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 […]
If you look at the new Disney photo-realistic (but still very much animated) remake of The Lion King from a purely technical standpoint, what it accomplishes is above and beyond […]
A threat of severe storms dissipated the evening of July 10. Yet a cinematic tornado blew through the Jay Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park… and the band played on. The […]
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 […]
I never get tired of learning about the strange and wonderful pockets of Chicago history. I also don’t hate candy. So imagine my delight at watching a documentary that combines […]
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 […]
It’s almost inevitable that when a documentary filmmaker puts together a story that is personal, the resulting movie will touch us more deeply. And this is certainly the case for […]
Sometimes, it just comes down to laughs. A few years back, director Michael Dowse made one of the great sports comedies of the last 10 years, Goon, and he proved […]
As is detailed in the fantastic, illuminating and inspirational new documentary Maiden, Tracy Edwards is the British sailor who captained the first all-female crew in the Whitbread Round the World […]
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 […]
Sometimes a familiar story needs a fresh twist, even if that story is arguably one of the most famous in all of William Shakespeare’s lexicon, Hamlet. Directed by Claire McCarthy […]
Back in January 2018, I attended the world premiere of writer-director Ari Aster’s debut feature Hereditary at the Sundance Film Festival, and I predicted that it was an early candidate […]