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đ˝ď¸ CRUCIAL VIEWING
Laura Poitras' ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED (US/Documentary)
Gene Siskel Film Center â See Venue website for showtimes
Never underestimate the reach and power of a tenacious, iconoclastic artist. If youâre feeling hopeful, that might be a takeaway from Laura Poitrasâs latest multifaceted documentary. Her subject is photographer Nan Goldin, whose provocative portraits of her friends and associates in New York Cityâs hedonistic, drug-fueled underground made her a star of the scene in the late 1970s and '80s. Goldinâs confrontational, often explicitly sexual photographsâmany focused on the LGBTQ community before and during the AIDS crisisâwere fueled by an activistâs ethos to preserve the lives of those cast to the margins by society, a position she related to as both a lifelong misfit and a forthright woman in a male-dominated field. Essentially co-authored by Goldin, who narrates the film, ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED takes us up to her present-day involvement with P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), an advocacy group she formed in 2017 in response to her battle with opioid addiction. Her work with the group has a surprising connection to the art world via the Sackler family, former owners of OxyContin producer Purdue Pharma. The Sacklers have donated millions that they made from the distribution of deadly opioids (over 450,000 American casualties) to arts and cultural institutions around the world to launder their reputation, and Goldin has made it her mission to have the familyâs name removed from wings in the Met, Guggenheim, Tate, and Louvre, and other museums. The cohesiveness with which Poitras pulls together the filmâs myriad threadsâbiography, sociocultural chronicle, advocacy, and art display (excerpts of Goldinâs famed slideshows punctuate the filmâs chapters)âevinces the inextricability of art and lived experience from politics and economics, and highlights the frequently vexed relationship between subversive creators and the establishment interests they depend on to culturally enshrine their work. Poitras also posits a fascinating connection between art and the legacy of medical science, as she continually shows how various health stigmas, from mental illness to HIV, have been catalysts for artists to transform pain and erasure into social action. With ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED, Poitras and Goldin vibrantly demonstrate the real and very visible change such action can affect. (2022, 117 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
Robert Bresson's AU HASARD BALTHAZAR (France)
Gene Siskel Film Center â Friday, 9pm
AU HASARD BALTHAZAR has long been encircled by a cacophonous mystique of hyperbolic Godard proclamations (he famously married into the montage) and unenlightened uses of the word "transcendental." It is now, for better or for worse, solely a masterpiece for secular melancholic cineastes and an exercise in futility for the pious Netflix user. Even the Schubert Sonata in A Major, bringing tears to single men at Facets, can be played by a child. That said, what a masterpiece! Cinema's most thorough estrangement of humanity, at the hand of our most enigmatic auteur: from Bresson's editing room, total war on the filmic conventions of emotional identification. Love in the air?? Always cut to an uncomprehending donkey. Point-of-view cutting between said donkey and a caged tigerâwhy not? The erstwhile aspiring psychologists of film studies deserve to be flummoxed. See also: the most alienated dance floor brawl of all time. Despite all this, a certain sympathy is generated between the film and its victims (the audience), so long as the latter is prepared to progressively teach the former its vulnerability. Like Hollis Framptonâs ZORNS LEMMA, the deliberately supine viewer is rewarded with a recognizable universe viewed obliquely, dispassionately, and at a temporal distanceâthe mysterious theological recitations of childhood; the wintry march of old age; and the long, relentless oppression of 'civilized' society in between, made entirely of humble gesture and symbol. Screening as part of the Fringe Benefits series. (1966, 95 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Castelle]
Jerzy Skolimowskiâs EO (Poland/UK/Italy)
