Friday, January 24, 2014
Opening / Film Adolf Hitler, Charles Dickens, Tom Clancy, and the rest of this week's screenings
Posted By J.R. Jones on 01.24.14 at 07:38 AM
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In this week's long review I take a look at Generation War, a German miniseries about five 20-year-old Berliners pulled into Hitler's doomed assault on the Soviet Union; it's hardly a masterpiece, but it's entertaining and sometimes compelling, and its weeklong run at Music Box includes a panel discussion Saturday at 2:30 PM (between parts one and two) on the historical controversies surrounding the project. We recommend Black Jack (1979), an 18th-century children's adventure directed by Ken Loach, and An Honest Living, a documentary about four creative Chicagoans (director Jordan Freese attends both screenings).
Check out this week's issue for new reviews of: Be Known, a documentary profile of jazz percussionist Kahil El'Zabar; The Broken Circle Breakdown, a Belgian melodrama about two parents whose child is incurably ill; Devil's Due, a horror flick in the Satanic offspring subgenre; Gimme Shelter, with Vanessa Hudgens as a troubled street kid; The Invisible Woman, with Ralph Fiennes as Charles Dickens and Felicity Jones as the young woman he took as a lover; Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, the latest adventure for the Tom Clancy hero; Maidentrip, chronicling the round-the-world sea voyage of Dutch teenager Laura Dekker; Ride Along, with big-city cop Ice Cube smacking down goofball Kevin Hart; and Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?, a Taiwanese comedy about a closeted husband and father who falls for an airline attendant.
Best bets for repertory: Katharine Hepburn in Alice Adams (1935), Monday at University of Chicago Doc Films; Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life (1956), Wednesday with free admission at Northbrook Public Library; Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955), Sunday and Thursday at Gene Siskel Film Center; Lionel Rogosin's On the Bowery (1957), Friday and Tuesday at Film Center; and on Saturday afternoon at Northwestern University Block Museum of Art, a double feature of It (1927), starring Clara Bow, and Underworld (1927), directed by Josef von Sternberg—both screenings feature live accompaniment by pianist Dave Drazin.
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