Siskel Film Center

Siskel Film Center Chicago's home for great cinema. See you at the movies!
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For more than 50 years, the Gene Siskel Film Center has welcomed cinephiles and curious newcomers alike to experience a curated collection of the world’s most compelling films.

🪐 “The film has a hypnotic pull, drawing the viewer deeper and deeper into its enigmatic adventure by crafting a world a...
09/06/2026

🪐 “The film has a hypnotic pull, drawing the viewer deeper and deeper into its enigmatic adventure by crafting a world all its own.” —Mark Olsen, Los Angeles Times

When mysterious transmissions arrive from the three remaining residents of the Solaris space station, psychologist Kris Kelvin is dispatched to investigate. There, he encounters the same strange phenomena afflicting the crew—sending him on a voyage into the darkest recesses of his own consciousness.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s brilliantly original science-fiction epic transforms a journey into space into a haunting meditation on memory, lost love, truth, and what it means to be human.

Presented as part of our Andrei Tarkovsky Retrospective.

🪐 Fri. Sep. 11, 7:45 pm
🪐 Sat. Sep. 12, 2:15 pm
🪐 Sun. Sep. 13, 11:45 am
🪐 Tue. Sep. 15, 5:45 pm

🎟️ Get tickets at siskelfilmcenter.org/solaris

at the Edge Opens its 25th Anniversary Season with Karimah Ashadu!Join us Thursday, September 10 at 6:00 p.m. for an e...
09/04/2026

at the Edge Opens its 25th Anniversary Season with Karimah Ashadu!

Join us Thursday, September 10 at 6:00 p.m. for an evening with British-Nigerian artist Karimah Ashadu, winner of the 2024 Venice Biennale Silver Lion.

Three deeply immersive, sensory films shot in Lagos, Hamburg, and Nigeria’s Jos Plateau draw viewers into the lived realities of labor, migration, global trade, and colonial extraction.

The screening will be followed by a conversation between the artist and curator Giampaolo Bianconi.

✨ FREE for SAIC students.
🎟️ Info + tickets: siskelfilmcenter.org/karimah-ashadu

This event will include real-time captions (CART).

Presented in partnership with the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, in conjunction with the exhibition Karimah Ashadu: Tendered (opening Sep 12), and the Art Institute of Chicago’s presentation of Karimah Ashadu: Machine Boys (opening Sep 11).

📷
1. Karimah Ashadu, Plateau, 2021–22. Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ.
2. Karimah Ashadu. Photo by Aaron Leithauser.
3. Karimah Ashadu, Brown Goods, 2020. Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ.
4. Karimah Ashadu, Plateau, 2021–22. Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ.

Opening tomorrow: THE SUN NEVER SETS, the latest from Chicago filmmaker Joe Swanberg—who joins us in person next Thursda...
09/03/2026

Opening tomorrow: THE SUN NEVER SETS, the latest from Chicago filmmaker Joe Swanberg—who joins us in person next Thursday, September 10.

Shot on 35mm against the sweeping landscapes of Alaska, Swanberg’s richly observed romantic drama stars Dakota Fanning as Wendy, whose relationship with her older, divorced boyfriend (Jake Johnson) is thrown into uncertainty when he asks for space—and a chance encounter with her ex (Cory Michael Smith) creates a volatile triangle.

🎬 THE SUN NEVER SETS
Opens FRI., SEP. 4

Director Joe Swanberg in person!
THU., SEP. 10 at 8:30 PM
Q&A follows the screening.

🎟️ Get tickets: siskelfilmcenter.org/the-sun-never-sets

📺 “Sharp, mesmerizing, and frequently hilarious.” — SlantMade entirely from 1990s Romanian television commercials, EIGHT...
09/03/2026

📺 “Sharp, mesmerizing, and frequently hilarious.” — Slant

Made entirely from 1990s Romanian television commercials, EIGHT POSTCARDS FROM UTOPIA finds filmmakers Radu Jude and Christian Ferencz-Flatz fragmenting, collaging, and wittily analyzing the advertisements of a country newly emerging from communism.

