:: FRIDAY, JUNE 20 - THURSDAY, JUNE 26 ::

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Arthur Penn’s NIGHT MOVES (US)

Music Box Theatre – Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am

At the time of making NIGHT MOVES, Arthur Penn was already a director of formidable range. Known for BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967), THE MIRACLE WORKER (1962), and LITTLE BIG MAN (1970), Penn never repeated himself. His films swung from biographical drama to revisionist Western to psychedelic musical—each shift brought a new style, a new voice. BONNIE AND CLYDE marked a turning point in American cinema, showcasing unflinching, lingering violence that shattered taboos and gave studios permission to bleed. In October 1973, Penn began work on what would become his sun-drenched homage to noir. That same month, Roman Polanski started shooting CHINATOWN (1974). Polanski’s film became an instant classic, while NIGHT MOVES took longer to find its audience. Alongside Robert Altman’s THE LONG GOODBYE (1973), these films helped form “Sunshine Noir”—a reimagining of the genre where German Expressionist alleyways were swapped for blinding light and characters now exposed under an unforgiving sun. Still, the ghosts of pulp remain. Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe—those bruised, wisecracking detectives—echo through time, from THE MALTESE FALCON (1941) to THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1996). In NIGHT MOVES, Gene Hackman delivers one of his finest performances as Harry Moseby, a former football player turned private investigator, fumbling through a life he can’t control. He’s a Marlowe type reshaped by Nixon-era malaise: introspective and hopeless. His task is simple: find a 16-year-old runaway named Delilah, daughter of a washed-up actress clinging to scraps of relevance. But Harry’s problems stack up: a faltering marriage, memories of his absent father, a dying business, and a decades-old chess game he can’t let go. Penn’s layered narrative includes a shady stunt crew—a nod to Paul Brodeur’s novel The Stunt Man, which Penn once tried to adapt—that helps navigate Harry’s case. On the trail, Harry encounters Quentin (a bruised-up James Woods) and Joey, a stunt coordinator. They prove that every man in Delilah’s orbit is compromised. Only Harry treats her as a child. Their bond, forged in mutual respect, carries a paternal note. He wants to save her—but his best intentions simply serve her back to the wolves. In her debut role, Melanie Griffith plays Delilah with startling precocity, balancing trauma with innocence. Throughout the film, Harry plays a specific chess match: Emmrich vs. Moritz, 1922. Moritz missed the checkmate. One well-placed knight, one sacrificed queen—victory was his. “He didn’t see it coming,” Harry mutters. That becomes the film’s thesis. He didn’t see his wife’s affair. He didn’t see the real shape of the case. He didn’t see that doing the right thing wouldn’t be enough. The title NIGHT MOVES, which replaced the original "Dark Tower"—apparently too close to THE TOWERING INFERNO (1974)—references both the chess knight and Harry’s stumbling journey through the darker corners of Americana. Cinematographer Bruce Surtees—Clint Eastwood’s frequent collaborator—frames Harry through windows and mirrors, isolating him visually. As Harry begins to grasp the bigger picture, the lens pulls wide. When the case finally unravels, Penn leaves us with a haunting image: a boat circling endlessly, Harry alone, adrift, locked in a loop of regret. When Paula (Jennifer Warren) says, “Why can’t you be content? You solved the case,” Harry answers, “I didn’t solve anything.” That line lands like a gut punch—pure 1970s nihilism. In Vietnam-era noir, you didn’t need a dangerous woman to lead you astray. The protagonists did that just fine on their own. NIGHT MOVES isn’t just a mystery. It’s a meditation on missed signals, personal failure, and the tragic cost of clarity that comes too late. Screening as part of the Films of Gene Hackman series. (1975, 100 min, 35mm) [Shaun Huhn]

Mikio Naruse’s LIGHTNING (Japan)

Chicago Film Society at the Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 6pm

There are few directors whose focus on domestic dramas were as artfully handled as Mikio Naruse. His female protagonists seem to drip with a sadness that extends beyond their particular troubles to an existential cry from the depths of their oppressed womanhood. A master of melodrama, Naruse knew how to leaven the despair with at least one redeeming relationship, but the dark clouds still remain long after the final fade. LIGHTNING, a mid-career film for the director based on a novel by Fumiko Hayashi, contains all the typical elements of a Naruse film, but dialed up to soap-opera levels. The set-up is almost comic, dealing as it does with four siblings with four different fathers, and a mother whose main concern is to get them all married off. The central character, Kiyoko (Hideko Takamine), is a modern woman. She eschews the traditional kimono in favor of breezy Western-style clothes, has a job as a tour guide, and seems positively allergic to men, whom she regards with disgust. No wonder. Her brother is an uncouth layabout, her brother-in-law is a drunkard, and the man her mother wants her to marry is after her widowed sister’s money. There are also not-so-subtle suggestions that Kiyoko is a lesbian, though Naruse backs away from this avenue into a more crowd-pleasing hetero attraction. If the actors and direction hadn’t been so earnest, the comic possibilities of the scenario might have elevated this film out of its confused tone. What I found myself admiring the most was the cinematography of Shigeyoshi Mine. The compositions seem influenced by classical framing in fine art and ukiyo-e master Hokusai’s portraiture and prints of everyday life. Indeed, near the end of the film, Kiyoko is asked by her possible love interest whether she, a Tokyo native, is from picturesque Yamaguchi, reasoning that only people from beautiful places have beautiful eyes. The tawdriness of the story, mixed with a feminist message and kitchen sink drama really shouldn’t have worked, but thanks to some fine acting and visual richness, it does. (1952, 87 min, 35mm) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Robert Altman Centennial

