FIRE feels theatrical, but as far as I can recall, Uncle Vanya didn’t have a dance sequence scored to the B-52s' “Rock Lobster.” (2024, 155 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
Sapphopalooza at the Music Box
Music Box Theatre – See showtimes below
Nicholas Ray's JOHNNY GUITAR (US)
Sunday, 11:30am and Monday, 4pm
The western is an odd beast, a genre bound only by location, easily shaped into something as desolate or as crowded, as stark or vivid, as is required. They come more varied than science fiction films, expanding the West into something more complex than outer space, and creating dozens of different landscapes out of the same mold—Anthony Mann's West, John Ford's West, Budd Boetticher's West. Nicholas Ray's West, at least as created in JOHNNY GUITAR, is one of the most bizarrely beautiful. From Peggy Lee's desperate title song and Victor Young's score, hanging over the film like a sympathetic vulture, to the unearthly two-strip Trucolor, which seems to bind the film's characters into their environment as if they're bleeding into one another, it's Ray's most aesthetic film. But it's every bit as personal as IN A LONELY PLACE or WE CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN. Joan Crawford and Sterling Hayden don't seem fit for the west, and the same could be said of their gender roles, but it's their complete discomfort that gives the film its tense and uneasy beauty. Ray has a knack for finding poetry where others would surely fumble, and here he's at his most poetic. (1954, 110 min, 35mm) [Julian Antos]
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Jamie Babbit's BUT I'M A CHEERLEADER (US)
Monday, 7pm
Instead of rewatching BUT I'M A CHEERLEADER, a hilarious, if occasionally inexpert, sendup to John Waters in a hard, vinyl bubble gum palette that skewers gay conversion therapy, gay culture, and binary gender roles, among other things, instead I decided to read contemporary reviews of the movie (spoiler: most critics hated it). Having loved the movie so much that I've seen it a good half dozen times, I wondered what I was missing, or what those critics were missing, and then I realized no one seemed to be mentioning just how camp this movie is, and why it could not be enjoyed as anything else and still enjoyed. Lou Lumenick of the New York Post called it "dumb, heavy-handed satire." Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly declared, "Any self-respecting lesbian should rear up in horror at [this movie]." (Spoiler: I didn't.) Gemma Files at Film.com disparaged the film's "Ungainly sentiment and unnecessary stylization." (Emanuel Levy's moustache also hated the movie.) Did these critics watch the same movie as me? Or do they just not love camp? In lieu of tracking them down and asking why they hated the movie so much, I re-read Susan Sontag's popular essay from 1964, "Notes on 'Camp.'" Sontag admitted in her notes, "I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it." How presciently that hints at the enduring magnetism of PINK FLAMINGOS and the rest of Waters' glorious spectacles! Sontag also notes, "Many examples of Camp are things which, from a "serious" point of view, are either bad art or kitsch." ...much like BUT I'M A CHEERLEADER. The subject matter of Jamie Babbit's first feature film is, in many ways, so horrifying and traumatic in reality that the only way to properly tease out the absurdity, the trauma, and the brutally oppressive systems at play that sculpted these actual camps where fragile LGBT youth were sent to "pray the gay away" or learn how to properly conform to gender roles is through camp, in Sontag's definition of the term. The only way to process and analyze just what was at stake (and still is, by the way...this pseudoscientific "therapy" is only banned in 15 states today, and that only for minors), was through extreme stylization and aestheticization, devotion to overblown artifice, and "failed seriousness" that define camp. Sontag goes on to say, "The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious." "Camp is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness." Babbit's direction of BUT I'M A CHEERLEADER is crystal clear in this sense. She skewers each subject she tackles with "heavy-handed satire," or, as Sontag would put it, that feeling of "it's too much!" through fabulous actors like RuPaul as an "ex-gay" counselor who constantly displays his (failed) masculinity in a sort of reverse-drag performance, Clea DuVall as the brooding fellow inmate at camp who lures Natasha Lyonne's innocent cheerleader to the dark side of homosexuality, Dante Bosco (whom you may remember as Rufio from HOOK, an accidental, as opposed to deliberate, camp film), and of course, Cathy Moriarty as the seethingly angry director of "True Directions." Perhaps, now that I think about it, BUT I'M A CHEERLEADER isn't a good movie. Is it so bad that it's good? Or is it that gay conversion therapy is so morally repugnant you just have to laugh, have to make it playful? Perhaps it's just so camp that it doesn't have to be good. Camp is a sensibility that doesn't lend itself to traditional criticism. All I can say is that the first time I walked out of this movie I chuckled at remembered jokes, but I also felt seen and understood in a unique way that only queer, camp movies can do, and that it reached something beyond the comedy and made me feel quite tenderly about the earnest first love the teens experience in one of the few lesbian films from the 1990's with a happy ending. Because, as Sontag put it so well, "Camp is a tender feeling." DJ set in the lounge with Dyke Night before (6-7pm) and after (9-11pm) the film. (1999, 92 min, 35mm) [Alex Ensign]
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Also playing in the Sapphopalooza series is Yvonne Rainer’s 1996 film MURDER AND MURDER (113 min, DCP Digital) on Saturday, 11:30am, with a post-screening discussion between actress Kathleen Chalfant and Annie Howard (Gerber/Hart will also be tabling in the lounge with a pop-up of queer archival materials from their collections before and after the screening) and Alexis Langlois’ 2024 film QUEENS OF DRAMA (115 min, DCP Digital) on Tuesday at 7pm.
