:: FRIDAY, APRIL 17 - THURSDAY, APRIL 23 ::

☀️ 42ND CHICAGO LATINO FILM FESTIVAL

Landmark's Century Centre Cinema – See below for showtimes

Heixan Robles’ BOREALIS (Puerto Rico)
Friday, 8pm and Saturday, 3:15pm
Though BOREALIS is kick-started by a science-fiction-inflected catalyzing event, Heixan Robles—a celebrated cinematographer in Puerto Rico, here making his directorial debut—reveals early on that he’s far more interested in social storytelling than in any particular genre trappings. After a massive electromagnetic storm strikes Earth, the population awakens in an amnesiac state, their memories and identities completely erased, with a small section of the population even further turned into feral, zombie-like creatures. As Robles guides us through his ever-expanding ensemble of characters, the puzzle pieces of this community slowly start to fall into place, the chief concern ultimately arising as how much one’s past—even a forgotten past—can dictate their future (does the body truly keep the score?). This manifests most directly in the lead trio of characters: “Thalia” (Greta Merced Cruz), a mother searching for her missing daughter; Pagan (Nestor Rodulfo), a police officer whose gun-toting braggadocio leads him to immediately become corrupted with power; and Ivan (Jorge Alberti), the only English-speaking member of the group (the solar flare seems to have made people able to communicate across language barriers too), whose criminal past threatens to overtake his newfound communal spirit. All these characters become ensnared in the web of “Cisco” (a slimy Omar Torres), a custodian whose proximity to the town’s local data center has made him a walking deity of knowledge and memory. Bathed in glowing greens and blues, BOREALIS is most invigorating when it examines the interpersonal ramifications of these isolated characters trying to escape their wretched pasts, the chance for personal and communal redemption as its own reward. Robles can’t help but leave things off with an intentionally ambiguous ending coda (are we setting up some sort of BOREALIS Cinematic Universe?) but the questions and dilemmas propped up along the way are, undeniably, quite memorable. (2026, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
---
Gustavo Hernández’s THE WHISPER (Uruguay/Argentina)
Friday, 8:30pm and Wednesday, 8pm
Imagine leaving an abusive childhood home with your younger brother, only to end up next-door neighbors to murderers making snuff films. In Gustavo Hernández’s THE WHISPER (El SUSURRO), this nightmare scenario becomes a blood-soaked meditation on inherited trauma, voyeurism, and survival. His feature debut LA CASA MUDA (2010) announced Hernández as a technical virtuoso. The Uruguayan, single-take ghost story, used real-time claustrophobia to trap viewers in the protagonist’s psychological terror. While the cinematography drew the viewer in immediately, it was the character development, happening in the moment, that solidified Hernández’s merits as a storyteller. THE WHISPER is a confident evolution of that skill, while also expanding his canvas into genre-blending, vampiric folklore, found-footage in its literal form, and home-invasion brutality. The film centers on Lucía (Ana Clara Guanco) and her nonverbal younger brother Adrián (Marcelo Michinaux, winner of Best Actor at Buenos Aires Rojo Sangre), who flee their monstrous father (Luciano Cáceres) and find sanctuary in a remote woodland mansion. Their hope for tranquility shatters when Jackson, a local cat, delivers a severed finger; a harbinger of the criminal network operating in a nearby farm, where teenagers are kidnapped and murdered for snuff films. Hernández weaponizes the cyclical nature of video as both evidence and currency. Lucía carries footage of her father committing murder, using it as blackmail; the snuff ring treats their footage as product for the highest bidder. This creates a direct conversation with cinema’s voyeuristic nature, as film has a tendency of reflecting real-life grotesqueries at just a few degrees away from reality. Offering, for some, vitality in the face of fear. Hernández shows posters of missing teenagers—taken by the snuff filmmakers—and the teens we see, evoke the real-world threats of I.C.E. or trafficking. Set during the final days of Carnivale, a metaphor Hernández describes as temporary permission for society’s repressed monstrosities to emerge, the film balances the grounded dread of kidnapped women with a blood-offering genre spectacle. Lucía’s glimmer of freedom—after escaping their father—comes in the form of a long drive listening to The Bangles’ “Walk Like An Egyption.” It isn’t long before the cat gets a collar camera, POV cat footage shows snuff film being made, and the siblings must be silenced by the cabal of killers. There is a whisper that only Adrián can hear, a gift or curse inherited from his father. One that will help them survive and seek revenge. Hernández treats the bond between Lucía and Adrián as the film’s sacred core, with Lucía assuming a maternal role to protect Adrián from both the external threat of the snuff filmmakers and the family curse. When masked invaders breach their sanctuary, the supernatural collides with gritty reality. Having vampires within the narrative allows Hernández to pull off several scenes that may have otherwise been cut by censors. It also provided a way to give the snuff filmmakers a proper comeuppance. THE WHISPER delivers what its title promises: a quiet, insistent dread that grows into something impossible to ignore. Through its fusion of supernatural and real-world horrors, Hernández demonstrates that the monstrosity we inherit may help us fight monsters we’re forced to confront. (2025, 101 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]
---
Julio Medem’s 8 (Spain)
Saturday, 6pm
The title of Julio Medem’s latest refers to its structure: the film unfolds in eight chapters, and each one employs a fair amount of digital trickery to make it look like a single shot. The trickery is only fitfully convincing and largely superfluous, yet Medem (who made LOVERS OF THE ARTIC CIRCLE [1998] and SEX AND LUCÍA [2001], after all) remains a captivating storyteller in spite of this, and the film covers so much ground in relatively little time that it maintains interest with its ambition alone. The story begins in 1931, when a doctor in small-town Spain is pulled between two homes three kilometers apart, where two different mothers are giving birth. The movie will follow these two children over the next 90 years, jumping forward multiple years between chapters and observing how their lives are impacted by modern Spanish history. Adela is the daughter of a socialist schoolteacher, while Octavio is the son of an outspoken fascist. In one parallel between the two protagonists’ lives, both of their fathers are killed during the Spanish Civil War (his by partisans, hers by the State); in another, both move to Madrid in adulthood. She grows up to be married to a fascist (whom she despises), while he becomes a taxi driver and family man who’s generally apolitical. The two finally meet in their 30s, crossing paths in a surprising and erotic fashion that results in what may be the most Medem-like scene in the movie. The next few chapters are motivated by the question of whether Octavio and Adela will ditch their spouses and get together, their union destined for no other reason than the movie gods say they were made for each other. Well, there is another reason—their coming together represents Spain’s triumph over its internal divisions and its transition to a more harmonious post-fascist era. The film’s lush romanticism (Medem’s stock in trade) reflects an underlying optimism. (2025, 126 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
---
William D Caballero’s THEYDREAM (Puerto Rico/US)
Saturday, 6pm and Sunday, 3:30pm
Premiering at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, THEYDREAM received the NEXT Special Jury Award for Creative Expression. A most-deserved award, as William D. Caballero’s documentary acts to resurrect family members that have passed to provide closure, celebration, and remembrance. Cultivated from a decades-long act of witnessing, Caballero chronicles his Puerto Rican family through a blend of animation styles, vérité footage, voicemails, audio recordings, interviews, and raw mother-son conversations. The result is a handmade offering to those who came before. Caballero made his first film AMERICAN DREAMS DEFERRED (2012) as a portrait of his family’s health, financial, and social struggles. Following this, Caballero gained wider recognition with his HBO series Gran’Pa Knows Best, which featured 3D printed miniatures of his grandfather providing advice. Across his projects, Caballero’s family has always been the emotional center of his work. THEYDREAM opens with the death of his father, Guillermo “Chilly,” after years of kidney failure and dialysis. Drawing from home videos and audio recordings, Caballero reconstructs his father’s life through miniature sets, 2D animation, and motion-captured 3D figures. The film then shifts toward his grandfather’s passing, folding in the making of Gran’Pa Knows Best and his grandfather’s response to seeing it. Asked about life’s meaning, Gran’Pa answers simply: Keep wanting to do things until you die and don’t take life for granted. At the center is Caballero’s mother, Milly, who leaves