The 125th Anniversary of the Woodworkers’ Strike and the Labor Movement Today

Free Event: Monday, March 13, 2023 6 – 7 p.m. (doors open 5:30 p.m.) Loyola University Chicago Quinlan School of Business

16 E. Pearson, Room 1001 RSVP at https://bit.ly/Darrow2023

Speakers:

Robert

For more on the program, see www.darrowbridge.org

NOW PLAYING R Art Talent Show

This funny, thoughtful, verité look at the yearly selection process in Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts manages to pack insights about education, societal shi s, and intellectual differences without getting bogged down in culture war cliches. The filmmakers don’t shy away from showing the very real and vast chasms between prospective students, professors, and school staff, but they do so through deadpan humor and with an even hand—whoever’s in front of their camera is allowed to voice their own point of view.

The venerable building that houses the academy is as much a character as its human inhabitants; an oversized gothic-style wooden crucifixion shares hallway space with crude, tacked-up sketches, and plaster casts share studio real estate with multimedia installations. By refraining from talking-head interviews or intertitles, the film allows the viewer to feel like another teacher or student trying to get through a grueling process the best they can. There are debates about gender, style, capitalism, morality, and every other topic that naturally comes up in art school but with blessedly little of the ax-grinding or solipsism that so o en replaces good-faith debate these days. It’s clear that this faculty truly has these young people’s best interests at heart, even when they laugh out loud in closed-door meetings while reviewing the kids’ half-formed exam answers. If you squint at these esteemed professionals, you can see their younger selves in the pompous but completely uncertain applicants. This is as close to the messy Platonic ideal of what an art school should be as I’ve ever seen onscreen.

—DMITRY SAMAROV 102 min. Gene Siskel Film Center

Children of the Corn

The 1984 film Children of the Corn, based on a Stephen King short story, was a fever dream of generational panic, in which the rebellious youth turn away from God and reverence and overthrow the proper patriarchal order by the simple expedient of murdering all their parents.

In Kurt Wimmer’s new reboot, a demon in the corn once again possesses the children of a rural town. But Wimmer makes the political context even more explicit and, thereby, more fertilely ambiguous. In the original, the older generation are good, bland, kind, churchgoing folks; their only sin is trusting their kids too much. In the reboot, in contrast, the parents are a dysfunctional barnful of disappointments and fuck-ups, mired in drink, adultery, and cruelty. They neglect the children, abuse them, and trap them in an economic and environmental cul-de-sac when they destroy the corn crop with pesticides and shortsightedness. As Eden (Kate Moyer), the leader of the feral children, says with disgust, “[Adults] kill everything they touch.”

The acknowledgment that adults are, in fact, o en horrible to children makes a simultaneously more balanced and hyperbolic film. You can understand the children’s motivations, which means the movie has to have the kids do exceedingly horrible things (eye gouging, for example) if you’re going to root for teen protagonist Bo (Elena Kampouris) to stop them.

Unfortunately, the meandering script gets lost in the additional nuance rather than bringing it down like a cleaver. The CGI corn demon, once revealed, is underwhelming, and while Eden is a solid villain, she doesn’t have the indelible menace of the original’s Isaac and Malachai. This Children of the Corn has its appeal, but even if you’re wielding a scythe, replacing your predecessors is no easy task. —NOAH BERLATSKY R, 93 min. Wide release in theaters

Cocaine Bear

A smuggler dumps duffle bags full of cocaine into a forest before plunging to his death, and a 150-pound bear gets into the drug packets and dies. Great plot for a comedy, right? What if you make the bear 500 pounds, and she doesn’t die but goes on a killing spree, and a bunch of well-known actors are cast as drug dealers, cops, delinquents, and civilians who cross the addicted beast’s path? Laughing yet? Director Elizabeth Banks is shooting for an irreverent 80s-style gross-out but winds up with a bunch of barely connected gags that wear awfully thin past the half-hour mark. I spent most of the remaining run time thinking of the much better movies and shows that Keri Russell, Margo Martindale, Isiah Whitlock Jr., and especially the late Ray Liotta starred in beforehand. He deserved much better than this for his swan song. Whatever slight charm or momentum the film has is due to their presence and the associations we have with them from elsewhere.

