☀️ 42ND CHICAGO LATINO FILM FESTIVAL
Landmark's Century Centre Cinema – See below for showtimes
Ana Cristina Barragán’s THE IVY (Ecuador/Mexico/Spain/France)
Friday, 5:45pm and Saturday, 8:15pm
Azucena (Simone Bucio) aches for her lost youth. An early teenage pregnancy ended her burgeoning gymnastics career, and she was forced by her mother to give her child away. Now 30, she lives alone dreaming of the past she never had. The teenage Julio (Francis Eddú Llumiquinga) aches for his lost parents, having spent his childhood in a foster home resenting them for leaving him. These two melancholic souls will find each other, again and again, throughout THE IVY, engaging in a tender pas de deux that keeps taking on new textures. For most of the film, Barragán works in a Dardennes-esque mode of social realism, capturing hardscrabble lives with a handheld camera that cleaves to faces and gestures in fervent closeup. Her focus is on the affects of physical interaction, particularly in contexts of care. Azucena acts as a caretaker for her grandfather, and Julio nurses babies at the foster home; when the two meet, they develop a relationship founded on the mutual care and affection they each have been missing in their lives. What keeps THE IVY interesting is how their compassionate interactions are mixed with the tension of their age and ethnic differences, as well as the ambiguities of their motivations. Can the pair’s bond transcend personal traumas and social boundaries? As the film goes on, Barragán subtly colors the story with symbolism, including the fluffle of bunnies multiplying in Azucena’s apartment. By the poetic denouement, we have seemingly entered the realm of allegory, with a movement into the natural Ecuadorian landscape occasioning a new, more primal stage in Azucena and Julio’s relationship. Out in the elements, the care they show for each other is touching, in both senses of the word. (2025, 98 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
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Jayro Bustamante’s CORDILLERA DE FUEGO (Guatemala)
Friday, 8pm and Sunday, 3:45pm
CORDILLERA DE FUEGO is a curious film, born of a social impact project (spearheaded by Bustamante’s Ixcanul Foundation and funded by the UK government’s Global Challenges Research Fund and the Scottish Funding Council, per the festival’s description) “to explore the multifaceted nature of volcanic disasters in Guatemala.” The result is on par with an American disaster movie—think, most literally, of films like VOLCANO and DANTE’S PEAK—but confronts Indigenous issues specific to the region; it’s a mystifying blend that compels even as its flag cinematography and special effects sometimes dip into the uncanny valley. It does seem a little below Bustamante’s capabilities as a filmmaker, but I could see history being kind to it as an odd artifact of an otherwise accomplished career. The film centers on two volcanologists (played by actresses from Bustamante’s previous films) who discover an emerging volcano and go to warn the Indigenous communities in the region so that they may evacuate. While it seems cut and dry, there’s tension in the form of the community’s past displacement to ecologically unsound areas and sinister corporate interests—the deceptively charming executive is played by Juan Pablo Olyslager from Bustamante’s TREMORS (2019)—that make the volcano and resulting evacuation advantageous. There’s also a pulpy aspect to the latter plot point, making the shady machinations of big business narratively engaging as well as disturbing (Bustamante wields sensationalism like a cudgel, as if to confront an audience’s need for thrills and action to appropriately care about an issue). Though the special effects are crude at times, the volcano’s eventual eruption and subsequent carnage are still jaw-dropping; there’s even an Ulmer-esque charm to the awkwardness, suggesting that the desire to realize a vision is sometimes more impactful than its actual execution. Per an article about the film in Variety, “To prepare his feature, Bustamante set up his itinerant acting school, Academia Ixcanul, which he founded in 2012 and has already trained as many as 1,500 actors in Guatemala.” About the non-professional actors, he’s quoted as saying, “We got the two indigenous communities involved, the Cakchiquel and Tzutujil, and gave acting lessons to entire families, from children to parents and grandparents.” He boasts later that this is his first film to be 100% composed of Guatemalan talent, and his ambition mirrors the film’s own uneasy but compelling scale. Followed by a Q&A with Bustamante. (2025, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
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Julio Medem’s 8 (Spain)
Friday, 8:15pm
The title of Julio Medem’s latest refers to its structure: the film unfolds in eight chapters, and each one employs a fair amount of digital trickery to make it look like a single shot. The trickery is only fitfully convincing and largely superfluous, yet Medem (who made LOVERS OF THE ARCTIC CIRCLE [1998] and SEX AND LUCÍA [2001], after all) remains a captivating storyteller in spite of this, and the film covers so much ground in relatively little time that it maintains interest with its ambition alone. The story begins in 1931, when a doctor in small-town Spain is pulled between two homes three kilometers apart, where two different mothers are giving birth. The movie will follow these two children over the next 90 years, jumping forward multiple years between chapters and observing how their lives are impacted by modern Spanish history. Adela is the daughter of a socialist schoolteacher, while Octavio is the son of an outspoken fascist. In one parallel between the two protagonists’ lives, both of their fathers are killed during the Spanish Civil War (his by partisans, hers by the State); in another, both move to Madrid in adulthood. She grows up to be married to a fascist (whom she despises), while he becomes a taxi driver and family man who’s generally apolitical. The two finally meet in their 30s, crossing paths in a surprising and erotic fashion that results in what may be the most Medem-like scene in the movie. The next few chapters are motivated by the question of whether Octavio and Adela will ditch their spouses and get together, their union destined for no other reason than the movie gods say they were made for each other. Well, there is another reason—their coming together represents Spain’s triumph over its internal divisions and its transition to a more harmonious post-fascist era. The film’s lush romanticism (Medem’s stock in trade) reflects an underlying optimism. (2025, 126 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Ricardo de Montreuil’s MISTURA (Peru)
Saturday, 1pm
Here’s a perfectly nice movie that Roger Ebert would have been happy to overrate, a clichéd but sensitively played drama about relatable people in photogenic settings. Norma is a middle-aged, well-to-do woman in 1960s Lima who finds out at the start of the film that her husband has left her for someone younger. Broke and alone but not without her pride, Norma decides to risk everything on a new venture that will hopefully pay off her debts and return her to good standing in Peruvian high society: opening a French restaurant in her home. She assembles a team to manage and operate the place, starting with Oscar, her servant of many years, who exhibits a surprisingly savvy business sense and a taste for poetry. The two end up running the restaurant as partners, which is at once humbling and liberating for Norma, an ambassador’s daughter, who’s used to having others do things for her and never do things for herself. She and Oscar develop a pleasant chemistry too, but any signs of passion are generally sublimated through shots of delicious meals being prepared. Writer-director Ricardo Montreuil has found a crowd-pleasing formula in his combination of underdog story, chaste romance, revenge fantasy, and food porn; chances are this will play well with an audience. (2024, 101 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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William Reyes’ EVA (Honduras/Colombia)