Gene Siskel Film Center â See Venue website for showtimes
In 2022, Steven Spielberg retrofitted JAWS for IMAX theaters, transforming a classic film into a towering, visceral experience. One might say that Jerzy Skolimowski did the same thing that year with Robert Bressonâs AU HASARD BALTHAZAR (1966); his quasi-remake EO (a prizewinner at Cannes) is a big screen experience par excellence, with large-scale imagery and booming sound design that make you feel the titular donkeyâs suffering in your bones. Some might balk at Skolimowskiâs decision to put his spin on Bressonâs allegorical masterpieceâwhich is beyond question one of the greatest films ever madeâyet such an audacious move is in keeping with this major artist, who first came to prominence in the early 1960s as an acclaimed poet and a figurehead of Polandâs postwar youth culture. The directorâs â60s work remains astounding in its freewheeling energy and inspired visual metaphors (itâs worth noting that, after Bresson, he was one of the European filmmakers that Cahiers du cinĂŠma championed the most in that decade); this period culminated with the blunt social critique of his 1967 production HANDS UP!, which was so incendiary that it more or less got him exiled from his native country (moreover, he wasnât able to complete the film until 1981). After that, Skolimowski made movies in several other countries (including the US) before returning to Poland in the 1990s. The handful of films heâs made since then feel less indebted to his work as poet than his work as a painter, which has occupied much of his time in the past several decades. Indeed, EO contains an abundance of striking images, and these drive the film more than the loose narrative, which follows a donkey in his travails after he leaves the circus where heâs performed. The animalâs misfortunes mirror those of contemporary Europe; the most upsetting episode is probably the one that concerns the violent activity of a thuggish group of modern-day nationalists. A late episode in the film with guest star Isabelle Huppert works in some anticlerical sentiment that feels more akin to BuĂąuel than Bresson, while the final episode approaches the apocalyptic feelings of Bressonâs last two features, THE DEVIL, PROBABLY (1977) and LâARGENT (1983). Itâs a grim work, to be sure, yet Skolimowskiâs immersive camerawork alleviates the proceedings, reminding us (as Bresson did) how miraculous the cinematic form can be. (2022, 86 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Holiday Detour Film Series
FACETS Cinema â See Venue website for more information
David Cronenberg's EASTERN PROMISES (UK/Canada/US)
Friday, 7pm
Beloved by the Russian mafia, EASTERN PROMISES demonstrates David Cronenberg to be a multifaceted filmmaker who masterfully tackles stories across genres, pushing what it means to make a crime thriller for the modern age. Many crime films follow an almost formulaic approach, pushed along by stock characters familiar to the audience through redundancy. Cronenberg breaks the mold by taking a humanist approach to Londonâs underworld. His collaborators took special attention to accurately depict the world of organized crime: In the development of the script, Steven Knight performed in-depth research, conducting interviews with both law enforcement and criminals who had firsthand experience with the filmâs subject matter. The only inaccuracy came from Cronenberg's choice to keep guns out of the film to heighten brutality and make the filmâs violence weightier. (According to Roger Ebert, this film did for knife fight sequences what THE FRENCH CONNECTION [1971] did for car chases.) The film also marks the second time David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortenson worked together, after A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE (2005). Mortensen disappears into the role of a Russian bodyguard, devoting every ounce of his body to the role as a tattooed tough guy (going as far as traveling to Russia to study and meet Russian criminals). Knight builds an amoral underground where humanityâs most troubling organizations and disturbed personalities dwell, some of whom battle with lingering shreds of integrity. Cronenberg has used monstrosity to reveal humanity his entire career; EASTERN PROMISES uses human monsters to meditate on deeper themes within the world of crime. (2007, 101 min, Digital Projection) [Ray Ebarb]
