:: FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7 - THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 13 ::

📽️ BLACK HARVEST FILM FESTIVAL

Siskel Film Center – See below for showtimes

Brittany Shyne’s SEEDS (US)
Saturday, 2pm and Monday, 8:15pm
When discussing her debut feature SEEDS, director Brittany Shyne has described the film as "the maintenance of legacy and cultural presentation." This becomes painfully clear as the full scope of her work comes into view, a kaleidoscopic look at the lives of Black farmers in the American South that, like the best documentaries, acts as both art and artifact. Originally conceiving of the film as a project while in grad school, Shyne, also acting as cinematographer here, wanted to use her filmic voice to capture a perspective that she had yet to see portrayed faithfully, if at all, on camera. Structurally, SEEDS exists as a “process” documentary; there are no talking heads, no descriptive voiceovers, simply the footage of these farmers in Georgia and Mississippi working, talking, and simply living, Shyne’s imagery providing enough context and artistry to paint a sumptuous picture as is. We are thrust, in pristine black-and-white, into the world of these “centennial farmers,” those whose families have owned their respective land for over a hundred years, their cultural footprint measured in acres, struggling to keep up with an agricultural community that has systematically left them far behind. Shyne’s compositions are gorgeously intimate, her camera finding its way into the deep crevasses of gigantic mechanical cotton pickers, into funeral homes during reverentially joyful services, and even to Washington DC, joining the farmer’s mass protests against the blatantly racially discriminatory practices of the Department of Agriculture (during the Biden Administration, mind you). Two figures who find themselves poking through the artistic morass of agricultural imagery are Willie Jr. and Carlie, two enigmatic farmers whose presence particularly highlights how this profession—for Black southerners, at least—still mainly rests in the hands of the elderly (Carlie is 89 in the footage here, but has since passed). There is an existential weight at the heart of SEEDS, of Black Americans finally owning land in a country that has brutally othered them for centuries, hoping that there will be someone to whom they can pass down these fields of legacy. Cotton and corn will continue to grow, but will those who have given their lives to cultivate these crops still be given the space to do so, to grow even fuller, even stronger? (2025, 123 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
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Jessie Maple’s WILL (US)
Saturday, 5:30 pm and Wednesday, 6:15 pm
The first feature length film directed by a Black woman, WILL is an unyielding but empathic look at the effects of drug use. Jessie Maple uses a documentary style, combining gorgeous cityscape shots of Harlem with everyday vignettes that build an understated but powerful story. Will (Obaka Adedunyo) is an ex-college basketball star struggling with heroin addiction. He is supported by his loving yet frustrated wife, Jean (Loretta Devine, in her first on-screen role); scenes between the two feature striking but subtle framing and blocking that get at shifts in their power dynamics. When he meets Little Brother (Robert Dean), an orphaned kid who’s been hanging around the drug scene, Will takes him under his wing, determined to keep him from heading down the same path he took. Despite being a character study, WILL emphasizes the power of community and care; Will also eventually begins coaching his niece’s basketball team and his commitment to the youth of the neighborhood becomes his determination. With shots like those of Will and Little Brother chatting through the streets of Harlem, WILL beautifully captures the routine of everyday life as a space where both struggle and healing play out. This groundbreaking film skillfully maintains its optimism while acknowledging the often-devastating realities of addition and recovery. (1981, 73 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
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Elegance Bratton’s MOVE YA BODY: THE BIRTH OF HOUSE (US/Documentary)
Sunday, 2:30pm
This is a heartfelt and informative introduction to house music, and it’s also a must-see if you’re looking for a dose of Chicago pride. As the title implies, MOVE YA BODY: THE BIRTH OF HOUSE focuses on the origins of the musical genre, which can be traced to our own South Side. The film argues that house as well as hip-hop grew out of the ashes of disco as new styles of dance music created by and for people of color. But before getting to the development of these forms, Elegance Bratton grants solemn consideration to the death of disco, noting that the reaction against the genre was essentially racist and homophobic. Chicago, sadly, also played a role in the “disco sucks” movement, as MOVE YA BODY relates in a passage about the notorious “Disco Demolition Night” at Comiskey Park in 1979. Given the antagonism toward disco and the people who enjoyed it, house emerged as a form of rebellion in its open embrace of Black and queer culture. (As some interviewees note, this distinction kept away white racists and Black gangbangers from early house parties.) From here, MOVE YA BODY looks at the rise of Chicago’s house scene in the 1980s, with sections devoted to influential DJs, popular clubs, and the music’s cultural impact. The film concludes on a somewhat sour note when it addresses how house music was appropriated by mainstream culture and how many of the pioneering artists never got a fair shake financially—phenomena common to too many underground movements. Regardless, this succeeds in inspiring admiration for house and conveying the excitement (and inclusivity) it’s generated over the years. (2025, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Angela Lynn Tucker’s THE INQUISITOR (US/Documentary)
Thursday, 8:15pm
When many of us think of groundbreakers in US politics, Barbara Jordan comes immediately to mind. Jordan, a native of Houston, Texas, became the first Black woman from the South to be elected to the US House of Representatives, where she served Texas’s 18th District until she retired from politics to teach at the University of Texas at Austin. She gained a national reputation serving on the House Judiciary Committee during deliberations on the impeachment of President Richard Nixon, during which the nation got to witness her articulate intelligence. Angela Lynn Tucker’s THE INQUISITOR, titled after a term Jordan used to refer to herself, was created to air on PBS’s The American Experience and adheres closely to the template of such documentaries. It hits the highlights of Jordan’s life and career, including her formative years in a family that expected excellence; her close relationships with President Lyndon Johnson and Texas Governor Ann Richards; and her lifelong, though not public, partnership with Nancy Earl that the US National Archives says makes her the first LGBTQ+ woman to serve in Congress. She is shown to be pragmatic while trying to extend protections to vulnerable Americans, and upbeat and active through a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis until complications of leukemia ended her life at the age of 59. If you don’t know much about Jordan, this is a great introduction that should leave you wanting to learn more about her. (2025, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Full festival schedule and more info on all films and events here.

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

2025 Eyeworks Experimental Animation Screening Series

Block Cinema (at Northwestern University) – Saturday, 12pm (Program 1) and 2:45pm (Program 2)

The experimental animation that makes up the two programs of Eyeworks mostly falls into the fruitful middle ground between avant-garde and narrative work, where recognizable forms and characters make appearances but always in dazzling ways. There’s a sense of discovery to watching these films, where the artists seem to relish their control over their chosen media and their ability to make anything from the ground up. Malleability is the name of the game, and many films in the programs hinge on the possibility of any object becoming any other, becoming anthropomorphic or symbolic to the point of actually being the new thing. Some of the older films approach this concept playfully, like Sandy Moore’s THE LIVES OF FIRECRACKERS (1979) which anthropomorphizes firecrackers such that they’re both people and symbols, constantly unmaking themselves into raw material and occasionally exploring the phallic implications of their shape and eventual death by "bang." Carter Burwell’s HELP I’M BEING CRUSHED TO DEATH BY A BLACK RECTANGLE (1977) similarly takes its structuralist conceit and spins it into a cycle of mini-thrillers, like a Looney Tunes take on EDGE OF TOMORROW. This type of surrealism is on display in the more contemporary work too, where filmmakers mix formats with digital tools to surreal ends. Priit and Olga Parn’s LUNA ROSSA (2024), for instance, depicts the planning and execution of a terrorist attack using visual language borrowed from The Sims and point-and-click flash games. The longest film of the group at 32 minutes, its pace invites a deeper exploration of the frame’s both drawn and found materials while the viewer settles into its unnerving semi-rotoscoped look. Mike Lopez’s FRIENDS, SHOPPING, AND FOOD (2025) similarly blends blocky 3D bodies with 2D hand-drawn features en route to head-trip dream states where characters find themselves trapped in infinite loops and approaching strobing houses in forests. Mixing formats is another mini-interest of the festival, approached the most literally with Caroline Leaf and Veronika Soul’s classic INTERVIEW (1979), in which the two artists create portraits of one another in their respective styles (with Leaf using painted animations and Soul manipulating film and photographs) while discussing themselves and their working styles. Naturally, it’s the most stylistically diverse film in Eyeworks, and it offers a novel way that animation can conceptually expand to include certain types of film photography. Elena Duque’s PORTALES (2024) is similarly photography-heavy, using Duque’s own footage of the Guadalete River as a foundation to hand-color and cut up with other found materials taken from textbooks. The two films, coming back-to-back later in the second program, have a certain grounding quality after the flights of fancy we’ve seen over the previous films, a quality continued by Zach Dorn’s tender, Sopranos-themed tribute to his family LONG LIVE LIVIA (2025). These all set the table nicely for the last and most astonishing object of the festival, Meejin Hong’s looping film DELUGE (2024). Starting with a blooming flower, Hong creates dozens of small drawings on 2-second loops, adding them to the screen one-by-one until they begin blending and crowding each other out over the film’s 12 minutes. As the frame darkens with ink and Hong continues animating in negative space, one can’t help but be grateful to see handmade wonders onscreen at a time when such craft’s stock is critically low in our culture. Festival curators Alexander Stewart and Lilli Carré in person. (1953-2025, Total approx. 83 min (Program 1) and 78 min (Program 2), Digital Projection) [Maxwell Courtright]

