Judging by 2011's box office, it was a terrible year for movies. Just because theater chains and studios had a bad year doesn't mean you have to. Get the most out of film in 2012. more ›

Digital incarnations notwithstanding, film is a fragile, even ephemeral thing. It is commonly observed that 90 percent of all American silent films and 50 percent of American sound films made before 1950 have already been lost forever. The great majority of those that have survived continue to suffer woeful decay and neglect. The vaults of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, with a big, dedicated staff and a 220,000-title collection that makes it second in size only to the Library of Congress, are xenon arc lamp of our burgeoning enlightenment about the need to restore and preserve our cinematic heritage so it can be shared with future generations. Throughout September, treasures plucked from that vault will be available at the Gene Siskel Film Center, and we recommend you take as much of it in as you can. more ›

Though fresh from a painstaking digital face-lift, Martin Scorsese's breakthrough 1970s Masterpiece Taxi Driver is not your typical summer escapist fare. The dark antipode of feel-good Spielbergian kinderfantasie like 8mm, the film is a gorgeous yet repellent head-on confrontation with the violent and sexual energies that crash through films like Transformers stripped of the CGI sheen and sublimation of mechanized bodies to absorb the supposedly cathartic violence. Its anti-hero Travis Bickle is a very different sort of Captain America, as if Steve Rogers had been injected with the bloody muck of My Lai instead of "super soldier serum." more ›

MoviePass, the experimental $50-per-month subscription to unlimited movies in theaters which uses your phone as a ticket, goes live in a very limited beta for the San Francisco area today. Hoping that movie buffs will jump at the chance to save cash at the box office (where tickets climbed to a record $7.89 this year) and seek the convenience of bypassing the torture of waiting in a line and the "hassle" of printing your own ticket. more ›

Tonight may be the last time for you to catch a movie at Piper's Alley Theatre. more ›

We still watch movies. We may not go see them in the theater as much as we used to (today's audience of 23 million per week seems laughable compared to the 90 million the movie palaces were pulling in in the late 1940s), but there are movies everywhere. Proliferating cable channels offering something to fit your mood. Blu-Rays and affordable DVDs for sale at everywhere from grocery stores to Best Buy, for rent at amazing stores we are lucky enough to have, sent to you through through the mail by NetFlix or Greencine, or streamed online via Netflix, Hulu, Apple and Mubi. And we haven't even mentioned YouTube, Vimeo or the many other online sources for video entertainment. more ›

The focus may be on music rather than cinema for the Nightingale's observance of their third birthday this weekend, but with such a great variety of film and video-related events already under the belt of the Noble Square screening room, we think they've earned the right to have whatever kind of party they want. What they want, is apparently to rock. On Saturday night, Giant System, the music video production team that has been turning out some stunning videos for the past year, will be screening their videos of local Chicago musical acts. After a short break, Joan of Arc will perform a set as Giant System records the whole thing for their next work. more ›

The Academic community lost a titan last week, when Miriam Hansen, the Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, died after a long battle with cancer. Although she taught in the Department of English, it was the Committee on Cinema and Media Studies and the Film Studies Center, which she founded, that the beloved scholar's legacy will be most be most indelible. Hansen redrew the boundries of film scholarship and influenced a generation of students around the world. more ›

Try to make it over to the Landmark if you have some free time today; today is your last chance to catch the Hennegan brothers’ new documentary about the Kentucky Derby. The First Saturday in May follows five horses on the path to the 2006 Kentucky Derby, the year _______ won.* Much like Spellbound did in 2002, the documentary serves to show the training and utter devotion that goes into preparing for the culminating moment of the film. more ›

Filmmaker Taylor Greeson was twelve years old in 1993. That summer, three things occurred: he was ordained with the priesthood in the Mormon church, he lost his virginity to an older man and his older brother Charlie was murdered. Using montages of family photographs and pastoral footage of Montana, where he lived at the time, Greerson revisits that summer in Meadowlark. He uses a cool, seemingly-detached perspective that drains any traces of sensationalism from the events. His unflappability extends even to sequences where he interviews his brother's killer in prison. It's a horse of a different color compared to daytime TV. more ›

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Ah, the Academy Award "Shorts." Largely ignored in favor of the races focusing on acting accomplishments and what movie had the saddest/more politically controversial/historically momentous ending, the Short Subject categories often offer a hodgepodge of achievements actually more worthy of your time than most of the feature length tripe that hits theaters these days. They're also full of fun trivia: did you know Billy Zabka, a.k.a the fantastic villain Johnny Lawrence from one of our favorite films of all time, was actually nominated for an Academy Award in the Live Action Short category in 2004? And have you ever seen Don Hertzfeldt's excellent 2001 nominated animated short, "Rejected"? Wacky stuff. more ›

Several decades before the eye-popping wizardry of Koyaanisqatsi, the "City Symphony" genre, whose golden age lasted until perhaps the early 40's, was equal parts travelogue and razzle dazzle. The movies of this genre aimed to capture not only the atmosphere of the city in question but also showcase the latest in filmmaking technology. Canted camera angles, flash-cut editing and film that was sped up, slowed down, frozen, superimposed or otherwise manipulated were tools skillfully (and playfully) used to create a sense of wonderment about the modern world. more ›

