:: FRIDAY, JULY 18 - THURSDAY, JULY 24 ::

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Vincente Minnelli’s TEA AND SYMPATHY (US)

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

Per biographer Emanuel Levy, Vincente Minnelli was embarrassed by TEA AND SYMPATHY and would ask for it not to be included in retrospectives of his work. While the film is in many ways a failure, that’s not to say it’s devoid of virtues; Minnelli’s sophisticated visual sensibility and compassion for his characters are apparent in every scene. The film was based on Robert Anderson’s groundbreaking Broadway play about a gay teenage boy who’s befriended by the lonely wife of his boarding school’s gym coach. Directed on stage by Elia Kazan, Tea and Sympathy shocked audiences with its final moments, which suggested that the wife was about to offer herself sexually to the boy. It’s easy to see why Minnelli, by many accounts a closeted gay man, was attracted to the material, with its message of tolerance toward gay people in particular and nonconformists in general. Perhaps naively, he thought he could bring Tea and Sympathy to the screen as faithfully as possible, yet the results reflect the authorship of the Production Code as much as they do Minnelli (which may be the source of the director’s embarrassment). In the film version, the boy is no longer gay, simply effeminate and socially awkward, and the final scene is rendered so ambiguous as to become unreadable; still, a prologue and epilogue, set ten years after the principal narrative, were added to the script to let audiences know that the wife suffered for her transgression, whatever it may have been. That TEA AND SYMPATHY is a beautiful movie in spite of all this is a testament to Minnelli’s mastery. Forever the greatest director of decor in cinema, Minnelli arranges his characters and the places they live in to tell us about who they are, presenting the boarding house where the protagonists live as a den of conformity and the natural places where they can be themselves as virtually Edenic. (The film’s climax, however bowdlerized, remains a rapturous explosion of color that ranks with the boldest moments of Minnelli’s career.) TEA AND SYMPATHY is also affecting in what it manages to say about being an outsider and being bullied. While he was not allowed to condemn homophobia explicitly, Minnelli still renders the boy’s feelings of loneliness and otherness with acute sensitivity, emphasizing just how painful is the pressure to conform. In this regard, TEA AND SYMPATHY would pair well with Nicholas Ray’s BIGGER THAN LIFE, another CinemaScope melodrama released in 1956 about what Jonathan Rosenbaum has called “the sheer awfulness of normal American family life during the ‘50s.” Preceded by Staber Reese’s 1959 short film WISCONSIN WILDFLOWERS (10 min, 16mm). (1956, 122 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Prepared Texts: Picture Restart 16mm Series (US/Experimental)

Chicago Filmmakers – Saturday, 6pm

This iteration of the Picture Restart 16mm series pulls away from its usual eclecticism to bring a particular filmmaker into focus: beloved Chicago-area artist and Northwestern University film professor Dana Hodgdon. Hodgdon’s work indeed calls for a picture restart, rumored to have been taken out of circulation after the filmmaker became “frustrated with the aesthetic directions of the experimental film world,” according to the program notes. We can speculate on these differences as Hodgdon’s singular structuralist ethos, at once rigorous and playful, holds up a funhouse mirror to indexical filmmaking. The first film, A PREPARED TEXT (1976, 6 min, 16mm), is spoken for and speaks for itself as Hodgdon delivers a prepared text that lands somewhere between formal address and theoretical lecture. In front of the camera, the filmmaker explains how superfluous sounds and stammered syllables will be removed and collated into a sequence of their own, one which reframes the entire system. Hodgdon describes the editing process of his film in mathematical detail, necessarily in advance of its material undertaking but nonetheless demonstrated by the instantiation before us, a continuous take clearly interrupted by minute splices. The film cleverly reveals the underlying syntactical forces of spoken grammar and film editing as they condition temporality and meaning for a receiver. Hodgdon’s obsession with the manipulative power of language and contextualization is made even more granular in PHONEME FROLICS (1978, 11 min, 16mm), with an extractive process now taken to the level of basic sounds within words and extending to the voices of 45 university students and professors. Solicited soundbites, lifted and abstracted from words like “reactionary,” “selection,” and “iconoclast,” are scientifically collided in the edit until their influential proximity reconstitutes English language as wholly new words. Hodgdon’s ruthless study continues with DIALECTIC DEFINITIONS (1977, 8 min, 16mm), a cheeky film in which an increasingly disheveled academic is made to recite each word of the dictionary while nursing a goblet of wine and chain-smoking a pack of cigarettes. Our obliging protagonist is liberated from drudgery by the whims of the filmmaker, whose directorial and editorial hand puppets the performer through an ode to language’s power of selection, its ability to re-order established orders. My favorite exquisite corpse of the film spits out the following sentence: “In-history-great-films-eventually-decompose-creating-beautiful-art.” The program carries onward with DEAR FRIENDS, (1977, 10 min, 16mm), a film whose title actually includes the comma you see, a comma of address, or else—if we dabble in Hodgdon’s art of resequencing and negation—an Oxford comma might better suit the penultimate work of the evening. The film consists of a single shot through the passenger window of a car driving around Evanston blocks. Voiceover, laid thick with sarcasm, reads like a holiday letter describing quotidian milestones of family life. According to Picture Restart’s archivist and curator Ben Creech, critic B. Ruby Rich identified a host of experimental film jabs throughout the text when making her early observations about the film. Decoding awaits! To that end, Creech has pinpointed the journey traversed by Hodgdon; it begins and ends at 1001 Sheridan Road, looping twice and passing the address in the exact center of the film. Hodgdon’s participatory ethos is driven home in REFLEXFILM/FAMILYFILM (1978, 22 min, 16mm) which comprises seven pithy vignettes that capture his family in a playful season of dart throwing, dog naming, and hula hooping. If the first four films refine controls and delight in variables, this final work arranges stimuli and revels in reflex, once again subverting expectations. Reflex and family are explored through the bending of light, a jerk of the knee, instinctive guesses, historical roots, and ambitious angles. [Elise Schierbeek]

Off Center Presents Five Films by Rose Lowder (France/Experimental)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 6pm

Rose Lowder may be one of the most significant avant-garde filmmakers alive, and she's certainly one of the most distinctive, having made some of the most beautiful flicker films of the last 30 years. The career-spanning selection at Off Center offers a chance to put Lowder’s later masterpieces in the context of her broader career, charting her movements between more casually edited observational experiments and the densely patterned in-camera edits that have been her calling card since the mid '90s. The program’s earliest film, PARCELLE (1979), is made up of sequences of tiny, primary-colored shapes rapidly alternating at the center of the screen, functioning like an eye test for perceptual limits when identifying changes in shapes until the black background starts to flash complementary colors. An in-camera edit, the film showcases Lowder’s penchant for elaborate structure, though applied in this case to less conventionally beautiful imagery than her later work. QUIPROQUO (1992), the next film chronologically, is instructive in Lowder’s development, with the filmmaker deploying a variety of editing styles across short episodes studying different urban and natural landscapes. It’s a sort of Rosetta stone that finds Lowder in virtuoso mode, containing everything from breathable landscape shots to soundtrack-matched shots of vehicles to a dense flicker pattern of yellow and red flowers, anticipating her BOUQUETS. Some of this stylistic openness could be related to her collaborator Katie O’Looney, who supplies minimal sound compositions for the film, each movement a sort of sonic skeleton upon which Lowder can drape her images. This sort of response similarly structures the other sound film in the program, BEIJING 1988 (2011), which is the most ideologically involved of the works, if only barely—the travelogue’s main point of interest is seemingly that everything we see was shot in the titular city just one year prior to the Tia’nanmen Square massacre (but edited and released years later). It’s the weak point of the program mainly because of its more unvarnished and literal presentation of its material, but even then it finds resonance with the rest of the work in its focus on subjects’ natural rhythms of movement, whether they be people biking and exercising in the park or a turkey bobbing on the sidewalk. Lowder seems to restrict her hand more when she finds more movement in her material, which we see in the similarly less-edited TURBULENCE (2015). Here she goes for the tried-and-true avant-garde practice of filming running water up close, abstracting a stream into swarming points of light that move unpredictably in all directions. But Lowder is at her best when she blends her painter’s eye and scientist’s rigor in the micro-masterpieces of her BOUQUETS series. She creates each minute-long piece by selecting specific frames to shoot each piece of footage by hand-turning the reel to certain frames, and then shooting future footage on the same strip so as to make rapidly alternating and layered patterns of images. With 40 releases to date, Lowder’s missives have come out one by one since 1995 and have become a fruitful mini-form for Lowder to deposit beauty and math into every year or so. BOUQUETS 21-30 are presented in this program, created between 2001 and 2005 and finding Lowder operating at peak power creating her unique brand of turbo-impressionism. It’s rare to see a filmmaker from any era so easily in command of Their Thing, but this is one such case and reifies Lowder as one of our best working filmmakers. (1979-2015, Total approx. 50 min, 16mm) [Maxwell Courtright]

Sex, Love, & Liberation: The Films of Arthur J. Bressan, Jr.

