:: FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5 - THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 11 ::

🕵️ NOIR CITY: Chicago 2025 at the Music Box Theatre

See below for showtimes

Stephen Frears’ THE GRIFTERS (US)
Friday, 7pm
Jim Thompson and Donald E. Westlake are among the elite novelists of the crime and detective genres. Both men wrote screenplays and have had their fiction adapted for the movies, including such classics as THE GETAWAY (1972 and 1994) and POINT BLANK (1967). Pairing Thompson’s novel The Grifters with the screenwriting talents of Westlake and putting versatile British director Stephen Frears at the helm promise an amazing movie. At its center is a triangle formed by Roy (John Cusask), a grifter who specializes in short cons; Roy’s girlfriend, Myra (Annette Bening), a part-time chippy who used to play the long con; and Roy’s mother, Lilly (Anjelica Huston), who puts the fix in at racetracks for her mobster boss Bobo Justus (Pat Hingle). We meet Roy trying a penny-ante con in a tavern that is detected, earning him a life-threatening baseball bat to the gut. Roy limps home to the inept ministrations of Myra, who decides sex would be the best medicine. At the same time, Lilly gets a call to go to a racetrack in Delmar. Protesting that she never goes to California, she really can’t say no. She decides to drive to Los Angeles to see Roy, who is not at all happy to see her. When Roy starts to run a high fever, she calls an ambulance. The doctor who greets the ambulance—Bobo’s personal mob physician—says he probably has internal bleeding and likely will die. Lilly says, “You know who I work for. My son’s going to be all right. If not, I’ll have you killed.” Roy survives. Lilly is sent to La Jolla to do another job. After he recovers, Roy decides he and Myra should go to La Jolla for the weekend. She reminisces about her salad days on the grift, raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars in long-con investment schemes. Myra is determined to get back in the money. She follows Lilly to the track and watches her take money and put it in a hidden compartment in her car’s trunk—she’s been skimming Bobo’s winnings. Lilly suddenly finds herself in deep trouble with Bobo, Myra moves in on the money, and it all ends with a confrontation between Roy and Lilly. As one of noir’s core settings, Los Angeles is the American city that produces the most evocative night images. One look at the lights from atop it hills evokes a seductive nightmare of vice, criminality, and corruption. Frears likes to shoot reality straight, so he uses wardrobe to suggest character shifts. Huston’s blonde hair is so startling, so cheap, yet she’s a woman with a very nice figure who startles others as being too young to have a grown son. Her white suit glows in the Southern California sun, but soon she will switch to blood red. Bening is not convincing as a floozy in the first third of the film, putting on a stupid, Betty Boopish voice and dressing in the cheap, garish costumes of a Vegas showgirl. Nonetheless, she is enormously comfortable with her body; a full-length shot of her sashaying toward a jewelry store owner, willing to offer herself in exchange for rent money, is itself a jewel of cinematic power. In the final act, she is pure animal, willing to stop at nothing to survive, thus redeeming the overall performance. Cusack fares less well. He’s a bit more innocent than his foils. Nonetheless, his disillusionment with life should have been stronger, his antipathy for Lilly more bitter. His performance is weak and tinny even though he’s given great dialogue to chew on. Indeed, he admits on a DVD extra that his first day at work was almost a complete disaster. In the end, he does rise to the occasion, helping to create the most electrifying scene in the movie—Lilly’s desperate, would-be seduction of Roy. The incestuous undercurrents ripple quietly throughout the film, making this explosion of passion earned and its result shattering. The shining light in this dark tale is Anjelica Huston. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her perform with such intensity and shading. Her wiry body, nervous smoking, and shaky stability vibrate and build throughout the film as though emanating from an animal that has been horribly abused and only knows how to cower or go for the throat. The film of THE GRIFTERS stumbles but, ultimately, the power of Thompson’s nihilistic vision of society, embodied in Huston’s deep feeling for this world, makes the film memorable. (1990, 100 min, 35mm) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Stanley Kubrick's THE KILLING (US)
Friday, 9:30pm
As a genre, film noir has typically been hallmarked by straightforward, pulpy storytelling. Stanley Kubrick, on the other hand, has typically employed ambiguity and open-endedness with regards to adaptations in his own filmmaking. In THE KILLING, Kubrick displays his versatility as an auteur to create a noir based on Lionel White’s novel Clean Break that satisfies the former. Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) is a career con ready to make one last score before retiring. His plan is simple, rob a racetrack during a huge race and ride off into the sunset. To accomplish this task, he enlists a host of accomplices—from a corrupt police officer to a betting teller from the track—who will all serve as distractions and assistants in the process. The film runs at a rapid pace, a rarity for Kubrick titles, and flows exceptionally well, thanks in part to the whip-crack script and the fluidity of the cinematography. The film features a strong ensemble cast, including many actors Kubrick had admired from other noirs; in particular, Elisha Cook Jr. and Marie Windsor as the bickering couple whose marital troubles lead to serious complications for the heist’s plan. The film’s multiple-perspective narrative also adds to its overall intrigue, rewinding the plot to depict facets that are all transpiring simultaneously. Even more than his first feature, KILLER’S KISS, THE KILLING announced Stanley Kubrick’s strong capabilities as a director. It’s a noir that has aged like a fine wine. (1956, 85 min, DCP Digital) [Kyle Cubr]
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Edgar G. Ulmer's DETOUR (US)
Saturday, 2:15pm
In recent years Chicago's Edgar G. Ulmer cultists have made exuberant claims for this chameleon auteur's late career efforts, such as THE CAVERN and THE AMAZING TRANSPARENT MAN. Without discounting those works, it's DETOUR that remains Ulmer's classic, with its total congruence between aesthetic means and thematic ends—a nihilistic wonder shot in six days about a pair of cold-blooded meshuganas who should be lucky to live so long. (Another irony: the latter-day revival of this backwash noir, thoroughly and inevitably ignored in its day, has made it one hot commodity; an original one-sheet poster for DETOUR would probably sell today for an amount in excess of the film's entire production budget.) There are other noirs with sharper dialogue and more glistening photography, but none as elemental: a man, a woman, a car, a rear-projected desert, and a single street lamp standing in for the whole of urban America. God created the world in six days and Ulmer made DETOUR in the same time frame—a fact that Ulmer would never be so modest as to call a coincidence. (1945, 69 min, DCP Digital) [K.A. Westphal]
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Joseph H. Lewis' GUN CRAZY (US)
Saturday, 4:15pm
The legacy of Joseph H. Lewis was cemented by GUN CRAZY, a B noir whose audacity well exceeds its small budget. The film's visual ingenuity is still remarkable: Lewis stages tracking shots in reverse, creates odd compositions that intentionally leave faces or key actions outside the frame, and—most famously—shoots a bank robbery in a single long take from the back of a car. Along with some of Val Lewton's productions, it's one of the few US films of the '40s that can be compared to CITIZEN KANE in its go-for-broke stylization. But the psychological element of the film (so pronounced it can't really be called "subtext") is fascinating as well, as John Dall's emotionally stunted antihero is pulled into crime by a femme fatale as protective as she is conniving. This makes him different from the standard noir hero, who's confident but merely unlucky. Given his introversion and child-like fascination with guns, Dall is vulnerable to misfortune from the very start. This would place GUN CRAZY among the most fatalistic noirs, if it weren't for Lewis' sympathy for the character, which in turn makes the Rocky Mountain manhunt of the third act even more intense. The accomplished black-and-white cinematography is by Howard Hawks regular Russell Harlan. (1949, 86 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
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Jacques Tourneur’s OUT OF THE PAST (US)
Saturday, 6:45 pm
