For more than a decade, filmmaker Lynn Shelton has been making relationship-driven dramedies with some of the independent film scene’s most talented actors from Mark Duplass to Rosemarie DeWitt, Ellen Page and […]
Awkwafina (née Nora Lum) made a splash last year as the boisterous, straight-talking sidekick to Constance Wu’s Rachel, visiting Singapore to meet her fiancé’s family. Her performance as a say-anything, always-up-for-a-good-time friend […]
Jesse Eisenberg has made a name for himself playing tightly wound, neurotic types, from future media moguls (as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network) to unsuspecting zombie fighters (as Columbus in Zombieland and its […]
Last year, Windy City Playhouse launched a bona-fide hit with Southern Gothic, the immersive theater experience set in the early 1960s where audiences were “invited” to a birthday party among friends, there to […]
As a Chicago native, I have a vague memory of the heatwave of 1995, a days-long invisible natural disaster that ultimately took the lives of hundreds of Chicagoans who didn’t have the […]
It’s surely a good sign if, when a film ends, your first thought as the credits roll is that you wish there were more. Such is the case with what may just […]
The Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical this year went to Daniel Fish’s stripped-down, timely interpretation of Oklahoma!, a Rodgers & Hammerstein classic that first opened on Broadway in 1943. […]
Except for a brief period in my pre-teens when I thought it wasn’t “cool,” I’ve always been an avid reader. I was practically raised in the library, and to this day, I’m […]
In a genre that seems to be quite of the moment, count Wild Rose as the latest entry into films about female musicians searching for themselves, stardom, love…and sometimes all of the […]
The hardest reviews to write are the ones for greatly anticipated movies that ultimately fall short of expectations. Such is the case with Yesterday, a film that, based on its premise and […]
Fans of foreign films will recognize the two lead actors in Thomas Stuber’s In the Aisles, a sweet fable of love blossoming in the break room of a Costco-like warehouse superstore. The infatuated […]
Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch is nothing if not versatile, as can happen with a career that spans more than three decades. His early works helped shape a burgeoning independent film scene, while lately […]
