đ REELING 2025: THE 43RD CHICAGO LGBTQ+ INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Chicago Filmmakers â See showtimes below
Joy Gharoro-Akpojotorâs DREAMERS (UK)
Saturday, 1:30pm
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; itâs 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 sheâs 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 isnât 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 sheâs able to be herself for one of the first times in her life. The two leads, Ronke AdĂ©koluejo and Ann Akinjirin, have excellent chemistry; moreover, they bring great humanity to characters too often written off as statistics or harmful clichĂ©s. 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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Picture Restart: His Sacred Flesh (Shorts)
Saturday, 6pm
From autoerotic portraits to visions of homoerotic spiritual communion, the films in this program thrillingly undo, redefine, and sacralize the male body as a site of sensual experience. The astutely ordered sequence of films begins with Edgar Barensâ AUTOMONOSEXUAL (1988, 3 min), an expressionistic depiction of the filmmakerâs act of self-pleasure. Through black-and-white negative images, slow-motion, and fracturing edits, his masturbatory energy is abstracted into a kinetic visuality that canât be contained. The dissonant industrial soundsâand the fact of his isolated, depersonalized formâcanât help but suggest the shadow of the AIDS crisis. Thereâs no such pall in SONG OF THE GODBODY (1977, 11 min), James Broughtonâs rapturous ode to his body. In concert with lush orchestral music and, eventually, Broughtonâs own narrated poetry, the camera moves across his naked flesh in a series of macro shots that render folds, pores, hair, orifices, and fluids into alien topography. A rich representation of Deleuze and Guattariâs body-without-organs, it forces us to regard the body as pure sensuous material outside of socio-cultural structures. The secular panegyric to the sacredness of flesh becomes explicitly religious in James Herbertâs CANTICO (1982, 35 min), an interpretation of the story of Francis of Assisi from bon vivant to saint. The images speed up, slow down, slide across the screen, and repeat in a stuttering, discontinuous recursion, circling moments of Francisâs transformation through corporeal experiences of captivity, begging, devotion, and religious ecstasy. Herbertâs film posits a fundamental sensuality to Catholic ideology that is not precluded by asceticism, and that might even be called queer in its non-reproductive forms. An emphatic link between homoeroticism and holiness is made in Ronald Chaseâs CATHEDRAL (1971, 10 min), which closes the program on a euphoric high. Beginning with cross-dissolves of serenely resting nude men, it becomes more carnal as the men caress each other and kiss in closeup against heavenly white sheets, mosaics of light filtering through an unseen canopy. Chase literalizes the analogy made in the title by superimposing the soaring stained-glass windows of Parisâs Sainte-Chapelle over the scene, turning acts of gay love into the most divine things of all. [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
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Bart Everlyâs VELVET VISION: THE STORY OF JAMES BIDGOOD AND THE MAKING OF
PINK NARCISSUS (US/Documentary)
Sunday, 3:30pm
A landmark film of the queer avant-garde of the 1960s and â70s, PINK NARCISSUS (1971) had no attributed author for nearly 30 years until it was traced back to a New York artist by the name of James Bidgood. It turned out that Bidgood had disowned the film after its distributor, Sherpix, took the footage without his consent and edited it in a way he felt destroyed his vision. Itâs this sense of creative frustration and loss that Bart Everlyâs VELVET VISION identifies across Bidgoodâs life and career. Through new footage and interviews with his colleagues and admirers (including John Waters, natch), Everly shows Bidgood as an irascible, chronically depressed man who alienated people as much for his flaky temperament as the fussiness with which he treated his creative process. This, we learn, is what resulted in his distributorâs mutiny against PINK NARCISSUS, leaving Bidgood to flounder for decades while he lived in a cluttered, roach-infested Manhattan studio and found occasional work filming pornography and designing costumes and magazine spreads. The success of any biographical documentary largely depends on the charisma of its subject, and Bidgood delivers, careening between jolly bawdiness, somber introspection, and fits of rage and despondency that feel like something we shouldnât be seeing. Bidgood tells Everly he doesnât want a doc about him to be hagiographic or sentimental, and VELVET VISION certainly passes that criterion. Although the film reaffirms certain aspects of the tortured artist trope, it doesnât suggest that Bidgood was some kind of misunderstood genius; on the contrary, what makes it fascinating is how it presents him as a barely-working-class dilettante, undoubtedly talented but also someone reluctant to even call himself an artist. That he made something as gorgeous and enduring as PINK NARCISSUS becomes as much a testament to his ingenuity as to the fortuitous contexts around it. As if to echo the fragmentary nature of PINK NARCISSUS, Everly seldom composes with the whole frame, instead placing his footage in a small central window and using dissolves, wipes, and shifting stock-footage backgrounds for collage-like movement. (2025, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
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James Bidgoodâs PINK NARCISSUS (US)
Sunday, 6pm
Also screening at Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) â Thursday, 9:30pm
In his review of Bart Everlyâs documentary VELVET VISION: THE STORY OF JAMES BIDGOOD AND THE MAKING OF PINK NARCISSUS, Cine-File contributor Jonathan Leithold-Patt deftly summarizes the interesting background of Bidgoodâs queer, erotic reverie, PINK NARCISSUS, once attributed to âAnonymousâ for many years (and sometimes, mistakenly, to Andy Warhol and Kenneth Anger) due to a dispute between Bidgood and the filmâs distributor. Sometimes the lore behind a piece of art is more interesting than the work itself, but this is an occasion where thatâs certainly not the case. I can only describe it as a gay fantasia, if Lotte Reiniger and Jack Smith collaborated to make something akin to THE RED SHOES. Bidgood had gone to Parsons and then dabbled in set, window, clothing and costume design, and even drag before focusing on photography and filmmaking. All of his prior efforts are represented in PINK NARCISSUS; itâs as if a lush window display came to life, or a drag performance was taken to even more excessive extremes. Thereâs a balletic element as well, with discrete sequences that set the protagonist, a sex worker (Bobby Kendall), against various tableaux which involve him being such characters as a matador and a harem boy. The plot is tenuous at best, as it contains no dialogue, only music and various sound effects. Filmed over the course of several years in Brigoodâs apartment, itâs astounding what he was able to do with the space, taking it from what mightâve been a chamber drama out of necessity to a genre and location-spanning sex opera. Every second is full of visual splendor, with more yet to come. My favorite sequence is one that appears to take place on the grimy city streets of New York. The expressionistic technique of the grungy tableaux wouldâve impressed Lang and Murnau, even if Lang might have balked at the gay sex stuff (Murnau, however, may have been all for it). The details in this part are extraordinary: thereâs Melies gym, a newspaper box that says all the something or other (itâs illegible) thatâs shit to print, and a flickering sign that reads, âThe pause that refreshes, Cock-A-Cola.â With regard to the erotic aspect, itâs not explicit, necessarily, but rather lush, like a Caravaggio painting. (According to The Encyclopedia of LGBTQIA+ Portrayals in American Film, âBidgood intended to film men as straight directors had always filmed womenâthrough a dreamlike lens and with unapologetic objectification.â) Iâve mentioned so many references, and itâs somehow evocative of all of those and more. Itâs a feast for the eyes and, depending on oneâs proclivities, coquettishly arousing as well. (1971, 69 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
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For a complete schedule and more information, visit the festival website here.