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
Tran Anh Hung's THE SCENT OF GREEN PAPAYA (Vietnam/France)
Alliance Française de Chicago (Julius Lewis Auditorium, 54 W. Chicago Ave.) – Tuesday, 6:30pm
Tran Anh Hung's remarkable debut feature about a young servant girl's coming of age in pre-unification Saigon really could have been given any number of titles—"The Taste of Fish Sauce Over Rice" or "The Faint Glimmer of a Sweat-Covered Brow" immediately come to mind—yet there's an unmistakeable poignancy to the evocation of scent. I understand that there's a bit of linguistic play at work (Mui, the protagonist's name, translates to scent), but the allusion to aroma in particular, never described in the course of multiple encounters with the titular fruit and totally beyond the sensorial purview of cinema, conveys the intensely personal scope of Tran's exploration of Vietnam in the 1950s. He once described the film as being "born from the images I have of my mother, the freshness and the beauty of my mother’s gestures," but the piece is also a tactile meditation on his own memories of Vietnam, which he was forced to flee as a child following the fall of Saigon in 1975. Young Mui's time is mostly given over to cooking for her employers, and so lavish attention is naturally piled on steaming bowls of rice and smoke trickling from a hot wok, yet even more emphasis is placed on her growing amazement at the animal life that seamlessly pervades the open-plan home, be it in the form of a lone frog covered in pond scum, a lizard nesting in a priceless vase, ants gorging themselves on sticky papaya sap, or Mui's own Chinese cricket cage that comes to symbolize her uneasy servitude. The title also gestures to a haunting sense of absence that pervades the film. The ongoing French-Indochina War, just one of the country's devastating 20th century conflicts, is raging during the course of the film, yet it is only felt obliquely through hushed mentions of nightly curfews, a palpable sense of wartime frugality, and sporadic air-raid sirens that represent a small cross-section of the film's rich tapestry of offscreen sound. Having spent a sizeable chunk of time in Vietnam myself, I was swept up in my own recollections of Ho Chi Minh City, only to be walloped by the discovery that the film was in fact shot on an elaborate soundstage in a Parisian suburb—further proof that you can't go home again. Insofar as there is a political subtext, it is remarkably subtle, most reminiscent of Hou Hsiao-hsien's understated textural exploration of his own relationship to Japan in CAFÉ LUMIÈRE (2003). The film's greatest pleasure, though, which I have yet to allude to, is its astonishing compositional complexity, unfolding as it does over a series of virtuosic travelling shots that float omnipotently between rooms of the house, elevating household chores and quotidian movement into a full-blown symphony of domestic life. Screening as part of the “Au menu”—à table! Series followed by a discussion with Nick Davis, Associate Professor of English & Gender Studies at Northwestern University. (1993, 104 min, Digital Projection) [David Whitehouse]
Aleksei German's HARD TO BE A GOD (Russia)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Tuesday, 7pm
The "silence of God" has been a popular theme of serious artists working in different mediums for centuries but Russian filmmaker Aleksei German, adapting a sci-fi novel by the Strugatskiy Brothers, apparently found a completely original way to explore this concept in his final film (he died in post-production and HARD TO BE A GOD was completed by his wife and son): many years in the future, a scientist from Earth named Don Rumata (Leonid Yarmolnik) is sent to observe life on the distant planet Arkanar, a place that happens to bear a strong resemblance to Europe during the Middle Ages (i.e., it's a pre-industrial society where everyone is living in filth and misery, intellectuals are persecuted and human cruelty and stupidity are generally on display everywhere). The Arkanarians regard Rumata as a "God" but the more enlightened man is, for obscure reasons, not allowed to help the members of this alien race transcend the venality and backwardness in which their lives are mired. Some of this narrative information is explained via a sparse voice-over but most of it has to be inferred from a barrage of ugly, non-narrative images that are so rich in putrid detail that they attain a kind of mesmerizing, hallucinatory beauty. Indeed it is practically impossible to capture German's painterly mise-en-scene using words; suffice it to say that the immersive HARD TO BE A GOD feels like some kind of scatological remix of ANDREI RUBLEV where the plentiful blood, piss, shit, and vomit of the characters commingles with the endless rain and fog of the locations they inhabit, which, when captured by the low-contrast black-and-white cinematography, creates images that resemble moving charcoal drawings in their thick, gray, tactile textures. While the use of an endlessly mobile camera and the sense of lives constantly bustling beyond the edges of the frame will be familiar to those who have seen German's previous film—the equally formidable but more absurdist KHRUSTALYOV, MY CAR! (1998)—the overall tone here is closer to something like SALO, OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM (1975) in its unbearable bleakness. It is unlikely that either Pasolini or German knew these movies would be their last but the extremism with which they approached form and content lends each film the feeling of a final testament in hindsight; when creating a work of art entails jumping into an abyss, sometimes no encore is imaginable. Screening as part of the State and Revolution: Film Under the Boot series.(2013, 170 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]
Dea Kulumbegashvili’s APRIL (Georgia/Italy/France)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
APRIL has yet to be released in its native country, perhaps because the material hits too close to home. As Leonardo Goi explained in an article on MUBI, “Per a 2000 law, abortion can be performed [in Georgia] within the first twelve weeks of pregnancy, though religious stigmas remain in the heavily Orthodox Christian country, as do issues of access for the most vulnerable.” The heroine of APRIL, a doctor named Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), works to provide health care to some of this population. She works in a hospital in a rural area of the country, though it’s an open secret that she also performs abortions outside of working hours. After a woman comes to the hospital and miscarries near the beginning of the film, the woman’s husband confronts Nina about her practice as an abortionist, then spits on her. Clearly, it’s only a matter of time before this physician will be made to suffer for efforts, which makes APRIL a tense and sometimes agonizing viewing experience. Writer-director Dea Kulumbegashvili heightens the viewer’s sensitivity to Nina’s situation by shooting the film in the Academy ratio, employing very little music, and often shooting in close proximity to the characters; it feels like the world is closing in around the protagonist. In this light, the moments of natural beauty—to say nothing of the unexpected forays into outright fantasy—stand out that much more. “There comes a time during my creative process when reality starts to overwhelm me, and my only way of dealing with that is to make room for something else,” Kulumbegashvili said to Goi. “You can call that non-real, or fantasy, or magic—it doesn’t matter. It’s my way of dealing with the unbearable reality of everything. In APRIL, the world is filled with so much beauty and pain, and fantasy offered me a way out of that.” (2024, 134 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Chantal Akerman’s JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES (Belgium)
