📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING
Robert Woodburn's CORN'S-A-POPPIN' (US)
Chicago Film Society at Northeastern Illinois University (The Auditorium, Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) – Wednesday, 7:30pm
Waldo Crummit, the mendacious press agent of Pinwhistle Popcorn and the villain of this bizarre and lovely little oddity of a film, is sabotaging his own company with substandard corn kernels so that the Crinkly Corn Company in Chicago can buy it out. As his killing stroke, he has convinced his boss to sponsor a humiliating weekly, half-hour long musical variety television show, starring the former hog-caller Lillian Gravelguard. To hear Gravelguard croak through 'Drink To Me Only With Thine Eyes' is to know the sound of fear, and all seems lost for Pinwhistle Popcorn. However, salvation comes in the form of Agatha Quaid, a nearby farmer with a secret recipe for popcorn, and Johnny Wilson, host of the show and the boyfriend of Sheila, Pinwhistle's secretary. But is it too late, and will Johnny's mysterious sister come between him and Sheila? This rough synopsis of the action of CORN'S-A-POPPIN' might well imply that the movie itself holds some kind of narrative coherence. Be assured: nothing of the sort is in play. The film is a loving backstage musical, a bitter attack on corporate sponsorship, and a celebration of underdogs gaining the upper hand, but in aspiration only, for to be any of these things in actuality, it would first have to make some sort of rudimentary sense at all. As a completed work, it wavers amongst strange parody, wide-eyed sincerity, technical incompetence, and out-right strangeness to such a dazzling, exhausting, and thrilling degree, that mere description fails. The performers move in stiff, robotic jerks, planning out laboriously blocked gestures multiple lines ahead of time that often literalize the lyrics of songs they're singing. The sets, weirdly over-lit from too many sources, are awash with uncannily multiplying shadows and reflections, and display that antiseptic appearance only normally possible in model homes and department store display furniture. The camerawork tends to group all action into the lower 2/3 of the frame, leaving the upper sections of most images strangely mesmerizing fields of negative space, and the editing betrays the panicked jump-cut aesthetic of the home movie. Every cut is jarring, shocking; no rhythms, no patterns are developed, only the growing sense of alarm that at any moment some strange cutaway or alternative angle will erupt on to the screen. The 'loving' relationships amongst Johnny, Sheila, and Johnny's sister, Susie, are inscrutable, angry, and disturbingly incestuous. Susie, dressed always in the clothes of a grown woman despite her pre-teen age, repeatedly insinuates herself between Johnny and Sheila, bragging about how well she takes care of her brother's needs. From one perspective, then, one of conventional cinematic standards, CORN'S-A-POPPIN' must surely be a very bad film, but to watch it is to experience a kind of cinema wholly alternate from the staid, tedious movies that gave us those standards. Woodburn may have set out to make a low-budget version of Hollywood's glamour--the heart-rending penultimate song, the love song, 'On Our Way to Mars,' sung by Johnny and his sister to one other, is the closest CORN'S-A-POPPIN' ever gets to that--but their film falls so far short of Hollywood's styles, structures, and even ideas, that it's almost impossible to figure out how to know what to make of what's on the screen. How many times can a work of art fail to adhere to a set of rules before we realize those rules aren't being broken but instead are simply irrelevant? CORN'S-A-POPPIN' is a signpost, pointing to an unused, blind alley of undeveloped, ignored potential within film history, a delicate, confounding, alien thing. I love no musical in the world more than it. Preceded by a CFS Fun Pack on 16mm. (1955, 58 min, 35mm) [Kian Bergstrom]
Edward Yang's THE TERRORIZERS (Taiwan)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm
THE TERRORIZERS is a mystery of sorts but not in its plotting or screenplay. Pieces fall together through the film’s succession of images, from the cutting to the overlapping sound design, bleeding scenes together until they seem inseparable. Images and sounds, seemingly apart, become dependent on one another, as if the formal nature of the film is irremovable from its characters, who, in turn, come to understand their rooting to one another and explicitly to the story itself. Connection and disconnect loom large over Edward Yang’s third feature, signifying a greater need to search for where all these seemingly disparate threads join. The film is built out of several stories; in one, a wife tries desperately to write a novel while her husband seeks advancement at his low-end job as a lab technician. The wife tries to fight her writer’s block and dodge the complacency of her husband’s mindset, creating her story along with the film’s, spiraling the husband into a panic as he tries to hold on to that which has become fleeting. Another couple—a young photographer from a wealthy family awaiting a draft notice and his girlfriend—discovers their unhappiness early, the result of his obsession with a mysterious young woman he has taken pictures of. As time passes, the young photographer preserves moments through his lens, possibly in an attempt to stop his life’s forward progress. He seems especially enraptured by the photo of the young woman, first seen jumping from a balcony to escape police during a shootout in a strange apartment. This young woman finds her way into his life, and she also sets about grafting wealthy men around the city. Of the three interlocking stories, ebbing and flowing outside of and in one another, not one subplot gains full coherence with the audience until it’s all over. As a result, the film becomes challenging to the unsuspecting viewer, yet seductive and luminous in its ambiguity. Yang frames doorways and windows with shades of darkness and light, becoming intoxicating over the course of the film and allowing one to drift into the mystery like wind into an open room. THE TERRORIZERS even contains a shootout between police and gangsters at the start—slightly more clumsy and anticlimatic than say Michael Mann-blistering gunshot-concrete, but no less captivating or enthralling. The intricate but explosive cutting becomes the action, signaling Yang’s assured appreciation for the formal techniques laid down by the French New Wave, extending to the rich and bountiful Taiwanese New Wave. What is deeply significant about this awkward shootout at the start, though, is this is the one incident that appears to connect all the principal characters. However, as the gunshots and the camera clicks by the young photographer sound out, these sounds appear to upend the everyday rituals that begin the film, scattering the actions and lives of its characters, while slowly drawing them closer to one another unknowingly. Their lives and routines fray, but this disruption allows for their separate ends to find some suture. As elliptical and discordant the film may seem, what is woven together becomes an evocative tapestry of personal and public life in Taipei; between the realm of guilt-induced dreamscapes and the unease of a dawning reality. Screening as part of the Driving Towards the End: An East Asian Perspective series. (1986, 109 min, 35mm) [John Dickson]
Larry Gottheim's HORIZONS & Forrest Sprague's EPIPHANY I (US/Experimental)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Sunday, 7pm