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Allen Baron's BLAST OF SILENCE (US)
Saturday, 7pm
"You were born with hate and anger built in," reads a threatening voiceover narrator, setting the tone for the surprisingly blackened alt-Christmas gem BLAST OF SILENCE. Starring, written, and directed by Allen Baron in his debut before moving onto largely TV-based directing, the film follows hired killer Frank Bono as he goes back to his old home of New York between the Christmas and New Year's holidays to carry out a hit. Bono has an ambiguous face, craggy but with soft edges in that classically mobster way, and his actions say it all: this is a hardened man, ready to get in and get out without making any friends. But when an early encounter goes poorly and Frank wants out, heâs told by his boss that heâs in serious trouble for even thinking of dropping the job and that he has to do it anyway. This sets the stage for Frankâs further descent into a prison of the mind. The entire film is narrated in second-person, tossing out hardened noir-isms like candy and creepily implicating the viewer, not unlike the POV shots in slashers do. Weâre stuck in this world with Frank, killing time with him in his old city and its bad memories. Itâs this outsized sense of despair that elevates BLAST OF SILENCE from its boilerplate noir tropes, combining with the holiday setting to make a uniquely intense and bleak thriller. While itâs an extreme example, the film has that quality of the best Christmas films, those that show the holiday from a different side, the merriment of the season contrasting the sadness of outsiders. A man like Frank feels not just ambivalence but bitterness for this world; the giving and thanking done only by those who deserve it, not people like Frank whose souls were condemned a long time ago. It doesnât get any easier to stomach as it goes along, and it might not be what everyone looks for this time of year, but itâs a welcome palate-cleanser after the concentrated sweetness of so much holiday entertainment. (1961, 77 min, Digital Projection) [Maxwell Courtright]
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Daryl Duke's THE SILENT PARTNER (Canada)
Saturday, 9pm
I love David Cronenberg's early oeuvre for many reasons, but as someone born in the year 1975, there's one peculiar attribute in particular that especially appeals to me. Because Cronenberg did extensive location shooting for these films for budgetary reasons, each one offers surprisingly atmospheric glimpses of late '70s Canada. Hideous fashions, beige shag carpeting, chrome-and-plastic light fixtures. Very similar to the late '70s America of my childhoodâbut slightly askew. Watching THE SILENT PARTNER offers similar vicarious thrills. Elliott Gould (a non-Canadian, but we'll forgive him) works as a bank teller in a shopping mall; specifically, the Toronto Eaton Centre, which was a state-of-the-art palace of commercialism at the time. Just before Christmas (courtesy of Curtis Hanson's deftly plotted script), he gets wind that the bank is about to be robbed, then decides to siphon off a great deal of the money for himself. When the holdup man realizes how paltry the take is, the two enter into a deadly game of cat and mouse. Toronto native Christopher Plummer (sporting a disquieting application of eyeliner throughout the film) is mesmerizing as the criminal psycho. One minute he's dressed up as a mall Santa, the next he's shoving his bare foot into the face of a young girl he's just picked up at a sleazy dive bar: you truly believe he's capable of anything. To give away more of the story would be a crime, but suffice it to say that THE SILENT PARTNER is a worthy "alt Christmas" viewing choice. Among its other pleasures: John Candy in a small role as a jolly bank employee, modeling a series of extremely loud ties; a Christmas party during which a lady asks, âAnyone want to do a number?â; and, in his final scene, Plummer offering a prescient preview of David Bowie's "Boys Keep Swinging" music video. Also, this contains jazz giant Oscar Peterson's only original film score. (1978, 106 min, Digital Projection) [Rob Christopher]
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Also screening is Noah Baumbachâs 2015 film MISTRESS AMERICA (84 min, Digital Projection) on Sunday, 5pm.
