Film Top 5: January 2019

Distant Voices, Still Lives

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.”