In alignment with the nationwide general strike while remaining respectful of our contributors and Chicago’s cinema workers, this particular Cine-List is truncated, reflecting only screenings taking place Friday and Saturday; the full list will be sent out Sunday morning.
Be it known we are opposed to ICE and any systems of oppression that perpetuate terror in our communities. We stand in solidarity with everyone impacted by our government’s unjust and immoral actions. We also stand in solidarity with the citizens of Minneapolis, who are on the ground in this fight against fascism.
In the meantime we’ve compiled a list of resources on our blog here.
No human being is illegal. ICE out of everywhere.
📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING
Jafar Panahi's CRIMSON GOLD (Iran)
Film Studies Center (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm [Free Admission]
Abbas Kiarostami receives screenplay credit on Jafar Panahi’s fourth feature, CRIMSON GOLD, and one of the many compelling things about the film is how it plays like an inversion of Kiarostami’s TASTE OF CHERRY. That film told the story of one man’s efforts to find someone to bury him after he commits suicide; the hero’s quest, which confirms his connection to other people, is ultimately life-affirming in spite of its morbid nature. CRIMSON GOLD opens with a botched robbery that ends with the hero’s suicide, then flashes back to show the days leading up to that event; it’s a despairing journey that builds upon Panahi’s depiction of modern-day Tehran as an unforgiving hellhole that he introduced in THE CIRCLE. As in TASTE OF CHERRY, the hero’s progress is marked by three encounters, though here, the hero doesn’t initiate them. Hossain is a pizza delivery man, and the people he meets on his deliveries tend to regard him from the start as a social inferior. (Compare this with the gratitude with which the strangers regard Mr. Badii when he offers them rides in his SUV.) Each encounter reminds Hossain of his powerlessness within Iranian society, though, ironically, each one hinges on a moment of camaraderie. In the first, Hossain recognizes his customer as a military buddy from the Iran-Iraq War; the old acquaintance, embarrassed to see Hossain reduced to delivering pizzas, leaves Hossain with kind words and a handsome tip. The delivery man is unable to complete his second delivery, as the apartment building he’s supposed to enter has been surrounded by a police tactical unit, which waits in ambush for people leaving a party with illegal drinking and dancing on the second floor. The officer in charge of the unit berates Hossain for trying to enter the building, but forbids him from leaving the scene, since he could find a phone somewhere and warn the partygoers about their impending arrest. Hossain has a poignant conversation with a teenage soldier before deciding to share his undelivered pizzas with policemen lying in wait. The third key encounter of CRIMSON GOLD takes place in the high-rise condo of a rich man whose apartment has just been vacated by two female guests. Feeling spurned and lonely, the rich man invites Hossain in for dinner. He’s much nicer to Hossain than the wealthy jewelry store owner who’d condescended to him in an earlier scene; still, the apparent randomness of the rich man’s kindness—which Hossain clearly recognizes—speaks to the great, and likely insurmountable, social divide between him and Hossain. Like Kiarostami’s decision to place the hero’s death at the start of the movie, the scene in the high-rise makes Hossain’s act of desperation seem inevitable. Heightening the film’s morbid air is the ghostlike lead performance by Hossain Emadeddin, an actual pizza delivery man and an actual paranoid schizophrenic. Emaddedin’s deadpan under-reaction to practically everything borders on comical, yet it also reflects the inability of isolated, working-poor individuals to impact the system that degrades them. (2003, 96 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
Patrick Yau’s (or Johnnie To’s) THE LONGEST NITE (Hong Kong)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm and Saturday, 9:30pm
“Macau is a melting pot of different gangs,” narrates Sam (Tony Leung) at the start of THE LONGEST NITE before he goes into the key alliances and rivalries that define the local scene. Sam is a crooked cop who acts as negotiator between two of the top Triads; he has his work cut out for him at present, seeing as the leaders of said Triads are contemplating a new coalition while a third boss may want to have both of them killed. Adding to Sam’s troubles is the arrival in Macau of a mysterious stranger named Tony (Lau Ching-wan), who immediately starts making trouble for the Triads by stirring up animosities between different gang members. THE LONGEST NITE alternates between the exploits of Sam and Tony over the course of one high-pressure evening and in doing so illuminates one of Johnnie To’s favorite themes, the interconnectedness between criminals and law enforcement agents. Patrick Yau may be the credited director on the film, but To and Wai Ka-fai, the producers, claim