Aside from David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars, the only movie I’ve seen this year that really made me jump out of my seat was White God, a Hungarian drama about man’s inhumanity to mutt that played in last month’s European Union Film Festival and opens Friday at Music Box. Downtown at the Gene Siskel Film Center, the Asian American Showcase kicks off that same night with Man From Reno, a genial whodunit from director Dave Boyle (Surrogate Valentine, Daylight Savings). And be sure to check out Ben Sachs’s Q&A with Charlie Minn, whose drug-war documentary Es El Chapo? screens all week at the reopened Patio Theater on Irving Park.
Check out the new issue for reviews of: Furious 7, the latest installment in the durable car-porn franchise; Human Capital, a first-rate Italian drama about two families and a lot of money; Law & Order, Frederick Wiseman’s 1969 documentary about white cops and black arrestees in Kansas City, Missouri; Ned Rifle, the third installment in the “Henry Fool” series by indie stalwart Hal Hartley; Nelson Algren: The End Is Nothing, the Road Is All, a documentary portrait of the man who wrote Chicago: City on the Make; The Salt of the Earth, Wim Wenders’s beautiful and humbling documentary about third-world photojournalist Sebastiao Salgado; and Woman in Gold, with Helen Mirren as an Austrian Jew suing the Austrian government for return of the Gustav Klimt paintings stolen from her family during the Holocaust.
Best bets for repertory: Frank Tashlin’s Artists and Models (1955) with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Sunday at University of Chicago Doc Films; Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Dust in the Wind (1987), Sunday and Wednesday at Gene Siskel Film Center; Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel’s Leviathan (2012), an experimental documentary recorded aboard a Massachusetts fishing boat, Saturday and Tuesday at Film Center; Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Wednesday at Doc; and Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939), Saturday and Sunday at Music Box with a costume contest and sing-along for Easter weekend.
Don’t forget these special events: Dan Rybicky and Aaron Wickenden talk about their Kartemquin Films documentary Almost There, Tuesday at Landmark’s Century Centre; and Oscar-nominated animator Daniel Sousa (Feral) appears at Film Center next Thursday to screen and talk about his work.
