Let’s pretend you hate strawberries. Now let’s pretend someone takes a bunch of strawberries and makes them look all fancy with chocolate, and some fancy sauce, and makes the strawberries look unrecognizable. You see this fancy treat and you get excited like, “Oh, that looks good.” And then you take a bite and realize it is a strawberry, becoming immediately disappointed because you hate it. You put the strawberry down and look at the others and…
Read More
I have a slew of films I plan on seeing at this year’s Chicago International Film Festival. I can’t see all the movies I wish I could, but I have a pretty great slate ahead of me with some of my most anticipated movies of the 2015. Here are my five most anticipated movies of the 51st Chicago International Film Festival. 5 – Dheepan (Jacques Audiard) Jacques Audiard is a truly gifted director. His…
Read More
This week, the 55th Chicago International Film Festival kicks off and it is a festival near and dear to my heart. I first attended the festival in 2008, where I got to see Darren Aronofsky’s masterpiece The Wrestler I was also lucky enough to meet Mr. Aronofsky after the screening and talk to him about wrestling and filmmaking, which, for a 20 year old film student, was mind-blowing. I have attended the festival every year…
Read More
The 2010’s have not been kind to director Sir Ridley Scott. After having a great 2000’s with films like Gladiator (2000), Black Hawk Down (2001), the underrated Matchstick Men (2003) and American Gangster (2007), Scott has made some of the worst films of his career this decade. With the films Robin Hood (2010), Prometheus (2012), The Counselor (2013), and Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), Scott has received some of the worst reviews and box office…
Read More
It’s hard to follow up a masterpiece. After a director makes a masterpiece, everyone expects the next film to be just as great. Most of the time, the results are underwhelming. Quentin Tarantino followed up Pulp Fiction (1994) with Jackie Brown (1997), David Fincher followed up Se7en (1995) with The Game (1997), Steven Spielberg followed up Saving Private Ryan (1998) with A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), and so on. Not saying these movies are bad, but…
Read More
The story of French tight-rope walker Philippe Petit’s mind-blowing stunt of walking between the World Trade Center towers had already been told in 2008’s Oscar winning documentary Man On Wire. The documentary is a masterpiece and one of the best documentaries I have ever seen, so the idea of a narrative version of the story had me a bit hesitant, as it is completely unnecessary. But, with technical master Robert Zemeckis behind the camera and the…
Read More
Johnny Depp’s still got it. After a series of duds, Depp’s acting and film choices made us question his ability as an actor. But as James ‘Whitey’ Bulger in Scott Cooper’s gangster drama Black Mass, Depp gives one of his best performances to date and proves why he is one of the best actors in Hollywood. Told through the stories of Bulger’s henchmen, we start in 1975 with Bulger as a small-time, yet intimidating force…
Read More
Johnny Depp was at one time one of the most sought out and best actors in Hollywood. He would consistently give great performances in good and sometimes great movies, which allowed the actor to earn back-to-back Academy Award nominations for Best Actor in 2003 and 2004, as well as a nomination in 2007. But lately, Depp has been on a streak of duds. With movies like Dark Shadows (2012), The Lone Ranger (2013), and Transcendence…
Read More
With Scott Cooper’s Black Mass, starring Johnny Depp as infamous gangster Whitey Bulger as he runs the streets of Boston in the 1970’s, coming out this Friday, let’s look back at some of the best movies set in Boston. 5- Fever Pitch (The Farrelly Brothers, 2005) I could have gone with better overall films like the rousing The Fighter (2010), the extremely entertaining The Boondock Saints (1999) or one of the great Paul Newman…
Read More
We have seen movies about the quarter-life crises, like The Graduate (1967), Garden State (2004), and The Worlds End (2013). We have seen midlife-crises movies like 8 1/2 (1963), American Beauty (1999), and The Incredibles (2004). What we don’t see a lot of, however, is the three-quarter life crises movie. We rarely see movies about people in their elder years looking back at life and realizing, after seeing friends and loved ones die, that they haven’t fulfilled…
Read More
