In 1962 when it was announced that Tippi Hedren would be playing the lead in The Birds, Alfred Hitchcock's followup to Psycho, the general reaction was, "Who's that?" A hitherto unknown blonde model, Hedren was launched into stardom almost overnight after Hitchcock happened to see one of her television commercials and cast her in the film. And just as the director intended, she burns like a cool fire at the center of the movie. Even as the bird attacks grow more vicious, she maintains her coiffed, finely calibrated elegance. Until the climax, that is, a harrowing sequence in an attic room that, in our view, tops even Hitchcock's notorious shower scene as a pure tour de force of film editing. more ›

There are moments in Don Hertzfeldt's trilogy of animated shorts where you'll ask yourself: are stick figures supposed to make me feel this way? In the hands of a master, yes. Hertzfedlt brings the trilogy to the Music Box Theatre for a screening tomorrow night. more ›

Receiving two Academy Awards nominations last week seems to have put some wind in the sails of arguably the past year, Asghar Farhadi's A Separation: the best film out right now will be around for a few more weeks. more ›

Alien, screening Friday and Saturday, is a perfect midnight movie for the dead of winter. more ›

Let's be honest: there is a lot that can go wrong on New Year's Eve. You can be stuck at a terrible party. You can be stuck at an amazing party, but be the designated driver. You can find yourself at a party which seems so much like previous year's party that only the festive paraphernalia marked "2012" clue you in that this is déjà vu and not Groundhog Day. So we won't second guess you at all if you decide to ring in the new year watching other people endure a New Year's Eve where everything that could go wrong literally does, which is to say watching The Poseidon Adventure at the Music Box. more ›

They were a perfect couple. Intelligent, cool, sophisticated, romantic, bringing the party with them wherever they went, never taking themselves too seriously, and (almost by accident) solving crimes. The husband and wife team portrayed by Myrna Loy and William Powell in 1934's The Thin Man endures as one our favorite cinematic creations. Nick (played by Powell) is a sometime-detective who pleasantly idles away his early retirement with his wealthy firecracker of a wife, Nora (Loy). Tapping on a seemingly inexhaustible supply of cocktails and wit, the two flirt and tease their way through any situation with aplomb, watched over by their wire-haired fox terrier Asta. It cannot be denied: when we grow up, we want to be Nick and Nora Charles. more ›

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

The Music Box is the only place in the Country where audiences can enjoy this classic's in its sparkling, rejuvenated form. With a week-long run starting today and multiple showings each day, Raiders will surely make a good cinematic excursion for the holiday week. more ›

Black as midnight on a moonless night. It's how Agent Cooper likes his coffee, and how we like our crime dramas. From August 12-18, the Music box hosts Noir City: Chicago 3. 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 ›

When asked to name the single film that he would say changed his life, director John Waters is unambiguous: it's The Wizard of Oz, which he summarizes deliciously: "Girl leaves drab farm, becomes a fag hag, meets gay lions and men that don't try to molest her, and meets a witch, kills her. And unfortunately - by a surreal act of shoe fetishism - clicks her shoes together and is back to where she belongs. It has an unhappy ending." more ›

This is a bracing movie that gets under your skin. For maximum impact, you shouldn’t read anything about Meek’s Cutoff before you watch it. But this wouldn’t be much of a post if it was only one sentence long, so a few words: more ›

Events at the Music Box, CIMM Fest and Block Cinema head this roundup. more ›

Jean Paul Belmondo, in Mississippi Mermaid, tells Catherine Deneuve's character: "You're so beautiful it hurts to look at you." That isn't exactly the sort of statement one could assert to be true or not (though many have tried), but after an incredible 50 years captivating audiences onscreen we must admit that if it is, it must hurt so good. more ›

For many, many a year the classic Frank Capra film, It's a Wonderful Life, played ad nauseum across every television network until we could barely stand to even turn on the tube in the month of December. Just when we thought we couldn't take another trip down the road to Bedford Falls, it seemed as if the powers that be at major network television answered our prayers and began to show It's a Wonderful Life only once a year on Christmas Eve. Once the classic had been stripped from our retinas we began to truly appreciate the film again for the simple, yet telling morality tale that it is. more ›

Holiday movies form a sacrosanct canon. Stand between people and their It's a Wonderful Life, White Christmas or Miracle on 34th Street and you should expect to be treated as if you had just offered serve Rudolph as a plate of reindeer jerky. We love the old chestnuts, but sometimes you need to mix it up. Which is why, even if we personally can't get too fired up about their 27th annual sing-along Christmas show, we are thankful to them for putting together a nifty alternative Christmas program next week featuring a truly neglected Christmas classic: Gremlins. more ›