Gene Siskel Film Center – See below for showtimes

Robert Altman's McCABE & MRS. MILLER (US)
Saturday, 2pm
Existing in a middle ground between the life-affirming qualities of the Vancouver landscape where it was shot and his own self-loathing, anti-human biases, McCABE & MRS. MILLER is probably Robert Altman's most satisfying work. Roger Ebert, who can be credited with perpetuating much of the film's initial success, called it "an elegy for the dead," but as it progresses McCABE feels more like an elegy for the living; it's a film about misdirected intentions, poorly communicated emotions, and failed opportunities. Warren Beatty is a gambler and Julie Christie a prostitute in the mining town of Presbyterian Church, where they build a brothel as the rest of the infrastructure goes up around them. The town begins to fall apart as a major mining corporation takes interest in the town's financial prospects, and the lives of simple men and women are disrupted. Shot almost entirely in sequential order (by Vilmos Zsigmond, who may have a better feel for the zoom lens than any other cinematographer), McCABE & MRS. MILLER is a slow burning grumble: nobody raises their voice in anger, but Warren Beatty throws his eyes to the ground and worries about the town's lack of poetry, and as everything falls apart, everyone seems more and more helpless. As it moves along, it feels like the shot of Henry Fonda leaning back on a chair in MY DARLING CLEMENTINE (1946), but were he plucked out of Ford's film and thrown into Altman's, Fonda wouldn't be so hopeful, the name Clementine would bring him less solace, and he'd be leaning back in exhaustion. The whole thing suggests that just as the modern world we know is coming into existence, it has already failed. (1971, 120 min, 35mm) [Julian Antos]
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Robert Altman’s IMAGES (UK)
Wednesday, 6pmThe least mural-like film of Robert Altman’s ‘70s period, IMAGES nonetheless advances a fascinating approach to widescreen filmmaking; it will surely benefit from big-screen presentation. The movie finds Altman consciously working against the strengths he’d developed in M*A*S*H (1970), BREWSTER McCLOUD (1970), and McCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971), limiting his cast to only a half-dozen actors and creating mostly minimalist, rather than maximalist, compositions. It’s his homage to Ingmar Bergman—specifically the Bergman of the “Silence of God” trilogy and PERSONA (1966)—a chamber drama about mental illness, marriage, and the creative process that’s set in a stunningly beautiful yet painfully remote location that makes the characters’ inner turmoil seem more pronounced. Susannah York plays an author of children’s novels who goes to a country retreat with her arrogant husband (Altman regular Rene Auberjonois) to work on her new book. While she’s there, she finds herself interacting with the ghost of her dead lover (Marcel Bozzuffi) and fending off the advances of a friend of her husband (Hugh Millais), who comes to visit with his preadolescent daughter. In addition to Bergman, IMAGES evokes Roman Polanski’s REPULSION (1965) and Alain Resnais’ LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD (1961) in how Altman uses film form to convey the heroine’s unstable grasp on reality, employing shocking edits that reflect her jumps between fantasy and unadulterated experience. This may be the closest Altman got to making a horror movie, so it’s telling that it contains no villains; even when trying to scare audiences, he couldn’t drop his bemused affection for his characters. IMAGES isn’t devoid of humor (which is where it differs markedly from Bergman’s work), as the writer-director peppers the dialogue with corny jokes to keep things from getting overly serious. Still, the film feels relatively cold for Altman (maybe it’s all the negative space in the mise-en-scène?), which would make it feel like an outlier in his filmography if not for the earthy, spontaneous performances. (1972, 104 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Our Heavenly Bodies: Picture Restart 16mm Series (Shorts)

Chicago Filmmakers – Saturday, 6pm

“I felt a little queer today,” says an animated man surprised by this personal revelation of his sexual and romantic preferences. Perhaps that’s how it all starts, just feeling a little queer and going from there. Paul Kim and Lew Gifford’s QUEERDOM (1978, 8 min, 16mm) explicates on this possibility, featuring a man beginning to realize he’s queer and eventually embracing his identity as such. If the animation style feels similar to that of Schoolhouse Rock, it’s because Kim and Gifford worked on the series. This might be similarly educational, but certainly differentiated by a Medusa-like flow of penises atop the man’s head. The program takes its name from Karen Aqua’s HEAVENLY BODIES (1980, 4 min, 16mm), in which primitive, Matisse-esque figures embrace and transform. As this edition of the Picture Restart series focuses on “expressly queer films,” per the notes, it might seem that the two figures are both women; however the beauty of this ostensibly simple animation, rendered in bright, primary colors, is what it expresses about a cosmic love that transcends any kind of labeling. Being such a visual medium, cinema often embraces gender stereotypes as visual indicators. For example, fishnet stockings and a sexy high heel on a shapely leg would usually belong to a beautiful woman. Eileen Nelson’s NIGHTLIVES (1985, 6 min, 16mm) explores these assumptions vis-à-vis two people preparing for a date, their faces unseen and thus their genders not revealed until the very end; the film then subverts them, all with a velvety 80s New Wave aesthetic. Such an essential part of any pride celebrations are the parades, which two films in the program expand on, one via experimental means and the other more straightforward. Zack Stiglicz’s ARISTOPHANES ON BROADWAY (1991, 9 min, 16mm) depicts attendees of Chicago’s 1991 Pride Parade in a high contrast color negative, over which Stiglicz “ruminates on the story that appears in Plato’s Symposium (or Hedwig and the Angry Inch) that tells of an original human form outside of gender, falling to earth and splintering in all these beautiful ways, producing people drawn to each other perpetually, the very source of yearning for our other halves,” per the program description. It’s pulsing and magnetic, making an urban pride celebration the stuff of timeless mythos. Alternately but no less impactfully, Ronald Chase’s PARADE (1972, 13 min, 16mm) doesn’t employ any experimental techniques but is subversive and historic for its depiction of the first official Gay Pride Parade in San Francisco. Cutting between footage of the euphoric celebration and interviewees speaking about their respective stories, it captures both the rapturous joy and individual nuances that make such an event as powerful as it is. The film was once believed to be lost for 50 years; now here it is, a reminder for those who feel a little queer today and every other day that they’ve never been alone. [Kat Sachs]

Nicholas Ray's THE LUSTY MEN (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Thursday, 6pm