Larry Gottheim’s films are an invitation to look with intent. Throughout the early 1970s, the American filmmaker created multiple structural works that kept one’s gaze locked onto a specific object or locale. He captures the beauty and mystique of fog clearing in FOG LINE (1970). He finds drama in scooping blueberries on BLUES (1970). He magnifies the glory of light and shadow across CORN (1970). These short films are single-take, fixed-shot miracles that hone in on the foundational elements of cinema. He’d soon foreground other ideas—a curiosity-stoking pan on DOORWAY (1971), meditative repetition on BARN RUSHES (1971)—but it is HORIZONS (1973, 77 min, 16mm), his monumental 1973 feature film, where his craft turns the everyday sublime into something palpably ecstatic. Across 77 minutes, he sequences brief shots of landscapes with a single guiding principle: every image must contain a horizon. There is a consequent bifurcation in every frame, and it arrives via mountains and fields, roads and trees, fences and clotheslines. Whatever the source, there is an innate understanding of the foreground and then the other; note the dividing line, he seems to encourage us, and feel the infinitude of the sky, of the expanse, of the ineffable unknown. We’ll see humans and animals dot the landscape, making flesh and blood feel intertwined with nature. There are similarities across different scenes, too: colors will rhyme from shot to shot, as do the locations of the horizon line. While HORIZONS is eminently gorgeous, Gottheim reveals that appreciating beauty is only possible through active participation at the fundamental level of sight. It’s apt that so much footage is taken from a moving car, like he’s highlighting the decision we can make at every passing moment: see the world anew, or don’t. Also in the program is EPIPHANY I (2023, 17 min, DCP Digital), Forrest Sprague’s meditation on construction and demolition. Filming from a high vantage point, he peers down on ugly, muddy terrain like some sort of deity gazing upon creation. It is a strange and patient film, where man and machine feel one and the same as they go about their processes. Movingly, every image is cold: a portrait of our industrialized world as patently alien. [Joshua Minsoo Kim]
Sarah Kernochan’s ALL I WANNA DO (aka STRIKE!) (US)
Block Cinema (at Northwestern University) – Saturday, 12:20pm [Free Admission]
I discovered ALL I WANNA DO on cable in the late '90s or early '00s. It was probably the only way I could have possibly unearthed it, as the film was buried in its initial run by Harvey Weinstein and given a very limited theatrical release. Its original title, THE HAIRY BIRD (slang for male genitalia), was also considered too offensive for audiences by US distributor Miramax, and thus the multiple English names for the film left it further adrift. Twenty-five years later, it’s wonderful that this gem of a film is finding an audience. I’ve often thought of this era as a heyday for oddball teen comedies, and ALL I WANNA DO is a unique example featuring a familiar cast. Set in 1963, the film is based on director Sarah Kernochan’s own experience at an all-girls boarding school. After her plan to have sex with her boyfriend is discovered by her parents, Odie (Gaby Hoffman) is sent to Miss Godard’s Preparatory School for Girls in New England. There she falls into a group of intelligent, resourceful students (Kirsten Dunst, Monica Keena, Merrit Weaver, and Heather Matarazzo). These girls are part of a secret club dedicated to helping each other achieve their long-term career goals (doctors, a journalist, etc.), which are generally more ambitious than their finishing school peers. Though politically minded, Odie’s only ambition is to sleep with her boyfriend, and despite being a relatively small goal, the team is equally determined to help, even as school tattletale Abby (Rachel Leigh Cook) tries to thwart them. All their plans are interrupted when they find out the board of trustees is planning to turn the school coed due to financial troubles. While the idea of going coed is appealing to some at first, the students all soon realize how devastating this change would be to the exceptional space, run by the strict but supportive Miss McVane (an empathetic Lynn Redgrave); they are, in fact, determined to push back. It’s a teen comedy that doesn’t disregard sex obsession, but rather cleverly resituates as not any more or less important than friendship, education, self-discovery, and career ambition. While a comedy, it also seriously explores issues like sexual assault and eating disorders; Kernochan’s balances these shifting tones with complete effortlessness and understanding of the struggles faced by teen girls. ALL I WANNA DO’s charm is perhaps most sincerely felt in the relationships between the main group, who all are wholly compassionate and understanding, knowing that their ambitions can best be achieved with support from each other. Having myself attended a women’s college, I can say that ALL I WANNA DO truly captures the comradery and magic of these educational spaces. Kernochan’s presents Miss Godard’s as distinctive, with its own language and traditions, not fully cut off from the outside world but a kind of sanctuary nonetheless, and worth fighting for. Followed by a Q&A with producer Ira Deutchman. (1998, 97 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]
Trinh T. Minh-ha’s FORGETTING VIETNAM (US/South Korea/Germany)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6pm
In her inimitable fashion, essay filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha reflects on the nature of Vietnamese identity 40 years after the end of the Vietnam War, considering such factors as geography, national creation myths, agriculture and labor, the impact of certain public intellectuals, and, critically, the public’s forgetting of the War. The movie is open-ended by design, weaving between its various concerns in a manner suggesting free thought—Trinh T. Minh-ha expresses admiration for Vietnamese history and culture and anger toward the government, yet no one sentiment predominates. Adding to the open-endedness, FORGETTING VIETNAM contains no narration; rather, the filmmaker conveys her thoughts via intertitles, and the onscreen text comments on the images, provides historical context for them, and raises questions and concerns that are only tangentially related to them. As for the images, much of the footage was shot in Ho Chi Minh City in 1995 on Hi-8 video and in 2012 on HDCam, and the difference in quality between the two types of video becomes a matter for discussion too, with one early intertitle reading, “Does a bigger grain mean better politics?” One might liken the aesthetic to the essay films of Chris Marker or Jean-Luc Godard, but Trinh T. Minh-ha is distinctive in her emphasis on women’s experience in her social portraiture. A memorable section of FORGETTING VIETNAM considers how women laborers factor into the history in question; to quote Van Nguyen-Marshall’s essay on the work for Pacific Affairs: “The implication is that women’s daily activities, which have endured war, revolution, and globalization, have been the mainstay of Vietnamese society. Moreover, as some forms of women’s work, such as mobile and street vending, have been outlawed in recent years, their persistence also represents a form of resistance.” Trinh T. Minh-ha often returns to the cruel, repressive nature of Vietnam’s government, which has remained constant across seismic economic changes, and to the beauty of the Vietnamese water-and-landscape, which has remained constant for much longer than that. This feeling of constancy creates a push-pull tension with the loose structure, and to provocative effect. Screening as part of the Shadows of War lecture series. (2016, 90 min, Digital Projection) [Ben Sachs]
Doc10 Film Festival
See below for venues and showtimes
James Jones’s ANTIDOTE (UK/US/Netherlands/Documentary)
The Davis Theater – Friday, 5:45pm
I don’t remember when or where I saw a video clip of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump walking together past some journalists, but the memory of Trump’s displeasure with some of the reporters prompting Putin to ask whether he wanted them to be taken care of chills me. Perhaps to his credit, Trump quickly declined the offer. He seems to have known something the rest of us have only glimpsed from time to time: Putin has a habit of ordering the murder of people critical of his regime. Christo Grozev, once a researcher with the open-source investigative journalism group Bellingcat, not only was hounded out of his work, but also his longtime home in Vienna by credible plots against his life. ANTIDOTE, a grimly optimistic title for James Jones’s documentary centered on Grozev, suggests that exposing the crimes of brutal, corrupt regimes will somehow work to neutralize them. One of the dissidents featured in the film, Vladimir Kara-Murza, twice poisoned and sentenced to 25 years in a Russian labor camp for treason, believes that his country will yet breathe free. I wouldn’t put money on it. The vast network of assassins, informants, and spies the Putin regime has deployed throughout the world seems both sophisticated and dogged in its mission. Grozev discovers on the eve of his return to Vienna from New York City that he will be killed as soon as he arrives. Later, he learns Jan Marsalek, a bloodthirsty psychopath who helped perpetrate the largest financial fraud in German history, not only lives in Russia, but also is a Russian asset charged with coordinating Gorzev’s assassination by beheading. Grozev, who appears in the Oscar-winning documentary NOVALNY (2022) working with Novalny to investigate the latter’s poisoning, acknowledges the hard life he has put himself and his family through, one that eventually costs him dearly. Jones throws us a bone by filming the escape of a disillusioned man involved in developing poisons for the Putin regime. (Interestingly, the filmmakers seem to have used deep-fake technology to change this man’s appearance and that of his family.) Nonetheless, Grozev sees no future for Russia or the lifting of what he regards as a political fatwa against him, until Putin is gone. ANTIDOTE is a clear-eyed look at the limits of resistance while affirming that for many people, there simply is no other choice. Followed by a Q&A with Grozev, moderated by David Corn. (2024, 89 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
