I'm so glad that All That We Imagine as Light is running a second week at The Main. My review is below, along with a less enthusiastic evaluation of the Brazilian Oscar nominee I'm Still Here.
Special Screenings
Thursday, February 6
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King: Extended Edition (2003)
Alamo Drafthouse
You're saying it could have been even longer? $11.50. 2:30 p.m. Thursday 5:50 p.m. Friday 1:45 p.m. Saturday 11 a.m. Monday 1:40 p.m. More info here.
Hellraiser: Remastered (1987)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/Emagine Willow Creek
See every pin perfectly in this new 4K version. $13.52. 8 p.m. More info here.
American Fiction (2023)
Capri Theater
I still need to read the book. $5 or free for North Side residents. 7 p.m. More info here.
Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (2001)
Emagine Willow Creek
Set between the events of episodes 22 and 23 of the series. OK, ARE YOU HAPPY NOW? $14.10. 6 p.m. Sunday 3 p.m. More info here.
Eraserhead (1977)
Emagine Willow Creek
This movie really needs to be heard live. $11.60. 7:30 & 8:30 p.m. More info here.
The Flintstones (1994)
Emagine Willow Creek
Do millennials think this is a “lost classic” too? $4.60. 12 p.m. More info here.
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
Grandview 1&2
Looking back now, the movie that changed Hollywood doesn’t seem especially startling. Still terrific though. $14.44. 9:15 p.m. More info here.
You Only Live Once (1937)
The Heights
That’s the motto. $12. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Say Anything (1989)
Parkway Theater
OK, but in real life you gotta watch out for guys like this. $9-$12. Music from Adam Bohanan at 7 p.m.; movie at 8 p.m. More info here.
Friday, February 7
The Cat in the Hat (2003)
Emagine Willow Creek
An abomination. Through Wednesday. $4.60. 12 p.m. More info here.
If (2024)
Marcus West End Cinema
The six most terrifying words in the English language are “from the mind of John Krasinski.” Through Monday. Showtimes and more info here.
Scream It Off Screen
Parkway Theater
Damn, sold out again. 8 p.m. More info here.
Black Panthers of WWII (2025)
Trylon
Black soldiers fight the Battle of the Bulge. $8. Friday-Saturday 5 p.m. Sunday-Wednesday 1 p.m. More info here.
Blue Collar (1978)
Trylon
Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, and Yaphet Kotto are auto workers caught between their union and their bosses. $8. Friday-Saturday 7 & 9:30 p.m. Sunday 3 & 5:30 p.m. More info here.
Saturday, February 8
Se7en (1995)
Alamo Drafthouse
A “V” doesn’t really look like a “7,” you know. $10. 7:10 p.m. Sunday 7:45 p.m. Monday 7 p.m. More info here.
The Golden Child (1986)
Alamo Drafthouse
Eddie Murphy searches for the Dalai Lama or something. $11.50. 4:20 p.m. More info here.
Paddington in Peru (2024)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16
A sneak peek at the lovable bear's latest adventure. $12.28. 1 p.m. More info here.
Sherlock Jr. (1924)
Emagine Willow Creek
The Buster Keaton silent, scored by R.E.M. songs. They say it works. $12.50. 6 p.m. More info here.
UFC 312: du Plessis vs. Strickland 2
AMC Southdale 16/Emagine Willow Creek
This is their fight screening. $26.60. 9 p.m. More info here.
Sunday, February 9
About Time (2013)
Alamo Drafthouse
Domhnall Gleeson travels through time in search of a girlfriend. $11.50. 12 p.m. More info here.
Anomalisa (2015)
Alamo Drafthouse
Animated sadsackery from Charlie Kaufman. $11.50. 3:15 p.m. More info here.
Casablanca (1942)
Emagine Willow Creek
A seductive Claude Rains steals Humphrey Bogart away from Ingrid Bergman. Also Wednesday. $10.60. 12 p.m. & 6 p.m. More info here.
Wild Child (2025)
Main Cinema
Movies to inspire children to be environmentally active. Part of the Wild & Scenic Film Festival. $15-$25. 12:30 p.m. More info here.
Water Tales (2025)
Main Cinema
A selection of films celebrating bodies of water around the world. Part of the Wild & Scenic Film Festival. $15-$25. 2 p.m. More info here.
Discover Your River (2025)
Main Cinema
A selection of short films celebrating the Mississippi River. Part of the Wild & Scenic Film Festival. $15-$25. 4:45 p.m. More info here.
Ministry of Fear (1944)
Trylon
Ray Milland gets mixed up with Nazi spies in this Fritz Lang thriller. $8. 8 p.m. Monday-Tuesday 7 & 9 p.m. More info here.