A bare synopsis of THE LUSTY MEN makes it sounds like a standard-issue sports movie: a head-strong wannabe with dreams of fame and fortune, a grizzled veteran itching to get back in the game, a love triangle that threatens everything inside and outside the stadium. Much of the rodeo footage comes from stock shots so poorly integrated that they may as well be kinescope discards. The screenplay is functional and nothing more, chiefly notable for its power to inculcate the audience with the conviction that 'rodeo' is a verb as much as a noun. And yet I know no one who has failed to come away from THE LUSTY MEN reporting anything less than total emotional devastation. THE LUSTY MEN possesses the power to inspire great and unassailable personal devotion. I once hung a lobby card for THE LUSTY MEN in my office and anybody who had ever seen the film remarked upon it automatically. Since the studio has no print of THE LUSTY MEN in circulation and there's still no DVD on the market, I've spent an unhealthy amount of time mentally cataloging the whereabouts of four 35mm prints I know to be extant; the worn-but-watchable 16mm print screened by Doc has its own accumulated history, having been acquired by the student film group decades ago in its first flush of auteurist fervor. I detail all this not for good trivia, but because THE LUSTY MEN itself exudes an anguished fragility. Attribute that to the sensitive direction of Nicholas Ray or the heart-aching performances of Robert Mitchum, Arthur Kennedy, and, yes, Susan Hayward. Either way, it's a movie under perpetual threat of floating away, or perhaps of becoming one with the dirt. Lee Garmes' cinematography, one of the movie's major assets, captures trailer parks and dance halls with an unfussy solidity; they're present-tense ruins for a trio of stubborn ghosts. Screening as part of the Neo-Westerns of the ’50s and ’60s series. (1952, 114 min, 35mm) [K.A. Westphal]

Haydn Keenan’s GOING DOWN (Australia)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

A gem of Australian indie cinema finally being given the international life it deserves, Haydn Keenan’s GOING DOWN, fittingly, feels like a time capsule unearthed from the dusty coffers of cinematic limbo, every frame dripping with exquisite, noxious energy. Keenan’s film wouldn’t be out of place in a double bill with GIRLFRIENDS (1978) or AFTER HOURS (1985), its feminine anger and late-night bacchanalia providing an ample showcase for lived-in, intimate performances amidst an atmosphere of delirious vibes. In the grand tradition of “about last night…” films, the general set-up here is rather simple: four good friends (Tracy Mann, Vera Plevnik, Julie Barry, and Moira Maclaine-Cross) go out for a night of drinks, drugs, and debauchery before one of them (Mann as Karli) jets off to the U.S. with three thousand dollars gifted from her dad. The only problem—the money’s gone missing. Thus, the hunt is on through every grody bar and toxic alleyway they can journey through, cavorting with odious side characters and jamming out to the best rock music the Australian indie scene has to offer (the soundtrack is gorgeously eclectic, and most alive when featuring diegetic performances from bands like Pel Mel and The Dynamic Hepnotics). Do with this what you will, but in its best moments, GOING DOWN feels like a 1980s music video mixed with a 2000s mumblecore feature, capturing raw, earnest conversations with frustrated young people against the backdrop of brightly colored, tightly edited, incredibly loud music. It's a work of its time, effortlessly bottling the feeling of the anarchist youth of Sydney partying until the sun comes up, the stink of last night’s beer practically emanating from the screen. (1983, 96 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Leontine Sagan's MÄDCHEN IN UNIFORM (Germany)

FACETS – Wednesday, 6pm

The story of a fourteen-year-old girl's relationship to both her teacher and her headmistress at a traditional German boarding school, Leontine Sagan's MÄDCHEN IN UNIFORM is a film marked both by controversy and multiple stages of critical assessment. Although popular in Europe upon release in 1931, the film was banned both in the US (to be released only after significant cuts) and by Goebbels following the Nazi assumption of power. It was not shown again in Germany until a 1977 television broadcast, while screenings at New York and Chicago women's film festivals in the mid-’70s generated a significant reevaluation of the film, heralding it as a landmark of queer cinema, with some suggesting that it may be the first film with an openly lesbian storyline. In his seminal survey of Weimar cinema, From Caligari To Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer reads the film as a progressive response to the rising tide of fascism that was to overtake Germany in 1933. Despite its abstention from the expressionism that dominated the 1920s, Kracauer sees MÄDCHEN, along with films like DOCTOR MABUSE and THE CABINET OF DOCTOR CALIGARI, as exploring ideas of despotism and rebellion, with the tyrants of their story lines as nothing less than prefigurations of Hitler. MÄDCHEN's anti-fascism dominates much of the early commentary on the film, which sees it as a critique of the authoritarianism of the Prussian school system and an exploration of the emotional ramifications of life under dictatorship. However, such a reading obscures the film's palpable lesbian cadence. As B. Ruby Rich has written, "most important to the film's reputation through the years has been its significance as an anti-authoritarian and prophetically anti-fascist film… In emphasizing the film's progressive stance in relation to the Nazi assumption of power, however, film historians have tended to overlook, minimize, or trivialize the film's central concern with love between women… One of the few films to have an inherently gay sensibility, it is also one of the most central to establishing a history of lesbian cinema." (1931, 87 min, Unconfirmed Format) [Erika Balsom]
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Screening as the second feature on a double bill with the 1935 Japanese film THE SCENT OF PHEASANT’S EYE (67 min, Unconfirmed Format), which will feature live musical accompaniment by Kioto and Tatsu Aoki, as part of the ongoing series Projecting Homosexuality: Queer and Trans Visions from Cinema’s First Decades.

