2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967, 87 min, in French with English subtitles) Sun July 23, 4:00 pm Wed July 26, 7:00 pm The most intellectually heroic of Jean-Luc Godard’s early features was inspired by his reading an article about suburban housewives day-tripping into Paris to turn tricks for spending money. Marina Vlady plays one such woman, followed over a single day in a slender narrative with many documentary and documentary-like digressions. But the central figure is Godard himself, who whispers his poetic and provocative ruminations over monumentally composed color ‘Scope images and, like James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, continually interrogates his own methods and responses. Few features of the period capture the world with as much passion and insight. (Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader)

A New Leaf (Elaine May, 1971, 102 min) Sat July 15, 4:00 pm Tue July 18, 7:00 pm Writer-director-star Elaine May’s first feature concerns stunted manboy Henry (Walter Matthau) who, having squandered his inherited wealth, plots to marry and murder the very rich and very maladjusted Henrietta (May.) May’s savage take on her characters underscores their vanity and self-absorption, but also their tenderness. The Village Voice: “A film of such wit and comic invention that it belongs among the great American comedies.”

Sat July 1, 4:00 pm Wed July 5, 7:00 pm Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole is one of the most scathing indictments of American culture ever produced by a Hollywood filmmaker. Kirk Douglas gives the fiercest performance of his career as Chuck Tatum, an amoral newspaper reporter who washes up in dead-end Albuquerque, happens upon the scoop of a lifetime, and will do anything to keep getting the lurid headlines. Wilder’s follow-up to Sunset Boulevard is an even darker vision, a no-holds-barred exposé of the American media’s appetite for sensation that has gotten only more relevant with time.

All I Desire (Douglas Sirk, 1953, 79 min) Sat Aug 5, 4:00 pm Tue Aug 8, 7:00 pm A failed actress and mother of three (Barbara Stanwyck) returns to the husband (Richard Carlson) and family she deserted years before in this superior 1953 drama by Douglas Sirk, a very personal reworking of a standard soap-opera plot. True to form, Sirk transforms the material through a careful and ironic subversion of the conventions; what emerges is a biting assessment of the value of survival in the face of small-town meanness and prejudice, a neat use of a very bourgeois format to satirize its audience. (Don Drucker, Chicago Reader)

All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955, 89 min) Sun Aug 6, 4:00 pm Wed Aug 9, 7:00 pm A masterpiece (1955) by one of the most inventive and recondite directors ever to work in Hollywood, Douglas Sirk. The story (which Rainer Werner Fassbinder remade as Ali: Fear Eats the Soul) concerns a romance between a middle-aged, middle-class widow (Jane Wyman) and a brawny young gardener (Rock Hudson)—the stuff of a standard weepie, you might think, until Sirk’s camera begins to draw a deeply disturbing, deeply compassionate portrait of a woman trapped by stifling moral and social codes. Sirk’s meaning is conveyed almost entirely by his mise-en-scene—a world of glistening, treacherous surfaces, of objects that take on a terrifying life of their own; he is one of those rare filmmakers who insist that you read the image. (Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader)

The itinerary of a Junior Stargazer/Space Cadet convention (organized to bring together students and parents from across the country for fellowship and scholarly competition) is spectacularly disrupted by world-changing events.

Belly (Hype Williams, 1998, 96 min) Wed July 19, 10:30 pm “Fuck a book,” says star DMX, and indeed this is post-verbal filmmaking, with vital plot points rendered in Jamaican patois. Belly opens with a blacklight nightclub stickup set to a capella vocal gymnastics, and director Hype Williams (auteur of shiny-suit-era Bad Boy music videos) doesn't allow a routine frame past the velvet rope in his sui generis, Alizé-and-mushrooms swirl of millennial Manhattan and dancehall reggae.

Blade (Stephen Norrington, 1998, 126 min) Wed Aug 30, 10:30 pm When Blade’s mother was bitten by a vampire during pregnancy, she did not know that she gave her son a special gift while dying: All the good vampire attributes in combination with the best human skills. Blade and his mentor Whistler battle an evil vampire rebel (Deacon Frost) who plans to take over the outdated vampire council, capture Blade and resurrect voracious blood god La Magra.

Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan, 1981, 113 min) Sat July 29, 4:00 pm Tue Aug 1, 7:00 pm “You’re not too smart, are you? I like that in a man.” White-clad Kathleen Turner inveigles sweatily lustful lawyer William Hurt into a definitely R-rated reworking of Double Indemnity. More than one critic at the time noted that it didn’t make a lot of sense for the film’s lead characters to speak in the kind of erotically charged innuendo that was once written to get around censorship, only to then show them actually having sex… The one and only Body Heat!

Set during the early days of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, Chile ‘76 builds from quiet character study to gripping suspense thriller as it explores one woman’s precarious flirtation with political engagement. Carmen (Aline Kuppenheim) leads a sheltered upper middle class existence. She heads to her summer house in the off-season to supervise its renovation, while also performing local charitable works through her church. Her husband, children, and grandchildren come back and forth during the winter vacation, bringing reminders of the world beyond. When the family priest asks her to take care of an injured young man he has been sheltering in secret, Carmen is inadvertently drawn into the world of the Chilean political opposition and must face real-world threats she is unprepared to handle, with potentially disastrous consequences for her and her entire family.

Much has been written, but little is known about Johannes Vermeer, painter of iconic paintings and crowd pleasers such as The Milkmaid and Girl with a Pearl Earring. His small oeuvre is almost everything he left behind. Dicht bij Vermeer (Close to Vermeer) follows Gregor Weber, a globally renowned Vermeer expert and flamboyant curator at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. In the year before he retires, he works on his big dream: the largest Vermeer exhibition ever. Together with Weber, a number of Vermeer enthusiasts and experts go in search of what truly makes a Vermeer a Vermeer. Through new discoveries and by dissecting the work layer by layer, this film brings us closer to the painter to understand the decisions he made and the steps in his oeuvre.

Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963, 102 min, in French with English subtitles) Sat July 22, 4:00 pm Tue July 25, 7:00 pm Jean-Luc Godard’s subversive foray into commercial filmmaking is a star-studded Cinemascope epic. Contempt (Le Mépris) stars Michel Piccoli as a screenwriter torn between the demands of a proud European director (played by legendary director Fritz Lang), a crude and arrogant American producer (Jack Palance), and his disillusioned wife, Camille (Brigitte Bardot), as he attempts to doctor the script for a new film version of The Odyssey. An inimitable riff on marital breakdown, artistic compromise, and the cinematic process.

Double Team (Hark Tsui, 1997, 91 min) Wed Aug 2, 10:30 pm An international spy (Jean-Claude Van Damme) teams up with a flamboyant weapons dealer (Dennis Rodman) to escape from a penal colony and save his family. Screen Slate: “one of the more colorful, strange, and unclassifiable Hollywood action films of the 90s.”

Drylongso (Cauleen Smith, 1998, 86 min) Saturday July 8, 4:00 pm Tuesday July 11, 7:00 pm A lost treasure of 1990s DIY filmmaking, Cauleen Smith’s Drylongso embeds an incisive look at racial injustice within a lovingly handmade buddy movie/murder mystery/ romance. Alarmed by the rate at which the young Black men around her are dying—indeed, “becoming extinct,” as she sees it—brash Oakland art student Pica (Toby Smith) attempts to preserve their existence in Polaroid snapshots, along the way forging a friendship with a woman in an abusive relationship (April Barnett), experiencing love and loss, and being drawn into the search for a serial killer who is terrorizing the city. Capturing the vibrant community spirit of Oakland in the nineties, Smith crafts both a rare cinematic celebration of Black female creativity and a moving elegy for a generation of lost African American men.

