Every year, the Chicago Film Critics Association hosts a film festival at one of the city’s most historic venues, the Music Box Theatre. Pulling together buzzy films out of Sundance and SXSW, independent films searching for distribution, short films from around the world, and a few 35mm prints of notable films having major anniversaries this year, the festival provides a unique experience with something for everyone. While there’s no central theme for the fest, this year, each movie showcased the importance of authenticity and connection, in all the forms that connection can take.
The festival kicked off with Olivia Wilde’s third directorial feature The Invite, screening on 35mm in front of a sold-out crowd, and with Wilde in attendance. The Invite features two couples, Olivia Wilde and Seth Rogen, and Penelope Cruz and Edward Norton. It’s a refreshingly vulnerable, funny exploration of intimacy that reminds the audience that meaningful connection requires us to be honest with each other and with ourselves. Wilde and Rogen’s insecure and stunted portrayals of Angela and Joe are perfectly balanced by Cruz and Norton’s confident and liberated Pina and Hawk, catching each of these well-known actors at the perfect times in their careers to deliver the kinds of performances we’ve been waiting decades for. In her Q&A after the film, Wilde said that the cast rehearsed and workshopped for two weeks, building their connection and trust with each other. That work and that connection shines through. Just as sex isn’t always about penetration, The Invite is a sex comedy that is not always about sex—it’s about what happens to your most intimate relationships when you are not living truthfully and authentically.
Authenticity and connection took center-stage once more in Tuner, the upcoming debut narrative feature from Academy Award-Winning documentarian Daniel Roher (Navalny, The A.I. Doc), starring Dustin Hoffman, Leo Woodall, and Havana Rose Liu. Tuner centers on Leo Woodall’s Niki White, a piano tuner with a hearing sensitivity, and his mentor/pseudo-uncle Harry Horowitz (Hoffman). Niki is sent to tune a piano one evening when he overhears some men breaking into the client’s safe. Wanting them to be out of his way so he can finish the job, he uses his superior hearing to crack the safe for them. This leads to a series of events that are largely predictable, but never derivative. Along the way, Niki meets and falls for Havana Rose Liu’s Ruthie, a composing student and piano player. The harmony of the film is in the authenticity and connection between the major characters. Woodall, who was lackluster and quite boring in Netflix’s Vladimir, is much more compelling and attractive as Niki because he’s allowed to showcase the authentic connection that comes from a character who’s allowed to flex his competencies and share his vulnerabilities. Tuner reminds us that exposing our vulnerabilities and communicating with our loved ones can be worth the risks.
Tuner was followed by the much less successful Carolina Caroline. Directed by Adam Carter Rehmeier (Dinner in America and Snack Shack) and starring internet-appointed Scream Queen Samara Weaving as the titular Caroline and Scream King Kyle Gallner as Oliver, Carolina Caroline is an attempted modern take on Bonnie and Clyde—a timeless tale of the two outlaws whose connection to each other was as strong as their penchant for committing crimes. Carolina Caroline swaps authentic connection and strong filmmaking for cheap tricks and overly glossy visuals that do the story a disservice. The set design, costuming, and casting are so distracting that it’s almost impossible to tell when the film is supposed to be set, but it’s clear that it was attempting to be a period piece. What could have been a timeless story dragged into the future will instead likely be lost to time because of its lack of authenticity and its inability to connect with the audience.
On the other end of the spectrum, I Want Your Sex, Greg Araki’s latest neo-pop erotic comedy thriller, explores connection and intimacy (or lack thereof) in full color. I Want Your Sex features Cooper Hoffman (Licorice Pizza) as the latest gen Z intern to a provocative artist played by Olivia Wilde. The movie is incredibly self-aware, directly calling out gen Z’s deep craving for connection in an era of severe repression. The film is packed with sex and nudity with no vulnerability or connection, which is a pretty accurate depiction of sex in society at this moment, while Olivia Wilde’s character delivers lines like “This is not erotic, this is performance” and “contemporary art is arbitrary masturbation.” It’s a fun foray into our current problems with intimacy that could have benefited from pushing even farther. Hopefully someone will step up to the plate and continue funding Araki’s projects so he can push past arbitrary masturbation and into the sexually subversive.
