Chicago International Film Fest Schedule 2014
Here's what the plan currently looks like, O lookers at plans. Vagaries of sold-outs or me adding things could change it, but let's hope not.
The rise of Netflix streaming now adds another wrinkle to the "should I see it" game -- we've long since given up on seeing most things we're sure will get theatrical releases, and now we have to gamble on whether they're the kind of thing Streamflix will glom up. It's hell here in the Golden Age, I tells ya.
Friday, October 10
1:30 Viktoria (Maya Vitkova, Rumania/Bulgaria) Surreal celebrity emptiness meets Communist regular emptiness, satirically exploring the weird tale of the "Socialist Bulgaria Baby of the Decade."
6:00 The Word (Anna Kazejak-Dawid, Poland/Denmark) Described as a millennial Macbeth-slash-police procedural centered on a 14-year-old girl, this film had me at, well, at what I just typed pretty much.
11:00 The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, Australia) Two-dimensional monster illustration comes alive and terrorizes single mother after tragedy. This will either be great or terrible.
Saturday, October 11
2:30 Superegos (Benjamin Heisenberg, Austria) Chaotic con man hides out in psychologist's house, to the derangement of everyone involved. If this were a German comedy, we'd skip it, but Austria can surprise you sometimes.
8:00 Black Coal, Thin Ice (Diao Yinan, China/Hong Kong) Chinese noir feat. grim cop, gruesome crime, femme fatale, social catastrophe. Won the Golden Bear at Berlin, which is (probably) a pretty good sign.
11:00 The World of Kanako (Tetsuya Nakashima, Japan) Drunken ex-cop follows the trail of his missing daughter into the dark side of Japan, life, and his daughter. A robindlaws Recommended Film!
Sunday, October 12
12:00 The Midnight After (Fruit Chan, Hong Kong) Seventeen minibus passengers are the only survivors of a global pandemic. Then things get bad. mollpeartree and I were enthralled by Chan's 2004 body horror flick Dumplings when we saw it uncut at DragonCon, so maybe she'll come out to see this with us.
2:45 Free Fall (Gyorgy Palfi, Hungary) From the director of Hukkle, the funniest poisoning comedy I've ever seen, comes a surrealist montage of comic cruelty as a badly injured woman hauls herself upstairs and hallucinates truths about her neighbors. You know you want to.
5:15 Still (Simon Blake, UK) Photographer reeling from his son's murder steps off the sidewalk in North London and into a deeper urban cruelty. Should combine crime film and sense of place into a harrowing walk.
7:30 Buzzard (Joel Potrykus, USA) Horrible main character begins a spiral of failed con games in what looks like a millennial version of something like Night and the City except without the wrestling and the decent other people. We'll see.
Tuesday, October 14
5:45 Stockholm (Rodrigo Sorogoyen, Spain) Set in Madrid, so this meet-cute-turn-bad refers to the syndrome, not the city.
8:30 The Salvation (Kristian Levring, Denmark) Mads Mikkelsen in a Western. 'Nuff said.
Wednesday, October 15
5:45 Seven Little Killers (Matteo Andreolli, Italy) Seven 13-year-olds at the scene of an accidental death. Seven 43-year-olds implicated in the murder. Time-shifting crime flick sounds like a slam dunk.
8:15 Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako, France/Mauritania) Story of the takeover of northern Mali by the Islamist militants spawned from our recent Libyan misadventure. I haven't seen a Mauritanian film yet, and this one won a jury prize at Cannes, so there we go.
Friday, October 17
6:00 Concrete Night (Pirjo Honkasalo, Finland/Sweden/Denmark) 14-year-old boy follows his brother through the dark and steamy underbelly of Helsinki; will either be really strong and weird and unsettling or just ugh but either way will be over in 96 minutes.
8:30 In Order of Disappearance (Hans Petter Moland, Norway) Stellan Skarsgard plays the Liam Neeson character avenging his son with cold-blooded murderous gunfire in this ... comedy? Norway is up and down with us, but this could be really good.
