The FFC Attends Filmspotting Fest 2025 and Visits Film Criticism Mecca

Two weeks ago, I signed off at the end of my SXSW 2025 post-mortem by looking ahead to the upcoming Dallas International Film Festival. Please allow me to now pull a Tarantino and go back to the week before SXSW started. In the crush of activity over the four days between what I’m about to describe and the first day of South By – it was a flurry of laundry, the day job (because I’m only given so much PTO in a given year!), and preparing for my trip down to Austin – I barely had time to recover from another film festival (let alone getting anything written about it) before I was out the door again.

But I need to go back even further.

In early December of last year, the only movie podcast I listen to, Filmspotting, announced that they would be celebrating their twentieth anniversary by holding a three-day film festival of their own in the birthplace of the show, Chicago. Based on the lineup of films they had scheduled, and due to the fact that I’ve been a listener to Filmspotting for well over a decade, I decided I wanted to be there for the celebration.

And, I talked Rae into making the trip with me to the Windy City. It was the first time she would experience anything close to the bewildering – yet exhilarating – mysteries of a film festival. I haven’t asked her, but I feel confident that March 1, 2025, was the first time my wife has ever (or likely will ever again) watch four movies in a theater in one day.

I’m lucky I even knew Filmspotting Fest was happening in the first place. While I’m a fan of the podcast – going so far as to start from episode one of Cinecast (IYKYK) when I discovered Filmspotting circa 2013 – I am, as of now, right at a year behind on current episodes. In fact, this week, I finished episode 961, which was published on March 28, 2024. Fortunately, I’m subscribed to the Filmspotting newsletter and email updates, so while I’m woefully behind on current episodes of the show, I was able to get in on the festival celebration.

The reason I’m so far behind was a mystery even to myself until recently. I only listen to one movie podcast partly because I listen to so many political podcasts, the best of which is Best of the Left, a progressive show. As you can probably imagine, politics podcasts have been a real drag for the last decade or so, and keeping up on current events – like the slow-motion coup we’re currently witnessing in the Executive Branch of our government – tends to be a bit depressing.

I came to the realization some time last year that I only want to listen to Filmspotting when I’m in a joyful mood. That particular emotion has been in short supply in my brain, especially since the election last November, so Filmspotting is relegated to being a “when I feel like it” activity. I pick at it whenever I have the time/inclination.

Filmspotting Fest was to be my first festival outside of the state of Texas. I got tickets for both Rae and myself for each of the six programmed screenings. There was no press accreditation, festival badges, or multiple days of multiple screenings, so this piece won’t appear alongside my other extensive film festival coverage. It was a fantastic experience, though, organized by people I respect a great deal. It was also my first time in Chi-town, so I wanted to memorialize the event here.

I’ve been to Boston, once, but didn’t drive a car while there. Since we knew precisely nobody in Chicago who would be willing to pick us up from the airport, I decided to rent a car for the not-quite-48-hour-long adventure. Chicago, your parking situation is intense. I live in Dallas. I thought I knew what congested parking was. Trying to find street parking on a Friday night in a Chicago entertainment district was a struggle. But I never once got angry about it. I was too overjoyed that my and Rae’s plane didn’t fall out of the sky or land upside down at Midway airport to get too upset over not being able to find a good spot.

After the parking shenanigans, we quickly made our way to the Friday night screening of Rian Johnson’s Brick. It was selected by the Filmspotting crew because they were early champions of both Brick and Johnson, who was in attendance for a Q&A after the movie. Their annual award, in which the show recognizes first-time or under-the-radar filmmakers, is called The Golden Brick, in honor of the prize’s inaugural winner. Each movie selected for Filmspotting Fest was one that the hosts discovered because of the show and that has grown in esteem among the hosts and listeners alike over years of mentions and discussion.

And here’s where I have to make an admission. I’m not the biggest fan of Brick, or, I’m sad to say, the overall work of Rian Johnson. At some point, I need to sit down and wrestle with Johnson’s oeuvre and write a piece about what I discover. It has something to do with his writing being too clever for its own good. I’ve felt that way to one degree or another about Brick, the Knives Out pictures, and even Poker Face, the television series Johnson created and that stars the inimitable Natasha Lyonne.

