Battleship Potemkin

Opens March 8

"I am a civil engineer and a mathematician … I approach the making of a motion picture in much the same way as I would the equipment of a poultry farm... Read more

Filth and Freedom: Selections from the Vinegar Syndrome Film Archive

Opens March 15

In the late aughts, young Chicagoan and Odd Obsession video counter clerk Joe Rubin began amassing a huge collection of vintage adult films on 16mm an... Read more

Lady Windermere's Fan

Opens February 12

"Playing with words is fascinating to the writer and afterward to the reader, but on the screen it is quite impossible. Would much charm remain to lon... Read more

Real Life

Opens April 18

"I shouldn't be allowed to do this! Why did I pick reality? I don't know anything about it!" Albert Brooks, one of cinema's greatest comic minds and d... Read more

Reds

Opens April 6

"The curious notion that Hollywood or its European counterparts could produce a truly and unequivocally progressive spectacle…continues to be as much... Read more

Written on the Wind

Opens February 17

Perhaps the most anxious and lurid of Sirk's incredible run of melodramas for Universal-International, Written on the Wind is a soap opera laid in a T... Read more

16mm Centennial Celebration

When motion picture film began, the 35mm gauge seemed like it could fulfill every conceivable commercial application — first the kinetoscope, allowing... Read more

Aelita, Queen of Mars

A cryptic radio transmission baffles scientists and statesmen around the globe. Only the dreamy Soviet engineer Los correctly surmises that the signal... Read more

Alias Jimmy Valentine

Jimmy Valentine (Robert Warwick) belongs to a gang of bank-robbers– his job is to crack safes and he is the best in the business. After a stint in Sin... Read more

Birth

Wealthy New York widow Anna (a miraculous Nicole Kidman) accepts the marriage proposal of Joseph (Danny Huston), whom she doesn’t particularly love (n... Read more

Blind Husbands

The Armistice marked not only the cessation of World War I, but also the cessation of films that cheered on the conflict and fanned the flames of nati... Read more

Body and Soul

In 1924 Paul Robeson electrified Broadway with his performance in Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings, which soon led to the starring role in... Read more

The Bright Shawl

Richard Barthelmess had become a movie star playing bright young men and hayseed hunks, eventually forming his own production company, Inspiration Pic... Read more

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Two roaming bandits reject modernity and hold on tight to their saddles — they would never flee their foes on something as newfangled as a bicycle. Ad... Read more

Chris + Heather's 16mm Big Screen Blowout

Artist and filmmaker Heather McAdams and songwriter and musician Chris Ligon have assembled one of the most impressive and painstakingly curated priva... Read more

Chris + Heather's 16mm Big Screen Blowout #2

CFS continues its bid to secure “national treasure” status for Heather McAdams and Chris Ligon by offering up the Music Box’s large screen for another... Read more

Daisies

“We exist! We exist! We exist!” Věra Chytilová’s Daisies bursts with chaotic energy and vivid color, turning each frame into a bold statement of rebel... Read more

The Dragon Painter

Sessue Hayakawa was an unlikely star in early Hollywood, a Japanese actor who became a beloved matinee idol in an era of intense anti-Asian prejudice.... Read more

Earth

An old man dies, a baby is born, and still the wind ripples through the apple trees. The ancient, quasi-mystical connection between a people and their... Read more

Eating Raoul

Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov are Paul and Mary Bland, a prudish couple pursuing a simple American dream of opening their own restaurant. After a sex-c... Read more

Every-Night Dreams

Mikio Naruse’s career spanned the 1930s late-silent era up through the time of color film and anamorphic widescreen. His interest in the professional... Read more

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift

After seven-and-counting entries heavily dedicated to gravityless, CGI-assisted bank robbing/international espionage antics, it can be easy to forget... Read more

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! + Scorpio Rising

“Let’s examine closely this dangerously evil creation, this new breed, encased and contained in the supple skin of woman.” Ostensibly members of this... Read more

Forbidden Paradise

Pola Negri had achieved international fame in the elaborate historical epics she made under Ernst Lubitsch’s direction in Germany, but her Hollywood c... Read more

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

The Spaniard Madariaga (Pomeroy Cannon) has made a fortune as a landowner in Argentina, but the paterfamilias of the Pampas can scarcely keep his clan... Read more

Girl Shy

By day Harold Meadows (Harold Lloyd) is a meek tailor’s apprentice at his uncle’s shop in Little Bend, blushing through every interaction with the alm... Read more

Harakiri

One of the great movies about honor (and unemployment), Masaki Kobayashi’s samurai drama Harakiri tells “the hardscrabble tale of a rōnin,” who arrive... Read more

Humoresque

Publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst founded Cosmopolitan Productions to boost the screen career of his mistress Marion Davies, but the studio f... Read more

I Was Born, But...

