:: FRIDAY, AUGUST 15 - THURSDAY, AUGUST 21 ::

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

The Music Box 70mm Festival 2025

See below for showtimes

David Lean's LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (UK)
See Venue website for showtimes
If there is a single sequence in the history of film that tells you what watching a movie on a big screen really means, and how that larger-than-life way of experiencing a movie can be so important, it's in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. A breathtaking long-shot of the desert. A view extending to the horizon. At first, we see nothing more than a shimmer. A mirage. Then a speck. Then, finally, a rider on a horse. Trotting toward us at a deliberate pace. All at once an Arab in the foreground rushes to his own horse, pulls out a gun—and is shot. His body falls to the ground, a streak of blood across his black robe. It lies on the sand. Peter O'Toole looks down at it. After a time, the rider sidles right up to him and undoes his veil. Omar Sharif. They exchange words. The Pinteresque intimacy of their dialog is startlingly paired with the infinite vastness of the desert. It's only one of countless great moments in this truly great film. And when the ten-minute intermission occurs, I dare you not to go to the concession stand and buy yourself a drink. (1962, 216 min, 70mm) [Rob Christopher]
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Steven Spielberg's CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (US/UK)
Friday, 7pm, Wednesday, 3:30pm, and Thursday, 7pm
A bearded man, covered in grime, hauls material into a workspace. He labors, meticulously, on what appears to be a sculpture. The endeavor has clearly taken over his life as well as his surroundings, much to the chagrin of his family, who simply don’t understand the forces at play behind his compulsion. Without context this might be describing a scene from a film about an artist, intended to depict passion for their craft. But this isn’t from that kind of film—it’s from Steven Spielberg’s CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, a big-budget sci-fi saga centered on the plight of a blue-collar worker in Indiana who witnesses an unexplained phenomenon and becomes obsessed with pursuing the visions that follow. That includes constructing a giant model of the northeastern Wyoming landmark Devil’s Tower in his living room, which he continues after his wife and three kids leave when he starts hauling in dirt for the model through their kitchen window. And he’s not the only one attempting to articulate a persistent forethought; Jillian (Melinda Dillon), a single mother whose toddler son is later taken by the mysterious lights in the sky, draws the same image, over and over again. Before seeing this film for the first time several years ago, I hadn’t quite figured out Spielberg, often touted as a purveyor of popular entertainment. Obviously I’d seen and liked many of his films, especially as a kid, but I had a tendency toward dismissing him as I got older because I thought it possible that ubiquity and nostalgia made them seem more special than they really are. Then I saw CLOSE ENCOUNTERS and suddenly it all made sense, the ‘whys’ of my inquiry becoming ‘why nots.’ Richard Dreyfuss stars as Roy, the electrician whose life is turned upside down by an image, the image he sees of something theretofore inexplicable to him, a UFO flying overhead. He is Spielberg, an obsessive dreamer with a predilection for meticulous expression, and we, the viewers, are him, enthralled by the beauty and possibility of such obsession, one Roy becomes more and more desperate to realize. This propels the course of the film, amidst which the technicalities around the visitors’ arrival occur; this part is epitomized by Francois Truffaut as the scientist Lacombe, who’s in charge of investigating the extraterrestrial activity. (There’s a certain irony to the French director playing a scientist and the electrician being the one whose blind faith and desperation to pursue a vision leads him, only semi-metaphorically, to the mountain, but as is evidenced in Spielberg’s most recent film, THE FABLEMANS, a mix of art and science—represented by his mother and father, respectively—are what have long motivated him.) Both parts of the film, the existential and the expository, the preposterous and the proasic, meld perfectly, each propelling the other forward to a wondrous denouement. “I believe that the success of [the film] comes from Steven’s very special gift for giving plausibility to the extraordinary,” Truffaut remarked. “If you analyze [it], you will find that Spielberg has taken care in shooting all the scenes of everyday life to give them a slightly fantastic aspect, while also, as a form of balance, giving the most everyday possible quality to the scenes of fantasy.” Special effects, once an art even if now just a surrogate for imagination, are, of course, instrumental here, and Douglas Trumbull and Carlo Rambaldi’s impeccable fulfillment of Spielberg’s vision bring it fully to life, the film itself a fruit of obsessive labor. (1977, 138 min, 70mm) [Kat Sachs]
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Jim Henson & Frank Oz's THE DARK CRYSTAL (US)
Sunday, 11am
Though not as charming or funny as any of the GREAT MUPPET movies or its successor, LABYRINTH, THE DARK CRYSTAL is an impressive and immersive feature that still accomplishes a good bit of cinematic alchemy. Henson and Oz decided with this feature to shoot a somber, epic high-fantasy story with not a single human actor. It would be impossible to shoot a movie with Muppets and not inject a little silliness in here and there, though, and the credit for that silliness goes to the character designs and sensational voice acting (most notably by the Chamberlain, a sycophantic and especially grotesque villain). THE DARK CRYSTAL tells the story of Jen, a gelfling (an elf-like creature) who was orphaned by the evil skeksis, hilarious bird-like grotesques that rule the land since the dark crystal was sundered 1000 years ago. The costuming and character design of the skeksis are just perfect. Such an intricate amount of detail went into every nook and cranny of this film, but especially the wrinkles and hideous folds of the withered, avaricious faces of the skeksis. Though the prophecy foretold that a gelfling would bring about the end of the skeksis, they have tried to battle their fate by wiping out the entire race. Little did they know, Jen survived and was rescued by the mystics, many-armed and humpbacked creatures reminiscent of Buddhist monks. A convergence of three suns is foretold and the mystics send Jen on a journey to find the shard to repair the dark crystal and heal the land. Jen's journey takes him through magical landscapes that take full advantage of Brian Froud's art design and the then-flashy technique of optical printing to enhance the enchanting experience. Though the story is not very original, and the script is not witty like LABYRINTH or some of the other later Muppet movies, the charm and splendor of this movie really lies in the painstaking attention to detail. A very dear film from my childhood, as an adult I can return to it and appreciate the care and creativity and joy that was clearly expressed in creating fantastically weird and majestic Muppets, villages, castles, miscellaneous forest creatures and plants, backstory, mystical pictographic language and hieroglyphics, and hideous villains. Like many dark fantasies of the 1980s (RETURN TO OZ and THE SECRET OF NIMH jump to mind), THE DARK CRYSTAL struck a sharp contrast to saccharine Disney animations. Henson and Oz instead drew on the tone and archetypes of The Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, and the result is horrifying and thrilling, as any traumatized 1980's child will testify. The mere fact that Henson was able to make Muppets terrifying and their tragedy heart-wrenching is reason enough to watch this film, but the gorgeous detail in every frame is the real reason to watch it at the 70mm Film Festival. Bring your children with you so that you can traumatize a new generation of loyal Muppet fans. (1982, 93 min, 70mm) [Alex Ensign]
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Quentin Tarantino's ONCE UPON A TIME... IN HOLLYWOOD (US)
Monday, 3:30pm and Wednesday, 7pm
ONCE UPON A TIME… IN HOLLYWOOD could not be any truer to its creator’s decades-long fascination and obsession with 1960s and ‘70s cinema, though it also feels slightly atypical for the director. Without giving anything away, the long blocks of back-and-forth dialogue that Tarantino usually indulges in have begun to give way to more preoccupation with staging, fourth-wall-breaking camera moves, and all around color, resulting in an ambling and evocative dreamscape rife with a whole host of characters. Atmosphere has never been so palpable and dialogue between characters so natural in a Tarantino film—there’s nary a monologue in sight. The film begins at the tail end of an era in Hollywood filmmaking in which rapidly-fading TV actor/cowboy “heavy" Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) is seeing his career head towards Italy, specifically towards the cheap and fast genre films of Sergio Corbucci. Burt Reynolds went to Rome to work with Corbucci, Eastwood did the same for Sergio Leone, along with character actors like Lee Van Cleef, and so did one-time TV western stars like Ty Hardin (Rick Dalton is probably most similar to the latter). In the cases of Reynolds and Eastwood, their careers were revitalized by the Italian industry, but many others, like Hardin, were pushed further into obscurity. While watching his star power sputter out in what he perceives to be his twilight years, Dalton is accompanied by his sidekick/assistant/stunt man/reflective image Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), who lives in a trailer behind a drive-in theater, while Dalton lives in a Benedict Canyon home (with pool, naturally). He lives next door to Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), and Manson family members are prowling around the streets of LA, hollering at police officers and offering up blowjobs while they try to hitch back to their nesting grounds at the Spahn Ranch. Tarantino covers a lot of ground in ONCE UPON A TIME—an entire landscape of stories is on view, not dissimilar to something like Robert Altman’s NASHVILLE or Richard Linklater’s DAZED AND CONFUSED. The film has a near three-hour running time, but three hours that have never seemed so short and compact in recent film memory. The movie has a blink-or-you’ll-miss-it pace, rare for a director who sometimes has a tendency to halt the rush of his work with overly bravura dialogue sequences. Tarantino seems to find fresh new ground within his already steadfast movie-making abilities, to let the scope of his powers extend further than previously thought possible. He barely pauses for the chance to show off his noted screenwriting abilities, and instead chooses to craft an ensemble work that somehow feels more epic than any of his films have ever felt; this is Los Angeles completely transformed back to the summer of 1969, in a way that only a very large budget and large talent could realize. It might possibly be one of the last times we see Hollywood bankroll such an ambitious project by an auteur still powerful enough to retain final cut. ONCE UPON A TIME isn’t as cynical a look at Hollywood as other films have been (such as Altman’s THE PLAYER—even though it does share a curious opening shot). It’s more bittersweet nostalgia, and is perhaps Tarantino’s breeziest and best work to date; his entire career as a director bursts forth as both a marvelously crafted time-capsule and a fantasy-land-rendering of a mythical Hollywood, specifically the place where dreams, however real, are made. (2019, 165 min, 70mm) [John Dickson]
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Ryan Coogler's SINNERS (US)
Thursday, 2:30pm
What is a film like this doing on Cine-File? While our mission is to champion what I like to call “offroad movies,” SINNERS, I believe, needs our attention. Ryan Coogler, one of the most gifted director-screenwriters working today, has garnered popular acclaim by offering original stories that are wildly entertaining while providing the kind of food for thought that cinephiles used to chew on with every new release. That in itself makes the film an outlier in this age of mostly vacuous retreads and superhero movies. The filmmaker also has come under attack for negotiating a supposedly “extinction-level event” for Hollywood studios by securing final cut, a percentage of box office, and ownership of his film after 25 years. There is nothing unprecedented about this deal, that is, if you’re white. The racist hysteria aimed at Coogler, however, emphasizes the more serious point behind SINNERS—the need for Black Americans to have agency over their own lives and intellectual property. This need is the motivation that propels Coogler’s story. Twin brothers Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan), World War I veterans and Chicago bootleggers, return to their hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1932 after finding that the North was little more than Jim Crow with tall buildings. They make a deal to buy an empty mill to set up their own juke joint, recruit their cousin Sammie (Miles Caton) to play guitar and sing, sign up a local musician legend Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) with the promise of all the food and drink he wants, pluck a large cotton picker (Omar Miller) out of the field to act as bouncer, and line up food and a venue sign from a Chinese couple (Li Jun Li and Yao). With everything set in place, the brothers prepare to open their venture the same night. Little do they know that a trio of white vampires, drawn to Sammie’s music, will show up at their club to “assimilate” them. Coogler takes his time settling us into life in the Mississippi Delta, slowing us down to the pace of life in a hot, rural environment. His return of the prodigal sons shows off the pride they feel and inspire in others, as well as the ruthlessness they learned as war veterans and Capone associates. The no-fuss deals Smoke strikes with his juke joint employees are as efficient and amusing as the touching reunion of Stack with his wife, Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), and grave of their infant son, which Annie sets with a bottle of milk almost daily. His elements of magic realism move beyond vampire manifestations to include a dance floor peopled with Black musicians from every place and era, from Africa to the Bronx, in a celebration of Black creativity and joy that the juke joint revelers easily tap into. The failure of the vampires to gain permission to enter the juke joint thus separates them from that which they hoped to appropriate. SINNERS is teeming with the joy of Black life even in its sorrow and the obstacles faced by its characters in just trying to live their lives with purpose and dignity. The always interesting Jordan differentiates his dual roles beautifully. Caton is a skilled musician and surprisingly affecting actor who has a huge future ahead of him. A final, personal delight for me was seeing Buddy Guy play the elderly Sammie in his own club, named for the woman he got busy with at the juke joint, as he contemplates that fateful night. Having the rare movie that is an authentic cultural expression wrapped in an ever-satisfying horror and revenge fantasy is something to celebrate and encourage. (2025, 137 min, 70mm) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Forever Young: Picture Restart 16mm Series (Shorts/Animated)