Music Box Theatre – See below for showtimes

Arthur J. Bressan, Jr.’s PASSING STRANGERS and FORBIDDEN LETTERS (US/Adult)
Friday, 9:30pm (STRANGERS) and Saturday, 9:30pm (LETTERS)
Arthur J. Bressan, Jr. had a fondness for Frank Capra—he wrote his thesis on the director and even spoke with him for a 1971 issue of Interview magazine. I’d say this penchant comes through in the way his films evoke dual senses of idealism and melancholy with regards to queer love and the gay liberation movement. Among his better-known films is the landmark GAY USA (1978), the first feature-length documentary made by and about persons from the LBGTQIA+ community, which embodies that duality more straightforwardly but no less intriguingly; later, in 1985, he wrote and directed BUDDIES, a strikingly sensitive endeavor and the first film to address the burgeoning AIDS crisis. Around these touchstones of independent queer cinema, he made his debut feature, PASSING STRANGERS (1974, 75 min, DCP Digital), and, several years later, FORBIDDEN LETTERS (1979, 70 min, DCP Digital), two hardcore films that have recently been restored by Vinegar Syndrome in collaboration with The Bressan Project. Having previously seen and admired GAY USA and BUDDIES, these newly available works account for two of my choice film discoveries of the past year, each exhibiting a distinct cinematic sensibility that complements the requisite intercourse. PASSING STRANGERS tells the story—yes, an actual story—of 28-year-old Tom (Robert Carnagey), who posts a personal in the Berkeley Barb that quotes Walt Whitman’s “To a Stranger” and 18-year-old Robert (Robert Adams), who responds. (Bressan himself features as a projectionist at a porn theater who’s friends with Tom.) One might hear ‘Walt Whitman’ and assume pretension, but that’s the beauty of the Bressan films I’ve seen: they’re wonderfully earnest, and he incorporates urbane references with heartfelt aplomb. Both PASSING STRANGERS and FORBIDDEN LETTERS utilize an epistolary approach; in the former, the two men exchange letters, which are read in voiceover and accompanied by various sexual scenarios onscreen. Some are near avant-garde in nature, as evidenced by one sequence where young Robert goes to a sex store and enters a single-occupancy viewing booth; images of Robert watching are superimposed onto images of the pornography he’s viewing. In the next scene, he masturbates while watching D.W. Griffith’s BROKEN BLOSSOMS (a first—maybe only—in porn?). In a later scene, Robert examines himself in a mirror, prodding at a few spots on his face, which then turns into that of a clown and then back into his own—it’s simple enough, but the almost Bergman-esque close-ups are breathtaking. This moment leads to a dream sequence in which Robert masturbates again while several naked men, including himself, jump up and down, blowing bubbles. Despite the joyous nature of the sex scenes, melancholy comes into play with Robert’s final letter to Tom before they meet; he expresses anxiety, writing, “You know more about me than anybody else, and we’ve never really met. I don’t understand you too well. You wrote that you have friends and that you’ve had lovers, and yet you said you’re not at all that happy. That blows my mind.” When the two come together in the second half of the film, Bressan switches from black and white to color, an obvious reference to THE WIZARD OF OZ. The men fly kites, have sex, and, toward the end of the film, attend a pride march in San Francisco, scenes that contain footage from Bressan’s 1972 documentary short, COMING OUT. Bressan seems to have wanted to make an artful film, a sexy film, and a political film, and he succeeds on all counts. FORBIDDEN LETTERS is a more worn-in romance, this time between the younger Larry (Robert Adams, who played Robert in the previous film) and the older Richard (Richard Locke), who's been arrested for mugging. It follows Richard’s imminent release from prison and consists of flashbacks to sexual encounters between the two or between Larry and others, ruminations on Richard’s time in prison—they have to sanitize their letters, lest anyone discover Richard is gay—and scenes with their friend, Iris (Victoria Young), a female sex worker whose long-winded assessment of their relationship is some of the most extraordinary acting I’ve seen in porn. Another of the more affecting sequences in this film merges Bressan’s desire to reflect gay life as well as the tantalizing aspects of gay sex. In voiceover, Larry talks about the first time he saw Richard, at a Halloween party in the Castro district, with glitter in his beard and a stunningly outfitted drag queen as his date. The footage is shot like a documentary, which imbues the scenario with a sense of realism that recalls a moment where someone might see another person and be instantly attracted to them. Like the preceding film, there are shifts in tone and style, some of the scenes shot in black and white and others in color, though here Bressan interweaves the two. He specifically uses black and white for intense sequences taking place in prison that serve as metaphors for the men’s constrained sexuality and their physical distance from one another, while flashbacks to the men at home and at play are often in color. Many of the latter sequences occur as Larry, in voiceover, reads a letter he wishes he could send to Richard, one full of love, gratefulness, and trepidation. I was as moved as I am by, say, Capra’s films, so do both auteurs’ films teem with the beautiful complexities of life in all its tricky splendor. Humorously, the end credits riff on the credits sequence from Orson Welles’ THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS—likewise, they’re an apt assertion of Bressan’s personal mode of filmmaking: “My name is Arthur J. Bressan, Jr.,” he concludes, “and I made this motion picture.” [Kathleen Sachs]
---
Arthur J. Bressan, Jr.’s BUDDIES (US)
Tuesday, 7pm
Heralded as the first feature-length drama about AIDS, landmark gay filmmaker Arthur J. Bressan, Jr.’s brisk 1985 film BUDDIES is still as poignant as ever. The film follows 25-year-old typesetter David (David Schachter) after he volunteers to spend time with an AIDS patient as a “buddy”; he’s assigned to Robert (Geoff Edholm), 31-year-old gardener who’s been abandoned by his family and friends in the midst of his illness. Both are gay, but they’re on completely different ends of the political spectrum: Robert is a full-fledged activist, while David, having always been accepted by his family and in a long-term monogamous relationship, is less inclined toward protesting oppression as he’s never personally experienced it. Over the film’s compact 81-minute runtime, the two buddies form an intense, romantically tinged friendship, illustrated via hospital visits and David’s diary entries, which are expressed in voiceover narration. Relatively straightforward in his aesthetic style, Bressan nevertheless employs a unique trick in only showing David and Robert straight-on, obscuring other characters such as David’s partner and hospital nurses from the back. It’s novel—if not somewhat gimmicky—but nonetheless effective in highlighting the emotional intimacy between the two men. Independently made on a super-low budget and scripted in only five days, its economic dialogue, while didactic at times, is powerful in both content and execution; Schachter and Edholm, working within the confines of a nine-day shooting schedule, breach the awkwardness of such a constricted timeframe to convey a beautiful connection between two humans. "Every once in awhile you get the chance to make a statement on film that has nothing to do with your career, with ego, with money,” Bressan is quoted as saying in Vito Russo’s book The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, “but only with the issues of life and love and death. If BUDDIES turns out to be my last film, it'll be a fine way to go." Sadly, Bressan died of AIDS in 1987—this was indeed his last film. (Edholm also died of AIDS in 1989.) Despite living in a day and age when HIV and AIDS are generally more treatable than they were thirty years ago, BUDDIES, which was digitally restored by Vinegar Syndrome after decades of unavailability, is a much-needed reminder about the power of interpersonal connection in the face of adversity. (1985, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
---
Also screening is Bressan’s 1984 adult film DADDY DEAREST (72 min, DCP Digital) on Monday at 9:30pm. All screenings introduced by series programmer Zack Paslay.

