Just when we thought the Siskel Film Center had reached its maximum level of awesome, they've pretty much blown our minds by announcing a month-long Jim Henson retrospective. It runs from November 8 through December 4. It features all the highlights you'd expect (including The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper, The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth) as well as a bunch of stuff you won't see anywhere else. "Muppet History 101" compiles early TV appearances,......

Single tickets for the 44th Chicago International Film Festival, which runs October 16-29, are now on sale. You can buy them online, by phone (312-332-FILM), or in person at several venues around town. And of course the entire festival schedule is online. Your best value is still one of the festival passes; and there are so many great movies to see this year it'd be shame to limit yourself to only one or two.......

A movie we saw at last year's Chicago International Film Festival has a return engagement at the Midwest Independent Film Festival this Tuesday, and it's got our seal of approval. Home of the Giants was one of our surprise favorites last year, partially because going in we weren't expecting much from a high school crime thriller starring Haley Joel Osment. But we were impressed: Osment plays Gar, a journalist on the school paper who......

He might have come of age in Hollywood and lived most of his life in Connecticut, but now that he's passed away people are also remembering the time Paul Newman spent in Chicago. The Color of Money, Martin Scorsese's followup to The Hustler, used various locations around town, including Chris’s Billiards at 4637 N. Milwaukee, O’Brien’s Steakhouse at 1528 N. Wells and even The Gingerman in Wrigleyville (click here for more). It gave Newman......

Undoubtedly a large percentage of Chicagoans were freakin' thrilled that The Dark Knight was substantially filmed in our fair city. But how badly do we want a repeat? The three state legislative sponsors of the Illinois filmmakers’ tax incentives bill want to make it even easier for Warner Bros. (and other production companies) to shoot movies here by offering a 30% tax credit. Currently it's at 20%; when the bill was enacted in 2003 it......

DEBATE Crew, Chicago’s “premier gay sports bar + grill” is hosting a presidential debate watch party tonight! Come for the points and counterpoints, stay for a nice beverage or two on the bar’s lovely patio … or for the crazy Frat Boy party, whichever’s more your bag. 4804 N Broadway, 8 p.m. – 9:30 p.m. MOVIES Get a sneak peek at Justine Nagan’s new film, TYPEFACE, at AV-aerie tonight. The documentary offers a pretty compelling......

The 44th edition of the Chicago International Film Festival (we're gonna be lazy and use the acronym from here on out), which runs October 16-29, might be the most ambitious yet: more than 175 films from at least 45 countries. The schedule won't be online until next week (and a printed schedule will be in the October 1 issue of the Reader), but we have the full listings in front of us. And we're excited......

This ain't the Dells. A pair of aquatic-themed films currently playing at the Landmark Century use water not only as a symbol but also as a character in their stories. Chris Smith is best known for his documentary American Movie, which traced the travails of making a low-budget horror movie in Wisconsin. His new film, The Pool takes place in Goa, India. Venkatesh is a young man who splits his time between working at a......

Gabe Klinger of Chicago Cinema Forum has the coolest friends. For tomorrow night's show at Sonotheque, guitarist Jeff Parker (of Tortoise) will perform his own score live for the very first feature-length animated film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926). The program, entitled "Magic in Cinema," also includes work by Georges Méliès, Edwin S. Porter and R. W. Paul with additional accompaniment by producer/musician Shannon Harris. There'll even be a live magic show! The doors......

Thanks to the Sun-Times for putting together this great list of ways to save on tickets to local live theater. Harris Theater’s price reduction on tickets for the upcoming ballet is mentioned, as well as the fairly well-known daily drawing for front row seats at Wicked (we won once!) but otherwise it’s a pretty thorough list – recommending both general and theater-specific tactics to help you save money. Chicagoist racked our brains to try and......

Sleep with one eye open, New York Post film critic Lou Lumenick! We're coming for you. Lumenick whapped our beloved Roger Ebert with a gigantic binder at a screening at the Toronto Film Festival. Soon after the lights went down, a source tells us, "a man in the audience started yelling, 'Don't touch me!' People looked around and shrugged. Ten minutes later, the voice yells again, 'I said don't touch me!'" Again, people shrugged off......

There are tons of things we love about the autumn, and the Chicago International Film Festival is definitely one of them. This year's edition, the 44th, runs October 16-29 and will include screenings of over 150 films. The full lineup hasn't been released yet but the festival site does offer a sneak peek. The promise of new movies from Brits Terence Davies and Mike Leigh and local fave Joe Swanberg are as exciting as......

Los Angeles, 1972: Barbi is a bored suburban housewife, frustrated that her blond stud of a husband Rick seems to care more about working at the office than spending time with her. So she reinvents herself as Viva, call girl extraordinaire, and soon finds herself in the middle of some far out adventures, pursued by a nudist hippie, a narcissistic artist, a cynical theatre director and her best friend Sheila's philandering husband. Can she find......

The GOP has altered their convention plans, scuttling what could've been a day of pomp and circumstance. But perhaps they can still get themselves in the mood by watching a flick or two ... 1. Primary Colors (1998, directed by Mike Nichols) A scathing, fly-on-the-wall view of presidential politics centering on a philandering, utterly charming Southern governor as he runs for the White House. Sound familiar? Maybe not: dirty deals, foul language, adultery and even......

Quirky workplace comedy The Promotion came and went earlier this year without getting the attention it deserved, but courtesy of First Tuesdays with the Midwest Independent Film Festival you'll get a second chance to see it on the big screen. Starring Seann William Scott and John C. Reilly as two employees jockeying for the store manager position of a supermarket, it was directed by Steve Conrad (The Pursuit of Happyness, The Weather Man) and shot......