An essential film noir, OUT OF THE PAST benefits from director Jacques Tourneur’s distinctive style. The film was released after Tourneur's run of iconic, moody Val Lewton-produced horror films, including CAT PEOPLE and I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE, and it’s interesting to consider the overlap between the genres. Tourneur’s striking images are driven by the way he directs melodrama, as it penetrates and seemingly physically shifts ordinary spaces. This technique creates a unique kind of tension that translates so well from the psychologically driven horror films to OUT OF THE PAST’s noir genre. Alongside the expected shadowy cinematography—by Tourneur collaborator Nicholas Musuraca—are layers of texture, spaces that seem to creep off endlessly and sparkling, verdant natural vistas contrasted with concrete interiors. It is a film driven by emotion, giving way to typical noir plot muddling that never obfuscates exactly how the events are affecting the characters. Confessing to his current girlfriend, Ann (Virginia Huston), Jeff Bailey (a towering Robert Mitchum) recounts his complex past working as a private investigator for gambling kingpin, Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas). Jeff is hired to find his girlfriend, Kathie (Jane Greer), who’s run away after shooting Whit and stealing $40,000 dollars. After discovering her hiding in Mexico, Jeff and Kathie fall in love, in a steamy, dreamy crescendo of flirtatious scenes. Greer’s Kathie, however, is an archetypal femme fatale, and of course things aren’t exactly as they seem. Amidst the love triangle, dark deeds, and enclosing shadows are some sharp one-liners and grounding performances, making this exemplary noir still feel completely modern. (1947, 97 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]
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Dennis Hopper’s THE HOT SPOT (US) & Lewis Milestone’s THE STRANGE LOVE OF MARTHA IVERS (US)
Saturday, 9pm (HOT SPOT) and Tuesday, 7pm (MARTHA IVERS)
While undoubtedly a noir, there’s an elegance that smooths any roughened edges, turning sensationalism into wry pathos in THE STRANGE LOVE OF MARTHA IVERS (1946, 116 min, 35mm). Adapted by Robert Rossen and an uncredited Robert Riskin from a short story by John Patrick, it centers on an odd love triangle between a poor little rich girl, Martha Ivers (Barbara Stanwyck), and two boys, later men, both from a lower social stratosphere. One, Sam (played as an adult by Van Heflin), runs away with the circus and later becomes a drifter, making a living as a gambler; the other, Walter (Kirk Douglas), is the son of Martha’s tutor, who aspires for his boy to go to Harvard. In a fit of rage, Martha accidentally—but justifiably, as the victim in question had just murdered her beloved kitten—kills her detested aunt (played by Judith Anderson, basically reprising her role as Mrs. Danvers from Hitchcock’s REBECCA). Later, she marries Walter, who witnessed the crime and whose father, seeing wealth and respectability finally in reach, took care of Martha and charioted Walter into prosperity by sending him to law school. Sam stumbles back into Iverstown (the sailor in his car when he crashes it is none other than future filmmaker Blake Edwards), a small but quickly growing industrial city. Back home he soon meets Toni (Lauren Bacall-lite Lizabeth Scott, mistress of the film’s producer, Hal B. Wallis; Lewis Milestone vowed never again to work with Wallis after the latter asked him to shoot more close-ups of Scott), in whom he finds a kindred spirit. How the original trio and Toni become entangled is a labyrinthine coincidence, yet it feels more like the product of fate rather than a ham-fisted potboiler. Marketing at the time positioned Stanwyck’s character, playing off the actress’ archetypal sternness, as larger and indeed meaner than life: “Lucretia Borgia was a baby compared to Martha Ivers,” “Delilah was harmless compared to Martha Ivers,” and “Mata Hari was guileless compared to Martha Ivers” were all suggested taglines. Though it’s impressive that Paramount would have reason to believe their audiences would understand such references, Martha is altogether more complicated than they suggest; she’s driven by hate but ultimately becomes a facsimile of the woman she so detested, hoping for a return to her younger self via a rekindled flame with Sam. In his first role for the screen, Douglas plays an uncharacteristically weak character, as Walter has devolved into alcoholism by adulthood, driven by the guilt of helping his father and Martha pin her aunt’s murder on an innocent man. As their foils, Sam and Toni are the continually disenfranchised; finding one another represents a shot at redemption. Martha and Walter, however, started on top and have nowhere to go but down. There’s a similar arrangement of characters in Dennis Hopper’s neo-noir THE HOT SPOT (1990, 130 min, 35mm), though rather than begin with the return of a prodigal son, it starts with a stranger rolling into town. This man soon finds himself torn between two women, bad—but, like Toni, only relatively speaking—and badder. Based on Charles Williams’ 1953 novel Hell Hath No Fury (Williams co-wrote the screenplay with Nona Tyson), it was originally intended as a vehicle for Robert Mitchum. Hopper later came across the script and updated it, referring to the material as “Last Tango in Texas.” Apparently another script for THE HOT SPOT had been written by Mike Figgis. As star Don Johnson tells it, three days before shooting began, Hopper  declared that they were no longer making that script, they were making this one, referring to the Mitchum project. In the film, drifter Harry Madox (Johnson) takes a job as a used car salesman in a small Texas town and meets two women: Gloria (Jennifer Connelly), the young receptionist at the lot where he works, and Dolly (Virginia Madsen), wife of the lot’s owner, George (Jerry Hardin, or as some might know him, Deep Throat from The X-Files). Gloria is sweet and wholesome but plagued by some past wrongdoings, while Dolly is the embodiment of a femme fatale, unrelenting and unapologetic—and devilishly sexy. (Roger Ebert would later compare her to a Barbara Stanwyck type.) Don falls in love with Gloria but enters into a sexual affair with Dolly; the latter sinks her claws even further into Harry when she blackmails him after he commits arson and robs a local bank. The film’s best aspects are the most Hopper-esque, perverse details that hardly matter to the plot but belong instead to its atmosphere. (The film has evoked comparisons to the work of David Lynch in this regard, while, ironically, THE STRANGE LOVE OF MARTHA IVERS has been dubbed proto-Lynchian, especially as it involves murder in a small industrial town.) One of my favorites is the used car dealer’s collection of taxidermied animals, which stands in contrast against his wife’s proliferation of candy-colored stuffed animals. But the ultimate perversity is the ending. Without giving it away, it’s the exact opposite of anything mandated by a Production Code—there’s no comeuppance, but rather the wholesale acceptance of deviance. In the aforementioned review in which Ebert compares Madsen’s character to Stanwyck, he also wrote, “Only movie lovers who have marinated their imaginations in the great B movies… will recognize THE HOT SPOT as a superior work in an old tradition.” If that’s not endorsement enough, there’s also this epitomization by Hooper himself: “Real hot, steamy stuff.” The film also boasts a  score by Jack Nitzsche and an original collaboration between Miles Davis, John Lee Hooker,  Roy Rogers, Taj Mahal, Tim Drummond, and Earl Palmer. [Kat Sachs]
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John Berry’s TENSION (US)
Sunday, 4:15pm
“Everybody’s got a breaking point.” So says Lieutenant Collier Bonnabel (Barry Sullivan) in the prologue to John Berry’s aptly-named TENSION, where betrayal, deception, and infidelity are all on the menu. The key to Berry’s knockout of a noir is the ever-shifting microscope that rotates throughout the film, alternating between Lt. Bonnabel, the put-upon cuckold drugstore clerk Warren Quimby (Richard Basehart), and his canoodling wife Claire Quimby (Audrey Totter). Quimby’s discovery that Claire has run off with another man leads him down a treacherous path involving murder, a fake identity, and a surprise romance along the way, all accompanied by André Previn’s nerve-wracking score that alternates between jazzy flirtation and tense atmosphere. TENSION contains all the trademarks of a well-constructed noir (sumptuous black & white cinematography, snappy dialogue, labyrinthine plotting), but the film is understandably most well-known for Totter’s knockout performance, the physical embodiment of sultriness. She slinks through the film, dragging her husband along with devilish glee, eventually sucking all the men of the film into her devious orbit. As the film eventually locks back onto Totter as the true driving force of the film, Lt. Bonnabel’s opening line finally reveals itself to us in a surprisingly nervy fashion; sometimes a person just needs one final push to make them give up the game. (1949, 91 min, 35mm) [Ben Kaye]
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Fritz Lang's THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW (US)
Sunday, 6:30pm
The first thing that strikes you about WOMAN IN THE WINDOW is that you're expected to believe that Edward G. Robinson is a fogeyish square in baggy trousers and striped socks; this movie's a parade of physiognomies (just look at the membership of the club Robinson hangs out in—one fat, one short, one lean...), and E.G.R.'s harsh face hints otherwise. But maybe that's because WOMAN IN THE WINDOW is a film that intends to make us see through the way the characters present themselves and how they rationalize their actions. After all, if they're so erudite and educated, why are Robinson and his friends so struck by a kitschy portrait? If they're real intellectuals, then why does the intellectualism they practice consist of sitting around in armchairs smoking? If Dan Duryea's supposed to be such a smooth operator, why does he wear that ridiculous boater that makes his ears look like snowshoes? If Joan Bennett is so universally beautiful, why does she put on so much make-up? The truth is that in this movie, everything's a sham, especially the ending. It is, along with CLASH BY NIGHT, one of the cruelest of Fritz Lang's American movies, which Cine-File's Rob Christopher succinctly dubbed "majestic downers" when writing about SCARLET STREET (made the next year with the same cast and a similar set-up). Maybe the cruelest aspect of WOMAN IN THE WINDOW is that the camera always moves a beat too early, as though in anticipation of the next step. And it always guesses right. (1944, 99 min, 35mm) [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]