her job to care for her husband, then her father, then her mother—who have all passed. Often rendered as an animated superhero, she becomes the film’s pulse, raising the question of who cares for the caretakers. After her mother’s death, while she and Caballero are away on a trip, she carries a deep sense of guilt that she wasn’t there in her final moments. In response, Caballero invites her into the creative process, animating her mother’s voicemails together. What begins as reconstruction becomes release, and, gradually, a reawakening of his mother’s creativity. Formally, THEYDREAM reflects a decade of experimentation. Caballero builds intricate 1/12-scale environments including a dollhouse version of his parents’ first home. These spaces merge with photorealistic 3D models, 3D-printed figures, and rotoscoped performances, allowing Caballero and his mother to inhabit their parents and grandparents. The film resists visual uniformity: felt animation, cartoon abstraction, graphic-novel realism, and digital rotoscoping coexist, mirroring the instability of memory itself. Loss accumulates with the death of Gustav, a dachshund Caballero gives his mother for companionship. Together, he and his mother animate a tribute. What emerges is a film about survival through creation. THEYDREAM resonates not just for its formal ingenuity, but for its openness: a family inviting others into the fragile, necessary work of remembering, healing, and finding a way forward. (2026, 91 min, Digital) [Shaun Huhn]
---
Lorena Villarreal’s LIFE IS (Mexico)
Saturday, 8:30pm and Sunday, 5:45pm
Throughout LIFE IS, characters break the fourth wall and provide the audience with their inner thoughts, Strange Interlude style, but rather than just vent what they’re feeling, they also try to sway the viewers in how we interpret the action, trying to get us to be on their side. It’s an ingratiating device, especially since it isn’t limited to the protagonist à la ANNIE HALL (1977) and films of its ilk. Rather, director Lorena Villarreal is after something more inclusive; she wants us to know that everyone deserves their say, not just the main character, who’s far from having it all figured out anyway. Nora (Natalia Plascencia) is about to turn 40, and her life is on the rocks. She and her husband recently experimented with polyamory to disastrous results; they’re currently living apart. She’s also just lost her job at the club where she worked as a pianist for a decade, and her extended family is still mourning the death of a young cousin who was murdered two years ago. Nora and another cousin in her mid-30s—who’s also her best friend and going through crises of her own—decide to get away from things by going to the remote home of their aunt (Paulina García) and her partner of many years, a lesbian couple who have been like another set of parents to both women their whole lives. Villarreal occasionally interrupts their trip with flashbacks, not in any particular order, that clarify Nora’s present situation, and this gives LIFE IS a literary feel (which seems appropriate, as it was based on a book); so too does the mobile camerawork, which is often reframing the scene to incorporate different characters. The narrative can feel overstuffed at times—we come to know Nora’s aunt, husband, and cousin in more detail than most two-hour films would relate—but the film’s ambition is ingratiating too, the maximalism reflecting an obvious big-heartedness. (2025, 119 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
---
Lucía Garibaldi’s A BRIGHT FUTURE (Uruguay/Argentina/Germany)
Sunday, 6:15pm and Monday, 8pm
The title of this sci-fi comedy may be ironic, yet its retro-futurist vision of a time to come where there are no cell phones or social media (and where plaid pants have made a big comeback) is actually rather pleasant in some of its particulars. Leave it to a Uruguayan director to make a dystopia seem quaint. In her second feature, cowriter-director Lucía Garibaldi accomplishes an impressive amount of world-building on a relatively limited budget, imagining her future society down to the new fetishes and everyday frustrations that have emerged in the wake of cultural upheaval. A BRIGHT FUTURE takes place in a purgatorial vision of South America where civilization has been decimated to small clusters of apartment buildings separated by vast swaths of land that have been taken over by ants. The central government promises that a new civilization exists “up north” (accessible only by ocean liner), and many young people are being sent there to develop a better life for all. Curiously, no one who goes north ever returns… The film centers on a 19-year-old named Elisa, the last young person left in her community—all the others passed the official examinations of intelligence and character and were deemed fit for export. (In a particularly Uruguayan twist, eccentricities are highly valued in these examinations because they’re believed to demonstrate capacity for independent thinking.) Though she has warm relationships with her mother and uncle, Elisa is fairly lonely until a 30-ish nurse named Leonor arrives in town. The burgeoning friendship between these two lonely souls provides A BRIGHT FUTURE with its narrative thrust; it’s refreshing to see a contemporary sci-fi film that isn’t about someone on a quest to save the world. The narrative stakes seem life-sized and relatable, while the humor is stridently odd, with many of the jokes built around non sequiturs. The recent film this resembles most may be Matthew Rankin’s UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE (2024) in its surfeit of imagination and sympathy. (2025, 98 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
---
Ricardo de Montreuil’s MISTURA (Peru)
Monday, 8pm
Here’s a perfectly nice movie that Roger Ebert would have been happy to overrate, a clichéd but sensitively played drama about relatable people in photogenic settings. Norma is a middle-aged, well-to-do woman in 1960s Lima who finds out at the start of the film that her husband has left her for someone younger. Broke and alone but not without her pride, Norma decides to risk everything on a new venture that will hopefully pay off her debts and return her to good standing in Peruvian high society: opening a French restaurant in her home. She assembles a team to manage and operate the place, starting with Oscar, her servant of many years, who exhibits a surprisingly savvy business sense and a taste for poetry. The two end up running the restaurant as partners, which is at once humbling and liberating for Norma, an ambassador’s daughter, who’s used to having others do things for her and never do things for herself. She and Oscar develop a pleasant chemistry too, but any signs of passion are generally sublimated through shots of delicious meals being prepared. Writer-director Ricardo Montreuil has found a crowd-pleasing formula in his combination of underdog story, chaste romance, revenge fantasy, and food porn; chances are this will play well with an audience. (2024, 101 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
---
Alberto Sciamma’s CIELO (Bolivia/UK)
Wednesday, 8pm
In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, director Alberto Sciamma recalls, “I had a very visceral image in my head of a little girl swallowing a fish, and I didn’t really analyze it. I didn’t know why I was fascinated by that image.” So it follows, then, that CIELO isn’t really a film about whys, its magical realist tone throwing caution to the wind and letting emotion, dream logic, and whimsy lead the way. Sciamma hands the reins of his walking fable to a young girl named Santa (played by Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda with stunning clarity and commitment) who, as Sciamma fully imagined, opens the film by swallowing a fish. From there, she tosses a heart-shaped rock at her father, stabs her mother—who joyfully accepts her fate—before stuffing her in a barrel, and begins her arduous trek to find a literal Heaven on Earth. Sciamma’s ethereal camera travels across Bolivia’s wide variety of topography, from deserts to forests to towns filled with bright shining hues ready to welcome us to whatever emotional beat will follow. Santa’s journey to find Paradise attempts to reconcile what parts of our grand beliefs are tactile, and what is merely ephemeral, with various miracles performed along the way (dead vultures springing back to life, fresh bloody wounds healing in seconds) seen as proof of the faith we have in higher powers, or maybe more so the faith we have in ourselves. Santa crosses paths with colorful characters that include a busload of roaming luchadoras, a skeptical, mustache-laden police chief, and the very priest whose ideology has set her on this journey, all in their own ways willing to play in to the out-of-the-box world Santa is crafting for them. Sciamma’s world is expansive enough to allow for the grand leaps in narrative logic, while having a sturdy sense of visual exploration and glee. There is a method to the madness of the yarn being spun, which no doubt explains the wistful ending where, after all this dreaming, Santa learns to plant her feet on solid ground and trust in the truth of the world around her. (2025, 108 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
---
For more information about the festival, including the full line-up, visit the festival website here.