Saturday, October 18
2:30 The Princess of France (Matias Piñero, Argentina) Radio theater troupe gets all stirred up when a young director re-enters their lives to record Love's Labours Lost. Play and personas tangle and oh I am such a sucker for this Slings-and-Arrows-Shakespeare-bleeds-into-actors-lives stuff it's not even funny. I'm even braving the dread robindlaws Not Recommended star to see this one.
9:45 It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, USA) Stalker horror as supernatural demonic presence; I hope it's even a fraction as good as it sounds.
Sunday, October 19
2:45 Fort Tilden (Sarah-Violet Bliss & Charles Rogers, USA) Hipster After Hours follows two Brooklyn girls to ... well, I guess to nowhere. Won the SXSW Jury Prize, which gives hope that it falls closer to Slacker than to all the movies that wanted to be Slacker but weren't.
5:00 Why Be Good? (William A. Seiter, USA) The box-office smash of 1927 is back! Long thought lost, this silent classic of virtue tested should be a rip-roarer, as these silents have been at CIFF.
8:00 The Editor (Adam Brooks & Matthew Kennedy, Canada) A Canadian giallo! If that doesn't get you placing bets, you're dead inside. Almost as dead as the actors in the titular editor's latest film!
Tuesday, October 21
5:45 Maestro (Léa Fazer, France) A roman-a-clef about the making of Eric Rohmer's last film, and a love-letter to all of those things. I suspect it will also be a feast for all fans of Michael Lonsdale (playing the Rohmer part), which I have been since Day of the Jackal.
Wednesday, October 22
5:30 Alleluia (Fabrice du Welz, France/Belgium) Oh, murder, where would film be without you? Transposes the Beck-Fernandez Lonely Hearts Killings (1947-1949) to rural France and gains a robindlaws Recommendation along the way!
8:30 A Dream of Iron (Kelvin Kyung Kun Park, South Korea) Our last film is often something kind of weird, and so I suspect is this documentary about a man looking for a god in the industrial (and literal) leviathan.
The rise of Netflix streaming now adds another wrinkle to the "should I see it" game -- we've long since given up on seeing most things we're sure will get theatrical releases, and now we have to gamble on whether they're the kind of thing Streamflix will glom up. It's hell here in the Golden Age, I tells ya.
Friday, October 10
1:30 Viktoria (Maya Vitkova, Rumania/Bulgaria) Surreal celebrity emptiness meets Communist regular emptiness, satirically exploring the weird tale of the "Socialist Bulgaria Baby of the Decade."
6:00 The Word (Anna Kazejak-Dawid, Poland/Denmark) Described as a millennial Macbeth-slash-police procedural centered on a 14-year-old girl, this film had me at, well, at what I just typed pretty much.
11:00 The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, Australia) Two-dimensional monster illustration comes alive and terrorizes single mother after tragedy. This will either be great or terrible.
Saturday, October 11
2:30 Superegos (Benjamin Heisenberg, Austria) Chaotic con man hides out in psychologist's house, to the derangement of everyone involved. If this were a German comedy, we'd skip it, but Austria can surprise you sometimes.
8:00 Black Coal, Thin Ice (Diao Yinan, China/Hong Kong) Chinese noir feat. grim cop, gruesome crime, femme fatale, social catastrophe. Won the Golden Bear at Berlin, which is (probably) a pretty good sign.
11:00 The World of Kanako (Tetsuya Nakashima, Japan) Drunken ex-cop follows the trail of his missing daughter into the dark side of Japan, life, and his daughter. A robindlaws Recommended Film!
Sunday, October 12
12:00 The Midnight After (Fruit Chan, Hong Kong) Seventeen minibus passengers are the only survivors of a global pandemic. Then things get bad. mollpeartree and I were enthralled by Chan's 2004 body horror flick Dumplings when we saw it uncut at DragonCon, so maybe she'll come out to see this with us.