DeWitt Beall's LORD THING (US/Documentary)

Chicago Film Archives at First Church of the Brethren (425 S. Central Park Blvd.) – Saturday, 4:30pm [Free Admission]

For most of its history, Chicago has been a hotbed of gang culture in America. Although the street gangs of Los Angeles get more attention from the national media and Hollywood screenwriters, the Chicago gangs that formed in the late 1950s and expanded throughout the Civil Rights era really created the model for what we know today. The beginnings of the Vice Lords, one of the oldest and largest street gangs to emerge from this era, is the subject of DeWitt Beall's LORD THING (1970), which chronicles the VL's growth into a large coalition of gangs with over 20,000 members, and its emergence as both a community and business force. During the late 60s and early 70s, the leaders of the gang, now sometimes known as the Conservative Vice Lords (or even CVL, Inc.), began thinking well beyond their immediate surroundings and utilized their collective confidence in completely new ways. Beall gives us a fair amount of back-story, presented through re-enactments of historical fights with rival gangs, played by a cast of actual CVL members. He also documents numerous meetings of gang leaders that look and feel like town-hall meetings, and show both their increasing size and expanding concerns. Political actions such as protests carried out at construction sites, and a march on city hall--conducted as a joint action with other large Chicago gangs--illustrate how the CVL chose to use their power to influence the economic and social conditions in their turf and beyond. At times, Beall's film feels rather propagandistic--pro VL-- but this may only be due to the desire that leaders like Bobby Gore have for using the VL's power to effect social and economic change. Perhaps this sympathetic depiction is the reason the film was never shown in the US, despite screening at Cannes and winning an award at the Venice Film Festival. After funding the film, the Xerox Corporation decided not to release it. Allegedly, they bowed to pressure from Richard J. Daley and the Chicago Democratic Machine, both of whom are roundly criticized in the film's final moments. In 2011, Cine-File contributor Michael W. Phillips Jr. programmed LORD THING at the inaugural South Side Projections screening after viewing a DVD burn of a VHS recording of a French television broadcast that University of Illinois-Chicago professor John Hagedorn located in the director's garage after he passed. The following year, CFA located the original LORD THING elements and received a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation to restore both films. Followed by conversation around the histories of the North Lawndale neighborhood, violence mitigation, and self-transformation through literature and the arts. (1969, 55 min, 16mm) [Jason Halprin]

George Roy Hill's BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (US)

Chicago Film Society at the Music Box Theatre – Tuesday, 7pm

In "Tomorrowland," the final episode of Mad Men’s fourth season, Don Draper pitches a series of anti-smoking spots for young people to the American Cancer Society. “[Tobacco companies]... play on a two-pronged attack, promising adulthood and rebellion. But teenagers are sentimental as well; have you heard their music?” He elaborates, “they won’t be thinking about their parents, they’ll be thinking about themselves. That’s what they do… They don’t know it yet, but they don’t want to die.” Matthew Weiner’s insightful writing in this scene, set in 1965, distills the same executive class instincts Pauline Kael reflected on in a 1969 essay about the new breed of youth pictures, among them that year’s BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID: "We all know how the industry men think: they’re going to try to make 'now' movies when now is already then." The script for BUTCH CASSIDY made screenwriter William Goldman—who had previously inked the Ross Macdonald adaptation HARPER for Paul Newman—a studio darling and repeat collaborator with director George Roy Hill (THE GREAT WALDO PEPPER) and star Robert Redford (again WALDO PEPPER, THE HOT ROCK, ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN). Inspired by the exploits of Robert LeRoy Parker, a turn-of-the-century bank robber better known as Butch Cassidy, the true story’s bizarre denouement—in which Parker and accomplice Harry Longabaugh, the "Sundance Kid," fled the Pinkertons to South America and perhaps perished in a shootout with the Bolivian army—gave the otherwise nostalgic material a timely, doomed existentialist flavor in a Hollywood looking for its next BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967). Newman and Redford’s easy chemistry as Butch and Sundance provides more romantic charge than the frictionless ménage à trois with Katharine Ross’s Etta Place, and served as the template for the Clooney-Pitt double act in OCEAN’S ELEVEN (2001). Easy to like and easier to overrate (the 7th greatest Western produced stateside, per the American Film Institute), the film’s commercial articulation of what scholar Chris Dumas called the "failure motif" nonetheless anticipates much of the New Hollywood cinema to come. As enviably witty, skilled and handsome outlaws, Butch and Sundance have had it too good for too long; the movie simultaneously indulges a liberatory rooting interest in their heists and a punitive impulse to see them dead. Hill’s insistence on location photography during the middle section, in which the faceless Union Pacific posse led by Joe Lefors pursues the runaways across a stretch of wilderness, suggests a fashion-mag version of Monte Hellman’s absurdist Western THE SHOOTING (1966). The wistful score is by Burt Bacharach, whose composition "Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head" with Hal David soundtracks a scene of Newman and Ross atop an early bicycle as if taking time out for a music video, one of the movie’s many forward-looking aspects. The final section in Bolivia, including the climactic shootout, rhymes with that year’s earlier THE WILD BUNCH, and the boys’ blind wandering into oblivion makes a soft-focus allegory of the foreign misadventures then dominating American headlines. The movie’s gold-hued nostalgia is for a Western past that looks like a Madison Avenue present, a love letter to the Baby Boom generation growing into its own cynical maturity. This cannily constructed piece of product is an essential text of the Sixties. (1969, 110 min, 35mm) [Brendan Boyle]

Jack and Olga Chambers’ THE HART OF LONDON (Canada/Experimental)

Comfort Film at Comfort Station – Wednesday, 7pm [Free Admission]

Stan Brakhage once named THE HART OF LONDON as one of the five greatest films ever made, and it’s easy to see why. The only feature-length movie signed by painter and filmmaker Jack Chambers, it exemplifies a certain mode of experimental cinema often associated with Brakhage: intuitive, propulsive, epiphanic. It’s a collage-like work that incorporates newsreels from the 1950s (with an emphasis on footage of natural disasters) along with material that Jack and Olga Chambers shot in Spain and their hometown of London, Ontario. The filmmakers often superimpose one shot over another or cut rapidly between different shots; the effect is overwhelming, but the elaborate decoupage is also invigorating in its rhythm and pace. Though it would be reductive to offer a summary of its content, THE HART OF LONDON is broadly concerned with the life cycle, alternating images of death with images of birth and vitality. The latter are often represented by the titular animals (proud quadrupeds seen roaming the outskirts of the city), though one sees life everywhere in the film, particularly during a sequence of child birth as visceral in its impact as Brakhage’s classic short WINDOW WATER BABY MOVING (1959). The specter of death also hangs over THE HART OF LONDON, as Jack Chambers was diagnosed with leukemia about a year before the film was completed; clearly, he and his wife were using their art to work through feelings about his mortality. These feelings don’t overburden the film, however, as no particular subject or mood predominates. As in numerous works by Marc Chagall, the spectator is invited to consider the whole of existence in one fell swoop—you don’t watch the film so much as you immerse yourself in it. (1970, 79 min, 16mm) [Ben Sachs]
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Screening as the first half of True Patriot Love: A Double Feature of Canadian Experimental Film with Joyce Wieland’s 1969 experimental film REASON OVER PASSION (80 min, 16mm). More info here.

