The 61st Chicago International Film Festival

My coverage of the films unspooling over the next couple of weeks

Running October 15-26 at a number of venues throughout the city, including the AMC NewCity, the Gene Siskel Film Center and the legendary Music Box, the 61st edition of the Chicago International Film Festival has arrived to bring local moviegoers a taste of what is going on in the current world film scene. Boasting well over 100 feature films from more than 60 countries—including a number of World, North American and U.S. premieres—this lineup is somewhat stronger than it has been in recent years, offering up a mix of of highly hyped projects (including a number of titles looking to compete in this year’s upcoming Oscar race) and titles that might not be quite as well known at the moment but which are worthy of your consideration.

Over the next couple of weeks, I will be covering as many of the film as I can and will be posting brief reviews here—when I am able to see them in advance, I will note the dates when they will be playing. Ideally, I will be updating this list daily, though I beseech you not to hold me completely to that. Anyway, here are a few titles from the first couple of days that you may find of interest. For information on the fest as a whole, including ticket availability, screening times and locations, special events and the like, go to the festival website at www.chicagofilmfestival.com

ARCO: After sneaking out of his home in the distant future to do a bit of unauthorized time traveling, young Arco winds up landing in 2075, where he befriends a lonely 10-year-old girl named Iris, who is essentially being raised by loyal robot caretake Mikki while her parents are away. The two kids try to figure out a way to return Arco to his own time but have to contend with obstacles ranging from a trio of goofballs who are onto Arco’s secret to a forest fire threatening Iris’s town with destruction. In his full-length debut, French animator Ugo Bienvenu tries to evoke the look and spirit of the works of Hayao Miyazaki and while he does manage to pull this off for at least the first half, it begins to fall apart in the second as the relationship between the two young characters gets lost amidst the increasingly busy narrative, leading to a finale that is not nearly as touching as it is aiming to be. Another distraction comes in the form of the high-powered American voice cast brought in to do the dubbing—the actions of the aforementioned goofballs are hard enough to take as is without also having them being voiced by the likes of Will Ferrell, Andy Samberg and Flea. The results aren’t terrible but there is little here that you haven’t seen done before and usually better. (10/18, 10/25

BOUCHRA: At first, this project from co-directors Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani may sound like a familiar LGBTQ narrative—queer Moroccan filmmaker Bouchra is trying to make a go of her career in New York City while navigating the various relationships in her life, including the one with her mother back in Casablanca that is somewhat fraught because of how, despite their otherwise close relationship, she simply refuses to acknowledge the news about her daughter’s sexuality. What makes this different is that the film mixes documentary-style footage with animation throughout and the characters themselves are depicted as animals—Bouchra and her mom are coyotes, the ex she still has complicated feelings for is a cow and so on. As odd as this conceit sounds, it actually works, mostly because the characters and story are compelling enough so that we just accept the approach after a few minutes. Funny, touching, stylishly made and even fairly sexy at certain points, this is definitely one of the highlights of this year’s festival. (10/16, 10/17)

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CHASING STORMS: This documentary from Chicago filmmaker Curtis Miller takes the form of a road trip through the multi-state region known as “Tornado Alley” to explore everything from the history and mythos impact of such events to the ways in which we try to come to terms with them, both scientifically and culturally, and, in some cases, try to make a buck off of them in ways ranging from selling tornado-proof shelters to a museum in an Oklahoma town dedicated entirely to the movie Twister, which shot some key scenes there. The film does an interesting job of showing how these destructive natural phenomenon are tied in to so many different aspects of society—historical, cultural, sociopolitical—but by coming in at a brief 70 minutes, there is the sense that it could have taken the time to explore matters in a little more detail than is afforded here.(10/18, 10/25

BUGONIA: In one of this year’s higher-profile fest entries, Yorgos Lanthimos returns with yet another bizarre bit of brutal black comedy. In this one, Jesse Plemons stars as a small-town conspiracy buff whose journey down various internet rabbit holes leads him, aided by his dimmer cousin (newcomer Aidan Delbis), him to kidnap a powerful corporate CEO (Emma Stone) and chain her up in his basement. As it turns out, they are convinced that she is actually a representative of an alien race planning to eradicate the human race and they want her to take them to her leader four days from them, during a lunar eclipse, so that they can order them to retreat and save mankind. This is ridiculous, of course, but the CEO’s smooth corporate speak is unable to break through to her captors and the next four days prove to be a titanic (and occasionally violent) battle of wills as the cousins try to save the world while she tries to save herself.

