The Chicago Critics Film Festival is unique in the cinema scene. The annual week of screenings at the Music Box Theatre is curated exclusively by film critics. Arguably the city’s most selective festival, it is the city’s smallest for a reason. The simplified schedule books only one feature or shorts program at a time. Trust us, the critics are saying, we want you to see everything.
Among the highlights is the idiosyncratically punctuated “The Invite,” which kicks off the festival Friday. Director and star Olivia Wilde is scheduled to attend the 6:30 p.m. screening of a 35 mm print. She plays Angela, the wife of Joe (Seth Rogen). Their marriage is shaky, so they figure now is the best time to invite the dodgy couple upstairs, portrayed by Penelope Cruz and Edward Norton. What could go wrong? Judging by the trailer, since the film was unavailable for preview, the get-together goes sideways. This screening is sold out, but the film, from ace distributor A24, hits select theaters on June 26.
Members of the Chicago Film Critics Association pick films from out-of-town festivals they covered for their respective outlets. “The Invite” premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Centerpiece documentary “When a Witness Recants” also premiered at Sundance. Concluding the festival on May 7, “The Sun Never Sets” by Chicago indie auteur Joe Swanberg premiered in March at South By Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas.
The festival, founded in April 2013, began as a way to showcase the Chicago Film Critics Association, said Brian Tallerico, co-producer, website coordinator, film critics association board president and managing editor of RogerEbert.com.
“In the years before the festival, we did a Chicago Film Critics Association Awards, and those were getting harder to put on, to get celebrities to come,” said Tallerico, who is from Arlington Heights. “Things changed after 9/11.”
What to do next? “A forward-facing program that would highlight the CFCA,” he added.
Initially held at suburban Muvico Rosemont 18, the festival was “like an experiment,” said Erik Childress, co-producer of the festival and board member who reviews on the “Movie Madness” podcast” and reports on the box office at Rotten Tomatoes.
Childress and Tallerico lucked out for the inaugural event. For their first opening night, they screened “Stories We Tell” by Canadian actor/director Sarah Polley, who made an appearance. Another big name, Chicago native William Friedkin, director of “The Exorcist” and “The French Connection,” also stopped by. On a book tour for his memoir “The Friedkin Connection,” he brought a precious 35 mm print of his 1977 action thriller “Sorcerer.”
The debut Chicago Critics Film Festival was dedicated to the late Roger Ebert. The Chicago Sun-Times critic’s Overlooked Film Festival and EbertFest served “as a sort of a model, as someone who was taking his art and his passion and his interest, and using it to showcase films,” noted Tallerico. Ebert founded and programmed that annual fest in 1999 in Champaign, Illinois. Its historic venue, the Virginia Theatre, was a 1920s-era movie palace like the Music Box.
European film festivals early in the year traditionally supply features that travel to North America’s big festivals in the fall. Tallerico said when it comes to curating films for the fest, “quality control” is paramount.
“We have turned down films that I know would have made us money because we didn’t like the film. Quality control is above and beyond everything that we care about. But increasingly, [other studios are] picking things up at Sundance and South by Southwest and dropping them in May and June. So we’ve tried to fill in a space. We are where we are to kind of maximize the buzz. Roughly half our program every year premiered at Sundance or South By Southwest.”
Retrospective screenings this year are projected on 35 mm: It’s the 40th anniversary of David Cronenberg’s “The Fly,” the 25th anniversary of Steven Spielberg’s timely “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” and Jonathan Demme’s “Something Wild” from 1986.
Chicago Critics Film Festival will co-present select screenings with Black Women Directors, Instituto Cervantes de Chicago and Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago’s Moto Continuo Film Showcase.
Here is a selection of films to check out during the festival. All will screen at the Music Box, 3733 N. Southport Ave. All are Chicago premieres. None played at earlier Chicago festivals.
‘Decorado’
Animator Alberto Vazquez directs the angsty saga of a mouse increasingly wary of Almighty Limitless Megacorporative Agency. Out of work with time on his hands, he researches whether he and his wife and everyone else dwell in a blue-pilled dystopic simulation. His doctor prescribes pills. Ingredients? “100% Happiness.”
12 a.m. Friday, part of Music Box’s Animation Adventures series
‘Shorts Program #1’
In “Paper Trail,” Don Hertzfeldt animates a 14-minute life story via a revelatory collage of papers he saw and altered, from childish scrawls to faltering signatures, as retirement nears. Seven other shorts have remarkable unforeseen endings. Four filmmakers, though not Hertzfeldt, are coming for a Q&A.
11:30 a.m. Saturday
‘You Had To Be There: How the Toronto Godspell Ignited the Comedy Revolution, Spread Love & Overalls, and Created a Community That Changed the World (in a Canadian Kind of Way)’
The longest titled film is the most entertaining. Nick Davis revisits the 1972 Toronto production of a musical that boosted the careers of Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Gilda Radner, Victor Garber, Andrea Martin, Dave Thomas and Paul Shaffer. Sharing their recollections of youth and decades-long camaraderie is a gift.
11:30 a.m. Sunday
‘Shorts Program #2’
Who can resist this trailer tagline: “See it so you can say you saw it!” Eric Jackowitz riffs on Italian gore cinema in campy spoof “The Seeing Eye Dog Who Saw Too Much.” Only the dog of a sexy blind violinist can see the killer. One of the six other shorts in this program ends with the disclaimer: “This film was not made with generative AI.” Four filmmakers will attend.
1:45 p.m. Sunday
‘When a Witness Recants’
This compelling HBO documentary is about a witness who comes face to face, on camera, with three now-free men he helped imprison for 36 years. In 1983, a teenager’s untruthful testimony convicted three other teens for murdering a 14-year-old student in a Baltimore middle school hallway for his jacket. Director Dawn Porter will attend a don’t-miss Q&A after the screening.
6:30 p.m. Monday
‘Time and Water’
Sara Dosa directs an elegiac ecological essay on Iceland’s disappearing glaciers. Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason narrates. Family home movies interlace with artful shots of “living” glaciers and the abstract sounds they make. As Magnason’s glacier-loving grandparents age, their memories melt as well.
9:30 p.m. Monday
‘Black Zombie’
Maya Annik Bedward directs an incisive look into Haiti’s colonial sugar plantations and the living tradition of voodoo. Spiritual forces liberated the enslaved Africans who worked to death for European wealth. What does that have to do with our freaky fixation on movie and TV zombies? Everything, argues this illuminating history lesson; the original zombies were oppressed workers struggling to be free and fully human. Die-hard fans of zombie cinema, prepare to get schooled.
9:45 p.m. Tuesday