1 Human Flow (Music Box, opens November 3) Artist Ai Weiwei works brilliantly at commanding scale, and the 145 minutes of “Human Flow” captures in teeming, intimate detail the daily life of the nearly sixty-six million displaced persons around the world. Faces matter as much as massed figures.
2 Faces Places (Music Box, opens October 27) Agnès Varda is a bantamweight master of the lightly magical film essay, and her collaboration with muralist JR is a blissful gift from the eighty-nine-year-old artist.
3 Streets of Fire (The Front Row at Music Box, November 17-18) The first question is unnecessary: why is there a 70mm print of Walter Hill’s drenching dreamy pulp rock fever dream, the lovingly assaultive 1984 “Rock And Roll Fantasy”? The second: What! Only two midnight shows?
4 Suspiria (November 6, Cinepocalypse at Music Box) There’s a digital restoration of “Suspiria” on the loose, but Chicago Cinema Society’s own recently unearthed 35mm print of the uncut original version of Dario Argento and Luciano Tovoli’s tactile horror masterwork may be the finer choice. Lead Jessica Harper will appear.
5 Lady Bird (Opens November 10) Greta Gerwig’s hosanna-heralded second directorial credit, from her own screenplay, is a story of mothers and daughters set in early 1980s Sacramento, where she grew up; with Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf.
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.