If this premise sounds familiar to you, then perhaps you have seen Save the Green Planet!, the wild 2003 cult classic from Korean filmmaker Jang Joon-hwan. Although changes and tweaks have been made here and there (the violent content has been toned down a bit, though it is still pretty gruesome at times), the parameters of the narrative are basically the same, which means that this version’s ultimate impact will depend to no small degree on whether or not you have seen the earlier version. That said, there is still plenty to like about this particular iteration of the material. While Lanthimos tends to be hit-or-miss for me as a filmmaker (I loved the likes of The Favourite and Poor Things but found last year’s Kinds of Kindness to be a deeply tedious snooze fest), this particular project proves to be a good showcase for his particularly peculiar brand of deadpan surrealism and he keeps things moving along even when Will Tracy’s screenplay occasionally threatens to go off the rails. Plemons and Stone are both spectacular in the ways in which they throw themselves into their roles—Plemons gives an absolutely terrifying portrayal of someone who has so willingly embraced the cold comforts of conspiracy that one cannot even agree with him without arousing his suspicions and Stone is pitch-perfect as the cool corporate leader caught in the midst of a type of negotiation that they probably didn’t teach at business school. In the end, what may be most unnerving about this film is how a premise that might have seemed absurdly over-the-top back in 2003 now seems almost absurdly on-point for the times in which we are currently living. (10/16

)DRACULA: There have been hundreds of films inspired by Bram Stoker’s legendary creation over the years but I can guarantee that you have never seen one remotely like the take(s) presented here by iconoclastic Romanian filmmaker Rade Jude, the creator of such bizarre art house favorites as Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn and Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. The conceit here is that an ambitious young Romanian filmmaker has decided that for his next project, he will take on the famous vampire character and reclaim him for his native country. Alas, he is not entirely certain as how exactly to go about it and so he utilizes an hi-tech (and fictional) AI system to help him sketch out a number of ideas presented in vignettes ranging in length from a few minutes to nearly an hour. (The whole shebang runs a little under three hours in length.) Among them, we see a vampire visiting a remote health clinic that once treated the likes of Chaplin and Gish, footage of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (itself an unofficial take on Stoker’s work) overlaid with pornographic pop-up ads, a riff on Francis Coppola’s version that descends into a mass of erotic imagery and discussion about potential copyright violations, an extended adaptation of the 1938 Romanian vampire novel Vampirul and a modern take in which Vlad Dracul, one of the real-life inspirations for the character, has been reimagined as the manager of a tech start-up. Between these iterations, we witness the antics of a vampire-themed theater show that offers viewers the chance to have sex with the performers and then chase them through the streets with fake stakes for the finale.

While Jude’s previous films have managed to combine his anarchic approach to cinema, a caustic view towards modern society, biting humor, shocking imagery and extended running times into undeniably compelling works, Dracula is a far more scattershot and uneven affair. Some of the individual approaches are very clever and funny in the way that they bring together philosophical concerns, cinema history and dick jokes and his deployment of AI technology as a way of underscoring its inherently vampiric nature is intriguing. The trouble is that by flitting from one take to the next without ever committing to any particular idea or approach, the whole thing begins to get a bit repetitive and redundant after a while and the extended take on Vampirul seems to go on forever. Also, while some of the individual images may be striking, the rough, shot-on-smartphone grows wearying after a while. And yet, while I don’t think that Dracula exactly works, as they say, it is certainly something, as they also say, and if you are a fan of go-for-broke cinema in general and Jude’s unique approach to filmmaking in particular, you might respond to it more than I did—if it is ultimately a failure, at least it is a failure of ambition that is just too much for its own good.

