Chicago Film Fest, Dispatch #1: Nightbitch, Maria, and a Christmas short
Chicago Film Fest, Dispatch #1: Nightbitch, Maria, and a Christmas short
A check-in from the first week of the 60th Chicago International Film Festival
Welcome to Girl Culture, the newsletter where Caroline Siede examines pop culture, feminism, and more. You can learn about Girl Culture’s mission here and support here.
Cinephiles measure their seasons in film festivals. The new year starts with indies and documentaries at snowy Sundance; SXSW celebrates genre fare in Austin in the spring; Cannes brings some European glamour to the summer; and the fall is filled with major festivals including Venice, Toronto, Telluride, and the New York Film Festival, as well as mid-size regional festivals like one I’m currently in the midst of attending: the Chicago International Film Festival.
Celebrating its 60th anniversary, this year’s CIFF takes place at venues all across the city, with its main hubs at the AMC NEWCITY in Lincoln Park and the historic Music Box Theatre in Lakeview. With over 120 features made in all sorts of genres and at all different budgets, there’s something for everyone at the fest. But—as with most of these fall film festivals—a big part of the game is about setting the stage for awards season, which will eventually culminate at the upcoming Oscars. While a lot of the films that screen at these festivals won’t be officially released until closer to Christmas (or maybe even early next year), the narratives about front-runners and favorites is already being set right now.
In truth, I’m a bit of a novice to the film festival circuit. While full-time film critics will often attend several of the big festivals each year, I spend so much time hopping between TV, film, and broader pop culture writing that I don’t always get the chance to go truly in-depth in any one arena. During my brief sojourn as a critic for FOX in 2022, I “attended” Sundance virtually (i.e. watched everything at home on my laptop), spent 10 days at SXSW, and experienced my first Chicago International Film Festival.
But this is my first year getting credentialed for a fest as an independent critic running my own site—an exciting milestone for Girl Culture. So I thought it might be fun to offer a behind-the-scenes glimpse of what it’s like to attend one of these festivals as a critic, as well as preview some of the big movies and performances you might want to keep an eye on this awards season. Here are some highlights of what I’ve seen so far, with more dispatches to come later this week.
Hard Truths (a British family drama hitting theaters Jan 2025)
A big part of attending a film festival is logistics. Given the staggering amount of things to see and do, I’m currently juggling about five different color-coded spread sheets to help me keep track of it all. And sometimes your choices are simply made for you. While I would’ve loved to have seen Malcolm and John David Washington at the Opening Night screening of The Piano Lesson, I was busy reviewing Agatha All Along that night instead. But I did get to kick off my 2024 CIFF experience with a press screening of Mike Leigh’s new film, Hard Truths.
A contemporary drama from a legendary British director, Hard Truths centers on two very different middle-aged Black women: upbeat hairdresser Chantelle (Michele Austin), who lives her life with a sense of empathetic joy, and her bitter older sister Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), who wouldn’t know joy if it hit her in the face. With a thunderous central performance from Jean-Baptiste, Hard Truths is a sometimes funny, frequently harrowing character study about what it’s like to be a difficult person—the kind who belittles customer service workers and starts petty arguments over parking spaces. It’s also maybe a film about what it’s like to live with untreated OCD, although this isn’t the sort of story that’s interested in providing easy answers or clear-cut diagnoses.
Instead, Leigh is operating in his signature observational key, capturing snapshots of how people live without concerning himself over whether those snapshots add up to a full portrait. This is a minor family drama in some ways and a major one in others; both painful and cathartic in how real it all feels. We all know people like Pansy, and we may very well recognize parts of her in ourselves too. While the largely plotless structure may prove frustrating for those looking for a more conventional narrative, the small-scale emotional nuances slowly add up to a masterclass in tonal control.
Indeed, while I was grateful to have seen this one at a press screening (public screenings can be harder to get into), I’m very curious how it played with a crowd. Reports from other fall film festivals seem to suggest that Hard Truths was a laugh-riot that only slowly became more serious as the movie went on. But my smaller screening room felt like we were all treating it like a drama from the start. That’s not a bad thing, of course. In fact, it might just suggest that Hard Truths has new layers to peel back with each repeat viewing.
Grade: B+
Nightbitch (a horror-tinged Amy Adams comedy hitting theaters Dec 6)
Of course, press screenings aren’t inherently dour affairs. The group of us assembled for a mid-morning screening of Nighbitch seemed to have a relatively enjoyable time laughing along at the movie’s winking nods towards the difficulties of parenthood. Based on Rachel Yoder’s bestselling novel of the same name, Nightbitch stars Amy Adams as an installation artist who put her career on hold to stay home and raise her two-year-old son, only to find the experience of full-time motherhood to be way more than she bargained for. So much so that she starts to have fantasies (or are they?) that she’s turning into a dog.
The latest from Can You Ever Forgive Me? director Marielle Heller, Nightbitch has a cathartically crowd-pleasing quality that will no doubt prove relatable to parents of small children. On the whole, however, it runs into the same problem as the America Ferrera monologue from the Barbie movie: The film has righteous, relevant points to make about the burden we place on mothers and the ingrained gender inequality of domestic life that so often becomes apparent in parenthood. But it makes those points so bluntly and directly that it starts to feel more like an essay than a film.