Robert Altman Centennial

Gene Siskel Film Center – See below for showtimes

Robert Altman’s 3 WOMEN (US)
Saturday, 2pm
Inspired by a dream, Robert Altman made a film that can only be explained using dream logic. Pinky (Sissy Spacek) starts out as a young, naive girl new to a bleak desert California outpost. She starts a job at a spa for seniors where she meets Millie (Shelly Duvall) and quickly attaches herself to her in an unhealthy way. They become roommates at a rundown apartment complex run by a sleazy former movie cowboy and his wife, Willie (Janice Rule), who’s pregnant and wanders around somnambulantly, painting mythological murals around the property. Each of the women is visually associated with a color at the beginning—Pinky’s red, Millie’s yellow, Willie’s blue. But colors, moods, even entire identities shift and switch as things go on. I’ve seen this film three or four times and fall under its trance/spell every time. Unencumbered by the constraints of somebody else’s screenplay, as he often was in much of his other work, Altman can free-associate dialogue and not worry at all about making narrative sense. There are resonances with films like Bunuel’s THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE (1977) and Polanski’s ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968) in the ways that male directors reckoned with the changing roles of women in contemporary society, but Altman’s take is more abstract and poetic. Still, it’s very much a man’s point of view that informs this almost entirely female-centric film. There’s an added interest to watching it now during another time of societal change in terms of gender roles. Or, you can just let its slippery vibe carry you off into the desert where these women may still be mutating into and out of one another to this day. (1977, 124 min, DCP Digital) [Dmitry Samarov]
---
Robert Altman’s POPEYE (US)
Wednesday, 6pm
What, exactly, was producer Robert Evans thinking? After Paramount lost the bidding for the film rights to the mega-smash Broadway musical Annie, he and his execs settled on producing a musical version of Popeye, to which the studio already owned film rights. But Popeye in 1980 was no Annie; E.C. Segar’s comic strip creation, which enjoyed wide popularity in newspapers and in the Fleischer brothers’ animated theatrical shorts in the 1930s, had become pure kid-stuff, lingering on only in comic books and television cartoons. Yes, the character had become culturally iconic, but who was the audience for this?  Evans’ decision to move ahead with this project feels like the moviemaking equivalent of rebound sex. Still, it’s hard to argue with the results. Evans and team made a series of inspired hiring choices. Robert Altman as director was certainly a curious choice, but his felicity with ensemble casts, period filmmaking, and quirky characters, and his strong love of music served him well. Screenwriter Jules Feiffer turned in a nuanced script and songwriter Harry Nilsson crafted a set of lovely and eccentric songs; both carefully straddle the line between sincerity and playful parody. Cinematographer Guiseppe Rotunno brought his eye for filming busy, dark sets and mise-en-scene from his work for Fellini (including FELLINI’S SATYRICON and FELLINI’S CASANOVA) and Visconti (especially THE LEOPARD), and had just shot Bob Fosse’s ALL THAT JAZZ. Evans’ original casting choices, Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin, thankfully fell by the wayside. Instead, we got Shelley Duvall, who had been a frequent presence in Altman’s 1970s films, and Robin Williams, then in the middle of his star-making run on Mork and Mindy. In retrospect, it’s hard to imagine anyone else in these roles. Duvall’s waif-like appearance and lingering shell-shocked expressions from her experience shooting Kubrick’s THE SHINING are made-to-order for Olive Oyl. And, somehow, Williams contains his explosive energy but retains his considerable improvisational and mimicry talents in a deft, and moving, portrayal of Popeye. Both actors inhabit their characters with an uncanny physicality. The pieces all fit together. Evans lucked out. The film did well, earning less than hoped for but still three times its $20 million budget. It received mixed reviews, but has only grown in esteem since its release, attracting some die-hard admirers along the way (yours truly included). And the film Paramount lost out on? The less said about the 1982 John Huston film ANNIE the better. (1980, 114 min, 35mm) [Patrick Friel]

King Vidor’s HALLELUJAH (US)

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

HALLELUJAH was King Vidor’s first sound film—despite his initial reticence to venture into the new era, he was enticed by the possibility of being able to make a film with an all-Black cast, something he had specifically wanted to do—and the second Hollywood musical to have a such a line-up. (The film is often cited as being the first, but that distinction is held by Paul Sloane’s HEARTS IN DIXIE, which premiered a few months earlier.) It’s interesting both as a relic of cinema history and as a reflection of its filmmaker’s and performers’ talents, which makes an early sound endeavor feel and well, sound, effortless. It centers on Zeke Johnson, a tenant farmer who goes to town to sell his cotton and is seduced by Chick (Nina Mae McKinney, referred to in Europe as “The Black Garbo”), a dancer who swindles Zeke into gambling away his family’s earnings. His brother is killed in the process, which drives him to embrace religion; Zeke becomes a preacher, but then again encounters Chick, who then again lures him into a life of sin. (Chick’s character is absolutely that of a soulless, stereotypical temptress, a Jezebel, if you will—even though at one point she seems to find religion—but it’s a testament to Mae McKinney’s performance that her character is so compelling in spite of the egregious characterization.) Inspired by Vidor’s appreciation of the so-called “Negro spirituals,” the musical sequences are engaging, clearly reflecting his appreciation. It’s a problematic film by today’s standards, as Vidor exhibits a paternalistic and at times insulting view of African Americans, but in context it could be considered progressive for its time; when Warner Bros. released it as part of their archive collection, they attached a disclaimer about its less savory elements. Film historian Kristin Thompson noted, "Unfortunately the company has chosen to put a boilerplate warning at the beginning that essentially brands HALLELUJAH as a racist film… I don’t think this description fits HALLELUJAH, but it certainly sets the viewer up to interpret the film as merely a regrettable document of a dark period of US history. Warner Bros. demeans the work of the filmmakers, including the African-American ones. The actors seem to have been proud of their accomplishment, as well they should be.” I certainly can’t dictate how viewers might feel about this aspect of the film, glaring as it can be, but as a part of film history and an exhibition of the skill of those who made and starred in it, HALLELUJAH undeniably has value. Screening as part of the Pre-Code Musicals on Film series. (1929, 100 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]

Rouben Mamoulian's LOVE ME TONIGHT (US)

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

Before Jeanette MacDonald paired up with Nelson Eddy, she made several films with that prototype of French bon vivants, Maurice Chevalier. Most of these films were made with the fabled touch of director Ernst Lubitsch; the final mating of this threesome, scored by the great operetta compositions of Franz Lehar, is the most sublime of them all: THE MERRY WIDOW (1934). Somewhere in the middle, Rouben Mamoulian, whose knockout debut as a director was the melodrama APPLAUSE (1929), was given his chance with these appealing stars and fashioned LOVE ME TONIGHT, one of their stock stories of an aristocratic woman and her common courter. The film is rightly famous for its opening scene, which give a panoramic view of the Paris skyline and then moves in to listen to the rhythms by which the city wakes up, finally landing on Maurice Courtelin (Chevalier), a Parisian tailor singing of the noise of Paris in “That’s the Song of Paree.” This is the first of several delightful, often memorable songs by Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers, perhaps the most famous of which, “Isn’t It Romantic,” foreshadows the romance of Maurice and Princess Jeanette (MacDonald). The pair is brought together when Maurice sets off to collect payment for the wardrobe he made for the notorious freeloader, the Viscount Gilbert de Varèze (Charlie Ruggles). On the way, he hears a woman singing (“Lover”). It is the princess. When she stops, he declares his love for her in the impertinent and naughty tune, “Mimi” (“I’d like to have a little son of a Mimi by and by!”). We watch her full face assume an insulted but gauzily romantic look in the camera of Victor Milner, who shot several films for Lubitsch and knew how to get just the right touch. For a pre-Code film, this one’s attempts at suggestiveness are pretty tame. Maurice insults Jeanette’s seamstress for building her a dowdy riding habit and bets that he can do better. Then we get to see him remove Jeanette’s unfinished riding jacket and take a tape measure to her every body part. It could have been sexy, but Maurice is all efficiency and Jeanette doesn’t melt even a little at his ministrations. Seeing her flirty, womanly performance in THE MERRY WIDOW, this was, for me, like seeing an entirely different actress, and again, with Chevalier. Thus, the tepid romance may be on Mamoulian. Still, between the meeting and the inevitable clinch, much hilarity ensues, delivered by such comic stalwarts as Ruggles; Charles Butterworth, as Jeanette’s nebbishy suitor; and Myrna Loy, as a man-crazy countess. While Mamoulian falls short of the waltz-like grace and romantic sensuality of Lubitsch, his humor more than makes up for it. Screening as part of the Pre-Code Musicals on Film series. (1932, 89 min, 35mm) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Susan Seidelman's DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN (US)

