The Chicago International Film Festival continues for a second and final week at the Landmark Century Centre Cinema, the AMC River East 21 Theatre, and a special closing night presentation of "The Polar Express" at the historic Cadillac Palace Theatre. Starring Tom Hanks, who will be in attendance at the screening on October 21, 2004, director Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump) brings his adaptation of author Chris Van Allsburg’s children’s favorite to the screen. Prior to the screening, Zemeckis will be honored with a tribute to his work.

Also continuing throughout the festival is a special exhibition of selected photographs by long time festival photographer Victor Skrebneski in the lobby of the Equitable Building at 401 N Michigan Avenue. In addition to scheduled screenings, check the festival’s web site at chicagofilmfestival.com for encore showings of audience choice winners on October 21, to be determined by ballots collected throughout the festival.

(United States). Shot in black and white with a free-form, fluid style, this stream of consciousness chronicle of New York writer Robyn examines her life and thoughts as she spends her time in self-imposed isolation in her apartment, contemplating life and whether she finds it reasonable to continue. Allowing limited news, and fewer people, inside, her voice over narrates while she works on writing a novel, interweaving her memories, both traumatic and lyrical, into the reflections. Alternately confessional, melancholy and wishful, she yearns for and idealizes lost love, fears the post-9/11 world outside, and her thoughts blur the boundaries of what is real, and what is fantasy.

Director Jennifer Todd Reeves captures the spirit of what it feels like to be adrift with only the companionship of one’s own soul to bounce things off. As Robyn listens to the neighbors through the thin walls of the apartment building, the shifting, high contrast visual style echoes the dense and multiform thoughts that segue one into the next, as thoughts do. She shrinks from destructive life forces as the world outside is rocked by terrorism. She longs for love, but is incapable of pursuing it. In her exile world of typewriter and TV, much as she tries to keep emotional distress out, its’ presence fills her apartment, her thoughts, and her writing. 94 minutes. (SC)

(United States) One of the greatest and most illuminating documentaries ever created about the life, philosophies, and technique of an artist. In a compact 75 minutes, director Travis Klose exposes the explicit, no-holds-barred world of controversial Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, an insanely sexual, compulsive figure who has inspired scorn and praise worldwide for his now legendary depictions of women, objectified, exposed, beautifully shot and sexually charged. Through interviews with such luminaries as Takeshi Kitano, Bjork, and Richard Kern, the film probes some deep terrain about art and pornography. It’s also a picture of a mad genius, bar none. To see Araki’s daring on-set behavior with his models leaves one speechless. He fascinatingly discusses going over the line with his subjects, shooting from art to porn. As one observer notes, "He acts like a martial arts character." This is a portrait of an artist as a raunchy madman, erotic genius, and comic controller. (Stunning) Images of domination and bondage abound. "I’m going to caress you with my lens," he tells one model, before professing to us his sexual activity with all of them. But the film does peel back layers into his past, painful memories, the loss of his wife and a particularly heartbreaking photographic record of such, as well as his need to photograph his mother’s dead body and more. Combining high and low, art and porn, says Araki: "I lost my dirty side in my youth, and I had to re-invent it." He also confesses how pain and sadness drive his work. This is an unmissable film. Very explicit and highly recommended. In Japanese and English with English subtitles. 75 minutes. (LS)

(France) A regal Fanny Ardant struggles with the news that husband Gerard Depardieu has been unfaithful in Nathalie, an effective meditation on the life of a woman who confronts the shock of infidelity not with devastation but rather a cavalier and complex game of sexual entrapment.

When Ardant’s well-to-do doctor inadvertently discovers her husband’s dalliance, she’s forced to confront the emptiness of their marriage and integrate the emotional consequences. She wanders into a strip club alone and meets a stunning stripper played by a breathtaking Emmanuelle Beart. Together, they invent a web of sexual entrapment designed to test the husband’s limits, creating an elaborate set-up with Beart’s imaginary alter ego "Nathalie," to surprising consequences. Both women are well developed and their gradually building relationship under such extreme circumstances intrigues. Ardant gives one of the screen’s great listening performances, called on to react to volumes of exposition

and all manner of graphic sexual description as delivered by Beart, in exchange for healthy sums of cash. The situation is refreshingly free of melodrama and the upscale production values and seriousness of performances go a long way in making the tawdry set-up elegant and tasteful. Ardant learns about Depardieu, and consequently herself, through conduit Beart. Some late surprises are simple to predict, but Ardant and Beart grace this picture with a rare gravity. It’s a dignified, adult film about sex and infidelity. French with English subtitles. 100 minutes. (LS)