Alamo Drafthouse – Saturday, 11am
I used to think that Chantal Akerman’s films had more in common with Yasujirō Ozu’s than even those of his most devout disciples. Her use of still, waist-level medium shots (similar to Ozu’s signature “tatami shots,” said to mimic the perspective of someone kneeling on a tatami mat), stylized settings hyper-respective to her cultural background, and a seemingly detached tone that cloaks rich subtext all recall Ozu’s invariant oeuvre. After rewatching her seminal 1975 film JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES, which she made when she was just 25 years old, I still believe that her work exhibits these aspects, but to antithetical effect. Where Ozu reveals the calm within chaos, Akerman inveigles chaos out of the calm, and there’s perhaps no better example of this than her 201-minute tour de force that depicts three days in the life of its title character, a middle-aged mother played to perfection by the solemn, red-haired Delphine Seyrig. Most of the film is composed of superlative long takes in which Jeanne does her daily chores, intercut by brief expositional conversations with her 16-year-old son and oblique references to her “job” as a rather apathetic prostitute. Though it evokes experimental cinema in how it ingeniously uses a simple concept to confront the illusion of that simplicity, it’s also a brilliant depiction of real life as narrative; in a 2009 interview with the New York Times, Akerman observed that “[i]n most movies you have crashes or accidents or things out of the ordinary, so the viewer is distracted from his own life…[T]his film is about his own life.” A friend once remarked to me that their standard response when asked by a filmmaker to provide feedback about a film they didn’t like was to say that it gave them space to think about that very subject. Ironically, the same is true about the masterwork that is JEANNE DIELMAN. The long takes are simultaneously hypnotic and freeing, producing a sensation that’s almost as mindless as the tasks themselves. Akerman’s depiction of these chores, which are certainly banal even if rendered extraordinary by Babette Mangolte’s lens, is often regarded as a feminist interpretation, a label that Akerman rejects. Indeed, she’s said in several interviews that the seemingly monotonous routines were lovingly inspired by both childhood memories of her mother and Jewish ritual; in the aforementioned interview, she also said that “Jeanne has to organize her life, to not have any space, any time, so she won’t be depressed or anxious…[s]he didn’t want to have one free hour because she didn’t know how to fill that hour,” which speaks less to the mundanity of the tasks at hand and more to Jeanne’s general discontent. At the risk of spoiling the film for anyone still unfamiliar with its abrupt ending, the duration doesn’t so much emphasize the monotony as it provides context around the downturn of both character and tone. It doesn’t show three days in a life, but rather the day before the day that cracks start to appear in the foundation, and then the day that it finally crumbles to the ground, out of which something altogether new and different is formed. (On a tangential note, the ending reminds me of these lines from Sylvia Plath’s Holocaust-adjacent poem “Lady Lazarus”: “Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air.” In 1986, Akerman directed an adaptation of Rose Leiman Goldemberg’s off-Broadway play Letters Home, based on Plath’s letters to her mother. So much to unpack there.) Only the late filmmaker’s second feature, JEANNE DIELMAN is almost daunting in its command of the medium—perhaps the only label that can rightfully be attached to it is masterpiece. Screening as part of the Alamo Time Capsule 1975. (1975, 201 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]
Kiyoshi Kurosawa's PULSE (Japan)
Alamo Drafthouse – Tuesday, 9:30pm
In 2001, the Internet was still a gigantic mystery to those who patiently waited for their dial-up connection to allow them to access it. These were the days when people warned you about “buying things over the Internet” and parents and schools heavily guarded their browsers for fear of young minds being warped by the nether regions of the World Wide Web (something which is still a distinct possibility). The Internet was a bottomless altered reality that could’ve contained anything. We basically get what the Internet is now, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something terrifyingly unknown hiding inside. PULSE’s horror contains more than just an early 2000’s phobia that the Internet could be riddled with portals to horrifying places; the film’s true power derives from a more metaphysical position. When acclaimed Japanese filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa introduced PULSE to the audience of its 2001 Cannes premiere, where it was in competition for the Un Certain Regard prize, he thanked the committee for allowing his film to be shown at all. In his words, “(PULSE) is a horror film,” and films of this nature were hardly ever selected to compete in serious competitions. Not only do his words echo a similar statement by the master John Ford (“I make westerns”), they signal that the film functions well outside of its typified genre. On paper, PULSE does sound like a horror film: young students in Japan discover they can access a website that somehow connects to the land of the dead, and that this phantasmic website is learning very quickly to extend its otherworldly reach into the reality of everyday life, causing an entire city to start committing suicide or simply vanish into shadows on the wall. The film was remade in 2006 as a crappy Hollywood horror cash-grab, capturing none of the atmosphere, intelligence, or sheer terror of the original (unfortunately genre-great Wes Craven was set to direct the remake but was removed from the project over creative differences, control going instead to a guy who directed the cut scenes in video games). The original PULSE vaguely resembles the zombie films of George Romero and Lucio Fulci, or even an alien invasion film like Don Siegel’s INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. (Kurosawa himself claimed the film was inspired by Tobe Hooper’s LIFEFORCE.) The only real difference is the scale on which this film operates. Its horror is almost beyond words, partly because many of the causes for the ghostly behavior are never wrapped up or explained. Why do so many filmmakers, now dubbed by lowbrow critics as directors of “elevated horror”, feel the need to explain as to why the events in their film took place? One might