Month: October 2026

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,…