Monday, February 10
The Monkey (2025)
Alamo Drafthouse
An advance screening of the new Oz Perkins shocker. $14.50. 8 p.m. More info here.
Attack on Titan the Movie: The Last Attack (2024)
Emagine Willow Creek
The final two episodes of the anime series, combined into a single movie. $12.60. 2:40 & 6 p.m. Tuesday 3 & 6:30 p.m. More info here.
Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)
Emagine Willow Creek
My friend John when we saw this 33 years ago: “Keanu’s acting was so wooden they should’ve driven him through Dracula’s heart.” $7.60. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Tuesday, February 11
Bones and All (2022)
Alamo Drafthouse
Part of this Timothée Chalamet cannibal movie takes place in Minnesota! $11.50. 7 p.m. Wednesday 3:40 p.m. More info here.
Memoir of a Snail (2024)
Alamo Drafthouse
A shy girl comes out of her shell (snail term) when she meets a brash older woman in this Oscar-nominated animated film. $7. 4 p.m. More info here.
Wednesday, February 12
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2003)
Alamo Drafthouse
I’m rooting for the world. $20.59. 7 p.m. More info here.
Secret Movie Night
Emagine Willow Creek
What will it be this month? $11.60. 7 p.m. More info here.
The Princess Bride (1987)
The Heights
Wallace Shawn is a solid dude. Sold out. More info here.
When Harry Met Sally (1989)
Parkway Theater
LOL, she wants to eat the orgasm sandwich. $9-$12. Trivia at 7:30 p.m.; movie at 8 p.m. More info here.
Basquiat (1996)
Trylon
Why did Julian Schnabel re-release this in black and white? Presented by Sound Unseen. $13. 7 p.m. More info here.
Opening
Follow the links for showtimes.
Becoming Led Zeppelin
Good news—it’s not a biopic.
Bring Them Down
You’re not gonna believe this, but this Irish family drama stars Barry Keoghan.
The Forge
This Christian drama got an average grade of A+ from viewers. Can’t imagine why.
Heart Eyes
It’s a Valentine’s Day massacre!
I’m Still Here
There’s a lot to admire about Walter Salles’s newest film, which documents the struggle of Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres) to learn the truth about what happened to her dissident husband Ruben (Selton Mello) after his abduction by the Brazilian military dictatorship. Mostly there’s Torres’s performance, which projects an astonishing dignity and perseverance. (As a nice touch, Fernanda Montenegro, the jaded teacher from Salles’s 1998 breakthrough Central Station, plays the older Eunice.) Salles’s timing couldn’t be better: Surely the film’s Oscar nominations (Best Picture and Best Actress for Torres) owe something to the mood of “it can happen here?” now belated descending upon the privileged in the U.S. But as a director Salles lacks the historical sweep required to tell a multi-decade story, the Paivas’ family life feels idealized both before and after the arrest, and we rarely quite get inside Eunice’s mind and heart. The film exists for a worthy goal, bearing witness to the fact that repressive regimes someday come to an end—sometimes even with a single lifetime. But it’s more testimonial than art. B
Love Hurts
Ke Huy Quan is a hitman-turned-real estate agent who has to come out of retirement.
Parasite: IMAX
Bong Joon-ho's Oscar winner on the big, fancy screen.
Thandel
Indian fisherman drift accidentally into Pakistani waters.
Vidaamuyarchi
A man searches for his wife after their trip goes awry.
Ongoing in Local Theaters
Follow the links for showtimes.
