Founded in 1990, the Chicago Film Critics Association is the only critics’ group in the U.S. to mount its own film festival, which offers its nearly 60 members the dubious distinction of reviewing an event they’re simultaneously promoting. (This is the sort of thing that makes two-thirds of Americans distrust the news media.) I haven’t belonged to the CFCA for years, and because this puts me in a small minority of local critics who can comment on the festival impartially, I’d be remiss if I didn’t weigh in. The festival was conceived as a launch pad for domestic indie films needing a break, and the lineup is always pretty good. Yet the more notable titles screening this year have already been picked up by Magnolia Pictures, Sony Classics, Bleecker Street, and other national distributors. Twenty-two features screen in this year’s edition; following are five that I was able to preview.
Still best known as the screenwriter of Taxi Driver (1976), veteran director Paul Schrader indulges his two big passions—Calvinism and bloodletting—with his audacious new drama First Reformed (Mon 5/7, 7:15 PM, with Schrader in person). Ethan Hawke stars as the earnest, middle-aged pastor of a historic Dutch Reformed church in upstate New York; called upon to counsel a suicidal young man, the minister begins to learn about the chaos awaiting humanity in the next few decades as the ice caps melt, and he succumbs to the same sin of despair. You’ve got to hand it to Schrader: for 40 years critics have been razzing him for his religious obsessions, which are even less hip now than they were then, yet the 71-year-old filmmaker just won’t give up. First Reformed develops into a conventional moral dilemma as the minister runs up against an oil executive who’s bankrolling the church’s renovation, and you can trust a Protestant like Schrader to recognize the inferiority of good words to good deeds. The movie’s climax is completely over-the-top, but what else can you expect from the guy who created Travis Bickle?
Fri 5/4-Thu 5/10. Music Box, 3733 N.Southport, 773-871-6604, chicagocriticsfilmfestival.org, $12, passes $150.