Husbands (John Cassavetes, 1970, 142 min) Sun June 18, 4:00 pm Wed June 21, 7:00 pm In the catalogue of films about platonic male love, few have the same sensitivity for its codes and complications as Husbands. This tale of a middle-aged, suburbanite trio (real life buddies Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk, and director John Cassavetes, all at the top of their game) mourning the recent death of their pal—and their youth—by going on an endless memorial bender suggests that, for many, the truest way to express one’s feelings is by throwing them up… That Cassavetes and his friends still managed to have such a blast making it gives this picture a bittersweet, Frank Capra-like tenderness which, for all its sometimes revolting messiness, feels pretty much classic. (Dylan Pasture, Screen Slate)

Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959, 125 min) Sun Aug 20, 4:00 pm Wed Aug 23, 7:00 pm Douglas Sirk’s 1959 film was the biggest grosser in Universal’s history until the release of Airport, yet it’s also one of the most intellectually demanding films ever made in Hollywood. The secret of Sirk’s double appeal is a broadly melodramatic plotline, played with perfect conviction yet constantly criticized and challenged by the film’s mise-en-scene, which adds levels of irony and analysis through a purely visual inflection. Lana Turner stars as a young widow and mother who will do anything to realize her dreams of Broadway stardom; her story is intertwined with that of Susan Kohner, the light-skinned daughter of Turner’s black maid, who is tempted to pass for white. By emphasizing brilliant surfaces, bold colors, and the spatial complexities of 50s modern architecture, Sirk creates a world of illusion, entrapment, and emotional desperation. (Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader)

Losing Ground (Kathleen Collins, 1982, 86 min) Sat June 24, 4:00 pm Tue June 27, 7:00 pm The inimitable Kathleen Collins's second film tells the story of two remarkable people, married and hurtling toward a crossroads in their lives: Sara Rogers, a Black professor of philosophy, is embarking on an intellectual quest just as her painter husband Victor (Bill Gunn) sets off on an exploration of joy. Victor decides to rent a country house away from the city, but the couple’s summer idyll becomes complicated by his involvement with a younger model. One of the very first fictional features by an African-American woman, Losing Ground remains a stunning and powerful work of art for being a funny, brilliant, and personal member of indie cinema canon.

Love Streams (John Cassavetes, 1984, 141 min) Sat June 17, 4:00 pm Tue June 20, 7:00 pm John Cassavetes’s career of risk-taking comes to a climax in this rich, original, emotionally magnificent 1984 film about a brother who is unable to love (Cassavetes) and a sister who loves too much (Gena Rowlands). For half its length the film follows their separate experiences—he as a celebrated novelist living a life of desperate dissolution in Los Angeles; she as a wife and mother undergoing a painful divorce in Chicago—and then brings them together for a rocky reunion. At the climax they trade roles, and each is alone again in a new way. Cassavetes follows his vision to the limit, a course that takes him through extravagance, indulgence, and hysteria—yet for all of his apparent disdain for classical construction, there isn’t a moment in the film that doesn’t find its place in a grand design. (Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader)

Sun July 9, 4:00 pm Wed July 12, 7:00 pm A stylish and seductive submersion into the techno-scored neon nightlife of Taipei, Hou’s much-misunderstood marvel stars Shu Qi (The Assassin) as an aimless bar hostess drifting away from her blowhard boyfriend and towards Jack Kao’s suave, sensitive gangster. Structured as a flashback to the then-present from the then-future of 2011, it’s a transfixing trance-out of a movie, drenched in club lights, ecstatic endorphin-rush exhilaration, and a nagging undercurrent of ennui.

My Man Godfrey (Gregory La Cava, 1936, 93 min) Sat June 10, 4:00 pm Tue June 13, 7:00 pm Carole Lombard and William Powell dazzle in this definitive screwball comedy by Gregory La Cava—a potent cocktail of romantic repartee and social critique. Irene (Lombard), an eccentric, wealthy Manhattanite, wins a society-ball scavenger hunt after finding a “forgotten man” (Powell)—an apparent down-and-out drifter—at a dump. She gives him work as the family butler and soon falls head over heels for him. Her attempts to both woo Godfrey and indoctrinate him in the household’s dysfunction make for a string of madcap high jinks that has never been bested, and the film remains one of Hollywood’s greatest commentaries on class and the social unrest of the Depression era.