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Albert Brooks' REAL LIFE (US)

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

In a modern culture where every moment of your life can become potential fodder for public broadcast in the online arena— willingly or otherwise—Albert Brooks’ directorial debut seems almost frighteningly prescient in its dedication to broadcasting what is "true," by any means necessary. Brooks’ particular brand of comedy—self-deprecating but pompous, down-to-earth but quippy to the nth degree—proves to be a perfect vehicle for an early dive into what would become our norm of reality television; REAL LIFE debuted decades before the vast proliferation of The Real World and Big Brother and countless Housewives franchises attempted to earnestly capture reality, and especially before the likes of Nathan Fielder or Sacha Baron Cohen attempted to use the reality TV genre to dissect human behavior under the microscope of the video camera. Here, Brooks (portraying a slightly sleazier version of himself) attempts to work with the National Institute of Human Behavior to document a year in the life of a "regular American family," with any pretense of this being a real documentary being shred to bits once the patriarch of said family is revealed to be played by Charles Grodin, a similar master of comedic deadpan. Though much of the film is devoted to antics from the inane (Brooks engaging in something of an emotional tryst with Frances Lee McCain as the matriarch of the family) to the insane (Grodin’s veterinarian character unwittingly hitting tragedy during surgery on a horse), Brooks hits surprisingly fertile ground with his examination of how the documentary genre’s attempts at capturing what is true are inherently flawed, the mere presence of a film camera—or in this case, the hilariously lumbering Ettinauer over-the-head cameras that the film crew begrudgingly adorns—tossing a wrench into any pretense of traditionally normal behavior. The residents of Phoenix (where the documentary takes place) are all too eager to get cast into the limelight, where Brooks’ patronizing attempts at relating with "small town folk" wear thin fast. By the end, Brooks, perhaps rather cynically, comes to the only conclusion that could seemingly make any sense to him: "The audience loves fake. They crave fake. Reality sucks." Preceded by a REAL LIFE 3D teaser trailer. Critic A. S. Hamrah in person to introduce the film and participate in a post-screening discussion. (1979, 99 min, 35mm) [Ben Kaye]

Annemarie Jacir’s PALESTINE 36 (International)

Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6:30pm

There’s a double-edged sword to the grandiose methodology of Annemarie Jacir’s often-bracing PALESTINE 36, a film that tackles unexplored territory through extremely well-trod means. Taking on the general structure of the Western Historical Epic, Jacir’s narrative portrayal of the early history of Palestinian rebellion against British Imperialism seems to follow in the footsteps of the most epically scaled work of filmmakers like David Lean, Ridley Scott, and Steven Spielberg, her camera navigating lush, sweeping scenery while following swaths of characters marching through the annals of history. It’s a tried-and-true means of using enormous tools to tell enormous stories, yet one worries that the cliches and trappings of these works threaten to flatten what is otherwise a genuinely compelling piece of history, here dividing our attention between soon-to-be revolutionaries, mothers protecting their children, reporters trying to stay afloat amidst a sea of Western propaganda, and politicians waffling between protecting their people and amassing power. Between these large stretches of historical fiction lie what appears to be digitally upscaled and colorized newsreel footage of Palestine as it truly existed in the early 1900s, though one wonders whether removing the shiny, digital gloss and letting the bare truth shine through might have made for a more honest and daring choice. Either way, the strengths of Jacir’s film, a genuinely entertaining piece of bravado, lie in its being able to contort this particular brand of motion picture around a tale blatantly opposing Western Imperialism, centering the Palestinian cause for self-determination within a narrative structure that has otherwise left them villainized or altogether absent. Most interestingly of all, in my eyes at least, the Jewish immigrants of PALESTINE 36—those cast away from Europe due to intense anti-Semitism and bigotry—primarily exist here as the British Empire likely saw them: silent pawns, relegated to the role of scapegoat to allow for the West’s continued dominance over Palestine land and independence. How thrilling then, almost a century later, for Palestinian artists to be able to reclaim the cinematic tools of the oppressor, to remake history, and cinema, in their own image. Screening as part of the Chicago Palestine Film Festival. (2025, 118 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
---
For more information about the festival, including the full line-up, visit the Venue website here.

Marcel Carné’s PORT OF SHADOWS (France)

Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

“PORT OF SHADOWS possesses nearly all the qualities that were once synonymous with the idea of French cinema,” Lucy Sante wrote for the Criterion Collection in 2004. “[Jean] Gabin—eating sausage with a knife or talking around a cigarette butt parked in the corner of his mouth or administering a backhanded slap to [Pierre] Brasseur’s kisser—is the quintessential French tough guy, as iconic a figure as Bogart playing Sam Spade…” Sante here speaks to the glory of Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert’s 1938 film as well as the challenge of looking at it today. Like a couple other Gabin features of the 1930s (PÉPÉ LE MOKO, GRAND ILLUSION), PORT OF SHADOWS has so pervaded global cinematic culture that it can be difficult to watch with fresh eyes. (Maybe this new 4K restoration will help?) Still, its virtues are so evident and plentiful that it’s also a difficult movie to dislike. Gabin stars as an army deserter who hitches a ride to Le Havre in the opening scenes, hoping to stow away on a boat leaving the country. In one of the first examples of his French tough guyness, Gabin gets into a fight with the driver who picked him up because he almost hit a dog. The hero ends up keeping the dog, who provides the movie with a winning, if somewhat sentimental streak. Along with Michèle Morgan’s angelic street urchin Nelly, the pooch represents a bright spot in a world shaped largely by war, crime, and dirty money. Herein lies a challenge of writing about PORT OF SHADOWS: its most powerful attributes can seem broad or cliché when translated into prose. Prévert was a successful poet in addition to being a screenwriter, and with this film he really puts the poetic in French poetic realism—the story is basically a framework for vibrant details and overall mood. Each of the characters is accorded some memorable quirk, and the movie’s fatalism is so strong as to be overwhelming. Carné makes Prévert’s fatalism seem like a physical presence with his extensive use of fog, low lighting, and of course shadows. As Sante noted, the film’s version of Le Havre, created on studio sets, is weirdly devoid of people, which creates the impression that practically everyone in town is a criminal. This adds to the feeling that Gabin’s demise is inevitable, which in turn makes his love for Nelly seem that much more urgent and beautiful. (1938, 91 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Ben Sachs]