The Museum of Science and Industry is raising its prices. Adult Chicago residents will now pay $12 (up from $10), adult non-Chicagoans $13 (from $11), Chicago children $8.50 ($6.25), non-Chicago children $9 ($7), Chicago seniors $11 ($8.75), and non-Chicago seniors $12 ($9.50). more ›

Courtesy of the TOC blog, we've learned that on February 27 (his 65th birthday) Jonathan Rosenbaum will retire as senior film reviewer at the Reader. Blogger Hank Sartin swears that it's not "one more sign of new Reader owners Creative Loafing trimming the budget. In fact, Rosenbaum tells us that his new bosses at Creative Loafing will be setting him up with a website of his own so that even in 'retirement' his writings on film will continue to be part of their franchise." more ›

Interview: The Movie Queens more ›

Even before we moved to Chicago we were aware of Poi Dog Pondering, thanks to a splashy ad in Rolling Stone for their album Wishing Like a Mountain and Thinking Like the Sea. Their song "Thanksgiving," from the aforementioned album, always pops into our playlist this time of year; and it was really cool to see them open for David Byrne a few years back at Navy Pier. However, their newest foray comes as something... more ›

Skidoo sounds like something we made up at 3 AM while at some party: Groucho Marx (in his last movie) plays a gangster named God, Jackie Gleason trips on acid while in jail, Carol Channing plays the most sane character in the whole thing, there's a musical number known as the Garbage Can Ballet, and every credit to the movie is sung. It's an actual movie from 1968 and it was directed by Otto... more ›

Luis Buñuel once wrote, "A film is like an involuntary imitation of a dream; as in dreams, images appear and disappear through dissolves and shadows, time and space become flexible, shrinking and expanding at will." A film is like a dream ... or a nightmare. Why do we, as viewers, sitting in the dark, voluntarily subject ourselves to disturbing images and sounds? Do the horrors of the real world help to explain the popularity... more ›

As the CIFF winds down, the Chicago International Children’s Film Festival kicks off. Over the next ten days, kid-friendly films from around the world will be shown at seven different area theaters, from Bronzeville to Lincoln Square and even Wilmette. Some showings feature a full-length film, but most are a thematically assembled collection of shorts.There will be actors on site to read the subtitles for movies directed towards those nine and under. How thoughtful is... more ›

The Chicago International Film Festival is one of the highlights of the Chicago movie calendar. Every October for the past several years, we've purchased a festival pass and taken a gamble; in addition to catching films every year that we've already heard about, we always force ourselves to see at least a few films we know nothing about. In the past that's meant such pleasant surprises as Syndromes and a Century and 10th District Court.... more ›

Recently we’ve told you a little bit about the Chicago Cinema Forum, a new group that’s trying to bring rare and underseen movies to Chicago. To honor Ingmar Bergman after his passing, they quickly put together a mini-retrospective that touched all the bases; and last weekend they presented Roberto Rossellini’s all-but-unseen masterpiece India, Motherland. What was to have been the final screening of the latter, in fact, was sold out (!) so a third show... more ›

- In case you've missed the previous screenings of local film Crime Fiction, produced by former U of C students, you've got another chance to see it this evening at this month's edition of the Midwest Independent Film Festival. That's at the Landmark Century. There'll be an afterparty just around the corner at Cousin's. - Starting this Wednesday night at 6, Jonathan Rosenbaum presents a weekly series of film screenings and lectures at the Siskel... more ›

A: Damn well worth seeing! more ›

Who was Ingmar Bergman? You probably heard the news that he died last week, at age 89, and somewhere you mostly likely read Woody Allen’s pronouncement that he was, “probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion-picture camera.” But you shouldn’t feel ashamed if you don’t really know who he is. For example, he was not the father of Ingrid Bergman (although they did make one film together, Autumn... more ›

A: A free movie every week. To us summer is about more than music festivals, street fairs and outdoor dining. It's also about enjoying wonderful cinema, either indoors in a wonderfully air-conditioned theater, or outside on a big freakin' lawn. And we'll be getting plenty of chances for both over the next several months thanks to Cinema/Chicago and the Chicago Outdoor Film Festival. Better known as the organization behind the annual Chicago International Film Festival,... more ›

In his autobiography My Last Sigh, filmmaker Luis Bunuel describes going to the movies as a child during the silent era: "In addition to the traditional piano player, each theatre in Saragossa was equipped with its explicador, or narrator, who stood next to the screen and ‘explained’ the action to the audience." The movie experience wasn't just what was on the screen, there was also a live component. As we posted last week, in his... more ›

As if the gorgeous weather wasn't enough reason to call out sick for the week, Columbia College give you another with its 11th annual Story Week: Cities of Words. Sunday kicked off the week of words with an alumni reading, and Monday's reading by Anchee Min about Maoist China was tender, raw and funny. With fifteen events over five days, you can't go to everything, but here's where Chicagoist will be: Tuesday: the Graduate Student... more ›

You know what Chicago needs? More news programs. We just can’t get enough of morning news, along with news at 4, 4:30, 5, 5:30, 6, 9 and 10 p.m. And that’s just the networks. You cable and satellite-lovers must be in headline heaven! more ›