1
Jean-Pierre Melville: Criminal Codes
(Siskel)
A breathtaking array of eleven exemplars of the French master’s astringently gorgeous work, including “Le Samouraï,” “The Red Circle,” “Bob The Gambler,” “Army of Shadows” and an extended digital restoration of “Léon Morin, Priest.” I know where I’m going to be eleven nights in June.
2
It Comes At Night
(Opens Friday, June 9)
Two families make uneasy peace in brooding post-apocalyptic horror from Trey Edward Shults, director of 2015’s family tempest “Krisha.” With Joel Edgerton, Riley Keough, Christopher Abbott, Carmen Ejogo.
3
Baby Driver
(Opens Wednesday, June 28)
Master of comic pop purees Edgar Wright plays homage to Walter Hill’s “The Driver” among other race-to-ruin action movies while also providing a jukebox musical: its young getaway driver scores each job to a propulsive soundtrack.
4
I, Daniel Blake
(Music Box, Opens Friday, June 9)
Ken Loach had retired from fiction filmmaking, but returned for his deeply moving, Cannes-prized melodrama about a middle-aged worker’s humiliation by the British health service after a heart attack.
5
The 24th Chicago Underground Film Festival
(Logan, May 31-June 4)
The world’s longest-lasting underground film festival returns to the Logan with dizzying and daunting dispatches from the bright and burning fringes of modern media.
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.