Although writer/director Pedro Almodóvar has had many creative partnerships over the year (mostly notably with the likes of Carmen Maura and Antonio Banderas), his now eight pairings with Penelope Cruz […]
The Gene Siskel Film Center celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2022, and the downtown cinema is celebrating with a year-long film series they’re (fittingly) calling 50/50. Every Monday of the […]
It’s the last day of the year, so naturally it’s time to unleash my Best of the Year list. As always, I was able to squeeze in about 10-12 additional […]
As is tradition around these parts, I separate documentaries into their own Best of the Year list, not because I feel they should be judged any differently than narrative films, […]
Like Orson Welles did nearly 75 years earlier, director Joel Coen (working without brother Ethan) has taken Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, stripped it down to essentials—minimalist set design, shot […]
I was too young in the early to mid-1970s to have any real appreciation or nostalgia for the era today; and I grew up on the east coast, nowhere near […]
To be clear, this 100-years-earlier prequel to director Matthew Vaughn’s original 2014 Kingsman: The Secret Service (as well as its abysmal 2017 sequel Kingsman: The Golden Circle) does not portray […]
It’s astonishing that there are those criticizing how Spider-Man: No Way Home bends multiple Spider-Man universes in on themselves, but they don’t seem to have any issues with the latest […]
Italian author Elena Ferrante (a pseudonym, no one actually knows who Ferrante is) has written 11 novels; her four-book Neopolitan series has sold millions of copies, been translated into dozens […]
One of the most interesting aspects of Sean Baker’s filmmaking is his ability to realize his unique vision under circumstances other, less-assured filmmakers would consider disadvantages. Baker (Starlet, Tangerine, The Florida Project) […]
First time writer/director Lauren Hadaway’s background in film work is primarily in the sound department, having worked as a dialogue editor on films like Ava Duvernay’s Selma and Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful […]
I’ve had enough conversations with director Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, The Shape of Water) over the years to know two things about him: 1) he has the soul of […]