Movies are really good at showing sweat, which is perhaps why there are so many great ones that take place in sweltering heat. Here are some suggestions for the sedentary sadists out there who wish to mirror the brutal temperatures outside using their TV screens. 1. Touch of Evil (1958, directed by Orson Welles) A bomb goes off in a Mexican border town, and sanctimonious narc Charlton Heston decides he doesn't like it. But first......

Hitchcock got the ball rolling. Orson Welles experimented with it too. But it wasn't until Russian Ark (and the advent of digital video, with its high-capacity recording capability) that an audacious technical challenge was satisfyingly fulfilled: shoot an entire feature-length film in a single take. Aleksandr Sokurov's surreal voyage through St. Petersburg's Hermitage showed exactly what the form is capable of and received nearly universal critical plaudits. Now writer/director Aram Rappaport plans to try......

- 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......

If variety is the spice of life, then fans of online food writing just entered their own little spice house. It may seem as though these new entries are playing catch-up with the well-established, familiar bastions of food porn, but they do have different things to offer and influence established food coverage in Chicago. Gapers Block just launched their food blog, Drive-Thru. If you're familiar with the GB style, you know what to expect. You......

"... when people ask me today where I live, I am often tempted to say instead of Chicago, I live on the Internet." That quote is from a new interview with Jonathan Rosenbaum that we came across at one of our very favorite film/TV blogs, The House Next Door. There are two giants of film criticism in Chicago, and we're talking of course about Roger Ebert and Jonathan Rosenbaum. Ebert has the TV show and......

A few Chicago theaters are on vacation but this summer’s slowdown is much subtler than past years. The Reader lists over a dozen shows opening this weekend and, between now and autumn, more than a dozen local outdoor productions may indulge our insatiable need to slather on the SPF65, don our big floppy hat, and watch actors sweat in the great outdoors. Performing Shakespeare in the park remains a rite of passage for thousands of......

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.......