Chicagoist was chatting it up with the clerk in our local video store last Saturday (Netflix is fine if you’re a movie junkie but sometimes you need a certain kind of fix RIGHT NOW) when a customer walked in and said he wanted a story that was similar to The Terminal. We tried to recommend Before Sunrise—Richard Linklater’s dictionary definition of a sleeper hit about two people who meet, fall in love, and talk a lot during a brief encounter on a Vienna-bound train—but after a few moments of listening to us with glazed eyes the customer turned to the clerk and said “yeah something like that only more fun.” Burn! What more could you ask for? You wanted a story of love, funny accents, and chance meetings against a backdrop of mass transit and that’s what we gave you! Go rent Wimbledon next time and see how much fun that isn’t. more ›

We're always in favor of more places to see movies, especially if those places are in close proximity to alcohol. So the news that Smartbar is now hosting a FREE Tuesday night movie night (via DVD projection) called "The Reel Deal" was welcome indeed. Bad news: you have to be 21+. Good news: they're showing two (tenuously thematically connected) classic cult films per night (plus an entire showing of the BBC's The Office on March... more ›

� You need to be watching Degrassi more ›

With all the attention surrounding Fahrenheit 9/11 and Spiderman 2 (released today and yes, we really want to see it, too) a sure-to-be-great small movie may get lost in the fold. That movie is Before Sunset, the aptly titled sequel to Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise, one of the best romantic films (or films period, really) of the last ten years. So simple and so beautiful, the original follows two people (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, neither of them better before or since) as they stroll around nighttime Vienna until having to depart the next morning. Like an American Eric Rohmer movie, it's full of smart, witty dialogue and, like a Richard Linklater movie (see: Waking Life), it's full of rambling, confused and confusing post-graduate monologues. But unlike the director's Slacker � which will be released on an incredible Criterion DVD this August � the movie isn't one big conversation spread amongst a hundred people, but one focused discussion centered around two complete characters. We watch them first get to know each other, then slowly fall in love � all just through the magic of talking. more ›