(Israel) A single mother of two teenage daughters makes a decision to move to a new settlement in this smart and affecting Israeli feature. The film is set in 1981 Jerusalem, but could easily take place in any North American city, with its single mother looking for love and acceptance, her delightful teenage daughters curious about boys. When the youngest girl is sexually assaulted by a band of rowdy teenage boys, her reputation—and the family’s social standing—are threatened, and the mother must reexamine her priorities and loyalties. At the same time, she’s developed a sweetly tentative relationship with a forty-something, virginal bus driver. Director Joseph Cedar trains a sensitive eye on the mother’s need for a "better life" and how her oblivious selfishness reverberates and

shifts the household dynamics. Israeli superstar Yehuda Levi (Yossi and Jagger) turns up in a small role as a soldier, romancing the eldest daughter. The film ends on just the right note of sweet hopefulness. Hebrew with English subtitles. 92 minutes. (LS)

(Denmark) When ‘plain-Jane’ Caroline’s philandering husband cheats on her, she moves in with stylish sister Sarah, embarking up on a comic adventure with a never-ending string of first dates. She’s unhappy unless she’s got a new man in her life. The sisters have diametrically opposed habits and lifestyles, as well as a strained relationship involving a selfishly botched kidney donation from years prior. Sarah’s relationship platitudes ("When you’re sad, you should talk about sad things") form the "rules" she implores Caroline to follow in searching for the perfect soul mate. The film takes a common subject—the plight of the single woman to find love and happiness—and infuses it with slightly more depth and intelligence than mainstream American films do. The comic moments are effective, such as an unexpected skydiving date and a very funny sequence involving a military test operation. But there’s a limited contrast between the sisters’ lives that doesn’t really seem to reach beyond the obvious. Of course, fortunes turn, with beautiful, icy Sarah losing her boyfriend just as the heavier, nicer Caroline finds her own prince. There’s a potentially deep area here that isn’t fully mined—the selfishness of a sister not sure if she can donate a kidney to save her own sister’s life. The film, however, for the most part steers clear of this drama and focuses on the hijinks of the heroine’s unlucky love life. It’s diverting, just not too engaging. Both leads are appealing. Wish they were in a richer film with a less trite conclusion. Danish with English subtitles. (LS)

(Argentina) At her birthday party surrounded by her children, grandchildren and various in-laws, an elderly woman receives an invitation to a family wedding a long distance from their Buenos Aires home. She declares that the whole family will attend. The ensuing trip in the rickety RV of her son-in-law forms the basis for this bittersweet slice-of-life story, revealing the alliances and tensions, the blossoming relationships and the fading ones, along the way. While the children have fun, the teenage cousins explore their emerging sexuality, their parents try to sort out mid-life dilemmas, and they all share caring for the youngest member, the new baby of the old woman's granddaughter and her slacker boyfriend. Motor trouble, close quarters, lack of privacy and stifling heat cloud the already precarious circumstances before they reach their destination. More effective at imparting the static energy of an unwelcome family road trip than at gathering much steam as a drama, the final shot of the old woman when it’s all over suggests her disappointment, and ours. 89 minutes. In Spanish with English subtitles. (SC)

(Hungary) Director Benedek Fliegauf’s eerie marathon tale of a bicycling drug dealer is a road movie of sorts, though certainly not in the traditional sense. A young drug dealer makes his rounds through a burnt out, cold urban landscape. From the opening sequence where the dealer visits a hospitalized former client, burned beyond belief, it’s clear that Fliegauf’s film is a horror picture. It’s a grim, dark and contemplative film, loaded with atmosphere and cold style that recalls David Lynch. There’s little dialogue—in fact, much of the film is shot in long, wide-angle moments that simply observe the drifting, disconnection of the addicts with chilling precision. Too much of the film feels bloated and self-indulgent, and a bit more plot might have made the film’s pace seem more inviting. This is a trip through drug culture as zombie film, where ghosts stand on the edge of the abyss, unable to feel anything beyond the next score. The dealer toys ironically with physical fitness before himself falling back onto substances. At the film’s center is a child who may or may not be the dealer’s daughter, who ends up in tow after her mother goes over the edge. It’s a dream, a trance, sometimes a bore, and sometimes a nightmare. Hungarian with English subtitles. 160 minutes. (LS)