---
David Osit’s PREDATORS (US/Documentary)
The Davis Theater – Friday, 8:15pm
Suffice it to say, the scariest aspects of David Osit’s PREDATORS, a tense and methodically crafted work of non-fiction tracking the history and legacy of the hit television show To Catch a Predator, have nothing to do with the illicit proclivities of the sexual predators arrested on the program. Rather, a darker sense of systemic reckoning lives in the bones of Osit’s film, old DVCAM footage eerily intermingling with present-day interviews to probe the true ethical dilemmas of one of the earliest examples of twenty-first-century true crime. As a nation learned to fall in love with Datelinereporter Chris Hansen and his seemingly cathartic ensnaring of child predators, a viewing public were also taught to remove any sense of humanity from the men caught in the web of Hansen’s law-enforcing theatrics. Osit isn’t necessarily coy about his own personal feelings on the show, employing the assistance of ethnographer Mark de Rond to parse through the series and its function as a vehicle for entertainment and suspense through the suffering and dehumanization of men clearly in need of help and support. The word “empathy” may as well not exist in the vocabularies of those in the predator-hunting business, something that, since the end of the original run of To Catch a Predator, has extended out to vigilante copycats on YouTube and TikTok, the shameless clickbait nature of the exercise blown out to the nth degree. “Justice” and “awareness” are paraded around as socially-conscious covers for exploitative behavior in the true crime space, with the actual well-being and rehabilitative potential of those with pedophilic tendencies left to the wayside, and in some horrific cases, left to rot in tragic, violent misery. Osit eventually becomes a character in his own work, his past life brought to the surface as a means of wrestling with the limits of empathy we hold for those otherwise exiled from society, and a fateful interview late in the film aims to messily wrestle with all the history that has come before it. PREDATORS is a tough but enlightening watch, and the real question is whether Osit thinks that’s a compliment or not. Followed by a Q&A with Osit. (2025, 96 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
---
Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s FOLKTALES (US/Norway/Documentary)
The Davis Theater – Saturday, 1pm
Hege, whose story bookends FOLKTALES, speaks of how life is chaotic, particularly for a young woman; the tragic loss of her father at a young age drives a lot of her perspective. But, social media, too, plays its role, and Hege’s journey, more than any of the other young people featured, is most directly affected by it. Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s coming-of-age documentary FOLKTALES depicts a year in the life at Pasvik Folk High School, located in Norway in the Arctic Circle. There, in the midst of the exquisite natural landscape, students study Nordic culture, taking care of dogs used for dog sledding, practicing survival skills, and learning crafts like knitting and arts like folkdance. Hege, along with the other featured students Bjørn and Romain, are all struggling with the bridge to adulthood and the pressures of the modern world creating a sense of isolation and disconnect. Through this unique education experience, they learn responsibility, confidence, and even how to better connect with others. It’s a charming and gentle representation of youth, with students speaking insightfully about their internal struggles; their attachment to the dogs at the school and their genuine sadness to leave this clearly nourishing space after they graduate is evident. FOLKTALES, however, does take on a lot thematically, and never fully dives satisfactorily enough into any one aspect; while the dogsledding may seem like the heart of the film, for instance, it isn’t shown in much detail. Similarly, while mythology is clearly an important framing device and discipline of study for the school, it isn’t fully explained. The result is an interesting oscillation between the way in which FOLKTALES both criticizes and relies on the language and use of social media. Its dreamily constructed vignettes set against the Northern Lights appear like Instagram posts, as we see students both embrace the school’s mission and yet are never far from their smartphones. While I’m unsure where the film ultimately lands, its juxtaposing presentation of social media brings up fascinating questions. Followed by a Q&A with Ewing. (2025, 106 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
---
Elizabeth Lo’s MISTRESS DISPELLER (China/US/Documentary)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 4pm
A shockingly intimate documentary, MISTRESS DISPELLER highlights a new industry on the rise in China. With the goal of keeping couples together, a "mistress dispeller" can be hired to infiltrate family dynamics and bring harmony back to marriages flailing due to infidelity. Featuring the challenges of modern relationships, dating, marriage, family, and loneliness, the film creates space for everyone involved, demonstrating sincere empathy for all sides of the love triangle. MISTRESS DISPELLER follows a couple, Mr. and Mrs. Li, as the wife reaches out to Teacher Wang, a mistress dispeller who skillfully inserts herself into their dynamic, discovering the innermost details of the relationships involved to save the marriage; her purpose, however, expands to helping everyone, including the mistress. The film insightfully draws connections between personal relationships and larger cultural norms and expectations. Frank conversations, shot with arresting stillness, many featuring close-ups, are juxtaposed with lingering shots of Chinese art, landscapes, and cityscapes. Throughout, as well, there are interludes with images of new brides, lonely hearts ads, dating seminars, and matchmaking services, illuminating the cultural pressures that exist in finding and maintaining successful relationships—so much so that industries spring up to fill the need. What is most surprising is how director Elizabeth Lo got everyone involved to agree to willingly participate; a fact she is clear to emphasize with text at the beginning of MISTRESS DISPELLER. The result is true cinematic melodrama in documentary form. Followed by a Q&A with Lo. (2024, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
---
Also screening are Geeta Gandbhir’s 2025 film THE PERFECT NEIGHBOR (94 min, DCP Digital) on Saturday, 3:30pm at the Davis Theater, followed by a Q&A with Gandbhir and producers Nikon Kwantu, Alisa Payne, and Sam Bisbee; Nyle DiMarco’s 2025 film DEAF PRESIDENT NOW! (101 min, DCP Digital) on Saturday, 6pm at the Davis Theater, followed by a Q&A with DiMarco and interpreter Grey Van Pelt; Mstyslav Chernov’s 2025 film 2000 METERS TO ANDRIIVKA (107 min, DCP Digital) on Sunday, 1:30pm at the Gene Siskel Film Center, followed by a Q&A with Chernov; and Michelle Walshe and Lindsay Utz’s 2025 film PRIME MINISTER (102 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday, 7pm at the Davis Theater as Doc10’s Closing Night selection, followed by a Q&A with Utz and New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, moderated by Christie Hefner. More info and full schedule of events here.
