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🎉 Year-End Lists

Here at Cine-File we like to wait until the year actually ends to publish our “best-of” lists, which abide by whatever rules the contributor chooses. View them on our blog here.

📽️ Crucial Viewing

F.W. Murnau’s TABU: A STORY OF THE SOUTH SEAS (US/Silent)

Chicago Film Society at Northeastern Illinois University (The Auditorium, Building E 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) – Wednesday, 7:30pm

If film history is determined as much by absences as by presences, then the history of sound cinema was certainly shaped by the untimely death of F.W. Murnau. The most innovative of silent filmmakers, Murnau worked across a variety of styles, from expressionist fantasy to impressionist moral drama, and found novel ways to tell stories no matter what path he chose. TABU, his final feature, contains no dialogue even though it was made a few years after the introduction of sound; building on the innovations of his Fox production SUNRISE (1927), he approaches the sound film as an artistic mode akin to the symphony, with visual and musical motifs that draw out the formal majesty of cinematic storytelling. Murnau had composer Hugo Reisenfeld contribute themes of his own as well as passages from the symphonic canon (some estimate as many as 100 themes), and his choice selections augment the abstract beauty of the film’s nature photography and its timeless themes of innocence and devotion. In this regard, TABU anticipates not only Disney’s FANTASIA (1940) but also certain passages of Terrence Malick’s THE THIN RED LINE (1999) and THE NEW WORLD (2005). The story, allegedly drawn from South Seas mythology, is divided into two parts, “Paradise” and “Paradise Lost.” These section titles impose a Western religious tradition onto the narrative, but they also combine with the material to inspire a sense of universality. A young man and a young woman living on the edenic island of Bora Bora fall in love, only for the young woman to be selected as the sacred virgin of a neighboring island chief. Since it is now tabu for any man even to look at her, the lovers flee for another nearby island that has become a center of the pearl-diving industry. The effects of civilization, namely capitalism, account for the heroes’ loss of paradise; the film’s sense of tragedy derives in part from the incompatibility of their pure souls and the impure world they enter. TABU began as a collaboration between Murnau and the pioneering documentarian Robert Flaherty, who went to the South Seas together in search of material, though their relationship quickly soured and Murnau went on to direct almost all of the film himself. The production history may be said to represent a triumph of cinematic stylization over reality, though a more fruitful approach to the film is to regard it as a duet between naturalism and expressionism. Preceded by the Fleischer Brothers’ 1929 short FINDING HIS VOICE (11 min, 35mm). (1931, 81 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Abel Gance’s LA ROUE (THE WHEEL) (France/Silent)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 11am

French film pioneer Abel Gance has achieved almost mythic status for his bold experiments in the art of filmmaking, the clear artistic father of his countryman Jean-Luc Godard and countless others. His nearly six-hour magnum opus, NAPOLÉON (1927), projected on three screens nearly 30 years before Cinerama was introduced to moviegoing audiences, created a sensation when a four-hour version of it, complete with full orchestra, toured the United States in 1981. While NAPOLÉON may be Gance’s ultimate achievement, LA ROUE (THE WHEEL) was its exuberant progenitor. Originally nine hours in length and endlessly tinkered with in the following years, Gance’s overheated melodrama pulls out all the stops in forwarding the cinematic theories of the day: location shooting, social realism, labor politics, and experiments in geometry, rhythm, and movement. The silent era’s use of iris shots reaches its apotheosis here, as Gance turns his film into a veritable vault of cameo jewelry adorned with the faces of his cast. Interestingly, his matte shots are not of the French Alps where the second half of the film is set, but rather black masks outlining train tracks and related machinery. The script written by Gance concerns a railroad engineer named Sisif (Séverin-Mars) who rescues a little girl from a spectacular trainwreck near his Nice depot and learns she is an orphan. He takes her home to raise alongside his son, whose mother died giving birth to him. The film flashes forward 15 years. The siblings, Elie (Gabriel de Gravone) and Norma (Ivy Close), are very close. He makes violins, and she frolics adorably with her pet goat, a rose always at her hip as befits her nickname, “rose of the rails.” Sisif slowly realizes that he has fallen in love with Norma and after unsuccessfully attempting to throw himself under his own train engine, pushes her into marrying a rich, older suitor (Pierre Magnier) who lives in Paris to keep her safe from his incestuous impulses. Elie learns that Norma isn’t his biological sister, and then finds he’s hopelessly in love with her, too. Following an accident that partially blinds Sisif, father and son move to the French Alps where Sisif operates a funicular up and down Mount Blanc. Of course, Norma comes back into their lives with tragic consequences. Gance’s editing and special effects are a wonder to behold. When a character recalls past events, for example Elie thinking about his father’s behavior and his own admiration of Norma’s beauty, Gance flashes back with previous footage. He makes great use of superimposed images and quick cuts to create excitement and visual thoughts. I was especially taken with his shooting in the Alps. A massive glacier is seen in the background in many shots (one wonders sadly what has become of that majestic ice mass today) and plays an important role in the fates of Sisif and Elie. On the downside, the characters experience so much misery that the performances generally become one-note and tend to bog the film down with tooth-gnashing angst. Still, railroad enthusiasts will be in hog heaven, and the original score by the great Swiss composer Arthur Honegger should get one through some of the soggy bits. Includes three intermissions. Screening as part of the Settle In series. (1923, 426 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Bob Fosse’s ALL THAT JAZZ (US)