consider true horror as impossible to explain as to why things happen. Kurosawa certainly has zero time for that and would rather inject unease through the film’s slow pacing and “dated” techniques such as rear-projection (used to suggest someone is traveling in an automobile). Whether or not you consider that to be a desperate financial resort to stay within budget, in PULSE (and the rest of Kurosawa's films) it has the distinct power to unnerve. This is where Kurosawa finds his way beyond the trappings of genre, his command of cinema history and form allows his films to convey pure, unexplainable horror that can unsettle a viewer like nothing else. Kurosawa's refusal to explain bucks the current trend of those brazenly dubbed “elevated horror," coined to showcase movies such as GET OUT, A QUIET PLACE, or THE BABADOOK. It suggests that most people consider horror a commodity, a section in the bygone days of video stores. Whatever the reasons for neatly categorizing films as “intelligent horror," the genre has never actually lacked intelligence or elevation. PULSE doesn’t even show blood being spilled; its violence transcends the physical and hovers over the terrifying notion of a spiritual death, a death beyond the confines of the body. The director, in a 2006 interview, expressed that he wouldn’t consider PULSE a horror film in the traditional sense. It’s possible he hoped to escape the J-horror trend in his home country, a movement he helped ignite and which lead to him being courted by overseas producers hoping to emulate the success of his previous horror outings, something Kurosawa didn’t seem to be very interested in. Whatever the reason, PULSE is one of the most terrifying films ever made in any part of the world, with nary a jump-scare in sight. Kurosawa also, in a book about horror films he co-wrote with Makoto Shinozaki (sadly in need of a full translation), argues that movies dealing with monsters or murderers are indeed scary, but they are terrors to be overcome and conquered. Kurosawa’s terrors come from a place closer to psychological drama, of the sight of a loved one now dead appearing before you, then suddenly vanishing, leaving the impression of their absence in your mind, which will now never be the same again: “the fear that follows one throughout one’s life." Screening as part of the Terror Tuesday series. (2001, 119 min, DCP Digital) [John Dickson]
Alejandro Jodorowsky's SANTA SANGRE (Mexico)
Alamo Drafthouse – Wednesday, 9:30pm
You wouldn't know it from the circus freaks, the religious cults, and the malicious (not to mention limbless) mothers, but SANTA SANGRE is Alejandro Jodorowsky all grown up. Separated from his early staples of hallucinatory cinema, EL TOPO and THE HOLY MOUNTAIN, by 16 odd years and a highly mythologized failed first crack at Frank Herbert's Dune, the film finds Jodorowsky with an unexpected amount of narrative confidence, and surrealist sensibilities half as wild, yet twice as perceptive as all his concoctions to date. He spins the story of Fenix, troubled son of the circus, both in flashback and flash-forward, and the first half even tugs a few heartstrings with its tale of love, loss, and complete mental breakdown in the world of ethereal trapeze artists and adulterous knife-throwers. The murderous second half shakes things up, and Fenix's story takes a most unorthodox Oedipal twist that could wake Freud from cold, dead slumber. It's here we recapture some of the Jodorowsky visual flair we once knew, but more importantly, as the film veers firmly into the horror genre, he gets to flex his muscles as a surrealist pioneer. Sure, it's nowhere Lucio Fulci hadn't dabbled before, but Jodorowsky's return proves a surprisingly wise and unsurprisingly creepy effort, not quite the sensory experience that his earlier works remain, but every bit as much a great film. (1989, 123 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Tristan Johnson]
Eli Craig’s CLOWN IN A CORNFIELD (Canada)
Alamo Drafthouse, Landmark's Century Centre Cinema, and Music Box Theatre – See Venue websites for showtimes
CLOWN IN A CORNFIELD opens with a sly homage to JAWS (1975)—not surf but stalks, not a shark but Frendo the Clown. A couple sneaks off into the corn, their flirtation cut short by bloodshed and squeaking clown shoes. It’s a familiar setup twisted just enough to feel fresh, setting the tone for a slasher that both reveres and updates its forebears. Adapted from Adam Cesare’s Bram Stoker Award-winning YA novel, CLOWN IN A CORNFIELD is dripping with '80s slasher DNA and coulrophobia (fear of clowns, for the blissfully uninitiated). Director Eli Craig inserts his brand of horror-humor that made his debut film, TUCKER AND DALE VERSUS EVIL (2010), such a hit. He leans into the pulp and the politics, crafting a horror pastiche that slices deeper than expected. At its core is Quinn Maybrook (Katie Douglas, delivering a layered performance balancing grief and hope), whose mother’s passing forces the teen to be yanked from Philadelphia and planted into the rural backwash of Kettle Springs, Missouri. The town is a hollowed-out husk, left behind by the closure of the Baypen Corn Syrup Factory. Her father, a once respected surgeon but now the local doctor, sees an opportunity to bond with his daughter in a setting that should lack the anxieties of a Philadelphia ER. Kettle Springs is caught in a generational standoff: bitter, buttoned-up adults longing for the “good old days,” and neon-drenched teens livestreaming their mischief with nihilistic flair. Quinn falls in with a band of charismatic misfits—the Queen Bee, the dreamboat boyfriend, the alleged arsonist—all too familiar, all too doomed. And then there’s Frendo. A once-jovial mascot turned vengeance avatar, Frendo is the absurdity of American nostalgia given a butcher’s cleaver. As Founder’s Day spirals into a bloodbath, Craig injects sharp satire into the slaughter. Frendo isn’t just killing teens—he’s embodying a town’s fury at its own future. Is he a supernatural slasher coming back to implement fear as a means of control, is he Jason Voorhees with no voice but a political platform, or is he an interchangeable Ghostface smitten with the glory days? Craig’s film references come fast and furious—LEPRECHAUN (1993), AMITYVILLE HORROR (1979), CHILDREN OF THE CORN (1984), THE WICKER MAN (1973), even HOT FUZZ (2007)—but they never drown out the original voice. In one breathless moment, a character asks, “Who would follow a clown?” The question lands with unnerving weight. It's not just about the man in the mask—it’s about the ones who cheer him on. The clown becomes a totem of weaponized nostalgia, a rallying cry for those who’d rather burn the future than live in it. Even as the teens initially slot into familiar horror archetypes—the jock, the virgin, the cheerleader—they deepen, evolve. But it’s Quinn who carries the torch: a final girl for the modern age, smart, bruised, and perpetually underestimated. She’s got Sidney Prescott’s survival instincts with a little extra grit under her nails. Sure, you can read the subtext. Or you can enjoy a chainsaw-wielding clown painting the corn red. Either way, CLOWN IN A CORNFIELD delivers. And if you're laughing nervously as Frendo swings that axe—good. That means it's working. (2025, 96 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]
