Runs & Limited Engagements

Was Marcel Duchamp the most important artist of the twentieth century? This substantial yet accessible overview makes a compelling case for the man who painted a mustache on the Mona Lisa and turned a urinal into an art exhibit. After causing an uproar with his 1912 painting Nude Descending a Staircase, Duchamp abandoned painting, along with such encumbrances as taste, tradition, seriousness, and absolutes. His goal was to make "works of art that are not works of art" but rather concepts and creative gestures that are completed by the spectator. Pop Art, Fluxus, post-modernism, conceptual art, performance art, and much else marched (and continues to march) through the door that Duchamp kicked open. Duchamp's works are presented with widescreen flair, along with material from his notebooks, archival interviews, and contemporary interviews with art historians, curators, and artists including Marina Abramović, Michel Gondry, Jeff Koons, Edward Ruscha, Carolee Schneeman, and Calvin Tomkins. DCP digital widescreen. (MR)

Alex Gibney, the prolific auteur of such award-winning investigative documentaries as TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE and GOING CLEAR, sets his sights on recent Russian history in this portrait of former oil billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The title's nod to CITIZEN KANE is apt; like Orson Welles's fictional tycoon, Khodorkovsky is seen as a bundle of contradictions who is as charismatic as he is confounding. From humble half-Jewish roots, he rose during the "gangster capitalism" phase of post-Soviet Russia to become the wealthiest man in the country. After helping to engineer the ascendancy of Vladimir Putin, Khodorkovsky grew recklessly critical of Putin's authoritarian policies, leading to his 2003 arrest on trumped-up charges, a ten-year incarceration in a Siberian prison, and current exile in London. It remains an open question whether Khodorkovsky is a martyr or an opportunist with too many skeletons in his closet, as Gibney sets this character portrait in a context of rampant wealth and diminishing democracy that extends far beyond Russia. In Russian and English with English subtitles. DCP digital. (MR)

The independent neighborhood video store is both celebrated and eulogized in this lively documentary recalling the heyday of what was once a democratic temple of high art and movie madness like no other. Director Westby (FILM GEEK, THE AUTEUR) conjures up an age when wildly eclectic selections of VHS tapes graced the shelves of these establishments like rare volumes presided over by intensely knowledgeable—and often geeky and eccentric—curator/ clerks. It’s not all nostalgia, as the featured presence of a handful of surviving mom n’ pop stores reveals, including Chicago’s own Odd Obsession Movies. Entertainment world movers and shakers including John Waters, Bill Hader, Thelma Schoonmaker, Todd Haynes, Nicole Holofcener, and more testify to the life-altering and career-making effects of their video store experience. DCP digital. (BS)

Born to Jewish parents in Kežmarok in modern-day Slovakia, Herz spent part of his youth in Ravensbrück labor camp, an experience of horror which may have obliquely informed much of his work, and which is directly reflected in CAUGHT BY NIGHT. Coming to what was conceived as a biography of Communist journalist Jožka Jabůrková, a victim of Ravensbrück, Herz went his own way, creating a nauseously stylized vision of hell on earth that is, with Wanda Jakubowska’s THE LAST STAGE (1948), one of only two fiction films made by a camp survivor about the experience. (Some of Spielberg’s possible borrowings in SCHINDLER’S LIST had Herz reportedly considering legal action.) In Czech with English subtitles. Imported 35mm archival print. (Description courtesy of Metrograph/Nick Pinkerton)

"Klezmer" refers to both a practitioner and a style of festive Jewish band music, rooted in prewar Eastern Europe. Recently restored to commemorate its 25th anniversary, THE LAST KLEZMER is a portrait of Leopold Kozlowski of Krakow, the last active klezmer trained in the original prewar tradition. Kozlowski is no relic but a robust, Falstaffian figure, brimming with energy and enthusiasm. The filmmakers accompany him on an emotional visit (his first in fifty years) to the village where he was raised, the nearby sites where his family was murdered, and the forests where he fought with partisan units. After the war, Kozlowski remained in Poland, composing, conducting, and performing, continually finding new outlets for his talents whenever discrimination closed off the old ones. THE LAST KLEZMER is a survivor's tale, filled with laughter and tears, as infectious and unabashedly emotional as the musical tradition it celebrates. In English, Yiddish, Polish, and Russian with English subtitles. New 2K DCP digital restoration. (MR)

