Tonight is the last night of the 27th Chicago International Film Festival; screenings take place at the Fine Arts, 418 S. Michigan, and the Esquire, 58 E. Oak. Tickets can be purchased at the theater box office one hour before show time or at the film festival store, 828 N. State. General admission is $7, $6 for Cinema/Chicago members; the first show of the day before 6 PM is two dollars cheaper. “Best of the Festival” costs $10, $9 for Cinema/Chicago members. For more information call 644-3456.
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THE TALE OF THE UNEXTINGUISHED MOON A Soviet docudrama directed by Yevgeny Tsimbai about the rise and fall of Army and Navy People’s Commissar Frunze, once considered a potential successor to Stalin. (Esquire, 5:30)
THE LITTLE CRIMINAL At a time when cinema, even in France, is all too often a prisoner of social or psychological realism, Jacques Doillon’s films define their own narrative conventions and semitheatrical space. In The Little Criminal a delinquent kid runs away from his hometown to find a sister he never knew. Even though his journey takes him on the road, we are acutely aware of the limitations of space that are also limitations on the protagonist’s freedom; the film unavoidably points toward a return of the kid to the police station, the end of the game. Most of the time the three main characters are confined in the car of the young cop the boy has kidnapped at gunpoint to take him to Montpellier in search of his sister. The cop alternately plays detested authority figure, substitute father, gullible adult, young man secretly attracted to a blooming female, and a few other roles. American audiences might cringe at some of the plot devices: Why did the cop leave his gun unwatched? Why did he trust the kid? Yet the poignancy of the cop’s naivete, the dialectic of misunderstanding and recognition between two people from the same background, is precisely what gives the film its fragile grace. (Berenice Reynaud) (Esquire, 7:30)