Chicago Filmmakers – Saturday, 6pm

In the latest installment of the ongoing Picture Restart series, a resuscitative deep dive into the 16mm film archives of the long-since shuttered Picture Start Distribution Company, curator Ben Creech has gone against the grain and assembled a true programmatic novelty: an experimental film program designed with the entire family in mind. Here is a grab-bag of animated whimsies that aims expressly to revivify the inner child, packaged with a daring challenge to the usual clientele for these sorts of outings: "please feel free to bring your parents or your kids to the show with you." Leading the pack is DOT-TO-DOT CARTOON CARTOON (1990, 7 min, 16mm), a heady children's cartoon from JP Somersaulter & Lillian Moats, a married midwestern animation powerhouse whose work enjoyed a strong Chicago presence in the '80s and '90s and whose body of work has since been placed in the Chicago Film Archives' custody. It is a quintessentially great work of child entertainment—a treatise on connect-the-dot puzzles, at once whimsical and free-wheeling enough to delight young viewers, yet totally adult-friendly in its meditations on logical relationality, the mutability of personal identity and the limitless possibilities of animation as a medium. Cucumber Studios' iconic music video for the Tom Tom Club's GENIUS OF LOVE (1981, 3 min, 16mm) and Wendy Hershey's brisk satirical commercial spot BABY UP-CHUCK (1981, 1 min, 16mm) play out next, making it clear that spontaneity and an abiding sense of nonchalance will be the program's guiding principles. Deanna Morse's HAND (1982, 5 min, 16mm) thoughtfully plays with the raw material of finger-painting, unfolding as a suite of slow-motion collisions of traced hands (purportedly drawn on 3x5 notecards per the program notes) and effectively relating the hand as subject of an inordinate number of experimental films to perhaps the most universal of infantile art-making practices. Amy Kravitz's RIVER LETHE (1985, 7 min, 16mm) is a gloomy procession of penumbral charcoal landscapes that plays out like HEDGEHOG IN THE FOG (1975) if we only got ominous glimpses of shrouded tree-lines and trickling water, or alternatively like a primitivist Scott Barley short. The mood is instantly reinvogorated by Vince Collins' EUPHORIA (1974, 3 min, 16mm), a bombastic bit of '70s psychedelia that rides like a feverish dance party with DMT entities. Osamu Tezuka seemingly plumbed a recurring childhood nightmare of mine with JUMPING (1984, 7 min, 16mm) in which the film's protagonist simply jumps—merely short hops at first, but soon massive bounds that send them soaring across farmland, over skyscrapers, down into the depths of hell and eventually right back to the suburbs where they began. A quaint series of living room still lifes paint a picture of love flourishing in domesticity with Ed Counts' ROCKERS (1990, 4 min, 16mm), while animal divinity seems to be the theme of PHASES (1977, 4 min, 16mm), a sanguine and sinister student film from Henry Selick that presages his iconic work in films like CORALINE (2009) and THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS (1993). The program concludes in terrific style with a piece from Marv Newland titled BAMBI MEETS GODZILLA (1969, 2 min, 16mm), a sort of proto-Newgrounds shitpost that is precisely as ridiculous as it sounds. I wouldn't dare spoil the victor of this heavyweight cinematic matchup. [David Whitehouse]

