“I have all these feelings wrapped up inside of me. I just don’t have anyone I can trust my feelings with.” The mysteries of female adolescence are explored with concentrated poignancy in the short How Does It Start, as a curious twelve-year-old girl comes…
Read MoreLife and death in a small New England town haunt a beleaguered Mary Kay Place in Diane, an assured debut from New York film festival honcho turned feature writer/director Kent Jones, who gives us a doozy of a titular character, a well-meaning caretaker filled…
Read MoreA vacationing family is terrorized by doppelgangers in Jordan Peele’s sophomore outing Us, a tense thriller featuring a high-bar performance from star Lupita Nyong’o and Peele’s signature blend of comedy, terror and social allegory that, for a while at least, proves an enjoyable ride. Peele,…
Read MoreShe’s not exactly looking for love, but she’s open to it. And while she’s not quite lonely, no one in her life seems to have much use for her. She spends most of her time alone, but as she sees it, that’s not necessarily…
Read MoreGaspar Noe’s Climax, about a troupe of young dancers whose group rehearsal goes spectacularly wrong after someone spikes their sangria with LSD, is a sensory overload of style and cool, a hypnotically absorbing head trip amounting to little yet an undeniably fun watch. Noe,…
Read MoreLove, in Michael Glover Smith’s buoyant roundelay Rendezvous in Chicago, doesn’t come easy for a handful of the city’s paramours, but when it does—it’s a treat for them, and us. In a sixty-nine-minute ensemble romantic comedy charting three couples meeting, committing and splitting, Smith…
Read MoreSeduce Your Casting Director, Make Your Agent Your Best Friend: Working Actor (and Legend) Richard Dreyfuss on a Life, and Career, Across the Ages
It would be difficult to overestimate the impact that Richard Dreyfuss has had on American culture, his sort of whip-smart, articulate neuroses and acute attention to, as he puts it, inner heroics, a staple of his now canonized portraits in a series of seminal…
Read MoreAdam McKay’s Vice races across several decades of recent American political history to contextualize how we have arrived at the disaster in which we are currently mired. It’s a movie that tells you upfront that its notoriously private subject—Dick Cheney—is all but impenetrable, but…
Read MoreJulia Roberts pulls out all the stops in a career high performance—one that reminds us how much empathy we can have for an actor we hold dear—in Ben is Back, a searing look at the bond between a mother and son over 24-hours of…
Read MoreEveryday Lives, Second Chances: Rusty Schwimmer Turns Romantic Comedienne in Offbeat Wild Honey
Rusty Schwimmer is likely the most prolific actress ever to come out of Chicago, her long career in Hollywood movies, indie films and what seems like every television show ever broadcast a testament to the ubiquitous star’s boundless imagination in a slew of high-profile…
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