đ˝ď¸ ALSO RECOMMENDED
Roy Andersson's ABOUT ENDLESSNESS (Sweden)
Gene Siskel Film Center â Monday, 6pm
Swedish writer-director Roy Andersson trades almost exclusively in tableau-like shots that suggest the offscreen space goes on foreverâin this regard, all of his features beginning with SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR (2000) could be called ABOUT ENDLESSNESS. Anderssonâs style is by now immediately recognizable; as Nick Pinkerton summed it up in a November 2020 article for Sight & Sound: âIt comprises a string of vignettes, almost all playing out in a single take, viewed by a locked-down camera with a static frame that holds its human subjects in the philosophical distance of a deep-focus long shot⌠The skies in his Stockholm are overcast or pale; the light in the city is weak and milky; and the walls are bare in the cityâs seedy cafĂŠs and offices and flats. Grays and off-whites proliferate, and the palette is desaturated, as though colors have lost their will to live in this cold climate.â For those who appreciate his aesthetic or his dry, Scandinavian wit, Anderssonâs approach is endlessly compelling. Each shot feels like a little world unto itself; the director strews details all around the frames, creates expansive backgrounds, and brings each scene to a pointed observation reminiscent of a fable or parable. ABOUT ENDLESSNESS (for which Andersson won the Best Director prize at the Venice Film Festival) feels especially parable-like in its focus on big philosophical questions. The movie runs just 76 minutes but has the air of an epic, since Andersson seldom strays from considerations of what it means to live, love, believe, act morally, kill, grieve, and die. Most of the scenes are narrated by an omniscient figure who flatly delivers pithy descriptions of the onscreen action (e.g., âI once saw a man who wanted to surprise his wife with a nice dinnerâŚâ), which renders them, alternately, universal and almost comically simple. Indeed, the straight-ahead, presentational style is a reliable source of deadpan humor; even the recurring character of the preacher whoâs lost his faith comes across as a little funny when seen from such an exaggerated distance. Anderssonâs style can be devastating too, as in the scene of a man who instantly regrets carrying out an honor killing; and it can be majestic, as in a scene occurring roughly halfway into ABOUT ENDLESSNESS that finds three young women improvising a dance in front of an outdoor cafe in late afternoon. A director prone to using miniatures to create the illusion of outsize spaces, Andersson is very good at reminding us how smallâwhich is to say, preciousâhumanity is in light of eternity. Screening as part of 50/50, the Siskelâs year-long series including a film from each year the theater has been open. (2019, 76 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Steven Spielbergâs THE FABELMANS (US)
Various Multiplexes â See Venue websites for showtimes
Per Steven Spielberg's largely autobiographical bildungsroman THE FABELMANS, all movies have the power to create an intimate connection between filmmaker and spectator. One of the through lines of Spielbergâs film is that cinema not only serves as a bond between auteur and audience; it has the potential to serve as a secret between them. (The most opulent gift a filmmaker has given the Freudians since the heyday of Bertolucci, THE FABELMANS argues that the ideal spectator is always the filmmakerâs mother.) This association of pleasure with guilt and responsibility makes Spielbergâs film, which he wrote with Tony Kushner (the most valuable collaborator heâs had after Janusz Kaminski), feel supremely Jewish, in spite of the fact that itâs also a film about Jewsâ assimilation into American society. Itâs complicated. I canât explain how Spielberg makes the gentile actors Paul Dano and Michelle Williams seem acceptable, even lovable as Jews; it has something to do with how all the little details of the world they inhabit speak to a socially aspirational mid-century Jewish-American mentality. (For me, the movie inspired visceral memories of the homes of elderly relatives I visited as a boy.) Sammyâs interest in filmmaking as a technical process he can master parallels his fatherâs interest in early computing systems; the folkloric quality of a son inheriting his fatherâs scholasticism is one of the most Jewish things about THE FABELMANS. In the movieâs third act, Spielberg and Kushner hone in on another truth any Jew can confirm: that antisemites donât care what you or your parents look like; their ignorance makes them hate you as they hate all Jews. Thanks to Spielbergâs extraordinarily rich visual language, heâs able