FRANKENSTEIN: Guillermo del Toro has spoken for years of his desire to do a screen adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic 1818 horror narrative and now, with the help of countless millions of Netflix’s money, he has gotten the chance to accomplish that dream with this lavishly produced and fairly faithful take on the story, the particularly of which I suspect I do not have to unfold for you here. Suffice it to say, Oscar Issac portrays Victor Frankenstein, the brilliant-but-arrogant doctor determined to prove his genius to the world by conquering death by reanimating dead tissue and Jacob Elordi plays the ultimate result of the doctor’s experiments, a creature who, ultimately abandoned by his creator, reviled by all who encounter him as a monster and cursed with the inability to die, finds himself remorselessly pursuing his maker to the ends of the earth and beyond. Others turning up include Felix Kammerer as Victor’s more straitlaced brother, William, Mia Goth as William’s fiancée, who turns out to be the only person who really sees the creature as more than just an experiment gone sideways, Christoph Waltz as her uncle, a wealthy arms dealer who offers to fund Victor’s work but suggests that he might ask for a favor in return, Charles Dance as the harsh Frankenstein paterfamilias and Lars Mikkelsen as the boat captain who rescues Victor at the North Pole and hears out his story, only to extend the same courtesy to the creature when it happens to drop by as well.

When a filmmaker spends so much time trying to get a pet project going, they run the risk of having expended all their enthusiasm and ingenuity before it actually gets to the cameras. That is not precisely the case here, though it does take a while for the film to ultimately find its footing. The early scenes charting Victor’s childhood and profound familial issues, while always visually compelling, are a bit of a slog that finds del Toro a little too attached to the source material for his and the film’s own good. However, once it gets past all off that to the meat of the story and the dramatic elements begin to take hold amidst the lavish production design and cinematography, it really kicks into gear, becoming a bold, daring and at times startlingly emotional take on the familiar storyline. A lot of this is due to the inspired conceit of adopting the creature’s point-of-view after his abandonment by having him recount his experiences on his own terms, an idea that truly comes to life, so to speak, thanks to a performance by Elordi that manages to find its soulfulness without minimizing his capacity for rage or brutality that has been fostered by the ghastly circumstances of his own existence. Although perhaps not quite on a par with such earlier works as the classic 1931 version with Boris Karloff, its equally venerated 1935 sequel The Bride of Frankenstein or the notorious 1957 Hammer revision The Curse of Frankenstein (although brilliant, Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein does not quite count), this is a strong and sturdy take on the tale and if you have a chance to see it theatrically in the next couple of weeks before it lands on Netflix, you should take it because it really deserves to be seen on the big screen. (10/17, 10/20

HEDDA: Presenting bold, revisionist takes on Henrik Ibsen’s famed 1891 stage drama has become a cottage industry in recent years and now we have a new vision of it from writer-director Nia DaCosta that resets the material to London in the 1950s and plays around with the gender and sexual preferences of a number of the characters. The basic plot is still the same—former free spirit Hedda (Tessa Thompson) and her meek academic husband George (Tom Bateman) are throwing a lavish party at their massive estate, neither of which they can really afford, for his colleagues in the hopes of landing him an important faculty position. Alas, there is a competitor for that position in the form of Eileen Lovborg (Nina Hoss), who is a lesbian author who arrives at the party along with the only copy of her latest manuscript and a secret past with Hedda. Perhaps jealous that Lovborg is openly living the kind of lifestyle that she put to the side to embrace comfort and prestige, Hedda meticulously starts a chain of events over the course of one long night that she manipulates in order to help secure her husband’s job and destroy the reminder of her past in the process.

As she did with her previous film, the remake of Candyman from a couple of years ago that you kind of forgot existed, DaCosta presents us with a revised take on a well-known narrative that is visually stunning and dramatically inert from start to finish. By ramping up Hedda’s behavior from increasingly desperate self-preservation to flat-out psychopathy, the complexity of the character has been all but removed as the film starts to feel more like a Saltburn knockoff than anything else. This is especially evident in the performance from Thompson, a normally excellent actress who so overplays the role at times that she makes Hedda come across like a cartoon villain that a plausible portrait of a person driven to do horrible things in the name of security. Faring much better is Hoss, who does find a way of connecting with her character so that she comes across as a believable and ultimately tragic figure in spite of the overheated circumstances. She is pretty astounding here but her impassioned work only helps to underscore just hollow the rest of it is. DaCosta, whose other films include The Little Woods, The Marvels and the upcoming 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, will be on hand at the screening to receive the festival’s Black Perspectives Artistic Achievement Award. (10/19)