"Cocksucker! Fuck with me and we'll see who shits on the sidewalk!" That's not dialog you'd expect to hear coming from the mouth of three-time Oscar nominee and Steppenwolf ensemble-member Joan Allen. Then again, you don't expect her to be in a movie surrounded by crazed, Mad Max-like motorists smashing into each other with their souped-up vehicles. But there she is, playing the icy warden of a maximum security prison in Death Race. Presumably she......

What more can we add to what's already been said about Showgirls, except that it meticulously catalogs every single reason why this country is so fucked up? John Waters has described it as "funny, stupid, dirty and filled with cinematic cliché; in other words, perfect … it will be great trash forever" while acclaimed filmmaker Jacques Rivette calls it "one of the great American films of the last few years ... Like every Verhoeven......

“Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.” --Martin Luther King, Jr. Coinciding with the fortieth anniversary of Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech, a new film festival aims to showcase the best independent films around the world on the themes of peace and non-violence. The Peace On Earth Film Festival, running from August 29 - 31 at the Biograph Theater, has......

Netflix halted shipments of its movies earlier this week due to "severe technical issues." They started mailing movies out again midweek, but they're moving at a snail's pace, and they have no idea when service will return to normal. The lesson behind all this? Get movies with lots of special features so you have something to watch until the next DVD in your queue finally crawls through your mail slot. [Trib]......

Beginning next Friday, Facets is hosting an unprecedented retrospective of films dealing with the roiling events of the late '60s. In fact there are so many amazing titles included in the lineup that it's a shame we have to settle for a summary. The epicenter of "40 Years After: Filming the '68 Revolution" is Chicago's 1968 Democratic National Convention, when thousands of protesters and police in riot gear clashed on Michigan Avenue. Several programs......

The Park District plays movies just about every night, so if you're big on al fresco viewing...enjoy. Tonight: Touch of EvilSee Orson Welles's noir masterpiece as he originally intended; this recut version follows instructions Welles gave in an apparently long-lost memo.Grant Park, free, starts at 8:25pm Tomorrow: West Side StorySay it loud and there's music playing; say it soft and it's almost like praying. If it's been a while since you've seen the classic, refresh......

We love bikes. We love movies. So it stands to reason that combining the two is a win-win situation. And Bike-In Cinema has done just that. Every Wednesday night though the end of the month, they'll be showing double features at dusk (9 o'clockish) via DVD projection. Just bike (or walk or CTA-it) to Reba Rar Rar's Side Yard at 1441 W. Cullerton (near Blue Island/Cullerton in Pilsen). What interesting pairings they are! This......

The Bicycle Film Festival is going on now, and this weekend includes a whole slew of documentaries, shorts, and foreign films, all about, well, you know. No Pee Wee's Big Adventure or Breaking Away, sadly. Passes for the whole fest are $27, and for specific nights $10.......

The weed movie might be the last remaining subversive genre in cinema, and Pineapple Express is one long, exceedingly good-natured "fuck you" to the establishment. It tries to be all things to all audiences: a stoner movie, a buddy picture, a gory black comedy, an action thriller and a parody of an action thriller. Remarkably, it pretty much succeeds on all counts. After accidentally witnessing a murder, stoner Seth Rogan is forced to take......

We interviewed local filmmaker Joe Swanberg recently and so we figured that was a pretty good excuse to talk to his sometime-partner-in-crime Andrew Bujalski. The two have been fountainheads of enthusiasm for the recent explosion in microbudget filmmaking. Bujalski has two features under his belt, Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation. Both are painfully hilarious (or hilariously painful) and startlingly lifelike: it's impossible to tell where the screenplays ends and improv begins. Pretentious comparisons......

Movies are really good at showing sweat, which is perhaps why there are so many great ones that take place in sweltering heat. Here are some suggestions for the sedentary sadists out there who wish to mirror the brutal temperatures outside using their TV screens. 1. Touch of Evil (1958, directed by Orson Welles) A bomb goes off in a Mexican border town, and sanctimonious narc Charlton Heston decides he doesn't like it. But first......

Distinguished English author Christopher Isherwood, best known for his book Berlin Stories, basis of the musical Cabaret, met teenaged Don Bachardy on a Malibu beach in 1953. Despite a thirty-year age difference (Isherwood was already in his his late forties) the two fell in love and carried on a relationship for over thirty years, ending when Isherwood died of cancer in 1986. That they lived openly as a couple at a time when unmarried......

Weigel Broadcasting, the local company behind The U, MeTV and MeToo, has announced that this fall it'll be partnering with MGM to produce a new, nationwide digital TV channel to be called This TV. When stations go all-digital in February, there will be many broadcasters that won't be able to fill the new subchannels, due to lack of funds and/or programming. This TV aims to fill the gap, available for lease to broadcasters who......

We'll go out on a limb and declare that the best sound system in Chicago is on the lawn at the Pritzker Pavillion in Millennium Park. You can be all the way in back and it still sounds as if you're sitting in the middle of the Grant Park Orchestra. So what's even better than that? Pairing it with a movie. Next Wednesday the Orchestra will perform special guest Nitin Sawhney's original score alongside......

Roger Ebert announced today that he too is leaving Ebert & Roeper, which means that poor ampersandy bastard has to run the show all by himself; Richard Roeper already announced his departure. In a statement he released today, Ebert writes "The [thumbs] trademark still belongs to me and Marlene Iglitzen, Gene [Siskel]'s widow, and the thumbs will return. We are discussing possibilities, and plan to continue the show's tradition."......