With The Boys in the Boat, George Clooney’s ninth directorial outing, the actor turned filmmaker has crafted a handsome, appealingly traditional throw-back movie with a reverence for both historical context and bygone true life sports movies done well a few decades ago. A late…
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In her 2020 Sundance-winning The Forty Year-Old Version, New York playwright Radha Blank wrote and directed a close-to-reality self-portrait of a Black writer and artist in a state of continual invention. Her dilemma? The Broadway purse strings, held by affluent, liberal white producers and…
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In Paul King’s sunny, funny Wonka, Timothée Chalamet steps into the very big Roald Dahl-Gene Wilder shoes belonging to the world’s most famous chocolatier for a pleasing, throw-back musical of genuine sweetness. It turns out those shoes fit quite well, and far better than…
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This year’s prize for movie audacity goes to Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’ fiercely realized, exuberantly funny liberation odyssey starring Emma Stone in a career-high performance as an instantly iconic screen character, one created as a companion for man but whose appetite for self-discovery challenges…
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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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Compulsively compelling Eileen—an offbeat period character study turned thriller of a shy young secretary at a Massachusetts juvenile correctional facility seduced by the allure of a newly appointed psychiatrist—is either an impressive genre straddler or an uneven potboiler. I couldn’t decide which (and perhaps…
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Saltburn, a not exactly eat-the-rich skewering by way of Patricia Highsmith, is a glossy shockwave that finds Oscar-winning writer-director Emerald Fennell casting a seductive spell before twisting her sophomore picture into a somewhat reductive narrative knot. Despite a bigger budget and plenty of talent…
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Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein picture Maestro, the actor-director’s follow-up to his lauded 2017 version of A Star is Born, finds him confidently back in the musical arena for an unexpected, eras spanning scenes from a (musical) marriage. A Leonard Bernstein biopic turned domestic drama?…
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Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, starring Joaquin Phoenix as the legendary Corsican-born general who reigned as French emperor for a decade, does little to illuminate the man or the leader. Scott’s 158-minute historical saga, a surprisingly tedious grind from an indisputably master director and world-class actor,…
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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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