to have fired him after he shot just five scenes; they then took over the rest of production, with Wai rewriting the script and To directing. The results certainly feel in keeping with To and Wai’s work, given the balletic camera movements, wild plot twists, and charismatic characters. There’s genuine star power on display here, most notably from the two leads. Leung is particularly strong, playing against type as a sadistic bully; the way he inverts his usual charm recalls Henry Fonda’s classic turn in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968). Lau is just as good as the agent of chaos, suggesting at times an avenging angel. As both protagonists behave unpredictably, the characterizations fuel the action, which is directed (characteristically) brilliantly. (1998, 81 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
Frank Capra's THE MIRACLE WOMAN (US)
Music Box Theatre – Saturday, 11:30am
Frank Capra's THE MIRACLE WOMAN was one of only two films of his from the 1930s to lose money, and though this was later attributed to the film's censorship in Britain by their Board of Film Classification, it could also have been due in part to its initial critical reception. Critics at the time praised star Barbara Stanwyck's fiery opening monologue, in which she, as "Sister" Florence Fallon, takes a congregation to task after her priest father dies penniless and having recently been terminated from his position, but the film was largely criticized for opening on such a strong note, thus causing the rest of the film to simmer in comparison. Following Florence's impassioned outburst, the rest of the film details her decision to join forces with a con man and "punish" religious hypocrisy by fleecing those who attend her evangelical road show. She then meets John, a blind man who was previously shown as having decided not to commit suicide after hearing one of Florence's sermons on the radio. They soon fall in love, and Florence seeks to extricate herself from the con. Though the film is never as surprising or exciting as its vehement opening credo, it is exceptionally well written, and at times even genuinely humorous. It's based on the play Bless You Sister by John Meehan and Robert Riskin, which was inspired by evangelical superstar Aimee Semple McPherson, or "Sister Aimee" as she was more popularly known. Adapted to the screen by longtime Capra collaborator Jo Swerling, it's said to largely retain the play's witty dialogue and fast-paced narrative. Capra did compromise, though, by inserting the con man character (Bob Hornsby, played by Sam Hardy) and making Sister Florence appear to have been exploited rather than willfully complicit in the scheme. Perhaps decided upon in part because of objections raised by Harry Cohn, then head of Columbia Pictures, it eventually became Capra's greatest regret about the film that was largely forgotten until 1970, when it played in a retrospective sidebar at the New York Film Festival. According to Dr. James Robertson's book The Hidden Cinema: British Film Censorship in Action 1913-1972, "some forty years after the event Capra was to admit that he had pulled his punches over the film by shifting the blame for religious confidence tricksterism onto an unscrupulous promoter and away from the disillusioned evangelist." The film's script is nonetheless estimable with its earnest ruminations and smart romantic dialogue, and the performances more than seal the deal. Capra once called Stanwyck a "primitive emotional," a characteristic that's evident in the pulpit and out. David Manners proficiently characterizes John, subtly transforming him from suicidal cynic to romantic jokester against Stanwyck's more outwardly emotive portrayal. Despite Capra's regret over his concession, there's still some moral ambiguity left in both the film and Stanwyck's performance. As he recounted in his autobiography, "[Hornsby] cons Fallon into it. He gets wealthy. She becomes his flamboyant stooge. Did she or did she not believe those 'inspiring' sermons delivered in diaphanous robes, with live lions at her side? I didn't know, Stanwyck didn't know, and neither did the audience." Though Capra is now remembered primarily for films such as MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON and IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, which are more conventionally constructed, THE MIRACLE WOMAN is two third-acts sandwiching a second, and altogether a delightful insight into the early careers of Capra and company. Screening as part of the Working Girl: The Films of Barbara Stanwyck series. (1931, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
Chantal Akerman’s PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG GIRL AT THE END OF THE 60s IN BRUSSELS (France)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Saturday, 4pm