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

The most harrowing movie musical (and the greatest of all the 8 ½ knockoffs), Bob Fosse’s searing auto-critique is almost too excruciating to actually enjoy. Of course, that hasn’t kept the film from being embraced by such luminaries as Kirk Douglas (who presided over the Cannes festival jury that awarded it the Palme d’Or along with Kurosawa’s KAGEMUSHA in 1980), Stanley Kubrick (who called it “the best movie I think I’ve ever seen”), and Kat Sachs (who placed it on her Sight & Sound ballot of the ten greatest movies of all time in 2022), all of whom have recognized its consummate artistry and emotional pull. In a jaw-droppingly commanding performance, Roy Scheider stars as Fosse’s autobiographical stand-in, a Broadway choreographer in crisis. Addicted to drugs, juggling multiple romantic relationships, and struggling with creative block and a heart condition, Joe Gideon relies on his art to hold his life together. It’s a miserable life, but what art! The choreography of ALL THAT JAZZ is some of the most electrifying (and erotic) ever put on film, and Fosse’s montage builds brilliantly on its energy. One of the movie’s great formal achievements is how it employs editing to bring viewers into Gideon’s tormented headspace, whether it’s through the quick cuts of the morning routine sequences (famously pilfered by Darren Aronofsky in REQUIEM FOR A DREAM) or the way the filmmakers interweave his memories, fantasies, and real life when he’s on his deathbed in the final act. The film was inspired by Fosse’s own near-death experiences—he would die of a heart attack less than a decade after this was made—and seeing him confront his mortality so nakedly is what gives this its rare power. Even though he didn’t resolve them in real life, Fosse certainly ascertained all of his flaws: his narcissism, his philandering, his aloofness from the people closest to him. ALL THAT JAZZ is unflinching in its personal reckoning, but it’s also one of the most profound movies about the relationship between neurosis and the art-making process. The universal insights prevent the movie from slipping into the realm of mere navel-gazing. (1979, 123 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Edward Yang: Cities and Souls (Taiwan)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See below for showtimes