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Joseph Losey’s THE PROWLER (US)
Sunday, 8:45pm
In THE PROWLER, a bored housewife in suburban Los Angeles enters into an affair with a disaffected cop because each sees in the other a reflection of their own unhappiness. In a plot to make her his exclusively, he murders her husband while on duty and makes it look like an accident; she covers for him during the subsequent legal inquest, saying they’d never met before the shooting, in large part to protect her own reputation. The two marry and try to settle down by buying a motel in Nevada. But when she announces she’s pregnant—and has been pregnant since before the wedding—they realize that anyone who considers the chronology of events will figure out they lied under oath, which would be enough to implicate them in murder. They run away again, this time to a ghost town in the desert, where they intend to lay low until after she gives birth, but paranoia overtakes the couple, and things end horribly. The depopulated hideaway where THE PROWLER concludes is one of the most memorable settings in film noir, suggesting the physical manifestation of the central couple’s alienation and guilt; it marks the culmination of multiple discomforting choices made by screenwriter Dalton Trumbo and director Joseph Losey in their depiction of all-American angst. Trumbo implies that both the cop and the housewife owe their dissatisfaction to the feeling that they’d been denied the American Dream—in an early scene when the two get to know each other, he grumbles about never getting the chance to deliver on the potential he showed as a high school basketball star, and she talks ruefully of being one of many young women who come to Hollywood to become actresses and end up as housewives. (To add insult to injury, her husband is unable to sire children, which was the principal reason she’d even considered marrying.) A one-time assistant to Bertolt Brecht, Losey complicates Trumbo’s social critique by eliciting sympathetic performances from leads Van Heflin and Evelyn Keyes, rendering the characters at once archetypes and nuanced individuals. Moreover, his cool approach to the tale of unhealthy desire (James Ellroy, who's named THE PROWLER as one of his favorite films, has described it as “perv noir”) anticipates his later art movies EVA (1962) and THE SERVANT (1963)—the elegant camera movements seem to encourage us to examine the characters as if they were pieces of evidence. Both Trumbo and Losey were members of the Communist Party, and one can extrapolate from the film’s take-down of the American Dream a critique of capitalism in general. (It’s worth noting that the film’s working title was “The Cost of Living.”) Trumbo was blacklisted in 1947 when he refused to name names before the House Un-American Activities; he had to write this, like all his films until SPARTACUS (1960), under a front. Losey was called to testify before HUAC while THE PROWLER was in production; he would flee the country the next year. Among its numerous accomplishments, the film stands as one of the last American movies to issue so brutal a condemnation of American society prior to the far-right crackdown on the national cinema that started in 1952. (1951, 92 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
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Max Ophüls' THE RECKLESS MOMENT (US)
Monday, 9:20pm
A mother tries to dissuade her 17-year-old daughter from seeing an older man, but is rebuffed. When the teen accidentally causes the man’s death, her mother goes into action to cover it up. We’re in MILDRED PIERCE territory—a noir melodrama—but because THE RECKLESS MOMENT was directed by Max Ophüls, it has a certain delicate vérité feel to it that puts emotional flesh on the bones of its schematic plot. The last of the four films Ophüls completed in the United States, THE RECKLESS MOMENT is an excellent example of what the German director did so well. Ophüls’ preference for fluid camerawork, lensed here by Burnett Guffey in a fair approximation of what we’d later see with the invention of the Steadicam, adds an elegant, vibrant energy to the film. Each scene is a complete thought, not a rush from plot point to plot point. Most important, Ophüls elicits a performance of depth and range from Joan Bennett, usually a rather obvious actress, that represents a career best for her. James Mason, as part of a blackmailing team, seems to have filched his performance here from his star turn two years earlier as an IRA leader in Carol Reed’s ODD MAN OUT. As strange as it seems to have an Irish criminal running around in Southern California, the psychology of an Irish lad makes his change of allegiance believable, as Bennett’s character reminds him that her actions as a mother are no different from what his mother would do for him. Suggestions that the two have formed a love match—something that would happen in an ordinary noir—are undercut by this deft interpretation of the material; their love is strictly maternal in orientation. (1949, 82 min, 35mm) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Robert Siodmak’s PHANTOM LADY (US)
Tuesday, 9:30pm
PHANTOM LADY’s inventive narrative structure probably played a big role in the film becoming a sleeper hit in 1944; it begins as one movie, then changes its shape into another. For its first half-hour, the story follows a sadsack civil engineer named Scott Henderson who’s having marital problems. The opening scene feels like an Edward Hopper painting come to life: Scott walks into a half-empty bar and strikes up a conversation with a woman he suspects to be lonely. He explains that he got into an argument with his wife on their anniversary and now has two tickets to a show he won't use; she agrees to go to the performance with him on the grounds that they don’t exchange names or personal information. The evening goes well enough, until Scott comes home to find his wife murdered, the police already on the scene, and himself the chief suspect. When the cops check out his story, they can’t find anyone at the bar or the performance who remembers him being with a woman; Scott is soon found guilty of murder and sent to prison. But good thing for Scott, both his secretary Alice and a sympathetic police investigator (played by Thomas Gomez, later immortalized as John Garfield’s older brother in FORCE OF EVIL [1948]) believe in his innocence and get to work to clear his name. It’s here that Alice becomes the main character of PHANTOM LADY and the film follows her private investigation. Plucky and curious, she makes for a winning heroine, especially after Scott’s moroseness; she’s also noteworthy for being a rare female detective in the classic film noir era, which PHANTOM LADY helped to inaugurate. Robert Siodmak, who directed, was a German Jew who made several films in his native country before escaping to France and later the US, and he brought with him an expressionistic approach to lighting and production design that imbues the pulp material with a sense of ominousness. Without much precedent for this sort of thing in American crime movies (barring the crucial work of fellow German émigré Fritz Lang), the film must have been bracing on first release. Manny Farber seemed to think so; he named the film one of the best of the season and wrote, “This is a likable thriller that works much harder than most modern movies to turn up some actual life in actual settings, and to project the psychological states of both its people and its events in a genuine movie way.” (1944, 87 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Fritz Lang's SCARLET STREET (US)
Thursday, 7pm
Edward G. Robinson is not merely an actor or performer. He's a force of nature. Much like Jimmy Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson is both character and legend, a metatextual presence who charges the screen space around him. In SCARLET STREET, he achieves a kind of nirvana: playing against type, he's not a ruthless criminal but a meek, kind-hearted amateur painter, easily duped by femme fatale Joan Bennett because she seems to be the first person to pay any attention to him. In films such as LITTLE CAESAR, Robinson guns people down with the offhanded casualness of eating a hamburger; here, he's at the mercy of forces he cannot see or even imagine, and they gradually strip him of everything. We know that coiled deep inside him is the power and violence with which he could save himself. But it's not to be. Robinson is fated to wander the streets, penniless; forced to stare at his own priceless masterpieces, taunting him from art gallery windows with their inaccessibility; and finally, even have his sanity taken away from him. Lang's filmography is stuffed with majestic downers, but surely this is among his most bleak. (1945, 103 min, 35mm) [Rob Christopher]
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For a complete schedule, visit the festival website here.

