JULES AND JIM (1961, France) Directed by Franois Truffaut. Before and after World War I, Jeanne Moreau can't decide between German Oskar Werner and French Henri Serre... so she goes from one to the other, in an unmanageable menage a trois. Truffaut's abrupt shifts in tone are particularly accomplished. Franscope widescreen. 104m. 105m. $3. International House (773)753-2274, 1414 E. 59th, 7:30.
KING OF THE CHILDREN (Haizi Wang) (1987, China) Directed by Chen Kaige. Writes Tony Rayns, a scholar of contemporary Chinese film: "There are echoes here of a film like 'Padre, Padrone," but Chen's film is completely free of flabby humanist sentimentality. It takes its tonality from the harsh beauty of the Yunan landscape of soaring forests and misty valleys: a territory of the mind where hard-edged realism blurs easily into hallucination... This is filmmaking brave to the point of being visionary." 118m. $3. DOC Films (773)702-8575, University of Chicago, 1212 E. 59th, 7:00.
THE LAST WAVE (1977, Australia) Directed by Peter Weir. Rational man confronts the irrational and mystical. Richard Chamberlain is a white lawyer defending a case involving aboriginals when strange weather hits Sydney. Terrific mood if sometimes thin plotting. 106m. Shown with Georges Mlis' "Baron Mnchausen's Dream." $3. DOC Films (773)702-8575, University of Chicago, 1212 E. 59th, 9:30.
LEAVING LAS VEGAS (1995, France-USA) Directed by Mike Figgis. As gorgeous and tender as a bruise, "Leaving Las Vegas" haunts. Nicolas Cage gives a brave, beautifully modulated performance as the self-destructive alcoholic Ben Sanderson, who even chugs vodka in the shower. Cage captures the different levels of Ben's agony and Ben's joy without ever becoming merely show-offy. Ben's an L.A. screenwriter who craves the gutter, the grave, but he only knows the bottle. The opening sequence, with Cage under a liquor store's bleak, etiolating fluorescence, performing a little supermarket-spree action by filling a shopping cart to the brim with booze, is horrifying madcap, an indication of both Ben's and the movie's unapologetic urges. 113m. Projected video. Free. Celluloid Moviebar (312)707-8888, 1805 W. Division, 10:00.
TERMINATOR 2 : JUDGMENT DAY (1991, USA) Directed by James Cameron. He's back. Projected video. Free. Celluloid Moviebar (312)707-8888, 1805 W. Division, 7:15.
THE MEMOIRS OF A SINNER (Osobisty Pamietnik Grzesznika) (1985, Poland) Directed by Wojciech Has. A period piece set in eighteenth-century Scotland, against a backdrop of religious conflicts. 115m. $6. Film Center (312)443-3733, Columbus Drive at Jackson, 6:00.
CHASING AMY (1997, USA) Directed and Written by Kevin Smith. A movie ripe with Smith's trademark verbosity, raunchy sexual discussions, intense dramatic confrontations and a storyline about Holden, a hipster-in-his-own-head, goateed young comics artist (Ben Affleck) who, against the counsel of his jealous collaborator, Banky (Jason Lee), begins to fall for Alyssa (Joey Lauren Adams), a bright, funny, sexy, gorgeous woman who also draws comics and happens to be lesbian. Smith's dramatic turns amplify his gags with great skill, examining with the fluidity of gender boundaries in matters of the heart as capably as the farcical tragic cruelties of male jealousy. Smith's started to tap into the heart behind his glib japery. "Chasing Amy" is a major step forward for a smart young writer-director. $5. Village North (773)764-9100, 6746 N. Sheridan, Midnight.
DESPERATE LIVING (1977, USA) Directed by John Waters. The world of fairy tales is given the distinctly Watersian touch, with its most disgusting moments depicted with love. In the town of Mortville, a wicked queen tortures her subjects in between indulging her tastes for leather boys, only to be overthrown by a lesbian transsexual revolt. With Mink Stole, Liz Renay, Edith Massey, Jean Hill. 91m. $7.75. Music Box (773)871-6604, 3733 N. Southport, Midnight.
EASY RIDER(1969, USA) Directed by Dennis Hopper. Don't you miss the days when marijuana was considered a legitimate creative tool? Two motorcyclists -- Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper -- hit the road in search of the "real American" at the end of the '60s. Fine photography by Laszlo Kovacs and a superb performance by Jack Nicholson as a drunken lawyer leaven the general "hey man" atmosphere. 94m. 94m. $7.75. Music Box (773)871-6604, 3733 N. Southport, Midnight.
