To state the obvious, the 11th Annual European Film Festival, which opens tonight at the Siskel, is an embarrassment of riches. This year features 61 feature films, all Chicago premieres, representing 26 nations. It's a lively cross-section that spans from the heart-tugging (opening night feature Estrellita) to the unbashedly experimental (In the City of Sylvia), including documentaries (To The Limit) and docudramas (Battle for Haditha, Lagerfeld Confidential). The festival runs through April 3, and......

We were grabbing a granola bar from the Walgreens by our office this morning and came across these amazing treats. It was then we realized that we've been so caught up in the Leap Year excitement that we nearly forgot that it's time to get excited about St. Patrick's Day. While most of our non-Irish friends celebrate this time of year by getting drunk on green beer and acting like idiots, we like to......

The listed events were chosen by the editors of Chicagoist and brought to you by the 2009 Toyota Corolla. Music During the day, she's the Chicago correspondent for the Nikkei stock exchange's newpaper. After hours, Yoko Noge is one of the more adventurous musicians in the city, with an innate grasp of the blues that many folks born and raised in this city would kill to have. Singing both in English and Japanese, Noge......

It wasn't so terribly long ago that in order to watch any sort of semi-obscure Japanese cinema you'd have to be prepared to invest in a region-free DVD player and sit through discs with dubious subtitles (when they were subtitled at all). Even a filmmaker like Kurosawa wasn't immune. Luckily for cinephiles the situation has really changed, and access to Asian cinema in general is better than ever. If only our access to Hyde......

--The Midwest Independent Film Festival starts a new season on Tuesday with the world premiere of Osso Bucco, which was produced in Chicago. The comedy revolves around disparate types stuck in an Italian restaurant during a massive snowstorm. Doesn't sound like such a terrible situation. The movie stars Illeana Douglas, who we've had a sort of crush on ever since Grace of My Heart. Several other cast members as well as the filmmakers will......

Movie attendance is down 10% this year. Bad word of mouth when it comes to this year's mainstream releases perhaps? Moviemaking competitions are a great way to put our money where our mouths are, and here are some worth shooting for: -- In surely the first competition of its kind (outside of some obscure William Gibson story maybe), this January filmmakers will converge in Second Life for the 48 Hour Film Project. It's an abstract......

Interview: The Movie Queens...

The Reeling Film Festival is in its last days, but there's still time to catch what's sure to be one of the most fascinating movies in the program. Quearborn & Perversion, a new documentary by Columbia College alum Ron Pajak, tells stories of lesbian/gay Chicago life spanning the years 1924-1974. It's surely a beautiful irony of history: what is today the epicenter of the Viagra Triangle was, in the 50's, the epicenter of gay life;......

Let's face it: we're spoiled when it comes to movies. Not only do the best (and worst) theatrical releases play here, but we also have scads of film festivals to choose from year-round. No sooner are CIFF and the Korean Film Festival over than Reeling is upon us. Since 1981, Reeling, Chicago's gay and lesbian film festival, has been unspooling a vitally diverse cross-section of queer filmmaking. This year's schedule includes nearly 70 programs,......

We're embarrassed to admit that when it comes to Korean culture, beyond bulgoki and kimchi we sort of draw a blank. (But oh how we love bulgoki!) So it's great to know that DOC Films at U of C is on the job: this week they're hosting the Korean Film Festival, a traveling tour of contemporary and classic cinema. 1958's A Flower in Hell is described by Jonathan Rosenbaum as "potent and grim," but......

Since its restoration in 2005 the Portage Theater has become a popular destination for music, movies (it's the home base for the Silent Film Society of Chicago) and live theater. This time of year, Portage Theater management and the folks at the Six Corners Association use the theater to screen some classic scary movies. This year's line-up casts a wide net across silent film, the classic Universal monster movies, modern horror, and a little bit......

Now that the Chicago International Film Festival is over, we can finally turn our attention to some homegrown cinematic delights. Currently showing at the Siskel for a week-long run is Joe Swanberg's dramedy Hannah Takes the Stairs. A microbudgeted movie shot in Logan Square, it's been taking the festival circuit by storm and garnering write-ups in the New York Times. Despite his movie's acclaim, Swanberg himself, according to a new article in the Reader, is......

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......

This is part of Chicagoist's continuing coverage of the Chicago International Film Festival. A plot summary of Ermanno Olmi's One Hundred Nails doesn't really capture its charm. It's a simple parable about a young philosophy professor who becomes so disillusioned that he snaps. After committing a particularly poetic act of vandalism (which we won't spoil for you), he flees to the countryside, where he appropriates an abandoned hut on the edge of the Po River......