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Harun Farocki’s SERIOUS GAMES I-IV (Germany) & Joe Dante’s SMALL SOLDIERS (US)

Highs & Lows at The Davis Theater – Thursday, 7pm

The Call of Duty video game franchise launched in 2003, during the peak of the United States’ foolhardy “War on Terror” across the Middle East. Though the first few games in the franchise, set during World War II, feel indebted to the cultural success of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1998), later games in the series span across a wide historical canvas of good ol’ American militaristic carnage, even venturing into an imagined future where the US remains as trigger-happy as today. With all that, it’s no surprise that in 2024, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6—set during the Gulf War in the early 1990s—ended up being the highest-selling video game of the year. How prescient then that, in 1998, that Joe Dante, anarchic directorial champion behind films like GREMLINS (1984), THE ‘BURBS (1989), and MATINEE (1994), would helm one of the most diabolically entertaining films concerning the US' distinct brand of militaristic consumerism. SMALL SOLDIERS (1998, 110 min, DCP Digital), is typical of Dante’s work, taking the satirical mania of a Paul Verhoeven film and channeling it through a charming, Steven Spielberg-esque filter, resulting in something seemingly anodyne on its surface, but brimming with socio-political, boundary-pushing substance. The plot tracks the development of a dual set of rival action figures: the peaceful Gorgonites, kind monstrous creatures attuned to the whims of nature, who have been chosen as the sworn enemies of the Commando Elite, a ballistic squad of all-American gun-toting brutes, targeting the Gorgonites for no other reason than pure power-hungry means (insert your military conflict of choice here). The company manufacturing these toys has been bought out by a wing of the US military tasked with turning battlefield technology into consumable home goods for the average taxpaying citizen. Thus, a military defense chip is used to power these new toys, and their level of intelligence and learning abilities grows exponentially to a destructive degree. Appropriately, cinematic chaos ensues, with Dante’s strengths as a director of comic action sequences shining in the latter half of the film. Naturally, as part of the latest in Oscarbate’s much treasured Highs & Lows series, this film is paired with the late Harun Farocki’s documentary quartet SERIOUS GAMES I-IV (2009-2010, 40 min, Digital Projection), following two sets of military facilities using computer graphics and video game technology for purposes both educational and therapeutic. Various soldiers are documented training on the Virtual Battle Space 2 simulator, readying themselves for real-world combat through the prism of a desert rendered in Playstation 2 graphics. This is paralleled with scenes of soldiers using virtual reality technology to try and piece together memories of their time in combat, the promise of the digital world acting as a potential therapeutic tool for victims of PTSD. What can one surmise from Farocki’s admission that, when comparing the therapeutic program against the training program “...the system for remembering is a little cheaper than the one for training.” No surprise that the young men forced to “serve our country” receive superior resources to those recovering from the horrors of war. Both Dante and Farocki find singular methods of documenting this country’s sinister military industrial complex, its tendrils infecting all facets of technology and art, turning us all into purveyors of unnecessary bloodshed and violence under the guise of entertainment. Or, as we hear in Dante’s film, “Don’t call it violence, call it action. Kids love action. It sells.” [Ben Kaye]

Frédéric Moffet: YOU’RE TOO LOVELY TO LAST (Experimental)

Conversations at the Edge at the Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 6pm

This collection of short works considers various aspects of queer life as well as larger cultural forces that impact them. Three of the six pieces were directed by Frédéric Moffet, current professor and chair of the Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and fellow SAIC professor Bruce Jenkins is cited as a reference in one of the pieces. GODDESS OF SPEED (2023, 9 min), which closes the program, presents text by Jenkins that describes a lost Andy Warhol film called DANCE MOVIE, which featured queer dancer Fred Herko. Moffet recreates this lost film with artist Stevie Cisneros Hanley as Herko, dancing on the roof of a building; the shots are presented in two frames side-by-side à la Warhol’s THE CHELSEA GIRLS (1966). The film provides insight into Herko’s life both on-screen and off, with some chilling reflections on the dancer’s death. In contrast, the Moffet work that opens the program, THE MAGIC HEDGE (2016, 6 min), seems enlivening. In this short documentary, Moffet looks at the Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary on the North Side, once a storage area for missiles, now a popular gay cruising site. The film moves between considerations of past and present, public and private, people and birds, resulting in a rather complex six minutes. Moffet’s THE JOB (2024, 15 min), which comes in the middle of the program, is a profile of photographer John Phillips, a Canadian who moved to Los Angeles in the early 1990s to begin a career shooting men in the nude for gay men’s magazines. Phillips is candid about his work and about living with HIV from the ‘90s until his death from cancer in 2023. Soft-spoken but proud, he cuts a memorable figure. Jamie Ross’ LA JUNGLE (2025, 11 min) pairs nicely with THE MAGIC HEDGE, as it considers the history of gay cruising at Montreal’s Mont Royal Park; this history is interspersed with accounts of police surveillance and persecution of the gay community. Ross balances archival footage with contemporary interviews, and this yields a multi-dimensional portrait of the issues at hand. In Amina Ross’ MAN’S COUNTRY (2021, 8 min), the filmmaker “digitally reconstructs the now-demolished interior of Chicago’s longest-running gay bathhouse, inserting themself into a space they could previously not enter,” per the program notes. The depopulated animated setting makes for a haunting backdrop for this short rumination on memory and desire. Also on the program is Zuqiang Peng’s SLIGHT LEAK (2022, 12 min). All works presented digitally. Followed by a conversation between Moffet and the artist, curator, and scholar John Neff. [Ben Sachs]

