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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
"Diminished Capacity" rests on the fate of a small item of great value, a Chicago Cubs baseball card - Frank "Wildfire" Schulte, 100 years old, near-mint condition. Cub-wise it's a good year to bring this story to the screen. In his feature film directorial debut, Steppenwolf Theatre Company founder Terry Kinney demonstrates a light, sure touch with actors, who include Matthew Broderick, Alan Alda and Virginia Madsen, plus several of Kinney's Steppenwolf colleagues, among them Jeff Perry (as a newspaper editor) and Lois Smith (as Broderick's mother). more |
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Chicago Tribune: Tasha Robinson
In a telling clip toward the end of Alex Gibney's biopic "Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson," a young Thompson explains that his myth has outgrown him, and that he, as a real, living human being, is standing in its way. "It'd be much better if I died," he says, with no particular rancor. "Then people could take the myth and make films." more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
The idea sounds ripe: Will Smith, one of the screen's most engaging movie stars, playing a surly wino of a superhero, making a mess of Los Angeles as he comes to the occasional aid of those in need. But not even Smith's charisma can mitigate the chaos that is "Hancock." more |
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Chicago Tribune: Jessica Reaves
As someone who does not come into regular contact with girls aged 5 to 12, my personal experience with the "American Girl" phenomenon has been limited. As a sentient human being who happens to work in close proximity to a very large American Girl retail store, I am, however, well aware of the brand's peculiar hold over pre teen girls. And if the number of red shopping bags on Michigan Avenue is any indication, the devotion to the "Girls" is on par with what my generation once felt for the inhabitants of a certain Little House on the Prairie (augmented by an epic marketing budget). more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
"Finding Amanda," the alternate title of which might well have been "I Oughta Be in Rehab," is an uneasy chronicle of addiction and denial wrapped in the rhythms of Neil Simon. The writer/director is Peter Tolan, whose early work in improvisational and scripted comedy I saw in Minneapolis back in the 1980s. (A quarter-century later I still recall his "Call Me Madam"-type song imagining what "Cats" would have sounded like had the score been written by Irving Berlin.) Tolan went on to become a versatile comedy writer, a force behind "The Larry Sanders Show" and a key member of the team responsible for "Rescue Me." more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
It's the surest thing in the infinitely malleable world of animation: Get the eyes right, and you're halfway home. more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
It'll be fun, up to a point, for Chicago audiences to see "Wanted." Russian director Timur Bekmametov, who's now shooting the third in his "Night Watch" trilogy, filmed parts of his adaptation of the "Wanted" comic books on location in Wrigleyville, the Loop and other settings, and the results make our poor, beleaguered CTA trains look like they can fly like the wind. Can you imagine an action sequence involving the "L" where the train moved at its actual top speed? The stunt people would die of boredom. more |
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Chicago Tribune: Jan Stuart
Tannishtha Chatterjee is a supple screen presence with a reticent smile and big, pining eyes. That plaintive gaze gets a workout in "Brick Lane," in which she inhabits the skin of Nazneen, a Bangladeshi transplant to East London who variously yearns for her rural village, the sister she left back home and a handsome lug to rescue her from the passionless banality of her domestic life. more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
Missed it by that much. more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
If Richard Attenborough ever follows up his Charlie Chaplin biopic with a project dedicated to cross-eyed wonder Ben Turpin, whom Chaplin took with him from Chicago to California during the silent days, casting the leading role won't be hard. Ben Kinglsey's the man! more |
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