In what is unquestionably one of his signature leading roles, Javier Bardem plays Blanco, the charismatic and sometimes menacing owner of a factory that manufactures industrial scales. While awaiting the presentation of an award for corporate excellence, Blanco must sort out the problems of his workers - problems that are undoubtedly compounded by Blanco’s not-so-upstanding personal behavior! A compelling and darkly funny workplace satire. The Good Boss “provides prime material for Bardem, who has to maintain a polished veneer even as his character’s mendacity and troubles mount” (Ben Kenigsberg, The New York Times).

Set in and around Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing projects, Cooley High presents the seriocomic adventures of two best friends, Preach (Turman) and Cochise (Hilton-Jacobs), as they navigate their way through the humdrum of high school and the hazards of North Side 1964’s mean streets. Labeled the “Black” American Graffiti for years, Cooley is looser, grittier, and less nostalgic than the comparison suggests, with an energy and vibe that has proved influential in the ensuing decades. Director Schultz’s movie inspired the long running tv sitcom What’s Happening, and left its fingerprints all over subsequent big screen portrayals of Black teens, including, notably, 1991’s Boyz n the Hood. (BR)

When her teenage daughter is kidnapped, Cielo will stop at nothing to get her back. After turning to the cops and her family, she takes matters into her own hands, and goes up against the cartel herself. Co-produced by Palme d’Or winners Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days) and the Dardenne brothers, La Civil invests its gripping, ripped-from-the-headlines thriller premise with a documentary-like eye for detail. Inspired by true events, La Civil won a Courage Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. (MK)

In a closed-minded hamlet, bank clerk Ruth (Carroll) finds herself the subject of a scandal when she innocently spends an evening with city-slicker playboy Romer (Grant). The false accusations threaten Ruth’s livelihood and her budding romance with childhood friend Bill (Scott). A racy, beautifully directed pre-code gem, Paramount’s Hot Saturday “ is set in a curdled version of the small-town America that was being enthusiastically celebrated down the road at Fox…[a town] where the local youths spend their leisure time chugging bootleg liquor and groping each other on the dance floor at a lakeside roadhouse” (Dave Kehr, The New York Times).

In October 2019, over a million people took to the streets of Santiago demanding social change, igniting years of protests with the aim of reshaping the very foundation of Chile’s government. Master documentarian Guzmán (Nostalgia for the Light), who chronicled Chile’s 1973 coup d’état in his classic The Battle of Chile, is once again on the ground to capture his home country’s latest political earthquake. My Imaginary Country is amply supplied with Guzmán’s characteristically clear-eyed observations and arresting protest footage, but is most of all devoted to probing interviews with a broad cross-section of the women behind the revolution. (MK)

The San Francisco Police ask Eleanor Johnson (Sheridan) for help in tracking down her husband, who is the eyewitness to a murder. Eleanor must find her spouse before the killer does, so she embarks on her own investigation all over the city, learning things about her marriage that she never realized before. Her search leads her ultimately to the roller coaster on the Santa Monica pier (the same coaster used three years later for the climax of Man in the Dark). After twelve years under contract at Warner Bros., Sheridan gives one of her finest performances in this riveting noir thriller, a movie she also produced! 35mm print restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Film Noir Foundation.

Pinky is on the run. After living under the spell of a cult, he’s finally escaped and is hiding out with his gun in an abandoned building in Medellín, Colombia. Edging back into society, he takes a job in an illegal screen-printing factory and watches his back, waiting for fate to catch up with him. Shot on rich 16mm, crafted with total precision, and paced like a bullet, Camilo Restrepo’s stylish debut won the Best First Feature prize at the Berlin Film Festival. “Succinctly potent like a concentrated shot of a mood-altering substance” (The Film Stage). (MK)

An avant-garde artist whose work was completed between the late 1960s and his death in 2022, Paolo Gioli occupies a unique spot in the history of Italian cinema. Gioli's films explore the mechanical, chemical, and perceptual elements of the cinema that, while often overlooked, are nevertheless essential to the cinematic experience as we have known it. This selection of Gioli’s short films, curated and presented by UW Madison Professor of Italian Patrick Rumble, offers examples of the filmmaker’s playfully archeological attitude towards the medium and its technology, resulting in Rumble's description of Gioli as "among the last of the first filmmakers."  The program of 8 Gioli short films spans between Traces of Traces (1969) and Natura Obscura (2013). (PR)