2:45 Free Fall (Gyorgy Palfi, Hungary) From the director of Hukkle, the funniest poisoning comedy I've ever seen, comes a surrealist montage of comic cruelty as a badly injured woman hauls herself upstairs and hallucinates truths about her neighbors. You know you want to.
5:15 Still (Simon Blake, UK) Photographer reeling from his son's murder steps off the sidewalk in North London and into a deeper urban cruelty. Should combine crime film and sense of place into a harrowing walk.
7:30 Buzzard (Joel Potrykus, USA) Horrible main character begins a spiral of failed con games in what looks like a millennial version of something like Night and the City except without the wrestling and the decent other people. We'll see.
Tuesday, October 14
5:45 Stockholm (Rodrigo Sorogoyen, Spain) Set in Madrid, so this meet-cute-turn-bad refers to the syndrome, not the city.
8:30 The Salvation (Kristian Levring, Denmark) Mads Mikkelsen in a Western. 'Nuff said.
Wednesday, October 15
5:45 Seven Little Killers (Matteo Andreolli, Italy) Seven 13-year-olds at the scene of an accidental death. Seven 43-year-olds implicated in the murder. Time-shifting crime flick sounds like a slam dunk.
8:15 Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako, France/Mauritania) Story of the takeover of northern Mali by the Islamist militants spawned from our recent Libyan misadventure. I haven't seen a Mauritanian film yet, and this one won a jury prize at Cannes, so there we go.
Friday, October 17
6:00 Concrete Night (Pirjo Honkasalo, Finland/Sweden/Denmark) 14-year-old boy follows his brother through the dark and steamy underbelly of Helsinki; will either be really strong and weird and unsettling or just ugh but either way will be over in 96 minutes.
8:30 In Order of Disappearance (Hans Petter Moland, Norway) Stellan Skarsgard plays the Liam Neeson character avenging his son with cold-blooded murderous gunfire in this ... comedy? Norway is up and down with us, but this could be really good.
Saturday, October 18
2:30 The Princess of France (Matias Piñero, Argentina) Radio theater troupe gets all stirred up when a young director re-enters their lives to record Love's Labours Lost. Play and personas tangle and oh I am such a sucker for this Slings-and-Arrows-Shakespeare-bleeds-into-actors-lives stuff it's not even funny. I'm even braving the dread robindlaws Not Recommended star to see this one.
9:45 It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, USA) Stalker horror as supernatural demonic presence; I hope it's even a fraction as good as it sounds.
Sunday, October 19
2:45 Fort Tilden (Sarah-Violet Bliss & Charles Rogers, USA) Hipster After Hours follows two Brooklyn girls to ... well, I guess to nowhere. Won the SXSW Jury Prize, which gives hope that it falls closer to Slacker than to all the movies that wanted to be Slacker but weren't.
5:00 Why Be Good? (William A. Seiter, USA) The box-office smash of 1927 is back! Long thought lost, this silent classic of virtue tested should be a rip-roarer, as these silents have been at CIFF.
8:00 The Editor (Adam Brooks & Matthew Kennedy, Canada) A Canadian giallo! If that doesn't get you placing bets, you're dead inside. Almost as dead as the actors in the titular editor's latest film!
Tuesday, October 21
5:45 Maestro (Léa Fazer, France) A roman-a-clef about the making of Eric Rohmer's last film, and a love-letter to all of those things. I suspect it will also be a feast for all fans of Michael Lonsdale (playing the Rohmer part), which I have been since Day of the Jackal.
Wednesday, October 22
5:30 Alleluia (Fabrice du Welz, France/Belgium) Oh, murder, where would film be without you? Transposes the Beck-Fernandez Lonely Hearts Killings (1947-1949) to rural France and gains a robindlaws Recommendation along the way!
8:30 A Dream of Iron (Kelvin Kyung Kun Park, South Korea) Our last film is often something kind of weird, and so I suspect is this documentary about a man looking for a god in the industrial (and literal) leviathan.