Due to ongoing technical issues, this week’s Cine-File email will not be sent out. We’re working to resolve the problem, but in the meantime, please help spread the word that our latest listings and write-ups are available as always here on cinefile.info.
📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING
Chantal Akerman's D'EST (FROM THE EAST) (Belgium/France/Portugal/Documentary)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Sunday, 7pm
Chantal Akerman said she wanted to travel around Eastern Europe and shoot everything that moved her, so she did. The result, D'EST (From the East) is part ethnographic documentary and part neorealism—a travelogue from East Germany to Moscow in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. People-watching is one of Akerman's many talents. In some scenes she is a flaneuse—a woman, hidden from view, who follows the paths of unknowing subjects through city streets; in others she is seen, and acknowledged by her subjects, although often its more of an unsurprised glance than an acting out for the camera. Despite all this watching, Akerman's eye is not oppressive; her gaze comes from below, elevating and empathizing with the people she shoots. D'EST is in many ways much like an exhibition of stunning photographs or perhaps a meditative and somber Jacques Tati film; the scenes Akerman captures are at times so perfectly choreographed that it's hard to believe they are not planned and orchestrated. Maybe this is just another of Akerman's talents—the ability to compartmentalize the world into images both haunting and touching in equal measure. Unlike JEANNE DIELMAN, Akerman's three-hour masterpiece where audiences are forced to inhabit the oppressive tedium of one woman's daily routines, the everyday is anything but mundane in D'EST. Every image is more compelling than the previous one, proving that the more we look at one another, the more we want to look. Akerman's hope is that perhaps in looking we'll reach an understanding. Screening as part of the Encounters in the Cinema series. (1993, 107 min, 16mm) [Beth Capper]
Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky's THE TURIN HORSE (Hungary)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Tuesday, 7pm
Béla Tarr's starkest feature to date begins with an unnamed narrator recounting a central episode in the life of Friedrich Nietzsche. Shortly after he achieved enlightenment through his philosophy, the 45-year-old writer witnessed a peddler beating his horse; the sight so overwhelmed Nietzsche that he stopped the man in his action, embraced the horse, and wept. Several days later, Nietzsche would be diagnosed with mental illness and retreat to the care of his mother and sisters, with whom he'd remain for the last ten years of his life. This anecdote, it should be noted, contains more plot than anything that follows in THE TURIN HORSE. The film proceeds as a gradual shutting down, ridding itself of detail and ultimately momentum, ending on a note of morbid finality. Is this an allegory for Nietzsche's mental breakdown? Or does Tarr see in his breakdown an allegory for the end of civilization? Is the film something else entirely? The direction—credited to Tarr and his editor and wife, Ágnes Hranitzky—is careful and poker-faced; like all of Tarr's films since DAMNATION (1987), it's rooted in slow, hesitant camera movements that approach every action like it were a 50-foot statue or the stuff of biblical verse. The movie depicts an old man (possibly the one who beat that poor horse) living with his daughter on a small, isolated plot of land. They subsist on the little they make from delivering goods from their horse-drawn cart. But when their animal stops eating and refuses to walk, the two are effectively stranded; when a violent, prolonged dust storm kicks up, they're unable to leave their house. The minimal story is rendered consistently gorgeous by the work of cinematographer Fred Keleman (a noted filmmaker in his own right, here shooting in stunning high-contrast black-and-white) and Steadicam operator Tilman Büttner, the muscle behind Aleksander Sokurov's single-take feature RUSSIAN ARK (2002). The camera skulks through scenes or else hovers in place before some elemental detail, such as the wrinkles of an old bed sheet hanging to dry. Some viewers will be hypnotized by the aesthetic; for them, it might feel as though Tarr has stopped time itself. People who hate the movie will probably feel this way too, but it's hard to deny that Tarr and his collaborators have created a theatrical experience like very few before it. Screening as part of the State and Revolution: Film Under the Boot series. (2011, 146 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
Sapphopalooza at the Music Box
Music Box Theatre – See showtimes below
John Waters' DESPERATE LIVING (US)
Friday, Midnight
From the film of his monologue JOHN WATERS: THIS FILTHY WORLD: "When I was growing up, 'Art' meant 'dirty,' which is the way it should be as far as I'm concerned." Art isn't as dirty as it used to be, and dirt isn't as arty as it should be. DESPERATE LIVING, a Douglas Sirk-style melodrama welded to a Jean Genet rewrite of THE WIZARD OF OZ, is the best kind of arty dirt. It's a comedy. Compare and contrast the genital mutilation scene here with the one in ANTICHRIST, where von Trier plays it straight and uses a great deal more blood. Sure enough, the scene is both harrowing and disgusting. But the spectacle of Mole McHenry removing their appendage with the help of pruning shears and a hungry dog in DESPERATE LIVING isn't merely disgusting. It's also in genuinely bad taste. Uniquely bad taste. Which is why, even after decades of witless, raunchy comedies and solemnly bloody torture porn, Waters' masterpiece still makes us feel dirty. God bless the Pope of Trash. (1977, 90 min, 35mm) [Rob Christopher]
---
Angela Robinson's D.E.B.S. (US)
Thursday, 9:45pm
Discipline. Energy. Beauty. Strength. Hidden within the SATs is a secret espionage aptitude test. Score high, and you’re recruited into a college that doesn’t exist, trained to be an American spy. That’s the premise behind D.E.B.S., a sly, candy-coated subversion. Angela Robinson, a Chicago native known for her work on The L Word and True Blood, has long celebrated queer identity and POC visibility. Her first short, CHICKULA: TEENAGE VAMPIRE, premiered at LGBTQ festivals in 1995. She continued mixing genre with queer themes in her late ’90s shorts, and in 2003, with help from a Power Up grant, created the D.E.B.S. short. It hit Sundance, L.A. Outfest, and the New York Lesbian and Gay Film Festival—turning heads and winning awards. The short—and its 2004 feature adaptation—is a genre-spoofing homage to McG’s CHARLIE’S ANGELS (2001) with its own heart-thumping twist. Screen Gems, in a rare move, backed Robinson completely, even encouraging her to deepen the emotional complexity of her characters' relationships. D.E.B.S. opens with spy-thriller exposition à la MISSION IMPOSSIBLE (1996). We're introduced to the D.E.B.S. squad, elite recruits led by Michael Clarke Duncan’s booming authority. Their mission? Track the infamous archvillain Lucy Diamond. Enter Jordana Brewster’s Lucy—a sly, lonely criminal whose expressiveness could charm even the snootiest cinephile. While Lucy’s name inspires fear, Robinson lets us peek behind the villain veil. Lucy’s not murderous—just misunderstood and aching for love. Her hype-man and confidant Scud (Jimmy Simpson) arranges a date with Russian assassin Ninotchka Kaprova (Jessica Cauffiel), queen of early-2000s genre cinema. The date’s a bust before it begins, ending in a shootout that results in a chance encounter between Lucy and Amy (Sara Foster), the squad’s golden girl and only spy with a perfect aptitude score. Here lies the film’s glittering heart. Amy, who’s writing a psychological profile on Lucy, literally collides with her subject. What follows is a swoony, unexpected love story told through dreamy montages and infectious pop. Action takes a backseat as romance blooms, and Robinson leans into joy as resistance. Much like BUT I’M A CHEERLEADER (1999) battled homophobia with camp, Robinson sidesteps overt sexual politics by embedding queerness inside an action parody. When Amy’s boyfriend finds out she spent a romantic week with Lucy, his reaction? “Kinda hot.” When Holland Taylor’s Ms. Petrie dismisses the relationship as a “college phase,” it only emphasizes how rarely the film even acknowledges the couple’s queerness. The issue isn’t who Amy loves—but what Lucy is. A spy has fallen for a criminal, but is Lucy truly dangerous? Robinson dismantles queer villain tropes with care. The coded Miss Danvers from Alfred Hitchcock’s REBECCA (1940)—tragic, obsessive, doomed—is only one example of queer characters Hollywood could only show as monstrous. Lucy’s background is conveyed within this mold, but Robinson strips away the criminal costume. Lucy hasn’t killed anyone. She’s just lonely. Love doesn’t just soften her edges—it reshapes her. And Robinson doesn’t serve us a THELMA & LOUISE (1991) cliff-dive. Instead, she dares to offer what queer characters rarely receive: hope. Because maybe love does conquer all. We’ve seen endless cis-het love stories. What we need now are the saccharine-sweet, openly queer ones—unburdened by tragedy, unhidden, unashamed. Screening as part of Rated Q's monthly film series. Preshow drinks and DJ in Music Box Lounge at 9pm, drag show performance in the Main Theater at 9:45pm and film screening to follow. (2004, 91 min, 35mm) [Shaun Huhn]
Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's THESE ENCOUNTERS OF THEIRS and DIALOGUE OF SHADOWS (Italy/Switzerland/France)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Wednesday, 7pm
Nobody would accuse Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet of being overly sentimental. The duo’s flat, alien style is known more for its inaccessibility than its emotional core. Even still, some key works from their later period find the two adapting more poetic texts that allow for human emotions to creep into the rigor. Two such films, DIALOGUE OF SHADOWS (2013, 28 min, DCP Digital) and THESE ENCOUNTERS OF THEIRS (2006, 68 min, 35mm), share a program at Doc this week. THESE ENCOUNTERS OF THEIRS, a feature adapting Cesare Pavese’s Dialogues with Leucó, imagines dialogues between figures of Greek mythology as they wax about ethics and the nature of immortality. The filmmakers separate the film into five dialogues, naming each section for the actors doing the reading rather than the figures they’re playing, further abstracting Pavese’s text and giving each actor a non-specific omniscience. As is typical of Straub-Huillet, the film prioritizes the text itself by having both the camera and actors barely move, with every line read in a measured, accented sort of verse. While Pavese’s text has a broad focus, many of the dialogues feel like roundabout approaches to the concerns of Straub-Huillet’s materialist style. In the fifth section, two hunters consider their forebears and their relationship with the divine: “Those people knew too many things. With just a name, they told the stories of the cloud, the wood, the destinies. They saw surely what we know barely… They knew what things were,” says one, to which the other replies, “They spoke names, yes. So much so that at times I wonder which came first, things or those names." The trans-historical presentation (here, the men are carrying modern-day rifles) that occurs throughout Straub-Huillet’s filmography seems to collapse time such that all land and people become infinite and archetypal, searching for some common original signifier. This approach has a more tragic edge in the short work DIALOGUE OF SHADOWS, an adaptation of a Georges Bernanos short story that Straub and Huillet had planned to adapt early in their career but abandoned. After Huillet’s death in 2006, Straub eventually mounted the work as a solo project. Given its career-spanning nature, it’s hard not to map biographical detail onto the work, a dialogue between two lovers in which the woman (Cornelia Geiser) questions the man’s (Bertrand Brouder) desire to recreate their passion in writing. “Whatever happens, you’ll not be able to put our love in a book,” she warns him, before later acknowledging “it’s not me, it’s you who’ll get the better of my soul." The trees that surround them catch light and shadow in beautiful ways like in the other film, but the lovers' words, while poetically written, have a more mortal specificity than the Pavese dialogues; these are two people concerned less with divinity than they are with immediate, earthly desires. Whatever care they have for history is focused on their ability to be held in the hearts of others. To counter all the warm fuzzies, Straub composes his shots in an even more alienating way than usual, his actors seated and squeezed into the corner of the frame, reading most of their lines staring down at their script. But this Brechtian distancing makes way for a final shot that allows the two actors to finally make eye contact, a small gesture that carries the weight of decades-long creative and romantic partnership, one whose love language was a severe commitment to aesthetic principles. Screening as part of The History Lessons of Straub and Huillet series. [Maxwell Courtright]
Sally Potter’s THE TANGO LESSON (UK)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Saturday, 7:30pm
In tango, as all too often is unfortunately the case in cinema, it’s traditionally the men who lead and the women who follow. But it’s a compelling dynamic precisely because of that tension, which British filmmaker Sally Potter explores in THE TANGO LESSON, an intimate consideration of the relationships between men and women and artists and their craft, and the shifting affinity among them as they struggle for control while also embracing various degrees of submission to the act of creation. Potter stars as Sally, a semi-autobiographical character given her name and profession; Sally is a filmmaker, working on a new project titled RAGE (Potter would release a film called RAGE in 2009, also about the fashion world but not the same one hinted at here), bits of which we see in brief color sequences. She’s frustrated, not just with the creative process but also with the fiscal one, investors ultimately seeking something more commercial. Perhaps it’s these setbacks that compel her, after seeing Pablo (played by real-life Argentinian tanguero Pablo Veron) dance on a night out at the theater in Paris, to solicit lessons from him. The film is then divided into these “lessons,” though they eventually evolve past being such in the more traditional sense. Sally begins to toy with the idea of making a film starring Pablo, and he eventually invites her to dance with him in a showcase. Neither their artistic nor their romantic relationship is without conflict, the issue fundamentally being one of control, both reluctant to relinquish it and thus inherently at odds as a result. Potter studied tango in real life, and Veron choreographed all the dancing in the film. Yet the film isn’t so much about art, but rather a personification of the relationship between the two forms embraced therein that emphasizes the ecstasy and vexation of each. The dancing is sublime, though, as is the filmmaking. Some critics at the time considered Potter’s casting of herself as indulgent, especially as she’s an older woman in a relationship with a younger man, lazy criticism at best and misogynistic at worst. About the popularity of the film among her admirers, Potter once said that, “At the age of 46 I put myself in a movie, dancing the tango with the best tango dancer in the world… It was so terrifying, and so driven by passion at the same time, maybe that’s partly what people respond to.” So yes, there is a sense of indulgence to it, one of zeal and vulnerability that makes it compelling. Followed by Q&A with Marya E. Gates, author of Cinema Her Way. (1997, 100 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]
Marguerite Duras and Paul Seban’s LA MUSICA (France)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Sunday, 4pm
The film’s star Delphine Seyrig recounted that Marguerite Duras’ vision for it was about the “dialogue and faces, and that’s all.” Thus it may appear deceptively slight, but it’s actually intentional, and really with no deception, those two elements cultivated in tandem to create an effect rather than a necessarily momentous narrative. (Vincent Canby’s review of the films for the New York Times called it “intellectually chic moviemaking of the sort that is quite entertaining while it is going on but practically ceases to exist, even as a memory, when it’s over,” which is reductive but potentially also true and indicative of the film’s intellectual command but obstinate fleetingness.) And I say “star” and would say Seyrig “stars” as one half of an estranged couple who reunite in a small town in northern France to finalize their divorce, initiated three years prior, yet Duras’ films are neither so involved nor so inconsequential as to be buoyed by any influence of celebrity. But indeed she does appear, and powerfully so, as does Robert Hossein as her ex-husband and Julie Dassin as the young American woman with whom the couple becomes embroiled over the course of a single day. It’s adapted from Duras’ own one-act play, which she’d written two years prior for BBC Radio, and, being her first film, was co-directed with Paul Seban (who had worked as an assistant director for the likes of Jean Renoir, Marcel Carné, and Orson Welles) “to safeguard the production and ensure the film’s more widespread appeal,” per the Harvard Film Archive’s description. It certainly has more in common with the era’s canonical New Wave films—in terms of cinematography, which was done by Sacha Vierny, and themes of ennui amid a post-war landscape—than Duras’ more nouveau roman offsets, such as the screenplay for Alain Resnais’ HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR (1959) and her later films like DESTROY, SHE SAID (1969) and INDIA SONG (1975), though there are definitely still elements of the formal density and rigor that demarcate her most profound works. Despite being Duras’ first foray into directing, she was 42 years old at the time, and her assuredness, both as a person and artist, is very much on display. Hence when Duras refers to “dialogue and faces, and that’s all,” she is both technically and profoundly correct, exiguous as it may seem. (1967, 81 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
