We will highlight physical screenings at the top of the list for theaters and venues that are open, grouped in our standard Crucial Viewing and Also Recommended sections, as well as all other physical screenings, and list streaming/online screenings below.
Remember to check venue websites for information on safety protocols and other procedures put in place for COVID prevention. We recommend verifying those before every trip to the theater.
Note: We recommend checking the Doc Films website before attending a screening, to verify that it is still happening and in the format advertised.
⭐ CHICAGO CRITICS FILM FESTIVAL
The Chicago Critics Film Festival goes through Thursday, with screenings every day at the Music Box Theatre. We have reviews of select films below; other films of note include Daniel Fleischer Camp’s MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON, Claire Denis’ BOTH SIDES OF THE BLADE, Terence Davies’ BENEDICTION, and a 25th anniversary screening of Paul Thomas Anderson’s BOOGIE NIGHTS on 35mm. More info on the festival here.
---
Cooper Raiff’s CHA CHA REAL SMOOTH (US)
Friday, 7pm
The American film industry always seems to be looking for the next big thing, and when it comes to directors, the younger the better. This tendency births a lot of stories no one over the age of 18 is likely to enjoy. Of course, there are exceptions, and one of them is Cooper Raiff’s CHA CHA REAL SMOOTH. Twenty-five-year-old Raiff wrote, directed, and stars in this tale of a new college graduate named Andrew (Raiff), who has no idea what he wants to do with his life. He lives at home with his mother (Leslie Mann) and loathed stepfather (Brad Garrett), sharing a room with his 13-year-old brother David (Evan Assante) and working behind the counter of a fast-food joint. His life changes when he meets Domino (Dakota Johnson) and her 16-year-old autistic daughter, Lola (Vanessa Burghardt), at a bat mitzvah. Andrew rouses the guests to have fun, and his success leads him to become a professional party starter, primarily for bar and bat mitzvah celebrations where the guests are the same people from party to party because all of the celebrants are in the same grade at school. Lola and Andrew share a special understanding, and he starts babysitting for her and becoming attached to Domino despite the 10-year difference in their ages. Audiences have come to expect that there will be a clinch between these two attractive people, but Raiff has a different agenda. Domino and Andrew are at different stages in their lives, making their attraction problematic. Despite his youth, Raiff is not a first-time director, and his interest in a more mature handling of romance shows that he is a thoughtful filmmaker to watch. The performances, no matter how small, are very good, marred only by the fact that Raiff and Johnson don’t look that far apart in age. As I watched the film, I was reminded of Lynn Shelton’s OUTSIDE IN (2017) in story, tone, and performances. Given that I thought OUTSIDE IN was one of the best films of its year and many others, that is high praise indeed for CHA CHA REAL SMOOTH, a warm and wise film. (2022, 86 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
---
Francis Ford Coppola’s BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA (US)
Saturday, Midnight
BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA capped the most prolific, varied, and unpredictable period of Francis Ford Coppola’s career, and it delivered a happy ending in at least one respect: its popular success allowed Coppola to save his production company American Zoetrope, which had gone bankrupt after a series of commercial failures. Almost all of those failures look better today than they probably did in the 1980s, when memories of THE GODFATHER (1972) and APOCALYPSE NOW (1979) were still fresh in the minds of most moviegoers and led them to expect more bloated, thematically obvious epics like those. But Coppola was never content to repeat himself. The dozen years post-APOCALYPSE found the director following his whims wherever they took him, exploring not only new ways of making movies, but different ways of contemplating his relationship to film history. (It’s no wonder that Coppola helped shepherd the American release of Jean-Luc Godard’s EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF [1979]; one might describe Godard’s work beginning with that film along similar lines.) This long experiment could take the form of A WOMAN IS A WOMAN by way of the cinéma du look (ONE FROM THE HEART [1981]), American International teensploitation mixed with Norman Rockwell (THE OUTSIDERS [1983), or modern imperialist history seen through the lens of John Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy (GARDENS OF STONE [1987]). Not every film of this period began as a personal project, but they all ended up that way. Case in point, BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA was intended to be a TV movie directed by Michael Apted before Winona Ryder brought the script to Coppola’s attention; the inveterate cinephile, taking over the project, quickly decided that his version of Dracula would be a tribute to F.W. Murnau’s NOSFERATU (1922) in particular and German Expressionism in general. In the tradition of that movement, the film is a feast of brazenly unrealistic production design and playful camera tricks, which were made (as in the movies that served as inspiration) without the aid of digital technology. Coppola insisted on practical effects, going so far as to fire the special effects team he’d been assigned and replace them with his comparatively inexperienced son Roman, who was just 29 at the time of production. The contributions by Coppola fils are loads of fun to watch, as they riff not only on German silent classics, but such other expressionist touchstones as Frank Capra’s THE BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN (1932) and Jean Cocteau’s BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (1946). Both Coppolas are aided immeasurably by the great cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, whose lighting schemes and tracking shots are appropriately baroque; he’s matched in showmanship by the much of the cast, namely Gary Oldman (as Dracula), Anthony Hopkins (as Van Helsing), Sadie Frost (as Lucy), and Tom Waits (as Renfield). Keanu Reeves and Ryder, playing the romantic leads, are about as flat as the ones in A NIGHT AT THE OPERA (1935), but that’s a minor complaint; Coppola gives us almost too much to chew on here, visually as well as thematically. Jonathan Rosenbaum suggested that Coppola was drawn to the story’s 1897 setting because it enabled him to reflect on the origins of both cinema and psychoanalysis; one of the more enjoyable elements of BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA is how the malleable the horror is, how it conforms to the thematic influence of those phenomena depending on what Coppola wants to do with it. (1992, 127 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
