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Chicago Tribune: Betsy Sharkey
There is a pivotal scene in "Skin," a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction story plucked out of South Africa's apartheid, when young Sandra Laing's father shouts the good news to the family - "She's white again." Surreal and ironic, the moment captures the sensibility of this ambitious if sometimes uneven indie film, with its eye always on the larger issues of race to be found within one unusual life. more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
"The Ugly Truth" continues a pretty ugly run of romantic comedies squandering the on-screen talent while perpetuating the image of career women as harpies with nice clothes and no dates. The sex of the screenwriters doesn't seem to matter (all three credited screenwriters here are women). Everyone belonging to the Writers Guild of America, apparently, has signed a secret pact to recycle the same shrill, Type-A, vaguely inhuman female lead who must learn to bend a little and appreciate the hunk in her midst, the one smitten with all her nutty foibles. If only the foibles were funny foibles. If only the characters seemed like earthlings. more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
A small vial of "liquid luck" (lovely concept, one of many in J.K. Rowling's universe) plays a supporting role in "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," No. 6 in the franchise. (The two-film edition of " Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" will be released in 2010 and 2011, respectively.) But luck, really, has little to do with the way these films turn out. After getting my head caught in the blender that is "Transformers 2," I found it especially gratifying to get back with the Hogwarts crew. The latest, meticulously atmospheric and wonderfully acted Potter adventure lands happily - broodingly, but happily - near the top of the series heap, just behind Alfonso Cuaron's "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban." more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
Extraordinarily raunchy, occasionally funny, "Bruno" takes everything "Borat" did so well three years ago and pushes it further, swapping one primary target (American anti-Semitism) for another (American homophobia). But comic nerve has little to do with sheer excess. The fashionista at the center of "Bruno" is a pretty tedious fellow, and there's a calculated stridency to the material in Sacha Baron Cohen's new guerrilla lark, directed (as was "Borat") by Larry Charles. By the end, you may feel like Eminem at the recent MTV Movie Awards, getting a face full of Austrian kugelsack. For 82 minutes. more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
Pure pleasure. I've heard the arguments against this out-of-the-vault concert film, capturing the frantic planning and glorious execution (financed by Liberian investors) of the three-day music festival "Zaire '74." Not enough political or ethnographic context; too plain Jane in the presentation; not nearly enough about the festival's relationship to its sister act, the '74 Muhammad Ali/George Foreman "Rumble in the Jungle," the subject of the Oscar-winning documentary "When We Were Kings." more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
At one point in the juicy new documentary "Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg," Ed Asner - who grew up Jewish in Kansas City, Kan. - talks about why his family wasn't crazy about "The Goldbergs," a radio mainstay from the beginning of the Depression through 1947 and successfully adapted for television two years later. more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
Luxembourg-born director Anne Fontaine's first film, in 1993, was a comedy called "Love Affairs Usually End Badly." That title applies to any number of other films before or since, including Fontaine's newly released and stimulatingly unpredictable comedy-drama "The Girl From Monaco." more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
Sequels are tough. "Here we go again!" so easily becomes "Here. We go, again." Characters start getting a little sick of each other, as they do in "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs," with the story falling back on a falling-out between a mammoth and a sabre-toothed tiger, or the tiger and a sloth. The dialogue begins to sound like screenwriters voicing their creative frustration. "Face it, Sid," Denis Leary's Diego mutters to John Leguizamo's lateral-lisping mammal Sid in "Dawn of the Dinosaurs." "We had a great run, but now it's time to move on." more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
You don't go to a Michael Mann movie for realism. You go for the sleek, threatening glamour of crime and punishment. From "Thief" to "Heat" to "Collateral" to another vein of wrongdoing in "The Insider," his films ruminate, beautifully, as they place their characters in settings of insinuating darkness, hunter versus the hunted, brothers under the skin. more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
Movies are like that, too: They can choose to work us over honorably, or dishonorably. This brings us to a well-acted phony such as "My Sister's Keeper." I'm sure its emotional intentions were honorable. But the harder this assault weapon went at my tear ducts, the more duct tape I wrapped around them as a defensive measure. more |
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