On the Steppenwolf and Broadway stages, Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer Prize and Tony winning August: Osage County, a portrait of family turmoil to end them all, was a galvanizing experience—a three-act, 3 ½ hour showdown between estranged family members gathering on the sweltering Oklahoma plains…
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It’s a good problem to have when your first cut of the top ten movies of the year comes in at about thirty. In 2013, the field was so dense and competition so intense, with one seemingly terrific film after another opening well…
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There’s a good movie somewhere in Ben Stiller’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, but he hasn’t quite delivered it. Based on James Thurber’s 1939 New Yorker short story and subsequent 1947 screen adaptation starring Danny Kaye, Stiller has taken a screenplay stuck in…
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Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio are at the top of their respective games with The Wolf of Wall Street, the crown jewel of American film in 2013. At 71, Scorsese returns to glorious form with a wild ride of a movie, an unrepentant and…
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A sensationally entertaining actors’ show—exactly what we expect from director David O. Russell—is the engine behind American Hustle, a smart piece of movie enjoyment so much fun to watch that it stands with Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street as a pair of…
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The beating heart of an artist in a tailspin fuels the Coen Brothers lovely little period picture, Inside Llewyn Davis, a beautifully rendered portrait of a struggling folk guitarist, played in a star-making performance by Oscar Isaac, circa 1961 Greenwich Village. In a season…
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Not unlike his title character in Inside Llewyn Davis, the Coen Brothers’ ode to a down-on-his-luck folk guitarist in 1961 Greenwich Village struggling to make a go of it, actor Oscar Isaac has spent years doing solid supporting work in movies, looking for his…
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“12 Years A Slave,” Steve McQueen’s harrowing adaptation of the memoir of a free black man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the pre-Civil War era Deep South, clearly made an impact among members of the Chicago Film Critics Association. The highly…
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Emma Thompson gives a performance for the ages in Saving Mr. Banks, the new picture chronicling Walt Disney’s pursuit of humorless Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers, who in 1961 traveled from London to Hollywood to entertain signing away the film rights to her deeply…
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