Heavy Meta
Smiling through "Iron Man"
Studios seem to have a harder and harder time to make movies in familiar forms that don't seem… familiar. Yet even with well-worn elements, there's much to enjoy in "Iron Man"
(2008-05-06)
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Tip of the Week
Son of Rambow
Garth Jennings' "Son of Rambow" takes the same rude clay as Michel Gondry's "Be Kind Rewind" with much more fruitful results. In the case of "Rambow," two English 11-year-olds in the early 1980s get the idea of remaking "Rambo: First Blood" out the wilds of their imagination
(2008-05-06)
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Short Runs
This week's limited screenings
(2008-05-06)
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Humboldt's Gift
Filmmaker Bob Teitel brings his moviemaking success home to the old neighborhood
A late February rain melts the snow that blankets Humboldt Park. Gray and wet, yet Division and California bustles with pedestrians. It’s the first day above freezing in weeks, and the neighborhood is starring in its first major motion picture, called, fittingly, "Humboldt Park"
(2008-04-29)
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Short Runs
This week's limited screenings
(2008-04-29)
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How Do Photographs Mean?
Errol Morris and the esthetics of evidence
At the end of last week, the New York Times set off a secondary firestorm about "Standard Operating Procedure," Errol Morris' documentary about the photographs taken by soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq that led to the exposure of the continued use of the facility, post-Saddam Hussein, for torture. Morris paid some of his interviewees, but doesn't specify which were given consultation honoraria. Some writers (and several documentary filmmakers I talked to about this) say this is an abdication of the responsibility of a journalist, or of a generally held consensus of what constitutes documentary practice. But some of the arguments are in a different service
(2008-04-29)
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Tip of the Week
The Unforeseen
A shambling yet exceptionally good movie with gorgeous visual interludes befitting the work of co-producer Terrence Malick, Laura Dunn's "The Unforeseen" is an overt agit-doc about irresponsible land-use policies and practice over a couple of decades in a suburb of Austin, Texas
(2008-04-29)
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Something Happened
Life, love, liquor and Hong Sang-soo
The relatively young Korean director Hong Sang-soo, who studied at the School of the Art Institute, is one of the younger directors whose characters' seemingly diffident or reckless behavior is in fact only an apparition of normalcy or the everyday
(2008-04-22)
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Short Runs
This week's limited screenings
(2008-04-22)
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Tip of the Week
Tuya's Marriage
The debut release from Chicago's newest distribution label, Music Box Films, "Tuya's Marriage" is a brightly colored, genial story of culture clash in the form of a not-quite-ethnographic romantic comedy
(2008-04-22)
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