1 All In A Day’s Work (Siskel, April 1-9) Ten stellar examples of filmmakers tempting the boundaries of temporal unities, with 35mm prints of Jim Jarmusch’s “Night on Earth”; Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb”; “My Dinner With Andre”; Spike Lee’s “The 25th Hour”; Sidney Lumet’s “Dog Day Afternoon”; Agnès Varda’s “Cleo From 5 to 7”; and Tom Tykwer’s “Run Lola Run,” as well as “High Noon” and a 4K digital restoration of Michelangelo Antonioni’s “La Notte.”
2 The Works Of Robert Zemeckis (Music Box, April 13-19) “You don’t just walk into a store and buy plutonium!” The Music Box and Oscarbate present a week of almost all the films made by radical American mainstream filmmaker Robert Zemeckis. The 35mm attractions, alphabetically: “Back to the Future,” “Back to the Future II,” “Back to the Future III,” “Beowulf,” “Contact,” “Death Becomes Her,” “Flight,” “Forrest Gump,” “The Frighteners” (executive producer), “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” “Polar Express,” “Romancing The Stone,” “Used Cars” and “What Lies Beneath.” DCP versions: “Allied,” “Cast Away,” “The Walk,” “Welcome To Marwen,” “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” Passes available.
3 Idiocracy (Siskel, April 11) Wanna know what an “ur-text” is? How about a “hur-hur, hur-text“? Try Mike Judge’s miraculously doltish, vicious and visionary satire of the near-future of American consumerism (“Brawndo has what plants crave“) along with a “Gore Capitalism” lecture.
4 A Touch of Sin (Siskel, April 18) Zhangke Jia’s torn-from-the-headlines rendition of stories from all around the immense country of China: vital, electric, essential filmmaking. Comes with a “Gore Capitalism” lecture.
5 Renfield (Opens Friday, April 14) Nic Cage returns as a second-banana vampire, Count Dracula to Nicholas Hoult’s Renfield in a comedy-horror from director Chris McKay (“The Lego Batman Movie,” “The Tomorrow War”; co-editor, “The Lego Movie”), with Awkwafina as an aggressive traffic cop and Shohreh Aghdashloo as a mob boss.
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.