I hate that I don’t like Johnson’s movies. It’s not because I feel like I’m on a deserted island when it comes to my opinions about them (although that certainly feels true). It’s because, from everything I can tell, Rian Johnson is a contemplative, kind, empathetic human, and he exemplifies that through his work.

For the 500th episode of Filmspotting, Johnson was interviewed by the hosts about his career, movies in general, and, specifically, film criticism. It was one of those interviews that was so incisive and intelligent that I remember exactly where I was when I listened to it. I was on a training run for my first marathon – I want to say it was a 15-or-so mile run (#humblebrag) – and I was in a part of downtown Dallas that I had never before run through.

The most illuminating thing Johnson said during that interview was that film criticism is not, despite popular opinion, analogous to a grade on a term paper. It shouldn’t even be considered notes to the director or filmmakers. Film criticism is, according to Johnson, first and foremost a rendering of the personal experience that the critic had with the movie under review. According to the director, when he reads a critic, it’s because he enjoys the writing and is genuinely curious to know how a movie moved a critic in one way or another. These observations have shaped my own work in the decade I’ve been writing about movies.

Johnson was every bit as engaging in his Brick post-screening Q&A at Filmspotting Fest. The most beautiful thing he said was in relating how, for him, watching one of his movies is like looking through a scrapbook of the experience. Each scene provides him with sense memories of what the shoot was like on that particular day. To Johnson, working with people you enjoy being around and who you respect professionally is the key to making wonderful memories while having a fulfilling experience creating art.

After the Brick screening, Rae and I found our hotel, which was situated along Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, not far from the famous Drake Hotel. (I took the opportunity to snap a picture of the building that plays a pivotal role in Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible. I immediately sent it to a group chat of friends with the caption, “They stamped it, didn’t they? Those damn Gideons.”

The weekend encompassed the last day of February and the first day of March, meaning that, in Chicago, it was brutally cold. Rae and I bundled up as best we could on Saturday morning, filled ourselves up with pancakes at breakfast, then walked around the city a bit before the first screening of the day. We dropped by the Bean and I got a picture of the Chicago Tribune, where the late, great Gene Siskel plied his trade. Even though we would only be in the city for about 24 more hours – and we’d be spending roughly half of those hours watching movies – I started to plot a stop by the Chicago Sun-Times, so I could snap a shot of where Roger Ebert spent decades contemplating and writing about cinema.

Filmspotting Fest was scheduled to take place in two different iconic Chicago movie theaters. Brick was screened, in 35mm, at the famous Music Box Theatre, which has a rich history spanning almost a century. I’ve been hearing about the Music Box on episodes of Filmspotting for over a decade now, so the movie house had begun to take on a mythic stature in my mind.

Seeing it in person didn’t diminish that stature one bit. The Music Box is an absolutely fantastic place to see a movie. From the digital clouds projected on the ceiling between screenings to the magnificent pipe organ (complete with organist!) to set the mood, being able to experience this piece of film exhibition history was a highlight of the weekend. Simply being able to look around the place was as satisfying as seeing a movie there. My own community arthouse cinema, the Texas Theatre, where Lee Harvey Oswald was famously arrested in the aftermath of the John F. Kennedy assassination, will always be THE place to see a movie as far as I’m concerned, but the Music Box is a splendid alternative.

Inside the Gene Siskel Film Center (photo by the author)

All four of Saturday’s screenings were scheduled at the Gene Siskel Film Center, another delightful arthouse theater. Part of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Siskel was renamed in 2001 to honor the film critic after his untimely death in 1999 due to brain cancer. It’s a quiet spot. A massive two-story section of interior wall memorializes Siskel, and the upstairs lobby features a picture of both Siskel and Ebert, complete with their familiar thumbs gestures (in this picture, Siskel is giving the thumbs up, while Ebert is completing the duo’s iconic yin-yang with a thumbs down).