đœïž CRUCIAL VIEWING
Luis Buñuelâs SIMON OF THE DESERT (Mexico) and Luis Buñuelâs THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL (Mexico)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) â Tuesday, 7pm
Spanish director Luis Buñuel never intended to become a Mexican filmmaker, but the fascist victory in Spain in 1938 kept the director, on a visit to the United States, from returning. His subsequent loss of income as a dubber when Hollywood turned its back on the Spanish-speaking market sent the surrealist south of the border. There, he lived, gained citizenship, and rebuilt his career and life in the Mexican film industry over 35 years. When he was ready to return to Europe, he bid farewell to his adopted country with SIMON OF THE DESERT (1965, 45 min, 35mm), a feature film truncated to a short when he ran out of money. Buñuel, an atheist still immersed in the Catholic teachings of his youth, based the film on Saint Simeon Stylites, a fifth-century Syrian Christian who spent 37 years atop a pillar in the desert mortifying himself in religious devotion. Simon (Claudio Brook) is shown at the beginning of the film coming down from his pillar because a benefactor has built him a new one five times taller. Portentously, the priests who come to worship with him every day remark that his move comes six years, six months, and six days after he first asended to the platformâ666, the devilâs number and a signal that Simon is about to have his faith tested by Satan, in the luscious, exuberant form of Silvia Pinal. Despite some of the madcap antics around him, including the ho-hum reaction to Simon restoring hands to a man who had them lopped off and the various disguises Pinal adoptsâa peasant woman, a schoolgirl in nylons and garter belt, a bearded shepherd holding a lambâSimon remains devoted to his religious practice. Brook portrays Simon with human sincerity and feeling, a far cry from, say, the literally holier-than-thou take of Charlton Heston as Moses in THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (1956). The film ends in a 1960s discotheque with Simon and Satan, both in modern dress, sitting at a table as a swirl of teens dancing to a rock ânâ roll band writhe around them. This was not the ending Buñuel intended, but it is one that drives home the point that religious dedication has done little to curb human appetites. [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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He was always ahead of the curve. Once upon a time, or maybe twice, master surrealist Don Luis beat Irwin Allen to the punch. A good ten years before THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE, he made his own contribution to the genre of the disaster movie. Because that's exactly what THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL (1962, 96 min, DCP Digital) is. The plot's setup matches Allen's formula perfectly. After an elegant dinner party, the moneyed hosts and their guests retire to the drawing room for music and cigars. And then, in a Buñuelian twist that prefigures THE TOWERING INFERNO, disaster strikes. They find themselves mysteriously unable to leave the room, suddenly imprisonedânot by a raging fire or faulty elevators but by some mysterious force of social etiquette. After being trapped for several days, they begin to starve and are soon reduced to living like animals. Madness follows. (One of the tropes of the disaster movie, of course, is that not everyone makes it out alive.) "Basically," as Buñuel puts it in his memoir, "I simply see a group of people who couldn't do what they wanted toâleave a room. That kind of dilemma, the impossibility of satisfying a simple desire, often occurs in my movies." This dreamlike fable about the complacency of the wealthy elite is as funny and frightening as any other film in his oeuvre, and it features one of his all-time greatest endings. [Rob Christopher]
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Both screen as part of the Buñuel in Mexico series.
Manoel de Oliveiraâs ABRAHAMâS VALLEY (Portugal/France/Switzerland)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) â Wednesday, 7pm
Manoel de Oliveiraâs adaptation of a novel by his friend and sometimes collaborator Augustina Bessa-LuĂs, itself a free adaptation of Madame Bovary, may update Flaubertâs story to the present (and transpose it from France to Portugal), but as Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, itâs still very much about the 19th century. Rosenbaum went on to argue that ABRAHAMâS VALLEY offers âa precise but complex sense of how the 19th century might look at the 20th (unlike Merchant-Ivory films, which at most give you a 20th-century view of the 19th),â which is a good summation of what makes the movie so challenging and rewarding. De Oliveira approximates numerous conventions of 19th century fiction, so that watching ABRAHAMâS VALLEY (or, indeed, almost any of his films) often feels like reading. The director frequently employs an omniscient narrator, who interrupts the action with commentary on the characters, their environment, and morality in general over static shots of nature or people performing basic activities. (Per Rosenbaum, âthese beautifully framed compositions allow meaning to sink in slowly, as if by osmosis.â) When the characters do speak, they speak eloquently and at lengthâthe film can seem like a salon, with characters standing in for philosophical positions on various topics, sex being chief among them. One of the through lines of ABRAHAMâS VALLEY is its consideration of how sexual mores have changed since the mid-19th century, which can clash humorously with the filmmakerâs chaste visuals. De Oliveira recognizes that western society is more permissive now than it was then, and one of the more interesting differences between the film and Flaubertâs classic is that the heroine doesnât suffer for her infidelity. ABRAHAMâS VALLEY follows its protagonist from early adolescence to her 50s, yet her transgressions never ruffle the filmâs genteel surface. In fact, virtually nothing disrupts the air of placid reflection, which has the effect of obscuring the meaning behind the charactersâ behavior (the heroineâs especially). Itâs in this regard that the film shows the greatest influence of Robert Bresson, one of de Oliveiraâs heroes; it provides a wealth of information about its subjects but maddeningly little access to their inner lives. The gap between what we see and what we must interpret is surprisingly vast, and ABRAHAMâS VALLEY may be described as an invitation to explore this mysterious terrain. Screening as part of the Sounds of Shaking Earth: Landscapes of Portuguese Cinema series. (1993, 211 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Jordan Lordâs SHARED RESOURCES (US/Documentary)
Conversations at the Edge at the Siskel Film Center â Thursday, 6pm