Barbara Loden's WANDA (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6pm

Inspired by Jean-Luc Godard's BREATHLESS, the little-known, but very talented actress Barbara Loden wrote and directed her first and only film, WANDA, in 1970. Although she cast mostly nonprofessional actors for other roles, Loden herself stars as Wanda Goronski, a coal miner's wife who leaves her husband and children because she's "just no good." Put down as "Lover" and "Blondie" by other men she meets afterward, Wanda eventually takes up with a married bank robber (Michael Higgins) who tells her to call him Mr. Dennis, and they kill time on the road, running from the law through a landscape colored by distinctly American poverty. From a distance, the often expressionless, yet beautiful Wanda may appear like one of the lifeless mannequins that cinematographer Nicolas Proferes shoots in a department store; but Wanda is aware that she is a lost soul. Loden later described her partly autobiographical character: "She's trapped and she will never, ever get out of it and there are millions like her." Throughout this slow film of long takes, Wanda is always with some man or another, believing that she cannot take care of herself, that she is not a self. She finds herself in the hands of a criminal who only tolerates obedience, the same demand made of her by society. Loden's Wanda is both an impenetrable cipher and a fully embodied human being. She tells Mr. Dennis, "I don't have anything. Never did have anything, never will have anything." He bitterly responds, "That's stupid. You don't want anything, you won't have anything. You don't have anything, you're nothing. May as well be dead. You're not even a citizen of the United States." But while Wanda means nothing, it's not because she doesn't try. Society never gave her a chance. WANDA is a masterpiece of independent filmmaking that portrays what is rarely found onscreen—the true experience of a woman's life. Screening as part of the Interiority on Screen lecture series. (1970, 102 min, DCP Digital) [Candace Wirt]

Hong Sang-soo's BY THE STREAM (South Korea)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

With his 32nd feature, Hong Sang-soo blends tender sentimentality with lighthearted romance. Serving as writer, director, producer, cinematographer, editor, and composer on this low-resolution video production, the 64-year-old filmmaker weaves a story of glances, pauses, drunken dinners, and phases of the moon. The film opens with the director of a play at a women’s university getting fired for having affairs with three students. Another professor, Jeonim (Kim Min-hee), approaches her actor uncle, Sieon (Kwon Hae-hyo), to fill in for the now-absent director. She teaches textiles (we see her at her loom during one ludicrous scene), so the uncle will watch over a theatre project in which seven young women students perform a five-minute sketch. Excited to relive his theatre days, Sieon becomes ingratiated into campus life. As usual, Hong will let the camera rest in one set up through entire scenes, accenting the drama with the occasional slow zoom or pan. The characters may often spend time in cafés and restaurants bursting with drunken energy, but they always conclude to default emotionally regulated states. As in many Hong films, there’s always an air of self-parody. The story feels autobiographical in its depiction of director-actor relationships (famously Hong and Kim Min-hee tried to hide their affair), but this motif never makes it to the forefront of the picture. With both leads delivering agile performance, we find two people in search of themselves, highlighting a grander meditation on loneliness, creativity, and connection. As is often the case with the director’s work, Hong’s style manages to answer no questions while leaving the viewer charmed. (2024, 111 min, DCP Digital) [Ray Ebarb]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Edward Yang's YI YI (Taiwan)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 1pm and Sunday, 4:45pm

Edward Yang’s final film—one of the indisputable masterpieces of the Taiwanese New Wave, if not the culminating achievement of the entire movement—contains one of my favorite moments of any narrative film. It occurs during a business dinner between the film’s hero, middle-aged businessman NJ (Nien-Jen Wu, a key figure of the New Wave who collaborated on numerous screenplays with Hou Hsiao-Hsien), and a Japanese entrepreneur named Mr. Ota (Issei Ogata). Prior to this scene, Yang had presented Mr. Ota as something of a caricature, a nerdy computer whiz with limited social skills. But as the character opens up to NJ about his personal philosophy, something extraordinary happens: Mr. Ota transforms before one’s very eyes into a three-dimensional human being worthy of sympathy and respect. It’s an exemplary use of the long-take—not flashy, but wise, playing on duration to manipulate the audience’s understanding of character and interpersonal relationships. It also represents in microcosm what Yang accomplished with his small, but extraordinary body of work, employing a rigorous sense of form to better understand people, the social structures they inhabit, and how they can transcend those structures through a shared sense of humanity. YI YI is full of humanist epiphanies akin to the one at the business dinner, whether Yang is following NJ, his wife, his teenage daughter, or young son. (Many have commented on how this last character, pointedly named Yang-Yang and who’s interested in taking pictures, serves as an autobiographical stand-in for the director.) The accumulation of these assorted character portraits feels literary, as one comes to understand the family’s problems both intimately and on a societal level—their feelings of loneliness, disappointment, and aspiration speak to universal human experiences as well as the anxieties felt by many urbanites at the end of the 20th century. “At first glance,” wrote Kent Jones for the Criterion Collection in 2011, “YI YI appears to be a serene and becalmed film, in pace and spirit, a movie made by a director who has shed his youthful anger and made peace with the assorted confusions of ‘late capitalist’ Taiwanese life. On close scrutiny, it becomes something else again. Yang has set his city symphonies in a variety of emotional keys—the doleful lament of TAIPEI STORY (1985), the grid-like coolness of THE TERRORIZER (1986), the comic hysteria of A CONFUCIAN CONFUSION (1994), the carefully modulated fury of MAHJONG. In YI YI, he brings all of these moods together, never allowing any one of them to take precedence over another. Which is to say that this is a grand choral work, with a panoptic majesty and an emotional amplitude worthy of George Eliot or late Beethoven, whose ‘Song of Joy’ is quoted with the greatest delicacy in Kaili Peng’s piano score.” (2000, 173 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Ben Sachs]

Lynne Ramsay's RATCATCHER (UK/France)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 12pm

