Movies, Chicago Reader

Berberian Sound Studio: Eerie on the ears

J.R. Jones — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 04:00:00 -0500

Toby Jones is an audio engineer trapped inside the creepy Berberian Sound Studio. by J.R. Jones In the whole history of horror and suspense drama, there's never been a more promising line than "Did you hear that?" Sound leaves too much to the imagination, which is where fear takes hold.…

Superman returns (again) in Man of Steel

J.R. Jones — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 04:00:00 -0500

With Man of Steel, the screenwriters of the "Dark Knight" trilogy take a crack at the original superhero. by J.R. Jones Look, up in the sky! It's a bird!…

Dirty Wars zeroes in on Obama's assassins

J.R. Jones — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 04:00:00 -0500

In Dirty Wars, muckraking journalist Jeremy Scahill exposes the president's assassination squad. by J.R. Jones The flood of theatrical documentaries about the war on terror—Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), Why We Fight (2005), The Ground Truth (2006), No End in Sight (2007), Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), Standard Operating Procedure (2008)—has slowed to a trickle since President Obama took office, which makes this uncompromising exposé from reporter Jeremy Scahill even more important. Best known for his book about Blackwater, Scahill turns his attention here to the little-known Joint Special Operations Command, which answers directly to the president and, the film asserts, is licensed to kill anyone, anytime.…

Ricky Jay has something up his sleeve

J.R. Jones — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 04:00:00 -0500

In Deceptive Practice, master illusionist Ricky Jay remembers the stage magicians who shaped him. by J.R. Jones Sleight of hand tends to suffer on the big screen because moviegoers are so accustomed to mechanical trickery—to make something disappear, all you really need is a good splice. But the magic in Deceptive Practice, Molly Bernstein's documentary portrait of actor and stage illusionist Ricky Jay, comes mainly from Jay's fond recollections of old performers.…

American Mary, sculptor with a scalpel

J.R. Jones — Thu, 30 May 2013 04:00:00 -0500

The Canadian horror import American Mary spoofs the body-modification cult. by J.R. Jones Female filmmakers are marginalized in every genre, but horror is a particularly male domain. Tod Browning, James Whale, Val Lewton, George Romero, John Carpenter—from the silent era onward, men have shaped the horror movie, often around the sound of a woman screaming.…

Paradise: Love: Beach boys, white women, and the deep blue sea

Ben Sachs — Thu, 30 May 2013 04:00:00 -0500

Ulrich Seidl's career-topping "Paradise" trilogy screens at Gene Siskel Film Center. by Ben Sachs The art of Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl (Import Export) often feels closer to still photography than to cinema. He'll regularly stage an entire scene in a single, static shot, characters and objects arranged in a tableau.…

Our coverage of the Asian American Showcase

Thu, 23 May 2013 04:00:00 -0500

Asian American Showcase continues at Gene Siskel Film Center The 18th Asian American Showcase continues through Thursday, May 30, at Gene Siskel Film Center; tickets are $11, $7 for students, and $6 for Film Center members. Following are reviews of selected features; for a full schedule see siskelfilmcenter.org.…

Portrait of Jason delves inside a hustler's world

J.R. Jones — Tue, 21 May 2013 04:00:00 -0500

Portrait of Jason delves inside a hustler's world. by J.R. Jones A portrait is a delicate transaction: the subject might look at it and, shocked, see not himself but how the artist feels about him. Next week at the Portage, Northwest Chicago Film Society presents one of the most audacious character studies to come out of the American underground cinema, Shirley Clarke's Portrait of Jason (1967); like many portraits, it's most fascinating as a document of a relationship.…

Talkin' 'bout The Unspeakable Act

Drew Hunt — Thu, 16 May 2013 04:00:00 -0500

A brother and sister wrestle with incestuous feelings in Dan Sallitt's The Unspeakable Act. by Drew Hunt Movies that deal with incest are often couched in melodrama, dealing with hidden transgressions and shattered family roles. But The Unspeakable Act, which makes its Chicago premiere this week at Gene Siskel Film Center, is different.…

