1 A Brighter Summer Day (Siskel, May 20-21) The late Edward Yang’s four-hour 1991 masterpiece, a coming-of-age film, a love story, and a true-crime tale, is astonishing and a wondrous gift in so many ways and especially on a large screen in this digital restoration.
2 The Lobster (Opens May 20) An allegory without a single straight answer: Yorgos Lanthimos’ fourth precise, absurdist comedy (following “Dogtooth” and “Alps”), and his first in English, is the answer to the question: Is one of the worst bad-date movies ever made also one of the great ones? Oh yeah. If you can see below the surfaces and talk about relationships…
3 Viktoria (Facets, opens May 13) A girl is a woman is a country in the bold thunderclap of Bulgarian filmmaker Maya Vitkova’s magical mixed-genre debut feature.
4 Love & Friendship (Opens May 20) Bitter connivance brightly played in Whit Stillman’s appropriation of Jane Austen’s first, unfinished, epistolary novel.
5 Chicagoland Shorts #2 (Facets, opens May 14) New work by Daniel Davison, Lonnie Edwards, Aren Zolninger, Jim Vendiola, Brian Zahm, Eunhye Hong Kim, Shiri Burson, Monica Thomas, Mina Fitzpatrick and Jennifer Reeder.
Film Top 5: May 2018 Cinema from Euro elders, including Philippe Garrel, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Paul Schrader, Wim Wenders and a look at the life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Film Top 5: September 2020 Charlie Kaufman thinks, once more, as always, of ending it all; whimsitician Miranda July returns; Chicago Latino Film Festival goes virtual; Gerard Butler may or may not save the planet from a comet; and "Tenet" promises to time-invert over Labor Day in non-pandemic hotspot localities.
Film Top 5: October 2020 Chicago International, "Chicago 7" and "Candyman"'s Chicago; plus "WW1984" braces for social distancing and Kenneth Branagh again tunes up the tonsorial folderol as Hercule Poirot.
Film Top 5: March 2020 Eleven films on 70; forty-seven films from twenty-seven EU nations; and three singularities from Romania, the bayou and Chicago, Illinois.