THE HELSINKI EFFECT: Back in the summer of 1975, with the Cold War still casting a hold over the world, the leaders of 35 countries met for the Conference for Security and Co-operation in Helsinki, Finland, eventually resulting in the signing of the Helsinki Final Act, a document intended to bridge gaps between the East and West that would prove to be the catalyst for a number of shifts in the geopolitical situation that even the signees could never have anticipated. Utilizing loads of archival materials taken from the conferences and their coverage, including recently declassified transcripts of conversations that took place, Finnish filmmaker Arthur Franck attempts to grapple with the events that put his country at the center of the world for a few weeks and which would continue to resonate for decades to come. This might sound intriguing for political junkies and policy wonks but the film suffers from Franck’s decision to present the material in a breezier comedic tone, inserting himself into the story he is recounting whenever possible and even utilizing AI recreations of the voices of Henry Kissinger and Leonid Brezhnev and the aforementioned transcripts to stage faux phone interviews to “ask” them about the proceedings. Although the film’s ultimate message, a wholehearted endorsement of the necessity for diplomacy, is one that has extra resonance today, the awkward approach to the material ends up undercutting it far too much for its own good.(10/18, 10/20)

IS THIS THING ON?: The third directorial effort from Bradley Cooper centers around a middle-aged couple struggling to move on with their lives after electing to separate—while Tess (Laura Dern) looks for a way to get back into the world of volleyball where she found some success before leaving it to start her family, Alex (Will Arnett), despite no previous experience, begins hitting the stage of New York comedy clubs, mining the details of his martial discord for laughs. Essentially fusing together Punchline and Marriage Story, Cooper has made a film that is at least slightly better than his previous effort, the ponderous Maestro, but is otherwise a major misfire. Although Arnett and Dern do their best, they are hampered by a screenplay (co-written by Arnett, Cooper and Chappell) that is frustratingly shallow in dealing with the lives of the characters they are playing (we get no sense of how Alex balances his nights on the club circuit with his daytime job in the financial industry) or their fumbling attempts at reconciliation, preferring instead to indulge in extraneous supporting characters played by Cooper himself (who is so obnoxious here that you will wince every time he enters the frame) and, inexplicably, Peyton Manning (whose conspicuous presence ends up throwing off the balance of one of the film’s big dramatic moments). The only good scenes are the ones set at the comedy clubs—although Alex’s material is not particularly funny by any stretch of the imagination, Cooper does a decent job of presenting that milieu in a realistic manner, aiding in no small parr by casting a number of up-and-coming comedians to serve as our guide through this world. Arnett and Dern may supply the film’s star power but it is these lesser-known talents that supply its only genuine signs of life.

IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT: As the latest film from Iranian director Jafar Panahi begins, a man named Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi) is driving late at night with his wife and young daughter when they accidentally hit a dog on the dark road. When it turns out that the car is damaged, they go to a nearby garage where the owner, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), reacts violently to their arrival, follows them home and nabs Eghbal off the streets and throws him in the back of his van. As it happens, the familiar sound of Eghbal’s squeaking prosthetic leg leads Vahid to believe that he has, at long last, found the man who served as his torturer when he was a political prisoner and he is determined to bury him alive in the desert as vengeance. The trouble is that just before he is going to do this, a sense of doubt begins to emerge about whether this really is the guy or not and he finds himself rounding up a few people who also suffered at the hands of the same man—wedding photographer Shiva (Mariam Afshari), soon-to-be-married Goli (Hadis Pakabaten), her fiancée (who was not a victim) Ali (Majid Panahi) and vengeful hothead Hamid (Mohammad Ali Elysmehr)—to help him confirm his suspicions before killing Eghbal.

