Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” (also named the best film of the year by this site today) and Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” tied the Chicago Film Critics Association record for the most nominations this morning, landing a stunning dozen a piece. And yet the CFCA, of which multiple contributors to this site are members,
“Call of Duty: Black Ops 6” was one of the more underrated games of 2025, a blockbuster experience with a genuinely engaging campaign and some of the best multiplayer map design and physics in the genre’s history. Listen, some people gave up on “Call of Duty” years ago, tired of paying $60-70 every year for
“Trees Lounge,” a movie that Roger Ebert called “the most accurate portrait of the daily saloon drinker I have ever seen” is going to open the 2025 RescueFest, a benefit for IndieCollect that starts tomorrow, December 5 at the Laemmle Monica. Star/writer/director Steve Buscemi will be there in person, and it’s just the start of
An author needs to meet a subject on its own terms to find the right tone for the story being told. For example, you expect a different sort of cultural and philosophical unpacking of the work of Ingmar Bergman than you do Michael Bay. It’s not to say one is more “important” than the other,
The 2026 Palm Springs Film Festival has announced the 169 films that make up its 2026 program, including 53 premieres. The event unfolds from January 2 to January 12, 2026, and will also include 44 International Feature film Oscar candidates, often serving as a great platform for Academy voters to catch up with that category.
It’s been twelve long years since Starz’ “Spartacus” ended on a brutal and glorious high note, and after two years since it was initially announced, the show’s first spin-off series is finally here. Unlike many prequels or sequels, “Spartacus: The House of Ashur” takes place in an alternate future where the titular character (played by
Michael Pantozzi’s “Off The Face of the Earth” opens with a reclusive photographer, Tim (Pantozzi), who struggles to find the courage to delete his social media account. Once he does that, will he truly be alone and perhaps freer? Or is he trying to take a stand against being a product that exists only to
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.