Jordan Lordâs intimate documentary SHARED RESOURCES is doing and saying a lot, dealing with issues surrounding debt, disability, disaster, and essentially what it means to be connected to other people, all heavy and seemingly disparate subjects. Yet Lord nimbly counterbalances the weightiness with sequences of family life that both quell the intensity and further probe these issues. The film was shot over several years, but isnât presented chronologically; life may unfold in order, the continuance of time, but in retrospect how everything came to be at any given moment is made up of moments that preceded it, connecting backward and forward to establish the present. Jordanâs father, Albert, oversaw a debt collection department at a bank. He was unceremoniously laid off, thereby being forced into early retirement and, later, having to declare chapter 13 bankruptcy. (Additionally, Lordâs father had promised that if they got into an Ivy League school, heâd pay for it. When Lord got into Columbia, Albert used the entirety of his retirement fund to do so.) Further, he contends with ongoing medical issues due to exposure to Agent Orange while in the military, and the whole family, including Jordanâs mother and sister, lost everything during Hurricane Katrina. One might assume that the tension of all this unprocessed trauma will surely mount, culminating in either conflict or revelation, and indeed, both of those things occur. But the former doesnât have anything to do with the seriousness of their problems; it isnât money they argue about, but the depiction of themselves in the film. Albert, in particular, after being shown footage taken when heâd gotten out of the hospital, protests that it makes him look weak. The ethics of documentary filmmaking are also discussed, with Lord asking their parents to sign the opposite of a release form, which entitles them to give input on how theyâre represented in the film and to object to it anytime during or after production. Ironically, their father doesnât want to sign itâto him, the stripping of liability is antithetical to what a documentary filmmaker does, which is to take a subject and interpret it how they see fit, and also that a distributor would never agree to it. Thatâs the kind of man Albert is, big on integrity and beholden to personal ideals that seem to have him supporting entities and ideologies that ultimately go against his best interests. But then in another scene, he tells his son he has no regrets over spending the money to send them to college. He says he owes his son, to give them the tools to make their own life. Itâs a loving, surprisingly open-minded viewpoint considering that Lord majored in film studies, the humanities being the bane of every pragmatic-minded parentâs existence. (Ask me how I know.) At the core of this exchange is the essence of the film, the idea of what it means to owe one another. Debt is âa kind of prophecy. A logic of prophecy runs from âI love youâ to âI will always love you,â which continuously runs back to âI will always owe you',â a sentiment that can be either menacing and benevolent. And all this is to say nothing of the running motif throughout the film, which is the use of captions on screen that reflect whatâs being said in voiceover, descriptions of scenes either by Lord or their mother. This method is adjacent to the theme of disability being prevalent in the film but is also utilized as a tool. âDescription in the film,â Lord told Tone Madison in an interview, âfunctions adjacent to a zoom or a cut,â signifying resonance beyond just whatâs being shown on screen. Itâs all a lotâa lot to see, a lot to hear, but mostly a lot to think aboutâbut so is life, so is anything that ties us to others. Followed by a conversation with Jordan Lord and the scholar and curator Risa Puleo. (2021, 98 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
Gillo Pontecorvo's THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (Italy/Algeria)
Siskel Film Center â Sunday, 6pm
One of political cinema's enduring masterpieces, THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS is also a world-historical document, an essential piece in the puzzle of a violent and hopeful time. No film before or since has conveyed the drama of insurrection with such intensity or precision. Depicting the bloody clash for Algerian independence waged against French colonial powers in the late 1950s, THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS is defined by dualities, beginning with the central spatial dichotomy between the âEuropean Cityâ and the Casbah, which serve as the filmâs primary locations. The use of these real locations, like the stark, hand-held cinematography, show director Gillo Pontecorvo absorbing the techniques of Neorealism, but his masterful control of suspense and emotion owes just as much to the clockwork thrillers of Hitchcock and Lang. Like the latter's M, the film is also a study in the diverging methodologies of the underground and the police, with a particular interest in organizations of power and technologies of surveillance, detection, and terror. BATTLE OF ALGIERS is legendarily detailed and unflinching representation of the violence committed by both French colonial and Algerian radical forces, which has made the film an invaluable primer on guerrilla warfare to Black Panthers and Pentagon pencil-pushers alike. Indeed, with alternating scenes of reciprocal bloodshed, Pontecorvo proves himself as expert an architect of ethical complexity as of narrative tension. But his even-handedness is hard to mistake for pure ambivalenceâthe filmâs heart undoubtedly lies with the revolutionary spirit of the Algerian people. For one, the FLN freedom fighters are much more sharply individuated than the French occupiers, with the crucial exception of Colonel Mathieu, the focused and methodical leader of the French counterinsurgency. Himself a composite of several historical figures, Mathieu often serves as a mouthpiece to rationalize the brutality of their repression effort; Pontecorvo contrasts his chilling detachment with scenes stressing the emotional and physical impact of the anti-colonial struggle on the Algerians. In a sense, the question of the filmâs political sympathies may ultimately be a question of the viewerâs inclination towards empathy. If you receive the film as the dispassionate exercise in pseudo-reportage itâs often characterized as, you may take more from its overtures to impartiality; if you experience THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS as the gripping, devastating, and ultimately rousing work of art I think it is, youâll know which side it's on. Screening as part of the Cinema of Resistance series. (1966, 121 min, 35mm) [Michael Metzger]
Paul Thomas Andersonâs ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER (US)
Music Box Theatre and multiple other venues â See Venue websites for showtimes
A motif of flooded landscapes recurs in Thomas Pynchonâs novels about the midcentury American counterculture. In Vineland (1990), radical filmmaker turned counterinsurgent Frenesi Gates confesses a recurring vision of disappeared beaches she calls the Dream of the Gentle Flood, set to a siren song promising the return of âwhatever has been taken⊠whatever has been lostâŠ.