Edward Yang’s A CONFUCIAN CONFUSION
Friday, 8:30pm
Experiencing the satire of Edward Yang’s A CONFUCIAN CONFUSION is akin to being a kid and watching a movie or TV show about young urban professionals trying to make it in the big city. The self-containment of the world feels at once representative of the purported reality yet in stark opposition to it, a deceptive microcosm that invites engagement while reveling in its knowing artifice. A surprising turn for the Taiwanese filmmaker, whose previous movies considered the rapid development of the island’s economy (otherwise known as “the Taiwan Miracle”) during the back half of the twentieth century in rather dour terms, A CONFUCIAN CONFUSION presents almost like a run-of-the-mill urban comedy of its time, though it’s no ambitious because of that. The film centers on an interconnected group of Taiwanese yuppies and their respective (yet still enmeshed) professional and romantic predicaments. The affluent Molly owns a media company, gifted to her by her similarly well-off fiancé, Akeem; she’s pragmatic and hyper-focused on her flailing enterprise, while he yearns for a genuine romantic connection (it’s implied the two’s relationship was arranged by their families). Meanwhile Molly’s having an affair with Akeem’s second-in-command, who’s having a tryst with Molly’s best friend, Qiqi (played by Tsai Ming-liang regular Chen Shiang-chyi), who comforts her after she’s unceremoniously fired by the suspicious executive. Of course the movie is less about what is happening exactly amongst the characters and more about what each individual relationship represents in the context of Yang’s postmodern appraisal. The film’s title comes from the estranged writer husband of Molly’s older sister, who married the scribe for love rather than money; his latest manuscript is about a reincarnated Confucius who comes back to find that in the society he helped create, people admire him not for his ideas but for his successful “put-on” job, as if the ancient Chinese sage were Tony Robbins and not a revered philosopher. In contrast to the writer-husband is Birdy, a playwright friend of Molly and Qiqi’s, who, in opposition to the writer, has recently transitioned to comedies (the sister’s husband having begun writing more serious novels after a spate of lighter, albeit more lucrative, fare). The film opens with Birdy at a press conference, rollerblading around a table of reporters at a press conference. In a question that could have been directed at Yang himself, one of them asks, “Why are you doing comedy now?” “Because I’m an optimist,” the playwright replies. “Everyone’s having a good life, why spoil it?” The metatextual irony sets the tone, the film’s apparent vapidity it’s very consideration. At sporadic intervals intertitles with a phrase in both Taiwanese and English —there’s one at the beginning of the film as well, though it more so establishes the connection between Confucius and contemporary Taiwan—break up the narrative; the text is an idea or line that hasn’t yet been said but will be introduced in the following section. They become dictums of this self-contained world, a logic unto themselves. “Why are you suddenly taking me to lunch?” one asks. The titular confusion lies in what meaning may be ascribed, either where it’s undue or unrealized. Yang’s uncharacteristic entry into the Taiwanese New Wave confounds in its dizzying promulgations, widening that divide between the perceptions of one’s self in relation to it. (1994, 125 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Kat Sachs]
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Edward Yang’s A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY 
Sunday, 1:30pm
Edward Yang’s fourth feature—as well as his longest—is effortlessly lived in, to the point where spending four hours in this world almost feels like too little time to plumb the depths of feeling at play. As with many works of truly great cinema, Yang’s film focuses on the life of one character—an early teenage schoolboy struggling to find himself at his night school—in order to explore an entire world. The protagonist, Xiao Si’r, exists as an entangled ball of confusion and loneliness, and he easily acts as a vessel for feelings of displacement and isolation for a generation dislocated from China to the island of Taiwan, families grasping at cultural straws to establish their own identity. But here, establishing one’s own self often seems  to come in the form of enjoyment of Japanese food or devotion to American pop music (the movie’s title even comes from a lyric in Elvis Presley’s "Are You Lonesome Tonight?," which would be an equally fitting alternate name). Yang recognizes the anger that bubbles up under such conditions of discomfort and displacement, but on screen, this rage only shows up in spurts throughout, his camera preferring to languish, and beautifully so, on large encompassing shots capturing classrooms, fields, restaurants, and other hangouts across Taipei, where Si’r finds himself dragged between romantic entanglements and petty gang warfare. That things end with a grand act of violence should come as no surprise to anyone slowly dragged in by the tendrils of Yang’s bubble, a deep and thorny look at the lives of a youth culture struggling to escape daily despair, be it through school work, mindless brutality, or a classic Elvis tune. (1991, 237 mins, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
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Edward Yang’s 1996 film MAHJONG (121 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday at 6:15pm and Monday at 6:30pm.

Darren Stein’s JAWBREAKER (US)

Music Box Theatre – Thursday, 9:45pm

JAWBREAKER is perhaps the most memorable of the slew of dark teen comedies that came in the late nineties/early aughts—it is inarguably the most visually striking. These films, including DROP DEAD GORGEOUS and SUGAR & SPICE, twisted the teen comedy in the spirit of HEATHERS; here director Darren Stein combines it with a distinct ‘90s sneer and surprising melancholy. The Flawless Four (Rose McGowan, Rebecca Gayheart, Julie Benz, and Charlotte Ayanna) are the most popular girls in school. After a birthday prank goes terribly wrong, the clique find they’ve accidentally murdered the sweetest of their group, Liz (Ayanna). Their apathetic leader, Courtney (a charmingly villainous McGowan) jumps into action, devising a disturbing story of how Liz died as a cover up. Foxy (Benz) falls in line, but Julie (Gayheart) has a crisis of morality. Even more worrisome is Fern (Judy Greer), a high school nobody who discovers their secret. To placate Fern, they turn her into one of them, teaching her the ropes; it’s a classic high school makeover story juxtaposed against a shocking murder. Like HEATHERS, the politics of high school, popularity, and rumors are darkly explored, with a focus on façade: as Courtney mentions, “it’s all about details.” And the visual details of JAWBREAKER are immaculate—with credit to cinematographer Amy Vincent. Set to the band Imperial Teen’s song “Yoo Hoo,” the Flawless Four’s slow-motion walk through the high school halls post Liz’s death is beyond iconic. The use of the color in the film stands out, all bright and girlish. But it’s not primarily pastels; rather, these are harsh neon greens and bold blues and reds of the Flawless Four’s costumes and makeup—mimicking the jawbreaker candy at the center of their crime. These characters radiate, quite literally, against the dullness of the background and everyone else around them, with a hypnotizing but dangerous glow; JAWBREAKER’s most impressive aspect is how its story is skillfully told in shifting colors. Presented by Ramona Slick and Rated Q - A Celebration of Queer, Camp, & Cult Cinema. Enjoy pre-show drinks and a DJ set in the Music Box Lounge at 9pm. Drag show performance in main theater 9:45pm, followed by the film screening. (1999, 86 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]

George Sherman’s STORM OVER LISBON (US)

