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…
“No one in their right mind would do what you do,” journalist Marie Colvin is told late in A Private War, an absorbing character study of a woman who lived, and not always fearlessly, in harm’s way on the front lines of the bloodiest…
The mystique of Lisbeth Salander—that iconic, proto-feminist hacker turned crusader against the evil that men do—has been mostly sidelined in The Girl in the Spider’s Web, a disappointingly routine action picture that miscalculates by diminishing Salander’s knife-edged persona, her propensity for dispensing grim justice…
In a society driven by competition with value placed on perfection, what puts someone at the top of the game? Is it genetics? Psychological composition? Nature or nurture? How do these relate to getting the most out of oneself mentally and physically? What quality…