Robert Altman Centennial

Gene Siskel Film Center – See below for showtimes

Robert Altman's SHORT CUTS (US)
Saturday, 2pm
Robert Altman, the great purveyor of omnibus character dramas, reached a pinnacle of a self-styled form in 1993 with SHORT CUTS. Nominally based on nine of Raymond Carver's short stories and a poem ("Raymond Carver soup," as Altman once described it), SHORT CUTS consists of twenty-two L.A. locals who intersect in plots of Carver-esque realism. Where some of Altman's early films like NASHVILLE contained interwoven characters and narratives, these films felt less tightly controlled than SHORT CUTS. The freedom of those earlier films conjured an image of a director on his characters' level, deeply curious about them but indifferent to their choices and outcomes. (Contrast this with Paul Thomas Anderson's heavy-handed MAGNOLIA--a film greatly indebted to SHORT CUTS--where his characters are dealt one cynical blow after another.) Altman's evolution in SHORT CUTS shows more of the tinker--not necessarily superior to his characters but quietly orchestrating them to certain places on certain cues. Characters are less inclined to spontaneity and instead are freighted with a kismet (read: contrived) interconnectedness that is, more than less, natural for the world of the film. Disasters, natural and otherwise, touch everyone in the film and serve as unifying devices, providing thematic resonance to the characters' scattershot, middling lives. At three hours, SHORT CUTS is epic in scale and subject matter, showcasing Altman's brute force brilliance: it isn't always pretty, but damn if it doesn't work. Screening as part of the Robert Altman Centennial series. (1993, 187 min, 35mm) [Brian Welesko]
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Robert Altman’s GOSFORD PARK (UK/Italy/US)
Wednesday, 6pm
Taking inspiration from Jean Renoir’s THE RULES OF THE GAME (1939), Robert Altman’s masterly social satire GOSFORD PARK is a film so much about the power dynamics of spaces. Altman’s camera is slow and deliberate, tracing characters’ positions both figuratively and literally, their movements and placement within scenes as significant as any of the choice dialogue. While we follow some characters more closely than others, the focus on space helps to establish everyone so richly, as the cleverly overlapping dialogue in group scenes reveals a host of interpersonal issues bubbling underneath the surface. It’s also got a devilishly funny and sharp script, which makes the moments of grief and silence even more potent. Our entryway into this interwar-set film is Mary Maceachran (Kelly Macdonald), a sweet but inexperienced maid to Lady Trentham (Maggie Smith), who’s attending a shooting party on a large British country estate. Traversing between upstairs and downstairs, Mary witnesses the overbearing rule of the estate’s owner Sir William (Michael Gambon); the downstairs is run by the competing forces of head housekeeper Mrs. Wilson (Helen Mirren) and the cook, Mrs. Croft (Eileen Atkins). GOSFORD PARK examines what happens when outsiders—including an American filmmaker played by Bob Balaban (who developed and produced the film with Altman)—question or challenge the established social norms. This questioning culminates in a murder that turns the film into an Agatha Christie-like mystery. The apathy and sheer boredom of the upper class, however, is even more emphasized by the violent death of one of their own. The heartbreak of the film is how their callousness affects those with any kind of lower social standing, especially women. Their few moments of agency can be found in scenes of pleasure, like when party guest and matinee idol Ivor Novello (Jeremy Northam) entertains them all, even the servants who sneak up to hear the music. A song he plays, which also closes out the film, laments “we shall never find that lovely land of might-have-been,” suggesting that even with realization of the cruelty and unfairness of these structures, it’s incredibly difficult to change. (2001, 137 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Eric Rohmer's THE GREEN RAY (France)

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

It's unclear if Rohmer's 1980s Comédies et Proverbs series could have been an improbable influence on Studio Ghibli, but there are more than enough points of comparison with Takahata's ONLY YESTERDAY in the sunny, improvisational, and surprisingly tense LE RAYON VERT (the title is a reference to the optical "green flash" phenomenon sometimes seen on the horizon at sunset). Rohmer here takes the perspective of the antisocial Parisian depressive Delphine (Marie Rivière) during her July vacation, unconsciously seeking a moment of transcendence, constantly struggling to engage with the dismissive conversations and interests of secular urbanity. No other metropolitan auteur has shown more interest in the countryside's tourist economy of recreation and aleatory romance; in SUMMER the seasides stay in the background, as Delphine attempts to transcend the ennui of heteronormative superstition. Screening as part of the Éric Rohmer: Four Summer Films series. (1986, 98 min, 35mm) [Michael Castelle]

Clint Eastwood’s PALE RIDER (US)

The Davis Theater – Sunday, 7pm

There’s an argument to be made that Clint Eastwood’s PALE RIDER is derivative. For Time magazine, Richard Corliss surmised that “a double feature of SHANE and Eastwood's HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER will do just fine, thanks.” Yet earlier in his brief review he writes that, in “Hollywood's first big-time, straight-faced western since HEAVEN’S GATE, Eastwood plays God, or maybe Death. With his gritty stare and stubble, he looks like both, warmed over,” unintentionally getting at what actually makes Eastwood’s Western so distinctive. It earnestly considers a mythological figure—the lone savior—in juxtaposing terms, as the titular Pale Rider is a reference to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse yet he also fights to give a fresh start free of persecution to the people he’s defending. This becomes explicit early in the film when Megan, the daughter of a townswoman befriended by Eastwood’s nameless figure (known only as “Preacher” for his clerical collar), recites a prayer after her dog is killed in a raid. The attack, carried out by wealthy miners trying to force out smaller claim holders, prompts her to speak a variation of Revelation 6:8: “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.” Preacher is a harbinger of Death, but only to save the righteous living. He brings Hell with him, but through retribution on those terrorizing the innocent panners with lawful claims to their small subsection of Carbon Canyon, supposed to be sometime in the 1880s. Megan is the daughter of single-mother Sarah (Carrie Snodgrass), both of whom are taken care of by Hull (Michael Moriarty), who hopes to legally marry Sarah. The general well-being of the small mining hamlet is compromised by miner baron LaHood, who wants to drive them out in order to take their claims. Preacher then appears as their ultimate savior, an almost mystical figure who shows up at the right time and can seemingly take on any number of assailants, no matter how strong. (In a decisively prophetic sequence, Preacher defeats and ultimately “wins over” Club, played by Richard Kiel, a goon from the other faction who sees something in Preacher that literally converts him.) Aside from this central drama, there’s tension in the feelings elicited by Preacher in the women; both Sarah and her daughter are in love with him, though it’s the mother, appropriately, whose feelings he reciprocates. On the one hand, the film upholds certain patriarchal structures whilst also endorsing a quest for riches, as long as it's undertaken legally; on the other it’s an ecological parable that equates hydraulic mining with the rape of the natural earth and also positions Eastwood’s Preacher as a community organizer of sorts, proving the value of collectivism over individualism. More obviously unanswered than these sorts of deliberations are some of the film’s plot points, to a lesser extent who’s Megan’s father (it’s implied he was somehow an undesirable partner, perhaps non-white) and more so Preacher’s background and his connection to the roving wayward sheriff and his six deputies (perhaps meant to be the Seven Seals or the Seven Bowls of Wrath, but again, these represent cataclysm sent forth by god, against which the Pale Rider would be combating). The explicit ambiguity is all the more beguiling and authentic because it’s glaring; one wonders if the filmmakers desire us to fill in the gaps ourselves or be content with not knowing, a kind of inverted faith in the powers of narrative storytelling. Cinematographer Bruce Surtees, known as the “prince of darkness,” brings a spiritual murkiness to the otherwise light visuals of the natural landscape. If the film is derivative of anything, it might be of a dream, seemingly tangible while it’s happening but merely a wisp thereafter. Screening as part of the Don’t Fence Me In series. (1985, 115 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