Cannes Palme d’Or winner, Golden Globe winner, front-running Oscar contender and this award season’s international juggernaut hit, PARASITE merges a ripping black comedy with a thriller for one deliciously chilling ride. Family is at the root of this satire that pulls a series of sharp switcheroos to launch unexpectedly poignant social commentary. By a stroke of luck, some glib patter, and devilishly artful ruses, all four members of the unemployed Kim family score jobs in the wealthy Park family’s postmodern mansion, functioning variously as housekeeper, chauffeur, tutor, and art therapist. Director Bong (OKJA, THE HOST) craftily builds sympathy for the decent but gullible Parks, easy marks for the rascally shenanigans of this family of grifters, until the tables are slowly turned for a brutal look at the underclass who are at the mercy of the entitled. In Korean with English subtitles. DCP digital widescreen. (BS)

"It's a scary world, isn't it?" Miike's monumental mind-f---er is one of the iconic films of the J-Horror and Asian Extreme movements. It has provoked reactions ranging from rapture to revulsion but rarely indifference, and few would deny the skill with which its diabolical premise is meticulously set up and then ruthlessly carried out. Widowed for seven years, middle-aged TV producer Aoyama (Ishibashi) decides to look for a new wife. A co-worker suggests that he stage a cattle-call audition for a bogus TV show as a way to scout matrimonial prospects. Aoyama is quickly drawn to number 28 on the list: tall, skinny, soft-spoken Asami (Shiina)... Either you already know the rest, or you are best left to discover it on your own. In Japanese with English subtitles. DCP digital. (MR)

At its heart, IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK is a tender and lyrical love story. Based on James Baldwin's novel and set in 1970s Harlem, it centers on Tish (Layne) and Fonny (James), whose burgeoning romance is captured in the sensual, impressionistic style that director Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton developed in their Oscar-winning MOONLIGHT. But this is a love story that is deeply embedded in the larger contexts of racial injustice and African American family life. The latter provides the basis for two of the film's great set pieces, first in a delicate scene in which Tish reveals her pregnancy to her family, and later in a raucous confrontation with Fonny's disapproving parents and sisters. Seen in glowing flashbacks, Tish and Fonny's romance is framed by present-day scenes in which she visits him in prison, where he has been incarcerated on a trumped-up rape charge. A great ensemble cast is headed up by Regina King (Watchmen), who won an Oscar for her performance as Tish's fiercely supportive mother. DCP digital. (MR)

Vaginal Davis is a key figure in the history of queer music, performance, and video art. She emerged from Los Angeles’s 1970s queer and punk performance scenes, creating her own mythology during live shows with her “multiracial, maxi-gendered” bands. She turned to video in the late 1980s, mixing identity, fiction, and critique in satiric narratives, underground documentaries, and a video offshoot of her influential zine Fertile La Toya Jackson. In conjunction with the exhibition, The White to be Angry at the Art Institute of Chicago (February 1-April 26, 2020), Davis presents a selection of some of her most significant video works from the 1980s and 1990s and joins Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow Solveig Nelson for a discussion of the period. Presented in partnership with the Art Institute of Chicago and the Society for Contemporary Art. Digital Video. (Hendrik Folkerts, Solveig Nelson, Amy Beste)

