What do you do when you’re mired in a painful past and your identity is so shaped by regret and emptiness that you no longer recognize yourself? If you’re Cheryl Strayed, you draw a line in the sand—one that reaches 1100 miles along the…
We know how he did it—on January 26, 1996, billionaire eccentric John Eleuthere du Pont shot and killed, in cold blood, Olympic wrestler and gold medalist Dave Schultz. But why did he? Foxcatcher, Bennett Miller’s arresting new picture on the subject, has some very…
The Theory of Everything is both a fascinating biopic of renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking and a complex love story told from the perspective of Hawking’s long-suffering wife, Jane, whose memoirs informed this portrait of a marriage that nearly made it through everything, and two…
An imperfect masterwork still qualifies as one, and Christopher Nolan’s transcendent magnum opus Interstellar is perhaps the most thematically and technically ambitious mainstream movie in memory, one so demanding for its 169-minute running time that at times it feels like a final exam, but…
Birdman, Alejandro Gonzalez-Inarritu’s audacious backstage redemption tale, is at once an incisive portrait of the artistic ego and a rage against the dying of the (spot)light, a personal movie about art as savior, second chances, aging, irrelevance and an indictment of a fickle industry…
The aptly titled new war picture Fury, starring Brad Pitt as an American sergeant leading a band of GIs through Germany at the close of the World War II, is a machine of a movie that storms both the battlefields and the emotions. Fashioned…
The great movie star Kathleen Turner was honored last night the Chicago International Film Festival during a brisk, ninety-minute tribute that featured scenes from her (many) memorable performances and a livewire Turner, who shared memorable anecdotes from her storied career onscreen, some of the…
The 50th Chicago International Film Festival continues this week after a rousing Sunday night visit from maverick filmmaker Oliver Stone, in town to present two very different yet seminal pictures, the controversial Natural Born Killers and his one-reviled, now better appreciated Alexander. Stone stopped…
Comprised of two distinct features and running 195 minutes, The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her/Him is both too much and not enough. Arriving a mere few weeks after the film’s initial release, a 122-minute version titled The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them, the new…
The 50th Chicago Internal Film Festival kicked off its Opening Gala last night at The Harris Theater, with a star-studded red carpet affair followed by a screening of celebrated Norwegian legend Liv Ullmann’s new adaptation of August Stridberg’s Miss Julie. And while the festival’s…