THE FABULOUS JOURNEY OF BALTHAZAR KOBER (Niezwykla Podroz Baltazara Kobera) (1988, Poland) Directed by Wojciech Has. Writes the Film Center's Barbara Scharres, "A prevailing obsession... of Has is the exploration of conflicted spirituality through baroque spectacle. Setting this tale in the sixteenth-century, at the point where the Renaissance collides with the raging terror of the Reformation, he... conjures up ghosts to puts faces on troubles of both an earthly and metaphysical nature." 110m. $6. Film Center (312)443-3733, Columbus Drive at Jackson, 8:15.
FAST, CHEAP AND OUT OF CONTROL (1996, USA) Directed by Errol Morris. The pleasure of knowledge for its own sake seems to be at the core of Morris' enigmatic, elegant contraption of a movie, "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control." Yet his concatenation of four subjects that seem impossibly disparate suggests a quirky universe the meanings of which can be found only in unsettling juxtapositions, such as Morris creates with these four men's work: a lion tamer; a robot designer who believes silicon-based life will succeed the carbon-based variety; a topiary sculptor whose work will likely not outlive him and a man fixated on a strange, blind, subterranean mammal, the naked mole rat, which resembles a penis with fierce teeth. $5. Village (312)642-2403, 1548 N. Clark, Midnight.
JOURNAL ENTRY Experimental video on marriage and difficulty adjusting to it. 29m. Shown with April Sopkin's "A Storm in June." (18m) Free. Columbia College (773)342-5190, Ferguson Theatre, 600 S. Michigan, 7:00.
THE LAST ANGEL OF HISTORY (1996, England) Directed by John Akomfrah. 45m. An investigation of the struggles of black man through history. Shown with Art Jones' "Know Your Enemy." On video. $6. Chicago Filmmakers at Xionx Tea Room (773)384-5533, 2933 N. Lincoln, 8:00.
LEAVING LAS VEGAS See Jan 29. Projected video. Free. Celluloid Moviebar (312)707-8888, 1805 W. Division, 10:00.
THE MEMOIRS OF A SINNER See Jan 29. $6. Film Center (312)443-3733, Columbus Drive at Jackson, 6:00.
THE PILLOW BOOK (1996, England-France-Netherlands-Japan) Directed and Written by Peter Greenaway. Water and the shadows of reflected ripples suffuse "The Pillow Book." Hong Kong is shown as all urban delirium and dissociation, then the ripple of watery reflection plays off almost all of the miraculous, unaffordable dream decors of homes and cafs and restaurants. Even fire is photographed with the rippling caress of water. For the eyes, the ears, maybe even the mind. Panavision. $5. Village (312)642-2403, 1548 N. Clark, Midnight.
SICK: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF BOB FLANAGAN, SUPERMASOCHIST (1997, USA) Directed by Kirby Dick. The phrase "pain of creation" achieves new heights of meaning after you've seen Kirby Dick's extraordinary documentary, "Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist." "Sick" is an exacting portrait of the late performance artist, poet, lifelong sufferer of cystic fibrosis and "hetero masochist, in extremis" Bob Flanagan. "I've learned to fight sickness with sickness" was Flanagan's standard, typically jokey description of how his masochism helped him endure the chronic pain of CF. In collaboration with his longtime lover and collaborator Sheree Rose, what had been private ritual became a very public art. At his death at 43, Flanagan had lived double the years anyone in his condition is expected to live, and the pain he suffered -- fundamentally a slow, breath-by-breath drowning -- led him to explore the world of pain with great wit and knowledge. Dick, a friend of Flanagan's, has made a funny, beautifully nuanced, even tender film, touching on issues of intimacy in relationships in art and life in a way that could probably not be depicted in any other genre. 85m. $5. Village (312)642-2403, 1548 N. Clark, Midnight.
TANK GIRL (1996, USA) Directed by Rachel Talalay. How not to put a comic book on the big screen. Projected video. Free. Celluloid Moviebar (312)707-8888, 1805 W. Division, 12:00.
TERMINATOR 2 See Jan 29. Projected video. Free. Celluloid Moviebar (312)707-8888, 1805 W. Division, 7:15.
