Reeling: The Chicago LGBT International Film Festival opens Friday at Music Box with the romantic comedy Boy Meets Girl; check out our sidebar for reviews of eight features screening this week. That same night the Chicago Romanian Cultural Marathon kicks off at Facets Cinematheque, with four Romanian features making their Chicago premieres over the weekend; three of them are even subtitled! Our coverage is here.
But that’s not all—we’ve reviewed a dozen more movies this week.
Recommended: The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, starring Jessica Chastain and James McAvoy as a wife and husband separated by tragedy, and featuring a blue-chip supporting cast that includes William Hurt, Isabelle Huppert, Ciaran Hinds, Viola Davis, Bill Hader, and Jess Weixler; See You Next Tuesday, a dark comedy about a mentally ill mother-to-be who crashes with her obnoxious, lesbian art-punk sister; Through a Lens Darkly, a documentary that takes on no less than the history of African-American art photography; and Thy Womb, a Filipino drama about a long-married couple trying to survive on a small island menaced by pirates and sectarian militias.
Not recommended: God Help the Girl, a sugary, cute-as-a-button musical by Belle and Sebastian front man Stuart Murdoch; The Guest, a horror item about a family welcoming into their home a strange man who claims to be the combat buddy of their late son; In Search of Chopin, the latest classical music documentary from Phil Grabsky, who’s previously searched for Mozart, Beethoven, and Haydn (the last one was especially difficult to find, because he was Haydn); The Notebook, a thoroughly nasty Hungarian drama about two boys fending for themselves in the last days of World War II in Europe, which will really make the fur fly when people rent it thinking it’s the Ryan Gosling tearjerker; This Is Where I Leave You, a big-screen sitcom starring Jane Fonda, Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, and Adam Driver; A Walk Among the Tombstones, a revenge thriller starring Liam Neeson, who never gets tired of getting even with people; and The Zero Theorem, the latest from Brazil director Terry Gilliam, whose hero is ordered to prove mathematically that existence is meaningless.
Not recommended unless you’re a housefly and enjoy dining on giant pieces of shit: Tusk, a comedy remake of The Human Centipede from comic-book impresario Kevin Smith.
Best bets for repertory: David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999), late-night Friday, Saturday, and Monday at the Logan; Jerry Lewis’s The Ladies Man (1961), Friday and Tuesday at Gene Siskel Film Center, the latter show introduced by Jonathan Rosenbaum; Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), Tuesday by DVD projection at Transistor; and Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco (1930), Saturday and Sunday morning at Music Box.