Ritwik Ghatak’s MEGHE DHAKA TARA (aka THE CLOUD-CAPPED STAR) (India)

Film Studies Center (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm [Free Admission]

In its focus on the unhappiness and self-sacrifice of its heroine, THE CLOUD-CAPPED STAR bears resemblance to a number of films by Kenji Mizoguchi, arguably the cinema’s greatest chronicler of female suffering. It also warrants comparison with Luchino Visconti’s ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS, which was made the same year, in that it’s an operatic drama about a working-poor family living at a critical moment in their nation’s history. Like either of those points of reference, THE CLOUD-CAPPED STAR has won legions of admirers—it wasn’t just a commercial success, but the only box office hit of director Ritwik Ghatak’s career—and for decades it’s been recognized as one of the greatest Indian films. Its significance stems from how Ghatak confronts what critic Ira Bhaskar, writing for the Criterion Collection, has called “the irreparable despair and psychological unhinging that the 1947 Partition of the Indian subcontinent into the nations of India and Pakistan brought about in the people who experienced it.” Employing an expressionistic film style and melodramatic plotting, Ghatak conveys the Partition in emotional terms, making the agony of many seem personal and relatable. The film takes place in a refugee colony in what used to be East Bengal but is now East Pakistan; the story centers on Neeta (Supriya Choudhury), a dutiful young woman who’s forced to support her parents and three siblings after her father is injured in an accident. Her older brother, Shankar (Anil Chatterjee), is training to be a professional singer and refuses to work (which earns him the mockery of his neighbors), while her younger siblings are still in school. Neeta takes on more and more responsibility in order to provide for her family, turning her back on a loving fiancé because she’s always too consumed with work to get married. The heartbreaking irony of the film is that Neeta degrades herself in her willingness to do anything to preserve the dignity of the people she loves, though just as moving is Shankar’s determination to succeed in his art despite the shaming he receives from people around him. The scenes between these two characters form the heart of THE CLOUD-CAPPED STAR. Each one recognizes that they’ve alienated themselves from the people closest to them but can’t stop acting as they do. Shankar’s melancholy songs give beautiful expression to the characters’ frustration and emotional pain; they also add to the film’s musical sense of fluidity. (1960, 127 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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This screening is part of Varieties of Melodrama: Guru Dutt and Ritwik Ghatak at 100, a two-day program held between the Film Studies Center at the Logan Center for the Arts and Cobb Hall. Also screening on Friday are Ghatak’s 1965 film SUBARNAREKHA (aka THE GOLDEN LINE) (143 min, DCP Digital) at 10am and Dutt’s 1954 film AAR PAAR (aka THIS OR THAT) (146 min, DCP Digital) at 2pm. More info here.

Clint Bentley’s TRAIN DREAMS (US)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

Adapting Denis Johnson’s brief yet towering novella into a film is a formidable challenge, requiring a balance of the epic and intimate as well as the sacred and the decaying. Will Patton’s voice introduces Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) against the majesty of Redwood trees, immediately establishing a tone of cosmic smallness. Director Clint Bentley and co-writer Greg Kwedar craft a story driven by atmosphere rather than events, following a man whose life embodies the loneliness of American progress. The film traverses Grainier’s decades with the rhythm of memory, glimpsing his youth as a logger and the quiet grace of his frontier life with Gladys Oakley (Felicity Jones). Moments of pastoral beauty—like the couple lying by a river—are starkly juxtaposed with brutality, such as Robert's witness to the expulsion of Chinese laborers. This moral failure through inaction becomes the film's hinge, quietly acknowledging that modernity’s advances are built on systemic violence and omission. To mirror Johnson’s fragmentary poetics, Bentley employs a non-linear structure that collapses time. Parker Laramie’s editing fuses years into single breaths, while Patton’s narration preserves Johnson’s matter-of-fact mysticism. What the novella internalized, the film externalizes through potent imagery: the hand over a dying tree, the blank stare into wildfire, and the faint, vanishing flicker of a soot-covered girl. Cinematographer Adolpho Veloso renders the Pacific Northwest as both an Eden and a graveyard. Utilizing natural light or candles to match their era, Veloso’s frames—in which humanity is dwarfed by trees or locomotives slice through fog—evoke nature’s indifference and human awe. Bryce Dessner’s score, enriched by Nick Cave’s collaboration, murmurs as it blends the sounds of trains, animal cries, and ghostly whispers until progress itself seems to mourn. The film pointedly asks what civilization costs its builders. Grainier’s hands laid the rails connecting the nation, yet his own life remains isolated. As machines replace men and the forest yields to fire, silence gives way to the roar of modernity. William H. Macy, as explosives expert Arn Peeples, issues an early, prophetic warning: felling a five-hundred-year-old tree “does something to a man’s soul.” Bentley’s direction finds grandeur in the mundane, his camera observing with reverence, neither romanticizing nor condemning. TRAIN DREAMS fuses memory and melancholy but remains rooted in the working-class experience. Ultimately, Bentley transforms Johnson’s spiritual isolation into a lament for the laborers who built modernity. Grainier’s obscurity, through Bentley’s vision becomes luminous. Robert Grainier’s small life echoes beyond the screen as an elegy for the builders and the world they lost. A life carried on the wind through the pines and the fading whistle of a train. (2025, 102 min, 35mm) [Shaun Huhn]

Brian De Palma's CARLITO’S WAY (US)

The Davis Theatre – Sunday, 6:45pm

Midway through Frederick Wiseman’s documentary JUVENILE COURT (1973), a bespectacled drug counselor named Robert interrupts a young defendant’s appeal to tell his own story: “I’ve been arrested for [the] sale of narcotics, heroin… I’ve had burglaries, armed robberies, assault and robberies… I was a beast in the streets of New York.” Edwin Torres may have had similar scenes in mind when he developed the character of reformed New York hood Carlito Brigante in his novels Carlito’s Way and After Hours. Born in Spanish Harlem in 1931, Torres became a criminal defense lawyer and eventually a judge for the New York State Supreme Court, moonlighting as a crime novelist whose books provided original dictionaries of ethnic urban slang, corruption, recidivism, and redemption. Sidney Lumet adapted his novel Q&Awith Nick Nolte in 1990, while the Carlito novels became CARLITO’S WAY, a passion project for Al Pacino since first discovering the novels in the 1970s. Abel Ferrara was first attached to direct David Koepp’s script but fell out with producer Martin Bregman after stealing a bottle of wine from the studio offices. The package came together as a reunion with SCARFACE (1983) director Brian De Palma, who sublimated his transgressive instincts to fashion a career highlight, arguably his most successful work of pop moviemaking. The film opens with a triumphant Carlito telling a captive courtroom his story with an air of vindication; his thirty-year sentence has just been overturned thanks to sloppy police work exploited by defense attorney David Kleinfeld (Sean Penn). He begins building a nest egg, investing in a nightclub with his eye on retiring to run a car rental business in Paradise Island, Bahamas (at the time, host to the Atlantis Resort owned by Merv Griffin), but Torres, like De Palma, does not believe in clean getaways. Pacino’s brash Nuyorican affect is complemented by a chorus of iconic Latino actors, including Luis Guzmán, John Leguizamo as "Benny Blanco from the Bronx," and John Ortiz, a repeat collaborator of director Michael Mann. In its treatment of the convict’s psychology, the film has more than a little in common with Mann’s cinema (Carlito refers to himself in voiceover as "Last of the Mo-Ricans… well, maybe not the last"), particularly the wistful scenes between Carlito and his love Gail (Penelope Ann Miller), an echo of the dialogues about lost time and best-laid plans between James Caan and Tuesday Weld in THIEF (1981). The soundtrack is packed with disco favorites by KC and the Sunshine Band, the O’Jays, and the Hues Corporation, whose classic "Rock the Boat" features the chorus "Our love is like a ship on the ocean." The club scenes have a subterranean quality, as figures from Carlito’s past emerge from and vanish into the shadows, betrayal a question of when, not if, while De Palma’s restlessly floating camera in the last two reels—among the finest suspense sequences ever committed to screen—clinches the nautical theme, Carlito glimpsed through the windows of a moving subway car as if passing his own destiny like a ship in the night. A work of peak Hollywood artistry engineered for heart-in-throat mass appeal, CARLITO’S WAY speaks for itself—perhaps best in the words of its hero, watching Gail glide effortlessly across the floor with a suave stranger for a partner: "They’re just dancing. Don’t you appreciate that—the movement, the rhythm?” (1993, 144 min, DCP Digital) [Brendan Boyle]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Pedro Costa's WHERE DOES YOUR HIDDEN SMILE LIE? (France/Documentary)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Sunday, 5pm

