The Reader’s Guide to the 44th Chicago International Film Festival

A Christmas Tale French director Arnaud Desplechin (Kings and Queen) sets this overstuffed drama in the northern provincial town of Roubaix, his birthplace, which he also considered in his 2007 documentary L’Aimee. A dysfunctional clan gathers there for the holidays, arguing over a compatible bone-marrow donor for the leukemia-stricken mother (Catherine Deneuve); hovering like a ghost is the memory of the first-born son, whose death has polarized his sister (Anne Consigny) and black-sheep brother (Mathieu Amalric). Characters occasionally address the camera, which helps disentangle the competing story lines of madness, adultery, and betrayal. With Emmanuelle Devos and Chiara Mastroianni. In French with subtitles. 150 min. (AG) aSat 10/25, 6:45 PM, River East 21

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RFear(s) of the Dark Sinister and beautiful, this mostly black-and-white animation from France culls the talents of six artists and designers—Blutch, Charles Burns, Marie Caillou, Pierre di Sciullo, Lorenzo Mattotti, and Richard McGuire—who were asked to explore their most primal fears. Their styles run the gamut from comic-book pen-and-ink (Burns) to expressionistic pencil work (Blutch) to geometric abstraction (di Sciullo), but their sequences all reach past the stock materials of the horror genre into the obscure shadow land of the human psyche. Artistic director Etienne Robial has integrated the artists’ work so smoothly that one hesitates to single out any particular segment, though the one that really made my bowels clutch was Burns’s tale of a virginal college student who’s seduced by a pretty classmate, implanted with larvae, and harvested for a race of giant humanoid insects. In French with subtitles. 85 min. (JJ) aMon 10/27, 6:15 PM, River East 21

Four Nights With Anna A supporting role in David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises inspired veteran Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski to return to directing after a 17-year absence; the result is as creepy and menacing as much of Cronenberg’s oeuvre, with a heavy dose of European fatalism thrown in. Artur Steranko plays the repressed custodian of a hospital crematory, who visits his mother’s grave to tell her he finally has a girlfriend. But the object of his affections, a zaftig nurse (Kinga Preis) who lives across a field from him, doesn’t realize she has an admirer who slips her sleeping powder, then expresses his ardor by cleaning her house while she’s unconscious. Flashbacks to a traumatic event years earlier suggest that his stalking may be more sinister than it appears. In Polish with subtitles. 87 min. (AG) aSun 10/26, 7:30 PM, and Mon 10/27, 8:00 PM, River East 21

RThe Good, the Bad, and the Weird With a nod and a wink to Sergio Leone, South Korean filmmaker Kim Jee-woon (A Tale of Two Sisters) delivers a slam-bang western set in Manchuria after the Japanese invasion in 1931. Dynamic wide-screen camerawork propels the action, beginning with an over-the-shoulder shot as a doofus train robber (Song Kang-ho of The Host) hurtles through connecting railway cars to pilfer a treasure map. The theft sets him in conflict against a hired gun (Lee Byung-hun), a bounty hunter (Jung Woo-sung), assorted bandits, and, in a bravura desert-chase sequence, the Japanese army. Lee’s charismatic villainy and Song’s raffish glee bolster the slim plot, though the revelation here is the tall, lithe Jung, an actor of few words but striking physicality. In Korean, Mandarin, and Japanese with subtitles. 130 min. (AG) aSun 10/26, 8:00 PM, 600 N. Michigan

King of Ping Pong At first glance this Swedish tale of a nerdy, overweight Ping-Pong enthusiast looks like a standard exercise in Nordic deadpan comedy, with long, static takes and sporadic bursts of droll humor. Set in the frigid north country, it follows its sad-sack teen (Jerry Johansson) as he tries to cope with merciless bullies, less-than-enthusiastic Ping-Pong students, and life in the shadow of his girl-magnet younger brother. There’s nothing especially original here, but director-cowriter Jens Jonsson digs below the quirky surface, his deliberative style transforming this into an unexpectedly affecting coming-of-age drama. In Swedish with subtitles. 107 min. (RP) aFri 10/24, 8:40 PM, 600 N. Michigan

RThe Secret of the Grain Abdel Kechine is an actor (Sorry, Haters) as well as a writer-director (Blame It on Voltaire, Games of Love and Chance), so one naturally focuses on his movies’ fluid ensemble work. But this 151-minute French drama, his third and most accomplished feature, is even more impressive for its subtle, dexterous storytelling. The first half uses casual conversation to build a rich family portrait, as an aging Arab fisherman (Habib Boufares) loses his full-time gig at a shipyard and commiserates with his grown children and his girlfriend over what to do next. He decides to open a Middle Eastern restaurant and organizes a gala dinner to attract investors, yet these developments arrive not as italicized plot points but as casual remarks in loosely improvised dialogue scenes. Given the languid pace, I was hardly prepared for the cold-sweat suspense of the last act, as latent family conflicts erupt into complications that threaten to sink the high-stakes dinner party. In French with subtitles. (JJ) aTue 10/28, 8:30 PM, 600 N. Michigan