In Lubitsch’s most famous film, Garbo satirizes her own saturnine image as a straitlaced Russian envoy who journeys to Paris to fetch back three straying commissars (Sig Ruman, Felix Bressart, Alexander Granach) but finds herself succumbing to capitalism, champagne, and a charmingly decadent Count (Douglas). Avoiding simplistic politics, Lubitsch (along with screenwriters Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett, and Walter Reisch) tweaks both the self-indulgent West and the self-righteous East, with laughter and romance working together to rewrite ideology. 35mm. (MR)

Winner of the Queer Lion at the Venice Film Festival, JOSÉ is a beautifully observant love story about being young, gay, and poor in a world dominated by machismo, evangelism, and possessive mothers. Living with his devout single mom (Mota) in Guatemala City, the closeted 19-year-old José (Salanic) ekes out a living by hustling up customers for a cheap restaurant. His main source of pleasure is furtive afternoon hook-ups in hot-sheets hotel rooms. When one of these hook-ups, with an itinerant construction worker, develops into a serious affair, José is faced with the difficult decision to abandon his mother and leave town with his lover. The film's frequent sex scenes are explicit and tender; its long-take style was inspired by Hou Hsiao-hsien; and its feeling for the bustling street life of Guatemala City is vivid and authentic. In Spanish with English subtitles. DCP digital. (MR)

Before achieving notoriety as a director of formally audacious commercial thrillers, Brian De Palma found his footing in the New York independent film scene of the late ‘60s, producing a series of oddball underground features that culminated with this scabrous comedy. Prefiguring his turn in TAXI DRIVER, De Niro stars as a Vietnam vet navigating the seedier corners of New York City, first as a pornographer surreptitiously filming his neighbors’ sex lives, then as a member of a politically radical avant-garde theater company, before eventually dipping his toes into domestic terrorism. Moving freely between sitcom-ready mugging, Godardian direct address, and gritty faux cinéma vérité, HI, MOM! would demonstrate the breadth of De Palma’s gifts as a cinematic stylist and preternatural ability to stage memorable set pieces. 35mm. (CW)

A real-life cliff-hanger thriller, this daring documentary dissects the 1953 British-American coup that brought down Iran’s democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh in order to prop up the reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In a transparent grab for control of Iran’s oil industry, which had been nationalized under Mossadegh, Eisenhower, and Churchill set the stage for the long and treacherous slide toward the nation’s 1979 Islamic revolution. Utilizing archival footage, interviews, and newly unearthed and reconstituted transcripts, director Amirani weaves a gripping tale of spies, turncoats, secret negotiations, and suppressed documents, honing in on the mystery of a missing tell-all ITV interview with British M16 secret agent Norman Darbyshire, in which Britain’s role in the coup is for the first time substantiated. Edited by Oscar-winning sound designer and editor Walter Murch (APOCALYPSE NOW, THE GODFATHER TRILOGY). In English and Persian with English subtitles. DCP digital. (BS)

Tsukamoto's cyberpunk cult classic unleashes a non-stop barrage of metallic mutation and mayhem. A diabolical metal fetishist (Tsukamoto) who envisions an all-metal future crosses paths with a horn-rimmed salaryman (Taguchi) who will unwittingly serve as a pioneer into the hard new world of steel and iron. Flesh merges with pipes, wires, nuts, bolts, and all manner of metallic detritus in ever more grotesque configurations, including a drill-shaped phallus that serves as the centerpiece of one of the most demented sex scenes ever filmed. Shot in gritty 16mm b&w on a shoestring budget, the film's junkyard bricolage fuses elements of Cronenberg body horror, ERASERHEAD-era Lynch, Svankmajer stop-motion, and GODZILLA-style pop-apocalyptic slugfests. In Japanese with English subtitles. DCP digital. (MR)