Halfway through Pedro Costa’s capturing of the working relationship between legendary husband and wife filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet, as they edit their film SICILIA!, we see an editing console running footage of a fish cooking on a hearth, its smoke spiraling backwards into the fish itself. Not only can one revel in the formal simplicity of the image, which seems straight out of F.W. Murnau, but this small moment remains central to the film before us, as well as the filmmakers’ work, through the very essence of film construction, reversing and forwarding the images they’ve made, giving formal life to the matter of their ideas. It also serves to remind us that beneath the philosophical musing and pacing, lies a completely human rendering of two individuals, not that much different from any long-time married couple. What Costa captures in his overwhelmingly beautiful and meditative documentary, is both Straub and Huillet hard at work, or hardly working, as Huillet keeps her husband on track, who can’t help telling stories about Bunuel, Ray, Chaplin, and Eisenstein, as he paces in and out the door of their editing room, which might as well be the portal to another world. There is a bottomless, intricate quality to the film that grounds us in the day-to-day gestures and comments of two people, locked into either an artistic or domestic commitment. Even the debate between the small seconds of trimming a clip somehow feels magnificent and epic, even though they are simply determining where to make a cut in their film. Costa seems very intent on portraying the two as they are, not as the “materialistic” and “dense” figures they’ve been described as in essays since the 1960’s, but as the most profound and earthbound artists still alive in a time seemingly far-removed from their heyday. For instance, Straub could be telling a story about a shirt he found once in a pile of rubbish, possibly leading the viewer towards an oblique philosophical rumination on the conception of finding treasure in junk, until Huillet corrects him, informing him, and us, that she in fact bought the shirt for him while they were in Rome location-scouting. What seems like the undercutting of one of Straub’s infamous remarks about life and cinema, becomes an even deeper revelation careening through the discourse between these artists, giving way to a romantic comedy of sorts, but also an unveiling of the humor and romance within their artistic process, leading toward the heart of all three filmmakers’ particular brands of cinema: a cinema of complexity, punctuated and given life by the simplicity of human nature’s inherent playfulness—the foundation of all great art. The final shot of Straub, after Huillet has left the frame to walk up to a projection booth, while he sits alone outside the screening of their very first film, THE CHRONICLE OF ANNA MAGDALENA BACH, is one of those foreboding shots at the dusk of a long career (like the final shot in John Ford’s 7 WOMEN) that remains incredibly haunting and touching, transcending what we’ve become accustomed to, as we and the filmmakers emerge from the dark editing room, eyes still mesmerized by the glow of a soft screen, back into the plain air. Followed by Costa's 2001 short film 6 BAGATELAS (18 min, DCP Digital). Screening as part of the Marta Mateus: Carte Blanche series. (2001, 104 min, DCP Digital) [John Dickson]

Alan Rudolph's CHOOSE ME (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Friday, 4pm

Alan Rudolph has fallen out of fashion since he stopped making movies in the early 2000s, which is a shame because he’s one of the most idiosyncratic directors ever to work in this country. His best films are unique amalgams of film noir atmospherics, screwball-style dialogue, sinuous camerawork reminiscent of classic musicals, and a profound sense of romantic longing. CHOOSE ME is not just Rudolph’s most characteristic film, but also one of the best American films of the 1980s, a romantic roundelay infused with mystery and danger. It shows the influence of Rudolph’s one-time patron Robert Altman in its juggling of multiple characters, who include a former prostitute-turned-bar owner (Lesley Ann Warren), a lonely housewife (Rae Dawn Chong) who suspects her husband of having an affair, and a radio talk show host who lives a double life (Genevieve Bujold). Keith Carradine plays the handsome, wide-eyed stranger who romances each of these women and whose true identity is the film’s central mystery. Is he a CIA agent, a mass murderer, or a pathological liar? (At times, he seems like he could be any of these things—or maybe all three.) Carradine’s wistfulness and boyish charm have rarely been put to better use. You can understand what makes the other characters fall for him in spite of (or perhaps because of) the risk of getting close to him. Even when he’s not onscreen, the film conjures an intoxicating, amorous mood, the bold neon colors and balletic camera movements evoking a world where love is always in the air. Alternately funny, seductive, and unnerving, CHOOSE ME channels the chaotic rushof emotions that comes with falling in love as few other movies do. (1984, 106 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Tobe Hooper's LIFEFORCE (UK/US)

Music Box Theatre – Friday and Saturday, Midnight & Monday, 4:15pm

LIFEFORCE is one of the absolutely nuttiest film experiences, complete with an iron guard of kitsch that may be difficult to pierce, but that is in line with the complex themes and vision distinct to Tobe Hooper. Hooper’s films are unique; they awkwardly refuse an identifiable moral position, they suggest a long past before dooming the reality of the present, and they hold out no hope of a peaceful, non-destructive catharsis for the viewer at the end. That isn’t to say he creates bleak or deliberately open-ended films; rather, films whose finales don’t provide tidy resolutions. LIFEFORCE starts with the discovery of an enormous spaceship floating within the debris of Haley’s comet. Inside the ship, are glass coffins containing the bodies of three space-vampires, which are brought back to Earth, setting off a series of personal and global crises. Hooper has said that the film is “about relationships. It’s about the relationship between men and women and how that can turn, how there can be a dominance in a relationship that can flip flop back and forth […] men dealing with the feminine mystique or the feminine terror […] the feminine inside themselves.” Hooper, tasked by Canon, the low-budget genre-specializing production company, with adapting a book called The Space Vampires, was able to craft a deeply personal, hallucinatory, and often comedic allegorical observance about male sexuality. The widescreen space Hooper employs is breathtaking, and he uses colors and shadows effectively in his particular brand of scuzzed up satire masquerading as horror. Ultimately, he made something way outside of the mainstream, something that was so out of step for the time. LIFEFORCE is certainly kitschy and comedic, with Hooper himself confirming the odd intended mixture of tones. Post-POLTERGEIST, Hooper leaned in more on his blackly comedic and exaggerated sensibilities, allowing them to become more prominent, culminating in films like THE MANGLER and the extremely under-seen THE TOOLBOX MURDERS. While Hooper’s films were never as explicitly political as his fellow contemporary horror film master George Romero, LIFEFORCE captures the dawn of a new America, that of the 80s, one of rampant excess and hedonism. LIFEFORCE pairs well with his late-80s film SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION, both films of considerable camp, they also contain unexpected emotional weight, with Hooper dearly embracing the idea of the doomed couple, forced to grapple with the imperfections and dangers of their love; l’amour fou for the midnight crowd. (1985, 116 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [John Dickson]

Doris Wishman’s NUDE ON THE MOON (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Wednesday, 9:30pm