---
Teemu Nikki’s THE BLIND MAN WHO DID NOT WANT TO SEE TITANIC (Finland)
Monday, 10pm
As far as titles go, Finnish writer-director Teemu Nikki’s THE BLIND MAN WHO DID NOT WANT TO SEE TITANIC has one of the best of 2021, even if the titular blind man is objectively wrong in not wanting to see James Cameron’s pièce de la résistance. This character is otherwise a cinephile of rather good taste, with a particular fondness for the late ‘80s and early ‘90s films of John Carpenter; but due to his multiple sclerosis, he’s gone blind. Jaakko (Petri Poikolainen, who has MS and the same disabilities as his character, who’s also in a wheelchair) spends his days getting high and talking on the phone with his girlfriend, Sirpa, whom he met online and still hasn’t seen in person. She, too, is ill; still, their conversations are largely pleasant, often flirtatious, and the chemistry between them is evident at a distance. When Sirpa gets bad news, Jaakko impulsively begins making his way to her via taxis and train, with the hope that there will be people along the way to assist him. Things take a turn for the worse when he’s held against his will after being targeted by a thief on the train; the thief and an accomplice take Jaakko to a secluded clearing, where they shake him down for his banking information. Compounding the tension is how the film was shot—in extremely shallow focus, making most everything around Jaakko appear blurry. (It’s comparable to the background blurring effect on Zoom.) It isn’t shot from Jaakko’s point-of-view but rather in an approximation of how things might appear from his vantage point. The effect is both intimate and claustrophobic, with few other characters except Jaakko clearly discernible. This makes the robbery sequence especially unnerving and serves to put viewers in Jaakko’s position, thereby strengthening our connection to him. Poikolainen carries the film with his boyish charm and assured sense of self; its overarching device is compelling, adding a rarely, if ever, seen twist to what otherwise would be a standard thriller. (2021, 82 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING
Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes’ THE JANES (US/Documentary)
Doc 10 at the Davis Theater – 7:15pm
“That’s the beauty of Chicago, I think,” exclaims one interviewee early in THE JANES. “It’s a town where people did stuff.” Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes' lamentably very timely documentary tracks the history of the underground collective, known as Jane, which in the 60s and early 70s (pre-Roe v. Wade America) helped those in need secure safe and affordable abortions (eventually going so far as to perform the procedure themselves). It’s also a film about Chicago and how it’s a particularly befitting site for radical political activism. Archival shots of various women around the city open the film and are interweaved throughout, signaling both that abortion rights are something that affects so many and that THE JANES is a very Chicago story. Told directly by those involved, the film is focused on those stories: the larger one about the group’s clandestine activities, ones told by the Janes themselves about their own abortions, and the stories of those they helped, which motivated and still haunt them. It’s a documentary that is historically detailed and thorough but also extremely personal and self-aware. It goes without saying that this is an essential story for the contemporary moment. It’s terrifying to think about moving backwards, about future generations having less rights and autonomy, and about having to do this work again. By all rights THE JANES should be an educational and uplifting look at a turning point in history; instead, it’s a forewarning for those of us in the current moment, to not stop the fight for rights and to get stuff done. Followed by a Q&A with the directors and members of the Jane Collective. (2022, 101 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
---
This is the opening night screening of the Doc10 Film Festival. We will have more coverage of the festival on next week’s list.
Gregory La Cava’s GABRIEL OVER THE WHITE HOUSE (US)
Chicago Film Society at Northeastern Illinois University (The Auditorium, Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) – Wednesday, 7:30pm
During the 1930s, most Hollywood films were designed to provide distracting entertainment for a populace suffering through the Great Depression. Audiences could expect to see anything from Busby Berkeley musicals to gangster flicks and screwball comedies. But propaganda? Pretty rare. There’s only one well-known propaganda film of the era: GABRIEL OVER THE WHITE HOUSE, a production of William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Pictures. Hearst, of course, was the notorious newspaper baron whose politics and personal preferences trumped truth and impartiality in the heyday of yellow journalism and beyond. In the early 1930s, Hearst used his various bully pulpits to tout what would become Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal administration. The uniquely bizarre GABRIEL OVER THE WHITE HOUSE is a prime example of his heavy-handed political hucksterism. The film centers on Judson “Judd” Hammond (Walter Huston), the Hoover/Hardingesque political hack we see being sworn into office as U.S. president at the beginning of the movie. Shortly thereafter, Hammond is hobnobbing with his party cronies, all of whom hold cabinet seats, carelessly discarding the problems of massive unemployment and rampant crime as “local matters.” Hammond, the rare bachelor in the White House, installs his mistress, Pendie Molloy (Karen Morley), as his private secretary and puts off all serious questions at his first press conference with jovial dismissal and the announcement that all future press conferences will require questions submitted in writing beforehand. While taking a joy ride with several of his staff, he floors it to shake both his security escort and trailing reporters. The car blows a tire and careens off the road. The condition of the passengers is never revealed, but the comatose president is not expected to live. As divine presences always seem to do in movies, an unseen messenger arrives on a gust of wind that ruffles the curtains on the president’s open bedroom window and fills the room momentarily with light. When Judd regains consciousness, he’s alert, but distracted, as though listening to a voice beyond the wall. His coldness toward Pendie announces his renunciation of the immoral pleasures of the flesh, and with a vigor and seriousness of purpose never seen in him before, sets about mending the ills of the country. He fires all of his sleazy cabinet members, encourages labor leader John Bronson (David Landau) and his million unemployed men to come to Washington to talk about stimulating the economy, and sends tanks against notorious bootlegger