â Pynchon renders this uncommonly emotional scene with a blue-green melancholy, a generational lament for stolen futures and failed alternatives employing the same haunted imagery that Inherent Vice (2009) conjures in one of P.I. Doc Sportelloâs aborted reveries, analogizing the broken promise of the hippie decade to the excavation of a mythical underwater continent: âsome undrowned Lemuria, risen and redeemed, where the American fate, mercifully, failed to transpireâŠâ Said American fate is the subject of Paul Thomas Andersonâs new film ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER, a loose Vineland adaptation that strips one of the bookâs central plotsâa government spook returns to hunt an ex-radicalâs teenage daughter, living in hiding with her burnout papa sixteen years after the destruction of their revolutionary cellâout of the Reagan â80s and plants it in an apocalyptic present tense recent-past-near-future so up-to-the-minute it could have wrapped production this week. (Anderson isnât a prophet, heâs just paying attention.) In the Californian hamlet of Baktan Cross, forcibly retired explosives expert Bob âGhetto Patâ Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) tries to keep daughter Willa (newcomer Chase Infiniti) alive by sending her to self-defense classes with Sensei Sergio (Benicio Del Toro) and policing her use of technology, but canât protect her from the arrival of a federal dragnet led by Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), whose past entanglement with Willaâs mother Perfidia (Teyana Taylor)âand possible fathering of a mixed-race daughterâthreatens his initiation into the inner sanctum of a white supremacist cabal. So the thugs surge into town, an old ally (Regina Hall) spirits Willa away, and Bob teams with Sergio to rendezvous with what remains of his network before Steven can smoke them out. Andersonâs treatment of this scenarioâangry, funny, franticâdistills the experience of our 21st-century late-capitalist crack-up at a moment when the potential for organized mass resistance has slowed to an ebb tide. The diluvial theme in Pynchon resonates with Hunter S. Thompsonâs oft-mythologized monologue in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which describes California at the end of the 1960s as âthat place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.â The Fitzgeraldian, Lost Generation lilt of Thompsonâs prose typifies the rueful sentiment of much post-â60s literature (including Pynchonâs), and Andersonâs reliably knotty, suggestive character work here locates failures aplenty in Bobâs scattered movement: chiefly, the equation of Bob and Steven as parallel father figures with mutual responsibility for the shrunken future offered to Willa, and whose fetishization-slash-idolatry of Perfidia shares Andersonâs roving authorial eye. Bob has another parallel in Sergio, whose work speeding a hidden community of undocumented migrants to safety serves as a quiet contrast to the revolutionaries fixated upon code words and armed resistance. Sergio knows when to lie low and when to run for the high ground, as do the skateboarders they meet whose blissed-out ride for freedom amidst a militarized crackdown sums up this movieâs command of motion and message in a single feather-light shot. If Anderson ultimately wills some optimism into his vision of a shaky generational truce, ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER also acknowledges that an ungentle flood is here, and the tides are climbing high. The American fate may not be to recover what was lost but to move with the rising watersâas in the final chase that sees Willa hurtling through an undulating desert road, mastering its crests and troughs, surfinâ U.S.A. (2025, 161 min, 70mm at the Music Box) [Brendan Boyle]
Joel Patrickâs GOTHIC KING COBRA (US) and Tony Bubaâs SWEET SAL (US)
Elastic Arts (3429 W. Diversey Ave., #208) â Sunday, 7pm
In August 2025, Joshua Fay Saunders aka Gothic Cobra, the raw, broken, and brave gothic wizard of truth passed away. Years before his online fame, King Cobra was the subject of Joel Patrickâs GOTHIC KING COBRA (2014, 63 min, Digital Projection). Made in 2012 and released in 2014, the movie documents Saunders as he pontificates on life, death, drugs, and tobacco from his rural prison. Patrickâs documentary never coaxes Saunders to be anything other than himself. The film insists on just letting him be him. Where most YouTube compilations flatten King Cobra into either clown or victim, Patrickâs documentary reminds us that Saunders who was a goth wizard, metalhead, and livestream pioneer was first of all a person, stubbornly alive in Casper, Wyoming. You donât have to admire his wands, aptitude at making Hot Pockets, or his guitar covers to see that. Placed in the broader genealogy of outsider cinema, Patrickâs film sits closer to the work of the Maysles or even Frederick Wiseman in its variation on direct cinema rather than conventional YouTube biographies. Like them, he continues rolling until the artifice of a camera disappears. Saunders speaks to the camera about his past, the bullying in high school, wrestling with an erection, and farting on a dead armadillo. He admits to having autism spectrum disorder and depression or attempting suicide with the same cadence as he discusses working at a Wendy's. While following Josh through his daily routine, we are caught off guard by multiple people driving past him and screaming F-slurs. These moments transported this writer back to high school. The creation of your own individual identity against the pressures of peers and cliques. To express yourself creatively is to place a target on your back. Coming from a similarly small rural town, all I wanted was to pluck King Cobra out of his surroundings and tell him itâs not like this everywhere. As a historical artifact, GOTHIC KING COBRA is doubly important. It predates the explosion of âlolcowâ culture as disrespectful entertainment. Watching it now, in the wake of Saundersâs later notoriety and passing, we glimpse the fragile beginnings of a genre: the cinema of internet folklore, a cinema interested not in fame per se but in the daily rhythms of people who confuse visibility with survival. Patrick captures these rhythms without judgment, using long takes and local textures to emphasize the ordinariness of Saundersâ life through a visual palette of sidewalks, Walmart excursions, and bike riding. He shows the idle hours that coexist with Saundersâ self-mythology. This approach situates the film within a longer tradition of regionalist documentaries, where the so-called margins of America reveal more about the center than the other way around. Saunders is not simply an eccentric YouTuber; he is a product of Casper, of post-industrial drift, of a culture where music, myth, and media become prosthetics for identity. Thatâs why later filmmakers and online commentators returned to him not as a person whose eccentric behavior could be exploited to amuse onlookers, but because he embodied the contradictions of performing oneself in public. And so, the film ends up stranger and kinder than its premise might suggest. It never tries to define Saunders, whether that be a hero, a slacker, or a future success. But it shows quietly and stubbornly that he mattered and made a mark on this world. Rest easy, King. Tony Bubaâs SWEET SAL (1979, 25 min, 16mm) follows Sal Carulli, a Braddock hustler whose tough-guy swagger slowly collapses. Dense group framing and tight street-corner shots keep him rooted in community, reminding us that his independence is more performance than fact. Beneath the cocky patter lies a man starved for recognition, a longing laid bare in the filmâs graveyard climax. Bubaâs path to this portrait was circuitous. After earning his MFA at Ohio University, he worked in Pittsburgh commercials and met George Romeroâappearing as a biker in DAWN OF THE DEAD and a small-time dealer in MARTIN. In 1978, he became a visiting professor at Southern Illinois University, securing Illinois Arts Council funding for SWEET SAL. Back in Braddock, he trained his camera on Carulli, a self-styled mafioso who dressed sharp but once apprenticed as a cobbler. His real labor, Buba suggests, was curating masculinity via swaggering, trash-talking, and telling anyone whoâd listen that he was cooler-than-cool. Yet the cracks show. âI donât know why Jesus Christ is letting me live, I guess to suffer,â Sal mutters, a line that undercuts his bravado more effectively than any critic could. The film crescendos at his fatherâs grave, where the mask slips and a tenderness finally emerges. Werner Herzog admired the film so much he sought out all of Bubaâs work. Sal once declared he was a born actor, and SWEET SAL proves him right. After all, only a natural could play the role of a lifetimeâhimselfâwhile accidentally letting the audience see straight through it. Presented by Employees Only Cineclub. [Shaun Huhn]
