The Chicago European Union Film Festival is the Siskel Film Center’s annual love letter to the cinema of nearly an entire continent, a month-long program that includes films from all 28 member […]
Not yet 30 years old, filmmaker Kantemir Balagov directs Beanpole, a film that is perhaps the opposite of what his contemporaries are drawn to create. Instead of something of-the-moment, something about frivolous quarter-life-crises in […]
Nearly every scene in Emma., the latest adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel about a selfish young woman who sees the error of her meddling ways, looks as if it would be as at […]
There’s a moment in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, filmmaker Céline Sciamma’s exquisite new film, when painter Marianne (Noémie Merlant) gives up on an early attempt to capture the likeness of her […]
Believe it or not, there were other films besides Parasite nominated for this year’s International Feature Film Academy Award; even though the Korean film stole the show (and the most Oscars that […]
Set in the world of Georgian folk dancing, with its sharp, deliberate choreography and percussion-driven rhythms, And Then We Danced is the story of Mareb (Levan Gelbakhiani), a promising young performer determined […]
The Lyric Opera of Chicago first presented Puccini’s Madama Butterfly in 1955 (it made its world premiere in 1904); the version on stage there now (through March 8) is a revival of a […]
Later this month, a new film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma will open in cinemas, starring Anya Taylor-Joy (Thoroughbreds, “Peaky Blinders”) as the titular matchmaker with questionable, if endearing, motives. Meanwhile, Chicago […]
Though it grapples with a distinctly American scandal—that of the #MeToo movement in the movie industry—Kitty Green’s The Assistant comes off as surprisingly European in its observational, detail-oriented approach. As it follows […]
If you plan to see the Oscar Nominated Documentary Shorts Program, now playing at the Music Box Theatre, keep in mind that all five films are presented as a single program that, […]
The five 2020 Live-Action Short Film Oscar Nominees hail from four different countries—Belgium, Tunisia, France and the USA—and average about twenty minutes each. Aside from their runtimes, the films don’t have all […]
Perhaps best known as the longest-running play ever (notching north of 28,000 performances and counting), Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap has been continuously on stage in London’s West End since 1952. Now, the […]