All We Imagine As Light
Two nurses live together in Mumbai. The responsible Prabha (Kani Kusruti) is married to a man who emigrated years ago to Germany, a fact we only learn when he ships her a rice cooker with no note of explanation. Her younger and more carefree roommate Anu (Divya Prabha) has a secret Muslim boyfriend, Shiraz (Hridhu Haroon). Writer/director Payal Kapadia’s second feature Is about how their relationship changes once they help the hospital’s cook Parvathy (Chhaya Kadam) move back to her village after she’s booted by luxury housing developers. But All That We Imagine as Light is also collection of indelible moments: scenes from the playful courtship of Anu and Shiraz (leading up to a gentle, realistic sex scene), the devastating chill of Prabha when a doctor shyly expresses a romantic interest, and above all shots of teeming Mumbai nightlife, accompanied by voiceovers from unidentified individuals about how they came to live in this massive city. The stakes here are pretty high—the displacement of working people, religious intolerance, marital abandonment—but Kapadia has such a light touch that what we see are humans enduring the obstacles that humans endure. She tells these stories without softening any blows or overstating any drama, and that’s a rare gift. A
The Brutalist (read the full review here)
Brady Corbet’s aspiring epic tracks the disillusionment of a man who believed himself beyond illusion. László Tóth (Adrien Brody, once more a heroic European Jew) is a Bauhaus-tutored architect, Buchenwald survivor, and recent immigrant in Philadelphia. Into his life strides Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), a Bucks County nouveaux with a pseud’s hunger for as much expert-approved culture as money can buy. He enlists his pedigreed discovery to design and construct a massive community center for the suburban backwater of Doylestown. The Brutalist is a film about grandiosity that also aspires to it. There are tremendous moments, in which far from subtle images communicate boldly what language cannot, that only a filmmaker gifted with a certain degree of self-importance can achieve. But on the back end it loses the shape of a masterpiece, and the sturdy facsimile of a greatness we'd been watching reveals itself as something lumpier and less monumental. And for a film supposedly about ideas, The Brutalist is strangely devoid of them, unless you count “rich people will fuck you over,” “Americans hate foreigners,” and “the Holocaust!” B
A Complete Unknown (read the full review here)
Timothée Chalamet’s relative success here—he gets that Bob Dylan himself has always been a guy performing as Bob Dylan—is just one reason that James Mangold’s new biopic is so relatively un-embarrassing. The source material also helps: Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric! is a thoroughly researched and reported account of Newport ’65 that’s preceded by an even-handed evaluation of what was at stake. Wald represents the ethos of the folk scene with a respect that rockist triumphalists could never see past their ingrained generational narratives to allow, and the film’s climax, Dylan’s amplified defiance of the Newport folkies, doesn’t feel as triumphant as we might expect. Dylan comes off less as a genius coming into his own than a cornered, confused guy lashing out at whoever comes closest; when his pal Bobby Neuwirth asks him point blank who he wants to be, it’s hard not hear a hollowness in the defiance of Dylan's reply: “Whoever they don’t want me to be.” When he returns to visit Woody Guthrie one last time after Newport, reflecting on what he’s done and lost, Bobby Zimmerman is now as completely Bob Dylan as Anakin Skywalker is Darth Vader at the end of Revenge of the Sith. How does it feel? Not great, Bob. B
Conclave
Edward Berger may think he’s cooked up something more substantial than a chewy Vatican potboiler here—a meditation on faith in the modern era, or some other middlebrow (papal) bull. Who knows and who cares? The crowd I saw it with thought Berger’s flamboyant pope opera was funny as hell (pardon the expression, Father) and they were right. Watching old guys from around the world in funny clothes politic, gossip, and backstab is just solid entertainment. Cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine milks everything he can from the ornate setting and bright costumery, and this cast knows how to project an ominous seriousness that’s forever camp adjacent. We’re talking Ralph Fiennes working his timeworn visage of existential indigestion, John Lithgow looking more like Donald Rumsfield than ever, Sergio Castellitto as a gregarious bear who wants to repeal Vatican II, Isabella Rossellini as a mysterious nun, and, for the ladies, a little Stanley Tucci. You’ll guess most of the twists, groan at some, and even get blindsided by a few. Still, without giving too much away, it’s hard not to notice that none of the scandals here are as horrific as those the Catholic Church has covered up in real life. B+
Creation Of The Gods II: Demon Force
Dune: Part 2 (read the full review here)
The first part of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation was a well-crafted slog, occasionally spectacular but often merely studently, as the director seemed intent to prove that he deserved the assignment. But with all the power players set in place, Part Two does an awful lot right. Villeneuve distills the essence of the novel’s currents of deception and misdirection into a legible screenplay while generating some truly uncanny moments. And as Paul Atreides, Timothée Chalamet shows us a man who makes a pragmatic decision to exploit the dogmatism of his followers because he believes that every other choice will cause more death and destruction, or who at least rationalizes his motives that way. With IP-recycling now the culture industry’s standard cannibalistic practice, Villeneuve, like Paul, imagines himself the good guy in this scenario, respectful of the traditions placed in his care rather than merely exploitative. But also like Paul there are forces at play beyond his control. So what happens when Villeneuve’s hero threatens to become a butcher? Stay tuned for Part 3. B+