The Chicago Critics Film Festival
Music Box Theatre – See below for showtimes
Kathryn Bigelow’s STRANGE DAYS (US)
Saturday, 9pm
Utopias don’t age, but dystopias don’t age well. The imagined ideal society is always abstract, always planned for perfection, always writ on a blank slate. But our nightmares are built out of the quotidian, made from fears magnified, dangers taken to extremes, the horrors of today turned into the horrors of every day. But if the curve of history teaches anything, it’s that we as a species have a special power to become accustomed to any degradation, and so today’s apocalypses have the unenviable fortune of either tomorrow’s farces, which we read and watch and laugh over at how much worse things actually are than we were warned, or today’s uncanny documentaries, weird reverse time-capsules that accidentally captured the zeitgeist of the future. STRANGE DAYS is both. It is a film that unflinchingly puts American racism and misogyny on display as driving forces of catastrophic exploitation, cruelty, violence, and barbarism, constructing a dense web of a narrative that melds VERTIGO, PEEPING TOM, THE PARALLAX VIEW into an elaborate repudiation of the Rodney King verdict in which two women, a white sex worker and a black limousine driver, strike with brutal force at patriarchal bigotry and the police state. It is a dizzying murder mystery in which the killer is irrelevant and the detective is effectively already dead, a love story in which neither partner loves the other, a science-fiction allegory in which the futuristic technology is cinema itself. But in the America of Donald Trump and Richard Spencer, the America of Tamir Rice and Michael Brown, the America of Sandra Bland and Homan Square, the America of hipster Nazis in the New York Times, the romantic idea that a video recording of police officers murdering a black man at a traffic stop could bring such an institution as the LAPD to its knees is either uncomfortably naive or ridiculously idealistic. Bigelow’s film knows all this, of course. Its contradictions were clear in 1995 when it was first released, and Bigelow is a master at playing her films against themselves, at making political art that self-deconstructs in a thousand different ways. If anything, the dark malaise of STRANGE DAYS has only become more urgently needed as time has passed. This movie is the White Gaze stabbing its own eyes out. (1995, 145 min, 35mm) [Kian Bergstrom]
---
Tallulah Hazekamp Schwab’s MR. K (Netherlands/Norway/Belgium)
Saturday, Midnight
Twenty years in the making, Dutch director Tallulah Hazekamp Schwab’s MR. K is finally open for guests—and those guests may never leave. A surreal, Kafkaesque dark comedy steeped in nightmare logic and philosophical riddles, MR. K unfolds like a fever dream. Schwab invites us into a world where doors lead to nowhere and meaning is a mirage glimpsed just as it vanishes. Crispin Glover stars as the titular Mr. K, a traveling magician no longer capable of conjuring awe. In his opening monologue—a soliloquy of loneliness—he announces himself with heartbreaking sincerity. Known for roles teetering on the edge of the uncanny—Layne in RIVER’S EDGE (1986) or the loner WILLARD (2003)—Glover here trades eccentricity for stillness. His Mr. K becomes an avatar for the disoriented everyman: caught in a trap with no rules, no reason, and no exit. Mr. K’s failure of self-realization is actualized when he’s trapped in a crumbling hotel: a structure more organism than building. It wheezes, pulses, and sheds its walls like skin. Paisley wallpaper leaks, a heartbeat thumps behind plaster, and it cries out in pain. The byzantine hallways twist into a maze without center or edge, extending the terror of liminal space into something cosmic. Cinematographer Frank Griebe paints this world in sickly, seductive tones that echo early Jean-Pierre Jeunet: DELICATESSEN (1991), THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN (1995). The palette is putrid yet playful, as if rot had a sense of humor. A marching band erupts from the vents. Guests speak in riddles. Silver-haired ladies of a certain age—Ruth and Sarah—comfort Mr. K with coffee and a reminder that the hotel has everything you need. One closet leads impossibly into a bourgeois artist’s sprawling flat. She urges Mr. K to find art in the smallest of details. Another door opens into a brutalist kitchen, where our hero is absorbed into a surreal workplace soap opera. Here, egg-cracking becomes metaphor, and success is awarded not for skill, but for spectacle. Schwab skewers capitalism as each promotion handed out is a punchline to a joke too bleak to laugh at. Graffiti scrawled across the walls suggests the coming of a messiah liberator. When Mr. K is asked if he is the one he replies, “I am nobody,” echoing Josef K.’s bewildered pleas of innocence in Kafka’s The Trial. As rooms shrink and furniture spills into the halls, the building decays from within. A torn strip of wallpaper reveals veins—proof the hotel is alive, and sickly. Mr. K becomes a prophet to the guests, warning of collapse. Is there escape, or will the content guests of the hotel turn on their new prophet? Schwab leans fully into the absurdity of meaning-making. She cites Kafka, but her voice is unmistakably her own. “There are no right answers,” she says of the film. This idea beats at the core of MR. K as each scene disorients and every answer is a riddle. It resembles a dream you half-remember but fully feel, the film bypasses logic to speak directly to something quieter, more terrified within. In a cinematic landscape of second-screen approved films drowning in exposition and closure, MR. K stands apart. It doesn’t explain. It doesn’t even try. Instead, it dares to sit with the ache of ambiguity, the sharp terror of not knowing why we are here or where we are going. And in doing so, it becomes something rare: a haunting, hypnotic echo of the human condition—confused, yearning, and beautifully lost. (2024, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]
---
Charles Chaplin's THE GREAT DICTATOR (US)
Sunday, 11:30am
One of the most courageous of all films, Chaplin's satire attacked Adolph Hitler while the US government was still officially neutral towards Nazi Germany, but it's even more remarkable for recognizing the complex relationship between fascism and popular culture. Chaplin famously quipped that he had a vendetta against Hitler because he stole the Tramp's mustache, and he portrays his Hitler caricature Adenoid Hynkel as a version of his beloved Tramp turned inside out by the evils of the twentieth century. The clownish, neurotic dictator is of course motivated by delusions of grandeur (which Chaplin displays, gorgeously, in a ballet sequence where he dances with a balloon globe) but he's equally dependent on mass acceptance. Chaplin also represents the people persecuted by dictatorship; he stars in these scenes as well, playing a Jewish barber even more reminiscent of the Tramp. The scenes depicting the barber's social life in the ghetto are so deeply felt in their sympathy for European Jewish humor that THE GREAT DICTATOR could be ranked justifiably with the great Jewish films. Given his worldwide popularity, Chaplin's decision to ally his screen image so closely with the Jews had deeply radical implications, but that's no match for the openly Leftist monologue at the film's end. Following a series of tragic/farcical complications, the plot breaks away and Chaplin addresses the camera for a three-minute unbroken shot. What begins as an outcry against fascism turns into a plea for human brotherhood, and it's audacious in how fully it manipulates the communicative nature of cinema. Writing about this scene in 1974, Jonathan Rosenbaum was rightly hyperbolic: "Seen with historical hindsight, there are few moments in film as raw and convulsive as this desperate coda. Being foolish enough to believe that he can save the world, Chaplin winds up breaking our hearts in a way that no mere artist ever could." (1940, 124 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
---
Charlie Shackleton’s ZODIAC KILLER PROJECT (US/Documentary)
Wednesday, 9:30pm
What do you do if, for some reason, you can’t make the movie you want to make? Perhaps make one about just that. This is what British filmmaker Charlie Shackleton (whose 2021 film THE AFTERLIGHT, made up of hundreds of films from around the world featuring an ethereal cast of actors who are all deceased, notably existed as a singular 35mm print) did when he couldn’t secure the rights for Lyndon Lafferty’s 2012 book The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge. Rather than deliver the true crime documentary he intended to make, Shackleton instead crafts an essay film not just about the aborted project but also about its ostensible genre, which has beguiled the nation these past several years in the form of books (more proliferate and hastily written than ever before), podcasts (the playground of privileged white women), and documentaries, stretched out into overly long and often ethically dubious narrative sagas. Shackleton didn’t necessarily set out to do that, but there’s no denying that his subject, the Zodiac Killer, is nevertheless a beleaguered one, though this does allow for the formal playfulness of his consolation-prize-project to take center stage. At one point in the film, over the course of which Shackleton is sporadically shown sitting in a sound booth recording its narration, he explicitly says that he has no desire to rehash the details of the Zodiac Killer’s crimes, something he claims is a minor alleviation of not having secured the rights to Lafferty’s book. Of course not getting the rights is merely a technicality, as much of what Lafferty wrote about, sans a few key twists, has been discussed publicly and could therefore be disclosed in the film. Where Shackleton fills in the gaps are with what he would have done had he been able to make it as originally intended, the kind of shots he’d set up or the sort of evocative B-roll he’d use. What I found most illuminating about these parts is where he would show a location, say, and clarify that it wasn’t the exact location of wherever he was talking about, but that for the sake of the film it would do. Perhaps unintentionally Shackleton is pulling back a veneer of deceit around this so-called “true” crime content that prioritizes what might either be more exciting or convenient than what is real. He explores this more obviously in references to the consistent filmic grammar of other such documentaries, with examples from these films and docuseries side-by-side on screen. This takes it into more film essay territory, which is interesting to compare and contrast to his own creative approach and ruminations over the allure and disservice of the genre. His film is like an investigation, both into a hypothetical and a literal, perhaps in such a juxtaposition becoming something of the ultimate true crime documentary. Or at least the ultimate in the “fake it til you make it” variety. (2025, 91 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
---
More info and full schedule here.
