1 Chicago European Union Film Festival (Siskel March 1-31) One of the year’s most distilled Chicago film festivals: the twenty-sixth Chicago European Union Film Festival showcases twenty-four new films from twenty-three EU nations.
2 John Wick: Chapter 4 (Opens Friday, March 24) “John Wick (Keanu Reeves) uncovers a path to defeating The High Table. But before he can earn his freedom, Wick must face off against a new enemy with powerful alliances across the globe and forces that turn old friends into foes.” Well, yes.
3 Scored By John Williams (Siskel March 20-26) A survey of the 1970s sonic triumphs of Hollywood’s still-flourishing ninety-one-year-old maestro, including, all on 35mm: “Family Plot” (March 20); “Close Encounters Of The Third Kind’ (March 22); “Superman: The Movie” (March 25) and “Dracula” (March 26).
4 Inside (Siskel, CEUFF, March 6; opens Friday, March 10) All is cost: put Willem Dafoe in a box and look what happens. In this Greek-German-Belgian fairytale, he plays Nemo, an art thief, who finds himself trapped in a Manhattan penthouse with nothing but priceless works of art.
5 65 (Opens Friday, March 10) The writers of “A Quiet Place” co-direct the story of two survivors of a spaceship crash on an alien planet stocked with scary monsters… sixty-five million years ago… and it’s Earth.
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: January 2023 Epic movies at a single sitting, including "OUT 1," "Sátántangó" and "Dekalog"; two months of Billy Wilder movies in 35mm; and one creepy doll.