Bob Saget’s DIRTY WORK (Dirtier Cut) (US)

Davis Theater – Sunday, 7pm

Bob Saget’s punchy directorial debut DIRTY WORK was a commercial and critical failure upon release. After being fired from a series of jobs, Mitch Weaver (Norm MacDonald) moves back in with his childhood friend Sam McKenna (Artie Lange) and his dad, Pops (Jack Warden). When Pops has a heart attack, Dr. Farthing (Chevy Chase) agrees to raise his name on the heart transplant waiting list in exchange for $50,000 to pay off his blood-thirsty bookie. Mitch and Sam decide to start a “revenge-for-hire” business and it picks up without a hitch, but that moderate success comes with a price... Will the powers that be get the best of Mitch and Sam? DIRTY WORK was made shortly after Norm MacDonald’s firing from Saturday Night Live for pointed comments aimed at NBC executive Dan Ohlmeyer’s dear friend O.J. Simpson; Ohlmeyer refused to sell ad space or air trailers for the movie during its promotion. Originally written as a raunchy, R-rated picture, MGM forced a PG-13 rating, “so essentially half the movie had to be cut,” according to MacDonald. In exchange, the studio moved the release from a spring dump to summer, where it fared poorly against blockbusters. DIRTY WORK’s unadorned style, anti-saccharine warmth, and stick-it-to-the man plot has since earned it a cult following. Now, in the year of our lord 2025, we are finally getting a 4K extended cut based on the original audience preview version, with seven more minutes of previously unreleased footage. It’s understandable that critics and audiences at the time might’ve been puzzled by Norm MacDonald’s flat affectation outside of the small screen. His performance, often referred to as “leaden” or “uncommitted,” is loose and unabashedly Norm. His line delivery is accompanied by intentionally vacant eyes, a wry smile, and an otherwise unmoving straight man expression. Yet, the film hurls him (quite literally) into physical comedy that his stiffness compliments in a meta fashion. Norm is the perfect counterpart to Artie Lange’s loud, large goofiness. It also boasts Chris Farley’s last (and dare I say, best) film role before his tragic death. The non-stop, gag-a-minute first act functions as a spoof of dumb comedy conventions, calling attention to its own inanity. Even though DIRTY WORK eventually succumbs to those very conventions, it wraps up with such a sense of communal joy it is well worth getting a little dirty. (1998, 83 min, DCP Digital) [Olivia Hunter Willke]

Summer Camp

Gene Siskel Film Center – See below for showtimes

Paul Verhoeven's SHOWGIRLS (US)
Friday, 8pm
Beautiful as money, Nomi Malone hitches a ride to Las Vegas in this film's opening moments, vividly asserting, switchblade at the ready, that she's going to be a dancer. Already she's a commodity, a body circulating through a network of temporary owners for a price, though this won't be fully clear until her past is revealed near the end of the narrative. Vegas proves exactly her equal, a hometown for people rejecting their origins, a city that Verhoeven shows to thrive precisely on the dissemination of dashed dreams and rude awakenings. Any sense of what a “real” Vegas might look like, how an actual dancer's career trajectory might be completed, is jettisoned in favor of a variegated torrent of imagery drenched in kitsch, in expertly ham-handed appeals to emotional response, in intricate and deadening formal maneuvers. But SHOWGIRLS isn't interested in characters, in narrative, but in glamour, in work, and in the tremendous effort that sexual entertainment takes to produce. 'You like her? ... I'll buy her for you,' the film's substitute Svengali says of Nomi, watching her gyroscopic breasts and buttocks slide around a stripper pole. This is of the falsest of films, constructed out of a series of intersecting surfaces utterly evacuated of substance. Its performers blandly dissemble wide, desperately erotic smiles, force their bodies into simulations of arousal, sweat through humiliating routines of grunt-and-thrust choreography, paint and festoon themselves with lacquer-thick make-up and acres of rhinestones. Verhoeven has always been a master of the physical object, at understanding human relationships as systems of conflicting and merging material engagements, but there has elsewhere always been the underlying hope that reason could see its way clear to an unmediated, somehow genuine connection between real people, could abolish, could transcend the mere appearances of things and give us access to ourselves as whole. Robocop finding, recuperating his family. Doug Quaid claiming interplanetary heroism. Nick Curran catching the killer. SHOWGIRLS will have none of this. It is the ne plus ultra and culmination of Verhoeven's cinema, a film that allows us no escape, that finds beneath every skin and layer nothing other than yet more sequins, glitter, ejaculate, and grime. No film takes American mass culture more seriously, or skewers it more dispassionately. (1995, 132 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Kian Bergstrom]
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Joseph Losey’s BOOM (UK)
Saturday, 8pm
Tennessee Williams once said that BOOM was his favorite film adaptation of any of his plays, even though it was derided by both critics and general audiences, but I can see where he was coming from. In opposition to the relatively naturalistic approaches of Elia Kazan, Richard Brooks, and John Huston (who had directed movie versions of Williams’ work prior to this), Joseph Losey advances an over-the-top visual style that matches the great playwright’s language in daring, imagination, and flamboyance. It makes sense that the film has been dismissed as well as embraced as camp (it doesn’t help that its most outspoken defender is John Waters); however, it’s more complex than its reputation has made it out to be. Like the play on which it’s based, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (whose failure in 1963 signaled the demise of Williams’ Broadway career), BOOM is blatantly allegorical, feeling more like a Greek myth than Williams’ Orpheus Descending, which was directly inspired by one. Elizabeth Taylor stars Flora Goforth, an obscenely wealthy woman slowly dying on a private island in the Mediterranean; Richard Burton plays Christopher Flanders, the mysterious interloper who trespasses onto the island and becomes a figure of erotic fascination for both Flora and her assistant; and Noël Coward plays Flora’s frenemy, “the Witch of Capri,” who delights in making Flora suspicious of Christopher. Williams had intended for Flora to be an older woman, Christopher to be a younger man, and the Witch to be female, so the casting has the effect of highlighting how unnatural the material already is. At the same time, Williams never was a naturalistic writer anyway, and so the casting, in drawing attention to this, feels appropriate, just like Taylor’s ostentatious costumes or the baroque camera movements. These latter two aspects of BOOM anticipate Fassbinder’s epochal melodrama THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT (1972), while the general premise, with its mix of morbidity and eroticism, harkens back to Jean Cocteau’s THE EAGLE WITH TWO HEADS (1948). The dialogue, though, is pure Williams—unapologetically overripe yet often breathtaking in its poetic opulence. (1968, 113 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Robert Aldrich's WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (US)
Sunday, 2pm
One of Robert Aldrich's secret weapons was composer Frank De Vol, with whom he worked multiple times. Better known as simply DeVol, he churned out the theme songs as well as the incidental music for TV shows like Gilligan's Island and The Brady Bunch: catchy, yet generic-sounding stuff was his forte. He worked the other end of the spectrum too—check out his score for KISS ME DEADLY (1955). Aldrich knew that DeVol could be counted on to supply meat and potatoes cues like "Joan Uncovers the Rat" and "Bette Kicks the Shit Out of Joan." A sort of grotesque musical wallpaper, his music effectively magnifies shock and revulsion but without sufficient individuality to call attention to itself; DeVol was the anti-Bernard Herrmann. It's exactly what WHAT EVER requires. Aldrich keeps the focus squarely on Joan and Bette, the yin and yang of "has-been showbiz legends," playing Jane and Blanche, two made-up "has-been showbiz legends." Celebrity and "reality" and fiction blur together more deliciously than ever before or ever since. (1962, 134 min, 35mm) [Rob Christopher]
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Josef von Sternberg’s THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN (US)
Monday, 6:15pm
The last of the seven Sternberg-Dietrich collaborations, THE DEVIL IS WOMAN is as ornate as some of the previous entries but decidedly colder, visually sumptuous—specifically in Dietrich’s stunning array of costumes—yet lacking a certain emotional tenor that may have more so endeared viewers to earlier efforts. But per Sybil DelGaudio’s Dressing the Part: Sternberg, Dietrich, and Costume, “It was Dietrich’s ‘cool indifference’ that Sternberg was most drawn to, an indifference which appealed to his attraction to film’s duality: accessible yet inaccessible, available yet elusive.” That description applies especially to Dietrich’s Spanish femme-fatala Concha, who works her way to fame and fortune as a singer by stringing along affluent suitors. The legend of Concha is conveyed via flashback, a young, handsome Spanish Republican (Cesar Romero) being advised by an older aristocrat (Lionel Atwill) to avoid her seduction, having been lured into her charms time and time again. Unfortunately, in real life Dietrich’s star power had been waning, their previous collaboration THE SCARLET EMPRESSa critical and commercial failure, a fate soon to plague THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN. It’s not my favorite of their films together, frankly due to that aforementioned chilliness, but it is especially interesting because of its connection to Sternberg himself, as Atwill’s character is largely read as being a stand-in for the director, even in his appearance as well as his slavish devotion to Dietrich. A certain resentment seeps through, portending Sternberg’s firing from Paramount by incoming production manager Ernst Lubitsch (the film is based on Pierre Louys's novel The Woman and the Puppet and also evokes  Rimsky-Korsakoff's "Caprice Espagñole; the film’s original title was to be, accordingly, CAPRICE ESPAGNOL, but was changed by Lubitsch). In this light, Dietrich becomes a stand-in for Hollywood, an alluring yet ultimately cruel mistress who will discard you as easily as they pulled you in. As it’s set during Carnaval in Spain, the film’s inherent coldness is dressed up in dazzling decor and out-of-this-world costumery for Concha. The elevated artificiality complements the frigidness, adding a sense of irony that Dietrich’s performance also embodies. She’s almost hammy—mention of the film appears in Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp, specifically called out but included in a point referencing all of the collaborations due to their “outrageous aestheticism.” That’s certainly the case here, but I also think Dietrich’s performance is an element of a slightly self-aware camp, as her duplicitous intentions are never wholly subdued but rather dressed in an over-the-top brattiness that also helps to turn the older man/younger ingenue trope on its head. Many have extolled the film’s virtues, the author of the notes for a screening at MoMA going so far as to call it “perhaps the most perfect film ever made in some ways… If Sternberg is any closer to understanding Dietrich, he is unwilling to solve the puzzle for the audience; the film remains one of the most beautifully realized enigmas in the history of the cinema.” Dietrich also said it was her favorite of her and Sternberg’s collaborations. Maybe it’s somewhat alienating quality is protection of sorts, guarding the nuances of Deitrich and Sternberg’s relationship even as they illuminate it with unparalleled visual splendor (enforced doubly by Sternberg, who also shot the film). (1935, 79 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]