Flow
Every house cat stalks through its domain like some fierce jungle predator indifferent to any challenge. Latvian animator Gints Zilbalodis calls that supposedly independent beast’s bluff, tossing a kitty into a flood and saying “How tough are you now, huh puss?” Flow is in part a unique hangout movie, a kind a postdiluvian animal Real World where a prickly black cat is forced to coexist on a boat with a wounded secretarybird, an acquisitive lemur, a stolid capybara, and an all too friendly Lab. None of the critters speak—aside from knowing how to work a rudder, they generally behave as animals would. And while the computer animation isn’t exactly beautiful, and can’t avoid an occasional cutscene quality, we pass through computer-generated environments with an unmatched three-dimensional ease that's its own reward. Though we never learn what happened to the humans—Flow is blessedly free of any backstory—there’s also an element of wish fulfillment here. If humans ever do finally off themselves en masse, it suggests, at least the animals we love will find ways to survive. If they learn to work together better than humans did, that is. A-
The Last Showgirl
Gia Coppola’s determination to reward Pamela Anderson with a star turn is as phony as a rhinestone. The camera lingering on that unmade up 57-year-old face, the low-res shots of Anderson against the backdrop of the Strip set to the whooshes of ambient soundtrackcore, that persistent and deliberate deglamorization of everything the camera sees—Coppola hauls out every nu-showbiz trick there is to signify “reality” in this film about a Vegas lifer being put out to pasture. And yet, line by line, Kate Gersten’s script pops, and everyone here does it justice: Dave Bautista as the show’s vulnerably gruff producer, Jamie Lee Curtis as a weathered dancer-turned-cocktail-waitress, bitchy Brenda Song and sweet Kiernan Shipka as younger dancers, and yes, Anderson as the chirpy Shelly, struggling to reorient herself as life undermines her cherished identity as a showgirl. But oy, the plot. Of course Shelly has an estranged daughter (Billie Lourd, doing what she can). Of course Shelly’s audition for a new gig doesn’t go as planned. Of course Curtis gets a “supporting actress” moment of her own, set to a blaringly obvious song choice. If it’s endearingly gentle of The Last Showgirl to refuses to fully puncture Shelly’s illusions, its pulled punches are also unfair to her, to us, and to Anderson, who should be given a character to act, rather than a routine to perform. B
Nickel Boys
You probably know the deal: director RaMell Ross’s debut feature is shot almost entirely from the point of view of two Black teens sentenced to a brutal Florida reform school. The opening moments are so perfect and impressionistic you think, well, this could be a fine short film, but there’s no way Ross can keep that level of formal command up for over two hours. And there are occasional stumbles, but the technique is no gimmick, or maybe it’s just a gimmick that deepens the content. Being essentially trapped in a character’s body with them creates a distancing effect. We feel as alienated from the strange surroundings as the somewhat naive innocent Elwood (Ethan Herisse) does; we keep a keen eye open as the more savvy Turner (Brandon Wilson) has learned to do. Using the techniques of screen realism to tell this story is what would have felt like a gimmick—just a gimmick we’ve learned to accept as natural. A
Nosferatu
Who needs a vampire to drain the life from a town when you’ve got Robert Eggers directing? Wisborg, the German community that Count Orloc (Bill Skarsgård) will eventually infest with plague, is so gloomy at the start of Eggers's take on the Dracula story that the fiend has hardly got any work to do. And the wan woman Orloc is drawn to (Lily Rose-Depp) already endures joyless orgasmic gasps and speaks in trite Emily Dickinson first drafts. Like any well-prepared corpse, Nosferatu can be striking, even beautiful, in its airless, stylized way. For the German scenes, Eggers favors a blue filter familiar to admirers of The Piano or the first Twilight movie, and some of his fussily framed shots do rise to a Barry Lyndon quality—no mean feat. Orloc’s castle is a black-on-black-on-black realm of shadows within shadows, a daring and somewhat frustrating design for those of us who like to occasionally see what we’re looking at. Willem Dafoe’s mad, chaotic Prof. Albin Eberhart Von—ah fuck it, I’m just gonna call him Van Helsing—brings a mad touch of chaos to the proceedings, but much of Nosferatu advances with the grim inevitability of a fairy tale. Skarsgård’s Orloc, a hulking, shadowy beast with the bristly mustache of an ancient warlord and a booming, electronically modulated voice, is a beastly embodiment of menace, a dark force awakened. But without pathos or malice, he’s just acting on instinct. Turns out pure evil can be almost as boring as pure good. B-
A Real Pain
