VENUE All films reviewed here, except for Miss Julie, screen at River East 21, 322 E. Illinois.
A half century of CIFF milestones, from Scorsese’s debut to Lee Daniels’s achievement award
Read our reviews of 15 revival films screening at CIFF.
Read our reviews of CIFF week one.
Film festivals are usually front-loaded, with all the best stuff at the beginning. But the “best stuff” isn’t always the best stuff—it’s just the stuff with the biggest names and the loudest buzz. In fact you stand just as good a chance of seeing something that will rock your world in the second week of the Chicago International Film Festival as in the first. It just won’t have Bill Murray in it. Following are selected films screening Friday through Thursday, October 17 through 23. –J.R. Jones
A Girl at My Door A young but resolute policewoman (Doona Bae of Cloud Atlas), reassigned from Seoul to a remote fishing village, becomes the reluctant protector of a motherless schoolgirl picked on by the community, cursed by her drunken grandmother, and periodically beaten by her loutish father. There’s something a little spooky about the girl—”She doesn’t seem like a child; sometimes she seems like a little monster,” another cop observes—which complicates the continually shifting power struggle between the policewoman and the father. As a mystery, this debut feature by writer-director July Jung makes a mockery of such huffing-and-puffing Hollywood exercises as Gone Girl; the tone is quiet and the pace steady, yet the story arcs so perfectly, tracing the heroine’s growing commitment to the child even as their secrets emerge, that I was engrossed for every minute of its two-hour running time. In Korean with subtitles. –J.R. Jones 119 min. Jung attends the Wednesday and Friday screenings. Fri 10/17, 5:30 PM, and Mon 10/20, noon.
Maestro Like Sacha Gervasi’s Hitchcock, this French romantic comedy pays tribute to a great director by making him a character in a movie that mimics one of his own. The young actor Jocelyn Quivrin appeared in Eric Rohmer’s last film, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon, before dying in a car accident in 2009, and Rohmer passed away a few months later at age 89. Drawing on Quivrin’s recollections of the shoot, which included his amorous pursuit of a fetching costar, writer-director Léa Fazer reimagines the movie’s production and premiere as a celebration of young love and its vicissitudes, with an affectionate portrait of Rohmer in all his literary acumen and emotional wisdom. The comedy is broader than Rohmer would have permitted, but this is a modest success nonetheless—and when you’re dealing with a master like Rohmer, you’d damn well better be modest. With Pio Marmaï and Michael Lonsdale. In French with subtitles. –J.R. Jones 81 min. Fri 10/17, 2:30 PM; Sun 10/19, 2:30 PM, and Tue 10/21, 5:45 PM.
Two Days, One Night An assembly-line worker at a solar panel factory (Marion Cotillard), recently returned to work after an emotional breakdown, discovers that her coworkers, coerced by management, have voted to terminate her employment rather than forfeit their annual bonus; over a long and desperate weekend, she visits them at their homes and begs them to change their votes. The premise for this Belgian drama couldn’t be simpler or more compelling, yet writer-directors Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne (The Kid With a Bike) tease out any number of moral complexities as the heroine learns of her coworkers’ various circumstances (many of them have children, and almost all of them are living hand to mouth). In film after film the Dardennes have proven themselves the cinema’s most acute humanist critics of predatory capitalism; this masterful drama finds them at the top of their game, laying bare the endless uphill battle of getting workers to look out for each other. In French with subtitles. –J.R. Jones 95 min. Sun 10/19, 6:15 PM.
