1 Fireworks (Chicago Film Society at NEIU, February 13) Takeshi Kitano’s haunting, gorgeous elegy to art and conjugal love is also a brilliant action painting of the wages of extravagant violence.
2 Police Story & Police Story 2 (Music Box, February 1-7) Jackie Chan’s greatest, most dynamic, most gratifying action marvels are restored and catapulted onto the big screen once more.
3 The Image Book (Siskel, February 1-21) The newest work from eighty-eight-year-old Jean-Luc Godard dips into the sizzling trickbag of his century of cinema.
4 The Wild Pear Tree (Siskel, February 22-28) Turkish master Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest survey of landscape and the human soul tops out at a teeming three hours and eight minutes, but it’s worth every lingering, poignant breath and breeze.
5 Play It As it Lays (Chicago Film Society at NEIU, February 6) Frank Perry’s 1970 adaptation of Joan Didion’s early sketch of Angeleno anomie, starring Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins, not available on video or streaming, is shown on a 35mm print from Universal Studios.
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.
Film Top 5: February 2021 Frances McDormand hits the road and the road hits back; Fred Hampton lights up the screen; a Korean family makes an Arkansas home; a regal if rocked Michelle Pfeiffer; and a pandemic-shot black-and-white relationship fizzle chamber drama.
