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... [continue]

"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... [continue]

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... [continue]

“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... [continue]

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... [continue]

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... [continue]

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... [continue]

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... [continue]

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... [continue]

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... [continue]

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... [continue]

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... [continue]

The Dark Knight sold a humongoton of tickets over the weekend. $155.34 million is the estimated three-day haul, beating the previous three-day record set last year by Spider-Man 3. Despite the bad economy (or perhaps because if it, if you go for dime store psychology), the multitudes descended on the multiplexes, braving sold-out screenings and power outages. You don't have to be a genius to conclude that with numbers and critical acclaim like that,... [continue]

A wee exaggeration on our part: the two stores scheduled for shuttering are not literally across the street from other stores (the Country Club Hills store is four miles from the nearest one and the other in Elmhurst is a few blocks). The Trib offers a deeper meaning: "To people who live in more fashionable ZIP codes, the loss of a Starbucks might not be viewed as a wound to civic pride. But in... [continue]

Frankly we don't know anyone who saw Speed Racer, the Wachowski Brothers' computer candy summer flick. Did anyone? The would-be Tron for a new generation has been a big hurt for the filmmakers behind The Matrix: according to boxofficemojo the movie has grossed only $43 million to date despite a production budget of $120 million. But the brothers haven't let it slow them down. REEL Chicago reports that their new project Ninja Assassin, which was... [continue]

Call us contrarians. One of summer's most delicious pleasures is to be esconced in a cool, darkened theater as we lose ourselves in a movie for a few hours. Or for more than a few hours. The Leopard, screening twice as part of the Siskel's Visconti retrospective, is 185 minutes long, and it's worth every single minute. The experience is especially overwhelming when seen on a big screen. This Italian film from 1963 adapts... [continue]

Will Smith has already said he'd play him onscreen, but first we have to get through the convention in August, an event that has its own series of rituals and traditions. One of the most high-profile of these is the biographical promo, a short film designed to introduce the nominee. Past efforts have invloved the likes of Harry Thomason (for Bill Clinton) and James Moll and Steven Spielberg (for John Kerry). Al Gore's 2000... [continue]

It's sad moment for fans of Twin Peaks and Stargate SG-1. We've just learned that character actor Don Davis passed away on June 29. The cause of death was a massive heart attack. Davis appeared in dozens of movies and TV shows over years (including The X-Files), but we'll remember him best as buttoned-down, extraterrestrial-hunting Major Briggs on Twin Peaks. He had one of the best lines of dialog in the whole series, delivered... [continue]

The Movie Queens (AKA Windy City Times film critic Richard Knight Jr. and local theater genius David Kodeski) delighted us when we interviewed them late last year, with Richard slamming the Robin Williams stinker License to Wed as the worst film of the year and David going ga-ga over such disparate movies as Coffin Joe and The Driver's Seat. So we're extra delighted that they've just launched a new podcast. It's available for download... [continue]

There are some movies so bad, they're good. You know the ones we're talking about. Showgirls immediately comes to mind; and among recent releases The Happening probably qualifies too. For seven years now, every summer the Neo-Futurists (and their imvited guests) have staged screenplay readings of some of the tackiest, cheesiest, most outdated and just plain terrible movies ever made. It's a brilliant concept that turns subtext into text, and dry line readings into... [continue]