SUPER-HORROR-RAMA! at the Music Box Theatre

See showtimes below

Juraj Herz's BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (Czechoslovakia)
Friday, 11:45pm
Czech/Slovak director Juraj Herz’s adaptation of this well-known story is decidedly darker (visually and thematically) than Jean Cocteau’s classical, mythic vision (1946) and Disney’s pop romanticism (1991). It hints more strongly at the Beast’s psychological and existential torment. A pervasive sense of dread overhangs the film. It moves toward horror, then pulls back. It subtly threatens the possibility of sexual violence, then doesn’t go there. Its palette is dominated by muddy browns, but with occasional bursts of color. Its use of lighting conceals more than it reveals. The camera work is voyeuristic, almost stalking at times, yet still graceful. The Beast is a harrowing bird-man (inspired perhaps by Max Ernst’s photocollages), with menacing claws, feathers that are scale-like, and a beak ready to rend flesh at a moment’s notice, but with soulful, human eyes. Throughout, Herz maintains a tension between unease and euphoria, one that invests the film with a sense of precariousness and danger. Fate here is more capricious; one senses that the story’s anticipated happy ending just might not happen. Or, if it does, one wonders whether it really is one. (1978, 84 min, DCP Digital) [Patrick Friel]
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Juraj Herz’s THE NINTH HEART (Czechoslovakia)
Saturday, 11:45pm
Juraj Herz shot THE NINTH HEART simultaneously with his BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (1978); the films share some of the same sets, but more importantly, they share an earthy, even muddy aesthetic that gives them the quality of something made by hand. These two fairy tales feel less like Walt Disney and more like genuine folklore—they’re at once primitive and mysterious. Set in a fantasy kingdom, THE NINTH HEART follows a poor but resourceful student named Martin who comes to rescue a princess from the clutches of an evil astrologer. Along the way, Martin befriends a group of traveling players (his love interest isn’t the princess, but rather a young puppeteer who’s part of the troupe), runs afoul of the law, and uses a cloak that turns him invisible to escape from prison. The film takes its title from an elixir that the astrologer hopes to produce that will make him live forever; the formula calls for the hearts of nine young men. When Martin assumes the task of saving the princess, he learns that eight other suitors have disappeared in search of her… Will he provide the missing ingredient for the astrologer’s potion? This would all be a lot of fun if not for the exceedingly grim mise-en-scène, which recalls nothing less than the Medieval films of Andrei Tarkovsky and František Vláčil. (Is it a coincidence that all three directors made the films in question behind the Iron Curtain?) One can almost smell how awful life must be outside the castle, while the astrologer’s lair seems fittingly dim and dank. Jan Svankmajer and Eva Svankmajerova contributed some stop-motion animation, and Herz integrates it fluidly with the film’s overall design. Indeed, both Herz and the animators advance a kind of Old World miserablist whimsy that can be hard to look away from. (1979, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Every ticket includes a limited edition pinback button (new design each night), and every show kicks off with giveaways donated by the Shadowboxery, Cryptid Craft Studio, Night Natalie, Drive-In Asylum, Full Bleed Zine, and Bumps in the Night for the first folks who answer our trivia questions

Eckhart Schmidt’s DER FAN (West Germany)

Music Box Theatre – Saturday, Midnight

It sometimes feels reductive to read films of the New German cinema primarily as reactions to the legacy of Nazism. Although DER FAN invites this reading early on—with an image of a Third Reich rally, set to the score composed by aptly named New Wave group Rheingold—Eckhart Schmidt’s thriller has both a monomaniacal focus and a sophisticated, expansive set of ideas on its mind; the links between girlhood and fandom, consumerism and violence, pop stardom and fascism. Teenage Simone (Désirée Nosbusch) thinks of nothing but her musical idol, R (Bodo Staiger), writing love letters to him in which she asks him to send her a message back through his television appearances. She cuts school and hitchhikes from Ulm to Munich, camping outside the television studio where he is preparing for another performance. Along the way, she suffers the attentions of leering bums who offer her wine and an attempted assault by the driver who offers her a lift—barely skirting a serious trauma until, that is, she comes face to face with her quarry in all his vacant majesty. An enthralling portrait of a disturbed mind, Schmidt’s film lulls the viewer into a trancelike identification with Simone, herself a political subject pressed between a consumerist culture industry and a pervasive structure of misogyny that are two faces of the same vise. Schmidt himself was a journalist and critic before turning to filmmaking, becoming a prolific helmer of documentaries, including interviews with Hollywood émigré and fellow countryman Douglas Sirk. An intellectual artist fully engaged with the past and present of popular culture, his treatment of R’s stage-managed performances—supposedly inspired by the progressive arrangements of David Byrne and Brian Eno—emphasizes the futuristic aesthetics that cycle back around to a kind of Hitlerian kitsch, all seen through the unblinking eyes of Simone, a girl yet without a past in a newborn country without a memory. Considering the caustic satire of an upwardly mobile, postwar Germany in THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN (1979), historian Tony Judt wrote that “For [Rainer Werner Fassbinder] and a coming generation of angrily dissenting West Germans, the newfound qualities of the new Germany in its new Europe—prosperity, compromise, political demobilization and a tacit agreement not to arouse the sleeping dogs of national memory—did not deflect attention from the old defects. They were the old defects, in a new guise.” DER FAN puts a fresh face to Judt’s “old defects”, studying their mutations with an empathetic but merciless gaze before—in its shocking if inevitable third act—peeling back the skin to show the red, raw underneath. (1982, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Brendan Boyle]

Samuel Van Grinsven’s WENT UP THE HILL (New Zealand/Australia)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Samuel Van Grinsven’s first feature film, SEQUIN IN A BLUE ROOM (2019), was a gay thriller dripping with style and emotional sensitivity, the kind of debut that makes you eagerly anticipate its director’s next outing. If not as electrifying as SEQUIN, Van Grinsven’s WENT UP THE HILL nevertheless shows the director taking queer stories and genre exploration in intriguing new directions. Jack (Dacre Montgomery) has returned to his homeland of New Zealand for the funeral of his estranged mother Elizabeth. At the funeral, held in the brutalist hilltop mansion Elizabeth designed for herself, Jack meets his mother’s widow, Jill (Vicky Krieps). The encounter is a shock to Jill, who neither invited the young man nor was even aware of his existence. Jack ends up staying the night, and as he and Jill sleep, Jill’s body becomes possessed by the spirit of Elizabeth. After this, every time Jack and Jill fall asleep, Elizabeth will inhabit their bodies in turn, speaking through them as a mother and a wife who has left deep psychic wounds on those she left behind. A two-handed chamber piece set in a remote location and visually characterized by fragmentation and austere, shadowy monochrome, WENT UP THE HILL takes obvious cues from Ingmar Bergman’s PERSONA (1966); if it wasn’t explicit enough, Van Grinsven even stages a shot-reverse-shot with Jack and Jill’s faces half-obscuring the other’s. There are also echoes of Hitchcock’s REBECCA (1940) and myriad other supernatural thrillers that hinge on the return of the repressed through a haunting or possession. What makes WENT UP THE HILL more unique is its textual queerness. Both Jack and Jill are gay, and the trauma they’ve inherited manifests as embodied memory that brings them emotionally closer as their identities blur. Both actors are very good in roles that require nuanced and close-up physicality, especially Krieps, who manages to be open, opaque, warm, and chilly across a few glances. Listen for the end-credits song, written and sung by Krieps in a nursery-rhyme lullaby befitting the film’s nomenclature. (2024, 100 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]

