Chicago Critics Film Festival 2024: Five movies you shouldn't miss

I’ll be the first to admit my bias towards the Chicago Critics Film Festival. I’m part of the organization that puts it together, it takes place at my favorite movie theater (Chicago’s organ-scored Music Box Theatre), and it enriches my local community of arthouse moviegoers. I can’t, in good conscience, advocate for anyone to pay through the nose for the privilege of standing in an icy Sundance line, only to pack into a theater filled with high-earning super-spreaders. But I can tell those in Chicagoland to check out a slate of movies curated from Sundance, SXSW, Tribeca, TIFF, and more. Especially since the summer will welcome the likes of The Garfield Movie, y’all should get in while the getting’s good.

In fact, I can personally vouch for a handful of those films playing at this year’s fest, and not just the rep screenings of Little Women, Bringing Out The Dead, and Ghost In The Shell 2. Here are five new movies at Chicago Critics Film Festival 2024 (which runs from May 3 – 9) that you should make sure you catch, if you’re able.

Good One

The feature debut from writer/director India Donaldson tightly packs its insecure, hilarious baggage for an intimate backcountry camping trip. Middle-aged dorks Chris (James Le Gros) and Matt (Danny McCarthy) have been pals a long time, long enough to wax nostalgic about their past and pick at each other’s bittersweet present. They were supposed to bring their kids into the wilderness with them, but only Chris’s daughter Sam (Lily Collias) showed. The unbalanced trio navigates its tension with realistic ebbs and flows of sarcasm, dad jokes, and teenage eyerolls. Chris is a serious outdoors nerd, while Matt is more of a blowhard. Both are full of it, losing their marriages, and on the brink of seeing their children leave for college. Sam sees the light at the end of the tunnel, ready to strike out on her own, but she’s got at least one more isolated trip to weather, shackled to these men. It’s fertile ground for itchy humor and quiet observation, both of which are left to Donaldson’s well-balanced script and Collias’s calculating performance. Lush greenery fills the screen as it becomes humid with unspoken conflict, every shot lingering with an unhurried elegance befitting its small yet potent story. Good One’s impressively tuned dramedy finds uncomfortable honesty out in the woods.

Handling The Undead

One of the most quiet and disquieting zombie movies I’ve ever seen, Handling The Undead is exactly what you’d expect from an adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s undead follow-up to Let The Right One In. The tragedy is one of false hope and brutal reality, meted out in heartbreaking vignettes across Oslo. After an odd electrical event, the recently dead rise up…but showing no real signs of what we recognize as life. They don’t feel, or see, or hunger. They don’t acknowledge their loved ones. They’re just there, nearly immobile and without motivation. The movie around them is distant, slow, and shot with a Nordic brutalism that emphasizes hard lines and obscured frames over warm humanity. The numbness of loss hasn’t faded for any of the three groups we see affected by this phenomenon, and Thea Hvistendahl’s direction incorporates that feeling into how they deal with their resurrected family members. It’s a despairing subversion of your typical entry into the genre, one that avoids larger worldbuilding or imminent threats in favor of pained contemplation.

In A Violent Nature

In A Violent Nature is a slasher fan’s slasher. Not only is it one of the most inventively gory movies I’ve seen in a minute, its gimmick is one that’s been perfectly calibrated for The Cabin In The Woods crowd. That’s not to say that In A Violent Nature is drowning in Whedon-isms, but that writer/director Chris Nash’s embrace of the genre allows his film ample space to flip the script. In A Violent Nature features a bunch of young, dumb campers about to get turned inside-out by a hulking killer, but this time the whole movie is from the perspective of the boogeyman (Ry Barrett). Barrett’s wordless performance is captivatingly heavy and inhuman, each step plodding towards certain doom even during the film’s confidently shot segments in broad daylight. His inevitable arrival is often all that fills the screen. The film is only scored by sparse diegetic music, the camera is almost always locked behind its killer like a third-person video game, and the crisp nature photography only makes the grisly death sequences all the more fun. When it wavers from its formal premise, it can lose a little of its grip on us, but when the horror dedicates itself to the pure rhythm of the slasher film, it’s a deconstructive delight.

I Saw The TV Glow

Already one of the year’s best films, I Saw The TV Glow takes filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun’s canny observations about how pop culture can create identity and applies them to a warped world of dysphoric digital nightmares. On its face, the film follows the stunted Owen (an incredible, committed Justice Smith), who bonds with fellow outcast Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) over a Buffy-ish genre show. As the movie and its inhabitants evolve, changing but perhaps not growing up, it becomes like a bad trip to Twin Peaks’ Roadhouse, where the grim setlist is composed of neon static. The film features performances from Phoebe Bridgers and Kristina Esfandiari, as well as small appearances by two men who are discomfort personified: Conner O’Malley and Fred Durst. Just typing their names so close together gave me a little anxiety. Interconnected with the film’s crushing reality is that of the campy series its characters obsess over, its haunted creatures (one of which looks a bit like if Mac Tonight was a sex offender) allowing real-world problems to be mapped onto their cartoonish make-up. If I Saw The TV Glow doesn’t awaken something in you, you probably didn’t grow up hiding your personality behind your favorite pieces of media. The result is a captivating feat of audiovisual style, unconventional storytelling, and pervasive emotional pain.

Thelma

A cute-not-twee action pastiche transposing blockbuster tropes to the geriatric crowd, swapping speedboats for mobility scooters, Thelma offers its 94-year-old star June Squibb an unprecedented opportunity. Actors in Squibb’s demographic don’t get many lead roles period, let alone lead roles that require barrel rolls and one-liners. And Squibb’s hilarious, incorporating her shuffling physicality and squinting confusion into every gag. She’s got to sell jokes based around her being as bad at Facebook as my grandma, which takes an ironic amount of control and timing. Thankfully, writer/director Josh Margolin’s writing never punches down as he takes his characters on a revenge mission to track down a phone scammer. It helps that Squibb is supported by an endlessly charming Richard Roundtree in his final film role. Whenever we leave our veteran co-stars, Thelma gets shaky, but with quick pacing and dashes of stylistic parody (closing a pop-up becomes as nerve-wracking as any over-the-top feat of cinematic hacking), Margolin keeps us tied to his charming film’s strengths.