Saturday, 3:30pm and Sunday, 6pm
Honduran writer-director William Reyes’ feature debut is a tenderly realized and assuredly executed drama. It centers on the titular character, a trans woman whose son’s girlfriend unexpectedly dies in childbirth, leaving her to raise the baby on her own. She’s a dance instructor in a situationship with a younger man reluctant to commit; her son is wary of the relationship and also of her as a parent. More positively, the girl’s father, who had initially disapproved of the pregnancy, eventually comes around and helps care for the baby. This is the first of slow acclimations to the family’s unconventional circumstances; the film dwells in these adjustments, without making pointed suggestions as to why they occur. There are only a few references to Eva being a trans woman, and they’re never overt—if anything, this restraint solidifies her struggle, hinting at the intolerance that can linger beneath a surface of cordiality. At the same time, there is room for misconception, as when, almost offhandedly, Eva’s son mentions her having abandoned him to live with her parents, whose household, he says, was hell. The characters are fully realized without overly reliant exposition; even the daughter-in-law, who passes away early in the film, feels wholly drawn, making her loss all the more affecting. An interesting incorporation of motorcycle culture—Eva rides, and her son is active in a community of riders who gather and perform tricks—adds texture to their lives in the way such details do, even if its connection to Honduran culture is opaque. Reyes enriches a tragic drama—already shaped by the struggles faced by marginalized communities—with the kinds of specificity often missed in the broader strokes of similar films. Even smaller details, such as the rich production design, make it feel similarly lived in. David Estrada’s cinematography is elegant and sumptuous, and the occasionally voyeuristic compositions reinforce an intimacy that feels earned rather than imposed (for example, when the daughter-in-law is being interred, the camera takes the position as if inside the tomb, the frame slowly being obscured by the casket being inserted into it). Colombian transgender actress Endry Cardeño is fantastic, as is the rest of the cast. Producer David Corredor will introduce the film. (2025, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
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Alberto Sciamma’s CIELO (Bolivia/UK)
Sunday, 8pm
In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, director Alberto Sciamma recalls, “I had a very visceral image in my head of a little girl swallowing a fish, and I didn’t really analyze it. I didn’t know why I was fascinated by that image.” So it follows, then, that CIELO isn’t really a film about whys, its magical realist tone throwing caution to the wind and letting emotion, dream logic, and whimsy lead the way. Sciamma hands the reins of his walking fable to a young girl named Santa (played by Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda with stunning clarity and commitment) who, as Sciamma fully imagined, opens the film by swallowing a fish. From there, she tosses a heart-shaped rock at her father, stabs her mother—who joyfully accepts her fate—before stuffing her in a barrel, and begins her arduous trek to find a literal Heaven on Earth. Sciamma’s ethereal camera travels across Bolivia’s wide variety of topography, from deserts to forests to towns filled with bright shining hues ready to welcome us to whatever emotional beat will follow. Santa’s journey to find Paradise attempts to reconcile what parts of our grand beliefs are tactile, and what is merely ephemeral, with various miracles performed along the way (dead vultures springing back to life, fresh bloody wounds healing in seconds) seen as proof of the faith we have in higher powers, or maybe more so the faith we have in ourselves. Santa crosses paths with colorful characters that include a busload of roaming luchadoras, a skeptical, mustache-laden police chief, and the very priest whose ideology has set her on this journey, all in their own ways willing to play in to the out-of-the-box world Santa is crafting for them. Sciamma’s world is expansive enough to allow for the grand leaps in narrative logic, while having a sturdy sense of visual exploration and glee. There is a method to the madness of the yarn being spun, which no doubt explains the wistful ending where, after all this dreaming, Santa learns to plant her feet on solid ground and trust in the truth of the world around her. (2025, 108 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
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Pablo Arturo Suárez’s THE DOG, MY FATHER AND US (Ecuador)
Monday, 7pm
Late in THE DOG, MY FATHER AND US, there’s a scene where the hero, Sebastián, feels he must tell his wife the truth about why he got fired from his university job. He wasn’t let go because of budget cuts, as he told her previously, but because he got caught sleeping with one of his students. His wife responds that not only did she know this the whole time—she’s refused to get upset about it because that would be hypocritical, given all of her own extramarital indiscretions. And so, what promises to be a dramatic scene about Sebastián hurting his wife becomes a comic one about his cluelessness. It’s characteristic of the movie, which views its neurotic protagonist from a knowing remove, seeing past his ego while still regarding him in a sympathetic light. And Sebastián is deserving of sympathy—or maybe, more accurately, pity. His marriage is quietly crumbling, his teenage son says he can no longer go to school because he needs to work on his YouTube channel, and his widower father, who lives with him, is alienating the rest of the family with his porn addiction. (In one of the funnier gags, Sebastián discovers that his old man is actually quite friendly and popular at the local adult movie theater. Apparently these still exist in Quito.) The film’s plot is motored by the sudden arrival of Sebastián’s estranged younger brother, who’s come back to Ecuador after traveling the globe for eight years. Our hero is pressured into welcoming the brother and his pregnant Russian girlfriend into the family home, but their bohemian ways quickly prove a source of conflict with Sebastián’s bourgeois household. The rift between brothers is resolved fairly easily, however; one of the pleasant things about THE DOG, MY FATHER AND US is that it’s about how the protagonist comes to recognize that his problems aren’t so insurmountable, provided he can overcome his bad habits and start listening to the people around him. On a related note, there are no real villains in this movie—everyone who seems at first like an obstacle to Sebastián’s happiness is revealed to be flawed but well-meaning, just like him. Filmmaker in person. (2025, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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For more information about the festival, including the full line-up, visit the festival website here.
📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING
Michelangelo Antonioni’s BLOW-UP (UK/Italy/US)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday and Saturday, 9:45pm
When Michelangelo Antonioni came to MGM, he brought with him a peculiar attention to mise-en-scène that merged with his access to bigger budgets and stars to make an utterly unique run of films. His most successful of these fusions was his first, the Palme d’Or-winning, Oscar-nominated Julio Cortázar adaptation BLOW-UP, which served as a bridge for Antonioni’s arthouse sensibility to enter English-language cinema in the lead up to the New Hollywood era. The film follows Thomas (David Hemmings), an English photographer introduced in a whirlwind opening that finds him getting mobbed by mimes in the street before bouncing between a succession of personal and professional appointments that he navigates with a sleepy smarminess. When he takes some time to himself to explore a local park, he photographs a man and woman before being accosted by the woman (Vanessa Redgrave), who demands the photos back. Though he strikes a deal with her to return the negatives once he finishes the roll, Thomas’s further exploration of the photo suggests that something is amiss, bringing him deeper into an obsession with uncovering the truth. The story takes shape slowly, largely through Thomas’ study of his own photographic gaze. Through obsessively re-seeing reality through these constructed images, he seeks an omniscient view of the situation that slips further away the more he zooms and enhances. Where the Cortázar story gets its kicks from playing with an uncertain narrator who keeps interrupting himself, Antonioni finds a similar sort of play in the freewheeling tone of his film. This feels especially stark midway through the film when our lead becomes slowly aware of the evidence of murder hiding in his photographs, only to be interrupted by young women desperate to get their photograph taken. A brief sex romp ensues before Thomas’s descent into paranoia resumes. Despite his extremely considered mise-en-scène, Antonioni seems to be stretching what the viewer expects on a moment-to-moment basis both conceptually and emotionally. Thomas’ voracious eye is a sickness brought on by the industrial development of an image-obsessed culture. His camera is the site of his labor and his virility, and it ultimately facilitates his descent into uncertainty. “Prescient” would be an understatement for such a paranoid, modernist statement about the ethics of viewing when we are constantly viewing too much. The template would prove useful to other major auteurs in the following decades with THE CONVERSATION (1974) and BLOW OUT (1981), with contemporary work like RED ROOMS (2023) and FACES OF DEATH (2026) continuing to rework the basic ideas for the internet age. BLOW-UP has such durability because it asks us to reconsider the act of looking itself, something only the greatest and most durable of materialist films do. Screening as part of the Board Picks series. (1966, 111 min, 35mm) [Maxwell Courtright]
Hal Hartley’s HENRY FOOL (US)
Chicago Film Society at the Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 6pm
Hal Hartley has never received his due. For audiences raised on the emotional hand-holding of Hollywood form, his early films could feel alien with their deadpan performances and restrained compositions. But as Hartley himself says, the goal was to “keep the individual shots and the individual scenes carefully unemotional for the real emotion to be rendered.” That ethos that began Hartley's career is finely tuned for HENRY FOOL, his most expansive at the time, a grimy American epic masquerading as a Pygmalion story. The film begins with Simon Grim (James Urbaniak), a shy, bespectacled garbage man drifting through a life of quiet humiliation in Long Island. His days loop in deadening repetition: work, solitude, and a dysfunctional home where his clinically depressed mother and volatile sister Fay (Parker Posey) orbit in despair. Simon listens to the ground, to the world, to nothing, and with his ear to the pavement—in a moment of desperate need—he conjures a devil, complete with a thrift store suit, named Henry Fool. Played by Thomas Jay Ryan, whose first line is to tell Simon to get up off his knees, commands the performance. Equal parts con man, poet, and provocateur, Henry chain-smokes himself into the Grim household. Hartley initially drew the character of Henry Fool as a modern Mephistopheles, tasked with collecting Simon’s soul. Henry encourages Simon to write the words he’s unable to say, he gives him permission. Through tutelage, editing, and encouragement from Henry, the work becomes a book-length poem. Though Henry is genuinely doing good in sparking Simon’s creativity, his presence feels more akin to The Visitor in TEOREMA (1968) as he becomes a curse within the Grim household. What follows is a volatile Bildungsroman that sprawls across years, charting Simon’s transformation from inarticulate observer to literary phenomenon. His epic poem that’s criticized as equal parts obscene, scatological, and piercingly lucid emerges as a work of pure expression. Hartley leaves us to judge Simon’s work by how characters react to it. The poem inspires readers, repulses Republicans, sparks violence, and goes viral in one of cinema’s early visions of internet fame. Meanwhile, the boisterous and pedantic drunk who performs soliloquies for anyone willing to listen lathers on the charm and floats around untethered; there’s something monstrous textured just below the surface. Upon learning he served time in prison and why, there’s no redemption arc allowed for Henry. He is the monster, as suspected. Imprisoned for the sexual assault of a thirteen-year-old. Hartley lets this knowledge poison everything retroactively. The mentor is rendered monstrous. The catalyst is corrupt and yet, his impact was undeniable. Henry’s confession festers, comes full circle, and becomes more significant across Hartley’s follow up films known as the Grim trilogy, FAY GRIM (2006) and NED RIFLE (2014). In this sense, the film shows a mentor who helps to awaken artistic talent, but ultimately the shame of that influence. This tension between gratitude and shame or creation and its contamination drives the film into darker territory than Hartley had gone previously. The film sets out for gritty Long Island mythmaking while immersing itself into moral darkness via vomit, sex, domestic abuse, clinical depression, bullying, child endangerment, murder, and death by suicide. The Grim household itself becomes a pressure cooker of violence and despair, culminating in acts of cruelty and tragedy that feel both absurd and inevitable. Fay ricochets between aggression and vulnerability. Simon’s mother, briefly stirred to creativity, collapses under the weight of what she reads. Even as Simon ascends, the wreckage accumulates. HENRY FOOL insists that influence, art, and corruption might be inseparable, and the devil who teaches you to speak might be the only devil you get. Preceded by the 1941 Chicago Park District short film SHARE THE CARE (2 min, 35mm). (1997, 137 min, 35mm) [Shaun Huhn]
Robert Bresson's A MAN ESCAPED (France)
Music Box Theatre – Saturday, 11:30am
There's little dialogue in A MAN ESCAPED. The story is told largely through the voice-over narration of Fontaine (François Leterrier), the condemned man. What little there is is mostly shared with a fellow prisoner—a pastor arrested mid-sermon—and largely concerns matters of freedom and faith. "He'll save us if we give him the chance," Fontaine responds to the pastor's advice to pray, "It would be too easy if God saw to everything." That Bresson, here, is concerned with faith is clear (the longer title "The Wind Bloweth Where it Wants" refers to the Bible passage the pastor passes Fontaine) but it's a very specific kind of faith—one which both inspires and rewards careful, considered action. Fontaine's escape is neither an act of desperation nor one of bravado. It is the result of calm deliberation and clearheaded execution, aided by either luck or grace. It is as meticulously carried out by Fontaine as it is captured by Bresson. The director has much in common with Fontaine, the man, escaped, and André Devigny, the prisoner of war upon whose memoir the film is based. There are the biographical similarities—fighters for the Resistance imprisoned by the Gestapo for their parts. There is also their focus on transcendence through action. Here, Bresson is at the peak of his mature, pared-down style. DIARY OF COUNTRY PRIEST (1951) is his first film to employ a cast of non-professionals—models, not actors—chosen for their blankness of expression, this his second. Bresson reveals little of Fontaine's thoughts and hopes. Nor is he given much background—we don't know where he comes from, the nature of his role, his family life, or the obstacles he'll face beyond the prison walls. We know him and we judge him only by his actions, and that is enough. What appears on camera is significant. What does not is not. Every detail is deliberate and revelatory. A MAN ESCAPED is Bresson at his best—the perfect marriage of form and content. Screening as part of the Prison Break!: Films of Escape series. (1956, 99 min, 35mm) [Elspeth J. Carroll]