Jonathan Glazer’s SEXY BEAST (UK/Spain)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 9pm and Thursday, 6pm

Jonathan Glazer trapped a horror film inside a heist movie. Though seeming to swim in the same extravagant pool with similar gangster thrillers like THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY (1980), LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS (1998), or even Steven Soderbergh’s THE LIMEY (1999), SEXY BEAST feels more haunted, cursed even, weaving a mile-a-minute story that still wears its distress and mania on its sleeve. Framed as a “one last job” caper that ends up as an exhaustive endurance test for retired safecracker Gal Dove (a never-better Ray Winstone), the film (which Gazer scripted with Louis Mellis and David Scinto) pulls its protagonist back into the muck through fantastical means, beginning with a literal boulder that almost crushes him in his lush palace of a home on the Costa del Sol. There are also surreal visions of a mangy humanoid rabbit, daringly pointing a firearm at Gal to reawaken his crime-ridden ways. (Is this horrifying, recurring nightmare creature the eponymous "sexy beast?” Discuss!) Glazer’s camera similarly takes on a life of its own, morphing and gliding through the film, flipping around to match the POV of the aforementioned boulder, spinning around in a revolving door, careening around a table to capture the glee of assembled criminals serving the whims of terrifying mob boss Teddy Bass (Ian McShane). Alongside Glazer’s confident and artful filmmaking—the line between this and his later THE ZONE OF INTEREST (2023) is his artful, genre-poking curiosity—the true breakout piece of the film is Ben Kingsley’s Don Logan, the gangster who crosses the Pond to rope Gal back into the business. Kingsley gives a performance akin to a rabid dog trying to play nice, his oily charm ready to turn venomous at a moment’s notice, turning the word “no” into a long string of artillery fired into a scene. A film like this needs an attention-grabbing catalyst to kick things into high gear, and Kingsley achieves that and then some, injecting an intoxicating level of fear and desire into the narrative and bringing the film to a close on with dark, twisted image as memorable as that mangy old rabbit. Screening as part of the Scorchers series. (2000, 89 min, 35mm) [Ben Kaye]

Peter Greenaway's THE COOK, THIEF, HIS WIFE & HER LOVER (UK)

Leather Archives & Museum – Saturday, 7pm

The film opens with dogs fighting in the gutter over rotting flesh. Following them, rogues and thieves arrive for yet another night of fine dining at the posh restaurant, La Hollandais. A man owes money to renowned London gangster, Albert Spica. As a penalty for not paying up, Spica’s cronies force-feed and cover the man with dog feces. Albert and his wife Georgina dine at La Hollandais every night. Michael, a bookshop owner and another regular at the establishment, catches Georgina's eye, and they begin an affair in the restaurant bathroom. Albert uncovers his wife's extramarital activities, then hunts down Michael at home and murders him by stuffing pages from books into the bibliophile’s mouth. Furious at her husband, Georgina plots a revenge on par with Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. THE COOK was one of a group of films that forced the MPAA to reconsider its evaluation system. Harvey Weinstein wanted Miramax to distribute the film in the United States but knew it would receive an X rating if seen by the MPAA (the film had just escaped an X in the United Kingdom). Miramax went ahead and distributed the film with no rating. This initiated other independent distributors to follow suit, causing leadership at MPAA to reconsider their structure, leading to the creation of the NC-17 rating. Helen Mirren and Michael Gambon were already regarded as heavyweight actors in England, but the whole ensemble is stunning, including a young, vibrant Tim Roth and Ciaran Hinds. Peter Greenaway has painted his entire life. He places the utmost emphasis on color for each shot: a shade of green for the kitchen, red for the restaurant, stark white for the scenes in the bathroom. Between the intense gambit of color-coded sets and the visceral violence, the audience walks out of the theater, as Mirren stated in one interview, feeling "like they’ve been mugged." COOK takes major influence from Flemish painters such as Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck. Greenaway places Frans Hals’ The Banquet of the Officers of the St George Militia Company in 1616 in the background of Spica’s table. The film’s visual style is not the only aspect inspired by the Baroque period. Michael Nyman’s score cranks through the film like a squeezebox borrowed from the likes of Kurt Weill or Dmitri Shostakovich, taking the melody of Henry Purcell’s “What Pow’r Art Thou?” from his 17th century opera King Arthur for the main theme. It’s reasonable to ask why Greenaway insisted on using 17th century art to influence his film released in 1989. There are two possible answers. First, its placing emphasis on the stark contrast between cultured, high-echelon delights and the brutish, dark souls who enjoy them exclusively. The second possibility requires a bit more historical context. With the rise of large industrial trading companies in the mid 17th century, England’s Parliament enacted the Tenures of Abolition Act 1660 into law. This event is considered the first baby steps toward modern capitalism and the contemporary notion of private property. When the legislative ink was still fresh on the page, the new ideas surrounding ownership made their way across Europe, informing art and philosophy. At the time of its release, many saw COOK as a condemnation of society’s obsession with materialism, Thatcher, and her financial reform that favored the powerful. Greenaway has exhibited political awareness since his career began. He started as an editor of propaganda for the Central Office of Information from the early 1960s and continued all the way through the counterculture revolution. Moreover, COOK's theatrical presentation and parable of rewarded thieves echoes Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. Like Brecht, Greenaway chooses to identify characters by their occupations or function in society; the cook cooks, the thief thieves, and the wife obeys. There’s no given psychological explanation to their actions; they are fulfilling their role subscribed by society, cogs in a machine. Michael, although a bookstore owner in occupation, disrupts the status quo as a lover and is punished for it. Although the thief faces consequences for his actions, the audience finds no relief. Even Roger Ebert believed Albert was let off the hook too easy for his crimes of the flesh. Screening as part of the Fetish Film Forum. (1989, 124 min, Digital Projection) [Ray Ebarb]

Olivier Assayas' DEMONLOVER (France)

FACETS – Friday, 7pm

DEMONLOVER was one of the first movies to address the internet’s impact on communication and interpersonal relationships; what distinguishes it from many of the other, lesser movies on the subject to have come in its wake is that Olivier Assayas, a cineaste of the highest order, doesn’t regard the Information Age from a detached, moralizing position, but rather from an immediate and sensuous one. Perhaps the defining trait of the movie’s intoxicating style is Assayas’ tendency to cut from one tracking shot to another and then another. The technique conveys a sense of constant movement through the physical world and, more importantly, the fluidity with which we move online between ideas, cultures, and the intimate details of other people’s lives. Likewise, the narrative of DEMONLOVER is a fusion of high- and lowbrow cinematic references that include David Cronenberg’s VIDEODROME, Michael Mann’s THE INSIDER (Gina Gershon, who appears here, essentially plays a variation on her character from that movie), espionage thrillers, and animated S&M porn. This mixture suggests an early 21st century update of the French New Wave in that Assayas—who, like the New Wave directors, wrote criticism for Cahiers du Cinéma before he started making movies—builds on his references to craft a statement about the zeitgeist. What he has to say is unsettling as well as seductive: the movie posits that the most typical relationships in the Information Age involve people using or being used by others; it also suggests a dark underside to the world of knowledge created by the Internet. Yet Assayas’ concerns never come across as cerebral, thanks to the mobile filmmaking and the exciting plot, which has to do with power plays (both corporate and sexual) within internet bondage porn companies. The score—written and performed by Sonic Youth when they were a five-piece with Jim O’Rourke on third guitar—adds to the hypnotic effect. (2002, 122 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Screening as part of a Cold Sweat double feature with Pascal Plante’s 2023 film RED ROOMS (118 min, DCP Digital) at 9:15pm.

