1 Chicago Underground Film Festival (Logan Theatre, June 1-5) The world’s oldest underground film festival turns twenty-three, earnestly expanding the creative boundaries of contemporary narrative and experimental storytelling.
2 Sunset Song (Music Box) At seventy, long-stymied cine-swooner Terence Davies has hit his stride, with a second feature coming later this year and two more supposedly about to shoot: this period piece set in pre-World War I Scotland and based on a grim, locally beloved novel, is rich with the emotional swells and cinematic raptures you’d expect.
3 Blue Velvet (Music Box, opens June 10) Thirty years already? Well, “fuck you, you fucking fuck!” If you insist… and since it’s a restoration on DCP… maybe just a little peek through the louvers.
4 Dheepan (Landmark Century, opens June 3) Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes 2015, Jacques Audiard’s flinty new thriller takes on the contemporary European migrant crisis through the story of a Sri Lankan man, a former Tamil Tiger, and two female refugees, a woman and a 9-year-old girl, who pretend to be his family, and get caught up in violence in the suburbs of Paris.
5 Louder Than Bombs (Facets, June 3-9) Joachim Trier’s essential third feature gets a second chance on the big screen in Chicago. Trier moves from his Norwegian turf to upstate New York to describe the unfinished grief of a hurt, artistic family. Trier is one of our most literary filmmakers, in the sense that in movies such as “Reprise” and “Oslo, August 31st” he fuses the lyricism of cinema with the flow and structure of the novel.
Ray Pride is Newcity’s film critic and a contributing editor to Filmmaker magazine.
His multimedia history of Chicago “Ghost Signs” will be published soon. Previews of the project are on Twitter and on Instagram as Ghost Signs Chicago. More photography on Instagram.
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