and criminal Nick Diamond (C. Henry Gordon). When some members of Congress rebel against Judd’s sweeping social welfare proposals, he declares martial law. It would have to take someone with the enormous ego Hearst had (or the absurd humor of the Blues Brothers) to promote his politics as a mission from God. Hammond’s use of threats to fill up the nation’s depleted coffers by collecting debts owed by other nations too closely echoes the punishment of Germany following World War I; we all know the disastrous consequences of that humiliation and economic deprivation. Nonetheless, there’s no mistaking the appeal of Hearst’s agenda to a country bent by the Depression, from the proposal for a federal works program Hammond promises to the throngs of jobless men chanting, “We want work,” thrusting their shovels into the air, to the war on crime, with Nick Diamond unmistakably modeled on the real gangster Jack “Legs” Diamond, whose death in 1931 precluded him from suing Cosmopolitan for defamation. Many of the programs Hammond outlines actually formed part of the New Deal; indeed, Hearst sent the script to FDR for suggestions and revisions and worked them into the screenplay. Despite Hearst’s adulterous, live-in relationship with Marion Davies, he preferred to project a moral protagonist in Hammond. Pendie comes off a bit like Mary Magdalene crossed with Jean Arthur’s Clarissa Saunders in MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON (1939). The very presence of women seems to be undesirable, and there are only four in the entire picture: Pendie, Hammond’s nurse, Hammond’s sister, and Bronson’s wife—a reformed sinner, a traditional helper, a relation with a walk-on, and the wife of a labor martyr. Gregory La Cava was a skilled director with such classics as MY MAN GODFREY (1936) and STAGE DOOR (1937) among his credits. I believe it is his skill in bringing this film to life that disguised its true nature as a propaganda picture. Huston plays the sinner quite realistically, as do all of the crooked pols who surround him; his saint is forceful and rather wooden, appropriately a vessel rather than a man. GABRIEL OVER THE WHITE HOUSE is a timely film to ponder as our current wave of rampant inequality and perpetually angry populist media and party hacks seem determined to lead our imperfect democracy over a cliff. Preceded by a political trailer reel (10 min, 35mm). (1933, 86 min, 35mm) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Frank Perry’s DOC (US)
Music Box Theatre – Sunday, 11:45am and Tuesday, 7:15pm
The films Frank Perry made at the height of the New Hollywood era are both cynical and earnest, communicating a modish skepticism about established institutions while advancing sensitivity towards emotionally fragile individuals. DOC, his inevitable revisionist Western, aims to de-mythify the events leading up to the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, a real-life shoot-out that inspired decades of Hollywood movies. In this version, Wyatt Earp is a calculating social climber who shoots down the Clanton gang for political gain (Perry and screenwriter Pete Hamill may spend more time on Earp’s campaign to become sheriff of Tombstone than they do on his efforts as a gunfighter), and Doc Holliday is a cold-blooded murderer who takes part in the raid because he acknowledges how good he is at killing. The film centers on Holliday; he’s played by Stacy Keach just before he landed two of his best roles, in John Huston’s FAT CITY and Richard Fleischer’s THE NEW CENTURIONS (both 1972). His performance here feels like a warm-up for those two milestones in that he approaches the character as an eccentric loser who’s almost pitiable for being a victim of his own brutishness. Faye Dunaway plays Katie Elder, the woman whom Holliday falls in love with and “saves” from sex work; she and Keach have some pleasant scenes together in which the two amoral misfits attempt the niceties of normal domestic life. Harris Yulin, who plays Earp, doesn’t achieve the same level of chemistry with Keach. In fact, he comes across as hollow and unpleasant, which seems to be the point. Like Perry’s attack on domestic and sexual conventions in DIARY OF A MAD HOUSEWIFE (1970), there’s nothing subtle about DOC's take-down of Western myths, especially the myth that violence in the Old West was necessary and just. Not coincidentally, the movie was made when America was unleashing lots of unnecessary and unjust violence in Vietnam. Screening as part of the “Hell on the Homestead: Surviving the Frontier” series. (1971, 96 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
Elaine May's MIKEY AND NICKY (US)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Wednesday, 7pm
Letting Peter Falk (Mikey) and John Cassavetes (Nicky) run wild on film can be a dangerous proposition. Sure, Cassavetes got away with it as a director, but he financed his own movies. After shooting 1.4 million feet of film while running 3 cameras at once, Elaine May was understandably over budget and the studio was understandably disappointed. Paramount buried the film after a short run, and it would be 12 more years until she would direct again (ISHTAR). Although the film was panned by critics at the time, May's approach yielded a nuanced portrait of the male ego and of Downtown LA that has rarely been matched. The two close-ups and a master shot approach to cinematography was effective, albeit listless, in generating a claustrophobic world—a structure largely controlled during May's lengthy editing process. Although the two leads play low-level gangsters, they may as well be any of Cassavetes' standard protagonists: cornered by their jobs and social circumstances, and long past fighting to break out of them. We know the hero isn't going to win by the end of the first reel, and we know that he's not much of a hero by the end of the second. But watching May's collaboration with two great method actors in their prime is worth savoring until the credits roll. Screening as part of Doc’s Wednesday series: They Thought I Was a Nice Girl: The Films of Elaine May. (1976, 119 min, DCP Digital) [Jason Halprin]
Mira Nair’s MISSISSIPPI MASALA (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 6pm