George Tillman Jr.’s SOUL FOOD (US)

Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts (at the University of Chicago) – Sunday, 1pm

While it may not seem like it, the 1990s were a relatively good period for movies by, about, and for Black Americans. Some genuine artistic achievements released during that decade include John Singleton’s BOYZ IN THE HOOD (1991), Julie Dash’s DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST (1991), Spike Lee’s MALCOLM X (1992) and CROOKLYN (1994), and Kasi Lemmon’s EVE’S BAYOU (1997). The decade also had its share of Black horror films, comedies, and family dramas. Of the latter, George Tillman Jr.’s SOUL FOOD offers a heartwarming tale of familial love that emphasize the importance of maintaining the ties that bind. The Chicago-set film centers on sisters Teri, Maxine, and Bird (Vanessa Williams, Vivica A. Fox, and Nia Long); their husbands, Kenny, Miles, and Lem (Michael Beach, Jeffrey D. Sams, and Mekhi Phifer); and especially Maxine and Kenny’s son Ahmad (Brandon Hammond), whose point of view and narration propel the story. The family meets every Sunday for a feast of soul food presided over by Big Mama Joe (Irma P. Hall), the sisters’ mother. This bonding ritual is interrupted when Big Mama has a stroke, allowing the fractures in the family to widen and threaten to break the family apart. Based loosely on director-screenwriter Tillman Jr.’s own life, SOUL FOOD follows the familiar beats of a mainstream Hollywood movie, but offers a multidimensional look at Black American life long missing from the silver screen. Hammond is an affable guide through the ups and downs of his family, and Gina Ravera as a free-spirited cousin provides a small jewel of a performance. Look for a banging rendition of the original song “I Care ’Bout You” at the Green Mill written by the film’s executive producer Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds and performed by him and a fictitious band called Mylestone that includes Edmonds’s brothers Kevon and Melvin. Screening as part of the Mothering on Screen: Film + Discussion series. (1997, 115 min, Digital Projection) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Robert Lee King’s PSYCHO BEACH PARTY

Alamo Drafthouse – Wednesday, 9pm

Celebrating its 25th anniversary, director Robert Lee King’s film is a sun-soaked, slasher-laced jewel within American queer camp cinema. Emerging from a lineage that includes Andy Warhol, Paul Morrissey, Russ Meyer, and Kenneth Anger, the film inherits a tradition of gender-bending portraiture and hyper-stylized sexual pulp. From the transgressive saints including John Waters, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Richard O’Brien to the postmodern parodists Pedro Almodóvar, Derek Jarman, and Todd Haynes a path was paved toward queer soap opera, genre appropriation as political critique, and drag-infused satire. In this family tree, PSYCHO BEACH PARTY is a limb bridging a John Waters audacity with the DIY midnight movie ethos, nods to Russ Meyer’s pulp ferocity, and playing in the drag-parody sandbox later championed by Peaches Christ. The film adapts Charles Busch’s 1987 stage play into a rear-projected, sun-baked reimagining of the early 1960s Beach Movie cycle, recalling BEACH PARTY (1963), MUSCLE BEACH PARTY (1964), and HOW TO STUFF A WILD BIKINI (1965). Busch’s script uproots Sandra Dee’s GIDGET (1959) performance as Frances Lawrence, replacing her with Lauren Ambrose’s Florence ‘Chicklet’ Forrest. King and Busch rewire the beach film premise with slasher mechanics, homoerotic innuendo, and stage-theatrical performances. Chicklet negotiates uncharted beach culture while pursuing first-female-surfer status and contending with sudden psychotic episodes triggered by hypnotic spirals. She may be a masked killer targeting teens deemed abnormal by '60s standards or a dominatrix who created orgies. A single testicle, homosexuality, schizophrenia, perceived disabilities, or even psoriasis become reasons to fear the killer may get you. Busch, who originally played Chicklet on stage, creates Captain Monica Stark as a role for himself in the film. As a no-nonsense gumshoe with camp swagger, Stark’s presence elevates the absurdity: it’s not the sight of a drag cop, but his over-the-top performance that echoes the confidence of hard-boiled detective archetypes. His line, “I want to know exactly what you heard, and exactly what you saw,” transforms noir bravado into gleeful lyricism, letting theatrical exaggeration meet genre satire. Cinematographer Arturo Smith, known for Gregg Araki’s NOWHERE (1997), captures flat, almost airless lighting evoking 1960s studio teen comedies. King and Busch resist improving upon the look, instead they preserve its artifice and in doing so the thematic dissonances shines in the summer sun. When violence occurs, it does so within the same bright, artificial space, and underlines the collision of genres. Positioned between John Waters’ CRY-BABY (1990) and Jamie Babbit’s BUT I’M A CHEERLEADER (1999), the film participates in a wave of indie queer features satirizing mainstream repression and coded desire. King’s fidelity to theatrical convention is on display with exaggerated diction by the actors, stage blocking, and jokes allowed to linger for an audience response help to distinguish the work. At 25, PSYCHO BEACH PARTY merits reassessment. Its humor arises not from postmodern detachment but from fully inhabiting its period idioms, trusting friction between past innocence and present awareness. The slasher element structurally literalizes societal threats against those who deviate from perceived normative roles. In doing so, the film transcends cult artifact status, demonstrating that camp can reanimate obsolete genres to expose their ideological core while preserving pleasure. PSYCHO BEACH PARTY reminds us that the intersection of parody, performance, and period-specific style remains a potent vehicle for critique. Screening as part of the Weird Wednesday series. (2000, 95 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]

Ray Enright & Busby Berkeley's DAMES (US)

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

For those longing for the days when the movie musical was as commonplace as a superhero flick, something like DAMES feels pretty exemplary of what the genre does best; it's a frothy, silly, charming piece of low-stakes entertainment committed to the genre in both its narrative leanness and its visual excess. The comedic setup is both bizarrely knotty and dubiously simple, involving a wealthy conservative benefactor who despises the “immoral” world of musical comedy diverting his $10 million inheritance away from his theatrically-inclined descendant, Jimmy Higgens (Dick Powell), and towards a distant relative who ends up—surprise surprise!—investing said inheritance into Jimmy’s new show, "Sweet and Hot." The hour-or-so leading up to the performance is delightful enough, with director Ray Enright keeping the action light and brisk, Delmer Daves’ screenplay filled with zippy one-liners and enough comic foibles to keep the feature floating along (a particular segue involving trying to procure a rare form of medicine is perhaps the most needlessly diverting). But once we get to the show itself, we find ourselves in musical comedy heaven thanks to the tremendous staging of Busby Berkeley and his commitment to spectacle-driven performance. The songs filling this section are rather thin, a surprise since they come from the songwriting team of Harry Warren and Al Dubin, reuniting with Berkeley after previous collaborations on the previous year’s 42ND STREET (1933) and FOOTLIGHT PARADE (1933). Only the tune "I Only Have Eyes For You" is able to dig its way into your skull as a bona fide ear worm, aided by its accompanying number, where leagues of cutout faces of the actor Ruby Keeler flood the screen. Berkeley’s innate sense of how to use the human body as a canvas for explosive movement and shape is fully realized in the closing number—titled, of course, "Dames"—where chorus girls shed their clothing to fill the screen with innumerable patterns of eye-catching sensational choreography. It’s silly, it’s inane, and it’s just what the movies were made for. Screening as part of the Pre-Code Musicals on Film series. (1934, 91 min, 35mm) [Ben Kaye]

