Runs & Limited Engagements

Special Chicago Marathon screening added on 10/6!

Marathon running as the way to personal transformation is the subject of this stirring documentary covering the world's longest and least-known marathon - the Self-Transcendence 3100 Mile Run. An extended and demanding exercise that has been compared with walking Spain's Camino de Santiago for its life-altering effects, the 3100, conceived by Indian spiritual teacher Sri Chimnoy, involves running approximately 59 miles per day for 52 straight days, all confined to one city block in Jamaica, Queens, NY. Inspired by Christopher McDougal's 2009 book "Born to Run," director Rawal (FOOD CHAINS) follows the progress of a handful of perennial and passionately competitive international contenders in the 3100, while examining the ancient tradition of marathon-running as a spiritual practice in cultures and institutions around the world, from a Navajo reservation in Arizona to Botswana, the Kalahari Desert, and a Japanese monastery that venerates running. In English, German, and Japanese with English subtitles. DCP digital widescreen. (BS)

Varda (CLÈO FROM 5 TO 7, FACES PLACES) maintains that she has been a feminist filmmaker throughout her long and illustrious career. Her direct involvement in the women's movement in the 1970s led her to make her most explicit film on the subject. Characteristically, Varda avoids preachiness by embedding the political deeply in the personal - specifically, the long and winding friendship of two women: the free-spirited Pomme (Mairesse) and the more conventional Suzanne (Liotard). Their friendship begins in 1962, when Pomme helps the weary mother of two to arrange an abortion. Over the next fifteen years, the connection is maintained mainly through postcards, as they experience tragedy, affairs, marriages, separations, abortions, motherhood, and careers, with Suzanne breaking free of her straitlaced rural family to found a Family Planning Center, while Pomme sings in an agit-prop pop group (lyrics written by Varda) and travels far and wide (including a stunning episode in Iran). In the end, it all boils down to "one sings, the other doesn't" - otherwise, Pomme and Suzanne, though so different in personality and social background, are more essentially part of the larger family of women. In French with English subtitles. New 2K DCP digital restoration. (MR)

This most fragmented, self-referential, and self-indulgent neo-Western in history - produced, written, directed, and featuring Dennis Hopper at the height of his drug-fueled post-EASY RIDER triumph - gave the star the screen martyrdom of his dreams and the career-trashing move of his nightmares. A Hollywood film crew takes over a remote Peruvian village high in the Andes, carousing nightly in sight of the uncomprehending locals. The production moves on, but stuntman Kansas (Hopper) sticks around, only to become the sacrificial victim chosen to pay the steep price for cultural transgression. Referencing Godard and the Abstract Expressionist painters, Hopper slashes, splatters, interrupts, and deconstructs his story, delivering the narrative as a nonsequential pageant studded with dream sequences, hallucinations, and asides, and given breathtaking presence through the cinematography of Laszlo Kovacs. The cast is a veritable Who's Who of Seventies New Hollywood icons and hipsters, including Peter Fonda, Severn Darden, Samuel Fuller, Michelle Phillips, Kris Kristofferson, Henry Jaglom, Dean Stockwell, Russ Tamblyn, Sylvia Miles, and more. New 4K DCP digital restoration. (BS)

A mute little orphan girl with wise knowing eyes wanders into a Zambian village and is declared a witch by frightened locals. She is quickly cast in the dual roles of scapegoat and magic charm in this entrancing tale based in part on African superstition and mythology. Nine-year-old Shula (Mulubwa) is sent to a witch camp, where abandoned older women accused of dabbling in the supernatural are forced to live a sideshow life, on display to tourists and tethered by long streamers meant to keep them from flying away or from changing into goats. In a biting satire on patriarchy, first-time feature director Nyoni blends misogynist folk traditions into a magic realist fantasy filled with humor, haunting imagery, and irony, as the child is dressed and painted in a fanciful costume and exploited by a corrupt official who rents her out to cast spells for cash. In English, Bemba, and Nyanja with English subtitles. DCP digital widescreen. (BS)

