Screen
Diving into a sticky situation
Conflict is the heart of cinema. Conflict drives the plot and draws the audience and practically every movie revolves around it. Yet, only a select few have the audacity to dive into what fuels that conflict and, to borrow a line from The Rules of the Game, ...
Real guitar heroes in ‘It Might Get Loud’
What do Jack White from The White Stripes, The Edge from U2, and Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin have in common, besides the obvious? Each represents a prominent part of a musical movement that thrives around one of the most significant instruments created in the past ...
Boring vampire sex
The fourth film in the Twilight series, Breaking Dawn: Part 1 reveals a flash or two of real filmmaking (mostly in a suggestively grotesque birthing sequence), enough to save it from pure lousiness...
Indecent bro-posal
That’s My Boy isn’t just so bad that you would rather play a fun game of “scratch my retina with chicken wire” for 90 minutes, it’s so bad that writer David Caspe and director Sean Anders should be legally prosecuted for crimes against humanity. If this is what we’re...
‘Extraordinary Measures’ is safe, not extraordinary
For its big screen debut, start-up studio CBS Films...
Art reflecting Ebert
The Chicago Sun-Times obituary by Neil Steinberg couldn’t have said it better: “Roger Ebert loved movies.” Considering that he reviewed thousands upon thousands of them, it was a good thing. From 1967 to his death in 2013, Ebert was the film critic for the Chicago ...
Life, liberty and the pursuit of Elvis
Filmmaker Eugene Jarecki is in search of the American Dream. To find it, he loads up Elvis Presley’s 1963 Rolls-Royce with a camera rig...
Deadpan double feature
Sometimes a coincidence is too good to ignore, and this weekend we’ve got two new movies, alike in style and substance, ripe for a...
Watch This: ‘Master of the Flying Guillotine’
Master of the Flying Guillotine is Taiwanese director Jimmy Wang Yu’s 1976 sequel to One Armed Boxer. Yu not only directed and wrote the film but starred as the main character, a martial arts master who is stalked by a blind assassin seeking revenge...
So choose one, Seth
It would be easier to shrug off writer/director/actor/egomaniac Seth McFarlane’s blatant racism and misogyny if he was funny or had a point. Alas, he isn’t and he doesn’t. A Million Ways to Die in the West is McFarlane’s laborious love letter from himself to his own ...
Not a question of where, but why
Watching movies in 2019 is no longer a question of where, but why.
It could be everywhere: Multiplexes, art house theater, film societies, living rooms,...