Looking back on one’s childhood often feels fragmented, memories connected by gossamer rather than any firm understanding of time as it coheres to form a life. In her feature debut, RATCATCHER, writer-director Lynne Ramsay (the second Scottish woman behind Margaret Tait to make a feature film) looks at a particular point in her young protagonist's development, coinciding with the 1973 garbagemen’s strike during which Glasgow was beset by trash and under siege by rats. What will undoubtedly become a defining moment in James’ (William Eadie) life occurs toward the beginning of the film; he pushes a neighborhood boy into a local canal and runs away as said boy accidentally drowns. From here an existential curtain is drawn—presaged by the film’s opening, wherein the drowned boy has playfully wrapped his head in a lace curtain—beyond which James watches as life goes on around him with firsthand knowledge of its looming conclusion. His family awaits a new residence from the housing council; the tenements where they currently reside are cramped and dingy, but their large family—mom, dad, and three kids—make do. Theirs might be described as a typical family in this sort of situation, not quite outwardly loving but more or less stable, though James’ father drinks too much. James doesn’t have many friends, per se, but he hangs around with a neighbor boy who’s obsessed with animals and a teenage girl, posited as being “loose” and thus another lost young soul forced to confront adult realities all too soon, with whom he explores a tentative attachment. It’s not necessarily a social realist film; while its central "action," an overstatement, to be sure, is similar to that of a kitchen-sink drama, Ramsey approaches the subject matter with a poetic sensibility, like Ken Loach by way of Terrence Malick (whom she’s cited as a filmmaker she admires), yet specifically with an eye for beauty that can be found amidst misfortune. Ramsay began her career as a photographer, and I’m reminded, albeit very loosely, of Agnes Varda’s first film, LA POINTE COURTE, which the French auteur made after starting out as a photographer as well. Both endeavors evince a purity of seeing, unhampered by what came before or what may have been fashionable at the moment. That’s ironic in the case of RATCATCHER, as it represents what many films after it aspired to be, a quiescent coming-of-age story with an aesthetic that extracts from the prosaic a sense of the poetic. Screening as part of the Interiority on Screen lecture series. (1999, 95 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Jacques Demy's THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT (France)

Alliance Française de Chicago (Julius Lewis Auditorium, 54 W. Chicago Ave.) – Tuesday, 6:30pm

Jacques Demy, in the preparation for his follow-up to the downbeat psychedelic jazz opera UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG, reportedly waited two years to cast Gene Kelly as a love-struck American composer in this symmetrical ensemble of Crayola-coded seaside romantics—a move which helps place the perpetually sunny ROCHEFORT as one of the best "date movies" in Demy's otherwise surprisingly existentialist oeuvre. Taking place over the course of one weekend in and about the town square of the namesake Atlantic seaport, the film literally "transports" us (via the opening crane shots on an extended mechanical gondola) into a harmonious lattice of unresolved heterosexual affinities established through two complete hours of straight-faced song and dance in Iambic hexameter. With each character in the network colored fairly exclusively by garish pastel wardrobe signifiers (e.g. Catherine Deneuve's canary yellow and her sister Françoise Dorléac's lavender), the viewer—at least on the big screen—can relax their focus on the protagonists and enjoy the kaleidoscopic spectacle of public space dispersed into a chromatic orgy of pirouetting passersby. Initially criticized for a level of semi-professionalism unworthy of its ostensive Hollywood musical progenitors, the essentially half-assed choreography remains one of the film's most glorious attributes--a singular mode of expression that attempts to dissolve the distinction between the individual and the collective. And in a tableau that reduces the missed connections of a complex urbanity into the orchestrations of 8-10 amorous souls, Michel Legrand's hyperactive score projects a traditional musical narrative into just four or five essential themes that mirror and overlap each other in tandem; behold, the first (and last) great fugue musical. (1967, 125 min, Digital Projection) [Michael Castelle]

Andrea Bianchi’s STRIP NUDE FOR YOUR KILLER (Italy)

Alamo Drafthouse – Tuesday, 9:30pm

Reputed to be one of the sleaziest gialli of the 1970s, STRIP NUDE FOR YOUR KILLER is more than a grindhouse curiosity. It captures a moment when Italian thrillers shifted from the sleek elegance of the 1960s toward the decade’s hunger for pulp and provocation. Andrea Bianchi doesn’t reconcile these impulses so much as fuse them into a cocktail of style and sleaze. The film opens on a young model undergoing an illegal abortion. When the procedure goes wrong, the doctor hides the body in a bathtub. His attempt at cover-up is short-lived: he’s murdered by a leather-clad, motorcycle-helmeted killer. The film connects with the high-fashion murders of Mario Bava’s BLOOD AND BLACK LACE (1964) but also looks ahead to the faceless stalkers of the slasher boom that followed. The story then shifts to Milan’s Albatross Modeling Agency, where glamour shots are always nudes. Carlo, the agency’s star photographer and entitled womanizer, gets caught in the middle of a murder spree, which puts his assistant Magda (Edwige Fenech) in danger. New model Patrizia contends with the advances of Maurizio, the impotent husband of Albatross Modeling Agency’s owner Gisella. Rivalries, coercion, and desire circulate like currency, with each encounter shadowed by the threat of violence. The killings echo the agency’s corruption. Women coerced into sex with Gisella are punished when they resist. Maurizio, fumbling to purchase intimacy and failing physically, is soon dispatched. Even Carlo, who photographs Gisella’s corpse instead of intervening, pays for his opportunism with a hospital bed and destroyed evidence. Bianchi underlines a central giallo tension: crimes are never contained, and killers perpetually scramble to erase their own tracks. The eventual revelation of the killer’s identity carries more sadness than sadism. Yet the ending denies the spectator catharsis. An accomplice to murder goes free, and the film closes with a shrug instead of justice. Much of the film’s appeal rests on Franco Delli Colli’s cinematography, which renders Milan’s studios glamorous one moment and sterile the next, and Berto Pisano’s score, which slinks from funky seduction to dread. The script, co-written by Massimo Felisatti (known for THE NIGHT EVELYN CAME OUT OF THE GRAVE [1971]), grounds the pulp into contemporary anxieties. The abortion prologue, however sensationalized, echoed Italy’s contentious debates over reproductive rights in the 1970s. Bianchi’s career spanned horror, sex, and exploitation, with BURIAL GROUND (1981) as his most popular work. STRIP NUDE remains his purest giallo. Like the best of the genre, it implicates the audience in its violence. The film insists that our gaze is never neutral, pleasure and cruelty arrive bound together. STRIP NUDE literalizes the mechanics of spectatorship. The modeling agency stages women’s bodies as commodities, while the killer re-stages them as corpses; both spectacles captured through a camera’s gaze. The film ends flippantly with the killer dead, the plot unraveled, accomplices free, and a final scene culminating with Edwige Fenech in the nude and a perverse sex joke. Being known as the sleaziest giallo film is high praise for a horror film, and the film bares this badge with conviction. Screening as part of the Terror Tuesday series. (1975, 98 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]

Jack Sholder's A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 2: FREDDY'S REVENGE (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Friday, 9:45pm

Freddy Krueger: one of the few horror villains so iconic that he got a crossover movie in the mid-2000s. Oft-imitated but never replicated (even within the series), Robert Englund’s Krueger is as rock-solid a slasher villain as there is, peppering his phantasmagoric killing streaks with puns and murder methodology borrowed from Looney Tunes. The series persists partly because of the iconic villain at the center, but mostly because of its reliance on finding novel ways to fold Freddy into the fabric of the characters’ minds. In a series that plays fast and loose with how Freddy works, the second entry perhaps plays the loosest, with Krueger essentially hijacking the corporeal form of one person rather than hopping between the minds of a group, as he does in most entries. This ups the allegorical potential especially in how it centers Mark Patton’s raw-nerve central performance, a turn that’s anchored the film as a queer cult classic. Despite its departures, the film opens right where the previous one’s abrupt cliffhanger left off, with a busload of teens careening in an uncertain dreamspace. This introduces us to Jesse (Patton), a teen whose dreams have become haunted by our murderous melty-faced friend since he moved into the house where the previous NIGHTMARE took place. As inexplicable occurrences and dead bodies begin to pile up, it becomes clear that Freddy is not only in Jesse’s mind but moving through him to dispatch everyone around him. Based in the realm of dreams, all ELM STREET films revel in being two things at once. The viewer never feels firmly in reality or the dream world, the two often collapsing, overlapping, and prefiguring one another. The unique alchemy is something both broadly entertaining and as cerebral as you want it to be, which is especially where this film’s status as an LGBT horror staple has germinated; while Jesse’s battle with a repressed inner desire could be read a few ways, it’s scaffolded by occasional dips into softcore and S&M aesthetics and an unconventional bully-nerd frenemy-ship between Jesse and his occasional wrestling partner Grady (Robert Rusler). And as with all great '80s horror, the film is also a repository for fun SFX ideas that build out the requisite gore with pyrotechnics, matte paintings, and a few ravenous dogs with the faces of human babies. Director Jack Sholder, for his part, infuses the proceedings with a Real Film stateliness, widescreen compositions and loads of steam grounding an emotional through line that heightens the horror of each set piece. Forget the Johnny Depp blood geyser; Freddy’s physical exit through Jesse’s body deserves its place on any highlight reel of horror effects. There’s really something for everyone in this thinking-gorehound’s coming-of-age nightmare, but horror fans in particular should recognize it for the essential work that it is. (1985, 87 min, DCP Digital) [Maxwell Courtright]

