:: FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 19 - THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 25 ::

🌈 REELING 2025: THE 43RD CHICAGO LGBTQ+ INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Note that all screenings through Thursday take place at Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema (dates and showtimes listed below); starting next Friday, they will take place at Chicago Filmmakers. For a complete schedule, visit the festival website here.

Emma Hough Hobbs & Leela Varghese’s LESBIAN SPACE PRINCESS (Australia)
Friday, 7pm
LESBIAN SPACE PRINCESS sits somewhere between “Steven Universe” and “Smiling Friends” in the realm of contemporary animation, mixing irreverent, joke-forward storytelling with impressive cartoon visuals and earnestness. The secret to Emma Hough Hobbs and Leela Varghese’s comic book-come-to-life is in how the hero’s journey—Princess Saira’s quest to save her ex-girlfriend (bounty hunter Kiki the Destroyer) from the evil Straight White Maliens—provides lessons in attachment, manipulation, and getting over your past loves and romantic insecurities. The film’s style, simple in expression but dynamic in design, allows for an exciting variety of modes, from stoic emotional confrontations to violent action bonanza. There are heaps of queer-centric character comedy in the initially timid voice performance of Shabana Azeez as the eponymous heroine, but the Straight White Maliens, voiced by the members of the Australian sketch group Aunty Donna, provide much of the film’s [adult swim]-adjacent comedy, with non sequiturs and vocal nonsense abound. Amidst the buffoonery, it’s charming to see a sci-fi film genuinely devoted to introspection and maturation, though having a wise-cracking spaceship and bloody sword fights along the way isn’t half-bad. (2024, 87 mins, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
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Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor’s DREAMERS (UK)
Saturday, 2:45pm
Like a Warner Bros. social issue drama from the 1930s, DREAMERS takes a ripped-from-the-headlines scenario and dramatizes it so as to make it relatable to anyone; it’s also heartbreaking from the get-go without feeling implausible or manipulative. Set entirely in a detention center for undocumented immigrants, the film centers on Isio, a young woman who fled anti-gay persecution in Nigeria (where being gay is illegal) to find herself treated like a prisoner in the UK. As such, DREAMERS often feels like a prison drama, with Isio navigating the social hierarchy at the center, forming emotional bonds with other detainees, and nervously awaiting her fate. Isio learns she has three appeals before a judge before she’s either permitted to stay in the UK or deported to Nigeria, and the filmmakers communicate her fears of deportation through minimal, carefully selected detail and some nicely understated dream sequences. The film isn’t entirely bleak, thanks to the depictions of friendship that motor the plot. Isio is also granted a love interest in the form of her understanding roommate, with whom she’s able to be herself for one of the first times in her life. The two leads, Ronke Adékoluejo and Ann Akinjirin, have excellent chemistry; moreover, they bring great humanity to characters too often written off as statistics or harmful clichés. At a time when undocumented immigrants are being persecuted with shocking malevolence, DREAMERS marks a welcome appeal for empathy. (2025, 78 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Gala del Sol’s RAINS OVER BABEL (Colombia/US/Spain)
Saturday, 9 pm
Set in a fictional, day glow purgatory, Gala del Sol’s RAINS OVER BABEL is a story told over one night filled with dreamy sets, drag performances, and death personified. With multiple narrators and various plot lines, the film weaves in and out of grounded emotional story beats about identity and family and surreal, sexy, and sometimes comedic set pieces; noteworthy is the subplot involving an adorable talking—and scheming—little leopard lizard. Inspired by Dante’s Inferno, RAINS OVER BABEL revolves around the Babel nightclub, where La Flaca (Saray Rebolledo), the city’s grim reaper, holds court. There are those who have made deals with death, those willing to gamble against her, and those desperately trying to avoid her: a plethora of ghosts, angels, demons, and those stuck in limbo. La Flaca and the rest are all anticipating the night’s main entertainment, a performance by the Black Mamba band, whose music frames the entire last act. Music and performance—including a key drag show—anchor the film, contributing as much to its vibrant texture as its colorful and magical imagery; the costuming and makeup, familiar and yet otherworldly, particularly stand out. It’s a world engaged in real issues faced by the queer and Afro-Latinx communities, set in purgatory yet illustrating joy and vitality. (2024, 113 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
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Michael Clowater’s DRIVE BACK HOME (Canada) 
Sunday, 6:30pm
Inspired by stories from the director's family history, DRIVE BACK HOME is a quiet and devastated picture about the complicated nature of brotherhood set against a moody Canadian winter in the 1970s. Weldon (Charlie Creed-Miles) is your classic small-town, blue-collar guy: immovable in his convictions due to a combination of convenience and a lifelong lack of curiosity. But Weldon is forced to leave his physical and emotional bubbles by driving 1,000 miles from New Brunswick to Toronto to bail out his brother Perley (Alan Cumming) after he was arrested for having gay sex in a public park. What unfolds is a road trip-turned-pressure cooker for long-dormant tensions and unhealed scars. For Weldon, it’s his resentment toward Perley continuing to inconvenience him with his irresponsibility, as well as his “big city” lifestyle that embarrasses if not enrages him. In turn, Perley is frustrated by Weldon’s stubbornness and inability to see him as an equal, but he’s also holding onto deep traumas that have long been unaddressed. DRIVE BACK HOME forces its protagonists into uncomfortable conversations when they would much prefer to forget anything ever happened. Brotherly banter and surface tension evolve into impassioned and revelatory confessions once repressed emotions have nowhere else to go but outward. Their feelings about themselves, and one another, manifest not just in traditional anger and violence, but also in a fog of disappointment. Some of the film's messaging is a bit heavy handed at times, and Cumming does spend much of the time awkwardly trying to suppress his Scottish accent—DRIVE BACK HOME is at its best when it sits in its own silence. And the result is remarkably tender and true. (2024, 100 min, DCP Digital) [Cody Corrall]
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Marco Berger’s PERRO PERRO (Argentina)
Monday, 8:45pm
While staying at the vacation home he shares with his girlfriend and another couple, Juan catches the attention of a stray dog who wanders onto his yard. The dog appears friendly and well groomed, which leads Juan to believe that he isn’t feral, but rather an abandoned pet. Juan begins to play with him, and the two become affectionate, sharing food and even bathing together. Juan’s girlfriend doesn’t appreciate that he’s giving so much attention to an animal, however; when Juan raises the possibility of taking the stray home with them, she quashes the idea. Ultimately, the dog gets left behind, and the couple return to their normal life. That’s the plot of PERRO PERRO, which would be a standard-issue pet movie if not for the fact that the stray dog is played by a nude man. Every sign of affection between Juan and the stray is thus plainly homoerotic; details that would seem banal if carried out between man and dog become downright kinky when enacted by two men. (Consider the scene where Juan ties his new friend to a bench so he doesn’t run away.) Marco Berger’s direction is emphatically poker-faced, eliciting muted performances from the cast and maintaining the sort of calm pacing befitting any descendent of OLD YELLER (1957). None of the jokes are played as such, which makes them feel even stranger, while the sparkling black-and-white cinematography gives it the look of a delicate art film. There are times when Berger achieves feelings of genuine tenderness, but a sense of sly wit tends to predominate. In a characteristic scene, Juan tries to dispel his girlfriend’s apprehension about having a stray in the house by saying, “I know you were almost attacked by a man when you were young, but you have to remember that they’re too often raised to be aggressive or mistreated as children.” (2025, 100 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Tadeo Pestaña Caro’s A FEW FEET AWAY (Argentina)
Wednesday, 8:45pm
A FEW FEET AWAY spends a little less than a day in the life of Santiago, a 20-year-old gay man who’s relatively new to Buenos Aires. Despite its narrow timeframe, the film has quite a bit to say about this character—not just his relationship to queer culture and the hookup scene, but his general experience of being young. The film opens with the hero in the middle of a meetup organized via Grindr. The relationship isn’t consummated as hoped, which signals the start of an unlucky day. Santiago gets a talking-to from his boss at work, another potential hookup turns out to be a creep, the party his best friend invites him to ends up being a drag, and so on until the day ends. Little of this seems to affect Santiago that much; he’s still at that age where you think you’re invincible, and, besides, he seems too unsure of what he wants from life (apart from sex) to feel too disappointed when things don’t go his way. Tadeo Pestaña Caro, making his feature debut as director, invokes a breezy sensibility that matches the hero’s mood. The film is amusing without being flat-out funny, thoughtful without being overly serious. This in-between tone seems fitting, given that Pestaña Caro’s ultimate ambition is to capture the nature of everyday life, which can be one of the hardest things in cinema to do. (2025, 88 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Thijs Meuwese’s PSYCHONAUT (Netherlands)
Thursday, 6:30pm
Thijs Meuwese’s film opens with a definition: a psychonaut is “a person who explores altered states of consciousness within the human mindscape.” The film embraces this as both premise and method, blending science fiction, noir, and melodrama to explore how memory shapes identity, relationships, and recovery. The story follows Max (Julia Batelaan) and Dylan (Yasmin Blake), whose search for cocaine ends in catastrophe. Their supplier Bogdan (Lloydd Hamwijk) shoots Dylan before turning the gun on himself, leaving Max desperate to save her lover. She turns to her estranged mother Samantha (Fiona Dourif), an underground doctor who treats criminals with advanced technology. Samantha proposes using an experimental device to enter Dylan’s mind and retrieve a “fundamental memory” that could allow the computer to rebuild her brain. Inside Dylan’s memory-scape, Max encounters visions where her own recollections merge with Dylan’s. Bogdan reappears as a hostile intruder, embodying trauma’s persistence as invasive and destabilizing. Cinematographer Jasper Verkaart reinforces this instability with noir-inspired shadows, sudden spotlights, and a monochrome palette punctuated by bursts of vivid red. Working against a low budget, PSYCHONAUT is an unsentimental ode to love. Drugs, lies, and betrayals frame the eventual declaration: “You are my home.” Alongside romantic devotion, the film probes mother-daughter estrangement, layering emotional guilt over the science-fiction conceit. Meuwese’s cinephilia surfaces in sly references: black-and-white imagery interrupted by color, posters for A HOLE IN THE HEAD (1959), YOU’LL LIKE MY MOTHER (1952), and THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN’T DIE (1962) tucked into the apartment, and a score that channels an unmade Michael Mann–Tangerine Dream collaboration. Classical noir lighting effects punctuate several scenes, such as when Max’s face is lined by shadows cast from window blinds while Dylan is lit with a soft glow as she is the damsel in distress while Max thinks herself the villain. Later Verkaart and Meuwesse use a spotlight and fan with large blades to show the distortion of memory and identity. Bogdan begins to embody trauma’s persistence as destabilizing, invasive, and resistant to control. The camerawork and editing begin to reflect the instability. Eventually, the camera pans across a room to a doorway. Inside the doorframe, the world is alive with color. A sequence that evokes THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939). Comparisons to ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (2006) or THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT (2004) are inevitable, but Meuwese distinguishes himself by weaving genre homage into a story scarred by violence, abandonment, and fractured trust. A mirror-filled sequence literalizes the dissolution of identity between Max and Samantha, their reflections splintering as unresolved anger surfaces. Yet the film resists despair. The “fundamental memory” is not rooted in trauma but in love, crystallized in the recognition that safety lies in vulnerability: “I can be stupid around you.” This rediscovery of love and safety inverts PSYCHONAUT to OZ. Where Dorothy believed there was no place like home and therefore she abandons her three friends who chose to fight an evil witch with her, Max runs away from home to find love and safety with Dylan. “You are my home” becomes the film’s ruby slippers, a reminder that a chosen family is sometimes what we need more than going back to living with Auntie Em and Uncle Henry on a tornado farm. (2024, 87 min, DCP Digitial) [Shaun Huhn]
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Siobhan McCarthy’s SHE’S THE HE (US)
Thursday, 8:15pm
There’s something cheekily joyous in watching Siobhan McCarthy take what could otherwise be a morally noxious film logline out of context (“two teen boys pretend to be trans to get closer to their female classmates”) and transform it into something effortlessly funny, incisive, and heartfelt. McCarthy’s film is a gleeful queer-friendly spin on the tried-and-true heteronormative trappings of the high school comedy genre—from the makeover montage in the retail store dressing room, to the inevitable third-act “break up” moment at the house party. It follows two loser high school seniors, Alex and Ethan (Nico Carney and Misha Osherovich, respectively), as they grapple with their own gender insecurities; the two are frequently targets of homophobic name-calling from the more macho of their student compatriots, Alex’s pathetic attempts at tough-guy masculinity as pathetic as Ethan’s shut-in tactics. The generally welcoming spirit of the female students—alongside nonbinary force Forest (Tatiana Ringsby)—provides a runway for Alex to finally discover how to shed his sex-forward brain and become a more empathetic gentleman, whereas Ethan’s life finally locks into place, the ploy of their initial gender ruse unlocking something in herself that becomes euphoric and affirming by the film’s end. The tonal bridge between wacky teen hijinks (accompanied by onscreen onomatopoeic sound effects and high-octane editing) and deep-seated, lived-in dramatic moments is a tough one to navigate, yet McCarthy and her cast and crew of queer and trans artists handle it briskly, unlocking something that has the guts to aim for cult classic status and the craft to back that ambition up. As far-right forces in the US continue to make lives living hell for our trans youth, SHE’S THE HE is a welcome antidote of charming comedy light on didacticism, and high on good vibes, gross-out humor, and charming characters. (2025, 82 mins, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

