In 1981, Roger Ebert called “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark” an “out-of-body experience, a movie of glorious imagination and breakneck speed that grabs you in the first shot, hurtles you through a series of incredible adventures, and deposits you back in reality… breathless, dizzy, wrung-out, and with a silly grin on

Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” was the big film for the Chicago Film Critics Association this year, leading their nominations with 9 this year, including Best Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, and Original Screenplay. The film, which was also named the best of 2024 by the critics of this site, many of whom are in the

Director RaMell Ross, and his spectacular leads in Brandon Wilson, Ethan Herisse, and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor sat down with us in Telluride months ago to discuss “Nickel Boys,” their adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, opening this month in theaters. They broke down the film’s challenging subject matter, richly steeped in the history of Black people

“Whether or not you believe in God, you don’t lie when you pray.” So says Richard Gere who plays aging documentary filmmaker Leonard Fife in director Paul Schrader’s “Oh, Canada.” Schrader’s films have never shied away from depicting how the divine has a role in the innate messiness of human experience. Still, there’s an earnestness

When we are first introduced to Helen Webb (Keira Knightley), the protagonist of Netflix’s newest spy thriller, “Black Doves,” she dons a nice dress and perfectly coiled hair that doesn’t move an inch. The wealthy wife of Defense Minister Wallace Webb (Andrew Buchan), Helen’s life has given her a big house, two children, and a

Since “Star Wars” has made its home on Disney+, the franchise has been stagnant, serving the same self-serious space-Western schlock with varying colors of lightsabers. Fortunately, Christopher Ford and Jon Watts’s “Skeleton Crew” is a refreshing departure from the recent, repetitive fare, offering an ‘80s-family-flick-style adventure. “Skeleton Crew” is set after the events of “Return

Netflix waited until Thanksgiving to drop its best original series since “Ripley” earlier this year, a very different kind of thriller featuring another magnetic performance from the incredible Colman Domingo. A cleverly modern riff on “The Fugitive,” “The Madness” is a show about a TV journalist who has been a part of our increasingly insane

I’ve never felt prouder to be a Chicagoan than when attending the 30th Black Harvest Film Festival. As Chicago’s premier Black film festival, Black Harvest serves as a homecoming for the voices and stories of Black people from the city and across the diaspora and the world. This year, I felt a profound connection to

One era’s trash is another era’s treasure. This becomes truer the deeper we get into the era of computers and automated, technology-assisted production. I’ve been thinking about this because of the existence of the nostalgia cable network MeTV Toons. It runs nothing but older animation—mainly stuff produced between the 1940s and the 1990s for movie

Mike Schur’s “A Man on the Inside” is a delightfully pleasant charmer, a comedy that’s almost calming as it drops into a tumultuous world. The co-creator of “Parks and Recreation” and “The Good Place” is not only one of the best writers in the history of the form (he also had his hand in “Hacks,”