You might expect a buddy comedy about Holocaust tourism to flounder on the side of bad taste or staid reverence. So one thing I’ll say about A Real Pain, written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg, is that it does strike the right delicate tonal balance. As to why that balance needed to be struck, however, I’m still not entirely sure. It's the story of inseparable cousins who now rarely see each other, reunited because their beloved grandmother’s dying wish was for them to visit the home in Poland that she fled during the Holocaust. David is uptight and tetchy, Benji is mouthy and moody. In other words, David is Jesse Eisenberg and Benji is Kieran Culkin. If you were hoping for Mark Zuckerberg and Roman Roy on the Road to Lublin, you’re in luck. Do they learn a little about themselves—and each other—along the way? Oh, brother (er, cousin?), do they ever. Though Culkin and Eisenberg are an ace comic pair, yuks are not enough for A Real Pain, and it’s one of those movies where the characters’ backstories seem to be written after the fact to justify the drama. The great thing about comedy? It never requires justification. B
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
A disappointment. Shot in secret, Mohammad Rasoulof’s film wants to be both an effective thriller and a depiction of how state-generated paranoia strengthens the Iranian patriarchy, but these two elements don’t entirely mesh. Appointed to the role of investigating judge despite his bosses’ reservations about him, Iman (Missagh Zareh) learns that he’s expected to rubber stamp certain political rulings. He does so despite his qualms, and thus begins his descent from loving father and husband to tyrant of the household. Desperate to find his missing state-issued gun, fearing that he’ll be jailed for incompetence, Iman turns on his family, who belatedly fight back. At times this is almost an Iranian take on The Shining, complete with a tense chase through a disorienting setting. But... B-
September 5
If turning a horrific real-life event into a gripping thriller is a morally questionable act, how do we feel about turning the TV coverage of a horrific real-life event into a gripping thriller? That’s what director and co-writer Tim Fehlbaum does here with the abduction and murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and to his credit September 5 is wholly upfront about the amorality of journalism. Both John Magaro’s control room newb Geoff Mason and Peter Sarsgaard’s quietly authoritative ABC Sports chief Roone Arledge are in this for the story, and to hold on to it they’ll fight the local police, the ABC News team, and the other networks demanding equal satellite time. It’s hard not to root for the scrappy, ingenious sports journalists improvising with the limited tech on hand as events unfold, even as we realize their tricky sensationalism is the future of TV news. (September 5 is otherwise as stripped of politics as this story can possibly be, which is probably for the best. I mean, just imagine.) For all the sharp performances—Benjamin Walker perfectly capturing Peter Jennings’s plummy cool, Leonie Benesch as a translator who becomes an essential part of the team—everyone here is upstaged by actual footage of ABC Sports’ Jim McKay, a guy visibly struggling with how to convey this horror to viewers in real time. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a little skeevy after September 5. But it’d be just as false to say I wasn’t caught up in it all. Like the man said, this is tremendous content. B+
The Substance (read the full review here)
Without our shared cultural knowledge of Demi Moore’s life and career, The Substance, Coralie Fargeat’s absurdist experiment in gory meta-hagsploitation, is a fairly limp if expressively graphic satire of impossible female body standards. Moore’s presence, and her performance, give the film its moments of depth—moments Fargeat doesn’t always seem particularly interested in. Moore is an aging, discarded star who injects herself with a black-market serum that looks like radioactive pee and mitoses into the “ideal version of herself,” a perky-butted and gleam-smiled Margaret Qualley who calls herself Sue. Each woman gets to remain conscious for exactly a week apiece, spending each alternate week as a nude, comatose lump ingesting bagged nutrients. And as Elisabeth begins to sulk through her allotment of days and Sue wants more time to shine, rules are inevitably bent, with increasingly disastrous results. The subtlety-free finale, which fire-hoses blood at the patriarchy and anyone else in proximity, will either have you pumping your fist at its audacity or rolling your eyes at what a cop out it is. For better or for worse, what Fargeat is “trying to say” and her grisly overindulgence are inseparable. B-
Wicked (read the full review here)
Thinkpieces are surely in the works about how Wicked, the story of a good woman who is cast as an enemy of the people by authoritarians using fiendishly disseminated lies, is a perfect Trump era fable (just as it was a perfect Bush era fable two decades ago). But maybe the best topical lesson that Wicked offers is that villains are often more entertaining than heroes. If anything, Cynthia Erivo has too much screen presence for her already underwritten part, and her almost-adult dignity undermines her character arc. Her Elphaba (a.k.a. the Wicked Witch of the West) is no ingénue misled by foolish dreams, and seems incapable of humiliation. Meanwhile, Glinda is a dream of a role that Ariana Grande floats through with perfect timing, flaunting her shallow vanity, scene-stealing blonde hair tosses, and comically sudden upshoots into her showy soprano. And while I’ll take songwriter Stephen Schwartz’s generically inspirational pop over the wan schlock of the dreaded Pasek and Paul, I have seen better movie musicals set in Oz. B
