:: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 24 - THURSDAY, OCTOBER 30 ::

👁️ THE 61ST CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Venues and showtimes listed below; see festival website for complete schedule and more info on all screenings and events

Spike Lee’s HIGHEST 2 LOWEST (US/Japan
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Friday, 12pm
HIGHEST 2 LOWEST marks Spike Lee and Denzel Washington’s fifth collaboration together, beginning with MO’ BETTER BLUES (1990). Washington plays David King, legendary record producer and owner of Stackin’ Hits records; he's sold a portion of his company and looks to retake control by putting everything on the line. His plan is upended when kidnappers apprehend his son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) and his friend Kyle, the son of his friend and chauffeur Paul Christopher (Jeffrey Wright). When the kidnapper releases Trey by mistake, David is faced with the choice to buy back power or risk it all for Kyle’s ransom. The film follows the outline of Kurosawa’s HIGH AND LOW (1963), but the insecurities of the collaborators saturate the story. For a majority of the runtime, this feels less like a crime thriller and more like a Bergmanesque meditation. Living in his ivory tower of pop culture relics, King lives fully aware his prime has passed. While his home decor fills the frame with images of James Brown, George Foreman, Muhammad Ali, and Michael Jackson, he feels restless. Washington, a surrogate for Lee, tries to keep up in an unrecognizable world after experiencing the greatest success in his field. Some have argued the film is a metaphor for Lee’s pivot towards conservative politics, glorifying ownership of production; but the character’s motivation lies in pursuit of mojo rather than salivating over exploitation. HIGHEST 2 LOWEST feels like two separate genre films colliding head on at 90 miles an hour. The first half presents a day in the life with sprinkled uneasiness by way of New Wave-ish editing style. As father and son enter the gym, the camera trucks along on Steadicam. As family talks to the coach, Lee cuts between parallel shots slightly punched in for coverage, a big no-no according to most accredited film schools yet a choice made by the artistic director of NYU Tisch’s film program. During one of Washington’s greatest monologues, Lee’s editing interrupts the actor to communicate the character’s frustration past the abilities of skilled oration. Lee’s intervals keep us on our toes, shocking us awake in case we were sleeping. An actor’s brilliance comes from his spontaneity; a good actor prepares, but a great actor prepares not knowing what will come out. Every frame of Denzel Washington exudes truth and vulnerability. In interviews, Lee appears quietly apprehensive sitting next to Washington, quietly observing a force of nature. The film pairs his chops with other heavy hitters such as Wendell Pierce and delightfully surprising A$AP Rocky. The final confrontation between rhyming foes deserves a seat next to the coffeeshop scene from HEAT (1995). For a film about an artist ruminating on the past, we witness the best images of the auteur’s career. HIGHEST 2 LOWEST is not OLDBOY (2013). Instead of remaking, this Spike Lee Joint riffs in its own direction, using the classic as a launchpad into the final phase of his career. (2025, 133 min, DCP Digital) [Ray Ebarb]
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An Evening with Spike Lee takes place on Friday, 5:30pm, also at the AMC NEWCITY 14. Note that this requires a separate ticket.
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Shorts 2: Animation
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Friday, 2:30pm
Hallucinatory, surrealist imagery dominates this year’s animated shorts program, in which memorable sights include a blue slug with a bandaid for a shell, a girl covered with blinking eyes, and neon pointillist rainforests. The latter appear in Carlos Velandia and Angélica Restrepo’s THIS IS NOT YOUR GARDEN (13 min), a self-described “kino-botanical report” made from 3D computer scans of endangered forests and páramos in the highlands of Bogotá, Colombia. These areas glimmer to posthuman life as constellations of animated particles against a void, the virtual camera gliding through the reconstructed landscapes amid durational sounds of nature. A different kind of precarious ecosystem is depicted in Jenny Jokela’s hand-painted DOLLHOUSE ELEPHANT (11 min), a vividly polychromatic cross-section of apartment residents cohabitating on the edge of chaos. A fish stew spewing bilious green steam and a strongwoman emerging like a genie from a smartphone are two of the elements that threaten to break—or perhaps unite—the disparate tenants. The unique affects of emigrant homecomings are central to a pair of autobiographical works. In Marta Reis Andrade’s DOG ALONE (13 min), which bears resemblance to the art style of Marjane Satrapi, a young woman returns to her Portuguese hometown to find that her grandfather, and a local dog, are as lonely as she. Distances are mended through a symbolic odyssey involving a fallen button, giant sewing needles, and murders of crows. The homecoming in Matea Radic’s PARADAÏZ (9 min) is similarly guided by dream logic, with a woman confronting both traumas and absurdities when she comes back to the home she left in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War. A third whimsical self-portrait, Li Quankai’s DIPOLAR BIPOLAR (9 min), veritably bursts at the seams with overstimulating invention meant to evoke the hectic workings of the filmmaker’s bipolar mind. On a complete opposite aesthetic register is Yoriko Mizushiri’s ORDINARY LIFE (10 min), a languid Zen-like montage of tactile sensations rendered in simple lines, pastel hues, and buttery-smooth match cuts: a finger running along a mushroom’s gills, then down the blinds; a pair of feet walking in shoes filled with water. This is the "oddly satisfying" subgenre of Internet video as avant-garde animation. The future-looking protagonist of John Kelly’s RETIREMENT PLAN(7 min) would benefit from such decelerated mindfulness, so fixated is he on the laundry list of activities he hopes to accomplish when he’s retired. Drolly narrated by Domhnall Gleeson and animated in clean, bold outlines, the film reflects the bittersweet longing for pleasures to come—even, or maybe especially, the ones that never will. Also screening is Sylwia Szkiłądź’s AUTOKAR, which was unavailable to preview. DIPOLAR BIPOLAR sound designer Chenxi Zhang is scheduled to attend. [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
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Radu Jude’s KONTINENTAL ’25 (Romania)
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Friday, 5:45pm
With the title and premise of KONTINENTAL ’25, Radu Jude alludes to Roberto Rossellini’s EUROPA ’51 (1952), one of the hallmarks of postwar European cinema. In that film, Ingrid Bergman plays an upper-class woman who acts on the preventable death of her ten-year-old son by committing herself to charity with increasing fervor; through her actions and the way they’re greeted by the people around her, Rossellini raises the question of whether saintliness is possible in modern times. Jude’s film is not a remake of Rossellini’s, nor are its concerns particularly religious, yet the Romanian director is clearly a descendant of the great Italian modernist in how he makes films to generate thought about morality and the state of the world. KONTINENTAL ’25 begins as a documentary-like account of a homeless man in the Romanian city of Cluj-Napoca (once the capital of Transylvania), centering on his degrading efforts to find work and food. After a bailiff comes to the boiler room where he’s been sleeping to evict him, the man commits suicide, and Jude shifts focus to the bailiff for the rest of the picture. Orsolya (Eszter Tompa) may feel terribly guilty about the man’s death, but she doesn’t develop any aspirations of saintliness (she does, however, get a Brechtian monologue in which she relates how much she donates each month and to which charity). Rather, she falls into a funk but tries to go on with life as usual, tending to her job, marriage, and children and trying to disregard the waves of online hate that have entered her life since news of the homeless man’s suicide went viral. In what’s become characteristic for the Romanian filmmaker, Jude presents Osolya’s life as a series of encounters that double as psychosocial examinations of late-capitalist Romania; more than ever, the prognosis looks bad. The writer-director’s wit remains forever sharp, and the subject matter here offers plenty of opportunities for his gallows humor. But the overriding sensibility is one of sadness and resignation; the more we learn about Osolya, the more unhappy we realize she is. A lot of this has to do with her limited economic possibilities, but that’s not all—Jude is trying to identify a despiritualized quality in contemporary Europe that’s making everybody miserable. (2025, 109 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Christine Turner's SUN RA: DO THE IMPOSSIBLE (US/Documentary)
Kennedy-King College (U-Building Theater, 740 W. 63rd St.) — Friday, 6:30pm [Free Admission]
Logan Center for the Arts (at the University of Chicago) — Saturday, 7pm
Christine Turner’s kaleidoscopic biopic SUN RA: DO THE IMPOSSIBLE reflects the many shades of one of the most impossible to define, mystical beings of the universe. But Turner has certainly tackled the impossible. Instead of demystifying Sun Ra, she perpetuates this myth that is his legacy, and convinces us why Ra’s commitment to myth-building is fundamentally intertwined with Black radical imagining that is itself a form of activism and resistance. Through Turner’s lens, conjures this presence who carried an earthling's name of Herman Poole Blount that was Sun Ra the avant-gardist jazz musician; Sun Ra the down-to-earth, lovely poet; Sun Ra the prodigal composer who never in a second of his life not thinking about music; Sun Ra the philosopher and leader—both that of a band and that of spirituality—who pioneers Afrofuturism and motherly chaperoned talents; Sun Ra the political activist who would reject a system he did not believe in despite the consequence of imprisonment. The film does not shy away either from—though still with much shyness—the shades of Sun Ra that have continued to bewilder most of us: Sun Ra’s odd disinterest in bodily hedonism in an era of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, his intense method of band management that was fugal on the payment but demanding at the verge of cultish. Following a chronological order, the documentary layers copious amount of archival footage, performances, photographs, experimental imagery, and contemporary or historical interviews with the Arkestra band members, musicians, journalists, and scholars to retell Ra’s formative years in Birmingham—Blount’s hometown—his Chicago decade and a half, his explosion from New York, California to the rest of the world. Under dazzling sparkles, the political, the intellectual, and the artistic coalesce and form a "transmolectularizing" power that will transform us all. Turner scheduled to attend both screenings. (2025, 84 min, DCP Digital) [Nicky Ni]
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Ildikó Enyedi’s SILENT FRIEND (Germany/Hungary/France)
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Friday, 8pm