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

The Monday night series on Doc’s winter calendar, “A Brief Introduction to George Sherman,” is one of the more fascinating tickets in town this season. As programmer Hunter Koch explains in the program notes, the series is not an auteurist reevaluation of a director who developed a personal vision within American genre cinema, but rather a deep dive into the sort of forgotten genre pictures that “make up the bulk of the Hollywood corpus.” Sherman was credited as director on over 100 features and TV shows between the late ‘30s and late ‘70s, most of them adventure stories and westerns; scrolling through his IMDB page yields scores of generic-sounding titles like WYOMING OUTLAW, RIVER LADY, THE BATTLE AT APACHE PASS, and STEEL TOWN. What better way to consider the “genius of the system” than through the filmography of a prolific journeyman? “While perhaps not true B-pictures—we might classify some of them as ‘Lazy As’ or programmers—they index a production context where Hollywood excelled,” Koch argues. “Sherman’s films are short, cheap, efficient. They are also garish, tacky, and exploitative. They are true representatives of run-of-the-mill filmmaking during a period prone to hagiography.” All this can be said of STORM OVER LISBON, a definitive non-masterpiece that gains no small allure from being shot by the great John Alton. A bald-faced knockoff of CASABLANCA, this revolves around a nightclub in the Portuguese capital that’s a hotbed for espionage. Erich von Stroheim plays the club’s owner, who’s also a spy; Richard Arlen plays his American nemesis, and Republic Pictures’ in-house star Vera Ralston plays the Czech dancer who comes between them. This often plays like a glossier version of an Edgar G. Ulmer movie (which is to say, not as good): von Stroheim leans into his faded celebrity so as to seem especially ghoulish, the limited number of sets augments the sense of paranoia, and Ralston gets at least one awkward dance number. STORM OVER LISBON may not be great cinema, but it is cinema—though it touches on current events, it’s always clear that the film does not take place in the real world, but instead a sexier, more exciting, faux-exotic version of it. Double-crosses occur with delirious frequency, and the settings look so needlessly glamorous that they sometimes seem to be on another planet. Watching the film, you can understand why people used to sit in movie theaters all day—this transports you to a place you can only imagine otherwise. Screening as part of the A Brief Intro to George Sherman series. (1944, 86 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Bertrand Tavernier’s COUP DE TORCHON (France)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Bertrand Tavernier, one of my favorite directors, has a particular talent for examining men and their work. In such films as ‘ROUND MIDNIGHT (1986), IT ALL STARTS TODAY (1999), and L.627 (1992), Tavernier looks at a musician, a school teacher, and a narcotics cop, respectively, and their obsessive devotion to their work. His appreciation of how much a man and his occupation fuse into one inseparable entity helps one understand how a man can drop dead the day after retirement. COUP DE TORCHON seems, at first, to be the antithesis of this theme. However, if we look at what its protagonist, Lucien Cordier (Philippe Noiret), says about his work as the sheriff of a small town in French West Africa, we can see that being thwarted in performing his duties may be a major problem for him. Bourkassa is a godforsaken nothing of a town that is populated by failures and run by the only man to have come there and made good—and in only two years—a fellow (possibly not even French) named Vanderbrouck (Michel Beaune). Cordier has spent 15 years in this backwater, and spends his days arguing with Vanderbrouck about the placement of a roofless communal latrine directly under his apartment’s balcony, trying to get his wife Huguette (Stéphane Audran) to have sex with him, and most important, avoiding having to perform his official duties. “Doing nothing is my job,” says Cordier. “I’m paid for it.” Because he appears to be a useless man in a useless town, Cordier is the butt of ridicule. His only pleasures seem to be sex with Rose (Isabelle Huppert), the battered wife of one of the locals, and large tumblers of absinthe. Cordier seems the essence of the man who goes along to get along. One day, he sees two pimps shooting at the corpses of Africans set adrift in a river, and threatens to arrest them for desecrating graves. They offer him a bribe, which he accepts. Then they shove him into the river and throw the money in after him. Although he resignedly picks up the money and climbs out of the water, this humiliation and his apparent sense of offense at how they regard Black Africans sends him to the next town to see his boss (Guy Marchand), Chavasson. Chavasson says when they kick, kick back twice as hard and sends him on his way with two swift kicks. His new flunky escorts Cordier to the train, where Cordier seeks his assurance that Chavasson has him covered. What this means becomes clear in due time. On the train back, he meets an attractive French woman named Anne (Irène Skobline). He asks her what she is doing in the country. She replies, “I’m the new schoolteacher of Bourkassa.” Strangely stung by her answer, he counters, “That’s a fine profession. A vocation, I’d say. Thanks to you, Black children will be able to read their daddy’s name on French war memorials.” Back in Bourkassa, he escorts Anne to her quarters. He is wearing a sidearm we haven’t seen him with before. He uses it to kill the pimps who humiliated him, though he says later that he doesn’t plan things out. It’s hard not to believe him; these two murders seem to be the emotional culmination of his humiliating, useless existence. If the first murders are happenstance, the rest are somewhat plotted. Cordier pretends he’s finally performing his public duty by putting these tortured souls—for isn’t all humanity tortured?—to rest. He starts telling people he’s Jesus Christ. What he is and what will become of him is an open question. I don’t think it is giving anything away to say that the last scene has him aiming his pistol at some African children, then hesitating to shoot. Cordier is a man we both revile and pity, a lunatic louse with some shred of humanity that torments him at all times. This movie, based on Jim Thompson’s novel Pop. 1280, is as funny as the book—but the murders are not. I found Noiret’s performance uneven and too contained. Huppert’s early performance as Rose eschews naïvete, but her almost nymphomaniacal attraction to him is incomprehensible. Despite these shortcomings, COUP DE TORCHON is a fascinating film. As an added point of interest, Tavernier cowrote the script with Jean Aurenche, one of the main subjects of his wonderful 2002 film SAFE CONDUCT, about the French filmmakers who worked under the Germans in occupied France during World War II. (1981, 128 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Andrei Tarkovsky's SOLARIS (USSR)