Chantal Akerman's TOUTE UNE NUIT (Belgium/France)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Monday, 7pm
While taking notes on TOUTE UNE NUIT, I meant to scribble “life is a series of moments,” but, in an awe-inspired delirium as hazy as the bootleg DVD from which I first watched Chantal Akerman’s 1982 film, I accidentally wrote “life is a series of movements.” In retrospect, both are true about what TOUTE UNE NUIT exemplifies—specific moments and expansive movements, the minute and the universal. Set in Brussels over the course of a hot summer night, the film depicts several dozen characters (if one could call them that) on the brink of some kind of romantic expression, from amorous embraces to more nuanced intimations of interpersonal disharmony. Its 90-minute runtime is composed entirely of these connections, all devoid of context—we’re privy only to a few moments of each, some of which lend themselves to more obvious narrative inferences (my favorite from this category being a middle-aged couple that spontaneously decides to go dancing), while others are more oblique (such as a young man and woman who randomly embrace in a cafe, then are shown dancing together in another scene). It’s ultimately an exercise—or, more fittingly, a choreographed dance—in futility, but a joyful sort of futility, in which the inherent meaninglessness of our collective experiences achieves some sort of cumulative significance. Life is indeed a series of moments, made up of seemingly extemporaneous movements, and Akerman reflects back at us what might seem obvious to our eyes but is nevertheless guarded from our hearts. Screening as part of the After '75: Women Filmmakers in France series. (1982, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
Yasujiro Ozu's TOKYO TWILIGHT (Japan)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm
Writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda once said he considered TOKYO STORY (1953) to be an outlier in Yasujiro Ozu's body of work. The film's portrait of an irreparably broken family was closer in spirit, Kore-eda argued, to the cynical domestic dramas of Mikio Naruse than to the reassuring stories for which Ozu was celebrated. That reading isn't hard to defend. When you consider that Chishu Ryu's character was probably a selfish drunk when he was younger, the chilly reception he gets from his grown children seems less a result of their insensitivity than the inevitable result of his. STORY is a downer, but it isn't the only one Ozu ever made--indeed, A HEN IN THE WIND (1948) and TOKYO TWILIGHT may be even grimmer. A despairing work that looks and feels as much like film noir as it does Ozu, TWILIGHT considers a middle-class family at the end of its long decline. Shukichi Sugiyama (Ryu) is a moderately successful banker who lives with one of his grown daughters, Akiko; the young woman shows no ambition except to someday go to junior college for transcription, and she's started hanging out with a bad crowd. Soon after the movie begins, Sukichi's other daughter, Takako (Setsuko Hara, in her saddest performance for Ozu) moves in with her two-year-old after a long period of strife with her loutish husband. None of these three has ever been happy, not since the girls' mother walked out on the family when Akiko was three. This crucial fact about the family isn't revealed until almost halfway into TWILIGHT; regardless, one senses from the characters' behavior that they've suffered serious loss. (The first hour positively simmers with negative energy.) In the second half, the revelations hit the audience like a hailstorm; the film takes place in the dead of winter (it's one of the only postwar Ozu films that does), and since so much painful history is revealed, it comes to feel as though it's always been winter for these characters. (1957, 141 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Béla Tarr’s DAMNATION (Hungary)
FACETS – Sunday, 3pm
With DAMNATION, his fifth theatrical feature, Béla Tarr proved himself to be the successor to master directors Michelangelo Antonioni and Andrei Tarkovsky, advancing a style of intricately blocked long takes and ravishing-looking scenes of industrial decay. The film specifically evokes Antonioni in its towering visual compositions and thematic focus on the de-spiritualized nature of modern life; it recalls Tarkovsky in its fetishistic obsessions with rain, mist, stray dogs, and crumbling buildings. Yet DAMNATION never feels derivative—Tarr filters his influences through a distinctive sensibility informed by black humor, film noir, and the world of small-town Hungary in the later days of Communism. The style is hypnotic, inspiring such fascination with the settings and despairing mood that the minimal plot comes off as secondary. The story isn’t bad, though; it’s essentially a drawn-out Hungarian joke. A drunken layabout named Karrer (Miklós Székely B.) falls head over heels with the married woman (Vali Kerekes) who sings at his town’s only bar. When a local criminal offers Karrer a job transporting contraband from across the country, Karrer extends the offer to the singer’s husband (who’s already suspicious of Karrer’s behavior toward his wife) in order to get the guy out of town for a few days. In spite of the heavy air of defeat, things actually play out in Karrer’s favor for a while. But the film lives up to its aesthetic (not to mention its title) and the drunk arrives at his doom in grand fashion. It’s a critical cliché to describe DAMNATION as a decisive break from Tarr’s first four features, but those early achievements inform the film in significant ways. The documentary-style dramas FAMILY NEST (1977), THE OUTSIDER (1981), and THE PREFAB PEOPLE (1982) introduced the director’s interests in economic desperation and broken relationships, which he’d take to nearly abstract extremes here, while his theatrical ALMANAC OF FALL (1984)—notable for being Tarr’s only theatrical feature shot in color—revealed his talent for making very slow camera movements seem highly engrossing. Still, the newfound literary sensibility of DAMNATION marks a distinct change in Tarr’s filmmaking; this progression can be likely attributed to novelist László Krasznahorkai, who collaborated with Tarr on the script and would go on to co-write all his features after this. (Two of those features, SATANTANGO [1994] and WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES [2000], are adaptations of Krasznahorkai novels.) The dialogue, when it occurs, is rich and philosophical in the tradition of William Faulkner, and the passages of intense concentration on mundane activity evoke the kind of burrowing-in to life one finds more often in novels than in films. Tarr shares the “film by” credit for DAMNATION not only with Krasznahorkai, but with some other important collaborators: cinematographer Gábor Medvigy, editor Ágnes Hranitzky (also Tarr’s wife, who would co-direct some of his subsequent features), and composer Mihály Vig. It follows that an atmosphere so dense would be the work of multiple individuals. Screening as part of the 5 Films/5 Decades/5 Critics series in celebration of FACETS’ 50th anniversary with Jonathan Rosenbaum in person for a post-screening discussion and Q&A. (1988, 116 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Ben Sachs]
Abel Ferrara’s THE ADDICTION (US)
Alamo Drafthouse – Tuesday, 9:30pm
