The Chicago Underground Film Festival is back, and the longest-running fest devoted to the subculture of movies has quite a variety of attractions.
Category: Film
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Review: Bottoms
Just gather your nonsqueamish WLW friends and go see Bottoms immediately.
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Documenting the ‘pure childhood joy’ of baseball
Solutions for violence disruption often fall on the shoulders of politicians and policymakers, but one youth baseball league is tackling the issue through the power of organized sports, as highlighted in an upcoming documentary.
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Review: The Eternal Memory
In the remarkable documentary The Eternal Memory, director Maite Alberdi brings us one of the most heartfelt renditions of life, love, and memory in recent years of cinema.
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Review: Fremont
Packaged in unsuspecting monochrome and monotone, Babak Jalali embeds Fremont with a cunning, melancholic charm.
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Review: Landscape with Invisible Hand
Once you get past the aliens’ appearances, it’s easy to be mesmerized by the film at large, which is a sweeping and heartfelt examination of colonization, voyeurism, capitalism, and humanity.
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Review: Perpetrator
A girl walking home alone is such a classic beginning for a horror film that it’s a trope (and title) in itself. This particular opening lends itself to endless continuations and explorations, and when you have a director like Jennifer Reeder, an old story can get retold like no other.
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Review: Red, White & Royal Blue
Those who desire mere fluff will be satisfied, but the reason the book became a sensation in the first place was its real awareness of the risks it took to truly build a better world. This groundbreaking love story deserved better.
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Solidarity in the summer
As has been the case for most of my adult life, I’ve also watched a lot of movies (and occasionally, some television) this summer. What’s been different this year is that I’m now thinking more about those who made what I’m watching, both in front of and behind the camera.
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Review: BAM!
There’s a refreshingly casual diversity that ensures BAM! isn’t only a love letter to Chicago, with many landmarks only natives will recognize, but also one of the best examples of what talented artists can achieve when they refuse to take making art itself for granted.
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Review: Strays
Director Josh Greenbaum and writer Dan Perrault team up for neither of their best work with Strays, a lackluster crude dog comedy whose blessedly short run time is its most redeeming feature.
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Review: Passages
Passages, New York-based filmmaker Ira Sachs’s tempestuous love-triangle drama, feels like a precious anomaly within the landscape of contemporary American cinema.
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Review: Blue Beetle
There is a recent idiosyncratic, smart superhero movie about family and togetherness. It’s called Encanto. I’d suggest watching it and skipping Blue Beetle entirely.
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Review: The Unknown Country
A solitary figure in a car traversing the American West in a movie can be as iconic as it is innocuous: a placeholder for every kind of journey, be it spiritual or material; a seeking of or a fleeing from.
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Review: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
These turtles are animated in an electric style that resembles clay splashed with vibrant colors and rough sketch lines. It’s enough to power this loving, if somewhat tame, reboot.