(Argentina/France) An indictment of the socio-economic conditions that plague modern Argentina, as well as a tale of familial loyalty perverted beyond reason, Buena Vida (Delivery) is an absorbing film that explores the limits of love. Bike messenger Hernan’s family leaves Argentina for Spain and he automatically inherits an empty house. At a gas station, he meets beautiful worker Pato, and the two immediately set up house together. What he doesn’t expect is to find her mother, father and young daughter immediately and surreptitiously moved in to his home without means or direction. To complicate matters, they not only settle down permanently, they turn his home into a bakery—complete with labor organizing and complex factory machinery to create churros—and he has no legal right other than a drawn-out eviction to get rid of them. A painful comedy, Buena Vida (Delivery) takes a harsh look at how labor conditions in Argentina have squeezed the little man out of business.

And how a proud and ingenious entrepreneur can be brought low by the economic system; stripped of his ability to not only provide for his family but for his own self-respect. At the same time, there are other more fascinating levels going on between the two leads. How much is one expected to take on for another human being that they love? How much is too much familial loyalty? Where is the line to be drawn? And what do you do when you realize that, beyond all costs, you’ve been emotionally and financially exploited? If you can’t beat them, are they really worth joining? Worthwhile. Spanish with English subtitles. 93 minutes. (LS)

(United States) The 2004 Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner, Primer is an intellectual head-trip that I’m still not sure I quite got. It’s a dark film that tells the story, I think, of some suburban, upwardly mobile computer geeks, whose garage experiments inadvertently produce a dangerous device. They spend their spare time, late evenings and waking moments playing with the principles of energy and physics, and the film’s first half- hour expertly captures their brainy tenacity with swirling energy cloaked in mystery. They ultimately create a device that is beyond control, with the terrifying, promising potential to revolutionize the world as we know it—economically, scientifically, technologically—and harboring an unfathomable power to time travel (from a U-Haul storage space, no less). It’s a dangerous proposition that two of them bargain with, and once they start "doubling" themselves the story gets loose of them, and becomes an increasingly frustrating brain-teaser that I’m not sure ever comes back around to any universally understood logic. Then again, it might just be me. I’m recommending it for its overriding weirdness and the mind-expanding notions it posits. (LS)

(Mexico) Set in a broken-down contemporary Mexico City, a pair of burnt out and fiercely loyal hustlers, who are supposed to represent the eternally youthful Adam and Eve, Adan (Carlos Martinez Baena) and Eva (Christiane Martell) eke out a desperate existence between drugs, tricks, and anonymous sex. If it sounds more exotic than it plays, the film’s highly conceptual approach gets bogged down in directorial indulgence, with endless and often shapeless scenes that go on…and on. There’s an interesting use of extended silence and an overemphasized use of music. Much of it feels experimental, including its use of claymation in the film’s pre-credit sequence to tell the story of Adam and Eve. Both Adan and Eva are pansexual, self-destructive nomads with appetites for wanderlust. There are merits, including some graphically inviting soft-core trysts and a dead-eyed and dead on performance from Martell, whose come-hither, bleached on black visage resembles a hybrid of Marilyn Manson and young Mary Woronov. Adam and Eve, with its remote characters and failure to add up to anything coherent or compelling, covers its emptiness with abundant flesh and a bleak sense of nothingness. Not recommended. Spanish with English subtitles. 100 minutes. (LS)

(Greece) A domestic squabble over a land inheritance is the backbone of Blackmail Boy; a would-be epic tragedy surrounding a contemporary Greek family, first shattered by tragedy then divided by a ferocious power struggle over real estate. A car accident, years earlier, took the life of one daughter and turned the patriarch into a vegetable. Mother Magda runs a bake-shop and watches over one grown daughter (and son-in-law), and a bi-sexual, raucous teenage son, who carries on illicit affairs with a desperate, aged local drug-addict, and an older married neighborhood man.