THIEVES (Les Voleurs) (1995, France) Directed by Andr Tchin. Tchin has become one of the most compelling and astute chroniclers of the shifts that occur from day to day and from moment to moment adult loyalties, in the fact that bonds of family and the law, of sex and desire, require a dance, more complex than say, simple formulas of sadism and masochism, of batterers and martyrs, a psychological dance of complicity that fuels the bulk of the world's relationships. One of the handful of great movies in 1996, "Les Voleurs" is a crime thriller told from multiple points of view, with overlapping narration, boasting sturdy, low-key performances from Daniel Auteuil as a policeman who resents the shady dealings of his older brother, Didier Bezace, and Catherine Deneuve as an intellectual academic and writer, whose lives intersect because of the ravishing and androgynous Laurence C(tm)te, astonishingly coltish, who is the immature twentyish lover of both Auteuil and Deneuve, and whose brother steals cars for Bezace. Cops, car thieves, the effects of crime on Bezace's small son, a young woman whose identity is fluid in every regard -- Tchin takes the stuff of low crime melodrama, yet deepens it with each complication, seldom spelling out the meaning of scenes. There are directors who can compose precious, painterly frames to be savored, but only a handful of contemporary filmmakers (notably Tchin's contemporary, Bertrand Tavernier) seem to work, like Tchin, with such a critical eye, with such vivid immediacy. There's nothing dense or theoretical here: "Les Voleurs" is nourishing work, possessed of rare beauty and rarer intelligence. Every component of filmmaking, from camera placement and motion to costume design to self-effacing performances from the actors, is superb. Here, Auteuil and Deneuve seem nothing like their brother-and-sister roles in "Ma Saison Prfre." Auteuil often plays a man possessed, alternately wild-eyed or wide-eyed at the cards fate deals him. His rivalry with Deneuve for C(tm)te engages him as a blunt man of the street who is willing to bend his scruples for sex (he met C(tm)te after she was picked up for shoplifting), yet the fact of his and Deneuve's interaction means much, much more than complication, or flirtation. Lives change at the strangest moments, like in life. Deneuve gets to play a harried, epigrammatic intellectual, much like the semiotics-and-aphorism steeped essayist Roland Barthes, ready to wring meaning from the everyday and commonplace, yet driven to despair by the inarticulate gestures and improbable behavior of a young woman like C(tm)te's character. ("She's a loser, a rotten, no-good spiteful bitch," one character says, trying to sway the emotions of another; a reduction belied by the contours of the story yet, in its own rude way, wholly true.) The conveying of emotion through camerawork is often simplistic, and at best, its effects are abstract and difficult to articulate in words. (The best directors may in fact be working from nothing more than supreme intuition.) Jean-Luc Godard liked to assert that morality is contained in a tracking shot; other directors insist on using prime (or fixed focal-length) lenses, finding the use of a zoom "unnatural." Yet while Tchin generally works with the kinetic potential of simple medium distance shots, he uses the camera like a precision instrument unafraid of the ambiguity inherent in the dance of intelligent, scrupulous reframings within scenes, at heart-stopping moments of emotion. "Les Voleurs" is filled with a camera operator's constant minor readjustments, like the hypercritical eye of god, one that is omniscient yet always questioning. It's a film of daunting brilliance. "In life, we never renounce, we only replace," Deneuve's intellectual muses. Auteuil's eyes shine with the knowledge that for his character, it is a lie. There's a scene near the end of the movie, where a young boy is shown a card trick on a gorgeous mountainside. The angle of the shot shows us how the trick is done, literally making us complicit in the characters' actions. It's typical of Tchin's choices, the sophisticated choices of a director who seems to miss nothing, a man who seems never to blink. 116m. $4. International House (773)753-2274, 1414 E. 59th, 8:00, 10:00.
U-TURN (1997, USA) Directed by Oliver Stone. 125m. $4. DOC Films (773)702-8575, University of Chicago, 1212 E. 59th, 6:15, 8:45, 11:15.
VERTIGO (1958, USA) Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock's 1958 excursion into surrealism and the lure of the blonde has been restored, with a new stereo mix approximating the look of the original VistaVision release. While the palette is both bolder and creamier than the reissue last decade, the deep, piercing colors of the original IB Technicolor process are still only approximated. Bernard Hermann's score is crisply re-recorded, however, and is the film's major highlight in this edition. 128m. $5. Village North (773)764-9100, 6746 N. Sheridan, Midnight.
CHASING AMY See Jan 30. $5. Village North (773)764-9100, 6746 N. Sheridan, Midnight.
DESPERATE LIVING See Jan 30. $7.75. Music Box (773)871-6604, 3733 N. Southport, Midnight.
EASY RIDER See Jan 30. $7.75. Music Box (773)871-6604, 3733 N. Southport, Midnight.