Larry Gottheim has been a key figure in American experimental cinema for nearly five decades. Combining conceptual and formal sophistication, Gottheim’s two most recent works included in this program survey the boundary between natural process and human agency, offering varied perceptions of deceptively simple subjects that concatenate into feasts of light, color, texture, movement, and sound. Larry Gottheim will appear in person to introduce his films and discuss after the screenings.

Schultz’s box office hit offers a day-in-the-life of the workers, customers, and strange visitors at a busy Los Angeles car wash. The Grammy-winning pop soundtrack features Rose Royce’s chart-topping title song, of course, and the talented cast also includes Antonio Fargas, Melanie Mayron, Jaws’s Lorraine Gary, Garrett Morris, Clarence Muse, The Pointer Sisters, Ivan Dixon, Bill Duke, Brooke Adams, and Danny DeVito. A multi-character laugh riot with moments of poignancy in the tradition of American Graffiti, Car Wash is a “sunny, lively comedy…[with a] tremendous sense of life” (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times).

In the last film produced by the celebrated Val Lewton (Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie), a gambler and gunman reluctantly returns to the desert mining town he’s just been expelled from to warn the citizens of an impending attack by Mescalero warriors. Excitingly directed by Fregonese, the final siege sequence inside a dance hall turned fortress sets the stage for films-to-come like Rio Bravo, Night of the Living Dead, and Assault on Precinct 13, and is “one of the most remarkable passages in American cinema” (Dave Kehr, Il Cinema Ritrovato Program Guide). Restored in 4K in 2021 by Universal Pictures in collaboration with The Film Foundation at NBC Universal StudioPost laboratory, from a 35mm nitrate 3-strip original negative preserved by UCLA Film and Television Archive.

Released the year after the end of World War II and the death of Mussolini, De Sica’s Shoeshine was an important early work of Italian neorealism—the influential film movement that explored social issues in postwar Italy. De Sica, who would go on to make the neorealist classics Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Umberto D. (1952), brings his trademark humanist pathos to this story of two young friends who, in their attempt to save money to buy a horse, find themselves falling into petty criminality that lands them in the uncompromising jaws of the juvenile prison system. Shoeshine stands alongside Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955) and Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) as one of the classic films about childhood in a challenging world. (JB). Restored in 4K in 2022 by The Film Foundation and Cineteca di Bologna in collaboration with Orium S.A. with funding provided by Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory. Prior to the screening,  a special introduction from Guy Borlée of Il Cinema Ritrovato and Cineteca di Bologna.

“Gee, whiz!,” exclaims young David (Hunt), as he witnesses a flying saucer landing near his home. Soon, his parents and all the adults in his smalltown begin acting strangely and it’s up to David to confront the green, bug-eyed aliens and their giant-brained leader who controls the grown-ups! Filmed in glorious color and directed by former set designer Menzies, Invaders from Mars remains one of the most eye-poppingly delightful films of the 1950s, especially in this new 4K restoration from Ignite Films.

The bucolic existence of a riverside town is disrupted by a traveling circus troupe. Filmed in cinéma-vérité style, director Aravindan rounded up a troupe of actual circus artistes and traveled with them to the village of Thirunavaya on the banks of India’s Bharathapuzha river. The resulting film is a gently poetic allegory that maintains the improvisational and immediate qualities of a documentary. Restored by Film Heritage Foundation, The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna at Prasad Corporation Pvt. Ltd’s Post – Studios, Chennai and L’Immagine Ritrovata Laboratory in Bologna, and in association with Producer K. Ravindranathan Nair of General Pictures, and the family of Aravindan Govindan. Presented with the support of the Center for South Asia.