In an example of a successfully subversive film, John Early honored the tropes of women-centered comedies from the 90s and early 2000s while also moving beyond those tropes in Maddie’s Secret, his directorial debut about a food influencer secretly struggling with bulimia. Maddie’s Secret subverts the classic quirky, unaware protagonists that everything seemingly goes right for by having John Early in drag as the titular Maddie. The film opens with a high-energy score over a montage of Maddie moving through the world, while also winking at the audience about what it’s doing. The entire storyline is itself a trope—a young woman whose unhealthy relationship with food stems from her unhealthy relationship with her mother—while also inherently subverting that trope through its use of Early exploring that relationship, without ever feeling like a man is telling women how to handle their relationships with their bodies. It’s truly masterful. The film is refreshingly contemporary with a retro feel and knows exactly how seriously to take itself. It’s proof that the things we loved from movies in the past can be dragged into the present, diced up and cooked into something new, all while saying something substantial about reconnecting with yourself and reclaiming your own power.
Willem Dafoe similarly reconnects with his once and future self in Kent Jones’s new film Late Fame. Written by Samy Burch (May December) and based on the novella by Arthur Schnitzler, Late Fame follows Dafoe as Ed Saxberger. Saxberger is approached by a young man on the street, Meyers (played by Edmund Donovan). Meyers recognizes Saxberger from an old collection of poems that was published decades before. Saxberger, a career postman, is pulled back into the world of young artists (including wannabe ingénue Gloria, played sharply by Greta Lee) in New York, chasing that feeling of his youth and experiencing the glory he once yearned for.
Late Fame paired expertly with The Last One For the Road, an Italian road movie following two middle-aged men who befriend a shy architecture student that they convince to join them for one crazy night on the road, and Agnes, a short film about an older woman who’s attempting to reconnect with her youth. All three remind us that there are three interconnected people inside us; who we were, who we are, and who we will be.
Chili Finger and Loafers delivered two entirely different mediations on age and reconnecting with who you will be. Edd Bena and Stephen Hestad were in attendance to show their new film Chili Finger, a dark crime comedy following a mother (Judy Greer, also in attendance) who discovers a severed human finger in her bowl of chili and uses that to blackmail a local fast-food chain (owned and represented by the likeness of a man named Blake Jr, played brilliantly by John Goodman). Chili Finger is a good old fashioned comedy with as much heart as the American heartland.
Loafers, the debut feature writer-director-star Zach Schnitzer and producer-editor Nate Simons (the two are cousins and collaborators), is a return to 2000s mumblecore and follows a group of friends navigating their changing relationships in their post-grad life, figuring things out in the sun-soaked flats and alleyways of Chicago. It’s an incredibly impressive debut. The Loafers team said that they didn’t set out to do anything specific, they just wanted to make a feature. Anything that happens after that is a bonus to them. And yet, with no major goal and only $6,000, they delivered a beautiful movie about reconnecting with yourself and your friends in a season of change. The whole thing is tender, earnest, and fully-realized. Loafers made me go for a walk through my own Chicago alleyway, reflecting on my friendships and my own seasons of change.
The festival closed out with what was essentially a hometown screening of The Sun Never Sets, Joe Swanberg’s latest, starring Dakota Fanning, Jake Johnson, and Cory Michael Smith. Several cast and crew were in the audience, including Swanberg and Smith. The Sun Never Sets was a perfect full-circle from opening night’s The Invite (which Swanberg also attended). Like The Invite, The Sun Never Sets centers on a woman grappling with whether her current relationship is the best fit for her current life and her authentic desires. Both films feel autobiographical in some ways, both were shot on 35mm, and both contain some truly incredible improvisation. The authenticity and intentionality that comes with shooting on film can be felt in both films. Unfortunately, the lack of a woman in the writer’s room can really be felt in The Sun Never Sets, which is much less successful in its portrayal of romantic connection from a woman’s perspective. It’s also a much less mature reflection on changing relationships than Loafers managed to be with a lower budget and less life experience.
Overall, the Critics Fest was a week of celebrating Chicago, celebrating film, film criticism, and the connections of all forms that we can find through art. Several of the screenings were co-presented by local organizations such as Black Women Directors, The Sierra Club, the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago, Instituto Cervantes de Chicago, and Animation Adventures. In my time in line, I saw film clubs from across the city meeting up to see the films and then discuss them after. Filmmakers brought their communities together to see their films. Hundreds of people showed up to cry to a pristine 35mm print of Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence on a Sunday night. I walked away feeling inspired by the art and grateful that spaces like the Music Box exist to allow us to witness art in community.