đœïž ALSO RECOMMENDED
Jan Svankmajer's ALICE (Czechoslovakia)
Music Box Theatre â Thursday, 9:15pm
Looking back on his first feature film, ALICE, over twenty years later, the great Czech animator Jan Svankmajer said, "So far all adaptations of Alice, including the latest by Tim Burton, present it as a fairytale, but Carroll wrote it as a dream. And between a dream and a fairytale there is a fundamental difference. While a fairytale has an educational aspectâit works with the moral of the lifted forefinger (good overcomes evil), dream, as an expression of our unconscious, uncompromisingly pursues the realization of our most secret wishes without considering rational and moral inhibitions, because it is driven by the principle of pleasure. My Alice is a realized dream." Inspired by rather than adapted from Lewis Carroll's classic of English literature, ALICE very loosely follows Carroll's plot or any plot at all. In her phantastic dream, the precocious Alice (Kristyna Kohoutova) narrates her adventures with living and dead animals, dolls, puppets, cutouts, and objects constructed from bric-a-brac, all of which Svankmajer brings to life through stop-motion. As Alice delves deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole of space and time, she realizes that this otherworld tries to stop her. In order to enter new openings that spontaneously appear, she eats cakes and mushrooms or drinks ink, transforming from a child into a doll and back again in various shapes and sizes. Svankmajer imbues his ever-changing Alice and Wonderland's objects, refashioned from those found in her bedroom, with the full weight of the surreal. The once ordinary and often old or discarded objects become unfamiliar and menacing in Alice's dreamscape; she acts out against the newly animate things and they also come after her. Recalling the project of the philosopher and enthusiast of Surrealism, Walter Benjamin, Svankmajer's ALICE is a work of art that reconstructs an extraordinary world out of all the rubble from his past. Screening as part of the Music Box of Horrors: Dead and Loving It! series. (1988, 85 min, DCP Digital) [Candace Wirt]
Stephanie Rothman's THE STUDENT NURSES (US)
Alamo Drafthouse â Wednesday, 7pm
Stephanie Rothman (THE VELVET VAMPIRE, THE WORKING GIRLS) merits distinction not only as a pioneering female independent filmmaker, but as one of American cinemaâs great subversives. Working in the realm of low-budget exploitation, Rothman managed to incorporate radical themes and pronounced feminist messages. Her films, like George Romeroâs or Melvin Van Peeblesâ, point to the substantial creative freedom available to independent genre directors in the 1960s and â70s, as well as the political awareness that elevated much genre entertainment during this era. THE STUDENT NURSES, Rothmanâs third directorial effort, features frank yet sympathetic depictions of abortion, class struggle, and non-traditional living arrangements. Even the nudity and violence (which were necessary in order to market the film to the exploitation circuit) reflect a radical perspective, as male performers are presented nude as often as female performers, and much of the violence is directed against figures of authority. The title characters are four young women living together in southern California as they complete their training at a large hospital; over the course of a year, each one experiences some life-changing crisis. Producer Roger Corman insisted that the women âwork out their problems without relying on a boyfriend,â and Rothman (who developed the story with her husband, Charles S. Swartz) ran with the idea, creating characters who were strong-willed and decisive. Thatâs not to say that Rothman made a film about superwomen; her nurses are also believably vulnerable and occasionally wrong in their actions. This three-dimensional characterization adds to the filmâs value as a provocation, both then and now. (1970, 89 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Ernst Lubitsch's TO BE OR NOT TO BE (US)
Siskel Film Center â Friday, 6pm
When TO BE OR NOT TO BE was new, it was understandably treated as a dybbuk in clown's clothingâa doubly insensitive vulgarity that mocked the ongoing holocaust in Europe while likewise disgracing the memory of hardscrabble, All-American goddess Carole Lombard. (She had died in a plane crash one month before the film's premiereâon a war-bond tour, in fact, which elevated the movie's poor taste to an aura of unpatriotism.) We can laugh more easily at the jokes these daysâthe post-GUNS OF NAVARONE (1961) epics have chipped away at the reverence that once encrusted combat movies, making WWII merely the backdrop for dad's go-to action sweet spotâbut we shouldn't diminish TO BE OR NOT TO BE either by plucking it out of that moment. As a moral statement for 1942, it's difficult to imagine a more complex and courageous movie, especially coming from a German Jew. (TO BE OR NOT TO BE, its every gag wrapped up in real-time argument and exegesis, is also conceivably the most Jewish movie ever made.) The genius of TO BE OR NOT TO BE is that it views Nazis, for all their terror and malevolence, as pathetic vessels of self-parodyâfeckless fascists whose Sieg heil shibboleths weakly conceal the intellectual and spiritual void at the center of their project. It's social psychology in the guise of comedy. Two decades before Hannah Arendt, Lubitsch demonstrates the banality of evil, treating the hilarious Concentration Camp Ehrhardt as an emblematic figureâa status-seeking bureaucrat who cannot comprehend his absurd indistinction. Lubitsch conveys this farcicality through repetition of a single joke. Ehrhardt, or Tura as Ehrhardt, respectively amuses himself or gets out of a sticky situation by repeatedly asking, âSo they call me Concentration Camp Ehrhardt?â Typically not one to linger on a joke longer than is necessary, Lubitsch conveys a sense of humorous futility through such a comic faux pas. Ultimately, its subject is illegitimacyâartistic, sexual, and political. The treatment of actors and lovers is just as nuanced as its politics, and essentially in parallel. The only object for the individual Nazi is to repudiate any suggestion that he is a subpar black shirt, wherever that may lead. (As Andrew Sarris observed, "For Lubitsch, it was sufficient to say that Hitler had bad manners, and no evil was then inconceivable.") The same logic prevails for Jack Bennyâs Joseph Tura and the rest of his theatrical troupe, always asserting personal integrity through maximal performance, textual intent be damned. Screening as part of the Cinema of Resistance series. (1942, 99 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs and K.A. Westphal]
Marina de Van's IN MY SKIN (France)
Music Box Theatre â Wednesday, 9:15pm