Edgar Wright's SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD (US/UK/Canada)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Thursday, 9:30pm
SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD has undeniably stood the test of time, having influenced music, video games, and other facets of popular culture for well over a decade. Despite a poor box office performance, Wright’s adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novels left its mark on a rapidly growing internet subculture surrounding DIY music scenes—so much so that a new generation of guys you wish you didn’t start talking to at a party were introduced to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope through Ramona Flowers, the title character’s romantic interest whose name will now forever be attributed to girls with brightly colored hair by boys who just bought their first indie rock album. Despite the film’s continued success, some may still write off SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD as a product of its time. After all, there was plenty of nerd-chic to go around in 2010 as the Marvel Cinematic Universe continued to build hype, and TV shows like The Big Bang Theory framed nerd subcultures in a more flattering light for the masses. But to dismiss the film as just having come out at the right time would be to ignore the gripping romance and slapstick humor that have endeared it to audiences for years. Michael Cera and Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Scott Pilgrim and Ramona Flowers have a chemistry that does not feel like it should work on paper, but is electric on film. The two carry an awkwardness that really brings the quirks and discomfort of the early stages of a relationship to life. The film’s supporting cast, a revolving door of actors soon to make their big break, also bring their A-game as effective caricatures of what ex-partners and friends in your 20s are really like. For example, Chris Evans plays one of Ramona’s exes, an overconfident, pompous hunk who became an action star, and Brie Larson plays Scott’s ex-girlfriend, the snobby front woman of Toronto’s hottest indie band who changed her entire personality to fit the role. The plot follows Scott as he fights a league of Ramona’s ex-partners in comic book fashion in order to win her over, learn from his own shortcomings, and grow past the stagnation their daily lives have settled into. While the film doesn't reinvent the wheel, it recontextualizes the tropes of modern drama, action, and comedy films through frameworks that are easily relatable to younger millennial and Gen Z audiences alike, making for an entertaining cult classic and must-see experience for anybody with a nose ring or stick-and-poke tattoo. Screening as part of the Doc and Roll: Rockstars of the Silver Screen series. (2010, 112 min, 35mm) [Michael Bates]
George Miller's BABE: PIG IN THE CITY (Australia)
Davis Theater – Sunday, 1pm
Maligned upon release by nearly everyone outside of Chicago's own Siskel, Ebert, and Pat Graham, George Miller's $90M perfectionist talking-animal masterpiece BABE: PIG IN THE CITY returns to our comparatively welcoming megapolis. Now, nobody knows what happens in the first BABE, so the titular plucky sheep-herding pig begins this tour-de-force sequel a returning conquering hero of something-or-other, before tragedy strikes; and in Miller's fantastic worldview, tragedy can only occur repeatedly, in the form of elaborate, set-clearing Rube Goldberg catastrophes. Our heroic pinkness becomes an undocumented refugee among many, abused by CBP and housed in an imaginary hypercity's zoophilic sanctuary, and in the subsequent 90 minutes of bold, painterly compositions, LOTR cinematographer Andrew Lesnie works magic alongside a literal army of animal trainers (over seventy are credited). The resulting CGI-assisted supporting performances—memorably the orangutan, duck, and pit bull terrier—far outrank many contemporaneous human thespians; their dubbed dialogue is a simultaneously poetic and illiterate slang-filled tenement argot, as if the Dead End Kids, Vito Corleone, and Blanche DuBois were all in hiding at the Chelsea Hotel, if the Chelsea Hotel was on the Bowery, and if the Bowery was in Venice, and if the Bowery-née-Chelsea-Hotel-on-Venice was constructed from scratch on the nascent Fox Sydney backlot. (The music, by contrast, is a 1950s Parisian daydream, sung by the rue de Belleville's finest castrati mice.) But BABE: PIG IN THE CITY also deserves to be seen on the big screen, in part because of its large-scale PLAYTIME-meets-STARSHIP TROOPERS satirization of both the technocratic dullness and hedonistic excess of monochromatic, globalized modernity, and in part because belly laughter and uncontrollable sobbing are more fun in public. What is clear today is how much is owed to this supposed "failure" of a film by the far more financially successful (and geographically accurate) FINDING NEMO/DORY, where a cornucopia of damaged fauna also attempt to collaboratively extricate themselves from Pacific-coastal urbanity. But with all due respect to Pixar, it's clear which production team will be first against the wall. Screening as part of the Coming of Age series. (1998, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Castelle]
Amalia Ulman’s MAGIC FARM (US/Argentina)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
Amalia Ulman’s sophomore feature follows a group of documentary filmmakers in search of a story that causes them to hopelessly spiral out of control before they land right back where they started, unsure what they’ve learned on their journey. Well, as Stephen Sondheim once said, “content dictates form,” and thus Ulman lets her cinematic wheels spin faster and faster to the point of whimsical disorientation, the motley crew’s initial impetus for heading to San Cristóbal, Argentina, getting washed away in favor of a sea of relationship drama and anxiety. Exploring these new Argentine environs, the camera slinks through shots, scenes morph into each other, and establishing moments often find a camera affixed with a fisheye lens attached to a dog or a skateboard or something to distort the scenes around us. The world becomes outsized and stylized and abrasive to the point where the sadness of the characters feels almost quaint by comparison, each of our protagonists dwelling in tangled relationships, unrequited loves, and deep insecurity about how life has ended up this way (in a jam-packed ensemble filled with indie favorites like Chloë Sevigny and Simon Rex, Alex Wolff, all puppy-dog eyes, is maybe the most enjoyable to follow throughout). Ultimately, the team’s efforts at documentary work shatter unceremoniously, resulting in them faking a “crazy new fad” in Argentina to cover just for the sake of clicks and likes. For Ulman, it seems, sometimes all you need to do is capture something flashy and fun and bizarre, artificial or otherwise. (2025, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
Shinji Sômai’s LOVE HOTEL (Japan)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 9:45pm and Saturday, 9:30pm