The title character of this puzzling art movie is not a person, but rather a tree, specifically a gingko biloba located on a German university campus. SILENT FRIEND alternates between three separate time periods and considers how people relate to this tree at different points in history. The principal story line concerns a neuroscientist from Hong Kong (Tony Leung) who comes to the university as a visiting scholar in 2020; during the COVID lockdown, he becomes fascinated with the tree and ends up conducting an unusual experiment having to do with its reproduction. The other two narratives take place in 1908 and 1972 and deal with, respectively, the exploits of the university’s first female student and the relationship between a socially awkward graduate student and the co-ed who tries to get him to open up. It’s never clear what writer-director Ildikó Enyedi is trying to say with all this, but that’s typical of this Hungarian writer-director, who’s marched to the beat of her own drummer since her debut feature, MY TWENTIETH CENTURY (1989). SILENT FRIEND circles around themes of alienation, connection, and the mystery of the natural world without coming to a point about any of them—the film is essentially a dance of ideas, kind of like Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s MEMORIA (2021) but without the transcendental elements. And like MEMORIA, this functions partly as a love letter to higher learning, as Enyedi successfully conveys the excitement of performing research and making academic discoveries. It’s a film that advances a scientific worldview, regarding people as case studies and their feelings as so much data to sort through. Some may find this perspective comforting; for one thing, it reflects a certain faith in progress and the triumph of intellectual endeavor. If nothing else, it’s undeniably unique, highlighting an alternative approach to both humanist and antihumanist thinking. Enyedi scheduled to attend. (2025, 147 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Radu Jude’s DRACULA (Romania)
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Friday, 8:30pm and Saturday, 9:15pm
Also starting at the Siskel Film Center on Wednesday – See Venue website for showtimes
Radu Jude opens his DRACULA with a literary invocation: “O gentle reader, you would find a tale in everything.” The Wordsworth quote is not a mere ornament, but a thesis statement, an admission that narrative, like history, is a proliferation of tales, and that every telling is an act of distortion. In the age of the algorithm, every tale tells itself. From the start, Jude signals that he’s not resurrecting the vampire myth but dissecting it, wielding irony like a crucifix against cliché. What emerges is a meta-fictional farce in thirteen disordered "digressions." A filmmaker, Adonis Tanța, plans a new Dracula yet confesses creative impotence; enter artificial intelligence, that new familiar spirit eager to suck the marrow from myth. Using Dr AI Judex, Tanta indirectly shows AI’s true vampiric identity as it consumes archives, myths, and memes only to spit them back as soulless inaccurate collages. The resulting patchwork of sketches that are part cabaret, part confessional, and part collapse invites its on-screen audience to hunt the performers after a sexual intermission. When the Count sighs, “Cock down, finished,” Jude turns centuries of seductive menace into the world’s bleakest punchline. He doesn’t slay the vampire; he neuters him. Jude’s sense of mischief propels the work. His method is both assembled from found detritus and digital refuse and traditional filmmaking. The nearly three-hour film mimics a social media feed as we doomscroll to the end. DRACULA, with its mixed media approach and barrage of ideology, becomes an homage to the work of Jean-Luc Godard. The digressions include a woman seeking longevity in a Romanian clinic, footage from F. W. Murnau’s NOSFERATU (1922) used to sell erections and tourism, and a Marxist metaphor, to name a few. The Karl Marx parable unfolds in a coding factory. "Capital is dead labor feeding on the living," a line that doubles as both doctrine and diagnosis.  This digression includes a smoking C3PO knock-off and a violent battle between the workers and a living dead army of 1933 Romanian soldiers who shoot at striking workers. Through abundant absurdity, Jude captures the essence of Vlad The Impaler, a figure of genocidal terror who defended his empire from the Ottoman invasion through sadistic impalements. Visually, Jude embraces generated ugliness like an aesthetic manifesto. His AI fragments, warped and waxy, flaunt their synthetic decay. Too many fingers, not enough soul. Where digital artists chase seamless illusion, Jude foregrounds the glitch. Those vehemently opposed to the use of AI in film will adore Jude’s scathing condemnation. Generated images are used for exterior backgrounds, mimicking Francis Ford Coppola’s DRACULA (1992) with anatomically distorted images of vampires and orgies, and for an army of zombies battling the working class. Between these moments of AI, are sets built with the minimalism of DOGVILLE (2003), stages in a restaurant, and outdoor shooting with a stable of actors—many of which have appeared in Jude’s prior films. Most notable is the return of Ilinca Manolache from I DO NOT CARE IF WE GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS BARBARIANS (2018), DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM THE END OF THE WORLD (2023), and KONTINENTAL ’25 (2025). The satire here isn’t soulless. Beneath the spatter of irony murmurs a stubborn tenderness. Late in the film, a garbage collector sneaks away from work to watch his daughter recite a poem about Vlad the Impaler. The shot lingers, not on the poet but the father’s distant, embarrassed pride. It’s Jude’s quietest heresy, a faith in empathy amid the noise. Jude’s DRACULA is less a horror story than a requiem for coherence or a laughing elegy. In its fragmented feed of lust, labor, and latency, Jude transforms exhaustion into style. “Dear reader,” his narrator pleads, “you must have read such nonsense in your life. Pray, read this one too, and if some part does not agree with you, take a quill and put down something better, for I only did the best I could.” And so, the film ends where it began, with an invitation. A tale, once bitten, is ready to tell again. (2025, 170 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]
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Curtis Miller’s A BRIEF HISTORY OF CHASING STORMS (US/Documentary)
Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 12pm
This essayistic documentary could’ve been tailor-made for me. I love tornadoes (and when I say love, I mean am in awe and fear of), and I love the movie TWISTER, and Curtis Miller’s A BRIEF HISTORY OF CHASING STORMS is about both. More so about tornados in general, as it traces an abridged history of Tornado Alley, a section of the country where tornados are most frequent, using several particularly monstrous ones as well as touchstones of “tornado culture,” as one might call it, to tell a rich story of this particular natural disaster. More than just delivering the macabre facts of these devastating events, Miller also mines them for sociological truths about our society. For example, one tornado originally rated an F6 on the Fujita scale but later downgraded to an F5 (Fujita, whose research was facilitated through the University of Chicago, personally surveyed the tornado’s damage, which helped to established guidelines for the newly realized scale) decimated a Mexican neighborhood in Lubbock, Texas, a history that’s been whitewashed, literally, to underemphasize the disproportionate amount of damage done in that area. It’s an elegant mix of such realities and the more folksy aspects of them, such as the TWISTER Movie Museum in Wakita, Oklahoma, where several of the film’s pivotal moments take place and were filmed. There’s a shrine to the late Bill Paxton, of whom the tour guide speaks very highly. This isn’t the only such museum in the film; it’s a fascinating examination of local histories and how they become the stuff of local legend, sometimes complete with charming museums that may not rival the Smithsonian in size but certainly exceeds it in spirit. There’s also a crusty amateur storm spotter (and car enthusiast, whose vehicle the Primo Victoria recently had some screen time in the 2024 sequel TWISTERS), whose interest in tornadoes doesn’t appear to be backed by science but rather a more homegrown communion with the phenomena, and a tornado safe room salesman who may represent the more capitalistic side of disaster speculation but is still strangely likable, in no small part due to the enthusiasm he exudes over his grandfather’s artwork, which peppers his office space. Evocative landscapes of impending storms were shot on 16mm (scenes involving interviewees were shot digitally but made to look like film in post-production), and a horn-heavy score resembles the beautiful but violent nature of the subject matter. If you didn’t “love” tornados before, you very may well after seeing this, and if you already did, well, join me in feeling as if it were made for you. Miller scheduled to attend. (2025, 70 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
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Brittany Shyne’s SEEDS (US)
Logan Center for the Arts – Saturday, 1pm
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Sunday, 12pm
When discussing her debut feature SEEDS, director Brittany Shyne has described the film as "the maintenance of legacy and cultural presentation." This becomes painfully clear as the full scope of her work comes into view, a kaleidoscopic look at the lives of Black farmers in the American South that, like the best documentaries, acts as both art and artifact. Originally conceiving of the film as a project while in grad school, Shyne, also acting as cinematographer here, wanted to use her filmic voice to capture a perspective that she had yet to see portrayed faithfully, if at all, on camera. Structurally, SEEDS exists as a “process” documentary; there are no talking heads, no descriptive voiceovers, simply the footage of these farmers in Georgia and Mississippi working, talking, and simply living, Shyne’s imagery providing enough context and artistry to paint a sumptuous picture as is. We are thrust, in pristine black-and-white, into the world of these “centennial farmers,” those whose families have owned their respective land for over a hundred years, their cultural footprint measured in acres, struggling to keep up with an agricultural community that has systematically left them far behind. Shyne’s compositions are gorgeously intimate, her camera finding its way into the deep crevasses of gigantic mechanical cotton pickers, into funeral homes during reverentially joyful services, and even to Washington DC, joining the farmer’s mass protests against the blatantly racially discriminatory practices of the Department of Agriculture (during the Biden Administration, mind you). Two figures who find themselves poking through the artistic morass of agricultural imagery are Willie Jr. and Carlie, two enigmatic farmers whose presence particularly highlights how this profession—for Black southerners, at least—still mainly rests in the hands of the elderly (Carlie is 89 in the footage here, but has since passed). There is an existential weight at the heart of SEEDS, of Black Americans finally owning land in a country that has brutally othered them for centuries, hoping that there will be someone to whom they can pass down these fields of legacy. Cotton and corn will continue to grow, but will those who have given their lives to cultivate these crops still be given the space to do so, to grow even fuller, even stronger? Shyne scheduled to attend. (2025, 123 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
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Christian Petzold’s MIROIRS NO. 3 (Germany)
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Saturday, 1:45pm
Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 12pm
German director Christian Petzold returns to his favorite subject, the nature of identity, with his latest film, MIROIRS NO. 3. The title, taken from Maurice Ravel’s solo piano work “Miroirs” (“Mirrors”), examines how people use other people to resolve stubborn emotional problems. Laura (Paula Beer), a music student living in Berlin, is involved in a car accident in a rural part of Germany that kills her boyfriend (Philip Froissant) but leaves her with only a very minor injury. Betty (Barbara Auer), a middle-age woman who was nearly hit by the car, is surprised when Laura asks to stay with her to recover instead of going home or to the hospital. The pair quickly falls into a familial routine that draws Betty’s estranged husband (Matthias Brandt) and son (Enno Trebs) back to their home. Laura clearly was having some troubles before she ever met Betty and her troubled family, and both parties saw an opportunity for healing through projection. Petzold, who also wrote the screenplay, fills the screen with bucolic images and good will as the four players in this drama work through their sadness and come out the other end in a brighter place. This little jewel of a film, a far cry from Petzold’s darker works, is a real heartwarmer. (2025, 86 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Jim Jarmusch’s FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER (US)
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Saturday, 4:15pm
With FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER, aging icon of sulky indie cool Jim Jarmusch may have reached the autumn of his career, that stage when some filmmakers, perhaps a little weary and with nothing left to prove, undergo a mellowing or paring-down of style. This is in many ways his straightest, simplest, and most sentimental feature, which is not to say it lacks his signature laconic wit or droll sense of existentialist detachment. The film is a tryptic of short stories of intergenerational distances, each bookended by a screen of dreamy flickering lights. In FATHER, well-off siblings Jeff (Adam Driver) and Emily (Mayim Bialik) check in on their widowed, financially and possibly mentally struggling recluse father (Tom Waits) in his New Jersey home. MOTHER focuses on a more dissimilar sibling pair, the materialistic pink-haired Lilith (Vicky Krieps) and the modest Timothea (Cate Blanchett), as they pay their annual visit to their posh writer mother (Charlotte Rampling) in Dublin. Finally, in SISTER BROTHER, fraternal twins Skye (Indya Moore) and Billy (Luka Sabbat) clean out their late parents’ flat in Paris. The first two stories unfold as dry comedies of manners, guarded encounters between estranged children and parents in which halting pleasantries conceal pains, insecurities, and resentments that are never spoken but are keenly felt. More sanguine, the third finds hope in how intergenerational gaps can be (belatedly) filled. All three stories include motifs that are mirrored or inverted across the others; as in Jarmusch’s PATERSON (2016), much of the pleasure here comes from picking up on the patterns. Some are obvious and quite funny—slow-motion skateboarders, Rolex watches, water and tea as questionable toasting beverages, a particular bit of British lingo—while others, like the use of eyeglasses or the repetition of certain camera angles, are more subtle. The latter helps spice up the flat digital images, mostly static closeup and medium shots that foreground the performers’ telling micro-expressions. Jarmusch hasn’t gone soft, exactly—these frosty relationships never do thaw out—but FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER does tap a heartfelt universality in the familial(r) aches of its characters, reaffirming a maxim from Rynosuke Akatagawa once used by an idol of Jarmusch’s, Yasujiro Ozu: “Life’s tragedy begins with the bond between parent and child.” (2025, 110 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
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Euzhan Palcy’s SUGAR CANE ALLEY (France)
Logan Center for the Arts (at the University of Chicago) — Saturday, 5:30pm
Apparently, in Martinique—where the film, Euzhan Palcy’s first feature, is set—Sugar Cane Alley beat Steven Spielberg’s E.T. at the box office. I found this factoid interesting, as Palcy’s film reminded me of Spielberg’s oeuvre in general, with its immaculate mise-en-scène and richness of conviction. (Palcy would later become the first Black woman to direct a film produced by a major Hollywood studio and to win major awards at various film festivals. Before she went on to make A Dry White Season, she had proposed to Warner Bros. that she direct an adaptation of her friend Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple, but Spielberg was already slated to do so.) Based on the semi-autobiographical novel by Joseph Zobel—which Palcy read as a child and for which she began tentatively drafting the screenplay while still in high school—it centers on a preteen boy, José, living with his grandmother, Ma Tine, in 1930s Martinique, under French colonial rule, where she works in the sugar cane fields as an exploited source of cheap labor—not quite a slave, but only one rung removed. José is an orphan; he’s also gifted, and his grandmother is intent on ensuring he doesn’t become a worker like herself. Palcy, who also wrote the screenplay, divides the film beautifully among various points in José’s journey. Approximately the first third showcases José’s youthful transgressions with his friends, set against the brutality of the adults working in the sugar cane fields. He’s also close with an older man in his community, who tells him of Africa, saying that he’ll go back there someday. There are several aspects of this film that could be read as “young adult, made-for-TV movie,” but somehow it doesn’t feel that way at all. It’s a credit to Palcy’s filmmaking that she avoids cloying sentimentality, instead leavening various emotional registers into something remarkably genuine. José’s academic aptitude then becomes the focus, as he attends a local school and later wins a scholarship to a high school in a nearby city, where he and his grandmother move—she taking on even more backbreaking labor to afford the costs. There’s anguish and trauma, of course, the latter expressed both generationally and on screen; this is evinced in a subplot where one of José’s friends, unacknowledged by his white father, learns on his father’s deathbed that he still won’t claim him. The boy, in turn, runs away and steals a ledger that proves the sugar cane barons are shortchanging their workers. Complementing all this is Dominique Chapuis’ stunning cinematography. In a great, recently published interview with Cinema Femme's Rebecca Martin, Palcy says they decided to shoot on Fuji film, which “had been designed for Asian skin tones,” because “it captured much more warmth and depth.” Both of those words describe the film itself: warm and deep, as much a showcase of emotion as of craft. At this screening, Euzhan Palcy will receive the Festival’s Black Perspectives Tribute and Career Achievement Award. (1983, 103 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
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Shorts 8: Drama
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Saturday, 8pm
The films in this program are slow burners. The knotted complexities of being human, submerged deep in the narratives, subtly unravel and emerge to the surface that become the image of the film. In HONEY, MY LOVE, SO SWEET (20 min), JT Trinidad sews together quiet tableaux vivants that glimpses at two children’s coming of age, against the backdrop of sultry Manila, an aging cinema, and daily humdrum. The ice-cold HIPPOPOTAMI (13 min) primes an insidious malice with silence. With a sterile palette it paints its characters not as living humans but as signs for themselves. A middle-aged man picks up a mysterious, older client before he picks up his young daughter and his wife. A promised trip to the zoo ends up in a white-cube museum, and the transactions among the adults spill over to the child’s world, pitting her waning innocence against a cruel, hopeless reality. “There are only two types of hippos in the world, regular hippo and pygmy hippo.” But there’s only one way of life for the girl, as she perceives for herself—that without a future. Actor Tawfeek Barhom’s directorial debut shows incredible force and restraint in telling a story about grief, trauma, and a kind of turbulent state where relief is coupled with guilt. In I’M GLAD YOU’RE DEAD NOW (13 min), two brothers return to an island after the death of their father. When memory flares and leaves a bad aftertaste, do they cover it up like how they used to, or do they embrace the future, leaving the sour and sorrows behind? Clàudia Cedó’s blazingly truthful and empowering film about disability and the backward view that society has toward it—whether through discrimination or patronization, MADE OF SUGAR (25 min) follows a neurodivergent woman, Maria, who desires to be a mother, which her circumstances do not permit. She lives in a care home, where restriction of reproduction is forced upon women. As Maria wrestles with the system, she finds solace in a group of supporting and loving friends. Also on the program is Pavo Marinkovic's THE COW (18 min), which was unavailable for preview. HIPPOPOTAMI producer Ying Lou and HONEY, MY LOVE, SO SWEET producer Jelsy Arcales, Clàudia Cedó, and Pavo Marinkovic and actor Stjepan Perić are scheduled to attend. (2025, Total approx. 89 min, DCP Digital) [Nicky Ni]
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Hong Sang-soo’s WHAT DOES THAT NATURE SAY TO YOU (South Korea)
AMC NEWCITY 14 – Saturday, 8:30pm
How many of Hong Sang-soo’s movies don’t contain a scene where someone gets drunk and makes a fool of themselves? No matter how much he evolves formally, Hong returns again and again to the same narrative and thematic fixations (his filmography may be the closest equivalent in narrative cinema to Monet’s haystacks), and drunken embarrassment happens to be one of them. So, if you’re a fan of the South Korean writer-director, then WHAT DOES THAT NATURE SAY TO YOU might play like a mystery for most of its run time, the mystery being, who will play the inebriated ass? In this film, Hong assembles a collection of characters, each of whom seems likely to implode when drunk, puts them in close proximity of one another for long enough for their foibles to become apparent, then gives everybody booze. Here’s the set-up: Donghwa (Ha Seong-guk), a 30-something poet, goes with his girlfriend of three years, Junee (Kang So-yi), to meet her family for the first time. Her mother, father, and older sister (who recently moved back home to “work things out”) live on the side of a mountain outside of Seoul; all three are interesting people with cool hobbies. Donghwa and Junee’s socially awkward sister (Park Mi-so) start to clash in subtle ways, which may lead you to think that one of them will make a faux pas after the wine starts to pour. But what about Junee’s dad (Hong regular Kwon Hae-hyo), who seems almost unnaturally happy about everything? Or her mom (Cho-Yun-hee), herself a poet of local renown? Who knows what resentments they’re harboring? As usual with Hong, the fun of WHAT DOES THAT NATURE SAY TO YOU lies in how the filmmaker unpeels his characters, revealing more about them as the story progresses until you reach their true natures. The film contains some jabs at the egos of poets, but for the most part, it maintains the gentle attitude that’s been running through Hong’s 2020s work so far. (2025, 108 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Frank Borzage’s LITTLE MAN, WHAT NOW? (US)

