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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
As the summer fades to black, critics are already bracing themselves for the aggressive onslaught of awards campaigns that will be vying for their attention in the coming months. We’ll […]
Indie Outlook 