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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Too clever by half and too broad to be genuinely funny, the contrived family dramedy This Is Where I Leave You favors situational contrivances over honest characters. It’s the sign of a distinctly modern movie such as this that after winding us up with…
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Someone is murdering the wives of New York drug dealers in the diabolical mystery A Walk Among the Tombstones, an appealingly low-key detective thriller featuring a top-of-his-game Liam Neeson as independent private detective Matthew Scudder, author Lawrence Block’s hardboiled crusader featured in 17 of…
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For awhile, the supernatural thriller The Possession of Michael King, about an atheist documentarian and grieving widower who turns to the supernatural for answers, delivers the goods—ingenious concept, strong acting, palpable atmosphere and some genuine scares. And while there’s nothing quite new in David…
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There’s one thing to recommend—or maybe two—in Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s tediously stylized mayhem opus Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, and that’s a delicious Eva Green as a scheming femme fatale who leads several men to doom. Green, who similarly elevated…
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