Pity the careless moviegoer who sees "Santa" on the Portage Theater marquee this Saturday and somehow finds his or herself in the aisles as the the first images of Santa Sangre flash onto the screen. Awakenings probably do not come much ruder. more ›

From high-profile releases to film sales to schlock, we've got you covered. more ›

It surprised us to learn that only two years after Richard Warren Sears moved to Chicago and joined forces with Alvah C. Roebuck, their catalog featured fine art. Perhaps the oil paintings for sale in that 1895 catalog weren't what the Sears Catalog ended up being known for (we still remember it primarily as a compendium of fantasies about what Santa might, in our wildest dreams, bring us). The point is that it would not have been surprising when, in 1962, Sears asked someone to curate and acquire a 2,700-piece art collection to be merchandised nationwide, with costs as low as $5 down and $5 per month. It does seem surprising, to many of us today, who they chose to head it up: Vincent Price. more ›

When it comes to scary movies, we relish the movie scenes that still make us jump or that we remember watching through our fingers. Here are some movie scenes that we will always love. more ›

Tomorrow night's Terror in the Aisles was on our calendar already, but is now a must-see with the addition of An American Werewolf In London and an appearance by its star, David Naughton. more ›

$5 gets you into the midnight screening as well as a pre-movie lecture, a selection of grindhouse and cult movie trailers, a post-screening discussion, and a packet of information about that evening's film. more ›

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 ›

As we can personally attest after escaping there on a 99 degree day last week, the air conditioning at the Portage Theater works just fine. It's also one of the few places where one can enjoy a cold beer while watching a flick. And if you need a third reason to find sanctuary from the heat within the beautiful old theater, an evening of chills should put you over the top, as the eighth incarnation of Terror in the Aisles returns on August 6, bringing a little something for everyone. more ›

Film geeks' weakness for any movie which toys knowingly with its genre is well known. If it's "revisionist," we're probably going to try and convince you to see it. If one set of generic conventions gets mangled up with the those of another, we'll fall all over ourselves to map the mash-up. And if we learn to interpret the world fundamentally through the codes of genre, we end up... becoming Quentin Tarantino. more ›

We're among the happiest people to learn that CIMMFest and former Bank of America Cinema programmer Michael Phillips has a new monthly program called Shock Theater at the Wicker Park Arts Center. more ›

For film buffs, March does indeed come in like a lion, as a month of European films gets underway tonight at the Gene Siskel Film Center with the 14th annual EU Film Festival. 64 films from 24 European Union nations will offer quite a menu of cinematic delicacies. Things get underway tonight as the Academy Award contender Bibliothèque Pascal. We're looking forward to Álex de la Iglesia's festival favorite The Last Circus, Michael Winterbottom's Steve Coogan vehicle The Trip, films from Manuel de Oliveira, Catherine Breillat and plenty of others. For an appetizer, we took a peek at a Belgian giallo-homage, Amer. more ›

Peeping Tom as a film is an equal of its cinematic sibling, Hitchcock’s Psycho (released a few months later). Instead of catapulting Powell’s career, the movie scandalized critics and audiences alike and was shown sparsely until Martin Scorcese (who introduced the film at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts just last week) and a few others campaigned for its retrieval from ignominy. It is a work of ferocious and uncompromising vision that contains within it a pre-emptive commentary on the subsequent 50 years of horror movies while being as creepy as any of them. more ›

The wind is howling and the witches are running for Senate: Halloween 2010 is upon us. If your cinematic chills can't be satisfied with just renting a horror movie, such as the ones we love, then you have more than a few opportunities to get out and get scared by something on the silver screen this weekend. Here is our guide to all the scary movies in theatrical exhibition during this weekend of Haloween 2010. more ›

Movies have been on the brains of the staff here this week, whether it's been our list of favorite scary movies or Rob's enthusiastic reasons why you should check out the Chaplin retrospective at the Music Box (which, as an owner of the complete Chaplin collection on DVD, I agree with Rob completely). So what happens when a critic with the renown of Roger Ebert is asked to compile a list? more ›

For the third consecutive year, the Portage Theater gives us a treat during the final week of October and the countdown to the 31st with their "Halloween Havoc," showing two scary movies per night starting tonight through Thursday, with a four-movie marathon capping things off on Friday. They've put together a solid assortment of horror films, mixing masterpieces with lesser films that are, if not classics, then adjacent to the classics. more ›

If you or someone close to you is undead, if you are a connoisseur of all things zombie, or if you just have been wondering what to do with all these extra brains that you can't possibly eat all by yourself, Saturday is potentially a very big day for you. That's when not one but TWO celebrations of all-things-zombie will be vying for your attention. more ›

For as long as I remember, I've loved classic horror movies. I can remember (during my early grade school years) walking home in the afternoon after class was dismissed, dropping my backpack at the back door, grabbing a grape drink and hot corn chips and heading to the living room to watch the afternoon movie on Channel 7 before doing homework. Channel 7's afternoon movie was almost always a Hammer horror flick, known as much for their cleavage-baring Victorian sexuality as their shock value. Now, Christopher Lee is the definitive Dracula, but the Hammer adaptations paled compared to the classic Universal horror flicks. more ›