🤘THE 32ND CHICAGO UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL

For a complete schedule, visit the festival website here.

Shorts 4: Mundi Ludicrum
ACX Harper Theater – Friday, 4:30pm, and Saturday, 6pm
“Mundi Ludicrum,” the sub-header given to this package of short films, roughly translates to “Games of the World," or perhaps “Playful World.” Not totally unsurprising, as each film feels like its own miniature distortion of the world around us, reflecting media and content in and on itself, finding alternate methods of conversing with the art that shapes and consumes us. Some people dive headfirst into their love for a work of art, like the endearing nerds we follow in Edward Frumkin's RAP WORLD DAY (2025, 13 min), heading to New York’s Metrograph Theater to attend a screening of Conner O’Malley’s underground comedy sensation, bonding over their shared idiosyncratic obsession with this outré artwork. Others look to remake art in their own image, be it through means of pastiche and homage in Karen Lawler and Leah Smith's newly discovered beach party-meets-horror flick BEACH-O (1998/2025, 12 min), or through literal manipulation of film stock, as TT Takamoto's LION IN THE WIND (2023, 5 mins) turns a print of ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINA AND AMERICA (1997) into literal abstract art. A few other shorts look to playfully interrogate our view of the world; Karin Fisslthaler's SHE DOLLS WITH DOLLIES / SIE PUPPT MIT PUPPEN (2024, 3 min) uses cut-out animation to transform people into ever-changing voids of flora, while Drew Durepos and Isaac Brooks' FRESH VALUES (2025, 12 min) reads as a dystopian short story come to life, reckoning with the use of Alternate Reality to try and turn the act of community that is grocery shopping into yet another means of profit-forward entertainment. It seems only fitting that this series of shorts contains both a film like Astria Suparak's TROPICAL CATS (2024, 7 min), which is altogether diverting and simple in its reflection and remixing of social media cat videos, alongside Tommy Becker's epic THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME (2025, 22 min), a multimedia music video presentation about the horrors of technology in our modern age. Perhaps there’s no escape from our eternal dance with art and technology; the only question is will we submit or will we revolt? Also included in the program are Auden Lincoln-Vogel and Stephanie Miracle's PURGATORIO (2025, 6 min) and Karen Yasinsky's I’M NOT YOUR MONSTER (2024, 5 min). [Ben Kaye]
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Shorts 5: Vox Machinarum
ACX Harper Theater – Friday, 5:30 pm and Sunday, 12pm
In the Vox Machinarum shorts program, the theme of nature versus technology emerges, as these films examine contemporary issues through a myriad of analog, digital, and outdated formats. Jesse Malmed’s STILL, MOVING (2025, 10 min) layers sonic and visual collages, creating the sense of straining between movement and an attempt to find stillness. In CLOUDS AND PERCEPTION (2024, 14 min), Darrin Martin also focuses on movement, this time connecting physical film to a collection of subjects, who, through both sight, touch, and even imagined sound, describe the object. Framed by a green screen, the subjects’ discussion of the physical film brings to light questions not only of the sensorial layers of the medium, but also its accessibility. Three of the films incorporate an examination of gender and sexuality to the technology at hand. In CHEW THIS! (2025, 2 min), filmmaker Delphyne Bella Panther-Brutzkus presents images of girl- and womanhood through a collage of bright advertisements and upsetting horror. The commercial-style voiceover also focuses on hygiene and looks, highlighting in both an internal and external anxiety about achieving the correct appearance. In COLORFUL COLORADO NAILS (2025, 7 min), Monica Panzarino creates brightly rendered video art of natural landscapes on her green-screened nails as she simultaneously plays around with both analog and digital sound technologies. Daniel Barrow’s HANDSOME DEVIL (2024, 4 min) uses the outdated Amiga software to create a pink and green pastel music video. Featuring a catchy song, queer imagery, and textured animation style, HANDSOME DEVIL abstractly and humorously examines contemporary dating app culture. The final three films explore technology and conflict. Shot on multiple formats, Christian Zakharchuk's WAR TIMES (2024, 10 min) follows two spirits as they travel through time, exploring through both the digital and analog. Matthew Sidle's BOZO OVER ROSES (2025, 11 min) stars Cate Blanchett, who stands out amongst a series of NPC-style figures existing in a postwar—perhaps post-human—future, narrating nonsensically. In CLIMATE CONTROL (2025, 15 min), Sarah Lasley’s documentary about on-the-ground climate activism is thwarted by generative AI, determined to disrupt the film’s production by creating a cliché romcom scenario. The film suggests that modern technology is not only destructive in its constant need for resources, but also in how it masquerades as helpful, yet becomes nothing but distraction. [Megan Fariello]
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Shorts 6: Vox Reclusa
ACX Harper Theater – Friday, 7:30pm and Saturday, 9pm
This expertly curated shorts program includes films ranging from narrative to documentary to experimental to some that straddle the line between these modes. Laura Kraning's ESP (2024, 3 min) is a short, sensory assault in which shots of Albany, New York's Empire State Plaza furiously stutter and flicker via the aid of a malfunctioning inkjet printer, which the director has amusingly credited as her "co-creator" at the film's end. Kraning's strobe-like editing of Brutalist architecture creates astonishing abstract patterns, which are accompanied by a pounding, staticky soundtrack. It's a blast in every sense of the word. Dan Schneidkraut's SUBHUMAN SERVICES (2025, 16 min) is a fantasia inspired by the "hold music" the filmmaker has to endure while waiting to speak to someone on the phone at Hennepin County's Department of Human Services. Schneidkraut's sober voiceover narration details how he must rely on government assistance despite working multiple jobs totaling between 50 and 70 hours a week. Meanwhile, the innocuous Muzak emanating from his cell phone speaker becomes the jumping-off point for a series of clever montages featuring music videos and soft-core porn films from the '80s and '90s. It's a sad but wryly funny portrait of being trapped in a bureaucratic nightmare. Kevin Contento's ASK A PUNK (2024, 20 min), produced by Chicago's Full Spectrum Features, tells the story of Luna, a troubled teen being raised by their grandmother, who seeks refuge in Little Village's DIY punk scene. It's a wisp of a narrative that feels like a proof-of-concept for a feature, but it's elevated by the deftly sketched milieu and Charin Alvarez's fine performance as an abuela who comes across as both a scold and an empath in the film's bookending scenes. Shayna Connelly's THE TENSILE STRENGTH OF AIR (2025, 16 min) seems like two movies at first: 1) A woman begins to disassociate from reality after witnessing a traumatic event. 2) This same woman, a married mother of two, grapples with her aging body and attraction to a charismatic co-worker. Connelly's splintered editing and stylized soundtrack eventually stitch it all together, effectively putting viewers into the headspace of her main character. Michael Curtis Johnson's PARKING LOT SEAGULLS (2025, 13 min) is a wild 16mm-shot curio about a young man searching for a missing friend in a small Alabama town. Johnson specializes in portraits of rural American masculinity in crisis (SAVAGE YOUTH, COTTON CANDY SKY), and this film is no exception. But he trades the disturbing verisimilitude of his previous work for something more absurdly funny and formally daring here: His unnamed protagonist eats pickled eggs from a jar, shadowboxes, fishes in a river beneath a highway overpass, and dispenses hilarious homespun wisdom directly to the camera (e.g., "You gotta think like a fish to catch a fish," "My heart's got a black belt. I don't need one for my waist")—all before being attacked by some deliberately artificial-looking CGI seagulls. Your mileage may vary, but I could've watched this weirdness go on forever. Jeremy Drummond's MONUMENT (2025, 17 min) rounds out the program on an explicitly political note as degraded Super 8mm footage of presidential busts in an abandoned theme park is superimposed over video images of Black Lives Matter protests at a soon-to-be-removed Robert E. Lee monument in Richmond, Virginia. The final shot, which endlessly circles the former site of the Confederate statue, now a generic garden, is a deeply moving testament to grassroots activism. [Michael Glover Smith]
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Jacob Gregor’s END OF HISTORY (US)
ACX Harper Theater – Friday, 9pm and Saturday, 1pm
There aren’t enough American filmmakers interrogating why American life is so awful, which makes Jacob Gregor an important new arrival to the national cinema. His debut feature, ENDLESS CONTENT FOREVER (2022), was a bracing lo-fi comedy about people whose brains seemed to have been rotted from internet overuse. Gregor may have played his characters’ apathetic, short-sighted behavior for dark laughs, but a chilling, even dystopic vision underlined the humor. Here were people more miserable than even they realized—trained both to give and demand attention in the form of half-joking catchphrases, they lacked the ability to hold meaningful encounters in real life. (Extrapolate what you will about the culture at large.) In Gregor’s second feature, END OF HISTORY, he takes this approach to characterization one step further—the unnamed protagonist is so alienated from others that we never see him interact with another person face to face. Gregor mostly presents the solitary antihero, played by cowriter Matt Calhoun, in wide shot and longish static takes, so as to emphasize how detached he is from other people; we learn about him mainly through the culture he consumes, which tends to be right-wing talk radio and self-help podcasts. After he hears a podcaster talk about driving to Alaska as a means to untap hidden potential (or something like that), Calhoun hits the road, and the film follows his drive across the western half of North America in pursuit of a goal he never bothers to establish. Everything is anticlimax in END OF HISTORY, which sometimes feels like the James Benning version of IDIOCRACY (2006). The long takes of highways, big box stores, and motels reflect a nation without serious identity; when Gregor does present something beautiful like a mountain range, he overlays some soulless creep talking about running your life like a business or some other cliché of motivational literature. This is a film about individualism turned poisonous and useless. (2025, 82 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Eleanor Gaver’s TRIPOLAR: THE MOVIE (US)
ACX Harper Theater – Saturday, 3pm
Eleanor Gaver, who has directed a film each decade since the 1980s, returns again with the sense of passing the torch to a younger generation. Absurdist comedy has long been her terrain: her 1998 film LIFE IN THE FAST LANE told the story of a street artist who mails himself to his crush, only to be fatally stabbed when she opens the package. Gaver’s previous film, HERE ONE MINUTE (2015), was made on a shoestring budget and under her full control—casting performers she found on the street alongside students from the Stella Adler Studio. Working with them, she rewrote and improvised until the dialogue sounded raw and lived-in. One of those students, Schuyler Quinn, impressed enough to earn a producer’s credit, and soon after she and Gaver launched Invincible Film. What began as a web series about making a movie together eventually mutated into a feature: TRIPOLAR THE MOVIE. The result is a THC-infused odyssey about getting an independent film made in New York. But more than that, TRIPOLAR is a stoner comedy with pedigree, standing proudly alongside HAROLD AND KUMAR GO TO WHITE CASTLE (2004) and PINEAPPLE EXPRESS (2008). Like its Cheech and Chong ancestors, it thrives on skits only loosely tethered to a plot, the spirit closer to vaudeville chaos than traditional storytelling. Gaver laces the film with moments worthy of 1970s John Waters, pushing the genre past cheap gags into a delirious, transgressive playground. We follow a cast of gloriously unhinged and morally bankrupt characters, all eager to escape reality through a haze of weed, pills, and psychedelics while trying to make a movie on less money than an Ed Wood production. An Ex-Lax induced race for a toilet becomes the thesis for the film as a whole: life’s just shit! Life is chock full of golden showers, drugging your friends, setting up your film crew as Islamic terrorists, prison sentences, fornicating around pot plants, and drinking bong water laced with LSD;  but who would want it any other way? With little to no plot to get in the way, the characters, ridiculous situations, and drug use take center stage. While popping Ambient, Klonopin, Xanax, hits of acid, and a constant rotation of joints, our leads battle film financiers, ageism, racism, gender politics, and attempt remaking THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939). Divine would be honored by dog-shit yellow brick roads. The great and powerful Oz is depicted as Trump asking to be called God. Oz’s voice is created completely from edited Trump soundbites. Gaver herself plays Lana Cockburn, the matriarch of a house full of misfits—though “matriarch” here means handing out drugs to her daughter’s best friend and then kicking her own child out in favor of the new recruit, Daphne (Quinn). Gaver and Quinn riff with the kind of rhythm usually reserved for seasoned comic duos like Abbott and Costello or Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy. To call TRIPOLAR plotless would be missing the point. Stoner comedies, after all, are less about narrative momentum than about vibe, invention, and the delirious freedom to derail. Gaver carries that tradition forward with a no-budget punk sensibility, reminding us that these films endure not despite their messiness, but because of it. Trying to track a linear story here is like reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas just to find out who won the Mint 400. That’s not why we’re here. We’re here for the drugs, the chaos, and the joy of watching performers leap headfirst into absurdity. TRIPOLAR doesn’t just pass the torch to a younger generation, it sets the damn thing ablaze, puffs twice, and asks if you want in on this. (2025, 85 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]
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Shorts 1: Sub Rosa Insurrectio
ACX Harper Theater – Saturday, 4pm
