EU Film Festival: Week 4 Preview (and Closing Night)
Now in its last week at the Gene Siskel Film Center, the EU Film Festival boasts another fine crop of films to check out as the affair winds down. We’re […]
Review: Steeped in Nostalgia, Spielberg’s Ready Player One is Youthful, In-Your-Face Fun
There are those who think that living in the past and allowing nostalgia to be a chief driving force in your life is a bad thing, and it certainly can […]
Review: Stop Motion Animation Wows in Anderson’s Touch-and-Go Isle of Dogs
In a similar way that writer/director Wes Anderson’s previous feature, The Grand Budapest Hotel, seemed to spring forth from his current obsessions with filmmaker Ernst Lubitsch and the writings of […]
Review: Charming Romcom Keep The Change Does the Genre Good
Despite its formulaic nature, making a decent romcom isn’t easy to do. It’s the reason films like When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle remain mainstays, classics of happily […]
Review: Coming of Age with a Twist in Flower
One of the things I noticed immediately when scanning the credits for director/co-writer Max Winkler’s (Ceremony) latest work, Flower, is that it’s executive produced by David Gordon Green, Jody Hill, […]
Review: The Fragility, Beauty of an Artist’s Process in Leaning Into the Wind
In 2001, filmmaker Thomas Riedelsheimer released the well-received and hugely successful Rivers and Tides, his first collaboration with Andy Goldsworthy, an artist best known for not only using objects in […]
Review: Claire Foy is Remarkable in Jittery, Tense Unsane
Almost as soon as we meet Sawyer Valentini (Claire Foy, best know for her role as Queen Elizabeth in Netflix’s “The Crown”), we notice things about her. She’s a hard […]
Review: The Missed Opportunity of Pacific Rim Uprising
Something I noticed almost immediately about the five-years-in-the-making sequel to Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim is how much of the film takes places during the daylight, with the sun shining […]
EU Film Festival: Week 3 Preview
Time is running out to catch some of the best European films of the year at Gene Siskel Film Center’s EU Film Festival. Now entering its third week (out of […]
Interview: Jason Isaacs Plays a Man With a Chestful of Medals in The Death of Stalin
If you’ve been paying any kind of attention to film or television in the past 25 years or so, you’ve likely seen actor Jason Isaacs in something. From early appearances […]
Review: The Art and Tradition of Georgian Winemaking in Our Blood Is Wine
Documentaries about passionate people also find a way to move me deeply, and you would be hard pressed to find a more passionate group than families in the Republic of […]
Review: 7 Days in Entebbe Dramatizes a Death-Defying Rescue Mission
A great deal of cinematic attention has been paid to the hijacking/hostage-taking/hostage-rescue mission that took place at the Entebbe Airport in Uganda in 1976. In an almost unprecedented reaction, two […]