to deliver dark observations about both cinema and secular Jewish life in a manner thatâs never less than breathtaking. The director has described the film as being like therapy in that it forced him to relive some of his most painful memories; he even makes the connection early in the film, when Sammyâs mother lets him recreate a train wreck on film so he stops having nightmares about them. Yet in rendering those memories through cinematic means (and howâitâs the sort of film where every lighting cue, prop, and focal length tells you something about the characters or their creator), he ends up revealing the psychological complexes behind a range of cinematic devices, including many he all but created. Why has Spielberg always shot his most personal films in the aspect ratio of 1.85:1 (this one included)? Because, as the first scene of THE FABELMANS reveals, this is the most appropriate ratio for presenting a middle-class Jewish-American kitchen circa 1952. The filmâs formal and thematic concerns coalesce in an audacious set piece that feels like something out of Michael Powellâs PEEPING TOM (a film with which THE FABELMANS has a surprising amount in common), an unholy communion between a young man and his mother that only cinema could have made possible. [Ben Sachs]
The 39th Annual Music Box Christmas Sing-A-Long & Double Feature
Music Box Theatre â See Venue website for showtimes
Frank Capra's IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE (US)
Like Steven Spielberg today, Frank Capra was associated more with reassuring, patriotic sentiment than with actually making movies; but just beneath the Americana, his films contain a near-schizophrenic mix of idealism and resentment. In this quality, as well as his tendency to drag charismatic heroes through grueling tests of faith, it wouldn't be a stretch to compare Capra with Lars von Trier. There's plenty to merit the comparison in IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE alone: The film is a two-hour tour of an honest man's failure and bottled-up resentment, softened only intermittently by scenes of domestic contentment. Even before the nightmarish Pottersville episode (shot in foreboding shadows more reminiscent of film noir than Americana), Bedford Falls is shown as vulnerable to the plagues of recession, family dysfunction, and alcoholism. All of these ills weigh heavy on the soul of George Bailey, a small-town Everyman given tragic complexity by James Stewart, who considered the performance his best. Drawing on the unacknowledged rage within ordinary people that he would later exploit for Alfred Hitchcock, Stewart renders Bailey as complicated as Capra himselfâa child and ultimate victim of the American Dream. It's because the film's despair feels so authentic that its iconic ending feels as cathartic as it does: After being saved from his suicide attempt (which frames the entire film), Stewart is returned to the simple pleasures of family and friends, made to seem a warm oasis in a great metaphysical void. (1946, 130 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Michael Curtiz's WHITE CHRISTMAS (US)
Critics agree that Mark Sandrich's HOLIDAY INN (1942), the first musical comedy to feature Bing Crosby, an inn, and Irving Berlin's "White Christmas," is a better film than this partial remake. Yet it turns out that it's the revivals of this Technicolor, VistaVision version that people look forward to this time of year. WHITE CHRISTMAS incorporates the history of its own title song, which, while it would go on to become perhaps history's largest-seller, actually seemed a flop at first. Music historians Dave Marsh and Steve Propes note, "What saved 'White Christmas' were requests made by GIs to Armed Forces Radio around the world. Soldiers away from home, many of them in the South Pacific or North Africa, uncertain of whether they'd ever again see family and friends, let alone a snowfall, responded passionately to Berlin's understated evocation of the mythic romance of Christmas Past." This history is folded into the opening scene: it's Christmas Eve, 1944, somewhere on a World War II battlefield, and Crosby sings the song to fellow troops amidst some very fake rubble, as bombs explode in the background. The movie's got Crosby and Danny Kaye as music-and-lyrics team Wallace and Davis, and Vera-Ellen and Rosemary Clooney as sister act the Haynes. They're a treat to watch even just sitting around a railroad passenger car singing "Snow," bound for Pine Tree, Vermont, where the inn turns out to be run by ex-General Waverly (Dean Jagger). When people gather for a screening of this movie, I doubt they worry that it may not rank with Michael Curtiz's best work (CASABLANCA, YANKEE DOODLE DANDY, MILDRED PIERCE). They come to mark the change of years together. If there's a season for nestling in the warmth of nostalgia, it's this one. Plus, there's the camp appeal of Crosby and Kaye doing "Sisters." (1954, 120 min, DCP Digital) [Scott Pfeiffer]
