Results tagged “internationalfilmfestival”

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...

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.

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.

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.

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...

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...

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?

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,...

Here's a trivia question for you: what is North America's oldest competitive international film festival? Answer: the Chicago International Film Festival, which has been going strong for 43 years. A lot has changed since 1964 (well OK, there's still a Daley in the mayor's office). For a great peek at the past there's nothing better than the photographs of Gary Stochl. But, we digress. Much of the credit for CIFF's longevity must go to Michael...

Filmmaker Brian Jun

We love our hometown film organizations. Places like the Siskel, Facets and Chicago Filmmakers help insure that the local film scene stays vibrant and relevant. We have always been very proud of Reeling, the Chicago Lesbian & Gay International Film Festival, which just wrapped its 25th incarnation on Sunday. That’s why the news that the offices of Reeling were burglarized Sunday evening particularly pisses us off. According to Brenda Webb at Reeling, “the thief also...

We knocked ourself out at the Chicago International Film Festival and RESFEST|10, and we see no reason to end our film-addicted ways. So already we've been perusing the schedule for Reeling, the 25th Chicago Gay & Lesbian Film Festival. It's the second-oldest festival of its kind in North America, and when they say they're proud of the diversity of their offferings you know they aren't kidding -- we spied romantic comedies, avant-garde shorts, provactive dramas...

"... when people ask me today where I live, I am often tempted to say instead of Chicago, I live on the Internet."

In Chicago, summer film viewing usually means … whatever’s air-conditioned. The Outdoor Film Festival is a notable exception, but generally speaking, summertime is an annual famine where interesting film choices are few and far between. But autumn is a horse of a different color. Suddenly (due in part to the Oscar race) it's time to bulk up. No sooner does the Chicago International Film Festival draw to a close (winners were announced this week) than...

The last time we saw James McAvoy, he was Mr. Tumnus in . There was something about that half-human, half-goat thing (combined with his angelic curls and baby blue eyes) that gave us some not-very-rated-PG thoughts. Thus we are thrilled to see Mr. McAvoy return to the screen in Starter for Ten, a comedy from the UK showing as part of the Chicago International Film Festival.

After debuting to controversy and yawns at the Toronto International Film Festival, the pseudo-documentary Death of a President, featuring the faked assassination of President Bush, is rapidly turning into a marketing agency’s wet dream. Newmarket Films is striking while the iron is hot and attempting to get the film into theaters while people are still talking about how CONTROVERSIAL it is, in hopes that those voices will scream louder than the ones who say it’s...

This weekend we had the chance to check out a new film from Thailand that’s screening as part of the Chicago International Film Festival, Syndromes and a Century directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. It’s been garnering an awful lot of attention (Mr. Weerasethakul’s film Tropical Malady won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2004), and luckily we find ourselves in agreement that this is indeed a special film.

You'll have to forgive us if it seems like we've got a one-track mind when it comes to film lately: CIFF is one of our absolutely favorite things about Chicago, and every year brings the thrill that comes from attempting to see as many movies as possible in its two weeks. The Opening Night feature at the Chicago Theater last night was Stranger Than Fiction, directed by Marc Forster (Monster's Ball) and starring Will Ferrell,...

October is almost upon us, which means it’s time for cool weather, trick-or-treating and more film festivals than you can shake a sprocket at. The Chicago International Film Festival begins next week with the Humanities, Reeling and Music Box Masascre fests soon to follow. This weekend is the appetizer to that full-course meal as the Chicago International REEL Shorts Festival begins tonight and runs through Sunday. The schedule is impossible to find through their main...

We've finally had a chance to sift through all the films in the preview of the Chicago International Film Festival, and it's got us drooling with film-geek joy. Each October we get a chance to sit in the dark and nurture our anti-social tendencies ... that is, until the lights come up and we begin to argue amongst ourselves about what we've just seen. Yes, it's two weeks of wall-to-wall film. So how to decide...

Even though we are way way past school age, we still get a little melancholy at the close of summer. Fortunately, our friends across the -ist network know that the shenanigans don't need to end just because the big yellow buses are back on the roads. So, grab your sunscreen and your favorite hangover cure, as we take a tour of end of summer fun from -ist cities all over the damn place. SFist Tourist...

If it weren't for our life as an -ist, we're not sure we'd ever leave our apartment. Fortunately, to fully -ist, one must seek out the new, the fresh, and the unknown. Brand new, or just new to us, that's what we're all about this week.