Category: Arts & Culture 2015 Critics’ Picks

Corner Stores Though only 25 minutes long, this incisive documentary (which screened last year as part of the Chicago Palestine Film Festival) says a good deal about inner-city America in general and Englewood in particular, and it delivers a moving character portrait to boot. Director Amina Waheed, an Indian-Canadian immigrant who’s worked on Frontline and […]

The Latest Sun Is Sinking Fast The films of Melika Bass seem to exist eerily out of time. This local artist, best known for her experimental feature Shoals, avoids onscreen details that might tie the action to any particular era, and because she typically shoots on 16-millimeter film, using only minimal lighting, her films even […]

Eastland disaster footage On July 24, 1915, the Western Electric Company chartered the steamship SS Eastland to ferry a few thousand employees from downtown Chicago to a company picnic in Michigan City, Indiana. Four stories tall and nearly the length of a football field, the Eastland was as spectacular as the Hindenburg—and just as poorly […]

Chicago Critics Film Festival Part of a critic’s job is to tell you about good movies, but with this unique festival, held every spring at Music Box, critics actually show them to you. Members of the Chicago Film Critics Association handpick notable movies from the festival circuit, many of which have yet to secure theatrical […]

Little House facebook.com/littlehousechicago Somewhere in Pilsen there’s a private residence with a do-it-yourself approach to film exhibition. As commercial theaters increasingly resemble bars and restaurants, Little House proves that the formula for presenting great movies is still a projector, a screen, and an eager crowd. The programmers favor experimental, classic, and underground films, almost everything […]

Manual Cinema The local arts collective Manual Cinema creates inventive live performance pieces that suggest silent movies materializing out of thin air. Employing actors, musicians, a variety of puppets, and a combination of live-feed cameras and overhead projectors, the group stages elaborate shadow plays whose action transpires on multiple screens. Watching its shows can be […]

Hogtown Last year we created the category Best Chicago Story in hope that it would become a perennial, and that every year we could single out the locally produced short or feature that best captured the life of the city. This year we didn’t even need that category, because the best Chicago story was also […]

Fabulous Freddie Ninja Unlike you and me, Fabulous Freddie Ninja (aka Freddie Leroy) irons his white jeans before an all-styles dance battle. And unlike anyone else, he fearlessly integrates breaking and voguing—two of the perhaps most disparate elements in Chicago underground dancing—spinning on his head, then jumping to his feet only to collapse to the […]

The Comedy Exposition When Just for Laughs stopped staging its huge annual festival in Chicago last year, it seemed there would be nothing in its place to bring big national acts to the city. Lucky for us, a group of local comics came together to create something even better: the Comedy Exposition, a showcase with […]

Algren and Nelson Algren: The End Is Nothing, the Road Is All &#8203  The past year brought not one but two documentary portraits of Nelson Algren, the bard of Division Street: Michael Caplan’s Algren, which premiered at the Chicago International Film Festival last October, and Mark Blottner, Ilko Davidov, and Denis Mueller’s Nelson Algren: The End […]

Kate Fry and Mark L. Montgomery No, they aren’t married. Not to each other, anyway. But they’ve been paired enough that I’m beginning to think of them as the Lunt and Fontanne, the Bogart and Bacall, the Bill and Hillary of Chicago theater. Over the last four years I’ve seen Kate Fry and Mark L. […]