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
Ernst Lubitsch’s BLUEBEARD’S EIGHTH WIFE (US)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Thursday, 7pm
It’s fitting for Lubitsch that one of his more minor efforts still yielded what many consider to be the greatest meet-cute in all of cinema, when millionaire Michael Brandon (Gary Cooper) happens upon his soon-to-be eighth wife Nicole (Claudette Colbert) at a department store, each eventually buying a single part of the same pajama set. BLUEBEARD’S EIGHTH WIFE was also the first time writer-cum-director Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett collaborated on a screenplay and, incidentally, the last film Lubitsch directe d for Paramount before going to MGM, where he’d next make what might arguably be his best film, NINOTCHKA (1939). A Lubitsch movie is always worth seeing, but this one more so for the aforementioned reasons than any certitude of genius—it’s among the weaker of his films, a screwball farce perhaps a little too heavy on the battle and, though expectedly considering the enactment of the Hays Code a few years prior, less so on the sex. After Michael and Nicole meet cute in the French Riviera, they go back and forth (facilitated in part by Nicole’s father—played by Lubitsch favorite Edward Everett Horton—a broke marquise from whom Michael buys an antique bathtub in hopes of wooing his daughter) before they marry, only a little before which Nicole learns of his past several marriages. She negotiates a large prenuptial agreement and then subsequently does her best to get him to divorce her, ostensibly so that he won’t tire of her like he did of all his previous, apparently money-grubbing wives. The narrative is flimsy at best, but as a vehicle for the humor it’s palatable. Critics then and now (me, I’m one from the now) disliked Cooper as the male lead, though he services the comedy well for the most part; a genuinely discomfiting aspect of the film are the jokes around spousal abuse, such as when Michael reads Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and attempts to do so to his own, or, following a nonsensical mental breakdown at the end, he breaks out of a straight jacket seemingly to throttle Nicole, only for them to embrace. These scenes conflict with the otherwise intelligent humor that undergirds the vulgarity; as a critic wrote at the time, “there are a number of moments when the story falls below its own general standard.” I am, however, more aligned with Serge Daney when he writes that, “Lubitsch has rarely come so close to zaniness… Made by a man who is confident about himself and his merchandise, the film is no longer about focusing on a flame that consumes itself, but of gathering up, here and there, left and right, the sparks.” Screening as part of the Something in Your Eye: Early Meet Cutes series. (1938, 85 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
Andrzej Żuławski’s THE DEVIL (Poland)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) - Tuesday, 7pm
Suppressed for almost 20 years after it was completed, Andrzej Żuławski’s second feature is one of the most damning and terrifying critiques of communist society in cinema. It takes place in the 1790s, during Prussia’s violent invasion of Poland, but Żuławski uses that period to comment on the time when the film was made, a repressive era in Polish history following the mild cultural thaw of the late 1960s. Responding to the state’s persecution of artists and intellectuals, Żuławski conjures a world defined by rampant brutality and betrayal; the pervasive onscreen violence is generally gruesome and protracted. The story follows a Polish nobleman who journeys home to his family estate after being released from a Prussian prison; he’s accompanied by a strange man (probably the devil) who goads him into committing heinous acts such as betraying his compatriots in the Polish resistance and murdering random people. Like the director’s later POSSESSION (1981), THE DEVIL is an immersive experience, employing a heavy psychedelic rock soundtrack, shaky and near-constant camera movement, and performances that seem to want to jump out of the screen and shake you. One doesn’t just watch THE DEVIL—one endures it. The film gains in meaning the more you know about Polish history (it’s dense with historical references, making it a rather modernist construction), but taken on a literal level, it remains a powerful vision of a world gone mad. Screening as part of the State and Revolution: Film Under the Boot series. (1972, 119 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Bob Fosse's CABARET (US)
Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St.) - Friday, 7pm [Free Admission]
CABARET starts off with a bang—it’s got one of the best opening sequences in the New Hollywood canon. Bob Fosse synthesizes a stunning range of influences: the ironic, modernist songs of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht; the circus-like atmospherics of Federico Fellini; the immersive camerawork and editing of direct-cinema documentaries (Fosse conveys the high of performing like few other directors); and the richly detailed yet subtly melancholy depiction of a past era à la Bernardo Bertolucci’s THE CONFORMIST and Luchino Visconti’s films from THE LEOPARD on. And all this is in the service of reviving the Hollywood musical, one of the greatest of popular genres. Fosse’s choreography is astonishing in its forthright eroticism; the dance numbers draw out the film’s themes of sexual liberation and exploitation in a way the conversations can only suggest. The subsequent musical numbers sustain the energy of the introduction, and they comment on the drama in a Greek chorus-like fashion. The story follows the relationship between Brian (Michael York), a closeted gay British writer who moves to Berlin in 1931, and Sally (Liza Minnelli), an American expat who performs at the titular club. They fall in love, but the relationship, like the liberated Weimar era, can’t last. Brian says he can’t adjust to Sally’s libertine ways, but really he can’t respect her for the moral compromises she makes for show business. It’s still remarkable that a serious, two-hour consideration of sexual revolution under the Weimar Republic could get released with a PG rating. I wonder how many kids learned about threesomes, cross dressing, and queer-positive attitudes from CABARET. The film won eight Academy Awards, including Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Cinematography (for Geoffrey Unsworth, who also shot 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and Polanski’s TESS). Presented in conjunction with Court Theatre’s world premiere of Berlin. (1972, 124 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
Koji Shiraishi’s NOROI: THE CURSE (Japan)
Alamo Drafthouse – Monday, 7:30pm and 10:15pm
Each crafted sequence of Koji Shiraishi’s NOROI: THE CURSE is a jagged puzzle piece that fits into a portrait of doom. Released in 2005, NOROI emerged during a time when J-horror was slipping from the international spotlight. RINGU (1998) and JU-ON (2000) had been remade in Hollywood, soft and glossy for global consumption—replacing ambiguity with exposition and dread with Dolby. Shiraishi aimed for something different. After years working on projects within the J-horror cycle such as DARK TALES OF JAPAN (2004), JU-REI: GEKIJÔ-BAN - KURO-JU-REI (2004), and the REALLY? CURSED VIDEO (2003) films, it was Shiraishi’s deconstruction of the genre that became the most successful film of his career. It endures because it is utterly without hope—and in that hopelessness, it finds something terrifyingly honest. NOROI resembles a cultural x-ray: a grainy, flickering diagnosis of a Japan spiritually gutted by its own forward momentum. Shiraishi conjures a work that functions less like screaming in a forest and more akin to an autopsy. And we, as viewers, are sifting through its remains. Framed as a posthumous documentary stitched together from the now-vanished investigative footage shot by one Masafumi Kobayashi (Jin Muraki), NOROI is a Russian nesting doll of psychic breakdowns, media detritus, and old gods wanting to make a comeback. While American horror films of the time were preoccupied with torture and easy cash-in remakes, NOROI dives into the horror of cultural amnesia. The cursed deity, Kagutaba, isn’t a bargain bin boogeyman dug out of the mythological basement. The demon is a stand-in for everything Japan paved over in the name of progress: submerged villages, sealed shrines, dead languages, rituals lost to red tape and hydroelectric ambitions. The genius of Shiraishi’s method is that he never lets the metaphor announce itself. He opts for the cumulative dread of uncovering a terrible mystery via news clips, VHS artifacts, and fractured timelines. The aesthetic is pure anti-style: off-kilter angles, flat lighting, tape hiss. The style actively disorients you. By the time the climax occurs, the film has already collapsed the boundary between spectator and victim. The curse isn’t just in the plot; it’s