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: November 2018 Vigo's body of work is small, but one of the most essential in all of cinema.
Film Top 5: December 2018 Restorations rule the roost, with Siskel's smorgasboard smacking on "Detour," "Wings of Desire" and "Andrei Rublev," while the Music Box goes yo-ho-ho for thirty-five with the Christmas Singalong, "White Christmas" and "It's a Wonderful Life." And Clint Eastwood, at 88, directs himself once more as a wizened, if not wise codger daring the law.
Film Top 5: June 2019 Classics time with Cassavetes, Hartley, Jarmusch, Pasolini and Chicago Underground turning twenty-six.
Film Top 5: August 2019 Chicago in the 1930s; Houston in the 1970s; a world of water; and the streets of Sheffield as if destroyed by distant nuclear war.