Chicago Film Society at the Film Studies Center (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm

If Ernst Lubitsch addressed life’s struggles wryly, with a wink and a nod to the sublime futility of being, then Frank Borzage did so earnestly, sometimes wallowing in despair and sometimes suggesting that we may be elevated out of it. LITTLE MAN, WHAT NOW? brought Lubitsch to mind mainly because of one of its stars, Margaret Sullavan, and its setting in two types of stores anticipate Lubitsch’s later THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER. But where even the dingiest of Lubitsch’s European-set comedies were made bright by his fabled touch, Borzage’s post-World War I Weimar Germany is darker, representative of a country on the precipice of a sea change that would alter the course of history. Based on Hans Fallada’s novel, the story follows a young man, Johannes (Douglass Montgomery), and his wife, Emma (Sullavan, in only her second role), called “Lammchen” (German for little lamb) by her husband, as Emma has gotten pregnant and Johannes is struggling at his workplace. First working at some kind of supply store, he quits that job after its proprietor pressures him to marry his daughter. Then they go to Berlin to live with Johannes’ stepmother, unknown to them as an ill-famed madam, where Johannes gets a job at a department store. Just as the country is on the brink, so, too, is the young couple, seeming forever to almost catch a break, only to have the rug pulled out from under them (in this way it also reminds me of King Vidor’s seminal 1928 silent THE CROWD)—the threat of unemployment looms over them as fascism does the country. It’s valiantly political, though not as glaringly as the novel supposedly is, with no explicit mention of the Nazi party. Rather, politics are a suggestion, such as through a minor character who appears throughout, raving about the injustices that befall him and everyone else, though he doesn’t seem to commune with his fellow man. (In one scene, the angry man and his wife encounter Lammchen in the park feeding bread to the ducks; he chides her for giving the ducks bread while people go hungry.) The exact parameters of this man’s politics are unclear. He could be a Communist or a disenfranchised German on the verge of embracing Nazism. (It seems to be the former, but an interaction with Johannes later in the film puts into perspective the man’s own ideological self-centeredness, which would be a strike against Communism if that's what it in fact is.) But Johannes and Lammchen embrace peace, wanting only to be together and welcome their child into the cruel world. The source material was brought to Carl Laemmle, Jr.’s attention by Edgar G. Ulmer, then a set designer; though Laemmle was initially reticent, he obviously felt compelled enough to tack on a zealous proclamation at the beginning, exclaiming that he “strove to render a social service,” and then extolling “that men can only hope to overcome by a courage born of great faith in the hearts of women.” It’s a gauzy romance with subtle but nevertheless sharp social commentary; as delicate as it sounds, it was released just a month ahead of the implementation of the Hays Code and in spite of Hays’ strong objections to certain, less savory aspects of the film, such as the premarital sex, the subtlest hint of abortion at the beginning, and the career of Johannes’ stepmother. Still, among the grime of existence, Borgaze portrays the grit of humanity with distinctive tenderness. Preceded by a 1934 Fox Movietone News short (10 min, 35mm). (1934, 98 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]

James Whale’s BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (US)

Music Box Theatre – Saturday, 11:30am

When first approached to direct a sequel to FRANKENSTEIN (1931), James Whale declined, saying he felt he couldn’t top his work on the original. But Carl Laemmle, Jr., who championed Whale and more or less gave him free reign during his brief tenure as Head of Production at Universal Pictures, got him to change his mind by first letting him direct his pet project ONE MORE RIVER (1934). Junior also gave Whale considerable creative control over BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, and as a result it may be the director’s most personal film. The justly famous passage in which Frankenstein’s Monster befriends the blind hermit represents the most moving expression of Whale’s sympathy for outsiders, which was no doubt colored by his experience of being openly gay. On a related note, the film’s humor marks one of the earliest expressions of intentional camp in a Hollywood production, from the hilarious posturing of the prelude sequence to Ernest Thesiger’s inspired performance as Dr. Pretorius. It’s worth noting that the comedic parts of BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN in no way detract from its sincere drama; rather, the tonal shifts suggest a sense of liberty from generic constraints, much like in George Cukor’s SYLVIA SCARLETT, another Hollywood film by an openly gay director released the same year. While this is surely one of the major auteurist horror films, it’s also representative of the studio system at its finest, given the contributions of composer Franz Waxman (who wrote one of the first great film scores for this), cinematographer John J. Mescall, the Universal props department, and hell, even the studio psychiatrist, who helped Whale develop the Monster’s personality and limited vocabulary. Boris Karloff clearly had a lot to work with here—his performance surpasses his work in the first FRANKENSTEIN, as he succeeds in making the Monster the most sympathetic character in the movie. His final line (“We belong dead”) has unexpected pathos and resonance, and it makes the film feel a lot more substantial than its 75-minute runtime might lead you to expect. Screening as part of the Music Box of Horrors: Dead and Loving It! series. (1935, 75 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Ben Rivers' BOGANCLOCH (UK/Experimental)

Siskel Film Center — Monday, 6pm

Much ink was spilled back in 2011 following the release of TWO YEARS AT SEA, Ben Rivers' debut feature, about the myriad ways in which the film functioned as a work of self-portraiture. For a ferociously non-commercial filmmaker whose penchant for artistic autonomy and commitment to process-oriented work saw him developing 16mm film in his kitchen sink and editing his own material, it was easy to discern how his methodology and worldview could be mapped onto Jake Williams, the retired merchant seaman turned hermetic woodsman who served as that film's iconic subject. TWO YEARS was a provocatively soporific work, one that now feels very much of its historical moment at the height of various "slow cinema" discourses, that documented Williams' solitary existence in the Scottish Highlands, following him in more-or-less total silence as he prepared food, tinkered with homespun gadgetry, and napped in serene locales around his secluded cabin. It is only natural that Rivers would eventually return to the Clashindarroch Forest to catch up with Williams more than a decade down the line, as an update the current state of Jake Williams also serves as a moment to reflect on Rivers' artistic trajectory as well as changing attitudes regarding self-reliance and the pursuit of personal liberty. The film is, by all accounts, relatively normative for Ben Rivers. He has once again captured the affair on lustrous 16mm black-and-white film, possessed of a savage beauty owing to the pockmarks and washes of overexposure that are characteristic of hand-processing. There's a noirish sensitivity to the interplay of light and shadows, and even greater care has been given to capturing the staggering beauty of the countryside. At its very best, the film manages to evoke through sheer textural ingenuity the splendor of the Highlands as famously depicted in the Powell & Pressburger classic, I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING! (1945). Notably, however, the pace of the work has quickened tremendously. Largely gone are the patience-testing static master takes, now supplanted by a comparatively brisk editing rhythm that allows for a significantly broader scope of observation. While TWO YEARS AT SEA is putatively a documentary, it is abundantly clear from interviews with the filmmaker that Williams was directed as an actor, effectively being granted participatory inclusion in an exaggerated portrait of his own grand and solipsistic ideals. Thusly, you could more accurately liken the work to one of Lisandro Alonso's lonely man portraits (notably, Alonso himself plans on revisiting the subject of 2001's LA LIBERTAD, for an upcoming film), or perhaps a more astute point of comparison would be to Víctor Erice's 1992 magnum opus DREAM OF LIGHT, which foregrounded naturalistic observations of the artistic process in order to limn various essential truths about creativity, mortality and the natural world. This brings me to another point of departure for Rivers; where TWO YEARS AT SEA reveled in hypnotic silence and total isolationism, BOGANCLOCH contrastingly invites all manner of sounds and voices into the fray, be it in the form of a spirited campfire sing-along, a small ditty performed during bathtime, or a science lesson in which Williams uses a pub umbrella to demonstrate the mechanics of lunar phases to a classroom full of children. That latter scene, instantly remarkable inasmuch as it echoes the opening reel of Béla Tarr's WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES (2000), proves to be of critical importance. BOGANCLOCH ultimately feels like a determined effort to air out the mythology cultivated by its predecessor, not merely by granting more detailed and honest insight into Williams' daily routines, but by suggesting that his deep relationship with nature and his life of stoic contemplation actually instill in him a greater understanding of his own place in the cosmos. It's enormously telling of the creative direction Rivers ultimately undertook that he initially planned to shoot this film in 2021 on the tenth anniversary of the original, only to have his plans dashed by the onset of the global pandemic. Screening as part of the Off Center series. (2024, 86 min, DCP Digital) [David Whitehouse]

Servando González’s THE FOOL KILLER (Mexico/US)

