1 Parallel Mothers (Opens Friday, December 24) Late-career Almodóvar is just as good as early career and mid-career; his best work continues to thrill and even astonish.
2 The Matrix: Resurrections (Opens Wednesday, December 22) It’s a family: writer-director-producer Lana Wachowski brings on novelist-co-writers Aleksandar Hemon and David Mitchell, as well as Tom Tykwer and Johnny Klimek (“Sense8”) as composers of a fourth “Matrix,” which has to be swell to have elicited a blockbuster budget in our era of waning corporate ambition and scale.
3 Red Rocket (Opens Friday, December 3) Another portrait from the other side of town from one of America’s greatest and most consistent mid-career directors, Sean Baker.
4 The Tragedy of Macbeth (Opens Saturday, December 25) Coen brother Joel directs alone in a highly stylized black-and-white adaptation of the Scottish play, with Denzel Washington, Frances McDormand, Corey Hawkins, Brendan Gleeson and Harry Melling.
5 Nightmare Alley (Opens Friday, December 17) Guillermo del Toro and Kim Morgan adapt the William Lindsay Gresham novel (1946) that was made into a harrowing 1947 noir; geeks beware.
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.