Unlike a number of Panahi’s earlier films, such as Crimson Gold, This is Not a Film and Taxi, which fused together elements of documentary and narrative filmmaking to give viewers a sense of what it was like to live under such a brutal regime—one that had in fact imprisoned him a number of times because of the content of his work—It Was Just an Accident boasts a more traditional story structure, one bearing more than a slight resemblance to Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden in its setup. As an admirer of his earlier films, I confess that this approach threw me a bit at first but as it went on, I found his meditation on the eternal debate between justice and mercy and the lingering scars, emotional as well as physical, felt by people living under a brutal regime to be increasingly compelling as it goes on, thanks in no small part to the impressive performances of the entire cast. It also shows that Panahi’s rebellious streak has not dimmed at all—in defiance of the country’s religious edicts, his female character go without wearing their hijabs throughout the film. However, even if you don’t have any prior knowledge of Panahi or any interest in the political situation in Iran, the film still works as a crackerjack, if low-key thriller, that deftly presents a scenario that Hitchcock himself might have sparked to and even demonstrates a mordant sense of humor about the corruption all around—in one of the funniest bits, a pair of security guards who have spotted the group demand bribes in order to look the other way and when it transpires that no one has any cash on them, they pull out credit card scanners to move the process along. The winner of this year’s top prize at Cannes, It Was Just an Accident is an angry, thoughtful and profound work from one of the world’s great filmmakers and is not to be missed. (10/18, 10/19

KONTINENTAL 25: Apparently thinking that merely doing a three-hour-long piss-take on a horror classic just wasn’t enough, Rade Jude has a second full feature appearing in the festival as well. In it, former law professor Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), now working as a bailiff, has been charged with evicting a penniless older man from the dilapidated basement where he has been squatting—the property being scheduled for destruction to make room for a new luxury hotel. After giving him twenty minutes to gather his stuff, she and the police return to discover that he has committed suicide. Although she did nothing wrong—even granting him numerous extensions—she is nevertheless racked with guilt over the incident and when her family goes off on a previously planned vacation, she elects to stay home, instead meeting up with a number of people—including a old colleague, a former student, her mother and a priest—to recount what happened and her feelings of guilt over it in conversations that inevitably spin off into any number of other areas, including Gaza, Ukraine and the perils of capitalism. Although stylistically less audacious than his previous features (while still managing to include mechanical dinosaurs in the midst of the Romanian forest and robot dogs pestering people in the streets), Jude’s loose riff on Roberto Rossellini’s Europa ‘51 is a more focused work that fuses together dark comedy with an interesting meditation on the ills on contemporary society and a good performance by Tompa, who manages to retain sympathy even as her pleas of guilt over the incident begin to feel somewhat performative after a while. Although it lacks the wild swings and raunchy humor that one associates with Jude’s work, this is nevertheless an admirable and energetic effort that serves as a good reminder of his genuine skills as a filmmaker

.THE MASTERMIND: Over the course of such films as Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, Certain Women, First Cow and Showing Up, Kelly Reichardt has become one of the most fascinating and exciting American filmmakers working today and this new work is easily one of her very best to date. Sent in Massachusetts in the early 1970s, the film is an extremely low-key riff on the heist genre centered around James (Josh O’Connor), an art school dropout who claims to be preparing a career in architecture but is content to coast on the social cachet of his judge father (Bill Camp), surreptitious loans from his mother (Hope Davis) and the efforts of his wife (Alana Haim) to support him and their two sons. However, after realizing the less-than-strict security measures at a local art gallery, James hits upon the idea of hiring two goons and a getaway driver to steal four paintings by abstract artist Arthur Dove that he plans to stash away in a nearby farmhouse. The heist goes off more or less as planned, though not without some hiccups, but in the aftermath, it becomes painfully clear that James has not exactly thought through anything beyond the heist itself—from whether his associates will prove to be reliable if they get into trouble to the simple act of trying to get the paintings up into a hayloft via a ladder by himself—and this lack of planning forces him out on the road and into a series of unexpected encounters that force him to come to terms with the increasingly chaotic world around him before arriving at a brutally ironic conclusion.