The first shorts program of this year’s CUFF introduces a markedly somber aspect to the festival; most of the inclusions are downbeat in some way. The major exception is Mark Street’s all day, and all of the night (2025, 13 min), which kicks off the program. An abstract city symphony, the work comprises various shots of New York City street life, alternating between daytime and nighttime views. At a few points in the collage, Street superimposes over the urban views shots of pools of ink slowly shifting shape, and these add further texture to the rich tableaux. One might call this a piece of classical experimentalism, as it invokes a filmmaking tradition best associated with the late silent era. New York City figures again in Elana Meyers and Katie Heiserman’s rousing documentary SURVIVAL WITHOUT RENT (2025, 22 min), which uses archival VHS footage to chronicle the squatters movement on the Lower East Side in the 1980s and early ‘90s; but first, the program considers the bombing of Hiroshima with Chi Jang Yin’s I WAS THERE, PART II (2024, 10 min). The second in a three-part series of short documentaries, the piece centers on an archival testimony of a German priest who survived the bombing. He raises concern about both Japan’s employment of total war and the United States’ use of the atomic bomb over images of destruction, which only underscore his points. For its first half, SURVIVAL WITHOUT RENT makes for a good palate cleanser after something as despairing as I WAS THERE, PART II, as the filmmakers look at the efforts of New York squatters to independently rehabilitate abandoned buildings and create functional, supportive, anarchistic communities. But as always, Rudolph Giuliani emerges as the villain, and the documentary shifts focus to the former Mayor’s 1995 efforts to “clean up” the Lower East Side by forcibly removing squatters from their homes. The program continues with a call to arms in the form of Kelly Sears’ THE CALL (2025, 7 min), which imagines a coordinated effort by the birds of the world to take down the airline industry. Sears combines footage from airport surveillance cameras with narration delivered by an unidentified bird, who describes the movement to defend airspace and wildlife from the encroachment of planes and airports. However fantastical, the work is clearly motivated by urgent concern for our natural habitat; its effect is surprisingly chilling. Next up is Erica Sheu’s IT FOLLOWS ON IT PASSES ON (撿起放下墜落提起) (2022, 5 min), which proceeds largely in the form of beams of light against black backgrounds. The filmmaker describes the work as “a personal ritual bridges generations and geographies, channeling echoes from Kinmen during the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis.” Cheri Gaulke’s OLD GIRL IN A TUTU: SUSAN RENNIE DISRUPTS ART HISTORY (2025, 7 min) is a short documentary about feminist scholar Susan Rennie and her second career as a visual artist. Gaulke profiles Rennie’s recent exhibit, which consists of classic paintings that she’s doctored by digitally inserting her own image into them. This prankish attack on the male gaze seems to have been performed in a spirit of good fun; the tone of the documentary is casually celebratory. The program takes a sharp left turn with the final selection, Kabir Mehta’s experimental documentary NIGHT OUT WITH RONNIE (2024, 21 min), about the filmmaker’s relationship with a 70-year-old teller of tall tales whom he met at the gym. Now based in Mehta’s hometown of Goa, Ronnie talks of having lived in England and the European continent, where he played polo and drove expensive cars. This seems to be an amusing character study until Mehta inserts a scripted scene in which Ronnie follows a woman he met at a bar, breaks into her home, and strips naked. The short concludes on an even more unsettling note when Mehta learns sobering information about Ronnie that makes him decide to discontinue the project. It’s a strange note to end on, but then, we live in strange times. [Ben Sachs]
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Shorts 8: Spectra Celluloidae
ACX Harper Theater – Saturday, 5pm
To quote the description of Jimmy Schaus’ excogitative short film WETLAND IMPULSE (2024, 2 min)—cited here because its impact lies so much in its making—“projected at 24 frames-per-second, the photographic images and my subsequent renderings appear superimposed rather than sequential, unifying the indexical and interpretive.” Referring to “single frame exposures… taken while walking through wetlands surrounding my home, alternating between image and no image at a rate of two frames each on black and white reversal film,” the result—a black-and-white reverie of the tactile and the analog—appears at once slow and fast, methodical and keen. Following suit, though turned toward the city, Ignacio Tamarit and Tomás Maglione’s ÉPOCA ES POCA COSA (2020, 3 min) is an urban symphony that pairs music with the shapes of buildings and the thrust of metropolitan momentum. The title translates to TIME IS A SMALL THING; both this and Schaus’ film are indeed small in duration yet contain a multitude of expressive imagery and much to contemplate. So too does Sara Sowell’s THE INDIVIDUAL (2025, 28 min), which, at almost a half hour, is described as a “two-channel Dada séance conducted through the fractured lens of Man Ray’s autobiography and filtered through the spirits of [Rosalind] Krauss, [Claude] Cahun, [Kathy] Acker, [and Virginia Woolf]… equal parts homage and erasure.” I’ve read that Marcel Duchamp is recast here as a female narrator. I’m struck by the ambition and appreciate the beautiful imagery—exhibited as a two-channel 16mm projection with reels projected side by side—even if the intent eludes me (which feels appropriate for a work in dialogue with Dadaism). Lacking dialogue and evocatively shot on 16mm, Laurent Reyes’ GABIANS (2024, 16 min) depicts a lone man on an island visited by an unwelcome interloper. More atmosphere than story, the island and its nonhuman inhabitants become the perspective from which the film descends into the ominously fantastical. Similarly wordless, Matt Feldman’s LAS ANIMAS (2025, 14 min) probes the violent history of the southeastern coalfields and the anti-labor confrontations with miners. Its chiaroscuro cinematography haunts, the past echoing within the present. Another two-channel 16mm projection, Tushar Gidwani’s SACCHARINE WONDERLAND & FORCES THAT MAKE ME SHIVER (2025, 6 min), is the most explicitly personal, exploring both the filmmaker’s coming to terms with his sexuality and his craving for sugar. The merging of analog textures with contemporary references—Bollywood music, comic books, sweet treats—creates a dissonance that coheres through intimacy. Joe Wakeman’s HOLLYWOOD LANDING: THE PEG ENTWHISTLE STORY (2024, 10 min) uses film for its nostalgic properties, recounting the tragic fate of Peg Entwhistle, the British silent film star who died by suicide in 1932 after jumping from the Hollywood sign. Hollywood lore is always enticing, but this work strips away sensationalism, leaving only Entwhistle’s fateful ascent toward the landmark—the crucial passage when consideration becomes decision. The program title evokes celluloid’s ghostly properties; each film does so in its own way, though the holiest specter is the format itself, which allows viewers to glimpse the ghosts among us. [Kat Sachs]
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Adam Marshall Present’s AMERICAN DENDRITE (US)
ACX Harper Theater – Sunday, 12:30pm
Super 8 filmmaking has been having a renaissance of sorts lately. Between the explosion of professional Super 8 wedding “videography” and a proliferation of big budget music videos shot on the format, the medium once relegated to backyard movies made by teenagers and angry art school students with a fetish for filming lofts and alleys in black and white is seeing an explosion. Kodak themselves released the first new model Super 8 camera in decades just this past year. Despite all that, the amount of serious feature length films made on the format is still incredibly miniscule. So to see a feature travel documentary shot on Super 8 is amazing. AMERICAN DENDRITE is a lush, dreamy, and earnest travelogue with more of an approach than a subject: to follow the water path of the Chicago River from Chicago to its terminus in the Gulf of Mexico as the Mississippi River. Along the way Present and his crew interview people who happen to be there. There’s a poetic sociology that reveals itself in AMERICAN DENDRITE. Made by a Chicagoan, it feels incredibly reminiscent of the city’s great barstool sociologists like Mike Rokyo and Studs Terkel. And much like Terkel's book Division Street, the film uses a road—or in this case a waterway—as both guide and metaphor for America as a whole and allows the people to use their voices to tell their own stories. AMERICAN DENDRITE focuses equally on the rural as the urban, and recognizes that the terms rural and urbancan have different meanings themselves. Chicago is not St. Louis is not New Orleans. Cape Girardeau, MO is not Cairo, IL. Present and company seek to show the nobility of the common person and Middle America as it truly is, complex and nuanced. As similar as it is dissimilar. The film has a breezy, meandering pace that is both comfortable and relaxing. This lazy river approach not only adds more depth to the film’s metaphorical and philosophical points, but really allows the beauty of the cinematography and the honestness of the interview subjects room to breathe and be fully appreciated. Despite it being shot on Super 8 film, this is a sync sound movie. The filmmakers were able to get a camera custom modified to allow for crystal syncing of sound, thus letting them not only shoot at the traditional 24 frames-per-second (as opposed to Super 8’s standard 18fps) but to fully capture the moment with matching sound. Still, the film often uses voiceover to give equal weight to the beauty of the moving image and the storytelling of the interviewees. Each one complimenting the other while still standing on its own. This is a massively impressive film that is truly only comparable to David Simpson’s 1995 film HALSTED STREET USA (which was coincidentally narrated by Terkel) in its approach. But let’s get real, AMERICAN DENDRITE unquestioningly surpasses it when it comes to cinematography, editing, and overall aesthetic beauty. I can’t wait to see more of what Adam Marshall Present makes, and I very much hope he continues to make films using celluloid—because it’s rare to see a filmmaker create something that is equally impressive narratively as it is technically. Films like this give filmmakers hope that they too can shoot on film, regardless of subject matter or form. Plus, it's just goddamn beautiful. (2024, 77 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
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Shorts 2: Corpus Subterraneum
ACX Harper Theater – Sunday, 2pm
Three of the seven shorts in this program boast Chicago connections—fans of local culture and history are strongly encouraged to check this out. Finn O’Connell’s 90 DEGREES (2025, 4 min) kicks things off with a burst of energy. The film is a shot-on-16mm portrait of the city’s punk and skateboarding scenes, and the texture of the celluloid cinematography blends perfectly with the gritty activity on display. Appearing in the middle of the program is Cine-File contributor Josh B. Mabe’s AMERICAN ALTERNATIVE: KURT HEYL (2025, 11 min), a documentary profile of the titular experimental filmmaker and former Chicago resident. Over a montage of shots taken from his body of work, Heyl recounts growing up on the West Side, attending the School of the Art Institute, becoming friends with Jon Jost, and making films here in the city before he relocated to California. Heyl is candid about the dissolution of his marriages and his wayward years in the 1970s, but these subjects are overshadowed by his pioneering work in underground cinema. The short takes its title from a documentary Heyl made about Chicago’s skid row area using nonsync sound, but it also sums up his concern for life outside the mainstream in this country. Closing the program is another documentary, Carson Parish’s MR. BOUND & GAGGED (2025, 36 min), which was largely shot at the Leather Archives & Museum in Rogers Park. This consists of interviews with Bob Wingate, publisher of the now-defunct gay BDSM magazine Bound & Gagged, and Lee Clauss, his partner of three decades. They recount some of the challenges of publishing the magazine as well as favorite moments in its history; they also reflect on their personal relationship and their efforts to combat censorship and anti-sex attitudes in the national culture. Despite the outré subject matter, this is ultimately a tender and thoughtful piece. More documentary shorts round out the program; the exception to the trend is Paul Tarragó wacky MAGIC WITH SMALL APPARATUS (2025, 8 min), which combines live action and animation in surprising ways. The throughline of the work involves the filmmaker finding the journal of a magician-ventriloquist who performed in London in the 1930s. Tarragó interweaves entries from the journal with shots of South London and rudimentary animated effects; the results are beguiling and highly amusing. In THERE’S A SMALL HOTEL (2024, 19 min), director Michael Grodner catches up with one-time Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro, who left the limelight long ago and now manages a storied hotel, the Brevoort, in Los Angeles. Much like the Chelsea Hotel in New York (to which it’s often compared), the Brevoort is something of a way station for various artists and eccentrics; Dallesandro speaks fondly of living amongst them. The former actor also shares revealing anecdotes about his film career and some touching recollections about his relationship with his wife (whom he’s married three times). Jenny Stark’s THE RINK (2024, 6 min) profiles another Californian, a Sacramento resident named Michael Love who earned his Master’s degree while he was incarcerated. Love now spends much of his free time at a popular roller rink; Stark intersperses stories from his difficult past with shots of him blissfully skating, images of happiness that stand in relief against his upsetting memories. Finally, Ryan Steel’s experimental work FORT GARRY LIONS POOL (2024, 6 min) presents the titular Winnipeg hangout through a variety of filmic devices. The short is impressionistic, moody, and evocative of fun times. Like the Chicago-oriented works in the program, FORT GARRY LIONS POOL exhibits pride in its sense of place and local character. [Ben Sachs]
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Brandon Daley’s $POSITIONS (US)
Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 7:30pm
Line goes up. Line goes down. In a sea of personal and professional calamities, perpetual sad sack Mike Alvarado (a sneakily intense Michael Kunicki) can only focus on the line going up, or the line going down. The line here is the value of cryptocurrency that Mike has given his money, life, and very soul for; the very essence of his being seems to rest on whether the line goes up or goes down. It’s modern American life presented as eerily and plainly as possible, Mike’s bulging eyes forever glued to his phone screen, the mere concept of financial growth becoming an animating force that guides him through his own personal Hell on Earth. Writer-director Brandon Daley has created a family drama wrapped in a thriller wrapped in a nightmare, somewhere in conversation with the Safdie Brothers, Robert Altman, and Michael Mann, all frayed nerves and anxious energy and desperate souls grasping for stability in an actively unstable world. Mike’s devotion to his ever-shifting crypto-investments acts as a destabilizing agent between him and his developmentally disabled brother (Vinny Kress), his widowed father (Guido Z. Cameli), his distant girlfriend (Kaylyn Carter), and his newly sober, fresh-out-of-prison cousin Travis (Trevor Dawkins giving a live-wire performance that dominates the film). The horror of $POSITIONS lies in the continuously toxic ways that Mike stoops lower and lower to maintain the barest semblance of financial stability, trying to invest more in his faltering crypto-dreams, the horrific reverberations of his actions unfolding in ways more akin to a Greek tragedy than an American indie film. As stressful and chaotic as Daley’s feature gets, there’s something deeply upsetting in thinking about how many people around the world actually do invest their lives in such volatile economic markets. Mike’s story likely isn’t that far off from the millions of poverty-stricken citizens just waiting for that lucky break that will never come. The capitalist beast rages on, but as Mike soon discovers, taking that moment to breathe in, put down your phone, and look at the world around you can reveal things more beautiful and meaningful than any line on a screen. (2025, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Robert Bresson's A MAN ESCAPED (France)

Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6pm

There's little dialogue in A MAN ESCAPED. The story is told largely through the voice-over narration of Fontaine (François Leterrier), the condemned man. What little there is is mostly shared with a fellow prisoner—a pastor arrested mid-sermon—and largely concerns matters of freedom and faith. "He'll save us if we give him the chance," Fontaine responds to the pastor's advice to pray, "It would be too easy if God saw to everything." That Bresson, here, is concerned with faith is clear (the longer title "The Wind Bloweth Where it Wants" refers to the Bible passage the pastor passes Fontaine) but it's a very specific kind of faith—one which both inspires and rewards careful, considered action. Fontaine's escape is neither an act of desperation nor one of bravado. It is the result of calm deliberation and clearheaded execution, aided by either luck or grace. It is as meticulously carried out by Fontaine as it is captured by Bresson. The director has much in common with Fontaine, the man, escaped, and André Devigny, the prisoner of war upon whose memoir the film is based. There are the biographical similarities—fighters for the Resistance imprisoned by the Gestapo for their parts. There is also their focus on transcendence through action. Here, Bresson is at the peak of his mature, pared-down style. DIARY OF COUNTRY PRIEST (1951) is his first film to employ a cast of non-professionals—models, not actors—chosen for their blankness of expression, this his second. Bresson reveals little of Fontaine's thoughts and hopes. Nor is he given much background—we don't know where he comes from, the nature of his role, his family life, or the obstacles he'll face beyond the prison walls. We know him and we judge him only by his actions, and that is enough. What appears on camera is significant. What does not is not. Every detail is deliberate and revelatory. A MAN ESCAPED is Bresson at his best—the perfect marriage of form and content. Screening as part of the Interiority on Screen lecture series. (1956, 99 min, DCP Digital) [Elspeth J. Carroll]

Seth Scriver and Peter Scriver's ENDLESS COOKIE (Canada)

