The veteran speed-metal outfit Anvil will appear at the Music Box tonight for Q-and-A sessions at the 7:20 and 9:40 PM screenings of Sacha Gervasi’s critically acclaimed documentary Anvil! The Story of Anvil. The movie continues all week, and it’s a killer.
In this week’s issue: suffer with me, if you will, through the screen adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s story collection The Informers.
If that’s too much to ask, then at least consider one of these recommended titles in week two of the Chicago Latino Film Festival: Christmas Eve, about a dysfunctional Colombian family whose finances are collapsing; The Good News, in which a lefty priest clashes with his conservative parishioners on the eve of the Spanish Civil War; Love, Pain and Vice Versa, a Mexican thriller about two strangers who inhabit each other’s dreams; and, in its last festival screening, Vicente Serrano‘s A Forgotten Injustice, which revisits the Hoover administration’s mass deportation of Mexican-American citizens.
Cliff Doerksen holds forth on the Chicago Palestine Film Festival, recommending two movies about Palestinian entrepreneurs trying to function in Israel: Hayden Campbell’s The Zoo and Buthina Canaan Khoury’s Taste the Revolution.
In this week’s new capsule reviews: Cliff likes Forbidden Lie$, Anna Broinowski’s doc about Jordanian author/con artist Norma Khouri, which screens all week at Gene Siskel Film Center. Andrea Gronvall recommends Disney’s new wide-release eco-documentary Earth. The most interesting thing I saw this week was Ying Liang’s shoestring video Taking Father Home, also at Film Center; shot with a single, borrowed camera, it uses impressively executed long takes to tell the story of a boy who leaves home in search of his father.