But I can’t think of a thing Banks could have done to live up to her movie’s title or down to the sad true story that inspired it. The real Cocaine Bear was stuffed and became a roadside attraction. The movie was a meme and launched a million jokes before anyone saw a frame. Save yourself the price of admission and just watch the trailer if you haven’t already, or—better yet—make your own TikTok version. It’ll be funnier and will cost viewers a lot less time. —DMITRY SAMAROV R, 95 min. Wide release in theaters

R Of an Age

Of an Age opens with a sequence worthy of entry into The Cinema of Stress library (think Uncut Gems or Dog Day A ernoon), but in 1999 and with a gay bildungsroman. Our protagonist Kol (Elias Anton) is sprinting between landlines and thumbing frantically through phone books, shooing his little brother away as he tells Kol to finish his call so he can log onto the net. His best friend Ebony (Hattie Hook), a vain mess who abuses his goodwill for emotional support, has woken up confused on the Australian shore, and he’s the first person she calls wailing from a pay phone. Her chaos costs them a chance to perform in a dance competition that, we know from Kol grief-puking, is an outsized part of his identity as he finishes high school.

The knotty episode gradually loosens as Kol and Ebony’s older brother, Adam (Thom Green), drive to find her. Adam, unlike Kol, is out and open with his sexuality. He’s also of the worldly variety in a provincial land. Kol, an immigrant from war-torn Serbia, is this way too, but not confidently. Adam is perfect-looking and hyperintelligent, but he has the air of someone who finds more alienation than comfort in being fully formed.

Kol is hangdog and madcap, sloppy in his fruitless search for sel ood but sweetly goofy at all times. The camera cuts back and forth between shaky close-ups of both as their dialogue takes us further into them than expected. Adam knows who Kol is more than Kol does, but he finds wonder and tenderness, not tedium, in the younger man’s much-needed unraveling.

The dilemma of Goran Stolevski’s movie is classic, badly timed romance stuff, a real One Last Night affair: Adam is off to Buenos Aires, to pursue a PhD in linguistics. It’s as good as those things get—a memorable blast of humanity and nostalgia. —JOHN WILMES R, 100 min. Limited release in theaters

R Return to Seoul

Heady, searing, strident, and poignant, this film follows Freddie (Park Ji-min), a French Korean adoptee who finds herself unexpectedly in Seoul. Is she there to find her adoptive family? Does Freddie want a reunion, confrontational, saccharine, or otherwise? Director Davy Chou invites us to watch and see, beckoning the audience into his dusty, psychedelic, lavender-blue world where impeccable music choices alternate with yawning maws of uncomfortable, pensive silence. This is a story that is less interested in plot and more in the emotional texture of growing up: confronting hard truths, indulging in delicious silliness, feeling the cold slap of disillusionment again and again. We watch Freddie and are invited to consider what we think is more important—coming home or coming into ourselves? In French, Korean, and English with subtitles. —NINA LI COOMES R, 115 min. Music Box Theatre

R Sound of Silence

Sound of Silence works quickly. Within the film’s first few minutes, an eerie but charming setup turns alarming when an angry apparition appears, gravely injuring an older man who was tinkering with an antique radio in his attic. The strong start slows a bit during the opening credits, which hint that this radio has a history, allowing viewers to catch their breath. Enter Emma (Penelope Sangiorgi), the man’s daughter, who flies from New York to her hometown in Italy to help her family navigate their increasingly bizarre circumstances. With both parents staying at the hospital, Emma is le alone in her audio-equipment-filled childhood home. It’s an obvious sign of supportive parents who wanted to foster her singing, a career she is still chasing. Her ambitions, however, only invite the apparition to reappear, as it becomes clear that staying silent means staying safe. That’s no way to live, though, and it leaves Emma desperate to reveal the dark secret haunting her home and release her family from its evil. An atmospheric and ambitious haunted-house movie that will call to mind Oculus (2013), Sound of Silence plays like a radio. Sometimes it’s smooth, and sometimes there’s static; regardless, you’ll want to tune in. —BECCA JAMES 93 min. Wide release on VOD v