Over the course of the day, we screened Sean Baker’s Tangerine, as well as Pather Panchali, the deeply moving first chapter of Indian director Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy, the psychological thriller Take Shelter, and Columbus, the contemplative and mournful debut feature from film-essayist-turned-director Kogonada. Of those four, I had only seen Take Shelter before the fest. At several points over the course of the weekend, I pondered how many times Ebert had sat in these auditoriums at both the Music Box and the Siskel. In my mind, mostly because of Siskel and Ebert, Chicago feels like a film criticism Mecca of sorts. I was thrilled to make the pilgrimage.

Filmspotting cocreator and host Adam Kempenaar famously has an antagonistic relationship with the Oscars – he’s often declared over the years of Filmspotting that he usually doesn’t even bother to watch the ceremony. So, it was ironic (and simultaneously poetic) that Sean Baker couldn’t be in attendance for the screening of his film Tangerine. The director is a friend of the podcast, and Tangerine was the winner of its year’s Golden Brick. Baker recorded a warm congratulations for Filmspotting’s twentieth anniversary that was included in the festivities, and that served as a nice warmup to Baker winning four Oscars that same weekend for Anora.

In Baker’s place, Filmspotting Fest scheduled critic Alison Willmore to speak about the film after the screening. She was one of a handful of critics and film thinkers who provided insight and analysis for the films screened during the fest. In addition to Willmore, critics Dana Stevens, Matt Singer, and Scott Tobias joined either Kempenaar, cohost Josh Larsen, producer Sam Van Hallgren, or a combination of all three to discuss Pather Panchali, Take Shelter, and Before Sunrise, the fest’s last screening – back at the Music Box and also, like Brick, projected in 35mm – respectively.

Kogonada was in attendance for the screening of his film, Columbus, and the director provided some insight into his philosophy on life and the movies. He spoke eloquently about finding meaning in our postmodern and, in many ways, post-religion society. Listening to him talk about the human experience and exploring it through his movies was itself like watching a Kogonada film. If you haven’t seen Columbus or his 2021 follow up, After Yang, I can’t recommend them highly enough.

Waiting to get into *Before Sunrise* at the Music Box (photo by the author)

The final screening of Filmspotting Fest, Sunday morning at the Music Box, was Before Sunrise, Richard Linklater’s first entry in his Before Trilogy. I was fourteen when Before Sunrise was released, and I didn’t catch up with it until two decades later, when the last in the trilogy, Before Midnight, was released. As with Brick, seeing it in a packed house with an audience primed to have a good time was a highlight of the weekend. I was able to speak before the screening to the man who played the pre-show organ music. I told him that I appreciated his talent and what he added to the atmosphere of the theater.

As at the beginning of the weekend, the city of Chicago wanted to remind us that it takes parking very, very seriously. Before the show, Rae and I found an impossibly good spot. It was almost directly across the street from the Music Box. Rae paid the meter using the city’s app, but when we left the theater, we found a $50 parking ticket under the wiper blade for parking illegally. We swear that all the signage indicated that we were good to park where we did. We promise.

We only had about three hours to get back to the airport for our return trip home, so it was a mad dash to get some authentic Chicago-style deep dish pizza – I had emailed Adam about the best place to go, since I’m obsessed with pizza – at Pizzaria Uno, then to pick up a few items for friends back home, then to see if I could get my picture of the Chicago Sun-Times.

That turned out to be a bridge too far. We got to Navy Pier, where the Sun-Times has been headquartered since 2004, but I couldn’t find the paper’s logo on the building before we needed to head for the airport. Sorry, Roger, maybe next time. It was a whirlwind trip spent seeing movies in what is one of the most consequential film criticism cities in the world. Cheers to 20 years of Filmspotting, and here’s to at least 20 more!

A few stray thoughts that didn’t make it into the essay:
- I tried three or four times to introduce myself to Adam, Josh, and/or Sam over the course of the weekend, but my social anxiety got the better of me.
- Rae and I made some festival friends on the Siskel Film Center day. We even ran across the street in between two screenings with them in order to grab a bite of something a little more substantial than popcorn or candy. We wolfed down our impromptu dinner and chatted about the fest before hurrying back for the next screening.
- That’s, uh… a pretty big lake ya got there, Chicago.
- Here are a few more random photos I took over the weekend:

Filmspotting Fest 2025 and a Trip to Film Criticism Mecca