In a 1998 profile of Doris Wishman, whom they deemed the “greatest living proto-indie feminist auteur,” for SPIN magazine, there’s a sidebar of musings on the filmmaker. In one, fellow filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh declares Wishman to be “a one-of-a-kind filmmaker with the idiosyncrasies of the experimental world, the business savvy of the commercial world, and the wit and imagination of some mysterious dream world.” It’s a perfect summation of Wishman’s chaotic output, mostly steeped in the sexploitation genre of the ’60s and ’70s (she’d later go on to make hardcore pornography), and of which NUDE ON THE MOON is just her second entry, co-written and co-directed with Raymond Phelan. Technically a nudist film, Nude on the Moon centers on two scientists who take a secret, self-funded trip to the moon, only to find it populated by an alien race composed of beings who look like humans except for being scantily clad in tiny underwear—if at all—and donning little antennae atop their heads. Of course, this is borne of necessity, as Wishman couldn’t devise an alien life form from scratch—and there needed to be breasts of the recognizably titillating (pun intended) variety. As it so happens, the queen of this alien race, who communicate via telepathy, looks exactly like—and is played by—the woman (an actress credited only as Marietta, a Bettie Page lookalike whose vibe doesn’t quite match the Boy Scout allure of the man playing the handsome young scientist) who’d been helping out the scientists back at their laboratory. There are breasts and butts aplenty, but no sex; if anything, it’s oddly innocent and not really provocative, nothing except for the nudity to whet the appetite. Another oddly wholesome aspect is that the first 20–30 minutes of the film are genuinely about the scientist duo aspiring to get to the moon. It’s not quite porn, but if it were, it would qualify as having a real plot. The Edenic moon setting was filmed at Coral Castle, an oolite limestone structure created by Latvian-American engineer and eccentric Edward Leedskalnin; it’s delightfully whimsical, as are the Méliès-esque opening and ending animations. The film even has its own song, “Moon Doll,” performed by Ralph Young of Sandler and Young. A cult classic that’s Wishman’s most notable film, NUDE ON THE MOON is as much about space travel and love as it ostensibly is about nudity. Screening as part of the Weird Wednesday series. (1961, 83 min, New 2K DCP Digital Restoration) [Kat Sachs]

Ridley Scott’s THELMA & LOUISE (US)

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

In Sir Ridley Scott’s career, crowded with stoic men, mythic landscapes, and the architecture of masculine power, THELMA & LOUISE stands as a sunburnt outlier. Written by first-time screenwriter Callie Khouri, the film transforms the male-coded road movie into a feminist fable of rebellion. Khouri, having endured the chauvinism of the 1980s music and film industries, wrote what Hollywood dismissed as "two bitches in a car," a reaction that only amplified the film's central critique. Khouri and Scott would combat the naysayers with awards, nominations, and big box office. The story begins in domestic hell. Thelma (Geena Davis) is a housewife suffocating under the thumb of her oblivious husband Daryl (Christopher McDonald, cast at Davis' suggestion and perfectly embodying his signature buffoonish machismo). Louise (Susan Sarandon), a hardened waitress, carries the scars of a trauma she never wants to recount. When the pair drive off for a weekend escape in Louise’s aquamarine 1966 Thunderbird, the film seems at first a playful getaway. Tony Child’s "House of Hope" lilts over the stereo as the two embrace the open road. But one saloon, one dance, and one brutal assault later, the tone shifts irrevocably. Louise kills the man who attacks Thelma, and the women become fugitives in a nation that will never believe them. Scott, who studied Terrence Malick’s BADLANDS (1973) during pre-production, paints their flight with the dust and glow of the American West. His desert is a moral wasteland where justice belongs to those who seize it. Thelma and Louise’s journey is both mythic and political: women reclaiming outlaw space once reserved for cowboys and convicts. Each male figure they encounter—rapist, robber, husband, or trucker—embodies a flavor of entitled patriarchy. Brad Pitt’s charming thief JD seduces Thelma and robs her, yet in doing so awakens her sense of desire and agency. Even sympathetic men, like Louise’s ex Jimmy (Michael Madsen) or Detective Hal (Harvey Keitel), are powerless to save the damsels in distress. The film drains its men of authority. A trucker’s obscene gestures are answered by his phallic rig exploding in a plume of feminist fire. A state trooper is reduced to tears as he’s locked in his own trunk. Even the police, camped out in Daryl’s living room, watch a Cary Grant melodrama instead of sports in a quiet satire of Hollywood’s gendered expectations. Scott famously told his actresses to focus on the interior lives of their characters; he gave them full control, he just had to keep up and frame a world too small to contain them. The result is seamless tonal fluidity; the film slips from road movie to Western to myth without warning, driven by the electric chemistry between Sarandon and Davis. The improvised kiss at the finale, Sarandon’s idea, seals their defiance not as victims but as legends. As Marianne Faithfull’s "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan" plays, Thelma and Louise reach a crossroads between capture and freedom. Louise asks, "Do I wanna come out alive? I’ll have to think about that. They choose flight over submission, speeding toward the Grand Canyon as police cars swarm behind them. The Thunderbird, gleaming like a turquoise bullet, sails into eternity and suspended in a freeze frame, free at last. Thirty years on, their leap still asks whether the world has changed, or if women are still forced to drive off cliffs to taste freedom. THELMA & LOUISE is not a tragedy; it’s a revolution that just happens to end midair. Screening as part of the Conversations in Cars: Road Trips and Relationships series. (1991, 130 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]

Ulli Lommel’s THE DEVONSVILLE TERROR (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Tuesday, 9:30pm

Set in early November and shot in Wisconsin, THE DEVONSVILLE TERROR captures gorgeous autumnal tones with rusty hues and landscapes of dappled trees changing colors. It's the three-hundred-year anniversary of the Devonsville Inquisition, in which women, accused of witchcraft, were murdered by the men of the town. The event has haunted the small conservative community ever since. Dr. Worley (Donald Pleasence, very much in a post-Dr. Loomis role) is studying the intergenerational effects of the inquisition; he himself is a descendant of one of the perpetrators and is cursed with worms crawling from holes in his skin. Three new young women have also arrived recently, a trendy radio DJ (Deanna Haas), an environmental scientist (Mary Walden), and, most prominently, a new schoolteacher, Jenny Scanlon (Suzanna Love), whose broadminded ideas are troubling the local parents. This throws Devonsville’s men into violent agitation, worried about what the presence of such independent, progressive women will do to the town and to them individually. Better known for his previous horror film, THE BOOGEYMAN (1980), German director Ulli Lommel had formerly worked in the New German Cinema movement and collaborated with Rainer Werner Fassbinder; he also spent time in The Factory with Andy Warhol. Here, he creates a folk horror with unsettling calmness that highlights the insidious and deeply embedded nature of violent misogyny. The patriarchs of the town are enraged by the women's independence and free-thinking as well as by the fact they completely reject the men's sexual advances. Situating the film beyond the gore or supernatural elements are the multiple scenes where the women are cornered by the men, which are disturbingly grounded in reality. THE DEVONSVILLE TERROR also insightfully and directly critiques the Reagan Era push for traditional family values, a deliberate backlash against the progressive movements of the previous decades—including Second Wave Feminism. It’s not, however, too stuck in any era. Instead, it feels quite modern; its theme of intergenerational violence and its quiet yet disturbing tenor allow THE DEVONSVILLE TERROR, from today’s moment, to feel horrifyingly relevant. Screening as part of the Terror Tuesday series. (1983, 82 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Neil Jordan's INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE (US)

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

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE was a staple for my best friend and me in high school, with its sexy vampires, extended plot that spans centuries, and overwrought performances. It’s a film that delighted and intrigued us to no end; it inspired complicated inside jokes that I couldn’t begin to explain to anyone else. I reached out to them while preparing to write this blurb, and we had an amazing conversation about how much the film meant to us, particularly in its impact as a queer film. I’m not sure it was my gateway to vampire horror, but it was certainly part of establishing a lifetime love of the subgenre. Based on Anne Rice’s first novel, the film begins with a framing narrative about a reporter (Christian Slater) interviewing Louis (Brad Pitt), a man who claims to be a 200-year-old vampire. Louis relates his early life as a human, leading up to his encounter with the charming but cruel Lestat (Tom Cruise), who turns him into a vampire and makes him his protégé. It’s essentially an unrequited love story between the two: Louis struggles to commit to the violence necessary for a vampiric lifestyle, and Lestat constantly pressures him to stay. He does this primarily by turning a young girl into a vampire (Kirsten Dunst) and forcing Louis to stay on to protect the child. This subplot provides most sincere emotion and horror, due largely to Dunst’s excellent performance. But INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE’s general self-seriousness is what makes it so enjoyable. It attempts to say something thoughtful about American history through Louis’ tale, but this is a story about glam vampires destructively making their way to the 20th century, and it works best when it leans into its gothic, melodramatic nature. Director Neil Jordan would go on to make another moody vampire film, BYZANTIUM (2012), which follows a mother-daughter vampire pair; it’s even darker and more compelling, demonstrating the continuing cultural obsession and evolution of the horror subgenre. Screening as part of the Ethical Vampire: The Moral Dilemma of Vampirism series. (1994, 123 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]