Featuring one of the truly outstanding onscreen romances, Mira Nair’s MISSISSIPPI MASALA is also a multifaceted film about race. After their forced expulsion from Uganda by the dictatorship of Idi Amin, Mina (Sarita Choudhury) and her Indian family end up settling in rural Greenwood, Mississippi. Here, she falls deeply in love with Black business owner Demetrius (Denzel Washington), but their relationship reveals prejudices from both their families and communities. Nair’s camera moves to highlight the deep connections and profound rifts between characters. The gorgeous cinematography lends itself to Choudhury and Washington’s chemistry, which is completely realized; this is evidenced by a scene early in their relationship when they’re on the phone and still their passion is palpable and so sincere. MISSISSIPPI MASALA is grounded in its detailed and charismatic characters. The film is also very much historically grounded, especially with regards to Mina’s father, Jay (Roshan Seth), and his relationship to his homeland of Uganda, a framing plot likewise about love and heartbreak that's interweaved throughout. MISSISSIPPI MASALA never shies away from complicated issues such as displacement, racism, and colorism and concurrently maintains its sweetness as a charming and sexy romance; it’s not a juxtaposition but rather an effective illustration by Nair of the complexities of these cultures and communities. Screening as part of 50/50, the Film Center’s year-long series including a film from each year the theater has been open. (1991, 117 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
John Sayles' MATEWAN (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 1pm
“You work, they don't. That's all you got to know about the enemy.” That's a striking line from Chris Cooper in his debut role as Joe Kenehan, a union organizer for the United Mine Workers of America. While Joe and other characters in the film are fictionalized, the struggles depicted in John Sayles' MATEWAN are far from make believe. The film covers the 1920 Battle of Matewan, which culminated in a shootout between coal miners and the Stone Mountain Coal Companies’ hired guns. Along the way, Sayles introduces us to all kinds of people, with various quirks and ways of life that cause friction. Some have their roots firmly planted in the area for generations, while others are immigrants looking for a new life or even scabs brought in by the coal company to undermine the striking workers. Though none of the conflicts in the film are unsurmountable, all it takes is some perspective to see we are all alike despite what they want you to think--again, “You work, they don’t.” The film is wonderfully crafted, every actor disappears into their role, and the ambience set for the particular period in West Virginia is perfect, with camp fires, folk songs, and the hum of cicadas. The cinematography from Chicago native Haskell Wexler, brings everything to life. The camera is placed in the right nooks and crannies to make a cramped mine feel alive with a spark strong enough to ignite the coal dust. This same energy isn’t particularly foreign to contemporary American audiences; just last month, we witnessed the first successful organization of Amazon employees by the Amazon Labor Union. The battle might not be waged with guns and explosions, but it is still ongoing, and films like MATEWAN will remain important as reminders that “You work, they don’t.” Screening as part of the Haskell Wexler Centennial series. (1987, 135 min, DCP Digital - New 4K Restoration) [Drew Van Weelden]
Fritz Lang's HANGMEN ALSO DIE! (US)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Saturday, 2:30pm
The story goes that German émigrés Fritz Lang and Bertolt Brecht conceived of a movie about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Czechoslovakia's designated Reichsprotektor, before any details of the operation were known. They simply read about it in the newspaper and concocted a fantastic conspiratorial backstory around the killing, a work of real-time historical fiction that refracted world events through Lang and Brecht's pre-existing interests in, respectively, the workings of the demi-monde and the dividends of proletariat solidarity. Their Heydrich would be a fearsome joke, twirling his cane like a swishy burlesque caricature, before suffering the indignity of an off-screen assassination less than ten minutes into the film version. The feature that would finally emerge in the spring of 1943, HANGMAN ALSO DIE! (the title was suggested by one of the production's secretaries and inadvertently spawned a generation of exclamatory auteurist actioners: FIXED BAYONETS!, RETREAT, HELL!, ATTACK!, VERBOTEN!, etc.) is a decidedly unruly film, constantly pulled between competing agendas and aims. It's simultaneously a crackling espionage thriller, a work of decidedly non-uplifting Allied propaganda, a congenitally anti-German diatribe, a plea for a treacly strain of politically-engaged art, and a romance that exudes as much passion as a cooties-fearing five-year-old. Much to Brecht's chagrin, the project was marked by inevitable concessions to the system that his theorist friends and SoCal refugee neighborhoods Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer would soon dub "the Culture Industry." The moral divisions are clear: the Czechs, conquered in body but never in spirit, are played by chipper American character actors (Walter Brennan, Gene Lockhart, and the Great McGinty himself, Brian Donlevy), while the Nazis are portrayed by the human refuse of Weimar cinema (including bit players from THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI and NOSFERATU). One suspects that it was the Communist screenwriter John Wexley, not half-heartedly Americanized "Bert Brecht," who strove to make the Nazis' victims more relatable and resilient by invoking the hardships of Valley Forge. As an artifact of Popular Front patriotism, HANGMEN is unrivaled—and fanciful. (In all of Prague, there seems but one collaborator and hundreds of loyal Czechs, always ready to form a spontaneous mob—the good kind!—to keep the wobbly ones in line.) Like several other war films of the era, HANGMEN ALSO DIE! was the work of dedicated leftists whose "premature anti-fascism" had suddenly become fashionable, albeit not in all company. Wexley, Lang, Brecht, and composer Hans Eisler had all attracted the interest of the FBI—the latter three labeled "Commu-Nazis" for their perceived (schizophrenic?) loyalties. No wonder HANGMEN ALSO DIE! found its most ardent boosters in CPUSA-affiliated rags like New Masses and The Daily Worker. (Over at the merely liberal New Republic, Manny Farber deemed HANGMEN "good, in spite of all the ineptitude—but it's close.") Screened for years in prints that lopped off a crucial minute at the climax, HANGMEN ALSO DIE! has now been restored to a reasonably coherent shape—less evasive, more despairing, and very much worth a reckoning. Preceded by an introduction and followed by a Q&A with Associate Professor of History Ben Frommer. (1943, 135 min, DCP Digital) [K.A. Westphal]
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
Pedro Almodóvar’s PEPI, LUCI, BOM AND OTHER GIRLS LIKE MOM (Spain) / Pedro Almodóvar’s PARALLEL MOTHERS (Spain)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Thursday, 9:30pm / Facets Cinema – See Venue website for showtimes
