Halloween is long over, but here’s one last chance to go dark before the tryptophan takes hold. This week Ben Sachs reviews In the Basement, a documentary about Austrian bondage aficionados by the reliably warped filmmaker Ulrich Seidl. And Neil Hamburger stars in Entertainment, the latest from indie doomsayer Rick Alverson (The Comedy).
Check out our new reviews of: The Great Man, a French drama about a Chechen immigrant in Paris; The Hallow, an ecologically themed horror flick; The Night Before, with Seth Rogen, Anthony Mackie, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as old pals whooping it up on Christmas Eve; A Poem Is a Naked Person, a long-lost documentary portrait of R&B great Leon Russell by oddball ethnographer Les Blank; Secret in Their Eyes, a remake of the 2009 police thriller from Argentina; and A Voice Among the Silent, a documentary profile of the American diplomat who tried to warn the world of the Holocaust.
Best bets for repertory: Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950), Sunday at University of Chicago Doc Films; Michael Mann’s Collateral (2004), Saturday and Tuesday at Gene Siskel Film Center with a lecture by Fred Camper at the second screening; Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (1972), Wednesday at Doc; Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978), Friday and Sunday at Doc; Karen Thorsen’s James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket, Friday at Black Cinema House with Thorsen in person; Mark Blottner’s Nelson Algren: The End Is Nothing, The Road Is All, Friday at Logan Center for the Arts; Luis Bunuel’s Los Olvidados (1950), Friday at Northwestern University Block Museum of Art; Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955), daily through Wednesday at Film Center; and Leo McCarey’s Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), Wednesday at Northeastern Illinois University Auditorium.