It’s representative of Shinji Sômai’s singular intelligence that the strangest thing about his second feature, SAILOR SUIT AND MACHINE GUN (1981), isn’t that it’s about a 14-year-old girl who assumes control of a small-time yakuza outfit after her mob boss father dies, but that the film is, for the most part, a poignant drama that respects the feelings of its major characters at nearly every turn. LOVE HOTEL, Sômai’s sole feature-length foray into softcore, or “pink,” cinema, is no less strange, subversive, or empathetic, delivering on the demands of the genre while also presenting a stark rumination on the role sex plays in our lives. The film comes from an extraordinary year in the director’s career, when he released three masterpieces; it arrived between TYPHOON CLUB, a devastating film about junior high students that might be described as a mix of John Hughes and Albert Camus, and LOST CHAPTER OF SNOW: PASSION, a movie that attained instant classic status in Japan for its first 15 minutes alone, which comprise just two shots and span a couple decades in the main character’s life. There are plenty of bravura long takes in LOVE HOTEL too, with at least one that calls upon the actors to play multiple complicated emotional states over several uninterrupted minutes. But what’s most remarkable about them—and indeed Sômai’s work in general—is that the formal mastery is regularly at the service of revealing or complicating something about the characters. It seems to stem from a bottomless curiosity about human beings and what they’re capable of. Encountering this outlook in pornography must have been bracing in 1985—it’s bracing now. LOVE HOTEL effectively turns the pornographic movie inside out; where most entries in the genre reduce characters to bodies, here is a film that advances an almost Borzagean concern with souls. Please be advised that this concern isn’t yet apparent in the opening scene, which lasts about 15 minutes and contains graphic depictions of sexual violence. Sômai renders the material particularly discomforting through his characteristic long takes, which trap the two main characters (and us) in the present moment, and his commitment to medium shots, which keep both victim and vicitimizer in the same frame and inhibit viewer identification with either. And then, when you least expect, the story jumps two years into the future. It’s only now that LOVE HOTEL begins to explain who these two people are, after their lives have been shaped by the brutal sexual encounter of the first scene. This shocking turn is characteristic of Sômai, and there are more where that came from; it would be unfair to give anything else away. Suffice it to say that the central characters continue to evolve until the very last shot and that sex remains a critical part of their evolution; however, it becomes clear early on that Sômai isn’t interested in titillation. The director avoids many of the formal tropes of pornography, eschewing editing and closeups during sex scenes and at one point even moving the camera away from the people having sex to consider the environment they’re having sex in. While his approach still allows for explicit content, the gaze upon that content never feels lecherous or even particularly erotic, which makes LOVE HOTEL as much an outlier in the world of pornographic films as it is in Sômai’s career. Screening as part of the New Releases and Restorations series. (1985, 88 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Alain Guiraudie's MISERICORDIA (France)
FACETS – Friday and Saturday, 7pm
Alain Guiraudie, one of contemporary cinema's great regionalists—he documents rural life in the south of France as reliably as Bruno Dumont does in the country's northern enclaves—returns to his old stomping grounds with a sublime and slippery work that is generating an unexpected amount of buzz for the perennially unsung maven of pastoral surrealism. It is without a doubt the most attention Guiraudie's work has received since his 2013 breakthrough STRANGER BY THE LAKE, a minor masterpiece that was nonetheless notable for its eschewal of a number of his signature directorial flourishes, notably a certain proclivity for freewheeling absurdism and surrealistic diversion (Guiraudie's cinema represents, above all, a bracingly cold plunge into the murky waters of the unconscious mind) as well as an unspoken and wholly unquestioned pansexual thrust that renders his characters as potential romantic vectors for virtually anybody with whom they might cross paths. MISERICORDIA follows Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), a journeyman industrial baker, who leaves the modest city of Toulouse for the remote village of Saint-Martial to mourn the death of the town boulanger, under whom he apprenticed during his youth. As it turns out, Jérémie long harbored an unrequited love for the recently deceased baguette purveyor, although he might also be attracted to his newly widowed wife Martine (Catherine Frot) as well as their son Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand) and perhaps a few other village inhabitants for good measure. Tensions rapidly escalate (with a singular, devastating act of violence looming on the horizon) as Jérémie settles into Vincent's childhood bedroom and indicates no desire to ever leave, having found himself swept up in comforting the grieving widow, foraging for wild mushrooms, and basking in the uneasy embrace of childhood nostalgia. That last part is crucial, as the film feels particularly raw and vulnerable; Guiraudie admitted as much in a recent Chicago Q&A, during which he explained that the film is a meditation on his own Catholic upbringing and a total exorcism of uneasy coming-of-age reminiscences, adding that he deliberately scouted a shooting locale that would be a dead ringer for his actual place of birth. MISERICORDIA is in part a film about the elaborate rituals and clandestine intensity that come with the territory of queer life, particularly for an emissary of an older generation like Guiraudie. Through all manner of cheeky allusions, the film explicitly links that constant sense of shame and dire need for secrecy to the Catholic faith. God loves you—in a way that is certainly quite gay—but you have blood on your hands, and you really ought to spend more time with the parish priest in order to allay some of that guilt. The film also posits, much like Thomas Wolfe, that you really can't go home again, lest you discover the town to be even smaller than you remember, or that your former friends are your friends no longer. Perhaps they've changed too much. You have definitely changed. Perhaps too much. (2024, 102 min, DCP Digital) [David Whitehouse]
Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham & Rachel Szor’s NO OTHER LAND (Norway/Palestine/Documentary)
FACETS – Saturday, 3pm and 5pm
