1 Distant Voices, Still Lives (Siskel, January) A 4K digital restoration of Terence Davies’ heartwrenching masterpiece of family portraiture and the human voice held high. Essential viewing.
2 Cold War (Music Box, opens January 18) Swooping rhapsodies of gleaming, elusive memories of a lifelong romance between mismatched lovers in Stalinist Poland and other seemingly more conducive lands in Pawel Pawlikowski’s masterpiece.
3 The Owl’s Legacy (Siskel, Sundays and Mondays, January 6-28) (L’Heritage de la Chouette) The apparition of Chris Marker’s dazzling, weighty thirteen-part television series considering the relationship between ancient Greeks and Western society.
4 Capernaum (Music Box, opens Friday, January 4) Nadine Labaki’s post-neorealist adventure featuring a raft of terrific first-time actors, following a clever twelve-year-old boy who flees his parents, and to assert his rights, takes them to court for the crime of giving him life.
5 Glass (Opens Friday, January 18) M. Night Shyamalan mingles the Blumhouse cheap-and-dirty model with his past imagination, combining characters and storylines from “Split” and “Unbreakable.”
Film Top 5: August 2019 Chicago in the 1930s; Houston in the 1970s; a world of water; and the streets of Sheffield as if destroyed by distant nuclear war.
Film Top 5: September 2019 Monte Hellman's road movie masterpiece; a vast survey of the work of Iran's Abbas Kiarostami; an awards push for "Joker"; "Noir City Chicago"; and a portrait of Trump's wicked mentor, Roy Cohn.
Film Top 5: October 2019 One of Bresson's greatest; two versions of Hemingway's "The Killers"; Nina Menke's essential "Queen of Diamonds"; Almodóvar and Antonio Banderas; and an early 70s horror gem.