Lotte Reiniger’s THE ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ACHMED (Germany/Animation)
Music Box Theatre – Sunday, 11:30am
What is it specifically that draws the eye to silhouettes? From the groundbreaking early 20th century filmmaker Lotte Reiniger to contemporary artists such as Chicago-based multi-media group Manual Cinema and subversive silhouettist Kara Walker, there’s no denying that this art form, originating as far back as the 1st millennium BC with traditional shadow puppetry, is as complex in the way it’s created and the reactions it can evoke as it is simple in how it might appear to the casual observer. (Reiniger once referred to herself a “primitive cavemen artist,” speaking to the apparent simplicity of her modestly intricate cut-outs.) THE ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ACHMED is not just a prime example of the art form, but it also has the distinction of being the oldest surviving feature-length animation, a consequence worthy of Reiniger’s achievement, even if a technicality. With a picaresque story derived from Arabian Nights, the German filmmaker’s precise cut-outs—made using a variety of materials, including regular and tissue paper, cardboard, and metal—depict the eponymous Prince Achmed as he embarks on a multinational adventure, complete with evil demons and sexy princesses, following a run-in with a sorcerer and his flying horse. Textured, colored tinting backlight the filigreed silhouettes, making it look all too modern for a film that predates Disney’s SNOW WHITE by more than a decade. Reiniger made it over the course of four years using a painstaking technique similar to what’s now recognized as stop-motion animation—if the cinema is truth twenty-four times per second, imagine how honest she had to be to photograph it, frame by frame. Even more intriguing than Reiniger’s output is her background; having worked under famed theater director Max Reinhardt and expressionist filmmaker Paul Wegener, her sensibility is thus rooted more so in the avant-garde than any traditional mode. This makes THE ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ACHMED all the more exciting, likewise canonical and experimental, reflecting both Reiniger’s clear legacy and her shadowy legend. With live musical accompaniment by harpist Isabelle Olivier, guitarist Raphael Olivier, and drummer Ernie Adams and followed by a Q&A with the musicians. Screening as part of the Animation Adventures series. (1926, 67 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]
Lucio Fulci’s THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY (Italy)
Music Box Theatre – Saturday, Midnight
Creaking doors, mysterious figures in windows, a derelict, but sentient house: THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY is a horror that both relies on and subverts common tropes, ripe as it is with atmospheric, arresting imagery. Though he’s sent warnings not to go by a mysterious little girl (Silvia Collatina) that only he can see, Bob Boyle (Giovanni Frezza) and his parents (Catriona MacColl and Paolo Malco) relocate from New York City to an old, abandoned house in Massachusetts. There’s something not quite right with the house, and the Boyles are quickly faced with strange noises, gaslighting townspeople, and unspeakable carnage. The third film in his unofficial Gates of Hell trilogy (which also includes CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD and THE BEYOND), Lucio Fulci presents a Northeast haunted house horror by way of Italian giallo. Though there’s clear inspiration from sources like Lovecraft, Henry James, and THE SHINING, Fulci’s take visualizes these American horror icons through his own lens, leaving behind restraint in favor of uninhibited violence. His camera turns as the plot does, focusing on the misty scenery and brutal, memorable set pieces rather than story. The lack of narrative cohesion only helps to emphasize the inescapable setting in which the characters find themselves. The film has a general look of pale translucence, a bloodless quality disturbed by shocks of dark red gore. From the first few moments, there’s a sense of desolation and inevitability of the events about to unfold; the prominence of the creepy kid horror trope in the film serves to emphasize that sense of bleakness. A common theme in Fulci’s work is at the heart of THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY: children as the ultimate victims of the failures and confusions of the adults around them. Preceded by Domenico Montixi’s RISORSERO DALLA TOMBA E FU...L'APOCALISSE (5 mins). Presented by Music Box of Horrors. (1981, 87 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]
Jacques Rivette’s JOAN THE MAID II: THE PRISONS (France)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Sunday, 1pm
Though it’s titled THE PRISONS, the second part of Jacques Rivette’s epic Joan of Arc biopic doesn’t concern itself with the subject’s imprisonment until nearly the third hour. Before then, Rivette continues the military focus of the first part, THE BATTLES, emphasizing Joan’s preternatural courage as a leading force in the French Army. Her force isn’t always displayed on the battlefield—as shown in an extended scene that occurs early in the film, her power is also rhetorical. This bravura, Shakespearean sequence finds Joan surrounded by men (many of them much older than her), almost of whom are trying to convince the King of France to agree to a truce with the invading English Army while she wants him to fight on to a decisive victory. Rivette, directing dialogue by regular collaborators Christine Laurent and Pascal Bonitzer, grants equal dramatic weight to each speaker so that the unique qualities of each character rise to the surface of the scene; when Joan starts speaking, her fiery passion immediately stands out. As in THE BATTLES, Rivette (the most actor-obsessed auteur of the French New Wave) seems mesmerized by Joan’s history-making charisma, and he isn’t the only one. Both parts of JOAN THE MAID highlight the subject’s effect on the people around her, making her seem like a movie star avant la lettre. Once Joan is imprisoned, several of the people responsible for her confinement take care to see that she’s comfortable because they’re so in awe of her—they practically cower before her celebrity. Their treatment of Joan makes her imprisonment seem manageable, which stands in contrast to earlier screen biographies of her life by Dreyer, Bresson, and Preminger. In fact, Joan’s frequently filmed trial gets reduced in Rivette’s version to a single title card; to include it here in greater detail would detract from the depiction of Joan as victorious. Screening as part of the Jacques Rivette’s Late Style series. (1994, 176 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Donald Siegel’s ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ (US)
Music Box Theatre – Tuesday, 9pm
“[Don] Siegel’s craftwork—the same steady job he’s been doing, unheralded, since the 1950s—only becomes art when it is no longer the norm, no longer necessary. In the summer of 1979, it is art.” So wrote Dave Kehr in the Chicago Reader upon the release of ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ, the last major film of Siegel’s career and arguably the apotheosis of Clint Eastwood’s restraint as an actor. Kehr also likened the movie, in “its gravity and sparseness,” to Robert Bresson’s prison film A MAN ESCAPED (1956), which may seem a tad excessive (you’d have a hard time detecting a spiritual quality in ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ), but not unwarranted on a formal level. Like Bresson, Siegel uses music and sound effects sparingly and exactingly, so that everything that occurs on the soundtrack seems dramatically impactful; comparably, Eastwood’s Frank Morris speaks little (though conveys plenty with few words) and defines himself primarily through his actions. We never learn why Morris got sentenced to prison or much else about his past, which makes him like a hero in an existentialist novel. And once he begins to execute his escape in the second half of the film, Morris practically has no identity outside of what he’s doing. Process becomes all. Kehr noted that since the title of ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ gives away its ending, the pleasure of the film lies in seeing how Morris accomplishes his task, not wondering whether he’ll succeed—and that pleasure is intertwined with watching Siegel work, as he elegantly creates tension with minimal means. (“It’s a movie about itself.”) Outside of the escape plot, the film is an elemental drama about life under authoritarian rule, with Patrick McGoohan’s unnamed warden punishing Morris’ fellow inmates by stamping out their individualistic traits. The warden is a perfect foil for Eastwood’s recalcitrant screen persona, which here comes to stand for unassailable dignity in the face of persecution. Screening as part of the Prison Break!: Films of Escape series. (1979, 112 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