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

Documentary is an expansive form that, especially over time, has grown to embrace more non-verité modes in the search for accurate storytelling. Seth and Pete Scriver’s ENDLESS COOKIE is an exuberant film that uses Seth’s psychedelic cartooning skills to render a semi-documentary made up of his Indigenous half-brother Pete’s stories from his life moving back and forth from the reservation to Toronto. While it’s cliche to call any film a “love letter," it’s as apt as ever to describe this one, whose voice cast is largely made up of 13 members of the Scrivers’ family. Everybody is equally adorable and grotesque in Seth’s animation style, which jams dozens of bright, disjunctive hues together while each landscape is littered with visual information and sight gags at the margins. Many characters exist metaphorically, taking the shape of an object or animal while Pete’s numerous pet dogs are sometimes presented by mythical creatures like Mr. Peanut. This is part of what gives the film its homely, familial quality; everyone is a loving caricature, like nicknames in physical form. The film’s tales make up a slice-of-life study of the contemporary Indigenous experience in Canada, existing in an unsteady state between tradition and modernity, state compliance and independence. Pete tells low-key stories, like detailing the scam he used to pull on a local pizza place in Toronto, with the same matter-of-factness that he tells a story of getting blackout drunk and breaking into his old home, terrorizing the new residents. He speaks candidly about his and others’ lives, touching on things like prison recidivism and environmental racism, with Seth letting the symbolic resonance of many moments exist without too much underlining. This casual quality puts the stories both jolly and depressing all on the same wavelength, with most being interrupted by other sketch-comedy-like tangents or jumping through time on a whim. While the original concept was to structure the film around 7 stories that would echo the Anishinaabe teachings of the seven grandfathers, the freewheeling structure and inside-jokiness eventually become jokes in and of themselves, with Seth luxuriating in the mess. Pete’s kids remark late in the film that they’ve been participating in this project for 9 years, and it’s a testament to the familial love that animates the work that one feels the Scrivers could have kept developing the work for another decade, adding new Russian Doll detours ad infinitum. Followed by a conversation with the filmmakers and the artist and animator Amy Lockhart. Peter Scriver will appear virtually. (2025, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Maxwell Courtright]

Patrick Tam’s MY HEART IS THAT ETERNAL ROSE (Hong Kong)

The Davis Theater – Wednesday, 7pm

Everyone who writes on MY HEART IS THAT ETERNAL ROSE seems obligated to note its influence on Wong Kar-wai, though the film really only feels proto-Wongian in its middle third, when director Patrick Tam tones down the violence and plays up the characters’ romantic frustrations. This section explores the inner lives of typical action movie characters and finds that they can be as lovesick as anyone else; the mix of melodramatic characterization with shoot-‘em-up narrative tropes is arresting. Also attention-grabbing is the film’s visual design, which makes frequent use of neon lighting and bold-colored costumes—this often suggests an Asian counterpart to the cinéma du look that was happening in France a few years earlier. ETERNAL ROSE opens on a swinging Hong Kong bar, where owner Uncle Cheung’s 20-ish daughter Lap carries on in puppy love with a local hotshot named Rick. When a neighborhood gangster calls on the bar owner to help smuggle a mainland Chinese colleague’s son into town, Rick gets pulled in to assist. Things go south, the son as well as a corrupt cop get killed, and Rick has to flee Hong Kong to save his life. Meanwhile, Uncle Cheung gets held hostage by the gangster he owed the favor to, and Lap pleads with another crime boss to intervene. He agrees to put up Cheung’s bail on the grounds that Lap becomes his mistress. Cut forward six years. Lap is living in semi-servitude to the nefarious gangster while her father, who watches on powerless, has become an alcoholic. A low-level criminal (Tony Leung), serving as a gofer to Lap’s enslaver, secretly longs for Lap, who in turn secretly longs for Rick, who has yet to come home from the Philippines. Naturally, he does, but until then, ETERNAL ROSE marinates for a while in the characters’ thwarted passion, which yields an intoxicating atmosphere of bruised romanticism and palpable tension. When that tension breaks, the film positively erupts, gaining intensity all the way to the scorched-earth finale. The last 20 minutes are as pulverizing as anything by John Woo or Ringo Lam, but the overall effect is jarring after the mood piece of the second act. (1989, 91 min, New 2K DCP Digital Restoration) [Ben Sachs]

Ringo Lam’s CITY ON FIRE (Hong Kong)

Music Box Theatre – Monday, 4:30pm and Tuesday, 9:30pm

Unlike John Woo, Ringo Lam never sweetened his depictions of brutality with a sense of transcendence or poetry. His films proceed in hard, brusque gestures that suggest minimalist prose; moreover, the violence in his work is so unrelenting as to crush any promise of redemption for the characters. Lam’s punishing worldview is on full display in CITY ON FIRE, a superior cops and robbers picture that shows both sides of the law using excessive force. The film wastes little time reaching high intensity—it practically starts with an undercover officer getting stabbed to death by three assailants in a shopping district. The rest of the film follows the officer’s replacement, Ko Chow (Chow Yun-fat, in one of his first major roles), a supercool detective who can’t seem to get things right with his fiancée. Chow makes contact with a gang of jewel thieves by selling them guns; soon, he’s asked to join them in a robbery. He’s also encouraged to take part by one of his police superiors, a young inspector who doesn’t care about morality so long as he catches his mark. An interesting subplot of CITY ON FIRE concerns the rivalry between this inspector and the older, more principled investigator who first puts Chow on the case—in a scene characteristic of Lam, the two men have an argument over police ethics that peaks with one pointing a gun at the other. Another heated standoff in CITY ON FIRE was famously borrowed (along with other elements of the film) by Quentin Tarantino in his debut feature RESERVOIR DOGS (1992), but as violent as that film gets, it doesn’t feel nearly as nihilistic as this. There are times when Lam’s characters seem little more than wild animals; there’s a ferocity to the stabbings and shootings that makes them seem more painful than they do in other movies. By the end of CITY ON FIRE, the violence no longer seems like subject matter, but rather a means of expression, as though the characters could not communicate any other way. Screening as part of the Hong Kong Cinema Classics series. (1987, 105 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Paul Thomas Anderson's PHANTOM THREAD (US)

Music Box Theatre – Sunday, 11am

More often than not, modern movies are endlessly clogged with flimsy, cardboard cutouts of the “classic love story,” a trend hopefully being seared away entirely, given that they seem more offensive in a cavernous last year of cynicism and bitterness. The genre has been in desperate need of a refurbishing to allow for a better understanding of what’s embedded inside its own fragile construction. Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest and possibly greatest achievement isn’t without a mind of its own; it is a wonderfully conceived cinematic dream, wrapped in the lush, evergreen imagination of an artist working closely within the inner representation of his creations, much like Daniel Day-Lewis’ dress-making main character, Reynolds Woodcock. Anderson achieves something much closer to the actual emotions and feelings that echo throughout a relationship between two people, avoiding many of the stale and dry trends found in the modern romance movie. These lifeless morality lessons, usually soaked in a pale blue sadness, seem too bitter and lazy to have much real purpose and functionality, allowing Anderson to spin a delightedly deceptive chamber piece instead. Given the film’s advertising, championing PHANTOM THREAD as a brooding sure-fire contender in the race for awards-season gold, you might be surprised to discover a strange rom-com hiding in the lining of its framework. The plot involves a dressmaker (Daniel Day-Lewis) and his closely-curated daily home and work life, right as another of his romantic relationships is beginning to dim out. As another unfulfilled and lifeless relationship goes, Woodcock decides to retreat to one of his favorite restaurants (it is here I’d like to heavily underline the film’s ideas about taste and hunger, given new literal and metaphorical life in a way that is shockingly unpretentious). It is at this place of dining that he meets Alma, played by newcomer Vicky Krieps, that leads to an intimate portrayal of love’s inherent mystery, built inside an almost hermetic world of imagination that conjures up visions of the classical Hollywood era, while simultaneously managing to subvert the work of “tradition,” straddling the lines of the modern and classical film structure/form with the skill of a master operating at the height of their creative abilities. Despite taking place in Great Britain, this is far from the British-ness on display in BBC dramas and endless droves of Oscar bait. Beginning with its suggestive point-of-view, then unwinding between not two points of view, but a shared point of view, the personal nature of this film for Anderson is evident, with Anderson not only writing the script, but also shooting nearly every frame of film himself (though he goes uncredited in that role). The everyday gestures, glances, embraces, arguments, and alluring atmosphere between two people seeps through every frame, delivering unexpected surprises carefully yet unabashedly. This is one of the few films in recent years that is really essential to witness in 70mm. The projection’s colors and light are captured in spellbinding luminosity, the sounds and images pushing forth the relationship of one woman and one fragile male ego, across a tapestry of sensual pleasures with hardly a hint of on-screen sex in sight. The results trace the lines around eroticism, rather than circling it directly, letting them blossom into a rare achievement in recent American cinema, a precious gift inside the fabric of its own design; one to keep close through the next several years. Screening as part of the Clean Plate Club: A Food and Film series. (2018, 130 min, 35mm) [John Dickson]

Andres Veiel’s RIEFENSTAHL (Germany/Documentary)

Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

After all that has been said about Nazi-era filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl—skillful and influential director, ambition personified, fascist collaborator, feminist icon—what you think about her may depend on what you value. For me, recognizing Riefenstahl’s genuine talent does not clash with my feelings of loathing toward her as a human being. German documentarian Andres Veiel is not so generous. The fact that she used her skill to glorify a monster and everything he stood for is the original sin for which he will never forgive her. Beyond that, he damns her with her own words from the many interviews she gave, the letters she wrote to such people as Hitler and architect to the Nazis Albert Speer, and the self-censored archive she kept of her work and experiences. RIEFENSTAHL, while not really meant as biography, gives the outlines of her life story, from parents who alternately berated her and pushed her ambition, through her career as an actress and director, to her time in Sudan photographing the Nuba tribespeople and her relationship with a man 40 years her junior. Where Veiel spends most of his time is in unraveling her self-justifying lies. Repeatedly she says she was not a Nazi, technically true because she never joined the National Socialist Party, but was judged a fellow traveler after the war by the tribunals putting Nazis on trial, effectively letting her off the hook for being one of Hitler’s chief propagandists. She claims not to have known about the persecution of the Jewish people because her Jewish friends all left before things really went south (did she never wonder why they left?). She claims total ignorance of the concentration camps and killing centers. Veiel demolishes this lie by showing her with Roma and Sinti children she “requisitioned” from a camp for her film LOWLANDS (1954 release) whom she claimed she met again a few years later, only to reveal that they were murdered in Auschwitz after they had outlived their usefulness. Veiel focuses relentlessly on her face at the various stages of her very long life, a face that remains strangely unchanged despite the gradual effects of aging. To me, hers is the face of an unyielding, unself-reflexive person of ambition and ego whose steely will and uncomplicated indifference kept her from confronting the hideous reality going on all around her. If you can stand it, RIEFENSTAHL is both a horror movie and a cautionary tale particularly suited to our times. (2024, 118 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Ken Russell's ALTERED STATES (US)