This is part of Chicagoist's continuing coverage of the Chicago International Film Festival. We had high hopes for Bela Tarr's new opus The Man from London. He's something of a rising star on the film festival circuit, thanks to his long, intricately choreographed takes, usually 8-10 minutes of the camera slowly gliding around a space, taking in details. A Tarr film is akin to a waltzing glacier. But that masterful technique fails him in his......

This is part of Chicagoist's continuing coverage of the Chicago International Film Festival. Filmmaker Brett Morgan introduced last night's screening by clarifying that his movie Chicago 10 is not a sequel to Chicago the musical. He was joking, but we could all use a little refresher on the events of August 1968, when riots turned the Loop and Lincoln Park into battle zones between the police and protesters. The chronology of the whole nightmarish week......

This is part of Chicagoist's continuing coverage of the Chicago International Film Festival. If you like comedy that's drier than a Churchill martini then You, the Living needs to be on your CIFF list. A hilarious, frequently surreal series of deadpan tableaux that may or may not take place in the afterlife is the even better follow-up to director Roy Andersson's acclaimed debut, Songs from the Second Floor. Picture Salvador Dali running amok in an......

This is part of Chicagoist's continuing coverage of the Chicago International Film Festival. Today is too hot and too humid to hang around the house. Instead, head over to the Landmark Century to catch the final screening of an amazing film from Argentina called The Aerial. We were late catching this one yesterday, but boy, we're glad we did. Picture a film from the late silent era codirected by Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton and Georges......

This is part of Chicagoist's continuing coverage of the Chicago International Film Festival. A major letdown from the director of Young Adam, this movie from Scotland centers around an odd young man named Hallam Foe (played by Jamie Bell from Billy Elliot), who's obsessed with two things: his dead mother and spying on people. When he's driven away from the family home in the Highlands, he heads to Edinburgh, where he promptly meets a young......

This is part of Chicagoist's continuing coverage of the Chicago International Film Festival. Rule #1: Dead Rock Stars do not make for happy stories, especially when the DRS in question is Ian Curtis, lead singer for Joy Division who committed suicide at the tender age of 23. The last half hour of Anton Corbijn's new biopic Control is especially hard to watch, knowing what's coming, but this movie does justice to both Curtis and the......

This is part of Chicagoist's continuing coverage of the Chicago International Film Festival. A sobering statistic from Chicago filmmaker Darryl Robert's new documentary America the Beautiful: Although the U.S. makes up only 5% of the world's population, its residents are exposed to 40% of its advertising. Roberts argues that one major effect of that hypersaturation is an obsession with a certain kind of "perfect beauty," an unrealistic ideal that leaves many women feeling unhappy with......

The Chicago International Film Festival begins on Thursday with The Kite Runner, a movie you'll be hearing a lot more about after the Oscar noms are announced. That's why we won't be seeing it. You see, we've got a strategy, and after many agonizing days we've got our "to-see" list all drawn up. The Kite Runner will be opening far and wide in November anyhow, so we'll wait. To us, the festival is a chance......

If you were at last night's Estrojam (warning: makes noise) opening-night Panty Party at Funky Buddha, it's likely you're familiar with the festival. You're also probably a) hungover from all the $1 beers and mango vodka shots, and b) searching for your face on Last Night's Party, hoping for a new MySpace photo. The five-year-old, woman-centric music and culture festival continues all over the city this week with a bevy of concerts, films, workshops and......

A few days ago we unwittingly created a monster when we expressed our frustration about having to wait to see the schedule for this year's Chicago International Film Festival, which runs October 4-17. Well, we finally have a copy of said schedule in our hot little hands. What follows is a very brief, cursory summary of what you can expect this year (the full schedule will be online within the next few days). Regardless of......

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.......

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......

- 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......

A: Damn well worth seeing! At the Cannes Film Festival in 1959, Roberto Rossellini (father of Isabella) presented his new film India Matri Bhumi (India, Motherland). Jean-Luc Godard, still just a film critic, wrote, "[Rossellini] has already gone on from the point which others may perhaps reach in twenty years. India is the creation of a world." But not long afterwards, the film faded from public view and has rarely been seen since. Why? Perhaps......

Would Hollywood make a movie about a swingin' 70's housewife, complete with musical numbers? Or a documentary about New York City's Union Square in the days immediately following 9/11? Would Hollywood make a movie about Thax? These are rhetorical questions; we're not saying that Hollywood is all bad, we're just saying that there are all kinds of movies out there. And dozens of the kind that you'd never see coming from Tinseltown will be......

So in 2000 a dude gets hit by a New York City Bus (Bear with us; the story has roots in New York, and eventually makes its way to our city) and decides he’s going to make something positive out of the experience. What does Brendt Barbur do? He creates a Bicycle Film Festival (BFF), featuring films celebrating the bike. And all forms of bikes: Tall-Bike Jousting, Track Bikes, BMX, Alleycats, Critical Mass, Bike Polo,......