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

In Tarkovsky’s luminescent and beautiful adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s novel, Kris Kelvin, a psychologist, has been sent to a space station orbiting the mysterious planet Solaris, which is covered entirely by a potentially sentient ocean. Kelvin is to take charge of the station and either close it down or take drastic, violent measures against the ocean in order to generate scientific data. When he arrives, though, he discovers that the station is regularly populated with ‘visitors,’ people seemingly generated out of thin air while one sleeps, who are manifestations of one’s own memories and dreams. In adapting Lem’s book, Tarkvosky develops a complex structure of flashbacks, dream sequences, and fantasies that are at times indistinguishable from the ‘actual’ events of the plot, and alternates between color and black-and-white cinematography to further alienate us from the narrative flow. The way he shoots Natalya Bondarchuk, uncannily incandescent in nearly every shot as she ethereally wafts through the sets, is in direct conflict with the staid, weathered and deeply conflicted Donatas Banionis, questioning her very existence. While the novel is set solely on the space station, Tarkovsky developed a crucial prologue set on Earth, in which the philosophical and aesthetic issues are introduced that will later play out in dramatic form. It is there that Burton appears, a retired scientist who is the only one we meet to have actually returned from the mysterious planet. It is Burton who gives voice to a potential thesis of the film, that “knowledge is only valid when it is based on morality,” when he learns of the potentially destructive nature of Kris’ mission. Burton’s shadow hangs low over the film, over the violence that the story heaps on the body of Hari, Kelvin’s lost love reborn. If Burton is right, what are we to make of Kelvin’s own understanding of his relationship with her, which is based on betrayal and pain?  What conclusions are we to draw on the apparent attempts by Solaris itself to study the scientists by means of the ‘visitors,’ when their inevitable result is heartbreak?  Late in the film, the camera lingers on a print of Breughel’s “Hunters in the Snow,” a painting that seems to imply that the titular hunters, instead of returning home empty-handed, are instead on the trail of the ice-skating children in the distance. It is an invocation of the untamable nature of violence, which once released can never be controlled. Kelvin’s reaction to his first ‘visitor,’ the first appearance of Hari, is to attempt to destroy her. Breughel’s hunters with their ambiguous target are mocking commentaries on Kelvin’s own predetermined failure as a scientist and as a human being. Like them, his inability to come to terms with his own nature leads him to lash out against those closest to him, and in so doing to destroy himself. When, in the end, he returns to a heavily ironic homecoming with his surely deceased father, it is with a sense not of a journey completed, but of a cycle repeated, with inevitable tragedy and with inescapable loss that he can never come to terms with. Screening as part of the Thursday 1 series, Mirroring. (1972, 166 min, DCP Digital) [Kian Bergstrom]

Werner Herzog’s THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR HAUSER (West Germany)

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

THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR HAUSER centers on one of the most famous acts of stunt casting of all time. After watching a 1970 documentary about the street performer, self-taught musician, and forklift operator Bruno S., a middle-aged man who had been abandoned in infancy and spent his first 20-odd years in psychiatric institutions, Werner Herzog decided to cast him in a docudrama as the real-life Kaspar Hauser, who in 1828 appeared in Nuremberg from out of nowhere claiming to have been kept in a cellar for his entire life till then. The film is distinctly Herzogian in how it exploits a singular bit of reality to heighten a work of fiction to otherworldly proportions. The lead performance is really something to behold—it’s the sort of thing we need cinema to capture and disseminate. To quote Roger Ebert’s 2007 “Great Movies” review, “[Bruno] looks anywhere he wants to, sometimes even craftily sideways at the camera, and then it feels not like he's looking at the audience but through us.” Indeed, his presence is so unique that it feels like Herzog is bending the film to suit his worldview. “KASPAR HAUSER tells its story not as a narrative about its hero,” Ebert explained, “but as a mosaic of striking behavior and images… The last thing Herzog is interested in is ‘solving’ this lonely man's mystery. It is the mystery that attracts him.” Herzog conveys that sense of mystery by occasionally punctuating the historical drama (which relates Kaspar Hauser’s education and socialization) with avant-garde passages of a desert caravan, German landscapes, and the Pyramid of the Caucasus that were shot on Super-8, projected, and then re-shot on 35mm. These sequences, marked by bracing shifts in texture, render life on earth overwhelming and almost terrifyingly strange—a reflection, perhaps, of how Kaspar and Bruno saw things. Screening as part of the Conquistador of the Useless: The Films of Werner Herzog series. (1974, 110 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Sean Durkin's THE IRON CLAW (US)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