Marina De Van writes, directs, and stars as Esther, an altogether ordinary woman whose descent into masochism and self-mutilation is portrayed with almost unbearable restraint in this assured debut. What's bracing about de Van's film is how Esther's emerging psychosis is never overtly foreshadowed in any meaningful wayâHaneke's THE PIANO TEACHER it is not. She's relatable to a fault: with middling to promising career prospects at a public relations firm and a playful, if occasionally dysfunctional relationship, any deviations from the mean are nearly imperceptible. Even her gruesome accident at a party, which critic Dennis Lim aptly describes as "equivalent [to] a vampire's kiss" setting things in motion, is observed at a sober remove and initially ascribed only ancillary importance. The clinical shock that grips Esther at the party in the aftermath of her injury, allowing her to dance and mingle unfazed, also seizes control of de Van's camera for the remainder of the film. One minute we see Esther at her desk transfixed by workaday concerns, and the next she's in an office storeroom with a faraway, blissed out look in her eye carving bloody fissures into her thigh. And then right back to work. IN MY SKIN often gets lumped into that nebulous genre New French Extremity (this isn't your father's French Extremity), which includes works such as HIGH TENSION, INSIDE, and MARTYRSâall films that share common, tough-to-shake images of a bloodied female protagonists. Beyond its most conspicuous moments of shock and awe though, IN MY SKIN has different aims. Like Laurent Cantet's psychological drama TIME OUT released only a year prior, de Van's film locates its most distressing moments not in our fear of pain or even death, but in everyone's innate suspicion that their meticulously regulated life is only momentsâor stepsâaway from becoming a slow-motion emotional catastrophe. (2002, 93 min, DCP Digital) [James Stroble]
Lucio Fulciâs THE PSYCHIC (Italy)
Alamo Drafthouse â Tuesday, 9:30pm
Between DONâT TORTURE A DUCKLING (1972) and THE PSYCHIC (1977), Lucio Fulci directed two Jack London adaptations, a Spaghetti Western, a vampire comedy, and an Edwige Fenech sex comedy. THE PSYCHIC, his return to giallo, occupies a peculiar position in both his career and the waning years of the genre. While many Italian thrillers of the late 1970s leaned into baroque violence, Fulci offered a subdued meditation on fate, clairvoyance, and the limits of vision. Known today for gore and eyeball trauma, Fulci would not be crowned by horror devotees until ZOMBI (1979). Here, he is patient and deliberate, uninterested in murder set pieces. If released now, THE PSYCHIC would likely be marketed as elevated horror. Jennifer OâNeill provides a glamorous performance as Virginia, the wife of a wealthy socialite whose psychic abilities mark her as both privileged and cursed. Her first vision occurs in childhood, when she foresees her motherâs suicide from a different city. Fulci stages the fall from a cliff with a jarring mix of intimacy and theatricality: the body collides with rocks in close-up, recalling the spectacle of DONâT TORTURE A DUCKLING. The sequence contains the filmâs only onscreen death. From then on, Fulci relies on atmosphere and psychological disorientation, setting his film apart from the bloodier gialli of the period. The contrast is sharp when placed beside Dario Argentoâs SUSPIRIA (1977), which wielded supernatural forces with operatic extravagance. Fulci resists, focusing instead on the inevitability of his charactersâ fates. The narrative follows Virginia as she uncovers a skeleton hidden in her husbandâs villa, prompting suspicion he murdered a former lover. Yet her fragmented visions resist tidy resolution, frustrating both the police investigation and the audience. Images of taxis, magazines, and bloodied faces demand decoding, positioning the viewer alongside Virginia as she struggles to piece the puzzle together. An alternate title, MURDER TO THE TUNE OF SEVEN BLACK NOTES, highlights Fulciâs structural play. The seven-note melody, devised early in production, recurs throughout the film as a clue and a curse, punctuating the narrative. The musical motif, coupled with the discovery of a body bricked into the wall, nods to Edgar Allan Poeâs âThe Cask of Amontilladoâ and âThe Tell-Tale Heart.â The puzzle itself is as much stylistic as narrative. Sergio Salvatiâs cinematography isolates objects so they acquire symbolic weight, while Ornella Micheliâs editing transforms visions into riddles. The fractured imagery recalls Nicolas Roegâs DONâT LOOK NOW (1973), another film where psychic premonition organizes both style and story. In Fulciâs hands, fragmentation becomes a strategy of suspense resulting in a giallo without the usual excess. It's tempting to view THE PSYCHIC as transitional, bridging Fulciâs earlier thrillers and the grotesque imagery of his 1980s work. Yet its restraint should not be mistaken for hesitation. Instead, it demonstrates Fulciâs ability to redirect genre conventions toward intellectual intrigue rather than bodily disgust. Here fate, repetition, and death are rendered not through practical effects but through the tightening coils of narrative. THE PSYCHIC encourages a second viewing. When you know how the fragments fit, you can fully enjoy the trick of his timing. Thereâs a sly perversity in watching Fulci, of all people, hold back. The filmâs real shock is that he could. Screening as part of the Terror Tuesday series. (1977, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]
Ridley Scott's BLADE RUNNER: THE FINAL CUT (US/UK)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) â Monday, 6pm
Seen in any version (there are at least seven), BLADE RUNNER is a monstrous messâa mĂ©lange of film noir, Philip K. Dick, action-heavy cineplex sadism, and horny chinoiserie. A critically-derided flop upon its initial release, BLADE RUNNER carries the uncanny suggestion that its story not only revolves around androids, but may actually have been conceived and shaped by non-human intelligenceâa quality it shares with that other misunderstood Summer of '82 sci-fi spectacular, TRON. When viewed alongside director Ridley Scott's prior effort, the masterfully controlled and minutely calibrated terror show ALIEN, BLADE RUNNER feels programmatic and kludgy, as if all decisions about staging, atmospherics, and rhythm were simply fed into an overheated circuit board. (The original endingâan improbably sunny coda repurposed from second-unit outtakes from THE SHININGâplays like the product of an inelegant Surefire BoxOffice algorithm.) It's not so much that art direction, set design, cinematography, editing, music, and acting are working at cross-purposesâinstead, they're merely zipping along semi-autonomously, without being shaped into a grammatical whole. So, it's odd and kind of touching that Ridley Scott has repeatedly re-asserted his authorship of this unruly, seemingly author-less masterworkâfirst in a hastily-produced 'Director's Cut' in 1992, subsequently in a 'Final Cut' released in 2007. (If Scott follows Oliver Stone's example with ALEXANDER, the 'Final Cut' need not really be final; there's always the promise of an 'Ultimate Cut' peeking out over the smoggy horizon.) It now takes on the impossible grandeur of a medieval saga, a lumbering epic embroidered and corrupted by countless textual variants. Most of the major changes were performed for the so-called Director's Cut: Harrison Ford's sleepy voice-over is gone, an origami unicorn rhymes with and undercuts a re-inserted dream sequence, and the freak ending is excised. The Final Cut, by contrast, services superfans, correcting gaffes imperceptible to the uninitiated: matte lines are cleaned up, lip sync is fixed with lines re-dubbed by Ford's son, Joanna Cassidy's face is digitally plastered over the body of a stunt double, Rutger Hauer treats his father more decorously. I still prefer the original 1982 theatrical cut above all othersâit really heightens the contradictions, as the student Marxists used to say. But the Final Cut is still queer and ungainly enough to slosh around in. This is a Night Owls screening, free for all UCID holders. (1982/2007, 117 min, DCP Digital) [K.A. Westphal]