The French anthology series All the Boys and Girls of Their Age—commissioned for channel ARTE by producer Chantal Poupaud, formerly a publicist for films by Marguerite Duras, Aki Kaurismäki, and Chantal Akerman—asked a distinguished roster of directors to capture the period of their youth within a single hourlong episode, stipulating only that each contain an era-appropriate needledrop and a scene at a party. Three of these were eventually developed into features and released theatrically: WILD REEDS (André Téchiné), TOO MUCH HAPPINESS (Cédric Kahn), and COLD WATER (Olivier Assayas). If Assayas maximized the use of music (as did Claire Denis in her installment US GO HOME), Akerman structured her segment around the inner dialogue leading up to a perfectly soundtracked movie moment, a crosshatch view into an aestheticized mode of nostalgia. Circé Lethem plays heroine Michèle as a young mind on overdrive, looking to lose her innocence first at a cafe where she and friend Danielle (Joelle Marlier) meet boys, then at a cinema where she impulsively connects with Paul (Julien Rassam), a deserter from the French army—the month is April, 1968. Michèle connects with Paul but suggests that he might like her friend better, thinking like a filmmaker, crafting a romance in her head, the better to step inside it. Both youths are in a stormy mood, speaking of impending cataclysms as they walk through a modern Paris with no traces of period dressing, a Situationist gesture in which the now conceals the real—“sous les pavés, la plage.” It was in 1968 that Akerman directed her first short SAUT MA VILLE, staging a comic apocalypse inside her kitchen, and PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG GIRL… expands upon the psychic and emotional terrain established in her brasher formal experiments. Not only do ordered domestic spaces contain unruly dramas, but films contain their own countervailing narratives. In the afternoon Michèle directs for herself, her sweet, trusting union with Paul is really the confirmation of a queer awakening. Their tryst (set to the melancholic lines of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne”: “they are leaning out for love / and they will lean that way forever”) is a rehearsal for the ecstatic disappointment of the party climax, in which she clasps Danielle’s hands at the center of a circle dance (the music is Ritchie Valens, “La Bamba”) before losing her to an offscreen encounter. The motif of desertion, of battles deferred, fits this deceptively complex film about an adolescent flavor of alienation: the feeling that the real thing must be happening somewhere else. (1994, 60 min, DCP Digital) [Brendan Boyle]
Sergei Bondarchuk's WAR AND PEACE (USSR)
Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 11am [SOLD OUT]
Is it a surprise that the Soviet film system gave a blank check to a novice Turkish director so he could helm the nation’s most prized text? A Soviet nationalist, Sergei Bondarchuk attempted to make a film to settle the score at the height of the Cold War. Despite King Vidor’s WAR AND PEACE (1956) polling well in Russia with Audrey Hepburn starring as Natasha, the question remained: Why is it that this novel, the pride of Russian national character, was adapted in America? Bondarchuk sought to prove Vidor and capitalist Hollywood’s inferiority to Russian creativity, backed by the Soviet Union. While political pressure loomed large over production, the young director desired cachet amongst more well-known Russian auteurs, who gawked at his actor’s ambition. Leo Tolstoy once said, “To influence others, an artist must be a seeker, his work must be a search.” For his sophomore film, Bondarchuk began preparation in 1961; the process included hundreds of script pages and thousands of storyboards. Forging his team, Bondarchuk took from an adage of Gogol: nothing astonishes one more than a perfectly coordinated agreement between all the parts. During the yearlong preproduction, thousands of letters would pour in across the Soviet Union from citizens who knew Tolstoy’s words by heart, offering their support. Museums across the country offered to provide period props and costumes. The studio wanted the film to mark the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Borodino, a pinnacle scene of the novel. The KGB and military offered access to helicopters, aircraft and fifteen thousand soldiers, one hundred twenty thousand extras, twenty-three tons of explosives, and ten thousand smoke grenades. After a long and tenuous casting and rehearsal process, the four-part epic began filming in September 1962 with a cast of three hundred speaking parts. With interiors shot on Mosfilm’s sound stages, the immense production design team constructed a life-size palace ballroom. For exterior sequences such as the burning of Moscow, an actual set prepared for demolition sat in a production lot. The first part opens with escalating battles of the Napoleonic wars, presenting bloody combat in counterpoint with the whimsical celebration of Saint Petersburg aristocracy. This introduces a core motif of the epic: the idle joys of the rich played against the backdrop of a burning and mortared countryside. As the viewer compares these two isolated worlds, the camera ascends through the clouds as an objective observer. In the second part, the story focuses on the betrayal of Natasha (Ludmila Savelyeva) to her betrothed