Speak Truth presented by Doc10
The Davis Theater – See below for showtimes
Sandi Simcha Dubowski’s SABBATH QUEEN (US/Documentary)
Friday, 7pm
For a certain kind of person, growing up as an Orthodox Jew is an incredibly lonely experience. For them, a world primarily dictated by rules and restrictions, a religious rubric steeped in thousands of years of tradition, much of which, in a contemporary landscape, seems far more restrictive than expressive. The patriarchal, isolationist tenets of the faith are particularly prohibitive for anyone who isn’t a straight, cisgender male, and anyone who is still committed to Orthodoxy that does fall outside of those lines must live a life continually reconciling the expanse of their identity with the restraints of their faith. This grand, life-long reconciliation provides the meat of Sandi Simcha Dubowski’s SABBATH QUEEN, a documentary whose Jewish esoterica is comfortably couched within a universal story of breaking free from societal binds and of finding one’s truth amidst a world that says otherwise. It’s also housed within the eminently watchable “character” of Amichai Lau-Lavie, a queer Jew bearing the weight of a lineage of 38 generations of Orthodox rabbis. When he’s not strutting his glammed-up tuchus as the drag Rebbetzin Hadassh Gross at yearly Purim celebrations, he’s pushing the boundaries and creating progressive Jewish spaces in a quest to discover what it means to celebrate one’s Judaism in a 21st-century context, often to the confusion and consternation of his more conservative family. The great debate about tradition versus expansion (a Jewish story as old as time) is helpfully laid out in Amichai’s relationship with his brother Benny, an Orthodox rabbi whose path is at odds with Amichai’s. Modern Jewish audience members, especially those grappling with their own religious identity today, will likely find catharsis and refuge in the teachings of Amichai, carving a Judaism that supports queer expression, inter-faith marriage, and solidarity with Palestinian self-determination. As Hadassah Gross herself says, “Redemption will only come through transgression.” DuBowski in discussion with Roberta Grossman of Jewish Story Partners about identity and faith in a chaotic world. (2024, 105 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
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Kim A. Snyder’s THE LIBRARIANS (US/Documentary)
Saturday, 6pm
Like Julia Loktev’s MY UNDESIRABLE FRIENDS: PART I (2024), THE LIBRARIANS documents the breakdown of civil society as it’s happening—the film has such urgency that it’s challenging to discuss as art. Still, Kim A. Snyder displays commendable restraint as a filmmaker (Donald Trump is mentioned only once, yet the impact of his incendiary politics can be felt in every scene), and her sobriety makes the film’s content all the more chilling. Snyder’s subject is the recent book bans in Texas, Florida, and Louisiana and the subsequent harassment (and in some cases threatening) of librarians in these states. Many of the bans, the film reports, are said to be in the name of protecting children from “pornography,” but a review of the titles deemed dangerous reveals nothing pornographic; rather, the bans are being applied to books that White Christian supremacists find objectionable. Snyder shares some of the more egregious examples—How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, Queerfully and Wonderfully Made: A Guide for LGBTQ+ Christian Teens, and antiauthoritarian novels like The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury—and reaches the conclusion that the real goal of these bans is to undermine libraries’ ability to serve as safe spaces for queer people, people of color, and freethinkers generally. There are historical precedents for this kind of political action, both at home (during the McCarthyite Red scare of the 1950s) and abroad (in Germany under Hitler), and Snyder succinctly reminds us of these in building her argument against present-day censorship, which she presents as a sort of violence against civil society. I do not use violence as a euphemism: at least one of the librarians interviewed in the film appears with her face obscured because she fears for her life and doesn’t want to be recognized. Who would have thought that a film about libraries would address the subject of political violence? Yes, there are currently people who support censorship so much they will threaten murder against those who don’t conform to it. Snyder profiles some of the individuals and groups who pushed for the bans; they are all fascists, and they include Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Texas State Representative Matt Krause, the organization Moms for Liberty, and the cell phone company Patriot Mobile. I found it difficult not to be appalled and terrified by this lot, as they represent the worst of humanity, yet Snyder presents them in a clear-eyed manner. That THE LIBRARIANS confronts evil without resorting to hyperbole or Michael Moore-style histrionics is commendable, even virtuous. With a discussion moderated by Laura Murphy (Senator, 28th District) with Snyder, actor Henry Winker, Martha Hickson (Librarian/Film Subject) and Commissioner Chris Brown (Chicago Public Libraries). (2025, 85 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Tia Lessin & Carl Deal’s STEAL THIS STORY, PLEASE! (US/Documentary)
Wednesday, 7pm
I’m not going to assert that Amy Goodman is perfect—a cursory Google search turns up plenty of Reddit threads about how she’s failed some ideological purity test or another—but there’s no denying that she’s devoted her life to independent media, free of corporate bias and bureaucratic interference, and to a form of journalism that doubles as social justice advocacy. Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s STEAL THIS STORY, PLEASE! details not just Goodman’s life but also captures the urgency with which she tells the stories of others. The film traces her upbringing by liberal Jewish parents in New York, to her early interest in Phil Donahue—a telling influence in her path toward progressive media—and eventually to the founding of Democracy Now!, where she has reported groundbreaking stories for more than three decades. The documentary is as compelling as its subject; Lessin and Deal convey her affable intensity, depicting her as an energetic mover and shaker, as at home finding the story as she is telling it. The film opens with Goodman chasing down Wells Griffith, then Donald Trump’s energy advisor, at the United Nations Climate Summit in 2018—literally pursuing him up stairs and through crowded hallways as he tries to evade her. Goodman has no hesitation here. She doesn’t second-guess her resolve, nor is she embarrassed to look a little ridiculous in pursuit of an answer; if anything, that willingness is part of what makes her formidable. This is Goodman in miniature: beyond committed, perhaps even obsessed with uncovering the mess beneath the all-too-tidy narratives of mainstream media. Much like her reporting, the film itself serves as a necessary explainer for issues such as the corporatization of news media. It also revisits some of her most notable stories, including Chevron Corporation’s involvement in a confrontation between the Nigerian Army and aggrieved villagers that resulted in multiple deaths. The film covers Goodman’s infamous call with Bill Clinton as well, when, on the eve of the 2000 election, he phoned into radio stations to “get out the vote,” only for Goodman to seize the opportunity to question him for nearly 30 minutes. As shrewd as she can be, there are moments when the stories she reports appear to affect her deeply; in another rebuttal of mainstream media norms, Goodman suggests that even the most rigorous journalists need not divorce feeling from fact. Followed by a Q&A with Amy Goodman (via Zoom), Democracy Now co-host Juan González, and Lessin, moderated by Daniel Ash (President, The Field Foundation).(2025, 98 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
Spike Lee's CROOKLYN (US)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Thursday, 7pm
