In November, the time change hits hard, not just in places that observe Daylight Saving Time. The darkness seems to creep in earlier and earlier every day, everywhere, as we barrel towards the end of the year. The city of Tallinn, Estonia, embraces this darkness as a virtue. Each year in November, they host the

In the fall of 1981, Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel fell in love with two men named Andre and Wally, and they told the world about it, thereby saving a tiny, eccentric, beguiling movie from a fast fade into commercial oblivion. I went to that movie, as did a few hundred thousand or more other

Earlier this year, I had the chance to sit in Chicago’s venerable Music Box Theatre and watch a 25th anniversary screening of “In the Mood for Love,” the masterful and visually ravishing exploration of romantic yearning from Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai that became an instant classic from the moment it first screened in 2000.

Nathan Johnson composed the score for Rian Johnson’s three “Knives Out” mysteries, but with each one, they start from scratch. While the character of master detective Benoit Blanc, played by Daniel Craig, has to solve a murder mystery with a colorful range of interconnected suspects in all three movies, each is a distinct genre, and

Between the ages of 3 and 5, I fell in love with the movies after seeing my very first one, learned how to read and write, and discovered there was actually a job out there that combined all of those things into one: A film critic. From that point on, I knew what I wanted

My eighth-grade teacher’s name was Mrs. Hughes. She always told us not to be a bump on a log if she saw that we weren’t using our energy to its full potential. I thought she’d coined the phrase until we read S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders as a class. It’s right there on the fourth

Before I was a friend and colleague, I was a fan. In my early and mid-teens in the 1970s, I was a loner jock/pop culture nerd who was obsessed with these pursuits: Playing and watching baseball and football and to a lesser extent basketball, and consuming issues of Sports Illustrated and Sport and Baseball Digest,

A profoundly moving portrait of a family reckoning with the painful memories embedded deep within the walls of their ancestral home, Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value” finds the filmmaker reflecting once more on the existential themes—of time, love, identity, and history—that have abounded throughout his career. The film reunites Trier with Renate Reinsve, a Norwegian actress

We are proud to be a part of a network of sites that has awarded Julia Loktev’s stunning “My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow” with the 2025 IFSN Advocate Award. Other films cited as essential ones of 2025 include “Cutting Through Rocks,” “Familiar Touch,” “The Perfect Neighbor,” “Put Your Soul on

November 1975. This is the month when “Opening Soon at a Theater Near You” premiered on PBS in Chicago. It featured the city’s two most prominent film critics, Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune and Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, who appeared ill at ease during their first pairing on camera. Perhaps the coolness with which they