In the wake of inheriting his father’s hotel chain, Hal attempts to end his long and secret relationship with Rebecca. A battle of wills ensues over the course of one incredibly fraught night, with both Rebecca and Hal struggling to keep the upper hand as the power dynamics swing wildly back and forth.

Southland Tales (Richard Kelly, 2007, 145 min) Wed Aug 16, 10:30 pm Donnie Darko’s Richard Kelly follows up his cerebral cult-classic with a bonkers, satirical, go-for-broke alternative (some would say prescient) imagining of a fractured US amidst political and social chaos. The only hope for survival: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Sean William Scott, and The Rock.

Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven, 1997, 129 min) Sun July 2, 4:00 pm Thu July 6, 7:00 pm Part comic book–style action adventure, part scathing satire of the military-industrial complex, Starship Troopers is one of the most subversive artistic acts ever perpetrated with a $100 million budget. Welcome to the 24th century, where fresh-faced, idealistic teens are encouraged to join up and become “citizens” by enlisting in the intergalactic army. They’ll grow up, see the universe, and, oh yeah, be slaughtered by the thousands as they battle giant, mutant insects threatening to wipe out mankind. Abetted by seamless special effects and impressively gory CGI carnage, Verhoeven delivers thrilling science fiction spectacle alongside a devastating takedown of jingoistic militarism.

The Eight Mountains is the story of a friendship. Of children becoming men who try to erase the footprints of their fathers, but who, through the twists and turns they take, always end up returning home. Pietro is a boy from the city, Bruno is the last child of a forgotten mountain village. Over the years Bruno remains faithful to his mountain, while Pietro is the one who comes and goes. Their encounters introduce them to love and loss, reminding them of their origins, letting their destinies unfold, as Pietro and Bruno discover what it means to be true friends for life.

The Green Ray (Éric Rohmer, 1986, 98 min, in French with English subtitles) Sun June 25, 4:00 pm Wed June 28, 7:00 pm Éric Rohmer captures the ache of summertime sadness with exquisite poignancy in this luminous tale of self-exploration, the fifth film in his Comedies and Proverbs cycle. The Jules Verne novel of the same name provides the loose inspiration for the story of Delphine (Marie Rivière), a dreamy, introverted young secretary who, reeling from a breakup with her boyfriend, faces the prospect of spending her summer vacation alone. As she bounces from Cherbourg to the tourist-choked Alps to the sunny beaches of Biarritz, Delphine passes through a whirl of social activity—but remains profoundly alone, as true human connection continually eludes her. As honest a portrait of loneliness, depression, and the longing for understanding as has ever been committed to film, The Green Ray is one of the most piercingly perceptive works by French cinema’s keenest observer of human relationships.

The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941, 93 min) Sun June 11, 4:00 pm Wed June 14, 7:00 pm Barbara Stanwyck sizzles, Henry Fonda bumbles, and Preston Sturges runs riot in one of the all-time great screwballs, a pitch-perfect blend of comic zing and swoonworthy romance. Aboard a cruise liner sailing up the coast of South America, Stanwyck’s conniving card sharp sets her sights on Fonda’s nerdy snake researcher, who happens to be the heir to a brewery fortune. But when the con artist falls for her mark, her grift becomes a game of hearts—and she is determined to win it all. This gender-flipped battle-of-wits farce is perhaps Sturges’ most emotionally satisfying work, tempering its sparkling humor with a streak of tender poignancy supplied by the sensational Stanwyck at her peak.

The Night is Short, Walk on Girl (Masaaki Yuasa, 2017, 93 min) Wed July 5, 10:30 pm A surreal nocturnal animated odyssey from Yuasa, the mad genius behind Mind Game, rendered in a frenetic, galaxy-brained, endlessly morphing style. The Night is Short, Walk on Girl follows a mysterious high schooler known only as The Girl with Black Hair through the streets of Kyoto’s famed Ponto-Cho party district, drinking middle-aged salarymen under the table when she’s not mixing with barflies, obsessive collectors, and guerilla theater performers, all the while oblivious to the efforts of a fellow student who has been creating increasingly fantastic and contrived reasons to run into her in a gambit to win her love. A comic fable of fleeting youthful passions, as lived out through one mad, unforgettable night.

