Ray Pride

Visionary filmmakers deserve visionary distributors: if a film made to change the world winds up with two copies in Netflix warehouses in Tacoma and Bangor, does it make a sound? The Siskel Film Center offers a deserving tribute to Zeitgeist Films, run for twenty years by Emily Russo and Nancy Gerstman as one of the keenest facilitators of international film. Many of their films have debuted at Siskel, and their catalog includes many titles by Peter Greenaway, the Brothers Quay, Atom Egoyan, Guy Maddin, Deepa Mehta, Francois Ozon, Abbas Kiarostami, Derek Jarman and Todd Haynes. The seven-film selection includes Amy Ziering Kofman and Kirby Dick's "Derrida" doubled with Astra Taylor's "Zizek"; Jacques Demy's "Umbrellas of Cherbourg"; Kiarostami's "Ten"; Guy Maddin's "Careful" (shown with his megawatt-short "Hearts of the World"); Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen's recent "Jellyfish"; and Nuri Bilge Ceylan's "Climates." Rich, enriching stuff over a holiday weekend.

For full attractions and showtimes, siskelfilmcenter.org.

(2008-08-26)

Also by Ray Pride

Still at the Movies
Sunday night, after thirty-three years, the movie review show that first featured Chicago newspapermen Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel swatting at each other while offering spirited opinions, breathed its last. The only survivors are distant cousins of short attention span. One of the reasons Ebert is an essential voice in American film criticism is because of his instincts as a trained newspaperman, the fine and largely misunderstood ability to provide cogent, thoughtful, lucid dispatches on deadline. (His enthusiastic output in recent months promises more of this, if fewer thumbs.) An important influence and stylist despite slim output, Manny Farber, was also stilled Sunday night. Farber, a painter and bold cultural critic, credited with coining the term "underground cinema," was 91
(2008-08-19)

Tip of the Week
Facets has assembled a sturdy roster of twenty or so key cinematic souvenirs of the anti-Vietnam War movement that exploded in Chicago during the August 1968 Democratic Convention, including Haskell Wexler's famous metafiction, "Medium Cool," which, during a police tear gas attack has a camera operator's words left on the soundtrack, "Look out, Haskell, it's real!"
(2008-08-19)

Candid Cameras
The light fires: four slow bursts to the eye, four shots. Corner of your eye, corner of the room, there's a couple dozen places this is commonplace in Chicago. But there's more ritual than with the now-ubiquitous self-portraits from cell phones and digital cameras: the photobooth is a foursquare, three-ring circus all its own. They're also an endangered product, created by a fragile mechanical contraption for the age of carnivals and midways, nothing so sleek you can slip in your pocket
(2008-08-13)

Tip of the Week
Opening the same week as "Frozen River," an American movie about trafficking in human souls, "The Unknown Woman," the first feature from Giuseppe Tornatore since 2000's "Malèna," is a heady, overproduced revenge tale about sex trafficking, and it's a heady eyeful
(2008-08-13)

Tip of the Week
(2008-08-05)

Stealing Beauty
(2008-08-05)

Dil Doings
(2008-07-29)

Tip of the Week
(2008-07-29)

I Am Curious, Yella
(2008-07-29)

Reality Bites
(2008-07-22)

Tip of the Week
(2008-07-22)

Scarlet Diva, Scarlet Empress
(2008-07-15)

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