Film listings are compiled from information available Monday, Occasionally bookings change after our deadline; we suggest you call ahead for confirmation. Submissions to the film listings are always welcome, but must include a phone number for publication. Commentary by Jonathan Rosenbaum and, where noted, by Fred Camper (FC), Don Druker (DD), Pat Graham (PG), Dave […]
Author Archives: Peter Keough
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Chicago International Film Festival
* = recommended Friday October 13 *Yaaba Idrissa Ouedraogo’s first feature film, The Choice, chronicling the long trek of a family forced by drought to leave their home, was a film about displacement. His second, Yaaba, on the other hand, is about having a place in the world. A young boy and girl, playing on […]
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A Sea of Celluloid: Our coverage of the 24th Chicago International Film Festival Continues
The 24th Chicago International Film Festival, now into its top-heavy second week, is offering 60-odd programs this week, reviews and descriptions of which can be found below. It’s particularly pleasing that the festival has managed to squeeze in filmmakers as important as Jean-Luc Godard and Raul Ruiz this week (although the latter is represented only […]
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The Reader’s Guide to the 23rd Chicago International Film Festival
What’s New This Week
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Week Two of the 23rd Chicago International Film Festival
A Multitude of Cinema
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A Guide to the 23rd Chicago International Film Festival
So Many Movies, So Little Time: Film festivals come in all shapes and sizes. Ours is relatively pluralistic and amorphous, for better and for worse.
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Local Lit: James McManus’s end-of-the-world epic
The fiction trade is never booming but it’s been relatively healthy of late. Short-story collections — tidy albums of terse snapshots framed with irony — have been a particularly popular commodity. This mild bull market is encouraging but conceals insidious dangers. Success breeds imitation and complacency, discouraging risk, excess, and ambition. Writers grow in craft […]
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Adrift in the Celluloid Sea
SWIMMING TO CAMBODIA *** (A must-see) Written by Spalding Gray Directed by Jonathan Demme With Spalding Gray. In Plato’s republic Spalding Gray would be among the first asked to pack his bags. The old Greek could not abide poets, whose art he saw as an imitation of a reality that was already a faint shadow […]
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Genre Abuse
RAISING ARIZONA ** (Worth seeing) Directed by Joel Coen Written by Joel and Ethan Coen With Nicolas Cage, Holly Hunter, John Goodman, William Forsythe, Trey Wilson, Randall “Tex” Cobb, and Sam McMurray. Formal mastery without feeling makes people uneasy. Perhaps Joel and Ethan Coen sensed this in the wake of (and despite) the resounding critical […]
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Trading Places
TIN MEN **** (Masterpiece) Directed and written by Barry Levinson With Richard Dreyfuss, Danny DeVito, and Barbara Hershey. There aren’t too many outlets for releasing the frustrations and fury of being civilized. One way, vilifying crazy drivers from behind the protection of your own steering wheel, will always–barring a drastic change in human nature or […]
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Therese
Therese Martin died of neglect and consumption in a Carmelite convent at the age of 25, leaving behind little more than a slim volume of memoirs and a reputation for piety and self-mortification. Like an obsessed artist or athlete, she had honed her life for one end–the sainthood she was granted in 1925, less than […]
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She’s Gotta Have It
Spike Lee takes the minimalist blackout style of fellow NYU film school grad Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise and jazzes it into the funniest comedy of summer ’86. Nola Darling (Tracy Camila Johns), an earthily charismatic young woman, refuses to be dominated by any man. After a series of “dogs” (hilariously lampooned in a montage […]
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Betty Blue
She’s young, she’s beautiful, she never wears underwear—why did she have to go and poke her eye out? Perhaps one reason Jean-Jacques Beineix’ films took a dip after Diva is that he feels obliged to deal with the tough questions that really bother a guy. Jean-Hugues Anglade is a writer on the skids, spurred to […]
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You Alone
Like the sport of bullfighting that is its subject, Teo Escamilla’s You Alone is primitive, mawkish, and perversely beautiful. In a Spanish bullfighting school a motley group of 6- to 13-year-olds learn the morbid art of the matador. The school star, Jose Miguel, is hassled by his former-bullfighter dad, but finally preens and skewers his […]