Despite strong work from Adams and some genuinely lovely chemistry with her toddler co-star, I found the central dog metaphor more half-baked than truly thought-provoking. And there’s not much depth to the weaponized-incompetence-personified husband (Scoot McNairy) either. Unfortunately, the film spends so much time on those two elements that it doesn’t leave enough space for more intriguing threads about the supporting female characters on its margins. Still, paired with the newborn exhaustion captured in Jason Reitman’s Tully and the elementary-school-aged angst of Mike Mills’ C’mon C’mon, you could program quite a nice triple feature of movies that empathize with the emotional challenges of modern-day parenthood at all ages of early childhood development.
Grade: C+
David Lowery and An Almost Christmas Story (a family friendly animated short debuting on Disney+ on Nov 15)
Thanks to a helpful nudge from Disney PR, I realized last minute that one of my favorite directors, David Lowery, was in town for the “Industry Days” portion of the festival. And since my press pass gets me access to that filmmaker-focused side of programming too, I dashed right from my Nightbitch screening to this keynote conversation.
Lowery’s eclectic filmography includes dreamy dramas like Ain't Them Bodies Saints and The Old Man & the Gun, big Disney projects like Pete's Dragon and Peter Pan & Wendy, and out-there genre experiments like A Ghost Story and The Green Knight (two of my all-time favs). He’s now adding animation to the mix too with his upcoming Disney+ short, An Almost Christmas Story, which follows a young owl who accidentally finds himself living in the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. (It’s the third and final entry in a collection of holiday shorts produced by Alfonso Cuarón.)
It was fun to hear Lowery chat about his wide-ranging career. He’s a deeply nerdy cinephile who frequently references his favorite films (Bram Stoker's Dracula being top of the list), but he seems to take a really instinctual approach to filmmaking too. He kept circling back to the idea that he’s guided by what “feels right” when it comes to making aesthetic choices. And while he’s become a meticulous storyboarder over the years, he apparently really encourages improvisation and discovery on set too. He also loves Christmas and the texture of corrugated cardboard, which pretty much sums up everything you need to know about An Almost Christmas Story.
The short itself is basically a Rankin/Bass-style stop motion special crossed with Disney’s Oliver & Company, featuring a dash of Henry Selick’s gothic vibe and a touch of Pixar-esque heartstring tugging. It’ll make for sweet, slightly melancholy holiday viewing for both the young and the young at heart. I’m also very intrigued to see Lowery’s upcoming film Mother Mary, which stars Anne Hathaway as a pop star and Michaela Coel as a fashion designer.
Maria (an Angelina Jolie-led music biopic debuting on Netflix on Dec 11)
After a jam-packed morning, I took a bit of a breather in the afternoon (shout-out to the Whole Foods hot bar!) and then eventually made my way up to the Music Box for my first public screening of the festival. I was rewarded with a delightful intro from Italian actress Valeria Golino, who sauntered up on-stage, apologized for not being Angelina Jolie, and then said that even though she was really in town to promote her directorial project, The Art of Joy, she also had a great time filming her one and only scene in Maria too.
It was a hilarious note to start the evening (Golino did a great job making fun of how she got roped into doing this intro while also making it clear that she does really like the movie) and it primed the crowd to really lean into the warmth and humor of this ethereal character study.
Maria follows Jackie and Spencer as the third installment of director Pablo Larraín’s “iconic 20th century women” trilogy. Although—with no offense intended—I’m not sure that legendary opera singer Maria Callas is quite up there with Jackie Kennedy and Princess Diana in terms of cultural impact. And that’s the biggest thing holding Maria back. While the power of Jackie and Spencer came from how they alternately embraced and subverted our cultural image of their famous central figures, Maria plays more like a straightforward biopic in arthouse drag. Or perhaps I’m just too much of an opera philistine to understand the nuances here.
Regardless, the biggest selling point of the movie is the absolutely stunning central performance from Jolie—which is not only career-best work, but also one of the most captivating movie star turns in recent memory. Tasked with playing a literal diva, many actors would immediately go broad and melodramatic, but Jolie underplays Maria’s more over-the-top qualities, resulting in a performance that’s playful and self-aware rather than histrionic and showy. While the movie itself is overly indulgent (Maria literally needs to think about her entire life before she sings her swan song), Jolie’s performance never feels that way.
After largely limiting her onscreen work to big genre movies like Maleficent and Eternals, it’s a joy to watch Jolie sink her teeth into something more full-throated again. In fact, she’s so perfected her Old Hollywood transatlantic accent that if she wants to role right on into playing an aging Audrey Hepburn, that would be fine with me. She’s certainly proven she has the chops for it. As a movie, Maria is just okay. As a calling card for the next phase of Jolie’s career, however, it sings to the rafters.
Grade: B-
Other stuff I’ve worked on lately: I reviewed the Laura Dern/Liam Hemsworth Netflix rom-com Lonely Planet, weighed in on Hulu’s new soapy British sex comedy Rivals, and published the second installment of my new Women of Action column on Jennifer Lopez’s 2002 thriller, Enough.