Davis Theater – Wednesday, 7pm

Susan Seidelman’s SMITHEREENS (1982) is one of my favorite discoveries of recent years, prompting me to explore her career further. Imagine my surprise at learning that DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN (1985), Seidelman's most recognizable work (owing to its casting of Madonna in her first major film role), was inspired in part by Jacques Rivette’s 1974 film CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING, one of the most idiosyncratic French New Wave masterpieces. In hindsight, both SMITHEREENS and DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN (and perhaps other films of hers—I still have more to discover or revisit) are absolutely Rivettian in nature, Seidelman’s filmmaking aligned with Rivette’s in more than just basic plot points. SUSAN stars Rosanna Arquette as Roberta, a bored suburban New Jersey housewife who’s enthralled with a series of personal ads written by a man named Jim; he’s desperately seeking a woman named Susan, played by Madonna, whom Pauline Kael affectionately called “an indolent, trampy goddess” despite not otherwise liking the film. The two women cross paths when Roberta goes to New York City's Battery Park, where Jim’s ad had requested he and the freewheeling Susan rendezvous. Thrown into the mix are such charmingly Rivettian elements as New Wave mobsters, stolen ancient Egyptian earrings, amnesia, and, finally, mistaken identity. Roberta temporarily forgets who she is and everyone assumes she’s Susan; this soon turns into a sort-of switcheroo when the real Susan invades Roberta’s humdrum suburban life. As Susan, Roberta meets Dez, played by Aidan Quinn (swoon), a projectionist (double swoon) at the Bleecker Street Theatre who’s friends with the real Susan’s Jim—when it comes to heteronormative romances as a central plot point, a young Aidan Quinn playing a projectionist (again, swoon) is about as good as it gets. The twists and turns down the rabbit hole—Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was an inspiration for both Rivette and Seidelman’s films—even include a magic club reminiscent of the one where Juliet Berto performs in CELINE AND JULIE. The small details most obviously suggest Rivette’s influence, but the larger concepts cement it. In his obituary for the filmmaker in the New Yorker, Richard Brody opined that “[h]is films reflect something bigger than the practical details of one person’s life; they represent an effort to capture the fullness of an inner world, a lifetime’s range of obsessions and mysteries.” This interpretation of Rivette’s ideology dovetails with my appreciation of Seidelman’s first two films as veritable feminist texts, specifically in how they illuminate that so-called inner world of humans whose gender often precludes them from being thought of as beings with rich interior lives. That array of obsessions and mysteries could be said of Wren from SMITHEREENS and the heroines of SUSAN, for whom things like music, fashion, and even romance—things sometimes associated, and sometimes in a negative context, with women—present an opportunity to escape the plodding monotony of domestic life. Adding to Seidelman’s all-around-cool cred is a supporting cast that features the likes of Laurie Metcalf, John Turturro, Giancarlo Esposito, Richard Hell, John Lurie, and even a cameo from the THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS triplets. The overall aesthetic, from the snazzy costumes to the absolutely awe-inspiring production design and finally the neon and candy-colored lighting, is superb, the attention to detail an appropriate ode to the fullness of its protagonists’ inner worlds. With a pre-recorded introduction from Seidelman. (1985, 104 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Roman Polanski's CHINATOWN (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday, 8:15pm

In the words of Karl Marx, “California is very important for me because nowhere else has the upheaval most shamelessly caused by capitalist centralization taken with such speed.” Roman Polanski’s CHINATOWN works like a doctored photograph, replicating a moment of California’s lineage of bloodshed for the sake of market expansion; the faces and dates are artificial but not far from the truth. No other film so aptly captures the transgressions of the thirty-first state. While Muybridge’s sequential photographs developed and Hollywood boomed, an ungodly underbelly festered with genocide, corruption, and (in the case of CHINATOWN) incest. In Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, Malcom Harris describes a West coast formula: “Anglos rule; all natives are Indians; all land and water is just gold waiting to happen.” Militantly researched by screenwriter Robert Towne, CHINATOWN borrows some traits from civil engineer William Mulholland, the first superintendent of the Los Angeles water system and tasked with creating the aqueduct to ensure the city had a sufficient water supply. Noah Cross’ scheme is a carbon copy of the real life 1913 “water wars," with Mulholland’s plan to divert water from Owens Valley, east of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Producer Robert Evans described the first draft, which spanned 178 pages, as “brilliant but incomprehensible.” After almost a year of outlines, Towne cranked out an intriguing but half-coherent text. Having previously left Los Angeles after the murder of his wife, Polanski returned to the United States to direct the picture. With the auteur’s eye, the duo delivered a taut final draft that puts the audience in the shoes of the PI, J.J. Gittes; as he connects the dots, so do we. Heralded by every screenwriting institution of the last forty years, CHINATOWN reflects some of the best writing in the history of cinema. As Polanski stated, “There are no loose ends. Each scene answers three questions instead of one.” Polanski claims the tragic conclusion of Of Mice and Men profoundly affected him for years, ultimately influencing this film’s grim ending. Jerry Goldsmith composed this haunting love theme in under ten days, instructing the trumpet soloist in recording sessions to “play it sexy—but like it's not good sex!" How can CHINATOWN speak to an audience fifty years later? It tells the story of the wealthy sexual sadists manipulating the environment to obtain government contracts, furthering their riches and influence with no regard for the pain and suffering of others. Described by friend Orson Welles as an "amicable Dracula," John Huston’s embodiment of Cross makes skin crawl from the jump. If the films of John Ford operate as American myth, perhaps CHINATOWN has earned the status of an American parable, ghost story even. The title represents a powerlessness and futile pursuit for justice, the way Jake felt when he used to work the beat. In the end, evil prevails and there’s nothing a stitch-nosed PI can do but walk away. CHINATOWN doesn’t offer any solutions; it shows the world as it is. Screening as part of the Spoiler Alert series. (1974, 131 min, 35mm) [Ray Ebarb]

Éric Rohmer’s A TALE OF SUMMER (France)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Thursday, 4pm

A TALE OF SUMMER, French director Éric Rohmer’s third in his “Tales of the Four Seasons” series, might be called quintessential Rohmer. Following a young man named Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud), the film uses the beachy, sunny landscape of Brittany, creating a “walk and talk” of sorts, as Gaspard meets various women over the course of his pre-career-starting vacation. Sans a soundtrack, with Rohmer’s characteristically simple, yet stunning visuals, A TALE OF SUMMER revels in Gaspard’s inability to choose between three women: Margot (Amanda Langlet), Solène (Gwenaëlle Simon), and Léna (Aurelia Nolin). While waiting for Léna, his on-and-off again girlfriend, Rohmer’s just-graduated, curly-haired protagonist meets local waitress Margot, spending his days meandering on the beach, chatting about her interest in ethnology, his musical ramblings, and the ideas surrounding a summer fling. Despite its affinity for romantics, the light drama is baked in a dose of reality, unwilling to flatter Gaspard, but rather taking every moment as a stroke of luck in his life. It harkens back to the freedom and levity of summer, before your career, family, and responsibilities fill your days. A level of uncertainty and opportunity feel limitless for Gaspard in this way, in that each chance encounter could lead to something as beautiful as love. As with some of us, when bouts of lust or passion come, we feel like they’re bound for destruction. Gaspard is no different, enacting a woeful tone with the innate knowledge that none of these romances will likely work out. Like several other Rohmer dramas, A TALE OF SUMMER focuses on the flaky nature of young love in all of its hopefulness and hopelessness. As Gaspard’s situation becomes hazier, by meeting the more-excitable Solène and the return of the less-committed Léna, he begins thinking and deciding in each moment what he will do next, with little to no concern for the girls’ well-being. Still, Margot remains a constant, a smile that seems to shine a bit brighter, a friendship that has more stakes than his two strictly romantic dealings. And this relationship swells into one of many points in A TALE OF SUMMER: friendship is as, if not more, serious than romance. Screening as part of the Éric Rohmer: Four Summer Films series. (1996, 113 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Frank]

Martin Ritt's HUD (US)

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

A sardonic, hard-drinking anti-hero, Paul Newman's Hud Bannon is both lamentable and irresistible. Based on Larry McMurtry's first novel Horsemen, Pass By, HUD is a steamy take on a male melodrama that pits Hud, his father Homer, and his impressionable nephew Lonnie in a family conflict where nothing less than the values of the next generation are at stake. Homer, an honorable cattleman nearing the end of his life, discovers a possible devastating outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease among his stock. Homer wants to abide by the law; Hud wants to do everything but; Lonnie is caught between his father figure and the rebel he admires. Patricia Neal delivers an equally compelling (and Oscar-winning) performance as Alma, the sultry though world-weary maid who confounds Hud, rebuffing his so-called charm. Hud is something of a filmic brother to Frank Sinatra's Dave Hirsch in SOME CAME RUNNING: both have no regard for people or rules, both are incompatible with their surroundings, and both ultimately can never be truly happy. And like SOME CAME RUNNING, HUD is set in the recent past of a postwar small town that appears static—see the quaint Kiwanis Club fair—but where its inhabitants are constantly evolving. Shot in black and white, the film evokes a tempered nostalgia for a grittier but simpler West. As David Kehr put it, the film puts "a little too much dust in the dust bowl," but it is nonetheless effective in drawing a stark contrast between rudderless Hud and his principled father; where the west was and where it is going. Screening as part of the Neo-Westerns of the ’50s and ’60s series. (1963, 112 min, 35mm) [Brian Welesko]

Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn's L FOR LEISURE (US/Experimental)