Olivier Assayas' Carlos was too big of a miniseries for the small screen and too long of a film for most of the big screens. Before offering the "feature-length" cut next week, the Music Box has the film showing in the Road Show Edition, meaning the entire epic in its original length and format. That's 332 minutes of one of the most-anticipated, best-reviewed films of the year on tap for one weekend only. 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 third and final film based on Steig Larsons' best-selling "Millennium" triology is premiering this weekend, and we're giving away three pairs of tickets and one copy of the book to some lucky Chicagoist readers. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is already out on DVD and The Girl Who Played with Fire is being released on DVD tomorrow. more ›

There is a duel at the heart of The Duel, Dover Koshashvili's beautiful Chekhov adaptation opening tomorrow night at the Music Box, but the "pointing the pistols at one another" part is the only one that seems to go according to plan. That's about right for this drama of near misses, self-inflicted wounds and collateral damage. If you're looking for punches that land squarely, you'll probably want to look away. more ›

Excepting only the Western, there is no more distinctly American cinematic genre of cinematic expression than what we call "film noir." Year in and year out you'll find everything from student films to Hollywood titans parading around in styles pillaged from the film noir closet of 50 years ago. more ›

"The imminent arrival of actual, calendar-based summer a little more than a week from now means that movie summer has been going on for almost two months," writes A. O. Scott. "And that means it is a perfect time to start complaining about how bad the summer movies are." For sure. more ›

Good news if you haven't been able to catch the new restoration of Fritz Lang's Metropolis: The Music Box has extended its run for another week. As Roger Ebert writes in his 4-star review: "Metropolis does what many great films do, creating a time, place and characters so striking that they become part of our arsenal of images for imagining the world. Lang filmed for nearly a year, driven by obsession, often cruel to his colleagues, a perfectionist madman, and the result is one of those films without which many others cannot be fully appreciated." So check out our earlier post and catch it while you can. more ›

One look at that trailer and, if you didn't already know it, you can see echoes of Star Wars, Blade Runner, The Fifth Element, and pretty much every other sci-fi movie (whether good or bad) that's been made in the last 75 years. Metropolis even contains the early seeds of what would become the disaster movie. It's been amazingly influential. In 2002, the "definitive" restoration of Metropolis was released, a 127-minute version compiling footage from no less than four separate prints. Historians assumed that this was the closest we'd ever get to seeing the movie as it must have looked at its 1927 premiere in Berlin. They were wrong. A few years ago, a nearly complete 16mm negative was discovered in a Buenos Aires archive (!) and after extensive cleanup work, 25 minutes of footage from this negative has been added to create the new version of Metropolis which opens Friday at the Music Box. more ›

Not like we ever need an excuse to watch North by Northwest again, but the presence of both Eva Marie Saint and Robert Osborne make our non-attendance at the Music Box's free screening on Tuesday, March 30 unthinkable. It's part of The TCM Classic Film Festival; the bulk of the festival takes place in LA (naturally) but Chicago is lucky enough to be part of the roadshow arm. more ›

Sad to say that once again this year the Chicagoist business office has refused to front us the money to attend Sundance. And we were really looking forward to mingling with Robert, Ethan, Maggie, and Ellen over a few bottles of organic champagne. Oh well. As consolation we'll head over to the Music Box. more ›

Chicago Public Radio's Sound Opinions continues its occasional film series with a screening of the "rock opera" Jesus Christ Superstar at the Music Box on December 3. Hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot will be on hand to introduce the movie. Advance tickets are $9. more ›

CIFF is over but a rich cinematic harvest has only just begun. Feast your eyes: more ›

Don't kid yourself. Anyone who says summer is the best time of year in Chicago is a rotten liar. Autumn is matchless. Especially if you're a movie watcher. From now through Thanksgiving (when Hollywood's Holiday/Oscar assault begins in earnest) an embarrassment of cinematic variety is yours for the taking. Your stamina and your wallet's size are your only limitations. more ›

We've mentioned the upcoming film adaptation of the famous childrens book Where The Wild Things Are before. Maybe it's because we're a little skeptical of how writer Dave Eggers and director Spike Jonze will transform a 40-something page book (that's not a whole lot of substance, though we love it dearly) into a 90-plus minute movie. Or maybe it's because we do love the book so much and we're also fans of both Eggers and Jonze and are anxious to see if they worked their magic on this. more ›