Jacques Rivette's JOAN THE MAID I: THE BATTLES (France)

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

Jacques Rivette’s two-part, five-and-a-half-hour Joan of Arc biopic may not be the longest or most ambitious project he ever undertook—that would be the eight-part, thirteen-hour OUT 1: NOLI ME TANGERE (1971)—but it may be the most expensive, featuring vivid recreations of Medieval warfare. It’s hardly uncharacteristic of Rivette, though. Like many of his films, it exhibits a bottomless fascination with the art of performance, which requires an extended running time to be fully felt. The films star Sandrine Bonnaire as Joan, and though she was in her late 20s at the time of production, she plays the character with such nuance and conviction that one never questions the casting. Moreover, JOAN THE MAID is, on one level, about stardom, so Bonnaire (who had already acted for Maurice Pialat, Agnès Varda, André Téchiné, and Claude Sautet) seems like a suitable choice. Many have noted that Rivette’s take on Joan of Arc differs from that of Dreyer, Bresson, and Preminger (to name the three most esteemed auteurs who had made films about her previously) in that he focuses less on her martyrdom and more on her vitality; indeed, THE BATTLES is largely concerned with how this devout teenage girl transformed herself into a brave military leader. But Rivette is just as interested in the impact she left on people around her through the force of her personality. Throughout the films, Rivette breaks from the action to have minor characters address the camera and describe events that haven’t been filmed. It’s a clever way of conveying how Joan’s life became legend, how it was passed down via the oral tradition; it also distances the audience from Joan by casting a sort of hushed reverence around her. Rivette likewise keeps the camera at a respectful distance from the subjects most of the time, almost never using closeups. Prior to the eponymous battle sequences, the first part of JOAN THE MAID advances a rather theatrical mise-en-scène, with players moving directly toward or away from the camera as if they were walking up- or downstage. Devices like these call attention to their own artificiality, as they do in the historical films of Manoel de Oliveira, and they serve a similar purpose here, foregrounding our distance from history as contemporary spectators. What closes the gap is Bonnaire’s charisma and, to a lesser degree, the sincere performances that Rivette elicits from the rest of the cast. Screening as part of the Jacques Rivette’s Late Style series. (1994, 160 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Bridgett M. Davis' NAKED ACTS (US)

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

Bridgett M. Davis—more than a triple threat as a writer, filmmaker, professor and curator—was inspired by Kathleen Collins to make NAKED ACTS, an auspicious, independent debut that echoes Collins’ exploration of Black art and identity. “As an emerging filmmaker in the ‘90’s, I felt I’d found a kindred spirit after chancing upon an interview with Kathleen Collins in Black Film Review,” Davis said. “She was so erudite, so passionate, so inspiring about the life of a woman artist.” Thus the main character in Davis’ film, Cicely (Jake-ann Jones), called Cece informally, is an artist, specifically an actress. But her choice to be so is in opposition to her mother, Lydia Love (Patricia DeArcy), a former Blaxploitation star who now runs a video store, where her former glory as a sex symbol is still being touted for all to see. In a pertinent flashback at the beginning of the film, we glean the toll that her mother’s career and accordant lifestyle has had on her through a subtle but heartbreaking scene that sets the stage for what’s to come. Upon visiting her mother for the first time in several years she reveals that she’s also an actress and has a part in an independent film (Davis was also inspired by the film-within-a-film aspect of Collins’ LOSING GROUND); her mother warns her of the industry’s penchant for exploiting young women, relegated as she was to exploitation films. Cece insists that hers is a more pure, artistic pursuit, though, ironically, the role—of a model for an esteemed older artist—requires nudity. Cece has recently lost a lot of weight, but the insecurities that came with her bigger body have not dissipated. As much as the film is about Cece’s artistic identity, it’s also about her corporeal self, an aspect that’s especially well-timed given recent conversations around Black peoples’ bodies and what it means to inhabit them. It’s the exploitation of her body (a fact that can be extrapolated to be about the exploitation of Black bodies in general) that prohibits her from being truly vulnerable both in her life and in her practice, the former of which is illuminated by her relationship with the film’s director (Ron Cephas Jones). His photographer sister, Diana (Renee Cox), becomes an integral part of the story, as much of her artistic work centers on taking nude photos of strong women from a distinctly female gaze. (Cox is an acclaimed feminist photographer in real life who uses her own naked body as the subject in many of her works; she was another source of inspiration for Davis.) The purported tension of the film’s story is Cece’s inability to open up and embrace real emotions in her performance; it’s actual tension is between Cece and her own body, betrayed through the abuse suggested by the flashback at the beginning but still beautiful and ultimately capable of revealing itself on her own terms. Similarly, Davis makes the film her own, despite the strength of her influences, and like Cece is both born of but yet separate from her own “mother” (Collins in this case, spiritually speaking), having embraced her own creativity in a way befitting her predecessors’ legacies and also providing inspiration for future generations. Screening as part of the Black Girlhood series. (1996, 87 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Hisayasu Satō’s RE-WIND (aka CELLULOID NIGHTMARES) (Japan)

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

With its body horror and videotape-focused plot, prolific pink film director Hisayasu Satō’s RE-WIND (aka CELLULOID NIGHTMARES) can be easily compared to David Cronenberg VIDEODROME (1983). When a gruesome snuff film is discovered in an abandoned refrigerator, the investigation into its contents reveals dark secrets in Tokyo's underground video scene. Satō constantly folds voyeurism in on itself, questioning the shifting relationship in the 1980s between technology and sex. The sex scenes start to become more unnerving as they become more reflexive, holding the audience accountable for their own participation in watching. Amidst fluorescent '80s fashion and neon light, Satō uses odd angles and reflections to highlight technology’s omnipresent watch over modernity; the most interesting of these happen in outdoor daylight scenes, where glass telephone booths become alien as the light of the city warps the image. Sex scenes surrounded by a sea of television sets suggest the technology is inherently voyeuristic, always watching, even when off. The voyeurism of it all is noteworthy, but RE-WIND implies an even more subtle and complex take on the video era. There’s a scene early on in which the investigators are sitting in a car as they discuss the underground American film scene while drinking very prominently placed cans of Coke; Steven Spielberg also gets mentioned shortly after. The rise of video technology prompted economic anxieties about this easily rewritable, copiable, and sharable format. Noted by theorist Caetlin Benson-Allott, foreign produced films like VIDEODROME additionally reflect a fear of a complete Americanization of global media and video’s role in that domination. Through its pink genre, RE-WIND is commenting on this, too, and is deserving of a place amongst other films about videotapes that question and complicate the format’s profound effect on culture. Preceded by Stephen Dwoskin's 1968 short film MOMENT (13 min, 16mm) and Naomi Uman's 1999 short film REMOVED (6 min, 16mm). Screening as part of the Arthouse Vulgarity series. (1988, 65 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Gasper Noé’s CLIMAX (France/Belgium)

