Outside of the Chicago International Film Festival, the hottest movie ticket in town this week is likely Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, which is now playing at River East, the Arclight, and the Landmark Century. I consider Parasite to be Bong’s best film since Memories of Murder (2003); the South Korean writer-director mixes comedy, suspense, and social commentary so successfully that the combination comes to seem irreducible. Clearly I’m not alone in my admiration for the film—it won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, and it’s been selling out screens across the country since it opened in the U.S. a couple weeks ago—though I don’t love it to the extent that some of my peers do. Bong is not a subtle social commentator; he lays all his ideas about class conflict right on the surface of the film, where you can’t miss them. At its worst, the filmmaker’s directness can suggest an inability to trust his audience to figure things out for themselves.
Viridiana Luis Buñuel returned to his native Spain to create this 1961 masterpiece, which marked his rebirth as a filmmaker of international repute. Mexican star Silvia Pinal plays the title character, a girl about to enter a convent whose confident plans for sainthood are interrupted by her uncle’s (false) announcement that he has raped her in her sleep. She forges ahead anyway, filling her uncle’s estate with beggars and madmen in an obsessive demonstration of Christian charity. Franco’s government, which financed the film, later attempted to suppress it, burning all the prints that remained in Spain. Luckily, a few had already been sent to France, and the rest—Buñuel’s brilliant late period—is history. With Fernando Rey and Francisco Rabal. —Dave Kehr