The plot—and there’s a lot of it—kicks in when Magda sells a plot of family land to the city. All hell breaks loose with family members at each other’s throats while manipulations (sexual and otherwise) pile up, and a lot of contrived melodrama comes crashing down on everyone in the final reel. Directors Michalis Reppas and Thanasis Papathanassiou haven’t a clue how to put their ensemble together or what their story is really about, and rely on titillation—the Greek god beauty of their young teenage cipher and his exploits—to disguise the story’s lack of depth and focus. This is shallow, going-through-the-motions storytelling that no one seems to believe in, laced with broad, silly theatrics. The film is simultaneously overwrought and underdeveloped. Tepid. Greek with English subtitles. 100 minutes. (LS)

ê ê P.S.

(United States) Director Dylan Kidd’s Roger Dodger was an urban comedy of masculine swagger, exceptional sex drive and cynical charge. In the unexpectedly surprising P.S., he turns the tables and presents the most well rounded and complex American female movie character in any film this year. Laura Linney stars powerfully as a bitter thirty-nine-year-old admissions advisor at Columbia University, who becomes convinced that a young applicant (a charming Topher Grace) is the reincarnation or reappearance of her high school boyfriend, who died decades earlier. Rather than use the device to fantastical ends, director shrewdly employs it to deconstruct all of Linney’s failed relationships, including the one with herself. Along for the ride are Lois Smith as Linney’s mother, Gabriel Byrne as her frustrated ex, Paul Rudd as her twelve-stepping brother and a devilish Marcia Gay Harden as her lifelong, competitive best friend.

There isn't a note in this film that Linney doesn't play, and her performance (and the film) gets deeper as the film progresses, particularly in the late scenes with the rest of the ensemble. The relationship between the two women is at least as complex, if not more, than between Linney and Topher Grace. When was the last time you saw a female character in an American film who's this developed and interesting on both personal and professional levels -- daughter, sister, best friend, ex-wife, lover, possibly failed artist? Linney does it all here. She’s alternately angry, astonished, disillusioned, in love, confused, jealous, and at peace. Possibly her best moment comes in a small scene set in a pool-hall restaurant where Grace says exactly the right thing to her at the right moment. Rated R. 95 minutes. (LS)

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(Argentina/France/Italy/Spain) In the touching, funny Lost Embrace, Ariel (Daniel Hendler) is searching for his identity and trying to come to grips with never having had a father in his life. Set in a Buenos Aires shopping mall where all of the tenants share common lives, experiences and friendships, his mother runs a lingerie shop and still holds a torch for the man who left her decades earlier to raise two young sons alone. Now Ariel is an adult, and is confused about his Argentine/Jewish/Polish heritage. He’s ready to start over in Poland and possibly re-connect with a father he has never understood, who abandoned him thirty years ago to live a disconnected life in Israel. It’s a very funny film and one that takes a comic/dramatic look at culture and identity, before digging much deeper into regret and family secrets. Director Daniel Burman builds to a genuinely moving conclusion that is absent of melodrama and effectively charts the tentative coming together of two misunderstood adults who have never understood each other, but nonetheless still have a deep familial bond. There are grown-up lessons about the predictability of life, forgiveness, and self-fulfilling prophecies. Everything is not as it seems. The telling last shot is both simple and complex. In Spanish with English subtitles. 100 minutes. (LS)

(France) Benoit Jacquot’s The School of Flesh featured an obsessed Isabelle Huppert driven to distraction by a sexy young hustler. In Right Now, Jacquot takes on equally torrid subject matter—a nubile nineteen-year-old nymph, sexually and criminally seduced by a callous young bank robber—and spins a stunning, black and white odyssey of fugitive eroticism. Eluding police, she ends up on a series of travels from Madrid to Tangiers to Greece, but ventures darker into suicidal territory. The film indeed recalls the hipness of the French New Wave both in temperament and physicality, feeling like a film made decades ago, rather than a contemporary film designed as such. These types of films—about individuals whose erotic pull wells up against, and supersedes, reason and crime—are always compelling. The dark desires in Jacquot’s luscious black and white palette are shadowy and dense, as is the film’s anti-heroine. Where The School of Flesh crackled with heat, Right Now is coolly detached. Gorgeous cinematography. French With English subtitles. (LS)

For a complete schedule and ticket information, go to chicagofilmfestival.com or call 312-332-FILM.