Ray Pride

Some people are better at making lists than others. Some people seem to breathe and shed lists. My memory's more of a mosaic, but the forty-third edition of the Chicago International Film Festival, with more than 100 features from forty-four countries, offers up almost forty movies that I've either seen or have read enough about to heartily recommend. A movie year should be this lucky, let alone a festival filled with these postcards from around the planet. Thursday night opens with "Kite Runner" and a Roger Ebert tribute, to whom 2007 CIFF is dedicated. I've written already about Tamara Jenkins' closing night entry, "The Savages," a tone-perfect American black comedy. My favorite title comes from Bangladesh, whose Oscar entry's here, "Swopnodanay," by Golam Rabbany Biplob. Serene Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-Hsien decamps to Paris and updates "Flight of the Red Balloon." Andrei Zvyagintsev's "The Banishment" is another post-Tarkovsky, post-Soviet slab of gloom from "The Return"'s director. Photographer Anton Corbijn's "Control" is a touching, tragic biopic of doomed Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis. Cannes-prized "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" is a Romanian gem about teen abortion under the Ceausescu regime. Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, whose "Invisible Waves" dazzled, returns with another Thai puzzle, "Ploy." New German master Christian Petzold's "Yella" is joined by new movies by established filmmakers including Andre Techine, Roy Andersson, Jiri Menzel, Catherine Breillat, Diego Lerman, Bela Tarr, Charles Burnett, Ermanno Olmi, Paul Schrader, Carlos Reygadas, Jean Renoir, Kartemquin Films, John Sayles, Anthony Hopkins, Susanne Bier, Sidney Lumet, Denys Arcand, Jacques Nolot, Jacques Rivette, Julian Schnabel and Zhang Yang. And newcomer Craig Zobel's "Great World Of Sound" is pretty terrific on our post-"reality" world and Esther Robinson's biopic of an uncle who worked with Warhol, "A Walk Into the Sea" is one of the year's most hypnotic.

Complete listings at chicagofilmfestival.org

(2007-10-02)

Also by Ray Pride

Heart of Larkiness
"Into the Wild" is an adaptation of Jon Kracauer's 1995 nonfiction bestseller about Christopher McCandless, who, after graduating from Georgia's Emory University in 1992, hit the road without telling his parents or sister, abandoning his plans for graduate school, forsaking possessions, giving his $24,000 education fund to Oxfam and burning cash on the side of the road. He wants to hitchhike to Alaska. Does he want to find himself? Some deeper meaning to life? Was he naïve? Did he make choices that could mean he was a little unsettled mentally?
(2007-09-25)

Tip of the Week
"Manda Bala" is a wicked eyeful, but I wouldn't count on it for absolute veracity, even while discounting the keepers of cinematic purity and of the Brazilian soul that have been perturbed
(2007-09-25)

Tip of the Week
A much, much better movie than "The Yes Men," Czech film students Filip Remunda and Vit Klusak manage to pull off something more in the vein of that group of social provocateurs’ ongoing pranks-cum-critiques-of-capitalism with their "Czech Dream"
(2007-09-18)

Mush From The Wimp
The Toronto Film Festival came and went, and I couldn't go. I read first dispatches from Canada way, where more than 300 programs would allow any attendee to find a ready twenty or so movies that make any filmgoer's year. From the flood of studio prestige releases to potentially fine new work from Europe and Asia, 2007 will have as many sources of lasting joy as any cinematic annum. Yet a lot of recent writing and posting shows a strange resentment in the air which writers are constantly, compulsively confessing and describing and concerning themselves with their process rather than that of filmmaking
(2007-09-18)

Long Live the New Flesh
(2007-09-11)

Tip of the Week
(2007-09-11)

Tip of the Week
(2007-09-04)

Pulp Infraction
(2007-09-04)

Bitter Biter Bit
(2007-08-28)

Tip of the Week
(2007-08-28)

Under My Umbrella
(2007-08-21)

Needing the Eggs
(2007-08-21)

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