FACETS – Friday, 9:15pm

Gasper Noé says CLIMAX is based on a true story. In 1996, a group of dancers had their beverages spiked with LSD during an after-party. The rest of Noé’s film is based on taking that shred of unvetted news and applying absurdist logic toward a nightmarish conclusion, described as “a group of people creating something together and then collapsing,” like a modern Tower of Babel. While the film descends into an infernal abyss of despair—like most of Noé’s films—first he forces us to stare at his reference films, while watching dancer interviews. Around the television set: VHS copies of ANGST, BAISE MOI, SALO, ERASERHEAD, SUSPIRIA, ZOMBIE, FOX AND HIS FRIENDS, POSSESSION, INAUGURATION OF THE PLEASURE DOME, and more are disheveled amongst books by Nietzsche, Wilde, Kafka, and Hans Christian Anderson. Creating a mood board for the film. This collection of cultural artifacts works as an indoctrination, to help provide a set of guidelines for the film that follows. We know without a doubt, it will end in bleak nihilism. Possibly due to this, CLIMAX continues to be Noé’s most accessible film. Baring in mind, Noé’s trademarks of taboo themes are still present such as child abuse, abortion, and drug addiction. Set during the heyday of ‘90s rave culture—“Life is a collective impossibility”—multiple choreographed dance styles are present including voguing, krumping, and breakdancing. Shot in 15 days with a 3 page outline and non-professional actors, improvised dialogue, and improvised character development combine to become a Bakunin feast of social collapse. The look of the film is hyper-stylized with long takes, impossible camera movements, flashes, text, and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it details. The style collides with its improvised documentary approach to create the feeling of a collective psychosis. CLIMAX provides a celebration of dance culture as it was, while commenting on its death and deconstruction. Beginning in a place of harmony with bodies moving in sync, led by Selva (Sofia Boutella), a dance troupe gathers for an after-party fueled by music, sweat, and a punch-bowl of acid-spiked sangria. As the trip begins, the film pivots from harmony to collapse. From suspicion to paranoia to primal instincts, the dancers spiral into varying states of delirium. Noé stated he structured the film around 1970s disaster films, with THE TOWERING INFERNO and THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE in mind. Hierarchies crumble and the microcosm society, struggling to survive after the disaster, normally falls apart into sects. Only in CLIMAX, the society becomes irredeemable as they blame each other, set each other on fire, laugh at potentially electrocuted children, commit incest, assault, and suicide. But have you heard the soundtrack? Beginning with Giorgio Moroder's "Utopia Me Giorgio," pushing you toward Cerrone's "Supernature," and filling in the gaps with Aphex Twin, Soft Cell, Gary Numan, Daft Punk, and Patrick Hernandez, this is the ultimate dance playlist. CLIMAX is the film equivalent to Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is,” she sings, “If that’s all there is, then let’s go dancing.” If the abyss does want to look back, let it find us dancing. (2018, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]
---
Screening as part of a Cold Sweat double feature with Asia Argento’s SCARLET DIVA (2000, 90 min, DCP Digital), which starts at 7pm. Between films, head to the studio for a live audio-visual performance by destruction.esk and Taylor Dye channeling both films’ drug-fueled decadence and rave-floor delirium.

Brandon Daley’s $POSITIONS (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Wednesday, 7pm

Line goes up. Line goes down. In a sea of personal and professional calamities, perpetual sad sack Mike Alvarado (a sneakily intense Michael Kunicki) can only focus on the line going up, or the line going down. The line here is the value of cryptocurrency that Mike has given his money, life, and very soul for; the very essence of his being seems to rest on whether the line goes up or goes down. It’s modern American life presented as eerily and plainly as possible, Mike’s bulging eyes forever glued to his phone screen, the mere concept of financial growth becoming an animating force that guides him through his own personal Hell on Earth. Writer-director Brandon Daley has created a family drama wrapped in a thriller wrapped in a nightmare, somewhere in conversation with the Safdie Brothers, Robert Altman, and Michael Mann, all frayed nerves and anxious energy and desperate souls grasping for stability in an actively unstable world. Mike’s devotion to his ever-shifting crypto-investments acts as a destabilizing agent between him and his developmentally disabled brother (Vinny Kress), his widowed father (Guido Z. Cameli), his distant girlfriend (Kaylyn Carter), and his newly sober, fresh-out-of-prison cousin Travis (Trevor Dawkins giving a live-wire performance that dominates the film). The horror of $POSITIONS lies in the continuously toxic ways that Mike stoops lower and lower to maintain the barest semblance of financial stability, trying to invest more in his faltering crypto-dreams, the horrific reverberations of his actions unfolding in ways more akin to a Greek tragedy than an American indie film. As stressful and chaotic as Daley’s feature gets, there’s something deeply upsetting in thinking about how many people around the world actually do invest their lives in such volatile economic markets. Mike’s story likely isn’t that far off from the millions of poverty-stricken citizens just waiting for that lucky break that will never come. The capitalist beast rages on, but as Mike soon discovers, taking that moment to breathe in, put down your phone, and look at the world around you can reveal things more beautiful and meaningful than any line on a screen. (2025, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Clint Eastwood's HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Tuesday, 6:45pm

The political odyssey of Clint Eastwood encompasses ideologies and idiosyncrasies so peculiar that they have yet to be named. In the 21st century, Eastwood has delivered a masterful and deeply sympathetic survey of minority-majority America in GRAN TORINO, implicated J. Edgar Hoover as a closet case whose private delusions left deep scars on free society, starred in an implicitly pro-Obama Super Bowl half-time spot directed by David Gordon Green, performed an explicitly pro-Romney duet with an empty chair at the Republican National Convention, directed a jingoistic pile of barely concealed kink called AMERICAN SNIPER, voiced ambivalence about the rise of Donald Trump while lamenting the political correctness imposed by the "pussy generation," and played a nonagenarian drug runner working for the Mexican cartels in THE MULE. Less a flip-flopper than a film personality with a downright Maoist penchant for self-criticism and deflection, the Eastwood oeuvre contains embarrassing multitudes. If you start out with the prostrate repentance of UNFORGIVEN, it might not be apparent just how extreme and violent Eastwood’s screen sins were. Take a fresh look at HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER, one of the most loutish and offensive films ever released by a major studio. Essentially a continuation of the sadistic adventures of the Leone/Eastwood Man With No Name, HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER envisions an American polity overrun with corpulence, whoring, hypocrisy, and general venality. Grafting a grinning, pro-rape grind house aesthetic onto big-studio classical filmmaking, HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER is a monstrous artifact from Spiro Agnew’s unconscious or perhaps a pre-Haneke experiment in audience torment. Is this a recommendation? No, definitely. (1973, 105 min, DCP Digital) [K.A. Westphal]

Michael Almereyda & Courtney Stephens’ JOHN LILLY AND THE EARTH COINCIDENCE CONTROL OFFICE (US/Documentary)

Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Following EXPERIMENTER (2015) and TESLA (2020), the reliably interesting filmmaker Michael Almereyda looks at another unusual scientist with countercultural bona fides, John Lilly, an American neuroscientist who invented the sensory deprivation chamber, studied the consciousness and communication of dolphins, and consumed a lot of psychedelic drugs; Courtney Stephens (THE AMERICAN SECTOR, TERRA FEMME) cowrote and codirected. The film proceeds mainly through pre-existing footage, much of which reveals Lilly to have been a regular on television in the 1970s and ‘80s. Almereyda and Stephens make little attempt to portray Lilly as a creditable scientist; rather, he comes across as a modern-day mystic whose experiments seem designed to impact his own consciousness before anyone else’s. (Also in the audiovisual mix are clips of Allen Ginsberg on television, and the filmmakers invite parallels between him and Lilly.) The film reveals that Lilly was a significant influence on pop culture during his lifetime, as Almereyda and Stephens link him to the TV show Flipper, the movies THE DAY OF THE DOLPHIN (1973) and ALTERED STATES (1980), and the Sega video game Ecco the Dolphin—the overarching theme might be described as the tenuous distinction between science fiction and science fact—and they suggest that his work with dolphins directly inspired the formation of dolphin advocacy groups. These accomplishments are interwoven with tales of Lilly’s extensive drug use and tumultuous love life. On the whole, this contains more outlandish details than a good number of fiction films. (2025, 87 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Panah Panahi's HIT THE ROAD (Iran)

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

Panah Panahi’s debut as a writer-director bears resemblance to his father Jafar Panahi’s recent feature 3 FACES (2018) in that it’s a seriocomic road movie that considers the difficulties of being a young adult in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The film approaches its concerns obliquely, however, making it an open-ended allegory more in line with certain films by Mohsen Makhmalbaf (THE CYCLIST, THE SILENCE) and Mohammad Rasoulof (IRON ISLAND, THE WHITE MEADOWS). Most of the story follows a family of four on their road trip across a remote, mountainous region of the country. Panahi generates winning humor from the familiar situation of family members trapped in a car with each other’s quirks, and he provides the principal characters with memorable idiosyncrasies. The father, mother, and 20-ish older son each get moments in the dramatic spotlight, but they’re all overshadowed by the family’s six-year-old younger son, a hyperactive brat who goes unpredictably (yet always believably) from being endearing to being obnoxious. Like a lit firecracker, he doesn’t seem to belong inside a moving car—he really ought to be doing sprints up and down the mountains the family keeps passing. The little boy’s liberty stands in sharp contrast to the fate awaiting his older brother, which Panahi starts to intimate around the half-hour mark of HIT THE ROAD, continues to allude to, but never reveals outright. All we ever learn for certain is that the family is delivering him to some group of people—maybe good, maybe bad—in the middle of nowhere. That the character’s future is literally unwritten brings an air of dread to this superficially pleasant movie, and it inspires alarm about whatever hangs in the balance for all of Iran’s young people. Yet in keeping with the poetic tradition of much Iranian art cinema, Panahi buoys the proceedings with plentiful moments of childlike wonder, most vividly in a late sequence that finds father and bratty tyke literally floating through the cosmos. Screening as part of the Iran Through the Lens of Childhood series. (2021, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Baloji’s OMEN (International)

Siskel Film Center – Wednesday, 6pm

In his feature film debut, Belgian-Congolese rapper, musician and filmmaker Baloji, (whose name, ironically, means sorcerer in Swahili), considers four people targeted with accusations of witchcraft in his native Congo. The first, Koffi (Marc Zinga), is going back to Kinshasa, the capital city of Democratic Republic of the Congo, from Brussels, where he lives with his girlfriend, a white woman who’s pregnant with their twins and whom he plans to marry. He’s making the visit to get the approval of his family, though we soon learn he’s practically estranged from them as a result of a large birthmark on his face that they say is a zabolo—the mark of the devil. His father seems to be avoiding Koffi in his work at the mines, while his mother refuses to let him in her house. At an outdoor get-together his nose begins to bleed on the newborn baby of one of his sisters, the outsized reaction to which sets into motion the film’s events. Centered in addition to Koffi, his sister and another of his family members whom I won’t divulge here as those targeted for witchcraft, Baloj also includes a young boy who lives on the street and uses the accusations to his advantage as the leader of a small wrestling gang. The boy is mourning the loss of his sister, which seems to fuel the conflict they have with another such group. As the film follows Koffi during his short trip, Tshala (Eliane Umuhire, who appeared in the 2021 film NEPTUNE FROST), also emerges as a central figure. Though not marked by the devil, she’s distanced from her family as the result of her being in a polyamorous relationship with a younger man; they’re moving to South Africa, like Koffi moved to Belgium, to disconnect further from familial and cultural repression. Baloji fragments the narrative to disorienting effect, perhaps mimicking the way one might feel to be so removed from people and beliefs once so close to them. The occasional magic realist elements reinforce the pother, bringing into perspective the idea of sorcery in relation to the natural, so-called “real” world. Screening as part of the African Cinema: From Independence to Now lecture series.(2023, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

John Woo's FACE/OFF (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Friday, 9:30pm and Thursday, 7pm

1997 found John Woo in a strange place. Considered a genius by his admirers thanks to the Heroic Bloodshed films he made in Hong Kong in the 80s and early 90s, Woo was brought to the big-budget Hollywood action filmmaking machine in 1993 to make the Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle HARD TARGET. The director hit a snag immediately, losing final cut of the film and seeing the studio release a much-maligned version. His follow up, BROKEN ARROW (1996), fared even worse critically, probably because he put nearly none of his signature style into the action. Thankfully, it made enough at the box office for him to get to make FACE/OFF, by far the greatest of his American films. The plot is completely bonkers. I mean, really bonkers. Terrorist psychopath Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage) tries to assassinate FBI agent Sean Archer (John Travolta); instead, he accidentally kills Archer’s child. Jump to six years later, and Archer is about to finally arrest Troy. Before he does, Troy lets Archer know that he’s hidden a time bomb somewhere in Los Angeles. And by bad luck, Troy gets knocked into a coma before he can let Archer know where it is. So, of course, Archer decides to have Troy’s face surgically removed and swapped with his own so that he can trick Troy’s brother into revealing the bomb's location. Oh my god, how fun is this ridiculousness, a surreal two hours of acting in which the two leads do their best impressions of each other doing impressions of themselves. We have Nic Cage doing Travolta doing Nic Cage, and vice versa. We also have the kind of cop-and-robbers story that John Woo needs to do his beautiful John Woo thing. FACE/OFF fulfills the promise of John Woo in America—it's a Heroic Bloodshed film for Western audiences, complete with his signature gun duels, bullet ballets, and birds. The film invokes a giddiness that's almost humorous, but without coming off as trite or planned. (1997, 139 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]

Joe Dante's GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH (US)

The Davis Theater – Tuesday, 7pm

The etymologically mysterious "gremlin" is one of the most modern of myths, with its origin in WWII airmen's tales of technological sabotage; and while the 1984 film GREMLINS—set in a backlot-simulated small town—limited the mischievous animatronic-puppet destruction to consumerist sites of household goods and department stores, its sequel appropriately centers on a symbolic temple of managerial capital, a hyper-automated midtown office tower inspired simultaneously by Trump and Tati. As with the 21st-century horror film CABIN IN THE WOODS, an antiseptic and efficient surveillance bureaucracy is portrayed as a form of social organization whose continued survival is undeserved, and which must be duly and gleefully demolished by monsters of its own creation. This destruction is enacted through scene after scene of diverse genre parodies of camp cinema. Screening as part of the Big Screen Classics series. (1990, 106 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Castelle]

John Carpenter's ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (US)

