1 Song To Song (Opens March 17) Terrence Malick’s Austin-set musical romantic comedy and reported dance with the devil, at least two years in the editing, stars Michael Fassbender, Rooney Mara, Natalie Portman, Ryan Gosling, Patti Smith and Iggy Pop.
2 Twentieth Annual European Union Film Festival (Siskel, March) Chicago’s essential annual film survey this year premieres feature films from twenty-eight EU countries (including soon-to-quit Britain) including Sergei Loznitsa’s “Austerlitz,” Bruno Dumont’s “Slack Bay,” François Ozon’s “Frantz,” João Pedro Rodrigues’ “The Ornithologist,” Doris Dörrie’s “Greetings from Fukushima” and Ritesh Batra’s “The Sense of An Ending.”
3 Blade Runner: The Final Cut (Music Box, March 17) The bigger the screen, the better. Sir Ridley has said this is the last tinkering, the final cut, for sure, well, for now, consider it done.
4 ATTENBERG (Siskel, March 11, 14) Athina Rachel Tsangari’s stylized, comic yet gloriously distanced 2011 movie pits a dying architect father against his still-unformed daughter. There is a wealth of awkwardness. Strengths include an extremely specific, heightened sound design, as well as a song score that includes work by Suicide, even though twenty-three-year-old Marina is told, “you’re too young to like Suicide.” (Double-entendre present and accounted for.) “ATTENBERG” is more gestural than dialogue-driven, but the father has a speech about the failure of modern Greece that is as piercing and pungent as anything you hear on the streets of that battered land.
5 Raw (Music Box, March 17) Julia Ducournau’s idea-rich feral fable is a magnificently calibrated, shiveringly expressionistic slab of female body horror. As in the best work of David Cronenberg, we simultaneously witness ruin and flowering transformation.
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.