Thirty-something delivery man Dexter Jackson’s (Carson) greatest dream is to be a television news anchor, a gig he spends every free moment practicing for. His big break comes during an active hostage situation where his heroic efforts earn him the respect of his community and a cushy reporting gig as the only Black newsman at a highly rated local network. Soon enough, though, he’s pushed by a craven, ratings-hungry producer to deliver sleazy exposés on his friends and neighbors, and he begins to see a grotesque, Dorian Gray-like transformation in his on-air appearance. In hindsight, Livin’ Large! looks like a stepping stone between Sidney Lumet’s Network and Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, a media satire as broad and crass as the industry it’s skewering, and another Schultz-directed winner that pins its wacky hijinks to an uncommon sensitivity regarding matters of race and work. Print courtesy Chicago Film Society. (CW)

In his finest lead performance, Caan plays Frank, a home-invading safecracker and ex-convict living and working by a strict code. He has a reliable partner in Barry (Jim Belushi) and a mentor in the still-behind-bars Okla (Willie Nelson). When a Chicago mob outfit recruits Frank for some high-end heists, the thief finds his entire way of life in jeopardy, especially his new marriage with Jessie (Weld). Writer/director Mann’s first theatrical feature, with its neon-lit nightworld pulsating to the music of Tangerine Dream, is one of the most exciting and stylish debuts of the 1980s.

A group of L.A. police detectives, led by Vincent Hanna (Pacino) are closing in on a clever, well-armed group of thieves, led by Neil McCauley (De Niro). Cross-cutting between the cops and criminals, writer-director Mann explores their codes of personal behavior, their working methods, and their relationships with women, finding more similarities than differences. Ditching plans to film in Chicago just before production began, Mann nonetheless delivered one of the definitive Los Angeles movies, and one of the greatest crime epics of our time.

Berlin, 1947: a congressional delegation is headed to a war-torn Berlin to evaluate military morale. U.S. Representative Phoebe Frost of Iowa (Arthur) is particularly concerned with the whereabouts of Erika von Schlütow (Dietrich, giving a career-best performance), a cabaret singer rumored to have been the mistress of high-ranking Nazi officials. Phoebe enlists Captain Pringle (Lund), one of her constituents stationed in Berlin, to aid in her investigation, blithely unaware that Pringle and Erika are lovers. A romantic farce colored by striking tones of lingering wartime danger, A Foreign Affair remains one of legendary writer/director Wilder’s most underrated comedies. (JB)

Be careful what you say when someone asks you ‘Permesso,?’” reads the poster tagline of Wilder’s Italian-set comedy. Wilder perennial Lemmon plays Wendell Armbruster, an uptight married American executive who turns up on the Mediterranean coast to claim the body of his dead father. Slowly, Armbruster falls in love with the daughter (the radiant Mills) of his father’s unknown-to-him mistress, discovering he has more in common with his old man than he thought.

They say a dog is a man’s best friend, but what if the man is a total dirtbag? In that case, it might be time for some sweet revenge, doggy style.  When Reggie (voiced by Will Ferrell), a naïve, relentlessly optimistic Border Terrier, is abandoned on the mean city streets by his lowlife owner, Doug (Will Forte), Reggie is certain that his beloved owner would never leave him on purpose. But once Reggie falls in with a fast-talking, foul-mouthed Boston Terrier named Bug (voiced by Jamie Foxx), a stray who loves his freedom and believes that owners are for suckers, Reggie finally realizes he was in a toxic relationship and begins to see Doug for the heartless sleazeball that he is. Determined to seek revenge, Reggie, Bug and Bug’s pals—Maggie (Isla Fisher), a smart Australian Shepherd who has been sidelined by her owner’s new puppy, and Hunter (Randall Park), an anxious Great Dane who’s stressed out by his work as an emotional support animal—together hatch a plan and embark on an epic adventure to help Reggie find his way home … and make Doug pay by biting off the appendage he loves the most. (Hint: It’s not his foot).  A subversion of the dog movies we know and love, Strays, directed by Josh Greenbaum (Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar) and produced by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, is a hilarious, R-rated, live-action comedy about the complications of love, the importance of great friendships, and the unexpected virtues of couch humping. See Strays at this free screening before it is released on June 9. Special Thanks to Universal Pictures.