It's only Tuesday, but if you're like us you're already dreaming of Friday. We need some vintage cinematic escapism this weekend, and we're having difficulty whittling it down to one from three very good options. Here are three diversionary movies that also happen to be "sequels" though, curiously, none had earlier installments. more ›

Tetro, featuring Francis Ford Coppola's first completely original screenplay since 1974's Oscar-winning The Conversation, has to shoulder an awfully heavy burden. But for the first two-thirds anyway, it carries itself impeccably. more ›

If you haven't yet seen a performance at Millennium Park's Harris Theater, you're missing out. It's a sleek space that has outstanding acoustics, and not only are the seats comfy but there's pretty much not a bad seat in the house. An upcoming concert of recent film music makes a great reason to give the Harris a try. more ›

Chicagoist enjoyed the surfing movie Blue Crush as far as it went: great camera work, cute girls in bikinis, tolerable clichés. But lines like “You were working it like a rib without the sauce” didn’t exactly smack of reality. So we were kind of excited that Chicago Filmmakers (5243 N. Clark) was screening Heart of the Sea: Kapolioka’ehukai (although we were less than thrilled about the prospect of spelling it correctly for this post) as part of their Dyke Delicious series that starts this Saturday. more ›

This Friday at the Music Box marks the long awaited (by Chicagoist, anyway) rerelease of Jacques Tati's classic Playtime (and, for better or worse, influence on Steven Spielberg's The Terminal). Like Francis Ford Coppola with his similarly neglected One From The Heart, Tati went all crazy Orson Welles on this one, demanding that an entire city be constructed on a soundstage. And again like Coppola, constructing that city on a back-lot effectively bankrupted him. But what a way to go out! more ›

Acting legend Marlon Brando, known for being as much of a character offscreen as on it, died yesterday at age 80. Over his long, storied career � which helped define modern American movie acting � he worked with some of film's best directors (Elia Kazan, Bernardo Bertulucci, Francis Ford Coppola) in some of their best works (On the Waterfront, The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris). One of the sexiest men to ever wear a wifebeater � Chicagoist says this with the utmost security in our heterosexuality � he was raised in our own great state of Illinois (first Evanston, then Libertyville). From the land of Lincoln, he went on to a Minnesota military academy (from which he was expelled) and moved off to New York at study at the Actor's Studio, an institution he helped make famous. more ›