Stars and stuff on the silver screen.
You always want to end a film festival with a bang, and Chan-Wook Park’s new epic, The Handmaiden, allowed me to do that at the Chicago International Film Festival both literally and figuratively. Park is a household name amongst American film buffs, almost single-handedly vaulting South Korea to the upper echelon …
The third film I saw at this year’s Chicago International Film Festival was far and away the best — and very likely one of the best documentaries I’ve seen in a decade or more. Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea is by turns beautiful, powerful, moving, quiet, angry, and always deeply humane; …
There are a lot of films that bear the signs of having been kicked around a long time before they ever made it to the big screen. This is particularly true with indie films, which struggle to even get completed, let alone distributed; by the time they finally make their …
One of the pleasures of attending a good film festival — and there are many — is that you never know what you’re going to get. You’ll see first-time directors whose work is entirely new, leaving you with nothing to compare it to; you’ll see films that will likely play …
Christopher Guest is a divisive figure in the comedy world. The comedies he makes with his stock company of gifted improvisers — ranging from This is Spinal Tap to For Your Consideration — tend to be loved by critics and fans, but Guest also has a reputation (well-earned, from my personal experience) as a difficult …
It is a curious thing what people remember and what they forget, either by choice or by the mysterious alchemy by which culture, media, and personal and social factors determine the rank of our memories. At the time when two men — an embittered, hostile and paranoid 42-year-old veteran named …
There is no such thing as purity in cinema, and even the expressions we find most effective and audacious are compromised in a million little ways before we ever come close to seeing them. One change, in the casting or in budget or even in the weather, and the movie …
It says something — something I am dead certain is not good — about our culture that the preeminent political statement of the moment is where you stand on the Ghostbusters remake. As I write this, Paul Feig’s all-female reboot of the beloved franchise has only just had its wide opening, and …
Yorgos Lanthimos does something that is almost unprecedented in film today: he makes movies that are entirely original. Say what you will about his work — that it is ridiculous, that it is pretentious, that it is incomprehensible, that it is impenetrable, that it is cynical, that it lacks humanity …
Peter Greenaway has had such a willy-nilly career over the last few decades that it’s easy to forget how amazingly potent and productive he was at the height of his powers. After years of making hypnotic short films throughout the ’70s, he began with The Falls in 1980 and, until he …
The mid- and late 2000s were an especially rich time for the comedy of failure. Perhaps it was the fact that we’d suffered a blow to our sense of national invulnerability that led us to elect a shit-talking faux-cowboy millionaire who reintroduced us to the concept of a pointless war …
SERGEANT’S DUTY LOG Week ending 04/29/2016 31 incidents of jawin’ with intent to slanderfy 26 incidents of reported sinful doin’s involving minors, blood kin, livestock and tree hollers 16 incidents of a-whoopin’ and a-hollerin’ 9 lynchings without a permit 8 incidents of Katie-bar-the-door Saturday night dust-ups 6 incidents of ee-legal …
Full disclosure before I start talking about Old Fashioned: I love supper clubs. I’ve visited a bunch of them in Wisconsin, and I love the old-school charm, the professionalism, the atmosphere, the consistency, the community and sociability of them. I bought the DVD as part of a planned excursion up to Arthur’s …
This year marks the 75th anniversary of the release of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. The Music Box is commemorating the year by showing a lot of classics from 1941, so we decided to take in a matinee. It’s almost impossible to say anything about Citizen Kane anymore. My partner, who’d never seen …
This weekend, the Gene Siskel Film Center, as part of the generally excellent programming at the Chicago European Union Film Festival, screened I Don’t Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman on a double bill with the Belgian director’s final film before her unexpected death last year, No Home Movie. Akerman was …