David Miller's SUDDEN FEAR (US)

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

As is the case with nearly every film in which she makes an appearance, Joan Crawford gives a powerful performance in SUDDEN FEAR. Myra (Crawford) is a wealthy heiress and playwright, who after turning Lester (Jack Palance) down for her next show, marries him when the two strike up a whirlwind romantic relationship. Lester discovers while Myra is writing her will that she plans to donate her fortune. Upset by this fact, he enlists his old flame, Irene (Gloria Grahame), to help him murder his wife so the two can collect the money. David Miller’s film is quintessential noir. The idyllic settings of San Francisco and Los Angeles aid in this and their locales are captured beautifully on screen with wide shots. In a genre famous for its grittiness and pulp, SUDDEN FEAR comes across as polished and sleek. The central narrative hinges on double-crosses on double-crosses as the characters learn of one another’s intentions in secret. Crawford’s performance showcases her ability to portray emotions of every sort, from infatuation and hatred to betrayal and fear. Grahame, who is no stranger to noir or playing the femme fatale, gives her strongest performance since CROSSFIRE and serves as the sultry counterpoint to Crawford’s more rigid demeanor. With well-polished set pieces, SUDDEN FEAR is an exciting cat and mouse game where the cat and mouse frequently change roles. Screening as part of the Joan Crawford: Actress as Auteur series. (1952, 110 min, DCP Digital) [Kyle Cubr]

Alfred Hitchcock's STRANGERS ON A TRAIN (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 9:30pm

Hitchcock was rarely, if ever, judgmental of his characters, but it seems the judgment he spared them was instead reserved for his audience. It's evident in many of his films as he forces the audience, along with the "innocents" of the stories, to identify with the criminal or the accused while likewise punishing them for doing so. This dynamic is particularly pronounced in STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, a film in which one character, Guy, is harassed by another, Bruno, after he kills Guy's estranged wife in hopes that he'll return the favor and murder his domineering father. An element of condescension plays into both the plot and Hitchcock's assessment of those watching; at the beginning, Guy patronizingly tells Bruno that his idea of a "you-do-mine-I'll-do-yours" murder plot is okay, that all his ideas are okay. Guy is obviously dismissive of the idea, but Bruno takes his patronizing agreement as confirmation that Guy is on board with his plan. In that scene, Hitchcock shows us just how gray the area is between good and evil, and how something as simple as a throwaway platitude can have such disastrous implications. Despite Hitchcock's sympathy for the killer, he allots sympathy to the victim as well, but only so far as he can use it to further indict the audience. In a telling scene, Barbara, the sister of Guy's love interest, remarks that his deceased ex-wife was a tramp, thus implying that her status as a "lesser person" justified her brutal murder. Barbara's father, the senator whom Guy hopes to emulate, tells her that the dead woman was also a human being. Considerably less wordy than Jimmy Stewart's impassioned epiphany at the end of ROPE, the scene is like a swift smack in the face from Hitchcock. Bruno's easygoing and almost infectious attitude toward murder is brought from the dark into the light—it's all fun and games until humanity becomes a factor. Another key motif that Hitchcock uses in several of his films is that of the rhetorical "perfect murder," scenes in which innocent characters participate with the real criminals in surmising how to commit a foolproof crime. During a party at the senator's house, Bruno convinces two elderly aristocratic ladies to indulge in fantasies of committing murder while Barbara looks on. The scene serves dual functions: it reveals the sinisterness that lurks beneath the genteel surface and, as Barbara notices Bruno staring at her, transfixed by her resemblance to Guy's wife, punishes her and therefore us for previously being so quick to dismiss the victim. That's Hitchcock reminding us that we could so easily be the murderer or the one being murdered, exposing both our hubris and our fragility along with that of his characters. Screening as part of the Board Picks series. (1951, 101 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Alex Ross Perry's VIDEOHEAVEN (US/Documentary)

Alamo Drafthouse – Tuesday, 6pm

Now that the video rental store has been relegated to the dustbin of history and we’re nearly two decades past it having any kind of commercial or cultural relevance, its history and place in society can begin to be reasonably assessed beyond facile nostalgia. Filmmaker (and, more importantly, former video store clerk) Alex Ross Perry has created a documentary synthesizing his ideas surrounding the value and purpose of the video store not only as a physical space and commercial endeavor, but as a concept. Inspired by the book Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store by Daniel Herbert (a professor at the University of Michigan whose research included the phenomena of the video store/tanning salon combo in the American South, and who serves as a producer of the project), VIDEOHEAVEN is essentially an academic-lite video lecture on the cosmology of the video store in (primarily American) culture, narrated by Maya Hawke. Not dissimilar in style to Alexandre O. Phillippe’s LYNCH/OZ (2022), this combines the increasingly familiar YouTuber video essay style with the more traditional philosophical essayist documentary style of folks like Adam Curtis. Compiling a more-than-impressive amount of film and TV clips, VIDEOHEAVEN is easily the most definitive single collection of footage of video stores appearing on screen. Making use of a runtime just shy of three hours (the Adam Curtis comparison further stands), Alex Ross Perry does his due diligence across multiple chapters to make sure that we see how the video store forever changed not only how audiences consume films, but how they influenced film itself. The material realities of the VHS business, the spaces video stores occupied as physical locations, the social third space they created, the experience and effects of the public consumption of pornography in a non-adults-only setting, and even the cultural and philosophical implications and refractions that were created by the way the video store itself was represented in film and TV are all finely parsed and dissected. A throughline of the film, which is probably its most interesting point, is how unique it is that the video store became such a cultural institution only to completely disappear. That is there is almost no trace of what the video store was left in larger society, how there is no contemporary correlative, and how the video store is now an inherently historic concept, despite a few still existing. I currently have five movies, rented from two different video stores, sitting on a table in my living room. So to have VIDEOHEAVEN suggest that every time I rent a title I’m not just picking up a movie to watch, but that I’m participating in a kind of hauntological act steeped in nostalgia and the imagined past created by the hundreds of times I’ve watched video stores appear on screen, legitimately freaks me out. But this makes sense, because I do feel like I'm time traveling, or at least taking a step out of time and place, every time I go to rent a movie—and not just due to nostalgia. It's kind of comforting to have a film try to explain why this is, and that it's not just my weird brain acting up again. VIDEOHEAVEN is a must see for anyone who is genuinely interested in the incredibly short time when film consumption was mostly a physical act, and how the way we watch film changes the world around us in very real ways invisible except through the lens of history. If you're looking for nothing more than a hotshot of video store nostalgia, this film will absolutely feel like a homework assignment; VIDEOHEAVEN has more in common with Marshall McLuhan's Laws of the Media and its tetrad of media effects than it does Vh1's I Love the '80s. But those who do enjoy some philosophy with their pop-culture history will be incredibly well served, and VIDEOHEAVEN manages to deliver equally to those who remember going to the video store and those who have only ever seen it depicted on their screens. RIP to all the video stores I haunted as a clerk in the past: Blowout Video, Blockbuster Video, Nationwide Video, Dogear Music and Movies. And long live the ones that I have worked at/still work at that are still holding on here in Chicago: Analog/TerrorVision Video and Facets Film Forum, may you continue to haunt our living, and increasingly digital, world. (2025, 172 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]

Andrei Tarkovsky's MIRROR (USSR)

Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6pm

Long before the great TREE OF LIFE euphoria of 2011, another film (from another director's famously sparse oeuvre) went off uncharted into the space between memories past and present, mapping onto them a universal significance. Andrei Tarkovsky's THE MIRROR may lack dinosaurs and metaphorical doors in the desert, but it does set a mean precedent for everything a passion project can be when an auteur is working on such an intensely personal level. Long a dream project of Tarkovsky's, it was only in the wake of SOLARIS that he was able to secure funding, and armed with a meager allotment of film stock, he began production in late 1973. Given the non-linear, dreamlike progression of the film, such obstacles aren't hard to comprehend, and they perhaps explain why this is his most fleeting film outside his debut, IVAN'S CHILDHOOD. Drawn across the middle of the 20th century, THE MIRROR takes a stream of consciousness journey through familial memories, with actors in dual roles as father and son, as wife and mother. Woven in are poems penned by Tarkovsky's own father, assorted clips of wartime newsreel footage, and the quiet, ethereal imagery characteristic of all his films. It all makes for a hazy dream of cinema, one from which you tragically wake too early. But lest the length should fool you, this is not Tarkovsky for beginners. No surprise that at his most personal, he's also at his most esoteric, so an afternoon spent with one of his aforementioned films would be a good primer. As for those already in his thrall, this is imperative viewing. Screening as part of the Interiority on Screen lecture series at the Film Center. (1974, 108 min, DCP Digital) [Tristan Johnson]

Yorgos Lanthimos’ BUGONIA (US)

Music Box Theatre and various other Venues – See Venue websites for showtimes

Within the dense pages of the Byzantine Geoponica—the sole surviving record of Constantinople’s agricultural methods—lies mention of the Bugonia ritual: a belief that bees were born from the carcass of a cow. Life springing from death. A spontaneous empire of bees birthed from decay. Yorgos Lanthimos’ BUGONIA opens with a similar conception. Teddy (Jessie Plemons), a beekeeper of sorts, narrates, “It all starts with something magnificent,” describing the kingdom of bees and their devotion to the queen. But his question lingers: what happens when the worker bees revolt? From the start, Lanthimos aligns this mythic order with political unrest. Teddy and his cousin Donnie (Aidan Delbis) are disillusioned Americans, suffocating under capitalism’s weight. Teddy, in particular, channels his resentment into a feverish anti-corporate crusade that gradually unravels into delusion. His manifesto—part political revolt, part alien conspiracy—culminates in a conviction that the planet is under threat from the Andromedans, a race of extraterrestrials poised to attack during an impending lunar eclipse. Donnie becomes the third point in this ideological triangle between Teddy and pharmaceutical CEO Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), whom the cousins kidnap to expose her supposed alien identity. Delbis gives Donnie an aching sincerity; his loyalty to Teddy feels both familial and tragic. “We are not steering the ship, Don,” Teddy warns, as if resigned to cosmic manipulation. Lanthimos juxtaposes the cousins’ rustic world with Michelle’s sterile minimalism—Teddy and Donnie framed in asymmetrical, natural compositions, while Michelle exists in crisp lines and geometric order. Rituals including yoga, running, and kickboxing mirror the discipline of hive behavior, showing the similarities as well as the disparity between the cousins and Michelle. These visual and thematic contrasts build toward confinement: a CEO bound and drugged in a basement, where philosophical arguments mutate into psychological warfare. The scenario echoes a cinematic tradition of class revenge fantasies—SWIMMING WITH SHARKS (1994), THE REF (1994), even NATIONAL LAMPOON’S CHRISTMAS VACATION (1989)—where taking the powerful hostage serves as comic wish fulfillment. But Lanthimos transforms that fantasy into dread. As Teddy demands that Michelle contact the aliens to negotiate humanity’s survival, she retaliates with manipulations of her own. Teddy’s paranoia tries to outpace her corporate cunning. Despite its grim setup, BUGONIA thrives on absurd humor. “Don’t call it a dialogue; this isn’t Death of a Salesman,” Teddy quips, moments before using a homemade electroshock device to the tune of Green Day’s “Basket Case.” His awkward apology, “I didn’t realize you were a Queen; I thought you were just admin,” lands with the strange charm of Lanthimos’ earlier comedies. While less overtly Buñuelian than his previous work, Lanthimos maintains his surrealist flourishes. Flashbacks to Teddy’s dying mother (Alicia Silverstone), suspended by a string he holds like a balloon, reveal trauma fueling his delusions. His crusade against corporate aliens becomes an exorcism of grief and rage toward a pharmaceutical system that poisoned her. Adapted from Jang Joon-hwan’s SAVE THE GREEN PLANET! (2003), BUGONIA reimagines its source within the American landscape of YouTube manifestos, startup jargon, and class inequity. The bees pollinate while a Marlene Dietrich cover of Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?” plays. This seems the most apt visual metaphor. If Teddy’s theories prove correct, like rabbit-hole conspiracies that embolden and foster violent rhetoric, would that mean we are supposed to believe angry young white men who develop clickbait conspiracy? Or are they themselves the front line of our own extinction? CEOs like Michelle Fuller, who present a workplace of false diversity and “self-managed” work hours, are part of the billionaire class—a concept very alien to most of us—who get away with pushing untested drugs and trampling anyone in their way, are equally (if not more) dangerous. The more we hear from Teddy and Michelle, the more we realize that there could be hope in the Bugonia ritual. Maybe one day, from our rotten carcasses a better species will emerge. (2025, 117 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]

Susan Seidelman's DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Sunday, 12:15pm

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

Jean-Pierre Jeunet's AMÉLIE (France)

Northbrook Public Library (1201 Cedar Ln., Northbrook) – Wednesday, 2pm and 7pm

This joyous romp of magical realism really should be screened more often as a date night reparatory programmer because if you can't tap into its wellspring of happiness then, I'm afraid to say, you have no heart and are dead inside and most definitely deserve to be alone. Originally released in Europe in 2001, and Stateside in early 2002, this film was a massive sleeper hit. I could present to you the fact that it's still the biggest French-language/French-produced box office success in the history of the US box office, but to contextualize that, a quick anecdote. I  was actually working at the theatre in Chicago that premiered this. And that weekend gave me the scariest moment I've ever had at a job: I had to hand deliver the weekend box office take on foot to the local bank—a half-mile walk with a bag filled with about $20,000 cash. The vast majority being AMÉLIE money. So, yeah, it was massive. Its five Oscar nominations didn't hurt either. With all the magical CGI, Audrey Tatou's instantly iconic (and replicated) hairstyle, its unrelenting demand for a universe of beauty, wonder, love, and whimsy, it's easy to judge the film as being too sentimental and, well, cheesy. But I'll also say that 20 years on it seems low-hanging fruit to accuse the film of being saccharine or too cute by half. Oh, it's twee as hell, no doubt about that. But contextually, this film pre-dated the oversaturation of that aesthetic—arguably helping codify it alongside the other twee barnstormer of 2001, THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS. But what people tend to forget is that this film was specifically made to be an escapist balm. AMÉLIE is a strange film in that it's a period piece set only four years in the past—specifically, it's set on the date of the death of Princess Diana. The film is pointedly born of tragedy. When the titular character learns of Lady Di's death she drops a perfume cap in shock, only for it to reveal a loose bathroom tile covering the hidden toys of a boy's youth. This set's off Amélie's mission to anonymously return the toys to their now-adult owner and spread mysterious joy around the city as both anonymous Cyrano matchmaker and champion of the downtrodden worker, as well as allowing herself to finally find love. Not unlike some of Tarantino's recent films, AMÉLIE seems to have been made specifically to alleviate, and comment on, a collective sociocultural tragedy that people had to endure. When it was being made, and originally released in Europe, AMÉLIE was to be a salve to the tragic loss of The People's Princess. It was a way to reframe this tragedy and give it a much needed, if admittedly fictional, additional positivity. Little did the filmmakers know that by the time this movie landed in America in February of 2002 that it was exactly what the US needed. In the immediate shadow of the 9/11 WTC attacks people in the US were still afraid that it might be inappropriate to laugh, yet alone love. It was an entire culture and country utterly terrified, heartbroken and wondering if things would ever be the same again (they weren't) and if they could ever feel happiness again (they eventually did)—and to a certain extent AMÉLIE allowed for that. The reassurance of hope I saw on the faces of people leaving the theater in 2002 is impossible to put into words. So if a film could help mend the broken soul of America post-9/11 just a tiny bit, then its joy can definitely shoulder a world whose social fabric seems to be fraying evermore each passing day—if only for 2 hours. Still bewitchingly lovely, AMÉLIE holds up much better than some people would like you to think; her radiant charms will have you leaving the theater in pure, wholesome delight. (2001, 122 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]

Neil Marshall’s THE DESCENT (UK)