In a pleasant coincidence of local programming, Facets is reviving Pedro Almodóvar’s latest feature, PARALLEL MOTHERS (2021, 123 min, DCP Digital), just a few days before Doc Films is reviving his earliest, PEPI, LUCI, BOM AND OTHER GIRLS LIKE MOM (1980, 81 min, DCP Digital). If you go to one, you might as well go to both. It’s always instructive to watch Almodóvar movies in pairs—not only for the rhymes between films, but for the insights these provide into the grand design of the writer-director’s oeuvre. Almodóvar is by no means a stagnant artist; compare any scene from the riotous PEPI, LUCI, BOM with any from the meditative PARALLEL MOTHERS, and you’ll see right away how much he’s matured over the last 40 years. At the same time, Almodóvar revisits scenarios, themes, and visual motifs so obsessively that his body of work sometimes feels (like Godard’s) like one very long movie, in which the story stays the same but the style, always intensely personal, evolves as he does as an individual. Watching PEPI, LUCI, BOM and PARALLEL MOTHERS back-to-back reveals how resourceful he can be when it comes to recycling narrative elements: both involve a lesbian romance where one partner is middle-aged and middle-class and the other is younger and bohemian. They’re also, incidentally, Almodóvar’s most explicitly political films. The debut, a bad taste comedy redolent of early John Waters, openly mocks the authoritarian leanings of Spain’s police force; the film, made in 1980, is basically an extended nose-thumbing at the recently departed Franco regime. PARALLEL MOTHERS considers the historical weight of Franco’s crimes through a prominent subplot about unearthing the long-hidden bodies of people who had been killed by the Spanish fascist state. If it’s a less satisfying experience than PEPI, LUCI, BOM, that may be because PARALLEL MOTHERS marks one of the rare occasions where Almodóvar seems to be presenting something out of moral duty—it’s a far cry from the outré filmmaker of the ‘80s who could joke giddily about golden showers, sexual masochism, and rape. And yet there’s much to admire in Almodóvar’s latest, namely the assured, Cukorian sense of understatement that previously flourished in his great Alice Munro adaptation JULIETA (2016). In a change like something from one of his own movies, Almodóvar grew from a feisty young punk to an elegant old man without compromising his faith in cinema. PEPI, LUCI, BOM AND OTHER GIRLS LIKE MOM screens as part of Doc’s second Thursday series: Punks Behind the Camera. [Ben Sachs]
Robert Altman's THE PLAYER (US)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Tuesday, 7pm
Robert Altman, having successfully brought QUINTET, HEALTH, and O.C. AND STIGGS to the big screen, was perhaps overly familiar with the very special interaction ritual known as the Hollywood Pitch, whose unformalized rules permeate nearly every other scene in THE PLAYER. The prevalence of these consistently awkward interrogations (pragmatically asking: why should your movie exist?) become inevitably redirected to the material on screen, and part of the elegance of THE PLAYER is how it cues into and channels this spectatorial recursiveness. For while there has been many a movie about making a movie, this is the only one firmly lodged inside some scumbag studio VP's (Tim Robbins) head: with nary a camera crew in sight but many, many celebrity faces milling about and making awkward, backstabbing small talk in the background. Thomas Newman's oneiric score of extended dissolve cues, in particular, successfully transforms the narrative into a psychological study, like the fever dream an exec might have on his deathbed, after a career's worth of speed-reading by-the-numbers screenplays penned by anxious, balding dudes in their late 20s. Perpetually ironic and thoroughly unsubtle mise en scène provides a steady flow of chuckles, but the film's other theoretical subject--the Hollywood Ending--manages to refer not just (as Hollywood Endings do) to the century past of Hollywood Endings but to the entire structure of the film itself. This is Altman's ANSIKTET--morally ambiguous, self-reflexive in the extreme, questioning the very social foundations of the endeavor of film production--but somehow it can keep the audience grinning as they leave the theater. The cast is primarily a Who's Who ass-kissing orgy, but Richard E. Grant (WITHNAIL AND I) and Cynthia Stevenson are exceptional as a director and young executive who respectively attempt, unsuccessfully, to keep it real in the land of the hyperreal. Screening as part of Doc’s Tuesday series: Neo-Noir ‘92. (1992, 124 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Castelle]
John Cassavetes' FACES (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Wednesday, 6pm
An exhausting masterpiece and one of the most galvanizing experiences in American cinema, John Cassavetes’ FACES will never diminish in its power despite having influenced scores of lesser movies. Many have compared the film to a direct-cinema documentary, and it certainly resembles one in its gritty 16mm cinematography, rough editing, and ineloquent dialogue. Yet the documentary-like aesthetic was actually the result of scrupulous work by Cassavetes and his crew. The director had cinematographer Al Ruban light every corner of every room they shot in, allowing the actors to move about spontaneously; the actors also wore body microphones so that the crew could forgo a boom operator. Cassavetes wrote multiple drafts of the screenplay and engaged in lengthy workshops with his actors—the dialogue only sounds improvised. If the montage makes FACES resemble the shards of a much longer film, that’s because it is: the final draft of the script ran about 250 pages, and the rough cut ran about six hours. Cassavetes’ prodigious skill as a director of actors has justifiably overshadowed his innovations as an editor, but FACES demonstrates how he could masterfully manipulate the flow of a drama so that it consisted entirely of emotional climaxes. (Kent Jones has compared the sustained intensity of his films to the compositions of Gustav Mahler.) One of the most electrifying cuts occurs early on in the film, after middle-aged louse Richard Forst (John Marley) abruptly ends an argument with his wife Maria (Lynn Carlin) to shoot some pool in the billiard room of his home. After maybe a couple seconds of downtime, Cassavetes jumps ahead to Richard and Maria reconciling in bed, laughing nervously over his dumb jokes. Indeed, there’s plenty of nervous laughter in FACES—it reflects the characters’ fear of their own feelings and their inability to articulate what bothers them—and Cassavetes uses it as dagger-like punctuation in dialogue comprised largely of false starts and interruptions. The narrative might be described as one grand interruption in Richard and Maria’s lives, following the characters as they attempt to assuage their mid-life crises by pursuing younger lovers (played brilliantly by Gena Rowlands and Seymour Cassel). Their rocky paths to self-realization culminate with a terrifying passage that sees one character at the brink of death. Cassel’s character interrupts that downward trajectory with one of the greatest monologues in Cassavetes’ filmography, an exhortation to feel more deeply that also describes the motivation behind the filmmaker’s aesthetic. “Cry! Cry! That’s life!” Screening as part of the Haskell Wexler Centennial series. (1968, 130 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
