In Jonathan Glazer’s icily austere The Zone of Interest, German musician and actor Christian Friedel was tasked with a dauntingly antithetical assignment in playing real-life Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss: to convey an architect of doom as a mild-mannered family man. No, these were not…
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While 2023 proved tumultuous for a movie industry grappling with striking actors and writers, the existential threat of A.I. and shrinking box office for once sure-thing blockbusters, it turned out to be a very good year for moviegoers, who were treated to socially observant…
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In Yorgos Lanthimos’ brilliant new vision Poor Things, Emma Stone plays a turn-of-the-20th-century Londoner who, through a spectacularly conceived series of events, both dies and is brought back to life by doctor Willem Dafoe, a god complex mad scientist whose unorthodox experiments play like…
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This Friday, November 17, at the Gene Siskel Film Center (8pm; tickets here), Chicago-born filmmaker and Hollywood director Andrew Davis returns to present his fledgling 1978 film Stony Island—his first as a director, shot on period Chicago’s gritty streets as a guerrilla endeavor of…
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In the inventive and frequently surprising Dream Scenario, filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli crafts a potent critique of flash-in-the-pan viral fame and our societal fickleness in making instant celebrities before breaking them as casualties of fifteen-minute brand recognition. The ever welcome, inspired Nicolas Cage stars as…
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In the arresting All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, a fictional memoir rendered in non-linear structure and rooted in emotion, confident first-time feature filmmaker Raven Jackson conveys the poetic lyricism of Terrence Malick by way of the minutely observant Kelly Reichardt. Thirty-three-year-old Tennessee native…
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Sitting across from the dynamic twin brothers Danny and Michael Philippou, as I am this morning at the famed The Peninsula Chicago, is an exhilarating trip. With the arrival of their terrific debut picture, Talk to Me, the wildly energetic, inventive duo have graduated…
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As theatrical box office numbers continue their upswing heading into a packed summer movie season, Emagine Entertainment, the national, Michigan-based theatrical exhibition chain specializing in a complete moviegoing experience from top notch projection and sound to high-end amenities like heated recliners, brick-oven pizza and…
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Chicago-born comedian and actor Sebastian Maniscalco is having a movie moment this weekend as his seriocomic and partially autobiographical new comedy About My Father, which he co-wrote and in which he stars, opens on screens around the country. In the film Maniscalco, whose stand-up…
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I caught up with Holderman and Simms—a delightful pair of simpatico collaborators tasked with crafting an audience-pleasing commercial entertainment befitting a cast of movie royalty—for a chat about their ambitious new picture.…
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