Block Cinema (at Northwestern University) – Thursday, 7pm

In his harrowing travels through Reconstruction Era south, George Mellish (Edward Albert) learns of an Appalachian folk figure known as the Fool Killer. Learning that the eight-foot-tall man murders fools with his trusty axe, the 12-year-old is tortured by the notion of such a man. A runaway from his abusive foster parents, George considers himself a bit of a fool, as he was punished for everyday minor childhood mishaps. The easily influenced George is taken by many of those he meets on his journey, but none so much as Milo Bogardus (Anthony Perkins), a loner Civil War veteran who’s lost his memory and presents some disquieting similarities to the Fool Killer. Directed by Mexican filmmaker Servando González, THE FOOL KILLER was given delayed and limited release with generally unfavorable contemporary reviews; recently, the film has been compared to Charles Laughton’s THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1955), rightfully being reconsidered as a standout of cinematic American Southern Gothic. Like George’s travels, the film is continuously winding somewhere between fairy tale and folktale. The film’s structure itself feels otherworldly, reflecting George’s child perspective of the messy world and messed up folks he meets along the way. With cinematography by Alex Phillips Jr., who would go on to work on films like BUCK AND THE PREACHER (1972) and TOTAL RECALL (1990), THE FOOL KILLER also stands out for its remarkable visual construction and style. Through shadowy, decaying interiors and wide-open natural spaces—each equally foreboding—the camera often moves as if a ghostly presence is presiding over the events. One such shot from below the water as George sips from a creek, pondering the Fool Killer, suggests there’s so much more under the surface. (1965, 99 min, 16mm) [Megan Fariello]

Luis Buñuel’s ILLUSION TRAVELS BY STREETCAR (Mexico)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Saturday, 4pm

Set in Mexico City, ILLUSION TRAVELS BY STREETCAR is one of the few standout features that has emerged from director Luis Buñuel’s vast catalog of forgettable Mexican films. The film centers on No. 133, a cranky, old streetcar scheduled to be dismantled. Conductor Juan Godinez (Carlos Navarro), nicknamed “Curls” for his dreamy head of hair, and his motorman, Tarrajas (Fernando Soto), have managed to repair No. 133, but are told it is destined for the scrap heap. What else is there to do but go to a fiesta and get drunk? At the very Buñuelian fiesta, the revelers are treated to a staged version of Adam and Eve being tempted by the serpent. The impact of sinning is rather lost since the First Couple are dressed like Fred and Wilma Flintstone, but the amateur theatrics give Buñuel a chance to send up religion for the low-rent pagan undertaking he always believed it to be. Soon, Curls and Tarrajas’s sorrow and inebriation lead them to take No. 133 for one last joy ride. Navarro and Soto are a bit like Abbott and Costello as they tool around the city with half-aware beneficence for the passengers they pick up and carry to their destinations free of charge. The nighttime group of workers from the city slaughterhouse feature in an especially colorful sequence in this black-and-white film. Workers pile into the streetcar with their pig’s heads and sides of beef in tow. Why they would be carrying these items out of the abattoir is a mystery to me, but I imagine Buñuel couldn’t pass up the chance to throw some surreal, Francis Baconish images at the audience. In the glaring light of day, Curls and Tarrajas realize they could be in big trouble if they don’t get the streetcar back to the depot. Yet, at every turn, their journey is thwarted by blocked tracks and, in one instance, a retired, asthmatic streetcar inspector, “Daddy” Pinillos (Agustín Isunza), who threatens to report them for minor irregularities, never noticing that he is on a rogue streetcar. The plot amounts to a case of mistaken identity, but of the streetcar itself, with its rolling sign changing to accommodate the routes Curls and Tarrajas need to return to the depot. The script is a bit confused, with Curls and Tarrajas first being worried about being fired and then with being charged with theft, but typical for the lazy bureaucracy Buñuel ridicules, nobody believes a streetcar can be stolen. After all, how could it run other than on the company tracks? Good point. So again, we are left with a kind of nonsense plot, something I imagine happened a lot with the numerous quickies Buñuel made during his directorial career in Mexico. He may even have enjoyed the lack of coherence. He doesn’t spare the unwashed masses his jaundiced eye, the same eye he trained on the tramps in VIRIDIANA (1961). Yet, despite these paeans to the director’s favorite peccadillos, the short, matter-of-fact discussions his characters engage in have the kind of lived-in reality that contradict the director’s early adherence to surrealism. Money and the corruption form a constant theme and the source of more than one melee between consumers and their crooked suppliers. Perhaps living in Mexico for so many years was a grounding experience for Buñuel. The surrealist, iconoclastic, political touches that mark it as a Buñuel film, mixed with a cross-section of urban Mexican life, make ILLUSION TRAVELS BY STREETCAR an enriching viewing experience. Screening as part of the Buñuel in Mexico series. (1954, 82 min, 35mm) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Kelly Reichardt’s THE MASTERMIND (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

THE MASTERMIND begins, like so many Kelly Reichardt films, obliquely and suggestively. A man moseys through an art museum, his gaze oddly intense. In another room, a woman, turned away from the camera, ignores her chatty boy; both then ignore another, similar-looking boy who sits down beside the other, nose in a comic book. As a security guard naps in the background, the man nicks a small figurine from a glass case and slips it unnoticed into the woman’s bag before they and the kids leave together. In this quietly observant opening, Reichardt succinctly sets the stage for a film about compromised attention and useless hubris, and how a person’s myopic self-interest ultimately effects a self-defeating estrangement from the world. The ubiquitous Josh O’Connor is smartly cast as James, bringing a soft-spoken affability to a character who is profoundly selfish and dishonest. Living a comfy, conservative middle-class life with his wife (Alana Haim, sadly underused) and two kids in suburban Massachusetts circa 1970, he puts it all on the line by plotting the heist of four Arthur Dove paintings from the museum he was scouting in the opening scene. Only, the unduly confident James doesn’t feel he’s risking anything at all, and after he’s able to successfully steal the paintings with his two accomplices, he thinks he’s in the clear. But things fall apart quickly, not with the frenzy of a traditional thriller but with the placid melancholy Reichardt has honed throughout a filmography populated with the most ordinary and hapless of outcasts and loners. James takes the inverse course to many of the filmmaker’s protagonists, starting from social privilege before becoming increasingly displaced and alienated. Surrounded by news broadcasts of the Vietnam War and the activism of protestors, he can do nothing but retreat ever-inward; his tragedy is not born from his criminal activity but his chronic failure to attend to the things that actually matter. Reichardt’s longtime DP Christopher Blauvelt shoots in glowing autumnal shades that gradually give way to the chilly light of late fall; Rob Mazurek’s lively jazz score is the only element not joining in the sense of regressive drift. By the deeply ironic denouement, thick with societal disillusionment, THE MASTERMIND has repeatedly and dolefully shown that its ostensible hero—perhaps America itself—has no clothes. (2025, 110 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]

John Carpenter's IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS (US)

Music Box Theatre – Tuesday, 9:30pm

GHOSTS OF MARS (2001), CIGARETTE BURNS (2005), and THE WARD (2010) all have their defenders (and rightfully so), but IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS is the last John Carpenter film to win a cult following on par with that of THE THING (1982) or THEY LIVE (1988). Like those earlier Carpenter masterpieces, MADNESS didn’t make a splash on first release, opening in early 1995 to mixed reviews and middling box office returns. Maybe after a year of such grandstanding, elephantine American movies as FORREST GUMP, NATURAL BORN KILLERS, THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, and PULP FICTION, Carpenter’s tribute to H.P. Lovecraft (another quirky American genre storyteller) seemed too modest in its themes and too goofy in its execution for most people to take it seriously. (Leave it to Jonathan Rosenbaum and the staff of Cahiers du cinéma to buck the trend: the former wrote a thoughtful essay on the film for the Chicago Reader, and the latter named it one of the ten best of the year.) Over time, MADNESS has revealed itself to be a multilayered work that rewards repeat viewings, presenting ideas about the power of storytelling and employing clever meta-cinematic formal jokes—it’s got to be Carpenter’s most self-reflexive movie. Projecting the right mix of charisma and snark, Sam Neill stars as an insurance investigator hired to track down a popular horror writer who’s gone missing. His search takes him to New Hampshire and, ultimately, into the setting of many of the writer’s books—a creepy small town that’s a composite of recurring locales in the work of Lovecraft and Stephen King. This transition from the real world to the fictional world isn’t the first or last time in MADNESS when reality gets shaken by storytelling. Soon after the movie starts, Neill’s character learns that the writer’s latest book is literally driving people insane; near the end, the writer appears and literally unleashes unholy beasts on the world. The story may sound silly on the page, but under Carpenter’s inspired direction, it’s exciting and often quite scary. Screening as part of the Music Box of Horrors: Dead and Loving It! series. (1994, 95 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

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Stanley Kubrick's BARRY LYNDON (UK)

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

Borrowing many of the 18th century costumes directly from European museums and selecting his score after listening (allegedly) to every piece of 18th century music ever recorded, Stanley Kubrick brought an unprecedented level of verisimilitude to the historical drama with BARRY LYNDON. But rather than revel in the details for their own sake, Kubrick used them to create the eerie effect of a past existing autonomously from us as something like an alien planet--which may explain why Jonathan Rosenbaum has called the film a follow-up of sorts to 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Rosenbaum has singled out "John Alcott['s] slow backward zooms" as key to the movie's impact, since they "distance us, both historically and emotionally, from its rambling picaresque narrative." Kubrick manages another great distancing effect with the film's wry, clinical-sounding narration (read by Michael Hordern), which often explains the action before it occurs. This has the immediate impact of making the spectacular, pageant-like mise-en-scene feel anticlimactic: It would be a fine nose-thumbing gesture in itself, but the movie is more complicated than that. Beneath the pomp and technical perfection (This is also the film for which Kubrick developed a special lens that allowed him to shoot scenes entirely by candlelight) is a fable about one man's rise and fall along the conventions of his time. Since the conventions themselves remain just beyond comprehension, Ryan O'Neal, as the title character, seems less of an antihero upon repeated viewings and more of a tragic figure—every bit the victim of systems beyond his control as Dave Bowman in 2001. Screening as part of the New Releases and Restorations series. Screening as part of the New Releases and Restorations series. (1975, 184 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

