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

In “Rebuilding,” a Colorado cowboy sifts through the ashes of the life that once sustained him, struggling to find a way forward after wildfires take his family farm.  In U.S. theaters Nov. 14 (with a national rollout to follow) via Bleecker Street, this elegiac story of one rancher’s journey through an environmentally devastated American West

After World War II, US Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson led an effort to create judicial proceedings to try the leaders of the Nazi military and government, coordinating the effort with representatives from the other Allied forces, France, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union. The charge was “crimes against humanity.” It was unprecedented

With the fall chill in the air and the holidays on the horizon, Black Harvest Film Festival is set to return to the Gene Siskel Film Center, Nov 7-16. The festival, programmed by Jada-Amina and Nick Leffel, boasts an eclectic and vibrant array of Black stories whose diasporic origins and bold ingenuity provide cinematic warmth

The Pokemon series has been in need of serious evolution recently. 2022’s “Pokemon Legends: Arceus” switched up the traditional Pokemon RPG formula by introducing real-time combat elements, a semi-open world, and a new way of story progression. It was a breath of fresh air for the franchise that had a stagnating turn-based battle system. Whereas

At all of its previous stops—Austin, Toronto, Los Angeles, New York—the Criterion Mobile Closet has attracted throngs of cinephiles hoping to pick their favorite films and shoot their very own closet videos. Its latest appearance at the 61st Chicago International Film Festival drew similar crowds during a short October (11-13) weekend stay that also witnessed