Chuck Russell's A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: DREAM WARRIORS (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Saturday, 9:45pm

While horror enthusiasts eagerly flock to Damien Leone’s TERRIFIER films featuring Art the Clown, this fascination with gory, inventive, and humorous killings can be traced back to Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund). Art’s pantomime behavior may be more akin to Harpo Marx, but both Krueger and Art share a love of artistic murder. Freddy wasn’t always the wisecracking humorist audiences know him as today. He was a scary force that attacked teens when they were most vulnerable—in bed, asleep. A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984) builds itself on surrealist gags: Freddy’s tongue coming out of the phone, stairs transforming into marshmallow fluff, and Johnny Depp sinking into his bed and exploding into a geyser of blood. Each practical effects gag provided an unnerving sight for audiences. Freddy was scary. New Line Cinema, who distributed the first film, decided to dive headfirst into a sequel and the quick result didn’t excite audiences. It would be a few decades before FREDDY’S REVENGE (1985) would find its cult audience in the LGBTQ+ community. In the meantime, Freddy Krueger became a household name. In two films he had clawed himself into the ranks of slasher stardom, but it was his third film that made him a cultural phenomenon. New Line wanted to give NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET another shot, believing the IP could produce profits, and the result was DREAM WARRIORS. A perfect sequel to the first film, complete with a returning Heather Langenkamp as Nancy and John Saxon as Nancy’s dad. When NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: DREAM WARRIORS begins, it has been six years since the first film and Nancy is returning to Springwood to assist at Westin Hills Psychiatric Hospital. She’s a therapist who specializes in dream disorders and the troubled teens there have been having terrible nightmares as of late. The teenagers here are different from the normal stock of '80s slasher fodder; these teens each bare emotional scars from past trauma and are far from helpless victims. Nancy learns that Freddy’s back and targeting one of the teens specifically, Kristen—screen debut for Patricia Arquette—who can pull people into her dreams. This opened the film’s world to increasingly fantastic realms of horror and humor. The enduring impact of DREAM WARRIORS is attributable to the collaboration of a talented ensemble of creators. Wes Craven contributed to the screenplay, ensuring narrative continuity by reintroducing Nancy. He later revived her character in the meta-slasher NEW NIGHTMARE (1994), completing an unofficial trilogy. The film also showcased Chicago artists Frank Darabont and Chuck Russell, who first met on the set of HELL NIGHT (1981). Before they partnered on the remake of THE BLOB, they were presented with the opportunity to craft a Freddy Krueger sequel. Their film would establish a formula that future installments would strive to emulate—a blend of supernatural horror, imaginative world-building, brutal killings, dark humor, and a head-banging soundtrack by Dokken. The team behind DREAM WARRIORS mirrors the eclectic group of teenagers depicted in the filmm as the emphasis on teamwork and resilience in the face of obstruction is a core theme within the film. Nancy empowers the teens to harness their unique abilities within their dreams, including a mohawk-wearing punk armed with switchblades, a mute pervert wielding a reality-bending voice, a wheelchair-bound wizard channeling the magic of Dungeons & Dragons, and a chair bending strongman. This motley crew of warriors have to go head-to-head with the "Bastard son of a hundred maniacs." The amalgamation of fantastical sets, special effects, character depth, and macabre comedy produced a perfect storm for New Line Cinema. DREAM WARRIORS is still considered the most popular film of the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET series. Freddy’s famous pre-kill quip, “Welcome to prime time, bitch!” became more than a one-liner; it was a herald. Freddy was no longer just a monster—he was a brand, a cultural icon who had slashed his way into a generation’s nightmares and merchandising shelves alike. (1987, 96 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]

John Woo's HARD BOILED (Hong Kong)

Music Box Theatre – Thursday, 4pm

Somewhere between silly and sublime, the pièce de résistance of John Woo's Hong Kong career turns pulp cheese into pop ballet—fluid, extravagant, and totally enamored with its own sense of cool. Chow Yun-Fat stars as Tequila (a name that only John Woo—or a ten-year-old boy—could love), a clarinet-playing cop who teams up with an undercover loner (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) to take down a triad boss (Anthony Wong), shoot a lot of people, and rescue some adorable babies. Woo's worldview—overwrought, slightly homoerotic, with some entry-level metaphysics and psychology thrown in for good measure—may be reductive, but damn if it doesn't have a certain brutal grace to it; the way he turns the characters into bodies in motion—charging at one another, leaping through space, getting showered with shards of glass—is engrossing and often just plain beautiful. Screening as part of the Hong Kong Cinema Classics series. (1992, 128 min, DCP Digital) [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

John Hughes' THE BREAKFAST CLUB (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Sunday, 3:45pm and 6:30pm & Wednesday, 4pm and 6:45pm

For people of a certain age, Anthony Michael Hall's voiceover that bookends this film will forever define the only roles everyone at their high school had to play: a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal. And for the brat packers who formed our ensemble cast, these labels would stick with them for the rest of their careers. Watching this film makes you recall a time when Molly Ringwald (the princess) was the Emma Stone of her day, and Emilio Estevez (the athlete) was the Zach Ephron. Both were young and cute, with girl/boy-next-door good looks, and it seemed that their careers could last forever. Hall was so good as the pressure-cooked nerd who couldn't get an A in shop class that he would spend then next decade-plus trying to show his range. Ally Sheedy (the basket case) is the exception that proves the rule, as she was able to lose that label as soon as the credits rolled. Our criminal, played by the now shaggy Judd Nelson, defined cool rebellion for the better part of a decade and is surely the highlight of the film. As John Bender, he insulted the school principal right to his face ("Does Barry Manilow know you raid his wardrobe?"), hid dope in his locker (and in AMH's underwear), saw through everyone's bullshit and called them out on it, and got to make out with the prom queen. John Bender was also full of some real malice, and had the cigarette burns on his arm to show us why. Ultimately, he forced a bonding ritual on his fellow high school students, and seemed to be the life of the party. He was the hero of the film, but what is left out of the diegesis may be Hughes' most important comment of all. We know that Bender's triumphant fist pump to close the movie ("Don't you... forget about me!") is the high point of his life. At best he is destined for a crappy job in a bleak suburb, stuck in a loveless marriage with kids he can't stand. At worst he's drunk and alone, recounting how he blew his last best chance with that pretty little rich girl. Easily John Hughes' most mature effort up to that point, the film encapsulated the social structure of the white, middle-class, suburban high school experience of the 1980s. It celebrated the characters and the institutional halls they roamed, but also paid respect to their anxieties and problems, and never implied that these weren't the best years of their lives. (1985, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Jason Halprin]