George Cukor's THE WOMEN (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Sunday, 4pm

When asked by Gavin Lambert for his 1972 book On Cukor which recent movies he admired, the first title to cross George Cukor's mind was Andy Warhol's transgressive LONESOME COWBOYS. It's a fun bit of trivia, but also a revealing insight into this misunderstood filmmaker—a heartfelt melodramatist as well as a gender-studies theorist avant la lettre, some of whose best work (HOLIDAY, GASLIGHT, ADAM'S RIB) critiqued hetero-male hegemony well before such practice was commonly accepted. On paper, THE WOMEN seems like ideal material for Cukor: it's the screen adaptation of a Broadway play (Cukor began his directorial career on Broadway and maintained a sure hand with actors throughout his career) famous for having no male characters among its large cast. Occupying the void of powerful men is a web of female alliances and rivalries, scripted in part by the poison pen of Anita Loos (and, characteristically uncredited, F. Scott Fitzgerald) and starring some of the brassiest actresses of the day—Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, and Joan Fontaine, among many others. The film has plenty of Old Hollywood charm, but it's nowhere near as subversive as Cukor's previous HOLIDAY or his subsequent collaboration with Crawford, the morbid A WOMAN'S FACE. It's far too reverent of its high society milieu, and the film ends up endorsing male hegemony by making its central conflict a woman's fight over her husband with a scheming mistress. In Lambert's book, Cukor says the movie would have worked better if the characters recognized the husband's corruption and became friends instead of enemies. Still, the movie works well enough, thanks to the sharp dialogue and Cukor's typically ingenious use of longer takes. Screening as part of the Joan Crawford: Actress as Auteur series. (1939, 133 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Yorgos Lanthimos’ BUGONIA (US)

Music Box Theatre and various other Venues – See Venue websites for showtimes

Within the dense pages of the Byzantine Geoponica—the sole surviving record of Constantinople’s agricultural methods—lies mention of the Bugonia ritual: a belief that bees were born from the carcass of a cow. Life springing from death. A spontaneous empire of bees birthed from decay. Yorgos Lanthimos’ BUGONIA opens with a similar conception. Teddy (Jessie Plemons), a beekeeper of sorts, narrates, “It all starts with something magnificent,” describing the kingdom of bees and their devotion to the queen. But his question lingers: what happens when the worker bees revolt? From the start, Lanthimos aligns this mythic order with political unrest. Teddy and his cousin Donnie (Aidan Delbis) are disillusioned Americans, suffocating under capitalism’s weight. Teddy, in particular, channels his resentment into a feverish anti-corporate crusade that gradually unravels into delusion. His manifesto—part political revolt, part alien conspiracy—culminates in a conviction that the planet is under threat from the Andromedans, a race of extraterrestrials poised to attack during an impending lunar eclipse. Donnie becomes the third point in this ideological triangle between Teddy and pharmaceutical CEO Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), whom the cousins kidnap to expose her supposed alien identity. Delbis gives Donnie an aching sincerity; his loyalty to Teddy feels both familial and tragic. “We are not steering the ship, Don,” Teddy warns, as if resigned to cosmic manipulation. Lanthimos juxtaposes the cousins’ rustic world with Michelle’s sterile minimalism—Teddy and Donnie framed in asymmetrical, natural compositions, while Michelle exists in crisp lines and geometric order. Rituals including yoga, running, and kickboxing mirror the discipline of hive behavior, showing the similarities as well as the disparity between the cousins and Michelle. These visual and thematic contrasts build toward confinement: a CEO bound and drugged in a basement, where philosophical arguments mutate into psychological warfare. The scenario echoes a cinematic tradition of class revenge fantasies—SWIMMING WITH SHARKS (1994), THE REF (1994), even NATIONAL LAMPOON’S CHRISTMAS VACATION (1989)—where taking the powerful hostage serves as comic wish fulfillment. But Lanthimos transforms that fantasy into dread. As Teddy demands that Michelle contact the aliens to negotiate humanity’s survival, she retaliates with manipulations of her own. Teddy’s paranoia tries to outpace her corporate cunning. Despite its grim setup, BUGONIA thrives on absurd humor. “Don’t call it a dialogue; this isn’t Death of a Salesman,” Teddy quips, moments before using a homemade electroshock device to the tune of Green Day’s “Basket Case.” His awkward apology, “I didn’t realize you were a Queen; I thought you were just admin,” lands with the strange charm of Lanthimos’ earlier comedies. While less overtly Buñuelian than his previous work, Lanthimos maintains his surrealist flourishes. Flashbacks to Teddy’s dying mother (Alicia Silverstone), suspended by a string he holds like a balloon, reveal trauma fueling his delusions. His crusade against corporate aliens becomes an exorcism of grief and rage toward a pharmaceutical system that poisoned her. Adapted from Jang Joon-hwan’s SAVE THE GREEN PLANET! (2003), BUGONIA reimagines its source within the American landscape of YouTube manifestos, startup jargon, and class inequity. The bees pollinate while a Marlene Dietrich cover of Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?” plays. This seems the most apt visual metaphor. If Teddy’s theories prove correct, like rabbit-hole conspiracies that embolden and foster violent rhetoric, would that mean we are supposed to believe angry young white men who develop clickbait conspiracy? Or are they themselves the front line of our own extinction? CEOs like Michelle Fuller, who present a workplace of false diversity and “self-managed” work hours, are part of the billionaire class—a concept very alien to most of us—who get away with pushing untested drugs and trampling anyone in their way, are equally (if not more) dangerous. The more we hear from Teddy and Michelle, the more we realize that there could be hope in the Bugonia ritual. Maybe one day, from our rotten carcasses a better species will emerge. (2025, 117 mins, 35mm at the Music Box; likely DCP Digital Projection everywhere else) [Shaun Huhn]

Sofia Coppola's LOST IN TRANSLATION (US/Japan)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 9:30pm

LOST IN TRANSLATION is to some early-2000s indie film aficionados what certain Yo La Tengo and Wilco albums are to record store clerks and Gen Z vinyl collectors: a piece of art which exemplifies the era in which it was made, advancing an aesthetic that can be appreciated by viewers who were college-aged at the time of its release and younger cinephiles obsessively posting screen grabs of Scarlett Johansson in a wig with Bill Murray. If the film’s beautiful photography of scenic Tokyo isn't enough of a selling point, then Sofia Coppola’s expertise in crafting emotionally driven narratives makes this essential viewing. Coppola is uninterested in her characters' everyday activities; she opts instead to explore their shortcomings, their unattainable expectations, and other disappointments that have bubbled to the surface of their lives. For Johansson fans, the film contains one of her earliest and most impressive leading roles as Charlotte, an unemployed graduate of Yale’s philosophy program who aimlessly wanders Tokyo, trying to develop a better understanding of her mixed feelings about her marriage and career. For Murray fans, this delivers another classic character of his: former movie star Bob Harris, who spends his trip drowning both familial problems and dissatisfaction with successes in Suntory, the alcohol that he's promoting in Japan. Coppola’s writing really excels in the unspoken, awkward chemistry that fills each scene. The platonic nature of the film’s central relationship seems like it could tip at any time; one wonders how things could have been different for the characters had they met under different circumstances, in a different place, or in a different time. As this relationship unfolds, Coppola invites us to explore our own feelings of self-doubt and regret through the lens of two hyperspecific, yet endlessly relatable characterizations—a technique which earlier melancholic filmmakers passed down to her and which younger filmmakers she's influenced have tried with mixed results to borrow. Screening as part of the Board Picks series. (2003, 120 min, 35mm) [Michael Bates]

George A. Romero’s DAY OF THE DEAD (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Tuesday, 6:30pm

Film scholar Thomas Schatz described the Western as “a familiar iconographic arena where civilized met savage in an interminable mythic contest.” Director George A. Romero’s contribution to cinema history was to push—almost single-handedly—his chosen subgenre of the zombie film into as rich an expression of human drama as that most American of screen traditions. Made with sparse budgets, unknown actors, and cramped locations—but with Romero’s suggestive, subversive scenarios and the innovative gore techniques of collaborator Tom Savini—the early DEAD films (NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, DAWN OF THE DEAD, and DAY OF THE DEAD) suggest the terminal point of the Western conflict, where the facade of civilization has slipped decisively, and the violent instincts kept for a time at bay take dominion over the country. Unconnected to the previous two entries in the series, save for the backdrop of an undead outbreak in medias res, DAY OF THE DEAD concerns a group of survivors at an underground civilian research station in Florida, where both the scientists and their military keepers have begun to regress. The head scientist, Logan (Richard Liberty) has begun to experiment in novel and questionably ethical ways on the zombie subjects, while a tyrannical instigator named Rhodes (Joseph Pilato) has assumed command both of the military unit and of their subterranean society. This new nation’s invented border, deep underground, is a fence at the mouth of a vast cave system populated by thousands of the undead, policed by soldiers who further dehumanize these remnants of civilization with reflexive torrents of misogynistic and racist invective. Rhodes is all for simply wiping out the hordes, but Logan points out that they haven’t the ammunition: “We’re in the minority now, something like 400,000 to 1.” Amidst the tragedy of small-scale collapse is a single specimen, Bub (Howard Sherman), a balding, pumpkin-headed zombie shackled to a wall in Logan’s lab who shows some memories of human behavior. The salute Bub offers the uniformed Rhodes suggests a past life in the military, a bleak suggestion of the kind of conditioning that survives apocalypse. The civilian survivors sequester themselves away from the increasingly mad soldiers in quarters decorated like an ersatz island, a reminder of colonial frontiers foreclosed. Just when the film seems as though it will concern itself exclusively with thematic and ethical questions, DAY OF THE DEAD snaps back into pure genre mode with some of Savini’s finest work: an unholy radiance of grasping hands, bodies pulled apart like pork shoulders. In the final melee, as the ammo dwindles, a pistol becomes the weapon of choice, the emptied-out world a Wild West, and the living dead man a gunslinger. (1985, 96 min, DCP Digital) [Brendan Boyle]

