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Chicago Critics Film Festival – Closing Night Report – We Are Movie Geeks

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Chicago Critics Film Festival – Closing Night Report

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The Chicago Critics Film Festival Runs May 17th – 23rd. Stephen Tronicek is covering the event for We Are Movie Geeeks

After a week and (checks schedule) 23 programs, all of this had to come to an end. Tonight, it did and while there is a bit of sadness in watching the Chicago Critics Film Festival go, there is also adulation at the movies that screened tonight.

Piranhas, directed by Claudio Giovannesi, is a marvelous little gangster film that captures the misadventures of an Italian gang of fifteen-year-olds, out to face the world. What’s surprising is how restrained the ride actually is. The filmmaking is mostly handheld but the storytelling isn’t explosive and that’s perfect. We observe, through the workman lens, the lives of these young men and women. We observe them as they struggle, succeed, die, and party and it goes by in a rush of 105 minutes. Definitely recommended to anyone who enjoys the likes of City of God.

After that was one of the most hyped films of the festival, Luce, about the struggles of two parents (a finally not wasted Naomi Watts and Tim Roth), as their adopted son Luce (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) is accused of a serious crime by one of his teachers (Octavia Spencer). Luce works hard to get out from its stage roots and mostly get there, mostly at the hands of a sumptuous visual style and great performances. Besides the obvious greats of the Funny Games reunion, Harrison Jr. explodes into full form onscreen, making Luce a believable character. There are some themes that seem a little mishandled at times, but I’d like to read more criticism on the film to see what the overall consensus of this is. Sometimes, I just don’t know. That being said, I exited the theater moved and just a little bit scared.

The festival closed on Light from Light. In it, a paranormal investigator (Marin Ireland) struggles to find meaning as she helps a client (Jim Gaffigan) find possible reconnection with the ghost of his dead wife. For the entire week Light from Light was compared multiple times to David Lowery’s (a producer on this film) A Ghost Story. Tonally, that just about hits the mark. Both are achingly sobering films about the relationships we have with the dead. Both hold a grey and green color palette that oddly wraps the audience into a calm comfort. Both feature “real” performances that ask the audience to engage. Both leave you in well of your own tears. Light from Light currently lacks a distributor. I hope it gets one soon. It’d be a shame for it to go to waste.

Harrill and Gaffigan spoke after the film, providing the audience with a wonderful treatise on the spiritual aspects of the film and the genres of drama and comedy in acting. Gaffigan, true to form, had me in stitches.

The 7th Chicago Critics Film Festival is now over, but the time I spent here will stay with me. I sat in the front row of the Music Box Theater at 10 pm, having just been wrung out by Jennifer Kent’s brutally brilliant The Nightingale, only to experience the equally impressive Monos. I talked with the kind, talkative filmmakers of this year’s startling crop. I stayed at a hostel for a week and best of all I got to interact with the wonderful group of people who put it all together.

I mentioned in my first piece that CCFF was introduced as “This festival takes all the best films that would be otherwise unavailable and show them in the Midwest (hometown Chicago) in one week.” Well, it’s more than that to me. The Chicago Critics Film Festival showed me around Chicago, showed me many great films and gave me a time I’ll never forget. Next year, you should be here because I guarantee, you’ll get that too.