THE IRON CLAW presents the true story of the Von Erich family as an Americanized Greek tragedy. The film opens with the famous 1950s wrestler Fritz Von Erich using his famous “iron claw” to nearly crush his opponent’s skull. Afterwards, he explains to his family his plans to make it to the top of the wrestling world. A competitive sports household, the Von Erich brothers care for one another despite being ranked, a Teflon fraternal bond. The audience learns of the Von Erich curse. It’s believed a tragedy would befall the family for changing their name from Atkisson. As the film progresses, fate strikes thrice upon the house of Von Erich, claiming the lives of brothers David, Mike, and Kerry. Left in the aftermath, Kevin moves on with a broken heart, but new hope begins to grow as he raises two young boys. THE IRON CLAW has some of the best ensemble work I have seen in years. The chemistry between the brothers (played by Harris Dickerson, Stanley Simons, Jeremy Allen White, Zack Efron) becomes so palpable, their deaths more gut-wrenching. In brief scenes and with little dialogue, Maura Tierney gives a bone-chilling performance as a mother forced to wear the same black dress to the funerals of her sons. Efron disappears effortlessly into his role as Kevin. As a leading man and partial audience proxy, he breathes life into a challenging role. The movie doesn’t work without him. Seeing his physical transformation, the audience made audible noise at my screening. A former teen heartthrob entering middle age, his performance earns him star power and my excitement for his work to come. Fritz, unflinchingly played by Holt McCallaney, holds control over his family to the near end. In the ring, his sons inherit his “iron claw,” a symbol of cruelty and its own true curse. The goals that the father sets for his family ultimately lead to its destruction. Chavo Guerrero acted as wrestling consultant, explaining to the cast male wrestlers have 2.6 times the mortality rates of the average American man. Success and doing all the right things do not mean everyone will live happily ever after and the unimaginable won’t come out of the blue. Despite tragedy, trauma, and wrestling, THE IRON CLAW is about love. Durkin’s direction and script emphasize the concern family members have for one another and remind us that these victims also experienced joy and laughed together. It’s a reminder that the only thing one can do is hold their loved ones tight and savor every minute they have together. (2023, 132 min, DCP Digital) [Ray Ebarb]

Geoff Marslett’s QUANTUM COWBOYS (US/Animation)

Elevated Films Chicago and Comfort Film at Comfort Station – Wednesday, 7:30pm 
Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 8pm

Lily Gladstone, David Arquette, Neko Case, Alex Cox, and Anna Karina (in her last film role) star in Geoff Marslett’s singular multiverse drama QUANTUM COWBOYS, which has as many animation styles (in addition to straight live shooting) as it does unlikely stars and professed universes. The latter literally, as was the filmmaker, animator and science enthusiast’s intent. “This is a movie about how our own internal memories create universes, and how they compete for reality,” he said in an interview. “All of us find a way to make our internal universes communicable to those around us. That’s how Clint Eastwood, from California, can be directed by an Italian for THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY and signify the American West.” This rather romantic notion is no less so as Marslett, in opposition to such recent films as DOCTOR STRANGE and EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE, based his multiverse reimagining on a more accurate understanding of the concept, having once worked as a physics researcher at the Naval Research Lab. (“I love the way that multiverse is used in film to let you do anything, but the theories that you see, they're really not that close to what physics really says is going on with multiverse,” he remarked in another interview. “And some part of me said, wouldn't it be cool to use cinema to let people experience something close to what the science says it is?”) The titular cowboys, Frank and Bruno, are traveling to Yuma to find a musician whom one insists is alive, despite having been the person who was shown previously to have shot and presumably killed him, and the other affirms is in fact still dead. Along the way they meet Linde (Gladstone), who is seeking something of her own, and two men (one of them played by Arquette) inexplicably looking for them. Just about every animation style is represented therein, from rotoscoping (these sequences were done by animators who worked on Richard Linklater’s APOLLO 10 1/2: A SPACE AGE ADVENTURE) to stop-motion to hand-drawn and oil painting. With its scientific premise and array of aesthetic stylings, not to mention its motley crew/murderers’ row of a cast, one might say it's unlike anything they’ve seen before. What a person might take from it is questionable; for some the film could be a profound statement on memory and the physical world as we know it, while for others it may suffice as an impressive moving-image curio. Marslett in person at both screenings. (2023, 99 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm and Saturday, 4pm

