Ode to a Cinematic Sanctuary on Lake Street
As soon as Richard Roeper broke the news with his touching article that Chicago’s Lake Street Screening Room may soon be no more, now that the office building housing it […]
Tag Archives: Robert Altman
My Favorite Films from Each Year
On my final day as a thirty-something, I’d like to honor my favorite art form by singling out a great many films that have enriched my life over the past […]
Indie Flashback: David Lowery on “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints”
The following interview was originally published on August 27th, 2013 at HollywoodChicago.com. Even if “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” hadn’t premiered this year, snagging two Sundance awards in the process, 2013 […]
Top 20 Films of 2015: Part I
It’s a weird time to be talking about movies. We are perched at a precarious point in the history of our species, with cultural divisions and ideological extremism threatening to […]
Stephen Cone, Cole Doman, Nina Ganet, Pat Healy and Elizabeth Laidlaw on “Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party”
“Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party,” the seventh feature from director Stephen Cone, is a masterpiece of nuance. It assembles a large cast of characters, observes their behavior as they interact during […]
Love Is Honesty: The Catharsis of “Almost There”
There’s a brief close-up that occurs early on in Dan Rybicky and Aaron Wickenden’s documentary, “Almost There,” of hands covered in glitter, those infuriating particles so often caked onto supposedly […]
Persona Non Grata: The Persona of 3 Women on Mulholland Drive
I wrote the following essay back in college and later presented it at the University of Notre Dame’s Midwest Undergraduate Film Conference. It was written for Dan Rybicky’s class on […]
In the Sweet By and By
“There’s a sense of elegy in the film. A sense that something wonderful is coming to an end, and the way to handle that is not to regret it, but […]
David Lynch: A Surrealist Symphony in Four Movements
Robert Altman always referred to his enormously diverse body of work as “one big movie.” Precisely how Altman interpreted the linkage between each of his distinctive pictures is left for […]
Same Old Song: 8 Great Reuses of Movie Music
Quentin Tarantino was once quoted saying that no filmmaker should use a song that has already been powerfully featured in a previous picture. The irony is that Tarantino recycles iconic […]
Indie Outlook 