Andrei. For long sequences, cameramen were placed on roller skates with handheld cameras to mingle between over one hundred waltzing extras. Expressing her agony over her wrongs, Natasha’s scenes of anguish prove some of the most violent sequences of the entire story. The final part took ten months of preproduction as the team planned to film the sacking and burning of Moscow. With limited takes, six cameras on foot and more overhead via helicopter captured the chaos as Napoleon’s army invaded the third Rome. During production, the director suffered two heart attacks (one which took place during a screening of Mikhail Kalatozov’s I AM CUBA [1964]). By the final scenes of the film, we witness our actor/director burst into laughter. The character, like director and audience, recognizes that while we may stand speechless by pure magnificence, we must remain aware we float between expansive existence containing both pleasure and horror where we have no control. In a postmortem, the director reflected: Our duty is to introduce our future viewer to the origins of sublime art, to visualize the innermost secrets of the novel War and Peace to convey the same sense of being fully alive, the joy of being human. In our very different time when peace is in danger, we must love life as never before and find a way to convey to everyone the feeling of love for life on our beautiful planet Earth. Screening as part of the Settle In series. Please note this screening is sold out. (1965, 453 min, DCP Digital) [Ray Ebarb]
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
Paul Morrissey’s BLOOD FOR DRACULA (France/Italy/US)
Alamo Drafthouse – Friday, 9:45pm
Though initially released in the US as ANDY WARHOL’S DRACULA, the infamous pop artist had absolutely nothing, neither financially nor creatively, to do with previous collaborator Paul Morrissey’s “Dracula spoof.” As Roberto Curti writes in Italian Gothic Horror Films 1970-1979, it was, in part, Warhol’s “nominal aegis” that helped get the project into being, produced in quick succession alongside Morrissey’s FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN (1973) with the monetary support of Italian producer Carlo Ponti. Such bizarre dramaturgical backstory might give BLOOD FOR DRACULA the appearance of some slapdash production, spreading actors and crew members across two film shoots as a means of killing two monster movies with one stone. But Morrissey’s vampiric antics are gleefully barbaric in a way that demands your attention: it’s too vicious and sad to be considered genuine camp, yet too bizarre and horny to be considered genuine horror. This Dracula (a delightful and delirious Udo Kier), in desperate need of virgin blood to keep himself alive, has fled his opulent Romanian castle to try his luck with the seemingly chaste and pure women of Italy, eventually working to court the young daughters of the Di Fiore estate. Seeing the Count as a way of bringing potential fortune to their dwindling finances, the Di Fiores welcome him with open arms, unaware of the bloody fate that is about to befall these young seeming virgins. It’s to Dracula’s dismay, and our delight, that he is instead subjected to the whims of a family of incestuous lesbians and their Marxist day-laborer, Mario (played with hulking idiocy by Morrisey’s frequent collaborator Joe Dallesandro). Beneath the idiosyncratic line readings, flailing physical performances, and insanely hilarious bloodbath of a finale, there’s also something haunting about Mario, the seeming “hero” of the film. He perpetrates just as much misogynistic violence and abuse against the Di Fiore women as Dracula, but his seeming mortality and overtly leftist politics are the only things that makes him less villainous than the blood-thirsty Count. Perhaps the most strikingly haunting moment in the film is the opening shot of Dracula (or is it Udo?) applying makeup and dying his hair, steadfastly preparing himself for the journey (and the film) ahead. Not too shabby for a seeming afterthought of a horror film made in less than four weeks. (1974, 103 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
Soft Systems Presents: Materials and Processes for an Expanding World
Parlour and Ramp (2130 W 21st St.) – Saturday, 7pm
In defense of small files and unfinished work, Soft Systems’s curated program selects nine titles from a larger pool of mailed-in submissions of videos, including video submitted on USB drives. This program is a compilation of snippets—nothing longer than ten minutes—made from a hysterical or absurd performance and a low budget. Fragmented, raw, uncontrived yet sometimes baffling, together they reflect a post-truth reality. UNPITCHED INSTRUMENTS (2 min) by Noelle Whitaker resembles a whimsical remake of Martha Rosler’s SEMIOTICS OF THE KITCHEN: the silly presentations of bell, rattle, clave, and tools that make sound subvert the seriousness of its instruction-like format. Wonderful Cringe plays with the feedback loop between two phone cameras in YOU CAN BE ANYTHING (3 min), both a coincidental recording of a stream and a completely deep dive into the weird