The Chicago International Film Festival begins its first full day of screenings on Thursday, October 16; here are the highlights our film critics recommend. Follow along for all our latest coverage of the festival, which runs through October 26.
Bugonia
Filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos follows up Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness with yet another in a string of fruitful creative partnerships with Emma Stone. Bugonia is an update of the 2003 Korean dark comedy Save the Green Planet! from writer/director Jang Joon-hwan. This time around, an intense Jesse Plemons plays Teddy, a conspiracy-obsessed individual, who drags his partner in crime, Don (newcomer Aidan Delbis, a wonderful young actor on the autism spectrum) into a plot to kidnap a high-powered CEO, Michelle (Stone), because he’s convinced she’s an alien who has come to Earth to destroy human life.
While the original film was more comedic and outlandish, Lanthimos and screenwriter Will Tracy (The Menu) lean heavily into the dangerously high number of conspiracy theories floating around in the modern atmosphere and turn this cautionary tale into a psychological thriller. Also, gender-swapping the CEO character from the Korean film adds an air of sexual politics to Teddy's agenda, without making it inappropriate since Teddy and Don both chemically castrate themselves before beginning this endeavor. But it’s the multiple scenes in which Stone and Plemons simply face off and attempt to negotiate a way out of this predicament that are the highlights of this sharp, unflinching work that looks right into the eyes of these extreme opposites—one who cares too little about humanity and one who cares too much. It’s a fascinating and weirdly moving journey. (Steve Prokopy)
The film screens at the Music Box Theatre on Thursday, Oct. 16, at 6:30pm; it opens in Chicago on Oct. 24, including a 35mm run at the Music Box.
Holding Liat
The whole world knows the horrors that happened in Israel on October 7, 2023 as Hamas executed coordinated attacks on Israelis across a music festival, several kibbutzes and more. Among the 250 hostages taken that day were twelve American citizens, one of whom is related to filmmaker Brandon Kramer; he discovers this news as he reaches out to family on that fateful day and he immediately springs into action. He knows exactly what to do: pick up a camera and document whatever might follow. That footage would become this moving and essential documentary, Holding Liat.
It’s a harrowing and risky decision, not just for Kramer but for the family members he begins to film as we learn what transpired that day: Liat and her husband, Aviv, living in a kibbutz with one of their three grown children, were abducted by Hamas and held as hostages as her parents, Yehuda and Chaya, and her sister, Tal, are left behind to do everything they can to bring them home safely.
With exceptional access to Yehuda and his family, Kramer witnesses this unparalleled experience with intimacy and urgency; more than once, the family makes it clear how aware they are that they’re being filmed, especially as tensions rise amidst the differences in the family’s political and religious ideologies. Over the last two years, there’s been no shortage of reporting, protesting and prognosticating on and about the conflict between Israel and Gaza.
Holding Liat is strikingly different from all of them, in no small part because it is presented without bias or agenda; Kramer is simply observing and offering back to us what one family endured over the first several months following Liat and Aviv’s abduction, and it’s incredibly powerful. At the risk of spoiling what becomes a riveting dramatic arc, the film’s final third shifts gears ever-so-slightly to remind us that even in the face of unimaginable tragedy, the human spirit perseveres and that empathy and understanding ultimately win the day. (Lisa Trifone)
Holding Liat screens Thursday, October 16 at 5pm and Friday, October 17, at 12pm. Producer Lance Kramer is scheduled to attend.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
One of the more memorable and impactful films of the year comes from writer/director Mary Bronstein (Yeast) and concerns a woman named Linda (Rose Byrne), who is effectively raising her ailing child by herself (I’m not sure we’re ever told what is wrong with said child, whose face is never shown, but she’s severely underweight). Linda’s husband is in the military and travels for weeks at a time, leaving her to deal with their child’s affliction as well as an unexpected, catastrophic home repair involving a massive hole in her bedroom ceiling. These events are negatively impacting Linda’s day job as a therapist, and her attitude toward her patients (I especially like Danielle MacDonald's performance as a paranoid mother), as well as her sessions with her own therapist (Conan O’Brien). Linda and her daughter are forced to move into a shady motel, where she meets a local eccentric, played by musician A$AP Rocky, whom she befriends.