Music Box Theatre – Friday, 11:45pm

“So, let’s get married, and if it turns out to be a disaster, it’ll be a disaster. We’ll shake hands and say goodbye.” If only it were that simple. Ken Russell’s sci-fi trip ALTERED STATES focuses on Eddie Jessup and his research on various mental states, utilizing methods like isolation chambers, psychoactive drugs or a combination of both. Eddie and Emily (who delivers the line referenced above) quickly meet, fall in love, and marry; after a jump forward in time, they prepare for their divorce. While this may sound like a lot of emotions to juggle, that’s not even the half of it. William Hurt, in his breakout roll as Eddie, delicately fluctuates from passionate lover in one scene to cold, rational, and narrow-minded in another. His struggle—between the physical and the mental, the rational and the emotional, the body and the mind—is perpetually on display in ALTERED STATES, and it was at play during the development of the film itself. It was adapted from a novel of the same name by novelist and screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, who dropped out of the production and took credit under the pseudonym Sidney Aaron after butting heads with Ken Russell over creative differences. Despite the departure, Russell claimed they mostly shot the script as it was presented. The tension between a screenwriter and a director is nothing unheard of, but the clash between two mediums—literature vs cinema—can be seen to seep into the finished film. Frequently the characters present us with mountains of intellectual jargon; it almost sounds poetic, the way they interrupt and talk over one another, layering on the pieces of an orchestra ensemble. Russell interrupts the talk to bombard us with extraordinary visuals that resemble something at an art installation. The filmmakers' refusal to pull back into comfortable tropes and accessibility proves that, with the right vision, you can create something unique, no matter how tough it may be to get to that point. Give ALTERED STATES a shot if you’re seeking true madness (genius?) on display. With a preshow performance by Grelley Duvall from 11:15pm to 11:45pm. (1980, 102 mins, 35mm) [Drew Van Weelden]

Lucrecia Martel's THE HEADLESS WOMAN (Argentina)

Siskel Film Center – Sunday, Noon

Lucrecia Martel’s films demand your attention to infinitesimal details and then upbraid you—albeit thoughtfully, like a sage imploring you to reconsider all your preconceived notions—for caring too much about them. Her 2008 film THE HEADLESS WOMAN, the last in her de facto Salta Trilogy (called as such because all three, with LA CIÉNAGA from 2002 and THE HOLY GIRL from 2004, are set in the eponymous Argentine province, also her hometown) and her most recent film before ZAMA, is the preeminent example of this tactic within her oeuvre. The plot is deceptively simple: before the title card even appears, a well-to-do Argentine woman, Verónica (referred to as Vero and played in a masterful performance by María Onetto), gets distracted by her phone while driving and hits something—possibly a dog, possibly a child. Rather than verify and, if necessary, help the victim, she drives on, presumably stopping only to get out and seek assistance for herself. The film’s Byzantine trajectory is rendered dreamlike via Martel’s perversely epical perspective (and real-life inspiration; she reportedly conceived of the film in a dream)—nothing is what it seems, neither for the protagonist nor the viewer. Although this is a recent trend in world cinema of late, considering some noteworthy films born of the Iranian and Romanian New Waves such as Asghar Farhadi’s A SEPARATION (2011) and Călin Peter Netzer’s CHILD’S POSE (2013), Martel’s disembodied approach is less tactical and more intrinsic than others’ use of such means. It may be trite to say that Martel challenges viewers to question what they see (and hear—her use of sound is exquisite), but it’s a logical assumption. After Vero hits whatever it is, I was almost sure that, when the film shows the casualty in the car’s rear window (movie pun unintended, though many critics reference its Hitchcockian overtones) as she drives away, it was in fact a dog; but when her family starts quietly helping cover up the accident following a series of disconcerting events—a servant’s child goes missing and is then found drowned in the canal next to the road where the accident occurred—I wondered what it was I think I saw, this newfound confusion mirroring Vero’s while likewise reinforcing the flimsy impudence of the very sense most crucial to film viewing. Martel’s sound design is similarly dumbfounding, the acousmatic dialogue further distancing us from already removed figures, practically unable to be called characters in how little is revealed about them. This distance, then, makes us question our own complicity, thus positioning the role of spectator, a seemingly passive viewpoint, as an active, if not political, stance. Martel said in an interview that “[t]here is a relationship between the dead body you never see and the desaparecidos,” referring to when a military junta disappeared tens of thousands of political dissidents during Argentina’s 'Dirty War' of the 1970s. This context reframes the scenario, prompting one to wonder if there’s any real difference between what one thinks they see and what one, either naively or maliciously, wants to see. There’s also an intriguing motif involving Vero’s hair, dyed blonde, making her bourgeois status even more prominent against the darker-skinned, lower-class people who serve her, that ties all this together. It’s another element that confronts one’s perceptions—what seems like a clever embodiment of the film’s central metaphor is, when Vero dyes her hair dark brown towards the end, further indictment of one’s connivance. Where Martel challenges her viewer’s preoccupation with minute narrative details, she impugns for what is confessed in that very absorption. If there’s no detail too small, how do we miss—or, better yet, ignore—so many big ones? Screening as part of the Interiority on Screen lecture series. (2008, 87 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Oliver Hermanus’ THE HISTORY OF SOUND (UK/Sweden/US)

Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Gently sweet and intentionally unhurried, Oliver Hermanus’ THE HISTORY OF SOUND is melodrama in its truest definition: a sentimental story set to music. The film follows Lionel (Paul Mescal), a talented singer from Kentucky who meets David (Josh O’Conner), a musician, while studying at the Boston Music Conservatory in 1917. They quickly fall for one another, reveling in their mutual love of music, particularly the traditional folk songs Lionel grew up with on his farm. After they're separated by World War I, the two reunite in the summer of 1920 for a passion project of David’s: to collect and record folk songs in rural Maine, their study driven by both the communal and intimate nature of music. The trip starts off blissfully, but it soon becomes clear David’s experiences during the war are taking a toll. Much to Lionel’s dismay, the two part ways once more. The rest of THE HISTORY OF SOUND tracks Lionel’s life beyond those few years and into the late 1980s, as he struggles to parse how both music and the memory of David fit into his history. THE HISTORY OF SOUND’s paced approach to a story devoid of much discord—the film is filled with beautiful music and tender acts of kindness—is to focus on the phenomenological experience of sound, namely the relationship between sound and other senses. Sight certainly has importance here, but touch is perhaps more significant, especially in how Lionel describes sound to those around him. In that way, THE HISTORY OF SOUND is also a love letter to the unassuming yet powerful significance of physical media. Sound transports through liminal spaces of past and present through these physical formats and technologies, allowing Lionel to process that life is so often desperately sad and that a constant longing for past happinesses lingers. It’s noteworthy that the film isn’t interested in nostalgia but more in sound’s role in memory and processing grief. As the older Lionel (played by Chris Cooper) narrates toward the beginning of the film, “It never occurred to me that music was only sound.” (2025, 117 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Michael Radford’s 1984 (UK/West Germany/Netherlands)

Siskel Film Center – Monday, 6pm

Big Brother is watching you. While this famous line doesn’t appear either in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 or in director Michael Radford’s adaptation of it, the film’s ever-present image of the carnivorous face of “B.B.” staring rapaciously out of two-way video screens all over the fictitious land of Oceania is all we need to experience what its people do—a humorless, war-mongering, totalitarian state where even thoughts are monitored for antisocial tendencies. Orwell (real name Eric Blair), a British subject, recorded propaganda broadcasts to combat Tokyo Rose and other Axis propagandists in the Pacific theatre during World War II. Tellingly, his protagonist in 1984, Winston Smith, spends his days at the Ministry of Truth “correcting” history by replacing purged enemies of the state with acceptable icons in newspapers and broadcasts. The film begins with Orwell’s epigram: “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” We enter a stadium-sized gathering of rank-and-file Outer Party members watching a show trial of traitors on an enormous screen. Among the viewers is Smith (John Hurt), whose attention strays from the trial to the front row of Inner Party members. At the trial’s conclusion, all rise and shout hate-filled diatribes at the traitor, including a bitter-faced woman (Suzanna Hamilton). Smith retires to his quarters, and in the only part of the room that isn’t in range of the ubiquitous view screens, retrieves a journal into which he writes that he hates this woman. Little does he know that this object of his hate, Julia, will become his lover and catalyst for his rebellion. Radford’s Oceania is claustrophobic in private and fascistically grand in public. It provides a believable environment for what is essentially a caricature of a communist country, its machinery antiquated even as its world seems futuristic. This is, I feel, a great strength of 1984. The utter devastation of war without end—the enemy changing frequently since the object is to keep warring, not win—and Smith’s memories looking so like London after the Blitz, ground this film in a Europe that was real not only for Orwell, but for the British cast and crew who made this film. The performances thus are wholly consonant with the mise-en-scène. Cinematographer Roger Deakins works with the blue-steel palette that is de rigueur for coloring dehumanization and misery, inflecting it with idealized images in bright colors and Julia’s nude body as a place to which Smith escapes after he is arrested and tortured. The duplicity of all of the characters surrounding Smith is extremely well rendered by the film’s stellar cast. Hamilton’s Julia seems a passionate drone of the state, only to reveal startlingly her passion really lies in the pleasures of the flesh. Richard Burton, who plays Inner Party member O’Brien, is so quiet in this, his last film role, that his betrayal of Smith comes as a genuine shock. Cyril Cusack as antiques dealer Charrington is perfect as a symbol of a quaint, bygone era who preys on the nostalgia of Party members. And then there is Hurt in the performance of a career. He’s sweet, gullible, absolutely no match for the mechanics of his totalitarian world—and yet he cries out even in his worst moments, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” In the end, when a numb Smith sits at a dirty café table and draws “2 + 2 =” in the dust, unable to finish, the poignancy of his suffering is almost too much to bear. Naturally, there had to be a movie of 1984 in 1984. I’m glad it was this one. Screening as part of the Cinema of Resistance series. (1984, 113 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Hal Hartley’s WHERE TO LAND (US)

