Gaspar 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,…
Love, 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…
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…
Adam 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…
Julia 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…
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…
In Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma, the Oscar-winning filmmaker looks back at his childhood circa 1971 Mexico City with a reverence for the women who raised, and formed, him. It’s part memory, part nostalgia, part Mexican history and most of all a testament to the unsung,…
In 1987, Colorado senator and surefire 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Gary Hart’s bright political future was handily extinguished by allegations of extramarital impropriety with Donna Rice—we’ve all seen the famous photo—and Hart went from popular man of the people to political pariah in a…
Widows, one of the year’s most best movies, is a high stakes heist picture on Chicago’s meanest streets, but what’s so good about it is that it’s almost an “anti-heist” heist movie. By that I mean that its characters—led by a herculean Viola Davis…
Joel Edgerton’s Boy Erased, one of the year’s best-acted movies, is an “issue” movie done so well it far surpasses another well-meaning, troubled teen picture this season. Both movies are about real-life teens in crisis—one forced into gay conversion “therapy,” the other in the…