Review: Satire and Terror Make for Quite the Pair in Velvet Buzzsaw
Like many die-hard film fans, I was sad to miss Sundance Film Festival this year. It marks the start of a new year of films we’ll be talking about through […]
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
Review: Some of Chicago’s Best on Stage in Porchlight’s A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder
The longer I write theater reviews, the more familiar I find myself becoming—at least via playbills—with the talent overflowing from Chicago’s stages. What’s more, I figured it would only be […]
Review: Discovery, and What Could Have Been, in Court Theatre’s Photograph 51
Once this awful cold snap breaks (because let’s be honest, we’re all hibernating until then), there’s a show on the south side that’s worth seeking out: Photograph 51 is a play by […]
Review: A Young Woman Rises to the Occasion in Powerful On Her Shoulders
Following an attack by the Taliban while on her way to school, Malala Yousafzai became a global advocate for peace, equality and education. Her name is known around the world, thanks […]
Review: A Woman of Means and the Women She Loves in I Know My Own Heart
Perhaps best known as the writer behind 2015’s Room, the film that won Brie Larson a Best Actress Oscar, Emma Donoghue has been producing plays, short stories, novels and more […]
Review: Windy City Playhouse Stages Another Must-See with Noises Off
Last year, Windy City Playhouse, the storefront theater company on West Irving Park Road on the north side, debuted a production so impressive they’ve recently launched a new venue in […]
Review: Filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski Follows Oscar Winner With Cold War, Another Work of Art
Cold War is the latest film from Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski, follow-up to his Oscar-winning drama Ida. Like that deeply intimate story of a young nun discovering the truth of […]
Review: El Angel Chronicles a Charming, Disturbing Killer in 1970s Argentina
True crime stories are big business. Since the success of the blockbuster podcast Serial, seemingly every producer, writer and director in any medium is looking for the next big crime […]
Review: Nicole Kidman Transforms in Karen Kusama’s Destroyer
Nicole Kidman is having quite a moment. She started 2018 on a high note, with Emmy wins for her contributions to the HBO series “Big Little Lies,” and just kept […]
Review: Heart-Wrenching Capernaum Is Essential, If Difficult, Viewing
At the center of Capernaum, the latest film from Lebanese writer/director (and actor) Nadine Labaki (Where Do We Go Now?, Caramel), is one of the year’s best performances, and it’s delivered […]
Review: Barry Jenkins Creates a Masterpiece in Adapting James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk
To those with just a passing awareness of such things, Moonlight may only be known as that film at the center of Envelopegate at the 2017 Academy Awards; the cast […]
Review: On The Basis of Sex Is an Approachable Biopic for an Ambitious American Icon
It could be reasonably argued that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the most important American woman alive today. In a deeply divided political climate, she sits in a […]