Synopsis

“There’s Potemkin, Citizen Kane, and this…Godard’s first film,” film critic J. Hoberman once wrote about the French New Wave classic. In his audacious debut feature, the filmmaking infant terrible broke the rules of cinema to create something that remains just as fresh, funny, and innovative today. Influenced by American noir and Hollywood gangster films, the plot goes something like this: Small-time crook Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo, doing his best Bogart) steals a car and murders a policeman. While on the run, he reconnects with old flame newspaper-seller Patricia (Jean Seberg, in classic pixie-girl mode) and tries to convince her to go on the lam with him.

But what is it really about? Truth, lies, love, desire, masculinity, ennui, existentialism. Along with Miles Davis and the Beats, Breathless helped bring about the birth of cool, breaking open film form with its revolutionary use of jump-cuts and improvisational energy and influencing generations of filmmakers from Martin Scorsese to Quentin Tarantino and Richard Linklater.

Screening in 35mm.

Synopsis

From The Wizard of Oz to the Twister movies, the tornado has become an iconic American symbol. In A Brief History of Chasing Storms, Chicago filmmaker Curtis Miller takes us on a road-trip through “tornado alley”—an ever-widening region that extends from Texas and Oklahoma across the Great Plains and up into Wisconsin and Minnesota. Along the way, he reflects on the multifaceted myths and histories around the famously destructive weather events, recounted by those who have been impacted as well as by opportunists looking to profit.

From a guide at the Twister Museum to the owner of a company that builds tornado shelters and a team of intrepid storm chasers, tornado-philes of all stripes are featured as the film traverses the U.S., capturing the landscape in carefully staged tableaux. Through an evocative series of vignettes, quirky yet swirling with meaning in a world increasingly reshaped by environmental catastrophe, this thoughtful cinematic essay maps out the ways in which history, inequality, climate, colonization, and capitalism are entwined with these natural disasters.

Synopsis

From visionary director Yorgos Lanthimos comes Bugonia, an explosive psychological thriller that offers a pitch-black comic window into our modern age of madness. Provocative and subversive, the film follows two conspiracy-obsessed young men as they burst out of their online rabbit holes and kidnap Michelle, a high-powered CEO they believe to be an alien who has come to destroy us. After the pair chain her in a basement and come face-to-face with the enemy, the two sides—the tinfoil-hat basement dwellers and the steely, soulless corporate executive—soon find themselves pitched in a battle as viscerally unpredictable as it is unexpectedly moving.

Anchored by powerhouse performances from Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, and newcomer Aidan Delbis, along with a devilishly sharp script from Will Tracy, Lanthimos constructs an audaciously original portrait of what it means to laugh, cry, and recoil in the fate of humanity.

Synopsis

Fiercely independent eighty-year-old Spaniard María is a vibrant lifelong member of her beloved Tangier community, but her stability is threatened when daughter Clara arrives for a long-overdue visit. In dire financial straits after a divorce, Clara intends to sell the family home, left to her by her late father, and even begins liquidating the property’s antiques to hasten the proceedings. But María won’t go so easily. Determined to find the financial means to keep her apartment and win back her belongings, María sets out on a surprising, romance-fueled late-in-life adventure.

Screen legend Carmen Maura (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Volver) delivers an unforgettable performance suffused with warmth, humor, and gentle defiance in this crowd-pleasing story of a woman refusing to relinquish neither her independence nor her dignity. Making her Spanish-language debut, Moroccan director and Festival alum Maryam Touzani (The Blue Caftan) brings a palpable sense of place to the screen. She renders María’s colorful coastal enclave in bright hues and her winning ensemble of neighbors with affection, richness, and complexity.

Synopsis

“The winners write the history; the losers write the songs,” so says Branwen, one of a new wave of Irish musicians featured in this loose and likeable tapestry of Ireland’s contemporary folk music scene. Funny, talented, and politically outspoken, these rebel artists are redefining Ireland’s traditional folk music, acknowledging the country’s colonial past and its painful legacy, while looking toward a better future—if not a utopia, at least an improvement on what came before.

Unfolding like a musical jam session, we meet and listen to a wide array of musicians—young, old, white, Black, guitarists, and rappers—offering up alternative folk songs that evoke the past, yet, as one cheeky bandmate says, are played “to scare priests and politicians.” The film also contrasts their present with evocative archival footage of Ireland’s recent history depicting its deeply conservative roots. With a form as irreverent as its subjects, Celtic Utopia is a wry and raw celebration of Irish culture, language, and yes, its fighting spirit.