Céline Sciamma’s PETITE MAMAN (France)
AMC River East 21, Gene Siskel Film Center, and Landmark's Century Centre Cinema – See Venue websites for showtimes
An old woman fills out a crossword puzzle with the help of an 8-year-old girl. After they fill in the last word, the girl, Nelly (Joséphine Sanz), says good-bye. She moves to the next room down the hall and says good-bye to the elderly woman in that room and then does the same in a third room. When she reaches the fourth room, a 30ish woman is packing up some belongings. The woman is Nelly’s mother, Marion (Nina Meurisse), who gives her assent when Nelly asks if she can keep a walking stick. This brief, skillfully rendered sequence tells us all we need to know about the circumstances that will dominate the remainder of the film—Marion’s mother has died, and she, Nelly, and Nelly’s father (Stéphane Varupenne) will go to Marion’s childhood home to pack up the old woman’s belongings. French director Céline Sciamma expands her examination of women’s lives by turning to their generational connections and, specifically, the formative moments of girlhood. Marion encounters artifacts from her childhood—books, drawings, old wallpaper. She tries to answer Nelly’s questions about her youth, but overcome by grief, she leaves the house. Left to her own devices, Nelly searches for remnants of a treehouse Marion built in the woods and encounters her mother at the age of 8 (Gabrielle Sanz). It is sheer genius for Sciamma, who also wrote the screenplay, to level the playing field by bringing mother and daughter together as peers to talk about the things that really matter to them—young Marion’s fear of an operation she is to undergo in three days’ time and Nelly’s worry that she is the cause of her mother’s melancholy (young Marion reassures her as only the honesty of a child can that “you didn’t invent my sadness.”) Nelly, who confesses to her older mother that she wishes she had given her grandmother a proper good-bye, gets a chance at a do-over, albeit with a younger version (Margot Abascal). Sciamma brings her camera down to a child’s eye level and favors close-ups that match the curiosity the girls have for each other. Perhaps Nelly is simply tapping into the ghosts of Marion’s past, but whether actual time travel is involved is somewhat beside the point. The simple, but never childish dialogue, the rapport and generosity of spirit between the girls, and the willingness to believe each other in a way that is so true of girlhood is the real miracle in this film. Sciamma has given us a story we all would like to believe in and imagine for ourselves in our own way. (2021, 83 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE (US)
Music Box Theatre – Friday, 2pm
So few digitally-shot features dare to place the medium's technical limitations at the front and center of their aesthetic. Mostly filmmakers just hope that the audience ignores how crappy everything looks. Not David Lynch. INLAND EMPIRE obsessively fixates on the look of mid-grade digital video: blocky smears of light, washed-out colors, hazy and peculiar. It's literally a dreamworld. As in a dream, you can't always tell what you're seeing—or what it means. There is only the eternal now; in the film's world, memory can just as easily refer to tomorrow as to yesterday. Memory is as blurry as the degraded visuals. We're forced to squint between the pixels, trying to remember. Lynch marries this to a soundtrack that's arrestingly intricate, populated with all manner of industrial noises and hair-raising sound effects. It's an image/sound mashup as scary and bewildering as any nightmare. Seen in a darkened theater we're caught in its brilliant grip. (2006, 180 min, DCP Digital — New 4K Picture and Sound Remaster) [Rob Christopher]
Sergei Paradjanov's THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES (USSR)
Facets Cinema – Friday, 7pm
In 1968 director Sergei Paradjanov made one of the most artistically uncompromised and unique expressions in the history of cinema with THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES. Upon submitting it for Soviet approval, his movie was promptly taken away and re-cut while he was serving jail time for its transgressions. The charges: "secretism," "decadent aestheticism," perpetuation of an "excessive cult of the past," and "latent anti-Sovietism." Though his five-year jail sentence and artistic hijacking are, of course, deplorable, it's hard to not agree with the charges. Paradjanov made an iconoclastic movie, celebrating the life of an Armenian poet, and breaking from the style of social realism. Instead of following the party line, he created an ode to pre-Soviet culture: The film is defiantly arcane; it rhapsodizes on the rituals, dress, customs, and poetry of a place and time very few audience members will be familiar with. It doesn't explain either, it just shows. Through use of gorgeous, Byzantine tableaux and cryptic excerpts of poetry (seen as text, and spoken as in an incantation), Paradjanov gives us a tantalizing glimpse into his occult world of beauty and hugger-mugger. The film, in a similar style to that of Pier Paolo Pasolini, moves through cuts rather than camera movements. His frames are filled with mystery: every person, place or thing is purposely positioned, even when that purpose isn't entirely clear. Spoken words are replaced by body movements as the means of communication: every gesture, turn, rhythm and pulse whispers something to you. Though highly visual, POMEGRANATES seems to be striving more for the invisible. The visible manifestations of this can be seen in the wind that blows through pages of hundreds of books, the "invisible" strings that hold and twirl props, in the small holes in the fabric that one character seems to be reading. For all of its attention to the details of the material world, it shows things that cannot be said. It speaks to the mind, soul and imagination. Screening as part of the Milos’s Picks series in conjunction with Facets’ 47th anniversary celebration. (1969, 79 min, Digital Projection) [Kalvin Henley]
Wong Kar-wai’s DAYS OF BEING WILD (Hong Kong)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm
DAYS OF BEING WILD is not just the movie where Wong Kar-wai came into his own as a filmmaker; it introduces themes, motifs, and even music cues that would appear in most of his subsequent films. Wong’s distinctive, poetic style is fully realized here, and it’s so rapturous that the film sustains its hypnotic effect even when little is happening onscreen. Befitting a movie about early adulthood, DAYS OF BEING WILD is brimming with a sense of possibility: Wong’s seductive camera movements, vibrant color combinations, and jazzy shifts in place and time reveal a director at play with the elements of cinema (not for nothing did his 90s work inspire comparisons with the French New Wave), and his good cheer is infectious. At the same time, the film is infused with melancholy, communicating the irretrievability of the past and longings for love and home. Set in Hong Kong in 1960, the movie begins with the promise of a love story between Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung), a ticket seller at a downtown stadium, and a Lothario called York (Leslie Cheung). They meet cute, and he seduces her with moony talk about the nature of time. Yet York quickly grows tired of Li-zhen and takes up with a showgirl named Mimi (Carina Lau); sometime later Li-zhen captures the romantic attention of a lonely young police officer played by Andy Lau. The plot splinters between all four characters, each of whom gets a chance to narrate the action, yet the bittersweet mood carries across each of the narrative strands. Everyone pines for someone who won’t reciprocate his or her feelings—even the callous York, who longs to connect with the biological mother who abandoned him as a baby. (York was brought up by a prostitute, and his thorny relationship with her feels like something out of a Tennessee Williams play.) DAYS OF BEING WILD is overwhelming in how it conveys so many conflicting emotions at once (romance and lovesickness, loneliness and connection, nostalgia and a heightened sense of the present), but the filmmaking is always fluid and enticing. Screening as part of Doc’s Friday series: In the Mood for Wong Kar-wai. (1990, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Paul Thomas Anderson's LICORICE PIZZA (US)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Saturday, 7pm
There are strong similarities between LICORICE PIZZA and PHANTOM THREAD (2017), Paul Thomas Anderson's previous film, though they present very different depictions of burgeoning romance. PHANTOM THREAD wrapped its lovers inside a hermetic world of high-end fashion, poisonous mushrooms, and very precise food orders. While the tone seemed to spell a romance bathed in doom, the results were closer to an arthouse rom-com. Anderson kicks up the romance and comedy for LICORICE PIZZA, yet the film’s construction doesn’t feel as pensive or classical as that of the previous film; it's something looser and shaggier, if only on the surface. LICORICE is glossy, loud, bright, and brimming with comedic subplots, but what holds it together are the experiences of its two main characters, played by Alana Haim (of the band Haim) and Cooper Hoffman (son of the late, great Phillip Seymour Hoffman)—their youthful romance will tug on the heartstrings of even the most jaded filmgoers. The film takes place in a world where youth is subjected to the forces of impending adult realities, represented here by a coked-out film producer (Bradley Cooper's winking portrayal of Jon Peters, the producer of the 1976 A STAR IS BORN), a gay politician with a cold attitude toward love (writer-director Benny Safdie, portraying LA politician Joel Wachs), or a pair of thrill-seeking actors hellbent on continuing the raucous nature of their lives well into their 60s (Tom Waits and Sean Penn, the latter portraying a character based on William Holden). The protagonists even encounter an actress based on Lucille Ball and America's gas-shortage crisis (pay close attention to a Herman Munster cameo as well). Though our young main characters remain locked in their growing views of love and human relationships, they're challenged in their beliefs when they come into contact with each of these adults. Anderson throws in plenty of quirks that could read as random flourishes, yet these quirks are designed to highlight our main characters’ lack of awareness of their surroundings, how the things they encounter make no sense to them; it makes sense that the audience isn’t allowed an easy explanation. I'm sure the surface-level casualness will be more deeply understood as the years roll by, but as far as entertainment goes on an immediate level, you aren’t going to find anything more heartwarming or funny than LICORICE PIZZA. Screening as part of Doc’s Saturday “New Releases” series. (2021, 133 min, DCP Digital) [John Dickson]
Robert Eggers’ THE NORTHMAN (US)
Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes
Vikings are having a moment in pop culture, but Robert Eggers is less than thrilled. Saying that "recent television, film, and video game representations of Viking mythology and Old Norse culture are romanticized and made to look flashy and cool," he decided to make the ultimate Viking film, aiming for historical accuracy. But THE NORTHMAN plays more like an '80s action movie, full of macho masochism à la Mel Gibson and sporting a revenge-driven plot influenced by HAMLET that could be set in the present day—of course, with some major details changed. Prince Amleth (played by Alexander Skarsgard as an adult) watches his father (Ethan Hawke) murdered by his uncle Fjolnir (Claes Bang), leading to a lifelong vow of revenge. Years later, he disguises himself as a slave and arranges to be sold into servitude in Iceland, where Fjolnir rules. Toiling on Fjolnir’s farm, he bides his time till he can enact his revenge. But that conflict takes place in a world where reality and fantasy blend together and the worlds of humans and animals seem very close. For all the period research that went into it, THE NORTHMAN, like Eggers’ THE LIGHTHOUSE (2019), boils down to a conflict between two men; and like the earlier film, it risks succumbing to making the extensive world-building a background for that struggle. Yet THE NORTHMAN has a far more seductive look, embracing blatant artifice—if the crows in the first scene aren't CGI, they're giving the film's best performances—and monochrome tones through which a fire’s golden glow bursts. (Tinted silent cinema is a touchstone for this film's cinematography.) Like Eggers’ first two films, both period pieces, THE NORTHMAN combines a trippy tone with extremely detailed production design. It’s most intriguing when Eggers’ direction hints at a world where reality and fantasy blend together, with the style rejecting the rationalist tendencies of contemporary Europe. THE NORTHMAN tries to embody Viking culture instead of merely depicting it. The sound design is purposefully overwhelming, with music blending into foley effects. Eggers still hasn’t topped his debut, THE WITCH (2015), but he’s made the leap from A24 folk horror to a $90 million studio project without watering down or changing his aesthetic. (2022, 136 min, DCP Digital) [Steve Erickson]
🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
ALSO SCREENING
⚫ Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
Marion Hill’s 2021 film MA BELLE, MA BEAUTY (93 min, DCP Digital) screens on Friday at 7pm. Hill will appear in person for a post-screening conversation with filmmakers Stephen Cone and Kyle Henry, professor in the School of Communication. More info here.