Noah Baumbachâs WHITE NOISE (US)
Music Box Theatre â See Venue website for showtimes
Stories about families, love, death, and the pursuit of meaning are nothing new, but in the 1980s, they were subjected to postmodern scrutiny, especially in literature. Don DeLilloâs 1985 novel White Noise became and remains a sensation for its examination of all of the aforementioned subjects through the lenses of Americaâs rash of blended families, hyperconsumerism, religious chaos, and pop cultural studies then invading academia. Over the years, there have been thoughts of turning the book into a movie, but they were all abandoned. Noah Baumbach, a long-time fan of White Noise, has finally broken through and adapted a book that seems particularly suited to his artistic concerns. What has emerged is another of his examinations of families under stressâin this case, a mandatory evacuation, drug abuse, and an extreme fear of deathâwrapped in the fetchingly bright colors of name-brand supermarket items. Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig play Jack and Babette âBabaâ Gladney, each trying love and marriage for a fourth time. They live in an Ohio college town with their four children, three from previous unions and one of their own. In general, Jack and Baba are blithely oblivious parents, forcing their oldest children, Denise (Raffey Cassidy) and Heinrich (Sam Nivola), to take on much of the caretaking and thinking for the family. Jack teaches Hitler Studies at the College-On-The-Hill, where the film opens. We see Jackâs friend and colleague, Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle), showing clips of Hollywood car crashes to his class and instructing them that these seeming disasters are actually quite uplifting, happy sequences because they provide us with harmless excitement and spectacleâa perfect description of the types of entertainment that flourished in the â80s. Still, Murray wishes to be considered an expert in the way Jack is about Hitler and chooses Elvis Presley as his ticket to professional renown. The scene in which he and Jack tag team a lecture about Elvis and Hitler to a growing crowd of students and faculty emphasizes the kind of celebrity worship that exploded as a secular religion during the â80s. A collision between a tank truck and train, far from being a happy event, ignites in a huge fireball that creates an âairborne toxic eventâ that forces the townâs evacuation, an experience fraught with horrors. Once the danger has passed some 10 days later, Jack and Baba must confront her use of an experimental drug that is designed to take away her fear of death and the âindiscretionâ that enabled her to access it. A final reckoning takes place in a seedy motel with a man (Lars Eidinger) Jack has seen beforeâperhaps the avatar of death Jack himself fears beyond reasonâbefore some kind of equilibrium can be restored. In a film premised on the perceived depth of the shallow, Baumbach provides plenty of visual bread and circuses, from the endless line of evacuating cars to the endless rows of grocery shelvesâeven dancing in the aisles in a well-choreographed closing-credit sequence. He tips his hat to Robert Altmanâs overlapping dialogue in our first meeting with the Gladneys, though the chaos of their chatter at the beginning of the film, unlike the calmer exchanges at its end, is impossible to understand. Rapidly updated information on the toxic cloud is reminiscent of the ever-changing directives surrounding the novel coronavirus, and the cloud itself reminded me of the snaking plague sent from the sky to kill Egyptâs firstborn in THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (1956; when it obscures a Shell sign as Jack gasses up the family station wagon, it certainly feels like the shadow of death falling across him and his consumerist world. I enjoyed many of the performances, particularly the didactic earnestness of Cheadle and Barbara Sukowa as a nun whose declaration in German that she does not believe in God is like a savage slap in the face in a film meant to skim the surface. And that superficiality kept the film from complete success for me. I wish I had believed that Jack and Babette were as afraid of death as they claimed to be. A long scene in which the couple is finally straight with each other plays like a serious scene in an archly written Neil Simon comedy. This film held my attention and showed expert craftsmanship, but could have benefited from something like the anarchic Jewish humor of the Marx Brothers to highlight the absurdity of the plastic world DeLillo created. (2022, 129 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Charlotte Wellsâ AFTERSUN (UK/US)
