Ray Pride

As if choosing between "Boat Trip" and "A View From The Top" was a tough enough choice, Chicago continues to have more festivals, it seems, than almost any other city, and they usually overlap. Siskel Film Center continues its thirty-four-feature European Union Film Festival; highlights this week include Christian Petzold's "The State I am In"; nonagenarian Manoel de Oliveira's lovely but snoozesome remembrance of the hometown of his youth, "Oporto My Childhood"; and the latest from social radical Ken Loach, "Sweet Sixteen." Women in the Director's Chair (http://www.widc.org/festival/fest2003/calendar.html) continues at four locations, featuring "films, videos and other media by women, girls and transgendered directors from around the world." The Music Box features three features by Rainer Werner Fassbinder twenty years after his death. Facets inaugurates the First Chicago International Doc Film Festival (click here) at five locations, including Facets, the Biograph, Evanston's Block Cinema and Doc Films. More than one-hundred programs will be featured; highlights I've seen in the first week include the Brazilian "Bus 174"; the ego-love-fest between Oliver Stone and Fidel Castro in "Comandante"; Stanley Nelson's stalwart yet still shocking "The Murder of Emmett Till"; as well as a range of Polish documentaries and works on filmmakers, such as Antonioni and Bertolucci. If that's not enough, Version >03 Digital Arts Convergence, the second year of that digital media event, starts Thursday at the MCA (click here).

See Short Runs for selected listings.

(2003-03-19)

Also by Ray Pride

Short Runs
This week's limited engagements
(2003-03-12)

Time regained
Gaspar Noé's horrifying provocation, "Irreversible," attempts both shock and art, leaving festival and preview audiences loving to hate or hating to love his attempt to show the purity of love as well as its profaning.
(2003-03-12)

DVD Tip of the Week
In "Straw Dogs," Dustin Hoffman plays David Sumner, a young American mathematician who moves with his English wife, Amy (Susan George) to a small Cornish village to experience a quiet and idyllic life together.
(2003-03-12)

Tip of the Week
At the center of Nat Brandt's research-laden sketch of a public disaster of another era, "Chicago Death Trap: The Iroquois Theater Fire of 1903," we see photographs of the aftermath of a fire in a theater that had been open only five weeks which killed 602 matinee-goers, mostly women and children.
(2003-03-05)

Short Runs
(2003-03-05)

Waiting for a superman
(2003-03-05)

DVD Tip of the Week
(2003-03-05)

Underground man
(2003-03-05)

Tip of the Week
(2003-02-26)

Short Runs
(2003-02-26)

DVD Tip of the Week
(2003-02-26)

Whispers in your ear
(2003-02-26)

about Newcitychicago | about Newcity magazine | advertising | privacy policy | FAQ | employment