Julian Schnabel’s THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY (France/US)

Siskel Film Center – Monday, 8:30pm

Jean-Dominique Bauby, editor of French Elle, became something of an instant legend when from inside the stroke-paralyzed, speech-robbed shell of his body, he produced a book of haunting, poetic beauty describing the dreams, sensations, thoughts, fantasies, and emotions brought out by his condition called The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (1997). Filming a largely interior monologue presents huge challenges, but if anyone was likely to succeed, it was Julian Schnabel. As a painter of largely nonrepresentation images, his vision of how to film Bauby’s fantasies and his subjective reality stood a chance of matching up to his subject’s poetry. The film opens in a blur of snatched images that float and move back into the mists. We are experiencing with Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) the first disorienting moments after he emerges from a three-week coma. He finds himself in a hospital and learns that he is completely paralyzed with a rare condition called locked-in syndrome. More shocking to Bauby is that all his utterances in response to his caregivers have been in his head. Jean-Do’s life in the hospital begins with a tech who sews his right eye closed to prevent damage to the cornea. After this trauma, Schnabel focuses mainly on the parts of Jean-Do’s days spent learning to communicate using his good eye to blink out words, one letter at a time, and receiving guests. One of them is Céline (Emmanuelle Seigner), the mother of his three children, who stays by his side even as Inès (Agatha de La Fontaine), the woman Jean-Do left her for, refuses to come to the hospital, preferring to remember him as he was. Jean-Do prefers to remember himself as he was, too, overseeing a photo shoot for Elle, driving with his son in his new car, visiting Lourdes with his then-girlfriend Joséphine (Marina Hands). Catching sight of himself, with his drooping, drooling mouth and patched eye fills him with horror. Considering his helplessness reminds him of going to care for his invalid father (Max von Sydow), in a close and emotional scene of the younger man shaving the fussy older one. Eventually, Jean-Do calls his publisher and says he wants to fulfill a book contract he signed before he fell ill. Claude (Anne Consigny) is hired to learn his alphabet communication and take down the prose he “dictates,” resulting in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Bauby likened his condition to that of a deep-sea diver, while nonetheless hearing butterflies fluttering in his head: “To hear them, one must be calm and pay close attention, for their wingbeats are barely audible.” His contrasting of the heaviness of the diver with the delicacy of the butterfly is a metaphor Bauby used to convey the silent life that continued inside the leaden uselessness of his body. Schnabel presents these images in a straightforward way, showing a diver floating underwater and a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. His fanciful shots that suspend Jean-Do between reality and imagining are really quite wonder, for example, recounting the history of the hospital as a place where Nijinsky was said to have leapt 12 feet in the air and showing this feat among the nurses and orderlies. Some of the imagery came from Schnabel’s imagination and didn’t work for me. For example, Schnabel has been quoted as saying that the collapsing front of a glacier that begins Jean-Do’s inner exploration was necessary, or there would have been no film. The image is too heavy and heavy-handed for me. In general, I preferred to inhabit Bauby’s dreams and imagination and follow his amusing and rueful musings about everything from wanting a father’s approval to wanting to feel the bodies of his children in his arms again—each thought a precious meditation on the infinite importance of the intimate moments that make us human. THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY is an intriguing and touching tribute to one man’s perseverance and discovery of what mattered to him in his too-short life. Screening as part of the Interiority on Screen lecture series. (2007, 112 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Tallulah Hazekamp Schwab’s MR. K (Netherlands/Norway/Belgium)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

Twenty years in the making, Dutch director Tallulah Hazekamp Schwab’s MR. K is finally open for guests—and those guests may never leave. A surreal, Kafkaesque dark comedy steeped in nightmare logic and philosophical riddles, MR. K unfolds like a fever dream. Schwab invites us into a world where doors lead to nowhere and meaning is a mirage glimpsed just as it vanishes. Crispin Glover stars as the titular Mr. K, a traveling magician no longer capable of conjuring awe. In his opening monologue—a soliloquy of loneliness—he announces himself with heartbreaking sincerity. Known for roles teetering on the edge of the uncanny—Layne in RIVER’S EDGE (1986) or the loner WILLARD (2003)—Glover here trades eccentricity for stillness. His Mr. K becomes an avatar for the disoriented everyman: caught in a trap with no rules, no reason, and no exit. Mr. K’s failure of self-realization is actualized when he’s trapped in a crumbling hotel: a structure more organism than building. It wheezes, pulses, and sheds its walls like skin. Paisley wallpaper leaks, a heartbeat thumps behind plaster, and it cries out in pain. The byzantine hallways twist into a maze without center or edge, extending the terror of liminal space into something cosmic. Cinematographer Frank Griebe paints this world in sickly, seductive tones that echo early Jean-Pierre Jeunet: DELICATESSEN (1991), THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN (1995). The palette is putrid yet playful, as if rot had a sense of humor. A marching band erupts from the vents. Guests speak in riddles. Silver-haired ladies of a certain age—Ruth and Sarah—comfort Mr. K with coffee and a reminder that the hotel has everything you need. One closet leads impossibly into a bourgeois artist’s sprawling flat. She urges Mr. K to find art in the smallest of details. Another door opens into a brutalist kitchen, where our hero is absorbed into a surreal workplace soap opera. Here, egg-cracking becomes metaphor, and success is awarded not for skill, but for spectacle. Schwab skewers capitalism as each promotion handed out is a punchline to a joke too bleak to laugh at. Graffiti scrawled across the walls suggests the coming of a messiah liberator. When Mr. K is asked if he is the one he replies, “I am nobody,” echoing Josef K.’s bewildered pleas of innocence in Kafka’s The Trial. As rooms shrink and furniture spills into the halls, the building decays from within. A torn strip of wallpaper reveals veins—proof the hotel is alive, and sickly. Mr. K becomes a prophet to the guests, warning of collapse. Is there escape, or will the content guests of the hotel turn on their new prophet? Schwab leans fully into the absurdity of meaning-making. She cites Kafka, but her voice is unmistakably her own. “There are no right answers,” she says of the film. This idea beats at the core of MR. K as each scene disorients and every answer is a riddle. It resembles a dream you half-remember but fully feel, the film bypasses logic to speak directly to something quieter, more terrified within. In a cinematic landscape of second-screen approved films drowning in exposition and closure, MR. K stands apart. It doesn’t explain. It doesn’t even try. Instead, it dares to sit with the ache of ambiguity, the sharp terror of not knowing why we are here or where we are going. And in doing so, it becomes something rare: a haunting, hypnotic echo of the human condition—confused, yearning, and beautifully lost. (2024, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]

Werner Herzog's NOSFERATU THE VAMPYRE (West Germany)

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

NOSFERATU THE VAMPYRE is Werner Herzog's homage to F.W. Murnau's glooming, swirling, haunting masterpiece—the 1922 original, NOSFERATU, A SYMPHONY OF HORRORS. As moody as its predecessor, this NOSFERATU dwells in the caverns and misty crossings of Herzog's Caspar David Friedrich-esque film landscapes. The centerpiece is Klaus Kinski's performance as Count Dracula—a limping, aching vampire who has lured an ambitious gentleman to his castle. Though radically differing from the original, NOSFERATU THE VAMPYRE does represent an interesting moment in the history of German cinema. Herzog, perhaps more than his contemporaries, is credited with bridging the gap of the so-called "lost years" of German cinema—those between Expressionism and the Neue Deutsche Film. Despite this film and his admiration of Murnau, Herzog has distanced himself from his esteemed predecessor in German film: "SUNRISE is a great movie... but there's really no connection." Agreed. Screening as part of the The Ethical Vampire: The Moral Dilemma of Vampirism series. (1979, 107 min, DCP Digital) [Liam Neff]

Jean Rollin's FASCINATION (France)