FACETS – Saturday, 5pm and 7pm; Sunday, 5pm; and Thursday, 7pm

Hal Hartley only makes a film about once a decade now, and one of the running jokes of his latest, WHERE TO LAND, is that a Hartley surrogate keeps having to explain to people that he’s not dying. Bill Sage plays Joe Fulton, a filmmaker who, like Hartley, is around 60 and has been unable to get a film financed for a long time. When the movie begins, he’s seeking employment as an assistant groundskeeper at a church graveyard because he doesn’t have much else to do (thankfully, he isn’t in want of money, either). After an interview with the senior groundskeeper, he visits his lawyer to begin drawing up his last will and testament because it seems like something he should do and, again, he has plenty of time. Various people in Joe’s life catch wind of his recent activities, and soon a rumor starts that he’s going to die. But before Joe can set things straight, he meets with a writer who’s working on a book about him, a centenarian friend who discusses her past work as a political activist, and a young man who thinks Joe may be his father, but probably not really. Even for a farce, WHERE TO LAND is pretty lightweight—very little is at stake here dramatically—but Hartley spins out the dramatic complications charmingly, and his trademark dialogue (fast-paced, deadpan, full of non-sequitur jumps between the profound and the banal) remains forever witty. Moreover, the day-in-the-life plot is essentially a vehicle for Hartley to express his feelings about subjects ranging from the fate of independent art in America to the future of life on this planet. (In this regard, the film it resembles most is Jean-Luc Godard’s JLG/JLG: SELF-PORTRAIT IN DECEMBER [1994].) He doesn’t seem optimistic about either of those things, and the grim prognostications at times threaten to disrupt the film’s cheery surface tone. Still, the jokes continue, and WHERE TO LAND ends happily—reminders to keep calm and carry on, as it were. (2025, 74 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Lizzie Borden's BORN IN FLAMES (US)

Siskel Film Center – Wednesday, 8:30pm

With a concept, style, and politics that are still radical and relevant, Lizzie Borden's 1983 film gets a revival screening that is all-too-timely. Railing against the patriarchal and racist structures that remained in even the most progressive corners of American Society after the '60s and '70s, we are thrust into a feature length narrative of critique. Borden is able to place her ideology front and center, but also let the story sneak up around it. Embracing the gritty look of both 16mm film and the more battered parts of New York City in the early '80s, and combining them with an objective camera, she uses her low-budget as a storytelling asset. The world in which the anarchist movement dubbed the Women's Army carries out its counterrevolutionary campaign of pirate radio and direct action is rendered complete through a skillful combination of narrative and documentary modes. Artificial news clips about the progress of the current Socialist government and covert operations of the Women's Army's are mixed with observational shots of unemployed men and women on the streets, and we are constantly reminded of the veiled nature of the allegory. Other fictional scenes feel like we're watching the unedited negotiations between rival factions in a civil war as shot by an embedded cameraperson. When the pirate radio DJ—who acts as the film's voiceover—declares that the true nature of socialism is constant revolution, it seems a natural reinforcement of the film's message, rather than a didactic add-on. Managing to tow the line between preaching and pandering is not an easy task when taking on the very fiber of our society, and rarely has a film done it with such ease. Screening as part of the Cinema of Resistance series. (1983, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Jason Halprin]

Massimo Dallamano’s WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? (Italy/West Germany/UK)

Alamo Drafthouse – Tuesday, 9:30pm

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? holds a distinct place in giallo history. Released at the genre’s commercial peak, it retains the pleasures of the whodunit while redirecting attention toward themes of institutions, adolescence, and moral negligence. Produced with a West German studio, the film was marketed as an Edgar Wallace krimi, yet it resists neat classification. Neither fully krimi, poliziottesco, nor giallo, it blends elements of all three into a hybrid that feels singular. Massimo Dallamano, once a cinematographer for Sergio Leone, brought to his direction a preference for grounded, procedural storytelling over the baroque set pieces favored by Argento or Bava. His film emphasizes restraint, suspense, and the failures of patriarchal disbelief. A striking narrative turn comes an hour in, when a secondary character casually mentions “…what happened to Solange.” Until this point, the name has not been uttered, and the audience, while absorbed in the murders of Catholic schoolgirls, have nearly forgotten the title’s promise. This sudden invocation reframes the investigation, revealing that the story has always circled an unspoken trauma. The belated naming dramatizes the film’s concern with secrecy and repression: institutions and adults fail to recognize violence until it is almost too late. The murders themselves underscore this theme. The opening shows a professor and student on the verge of an affair, interrupted by the student’s alarm at a flashing blade nearby. He dismisses her warning, and just 100 yards away, a girl bleeds to death. Dallamano stages the moment as an indictment of male refusal to credit female testimony. The tragedy lies not only in the murder but in its preventability, violence enabled by disbelief. Suspicion eventually falls on the professor’s severe German wife, whose jealousy and surveillance suggest she might be orchestrating revenge. Her quick exoneration upends audience expectations. Far from the archetypal female killer in giallo, she emerges as a stabilizing figure intent on clearing her husband and pursuing the murderer. Dallamano’s depiction of violence resists giallo excess. Killings are swift, direct, and almost bureaucratic, their bluntness softened only by Morricone’s enigmatic score. Religious imagery briefly suggests a priest killer punishing students and weaponizing their confessions. As the film progresses, we quickly realize we are far from the anti-clergy text of Fulci’s DON’T TORTURE A DUCKLING (1972). Instead, Dallamano grounds the mystery in adolescent dynamics: a clique of hedonistic, orgy-loving schoolgirls whose secrecy and exclusion set the stage for slaughter. The victims are not faceless bodies, but schoolgirls whose forced repression leads them morally astray. What distinguishes SOLANGE is its balance of mystery mechanics and themes of innocence and consequence. The film resists sensationalism, embedding each murder within a critique of disbelief, hypocrisy, and the perilous journey from youth to adulthood. As a transitional text, SOLANGE preserves the suspense and guessing game that fueled giallo’s popularity while anticipating the socially conscious thrillers of the mid-1970s, particularly the poliziotteschi cycle and Dallamano’s own WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOUR DAUGHTERS? (1974). DAUGHTERS became the second entry in his planned “Schoolgirls in Peril” trilogy, concluded with Alberto Negrin’s RED RINGS OF FEAR (1978) after Dallamano’s death. More than a stylish puzzle, SOLANGE is a meditation on innocence colliding with neglect, a work that expands giallo’s boundaries by binding its pleasures to a sober recognition of systemic failure. Screening as part of the Terror Tuesday series. (1972, 107 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]

Michael Schultz's COOLEY HIGH (US)

Cinema/Chicago at Kennedy King College (740 W. 63rd Street) – Wednesday, 6:30pm [Free Admission]

“I grew up in the Cabrini–Green housing project,” said the Chicago-born writer Eric Monte, “and I had one of the best times of my life, the most fun you can have while inhaling and exhaling.” Monte’s assertion is, of course, antithetical to the general conception of the storied public housing projects as being a terrifying place out of which it would seem joy is unlikely to emanate. COOLEY HIGH, which Monte wrote and Michael Schultz (CAR WASH, WHICH WAY IS UP?) directed, revels in the elation of youth, apolitical inasmuch as children and young adults themselves usually are but still evincing a message similar to Monte’s above, resisting any kind of bourgeois pity. It’s the final weeks of high school for Preach (Glynn Turman) and Cochise (Lawrence Hilton Jacobs) at Cooley High (the film was inspired by Monte’s childhood and his time at Cooley Vocational High School, near Cabrini–Green); the story takes place over the course of several days, during which Preach (a bad student but one who nevertheless reads poetry and history books for fun) falls in love and Cochise finds out he received a full basketball scholarship. All of this is seemingly incidental as the boys and their friends hang out at the local dive, go to a party, take a joy ride in a stolen car (where they partake in an impressive car chase through warehouses on Navy Pier), and see a movie (GODZILLA VS. MOTHRA, though it’s the fight in the theater that really grabs the audience’s—both in the film and out— attention), normal things young people do, the memories of which are often bright spots among the relative dimness of subsequent adulthood. Preach and Cochice eventually find themselves in trouble for the joy ride, though an encouraging teacher (played by Saturday Night Live cast member Garrett Morris) helps get them out of trouble with the cops. That, however, sets into motion the events that lead to the film’s heartbreaking conclusion. It’s been compared to George Lucas’ AMERICAN GRAFFITI, which was released the year prior, but, as Keith Corson notes in Trying to Get Over: African American Directors after Blaxploitation, 1977-1986, “While Lucas’s portrait of high school graduates in the San Fernando Valley relies heavily on on feelings of nostalgia, COOLEY HIGH remains grounded in the realities of urban transformation and decline.” Though not political in nature, the stakes in Schultz’s film are naturally higher than that of any predominantly white corollary, as is evidenced by the dramatic climax and sobering aftermath. The film has gone on to inspire many a Black filmmaker (e.g., Spike Lee, John Singleton) yet still stands on its own as an auspicious entry into the coming-of-age subgenre and a necessary corrective to pervasive assumptions. In collaboration with Kennedy-King College, Englewood Arts Collective, and Grow Greater Englewood, this screening of COOLEY HIGH marks the film’s 50th anniversary and includes a post-screening discussion. (1975, 107 min, Digital Projection) [Kat Sachs]

Douglas Sirk's ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Monday, 7pm

Though originally intended by Universal to be a Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman vehicle—building upon their popularity in MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION rather than Sirk's popularity as a director—ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS is every bit as personal, even if only because of Sirk's hefty allowance (both artistically and economically). Wyman plays the pussyfooting Cary Scott, a recent widow in a tight knit, high strung, upper class American town. She falls in love with her gardener, Rock Hudson, and her children object and buy her a television to replace him. It's a film about people making things difficult for themselves and others because they have nothing more pressing to attend to. They impose tragedy on themselves as a matter of course, but Sirk is sympathetic. In all the stunning grandeur of his heavily saturated colors and Superscope composition, Sirk never lets his characters become washed out, or treats them as secondary elements to his visual style. His sympathies save films like ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS from their own absurdities, and the more ridiculous his storylines and intricate visual compositions become (take note of the way he frames characters within things like window frames and television sets), the more beautiful his films seem. Screening as part of the Queer Film Theory 101 series. (1955, 89 min, DCP Digital) [Julian Antos]

Sofia Coppola's MARIE ANTOINETTE (US)