Music Box Theatre – Wednesday, 7pm

In their superb follow-up to 2010 CUFF-Winner BLONDES IN THE JUNGLE, Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn teleport from a demented Honduran spring break in 1987 to the sites of luxurious vacations from the Long Beach University 1992-93 academic year. Horn's cinematography loves sunlit beauty and human absurdity, juxtaposing awesome, glowing beach and forest panoramas with dipshits on rollerblades and skateboards, her 16mm evoking the 90210 color palette and aspect ratio. Under the cover of very funny mock-academic dialogue and the mellow wandering tempo of one vignette to the next, Kalman and Horn continue the subtle work of omission and implication they began in BLONDES. Professor Sierra Paradise (the outstanding Marianna McLellan) tips us off to the film's darker themes in the first few lines, as she lectures a colleague who is TAing Survey of Post-Apocalyptic Literature that "we underestimate how the post-apocalyptic fantasy effects reality, and how its erotic pull might be driving the decisions of our leaders, even unconsciously." In a gorgeous, nearly wordless segment called Christmas 1992 Selfoss, Iceland, one of our vacationing scholars reads a copy of Al Gore's Earth in the Balance while shaggy ponies peer over a low fence at him, quietly huffing clouds of breath. On Labor Day 1992 Sky Forest, CA, a group of white friends discuss the Los Angeles race riots with a mix of prurient awe and critical distance. From a world so comfortable, temperate, and lightly engaging, the looming social and environmental problems of our time are coated in unreality. Goofy sound-stage scenes of laser-tag 'FUTURE WARZ' illustrate exactly how unable our characters are to imagine the consequences of the cultural apex of leisure. At the heart of the film is a spooky encounter between four male grad students and a station-wagon full of teen girls that begins at a fast-food drive-thru: how hard can grown men try to seduce young girls without calling their own integrity into question? With two decades of hindsight, we can see this strategy driving 1990s neo-liberal policy, and continue to feel its environmental and economic repercussions. But L FOR LEISURE finds hope that the human need for natural beauty will change our script. The film's final lines, spoken to a beautiful dog, are both declaration and invitation: "The future is undetermined. Thank you. Are you ready?" Featuring a post-film Q&A with Kalman. (2014, 74 min, DCP Digital) [Josephine Ferorelli]

Frederick Wiseman's MENUS-PLAISIRS LES TROISGROS (France/Documentary)

Alliance Francaise (54 W. Chicago Ave.) – Saturday, 10:30am

There are a few precedents to MENUS-PLAISIRS LES TROISGROIS in Frederick Wiseman’s vast filmography, in that they were all shot in France: LA COMÉDIE-FRANÇAISE OU L’AMOUR JOUÉ (1996), LA DANSE: THE PARIS OPERA BALLET (2009), and CRAZY HORSE (2011). These films are also connected in that they’re all about the arts; in each of them, Wiseman alternates between presenting creative pursuits as joyous ends in themselves and, more characteristically, as time-honored institutions that reflect immortal tendencies of the human experience. MENUS-PLAISIRS, which runs four hours, has plenty of time to cover both approaches (as well as the characteristic approach that presents the central location as an intricate system with lots of working parts). On the one hand, the film contains numerous sequences devoted to the art of cooking that verge on pure cinema—Wiseman doesn’t organize these scenes sequentially (to make this recipe, first you do this, then you do that…), but rather flits around the titular restaurant’s kitchen, cutting between different activities based on the texture of the food or the type of utensil that’s being used. On the other hand, MENUS-PLAISIRS often stops to reflect on the meaning of what’s happening, with speeches by the restaurant’s owner and his various employees about the procedures, intentions, and legacy of the business. The film concludes with an especially moving soliloquy about how the owner learned the restaurant business from his father and has passed his knowledge down to his children, who also work there. One of the finest endings the director has ever constructed, it’s a sublime Wiseman moment that asks you to consider exactly how civilization endures. The philosophical underpinnings of MENUS-PLAISIRS make the film so much more than another documentary about a fancy restaurant—given the patience, seriousness, and introspection of the characters, the film ultimately has a lot in common with Wiseman’s early feature ESSENE (1972), which was about a Benedictine monastery. Screening as part of the Au Menu series. Presented by AF-Chicago Board President and scholar of gastronomy Richard Shepro. (2023, 240 min, Digital Projection) [Ben Sachs]

SUPER-HORROR-RAMA! at the Music Box Theatre

See below for showtimes

Lewis Teague’s ALLIGATOR (US)
Friday, 11:45pm
Before Hollywood quietly turned him into a footnote, Lewis Teague was building a curious and quietly compelling career. His start was pure celluloid romance: short films at NYU shaped by Godard and Rivette, a stint running the Cinematheque 16 on the Sunset Strip, and apprentice gigs with Sydney Pollack and George Roy Hill. He assisted on WOODSTOCK (1970), co-directed DIRTY O’NEIL (1974), and earned his editing stripes with Roger Corman, even crafting the avalanche in AVALANCHE (1978). Then came THE LADY IN RED (1979), scripted by John Sayles, a collaboration that would lead them both into the sewers of cinematic legend. In 1980, Teague and Sayles conjured ALLIGATOR, a film that turned the 1935 urban myth (a myth of such weight that February 9th is known as Alligator in the Sewer Day) about flushed baby reptiles into a mordant fable about unchecked science, political rot, and the delight of watching the powerful get devoured. The alligator grows to monstrous proportions after feeding on puppies injected with experimental growth hormones. Robert Forester stars as a detective with atrocious hair, so bad that it is commented on more than the string of body parts washing ashore. Sayles, never one for throwaway details, uses that hairline as a quiet metaphor for fading masculinity; undermined, questioned, and eventually redeemed through gator-fueled trial by fire. There’s also a herpetologist love interest, a smarmy mayor bought and paid for, and a big-game hunter so cartoonish even Quint from JAWS (1975) would’ve tossed him overboard. And yet, the film strikes an elegant, pulpy balance. Teague handles the chaos with a steady, subversive hand. ALLIGATOR is full of deadpan thrills, like a backyard birthday party where pirate-costumed children accidentally "walk the plank" into the gator's gaping maw. It's both horrifying and hilarious, and that's the sweet spot. By the time the beast crashes a posh garden wedding to snack on one-percenters, it's not just monster mayhem, it’s class warfare in rubber suit drag. ALLIGATOR is proudly of the post-JAWS boom, part of a wild menagerie that includes GRIZZLY (1976), ORCA (1977), and KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS (1977). But Sayles’ script elevates it, much like his script for Joe Dante’s PIRANHA (1978), lacing it with a sly advocacy for EPA regulations and a disdain for capitalist science gone rogue. Teague followed ALLIGATOR with two Stephen King adaptations, CUJO (1983) and CAT’S EYE (1985), but mainstream clout remained elusive. He bet his future career on THE JEWEL OF THE NILE (1985), assuming the combined wattage of Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner would vault him onto Hollywood’s A-list. Instead, he lost what made him interesting. “I was chasing prestige,” Teague admitted, “and I lost the playfulness.” Later efforts like WEDLOCK (1991) showed flashes of that early spark, but the industry had already moved on. The irony? The film that never asked to be taken seriously, about a toilet-flushed reptile on a diet of human waste and puppy carcasses became his legacy. In the end, it wasn’t prestige that came calling. It was a 36-foot alligator, grinning in the sewer and waiting for its cue. (1980, 91 mins, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]
---
Bruno Mattei’s RATS: NIGHT OF TERROR (Italy/France)
Saturday, 11:45pm
Often dismissed as a cinematic opportunist, Bruno Mattei exhibits a paradoxical kind of authorship: one grounded not in originality, but in reinvention. RATS: NIGHT OF TERROR may be one of his most emblematic works in this regard. The film is a genre hybrid that borrows liberally from MAD MAX (1979), ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981), and WILLARD (1971), yet synthesizes its influences into a work of surreal conviction. The film opens in the year 225 A.B. ("After the Bomb"), a time when humanity has fractured into subterranean dwellers and nomadic surface scavengers. A ragtag biker gang called the “New Primitives” stumble upon an abandoned town teeming with resources: water, food, and electricity. But this paradise is soon revealed to be a trap, overrun by genetically altered rats that pick off the survivors one by one. The premise is simple, but Mattei and co-writer Claudio Fragasso inject it with layered absurdity: stock footage, recycled sets—notably from Sergio Leone’s ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA (1984)—and an unrelenting flood of rodents, both real and fabricated that work to create a dreamlike instability. What distinguishes RATS is not narrative cohesion or technical prowess, but its commitment to world-building through pastiche. Mattei, known for working under numerous pseudonyms (including Vincent Dawn), often followed cinematic trends with industrial precision. When Lucio Fulci’s zombie films surged, he made HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD (1980); when post-apocalyptic survival tales became fashionable, RATS emerged. Twenty years after the release of JAWS (1975), Mattei created his ultimate cash-grabbing cobbled together magnum opus JAWS 5 (retitled CRUEL JAWS) which included direct footage taken from any shark movie he could get his hand on then placing a STAR WARS (1977) soundtrack over it. In this sense, Mattei functioned as both cultural scavenger and folk historian, mapping the shifting desires of genre cinema with perverse fidelity. To call RATS a "rip-off" would be reductive. Rather, it operates in the tradition of collage, using borrowed elements to reflect and exaggerate the anxieties of its era. The Cold War dread of nuclear annihilation, the disillusionment with modernity, and the fears of societal breakdown are all present, albeit through the garish filter of pulp. The performances, often derided for their melodramatic excesses, in fact contribute to the film’s heightened affect. Geretta Geretta’s role, filmed without fluency in Italian, adds a layer of unintentional alienation that aligns with the film’s estranged world. Much has been made of the film’s notorious ending, in which the human rescuers may not be the saviors they are perceived to be. Rather than absurdity for its own sake, this coda functions as grimly poetic: evolution has favored the overlooked, the verminous. In Mattei’s vision, the apocalypse does not end with humanity’s survival; it ends with our succession. If one approaches RATS: NIGHT OF TERROR as an example of industrial filmmaking, an artifact that thrives on recombination and audacity, it becomes easier to see why Mattei has retained a cult following. His films are less about terror than about the horror of repetition, of genre being eaten alive by its own offspring. And in that, RATS may be his most revealing text. (1984, 97 mins, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]