Existentialism and themes of human nature and religion are inherent to vampire stories. In Abel Ferrara’s THE ADDICTION, these themes are made completely explicit. Kathleen (Lili Taylor) is a timid doctoral student of philosophy at NYU who becomes addicted to human blood after she's bitten on the neck by a mysterious woman on the street. Her personality begins to shift completely, her philosophical thinking now spurring on more violent and sinister actions; her transformation is her study in practice, and Taylor’s performance impressively depicts her drastic change and inner struggle. Shot in black and white, THE ADDICTION is referential to the shadows of Murnau's NOSFERATU—Ferrara's use of light and shadow in some shots is strikingly constructed—even as its setting and allegory of vampirism to drug addiction feels quite modern. What is most interesting here is how Ferrara, as he so often does in his films, balances modern mundanity with characters trying to make sense of a world that has become increasingly nonsensical; these characters frequently conclude that they can only achieve that through violence and, in THE ADDICTION, the climax is a frenzied vampiric orgy at a graduation party. The black and white images force the audience to focus less on the blood and scrutinize more closely, as Kathleen does in her studies, the human actions driving the occurrence. Screening as part of the Terror Tuesday series. (1995, 82 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
Peter Weir's PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK (Australia)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
In 1967, Australian author Joan Lindsay published her popular novel Picnic at Hanging Rock, and it soon provoked the belief that its subject is a true, but undocumented event. Eight years later, Peter Weir and screenwriter Cliff Green adapted the novel into Weir's second feature film to explore this new subject of national folklore. In the film, several young women and their teachers from Appleyard College picnic at Hanging Rock near Mount Macedon, Victoria on Saint Valentine's Day in 1900. During the afternoon, Irma, Marion, and Miranda quietly leave their classmates to further explore "the geological marvel," and they never return. In time, the disappearance of the girls leads to greater tragedy at the college. Similar to his contemporary Terrence Malick's attention to American landscapes, Weir focuses his camera on the natural landscape of the Australian bush and its dynamic animal and plant life. Often shot from varying low angles, Hanging Rock appears to be very powerful and possibly dangerous. It arrests the sight of the small men and women who climb its steep slopes in search of an answer. While many films encourage viewers to solve their mysteries, PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK asks them to accept it. In contrast, the film's characters cannot face the unknown, and their reactions in turn obscure them from each other and from us. For Weir, Hanging Rock holds the last memory of Irma, Marion, and Miranda, yet no one can interpret what nature recounts. In the interview "Picnic under Capricorn" published shortly after the film's release, Weir described his uncommon aim: "We worked very hard at creating a hallucinatory mesmeric rhythm, so that you lost awareness of facts, you stopped adding things up, and got into this enclosed atmosphere. I did everything in my power to hypnotize the audience away from the possibility of solutions...There are, after all, things within our own minds about which we know far less than about the disappearances at Hanging Rock. And it's within a lot of those silences that I tell my side of the story." (1975, 115 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Candace Wirt]
Allan Moyle’s TIMES SQUARE (US)
Music Box Theatre – Friday, 9:15pm
Taking an unplanned detour from cash-in to cult classic, the soundtrack musical TIMES SQUARE was intended by its producers—chiefly Robert Stigwood, of TOMMY (1975), SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977), and GREASE (1978)—to do for the punk and new wave genres what SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER had done for disco, but achieved more notoriety for its hobbled production and stifled queer subtext than for its accompanying album. Its punk gestures amount to the use of real New York City locations and the casting of unknown fifteen-year-old Robin Johnson from a chance audition; the seedy storyline has Johnson’s Nicky, a street scener toting an electric guitar and the proverbial problem with authority, absconding from in-patient care with fellow teen Pamela (Trini Alvarado), the stressed-out daughter of a city commissioner on a mission to clean up Times Square and "Reclaim the Heart of the City." Turning only the most harmless of tricks to survive, the girls scamper through an unglamorous midtown Manhattan like silent-movie orphans, at one point dodging capture by ducking into a porno theater in a staging that recalls the prologue of SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN (1952). The sense of danger resides mainly at the level of metatext, in the inevitability that the producers will snatch back this premise from director Allan Moyle and squander its renegade credibility. If, decades later, TIMES SQUARE retains an underground reputation, it’s partly for Johnson’s performance—as if the young Angelina Jolie had a streetwise yawp like Linda Manz and a Mick Jagger strut—and for the picture’s acute understanding of the music industry’s culture vultures. Moyle, then a lesser-known filmmaker later famous for PUMP UP THE VOLUME (1990) and EMPIRE RECORDS (1995), said that he developed Jacob Brackman’s script from the found diary of a teenage girl on the New York streets. These anonymous pages might have inspired Nicky’s life on the margins, but the runaways are surrounded by guardian angels, like the improbably generous club owner who employs them and the aptly monikered Johnny LaGuardia, the radio DJ played by a top-billed Tim Curry. LaGuardia capitalizes on the notoriety of a politician’s daughter playing at Neverland on the Deuce, monologuing to Nicky and Pamela—now dubbing themselves the “Sleez Sisters”—in his nightly lead-off, and eventually traces them to their dilapidated hideout on Pier 56, in an uneasy scene sharing a bottle with Pamela during an up-all-night sleepover. This problematic passage, which never tips over into more traumatic territory, nonetheless reflects a music industry that preys on youth and turns precarity into product. Ergo, TIMES SQUARE was developed by Stigwood & co. as commercial fare, so the final cut backs hurriedly away from any adult transgressions—and from the scripted romance between its girl leads—to a rushed climax which gathers the youth of New York together for a farewell concert. These images of closing time, accompanied by soundtrack hit “Help Me” (Robin Gibb and Marcy Levy, alongside cuts from Roxy Music, The Pretenders, Talking Heads, XTC, Gary Numan, and The Ramones), suggest both the forced effort to manufacture a musical phenomenon and the picture’s unaffected melancholy—which yet survives, like Johnson’s heartsick teenage wail, a note echoing out of the blue. Screening as part of the CHIRP Music Film Festival. (1980, 120 min, DCP Digital) [Brendan Boyle]
Bong Joon-ho's MEMORIES OF MURDER (South Korea)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 9:30pm
With his second feature, MEMORIES OF MURDER, Bong Joon-ho established himself as one of the most gifted filmmakers of the Korean New Wave. The film is funny, suspenseful, and subversive, raising questions about the police’s use of force. It also anticipates David Fincher’s ZODIAC (2007) in its narrative structure, which was based on a real police investigation of a series of unsolved murders. Like ZODIAC, the film generates fascination through the careful accumulation of clues and investigative techniques, but thwarts the audience’s desire for catharsis by leaving the mystery open-ended. Set in the mid-1980s, MURDER takes place in a small town where a few women have been raped and killed in a grisly fashion. The local police, led by Song Kang-ho’s incompetent but lovable detective, begin to investigate, but they interrogate the wrong suspect time and time again. (They also exploit the brutality of the crimes to torture their suspects, which Bong plays for dark political satire—we’re reminded that the investigation coincides with the South Korean government’s crackdown on protesters throughout the country.) Enter Detective Seo (Kim Sang-kyung), who arrives from Seoul to help with the investigation. He’s clearly smarter than his small-town counterparts—which creates tension and no small amount of humor—though he too ends up flummoxed by the mystery. Bong’s style is graceful but tough; the camera movements are impressive, but you may not recognize that because the storytelling is so compelling and the details so lurid. The film culminates with a series of despairing sequences that call the entire investigation into question, elevating this policier into the realm of existential tragedy. Screening as part of the Board Picks series. (2003, 132 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Andrew DeYoung’s FRIENDSHIP (US)
Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes
There are moments where you almost feel bad for Craig Waterman, the chaotically average protagonist of Andrew DeYoung’s FRIENDSHIP, as he plods through life, struggling to maintain any kind of stable relationship, be it platonic, professional, or romantic. The problem, however, is that Craig is played by Tim Robinson, one of contemporary comedy’s premier lunatics, a man known for yelling, growling, and stink-facing his way through any and all social interactions to the point of sheer absurdity. Robinson’s comedic voice has solidified over the past decade, primarily through his Netflix sketch-comedy series I Think You Should Leave, but FRIENDSHIP represents something sharper and sadder, a prime leading-man vehicle for Robinson that wholly succeeds by keeping one foot firmly planted in crushing reality and the other maniacally flailing for its life. Stemming from the similar strains of comedic DNA that birthed last year’s RAP WORLD (2024)—along with sharing some of the same cast members—DeYoung’s debut feature is a potent examination of toxic masculine culture’s erosion of traditional male friendship dynamics, a system of aggression and dominance that leaves men like Craig with nowhere to turn but inward, toward chaos and anxiety and constant, unending fear. Craig’s seemingly voluntary isolation is put to the test when he meets his new neighbor, Austin (Paul Rudd, making a triumphant return to theatrical comedy after years in the Marvel superhero desert), an effortlessly cool and collected weatherman who takes Craig under his nurturing wing of friendship by way of adventures like exploring the underground sewer system and foraging for mushrooms. Naturally, things go the way of FATAL ATTRACTION (1987) as Austin realizes that, to put it simply, Craig’s just not that great of a hang. The repercussions of this friend break-up prove fatal, as Craig’s feelings of inadequacy infect every facet of his pathetically mundane existence, most notably his relationship with his oft-neglected wife, Tami (a brilliantly committed Kate Mara, in what might otherwise be a thankless role). Whenever the overall structure of FRIENDSHIP threatens to become nothing more than loosely collected sketches, each scene evolves into a deeper dive into Craig, a character brought to life by Robinson’s gripping traits as a performer, his physical and emotional instincts birthing new expressions of comedic id and ego with every passing moment that oscillate between hilarious and nightmarish (of particular note, a mid-film sequence centered around a drug trip unlocks newfound vistas of comedic potential I never thought possible). It would be unfair to reveal the specifics of FRIENDSHIP’s final scenes, but DeYoung and co. let this tale of unrequited brotherhood lead to its logical conclusion, where loose ends tie up in the most rip-roaring fashion possible, and Craig—for better or worse—learns what it means to be a friend. (2025, 100 mins, 35mm) [Ben Kaye]
Cold Sweat Double Feature
FACETS - Friday, 7pm (COOK, THIEF) and 9pm (PARENTS)
Peter Greenaway's THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE, & HER LOVER (UK)
The film opens with dogs fighting in the gutter over rotting flesh. Following them, rogues and thieves arrive for yet another night of fine dining at the posh restaurant, La Hollandais. A man owes money to renowned London gangster, Albert Spica. As a penalty for not paying up, Spica’s cronies force-feed and cover the man with dog feces. Albert and his wife Georgina dine at La Hollandais every night. Michael, a bookshop owner and another regular at the establishment, catches Georgina's eye, and they begin an affair in the restaurant bathroom. Albert uncovers his wife's extramarital activities, then hunts down Michael at home and murders him by stuffing pages from books into the bibliophile’s mouth. Furious at her husband, Georgina plots a revenge on par with Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. THE COOK was one of a group of films that forced the MPAA to reconsider its evaluation system. Harvey Weinstein wanted Miramax to distribute the film in the United States but knew it would receive an X rating if seen by the MPAA (the film had just escaped an X in the United Kingdom). Miramax went ahead and distributed the film with no rating. This initiated other independent distributors to follow suit, causing leadership at MPAA to reconsider their structure, leading to the creation of the NC-17 rating. Helen Mirren and Michael Gambon were already regarded as heavyweight actors in England, but the whole ensemble is stunning, including a young, vibrant Tim Roth and Ciaran Hinds. Peter Greenaway has painted his entire life. He places the utmost emphasis on color for each shot: a shade of green for the kitchen, red for the restaurant, stark white for the scenes in the bathroom. Between the intense gambit of color-coded sets and the visceral violence, the audience walks out of the theater, as Mirren stated in one interview, feeling "like they’ve been mugged." COOK takes major influence from Flemish painters such as Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck. Greenaway places Frans Hals’ The Banquet of the Officers of the St George Militia Company in 1616 in the background of Spica’s table. The film’s visual style is not the only aspect inspired by the Baroque period. Michael Nyman’s score cranks through the film like a squeezebox borrowed from the likes of Kurt Weill or Dmitri Shostakovich, taking the melody of Henry Purcell’s “What Pow’r Art Thou?” from his 17th century opera King Arthur for the main theme. It’s reasonable to ask why Greenaway insisted on using 17th century art to influence his film released in 1989. There are two possible answers. First, its placing emphasis on the stark contrast between cultured, high-echelon delights and the brutish, dark souls who enjoy them exclusively. The second possibility requires a bit more historical context. With the rise of large industrial trading companies in the mid 17th century, England’s Parliament enacted the Tenures of Abolition Act 1660 into law. This event is considered the first baby steps toward modern capitalism and the contemporary notion of private property. When the legislative ink was still fresh on the page, the new ideas surrounding ownership made their way across Europe, informing art and philosophy. At the time of its release, many saw COOK as a condemnation of society’s obsession with materialism, Thatcher, and her financial reform that favored the powerful. Greenaway has exhibited political awareness since his career began. He started as an editor of propaganda for the Central Office of Information from the early 1960s and continued all the way through the counterculture revolution. Moreover, COOK's theatrical presentation and parable of rewarded thieves echo Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. Like Brecht, Greenaway chooses to identify characters by their occupations or function in society; the cook cooks, the thief thieves, and the wife obeys. There’s no given psychological explanation to their actions; they are fulfilling their role subscribed by society, cogs in a machine. Michael, although a bookstore owner in occupation, disrupts the status quo as a lover and is punished for it. Although the thief faces consequences for his actions, the audience finds no relief. Even Roger Ebert believed Albert was let off the hook too easy for his crimes of the flesh. (1989, 124 min, DCP Digital) [Ray Ebarb]
---
Bob Balaban’s PARENTS (US)
By the time the mid/late ‘80s rolled around, it seemed like a lot of people were getting really sick of Ronald Reagan and the insidious mentality surrounding his whole “Let’s Make America Great Again” campaign from 1980 had worn thin. The pendulum swung hard from the anti-establishment ‘60s and ‘70s to a neo-conservatism filled with such ghouls as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Alexander Haig, Edwin Meese, and of course Reagan himself. There was a strange glorification of the law and order 1950s and its culture of conspicuous consumerism and cultural hegemony of the white, suburban middle class. Various underground art movements, such as hardcore punk rock, had sounded the alarms in the early ‘80s, but by the time of Reagan’s second term, more mainstream and commercially minded art began to address this puerile regressiveness and portrayed it as being both strange and unsettling. BLUE VELVET (1986) explored the confused darkness and malice in suburbia, and EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (1990) saw the loneliness of its conformity. Bob Balaban’s 1989 directorial debut, PARENTS, split the difference almost exactly. The film follows the most unreliable of narrators, a 10-year-old boy, as he and his family move from Massachusetts to suburban California. The boy, Michael, is prone to surrealistic dreams and waking nightmares while his parents—amazingly portrayed by Randy Quaid and Mary Beth Hurt—want nothing more than to have their son just be as normal as possible. Michael slowly begins to fear his parents, especially his father. The audience is often seeing the