and eerie world of navel-gazing at a pixelated self on the screen. TAITAIxTina examines in close-ups what looks like a variation or process video in LIT LUZ (5 min) of her performance for the Lit & Luz Live Magazine show. During the five-minute runtime, we watch the artist glue together a sandal and a helmet with some kind of metallic epoxy and then try to destroy them by throwing them from the second floor. The sound passes for ASMR, but the images unleash a perverse, destructive energy. Vanessa Norton alleges that they float their friends’ underwear down the dirtiest rivers in America in DIRTY WET (2 min). What a weird thing to do. But maybe it can be cathartic to stare at a cotton boxer drifting into a fleet of dead reed, slime, and foam and think of it as a symbol for our broken climate and democracy. CRYO EXPLORATION ECO ENDURANCE TRAINING (5 min) by MMM is a slowed-down video documentation of the artist plunging into icy water in a shiny silver suit. Its soundtrack, also slowed down, morphs into a dubby, staticky, and nihilistic soundscape. Leah Sandler’s LE JETTY (9 min) follows in the footsteps of Chris Marker’s famed 1962 proto-cyberpunk film LA JETEE and tells another post-apocalyptic story through subverting the meaning of everyday images. THE SIGHT IS A WOUND (8 min) lectures on the impossibility of making art or images amidst broadcast and livestreamed genocide in Gaza as we see artist Parham Ghalamdar sets a pile of his paintings on fire and documents its destruction. Zoey Solomon’s internet cinema THE FIRE IN THE MADHOUSE (4 min), with its title culled from a video sample heavily used and manipulated in the film, features psychedelic advocate Terence McKenna’s final interview from 1996; it is yet another exhilarating techno-pessimistic pondering on the end of humanity. The program concludes with Anabelle Lee Dehm's TRUST FALL (2 min), a vivid body metaphor for the utter failure of our social support system. [Nicky Ni]
Todd Haynes' SAFE (US)
Siskel Film Center – Friday, 5:45pm; Monday, 8:30pm; and Thursday, 5:45pm
Director Todd Haynes has restless eyes and ears that never linger in one aesthetic or time-period for longer than a film. And despite his continual shifts, it's the aesthetic that tends to star in his films, but this is never a shallow engagement. If Haynes can be said to have a formula, it is to find a pristine surface and scratch until we can see the uneasy construction underneath. His first (banned) public experiment was SUPERSTAR: THE KAREN CARPENTER STORY, in which he used Barbie doll whittling as an inspired, literal representation of Karen Carpenter's struggle with her eating disorder. FAR FROM HEAVEN honored and interrogated the world of Douglas Sirk. In I'M NOT THERE, he chipped away at the impenetrable image of Bob Dylan, all the while pointing at the impossibility of his project with a graphic mix of sympathy and irony. SAFE takes a break from public images to get intimate with a housewife's health. Shot and lit with the peachy haloes of a douche commercial, SAFE's blurry suburban Los Angeles is an unlikely venue for horror. We follow Carol White on her errands, to her exercise classes, with her friendly acquaintances; no one seems to mean her any harm. But it's precisely this vagueness—of purpose, of symptoms, of identity—that begins to gnaw at Carol until she is reduced to her flintiest self-preservation impulse. She suffers from both the controversial Multiple Chemical Sensitivity and the middle-class affliction of Unlimited Healing Budget, and either condition could prove fatal. Haynes takes care not to fix any problems or to answer stupid questions; the ending lingers in one's mind like an unresolved chord. (1995, 119 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Josephine Ferorelli]
Ugo Bienvenu’s ARCO (France/Animation)
The Davis Theater and the Music Box Theatre – See Venue websites for showtimes
Two lonely kids form a life-changing bond across space and time. It’s a familiar premise in children’s media (one that finds a variation in another four-letter 2025 animated sci-fi film named after its protagonist, Pixar’s lovely ELIO), but ARCO has enough idiosyncratic details and artistry to stand out. In some faraway future in which climate disasters have forced humanity to live on self-sustaining platforms in the clouds, young Arco longs for escape. Specifically, he wants to travel through time like the rest of his family, whose mode of transportation is rainbows. Disobeying their rules (children cannot rainbow time travel before the age of 12), Arco takes to the sky and ends up (literally) crashing down back in 2075. Unable to return to his reality, he befriends Iris, a budding artist raised by a robot nanny in lieu of her perpetually-away parents, who show up at the dinner table as holograms beaming in from work. Tailed by a trio of bumbling conspiracy theorists and imperiled by the effects of climate change, the kids seek to find Arco a way home. With his co-writer Félix de Givry, Ugo Bienvenu creates a bittersweet story of foundational childhood friendship subtly set within a larger portrait of societal