⚫ Chicago Humanities Festival
A preview of Bianca Stigter's THREE MINUTES — A LENGTHENING screens on Saturday at 3pm as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival, at the Feinberg Theater (610 S. Michigan Ave.). More info here.
⚫ Comfort Film at Comfort Station
As part of the Guest Curator series, Comfort Film presents “Mirror Image,” a program of short animated films that “celebrates the diverse voices of contemporary animators locally and internationally” and spans “across genres to reflect the new generation of filmmakers,” per the event description, on Wednesday at 8pm. More info here.
⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Campbell Scott and Stanley Tucci’s 1996 film BIG NIGHT (107 min, 35mm) screens on Sunday at 7pm as part of the “Food, the Common Tongue: Loves, Rages, and Delights of Gastro-Cinema” series.
Khady Sylla’s 2005 documentary AN OPEN WINDOW (52 min, Digital Projection) and Fronza Woods’ 1979 short film KILLING TIME (10 min, 16mm) screen on Monday at 7pm as part of the “An Open Window: Black Female Directors Across the Diaspora” series.
Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK (188 min, DCP Digital) screens on Thursday at 6pm (note the early start time) as part of the “Projecting Paranoia” series. More info on all screenings here.
⚫ Facets Cinema
Gordon Weisenborn’s 1969/1970 documentary WATER IS WET (80 min, Digital Projection) screens on a loop during business hours through and Sunday. More info here.
⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Audrey Diwan’s crucial 2021 French abortion drama HAPPENING (100 min, DCP Digital) begins this week. See Venue website for showtimes.
The SAIC Film, Video, New Media, Animation and Sound Festival 2022 continues through Saturday. This event is open to the public and free to attend.
Hany Abu-Assad’s 2021 film HUDA’S SALON (91 min, DCP Digital) screens on Friday at 8pm; Ameer Fakher Eldin’s 2021 film THE STRANGER (113 min, DCP Digital) screens on Saturday at 7pm; and Maryse Gargour’s 2021 documentary A TALK WITH REMARKABLE PEOPLE (52 min, DCP Digital) screens on Sunday at 3pm, all as part of the Chicago Palestine Film Festival, going through May 21. Both are preceded by one or more short films.
Alé Abreu’s 2013 Brazilian animated film THE BOY AND THE WORLD (80 min, DCP Digital) screens on Saturday and Sunday at 11am as part of the Film Center’s monthly Kid Flix series.
Norman Jewison’s 1968 film THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR (102 min, 35mm) screens on Saturday at 1pm; Miloš Forman’s 1975 film ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST (133 min, DCP Digital) screens on Sunday at 6pm; and Jewison’s 1967 film IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (110 min, DCP Digital - New 4K Restoration) screens on Thursday at 6pm, all part of the Haskell Wexler Centennial series. More info on all screenings here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
Alex Garland’s 2022 horror film MEN (100 min, DCP Digital) screens on Thursday at 10:45pm before beginning a full run starting next Friday. More info here.
⚫ South Side Home Movie Project
The South Side Home Movie Project is participating in the Key/Change exhibition at the Weinberg/Newton Gallery (688 N. Milwaukee Ave.), ongoing through July 16. The exhibition centers on housing; per the event description, “silent home movies and idiosyncratic sculpture subsequently suggest that housing is a productive place in which intimate moments, lifelong memories, and nurturing meals are made and shared.” More info here.
⚫ South Side Projections
Presented as part of EMERGENCE: Intersections at the Center, “Ceremonies: Short Films by Marlon Riggs” screens on Thursday, 6pm, at the South Side Community Art Center (3831 S. Michigan Ave.) and includes Riggs’ films AFFIRMATIONS (1990, 10 min, Digital Projection); ANTHEM (1991, 9 min, Digital Projection); and NON, JE NE REGRETTE RIEN (NO REGRET) (1993, 38 min, Digital Projection). A post-screening discussion will be led by SSCAC Public Programs and Engagement Manager, and co-curator of EMERGENCE, zakkiyyah najeebah dumas-o’neal and Aymar Jean Christian, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University, and co-founder of OTV | Open Television. More info here.
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS –
ALSO SCREENING/STREAMING
⚫ Video Data Bank
“Spring with Mike Kuchar” is available to stream for free on VDB TV. The program includes Kuchar’s SUNLIT SORCERY (2022, 34 min), composed of his works ECHO’S GARDEN (2010), A MIDSUMMER’S NIGHTMARE (2008) and THE VERNAL ZONE (2008), and Oscar Oldershaw’s AN AFTERNOON WITH MIKE KUCHAR (2014, 32 min). More info here.
CINE-LIST: May 13 - May 19, 2022
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Michael Castelle, Rob Christopher, Maxwell Courtright, John Dickson, Steve Erickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jason Halprin, Kalvin Henley, K.A. Westphal, Drew Van Weelden