Alex Russell’s LURKER (US)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

Sometimes a movie feels innately connected to the moment it's released, as if the film’s existence was sparked by an alchemical reaction to the culture around it. This isn’t to say that Alex Russell’s LURKER isn’t walking on well-trod cinematic ground; the horrors of parasocial fans wreaking havoc on their celebrities of choice have been mined in films as varied as THE KING OF COMEDY (1982) and PERFECT BLUE (1997). But LURKER feels particularly tied to our current moment, specifically its relationship to the way social media and surveillance culture have shaped our perception of celebrity. Just this week, the engagement of a billionaire pop star to a professional football player was deemed breaking news on the level of governmental malfeasance and international war crimes, the personal lives of the rich and famous receiving as much journalistic real estate as a fascist uprising. The latter news item likely wouldn’t even cross the mind of Théodore Pellerin’s Matthew; his mind is focused solely on the world around up-and-coming musician Oliver (a dazzling Archie Madekwe), a British pop singer who swallows Matthew into his orbit practically as a lark. Kindness gives way to artistic collaboration and tight-knit friendship, as Matthew exchanges his humdrum life working in retail for the opulence and vacuity of Oliver’s fame, joining an entourage of yes men unwilling to burst the bubble of Oliver’s celebrity. Pellerin—his bulging eyes filling up the screen, his grin indecipherably inviting—commands LURKER, his every move becoming more harrowing and maniacal, his physical performance shifting between a house cat and a mountain lion, forever trying to suss out how he can manipulate those around him to further entrench himself in Oliver’s life. A film like LURKER carries the possibility of countless endings, and it’s to Russell’s credit that he takes things in an ambiguous and nuanced direction, honing in on Oliver’s revelation that maybe part of becoming a pop culture icon is needing fans like himself to sustain his image. (2025, 100 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Angus MacLachlan’s A LITTLE PRAYER (US)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

On a quiet, tree-lined street somewhere in North Carolina, the Brass family is awakened by a soulful hymn sung loudly and with regularity by an unknown woman. Tammy (Jane Levy) rouses while her husband, David (Will Pullen), lays in, still dressed in street clothes. Tammy makes lunch for David and her father-in-law, Bill (David Strathairn), to take with them when they leave the house to work together at the family’s sheet metal business. Bill’s wife, Venida (Celia Weston), tells him he should call the cops on the singer, an obviously frequent request that Bill ignores. Soon, inconsiderate Brass daughter Patti (Anna Camp) will move home with her young daughter (Billie Roy) in tow after yet another horrible fight with her husband. The rhythms of this family move like the seasons, with its routines and predictable conflicts, but David’s affair with Bill’s secretary (Dascha Polanco) will widen existing fractures. Director-screenwriter Angus MacLachlan, who announced himself as a major talent with his script for JUNEBUG (2005), continues to plumb the depths of Southern families with this observational film that reveals its secrets gradually and with sometimes too much economy. Strathairn stands at the heart of this film, portraying a traditional, repressed, military veteran who works too hard and connects with his troubled children too little. The lack of real connection seems to be the point of the drama, made more poignant when we learn late in the film in a heart-to-heart between Tammy and Bill that they consider each other kindred spirits. In essence, MacLachlan has given us a subdued, American version of Mikio Naruse’s SOUND OF THE MOUNTAIN (1954). While A LITTLE PRAYER doesn’t rise to the heights of that masterpiece, it is a quietly devastating film that seems true to its milieu. (2023, 91 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

📽️ ALSO SCREENING

​​​​​​​⚫ Alamo Drafthouse
John Coates’ 1977 film FOES (92 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday, 9:30pm, as part of the Weird Wednesday series. More info here. 

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

⚫ FACETS
Christopher Nolan’s 2008 film THE DARK KNIGHT (152 min, Digital Projection) screens Saturday, 4:30pm, as part of the Chicago On Screen series, preceded by a pre-event mingle (for VIP ticket holders only) at 2:30pm and a crew member panel that will provide behind-the-scenes perspectives on the film’s most notable stunts, costume design and special effects at 3pm.

On Thursday, starting at 7pm, Anime Club screens one of the most notorious cyberpunk thrillers of the late ’80s, directed by Ichirō Itano. Free and exclusive to Film Club Members. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Rachaeal Holder’s 2025 film LOVE, BROOKLYN (97 min, DCP Digital) begins screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes. The 7:30pm screening on Saturday is hosted by Black Film Club Chi, followed by post-screening talkback.

Also screening as part of the Cinema of Resistance series is George Lucas’ 1977 film STAR WARS: EPISODE IV - A NEW HOPE (121 min, DCP Digital) on Friday at 8:15pm; Spike Lee’s 1992 film MALCOLM X (202 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) on Saturday at 7pm; and Ken Loach’s 2006 film THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY (127 min, DCP Digital) on Sunday at 2pm.

The September Mystery Movie screens Monday at 6pm. 

A members-only preview screening of Andres Veiel’s 2024 film RIEFENSTAHL (115 min, DCP Digital) takes place Wednesday, 6pm, followed by a Q&A with Veiel moderated by Anna Parkinson, Associate Professor in the German Department and Jewish Studies Program at Northwestern University. More info on all screenings and events here.

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

Siu-Tung Ching’s CHINESE GHOST STORY trilogy screens this week in new 4K DCP Digital restorations. The first film, A CHINESE GHOST STORY (1987, 96 min) screens Friday at 11:45pm, and Monday at 4pm. A CHINESE GHOST STORY II (1990, 103 min) screens Saturday at 11:45pm, and Tuesday at 4pm. A CHINESE GHOST STORY III (1991, 103 min) screens Wednesday at 4pm, and the following Wednesday, September 17, at 9:30pm.

John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton’s 1998 animated film A BUG’S LIFE (95 min, 35mm) screens Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am, as part of the Animation Adventures series.

The Chicago Japan Film Collective presents Taguchi Tomohisa’s 2023 animated film THE TUNNEL TO SUMMERS, THE EXIT OF GOODBYES (83 min, DCP Digital) on Saturday at 11:30am.

Robert McGinley’s 1990 film SHREDDER ORPHEUS (88 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday, 9:15pm, with McGinley in person for a post-screening Q&A. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Rooftop Cinema Club Fulton Market (at the Emily Hotel, 311 N. Morgan St., 5th Floor)
Sacha Jenkins’ 2015 film FRESH DRESSED (82 min, Digital Projection) screens Thursday, 7:15pm, as part of the Black Fashion Film Series organized by the Mahogany at 50 Committee. Arrive early to pose for the camera, groove to tunes by DJ ShamPain Wishes, and enjoy activations by League of Their Own Chicago. 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: September 5, 2025 - September 11, 2025

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Michael Castelle, Rob Christopher, Maxwell Courtright, Kyle Cubr, Ray Ebarb, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jason Halprin, Shaun Huhn, Ben Kaye, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, K.A. Westphal, Candace Wirt