The Most Exciting Movies Playing at the 2026 Chicago Critics Film Festival

The Most Exciting Movies Playing at the 2026 Chicago Critics Film Festival

The Chicago Critics Film Festival returns to the historic Music Box Theater in Chicago for the 13th time to highlight some of the most exciting films making their rounds on the film festival circuit. Once again, the festival showcases an eclectic group of films, from indie sensations to midnight hits to anniversary screenings of beloved favorites. Here are some of the titles I am most excited about at this year’s festival. Film synopsis from IMDb….

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Movie Review: Michael

Movie Review: Michael

  Antoine Fuqua’s Michael, a biopic about music icon Michael Jackson, is an “and then” movie. It is a movie made up entirely of scenes and sequences strung together solely to get us to the next scene or sequence, yet without any connective tissue. Its essential breakdown is: scene one happens, and then scene two happens, and then scene three happens, and so on. It is simply a series of things that happened in Michael…

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Movie Review: I Swear

Movie Review: I Swear

  Tourette’s Syndrome has not had a great run in pop culture. Despite how serious a disorder, and the stress it puts on the people who have it and those closest to them, Tourette’s is usually played for attempted laughs in movies and TV. From Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo to Not Another Teen Movie to South Park, when a character has Tourette’s, they usually, and uncontrollably, yell obscenities at the most inopportune times. Some movies,…

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From the Collection: The Blade (1995)

From the Collection: The Blade (1995)

Tsui Hark’s 1995 martial arts film The Blade has been added to the Criterion Collection. Among the boldest accomplishments of Hong Kong cinema’s golden age, this uniquely visceral martial-arts movie puts a gritty new spin on the story of the one-armed swordsman, an iconic figure from the moment he was introduced by the Shaw Brothers studio in 1967. Composed in a whirlwind of immersive close-ups and fractured editing, The Blade follows the young sword-maker Ding On (Vincent…

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