Dune: Part Two, Denis Villeneuve’s second installment of Frank Herbert’s landmark sci-fi saga and follow-up to his 2021 introduction Dune, is a bigger, bolder and better movie than its portentous predecessor, featuring gargantuan filmmaking on an “epic” scale and a return to the sort…
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Comedy, as they say, is hard—striking the target just right and knowing when to push a joke or let it speak for itself. If a movie comedy is constantly pushing, chances are the joke isn’t that funny to begin with. Such is Ethan Coen’s…
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The Unseen, a thriller about a young man tormented by supernatural entities and an overachieving father, has as much on its mind about malevolent family dynamics as it does those lurking in the otherworld. In a Chicago-set production from a screenplay by actress-producer Jennifer…
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My first priority after seeing France’s handsome The Taste of Things, a cuisine as art and love saga featuring the double act of a regal Benoit Magimel and Juliette Binoche, was a direct dash brunch at Chicago’s finest French restaurant. In a recipe combining…
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The eternally successful horror film genre has proven more profitable than perhaps any other given its dependably low investment, high-yield returns and passionate fanbase, always up for their next good scare. And while such scare pictures of late have taken a turn toward high…
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The space-set thriller I.S.S. is a modestly effective U.S.-Russia face-off in which a handful of scientists are forced to confront national versus personal loyalties while a war between their respective countries wages on Earth. Set aboard the orbiting International Space Station laboratory 248 miles…
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A well-meaning educator finds herself in the crosshairs of suspicion in the tightly coiled dramatic thriller The Teachers’ Lounge, a morality play indicting the swift spoils of cancel culture and the discarding of objective truth in a rush to judgment. It also has something…
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What is the role of objective truth—if any—in a modern moment when reputations and livelihoods can be instantaneously demolished without tangible evidence, and belief in alternative facts has been emboldened? And what are the spoils of idealism against such a rigged court of public…
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Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is an austere exercise with a single idea—that evil deeds can be compartmentalized while their perpetrators lead otherwise innocuously guilt-free lives—stretched out for 106 minutes. Deploying a theme applicable to many of history’s villains, Glazer’s glacial treatise on…
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In Jonathan Glazer’s icily austere The Zone of Interest, German musician and actor Christian Friedel was tasked with a dauntingly antithetical assignment in playing real-life Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss: to convey an architect of doom as a mild-mannered family man. No, these were not…
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