So much ink has been spilled over PSYCHO that it might have been best if nothing had been written about it at all. More than any other Hitchcock film it deserves a fresh pair of eyes (perhaps the kind we'd find in a kid with hands that barely reach the ticket window and then cling to the armrest as he loses the main character less than half way in, as a lucky few recount). Even if the infamous shower scene has lost its surprise and shock value (but watch it closely anyway), there's still a great deal to enjoy: a black and white pallet fine-tuned down to Vera Miles' bra; Hitchcock's bizarre infatuation with the Oedipus Complex; Bernard Herrmann's superb score. From the outside it's a film we've become accustomed to, but in a dark theater it becomes hauntingly unfamiliar again. Screening as part of the Mommy Issues: Freudian Relationships in Film series. (1960, 109 min, DCP Digital) [Julian Antos]

Hayao Miyazaki’s THE BOY AND THE HERON (Japan/Animation)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

The anticipation of seeing a new film directed by Hayao Miyazaki is two-fold: there is a set expectation of whimsy, magic, and complex thematic exploration inherent in his work, but this is tied to the mystery of not knowing how specifically these traits will play themselves out. So it is with his (seemingly) final film, THE BOY AND THE HERON, a film rooted in familiar themes that Miyazaki has been dwelling on for decades of artistry. As with many of his works, Miyazaki provides another story of a youthful protagonist; here, the teenage Mahito—buried within heavy emotional armor to navigate the grief of losing his mother in a hospital fire the year before—finds himself navigating an unknown mystical world that sits somewhere between the afterlife and his own subconscious, after he's lured there by a deliriously antagonistic gray heron. The fantastical elements of Miyazaki immediately float to the surface, from new imaginative creatures like the Warawara—adorable floating balls that ascend to the heavens to be born as humans—to the bizarre amass of pelicans and parakeets that threaten to swallow up any frame they inhabit. Mahito‘s quest to find closure for his mother’s death results in a journey, ever joyous and sumptuous to watch, that ponders the nature of a world built upon loss, destruction, and chaos. Without spoiling too much, the film leaves us on something of an abrupt note, left to ponder the work of an undisputed master of cinema who was unafraid to bare his mortality before us, letting us sit in the knowledge that to live with the chaos of grief is still a beautiful life in and of itself; to know that there is no escaping pain, and there is something beautiful to carry on towards. Maybe a book your mother left behind for you, maybe a new, unknown journey waiting on the other side of a doorway. (2023, 124 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

François Ozon’s THE CRIME IS MINE (France)

Music Box Theatre – Saturday, 11:15am

In his continuing excavation of film genres and styles, French director and screenwriter François Ozon has turned his attention to Hollywood’s screwball comedies of the 1930s. With exquisite period detail, costuming, and casting, THE CRIME IS MINE offers a madcap look at how the crime of murder pays for destitute actress Madeleine Verdier (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) and her roommate, Pauline Mauléon (Rebecca Marder), a struggling attorney. The plot most closely resembles the musical Chicago, but tips its hat to the silent CHICAGO (1927) by casting Isabelle Huppert as silent screen star Odette Chaumette. With her fright wig of red hair and clothing from the turn of the last century, her rapid-fire line deliveries (she's the only cast member who really achieves the screwball rhythm), and a rapacious disregard for male prerogatives (watch her chew off the end of a sausage with gusto), Huppert offers audiences a master class in comedy. Ozon’s suggestion that Mauléon is a lesbian is intensified by having her wardrobe resemble clothes Katharine Hepburn favored, and Huppert plays with this notion as well. Everything about this film is sheer delight, but Ozon manages to address sexual harassment in the entertainment industry with surprising gravity. And while this may have been accidental, Chaumette’s lament of “Who hides 300,000 francs in a cigar box?” points to former Illinois Secretary of State Paul Powell, who stashed $750,000 in a shoebox in a Springfield hotel room. (2023, 102 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Wes Anderson's ASTEROID CITY (US)

