Lisa Trifone is Managing Editor and a Film Critic at Third Coast Review. A Rotten Tomatoes approved critic, she is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association. Find more of Lisa's work at SomebodysMiracle.com
There’s a magic to writer/director Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, the kind that sneaks up slowly at first before becoming so powerful it’s impossible to ignore its pull. A […]
I have not read Percival Everett’s Erasure, the book on which Cord Jefferson’s hilarious and sharp send-up of literary culture and the Black experience, American Fiction, is based. But if […]
Since Alice Walker’s The Color Purple was first published in 1982, it has been adapted into a film (in 1985, directed by Steven Spielberg), a stage musical (in 2005, which […]
The first thing to know about Wonka, the latest film to revisit the Roald Dahl-created candyman and his antics, is that this version is the brainchild of co-writer and director […]
Bradley Cooper sure has come a long way since The Hangover, and we’re all the luckier for it. The one-time comic leading man has bold ambitions, and if his first […]
There is a lot that doesn’t work in Disney Animation’s latest original effort, Wish, but the main culprit is a plot that never clicks into place. The stakes never really […]
I first encountered the bold, scene-stealing energy that is Colman Domingo in 2009, when I stumbled across Spike Lee’s filmed adaptation of Passing Strange, the stage musical about a young […]
Todd Haynes is a filmmaker’s filmmaker, an artist who makes not just movies, but cinema. From award-winning period pieces (Carol, Far From Heaven) to acclaimed documentaries (The Velvet Underground, Six […]
Like movie theater blockbusters and best-selling fiction franchises, Broadway has its own version of the audience vs. critic debate, where the biggest commercial successes are often the ones least likely […]
Sofia Coppola is a filmmaker who, from the moment she arrived on the scene with 1999’s moody and melancholy The Virgin Suicides, announced herself with a style, perspective and narrative […]
The opening scenes of Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall are disconcerting and quietly upsetting, a glimpse into a dysfunctional domestic setting that immediately gives audiences a taste of the […]
In its first two full days of screenings, the 59th Chicago International Film Festival presents a strong variety of films, from locally made family dramas to harrowing, insightful documentaries about […]