THE EDGE (1997, USA) Directed by Lee Tamahori. Tamahori recovers nicely from the shambles of "Mulholland Falls" with this David Mamet-written boy's-own adventure in the wilds of Canada. After a plane crash, Rupert Murdoch-like billionaire Anthony Hopkins is pitted against the wilds and Alec Baldwin, a fashion photographer and competitor for trophy wife Elle Macpherson's affections. Hopkins' billionaire works with a writer's mind, dredging up anecdotes and untested theories to figure out the next step that may get them out of the forests before starving or being eaten by grizzlies. (Mamet's mogul brings to mind Henry James' dictum, "A writer is someone on whom no fact is ever wasted.") Tamahori and Mamet work simply, quickly tearing away the flimsy layers of social rhetoric and misrepresentation between the men. Baldwin is also a hoot with his playfully freakish delivery of Mamet's trademark cadences. After a while, they're like a couple of privileged brats, bickering like Siskel and Ebert in the wild. The action is reasonably compelling, and the result seldom descends into macho delirium. 122m. Panavision. 117m. $4. DOC Films (773)702-8575, University of Chicago, 1212 E. 59th, 6:15, 8:45, 11:15.
THE FABULOUS JOURNEY OF BALTHAZAR KOBER See Jan 30. $6. Film Center (312)443-3733, Columbus Drive at Jackson, 7:45.
FAST, CHEAP AND OUT OF CONTROL See Jan 30. $5. Village (312)642-2403, 1548 N. Clark, Midnight.
MY BEST GIRL (1927, USA) Directed by Sam Taylor. Mary Pickford as a shopgirl in a five-and-dime store. 81m. $6. Film Center (312)443-3733, Columbus Drive at Jackson, 4:00.
THE PILLOW BOOK See Jan 30. $5. Village (312)642-2403, 1548 N. Clark, Midnight.
PONETTE (1997, France) Directed by Jacques Doillon. "Ponette" aches with emotion. It's a true revelation. While I've seen a handful of his earlier features, his interest seems to lie in the burn, confrontation, the aftermath. (The face, the shout, the slap.) Four-year-old Victoria Thivosol received the best actress award at last fall's Venice Film Festival for her performance as a child of utmost self-absorption. After the death of her mother in a car crash that occurs before the film begins, Ponette chooses to live in her own world, fashioning her own mythology from the information she is given. This overalls-wearing, wrist-in-a-cast, full-pout-mouthed believer is embodied by Thivosol with heartbreaking emotional authenticity. To a father's blunt "Mommy is dead," what more is there to say than "No! She's flying with her magic mirror." She is not obstinate. Simply, she believes, and patiently awaits her mother's return. Doillon is patient as well, fashioning from many close-ups and a child's natural impulses a transcendent portrait of sorrow and loss, of the bewilderment the world has to offer. There are subtleties beyond Doillon's loving regard for Thivosol, such as, in an early scene, leaving the hospital in a car with her father, we see the landscape rushing forward with the rear-view mirror revealing similar greenery spinning vertiginously away from us. In a field, a boy and a girl play clumsily at kisses and comforting. Ponette rages at her doll, then comforts it. She hears that her mother is with Jesus, then waits for the pair to visit. She waits. She waits. We watch, grateful, mesmerized, moved. Music Box (773)871-6604, 3733 N. Southport, 11:30am.
THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975, England) Directed by Jim Sharman. You do the Time Warp again, leave me out of it. With Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick. $5. Village North (773)764-9100, 6746 N. Sheridan, Midnight.
STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN (1946, England) Directed by Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger. The first fifteen minutes of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's "Stairway to Heaven (A Matter of Life and Death)" are perfect. There's a line -- "I love you, June, you're life and I'm leaving you" -- spoken by doomed English airman David Niven to American air controller Kim Hunter that I can't even say out loud without my voice trembling. Begun as a propaganda plea for postwar American-British cooperation, "Stairway to Heaven" became something else in the hands of Powell, as most of his projects from the sublime "Black Narcissus" to the horrifically self-damning "Peeping Tom" always did. There are talky stretches about law and honor, but Powell's immensely inventive, serenely confident visual style and unabashed romanticism transcend the dated aspects. It's the most romantic movie I know; I once went on a first date to it. She didn't get it, and there wasn't a second date. "Stairway to Heaven" is the most gorgeously photographed movie you're likely to see in any given year (with a black-and-white heaven and a Technicolor earth). It's also about, oh, 75 percent perfect. 104m. Music Box (773)871-6604, 3733 N. Southport, 11:30am.