Lilly & Lana Wachowski's BOUND (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Wednesday, 6:30pm

At the Music Box several years ago following a screening of BOUND, Lana Wachowski shared that part of the inspiration for making the film was a traumatic viewing of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. Lana had not transitioned yet, but she had struggled with her gender identity since childhood; she was physically shaken by yet another disturbing depiction of trans identity and queerness as psychopathic pathology. The Wachowskis were determined to create something different: an engrossing, entertaining genre film that didn't criminalize or pathologize queerness. The result, BOUND, is an incredibly entertaining debut from the directing duo who would go on to make THE MATRIX trilogy, CLOUD ATLAS, and the very queer sci fi series SENSE8. BOUND stays true to its genre as a film noir set in Chicago (the Wachowskis' home town) with sumptuous cinematography by Bill Pope, who went on to collaborate with them on the first three MATRIX installments. BOUND tells a tightly wound (pun intended!) heist story centered around Corky (Gina Gershon), an ex-con and expert thief, who meets Violet (Jennifer Tilly), a high femme mob moll looking to get out of the family business. Sparks fly when Corky and Violet meet in the elevator of an art deco high rise and Violet pursues Corky aggressively with big Barbra Stanwyck energy. The first third of BOUND features a series of erotically charged moments that thrilled the queer community at the time with their authenticity, in large part because the Wachowskis hired Susie Bright, a queer writer, activist, and self-proclaimed "sexpert," to consult on the film. (Bright also has a brief cameo at "The Watering Hole," a classic lesbian dive bar filled with Bright's friends from the San Francisco dyke scene.) Things get complicated after Corky and Violet decide to pilfer $2 million from Violet's lover, Caesar (Joe Pantoliano). In a Bogart-esque performance that descends into wild paranoia, Caesar derails Corky and Violet's careful plan to pit him against his mortal enemy, Johnnie Marzzone (Christopher Meloni). BOUND is a delight to watch on many levels: for the lesbian love story, the oh-so-'90s interior design of the claustrophobic film set, the suspenseful heist plot, and the creative visual and sound design that build a lush, atmospheric viewing experience. (1996, 105 min, DCP Digital) [Alex Ensign]

Gus Van Sant's MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (US)