Raunchy and heartwarming are qualities that rarely go together, but this most unusual comedy/road movie is the exception. No self-pity seen here, when three men with significant disabilities set out to shed the shackles of dependent living, at least for a glorious pratfall-filled few days, and stake their claim to full manhood by losing their virginity in a fabled Montreal brothel that caters to men with special needs. A loose remake of the 2011 Belgian film HASTA LA VISTA, and based on the experiences of wheelchair-bound disabilities activist Asta Philpot (who fully endorses COME AS YOU ARE), it’s less about the end goal than the journey. Scotty (Rosenmeyer), quadriplegic amateur rapper and certified hothead jerk, forms a plan. Scotty’s paraplegic nemesis Matt (Szeto), a former boxer, and blind middle-aged Mo (Ravi Patel) join for an adventure into the unknown, with skeptical no-nonsense nurse Sam (Sidibe of PRECIOUS) as their driver. DCP digital widescreen. (BS)

Getting even, and possibly a bit more, is a two-edged sword in this final chapter in director Park’s “Vengeance Trilogy.” A sweet-faced schoolgirl is sent to the slammer for a sensational child murder she didn’t commit. Taking the old adage “Don’t get mad; get even” to heart, she spends 13 years behind bars ingeniously planning for the day of reckoning with the man who betrayed her. Soon the circle of vengeance widens beyond even what this ice-cold heroine had imagined. In Korean with English subtitles. 35mm widescreen. (BS)

Widely considered China's most important contemporary filmmaker, Jia (STILL LIFE, ASH IS PUREST WHITE) focuses on the city of Shanghai in this ambitious documentary, never before released in the U.S. The city's present in captured in stunningly composed widescreen images that emphasize the juxtaposition of decay and progress, often incorporating the hazy expanse of the Yangtze River. The past is explored through interviews with the survivors of such upheavals as the Civil War and the Cultural Revolution, their stories often marked by violent death and exile (the latter subject occasioning side-trips to Taiwan and Hong Kong). As in his other major documentary 24 CITY, Jia blurs the line between fact and fiction, with his muse Zhao Tao serving as a recurrent presence wandering through the city. In its latter stages, much of the film concerns China's cinematic past, with excerpts and interviews (including Hou Hsiao-hsien) evoking the often contentious relationship between art and politics. In Mandarin with English subtitles. New DCP digital widescreen restoration. (MR)

In Iran’s official submission for Oscar consideration, an Iranian woman adopted at the age of two from a Tehran orphanage by a Dutch family makes an emotional journey in search of her birth family. Eline Koning, aka Farideh, was abandoned as an infant at a religious shrine in the city of Mashad. With the help of a newspaper ad and a Persian-speaking friend, Farideh, now 38, ventures to Iran for the first time to meet three different families that have come forward. Each had abandoned a child at the shrine under tragic circumstances, and each seeks to claim her. Joy and tears mix in excess when these extended clans welcome her as their long-lost daughter. Stories of regret, guilt, shame and hardship are spilled, each one more wrenching than the last. The film builds to the tense day when the three families await the results of the DNA tests that will tell the tale. In Persian, Dutch, and English with English subtitles. DCP digital. (BS)

A zany approach to romance is the cover for a more insightful coming of age for endearingly flawed hero Jiu-bing (Lee), a disaster-prone would-be lover who has continuously crushed on perky classmate Bo-he (Shao) since they were both twelve years old. Bo-he proves a loyal pal but an elusive girlfriend. When she meets a hunky college man, and Jiu-bing becomes the focus of his landlord’s daughter’s girlish longing, both love and obsession prove to be blind. Actor Lee (SUBURBAN BIRDS, THE HANGOVER PART II), son of Oscar-winning director Ang Lee, comes into his own as a leading man, capitalizing on impish good looks and snappy comic timing. Presented in collaboration with Asian Pop-up Cinema. In Mandarin with English subtitles. DCP digital widescreen. (BS)

