Movie Reviews

        Jonah Hill is an actor who has worked with some of the best directors in the game today, such as Scorsese, Tarantino, Miller, Van Sant, and the Coen Brothers.  As an actor, working with these directors is probably a dream, especially if an actor has aspirations of becoming a director.  It is essentially the best directing class you could ask for.  So the idea of Hill directing a movie sounded intriguing….

*NOTE: This review is going to be a CAPSULE review, which means it’ll be a tight, quick critique of the film as opposed to the more in-depth reviews I usually do.             How do we suppress pain?  That is the question that is asked in Jumpman, Ivan I. Tverdovskiy’s drama that played in competition at the 2018 Chicago International Film Festival. Denis (Denis Vlasenko) has lived his entire life in an…

*NOTE: This review is going to be a CAPSULE review, which means it’ll be a tight, quick critique of the film as opposed to the more in-depth reviews I usually do.             A lot of people have a negative connotation of film festival movies.  A lot of people think that a lot of them are dense, or have a heavy subject matter, or are too vague and ambiguous.  This is…

*NOTE: This review is going to be a CAPSULE review, which means it’ll be a tight, quick critique of the film as opposed to the more in-depth reviews I usually do.         On paper, a documentary about the history of Chicago advertising sounds rough.  Half the people who read that first sentence probably fell asleep while reading it.  But Ky Dickens latest documentary is a fascinating, compelling documentary and a small love-letter…

*NOTE: This review is going to be a CAPSULE review, which means it’ll be a tight, quick critique of the film as opposed to the more in-depth reviews I usually do.           No, this isn’t a Lion King origin story.  Rafiki, which means “friend” in Swahili, is a forbidden love story about tomboy Kena (Samantha Mugatsia) who falls in love with Ziki (Shelia Munyiva), though not without problems.  Besides the fact that both of…

*NOTE: This review is going to be a CAPSULE review, which means it’ll be a tight, quick critique of the film as opposed to the more in-depth reviews I usually do.             Joël Karekezi’s film The Mercy of the Jungle tells the story of Sergeant Xavier (Marc Zinga) and Private Faustin (Stéphane Bak), two men who get separated from their troop and must travel long distances to join them.  However,…

*NOTE: This review is going to be a CAPSULE review, which means it’ll be a tight, quick critique of the film as opposed to the more in-depth reviews I usually do.           Over the years of going to the Chicago International Film Festival, the After Dark program has been one of my favorite parts of the festival, as it showcases some of the wildest movies from around the world.  Filled with…

“The world has enough superheroes.” Such is the tagline for Ruben Fleischer’s Venom, a film that looked to be the supervillain origin story of one of Spider-Man’s most infamous foes.  Supervillain origin stories have never been a thing in cinema, especially from major comic companies like Marvel and DC.  The closest we’ve gotten is M. Night Shyamalan’s Split, but other than that, the only villain-focused film we’ve gotten is Suicide Squad, which, simply put, is an abomination.  But…

      “Music is essentially 12 notes between any octave – 12 notes and the octave repeat. It’s the same story told over and over, forever. All any artist can offer this world is how they see those 12 notes. That’s it.”     Bradley Cooper’s directorial debut, A Star is Born, is the fourth telling of the classic story, dating all the way back to 1937, with subsequent remakes in 1954 and 1976.  Each movie…