Terrence Malick's THE TREE OF LIFE (US)
Siskel Film Center â Tuesday, 6pm
At the beginning of Terrence Malick's THE TREE OF LIFE, a mother says, "The nuns taught us there are two ways through lifeâthe way of nature and the way of grace." Shortly after, her son, a middle-aged architect named Jack O'Brien, remembers the death of his younger brother, R.L., at the age of nineteen. Jack then travels back to his idyllic childhood in 1950s Waco, Texas to find this brother that he lost. In a larger sense, THE TREE OF LIFE explores the nature of being, including those aspects of it neither children nor adults understand. It questions birth and death throughout the history of time, beginning with the origin of the universe, continuing through the evolution of the species, and finally to the untimely death of this one young man. Malick renders the small family at the center of the story as grand as the life of the universe itself. Why do we not see the world this way? What prevents our sense of wonder? We no longer experience life, so we turn to cinema. TREE OF LIFE appears to be a collection of memories and imaginings. It is a film of images more than of words. Malick focuses on imagery of the family and, in particular, the three boys, capturing them in close-up and only natural light. The audience often views the spontaneous unfolding of life from a child's eyes, which look up to encounter the world. Malick's camera behaves like a human being in its own right, expressing a variety of emotions in its movement. He films the world, both great and small, with such reverence that every image of it is truly beautiful. To return to the film's beginning, the mother continues, "You have to choose which one you'll follow. Grace doesn't try to please itself. It accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. It accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself, get others to please it, too. Likes to lord it over them, to have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy and all the world is shining around it and love is smiling through all things. They taught us that no one who loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end. I will be true to you whatever comes." THE TREE OF LIFE is a man's testament to Spirit that captures the phenomenon of being in its glory. Screening as part of the Interiority on Screen lecture series. (2011, 139 min, DCP Digital) [Candace Wirt]
Stanley Kubrick's SPARTACUS (US)
Siskel Film Center â Saturday, 7pm
A communist screenwriter, an iconic film star, and one of the greatest American directors in film history make a movie together in 70mm. It almost sounds like the start of a joke, but it's the truth of Universal's Roman epic, SPARTACUS. This grandiose classic came into existence through many happy accidents. It started with Kirk Douglas not getting cast in another Roman blockbuster BEN-HUR (1959). As producer, Douglas bought the rights to Howard Fast's book and hired Dalton Trumbo to write the screenplay. Hiring a writer on the Hollywood blacklist was a controversial choice that was expected to harm the filmâs PR; sure enough, it was picketed by anti-communists on its initial release. Douglas fired the original director of this picture a week into shooting; it was at this point that a 30-year-old Stanley Kubrick entered the project. This came to the surprise of the studio, as the actor and director butted heads constantly on the set of their previous collaboration, PATHS OF GLORY (1957). (Thereâs an interview with the late Kirk Douglas at over 100 years old still calling Kubrick a talented bastard.) On top of all these risks and happenstances, SPARTACUS was one Hollywoodâs most expensive projects at the time. Shooting in Technicolor was not cheap at the time, and the filmmakers blew up the budget even more by shooting it all in whopping 70mm. Even as a stand-in director, Kubrick shows some of his talented in-sequences and commands this colossal project with such legendary actors as Douglas and Olivier (very different in performance style) at the top of their game. In the history of cinema, there are many cases where massive production budgets bloat and ruin the story being told. SPARTACUS from its bones is a story that can only be contained and experienced at the largest scale known at the time. We are fortunate to have the ability to recreate this cinematic experience in its original form. Screening as part of the Cinema of Resistance series. (1960, 181 min, DCP Digital) [Ray Ebarb]
Oliver Hermanusâ THE HISTORY OF SOUND (UK/Sweden/US)
Siskel Film Center â See Venue website for showtimes
Gently sweet and intentionally unhurried, Oliver Hermanusâ 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 OâConner), 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 Davidâs: 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 Davidâs experiences during the war are taking a toll. Much to Lionelâs dismay, the two part ways once more. The rest of THE HISTORY OF SOUND tracks Lionelâs 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 SOUNDâs paced approach to a story devoid of much discordâthe film is filled with beautiful music and tender acts of kindnessâis 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. Itâs noteworthy that the film isnât interested in nostalgia but more in soundâs role in memory and processing grief. As the older Lionel (played by Chris Cooper) narrates toward the beginning of the film, âIt never occurred to me that music was only sound.â (2025, 117 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
Charlie McDowellâs THE SUMMER BOOK (US/UK/Finland)
Music Box Theater â See Venue website for showtimes
âWe had joy, we had fun / We had seasons in the sun / But the hills that we climbed / Were just seasons out of time.â These lyrics by Jacques Brel came to mind as I thought about the images and mood of director Charlie McDowellâs adaptation of Tove Janssonâs 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 Janssonâs novel, but McDowell and cinematographer Sturla Brandth GrĂžvlen, shooting on 16mm film using natural light, manage to deliver the bookâs spirit of childhood wonder while exploring more serious emotions. Like many good folktales, this one takes place in a world apartâa 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 donât notice that Sophiaâs mother is absent until Father finds a sun hat; Grandmother says, âIâll find a place for it.â 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 sheâs 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 arenât 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 Duplassâ THE BALTIMORONS (US)
Music Box Theatre and The Davis Theater â See Venue websites for showtimes
Returning after more than a decade away from directing features, Jay Duplassâone of the more prominent figures in the unfortunately-named âMumblecoreâ movementâreturns with a charming entry in the micro-genre of âSad Christmasâ 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 otherâs 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 âenemies-to-loversâ tropes being met perfectly beat by beat, but Duplassâ 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]
đœïž ALSO SCREENING
â« Alamo Drafthouse
Stuart Gordonâs 1985 film RE-ANIMATOR (105 min, DCP Digital) screens this week. See Venue website for showtimes.
