Chicago Int'l Film Festival is now open: Here’s a list of 8 to get you going

CHICAGO — This week the 59th Chicago International Film Festival, the oldest juried festival of its kind in North America, spreads out like a blanket across the city and says: Here’s new work, every kind, from everywhere. See some.

Some venues, chiefly the AMC NewCity 14 (1500 N. Clybourn Ave.) and the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago (915 E. 60th St.), make their festival screening debuts.

Other venues return for duty. The Music Box Theatre (3733 N. Southport Ave.) hosted Wednesday’s opening-night selection, the beautiful Cabrini-Green-set drama “We Grown Now,” recently picked up for theatrical distribution by Sony Pictures Classics.

Elsewhere, CIFF revisits the Gene Siskel Film Center, the Chicago History Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and CIFF screenings also can be found this year at the Hamilton Park Cultural Center in Englewood and the Harrison Park Field House in Pilsen.

You’ll find top award winners from the Cannes Film Festival (”Anatomy of a Fall”), the Venice Film Festival (”Poor Things”) and others. You’ll see documentaries on wheels, including the Chicago-centric doc “Bike Vessel,” and another kind of wheels, in Ukraine, on a van carrying refugees across landmined roads to the Polish border. You’ll catch Austin Butler, the heartthrob from “Elvis,” in the new Jeff Nichols film “The Bikeriders,” set in Chicago (though filmed in Pittsburgh; you can’t have everything).

Here are eight for starters. We’ll lay off the star ratings at this stage of the game. Many of these films already are headed for a commercial theatrical run while others are still seeking distribution deals.

“The Bikeriders” (5 p.m. Oct. 22 at Music Box Theatre): The festival’s closing-night attraction takes its credited inspiration from Danny Lyon’s 1968 book of photographs. Lyon’s subject is the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club. Writer-director Jeff Nichols, who gave us such penetrating dramas as “Take Shelter,” “Loving” and “Mud,” imagines a fictionalized version of that club and those men, and a few women allowed into their poseur’s orbit. The cast include Austin Butler, Tom Hardy, Nichols’ frequent collaborator Michael Shannon, and the invaluable Jodie Comer, who nails a Chicago dialect as (no joke) only Brits appear to be able to master. Commercial theatrical release in December.

“Eric LaRue” (6:30 p.m. Oct. 13 at Music Box Theatre): Speaking of Michael Shannon, “Eric LaRue” marks the actor’s stern, precise, absorbing feature directorial debut. His longtime associate from Chicago’s own A Red Orchid Theatre, Brett Neveu, adapts and expands Neveu’s 2002 play about the shaky ground underneath the lives of a school shooter’s grieving mother (Judy Greer, so alert and alive) beset by family and community members who think they know what’s best for her spiritual well-being.

“Alien Island” (5:15 p.m. Oct. 17 at AMC NewCity 14; 2 p.m. Oct. 18 at Siskel Film Center): A wily nonfiction cine-essay and Chilean-Italian co-production from director Cristóbal Valenzuela, in which a widely reported series of UFO sightings in 1984 Chile point the way, for a handful of disparate citizens, to the truth. This involves the truth behind a remote place known as Friendship Island, and the sinister reach of authoritarism capable of anything.

“The Zone of Interest” (8 p.m. Oct. 18 at AMC NewCity): From “Under the Skin” director Jonathan Glazer comes another audacious adaptation from a novel, this one Martin Amis’ flamboyant (and, I think, morally dubious) multiple-perspective narrative set among the family of the Auschwitz concentration camp commandant. Glazer discards Amis’ intricate romantic complications, presenting instead a gripping, painfully ironic depiction of daily life and death. Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller star. One of the essential cinematic responses to the enormity and the eternal shadow of the Holocaust. Commercial release date Dec. 8.

“Family Portrait” (3:15 p.m. Oct. 14 at AMC NewCity; 6:15 p.m. Oct. 16 at Siskel Film Center): An evocative slice of slippery recent history, writer-director Lucy Kerr’s film gathers a Texas family together at the riverside homestead, sometime in fall 2019. Or is it early 2020? The film doesn’t fix its time frame, but casual small talk referring to mystery viruses, aversion to hospitals, fallout from the most recent hurricane catastrophe and Kerr’s eye for the telling, mysterious detail makes “Family Portrait” one of the shrewdest captures of the early COVID era.

“All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt” (7:45 p.m. Oct. 18 at AMC NewCity; 7 p.m. Oct. 19 at Logan Center for the Arts): A striking, sparingly verbal feature debut from Raven Jackson, floating through time and memories as recalled by a Mississippi woman played at different ages by Charleen McClure and Kaylee Nicole Johnson. Echoes, visual and immersive, of Julie Dash’s landmark “Daughters of the Dust” have been freely acknowledged by Jackson, but she’s very much her own poet of family secrets and the tree of life. November theatrical release.

“The Taste of Things” (7:45 p.m. Oct. 13 at AMC NewCity; 5:15 p.m. Oct. 14 at AMC NewCity; 7:30 p.m. Oct. 20 at AMC NewCity): Reasonably ravishing orgy of beautifully prepared, meat-intensive meals, as whipped up in late 19th century provincial France by Juliette Binoche (as Eugénie, the cook) and Benoît Magimel (as the wealthy estate owner and foodie Dodin, her employer/lover). Director Tran Anh Hung made “The Scent of Green Papaya,” a more piquant mouth-waterer. But this will hit the spot for many. Early 2024 release.

“In the Rearview” (2:45 p.m. Oct. 15 at AMC NewCity; 5 p.m. Oct. 16 at AMC NewCity): I’ve written a bit about this remarkable documentary, a Polish/French/Ukrainian coproduction, in which a camera parked between the front seats of a van records the faces, stories and fragile survival of Ukrainian war refugees. The director Maciek Hamela rented his van, and then two more, to volunteer as part of the refugee rescue operation; his passengers become our window to the heartbreaking plight of a nation our U.S. leaders recently denied aid in the name of not shutting down our own government. Everything’s in short supply these days, except shame.

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Through Oct. 22 in multiple movie theaters and remember, with the Chicago International Film Festival, if something’s sold out, there’s always something else. Complete schedule, tickets and all venue locations at chicagofilmfestival.com.

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