in the format. The real horror isn’t Kagutaba, it’s the ontological collapse between document and fiction. The film’s schizophrenic effect comes from its refusal to honor chronology, coherence, or context. Shiraishi introduces his characters without explanation as to why they will be in Kobayashi’s documentary. Additional pieces of the puzzle that become pawns in a mythological spiral. The unhinged psychic, Mitsuo Hori (Satoru Jitsunashi)—imagine Crispin Glover playing Chuck McGill on Better Call Saul—rants about ectoplasmic worms while wearing a tin foil suit. Meanwhile, Kana Yano, a psychic child prodigy, vanishes like a fading echo while the film focuses more on the fact her parents died tragically after her disappearance. Marika Matsumoto plays herself (from 2001 to 2003, Marika acted as a spokesperson for Ministop, and was known as "Mini Stop-chan"). Each individual is cursed whether they are aware of it or not. While most horror traffics in catharsis—jump scares, last-minute reprieves, monster-versus-hero theatrics—NOROI offers no such comforts. There’s no final girl, no fight back, no tidy moral algebra. Only a tape mailed after a house fire. A postscript without survivors. A hero who vanishes into his own footage. It’s not a narrative; it’s an obituary. Which is precisely why NOROI endures. It wants to dismantle the idea that anything—history, ritual, even story structure—can protect you. And once that illusion breaks, what’s left isn’t fear, it’s a form of grief. Screening as part of the Killer Cuts series. (2005, 115 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]
Amalia Ulman’s MAGIC FARM (US/Argentina)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
Amalia Ulman’s sophomore feature follows a group of documentary filmmakers in search of a story that causes them to hopelessly spiral out of control before they land right back where they started, unsure what they’ve learned on their journey. Well, as Stephen Sondheim once said, “content dictates form,” and thus Ulman lets her cinematic wheels spin faster and faster to the point of whimsical disorientation, the motley crew’s initial impetus for heading to San Cristóbal, Argentina, getting washed away in favor of a sea of relationship drama and anxiety. Exploring these new Argentine environs, the camera slinks through shots, scenes morph into each other, and establishing moments often find a camera affixed with a fisheye lens attached to a dog or a skateboard or something to distort the scenes around us. The world becomes outsized and stylized and abrasive to the point where the sadness of the characters feels almost quaint by comparison, each of our protagonists dwelling in tangled relationships, unrequited loves, and deep insecurity about how life has ended up this way (in a jam-packed ensemble filled with indie favorites like Chloë Sevigny and Simon Rex, Alex Wolff, all puppy-dog eyes, is maybe the most enjoyable to follow throughout). Ultimately, the team’s efforts at documentary work shatter unceremoniously, resulting in them faking a “crazy new fad” in Argentina to cover just for the sake of clicks and likes. For Ulman, it seems, sometimes all you need to do is capture something flashy and fun and bizarre, artificial or otherwise. Ulman in person for a Q&A following the 6pm screenings on Friday and Saturday. (2025, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
Shinji Sômai’s LOVE HOTEL (Japan)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
It’s representative of Shinji Sômai’s singular intelligence that the strangest thing about his second feature, SAILOR SUIT AND MACHINE GUN (1981), isn’t that it’s about a 14-year-old girl who assumes control of a small-time yakuza outfit after her mob boss father dies, but that the film is, for the most part, a poignant drama that respects the feelings of its major characters at nearly every turn. LOVE HOTEL, Sômai’s sole feature-length foray into softcore, or “pink,” cinema, is no less strange, subversive, or empathetic, delivering on the demands of the genre while also presenting a stark rumination on the role sex plays in our lives. The film comes from an extraordinary year in the director’s career, when he released three masterpieces; it arrived between TYPHOON CLUB, a devastating film about junior high students that might be described as a mix of John Hughes and Albert Camus, and LOST CHAPTER OF SNOW: PASSION, a movie that attained instant classic status in Japan for its first 15 minutes alone, which comprise just two shots and span a couple decades in the main character’s life. There are plenty of bravura long takes in LOVE HOTEL too, with at least one that calls upon the actors to play multiple complicated emotional states over several uninterrupted minutes. But what’s most remarkable about them—and indeed Sômai’s work in general—is that the formal mastery is regularly at the service of revealing or complicating something about the characters. It seems to stem from a bottomless curiosity about human beings and what they’re capable of. Encountering this outlook in pornography must have been bracing in 1985—it’s bracing now. LOVE HOTEL effectively turns the pornographic movie inside out; where most entries in the genre reduce characters to bodies, here is a film that advances an almost Borzagean concern with souls. Please be advised that this concern isn’t yet apparent in the opening scene, which lasts about 15 minutes and contains graphic depictions of sexual violence. Sômai renders the material particularly discomforting through his characteristic long takes, which trap the two main characters (and us) in the present moment, and his commitment to medium shots, which keep both victim and vicitimizer in the same frame and inhibit viewer identification with either. And then, when you least expect, the story jumps two years into the future. It’s only now that LOVE HOTEL begins to explain who these two people are, after their lives have been shaped by the brutal sexual encounter of the first scene. This shocking turn is characteristic of Sômai, and there are more where that came from; it would be unfair to give anything else away. Suffice it to say that the central characters continue to evolve until the very last shot and that sex remains a critical part of their evolution; however, it becomes clear early on that Sômai isn’t interested in titillation. The director avoids many of the formal tropes of pornography, eschewing editing and closeups during sex scenes and at one point even moving the camera away from the people having sex to consider the environment they’re having sex in. While his approach still allows for explicit content, the gaze upon that content never feels lecherous or even particularly erotic, which makes LOVE HOTEL as much an outlier in the world of pornographic films as it is in Sômai’s career. (1985, 88 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Claire Denis’ TROUBLE EVERY DAY (French Revival)
Alamo Drafthouse – Tuesday, 9:30pm
TROUBLE EVERY DAY was Claire Denis’ most contentious film before BASTARDS; not surprisingly it was her goriest film to date, trading in dark, eroticized violence that can be a deal-breaker for many viewers. Vincent Gallo stars as an American doctor who travels to Paris with his innocent young wife. He says they’re on a honeymoon, but really he wants to research the rare condition with which he’s afflicted—it makes him want to drink human blood. Gallo encounters a doctor (Denis regular Alex Descas) whose wife (Beatrice Dalle) is afflicted with the same condition; Denis goes on to parallel Gallo’s story with Dalle’s, showing how terrible things might get for the American doctor. The violence is shockingly graphic, yet the narrative is characteristically vague. Is TROUBLE EVERY DAY an AIDS allegory? A Cronenbergian fable about how little we understand our own bodies? Or just a reflection of whatever nightmares Denis was having at the time? As usual for the director, Denis makes you feel vivid sensations before you understand what the film means. The associative editing, the moody cityscapes, and the evocative Tindersticks score combine to create a memorable sensory assault. Screening as part of the Terror Tuesday series. (2001, 101 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Ira Deutchman’s SEARCHING FOR MR. RUGOFF (US/Documentary)
Block Cinema (at Northwestern University) – Friday, 7pm