Davis Theater – Monday, 7pm

In a mystical turn about a half-hour into MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO, a Falstaffian character (William Richert) appears onscreen and suddenly the film becomes a full-on Shakespeare adaptation. It’s one of many notable qualities of the film that combine to create a dreamlike atmosphere. Characters wander in and out and poetically remark to themselves while the colorful illusions weave into one another, all set to a wistful pedal steel guitar score; it’s a reflection of the transformative power of character and cinematic storytelling. MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO is nevertheless grounded in the reality of its main characters, the dreamscapes emphasizing a wide world of harsh boundaries and possibilities. The film follows two young hustlers, Mike Waters and Scott Favor (River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves, in transcendent performances), living in Portland, Oregon. Mike, a narcoleptic constantly forced in and out of dreams, seems to be hustling out of necessity, while Scott, the son of the mayor (and the Prince Hal of this Shakespearean tale), is biding time until his inheritance kicks in. Amongst a noteworthy supporting cast—which includes Grace Zabriskie, Udo Kier, and Flea—the two find themselves traveling the country and even to Europe in search of Mike’s mother. A story of unrequited love and subsequent heartbreak, MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO is a significant film of the New Queer Cinema movement of the early 1990s. Early on, the film features a few of Mike’s experiences with clients and interviews with side characters about their experiences hustling and their dreams of the future; it gives the proceedings an almost documentary style, drawing empathy from both the dreamy narrative and real-world experiences. This is found wholly in Phoenix, whose performance as Mike is as compassionate as it is powerful. It’s stuck with me so much over the years that I still find myself wondering and worried about sweet Mike’s ambiguous fate, hoping he makes his way home. (1991, 102 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

John Huston's THE MISFITS (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 8pm

There’s so much extra-textual significance hanging over THE MISFITS that it threatens to drag down the film. Most writers are quick to point out that it was the last movie to star either Clark Gable (who died of a heart attack less than two weeks after production wrapped) or Marilyn Monroe (who died of a drug overdose about a year and a half after its premiere), that Arthur Miller’s screenplay was influenced by his souring feelings toward Monroe (and that his marriage to her was coming apart while the movie was being shot), and that the film’s story of desperate, aging cowboys suggests a death knell for the Western as a popular genre. One might add that, with its pervasive sense of defeat, THE MISFITS also has ties to numerous other films by John Huston, who returned to the subject of failure throughout his long and varied career. Indeed, THE MISFITS often feels like it isn’t about the failings of its characters so much as failure in its abstract, idealized form—the film often seems to be reaching for something very big just beyond its grasp, and this over-ambitious quality can upstage the more human-sized virtues. Yet those virtues are quite real, from Russell Metty’s superb black-and-white cinematography to the nuanced performances from the supporting cast. Montgomery Clift (appearing five years after his near-fatal car crash and five years before his own untimely death) is heartbreaking as the rodeo cowboy suffering from too many blows to the head; Thelma Ritter, as Monroe’s confidante, brings a winning proletarian feistiness to a character who may have otherwise come off as a shrewish caricature; and Eli Wallach, arguably the MVP of the cast, brings a spontaneity that distracts from the schematism of Miller’s writing. (Wallach has a drunk scene that’s particularly memorable for how he underplays it; Huston, no stranger to inebriation, instructed him to try very hard to act like he wasn’t drunk.) THE MISFITS has a classical three-act structure that reflects Miller’s theatrical background: the first concerns Monroe’s character getting a divorce in Reno, where she meets up with the characters played by Wallach and Gable; the second follows them to the rodeo where Clift is angling for quick cash; and the third follows all the major characters as they go to the mountains to round up wild horses to sell them for dog food. The film may teem with wasted machismo, but Monroe’s performance is arguably what holds it together (even though she claimed to have hated her character), playing on her vulnerability to tragic effect. Screening as part of the Neo-Westerns of the ’50s and ’60s series. (1961, 125 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Jim Jarmusch's GHOST DOG: THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 5pm

Were the late 1990s and early 2000s a golden age of cinema, or do I just say this because these were the years when I was a burgeoning young moviegoer? This was a time of reverence for new sights, sounds, and experiences on my impressionable and somewhat growing mind; this was the time I began to turn my eyes and ears to the world stage of new and challenging cinema. I knew EYES WIDE SHUT was important even though I didn’t understand it at the time; I knew YI YI was a life-changing experience that I couldn’t wait to have; and I was deeply convinced I had to immediately clasp looks on some Iranian film called THE WIND WILL CARRY US. It wasn’t just these canonical classics—names like Claire Denis, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Pedro Costa, and others were beginning to percolate in my brain, entire worlds were opening up to me. Even if I couldn’t quite grasp their galactic reach, I still understood their reverence. There was at least one movie I saw during this time that I felt I could get a grip on, and that was Jim Jarmusch’s GHOST DOG: THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI. The film was readymade for my taste buds at the time, with its combined love of LE SAMOURAI and BRANDED TO KILL (both 1967), plus Isaach de Bankolé (who had dominated that last decade of cinema with his memorable roles in CHOCOLAT, NO FEAR NO DIE, NIGHT ON EARTH, and CASA DE LAVA), the great Henry Silva as a terrifying, cartoon-loving mobster, and the RZA-produced soundtrack, featuring tracks performed by Jeru the Damaja and a host of affiliated B characters from the Wu-Tang dynasty. These elements meld into something that, on the one hand, seems deadly serious in its portrait of steeled morality and brutal violence while, on the other, offers a deadpan parody of the hit-man genre and its graveness. In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, the components would combine like oil and water or resemble something closer to Jim Abrahams’ MAFIA! Instead, Jarmusch allows GHOST DOG to pierce the middle ground between heavy and light, making the film another unique entry in its director’s work within various genre formats. Revisiting this film for the first time since it was released, I am more than pleased to say it remains as comically cool as it always was—a gleaming example of what made that era something of a halcyon time for the movies. Screening as part of the Needle Drop: A Hip-Hop Film Sample series. (1999, 116 min, DCP Digital) [John Dickson]

Tony Scott's THE HUNGER (US/UK)