Elia Kazan’s A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday, 6pm

If I had to guess which playwright’s work has garnered my most repeat viewings, I’m pretty sure it would be Tennessee Williams. I’ve seen most of his major plays on stage more than once, but the one to which I return again and again is A Streetcar Named Desire. It’s no wonder. It’s his best and most famous play, so it gets revived regularly. More importantly, getting lost in the poetry and epic battle between humanity’s benevolent and bestial natures is as enthralling as it is cataclysmic. When Streetcar opened on Broadway in 1947, it was a sensation that ran at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre for two years. Such success was bound to attract the attention of Hollywood, but worries at 20th Century Fox about the Production Code eviscerating its raw sexual content saw it bounce over to Warner Bros., where the original Broadway cast and director were hired to reprise their work, save for the substitution of the better-known Vivien Leigh, who played Blanche DuBois in London, for Jessica Tandy. Leigh’s interpretation, molded by her director and husband, Laurence Olivier, reportedly clashed with the American actors and director, but eventually, the ensemble found their footing as they told the story of a fragile, half-crazed Southern belle whose end of the line is in a rundown New Orleans two-flat bordered by walls ironically called Elysian Fields where her sister and brother-in-law live. Aside from an establishing shot in which Blanche emerges like a phantom from a cloud of steam at the train station and a few brief scenes, Kazan eschews opening the play up. Two sound stages demarcate the dimensions of Blanche’s prison, and his probing camera pushes us into a world where Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando) and his wife Stella (Kim Hunter) loom large, and Blanche is systematically diminished. It’s intriguing to watch Leigh inhabit Blanche. As a woman who lived under an actual, if ceremonial, monarchy, Leigh’s aristocratic bearing and attachment to Belle Reve, the plantation lost to creditors, feels almost an allegory for the British loss of this colony to the vulgar, brash Americans who find their apotheosis in Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando). Stanley subscribes to populist politician Huey Long’s notion of “every man a king,” and he’s proud of dragging his wife Stella down to his primordial level. I always cringe a little when I see Stella leap into his arms, his clothes covered with axle grease from working on his car, the tug of his animal magnetism overwhelming Blanche’s just-voiced plea that Stella not hang back with the apes. This particular scene encapsulates all that is great about STREETCAR and the actors who play it. Hunter, lounging in bed after a night of passion with Stanley, is drunk with physical satisfaction tempered only by her love for Blanche. Leigh’s defense of the world in which she and Stella grew up shows Blanche at her most rational, clearly articulating her values and appealing to Blanche’s sense of self. Stanley, overhearing the conversation from the street, only has to ring his usual bell (“Hey, Stella!”) and stand looking boyish and sexy to banish her doubts. The shit-eating grin Brando gives Leigh will emerge again when Stanley decides to break her will as he did Stella’s with sex, but this time, a violent sexual assault. Leigh conveys the hysteria of Blanche, exhausted by her endless spinning of fantasies to protect her from the world. I was struck by how thin she looks in the final scene, a ghostly remnant of the past. Brando made his career with this feral, utterly irresistible portrayal of an amoral man. Despite Stella’s subordination, Hunter deftly communicates her striving for self-determination (“You take it for granted that I am in something that I want to get out of.”) within a social structure that gives her little wiggle room. Karl Malden’s Mitch, the safe harbor where Blanche hopes to find some rest, seems as guileless as Blanche is calculating. But Mitch, trapped by a sick mother he hates, is a striver in his own right who wants to be just like Stanley and rise above his station if only by being with Blanche. Everyone uses everyone in this desperate look at one version of the American Dream filtered through the lens of Tennessee Williams’ tortured transmutation of his own horrible past in this steamy, claustrophobic masterpiece. Screening as part of the Scorchers series. (1951, 122 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Sergio Leone's THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (Italy)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 5:30pm

Sergio Leone is to the "spaghetti western," a popular subgenre of American-set westerns made in Europe in the 60s and 70s, what Jean-Pierre Melville is to the French crime film: Leone, like Melville, made outrageously entertaining movies that reflected a punch-drunk love for American genre fare, the conventions of which he inflated to a near-operatic scale after refracting them through his own unique cultural sensibility. And THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY remains the high point of both Leone's career and the spaghetti western in general. It's the third and most ambitious installment of a trilogy (preceded by 1964's A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS and 1965's FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE, both of which also feature Clint Eastwood in his career-defining "Man with No Name" persona) but this Hollywood co-production works perfectly as a stand-alone feature. The plot concerns the misadventures of the title trio (filled out by Lee Van Cleef as the heavy and Eli Wallach, the true heart of the film, as the Mexican bandit Tuco), all of whom are in search of $200,000 in buried gold coins. That these events unfold against the backdrop of a borderline-Surrealist, European's-eye-view of the American Civil War somehow feels ineffably right: Leone's exuberant visual style combines with Ennio Morricone's legendarily innovative score to lend THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY a singular tone that is at once comical, cartoonish, and, in Dave Kehr's astute phrase, "inexplicably moving." Screening as part of the Scorchers series. (1966, 161 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]

Jacques Deray’s LA PISCINE (France)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 5:15pm

The 4K restoration of Jacques Deray’s French thriller could not have come at a better time. In a twist that would have certainly pleased the likes of Will H. Hays, there has been a growing resurgence in online discourse of puritanical, anti-sex attitudes towards film, especially (and confusingly) among young people. It’s not uncommon to log onto Twitter and see the regurgitation of the same stale takes: sex scenes are unnecessary, problematic, or inherently abusive; they don’t move the plot forward; et cetera. LA PISCINE argues—and rightfully so—that sex and pleasure are inseparable from cinema. Two lovers, Jean-Paul (Alain Delon) and Marianne (Romy Schneider), enjoy a steamy vacation in their friend’s St. Tropez villa. But when Marianne’s former lover decides to join them, bringing along his 18-year-old daughter, the various intersections of attraction and tension amongst the four characters simmer—until they boil over into something much more sinister. It's a slow burn as far as erotic thrillers go, but the accumulation of seemingly small moments sets the film into a satisfying overdrive: the nonchalant non sequiturs, the bodies constantly dripping in sweat, the eyes that scan the room for the next beat, the hands always caressing a lit cigarette. LA PISCINE is unapologetically horny and sinister; Delon and Schneider craft a welcome cocktail of summer scandal that can evoke a heatwave in a cold theater. And the film’s climax, not unlike the film itself, is less of an explosion and more of a test of endurance. Screening as part of the Scorchers series. (1969, 123 mins, DCP Digital) [Cody Corrall]

John Carpenter's BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA (US)

Northbrook Public Library – Tuesday, 7pm

On their first meeting, the evil Lo Pan (James Hong) tells hunky truck driver Jack Burton (Kurt Russell), “You are not brought upon this world to ‘get it’.” The thing about Jack’s cluelessness throughout BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA is that it’s actually an incredibly smart device, buoyed by an endlessly charming performance by Russell, who knows exactly how the character functions within the film. Jack’s a parody of an American action hero: he doesn’t know to take the safety off his gun, he repeats clever lines other characters already said earlier in the film. The story—about the supernatural war occurring underneath San Francisco’s Chinatown—isn’t about him at all: he’s incidental, just kind of there. But his incompetence coupled with a desire to receive a gambling debt from his friend, Wang (Dennis Dun), drags us into the fantastical world of the film. Whatever’s going on, he quickly decides he’s not going to miss out on the ride and, thus, neither are we. And what a ride. BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA is equally notable in that the story Jack falls into is also compelling, filled with characters deeply invested in sorcerer Lo Pan’s plan to release himself from an ancient curse. Aggressively plucky Gracie Law (Kim Cattrall), for instance, is dedicated to uncovering the plot, along with Wang’s uncle, Egg Shen (Victor Wong), an old enemy of Lo Pan’s. Their scenes include smart and hilarious exposition, the film wholly self-aware of the tropes with which it’s engaging without being dismissive of the characters’ investment. Firing on all cylinders, it helps that BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA also looks so good. Dean Cundey’s cinematography is stylish without feeling too dated, highlighting the neon signs and darkened alleys of the film’s Chinatown. It also perfectly emphasizes the imposing action set pieces, and effective visual effects and practical monsters. The skill with which John Carpenter balances the fantasy/action/comedy elements in BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA remains impressive, and as Jack rides off, waxing poetically to himself about his heroism at the end of the film, it’s easy to wish he’d soon stumble into another adventure so we can continue to tag along. (1986, 99 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Kevin Smith's DOGMA (US)