Byrne finds ways to inject her dramatic roots and comedic flair into the character of Linda, making If I Had Legs I’d Kick You both darkly funny and a pressure cooker of a character drama. On its surface, the film is about the perils and pressures of motherhood, but in a broader context, it’s about being supported. It might take a village to raise a child, but Linda’s village has, with rare exceptions, abandoned her. Linda frequently leaves her daughter alone in their room so she can simply get out and feel connected with grown people, and we’re allowed to dive deep into her troubled and fractured mind as Byrne takes us from fantastical delusions to pure panic attacks. The film is certainly not for everyone, and some may even find it grating beyond words at times. But when it works, Bronstein and her team give us something that Nightbitch simply didn’t, because If I Had Legs I’d Kick You doesn’t presuppose that we’ll like Linda by the time things fade out. (Steve Prokopy)
The film screens at the AMC NewCity on Thursday, Oct. 16, at 8pm.
This Island
Winner of three awards (including Best Cinematography and Best New Narrative Director) at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, This Island (Esta isla) may at times be chewing more than it can bite. And for good reason. An expansion of their 2014 short of the same name, Lorraine Jones Molina’s and Cristian Carretero’s feature debut takes the “young lovers on the run” trope of such films as Badlands to paint a picture of an island—Puerto Rico—that has been pummeled by one crisis after another and of a population that keeps adapting to whatever nature and centuries of colonialism has thrown (and keeps throwing) at them.
Shot on Puerto Rico’s West Coast with a cast of mostly non-actors, This Island centers on Bebo (Zion Ortiz), a teen who, alongside his older brother Charlie (Xavier Morales), tries to earn a living fishing, with the occasional sale of drugs on the side over Charlie’s objections (even though Charlie himself is involved in some illicit business). Bebo falls for Lola (Fabiola Brown), a child of privilege bored with her own existence, at a local night club. When Charlie is gunned down outside a karaoke bar and Bebo foolishly tries to take matters into his own hands, the two young lovers pack up their bags and leave for the island’s mountains. So far, so conventional.
But then, slowly but surely, Jones Molina, Carretero, and co-writer Kisha Tikina Burgos (a key figure in the island’s burgeoning independent film scene) show their hand. The film becomes much more than a story about an incompatible duo trying to make a run for it, when they really have nowhere to turn (their only ticket out being an actual plane ticket). Bebo and Lola briefly become part of a greater community, one that plants and literally reaps what they sow, that sings old Puerto Rican country (or jibaro) songs and holds tight to their traditions, and where solidarity comes in many ways, shapes and forms. The film references the marches that forced Governor Ricky Rosselló to resign in 2019, the earthquakes that shook the island the following year, COVID, blackouts and the lack of running, potable water in many towns. There is even a sly reference to the gunning down of Macheteros leader Filiberto Ojeda Ríos in 2005 by the FBI (including a visit to his home in Hormigueros). Too much? Maybe. But Esta Isla, Puerto Rico, has been enduring, and is still enduring, too much, and all at the same time. (Alejandro Riera)
This Island will screen as part of the Festival’s Snapshots program on Thursday, October 16, at 8:30pm and Friday, October 17, at 8:45pm at the AMC NewCity. Co-director Lorraine Jones Molina and actor Fabiola Brown are scheduled to attend both screenings.
Sisu: Road to Revenge
The first time around in the surprise 2022 hit Sisu, Astami (Jorma Tommila)—the man who refuses to die—was fighting an army of Nazis trying to protect gold that he’d found to bring back to his small corner of Finland at the tail end of World War II. This time around, the relentlessly brutal, sometimes cartoonish (but with blood) action continues as Astami returns to the home where his family was cruelly murdered. His mission is to dismantle the house, log by log, transport it to somewhere safer, and rebuild it in their honor.
But returning director Jalmari Helander isn’t going to lets things transpire without a little bloodshed, as our hero is confronted by the very Red Army commander (Stephen Lang) who slaughtered his family and is determined to finish the job across the country if necessary. The action set pieces are death- and gravity-defying, clever, and worthy of cheers each time Astami barrels through another couple dozen Russian soldiers with little more than his wit and perseverance. The films doesn’t skimp on the eye-popping violence or let us forget how effective a well-staged stunt sequence can be. And the addition of Lang to the proceedings only helps to elevate this relentless fight to the death between two aging but highly motivated soldiers. (Steve Prokopy)
The film screens at the AMC NewCity on Thursday, Oct. 16, at 10:30pm.
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