anomie. Neither Arco’s time, with its isolated homes perched high above an uninhabitable Earth, nor Iris’, with its substitution of AI for human labor, offer reassuring views of our planet’s future. While it’s not clear how one reality grew into the other (one of many world-building mysteries audiences might find intriguing or frustratingly vague), what is clear is that ARCO sees a world of endangerment where hope rests in the younger generations and their ingenuity, reflected in Iris’ ability to imagine things through drawing. Her bright artistic sensibility is embodied by the film, which bursts with literal rainbows of color and contains a gorgeous score by Arnaud Toulon. Without being precious about it, ARCO self-reflexively celebrates its own handmade form—let’s just call it Art—as a way forward for humankind. The version being screened is dubbed in English from the original French; while I admired the clever layering of Natalie Portman and Mark Ruffalo’s voices as the nanny robot Mikki, I was more skeptical of the contributions from Will Ferrell, Andy Samberg, and Flea, as well as the child voice actors. (2025, 89 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
Mona Fastvold’s THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE (UK/US)
Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes
THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE can be approached less as a historical biopic than as an inquiry into how belief is embodied, transmitted, and policed. Directed by Mona Fastvold, the film resists the reassuring grammar of prestige historical drama and instead situates Ann Lee’s life within a tactile, experiential framework that privileges ritual, movement, and collective sensation over narrative efficiency. History is not highlighted so much as recast as mythos, delivered through Thomasin McKenzie’s narration. What follows is a story reenacted as a series of pressures placed on women’s bodies. Childbirth and loss share the same breath. Bodily autonomy and antiquated notions of “wifely duty” collide again and again. Fastvold’s use of natural light, hand-painted backgrounds, and rigorously composed frames does more than evoke the 18th century. It places the image in a liminal space between realism and iconography, recalling Baroque painting as much as ethnographic observation. Many scenes conclude with tableaux that suggest Caravaggio-like figures emerging from shadow, poised to behead Holofernes. This painterly strategy mirrors the film’s broader refusal to isolate Ann Lee as a singular genius. Her authority is inseparable from the collective that gathers around her. The Shakers’ theology holds that the second coming of Christ will be female, because God encompasses both masculine and feminine principles. This belief positions Ann Lee as an existential challenge to patriarchal Christianity, and to patriarchal society more broadly. The film makes clear that persecution arises less from the Shakers’ ecstatic dances or celibacy than from their devotion to a woman permitted spiritual authority. Paganism becomes a convenient accusation; gender is the real heresy. Amanda Seyfried’s performance is remarkable for its range, capable of erupting into exuberance or retreating into stillness without signaling either as spectacle. She avoids charisma, presenting Lee as a figure shaped by grief, labor, and belief rather than destiny. This approach aligns with the film’s skepticism toward heroic individualism, even when engaging a figure historically framed as messianic. That THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE arrives at a moment when the world is grieving the unprovoked loss of an American citizen at the hands of their own government gives the film an unintended but piercing contemporary resonance. Upon arriving in America, Lee’s response to a slave auction, her cry of “Shame,” echoes beyond the frame and into daily life. Later, the detention and beating of Shaker congregants by British soldiers evokes modern immigration enforcement, reinforcing the film’s argument that institutional brutality tends to repeat itself with only minor cosmetic updates. What distinguishes THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE from more conventional faith-based narratives is its insistence on pacifism as praxis rather than abstraction. Though not depicted onscreen, later generations of Shakers would be exempt from the Civil War draft, an early instance of conscientious objection. They sheltered both Confederate and Union soldiers. Their commitment to nonviolence is not symbolic but disciplinary, an ethical system requiring continuous labor, restraint, and dancing. Stripped of theology, the film ultimately reveals a social model grounded in collective work, gender equality, and the rejection of violence. It suggests that radical change does not require divine intervention so much as the redistribution of authority. Fastvold’s film emerges as a punk-rock feminist manifesto, sketching the blueprint for utopia: believe women, follow women, dismantle the patriarchy, and live out our days under a matriarchy. History’s male-ruled societies seem to agree on one thing. The most threatening idea in any era is not heresy, but women governing themselves. (2025, 137 min, 70mm) [Shaun Huhn]
