When storefront operations like Blank Theatre Company scale down a Broadway musical to their humbler proportions, the resulting show tends to live and die by the strength of its ensemble. Thankfully this production of She Loves Me—the best story about antagonistic pen pals at a perfume shop in Budapest that you’re likely to see all […]
Author Archives: Max Maller
Posted inFilm
Ahed’s Knee
If anything, the story might have gone on longer, as the Tamimi project never entirely takes shape and the powerful forces let loose in Y’s desert epiphany fizzle out by the end credits.
Posted inTheater Review
The art of the steal
When their brother Arthur dies, leaving behind to the world a lone splatter canvas from the heady foray into abstract expressionism that preceded his embittered art teacher years, Alex (Michael Appelbaum) and Andy (Rick Yaconis) decide to right fate’s wrongs and get the—to their minds—worthless and incomprehensible painting accepted to a prestigious gallery. This turns […]
Posted inFilm
Big Gold Brick
The effect is full disorientation, which feels refreshingly campy now and then, but bewilderingly out of touch the rest of the time.
Posted inFilm
Strawberry Mansion
It’s 2035 and the government has levied a tax on the objects you see in your dreams, which you store and upload off memory sticks. Nattily tweed-coated auditor James Preble (Kentucker Audley) doesn’t like it any more than you would.
Posted inFilm
Jackass Forever
You’ll see this movie and decide for yourself if the stunts are just juvenile brain-poison and nothing else.
Posted inTheater Review
Glitter and be gay
The stars in this play spend one act gleaming, another act fading away. For a brief window of time in the 1930s, Hollywood was a place of permissiveness toward the homosexuality of its leading men, with the movies’ first Ben-Hur, Ramon Novarro (Trey DeLuna) and the dashing MGM icon Billy Haines (Adam Jennings) throwing champagne […]
Posted inTheater Review
Fallout boys
Looking through the window of the control room at the stars, Leonid (CJ Lange-Embree) muses on how much he always wanted to be an astronaut. It’s too late for that. He’s been sipping vodka at the switches all night, the reactor is melting down, and there’s nothing he, his diligent counterpart Akimov (RJ Cecott), or […]
Posted inFilm
The Hand of God
Paolo Sorrentino has made more luscious films, but he’s never made a more personal one.
Posted inTheater Review
Eb & Belle riffs on A Christmas Carol
When the Ghost of Christmas Past visits decrepit miser Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, one painful memory the ghost has him swoop back over concerns a delightful young girl named Belle, who Scrooge was supposed to marry until greed eclipsed tenderness in his heart and she broke off the engagement. Adjusting the […]
Posted inFilm
What Do We See When We Look At The Sky?
A film so soothing to look at that you can almost forgive it for being essentially two hours and 30 minutes of watching grass grow
Posted inArts & Culture
‘You have to respect the power of objects’
In July, as COVID-19 restrictions began to lift and the Chicago performing arts geared themselves up to resurrect, the Rough House Theater Co. headquarters at coartistic directors Claire Saxe and Mike Oleon’s home in Humboldt Park morphed into a puppet rehearsal palace. Rough House’s anthology production House of the Exquisite Corpse wouldn’t be opening at […]