The 2023 Chicago International Film Festival kicks off this week and it is a film festival that I truly love. This was the first festival that I ever attended back in 2008 and it is one I have attended every year since. It is a great film festival that does not get the love and attention of some higher-profile festivals but deserves to be mentioned as one of the best film festivals in North America….
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As of writing this review, the superhero genre is a hot mess. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is lost in the world of the multiverse and doesn’t seem to be getting out of it anytime soon. The Universe seems stagnant and there doesn’t seem to be a direction to where it is going. DC is going through a revamp by bringing in James Gunn to take control of its new universe, but they might also…
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The Hill is a run-of-the-mill inspirational baseball movie about how one man beat the odds to make it to the pros with the help of the people around him, hard work, and determination. The film was co-written by Angelo Pizzo, a screenwriter who has made a living off writing inspirational sports films. He has written such films as Hoosiers and Rudy, along with a few other inspirational sports films, all focusing on underdogs who…
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Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams recently got a 4k release from the Criterion Collection. In a cinematic experience unlike any other, Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams unfolds in a series of eight vignettes inspired by the beloved director’s own nighttime visions, along with stories from Japanese folklore. In a visually sumptuous journey through the master’s imagination, tales of childlike wonder give way to apocalyptic apparitions: a young boy stumbles on a fox wedding in a forest; a soldier confronts…
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Carl Franklin’s theatrical film debut One False Move is the latest film to enter the Criterion Collection. One False Move looks at a small-town police chief (Bill Paxton), holding on to a life-changing secret, who gets word that a pair of ruthless, murderous drug dealers (co-screenwriter Billy Bob Thornton and Michael Beach) are on their way to his small Arkansas town. And an enigmatic woman (Cynda Williams), originally from the small town, who is caught up…
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Oppenheimer is a biopic as only Christopher Nolan could make. It features a plot with multiple timelines and multiple perspectives. It is filmed on a scale that no other director is capable of working on. It is a technical marvel and features possibly the best ensemble cast in 2023. It is a towering achievement and one of the best movies of the year. J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) was one of the most brilliant minds…
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Theater Camp is a film that has heart, humor, and not much else. This is a paper-thin mockumentary that despite having several interesting characters, can’t decide which character or story to focus on. Theater Camp takes us to AdirondACTS, a theater camp in upstate New York. After its founder Joan (Amy Sedaris) falls into a coma, her clueless “crypto-bro” son Troy (Jimmy Tatro) is tasked with keeping the thespian paradise running. With the camp…
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The opening ten minutes or so of Great Gerwig’s Barbie are truly magical. Through the voiceover of Helen Mirren, Gerwig establishes that there are two worlds: there is the “Real World”, where real humans live, and Barbieland, a matriarchal utopia that is inhabited by several different variations of Barbie, like President Barbie, Doctor Barbie, and Lawyer Barbie, among other occupations. Their counterparts in Barbieland are all named Ken (and there is one named Allan,…
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The League is an informative and excellent documentary about the Negro League, the all Black baseball league that produced some of the greatest baseball players to ever play the game, like Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron, and Satchel Paige. The film looks at how the League got started in the late 1800s, the struggles it faced, and the effect it had on Black America and its communities. When most people think about the Negro League…
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Much of the advertising for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One has been centered around the film’s centerpiece action scene, which finds Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise, doing the stunt himself, as we’ve come to expect) driving a motorcycle off of a cliff and opening a parachute on the way down. The advertisers at Paramount were right to focus on that scene because it lives up to the anticipation. It is a breathtaking sequence…
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