Currently scooping in awards by the armload for PARASITE, director Bong (SNOWPIERCER, OKJA) has long been the standard-bearer for a unique strain of fantastical horror-tinged Korean cinema. He followed THE HOST, his 2006 sea-monster hit, with a story in which the monster skews closer to real life. Dim-witted Do-joon (Won) is permanently tied to his mother’s (Kim) apron strings, the apple of her shrewd eye. Tough, sneaky and hilariously resilient, Mom thinks on her feet of necessity; she and her son both have nasty secrets. When a local schoolgirl is found murdered, suspicions point to odd mama’s boy Do-joon. Typical of Bong, the audience will pay big-time for falling for the irresistibly eccentric title character, who is hell-bent on protecting her son at any cost. In Korean with English subtitles. 35mm widescreen. (BS)

Following NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT and THE PEARL BUTTON, Patricio Guzmán's latest film completes a documentary trilogy that stands as one of the great achievements of 21st century cinema. Like its two predecessors, CORDILLERA centers on one of Chile's natural features, which serves as a grand metaphor linking the past and the present, the personal and the historical, the particular and the cosmic. The film's title refers to the massive bulwark of the Andes Mountains that surrounds the country, both protecting it and isolating it. Seen in both spectacular aerial views and granular close-ups, the cordillera (derived from Spanish for "little rope") becomes a springboard to explore the Pinochet regime's still-potent legacy, the current regime's efforts to deny the past, and Chilean artists' continuing struggle to confront that past, whether by working in exile (like Guzmán) or, in the case of featured documentary filmmaker Pablo Salas, by staying behind and providing a filmed record that stands as a bulwark against official state-sanctioned amnesia. In Spanish with English subtitles. DCP digital. (MR)

Exploring the mysteries of the cosmos from high to low is the astonishing task Guzmán has set for himself in a film so intensely personal yet so universal in its resonance that it stands as the crowning glory of an already distinguished career. In Chile’s Atacama Desert, 10,000 feet above sea level, astronomers gaze at the expanding reaches of the universe, while in the ancient sands of the desert floor, patient sifting reveals secrets. In imagery gorgeous to behold, Guzmán finds parallels between the sky’s macro palette of stars and the earth’s micro array of human remains, from pre-Columbian mummies and the preserved bodies of nineteenth-century explorers and miners to the bone fragments of “disappeared” political prisoners. In Spanish with English subtitles. 35mm. (BS)

Guzman's dazzling and haunting follow-up to his 2010 masterpiece NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT once again weaves together the cosmic, the personal, and the political with breathtaking grace. Whereas NOSTALGIA centered on the arid plains and crystal skies of the Atacama desert, PEARL takes water as its master image to explore the history of a country inseparable from its 2600-mile coastline. Beginning with a single drop enclosed in a block of quartz, the film flows with the sea through its various incarnations—as the home of the now nearly extinct “water tribes” of the Patagonian archipelago, as the vehicle for the arrival of the European colonialists, and as the dumping ground for victims of the Pinochet regime. In Spanish with English subtitles. DCP digital. (MR)

Action and melodrama, car chases, lurid affairs, and flashy musical numbers all figured into the Iranian cinema’s pre-1979 signature, as the nation’s filmmakers made a bold bid for the attention of the savvy entertainment-hungry audiences in the urban centers. Compiled from clips from more than 100 films painstakingly sourced from surviving VHS tapes and accompanied by insightful interpretive commentary by director Khoshbakht, FILMFARSI bursts with spirited revelations of the heyday of a popular cinema willfully destroyed and largely lost in the wake of the Islamic revolution. Repurposed Western genres and copycat films abound, from The Three Stooges to James Bond, but all with a uniquely Persian twist and unmistakable cultural coding. In Persian with English subtitles. DCP digital. (BS)