To be certain, this is not a slick caper film in the vein of Topkapi, Ocean’s 11 or seemingly half of the high-profile streamer-produced films of late—the crime itself is presented in the most matter-of-fact manner imaginable and Reichardt spends more time on the aforementioned sequence of James struggling up the ladder with those paintings than on their theft. In fact, the heist proves to be almost secondary to the aftermath, in which James endures the consequences of his habitual inability to look too deeply into anything, whether it is the potential loss of his family or the growing tensions on the streets inspired by the escalation of the Vietnam War. This might prove to be frustrating to anyone expecting the usual genre exercise but those who coming to it on the strength of Reichardt’s name and reputation will find it to be an absolutely mesmerizing character study of a guy who clearly thinks of himself as some kind of rebellious existential loner criminal mastermind—the kind you might find in the films of Jean-Pierre Melville or Walter Hill—only to discover to late that without the extended support system that he has long taken for granted, he is pretty much nothing. O’Connor does a strong job of making this character compelling throughout despite his basic asshole nature and he is aided by a crack supporting cast (though you may wish that the film had found a little more for Haim to do) and Reichardt’s expert evocation of the period it is set. The Mastermind may not be a thrill-a-minute in the conventional sense but I found it to be absolutely fascinating from start to finish and yet another considerable entry in the filmography of one of our most distinctive directors.

)RENTAL FAMILY: I confess that when I saw the trailer for this film from director and co-writer Hikari, in which Brendan Fraser plays a struggling American actor in Japan who takes a job at a company that, for a fee, supplies actors to portray people in the lives of their clients who are otherwise absent in their lives in order to help them in certain situations, it did not look particularly appealing to me—it just came across as potentially drippy and mawkish. However, even I was unprepared for the sheer crudeness of the whole enterprise. Watching Fraser’s mph of a character becoming enmeshed in the lives of his clients—including a woman who has him pose as the long-vanished father of a young daughter who thinks he is her real dad and another woman who has him pretend to be a reporter interviewing her aging father, a once-famous actor who fears he has been forgotten—is almost embarrassingly manipulative at times and not even Fraser, doing his best amidst dire circumstances, can quite sell it. What is even more frustrating is that there is a subplot involving another one of the actors (Mari Yamamoto) and her increasing frustration over constantly being hired to portray mistresses force to make grand apologies to the wives of husbands too cowardly to come clean for real—those scenes have a life and energy and edge to them that is genuinely compelling. That is the movie that Hikari should have made instead of this failed exercise in feel-good nonsense. (10/21

THE SECRET AGENT: Set in Brazil in 1977, “a time of great mischief,” according to an opening titles card, this sprawling and wildly ambitious drama opens with Armando (Wagner Moura), a widowed former university researcher whose leftist politics have forced him to go into hiding from the current military dictatorship, arriving in the small seaside town of Recife in order to reunite with his young son, Fernando (Enzo Nunes), who has been living with his former father-in-law (Carlo Francisco), who runs the local movie theater. Armando tries to blend in by taking a job at a state archive centers when he learns through a group of fellow local dissidents that a couple of hitman have arrived in town to kill him on the orders of a corrupt government bigwig that he crossed paths with in the past. While waiting for the arrival of fake passports that will allow him and Fernando to leave safely, Armando tries to avoid detection but he cannot escape his past for too long. To make things even more complicated, the story all takes place during Carnival, adding a surreal backdrop for the increasingly complicated paces that Armando must go through in his attempts to escape.

Even at 160 minutes, this film is stuffed with side characters and subplots including the discovery of a shark with a human leg in its stomach, young Fernando’s desperate attempts to get someone to take him to see Jaws even though the poster alone gives him nightmares and occasional leaps to the present day in which researchers attempt to piece together the story via old wiretap recordings. That said, it is kind of amazing to see watch writer-director Kleber Mendonca Filho presents all of these disparate elements in a way that flows with the efficiency and excitement of a crackerjack thriller firing on all cylinders (the opening scene, involving Armando pulling into a remote gas station and dealing with a couple of cops more interested in squeezing a bribe out of him than in dealing with the extremely dead guy laying in the parking lot, is a particular gem in its blend of tension and dark comedy) while enveloping you fully into the milieu of the particular place and time it is set and always keeping you on your toes by subverting your expectations of what is to come. All of the performers are good but the performance by Moura, who won the Best Actor prize at Cannes this year, is an absolute stunner, providing a true emotional center to go along with the cinematic pyrotechnics supplied by Filho (who won the Best Director prize at Cannes) to make it more than just a well-crafted thriller. Featuring some of the most exciting filmmaking that you will see this year—despite its considerable length, it moves like a shot from start to finish—this is as exciting and ambitious a work as anything that you will see in a theater this year.

