Top 20 Films of 2022
2022 was, without question, the greatest year of my life. On July 1st, I married the love of my life, Rebecca, while surrounded by so many of our loved ones […]
Tag Archives: The Wise Kids
CIFF 2018: “The Hate U Give” and “Widows” on the Red Carpet
A “Starr” is truly born in “The Hate U Give,” George Tillman Jr.’s riveting screen adaptation of Angie Thomas’ bestselling book, which was published only last year. Amandla Stenberg turns […]
Austin Pendleton and Ann Whitney on “Calumet”
The mind boggles when attempting to summarize the careers of Austin Pendleton and Ann Whitney. They are two of the finest actors ever to grace the stage in Chicago, and […]
Top 20 Films of 2017: Part I
Over the past 11 years I’ve spent on the movie beat in Chicago, there have never been as many contenders for my annual “best of” list as there are in […]
Top 100 Favorite Films: 2017 Edition
A few years ago, I was asked by a friend to rank my Top Five Favorite Films. It was so daunting to limit my list to only five titles that […]
Sadie Rogers on “RPG”
I’ve often thought of Sadie Rogers as Stephen Cone’s good luck charm. She would always pop up in his early films, including “The Wise Kids,” which is one of the wisest […]
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 […]
Top Twenty Films of 2014: Part I
These films mean so very much to me. The best thing an end-of-the-year list can do is entice readers to seek out movies they might have otherwise overlooked, and that […]
Stephen Cone and Stephen Cefalu, Jr. on “This Afternoon”
Two people meet in a sex addiction support group. One is a young housewife. The other is a repressed young man who mistakenly thought he was attending an info session […]
Indie Outlook 