FACETS – Saturday, 7pm and Sunday, 1pm

Kevin Smith's fourth film stands as one of the most audacious pieces of mainstream Hollywood auteur filmmaking of the 20th century. His career began on a rollercoaster. He had two wildly successful films—CLERKS (1994) and CHASING AMY (1997)—with a giant bomb in between, MALLRATS (1995). By this point the critics have mostly agreed that he had a good deal of talent, if unfocused and not fully realized, and he already had a diehard cult of fans. With this kind of cache and zeitgeist, he was finally able to get his dream film made, DOGMA. A surprisingly devout and practicing Catholic, Smith had always wanted to make a film about God through a very Catholic lens. An admittedly audacious project, he cashed in every chip he possibly could and got a rogue's gallery of actors on board: Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Alan Rickman, Chris Rock, Salma Hayek, George Carlin, Janeane Garafolo, and Linda Fiorentino. The high concept fantasy comedy involves two fallen angels (Affleck and Damon) who have found a loophole to get back into heaven via a demon. An abortion counselor in suburban Chicago, who unbeknownst to herself is the last descendant of Christ, is visited by an angel and sent on a mission to stop the fallen angels. Along the way she teams up with Smith's stoner avatar Silent Bob and his obnoxious hetero life mate Jay, also Rufus, the Black 13th apostle written out of the Bible due to racism, and the physical embodiment of serendipity, who is now a stripper. You can easily understand why this film was heavily protested by Christians. It's clear that everyone thought Smith, with his offensive stoner comedy past, would be gleefully reveling in being as offensively blasphemous as possible. But, oddly enough, it stands tall alongside Scorsese's THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST (1988) as a deeply considered exploration and questioning of both faith and religion by someone who actually goes to church. A lot. Still, it is surprising to see the man who coined the nonsense phrase "snootchie bootchies" waxing almost rabbinically about the theologically legalistic intricacies of plenary indulgences. Yes, it's a bit of armchair/stoner theology going on here, with Smith taking from Judaism, Islam, early post-schism Catholicism, and what seems to be the religious fiction of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens, but holding a man who has a literal giant shit demon in his film to a high theological threshold would also be disingenuous. It feels as the irreverence here comes from Smith's being steeped in the uniquely American version of Catholicism with its slight patina of cultural Protestantism. There's a little bit of Martin Luther in all Americans in our inability to fully believe in anything unquestioningly and our penchant to turn dissatisfaction into public spectacle. With this in mind, it's hard not to see DOGMA as a genuine exercise of a Catholic's faith in art. Just one equally filled with theological pontifications and dated gay jokes. It's exactly how you'd imagine a Catholic Gen X slacker from New Jersey would wrestle with God. By far the most commercially successful, and notorious, of the films Smith made in his View Askewniverse (the cinematic universe in which 9 of his film take place), it's now being re-released in theaters because after a long dark period in which the film was owned by Harvey Weinstein. Since the 2008 BluRay went out of print, DOGMA has been commercially unavailable in any manner until now, when Iconic Events bought the rights and are putting it back in theaters for an ersatz 25th anniversary celebration. Hopefully it'll hit streaming soon too because I'm definitely interested to see the current cultural response to this toilet humor testament to the Catholic divine. (1999, 128 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]

Takashi Miike's 13 ASSASSINS (Japan)

Alamo Drafthouse – Saturday, 12pm, Monday, 9:15pm, and Wednesday, 3pm

One of Takashi Miike's biggest international financial and critical successes, this neatly-bisected action movie—the first half following, in heist-movie style, a band of warriors as it assembles to ambush a renegade lord, the second depicting the resultant protracted showdown—finds the notoriously freewheeling filmmaker playing it more or less straight. Like his Stateside breakthrough AUDITION, 13 ASSASSINS sticks—almost perversely—to a conceptual structure, with the build-up a showcase of narrative expediency and hard-boiled dialogue, and the battle an exhaustive—though never exhausting—onslaught of inventive cartoon violence ("a fragmented, tapestry-like blur of death," per Daniel Kasman); still, Miike finds time for some of his trademark non sequitur flourishes, including a limbless CGI woman and the unexplained resurrection of a major character. As far as pure entertainment goes, this was one of 2011's finest stateside releases. (2010, 126 min, DCP Digital) [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

Francis Ford Coppola's PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED (US)

Davis Theater – Monday, 7pm

PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED is a familiar film from both a contemporary perspective and from a 1986 perspective, as it came out amidst a trend of similarly themed movies (such as the 1985 blockbuster BACK TO THE FUTURE); it’s also part of a larger '80s cultural fascination with revisiting mid-century America. At the start of the film, Peggy (Kathleen Turner) is attending her 25th high school reunion with her daughter instead of her philandering husband Charlie (Nicolas Cage), once her childhood sweetheart. She faints when the pressure of the event becomes too much, then wakes up twenty-five years younger, back in high school with a chance to do things differently. The plot successfully balances lightheartedness with dark melancholy about regret and longing; the most emotional moments of PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED are driven by the heroine's interactions with those she’s lost over the years, especially her grandparents. While there are obvious jokes about “look how times have changed!”, the film is more about change—and constancy—on a personal scale. It's held together by Turner’s playful and sincere performance as Peggy, who exhibits self-awareness and determination from the beginning. The supporting cast includes, among many recognizable faces, Joan Allen, Jim Carrey, and Helen Hunt. Standing out, unsurprisingly, is Cage, whose acting choices as teenage Charlie are wholly wild, not least is the squeaky voice he uses throughout; while his performance infamously prompted pushback from production and fellow actors alike, it somehow totally works. Screening as part of the Big Screen Classics series. (1986, 103 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

📽️ ALSO SCREENING

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

⚫ Cinema/Chicago
Gregory Dixon’s 2018 film OLYMPIA (93 min, Digital Projection) screens Monday, 6:30pm, at the Chicago Cultural Center.

Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein’s 2019 film SWOON (105 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday, 6:30pm, at the Chicago History Museum. Both screenings are free to attend but are currently standby only. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Comfort Film at Comfort Station
The FUGUE STATE Film Festival takes place Wednesday at 7pm, followed by a filmmaker Q&A. Free admission. More info here.

⚫ FACETS
Eva Victor’s 2025 film SORRY, BABY (103 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday at 3pm and 5pm.

Celine Song’s 2025 film MATERIALISTS (109 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday at 5pm. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Amy Berg’s 2025 documentary IT’S NEVER OVER, JEFF BUCKLEY (106 min, DCP Digital) continues screening. See Venue website for showtimes.

Black Harvest presents Bethann Hardison and Frédéric Tcheng’s 2023 documentary INVISIBLE BEAUTY (115 min DCP Digital) on Sunday, 12pm, as part of the citywide Mahogany at 50 celebration. Hardison in attendance.

Also screening as part of the Scorchers series are Stanley Kramer’s 1960 film INHERIT THE WIND (128 min, DCP Digital on Sunday at 2:45pm and Stuart Rosenberg’s 1967 film COOL HAND LUKE (127 min, DCP Digital) on Monday at 6pm.

Kelly Reichardt’s 2013 film NIGHT MOVES (112 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 6pm, as part of the Chicago International Film Festival Presents: The (Usual) Auteur Suspects series. More info on all screenings here. 

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

Kate Beecroft’s 2025 film EAST OF WALL (97 min, DCP Digital) begins screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

Joseph Kosinski’s 2022 film TOP GUN: MAVERICK (131 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday at 10:15pm. More info on all screenings 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. More info 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: August 15, 2025 - August 21, 2025

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Brendan Boyle, Michael Castelle, Rob Christopher, Cody Corrall, John Dickson, Ray Ebarb, Alex Ensign, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Patrick Friel, Shaun Huhn, Ben Kaye, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Raphael Jose Martinez, Michael Glover Smith, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Brian Welesko, David Whitehouse