Alfred Hitchcock's THE BIRDS (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Saturday, 11:45am

Slavoj Zizek wrote, "In order to unravel Hitchcock's THE BIRDS, one should first imagine the film without the birds, simply depicting the proverbial middle-class family in the midst of an Oedipal crisis—the attacks of the birds can only be accounted for as an outlet of the tension underlying this Oedipal constellation, i.e., they clearly materialize the destructive outburst of the maternal superego, one mother's jealousy toward the young woman who tries to snatch her son from her." That Hitchcock conceived of (and plotted) THE BIRDS as a comedy shows his gleeful perversity. It also goes a long way towards explaining the film's enduring fascination. Most disaster movies simply revolve around the spectacle of things blowing up; if they make any room at all for humor or interpersonal relationships it's usually of the throwaway or half-hearted variety. It's just window dressing for explosions. But in his own crafty way Hitchcock shows us that comedy, not tragedy, can be the best way to reveal the layers of a character while, crucially, misdirecting the audience's attention. Using a meticulously scored soundtrack of bird effects in lieu of traditional music cues, paired with George Tomasini's brilliant picture editing, heightens the feeling of disquiet. It all culminates in the stunning final shot: the superego has saturated the entire landscape. Screening as part of the Queer Film Theory 101 series. (1963, 119 min, DCP Digital) [Rob Christopher]

Constance Tsang’s BLUE SUN PALACE (US)

FACETS – Sunday, 5:30pm

Filmed almost entirely indoors and in tight medium shots, BLUE SUN PALACE is a markedly claustrophobic movie. Writer-director Constance Tsang, making her feature debut, denies the spectator views of the city, or even the neighborhood, the characters inhabit, despite the fact that her film takes place in Flushing Chinatown, a rapidly growing (and presumably bustling) community in Queens, New York. This dichotomy between setting and formal approach does a lot in the way of characterization, allowing Tsang to dive into her subjects’ lives without having to provide much explicit exposition. The viewer senses right away the characters’ disconnect from American culture—from much of anything, really, beyond their work, their apartments, and the people in the immediate vicinity. Amy and Didi are middle-aged women from Taiwan and mainland China, respectively, who work at a NYC massage parlor; Didi is also involved with Cheung, a Taiwanese emigré presently working in construction. Tsang presents the relationships between these three characters delicately and sympathetically, finding humanity where many other filmmakers would see nothing but dehumanization. She's aided to no end by Lee Kang-sheng, one of contemporary cinema’s great presences, who plays Cheung. For those who know Lee only from his work with Tsai Ming-liang, his performance in BLUE SUN PALACE may come as a shock; he speaks and moves his body much more than he ever does in Tsai’s films and installations. At the same time, Lee can’t help but maintain the opacity he’s kept up for decades with Tsai—no matter how much Tsang or Amy or Didi want to get to know Cheung, he remains in some ways unknowable. The viewer doesn’t even learn when or why Cheung came to the United States until halfway into the film, another sad reflection of how these characters’ value as cheap labor precedes their identities. (2024, 117 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Jia Zhang-ke’s CAUGHT BY THE TIDES (China)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Jia Zhang-ke reflects on the last two and a half decades of Chinese history through the filter of his own work—the title seems to be referring to the tides of time itself. CAUGHT BY THE TIDES was assembled from mostly unseen footage that Jia shot for three of his earlier films: UNKNOWN PLEASURES (2002), STILL LIFE (2006), and ASH IS PUREST WHITE (2018). Using this material, Jia constructs a story about a woman (Zhao Tao, naturally) who spends much of the 21st century in search of her missing lover. Her journey takes her across the country and permits her to bear witness to various changes that modern China has experienced. The film hinges on her visit to the region that would become the Three Gorges Dam in the mid-2000s. As Jia showed in STILL LIFE, the area was completely demolished and the denizens were forcibly relocated to make way for the project; the filmmaker clearly sees the event as a telling moment in China’s history insofar as it marked the triumph of “progress” over concern for the citizenry. In this regard, Zhao’s quest represents an attempt to locate humanity amidst state concerns that threaten to overwhelm it entirely; she also suggests a tenacity that Jia seems to be saying is necessary to survive in this ever-shifting landscape. In one of the film’s most memorable shots, Zhao contends with a man determined to keep her on a parked bus, pushing her down every time she attempts to leave. The pattern repeats several times until the man finally lets her go, signaling a reprieve in Zhao’s torment and a rare occasion where the proverbial tide breaks for a determined swimmer. (2024, 111 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Toby Jones’ AJ GOES TO THE DOG PARK (US)

Music Box Theatre – Thursday, 7pm

For those looking to chase the zany high they received from HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS (2024), director Toby Jones arrives with a work that's slightly more realistic but still delivers a joyous sense of lunacy and idiosyncrasy. Jones cut his teeth in the world of television animation, working as a writer and storyboard artist on a myriad of Cartoon Network series, where non sequiturs and expert visual humor reign supreme. It’s no surprise then that his live-action feature debut retains a jokes-first mentality that guides all artistic decisions, with its best moments feeling akin to a live-action transliteration of the humor of The Simpsons and the visual palette of Regular Show. Jones starts things off in a place of seeming normalcy; the eponymous AJ (played by AJ Thompson) takes his twin chihuahuas to the local dog park where, upon learning it has been transformed into a “blog park,” the stakes are raised at an exponential rate. Jones’ world operates with gorgeous cartoon logic, characters getting blown offscreen by leaf blowers, knocking person-shaped holes through doors, popping up from thin air, all amidst a sea of goofy fisherman, elbow-centric wrestlers, and a scheming mayor simply known as “Mayor.” As in the realm of animation, the world of AJ GOES TO THE DOG PARK operates on fluid rules of physics, the necessity of the gag being the only motivator for sense and logic in any given scene. Jones’ visual ambition is only matched by the film’s charming lo-fi qualities, proudly marketing itself as a “no-budget” feature, using green-screens, puppetry, and elaborate props work to carry out most of the outlandish effects. This is coupled with the film being populated primarily with the people and places of Fargo, North Dakota, making AJ GOES TO THE DOG PARK sometimes feel more like a loving community-building project than a major motion picture. But it is this home-grown quality that gives Jones’ feature that extra oomph, the feeling that genuine love and excitement propelled this wonderfully silly work to the finish line. Special Art House Theater Day screening featuring a post-film Q&A with Toby Jones, actor AJ Thompson, and Demon Lord Krogloch (aka producer Ben Hanson). (2024, 79 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s SLEUTH (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 2pm