Alamo Drafthouse – Monday, 9:45pm

Long before Tony Scott was celebrated as the vulgar auteur of DEJA VU and UNSTOPPABLE, he directed THE HUNGER—the infamous midnight movie where sleep scientist Susan Sarandon trades a Big Mac and an obnoxious boyfriend for a glass of sherry and the promise of centuries of vampire sex with Catherine Deneuve. Scott's first commercial feature after a decade and half making student films and advertising spots, THE HUNGER was roundly ignored by audiences (it ranked 95th at the 1983 box office) and ferociously derided by critics. Roger Ebert called it "an agonizingly bad vampire movie ... that has been so ruthlessly overproduced that it's all flash and style and no story." (The only unabashed fans of THE HUNGER were probably horny teenagers who sought out the male-gaze-optimized sex scenes on Cinemax.) This reaction is understandable. With its propulsive but senseless editing, its portentous self-regard, its indifference to exposition, THE HUNGER aggressively imports an overwrought advertising aesthetic to cinema. It plays like a feature-length cologne commercial with soft-core flourishes. Ebert was not wrong about "all flash and style and no story." As a narrative, the failures of THE HUNGER are total, but they are radical, deliberate failures. Instead of individual shots building towards a sequence, each frame dissolves into a miasma of details that refuse assimilation into conventional storytelling rhythm. This strategy is evident from the opening scene, when Bauhaus's performance of "Bela Lugosi's Dead" is continually ruptured by silence and spatio-temporal discontinuity. The shambolic New Grammar (or Neu! Grammar?) of THE HUNGER acts as a blood-letting for classical Hollywood. (The nod to ur-vamp Lugosi isn't the only po-mo touch; between Bessie Love's grotesque cameo, the Schubert cue lifted from BARRY LYNDON, and the left-over doves and smoke machines from brother Ridley's BLADE RUNNER of the previous year, THE HUNGER is an undead edifice of allusion.) It also contains a lovely, low-key performance from David Bowie as Deneuve's deader half, grisly "make-up illusions" from Dick Smith, and an affecting, largely non-fantastic approach to its core mythology. (These vampires don't even have fangs.) If anything, this roundly-ridiculed movie has cast a long shadow over its tonier successors: Jim Jarmusch's pretentious vampire comedy ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE probably owes more to THE HUNGER and less to Marlowe than it would like to admit, and Michael Haneke's AMOUR is a bloodless, glorified remark. Too long dismissed as camp, THE HUNGER actually restores an essential aspect to Susan Sontag's original formulation of that aesthetic—this movie courts absurdity with such guile-free sincerity that it could scarcely see itself in the mirror. Screening as part of the Killer Cuts series. (1983, 97 min, DCP Digital) [K.A. Westphal]

Rachel Elizabeth Seed’s A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY (US/Documentary)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

A particular audio clip of French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson is used twice in A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY. In it, he comments on the art of photography, stating, “Life is once forever.” Rachel Elizabeth Seed’s personal documentary is about many things: photography, memory, archive, time, loneliness. It is mostly, however, about loss and how media can both mitigate and highlight that loss; that perhaps it can allow for time to extend and the past to be revisited or revived. The film is focused on the fascinating life and pioneering work of photographer and journalist Sheila Turner-Seed, the filmmaker’s mother. She passed away in 1979, when the director was only 18 months old, and Seed is driven to learn more about the mother she barely knew. In the process, A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY becomes as much about her as her mother, and Seed’s own art and personal life becomes blended within the subject matter. Seed continually recognizes the mirroring between her life and her mother’s; they also look and sound very much alike, blurring the audience’s understanding of the two women. Through Turner-Seed’s interviews with the world’s most famous photographers—like Gordon Parks—the art and history of the medium throughout midcentury America is also threaded throughout, all intertwined into the personal experiences of the Seeds. It’s intimate and affecting, with Seed’s voiceover mingling with archival audio of her mother. What is most honest about the film is how Seed grapples with the way in which these archival items—her mother’s writing, audio, photos—are all windows into the past and yet limited in their scope. Seed remarks while watching a home video of her mother speaking to her as a baby that the audio and movement aspect allow her to recall the event not as media but as memory—"real" memory. The documentary questions the relationship between memory and media, that both are recordings and neither can ever be the whole truth, and that they can influence one another, creating something new. A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY argues there is absolutely illumination to be found in the extensive media archive, but there’s also a melancholy to learning more—that it is a tease of what might have been and is still nowhere near enough to make up for grief and loss. (2024, 87 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Mariano Biasin’s SUBLIME (Argentina)

Cinema/Chicago at the Chicago Cultural Center – Monday, 6:30pm [Free Admission]

A common experience for many queer people growing up is hopelessly pining after a straight, same-sex friend. The trepidation and confusion of that experience are captured in SUBLIME, which hinges on 16-year-old Manuel’s burgeoning love for his childhood best friend Felipe. Manuel (Martín Miller in an endearing performance) isn’t quite sure of his sexuality yet; when we first see him as a teenager, he’s being assisted by Felipe in setting up a van in the woods for a rendezvous with a girl name Azul. But when Manuel and Azul get intimate, the former can only think of his best friend, shirtless and nuzzling him in bed. That fantasy becomes a recurring dream for Manuel throughout the film, an erotic tease that always ends before the moment of embrace. Repeatedly denying both him and the audience the satisfaction of romantic reciprocation, SUBLIME aptly communicates the frustration of harboring an unrequited desire, especially for a nervous, reserved teenage boy afraid of ruining his greatest friendship. Much of the film is devoted to the rock band Manuel and Felipe play in with two other friends; as they jam together, Biasin draws out a naturalistic sense of both tension and bonhomie among the boys, finding in their homosocial group dynamic an intimacy that doesn’t require classification. SUBLIME may not reach the heights of its titular superlative, but in its denouement—a belated instant of quiet, euphoric fulfillment—you could swear it comes close. Please note: This screening is free to attend but currently accommodating standby attendees only. (2022, 100 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]

Alex Ross Perry’s PAVEMENTS (US)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