Stories We Tell and stories we don't

J.R. Jones — Thu, 16 May 2013 04:00:00 -0500

Sarah Polley's Stories We Tell peels away the layers of a family secret. by J.R. Jones "Who cares about our stupid family?" asks Joanna Polley at the outset of Stories We Tell, a documentary by her sister Sarah. "Every family has a story.…

The Not-So-Great Gatsby

J.R. Jones — Thu, 09 May 2013 04:00:00 -0500

Leonard DiCaprio stars in an overblown adaptation of The Great Gatsby. by J.R. Jones The Great Gatsby will always be an unfilmable novel because most of its drama resides in the space between the characters' snappy dialogue and their unspoken feelings of ennui, disappointment, and despair. This may explain why, transposed to the screen, Gatsby tends to become the very thing it abhors: a wild, loud party.…

Bush Mama: straight outta Watts

J.R. Jones — Thu, 09 May 2013 04:00:00 -0500

Haile Gerima presents his 1976 ghetto drama Bush Mama by J.R. Jones Angry and uncompromising, this 1975 drama by Haile Gerima follows the slow radicalization of a black woman in Watts (the magnetic Barbara O. Jones) as she contends with street crime, brutal police, invasive social workers, a husband in prison, and the pandemic despair of the late Vietnam era. "People who love money are animals," writes her husband (Johnny Weathers), articulating the film's bitter Marxist perspective, and the story is steeped in the mechanisms of economic violence.…

Olivier Assayas takes another crack at his radical adolescence

Tal Rosenberg — Wed, 08 May 2013 12:00:00 -0500

With Something in the Air Olivier Assayas takes another crack at his radical adolescence. by Tal Rosenberg Between 1904 and 1906, James Joyce tried to write an autobiographical novel called "Stephen Hero," but he grew frustrated with the manuscript and abandoned it (it was published posthumously in 1944). A decade later, armed with the publication of his short-story collection Dubliners, he revisited this failed pass at a first novel, emphasizing the psychology of his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, and experimenting with language and form to create A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. For Joyce, practice and perspective enabled him to craft a more meaningful expression of his life experience.…

Persistence of Vision recalls an animation legend's doomed dream

J.R. Jones — Thu, 02 May 2013 04:00:00 -0500

Persistence of Vision recalls an animation legend's doomed dream. by J.R. Jones Hand-drawn animation is a business filled with drama; the endless, painstaking work can propel both lonely odysseys (cf. Don Hertzfeldt) and ugly disputes between a ruthless taskmaster and his overworked minions (cf.…

Pain & Gain wants to kick your ass

Ben Sachs — Wed, 01 May 2013 13:30:00 -0500

Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne Johnson star in Michael Bay's satire of the American dream. by Ben Sachs Not long after Paul Verhoeven directed Showgirls (1995), French filmmaker Jacques Rivette told an interviewer the movie was about "surviving in a world populated by assholes." I thought of this line often while watching Michael Bay's Pain & Gain, which opened last week and is currently the number one box office attraction in the U.S. Nearly all the principal characters are loud, arrogant, aggressive, and materialistic.…

Hard times and hard liquor in The Angels’ Share

J.R. Jones — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 15:30:00 -0500

In the new Ken Loach comedy, two-bit thieves target a coveted barrel of scotch. by J.R. Jones For years proletarian filmmaker Ken Loach has been one of the most reliable downers in British cinema, reminding us time and again that the rich get richer and the poor get exploited (unless they can figure out how to exploit someone else). But in his mid-70s Loach has begun to try his hand at comedy, with Looking for Eric (2009) and now this 2012 feature.…

Rob Zombie returns from the dead

Drew Hunt — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 04:00:00 -0500

Rob Zombie's The Lords of Salem is a tale of modern-day witches. by Drew Hunt After the fitfully inspired Halloween (2007) and Halloween II (2009), goth-rocker-turned-horror-auteur Rob Zombie returns to form with this chilling story of a radio DJ who begins to unravel after playing a mysterious record sent to her by a coven of witches. Zombie finds formal inspiration in Roman Polanski and Stanley Kubrick, prioritizing atmosphere over blood and guts and, as the DJ slides further into madness, all but abandoning the plot in favor of unbridled hallucination.…