CROOKLYN is Spike Lee’s contribution to a rich cinematic subgenre, the autobiographical memory film. Like Tarkovsky’s THE MIRROR, Fellini’s AMARCORD, and Davies’ DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES, the film is based on the director’s childhood, and, like them, it’s designed to feel less like a story than a series of memories. It takes place in Brooklyn over the spring and summer of 1973, and for the first half-hour or so, Lee (who collaborated with siblings Cinqué and Joie Lee on the script) just rejoices in recreating this time and place. The weather is nice, kids play in the street, the music on the radio is killer, and people of all races more or less get along (the white neighbor played memorably by David Patrick Kelly is at worst an uptight weirdo). Lee’s filmmaking is as exuberant here as it was in SCHOOL DAZE, with the director trying out all sorts of cinematic devices as though he were a kid first discovering the medium. At the same time, CROOKLYN is as vivid a depiction of poverty as you’ll find in mainstream American cinema of the 1990s—one memorable episode revolves around the main character (a nine-year-old girl presumably based on Joie) experiencing embarrassment over having to pay for groceries with food stamps. Alfre Woodard and Delroy Lindo play the parents of five children, and they do a good job of playing parents as children see them—their performances are warm and a little larger than life. Critics writing about this are all but forced to mention that Lee shot one scene in widescreen without anamorphically adjusting the image to create a disorienting effect. Used to convey the young heroine’s feelings of disorientation when she visits her religious, socially aspirational cousins in suburban Virginia, the device is—at least from this writer’s perspective—one of the more successful formal experiments in the director’s accomplished body of work. Screening as part of the Black Girlhood series. (1995, 115 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
Jacques Rivette's CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING (France)
Alamo Drafthouse – Monday, 6pm
In 2012, the critic Miriam Bale coined the phrase “persona-swap film” to describe a previously unacknowledged genre, one that stretches from Howard Hawks’ GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES in 1953 through David Lynch’s MULHOLLAND DRIVE half a century later. She cites Jacques Rivette’s 1974 masterpiece CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING as an essential entry in this unique cycle of movies that focuses on the female experience by examining how two friends with contrasting personalities—one eccentric, the other more conventional—either swap or magically merge identities. The publication of Bale’s essay coincided with the rehabilitation of Rivette’s reputation when a number of his major films that were previously difficult to see started to become more widely available in the wake of his 2009 retirement. Based on a 2017 restoration of the original 16mm elements by France’s Centre National du Cinéma, the movie’s colors are now tighter than ever, while the plentiful grain within its Academy aspect ratio is beautifully preserved—at times giving the image the quality of a pointillist painting. But the irresistible central performances—by two actresses with pointedly contrasting styles (the theatrically trained Dominique Labourier as Celine and the natural-born movie star Juliet Berto as Julie)—have always been and still are the main draw. Berto and Labourier, who also co-wrote, have admitted to consciously drawing on Bergman’s PERSONA for inspiration (while Rivette, more typically, was thinking of Hawks) as they created the scenario of a magician befriending a librarian and, with the aid of a psychotropic hard candy, entering into a “house of fiction.” This location is a literal Parisian mansion inside of which the same 19th-century mystery story (involving a love triangle and the murder of a young girl) plays out each time the women pay it a visit. Eduardo de Gregorio, Rivette’s regular co-writer during this period, apparently scripted these “film-within-a-film” scenes based on two stories by Henry James. The way Celine and Julie start out as passive spectators of the Jamesian mystery but gradually become active participants in its plot underscores the most intellectually provocative aspect of this otherwise supremely playful opus: A lot of filmmakers have made great movies about the process of making movies—but only Rivette made a great one about the process of watching them. The result is one rabbit hole I am happy to go down again and again. Screening as part of Queer Film Theory 101. (1974, 194 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]
Gabriel Mascaro’s THE BLUE TRAIL (Brazil/Mexico/Chile/Netherlands)
Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
In a near-future Brazil, elderly people are treated like second-class citizens, forced by the government at a mandated age to give up their employment, enter the custody of their children, and relocate to a retirement colony. A government slogan reads “The future is for everyone,” but it’s entirely obvious this program, created to ostensibly boost the economy, is nothing but textbook paternalism that could stand in for any number of real-world authoritarian operations. One woman, the widowed Tereza, refuses to comply. When the age of forced retirement is lowered to 75, the 77-year-old Tereza seeks to escape her fate. Unable to legally secure a plane ticket, she improvises a multi-vehicle journey across the Amazon with whomever is willing to help her. THE BLUE TRAIL becomes a minor-key picaresque as Tereza alternately joins the company of a heartbroken skipper, an alcoholic gambling addict, and an atheist who sells digital Bibles. Pointedly, it’s the latter—an older, resourceful woman who literally bought her own freedom from the government—with whom Tereza finds the strongest and most emancipatory connection. Despite its dystopian setting and on-the-lam narrative, there isn’t a lot of urgency to THE BLUE TRAIL; rather, the film floats along lazily as if it were itself a riverboat, scrappy but majestic as it wends through breathtaking Amazonian vistas filmed in richly saturated colors. The odyssey is accompanied by an eclectic musical score and speckled with surrealistic flourishes, often involving animals, as in the “blue drool snail” that gives the film its title. I don’t know if the idiom “blue hair” exists in Portuguese, but this gastropod is plenty metaphorical in other ways as a slow, ancient creature that takes its time making its own path, and that secretes a hallucinogenic liquid coveted by many. And who says old things aren’t useful? (2025, 86 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
Lina Wertmüller's THE SEDUCTION OF MIMI (Italy)
Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
Lina Wertmüller’s THE SEDUCTION OF MIMI combines the wonderfully intriguing—albeit disorienting—political nuances of Italian cinema with a sort of broad comedy that has at its center Giancarlo Giannini’s Chaplinesque charm. Wertmüller’s breakout hit follows Giannini’s Mimi, a Sicilian laborer, as he goes north to find work after a run-in with the mafia, having voted communist out of disdain for the status quo. There he finds a better job, and a better lover, his own wife refusing to have sex with him while his mistress pledges herself only to him. In true tragicomic fashion, it’s all downhill from there. Wertmüller, who also wrote the script, rewards Mimi for his conviction but then punishes him when he begins to experience happiness by virtue of traditionally bourgeois ideals. He’s not so much a character, much less a man, as he is Wertmüller’s lab rat, put to test in a political maze that rewards principles with cheese and hypocrisy with poison. (1971, 121 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Kat Sachs]
Nicholas Ray's IN A LONELY PLACE (US)
Alamo Drafthouse – Monday, 7:15pm
Let's set aside for a moment the convention that IN A LONELY PLACE is another of Nicholas Ray's sub rosa memoirs, charting the decline of his marriage to Gloria Grahame; that the apartment complex Bogart and Grahame's LONELY lovers live in is a replica of one of Ray's own early Hollywood residences; that screenwriter Dixon Steele (Bogart) is in some way a stand-in for Ray's own Hollywood disaffection: an "abnormal" man isolated among jocular thieves and pretty louts. What's up on the screen is enough to satisfy us without resorting to biographical criticism: that is, a film whose wit, maturity, and bruised romanticism defy us to subdue or deconstruct them. LONELY is the most perfect sort of romance: one that shows the lover revealed as a "tyrannical detective" (Bogart is Spade even when he isn't); one that squeezes out a little of our own optimism as we watch suspicion roast our heroes alive. It is the most perfect sort of mystery: one that succeeds in making its own solution entirely irrelevant before it's revealed. Finally, it is the most perfect sort of noir: one that isn't. The tropes are here, but LONELY is as much about the impossible hope of shoehorning real and immutable suffering into a Hollywood film circa 1950 as about the gruesome deaths of hat-check girls or the fatality of character. They don't make 'em like this anymore—and, like the man says, they never really did. If anyone's counting, LONELY may be the best Bogart movie ever made, and it certainly contains his best performance. More to the point, it is one of the great American sound films: turning star-power and genre both into deadly weapons for getting under our skin. (1950, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Jeremy M. Davies]
Lee Chang-dong's PEPPERMINT CANDY (South Korea)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm
Not only is PEPPERMINT CANDY a searing character study; it’s also a useful introduction to South Korean history in the last two decades of the 20th century. Moreover, each aspect of the film reinforces the other, resulting in something of an Erich Fromm-like social-psychological assessment of the national character. Young-ho, played by Sol Kyung-gu in a relentlessly intense performance, represents all the worst qualities of the modern South Korean psyche. Shortly into his military service in 1980—the year that South Korea’s military staged a coup d’état and declared martial law—Young-ho accidentally kills a college student as a result of wanting to look tough with a rifle. When he transitions out of the military to the police force during the height of the military dictatorship later in the decade, he begins to torture the suspects he picks up, seeming to take pleasure from inflicting pain. During South Asia’s economic boom in the early 1990s, he becomes a businessman and abandons all morals in his pursuit of money; and when he loses his job at the end of the decade, he declares himself worthless and makes a pathetic spectacle of himself at a high school reunion before committing suicide by jumping in front of a train. One of the brilliant devices of Lee Chang-dong’s screenplay is to tell this story backward, beginning with Young-ho’s suicide, then presenting episodes that go further and further back in time, as if digging for clues to his self-destruction. Young-ho almost never emerges as likable in this journey: besides being a sadist, he’s also a reckless narcissist who cheats on his wife and hurts the only woman he ever loves. (His eternal feminine is played by the great actress Moon So-ri, seen here in her screen debut; her second film would be Lee’s even better OASIS [2002].) The visual style is unforgiving. Lee’s favorite approach to a scene is to film the whole thing from one position (pointed down from a slightly elevated position, if possible) so that everyone seems trapped in the shot. This analytical aesthetic, replete with depictions of cruelty, might bring to mind Michael Haneke’s films, but Lee is ultimately a humanist. He wants to assess South Korea’s psychological problems not to wallow in them, but in the hopes of solving them. PEPPERMINT CANDY ends, notably, with Young-ho as a naive idealist who wants nothing more than to take photographs and be nice to people. Screening as part of the Psychodynamic Cinema series. (1999, 130 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Baloji’s OMEN (International)
Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 12pm
In his feature film debut, Belgian-Congolese rapper, musician and filmmaker Baloji, (whose name, ironically, means sorcerer in Swahili), considers four people targeted with accusations of witchcraft in his native Congo. The first, Koffi (Marc Zinga), is going back to Kinshasa, the capital city of Democratic Republic of the Congo, from Brussels, where he lives with his girlfriend, a white woman who’s pregnant with their twins and whom he plans to marry. He’s making the visit to get the approval of his family, though we soon learn he’s practically estranged from them as a result of a large birthmark on his face that they say is a zabolo—the mark of the devil. His father seems to be avoiding Koffi in his work at the mines, while his mother refuses to let him in her house. At an outdoor get-together his nose begins to bleed on the newborn baby of one of his sisters, the outsized reaction to which sets into motion the film’s events. Centered in addition to Koffi, his sister and another of his family members whom I won’t divulge here as those targeted for witchcraft, Baloj also includes a young boy who lives on the street and uses the accusations to his advantage as the leader of a small wrestling gang. The boy is mourning the loss of his sister, which seems to fuel the conflict they have with another such group. As the film follows Koffi during his short trip, Tshala (Eliane Umuhire, who appeared in the 2021 film NEPTUNE FROST), also emerges as a central figure. Though not marked by the devil, she’s distanced from her family as the result of her being in a polyamorous relationship with a younger man; they’re moving to South Africa, like Koffi moved to Belgium, to disconnect further from familial and cultural repression. Baloji fragments the narrative to disorienting effect, perhaps mimicking the way one might feel to be so removed from people and beliefs once so close to them. The occasional magic realist elements reinforce the other, bringing into perspective the idea of sorcery in relation to the natural, so-called “real” world. Screening as part of the African Cinema: From Independence to Now lecture series. (2023, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
Rowdy Harrington’s ROAD HOUSE (US)
Music Box Theatre – Thursday, 9pm
I recently came across a video of a live performance of Patrick Swayze singing his single “She’s Like the Wind” from the DIRTY DANCING soundtrack. Always one of my favorite tracks off that album, I was especially struck this time watching Swayze perform by his leaning into a complete and romantic yearning. He’s an interesting figure amid Reagan-era hypermasculinity. A repeated line in ROAD HOUSE has characters remarking to Swayze’s professional bouncer, Dalton, “I thought you’d be bigger”—not in a critical way, just surprised and impressed, as is in the case of Elizabeth Clay (Kelly Lynch), a local doctor who can’t help but fall for him. Dalton has the quiet resolve of ‘80s icons, but he stands out both in his dancer’s physicality, his looks of longing, and his sensitive persona. ROAD HOUSE purposefully underscores a female gaze throughout, choices like its neon pink opening credits also subtly undercutting its more overt male gaze-y moments. After being recruited to help improve a rundown Missouri bar, the Double Deuce, Dalton faces violent pushback from a local corrupt businessman (Ben Gazzara, playing the perfect smalltown villain), all while struggling with a complicated past. ROAD HOUSE is over the top, filled with memorable one liners and aggressive music stingers that highlight the action sequences. Swayze, along with the excellent supporting cast, keep the film’s tone in balance, aware of exactly what kind of movie ROAD HOUSE is. Noteworthy, too, is the close relationship between Dalton and his old friend Wade (Sam Elliott), which ends up centering the film more than his steamy romance with Elizabeth; it’s a precursor to the homoerotic relationship that grounds a later film of Swayze’s, POINT BREAK (1991). Co-presented by the Beer Culture Center. (1989, 114 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
Julian Glander's BOYS GO TO JUPITER (US/Animation)
Alamo Drafthouse – Tuesday, 7pm
Will anyone handle the monotonous horrors of our contemporary gig economy culture with such whimsical artistry as Julian Glander? The writer/director/composer/3D animator behind BOYS GO TO JUPITER has crafted a potent and heartwarming treatise on the pitfalls of late-stage capitalism that doubles as a hilariously inventive computer-animated hangout film. Glander’s world, all bright pastels filling up painterly frames, reimagines Christmastime Florida as a grand geometric landscape filled with colorful humans of all shapes and sizes navigating a world absurdly similar to our own. The episodic proceedings follow the grindset mindset-obsessed Billy 5000 (Jack Corbett, in a bit of meta-casting considering his notoriety as the “Planet Money” TikTok guy), as he spends his precious teenage days avoiding his goofy friends and clingy younger brother to deliver food through the familiarly exploitative Grubster app (“Have a Grubby day!” becomes a familiar refrain throughout). There's a larger plot at stake here involving rare species of lemon, baby aliens running rampant, and a vicious capitalist juice scientist (Janeane Garofalo) pushing her research to the brink, but as thematically rich as the material is to dig into, BOYS GO TO JUPITER excels on a gorgeous aura of vibes. Glander’s electronic music (goofy and charming songs littered throughout) mixed with his exquisitely lo-fi animated scenes makes for a perfect hangout vibe to rival that of films like SLACKER (1990) or NOWHERE (1997). Glander fills out the cast with alt-comedy royalty like Julio Torres, Cole Escola, Joe Pera, and Demi Adejuyigbe, fellow artists with singular visions of creating meaningful comedy through aesthetically particular means. That Glander’s world is wide enough to make all of these voices mesh together seamlessly is a testament to how curious and peculiar his work is. It’s not spoiling much to say that Billy 5000 eventually learns that life is worth more than the gigs you stack up and the money you make and that the real joy of life are the connections you make. A lovely and meaningful message from a film featuring singing worms and talking dinosaurs—what could be more 2020s than that? (2024, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
📽️ ALSO SCREENING
⚫ Alamo Drafthouse
Ishirō Honda’s 1975 film TERROR OF MECHAGODZILLA (83 min, Digital Projection) screens this week. See Venue website for showtimes.
