Author Archives: Chicago Reader

A 1984 thriller by Michael Crichton (Coma, Looker), set in a not-too-distant future where a police sergeant in charge of stopping runaway robots (Tom Selleck) comes up against an evil genius (Gene Simmons of Kiss) who has found a way to program them to kill. With Cynthia Rhodes, Kirstie Alley, and Stan Shaw. PG, 100 […]

Chicago Filmmakers’ “dada soiree” will feature a collection of French and German dada films made between 1922 and 1931—including work by Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Hans Richter—plus a live performance by Andrew Laties of Kurt Schwitters’s dada sound poem The Ursonata.

Captured by the Russian army in its 1945 advance across Hungary, a boy is put to work herding cows with a young Russian soldier. The two become friends, but when the boy is released at the end of the war, he is punished for collaboration. A 1964 film by Miklos Jancso (Red Psalm), it’s said […]

Eleven animated shorts that up the genre’s usual quotient of sex and violence. Includes work by Gordon Lawson, Jeff Carpenter and Mary Lambert, Dave Bishop, George Griffin, Rick Goldstein, and Geoff Dunbar.

India’s land reform policies are attacked in a 1982 feature by Shyam Benegal, which follows four intertwined stories of peasants forced from their farms despite the government’s guarantees of protection. The central figure is a sharecropper who takes his case to court; his experiences turn him into a political activist.

An early (1964) film by Hungary’s Miklos Jancso, made between his documentary and experimental phases. A young doctor wanders the white corridors of a hospital, searching for human compassion in what seems to be a wholly impersonal system.

G-man Chester Morris gets the goods on underworld czar Joseph Calleia with the help of the mobster’s right-thinking sister, Jean Arthur. An MGM programmer from 1935 with a good reputation; the director was J. Walter Ruben, the cinematographer Gregg Toland. With Lionel Barrymore, Paul Kelly, and Lewis Stone.