Joseph L. Mankiewicz began his career as a sharp-witted writer in the Hollywood studio system, debuting with FAST COMPANY (1929), a title that ironically contrasts with his long, deliberate filmmaking journey. By 1936, he transitioned into producing, leaving his mark with polished fare like A CHRISTMAS CAROL (1938) and THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (1940). But it wasn’t until DRAGONWYCK (1946) that he stepped into the director’s chair, beginning a run of smart, literate films through the early 1970s. In that span, Mankiewicz helmed both critical darlings and costly misfires. CLEOPATRA (1963) nearly sank 20th Century Fox. Yet his reputation for verbal dexterity and theatrical precision endured in works like THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR (1947), ALL ABOUT EVE (1950), and GUYS AND DOLLS (1955). His screenplays played like stage dramas: characters fencing with language, revealing motives and class through cadence and cunning. Dialogue, not spectacle, was his sword. Enter SLEUTH, his final and arguably most devilish film. Based on Anthony Shaffer’s Tony-winning play and adapted for the screen by Shaffer himself, the film marries Mankiewicz’s love of theatricality with Shaffer’s obsession with duplicity and class-based mind games. Shaffer, also known for FRENZY (1972), THE WICKER MAN (1973), and DEATH ON THE NILE (1978), was a literary trickster with a flair for psychological intrigue. SLEUTH is a drawing-room thriller disguised as a chess match, with Laurence Olivier’s Andrew Wyke and Michael Caine’s Milo Tindle clashing over a woman, but more deeply over class, identity, and intellect. Wyke, a wealthy crime novelist, invites Tindle—his wife’s lover and a working-class hairdresser—into his baroque manor under the guise of offering his blessing. But from the moment Tindle must navigate a literal hedge maze to reach the house, we know we’re in metaphorical territory. Wyke proposes a fake burglary: Tindle will steal his wife’s jewels so both men can be free of her. Tindle, perhaps too eager, dons a clown mask and oversized shoes underscoring the humiliation built into Wyke’s game. And it is only the first. The pleasure of SLEUTH lies in watching Olivier and Caine tango through escalating psychological trials; they are written as intellectual gladiators sparring in a hall of mirrors. The estate itself is a character: filled with puzzles, chessboards, mechanical toys, and secret compartments, it reminds us constantly that manipulation is the point. Mankiewicz and Shaffer trade a traditional three-act structure for a trilogy of games, each raising the stakes until only one man remains. It’s Agatha Christie by way of 12 ANGRY MEN (1957), a single location where character’s manners are replaced by malice, and every smile sharpened. Mankiewicz directs with elegance and theatrical bombast, grounding the artifice in rhythm and precision. Shaffer’s script bristles with irony and class satire, a parlor trick that becomes a war. As a finale to Mankiewicz’s storied career, SLEUTH earned him a Best Director nomination, alongside Best Actor nods for both stars. It’s a brainy, baroque swan song that is clever without smugness and theatrical without excess. Just when you think you’ve solved it, the film resets the board. Because in SLEUTH, as in life, the real sin is underestimating your opponent… especially when he’s got a pair of clown shoes. Screening as part of the Spoiler Alert series. (1972, 138 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]

Gakuryu Ishii’s BURST CITY (Japan)

FACETS – Friday, 7pm

I would be lying if I said that BURST CITY was a film that I had an easy time following. Some words to describe what I witnessed: punks, pigs, and pompadours. Thankfully, the film's clash of rioting gangs, police and cyborgs hits a sweet spot that is infinitely cool and constantly intriguing. Where narrative coherence gets fumbled, a language of speed maintains control as Gakuryu’s camera falls into abstraction with fast paced, blurred movement and a frenetic montage that keeps the pacing electric. My best attempt at summary would be that multiple factions are fighting in a city which, as the title suggests, seems primed to burst. Holding all this together is a handful of rock ballad musical scenes. Some of them, like one near the beginning where we are first introduced to the dystopian city in full, are more intricate and fun than others that take place on a stage and feel like they exude a pent-up and angry energy. These performances by real Japanese punk musicians—The Stalin, Machizo Machida, and The Roosters and the Rockers—gives the film its necessary backbone and provide Gakuryu Ishii ample opportunity to flex his experimental muscles and keep the viewer entranced throughout the 115-minute run time. The first sequence alone will certainly stick in my head for a long while, and any filmmaker this proficient in their craft deserves further scrutiny and reevaluation. (1982, 115 minutes, DCP Digital) [Drew Van Weelden]
---
Playing as part of a Cold Sweat double feature with Shozin Fukui’s 1991 film PINOCCHIO 964 (97 min, Digital Projection), which begins at 9:15pm.

Marina de Van's IN MY SKIN (France)

FACETS – Thursday, 9pm

Marina de Van writes, directs, and stars as Esther, an altogether ordinary woman whose descent into masochism and self-mutilation is portrayed with almost unbearable restraint in this assured debut. What's bracing about de Van's film is how Esther's emerging psychosis is never overtly foreshadowed in any meaningful way—Haneke's THE PIANO TEACHER it is not. She's relatable to a fault: with middling to promising career prospects at a public relations firm and a playful, if occasionally dysfunctional relationship, any deviations from the mean are nearly imperceptible. Even her gruesome accident at a party, which critic Dennis Lim aptly describes as "equivalent [to] a vampire's kiss" setting things in motion, is observed at a sober remove and initially ascribed only ancillary importance. The clinical shock that grips Esther at the party in the aftermath of her injury, allowing her to dance and mingle unfazed, also seizes control of de Van's camera for the remainder of the film. One minute we see Esther at her desk transfixed by workaday concerns, and the next she's in an office storeroom with a faraway, blissed-out look in her eye carving bloody fissures into her thigh. And then right back to work. IN MY SKIN often gets lumped into that nebulous genre New French Extremity (this isn't your father's French Extremity), which includes works such as HIGH TENSION, INSIDE, and MARTYRS—all films that share common, tough-to-shake images of bloodied female protagonists. Beyond its most conspicuous moments of shock and awe, though, IN MY SKIN has different aims. Like Laurent Cantet's psychological drama TIME OUT released only a year prior, de Van's film locates its most distressing moments not in our fear of pain or even death, but in everyone's innate suspicion that their meticulously regulated life is only moments—or steps—away from becoming a slow-motion emotional catastrophe. Screening as part of Art House Theater Day and preceded by an introduction from Kyle Logan. (2002, 93 min, DCP Digital) [James Stroble]

Takashi Miike's DEAD OR ALIVE (Japan)

FACETS — Saturday, 9pm

DEAD OR ALIVE bursts onto the screen with a six-minute opening montage of sex, drugs, violence, gluttony, wrath, all of the seven deadly sins and a couple more for good measure. Often abbreviated as DOA and forming the first part of a trilogy, the film follows detective Jojima (Show Aikawa), indebted to a Yakuza boss for helping pay for life-saving surgery for his ill daughter, who must track down and exterminate a small-time rival boss, Ryūichi (Riki Takeuchi), who has decided to go big-time. Stylish, formally expressive, and ultraviolent, Miike's splashes of extreme perversity are woven within the narrative seamlessly and give an edge to the distinct melancholy surrounding each and every character. Sweeping, fluid action mimics the textural sludge that oozes from the image, rain, blood, feces, mud, broth, vomit among gunfire and firefights. The cavernous gonzo world these figures occupy acts as a never-ending maze with no way out and no reward. Each man is trapped within a despairing violence and alienation that can only multiply, even when immense efforts are made to thwart it. (1999, 105 min, Digital Projection) [Olivia Hunter Willke]
---
Playing as part of a double feature with Takeshi Koike’s 2009 animated film REDLINE (102 min, Digital Projection), which begins at 7pm.

Agathe Riedinger’s WILD DIAMOND (France)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Liane (Malou Khebizi) is a 19-year-old who lives in the small resort town of Fréjus in the south of France with her mother, Sabine, (Andréa Bescond) and little sister Ashley (Ashley Romano). Sabine, chronically unemployed, relies on what Liane calls “sugar daddies” to pay her way in life. An ineffective strategy at best, she is four months in arrears on the rent and facing eviction, setting Liane off with an explosive rage that has only intensified since she returned home three years after her mother dumped her in foster care. Fiercely determined to escape her circumstances, Liane has adopted a Vegas showgirl style and undergone breast augmentation in hopes of becoming a well-paid influencer and as famous as Kim Kardashian. One day, she gets a call from a reality show producer (Antonia Berasi) who was impressed with the video Liane sent her and wants to interview her for the show. This could be her ticket to a different life, and she grabs onto it hungrily through the long wait to hear whether she has been cast. WILD DIAMOND has been compared with films by the Dardennes, and it’s easy to see why. First-time filmmaker Agathe Riedinger, who also wrote the screenplay, keeps her camera up close and constant on Liane and her marginal existence, fascinated with her and the way she moves in the world. We see her pick plastic rhinestones off a garment to glue to her bedazzled fuck-me stilettos, apply make-up for her interview with the precision of a Native American warrior getting ready for battle, and watch her mesmerized face as she watches a dancer at a disco as though trying to imagine herself in the dancer’s place. At the same time, in a somewhat on-the-nose scene, we see Liane at the interview, stripped to her underwear, being questioned by the unseen producer, vulnerable and relatively powerless to control her side of the conversation. For me, WILD DIAMOND bears a more-than-passing resemblance to Sean Baker’s films, especially THE FLORIDA PROJECT (2017); first-time actor Khebizi was chosen from a street casting, and Baker cast Bria Vinaite as his star from an Instagram post. Unlike Vinaite’s character, however, Liane refuses to accept that she cannot change her circumstances and rejects anyone who would hold her back, including Nathan (Alexis Manenti), a motorcycle repairman who fell in love with her when they were in the foster system together. For a newcomer, Khebizi is surprisingly assured in a role that requires her to be in every scene; indeed, an influencer is always on, making WILD DIAMOND a shrewd meta experience. Riedinger spares us nothing in viewing Liane’s desperation, including watching her give herself painful tattoos for her social media audience. When she finally has a moment of real triumph, it is hardly a moment of grace. Riedinger trains her camera on Liane’s face, where instead of happiness, we see brokenness. It was small comfort, but Riedinger’s final image is of sunlight breaking across Liane’s makeup-free face, a final moment that tries to accomplish what Liane said was her reason for wanting to be on a reality show—to have her real self revealed to the world. While I wouldn’t say that WILD DIAMOND is a pleasant or particularly original film, its honesty, lived performances, and lack of judgment are compelling. (2024, 103 min, Digital Projection) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Carson Lund's EEPHUS (US)