The Tarnished Angels (Douglas Sirk, 1958, 91 min) Sat Aug 19, 4:00 pm Tue Aug 22, 7:00 pm Douglas Sirk took a vacation from Ross Hunter and Technicolor for this 1958 production, though he retained Rock Hudson, who turns in an astonishingly good performance as a journalist fascinated by the sordid lives of a trio of professional stunt fliers (Robert Stack, Dorothy Malone, and Jack Carson). Based on a minor novel by William Faulkner (Pylon), the film betters the book in every way, from the quality of characterization to the development of the dark, searing imagery. Made in black-and-white CinemaScope, the film doesn’t survive on television; it should be seen in a theater or not at all. (Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader)

There’s Always Tomorrow (Douglas Sirk, 1955, 85 min) Sat Aug 12, 4:00 pm Tue Aug 15, 7:00 pm Douglas Sirk is best known for his highly stylized Technicolor melodramas, but he also did superlative work in restrained black and white. There’s Always Tomorrow (1955) is a virtuoso study in tones, ranging from the blinding sunlight of a desert resort to the expressionist shadows of the suburban home where Fred MacMurray lives in unhappy union with Joan Bennett. Barbara Stanwyck is the old flame who turns up by accident, rekindling for MacMurray the dangerous illusion that happiness is still possible. With Pat Crowley and William Reynolds. (Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader)

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (David Lynch, 1992, 135 min) Wed June 21, 10:30 pm In the town of Twin Peaks, everybody has their secrets—but no one more than Laura Palmer. In this prequel to his groundbreaking 1990s television series, David Lynch resurrects the teenager found wrapped in plastic at the beginning of the show, following her through the last week of her life and teasing out the enigmas that surround her murder. Homecoming queen by day and drug-addicted thrill seeker by night, Laura leads a double life that pulls her deeper and deeper into horror as she pieces together the identity of the assailant who has been terrorizing her for years. Nightmarish in its vision of an innocent torn apart by unfathomable forces, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me is nevertheless one of Lynch’s most humane films, aching with compassion for its tortured heroine—a character as enthralling in life as she was in death.

Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956, 99 min) Sun Aug 13, 4:00 pm Wed Aug 16, 7:00 pm One of the most remarkable and unaccountable films ever made in Hollywood, Douglas Sirk’s 1957 masterpiece turns a lurid, melodramatic script into a screaming Brechtian essay on the shared impotence of American family and business life. Sirk’s highly imaginative use of color—to accent, undermine, and sometimes even nullify the drama—remains years ahead of contemporary technique. The degree of stylization is high and impeccable: one is made to understand the characters as icons as well as psychologically complex creations. With Dorothy Malone (in the performance of her career), Lauren Bacall, Robert Stack, and Rock Hudson. (Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader)

From acclaimed filmmaker Nicole Holofcener comes a sharply observed comedy about a novelist whose long standing marriage is suddenly upended when she overhears her husband give his honest reaction to her latest book. A film about trust, lies, and the things we say to the people we love most.

Young Adult (Jason Reitman, 2011, 94 min) Sun July 16, 4:00 pm Wed July 19, 7:00 pm If Lydia Tár traded classical music for YA literature and Berlin for Minnesota, she’d probably behave a lot like Young Adult’s Mavis. As in writer Diablo Cody’s previous feature, the lately re-appraised Jennifer’s Body, Young Adult centers a complicated, unlikeable female protagonist. Charlize Theron gives a pitch-perfect performance as a Young Adult author who delusionally exploits adolescent romance platitudes to try to break up the marriage of her long-lost high school boyfriend. Patton Oswalt delivers a delightful performance as her floundering sidekick torn between his conscience and his crush. One of the more astonishing - and corrosive - rom-coms one could ever hope to see.