Preview: Chicago Critics Film Festival
Though the heyday of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel has passed, Chicago boasts a strong showing in film criticism these days. The guys (because it’s mainly guys) who make up the Chicago Film Critics Association work hard across outlets to cover film releases and happenings around the city. On Friday, their fifth annual Chicago Critics Film Festival kicks off a week of screenings at Chicago’s classic Music Box Theater. A small festival by any measure – no galas, no panels, no frills – it’s big where it matters: the movies. More than twenty features will screen over the course of a week, and for those of us keeping track of these…
Watch This: Chicago’s DOC10 Film Festival
Next week, Chicago Media Project presents DOC10, an annual film festival that presents the most compelling documentary films of the year over the course of a few days. This year, organizers have partnered with the newly-revamped Davis Theater in Lincoln Square to showcase films covering subject matter from music and film to social justice and true crime. Much as I’d love to, I can’t fit in all eleven films in four days. But I am going to catch a few, which I’m highlighting here. Join me!
Watch This: Get Out
Last month, Film Twitter went all a-twitter when it was revealed that this year’s Sundance Film Festival secret screening was comedian Jordan Peele’s directorial debut, Get Out (he also wrote the original screenplay). Early buzz was effusive, a promising reception after a work-in-progress Keanu, which he co-wrote, failed to blow audiences away at SXSW last year. The team at Universal was smart to launch the film, the story of a young black photographer whose weekend visit to meet his white girlfriend’s family goes terribly wrong, at the January festival in advance of a February theatrical release. In doing so, they’ve carved out a fairly rare slice of positive momentum in an otherwise barren release…
Maybe Watch This: A United Kingdom
In 2014, director Amma Asante – former actress turned filmmaker – hit the scene in a big way with one of the most underrated films of that year, Belle. Actually her sophomore feature, she’d previously been named Most Promising Newcomer at the BAFTAs in 2005, a prescient prediction. This week, Asante returns with her latest film, A United Kingdom, the true story of a ground-breaking, continent-crossing interracial marriage built around a top-caliber cast that ultimately saves it from slipping into risky Hallmark-movie-schmaltz territory. It’s 1947 and David Oyelowo and Rosemund Pike are Seretse Khama and Ruth William Khama, the heir to the throne of Bechuanaland (later Botswana) and his white British…
Watch This: The Salesman
For years promoting the U.S. releases of foreign films, again and again I heard them described as “quiet.” Quiet and compelling. Quiet and taut. Quiet and affecting. It’s no wonder so many worthy imports fail to reach a large audience. Who wants to spend two hours watching a lot of quietness – which is to say, a lot of nothing – on screen? Which is why, even though it is in many ways, I will not describe Asghar Farhadi’s arresting new drama The Salesman as quiet. Yes, it employs more than one long stretch of dialogue-free action, and yes, the power of the film is in its nuances, the reaction…
Watch this: I Am Not Your Negro
“Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” -James Baldwin The hardest part about watching I Am Not Your Negro, easily 2016’s best documentary and most essential viewing, is watching it. More than once, I cringed, winced, looked away, closed my eyes; it was all I could do to keep watching, keep facing the stark reality Raoul Peck brings to the screen through James Baldwin’s words. In 1979, Baldwin proposed a book, Remember This House, that would chronicle his friendships with Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, each murdered for their activism. He wrote a proposal letter to his publisher,…