world of the film through Michael's eyes, leaving us wondering if the increasingly creepy and menacing behavior of his father is real or just the overactive imagination of a little boy who is just starting to develop his own point of view and personality that conflicts with the adults around him. We're never quite sure if Michael is being paranoid, naive, or unfortunately, very correct in his discoveries. Balaban mixes truly surreal and impressionistic arthouse imagery, Church of the SubGenuis-esque satire and biting Yippie-styled social commentary, and genre faithful slasher/’80s horror tropes in a way that even when it’s a little overstuffed and/or clumsy still manages to be incredibly engaging and wildly interesting. This is a genre-bending horror film that takes a lot of risks and chances and somehow manages to be simultaneously of its time and timeless because of them. PARENTS manages to be cerebral and artistic while keeping one foot firmly in the grindhouse of exploitation. You can tell that Bob Balaban, born into a legendary family of Chicago movie theater owners, grew up loving horror films as much as experimental arthouse fare and he drank deep from those influences knowing that this film may have been his only chance to make a film. Ken Russell said this movie did it better than BLUE VELVET, and when my Uncle George surreptitiously gave me a VHS copy when I was 12, he told me never to let my mom see it and if she found it not to rat him out 'cause he would throw me under the bus. If those aren’t ringing endorsements, I don't know what would be. (1989, 81 min, Digital Projection) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
Jake Kasdan’s WALK HARD: THE DEWEY COX STORY (US)
Music Box Theatre — Saturday, 9:15pm
The twenty-first century has been kind to WALK HARD: THE DEWEY COX STORY at the expense of mainstream cinema generally. Written by Judd Apatow and director Jake Kasdan on the strength of a single, mercilessly realized observation—that RAY (2004) and WALK THE LINE (2005), two biographical films about iconic singers operating in distinct musical traditions, were substantially the same movie—WALK HARD’s lampooning of the musician biopic holds up today because the market imperatives that produced its inspirations continue to generate new, insipid legacy plays. Recent years have seen the likes of Freddie Mercury, Elvis Presley, and Bob Dylan serve as big-screen fodder, vying to sanitize their legends, contend for low-hanging Oscars, or simply juice returns on the sales of catalog rights. Presenting the full cradle-to-grave story of fictional mid-century superstar Dewey Cox (who has to think about his entire life before he plays), WALK HARD is composed and lit in the same gold-hued wallpaper texture of so many forgettable “wig movies” of the 2000s, even as it depicts outlandish upgrades of genre conventions like a high school talent show that devolves into a mob scene, compounding drug addictions, an ill-advised experimental studio phase, the blue Force Ghosts of the dearly departed, and not one but two machete fights. Led by John C. Reilly, a Broadway veteran who acted as Amos Hart in the big-screen CHICAGO (2002), as Dewey, the ensemble comprises versatile character actors (JUSTIFIED’S Raymond J. Barry and Margo Martindale as Mr. and Mrs. Cox), comedy icons (Harold Ramis as the egregiously monikered Hasidic record executive Kvetch L’Chaim), and contemporary alumni of SNL and improv academies (Kristen Wiig as Dewey’s first wife alongside Tim Meadows, Matt Besser, and Chris Parnell as his bandmates). Most of the original songs are by Dan Vern and Mike Viola, while the hummable title track is courtesy of power pop impresario Marshall Crenshaw. The spoof template comes from BLAZING SADDLES (1974), comedy mogul Mel Brooks’s send-up of movie traditions that blanketed the popular culture of his and his collaborators’ youth. Without any material to mine as provocative as Brooks’ treatment of the racial prejudice undergirding much Western media, WALK HARD just nails trope after trope with indelible one-liners all capturing the nostalgia industry’s deep laziness and incuriosity about its artists, a hit parade of silliness marching from one easily signposted decade to another. (“The sixties are an important and exciting time, Dewey.”) The two-hour unrated cut includes more scenes in an aimless 1970s period depicting Dewey’s marriage to “Cheryl Cox-Tiegs”, excised for the tighter theatrical edit; the longer version retains the genre’s struggle to develop a coherent perspective on its subjects’ careers and better parodies its disinterest in history. Screening as part of the CHIRP Music Film Festival. (2007, 96 min, DCP Digital) [Brendan Boyle]
Philippe Lesage’s WHO BY FIRE (Canada/France)
FACETS – Saturday, 3pm
There’s a lazy line of criticism that pops up every now and then, calling a certain kind of film “too theatrical,” or saying that it “feels too much like a play.” This is usually lobbed at films set in single locations and focused on heated dialogue in close quarters, entire worlds filled with outsized emotions caged within a location that could, in theory, fit on an off-Broadway stage. Putting aside how expansive the medium of theater is to limit it to just one kind of play being described here, if the filmmakers at hand have done their work right, isn’t there something thrilling to being gripped by nothing more than bodies and words in close concert with one another? This particular label of theatricality, rather, can be embraced with fervor and attention and, above all else, meaning. Perhaps this is a roundabout way of saying that WHO BY FIRE, with its daunting two-and-a-half-hour runtime, sprawling ensemble of characters, and haunting relationship with space and time, feels more akin to an Anton Chekhov play than anything else, and maybe that’s not a bad thing. Certainly, frustrated writer Albert Gary (a note-perfect Paul Ahmarani) would appreciate the comparison, a man practically daring to namedrop one of the canonical literary classics into a conversation, to the point where one of his own children, Aliocha (Aurélia Arandi-Longpré), is named after a character from The Brothers Karamazov. Albert has brought his family, along with his son’s friend Jeff (a complex and eager Noah Parker) to the middle-of-nowhere cabin home of his old filmmaking collaborator, Blake Cadieux (Arieh Worthalter), who has switched to non-fiction filmmaking and thus, has no use for Albert’s words anymore. Naturally, tensions flare, words are flung like daggers, and secrets are unearthed, all in an atmosphere built upon pastoral cinematography and longing gazes filtered through cinematographer Balthazar Lab’s mesmerizing long takes. Though Albert and Blake’s semi-feud fuels much of the film’s conflict, the real engine here is the dual coming-of-age narratives for Jeff and Aliocha, each in their respective fashions shedding away their youth to try and embrace adulthood, even with the less-than-ideal role models they’ve found themselves surrounded by. Director Philippe Lesage has constructed something that floats along with energy and passion while still feeling ethereal and open, brimming with youthful energy while bursting to embrace more mature environs. Yes, WHO BY FIRE feels theatrical, but as far as I can recall, Uncle Vanya didn’t have a dance sequence scored to the B-52s' “Rock Lobster.” (2024, 155 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
Alain Guiraudie's MISERICORDIA (France)
FACETS – Saturday, 7pm and Sunday, 6pm
Alain Guiraudie, one of contemporary cinema's great regionalists—he documents rural life in the south of France as reliably as Bruno Dumont does in the country's northern enclaves—returns to his old stomping grounds with a sublime and slippery work that is generating an unexpected amount of buzz for the perennially unsung maven of pastoral surrealism. It is without a doubt the most attention Guiraudie's work has received since his 2013 breakthrough STRANGER BY THE LAKE, a minor masterpiece that was nonetheless notable for its eschewal of a number of his signature directorial flourishes, notably a certain proclivity for freewheeling absurdism and surrealistic diversion (Guiraudie's cinema represents, above all, a bracingly cold plunge into the murky waters of the unconscious mind) as well as an unspoken and wholly unquestioned pansexual thrust that renders his characters as potential romantic vectors for virtually anybody with whom they might cross paths. MISERICORDIA follows Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), a journeyman industrial baker, who leaves the modest city of Toulouse for the remote village of Saint-Martial to mourn the death of the town boulanger, under whom he apprenticed during his youth. As it turns out, Jérémie long harbored an unrequited love for the recently deceased baguette purveyor, although he might also be