The life and work of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, renowned for her signature polka dots, infinity nets, body-painting events, and room-sized installations, comes in for an in-depth exploration that charts her career from a troubled childhood in a conservative family that denied her evident talent, to the present, as the 89-year-old's adventurous work is accorded an international popularity that has been long in coming. Director Lenz explores little-known aspects of Kusama's life, including her pen-pal friendship with Georgia O'Keefe and muse relationship with Joseph Cornell. Her marginalization by the art establishment is detailed, revealing that ideas behind her most avant-garde pieces including mirrored installations and phallic soft sculptures were lifted by male artists including Andy Warhol, Lukas Samaras, and Claes Oldenburg. A breathtaking wealth of Kusama's life-long oeuvre is on display throughout, including film clips from naked happenings and anti-war demonstrations. In English and Japanese with English subtitles. DCP digital. (BS)

A bleak, bluesy flipside to BONNIE AND CLYDE, Barbara Loden's first and only film is a landmark in the evolution of women's cinema and American independent cinema. Loden, a remarkable, offbeat actress best known for her performances in husband Elia Kazan's films (SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS) and stage productions ("After the Fall"), plays the title role of a Rust Belt wife who leaves her family, drifts from bed to bed, and hooks up with a surly small-time thief (Higgins). Shot in a raw verité style, WANDA displays an uncompromising vision that marked Loden as a potential peer of John Cassavetes and Shirley Clarke, but she never got a chance to make another film before her death (at age 48) in 1980. New 2K DCP digital restoration. (MR)

This first feature directed by the producer/cinematographer of award-winning films including HOGTOWN and CHICAGO HEIGHTS is a warmly imaginative story of friendship, aspiration, the search for manhood and a model for fatherhood that moves elusively between reality and fantasy. Polar opposites, Sun (Kyson), a stringy cage fighter who loses every fight so as not to hurt his opponents, and Pete (Moler), a little person in a set of feathered wings, find a safe place in each other's company in a brief season that may fix the direction of their futures. The myth of Icarus holds sway over Pete, a painter who dreams of flying as he creates an extravagant avian mural on the town's lofty water tower. Stalled just short of full adulthood, loner Sun resists parenting the child he fathered while still a teen. Director Lee portrays the intersection of lives in flux, and the gentle point of departure as dreams are empowered to soar. DCP digital widescreen. (BS)

The 2 PM screening on Friday 10/12 is SOLD OUT!

Made in Chicago, this black-comic caper pays tribute to the city's musical legacy and its blues and bluesmen through a spirited fictional tale of a cursed record, based on a short story by Chicago writer Kevin Guilfoile. On the very day that Alan (Rosenmeyer of THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS), obsessed record collector and convicted felon, is released from prison, he resumes his search for the object that has been the holy grail of his life. Back in 1938, the wanted murderer Jimmy Kane Baldwin walked into a South Side studio and recorded a haunting (and haunted, it turns out) demo, then disappeared. A smarmy Southern lawyer (former SNL star Lovitz), a dotty widow (Anna Maria Horsford of A MADEA CHRISTMAS), and an arch-rival record-store owner (Conner of "Empire" and "The Chi") are among the conmen, musicians, killers, and goofballs who race through a saga that extends from the 1930s to the present, and plays like an urban legend. DCP digital. (BS)

PEPPERMINT SODA is an effervescent concoction with a surprising kick to it. An unheralded first film by a then-unknown 29-year-old director, it went on to become the year's biggest grossing film in France and winner of the Prix Louis Delluc (Best Picture), followed by an equally unexpected success in the U.S. Its free-flowing, episodic structure has been compared to that of a scrapbook. The story centers on the friends, family, classes, vacations, sulks, sexual misconceptions, pop records, bad grades, adventures, and misadventures of French-Jewish 13-year-old Anne (Klarwein) and her politically awakening older sister Frédérique (Michel) from summer to summer in the epochal years of 1963-64. In French with English subtitles. New 2K DCP digital restoration. (MR)

