The Chicago French Film Festival runs Friday, July 26, through Thursday, August 1, at the Music Box Theatre. Now in its third year, the series spotlights the sort of solid genre filmmaking that U.S. distributors tend to pass up in favor of art-house fare. This year’s selections lean towards romantic comedies and suspense thrillers, though the nation’s art cinema is represented too, with some naturalistic dramas (You Will Be My Son, The Dandelions) and formalist filmmaking (Alain Resnais’s You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Dirty Money, aka Un Flic) rounding out the program. Tickets are $10; a nine-screening pass is $50; an all-access pass is $75. Unless otherwise noted, all films are in French with subtitles. —Ben Sachs
Fly Me to the Moon In this French romantic comedy, Diane Kruger plays a successful dentist who’s afraid to tie the knot with her longtime boyfriend; no woman in her family has found true love until her second marriage, and this would be only her first. To solve the problem, she plots to marry and divorce a random stranger. Unluckily for her, he turns out to be an eccentric travel writer (Dany Boon, a popular comic actor best known in the States from Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Micmacs) who gets them both stranded in the middle of Kenya just hours after they meet. Some of the narrative developments achieve the sweet illogic of a 30s screwball farce, while others are merely inane. Still, the players are always in high spirits, and director Pascal Chaumeil (Heartbreaker) keeps the action bright and bouncy; the slapstick’s well executed too. In subtitled French and Russian. —Ben Sachs 101 min. Fri 7/26, 7:15 PM.
773-871-6607
musicboxtheatre.com $10, nine-screening pass $50, all-access pass $75
