Steve Prokopy is chief film critic for the Chicago-based arts outlet Third Coast Review. For nearly 20 years, he was the Chicago editor for Ain’t It Cool News, where he contributed film reviews and filmmaker/actor interviews under the name “Capone.” Currently, he’s a frequent contributor at /Film (SlashFilm.com) and Backstory Magazine. He is also the public relations director for Chicago's independently owned Music Box Theatre, and holds the position of Vice President for the Chicago Film Critics Association. In addition, he is a programmer for the Chicago Critics Film Festival, which has been one of the city's most anticipated festivals since 2013.
When I first met Craig Brewer, it was after a very early screening of his third feature film, 2006’s Black Snake Moan (maybe three months before its official release date). […]
Based on the best-selling 2022 book by Freida McFadden and adapted by Rebecca Sonnenshine, The Housemaid is something of a wild-ride thriller about Millie (Sydney Sweeney), a young woman with […]
For reasons that are beyond my comprehension, James Cameron’s Avatar films continue to land with mass, global audiences in an unexpected way. To be clear, I’m not someone who dislikes […]
Returning for round two in the troubling adventures of CW (Cassandra Naud), writer/director Kurtis David Harder brings us Influencers, the sequel to the surprisingly effective story set in the world […]
After years of boundary-pushing success in television, writer/director Bryan Fuller (Hannibal, Pushing Daisies, multiple Star Trek series) finally gets a crack at his first feature film with the darkly inventive […]
In such indisputable modern classics as Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, and As Good As it Gets, writer/director James L. Brooks profiled the lives of deeply flawed characters with good […]
Even though combing through the archival material could feasibly take a lifetime, making a documentary on a legendary photographer like Steve Schapiro must be the most fun to assemble. Searching […]
Directed by Marshall Curry (an Oscar-winning shorts filmmaker) and narrated by Julianne Moore, The New Yorker at 100 tells the fairly straightforward but no less interesting tale of both the […]
Set in an alternative past in which the world worships a god named Birdman (personified by Richard E. Grant, naturally), who has a mischievous daughter named Kiddo (Safia Oakley-Green) and […]
Although I enjoyed this third installment of the Benoit Blanc/Knives Out mysteries most of all, it’s also the one where Blanc (Daniel Craig) doesn’t show up until about 45 minutes […]
The cinema has been feeding us a steady diet of sad mothers in recent weeks. When I saw Rose Byrne tear up the screen in If I Had Legs I’d […]
Now in theaters, Eternity tells the story of an afterlife where souls have one week to decide where to spend eternity—and the options are infinite and sometimes hilarious. When the […]