James Ivoryâs 1985 film A ROOM WITH A VIEW (117 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday at 11:30am and Tuesday at 11:45am.
Church Basement Cinema Halloween Edition screens Wednesday at 9:30pm. More info on all screenings here.
⫠Alliance Française de Chicago
Mati Diopâs 2026 documentary DAHOMEY (68 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday, 6:30pm, followed by a conversation on contemporary approaches to repatriation of cultural heritage with Foreman Bandama, Field Museum Assistant Curator in African Anthropology, and Christopher Philipp, the Fieldâs African Ethnography Collection Manager. Tï»żhe evening will conclude with a social reception featuring complimentary Beninese cuisine. Please enter via 54 W Chicago Ave. More info here.
â« Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
Amos Poeâs 1978 film THE FOREIGNER (90 min, Digital Projection) and Poe and Sandra Binionâs 1978 short film ASCENDING/DESCENDING (11 min, Digital Projection) screen Friday at 7pm. The screening will feature a recorded introduction by Poe and a post-screening discussion with Binion. More info here.
â« Chicago Film Archives (329 W. 18th St., Suite 610)
The CFA Open House September 2025 takes place Sunday from 1-4:30pm. More info here.
â« Chicago Public Library
View all screenings taking place at Chicago Public Library branches here.
â« Cinema/Chicago
Voices that Carry: The Quiet Power of Kelly Reichardt, part of the ongoing Digging Deeper into Movies with Nick Davis discussion series, takes place Saturday, 11am, at the Alliance Française de Chicago (810 N. Dearborn St.). More info here.
â« Comfort Film at Comfort Station (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave.)
Comfort Film and Terrorvision present Chris LaMartinaâs OUT THERE HALLOWEEN MEGA TAPE (Digital Projection) on Wednesday at 8pm. Free admission. More info here.
â« Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Catherine Hardwickâs 2008 film TWILIGHT (122 min 35mm) screens Thursday, 7pm, as part of the Ethical Vampire: The Moral Dilemma of Vampirism series. More info here.
â« FACETS
The Aladerri International Film Festival runs through Sunday.
Queer Expression Film Fest and Open Space Arts present Jeremy Borisonâs UNSPOKEN (91 min, Digital Projection) on Monday at 7pm.
The Reel Film Club presents Jayro Bustamanteâs 2024 film RITA (106 min, Digital Projection) on Tuesday, 7pm, followed by a discussion. Starting at 6pm there will be appetizers and a cash bar.
Viktor TauĆĄâ 2024 film GIRL AMERICA (107 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday, 7pm, as part of the Czech That Film festival. More info on all screenings and events here.
â« Music Box Theatre
Itâs Music Box Garden Movies season! See Venue website for lineup and showtimes.
Linus O'Brienâs 2025 documentary STRANGE JOURNEY: THE STORY OF ROCKY HORROR (89 min, DCP Digital) continues screening. See Venue website for showtimes.
SUPER-HORROR-RAMA! presents David Schmoellerâs 1979 film TOURIST TRAP (90 min, DCP Digital) on Friday, 11:45pm, and Mario Bavaâs 1970 film HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON (88 min, DCP Digital) on Saturday, 11:45pm, both introduced by guest programmer Nicola McCafferty, a PhD candidate at Northwestern and the After Dark programmer at the Chicago International Film Festival. Every ticket includes a limited edition pinback button (new design each night), and every show kicks off with giveaways donated by The Shadowboxery, Cryptid Craft Studio, Night Natalie, Drive-In Asylum, and Full Bleed Zine for the first people who answer the trivia questions.
Sierra Falconerâs 2025 film SUNFISH (& OTHER STORIES ON GREEN LAKE) (87 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 7pm, followed by a Q&A with Falconer. More info on all screenings here.
â« Siskel Film Center
Dag Johan Haugerudâs 2025 film DREAMS (110 mins, DCP Digital) screens this week. See Venue website for showtimes.
The National Theatre Live production of Inter Alia screens Saturday and Sunday 2pm.
Off Center: Anolog Dreaming, celebrating the vast legacy of one of the Northwestâs most prolific filmmakers and composers, Jon Behrens (1964â2022), screens Monday, followed by a virtual Q&A with Interbay Cinema Society Executive Director Caryn Cline and Kornelia Boczkowska. More info on all screenings here.
â« 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 26, 2025 - October 2, 2025
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Brendan Boyle, Rob Christopher, Ray Ebarb, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Shaun Huhn, Ben Kaye, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Michael Metzger, James Stroble, K.A. Westphal, Candace Wirt