Talking Screens, May 26-June 1, 2023: Nicole Holofcener’s “You Hurt My Feelings” is a Fine, Fierce Comedy | Sam Green’s “32 Sounds” is a Head Trip

“You Hurt My Feelings”

Talking Screens, A Week In Chicago Film, May 26-June 1, 2023

Nicole Holofcener’s “You Hurt My Feelings” is a tender, testy feat: a fine, fierce comedy that moves at the pace of irritability without cataclysmic detonation, only deepening disappointment. Plus, a little bit of money and a lot of neuroses go a long way. Holofcener’s movies move gracefully from minor-key moments and momentary mortification. Her latest feature stars her capable muse, Julia Louis-Dreyfus (“Enough Said”) as a New York City writer who can’t get the hang of her new manuscript; playfully eavesdropping on her therapist husband, she overhears him saying that he really hasn’t liked any of the drafts he’s read. Social structures crumble in this comic kammerspiel, including with her sister, brother-in-law, therapy couple David Cross and Amber Tamblyn and her getting-up-there mother (the great Jeannie Berlin, playing her now particular style of dotage but with strong whiffs of her mother, Elaine May). Near non sequiturs run riot: “Have a lot of wine, just act normal”; “Can you shut up and keep taking”; and, in its context, providing the biggest laugh I’ve heard from an audience in ages, “This is a Greek omelet.” “You Hurt My Feelings” is the sort of refined, observational comedy that should sway even the most infernally recrudescent of common, philistine cultural observers; the film’s Albert Brooks-like minimalism and Elaine May-style fillips and Holofcener petulance and hope tingles and tickles through its characters’ testiness and their readily sparked rudeness. You know any selves like that? Opens Friday at the Music Box, River East, New City, ShowPlace ICON, Lake, Wilmette and other theaters.

Much of the work by Sam Green, a nonfiction filmmaker of uncommon invention and diverse intention, has been in the “live documentary” format without permanent record. Those pieces, comprised of archive footage, new images, live music and narration by Green, include “A Thousand Thoughts” (with the Kronos Quartet), “The Measure of All Things” and “The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller” (featuring Yo La Tengo). (“The Weather Underground,” co-directed by the late Bill Siegel, was always a feature film.) The immersive and singular “32 Sounds” also began as a live doc, a collaboration with electronic musician JD Samson of Le Tigre. In now-frozen form (shown in New York and other cities at some shows with dedicated headphones for each viewer as a kind of aural nickelodeon), it’s a head trip of a special kind, taking the audience on thirty-two separate sound voyages. It rocks and rollicks: this is cinematic (and sonic) imagination at top form, sound with vision. Opens Friday, May 26 at Siskel.

Another live-action animation of a recent Disney animated musical hits theaters, with “The Little Mermaid” by Rob Marshall (“Nine,” “Chicago”). Robert De Niro is up to his old old-man tricks in “About My Father,” which sounds about like “Meet The Parents,” based on a screenplay by Chicago-area native Sebastian Maniscalco.

“Kandahar” is the kind of B-movie action work that we’re all going to miss when it’s gone, when the now-sputtering streaming services give up the ghost of production after they’ve destroyed the long-in-the-making tightrope act of international co-production that allowed individual producers, sales reps and distributors to service their own territories. We’ll always have Gerard Butler, though. Butler plays a CIA operative undercover in Afghanistan who must flee to an extraction point in Kandahar with his translator. (A proposition all too akin to that in “Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant.”) Director Ric Roman Waugh, a former stuntman, frames and cuts with vigor and Butler’s lug mug is always a captivating presence atop his masterful slab of stillness and motion. Opens Friday in theaters.

“The Passion of Joan of Arc”

Well and truly broken-up longtime Chicago band Joan of Arc reunites for a night as the Chicago Humanities Festival presents “Joan of Arc Presents Carl Dreyer’s ‘The Passion of Joan of Arc.’” It’s their first show since 2018, as they perform their original score to Carl Th. Dreyer’s 1928 silent film. Tim Kinsella describes the history of the JOA/JOA enterprise here. Music Box, Tuesday, May 30, 7pm.

“Paris, Texas”

Wim Wenders’ “Paris, Texas” (1984): oh, the grief, the love, the loss; the implausible, color-complex, heart-stopping images—so faraway, so close—by the great, late Robby Müller. The kinetic, the peripatetic; the still, the stilled. The beating heart. The lonely man. The lonely land. I should just sit down and write a letter to Wim Wenders. DCP. Music Box, Saturday-Sunday, May 27-28, 11:30am.

Another 1980s stalwart in 35mm: “Conan the Barbarian.” See why the retired John Milius was one of the era’s great writer-directors even at his most outlandish. See why the not-so-retired Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to make a “Conan In Autumn” sequel. Come early at 7:30pm for events in the lounge as well as savor “Conan’s Handshake” ($10), a sixteen-ounce PBR with a shot of Evan Williams bourbon. Metal Movie Night at the Music Box, Sunday, May 28, 9:15pm.

“Coyote Ugly”

I’ll credit the crass New York City song-and-money fairytale “Coyote Ugly” (2000) for the brash-trash cinematography of Amir Mokri (“The Joy Luck Club,” “Slam Dance”), as well as the 11:30pm DJ set and in-auditorium bar service throughout the show during its 35mm non-ironic midnight shows. Music Box, Friday, May 26, Saturday, May 27, 11:59pm.

Three hours of thrilling and grinding ritual and spectacle and one of the only five great films ever starring the great John Cazale: Michael Cimino’s “The Deer Hunter” gets an early Sunday spin. Drafthouse, Sunday, May 28, 11am.