Kleber Mendonça Filho's THE SECRET AGENT (Brazil)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Saturday, 6pm
The films of Kleber Mendonça Filho unfold like novels, immersing viewers in the specificities of place while gradually revealing aspects of the principal characters that aren’t immediately apparent. They also abound in digressions and supporting characters, neither of which advance the plot so much as expand on it so that the world of the movie seems as rich as the one we inhabit. The richness of THE SECRET AGENT has a lot to do with how the film engages with Brazilian history. Mendonça Filho doesn’t confront the legacy of his nation’s military dictatorship head-on, but rather obliquely and circuitously, dramatizing how citizens lived under the terror of the period until that terror enters the foreground of the action. The story takes place mainly in 1977, at the height of the dictatorship; per a title card that comes near the beginning, this is a time of “great mischief,” one of several euphemisms for state-sponsored violence that arise during the film. Wagner Moura stars as a technical analyst who returns to his hometown of Recife after an unspecified time away. He wants to reconnect with his young son, who’s currently living with his maternal grandparents, but circumstances (also unspecified) keep the two from residing together. Mendonça Filho evokes a climate of fear and secrecy through his presentation of the intricate community networks that Moura’s character must navigate to stay safe in Recife. The writer-director also sometimes jumps forward a few decades to consider some young women in the present who are researching the character’s life, suggesting that Brazil is far from done with its culture of surveillance. These flash-forwards aren’t the only curveballs in THE SECRET AGENT, which also features a fascinating subplot about a human leg found in the body of a shark that’s washed up on the Recife coast (an event that coincides with the local popularity of JAWS) as well as a thorough account of how Recife’s police department functioned under dictatorship. The sheer volume of narrative detail recalls the films of Arnaud Desplechin, and Mendonça Filho adds to the complexity with his inspired direction, employing innovative widescreen compositions, unpredictable montage, and daring shifts in tone. Indeed, the film’s technical brilliance is so astonishing as to almost distract from the story, which is another way of saying that this towering achievement probably requires multiple viewings to reveal all it has to offer. (2025, 160 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan’s JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS (US)
Alamo Drafthouse – Friday, 7pm
Despite its connection to a larger IP (Archie Comics), JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS feels more closely aligned with the brightly colored, yet darkly satirical teen comedies that came out in the late 90s and early 2000s—movies like DROP DEAD GORGEOUS, JAWBREAKER, SUGAR & SPICE, and DICK. The film has gained cult status not only for its tongue-in-cheek takedown of commercialism in the record industry, but also for its eccentric supporting performances, fourth-wall-breaking humor and genuine sense of fun. After the sudden, tragic loss of DuJour, the world’s most popular boy band, singer-guitarist Josie (Rachael Leigh Cook) and her pals—compassionate bassist Val (Rosario Dawson) and ditzy-but-sweet drummer Mel (Tara Reid)—take their Riverdale band to the next level and snag a record deal. The Pussycats land a contract with MegaRecords, but their friendship is tested by a speedy rise to success. Complicating things further, the record company is not at all interested in the band, but rather in using their music to sell products subliminally. Alan Cumming and Parker Posey scene-steal as the villainous MegaRecords higher-ups with a plan for world domination; another standout is Missi Pyle as Alexandra Cabot, sister to the Pussycats’ original manager, who slyly claims she’s only tagging along because she “was in the comic book.” While not every moment holds up perfectly, JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS’ overarching themes still feel extremely germane, especially in light of contemporary social media and influencer culture. The film also works as a time capsule of early aughties pop culture, which is unignorable in the bold fashions: all asymmetrical hemlines, body glitter, and chunky highlights. Perhaps most importantly, the film sports an authentically catchy soundtrack by its two fictional bands, with Josie’s vocals provided by Letters to Cleo lead singer Kay Hanley. (2001, 98 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
CINE-LIST: January 30, 2026 - January 31, 2026
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Brendan Boyle, Ray Ebarb, Megan Fariello, Josephine Ferorelli, Shaun Huhn, Ben Kaye, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Nicky Ni