The Davis Theater – Monday, 7pm

The punchy beats of Gang of Four's "Natural's Not in It" opens this feminist retelling of Marie Antoinette's rise to teen queendom. With an aesthetic that is as yummy as it is indulgent, with bright pastels and gilded decor, Sofia Coppola departs from her somber directing style to make something more rebellious and creative. The initial shot of Kirsten Dunst as Antoinette sees her lying on a chaise lounge while a maid fits her with a shoe. With an air of boredom, she takes a lick of cake (she’s surrounded by cake) before noticing the camera’s gaze, then gives us a face that smirkingly asks, “What are you looking at?” In MARIE ANTOINETTE, Coppola seemingly sidesteps matters of the French Revolution to capture a more intimate and personal herstory of an adolescent girl attempting to fulfill a position of arbitrary divine right. The narrative begins with the arranged marriage of Antoinette and Louis XVI, then shifts to focus on their inability to secure an heir and establish a "Franco-Austrian" alliance. Pressure weighs on Antoinette from her mother and her aristocratic social life. "All eyes will be on you." Often employing a shaky, almost documentary realism, the camera notices the delicate details of her isolation and the awkwardness of the couple's participation in royal customs, a nuance not seen in many historical period dramas with the exception of maybe AMADEUS (1984). With historical accuracy such as accents thrown out the window, Dunst and the rest of the cast, including Rip Torn and Rose Byrne, are excellent. Jason Schwartzman plays the soon-to-be King with a quiet discomfort and timidness that I really enjoyed, seemingly more concerned with his own myopic interests than sexual, or political, relations. Unable to produce a child, the young bride steadily indulges in the lavish affordances of royalty. New shoes, custom clothing, desserts and champagne fill the void, as she attempts to gain some semblance of her own identity in France. Meshed with the movie is a score intended to evince Antoinette's subsequent debauchery and teenage angst, which consultant Brian Reitzell described as a "post-punk-pre-new-romantic-rock opera odyssey with some 18th century music." While this disparate mix of 2000s indie, classical, and post-punk can feel a bit gimmicky at times—​or even trite in the case of a conspicuous consumption montage set to "I Want Candy"—​the soundtrack provides notable subtext. Eventually Antoinette bears children with Louis XVI and finally finds solace at her Petit Trianon, where the director presents her maturation as a mother in a very primal light. Near the end of the film, she is seen spending most of her time in the garden with her daughter, wearing flowers and neutral tones, and contemplating the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau; however, this doesn't change her outcome or the resulting demise of the French monarchy. As the daughter of a renowned Hollywood king, it makes sense that Sofia Coppola would take such pleasure in humanizing a figure whose notorious condemnation was largely based on sexism. With a playful wink, Coppola provides a much-needed female perspective to the story. (2006, 123 min, DCP Digital) [Nic Denelle]

Charlie McDowell’s THE SUMMER BOOK (US/UK/Finland)

Music Box Theater – See Venue website for showtimes

“We had joy, we had fun / We had seasons in the sun / But the hills that we climbed / Were just seasons out of time.” These lyrics by Jacques Brel came to mind as I thought about the images and mood of director Charlie McDowell’s adaptation of Tove Jansson’s 1972 novel The Summer Book. Jansson, subject of the excellent 2022 biopic TOVE, was the daughter of a famous Finnish artist whose own artistic path led her into illustration, most famously the hippolike trolls called Moomins she used to populate her comic strips and books. Screenwriter Robert Jones has taken several liberties with Jansson’s novel, but McDowell and cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen, shooting on 16mm film using natural light, manage to deliver the book’s spirit of childhood wonder while exploring more serious emotions. Like many good folktales, this one takes place in a world apart—a rugged, forested island where nine-year-old Sophia (Emily Matthews) and her family own a weathered summer home. She is accompanied by her father (Anders Danielsen Lie) and her grandmother (Glenn Close). We almost don’t notice that Sophia’s mother is absent until Father finds a sun hat; Grandmother says, “I’ll find a place for it.” The family is, in fact, mourning her loss on this, the first summer without her. Sophia and Grandmother do indeed have joy and fun climbing hills, crawling through dense underbrush, swimming in tide pools, and rowing to a nearby island to check out some new neighbors. But the grief, especially as experienced by Father, make this summer a season out of time, disconnected and lacking human dynamism. Danielsen Lie lives on the margins of this film, working and avoiding talking to Sophia, but we can sense the struggle inside him. Matthews gives an interesting performance as a young girl trying to understand how to live in her new reality, screaming that she’s bored and wishing for a storm to come, perhaps to sweep her away, and then fearing her own feelings. Matching her is Close, playing much older than she actually is in age makeup. Her awkward, careful walk is a bit too studied, but she feels like the safe place to fall that has been thrust upon her. I found myself studying her face as part of the endlessly fascinating landscape that makes this film a gorgeously sensuous experience. There aren’t any unexpected revelations in this film, but the quiet, meditative nature of this story of loss and renewal felt very healing. Stay for the credits to see film of Jansson laughing and working in the outdoors, perhaps on this island. (2024, 95 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Jay Duplass’ THE BALTIMORONS (US)

Music Box Theatre and The Davis Theater – See Venue websites for showtimes

Returning after more than a decade away from directing features, Jay Duplass—one of the more prominent figures in the unfortunately-named “Mumblecore” movement—returns with a charming entry in the micro-genre of “Sad Christmas” cinema. Written in collaboration with comedian Michael Strassner, THE BALTIMORONS is a comedy about loneliness as disease, how the crushing weight of self-doubt and depression intensifies when we find ourselves in isolation and the only cure is, naturally, other people. If that sounds too intense for a film that is ostensibly a comedy, this is only hammered home by the morbidly amusing sequence where our central figure, Cliff Cashen (Strassner) blunderingly fails at a suicide attempt in his attic. Fast forward six months, and Christmas Eve becomes the setting for the newly sober Cliff, aiming to avoid both alcohol and the toxic improv scene where Cliff once reigned supreme. However, like any good improv scene, a series of escalating embarrassing scenarios begins to compound upon each other, where a broken tooth and an emotionally closed-off dentist (the note-perfect Liz Larsen) provide the backdrop for a tale of two wandering souls attempting to drown out the drone of isolation with each other’s respective odd couple personalities. To match their melancholy holiday setting, Duplass and Strassner clearly have Peanuts on the mind, their sad sack protagonist embodying some kind of sad wish fulfillment of a grown-up Charlie Brown, complete with a jazzy yuletide score by Jordan Seigel that channels Vince Guaraldi. There are few narrative surprises afoot in THE BALTIMORONS, the “enemies-to-lovers” tropes being met perfectly beat by beat, but Duplass’ particular brand of melancholic lo-fi storytelling still radiates humanity and quirk, crafting a charming vessel for feelings of despair to head towards a destination filled with hope and redemption. In other words, THE BALTIMORONS is good grief. (2025, 99 mins, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

📽️ ALSO SCREENING

​​​​​​​⚫ Alamo Drafthouse
Nobuhiro Yamashita’s 2005 film LINDA LINDA LINDA (114 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) and Mike Figgis’ 2025 documentary MEGADOC (107 min, DCP Digital) screen this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

Savage Steve Holland’s 1985 film BETTER OFF DEAD (97 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.

⚫ Comfort Film at Comfort Station (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave.)
Comfort Film and Terrorvision present Cheng-Liang Kwan’s 1981 film AN OLD KUNG FU MASTER (85 min, Digital Projection) on Wednesday at 8pm. Free admission. More info here.

⚫ FACETS
As part of the Cold Sweat double feature on Friday, Lars von Trier’s 2000 film DANCER IN THE DARK (140 min, Digital Projection) screens at 7pm and Darren Lynn Bousman’s 2008 film REPO! THE GENETIC OPERA (94 min, Digital Projection) screens at 9:45pm.

Boris Lokjine’s 2024 film SOULEYMANE’S STORY (94 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday at 3pm and Sunday at 1pm and 3pm.

Full Spectrum Features presents CAFE FOCUS in the FACETS Lounge on Sunday at 2pm. Cafe Focus is a monthly coworking pop-up for Chicago filmmakers and film workers of all backgrounds and experience levels.

Join the Prague Committee of CSCI and the Consulate General of the Czech Republic in celebrating 2025 Czech Heritage Week with the inaugural opening screening of the second post-COVID edition of the Czech That Film festival, Adam Martinec’s 2024 film MORD (OUR LOVELY PIG SLAUGHTER) (85 min, Digital Projection) on Tuesday at 7pm.

Ben Stiller’s 1994 film REALITY BITES (99 min, Digital Projection) screens Thursday, 9pm, in partnership with the SAIC Film Club, preceded by FACETS Film Trivia at 7pm. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Leather Archives & Museum
Samuel Shanahoy’s 2014 film QUEEN BEE EMPIRE (51 min, Digital Projection), along with Wren Tiffany's BONER SCHOOL (2024) and Brontez Purnell's 100 BOYFRIENDS MIXTAPE #3 (2023), screen Saturday, 7pm, as part of the Fetish Film Forum. More info here.

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

Also screening as part of the Hong Kong Cinema Classics are John Woo’s 1989 film THE KILLER (111 min, DCP Digital) on Friday at 9pm; Woo’s 1986 film A BETTER TOMORROW (95 min, DCP Digital) on Saturday at 9:15pm; Woo’s 1987 film A BETTER TOMORROW II (105 min, DCP Digital) on Saturday at 11:30pm; and Hark Tsui’s 1989 film A BETTER TOMORROW III (119 min, DCP Digital) on Monday at 9:15pm.

Phil Tippett's 2021 film MAD GOD (83 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday and Saturday at 11:45pm.

Robert M. Young’s 1982 film THE BALLAD OF GREGORIO CORTEZ (106 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, 11:30am, as part of the Crucemos al Otro Lado series.

Beeban Kidron’s 1995 film TO WONG FOO, TO WONG FOO, THANKS FOR EVERYTHING! JULIE NEWMAR (109 min, 35mm) screens Sunday, 7pm, presented in collaboration with Hoodbutch Studios. There’s a VIP reception at 5pm and a Vogue mini-ball performance after the screening at 9pm.

The Chicago Film Society presents Chris + Heather's 16mm Big Screen Blowout #2 on Tuesday at 7pm.

The shorts program Life Within the Lens: Chicago, Alli, y Mas (Digital Projection), part of the Crucemos al Otro Lado series, screens Wednesday, 7pm, followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2025 film ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER (161 min, 70mm) screens Wednesday at 7pm and 10:30pm in advance of an official run.

Linus O'Brien’s 2025 documentary STRANGE JOURNEY: THE STORY OF ROCKY HORROR (89 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 8pm, also in advance of an official run and featuring a live preshow performance by the Midnight Madness shadowcast. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ VDB TV (Virtual)
oliverio rodriguez and Victoria Stob's 2018 short film LYNDALE (24 min) and Sandi DuBowski's 1993 short film TOMBOYCHIK (15 min) stream for free on VDB-TV.  Programmed by Cine-File contributor Elise Schierbeek. More info here.

CINE-LIST: September 19, 2025 - September 25, 2025

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Julian Antos, Elspeth J. Carroll, Cody Corrall, Maxwell Courtright, Nic Denelle, John Dickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jason Halprin, Shaun Huhn, Ben Kaye, Raphael Jose Martinez, Michael Glover Smith, Drew Van Weelden