1 Chicago European Union Film Festival (Siskel, March 9- April 5) The Euro arthouse movie lives! The Siskel’s EU fest turns twenty-one, with over sixty feature films representing the (currently) twenty-eight EU member nations.
2 Loveless (Music Box, opens March 2) In a gleaming, remorseless masterpiece, Andrey Zvyagintsev presents a recent Russia as emblematic of a selfish, fallen world, where voices, stilled, catch on the wind, and children, lost, never return.
3 Foxtrot (Landmark Century, opens March 16) Samuel Maoz’s masterful story of the effects on a family after the loss of a son is hauntingly precise and relentless.
4 Way of a Gaucho (Chicago Film Society at NEIU, March 7) 35mm Technicolor Jacques Tourneur set on rapturous locations with Rory Calhoun, Richard Boone and the made-for-color Gene Tierney. Cinema for the eyes.
5 Happy End (Music Box, March 9-15) It’s Michael Haneke’s indiscreet, harm-of-the-bourgeoisie apocalypse, we just live in it.
Ray Pride is Newcity’s Senior Editor and Film Critic. He is a contributing editor of Filmmaker magazine.
Ray’s history of Chicago Ghost Signs is planned for publication next year. Previews of the project are on Twitter and on Instagram. More photography on Instagram.
Talking Screens: A Week In Chicago Film, March 12-18, 2021 OPENERS How condensed do you want your Almodóvar? In thirty taut minutes, the Spanish writer-director burrows inside Jean Cocteau’s 1930 play, “The Human Voice,” with Tilda Swinton as his physical and psychological blade. Studio-confined during pandemic days, it’s brightly, boldly interior in every way. Music Box Theatre; shown with Almodóvar’s 1988 breakthrough, “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.”…