Two of the makers of Oscar-nominated ERNEST & CELESTINE team up for an endearingly goofy 2-D animated romp hosted by a wily wide-eyed fox, who invites his audience behind the makeshift curtain for a three-part production of barnyard theater. A hoot for the whole family, with enough satire and pop culture references to engage the adults and enough slapstick to keep everybody in stitches, this set of tales boasts an all-animal cast with some winningly human foibles and fears. In the zany, fast-paced "A Baby to Deliver," a stork feigns a broken wing and leaves it to the clueless combo of Pig, Rabbit, and Duck to deliver a bundled baby girl, but a wrong turn lands them in China. The Fox, neither as big or as bad as he thinks, is faced with a fitting dilemma in "The Big Bad Fox," when the eggs he steals hatch and the rambunctious chicks imprint on him as their parent. In "A Perfect Christmas," the animals hustle to replace Santa Claus after a farmyard stunt goes disastrously awry. In English, or in French with English subtitles, at indicated times. DCP digital. (BS)

FRENCH WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES
Fri., 10/19 at 4 pm — Sat., 10/20 at 4:45 pm — Mon., 10/22 at 6 pm — Thu., 10/25 at 8:15 pm — Fri., 10/26 at 6 pm — Sat., 10/27 at 3 pm — Sun., 10/28 at 5 pm — Mon., 10/29 at 6 pm — Thu., 11/1 at 8:15 pm

ENGLISH-LANGUAGE
Fri., 10/19 at 6 pm — Sun., 10/21 at 3:15 pm — Tue., 10/23 at 7:45 pm — Wed., 10/24 at 6 pm — Fri., 10/26 at 2 pm — Sat., 10/27 at 6:30 pm — Sun., 10/28 at 1:30 pm — Wed., 10/31 at 6 pm

It took a young Puerto Rican-born unknown from Harlem to bust open the stuffy world of post- WWII high fashion with new energy, color, and diversity, as seen in this vibrant profile of New York artist, photographer, and videographer Antonio Lopez and his collaborator/partner Juan Ramos. First known for his sinuous, boldly sexy fashion illustrations in publications including Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and The New York Times, high-spirited pansexual Lopez quickly propelled himself to the heart of a new international fashion scene as discoverer of models and actresses including Jessica Lange, Jerry Hall, Tina Chow, and Grace Jones. As the ringleader of a good-time "gang" that included Bill Cunningham, Grace Coddington, Karl Lagerfeld, Yves Saint-Laurent, Patti D'Arbanville, Joan Juliet Buck, and more, he was both arbiter of taste and charismatic object of desire for both men in women in a hedonistic pre-AIDS era. Director Crump includes a wealth of Lopez's art, personal videos, and affectionate interviews with friends including Lange, Cunningham, and Coddington, in a film that moves to the beats of the time with music by the Temptations, Isaac Hayes, Donna Summer, and more. DCP digital widescreen. (BS)

AMERICAN REVOLUTION 2 begins by documenting the explosive confrontations between the Chicago police and protestors during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The filmmakers (Howard Alk, Mike Gray, and Bill Cottle) then move from these clashes to a nuanced, compelling, and very timely examination of the unlikely relationship that was developing between the Black Power movement in Chicago and the Young Patriots - a group of impoverished, primarily white residents of the Uptown neighborhood who were beginning to organize around issues of social mobility, police brutality, and income inequity. This new 35mm print is the most recent preservation project of Chicago Film Archives, with the support of the National Film Preservation Foundation and Rebuild Foundation. CFA also commissioned sound artist Adam Sonderberg to create a seven-minute audio prelude piece using archival material from their collections. Preceding the film, it will provide an alternative way to absorb and understand the political and social turmoil that defined Chicago in 1968. (Michelle Puetz)