You may have already missed your chance to fork over $400 for the complete Fat Albert series at the CFA Film Sale, but there are still lots of great titles to choose from. more ›

This is part of Chicagoist's coverage of the Chicago International Film Festival. more ›

This is part of Chicagoist's coverage of the Chicago International Film Festival. more ›

This is part of Chicagoist's coverage of the Chicago International Film Festival. more ›

This is part of Chicagoist's coverage of the Chicago International Film Festival. more ›

This is part of Chicagoist's coverage of the Chicago International Film Festival. more ›

This is part of Chicagoist's coverage of the Chicago International Film Festival. more ›

This is part of Chicagoist's coverage of the Chicago International Film Festival. more ›

This is part of Chicagoist's coverage of the Chicago International Film Festival. more ›

This is part of Chicagoist's coverage of the Chicago International Film Festival. more ›

This is part of Chicagoist's coverage of the Chicago International Film Festival. more ›

The 47th Chicago International Film Festival runs October 6-20. We look at some of the highlights. more ›

It's the middle of August and we all know what that means in Illinois: Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez Day approaches. If you didn't realize it was coming up on Friday, don't feel too bad. Governor Quinn only announced the designation last week to coincide with the Chicago International Film Festival's Summer Gala, where the two will be guests of honor. The question naturally arises, how does one properly observe Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez Day? We have a few suggestions. more ›

If you the gambling type, Tuesday could be your chance to get a sneak preview of a movie before anyone else in Chicago. The catch is that you won't know what the movie will be until just before the opening credits start to roll. more ›

If there's one thing to learn from watching King's Road, Valdís Óskarsdóttir's overtly quirky ensemble comedy-drama,it's that should one be obligated to get stuck indefinitely in a remote trailer park, Iceland is the place to do it. Everybody is interesting but harmless, the landscape is beautiful, it's not even that cold, and the lighting (even inside) is at all times very flattering. more ›

Supposedly, Steve Martin once said, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” and this Palme d’Or-winner is exactly that kind of deceptively simple charmer. The harder you try to describe it, the more elusive it is. But we’ll have a go at it. more ›

Director Sergei Loznitsa's eye for detail was honed through years of documentary film-making. In his debut feature, there are moments of great beauty and startling frankness — revelatory images of stark, rural life in Russia that themselves feel like documentary. more ›

This is my fourth year covering the festival for Chicagoist, but I've been going practically every year since I moved to Chicago in 1993. I've seen some amazing films at CIFF, and the chance to gorge myself on all different kinds of films is something I always look forward to. But CIFF has problems. more ›

This is part of Chicagoist's coverage of the Chicago International Film Festival. more ›

Alf is a perfectly ordinary 12-year old kid. He loves to read comic books and hang out with his younger sister. But he’s also a bit soft-spoken, making him a perfect target for the gang of bullies at his school. Toke, his class’s “fat kid,” has it even worse though. Thanks to some inspiration found in one of his comic books (“Without an ally, I’ll stay small and weak,” says the manga’s hero) Alf teams up with Toke to combat the tormentors head-on. But Toke turns out to be a dangerously apt pupil. Needless to say, the appearance of My Good Enemy at CIFF is unusually timely. more ›

This full-blooded (and occasionally very bloody) romance is set in the year 1567, while France is being ravaged by on again, off again civil war. We witness the intrigues of the royal court through the eyes of two central figures: the Comte de Chabannes, a world-weary man of learning who has given up the sword after one too many senseless deaths, and his pupil, the Princess of the movie’s title, a headstrong girl who chafes against the arranged life planned for her by the various men in her orbit. more ›

On the northern outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, a dump truck is tipping its payload onto a football field-sized patch of uncovered trash at the edge of the world's largest landfill, the Jardim Gramacho. Before the garbage is even out of the truck, a few dozen people scurry up the sides of the still-forming pile, plucking prized recyclables from the waste with desperate, practiced quickness, flocks of vultures circling overhead and a post-apocalyptically barren man-made desert stretching all around. These are the catadores, or pickers of recyclable materials, who work among the trash and live in the nearby favelas. Waste Land follows artist Vik Muniz as he attempts to document this community of 3,000 or so pickers who extract 200 tons of recycling as they work day and night, extracting an honest living out of the things we all throw away... more ›

Yes, this is the movie that Andrew Bird scored. Contrary to listener expectations, Norman is (thankfully) not a twee wisp of psuedo-Wes Anderson whimsy. more ›

Charting the story of a black Houston high school’s award-winning soul band, this electrifying documentary will please both crate-diggers and aficionados of 70’s nostalgia. The Kashmere Stage Band was not the byproduct of a typical band class meant to fill up an hour of the schoolday for reluctant teenagers. It was, for about six or eight years during the 1970’s, an elite funk unit, complete with syncopated dance moves and a backbone so tight you could set your watch by it. So successful during its heyday that it toured Europe and Japan, the Kashmere Stage Band’s recordings were later sampled by the likes of DJ Shadow and re-issued by Stone’s Throw Records on two very successful compilations. more ›

This is part of Chicagoist's coverage of the Chicago International Film Festival. Most films on the subject of divorce eagerly present simple, straightforward reasons for the dissolution of a marriage. He works too much. She’s frigid. He can’t keep his hands off the ladies (or she can’t stay away from other guys.) The stress of childlessness is too much. And so on. But Radu Muntean, director and co-writer of Tuesday, After Christmas, knows that offering such reasons is too easy--in effect they're simply lies we tell ourselves as talismans against the uncertainties of sustaining relationships. “If only Couple A hadn’t done X, Y, or Z,” the thinking goes, “they’d still be together.” But real life isn’t like that. more ›

We've got the CIFF schedule here in our hot little hands (it's also posted on the festival website), and having had the chance to give it the once-over it's pretty clear that this year's festival offers up more surprises than usual in addition to its traditionally buzzworthy fare. more ›

Even as we anticipate this year's CIFF (and keep your eyes peeled Wednesday morning for our take on the full schedule) some of the films featured in last year's festival are now trickling in theaters and on video. One of them, Air Doll, screens through Thursday at Facets. more ›

Quit yer bellyachin' about the end of the summer. The 46th Chicago International Film Festival opens one month from today, and if the sneak preview is any indication, the lineup will be more than adequate consolation for lower temps and shorter days. (Besides, when you're in a darkened theater who needs daylight?) more ›

This Saturday, cinephiles from across the city will humbly assemble at The Museum of Science and Industry to honor a filmmaker who has toiled in underappreciation for decades. As Cinema/Chicago describes him, more ›

Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute, was awarded the Palme d'Or for his new film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. The Thai filmmaker is known by his friends as Joe, and it's hard to think of a more deserving auteur to take home such a prestigious honor. We've seen two of his previous films and they both amused and challenged us in delightful ways. After seeing Syndromes and a Century at the Chicago International Film Festival in 2006, we wrote, "It’s a languid, sensual wonder as refreshing as a long drink of ice-cold spring water." more ›