Music Box Theatre – Friday, Midnight

High concept and low class, John Carpenter's 1981 sci-fi/action film premises itself on a paranoid endgame scenario: what if crime just keeps going up? Carpenter settles on the conservative trajectory of 400 percent and cedes Manhattan to the most violent criminals, turning it into an island prison and letting it go to ruin. Only the most hardened offenders are sentenced there—new prisoners are given the option of cremation before arrival—making it a particularly bad place for the President (Donald Pleasance) to crash land. Charged with fishing him out within 22 hours, the police commissioner (Lee Van Cleef) offers a full pardon to incoming convict 'Snake' Plissken (Kurt Russell), a former Special Forces operative-turned-criminal—but only if he can successfully recover the President. ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK is a wild ride that is at times clever and at other times surprisingly dull. Most interesting is not the search-and-rescue but the creative depiction of a ruined New York and its ad hoc city-life, circumscribed by extreme danger. An old acquaintance, Cabbie (Ernest Borgnine), watches an all-convict Broadway production before making his way uptown with Molotov cocktails at the ready. Shot mostly in darkness, Carpenter succeeds in creating a closed-off atmosphere that is both somehow dingy and futuristic. These touches, along with several solid performances, breathe life into the rote barrel fire-pocked landscape, and Snake himself. Screening as part of the Prison Break: Films of Escape series. (1981, 99 min, DCP Digital) [Brian Welesko]

Alejandro Jodorowsky's THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (Mexico)

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

Two sects of toads, garbed as Aztecs and Conquistadors, wage war across a model recreation of Tenochtitlan in a bloody and explosive show staged for a gathering crowd. This early scene in THE HOLY MOUNTAIN recalls another celebrated surrealist text, Antonin Artaud's theoretical Theatre of Cruelty, which similarly maps the infamous Mesoamerican massacre onto the destruction and rebirth of an artistic medium. Of course, Artaud's scope encompassed a radical overhaul of the stagnating state of theater, while the change Jodorowsky's film seeks to affect comes from within the viewer, but much in the spirit of The Theatre and its Double, THE HOLY MOUNTAIN strands the spectator as the very center of the objet d'art, and in a kind of out-of-body experience, immerses them wholly in the spectacle. Powered by meditation, LSD, and a bankroll from John and Yoko, the film tells the story of a humble thief, repeatedly depicted as a Christ-like figure, who one day ascends a tower and falls under the tutelage of the enigmatic alchemist residing therein. The allegory amps up as they acquire the assistance of the seven most powerful individuals under the sun, and together they embark on a journey to the titular sacred mountain. But all this is filtered through Jodorowsky's kaleidoscope, complete with disorienting aerial shots and eerily elegant mirror images, hallucination fuel for those not already under the influence. Screening as part of the Arthouse Vulgarity series. (1973, 114 min, DCP Digital) [Tristan Johnson]

Paul Thomas Anderson's THE MASTER (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Saturday, 12:30pm; Monday, 3:30pm; and Tuesday, 11:45am

Warning: Paul Thomas Anderson isn't going to answer your questions. And his movie will be exceedingly elegant in its refusal to answer your questions, of which you'll have many, and for which you'll either love him or despise him. It might be the most important lesson he ever learned from Robert Altman: how crucial it is to touch viewers on an "unconscious basis to where they sense something rather than intellectually know or agree to something." To further quote Altman from Hasti Sardishti's piece : "If they come there and sit in front of their sets or in the theater, and they don't go halfway with you, and don't take the material in front of them and process it through their own history, it's meaningless. If they do they might not have any idea what that was about, but they feel it was right and they know it that fits." Everything in THE MASTER, from its graceful camera movements to the occasional, frightening bursts of violence, fits. The cinematography of Mihai Malaimare Jr. is the most stunningly evocative portrayal of 50's America this side of FAR FROM HEAVEN; every image feels freshly washed. The performances are riveting too. Philip Seymour Hoffman is so mesmerizing that he could easily walk away with the movie, but he's matched by the rest of the cast. Joaquin Phoenix's Freddie Quell is a combustible mix of Brando-style mumbling and volcanic violence. He actually feels dangerous. While Amy Adams, as Dodd's tenacious and manipulative wife, is chillingly perfect. You get the sense that without her ruthless encouragement, Dodd might simply smother himself with his own words. Behind it all is Anderson's Zen-like refusal to hit all the usual plot points or tidy up his characters' messy lives. In fact, the movie's "happy" ending is actually disorienting; just as Dodd keeps his followers off balance, Anderson remains firmly ambivalent to the end. Who's ready to see it again? (2012, 136 min, DCP Digital) [Rob Christopher]

Genki Kawamura’s EXIT 8 (Japan)

AMC River East 21, AMC Dine-In Block 37, the Music Box Theatre and Regal City North – See venue websites for showtimes

Based on the 2023 walking simulation game The Exit 8 by Kotake Create, director Genki Kawamura's film adaptation preserves the minimalist premise and liminal horror while adding depth to its protagonist. The story follows The Lost Man, a commuter trapped in endless Japanese metro corridors who must spot anomalies to escape. Arnold van Gennep's Rites of Passage theory contains the first mention of a liminal space. He describes the rites as having three phases: separation, liminal, and incorporation. The liminal phase is the period between states. A liminal horror places audiences in transitional spaces like hallways and stairwells that exist only for movement between destinations. While exemplified by Kubrick in THE SHINING (1980) and as the Black Lodge in Twin Peaks, the concept wasn’t named until 2019 when “The Backrooms” Creepypasta went viral on 4chan. EXIT 8 uses liminality as both a psychological transition and architectural passageway. The Lost Man boards a train listening to Ravel's Bolero—the repetitive, building march subtly foreshadows the character’s future. When a passenger verbally assaults a woman for her crying baby, no one intervenes, including our protagonist. He then receives a call from a girlfriend he no longer sees, announcing her pregnancy. Overwhelmed, he suffers an asthma attack, becomes disoriented, and ends up at the starting line of a game that he’s not going to realize he's playing until five rounds in. When the dread sets in, Kawamura switches from POV long takes to reveal The Lost Man. The rules are deceptively simple: do not overlook any anomalies; if you find an anomaly, turn back immediately; if you do not find any anomalies, do not turn back; and go out from Exit 8. Now we play the game with him. It's a pattern recognition cognitive test—counting the posters on the walls, reading all the signs, checking that the lockers are empty, and noting the trash near the photobooth. We are immersed in this world. Cinematographer Keisuke Imamura’s POV work in the first ten minutes of the film showcases his talent, but his ability to make the same set of hallways interesting each time you see them is the real feat. There’s a museum poster with M.C. Escher's Möbius Strip II near the middle of the main hall, it’s magnetic inside the frame—the infinite eight, the grid pattern overlaid, and ants crawling in opposing directions for all time. The Lost Man is stuck within a Möbius loop, a purgatory of indecision. Along the way, he finds a six-year-old boy also inside the loop. Kawamura provides perspective shifts as chapters within the film to answer questions while also posing more. But any additional exposition we get is only given within the liminal space. Within these restrictive parameters Kawamura creates a breathing nightmare with raining blood, creatures crawling, tsunamis, and a “creepy middle-aged guy,” while also capturing fears associated with impending fatherhood. Nietzsche asked us to imagine life as an eternal recurrence with every moment repeated infinitely. EXIT 8 makes this literal: you could watch it forever. You'll never look at a subway corridor the same way again. (2025, 96 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]

📽️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Alamo Drafthouse
Johnnie To’s 2012 masterpiece ROMANCING IN THIN AIR (111 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, 4pm, as part of the Sad Girl Cinema Club series.