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

Through ten feature films made over nearly thirty years, Wes Anderson has honed an exacting Lionel Model Train set aesthetic in which human history and emotions often play second banana to design considerations and deadpan humor. Especially since his first stop-motion animation film, FANTASTIC MR. FOX (2009), Anderson's movies have mostly dispensed with any pretense of naturalism in favor of a strictly controlled environment in which the puppeteer's hand often invades the frame to rearrange the furniture or to recast his doll-like charges' fates. Depending on your tolerance for his near-autistic compulsion to demonstrate mastery over his domain, these films can be either an unbearable slog or a charming detour from humdrum reality. I'm an admirer of Anderson's steadfast dedication to his vision but often find that not much about his toy constructions follow me out of the theater after the credits roll. Though he often puts his characters in fraught world-historical settings and programs them to emote after heartbreak or other traumas, these feelings and reactions rarely break through the symmetrical compositions and wind-up gizmos buzzing about in the background. The need to deflect and distract oneself from pain through obsessive hobbyism is a time-honored strategy, especially for men, or, more precisely, boys who refuse to grow up. Anderson's latest has all the hallmarks of his previous work but adds a layer of present-day resonance. Though set in the 1950s, in a small western town on the edge of a nuclear testing site, and featuring a cascade of major and minor movie stars and even an alien landing, the references to COVID lockdown life are everywhere. This time the unreality, panic, and erratic behavior—while still often played for laughs—is not cribbed from beloved short stories or arcana, but from the very recently experienced every day. This gives the film a gravity the previous ones lacked. We all lived through a thing even a control freak like Anderson can't ignore by descending into his basement tinkerer's kingdom and his work is all the better for it. Screening as part of the New Releases series. (2023, 105 min, DCP Digital) [Dmitry Samarov]

🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Chicago Film Archives
The Chicago Transit Authority, in partnership with the Chicago Film Archives (CFA), presents a new, one-of-a-kind temporary art installation at the Cicero Green Line station (4800 W. Lake St.). The installation, called we love, is a filmic exhibition of home movies and amateur films selected from collections housed and preserved at CFA. The video will be projected onto a wall in the mezzanine area of the station and will run day and night through mid-March. More info here.

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Werner Herzog’s 1972 film AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD (95 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday, 9:30pm, as part of the Conquistador of the Useless: The Films of Werner Herzog series.

Eugène Lourié’s 1959 monster film THE GIANT BEHEMOTH (80 min, Digital Projection) screens Saturday, 1pm, as part of the Dinosaurs Plus! on Film series.

Christopher Nolan’s 2006 film THE PRESTIGE (130 min, 35mm) screens Sunday, 4pm, in collaboration with Society of Physics Students.

Fernando Meirelles and Kàtia Lund’s 2002 Brazilian film CITY OF GOD (130 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday, 7pm, as part of the Antropofagia: Reinventing Class and Race in Brazilian Cinema series.

Hironobu Sakaguchi and Motonori Sakakibara’s 2001 animated film FINAL FANTASY: THE SPIRITS WITHIN (106 min, 35mm) screens Thursday, 9:30pm, as part of the Computer Vision: Experiments in Digital Cinema series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ FACETS Cinema
On Thursday, FACETS Anime Club presents a members-only double feature of Yasuomi Umetsu’s OVAs KITE (1998, Digital Projection) and MEZZO FORTE (2000, Digital Projection). More info here.

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
The National Theatre Live production of Federico Garcia Lorca’s Yerma (2017, 115 min, DCP Digital), directed by Simon Stone, screens Saturday and Sunday at 2pm.

Adam Gacka’s 2023 documentary TEACHER (50 min, DCP Digital) screens Monday and Wednesday at 6pm. Gacka and CPS teachers in attendance for post-screening conversations following both showtimes.

Roland Nurier’s 2023 documentary YALLAH GAZA (101 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday at 6pm and 6:20pm. Presented by the Chicago Palestine Film Festival. Both screenings are sold out. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Andrew Haigh’s 2023 film ALL OF US STRANGERS (105 min, DCP Digital) begins screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes. 

Simon West’s 1997 film CON AIR (115 min, 35mm) screens Friday and Saturday at midnight.

Stanley Donen’s 1963 film CHARADE (113 min, 35mm) screens Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am, as part of the Hitchcock and Friends series.

Giuliano Montaldo’s 1978 film CLOSED CIRCUIT (88 min, DCP Digital) screens Monday, 7pm, as part of the January Giallo 2024 series. Co-presented by Severin Films, with a Severin Films pop-up shop in the lounge before and after the film. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ School of the Art Institute
Two job opportunities! The Department of  Film, Video, New Media and Animation (FVNMA) at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) is conducting a double search—two tenure-track positions hiring concurrently this year. They are jointly listed for artists with an expertise in "experimental film and video." The priority application deadline is January 8. More information about the role and how to apply here. 

⚫ Sweet Void Cinema (3036 W. Chicago Ave.)
Find more information on the Humboldt Park microcinema, including its larger screening and workshop schedule, here.

🎞️ ONLINE SCREENINGS/EVENTS

⚫ VDB TV
As VDB welcomes the Eiko & Koma and Eiko Otake collections, they are presenting a three-month series of programs that highlight representative works from them. Eiko Otake (2016-2019, Total approx. 49 min) screens for free on VDB TV. More info here.

CINE-LIST: January 5 - January 11, 2024

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Julian Antos, Kian Bergstrom, Ray Ebarb, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Ben Kaye, Dmitry Samarov