Alamo Drafthouse – Monday, 10pm

At one point early in THE DESCENT, Beth (Alex Reid) reassures her good friend Sarah (Shauna Macdonald), who’s panicking as she moves through a tight cave path that, "The worst thing that could have happened to you has already happened." The horror of the film is found in the idea that one terrible thing actually can happen after another—that suffering a traumatic event doesn’t preclude more and more. One of the stand-out horror films of the aughts, THE DESCENT works so well in a simplistic general conceit that's grounded in a story of trauma and the emotional relationships of the women at its center. While it's a creature-feature on the surface, the film's depths reveal unique complexity of its female characters that could slot easily into melodrama—if it weren’t also so scary. The film follows a trio of thrill-seeking friends, Sarah, Beth, and Juno (Natalie Mendoza). While driving away from a whitewater rafting trip, Sarah and her husband, Paul (Oliver Milburn), and young daughter, Jessica (Molly Kayll), get into a terrible car accident; Sarah is the sole survivor. A year later, the group, joined by three other adventurous women (MyAnna Buring, Saskia Mulder, and Nora-Jane Noone), embark on a spelunking trip in the Appalachian Mountains. Expecting a manageable level of spelunk, the path collapses on them and they soon realize they’ve been led into an unknown cave system with no chance of rescue. As if the claustrophobia isn’t enough, they soon discover they aren’t alone; the cave is crawling with, well, "crawlers": clicking humanoid creatures surviving deep underground, eager to consume the women. Director Neil Marshall does an incredible job depicting the horrors of the cave, not just the crawlers—though the creature design is impressive—but the simultaneous vastness and confinement of the space. Lit by the glowing of headlamps, the red light gives way to blood and gore in growing terror; the lighting turns a greener hue later in the film, suggesting their imminent decay. With the creatures not appearing until about halfway into the film, THE DESCENT is a masterclass in building gruesome tension. The cave is also a clear metaphor for the inner life of the grieving and traumatized Sarah and her relationships, filled with fear, anxiety, and uncertainties—and jump scares. (2005, 99 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

📽️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Alamo Drafthouse
Lynne Ramsay’s 2025 film DIE MY LOVE (118 min, DCP Digital) begins screening. See Venue website for showtimes.

William Friedkin’s 1985 film TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A. (116 min, Digital Projection) screens Saturday at 12:15pm and Tuesday at 4pm.

A Mystery Machine screening takes place Monday at 7pm. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Alliance Française de Chicago
Julien Chheng and Jean-Christophe Roger’s 2022 film ERNEST ET CÉLESTINE: LE VOYAGE EN CHARABIE (80 min, Digital Projection) screens Saturday at 10am.

Tom Hooper’s 2012 musical LES MISÉRABLES (158 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday, 6:30pm, as part of the Cinémélodie series. The screening will be preceded by a lecture given by historian and professor emerita of Northwestern University Sarah Maza. For both screenings, please enter via 54 W Chicago Ave. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
Threading Images, a program of short films and a project performance by Chicago-based educator, filmmaker, and expanded cinema artist Christina Nguyen, screens Friday at 7pm. Screening and performance followed by a conversation with the filmmaker.

Richard Beymer’s 1973 film THE INNERVIEW (84 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 7pm, followed by a conversation with film preservationist Ross Lipman. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Chicago Cultural Center (Claudia Cassidy Theater)
Peter Yates’ 1979 film BREAKING AWAY (100 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday, 7pm, as part of the Siskel & Ebert at 50 series. Selected by ‘Sneak Previews’ Thea Flaum, who will be in attendance for post-screening discussion. More info here.

⚫ Chicago Filmmakers
The Chicago International REEL Shorts Festival takes place Friday and Saturday, though is now sold out.

MOSTRA presents a free screening of Gabriel Mascaro’s 2025 film THE BLUE TRAIL (86 min, Digital Projection) on Sunday at 4pm. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Chicago Film Society
The CFS Open House takes place Sunday starting at 2pm, at the CFS office (2950 W. Chicago Ave., Suite 306). More info here.

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

⚫ The Davis Theater
Lynne Ramsay’s 2025 film DIE MY LOVE (118 min, DCP Digital) begins screening. See Venue website for showtimes.

Steven Soderbergh’s 2000 film ERIN BROCKOVICH (131 min, Digital Projection) screens Monday at 7pm. More info on all screenings here. 

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Marta Mateus’ 2024 film FIRE OF WIND (72 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, 7pm, as part of the Sounds of Shaking Earth: Landscapes of Portuguese Cinema series.

Ralph Steiner and  Willard Van Dyke’s 1934 short film HANDS (4 min, DCP Digital), Pare Lorentz’s 1936 short film THE PLOW THAT BROKE THE PLAINS (25 min, Digital Projection), Jay Leyda, Elia Kazan and Sidney Meyers’ 1937 short film PEOPLE OF THE CUMBERLAND (21 min, DCP Digital), and Marta Mateus’ 2017 short film BARBS, WASTELAND (25 min, DCP Digital) screen Saturday, 5pm, as part of the Marta Mateus: Carte Blanche series.

Hollis Frampton’s short films PUBLIC DOMAIN (1972, 14 min), SUMMER SOLSTICE (1974, 33 min), and PAS DE TROIS (1975, 4 min) and Stan Brakhage’s SHORT FILMS 1-10 (1975, 36 min) screen Sunday, 7pm, as Infinite Cinema: The Films of Hollis Frampton series, all on 16mm.

Konrad Wolf’s 1959 film STERNE (92 min, 16mm) screens Tuesday, 7pm, as part of the Konrad Wolf on the Centennial series.

Rita Azevedo Gomes’ 1990 film THE SOUND OF THE SHAKING EARTH (93 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday, 7pm, as part of the Sounds of Shaking Earth: Landscapes of Portuguese Cinema series.

A selection of short films by Curt McDowell, all on 16mm, screens Thursday, 9:30pm, as part of the Celluloid Is Out: Queer Freedom and Subculture of the 1970s series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ FACETS
The 2025 EUNIC Film Festival takes place Friday through Sunday. 

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

Joy Sela’s 2024 film THE OTHER (104 min, Digital Projection) screens Monday, 7pm, followed by a virtual Q&A with Sela and a local Palestinian leader. Co-sponsored by Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom Chicagoland Region & Illinois Friends of Standing Together.

A double feature of Dylan Mars Greenberg’s 2015 film DARK PRISM (106 min, Digital Projection) and their 2015 film SPIRIT RISER (106 min, Digital Projection) screen Wednesday at 7pm and 9:30pm, respectively. Discussions with Mars Greenberg follow each screening.

Anime Club presents the Dark Deals & Neon Dreams double feature on Thursday starting at 7pm. Free and exclusive to Film Club Members. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Film Studies Center (at the University of Chicago)
Ghosts in the Machine: Experimental Variations on Play, a selection of short films, screens Thursday, 7pm, as part of the Year of Games. More info here.

⚫ First Nations Film and Video Festival
A Short Film Retrospective and 20 Years of Wapikoni event takes place Friday, 6:30pm, at the Skokie Public Library (Petty Auditorium, 5215 Oakton St., Skokie, IL).

Also screening at the Skokie Public Library is an Animated Short Film Retrospective on Saturday at 2pm.

Martin Trabalik and Geraldine Zambrana Velez’s INCENDIOS screens Sunday, 3pm, at the Citlalin Arts Gallery (2005 S. Blue Island Ave.). 

Nyla Innuksuk’s 2022 film SLASH/BACK (86 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday, 7pm, followed by a Q&A with Innuksuk, at the Music Box Theatre. 

Cody Lightning’s 2023 film HEY, VIKTOR! (102 min, Digital Projection) screens Thursday, 7pm, also at the Music Box. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Yuen Woo-Ping’s 1978 film SNAKE IN THE EAGLE’S SHADOW (90 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday and Sunday at 11:30am as part of the Merciless Mayhem: Martial Arts Midnights & Matinees series. More info 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: November 7 - November 13, 2025

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Brendan Boyle, Maxwell Courtright, Kyle Cubr, John Dickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Shaun Huhn, Tristan Johnson, Ben Kaye, Raphael Jose Martinez