Music Box Theatre â See Venue website for showtimes
Thereâs something about the quality of DV home-movie footage that feels particularly, singularly fragile. Maybe itâs the tendency of the image to pixelate at relatively slight movements, or the fact that the format now exists in hindsight as a consumer video relic that experienced only the briefest of heydays before being usurped by HD and smartphones. Whatever the case, writer-director Charlotte Wells employs DV to poignant effect in her debut feature. The film opens in the low-resolution format, presented as video taken by 11-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) of her father Calum (Paul Mescal). The pair, whom we soon learn are sharing a motel room near a resort in Turkey, are spending one last summer vacation together before Sophie heads back to live with her divorced mother in Scotland. Wells will return to the girlâs video diaries throughout, although it takes one a while to situate them in time: are they sweet documents of the present or fragmented representations of the past? Whatâs the difference? Such temporal indeterminacy gradually reveals itself to be central to the meaning and effects of the film, which regards memory as always a hazy refraction of the then, now, and never-quite-was, an equation that, as it so happens, finds expression in the ontology of moving images. Not unlike the work of Wellsâs compatriot Lynne Ramsay, AFTERSUN comes at its characters and events from oblique angles that delay or preclude our apprehension. In visual terms, this sometimes manifests as a darkness in which figures are barely or fleetingly perceptible; at other moments, Wells composes shots using various reflective surfaces, such as when we see Sophieâs live video playing on a tube television in front of a mirror, the source of the action never glimpsed directly, just as Calumâs unspoken inner turmoil remains elusive to Sophie. Based on Wellsâ relationship with her own father, who passed away when she was an adolescent, AFTERSUN both diegetically depicts the splintered, wistful process of remembrance and evokes it through a nonlinear, diaphanous formal construction. During the climax, an outsize emotional crescendo set to âUnder Pressure,â the film snaps into focus as a kind of spiritual bridge from daughter to father, through which their âlast danceâ leaves a perpetually echoing afterimage. (2022, 101 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
đď¸ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS â
ALSO SCREENING
⍠Chicago Filmmakers
The 15th edition of Chicago Seen (formerly known as Spirit of Chicago) screens on Saturday at 7pm. Featuring short films by Christian Mejia, Melissa Kong, Ronan Morrissey & Bridget Johnson, Allison Torem, Sarah Schmidt, and Cai Thomas. Suggested donation is $10; however, donations are purely voluntary. More info here.
⍠Chicago Film Society
SCREENING POSTPONED: Garson Kaninâs 1939 film BACHELOR MOTHER (82 min, 16mm) screens Wednesday, 7:30pm, at the auditorium at NEIU (3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.). Preceded by Jerry Hopperâs 1957 short BENTLEY VERSUS THE GIRL SCOUTS (30 min, 35mm). More info here.
⍠Gene Siskel Film Center
Daniel Nearingâs 2022 film SISTER CARRIE (72 min, Digital Projection) screens several times this week. The 6:30pm screening on Friday is a special event with live orchestral score and Q&A; there will also be a live orchestral score and Q&A at the 4pm and 6:30pm screenings on Saturday. The Sunday and Tuesday screenings will have the Q&A as well. More info here.
⍠South Side Home Movie Project
Home Movies For The Holidays: A Pop-Up Exhibition goes through Saturday, December 31 at the L1 Retail Store (319 E. Garfield Blvd.). Swing by to watch the home movies, sound-tracked with a new score by DJ Raven Wright, inside or from the sidewalk as part of L1âs line-up of holiday activities. More info here.
đď¸ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS â
ALSO SCREENING/STREAMING
⍠Video Data Bank
TJ Cuthand's NDN Survival Trilogy, comprised of EXTRACTIONS (2019, 15 min), LESS LETHAL FETISHES (2019, 9 min) and RECLAMATION (2018, 13 min), is available to stream for free on VDB TV. More info here.
CINE-LIST: December 16 - December 22, 2022
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Michael Castelle, Rob Christopher, Maxwell Courtright, Ray Ebarb, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Scott Pfeiffer