Among the most celebrated of all Japanese film directors, Yasujirō Ozu began his studio career in 1923 at the Shochiku Film Company and would remain e... Read more

Japanese Girls at the Harbor

Best friends Sunako (Michiko Oikawa) and Dora (Yukiko Inoue) attend a Catholic school together in the port city of Yokohama, a bustling gateway to Wes... Read more

Joan the Woman

Before his name became synonymous with the Biblical epic, Cecil B. DeMille experimented with several different modes of historical storytelling, with... Read more

Kentucky Pride

You think you’ve seen everything, and then you see a silent film narrated by a horse. Following his ostentatious historical epic The Iron Horse (not n... Read more

The King of Marvin Gardens

After charting the course for a new kind of American art film amid the bowling alleys and oil fields of Five Easy Pieces, Bob Rafelson and Jack Nichol... Read more

Kwaidan

Spirits in the drinking water, stolen ears, crabs with human faces: such are the endless wonders of Kwaidan. Masaki Kobayashi (Harakiri, The Human Con... Read more

Love Streams

“Love is a stream. It’s continuous. It doesn’t stop.” Director John Cassavetes’s final masterpiece (he’d be diagnosed with fatal cirrhosis of the live... Read more

Mantrap

The girl can’t help it in Mantrap, a raucous silent romantic comedy starring the inimitable Clara Bow as an out-of-control flirt at the center of a ma... Read more

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

In the years since its maiden voyage, Peter Weir’s epic seafaring adventure film has made an inexplicable journey: from respected blockbuster that nev... Read more

Medium Cool

“Look out, Haskell, it’s real!” So warns an off-camera crewmember as a police-thrown tear gas canister rolls towards the director during one of the mo... Read more

Menace II Society

Presented by Chicago Film Society | CLICK HERE to Purchase Tickets At the age of 20, twin brothers Allen and Albert Hughes became the youngest feature... Read more

Messiah of Evil

A man collapses in exhaustion in a stranger’s backyard, believing himself saved until a smiling adolescent girl affectionately dries the sweat from hi... Read more

My Darling Clementine

Shakespeare in Tombstone? Assigned by 20th Century-Fox to turn out a new version of the well-trod story of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and the gunfight... Read more

The New World

Heavily disputed as actual history, English explorer John Smith’s account of being captured by the Powhatan tribe in 1608 and subsequently having his... Read more

Padlocked

The sexual hypocrisy of the Jazz Age is skewered, throttled, and puréed in Padlocked, an upside-down morality tale about the petty tyranny of the puri... Read more

The Patsy

Broadway showgirl Marion Davies became a movie star through the dedication (and pocketbook) of her paramour and patron William Randolph Hearst. Yes, D... Read more

Pierrot le Fou

Given the half-century or so of his career spent bouncing between televisual experiments, incendiary collectivist agitprop, and narrative ruminations... Read more

Pour Don Carlos

With a composer and a painter for parents, and the acclaimed writer Colette for a best friend, Jeanne Roques seemed destined for the arts. Having esta... Read more

Runaway Train

Over the years CFS has shown several films perhaps unfairly labeled as the “serious pictures” from the Cannon Group catalog: Jean-Luc Godard’s King Le... Read more

Seconds

Seconds, adapted from David Ely’s 1963 novel, is not for the faint-hearted. Director John Frankenheimer, known for his work on The Manchurian Candidat... Read more

The Ship of Lost Men

A Frenchman who established his directorial renown in New Jersey in 1914 when the infant industry was still working out the grammar of feature-length... Read more

The Shop Around the Corner

Inspired in part by Ernst Lubitsch’s father’s experiences running a small tailor shop in Berlin, The Shop Around the Corner stars James Stew... Read more

A Story of Floating Weeds

Early in his career, Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu regularly channelled the snappy verve of American commercial cinema, name-checking Ernst Lubitsch... Read more

The Symbol of the Unconquered

The Black independent writer-producer-director Oscar Micheaux had a knack for weaving incidents from his own life into uplifting, politically charged,... Read more

Tangerine + All About My Mother

About TANGERINE “Merry Christmas Eve, bitch.” Tangerine hurls us into the world of trans sex worker Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) as sh... Read more

Titanic

“Fifteen-hundred people went into the sea when Titanic sank from under us. There were twenty boats floating nearby and only one came back, o... Read more

Tokyo Drifter

With a filmography spanning coming-of-age comedies, sports dramas, sexploitation romps, and more, Seijun Suzuki lays claim to one of the most diverse,... Read more

The Turin Horse

When this movie came out a decade ago, its meat-and-potatoes slow cinema tempo (emphasis on the potatoes) seemed to herald the end of cinema. Cinema i... Read more

The Unknown

Some films spin elaborate plots, with a relentless parade of character and incident, and others simply toss out a ludicrous premise and let the chips... Read more

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs

Widow Keiko (Hideko Takamine) is a well-liked and decently paid bar hostess, but greedy relatives and ill-advised affairs leave her lonely and facing... Read more

Wild Things

“Where did she get those SHOES? Whores for Less?!” These words, uttered by Blue Bay rich girl Kelly Van Ryan (Denise Richards) to Everglades bad girl... Read more

Zabriskie Point

For a brief moment after his first English-language effort Blow-Up became a surprise hit, Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni was actua... Read more