Linda Mary Montano is renowned for videos and endurance-based performances that dissolve the boundaries between art and life. In works like Art/Life One Year Performance 1983–1984, a collaboration with Tehching Hsieh, she spent a year bound to the artist by an eight-foot rope; in 14 Years of Living Art (1984–98), she wore monochromatic clothing, devoted herself to meditative practice, and provided monthly “Art/Life Counseling” at the New Museum in New York (1984–91). Her transformative videos draw upon her biography, from the murder of her ex-husband in the powerfully cathartic MITCHELL’S DEATH (1977) to the humor of the everyday. For this special evening, Montano performatively discusses her body of work, presents a selection of videos, and guides the audience through an interactive healing modality that alternates between laughing and crying, embodying the fundamentally empathic nature of her practice. Presented in partnership with SAIC’s Video Data Bank. Digital video and live performance. (Amy Beste)

Associated with the Berlin School movement that also includes Christian Petzold (TRANSIT) and Maren Ade (TONI ERDMANN), director Schanelec has been slower to achieve widespread recognition. Her unconventional, austerely beautiful style is often compared to Bresson's, although the deadpan, delayed-reaction humor of Aki Kaurismäki seems just as relevant. Winner of the Silver Bear at Berlin and high on many year-end Top Ten lists, I WAS AT HOME, BUT... is considered her most accessible film to date. The film centers on Astrid (Eggert), a stressed-out Berlin mother struggling to cope with life following her husband's death and the week-long disappearance of her 13-year-old son. This central narrative is enriched, complicated, and expanded through Schanelec's unpredictable use of digressions, subplots, time-shifts, and ellipses, including a school production of Hamlet, pastoral scenes with a dog and a donkey, a lengthy rant on the artificiality of acting in cinema, and an extended dispute over the purchase of a defective bicycle. In German with English subtitles. DCP digital. (MR)

A small larcenous family does all the wrong things for the right reasons in this heart-rending Cannes Palme d’Or winner, Golden Globe nominee, and Oscar nominee. A crowning achievement in Kore-eda’s string of films centering on compromised familial bonds (OUR LITTLE SISTER; LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON), SHOPLIFTERS fashions a family consisting of mom Nobuyo, dad Osamu, pre-teen son Shota, and sister-in-law Aki, all living on the precarious edge of insolvency with Granny in her tiny apartment. World-class skill in shoplifting supplements their meager income. Their number grows when Osamu brings home a five-year-old girl found shivering and hungry in the street. A devastating family unraveling is soon in the offing with a crisis that reveals that all is not as it seems in this cozy setup. In Japanese with English subtitles. DCP digital. (BS)

Looking fresher than ever in a new digital restoration, GREGORY'S GIRL was the breakout film for Bill Forsyth (LOCAL HERO, COMFORT AND JOY), who spearheaded the emergence of an indigenous Scottish cinema before his career foundered on the shoals of Hollywood. Gawky, gangly 16-year-old Gregory (Sinclair) loses his position on the school soccer team—and his heart—to new arrival Dorothy (Hepburn). Striving to impress the goal-scoring goddess, he finally wins a date, but his longed-for rendezvous takes some unexpected detours in the course of an extended summer's-eve odyssey. With off-kilter humor, a rich array of supporting characters, and a prescient sense of gender-role subversion, GREGORY'S GIRL captured the splendors and miseries of adolescent love with a breezy charm that put more heavy-breathing American puberty comedies of the era to shame. New 2K DCP digital restoration. This version retains the Scottish accents that were de-burred for the film's American release. (MR)

Cultural traditions die hard, and the patriarchy still sets the rules in these mini-dramas revolving around an age-old fetishized ideal of female purity. Seven young women bravely face the question of virginity as the condition that may decide their fates for better or for worse. Despite her best friend’s advice, Shabaneh, a seamstress in a couture dress shop, longs to confide her closely guarded shameful secret to her fiancé. Negar is troubled by her fiancé’s prying and her prospective mother-in-law’s intimate request, while Fereshteh’s husband-to-be makes a non-negotiable demand. A paper marriage is a trap for Afghan immigrant Nahid, and marriage is a less than willing choice for Niloofar and Sugar, while Rahil seeks a dire antidote to betrayal. In Persian with English subtitles. DCP digital. (BS)