attracted to his newly widowed wife Martine (Catherine Frot) as well as their son Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand) and perhaps a few other village inhabitants for good measure. Tensions rapidly escalate (with a singular, devastating act of violence looming on the horizon) as Jérémie settles into Vincent's childhood bedroom and indicates no desire to ever leave, having found himself swept up in comforting the grieving widow, foraging for wild mushrooms, and basking in the uneasy embrace of childhood nostalgia. That last part is crucial, as the film feels particularly raw and vulnerable; Guiraudie admitted as much in a recent Chicago Q&A, during which he explained that the film is a meditation on his own Catholic upbringing and a total exorcism of uneasy coming-of-age reminiscences, adding that he deliberately scouted a shooting locale that would be a dead ringer for his actual place of birth. MISERICORDIA is in part a film about the elaborate rituals and clandestine intensity that come with the territory of queer life, particularly for an emissary of an older generation like Guiraudie. Through all manner of cheeky allusions, the film explicitly links that constant sense of shame and dire need for secrecy to the Catholic faith. God loves you—in a way that is certainly quite gay—but you have blood on your hands, and you really ought to spend more time with the parish priest in order to allay some of that guilt. The film also posits, much like Thomas Wolfe, that you really can't go home again, lest you discover the town to be even smaller than you remember, or that your former friends are your friends no longer. Perhaps they've changed too much. You have definitely changed. Perhaps too much. (2024, 102 min, DCP Digital) [David Whitehouse]
Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham & Rachel Szor’s NO OTHER LAND (Norway/Palestine/Documentary)
Music Box Theatre – Sunday, 11:45am
FACETS – Sunday, 1pm
“This is a story about power.” Basel Adra, a lifelong resident of the Masafer Yatta region of the West Bank, speaks these words to cap off a story about former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s visit to the region, a visit that—while perhaps nothing more than a publicity stunt—resulted in the IDF's previously scheduled demolitions of Palestinian schools and homes to be called off. But this film, NO OTHER LAND, is also a story about power, about needless emotional and physical damage, about the constant barrage of senseless destruction of peoples’ livelihoods that so many around the world have either become desensitized to or have found labyrinthine methods of justifying to themselves this continued degradation of humanity. The framework of the onscreen narrative stretches from the summer of 2019 through October of 2023, and it focuses on the growing friendship between two of the film’s directors: the aforementioned Basel and Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist who has arrived to learn more about the continuing Israeli mission of Palestinian subjugation. The footage we see is, at the very least, rage-inducing: homes and schools and entire villages senselessly bulldozed to oblivion, supposedly for the flimsy excuse of being turned into “military zones.” The ensuing carnage and accompanying attitudes perpetrated by the Israeli soldiers captured on film oscillates between “duty-bound” apathy or entitled machismo, in one instance resulting in a soldier shooting and paralyzing a friend of Basel’s, Harun Abu Aram. The law is, indeed, on the side of the Israelis, so why should these Palestinian children be so upset when their homes are destroyed in broad daylight when it’s perfectly “legal” to do so? The filmmakers make a point to highlight the intentional existential ploy being pulled off here, where Israelis can come and go as they please throughout the West Bank, whereas Palestinians are legally bound to the region and otherwise othered in all aspects of Israeli society (Basel notes, despite having a law degree, he would only realistically be able to find a job as a construction worker were he to move to Israel). Throughout it all—perhaps to actively combat it all—there are still laughs shared among family members, there are still games played in the snow during winter, and the children still play and swing around and try to find some semblance of joy amidst their displacement. Underneath the political mire of the “complicated” banner so often thrown at the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, there are simply families wanting to share a meal together, mothers caring for sons, fathers keeping businesses afloat, and countless young people staring at their phones, because what else is there? That the directing team is comprised of both Israelis and Palestinians points towards some kind of hopeful future where a shared understanding of the horrors at hand can be truly realized (some of the more noteworthy and thorny passages arise when various Palestinians question Yuval’s own complicity in the continued settlements of the region, though the film leaves these points dangling rather than digging deeper, for better or worse). Additionally, that the film failed to find US theatrical distribution, while still receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature, speaks to how open endorsement for Palestinian rights tends to only go so far. Perhaps the true power of NO OTHER LAND, and of this entire story, is the continued resilience and drive in Palestinians capturing the reality on the ground and urgently spreading the truth as far as possible. Here, the camera proves mightier than the sword. (2024, 96 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
Michael Schultz's COOLEY HIGH (US)
Alamo Drafthouse – Monday, 6:15pm
“I grew up in the Cabrini–Green housing project,” said the Chicago-born writer Eric Monte, “and I had one of the best times of my life, the most fun you can have while inhaling and exhaling.” Monte’s assertion is, of course, antithetical to the general conception of the storied public housing projects as being a terrifying place out of which it would seem joy is unlikely to emanate. COOLEY HIGH, which Monte wrote and Michael Schultz (CAR WASH, WHICH WAY IS UP?) directed, revels in the elation of youth, apolitical inasmuch as children and young adults themselves usually are but still evincing a message similar to Monte’s above, resisting any kind of bourgeois pity. It’s the final weeks of high school for Preach (Glynn Turman) and Cochise (Lawrence Hilton Jacobs) at Cooley High (the film was inspired by Monte’s childhood and his time at Cooley Vocational High School, near Cabrini–Green); the story takes place over the course of several days, during which Preach (a bad student but one who nevertheless reads poetry and history books for fun) falls in love and Cochise finds out he received a full basketball scholarship. All of this is seemingly incidental as the boys and their friends hang out at the local dive, go to a party, take a joy ride in a stolen car (where they partake in an impressive car chase through warehouses on Navy Pier), and see a movie (GODZILLA VS. MOTHRA, though it’s the fight in the theater that really grabs the audience’s—both in the film and out— attention), normal things young people do, the memories of which are often bright spots among the relative dimness of subsequent adulthood. Preach and Cochice eventually find themselves in trouble for the joy ride, though an encouraging teacher (played by Saturday Night Live cast member Garrett Morris) helps get them out of trouble with the cops. That, however, sets into motion the events that lead to the film’s heartbreaking conclusion. It’s been compared to George Lucas’ AMERICAN GRAFFITI, which was released the year prior, but, as Keith Corson notes in Trying to Get Over: African American Directors after Blaxploitation, 1977-1986, “While Lucas’s portrait of high school graduates in the San Fernando Valley relies heavily on on feelings of nostalgia, COOLEY HIGH remains grounded in the realities of urban transformation and decline.” Though not political in nature, the stakes in Schultz’s film are naturally higher than that of any predominantly white corollary, as is evidenced by the dramatic climax and sobering aftermath. The film has gone on to inspire many a Black filmmaker (e.g., Spike Lee, John Singleton) yet still stands on its own as an auspicious entry into the coming-of-age subgenre and a necessary corrective to pervasive assumptions. Screening as part of the Alamo Time Capsule 1975 series. (1975, 107 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
📽️ ALSO SCREENING
⚫ Alamo Drafthouse
Joe Sarno’s 1996 film RED ROSES OF PASSION (80 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday, 9:30pm, as part of the Weird Wednesday series. More info on this and other Drafthouse screenings not listed above here.