Most of those of us who are devoted to arthouse films and the venues that show them have no idea how they came to be in the first place. SEARCHING FOR MR. RUGOFF provides the kind of entertaining history lesson that cinephiles like us need to learn—the story of Donald Rugoff, founder of Cinema 5, the New York City movie chain and distribution company that began the arthouse cinema movement and spawned such companies as Miramax, New Line Cinema, and New Yorker Films. Director Ira Deutchman—who worked for Cinema 5 until he was laid off when Rugoff closed down the distribution arm of the financially distressed company—hadn’t thought about his former boss until his name came up at a Gotham Awards ceremony. Distressed to hear that Rugoff had died penniless and was consigned to a pauper’s grave, Deutchman searched out the truth about the impresario’s last years. Deutchman keeps the excursions into his investigation short, preferring to take a deep dive into Rugoff’s life and cinephilia. The number of major directors who first played the United States in one of Rugoff’s exquisitely designed theatres is legion: Jean-Luc Godard, Costa-Gavras, Francois Truffaut, Lina Wertmüller. Indeed, Rugoff’s campaign to promote Z (1969) led to an unheard-of number of Oscar nominations and awards for a foreign film. Wertmüller, who is interviewed in the film, was courted by many distributors, but chose to sell SWEPT AWAY (1974) to Rugoff. In turn, he made her reputation in the United States. The film discusses his marketing ideas, which ranged from having employees promote MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975) by walking through Midtown Manhattan wearing chain mail to running ingenious ads in the newspapers. When a Cinema 5 employee said the ad for Robert Downey Sr.’s PUTNEY SWOPE (1969) was better than the movie, he was told in no uncertain terms never to repeat that statement again. Deutchman succeeds in his quest to track Rugoff down to his final resting place on Martha’s Vineyard, but the real show is the incredible film culture he resurrects—one that will make cinephiles nostalgic for a time when a movie opening was an exciting event every single week. Deutchman in person to introduce the film and participate in a post-screening discussion. (2019, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Jonathan Glazer's UNDER THE SKIN (UK/Switzerland)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 9:30pm
Glazer’s first feature in nearly a decade following 2004’s BIRTH and what a return it was. In what is arguably the finest performance she has ever given, a black-haired Scarlett Johansson plays an alien who appears in Scotland and dons the aforementioned actresses’ appearance as if it were a costume. For much of the film, she roams around Glasgow in a utility van to pick up unwitting men only to lead them back to her abyss-like lair from which they never return. Many of these sequences maintain a hyperrealism thanks in part to the fact that Glazer hid cameras in and around the van while Johansson speaks with these men (many of whom were not actors, but rather just people out walking around). These unscripted scenes are fascinating to behold because they further stress the notion that her character is an outsider trying to blend in with modern society while she goes out to "hunt." Mica Levi’s haunting score boosts the film’s unnerving tone. The discordant sounds heighten the uncomfortable, sinister atmosphere Glazer cultivates and at times, seem otherworldly. One of the most interesting facets of this film is the way in which sexual politics and traditional gender roles are essentially reversed: here it is the men who should by wary of a strange woman attempting to pick them up. There is a strong sense of feminism underlying the film’s dark veneer. Heady, parasitic, and eerie, UNDER THE SKIN brings to the forefront contemporary societal issues and tackles them in unique fashion. It is the kind of film that sticks with you long after leaving the theater and in this writer’s opinion, a modern masterpiece. Screening as part of the Board Picks series. (2013, 108 min, DCP Digital) [Kyle Cubr]
Robert Altman’s NASHVILLE (US)
Alamo Drafthouse – Sunday, 11:15am; Tuesday, 2:30pm and 10pm; and Wednesday, 2:30pm
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Thursday, 9pm
It remains debatable as to whether NASHVILLE is Robert Altman’s crowning work (one could make as strong a case for MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER, THE LONG GOODBYE, or CALIFORNIA SPLIT), yet in no other film, save for perhaps SHORT CUTS, did the director achieve so many of his ambitions in one go. Indeed, the most remarkable thing about NASHVILLE may be how it threatens to collapse on itself at any moment but somehow doesn’t—Altman’s direction of this two-hour, 40-minute opus is comparable to a captain steering an ocean liner around a range of icebergs without even rattling the passengers. The film famously juggles two dozen principal characters and about half as many different storylines, but no less remarkable is the way Altman succeeds with multiple formal experiments that could have easily come off as gimmicky or distracting. Several of these experiments have to do with sound. Building upon the multi-track audio of CALIFORNIA SPLIT, Altman shot much of NASHVILLE with up to 16 separate microphones, seldom letting the actors know who would be recorded directly and mixing the wealth of sonic material in post-production. Roger Ebert once wrote that the beauty of Altman’s films often lies in basking in the music of a room, and by that token, NASHVILLE is a veritable symphony of jargon, offhand remarks, noise, and actual songs. Most of the songs, in fact, were written by the actors who sing them, and another one of Altman’s fascinating experiments was to insist that not all them be good. To reflect the range of quality one finds in Nashville’s music scene, Altman included great songs (like Keith Carradine’s Oscar-winning “I’m Easy” and the classic-style country numbers sung by Ronee Blakeley, arguably the best singer in the cast), hokey songs (like the self-aggrandizing tunes of Henry Gibson’s Haven Hamilton), and even terrible songs (like the ones performed by Gwen Welles’ heartbreakingly naive Sueleen Gay). Similarly, NASHVILLE alternates between a number of tones, ranging from poignant to sardonic to bitter to menacing. Altman creates the impression that he’s discovering the movie as it goes along, which is fitting, given how it was shot. Screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury created characters and situations for the film, but per Altman’s instruction, wrote very little dialogue; that was left to the actors, whom Altman directed to improvise as much as possible. As Altman put it, “We would stage events and then film the events,” resulting in a fiction film that has the look and feel of a documentary. In one way, NASHVILLE is a documentary about post-60s political disillusion in America—one significant through line comes in the form of campaign speeches by an erstwhile third-party presidential candidate named Hal Philip Walker, who roams the city in a tour bus, blasting calls for political upheaval. The movie ends at a Walker campaign rally that goes catastrophically wrong, then regains ground through the giant sing-along of another Carradine-penned number that would seem to contradict the spirit of liberty that’s run through the epic poem that preceded it. For even a few minutes after the credits end, the song’s haunting refrain repeats: “You may say that I ain’t free, but it don’t worry me.” Screening at Alamo Drafthouse as part of the Alamo Time Capsule 1975 series and at Doc Films as part of the Doc and Roll: Rockstars of the Silver Screen series. (1975, 160 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Luke Lorentzen's A STILL SMALL VOICE (US/Documentary)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Sunday, 1pm
Mati, the principal subject of A STILL SMALL VOICE, is a woman in training to be a hospital chaplain; the movie follows her over the course of her residency in New York City. While Mati’s training (like her future career) is surely filled with heart-rending interactions with patients and families, director Luke Lorentzen includes only a few of these in the film. His focus, rather, is on the more prosaic aspects of Mati’s professional development: meetings with her fellow interns, one-on-one sessions with her program adviser, moments of much-needed downtime when she learns to dissociate herself from her demanding work. The purpose of Lorentzen’s approach is to show that caregiving isn’t a skill one comes to naturally but arrives at after extensive training; apparently, providing emotional support to people in critical situations is as fine an art as surgery or any other aspect of modern medicine. Lorentzen considers the bureaucratic framework that ensures professionalism amongst chaplains, with scenes in which Mati and other interns review their strategies, take guidance, and consider ways to improve. It can be a little unnerving to think that empathy can be monitored and finessed in such a clinical fashion, that bureaucracy can penetrate some of our most human emotional instincts. A STILL SMALL VOICE presents this phenomenon without directorial comment, leaving all the reflection to the subjects—Lorentzen advances a style that’s fairly clinical itself, with lots of static long takes that make the film occasionally suggest a European arthouse drama. And like many an emotionally withholding art film, A STILL SMALL VOICE offers an eruption in its final act, when the tension between Mati and her advisor reaches its breaking point. Some may leave the film with negative feelings toward the advisor, but I don’t think that was Lorentzen’s intent. Instead, I think the point is to show that people in essential, high-stress jobs are simply human like the rest of us. Followed by a Q&A with Mati Engel. (2023, 93 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Payal Kapadia's ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT (France/India/Italy/Netherlands/Luxembourg)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Saturday, 7pm