FACETS – Thursday, 9pm

The marriage of the erotic and the macabre becomes an inescapable force in Jean Rollin’s FASCINATION, a sensual nightmare of a movie. The longer we find ourselves trapped in the abandoned castle inhabited by temptresses Eva (Brigitte Lahaie) and Elisabeth (Franca Maï), the deeper we realize that the choice between fear and temptation has slowly become one and the same. It’s 1905, and the preening macho, Marc (Jean-Marie Lemaire), has succumbed to a greed that has pitted his den of thieves against him, leading to his hideaway in the aforementioned castle. His persistence in trying to tame Eva and Elisabeth—women far more interested in the love and lust they see in each other than anything Marc can offer them—builds to the point where, joined for a larger cabal of blood-hungry maidens, his doomed fate is practically written in stone. Rollin’s camera shifts between raw intimacy and stately observation, running up and down staircases to capture the madcap action before serenely and patiently sitting still, capturing the fantastical images at hand. Due to a series of financial disappointments in his filmmaking career, Rollin spent much of his later years making explicitly pornographic cinema, though works like FASCINATION make the case for the artistry that sensuality and sexuality play in the world of the moving image. It’s no wonder one of FASCINATION’s most iconic images remains Brigitte Lahaie wandering across a bridge, her nude body wearing a black cloak carrying a domineering scythe, her breast artfully escaping from underneath, that magical bond between death and desire perfectly captured onscreen. Preceded by FACETS Film Trivia at 7pm. (1979, 80 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

George McCowan's FROGS (US)

Music Box Theatre – Wednesday, 9:30pm

Three years before Steven Spielberg's cash cow of a killer shark burst onto the scene, another American epic about vicious animals attacking hubristic Americans on the Fourth of July improbably made its way into theaters across the nation. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who prefers the amphibian antics of George McCowan’s eco-horror film FROGS over the popcorn theatrics of JAWS (1975), but there are still thrills to be had with this relic of 1970s horror filmmaking. McCowan’s particular brand of "Man Vs. Nature" storytelling finds itself off the coast of Florida, the swamp air practically emanating from every frame, with greenery devouring the atmosphere where the wealthy, aging Jason Crockett (Ray MIlland) has built a destination mansion smack dab in the middle of natural swamp territory, poisoning and polluting his cold-blooded neighbors to the point where revenge is all but expected. A youthful Sam Elliott arrives as a nature photographer, the only voice of reason speaking on behalf of Mother Nature amidst a cast of vapid socialites who find themselves picked off one by one by the viscous fauna. Despite what one might glean from what is a particularly frank title, the frogs themselves aren’t the actual forefront of vicious murder throughout this holiday celebration. They act more as guardians of the land, resting on the sidelines, akin to being the mafiosi of the swampland, having the lizards and snakes do their horrid business for them. But these green folks are never far from sight, hopping across the frame in close-up photography that gloriously captures every scale and patch of slime imaginable. Even if they rarely lay a webbed foot upon a soon-to-be-dispatched soul, their presence is ever felt within the sound design, barely a scene existing without a chorus of ribbits coloring the background. Les Baxter’s score, especially, exists as a cacophony of instrumentation, almost like the band is croaking across the soundscape of the motion picture, ensuring that every note of this film leaves us hopping mad. With live amphibians from The Reptile Den.Screening as part of the Music Box of Horrors: Dead and Loving It! Series. (1972, 91 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

📽️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Alamo Drafthouse
The Fleischer Halloween Party, featuring new restorations of spooky cartoons from the iconic cartoonist Max Fleischer, screens on Friday and Tuesday at noon and Sunday at 12:45pm.

Joel Schumacher’s 1987 film THE LOST BOYS (97 min, DCP Digital) screens Monday at 7pm and Wednesday at 4:30pm.

Jean Rollin’s 1971 film THE SHIVER OF THE VAMPIRES (95 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 9:30pm, as part of Terror Tuesdays and with an introduction by Samm Deighan.

The WNUF Halloween Special screens Wednesday, 9:30pm, as part of the Weird Wednesday series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Alliance Française de Chicago
In partnership with Villa Albertine and as part of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, three documentary shorts by French filmmaker and visual artist Theodora Barat screen Thursday, 6:30pm, as part of a program called Chicago’s Unique Nuclear Legacy with Theodora Barat and followed by a conversation with Amy Beste, Director of Public Programs and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Film, Video, New Media, & Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. More info here.

⚫ Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
Deepa Dhanraj’s 2011 film INVOKING JUSTICE (82 min, Digital Projection) screens Friday, Dhanraj in person for a discussion and audience Q&A. More info here. 

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

⚫ Comfort Film (at Comfort Station) 
Halloween at Comfort Films presents A Dark and Stormy Night with Group 312 Films, featuring videos made by members of the group, on Wednesday at 8pm. Includes a live musical performance by machinist and Animal Talking School. More info here. 

⚫ The Davis Theater
Riccardo Freda’s 1963 film THE GHOST (95 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) screens Thursday at 8pm. More info here.

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Danny Leiner’s 2004 film HAROLD AND KUMAR GO TO WHITE CASTLE (88 min, 35mm) screens Friday, 7pm, as part of the Conversations in Cars: Road Trips and Relationships series.

Rupert Julian's 1925 silent film THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (127 min, Digital Projection) screens Sunday, 7pm, with accompaniment by Dennis Scott.  

Hollis Frampton’s short films SURFACE TENSION (1968, 10 min, 16mm); CARROTS AND PEAS (1969, 6 min, 16mm); LEMON (1969, 7 min, 16mm); PRINCE RUPERTS DROPS (1969, 7 min, 16mm); ARTIFICIAL LIGHT (1969, 7 min, 16mm); and LESS (1973, 1 min, 16mm) screen Sunday, 7pm, as part of the Infinite Cinema: The Films of Hollis Frampton series. 

William Castle’s 1964 film STRAIT-JACKET (93 min, 35mm) screens Monday, 7pm, as part of the Joan Crawford: Actress as Auteur series.

Paulo Rocha’s 1966 film CHANGE OF LIFE (94 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday, 7pm, as part of the Sounds of Shaking Earth: Landscapes of Portuguese Cinema series.

Paul Morrissey’s 1974 film BLOOD FOR DRACULA (103 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 9:30pm, as part of the Celluloid Is Out: Queer Freedom and Subculture of the 1970s series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ FACETS
Sweet Void Cinema presents the October Shorts Bazaar on Friday, 7pm, with two blocks of short films, followed by a Q&A with filmmakers in attendance.

IDS and Mandala Arts present Nirmal Chander’s 2023 documentary 6-A AKASH GANGA on Saturday at 2pm.

Open Space Arts presents Mathias Broe’s 2025 film SAUNA (105 min, Digital Projection) on Monday, 7pm, as part of their ongoing Queer Expression Film and Theater Fest. 

The Reel Film Club presents Juan José Campanella’s 2019 film THE WEASELS’ TALE (126 min, Digital Projection) on Tuesday, 7pm, with appetizers and a cash bar starting at 6pm and a discussion following the screening. 

Eternal Family Nights presents Michele Soavi’s 1994 film ETERNAL FAMILY NIGHT (103 min, DCP Digital) on Wednesday at 7:30pm. The program will be presented as a “Funeral Service” with an officiator and eulogy section included. 

Michael Angelo Covino’s 2025 film SPLITSVILLE (104 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday at 7pm. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Film Studies Center (at the University of Chicago)
Night Trap: A Live Playthrough screens Thursday, 7pm, as part of the Year of Games. More info here.

⚫ Goethe-Institut Chicago (150 N. Michigan Ave.)
The Goethe-Institut and the German Film Office present a selection of vampire films curated by Deutsche Kinemathek as part of their “Wild, Weird, Bloody: German Genre Films of the 70s” retrospective at the 2025 Berlinale, including Franz Josef Gottlieb's 1978 film LADY DRACULA (79 min, Digital Projection) and Ulli Lommel’s 1973 film TENDERNESS OF THE WOLVES (82 min, Digital Projection), screening at 5:15pm and 7pm, respectively. Free admission. More info here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Also screening as part of the Music Box of Horrors: Dead and Loving It! series are Ryûhei Kitamura’s 2008 film THE MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN (100 min, 35mm) on Friday at 9pm and 11:30pm; Tony Williams’ 1982 film NEXT OF KIN (89 min, DCP Digital) on Sunday at 9pm, with a preshow starting at 8:40pm and including a special presentation of Synth History- EPISODE 1 Ela Minus- DIA, co-presented by the Synth History and Severin Films (free for Music Box members); Rupert Julian’s 1925 film THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (93 min, DCP Digital) on Monday, 7pm, featuring a live score by the Invincible Czars; and Strange and Found on Thursday at 7pm.

The Halloween Edition of Jim Sharman’s 1975 cult classic THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (100 min, 35mm) screens several times this and next week. See Venue website for showtimes.

Sam Feder and Amy Scholder’s 2025 film HEIGHTENED SECURITY (85 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, 4:30pm, with Feder in attendance for a post-film Q&A moderated by Lilly Wachowski and Mickey Mahoney. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ rewindr00m 
Álex de la Iglesia’s 1997 film PERDITO DURANGO (115 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday, 7:30pm, at Casa Cactus (4595 N. Elston Ave.). More info here.

⚫ Siskel Film Center
The National Theatre Live’s 2025 presentation of Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession (120 min, DCP Digital), starring Imelda Staunton, screens Saturday and Sunday at 2pm. More info here.

⚫ VDB TV (Virtual)
oliverio rodriguez and Victoria Stob's 2018 short film LYNDALE (24 min) and Sandi DuBowski's 1993 short film TOMBOYCHIK (15 min) stream for free on VDB-TV.  Programmed by Cine-File contributor Elise Schierbeek. More info here.

CINE-LIST: October 24, 2025 - October 30, 2025

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Michael Bates, Brendan Boyle, Rob Christopher, Maxwell Courtright, Kyle Cubr, Alex Ensign, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Shauhn Huhn, Ben Kaye, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Raphael Jose Martinez, Nicky Ni, Joe Rubin, Will Schmenner, Martin Stainthorp, David Whitehouse, Olivia Hunter Willke