Donald Cammell’s 1987 film WHITE OF THE EYE (110 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday, 9:30pm, as part of the Terror Tuesday series.

Robert Berry’s 1963 film HOUSE OF DREAMS (70 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday, 9:30pm, as part of the Weird Wednesday series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Alliance Francaise de Chicago (Enter via 54 W Chicago Ave.)
Guillaume Gallienne’s 2013 film LES GARÇONS ET GUILLAUME, À TABLE ! (ME, MYSELF AND MUM) (85 min, Digital Projection) screens Thursday at 6:30pm. Gallienne will be visiting the Alliance Française de Chicago on Friday, April 24 for a discussion about his acting career and his recently published collection of poems, Le Buveur de brume (The Mist Drinker). Doors at 6pm for a wine reception. More info here.

⚫ Asian Pop-Up Cinema
The 20th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema continues, with screenings throughout the week. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
The 2025 documentary KHARTOUM (78 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday at 6:30pm. Following the screening, there will be a virtual Q&A with filmmaker Timeea Mohamed Ahmed, one of the film’s five directors. Abdeljaleel Ismail, an MFA student in the Writing for Screen and Stage Program, will moderate the Q&A. Presented with BlackBoard Magazine. More info here.

⚫ Chicago Film Archives 
“A Celebration,” a new video artwork at 150 Media Stream created by experimental filmmaker Colin Mason, will showcase images from home movies in Chicago Film Archives collections. 150 Media Stream is a large-scale digital art installation spanning a 150-foot LED wall in downtown Chicago curated by Yuge Zhou. In the lobby of 150 N. Riverside Plaza; enter through the Randolph Street entrance. More info here.

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

⚫ The Davis Theater
Oscarbate presents a Trust Fall screening on Saturday at 7pm.

Joe Swanberg presents Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman’s 2026 film MUSCLE BEACH (93 min) on Monday, 7pm, followed by a Q&A with Hurwitz-Goodman moderated by Joe Swanberg.

Oscarbate presents Hisayasu Satô’s 1993 film KYRIE ELEISON (60 min, Digital Projection) on Thursday, 8pm, preceded by a recorded introduction from visual artist and Japanese pink film scholar Dakota Noot. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Brandon Colvin’s 2024 films THE WORLD DROPS DEAD (70 min, DCP Digital) and WHEN THE MOON RETURNS (15 min, DCP Digital) screen Friday, 4:30pm, followed by a Q&A with Colvin.

Toshio Matsumoto’s 1988 film DOGRA MAGRA (109 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday, 7pm, as part of the Psychodynamic Cinema series.

Shiori Itō’s 2024 documentary BLACK BOX DIARIES (103 min, Digital Projection) screens Saturday, 2pm, followed by a Q&A with Shiori Itō and Professor Yuki Miyamoto. Presented in partnership with the Center for East Asian Studies, Film Studies Center, Center for the Art of East Asia, Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, Department of Cinema and Media Studies, and Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. Free admission.

Sebastián Hofmann’s 2018 film TIME SHARE (96 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday at 7pm. Screening will be preceded by an introduction and followed by a Q&A with producer Julio Chavezmontes.

Vadim Kostrov’s 2024 film TOWARDS THE LIGHT (94 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday, 4pm, as part of the New Releases and Restorations series.

Three films by Robert Beavers—WORK DONE (1972/1999, 22 min, 35mm), RUSKIN (1975/1997, 45 min, 35mm), and AMOR (1980, 15 min, 35mm)—screen Sunday, 7pm, as part of the Robert Beavers: My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure series.

John Cromwell’s 1937 film THE PRISONER OF ZENDA (101 min, 16mm) screens Monday, 7pm, as part of the Painting with Light: The Cinematography of James Wong Howe series.

Wu Wenguang’s 1990 documentary BUMMING IN BEIJING: THE LAST DREAMERS (134 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 4pm, in partnership with the Smart Museum of Art on occasion of the exhibition Beyond Boundaries: Three Decades of Contemporary Chinese Art at the Smart. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ FACETS
Gore Verbinski’s 2005 film THE WEATHER MAN (102 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, 2:45pm, preceded by a crew panel with James McAllister (location manager) and John Milinac (special effects coordinator), who will discuss the making of the film, at 2pm. There will also be a video introduction from the film’s technical consultant and consummate weather pro Tom Skilling. Sponsored by Illinois Production Alliance, a non-profit organization dedicated to advocating for the Illinois film production community. 

Kristen Stewart’s 2025 film THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER (128 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday at 5:30pm and Thursday at 6:30pm.

Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine’s 2025 documentary TEENAGE WASTELAND (110 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday at 8:30pm and Sunday at 1pm.

Albert Birney’s 2025 film OBEX (90 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday at 3:30pm and Thursday at 9pm, followed by a Q&A with writer, producer, and cinematographer Pete Ohs, moderated by Must-Watch Indies programmer Marya E. Gates.

Cafe Focus, a monthly coworking pop-up for Chicago filmmakers and film workers of all backgrounds and experience levels, takes place Sunday from 2-5pm in the FACETS Studio.

Sweet Void Cinema’s Industry Hobnob takes place Sunday from 5-8pm in the FACETS Studio.

Sweet Void Cinema presents a Screenwriting Workshop on Wednesday from 6pm to 9pm in the FACETS Studio. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Film Studies Center (at the University of Chicago) 
Lucrecia Martel’s 2025 documentary OUR LAND (123 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday, 7pm, presented with producer Julio Chavezmontes in person. More info here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
François Ozon’s 2026 film THE STRANGER (120 min, DCP Digital) begins screening. See Venue website for showtimes.

Ngai Choi Lam’s 1991 film RIKI-OH: THE STORY OF RICKY (91 min, 35mm) screens Friday, midnight, as part of the Prison Break!: Films of Escape series.

Andrew Davis’ 2003 film HOLES (120 min, 35mm) screens Sunday, 11:30am, as part of the Prison Break!: Films of Escape series. 

Angelo Madsen’s 2025 documentary A BODY TO LIVE IN (98 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday, 9:30pm, followed by a Q&A with Madsen.

Jared Isaac’s 2026 film AN AUTUMN SUMMER (98 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 7pm, followed by a Q&A with Isaac, moderated by Joe Swanberg. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Siskel Film Center
Wanuri Kahiu’s 2018 film RAFIKI (83 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday, 12pm, as part of the African Cinema: From Independence to Now lecture series. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Tone Glow
Tone Glow presents Eyes on the Road: Four American Road Movies—featuring James Benning & Bette Gordon’s 1975 film THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (27 min, 2K DCP Digital Restoration), Thom Andersen’s 2010 film GET OUT OF THE CAR (35 min, 16mm), and two rare short films by Benning on 16mm—on Tuesday, 7pm, at Chicago Filmmakers. More info here.

CINE-LIST: April 17 - April 23, 2026

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Michael Castelle, Rob Christopher, Megan Fariello, Shaun Huhn, Tristan Johnson, Ben Kaye, Raphael Jose Martinez