Premiering as the first Indian film in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in thirty years, Payal Kapadia’s sophomore feature—and her first official foray into fiction filmmaking—dazzles with a confidence of voice and spirit that continues her emerging canon of poetic and politically charged narratives. Kapadia’s vision of feminine perseverance through lives of longing crafts a sprawling and complex vision of Mumbai as a nocturnal city that shines menacingly with wonder and opportunity. Voices that open the film tell us of the entrancing promise of money and stability that can be found in Mumbai, yet such gifts can only realistically be bestowed on the lucky few. For everyone else, you may end up like Prabha (Kani Kusruti) or Anu (Divya Prabha), two women living together and working together at the same hospital, each with varying levels of dedication to their work. Kapadia’s slice-of-life storytelling mode often finds these two at their most intimate and vulnerable in silent moments alone, each desperately working to take in the overwhelming world and circumstances around them. Prabha is stuck in time, her husband working abroad in Germany, with no attempts to contact her in months, save for a recent delivery of a rice cooker; Anu is conversely fixated on the promise of future love, with her nights spent with her new love—the charming Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon)—embarking on that most epic of quests: trying to find a place to hook up. Just like her previous film A NIGHT OF KNOWING NOTHING (2021), the repressive politics of mainstream Indian society find themselves hideously seeped into the fabric of the story, most prominently with Shiaz’s Muslim faith becoming a roadblock for any future life with Anu in an overtly Hindu nationalist society. Yet love, lust, and independence fight their way through to Kapadia’s hopeful ending, where a trip away from Mumbai literally uproots our protagonists from the horrors of living lives of passivity, and provides them each with opportunities to finally move forward in their respective lives. The gift of Kapadia’s film is in how major of a work it feels even with such slight and understated tools, the power of these emotional bubbles filling up to the point of bursting in ways cathartic and mystical and joyously communal. (2024, 110 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
Stanley Kubrick’s BARRY LYNDON (UK)
Alamo Drafthouse – See Venue website for showtimes
Borrowing many of the 18th century costumes directly from European museums and selecting his score after listening (allegedly) to every piece of 18th century music ever recorded, Stanley Kubrick brought an unprecedented level of verisimilitude to the historical drama with BARRY LYNDON. But rather than revel in the details for their own sake, Kubrick used them to create the eerie effect of a past existing autonomously from us as something like an alien planet--which may explain why Jonathan Rosenbaum has called the film a follow-up of sorts to 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Rosenbaum has singled out "John Alcott['s] slow backward zooms" as key to the movie's impact, since they "distance us, both historically and emotionally, from its rambling picaresque narrative." Kubrick manages another great distancing effect with the film's wry, clinical-sounding narration (read by Michael Hordern), which often explains the action before it occurs. This has the immediate impact of making the spectacular, pageant-like mise-en-scene feel anticlimactic: It would be a fine nose-thumbing gesture in itself, but the movie is more complicated than that. Beneath the pomp and technical perfection (This is also the film for which Kubrick developed a special lens that allowed him to shoot scenes entirely by candlelight) is a fable about one man's rise and fall along the conventions of his time. Since the conventions themselves remain just beyond comprehension, Ryan O'Neal, as the title character, seems less of an antihero upon repeated viewings and more of a tragic figure—every bit the victim of systems beyond his control as Dave Bowman in 2001. Screening as part of the Alamo Time Capsule 1975 series. (1975, 184 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
📽️ ALSO SCREENING
âš« Alamo Drafthouse
Gary Kent’s 1976 film THE PYRAMID (93 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday, 9:30pm, as part of the Weird Wednesday series. More info here.
âš« Bedsheet Cinema
Bedsheet Cinema presents Robert Bresson’s 1956 film A MAN ESCAPED (99 min, Digital Projection) on Sunday at dusk. The screening takes place at 1737 N. Sawyer Ave. and is open to the public. More info here.
âš« Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
Vera Brunner-Sung’s 2024 film BITTERROOT (87 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday, 7pm (pre-screening reception starts at 6:30pm), with Brunner-Sung and actor Wa Yang in person for a post-screening discussion and Q&A. Free admission. Note that this event will be held at Annie May Swift Hall. More info here.
âš« Chicago Filmmakers
SO LOVELY TO BE: The Everyday Poetics of Sandra Davis screens Friday at 7pm. The program includes two parts: Sound Films at 7pm and Silent Films at 8pm All films will be shown on 16mm. Davis in person for a post-screening Q&A. More info here.
âš« Chicago Public Library
View all screenings taking place at Chicago Public Library branches here.
âš« Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Jean-Claude Rousseau’s short films KEEP IN TOUCH (1987, 25 min, 16mm), VENISE N’EXISTE PAS (1984, 11 min, 16mm), and JEUNE FEMME À SA FENÊTRE LISANT UNE LETTRE (1983, 47 min, DCP Digital) screen Saturday, 4pm, as part of the Entering the Image: Jean-Claude Rousseau’s Super 8 Films series.
Walter Salles’s 2024 film I’M STILL HERE (137 min, DCP) screens Sunday, 4pm, as part of the New Releases and Restorations series.
Juliet Berto and Jean-Henri Roger’s 1981 film NEIGE (90 min, 35mm) screens Saturday, 7pm, as part of the After '75: Women Filmmakers in France series.
Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s 1992 film ANTIGONE (100 min, 35mm) screens Wednesday, 7pm, as part of the History Lessons of Straub and Huillet series. More info about all screenings here.
âš« FACETS Cinema
Lilly Wachowski joins Stephanie Jeter and Tracy Baim for an exclusive screening of the series Work in Progress, followed by a discussion. VIP ticket holders are invited to arrive early and mingle with host Rich Moskal and Jeter and Baim, and enjoy complimentary beer and wine. Note that the event is sold out.
Several screenings as part of the 6th Lithuanian Documentary Film Festival take place on Saturday. More info about the festival, including screenings at other Chicagoland venues, here.
FACETS Anime Club’s Wild Boys. Wild Dubs double feature screens Thursday starting at 7pm. Free and exclusive to Film Club Members. More info on all screenings here.
âš« Gene Siskel Film Center
Anthony Schatteman’s 2024 film YOUNG HEARTS (99 min, DCP Digital) continues screening this week.
The SAIC Film, Video, New Media, Animation, and Sound Festival begins Wednesday and runs through Saturday, May 10. More info on all screenings here.
âš« Leather Archives & Museum
Arch Brown’s 1973 film THE NIGHT BEFORE (72 min, Digital Projection) screens Thursday, 7pm, a Bijou Video presentation programmed by Scott Potis. More info here.
âš« Music Box Theatre
David Cronenberg’s 2024 film THE SHROUDS (119 min, DCP Digital) and François Ozon’s 2024 film WHEN FALL IS COMING (102 min, DCP Digital) continue screening this week.
Helmut Herbst’s 2006 film THE CATHEDRAL OF NEW EMOTIONS (60 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday and Saturday, midnight, as part of the Animation Adventures series. More information on all screenings here.
âš« Sisters in Cinema Media Arts Center (2310 E. 75th St.)
Tolu Adeniji’s shorts program ALTERED STATES OF CONNECTION screens Sunday, 1pm, as part of the Reel Innovators: Shorts Showcase + Training Incubator. The block features Adeniji’s films RED HANDS and A STRANGE PEACE. A free reception will be held before and after the screening. More info here.
âš« VDB TV (Virtual)
Selections from the Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive, in conjunction with the announcement of the Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive Collection, streams free on VDB TV. More info here.
CINE-LIST: May 2, 2025 - May 8, 2025
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, Kyle Cubr, John Dickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Shaun Huhn, Ben Kaye, Joshua Minsoo Kim