“This is a story about power.” Basel Adra, a lifelong resident of the Masafer Yatta region of the West Bank, speaks these words to cap off a story about former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s visit to the region, a visit that—while perhaps nothing more than a publicity stunt—resulted in the IDF's previously scheduled demolitions of Palestinian schools and homes to be called off. But this film, NO OTHER LAND, is also a story about power, about needless emotional and physical damage, about the constant barrage of senseless destruction of peoples’ livelihoods that so many around the world have either become desensitized to or have found labyrinthine methods of justifying to themselves this continued degradation of humanity. The framework of the onscreen narrative stretches from the summer of 2019 through October of 2023, and it focuses on the growing friendship between two of the film’s directors: the aforementioned Basel and Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist who has arrived to learn more about the continuing Israeli mission of Palestinian subjugation. The footage we see is, at the very least, rage-inducing: homes and schools and entire villages senselessly bulldozed to oblivion, supposedly for the flimsy excuse of being turned into “military zones.” The ensuing carnage and accompanying attitudes perpetrated by the Israeli soldiers captured on film oscillates between “duty-bound” apathy or entitled machismo, in one instance resulting in a soldier shooting and paralyzing a friend of Basel’s, Harun Abu Aram. The law is, indeed, on the side of the Israelis, so why should these Palestinian children be so upset when their homes are destroyed in broad daylight when it’s perfectly “legal” to do so? The filmmakers make a point to highlight the intentional existential ploy being pulled off here, where Israelis can come and go as they please throughout the West Bank, whereas Palestinians are legally bound to the region and otherwise othered in all aspects of Israeli society (Basel notes, despite having a law degree, he would only realistically be able to find a job as a construction worker were he to move to Israel). Throughout it all—perhaps to actively combat it all—there are still laughs shared among family members, there are still games played in the snow during winter, and the children still play and swing around and try to find some semblance of joy amidst their displacement. Underneath the political mire of the “complicated” banner so often thrown at the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, there are simply families wanting to share a meal together, mothers caring for sons, fathers keeping businesses afloat, and countless young people staring at their phones, because what else is there? That the directing team is comprised of both Israelis and Palestinians points towards some kind of hopeful future where a shared understanding of the horrors at hand can be truly realized (some of the more noteworthy and thorny passages arise when various Palestinians question Yuval’s own complicity in the continued settlements of the region, though the film leaves these points dangling rather than digging deeper, for better or worse). Additionally, that the film failed to find US theatrical distribution, while still receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature, speaks to how open endorsement for Palestinian rights tends to only go so far. Perhaps the true power of NO OTHER LAND, and of this entire story, is the continued resilience and drive in Palestinians capturing the reality on the ground and urgently spreading the truth as far as possible. Here, the camera proves mightier than the sword. (2024, 96 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
Mike Cheslik's HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS (US)
Music Box Theatre – Saturday, Midnight and Sunday, 7pm
A largely silent film that draws on Looney Tunes aesthetics as well as video game logic, HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS balances slapstick, sight gags, and sound effects with a genuinely arresting visual aesthetic, combining live action with animated elements. While all the features are familiar, together they create an imaginative modern approach and clever take on cinematic comedy. Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, who also co-wrote the film) is a popular applejack salesman, but when he loses his business in an explosion, he’s forced to find a way to survive in the snowy Midwestern wilderness. Desperate to find food, Kayak must learn the ways of a northern fur trapper, receiving help from some locals, though mostly struggling on his own to succeed; his goal to earn better equipment—and ultimately the hand of a local merchant’s daughter—by selling pelts is where HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS draws on a video game style, including recognizable sound cues, animations of how many pelts earn him which tools, and Kayak’s sneaking into the beavers’ hideout; it all adds to the uniqueness of the film’s storytelling. The cunning animals themselves are an annoying barrier to Kayak’s success. Larger creatures (such as the titular beavers) are performed by actors in mascot costumes, but director and effects designer Mike Cheslik also rounds out the animal residents with animation, puppets, and stuffed animals—which themselves are filled with stuffing guts; there’s a constant concurrence of the adorable, the gross, and cartoonish violence. Shot in black and white in both Wisconsin and Michigan, the film also looks striking, the backdrop of the forest landscape grounding the silly antics that ensue. Due its silent nature, the jaunty score by Chris Ryan is also an important driving force in the film, demonstrated in its first few moments with a catchy theme song about Kayak’s popular applejack. (2022, 108 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]
Celine Song's PAST LIVES (South Korea/US)
Wilmette Theatre – Thursday, 7pm
There is a lyric from a Little Feat song that has stuck with me all the years since I first heard it: "All the love that you missed / All the people that you can’t recall / Do they really exist at all?" In one sense, this is an egotistical way of looking at past relationships, using oneself as the only reference point. On the other hand, who we and those we knew were in the past no longer exist in the present. We move on. We change. We slough off our old skins, year after year. This idea informs director/screenwriter Celine Song’s debut feature, PAST LIVES. As children in South Korea, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) and Na Young (Greta Lee) were very close. Then, Na Young’s family emigrated to Canada. As many of us have done, Hae Sung and Na Young, now called Nora, used the internet to reconnect. But the strain of holding onto the past and trying to forge an adult life and career proves too much for Nora, and she backs away. Still, what Koreans call in-yun—a personal bond that can connect souls through lifetimes—pulls Hae Sung and Nora back together. What Song does in PAST LIVES is not indulge the Western concept of soul mates, but rather honors the important connections we make during our lives that do not overcome our circumstances, but rather give us the good memories that sustain us. Yoo and Lee convince us of their bond, even across wonky Skype calls, but delicately show that their characters have plans and commitments that are more important to them than a future together based on a long-ago love. In some ways, this film reminded me of CASABLANCA (1942), and that’s a high compliment indeed. (2023, 106 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
📽️ ALSO SCREENING
⚫ Chicago Public Library
View all screenings taking place at Chicago Public Library branches here.