Music Box Theatre – Saturday, 11:30am

It’s a beautiful autumn day in Massachusetts, with the trees painting the sky various shades of green and orange, and the clouds taking up just enough space to leave room for plenty of sunshine. Sounds like a great day to play some baseball. Carson Lund’s debut feature—focused around a rec-league of ball players and their final game before the town baseball field is paved over to become a school—revels in this pristine sense of atmosphere, creating a baseball film less interested in who ends up winning than the feeling of watching the sun go down while heading into the ninth inning. Baseball is, after all, more than just the game; it’s the old man in the stalls muttering to himself, the crotchety obsessive keeping score in his worn-out notebook, the food truck parked nearby peddling slices of pizza for passersby, and the friendly barbs thrown back and forth between teammates. EEPHUS somehow lands somewhere between “Slow Cinema” and indie dramedy without ever feeling self-indulgent or crass, its respect for its suburban characters too earnest in practice. There’s something inherently noble and relatable about the seriousness with which the players take their sport; here's a group of men who don’t do this for a living but feel some kind of pull towards the game, whether it's passion, obligation, or just an excuse to get out of the house. That Lund’s film is able to capture the tactility of a New England autumnal day, and carry such emotionally lofty material without feeling overly sentimental, and have some of the funniest dialogue in a film I’ve heard in recent memory, is no small feat. Perhaps it’s notable that the first character we hear in the film is voiced by legendary documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, maybe a nod to the film’s pursuit of capturing life’s circuitousness, the great American pastime acting as grand metaphor for all great things having their great moment in the sun, until we’re well into the night, and it’s time to pack it in. After all, there’s always next year. Actor/pitcher Bill Lee and co-writer/actor Nate Fisher in attendance for a post-film Q&A moderated by Matt Spiegel, host of 670 The Score. (2024, 98 mins, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Yorgos Lanthimos' DOGTOOTH (Greece)

Alamo Drafthouse – Saturday, 3pm and Sunday, 12pm

Mention of the words "Greek" and "cinema" in the same sentence often provokes shudders from veteran filmgoers. The fact is, one is used to seeing the same touristic views of the southeastern European country in film after film; the same easygoing, slightly quirky story of an extended family (usually staring Irene Pappas) set against a Mediterranean paradise. Either that, or the latest chef d'oeuvre by Theo Angelopoulos, who is to Greece what Manoel de Oliveira has become to Portugal. The novelty of Greek cinema seems to have worn off years ago (in the not too distant past the Film Center even offered a yearly spotlight on the country), and now one can finally look beyond it to individual works. On the surface and at its core, DOGTOOTH has very little in common with some of the dominant characteristics associated with Greek cinema: it's set mostly in interiors (a single house, in fact); the characters at the center of the film are completely atypical, in fact, totally balls-out nuts by any national standards; and its style is closer to Ulrich Seidl or Harmony Korine in the way it flattens out space, often capturing its protagonists in awkward, slightly off-center compositions. DOGTOOTH is a real oddity, and as such it merits close attention. Expertly straddling dark, Buñuelian humor with psychological horror, the film centers on three kids who are held captive by their parents at a remote estate. Even when the film's central contrivance becomes perfectly coherent, the film never loses its fascination or mystery. Director Yorgos Lanthimos' approach is to shoot and edit as if each scene were a loose fragment, so that small details or clues are teased out in the elaborate narrative. A discussion piece, if there was ever one, and a film that grows with multiple viewings. (2009, 96 min, DCP Digital) [Gabe Klinger]

📽️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Alamo Drafthouse
Claudio Lattanzi and Joe D'Amato’s 1987 film ZOMBIE 5: KILLING BIRDS (95 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 9:30pm, as part of the Terror Tuesday series.

Chris Bavota and Lee Paula Springer's 2019 film DEAD DICKS (83 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday, 9:30pm, as part of the Weird Wednesday series. More info on all screenings here. 

⚫ Chicago Film Archives
The Elmhurst Art Museum (150 S. Cottage Hill Ave.), in partnership with Chicago Film Archives, presents an evening screening of selected short films from past editions of the Chicago Film Archives Media Mixer on Thursday at 7pm. Filmmakers Jean Sousa, Melika Bass, and Jesse Malmed will appear in person. More info here.

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

⚫ Cinema/Chicago
Ernesto Contreras’ 2017 film I DREAM IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE (103 min, Digital Projection) screens Sunday, 2pm, at the National Museum of Mexican Art (1852 W. 19th St.).

Margien Rogaar’s 2023 film JIPPIE NO MORE! (95 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday, 6:30pm, at the Chicago History Museum. Both screenings are free to attend (the latter with registration).

A members’ screening of Nick Rowland’s 2025 film SHE RIDES SHOTGUN (120 min, DCP Digital) takes place Wednesday, 7pm, at the AMC NEWCITY 14, with Rowland and actor/producer Taron Egerton scheduled to attend. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Comfort Station
Comfort Films presents a program of short works by Nick Liberatore aka royb0t on Wednesday at 8pm. Free admission. More info here.

⚫ Consignment Lounge (3520 W. Diversey Ave.)
Jim Gillespie’s 1997 film I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER (101 min, Digital Projection) screens Monday at 7pm. More info here.

⚫ FACETS
Mahdi Fleifel’s 2024 film TO A LAND UNKNOWN (105 min, DCP Digital) screens this week. See Venue website for showtimes. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Embeth Davidtz’s  2024 film DON’T LET’S GO TO THE DOGS TONIGHT (98 min, DCP Digital) begins screening. See Venue website for showtimes.

Park Chan-wook’s 2003 film OLDBOY (120 min, 4K DCP Digital Restoration) screens Saturday, 7pm, as part of the Spoiler Alert series.

On Art House Theater Day, a new 4K DCP Digital Restoration of John Bailey’s THE SEARCH FOR SIGNS OF INTELLIGENT LIFE ON THE UNIVERSE (1991, 120 min) screens Thursday, 1pm, with actress Lily Tomlin in person to introduce the film and take a few questions from the audience.

Also screening on Art House Theater Day is Yoshifumi Kondô’s 1995 film WHISPER OF THE HEART (111 min, DCP Digital) on Thursday at 3:45pm and 8:15pm. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Green Line Cinema
Barry Jenkins’ 2016 film MOONLIGHT (111 min, Digital Projection) screens Friday, 8pm, at the Arts Lawn (337 E. Garfield Blvd.). The event starts at 6pm with queer trivia, food trucks, and more. More info here.

⚫ Leather Archives & Museum (6418 N Greenview Ave.)
Eduardo Casanova’s 2022 film PIETY (80 min, Digital Projection) screens Saturday at 7pm. More info here.

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

Ari Aster’s 2025 film EDDINGTON (148 min, DCP Digital) begins screening and Luis Ortega’s 2024 film KILL THE JOCKEY (96 min, DCP Digital) continues. See Venue website for showtimes.

The 2025 Cinema Femme Short Film Fest continues through Monday.

Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins, hosts of The Big Picture, present “their selection for No. 14 on their 25 for ‘25: The 25 Best Movies of the Century list” on Sunday, 8pm. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts (915 E. 60th St.)
“The Act of Recording is an Act of Love: The South Side Home Movie Project” exhibition is on display in the Gallery through Sunday, August 24.

As part of the exhibition, people can pose for an individual or group portrait on 16mm on Saturday at 2pm.

Andrew Dosunmu’s 2013 film MOTHER OF GEORGE (107 min, Digital Projection) screens Sunday, 1pm, as part of the Mothering on Screen: Film + Discussion series. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ VDB TV (Virtual)
“Dog Days: Superimposing the Canine,” programmed by Cine-File contributor Elise Schierbeek and with films by Jesse McLean, Ken Kobland, and Matthew Lax, streams free on VDB TV. More info here.

CINE-LIST: June 18, 2025 - July 24, 2025

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Rob Christopher, Maxwell Courtright, Ray Ebarb, Marilyn Ferdinand, Josephine Ferorelli, Michael Frank, Patrick Friel, Shaun Huhn, Ben Kaye, Gabe Klinger, Dmitry Samarov, Elise Schierbeek, James Stroble, Drew Van Weelden, Brian Welesko, Olivia Hunter Willke