My 2026 Chicago International Film Festival kicked off with the Brazilian wine drama Isabel and the documentary No Hands: The Wild Ride of the Schwinn Bicycle Company. Gabe Klinger’s Isabel is a charming film set in São Paulo’s wine community. Marina Person stars as the titular Isabel, a world-class sommelier working at a Micheline Star restaurant. She is unhappy at the restaurant, as the owner, Tommaso (Marat Descartes), does not appreciate her talents as a sommelier and…

  Early on in Joshua Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder’s documentary You Can See Everything, Elizabeth Holmes, the now-defamed founder of the company Theranos who was found guilty of conspiracy and fraud, and her partner Billy Evans are reading a profile the New York Times did on Holmes. In the profile, there is a quote from Holmes pertaining to Amanda Seyfried playing her in the Hulu show The Dropout. The quote reads, “They’re not playing me….

  I would argue The Social Reckoning is a companion piece to 2010’s The Social Network, not a direct sequel. Aside from screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, who also directed the film, and cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, none of the original cast and crew returned for Reckoning. It tells a completely different story and has a completely different tone, style, and motivation. The biggest connective tissue between the two films is the man at the center of both…

  The advertising for Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s Digger made it seem like a satirical political comedy in the vein of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, and that is part of the movie. But around the half-hour mark, the film becomes something completely different than what the advertising and the first act showed. To avoid spoilers, I will not go into what this shift is, but it’s bizarre and frankly unnecessary,…

  Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is one of those great movies where the weight of the world slowly collapses on a character, and we watch as they do everything in their power to keep it all up and do everything right, but struggle not to be crushed. These types of movies work best when they have a strong performance at their center, and great writing with a lot of emotion and thought-provoking ideas,…

  My relationship to Resident Evil is purely cinematic. I am not a player of the iconic video game series that has been scaring its players since 1996, and all I know of the franchise is everything that has been in the Milla Jovovich-led action-horror films that kicked off in 2002. All I really remember from those films, besides Jovovich kicking ass, is that there is a chemical outbreak in the fictional city of Raccoon…

  Don’t let the Cannes Film Festival logo fool you into thinking what kind of film Na Hong-jin’s Hope is. This is closer to an American action spectacle than a Palme d’Or nominee. Hope is a non-stop, action-packed blockbuster about monsters terrorizing a small town and the underqualified police and townspeople trying to stop it. Sounds like something right out of a Michael Bay movie. In the remote town of Hope Harbor, strange happenings begin;…

  The fact that Coyote vs Acme exists and that I am reviewing the film is a cinematic miracle. Originally slated to be released in July of 2023, Warner Bros, the original studio releasing the film, decided to shelve the completed film entirely for a tax write-off. Seemingly gone from existence, Ketchup Entertainment bought the distribution rights in March of 2025 and has now officially released the film in theaters. I don’t normally go into…