Jess Franco’s 1984 film NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND DESIRES (93 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday, 9:30pm, as part of the Terror Tuesday series.
Sam Firstenberg’s 1989 film RIVERBEND (101 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday, 9:30pm, as part of the Weird Wednesday series. More info on all screenings here.
⚫ Black Film Club Collective
Black Film Club Collective presents Matinee + Mimosas at Three Cities Social (1643 N. Milwaukee Ave.) on Sunday, 2pm, with a screening of John Singleton’s 1993 film POETIC JUSTICE (109 min, Digital Projection). More info here.
⚫ Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
Franco Zeffirelli’s 1966 documentary FLORENCE: DAYS OF DESTRUCTION (50 min, 35mm) screens Friday, 7pm, with Melina Avery, senior conservator at University of Chicago’s Joe and Rika Mansueto Library, and Dr. Jayme Collins, postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern’s Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, in person to introduce and discuss the film.
The China-America Reel Ecology (CARE) Student Film Showcase takes place Thursday, with Screening 1 at 5pm and Screening 2 at 7:30pm. Following the screenings, filmmakers from the CARE Program will participate in a Q&A with the audience. More info on all screenings here.
⚫ Chicago Cultural Center
One Earth Film Festival: Earth Day Action Fair and IN OUR NATURE screening take place on Sunday. More info here.
⚫ Chicago Film Archives
The CFA Open House April 2026 takes place Sunday from 1pm to 4:30pm. Drop by to chat with the staff, tour the workspace and cold storage vault, see a film scanner demonstration, and watch a 16mm film. More info here.
⚫ Cinema/Chicago
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s BİRDMAN OR (THE UNEXPECTED VIRTUE OF IGNORANCE) screens Monday, 7pm, at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts (915 E. 60th St.). Grammy-winning composer Antonio Sánchez will present a special live-score screening as part of the official program of 15th Anniversary International Jazz Day celebrations in Chicago. Immediately following the screening, a moderated Q&A with Sánchez will take place.
Also as part of the celebration, a panel discussion around Jazz, Film, and the Improvisational Architecture of Storytelling, featuring composers and film scorers Herbie Hancock, Terence Blanchard, and Kris Bowers, will take place on Wednesday, 2pm, at the Chicago Cultural Center. More info on all screenings and events here.
⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
New 4K DCP Digital restorations of two films by the divisive Portuguese critic-turned-filmmaker João César Monteiro screen Saturday in the New Releases and Restorations series: Monteiro’s 1989 film RECOLLECTIONS OF THE YELLOW HOUSE (122 min, DCP Digital) screens at 4pm, and his 1986 film HOVERING OVER THE WATER (137 min, DCP Digital) screens at 7pm.
Three films by Robert Beavers—EFPSYCHI (1983/1996, 20 min, 35mm), SOTIROS (1976-78/1996, 25 min, 35mm), and WINGSPEED (1985, 15 min, 35mm)—screen Sunday, 7pm, as part of the Robert Beavers: My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure series.
Sam Wood’s 1942 film KINGS ROW (127 min, 35mm) screens Monday, 7pm as part of the Painting with Light: The Cinematography of James Wong Howe series.
Jacques Rivette’s 1998 film SECRET DEFENSE (174 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 7pm, as part of the Jacques Rivette’s Late Style series.
Bahram Beyazi’s 1989 film BASHU, THE LITTLE STRANGER (120 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday, 7pm, as part of the Iran Through the Lens of Childhood series.
A collection of shorts by Martha Colburn, Peggy Ahwesh, Carolee Schneemann, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, and James Robert Baker (Total approx. 60 min, 16mm and DCP Digital) screen Thursday, 9:30pm, as part of the Arthouse Vulgarity series. More info on all screenings here.
⚫ FACETS
The 21st edition of the CineYouth Festival takes place through Sunday.
Open Space Arts presents Helen Walsh’s 2025 film ON THE SEA (111 min, Digital Projection) on Monday at 7pm. More info and tickets here.
Sweet Void Cinema presents a Screenwriting Workshop on Wednesday from 6pm to 9pm in the FACETS Studio. More info on all screenings and events here.
⚫ Film Studies Center (at the University of Chicago)
The 2026 Cinema and Media Studies Graduate Conference will have an evening screening on Friday, 7pm, to accompany their slate of 20 speakers on the theme of Inter-Media. More info here.
⚫ Leathers Archives & Museum
Sébastien Lifshitz’s 2023 documentary CASA SUSANNA (97 min, Digital Projection) screens Saturday at 7pm. More info here.
⚫ Mouse Arts and Letters Club (555 W. 31st St.)
Luo Li’s 2015 documentary LI WEN AT EAST LAKE (117 min, Digital Projection) screens Friday at 6:30pm. More info here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
François Ozon’s 2025 film THE STRANGER (120 min, DCP Digital) continues and Pete Ohs’ 2026 film ERUPCJA (71 min, DCP Digital) begins screening. See Venue website for showtimes.
Eddie Romero’s 1973 film BLACK MAMA WHITE MAMA (97 min, 35mm) screens Friday at midnight and Monday at 4pm as part of the Prison Break!: Films of Escape series. More info on all screenings here.
⚫ Nighthawk (4744 N. Kimball Ave.)
Four documentary shorts by Ciat Conlin screen Wednesday at 7:30pm.
⚫ Siskel Film Center
The Chicago Palestine Film Festival continues through Thursday. For more info, including a complete schedule, visit here. Please note that multiple screenings are sold out.
Huo Meng’s 2025 film LIVING THE LAND (132 min, DCP Digital) screens this week. See Venue website for showtimes. More info on all screenings here.
CINE-LIST: April 17 - April 23, 2026
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Elspeth J. Carroll, Maxwell Courtright, Jeremy M. Davies, Megan Fariello, Shaun Huhn, Ben Kaye, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Michael Glover Smith