A new life for Colonel Blimp

J.R. Jones — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 15:30:00 -0500

Michael Powell and Martin Scorsese remember The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, a British masterpiece. by J.R. Jones In the opening sequence of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)— considered by some the greatest British film ever made—a young army officer commanding a mock invasion receives orders to attack at midnight but, citing the surprise assault on Pearl Harbor, instead moves in at 6 PM. When he and his men arrive at a Turkish bath in London and capture the enemy commander, a rotund old major general wearing nothing but a towel and a walrus mustache, the younger man can't resist jeering at him and his quaint code of honor.…

Our guide to the Chicago International Movies & Music Festival

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 04:00:00 -0500

Our coverage of the Chicago International Movies & Music Festival The fifth annual Chicago International Movies & Music Festival runs Thursday through Sunday, April 18 through 21, at various north-side venues. Most events are $10, and one-day passes are $25.…

Big Star shines again in Nothing Can Hurt Me

J.R. Jones — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 04:00:00 -0500

Big Star shines again in the documentary Nothing Can Hurt Me. by J.R. Jones The deepest hurt in Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me occurs far from the world of rock 'n' roll, on a living room couch, where David Bell and Sara Stewart sit talking about the death of their brother, Chris Bell. As a founding member of the Memphis guitar-pop band Big Star, Bell collaborated with fellow singer-songwriter Alex Chilton on #1 Record (1972), a dazzling combination of folk, jangle-pop, and hard rock that won ecstatic reviews in the music press but was doomed by poor distribution.…

Mass murderers embrace movie magic in The Act of Killing

J.R. Jones — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 04:00:00 -0500

Indonesian executioners take to the big screen in The Act of Killing. by J.R. Jones Anwar Congo seems like a gentle, soft-spoken old man, but in the mid-60s he murdered as many as a thousand people when the Indonesian military, capitalizing on a brief coup attempt against President Sukarno, decided to exterminate the Communist Party of Indonesia. More than a half million people died in the purge, many of them beheaded.…

Our guide to the Chicago Latino Film Festival

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 16:00:00 -0500

Our coverage of the Chicago Latino Film Festival The 29th Chicago Latino Film Festival runs Friday, April 12, through Thursday, April 25. Tickets for most screenings are $11, $10 for members of the International Latino Cultural Center of Chicago; a festival pass, good for 12 general admissions, is $100, $80 for ILCC members.…

Ebert off-camera

Andrea Gronvall — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 12:00:00 -0500

A veteran Siskel & Ebert producer remembers the real Roger Ebert. by Andrea Gronvall When Gene Siskel died in 1999, I was working as a producer on Siskel & Ebert, the syndicated TV show he shared with Roger Ebert. I remember Roger being badly shaken, but he had barely any time to grieve, given the immediate challenge of keeping the show on the air.…

42 remembers the year Jackie Robinson integrated baseball

J.R. Jones — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 15:00:00 -0500

42 remembers the year Jackie Robinson integrated baseball. by J.R. Jones Like many Hollywood sports movies, this Jackie Robinson biopic seems to be pitched at high schoolers, but writer-director Brian Helgeland still manages a pretty absorbing account of Robinson's rookie year as the first black player in major-league baseball. Chadwick Boseman is appropriately anguished as Robinson, who struggles to control his rage as he absorbs a torrent of abuse from white fans, players, and officials.…

Three thousand GIFS, two guys, one movie

Aimee Levitt — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 04:00:00 -0500

On April 18, two artists debut Twohundredfiftysix-
colors, a full-length film made entirely of GIFs. by Aimee Levitt One afternoon two years ago, Eric Fleischauer, a filmmaker, and Jason Lazarus, a photographer, met for coffee. Gradually the conversation turned to one of their shared obsessions: GIFs, the infinitely looping minimovies ubiquitous on the Internet.…