THE STRANGER: It simply would not be a Chicago International Film Festival without a new project from French director Francois Ozon and so we have his latest effort, an adaptation of Albert Camus’ celebrated 1942 novel of the same name. Set in Algiers in 1938, it starts as seemingly normal office worker Meursault (Benjamin Voison) is informed of his mother’s death and leaves to attend her funeral. However, he shows no overt signs of emotion during the entire process and the next day, he goes to the beach where he meets old acquaintance Marie (Rebecca Marder) and swiftly takes her to a Fernandel comedy and to bed. Although he seems content enough, Meursault clearly has a complete indifference to everything in his life and when he comes across an Arab man who had earlier attacked him and his cheerfully corrupt neighbor during an earlier confrontation, he shoots him dead. He is quickly arrested and put on trial but even though the court has no demonstrable interest in providing justice for the dead man, Meursault’s cold indifference to the basics of human existence end up condemning him.

As a filmmaker, Ozon tends to veer between cheeky provocations like Swimming Pool, The New Girlfriend and the recent When Fall is Coming with more serious and straightforward dramas like By the Grace of God and Summer of 85. In adapting Camus’ novel to the screen (it has been filmed twice before, most notoriously in a 1967 movie from Luchino Visconti starring Marcello Mastoianni that so angered Camus’s family that they were able to get it suppressed), Ozon has understandably gone the latter route and while one may long at times for some of the audacity of his wilder works, what he does give us is a solid take on the material. Visually, the film is stunning with the black-and-white cinematography from Manu Dacosse doing a striking job of evoking Meursault’s sense of detached aloofness to his surroundings. It also benefits from a strong performance by Voison as a man who simply has no interest in faking the niceties of life that he does not believe in, not realizing that being true to himself is the very thing that eventually condemns him. Behind it all, Ozon maneuvers all of the elements with elegant precision and while it may not rank among his very best works, it is nevertheless a stylish and gripping work that serves as yet another reminder that he is among the most consistently surprising filmmakers working today. (10/17, 10/19

)YOUNG MOTHERS: The latest effort from the fraternal filmmaking team of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne is centered around a handful of the teen mothers or mothers-to-be living at a state facility designed to help them have and care for their babies or, if they choose, assist in the process of putting them up for adoption. Perla (Lucie Laruelle) has just had her child but is learning that the young father has little interest in either her or their child. Jessica (Babette Verbeek) is about to give birth and is determined to seek out the mother who gave her up for adoption years earlier. Ariane (Janaina Halley Fokan) is determined to give her baby, Lili, up for adoption, which puts her in conflict with her mother (Chistelle Cornil), a woman who made a mess of the lives of both her and her daughter due to her own considerable issues but is convinced that with this new baby, everything will be all right. Finally, there is Julia (Elsa Hiouben), a former addict who seems to have turned her life around—her boyfriend is still in the picture and she has been hired as a trainee at a beauty salon—but still struggles with the same issues that threatened to consume her before.

As the Dardennes have demonstrated in many of their past works, primarily their award-winning masterpiece Rosetta (a film whose influence can clearly be felt here), they are masters in presenting quietly devastating narratives of social realism and getting memorable performances out of young actors. Those skills are once again on display here but the results are a little more uneven than usual. Instead of telling one single story with devastating precision and insight, they have instead elected to focus on multiple characters (there is even a fifth girl, though her story is wrapped up fairly early on), which means that once we are becoming emotionally invested in what is going on with one of them, it awkwardly shifts to another storyline. I recognize that they have gone this path to illustrate how there is no single path for someone facing the circumstances of these characters to take but they have simply gone a little overboard here—even deleting just one of the narratives might have allowed the others the space to let them come fully alive. (I’d choose to delete the one involving Perla, whose story is both the most familiar and the one with the diciest acting.) It isn’t bad, per se, and some of it—particularly the material involving Julia and her struggles—is quite moving—but for the most part, it is a slightly lesser effort from a filmmaking duo who have done better and more affecting work in the past.