At once experimental cinema, cultural criticism, and a very strange trip through the archive, the film examines how advertising helped manufacture new desires for capitalist consumption in post-socialist Romania.

Presented as part of our Fall Lecture Series, Contact Zones: Cinema of Globalization, 1989–2024

📺 Tue. Sep. 8, 6:00 pm with post-screening lecture
📺 Sun. Sep. 13, 12:00 pm (screening only, no lecture)

🎟️ Register now at siskelfilmcenter.org/eight-postcards

This weekend, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s dazzlingly uncategorizable debut feature MYSTERIOUS OBJECT AT NOON returns to ...
09/03/2026

This weekend, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s dazzlingly uncategorizable debut feature MYSTERIOUS OBJECT AT NOON returns to our screen as part of 25 For 25.

A freewheeling mix of road movie, folklore, surrealism, and documentary, the film was shot in black-and-white 16mm as Weerasethakul traveled across Thailand, inviting villagers, performers, school children, and others to collectively build an ever-evolving story. The result continually blurs fiction and reality in ways that would come to define his singular filmmaking career.

MYSTERIOUS OBJECT AT NOON grew out of the experimental work Weerasethakul made while studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and screened as part of Conversations at the Edge in 2002.

As Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote: “I can’t think of another film remotely like it.”

🎟️ MYSTERIOUS OBJECT AT NOON
SAT., SEP. 5 at 2 PM
MON., SEP. 7 at 6 PM
siskelfilmcenter.org/mysterious-object-noon

Want more Apichatpong? On Oct. 26, OFF CENTER: APICHATPONG SHORTS brings together six personal and poetic short works—including rarely screened films spanning nearly two decades.

NEW FILMS COMING THIS FALL! September & October are bringing some of the best cinema of the season. Preview our slate of...
09/01/2026

NEW FILMS COMING THIS FALL!

September & October are bringing some of the best cinema of the season. Preview our slate of new releases and restorations...

⭐ Opens 9/4 FILIPIÑANA - Filipino filmmaker Rafael Manuel's "stunning assured" debut and Sundance Special Jury Award winner

⭐ Opens 9/4 THE SUN NEVER SETS - Starring Dakota Fanning, Jake Johnson, and Cory Michael Smith; Q&A with director Joe Swanberg Thursday, September 10, 8:30 p.m.

⭐ Opens 9/11 CENTER STAGE (4K) - Maggie Cheung stars in Stanley Kwan's unconventional biopic, newly restored in 4K

⭐ Opens 9/11 WELCOME II THE TERRORDOME - New 2K restoration of Ngozi Onwurah's radically ahead-of-its-time Afrofuturist vision

⭐ Opens 9/18 BAD APPLES - Jonatan Etzler's darkly provocative English-langauge debut starring Saoirse Ronan

⭐ Opens 9/18 MY BROTHER'S WEDDING - New 4K restoration of Charles Burnett's underseen follow-up to KILLER OF SHEEP

⭐ Opens 9/25 HA-CHAN, SHAKE YOUR B***Y! - Josef Kubota Wladyka's highly entertaining comedy set in Tokyo's ballroom dance scene

⭐ Opens 9/25 THE OLDEST PERSON IN THE WORLD - A decade-long global documentary odyssey; select Q&As with director Sam Green

⭐ Opens 10/2 YOU HAD TO BE THERE - Exuberant, revelatory documentary about the 1972 Canadian production of Godspell

⭐ Opens 10/2 THE SCOUT - Paula González-Nasser’s effortlessly sublime feature debut; select director Q&As

⭐ Opens 10/10 BARBARA FOREVER - Brydie O'Connor's expansive tribute to Q***r Cinema Legend Barbara Hammer

⭐ Opens 10/24 FJORD - Cristian Mungiu's Palme d'Or-winning drama starring Renate Reinsve and Sebastian Stan