⚫ Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
Endless Reveries: Water in Experimental Film (89 min, 16mm and 35mm) screens Thursday, 7pm, as part of Waterlogs: Global Cinema of the Aquatic, followed by a conversation with filmmaker Greta Snider and PhD candidate in Screen Cultures, Kylie Walters. Screening as part of Walters' Waterlogs: Global Cinema of the Aquatic class. More info here.
⚫ Chicago Filmmakers
Pamela Hogan’s 2024 documentary THE DAY ICELAND STOOD STILL (71 min, 2024) screens Friday, 7pm, followed by a discussion with associate producer Grima Irmudottir. Co-presented by DOC CHICAGO and the Chicago Women's History Center. Note that the screening is sold out.
Rapid Eye Movements (46 min, 16mm) screens Saturday, 6pm, as part of the ongoing Picture Restart series. Featuring rare prints and a lineup of six psychedelic shorts exploring rapid frame changes. More info on all screenings here.
⚫ Chicago Horror Film Festival
The 26th edition of the Chicago Horror Film Festival goes through Sunday at the Logan Theatre. More info here.
⚫ Chicago Public Library
View all screenings taking place at Chicago Public Library branches here.
⚫ Cinema/Chicago
“Digging Deeper Into Movies,” this time with the Cannes Staycation theme, takes place Saturday, 11am, at Alliance Française de Chicago (810 N. Dearborn St.). Hosted by Nick Davis, this lecture explores past work by this year’s Cannes filmmakers. Recommended viewing includes Sergei Loznitsa’s DONBASS, Chie Hayakawa’s PLAN 75, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s AQUARIUS, or either Carla Simón’s SUMMER 1993 or Oliver Laxe’s FIRE WILL COME. Please note that the discussion does not include film screenings. More info here.
⚫ Comfort Film at Comfort Station
Johnny Lange’s feature debut SPLIT PERSONALITIES ALTERNATE DIMENSIONS (80 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday at 8pm. Free admission. More info here.
⚫ Davis Theater
Steven Soderbergh’s 2001 film OCEAN’S ELEVEN (116 min, Digital Projection) screens Monday, 7pm, as part of the Big Screen Classics series. More info here.
⚫ DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center (740 E. 56th Pl.)
Bill Morrison’s 2023 short film INCIDENT (30 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday, 7pm, followed by a conversation with Morrison and journalist Jamie Kalven. Free admission. More info here.
⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Jean-Claude Rousseau’s 1995 film LA VALLÉE CLOSE (144 min, 16mm) screens Saturday, 3pm, as part of the Entering the Image: Jean-Claude Rousseau's Super 8 Films series.
Victor Fleming’s 1939 film GONE WITH THE WIND (223 min, 35mm) screens Thursday, 7pm, as part of the Something in Your Eye: Early Meet Cutes series. More info about all screenings here.
⚫ Elastic Arts (3429 W. Diversey Ave.)
Grin and Bear It: Cinema of the Dark Clown (85 min + performances),” a multimedia event centered on the figure of the dark clown in experimental moving image, takes place Friday, 7pm, presented by Tone Glow and Employees Only. The festivities will be broken into three programs: an analog film showcase of iconic works from Jack Smith and Luther Price, videos highlighting the dark comedy of Hester Scheurwater, Ximena Cuevas, Anne McGuire, and Paul and Marlene Kos, and a series of lyrical 16mm films from Jean Sousa, Donna Cameron, and Fred Worden. The evening will also include two live clowning and puppetry performances from local artist Justin D’Acci. More info here.
⚫ FACETS
CAFE FOCUS—a monthly coworking pop-up for Chicago filmmakers—takes place Sunday, May 18, 2–6pm, in the FACETS Lounge. Enjoy free coffee, community motivation, and meet Full Spectrum Features staff to discuss local industry resources.
Open Space Arts and Queer Expression Film and Theater Fest present Ludvig Christian Næsted Poulsen’s 2025 film IN ASHES (82 min, Digital Projection) on Wednesday at 7pm.
Maurizio Benazzo and Zaya Benazzo’s 2025 film THE ETERNAL SONG (87 min, Digital Projection) screens Thursday at 7pm. Half of the proceeds support Indigenous-led initiatives in filming communities. More info on all screenings here.
⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
The 28th Annual Asian American Showcase runs through Thursday. See full schedule here.
A 4K DCP digital restoration of Claude Lelouch’s A MAN AND A WOMAN (1966, 102 min) begins screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes. More info here.
⚫ Leather Archives & Museum
Radley Metzger’s 1975 film THE IMAGE (89 min, Digital Projection) screens Saturday, 7pm, as part of the Fetish Film Forum. Co-presented by the Oscarbate Film Collective. More info here.
⚫ Media Burn Archive
Mirko Popadić’s diverse video works screen Sunday, 2pm, at FORA (6435 N. California). Presented by West Ridge Artists Group in collaboration with FORA and Media Burn Archive, the program includes: BETWEEN UNCERTAINTY AND HOPE (focuses on issues in immigration), GET A LIFT OUT OF LIFE (accessibility to public transportation), THE POETS OF COMING HOME AT MAKOM SHALOM (Coalition for the Homeless Project), AMERICA’S GRIOT, an interview with Timuel D. Black, Jr., and STAYING AFLOAT: SWIMMING IN THE TIME OF COVID. Free admission. More info here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
Jeremy Workman’s 2024 documentary SECRET MALL APARTMENT (91 min, DCP Digital) continues screening this week.
Michael Kallio’s 2024 documentary DINNER WITH LEATHERFACE (106 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday and Saturday at 11:45pm.
Tommy Wiseau’s 2003 film THE ROOM (99 min, 35mm) screens Saturday at midnight. More info on all screenings here.
⚫ 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 16, 2025 - May 22, 2025
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Brendan Boyle, Beth Capper, Rob Christopher, Maxwell Courtright, Ray Ebarb, Megan Fariello, Shauhn Huhn, Ben Kaye, Raphael Jose Martinez, David Whitehouse, Candace Wirt