The first time I watched PAVEMENTS, Alex Ross Perry’s abstract cinematic nesting doll disguised as a music documentary, I was a practical novice concerning the history and discography of the ‘90’s slacker rock group Perry cheekily refers to as “The World’s Most Important and Influential Band.” By the film’s triumphant final montage, I wanted to become Pavement’s biggest fan. Amidst a culture awash in hagiographic film projects dedicated to propping up your favorite musical artist through corporate-approved “truths,” Perry’s sly, introspective approach instead chooses to probe our collective fascination with the myriad ways one attempts to engage with and honor our heroes of the music industry. To call the methodology of accomplishing this task “meta” feels like an understatement; the kayfabe established in PAVEMENTS leads us to believe that, alongside the band’s very real reunion tour, the cultural revival of Pavement has also extended into a museum filled with a vast collection of memorabilia being erected in their honor, a jukebox musical being staged to recontextualize their oeuvre in a new medium, and an awards-bait biopic being filmed to further dramatize and embellish the band’s "sordid" history. As confusing and esoteric as this might appear, the film is refreshingly accessible and entertaining throughout; on a technical level, Robert Greene’s structural editing is unmatched, weaving streams of storylines and archival footage seamlessly through and around each other, creating a collage of film that fits together both linearly and thematically. There’s also heaps of humor in Perry’s skewering (intentional or otherwise) of the various tropes found in the jukebox musical and biopic treatments here, though the latter undeniably achieves the most mileage when it comes to unabashed critique and scorn (in particular, Joe Keery gives a masterful performance as a method actor version of himself going to laughably bizarre lengths to capture the essence of Pavement lead singer Stephen Malkmus). But there’s something worth celebrating at the heart of these artistic tributes, even the corniest and most cringe among them, as they pull apart and put back together how we all experience art in our own unique ways. Somebody might love Pavement because of the band members themselves, or because of the poetry of their lyrics, or because of the atmosphere and energy their music creates, and all of these reasons contain validity. This is a film about one specific rock group, but Perry’s gambit succeeds by extending this into a film about how we all find bizarre, earnest, multifaceted ways of expressing our love for the art that shapes us, as contradictory as it all may be. As Malkmus once wrote, “the stories you hear, you know they never add up.” (2025, 128 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

📽️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Alamo Drafthouse
A Mystery Machine screening takes place Monday at 7pm.

Joseph Kahn’s 2011 film DETENTION (95 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday,  9:30pm, as part of the Terror Tuesday series.

Church Basement Cinema, a program of Christian film rarities from the heart of Chicago, screens Wednesday, 9:30pm, as part of the Weird Wednesday series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Chicago Filmmakers
Jon Silver’s 2024 film THE PREMIERE (81 min, Digital Projection) screens Friday, 7pm, followed by a Q&A with the director. Co-presented with IFA Chicago. More info here.

⚫ Chicago Film Society
Sara Sowell’s 2024 film THE INDIVIDUAL screens with 16mm prints of work by Man Ray and Viking Eggeling on Friday starting at 8pm, with Sowell in person. This screening takes place at the Chicago Film Society offices, which has limited seating, so RSVP is required. More info here. 

⚫ Chicago Public Library
View all screenings taking place at Chicago Public Library branches here.

⚫ Cinema/Chicago
Fawzia Mirza’s 2025 film THE QUEEN OF MY DREAMS screens Wednesday, 6:30pm, at the Chicago History Museum. The screening is free to attend but currently accommodating standby attendees only. More info here.

⚫ The Davis Theater
An Oscarbate Film Collective Trust Fall screening takes place Thursday at 8:30pm. Want a hint? Hong Kong. A stuntman snaps, a superstar gets skewered. Make of that what you will—we’ll see you there! More info here.

⚫ FACETS
This month’s Cold Sweat double feature is George Sluizer’s 1988 film THE VANISHING (106 min, DCP Digital) and Matthew Bright’s 1996 film FREEWAY (102 min, DCP Digital), starting on Friday at 7pm.

David Cronenberg’s 2024 film THE SHROUDS (119 min, DCP Digital) and Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s 2025 film WARFARE (95 min, DCP Digital) screen a few times each. See Venue website for showtimes.

Barry Shils’ 1995 documentary WIGSTOCK: THE MOVIE (85 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 9pm, following the monthly FACETS  Film Trivia event, which begins at 7pm. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Filmscape Chicago
Filmscape Chicago takes place at CineCity Studios (1414 S. Western Ave.) on Saturday and Sunday. More info here.

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Celine Song’s 2025 film MATERIALISTS (113 min, DCP Digital) continues this week. See Venue website for showtimes. 

Sandi Simcha Dubowski’s 2024 documentary SABBATH QUEEN (105 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday and Sunday, 5pm, with Dubowski in attendance for both screenings. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Leather Archive & Museum (6418 N Greenview Ave.)
Francis Savel’s 1980 film EQUATION TO AN UNKNOWN (109 min, Digital Projection) screens Saturday, 7pm, as part of the 2025 Fetish Film Forum. Co-presented by Cine-File contributor Olivia Hunter Willke and Scott Potis. More info here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
It’s officially Music Box Garden Movies season! See Venue website for lineup and showtimes.

Wes Anderson’s 2025 film THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME (101 min, DCP Digital) continues screening. See Venue website for showtimes.

Fawzia Mirza’s 2025 film THE QUEEN OF MY DREAMS screens Friday, 7pm, followed by a Q&A with Mirza and actress Amrit Kaur.

Coralie Fargeat’s 2017 film REVENGE (108 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday and Saturday, 11:45pm, as part of the Shudder Anniversary Selects Series.

Tommy Wiseau’s 2003 cult film THE ROOM (99 min, 35mm) screens Friday and midnight, and Jim Sharman’s 1975 cult film THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (100 min, 35mm) screens Saturday at midnight.

Charles Roxburgh’s 2025 film EVIL PUDDLE (90 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday, 7pm, as part of Music Box of Horrors Presents series. 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: June 20, 2025 - June 26, 2025

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Julian Antos, Erika Balsom, Kian Bergstrom, Rob Christopher, John Dickson, Alex Ensign, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Ben Kaye, Shaun Huhn, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, K.A. Westphal, Olivia Hunter Willke