CCFF2024 Preview: ‘Dandelion’ and ‘Flipside’ Highlight Day Four of Chicago Critics Film Fest

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CHICAGO – The 2024 Chicago Critics Film Festival Day Four – Monday, May 6th – presents a film about music dreams and a documentary on a music store. “Dandelion” is written and directed by Nicole Riegel and “Flipside” by Chris Wilcha are the centerpiece screenings. For the full schedule, info and tickets, click CCFF May 6th. For individual films, click titles below.

DANDELION

Dandelion
Photo credit: ChicagoCriticsFilmFestival.com

Dandelion (KiKi Layne) is a struggling Cincinnati singer-songwriter in a downward spiral, takes a last-ditch-effort gig at a motorcycle rally in South Dakota where she meets Casey (Thomas Doherty), a guitarist who walked away from his dream long ago. As Dandelion joins Casey’s nomadic group of struggling musicians, the kindred spirits make music together and strike up a whirlwind romance.

CAPSULE REVIEW: This is a passionate meditation on young love and the sensitive artist trying to interpret it. The love is as much about the title character’s passion toward music as the misplaced emotions regarding coupling. The story is deliberate and beautifully filmed, and reaches its destinations through that defiant, unquenchable need to create. Dandy. (7pm, Appearances from lead actor KiKi Layne and writer/director Nicole Riegel).

FLIPSIDE

Flipside
Photo credit: ChicagoCriticsFilmFestival.com

When filmmaker Chris Wilcha revisits the record store he worked at as a teenager in New Jersey, he finds the once-thriving bastion of music and weirdness from his youth slowly falling apart and out of touch with the times. “Flipside” documents his tragicomic attempt to revive the store while revisiting other documentary projects he has abandoned over the years. In the process, Wilcha captures a disparate collection of stories that develops into something strange and expansive … a moving meditation on music, work, and the sacrifices and satisfaction of trying to live a creative life.

CAPSULE REVIEW: For all of us who believe we can never get anything done, this documentary is all in. Filled with surprises, random thoughts and unlikely human profiles, this is a documentary within several documentaries, and the inevitability of this life all going away. As a creative, then to capture something, and then give it to the world. Aye, there is the rub. Meet you on the flip side.(9:45pm).

The 11th Chicago Critics Film Festival is the the only such festival in the country curated by film critics, and highlights the 2024 films from the early year festivals like Sundance, SXSW and more. The other film on May 6th is Shorts Program 2. Day Five is Tuesday, May 7th, and features ”What You Wish For”, directed by Nicholas Tomnay, and two anniversary revivals … the 25th Anniversary screening of Martin Scorcese’s ”Bringing out the Dead” and the 20th Anniversary of the anime classic ”Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence”.

By PATRICK McDONALD Editor and Film Writer HollywoodChicago.com pat@hollywoodchicago.com