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW (1929, USA) Directed by Sam Taylor. The only pairing of Mary Pickford and longtime husband Douglas Fairbanks. 67m. Shown with D.W. Griffith's "Wilful Peggy." $6. Film Center (312)443-3733, Columbus Drive at Jackson, 6:00.
TWILIGHT OF THE COCKROACHES (1987, Japan) Directed by Hiroaki Yoshida. Compelling and repellent, this combination live-action and animated feature imagines the home lives of our most popular vermin and includes a disquisition from a talking turd. Not especially terrific, but there are some startling and pesky images.105m. Free. Delilah's (773)472-2771, 2771 N. Lincoln, 6:00.
VERTIGO See Jan 30. $5. Village North (773)764-9100, 6746 N. Sheridan, Midnight.
DIVIDED HEAVEN (Der geteilte Himmel) (1964, East Germany) Directed by Konrad Wolf. An exploration of "the dangerous quest for a female identity against the backdrop... of building the Berlin Wall. Influenced by "Hiroshima Mon Amour." 114m. $3. DOC Films (773)702-8575, University of Chicago, 1212 E. 59th, 7:00.
THE EDGE See Jan 31. $3. DOC Films (773)702-8575, University of Chicago, 1212 E. 59th, 2:00.
PONETTE See Jan 31. Music Box (773)871-6604, 3733 N. Southport, 11:30am.
PRETTY VILLAGE, PRETTY FLAME (Lepa Sela Lepo Gore) (1996, Yugoslavia) Directed by Srdjan Dragojevic. "All of Yugoslavia's dancing rock 'n' roll," the pounding song asserts about twenty-five minutes into Dragojevic's horrifying, hilarious, bold, brutal, lyrical "Pretty Village, Pretty Flame (Lepa Sela Lepo Gore)." In that single, typically astonishing scene, the countryside's in flames, a soldier plays a video game in the darkness before columns of geysering gasoline flames, oblivious to an adversary writhing further into the black with more flames dancing over his back. With the kind of formal confidence that takes the breath away, "Pretty Village" announces itself as masterpiece material, and it may very well have hit the mark. Two boyhood friends, Milan, a Serb, and Halil, a Muslim, grow up near a "Brotherhood and Unity Tunnel" that was built to connect Belgrade and Zagreb. As children, they avoid the tunnel, fearing an "Ogre" trapped inside. As the story blasts forward, Milan and Halil will struggle to define, let alone contain, the ogre within. Welcome to former Yugoslavia. Or Bosnia. Or Hell. The land wants blood, and blood it will have. Dragojevic's storytelling is non-linear, bouncing from shot to shot across the lives of Milan and Halil, and the $2 million film, the first commercial blockbuster in Serbia, is as pyrotechnic and absurd as "Apocalypse Now" and as black-humored as any of Kubrick's icy antiwar tales. Comparing Dragojevic's film to Emir Kusturica's glorious, battering "underground," some critics have found "Pretty Village" cold and cruel, but that's hardly the case. The storytelling is diamond-hard, diamond-sharp and passionately unsentimental. A Belgrade film critic, Goran Gocic, properly points out, "This is not Eastern European art-house stuff... This is real cinema." Prepare for a wallop. 128m. $6. Film Center (312)443-3733, Columbus Drive at Jackson, 3:30, 6:00.
STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN See Jan 31. Music Box (773)871-6604, 3733 N. Southport, 11:30am.
THIEVES See Jan 30. $4. International House (773)753-2274, 1414 E. 59th, 8:00.
SHIVERS (1974, Canada) Directed by David Cronenberg. Crude early Cronenberg predicts a sexually-transmitted plague. The last image will stay with you a very, very long time. 87m. $3. DOC Films (773)702-8575, University of Chicago, 1212 E. 59th, 7:00.
BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (Bronenosets "Potyomkin") (1925, Russia) Directed by Sergei Eisenstein. The 1905 mutiny that sparked the Revolution, told with unforgettably vivid images and montage, including the famous Odessa Steps sequence of the runaway baby carriage (not to be further referred to as "That 'Untouchables' Show-off Scene"). 35mm print. Visually stunning, gripping dramatization of the start of the 1905 revolution. 75m. Cezar Pawlowski will lecture. $6. Film Center (312)443-3733, Columbus Drive at Jackson, 6:00.
CARMEN JONES (1954, USA) Directed by Otto Preminger. Preminger's retooling of Bizet's "Carmen" with Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte among the black cast. 105m. Shown with Roy Mack's "Rufus Jones for President." $3. DOC Films (773)702-8575, University of Chicago, 1212 E. 59th, 7:00.
copyright 1998 New City Communications, Inc.