⚫ Comfort Film at Comfort Station
View all screenings taking place at Comfort Station here.
⚫ Davis Theater
The Ocarbate Film Collective hosts Trust Fall, a monthly “blind” movie screening, on Thursday at 8:30pm. May’s film is a late career comedic triumph for a major box-office smashing studio-era director, the true definition of “late period.” More info here.
⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Several Films by Marco G. Ferrari (2013-2017, Total approx. 74 min, DCP Digital) screen Saturday, 6:30pm, followed by a Q&A with Ferrari.
Ishirō Honda’s 1975 film TERROR OF MECHAGODZILLA (83 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday, 1pm, as part of the Special Screenings and Events series.
Jean-Claude Rousseau’s 1989 film LES ANTIQUITÉS DE ROME (105 min, 16mm) screens Sunday, 7pm, as part of Entering the Image: Jean-Claude Rousseau's Super 8 Films series.
Marie-Claude Treilhou’s 2002 film UN PETIT CAS DE CONSCIENCE (95 min, DCP Digital) screens Monday, 7pm, as part of After ‘75: Women Filmmakers in France series.
Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet’s 1999 film SICILIA! (66 min, 35mm) screens Wednesday, 7pm, as part of The History Lessons of Straub and Huillet series. More info about all screenings here.
⚫ Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St.)
Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s 2024 film THE BALLAD OF SUZANNE CÉSAIRE (75 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday, 7pm, followed by a conversation with Hunt-Ehrlich. More info here.
⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Rachel Feldman’s 2024 film LILLY (93 min, DCP Digital) begins screening this week. After the 8pm screening on Thursday there will be a Q&A with Feldman moderated by Jane Ruby of the League of Women Voters of Chicago. See Venue website for showtimes.
This month’s Mystery Movie Monday is on Monday, 6pm. More info on all screenings here.
⚫ Goethe-Institut Chicago (150 Michigan Ave.)
Burhan Qurbani’s 2020 film BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ (183 min, Digital Projection) screens Friday, 6pm, as part of the Berlin Nights series. Free and open to the public, please register in advance. More info here. More info here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
Jeremy Workman’s 2024 documentary SECRET MALL APARTMENT (91 min, DCP Digital) and David Cronenberg’s 2024 film THE SHROUDS (119 min, DCP Digital) continue screening this week.
Mark Pritchard’s “visual and audio cinema experience” TALL TALES (2025, 65 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday at 7pm and Saturday at 2:30pm.
Glorimar Marrero-Sánchez’s 2023 film THE FISHBOWL (93 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday, 7pm, followed by a Q&A with Marerro-Sánchez moderated by Tracye Matthews, Executive Director, Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture at the University of Chicago.
Remsy Attasi’s 2024 documentary THE LEGEND OF KINGDOM COME (80 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday at 7pm.
François Ozon’s 2024 film WHEN FALL IS COMING (102 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday at 11:15am.
A free advance screening of Mike Flanagan’s 2025 film THE LIFE OF CHUCK (111 min, DCP Digital) for Music Box members is on Sunday at 2pm.
An advance screening of Andrew DeYoung’s 2025 film FRIENDSHIP (100 min, DCP Digital) is on Monday at 7:30pm. Please note this screening is sold out, but that the film begins its run at the Music Box next Friday.
Daniel Klein’s 2001 film TASTE THE REVOLUTION (86 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday at 7pm
Gary Hustwit’s 2024 documentary ENO (100 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 7pm, as part of the CHIRP Music Film Festival. More info on all screenings here.
⚫ VDB TV (Virtual)
Susan Mogul's 2024 video TELL ME ABOUT YOUR MOTHER (38 min) is free to stream through the VDB website and Vimeo over Mother's Day weekend 2025 (Friday through Sunday).
Selections from the Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive, in conjunction with the announcement of the Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive Collection, streams free on VDB TV. More info on both here.
CINE-LIST: May 9, 2025 - May 15, 2025
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Julian Antos, Michael Bates, Michael Castelle, John Dickson, Alex Ensign, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Shaun Huhn, Tristan Johnson, Ben Kaye, Michael Glover Smith, David Whitehouse