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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
Those of us who spent many hours in the '70s and '80s watching satanic cultists at work and play in junk like "Race With the Devil" (1975) will experience director Ti West's fourth feature in a different way from those who weren't around then, or were confining their filmgoing to more noble matters. more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
Was Jackson, 50 at the time of his death on June 25, in rougher shape overall than the concert rehearsal footage assembled here suggests? Most certainly, yes. Produced with the full, watchful cooperation of the Jackson estate, pulled from 100-plus hours of film and video shot between March and June 2009, "This Is It" has no interest in telling the full story of anything, or the crumbling state of anyone. more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
The Amelia Earhart biopic "Amelia" is not a bad movie, but it is distressingly ordinary for such an extraordinary subject. In everything from "Monsoon Wedding" to "Mississippi Masala" to the Thackeray adaptation "Vanity Fair," director Mira Nair has dramatized and celebrated risk-taking women and lives lived outside the strictures of convention. But a director can do only so much with a script (by Ronald Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan) that feels like it's on the runway, waiting, even when it's up in the air. more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
Astro Boy originally appeared in 1951 as a supporting player in an Osamu Tezuka manga, or Japanese comic. He proved irresistible: Those boots! Those flaming jets where the toes should be! That strategically pointy hair! What sort of atomic gel is this kid using? more |
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Chicago Tribune: Betsy Sharkey
In the bizarre world of "Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant," there's a war brewing over "portion" control. It seems the truce between those who sip, leaving humans a little weaker but none the wiser, and those who gorge, gluttons who leave death, destruction and no tip behind, has been on hold for a couple hundred years. more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
The new comedy "(Untitled)" has the punctuation and the thinness of a gallery wall label. It wanders the exhibition spaces, lofts and performance venues of Chelsea and other parts of Manhattan, eavesdropping on the narcissistic mutterings - funny, some of them, now and then - of a group of artists and bohemians and poseurs going up, or down, or sideways. more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
Fueled by a suspicious, insidious brand of malt liquor called Anaconda, the blaxploitation spoof "Black Dynamite" knows its genre's weak spots, sore spots and aesthetically challenged delights, from the cruddy overlit early-'70s-era interiors to the "Shaft"-ed theme song contributed by composer (and editor) Adrian Younge. Director and co-writer Scott Sanders' comedy reveals an eye for visual detail. I'm still puzzled as to why it's not funnier. more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
"I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell" is "The Hangover" for people who prefer hangovers to drinking. The film came from Tucker Max's gleeful bad-boy confessional, a best-seller. The book came from a blog. The blog came from Max's life, or so we're led to believe. more |
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Chicago Tribune: Roger Moore
"Law Abiding Citizen" is a glib, brutal and preposterous revenge fantasy, a take-the-law-in-your-own-hands rabble rouser that taps into a lot of fears and gripes about the American legal system. It's the sort of movie that Mel Gibson or Clint Eastwood might have made back in the day - a man survives the slaughter of his family and sets out to get even, and then some. more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
The simplest thing you can say about the movies is that they take you places, geographically, emotionally, hypnotically, and the ongoing "Cities We Love" project that began three years ago with "Paris, je t'aime" continues its global exploration with "New York, I Love You." more |
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