⛳ OPENING FRIDAY: FILIPIÑANA“A masterwork... with FILIPIÑANA, Manuel opens new vistas in the future of cinema.” —Richard...
09/01/2026

⛳ OPENING FRIDAY: FILIPIÑANA

“A masterwork... with FILIPIÑANA, Manuel opens new vistas in the future of cinema.” —Richard Brody, The New Yorker

At a posh country club outside Manila, 17-year-old Isabel (Jorrybell Agoto) navigates the immaculate grounds and the complex relationship between the club’s wealthy members and subservient staff. But beneath the pristine fairways, something is rotting.

Darkly comic and visually inventive, Rafael Manuel’s stunning feature debut uses the manicured world of the country club to expose class disparities, post-colonial power structures, and the subtle mechanisms of violence and control.

🎬 FILIPIÑANA opens Friday, Sep. 4 exclusively at the Gene Siskel Film Center.

🎟️ Get tickets + see showtimes at siskelfilmcenter.org/filipinana

TONIGHT at 6 PM 🌊Winner of the Cannes Grand Prix, Mati Diop’s haunting ATLANTICS transforms a story of migration, love, ...
08/31/2026

TONIGHT at 6 PM 🌊

Winner of the Cannes Grand Prix, Mati Diop’s haunting ATLANTICS transforms a story of migration, love, and loss into something altogether otherworldly.

In the beachfront suburbs of Dakar, young men leave Senegal by sea in search of a better future, while those left behind grapple with their absence. When Ada’s departed lover finds an unexpected way to return, Diop reinvents the ghost story as a hypnotic meditation on displacement, desire, and the communities migration leaves behind.

See ATLANTICS as part of 25 For 25, revisiting standout films from our 25 years on State Street.

🎬 Mon. Aug. 31 at 6 PM
🎬 Thu. Sep. 3 at 6 PM

🎟️ Get tickets: siskelfilmcenter.org/atlantics

Mira Nair’s vibrant, big-hearted MISSISSIPPI MASALA stars Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury as Demetrius and Mina, ...
08/31/2026

Mira Nair’s vibrant, big-hearted MISSISSIPPI MASALA stars Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury as Demetrius and Mina, whose romance crosses racial and cultural lines in the Deep South.

Against the backdrop of Mina’s family’s exile from Idi Amin’s Uganda, Nair explores race, displacement, family, and belonging with warmth and complexity.

Nair—who also happens to be the mother of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani—brings a distinctly diasporic perspective to this acclaimed classic of ’90s American independent cinema.

See MISSISSIPPI MASALA as part of our fall lecture series Contact Zones: Cinema of Globalization, 1989–2024.

🎬 Tue. Sep. 1 at 6 PM — with lecture and discussion led by SAIC Associate Professor Daniel R. Quiles
🎬 Sun. Sep. 6 at noon — encore screening, no lecture

🎟️ Register now: siskelfilmcenter.org/mississippi-masala

“Immersive and overwhelming.” —Ben Sachs, Cine-FileAndrei Tarkovsky wades deep into the past with ANDREI RUBLEV, his tow...
08/30/2026

“Immersive and overwhelming.” —Ben Sachs, Cine-File

Andrei Tarkovsky wades deep into the past with ANDREI RUBLEV, his towering second feature and a visionary meditation on art, faith, and endurance.

Tracing the renowned icon painter through the harsh realities of 15th-century Russia, Tarkovsky conjures a dark and otherworldly medieval world in a series of unforgettable episodes—from naked pagans celebrating the midsummer solstice to the monumental casting of a gigantic bell.

Presented in Tarkovsky’s preferred 183-minute cut as part of our Andrei Tarkovsky Retrospective.

🎞️ Sat. Sep. 5, 11:30 am
🎞️ Sun. Sep. 6, 2:30 pm
🎞️ Wed. Sep. 9, 6:00 pm

🎟️ Get tickets at siskelfilmcenter.org/andrei-rublev

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