Sometimes with documentaries, you just let an incredible story unfold and don’t worry too much about the bells and whistles that surround it. Or in the case of Armstrong, a […]

Awkwafina (née Nora Lum) made a splash last year as the boisterous, straight-talking sidekick to Constance Wu’s Rachel, visiting Singapore to meet her fiancé’s family. Her performance as a say-anything, […]

Jesse Eisenberg has made a name for himself playing tightly wound, neurotic types, from future media moguls (as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network) to unsuspecting zombie fighters (as Columbus in Zombieland […]

If you look at the new Disney photo-realistic (but still very much animated) remake of The Lion King from a purely technical standpoint, what it accomplishes is above and beyond […]

A threat of severe storms dissipated the evening of July 10. Yet a cinematic tornado blew through the Jay Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park… and the band played on. The […]

As a Chicago native, I have a vague memory of the heatwave of 1995, a days-long invisible natural disaster that ultimately took the lives of hundreds of Chicagoans who didn’t […]

I never get tired of learning about the strange and wonderful pockets of Chicago history. I also don’t hate candy. So imagine my delight at watching a documentary that combines […]

It’s surely a good sign if, when a film ends, your first thought as the credits roll is that you wish there were more. Such is the case with what […]

It’s almost inevitable that when a documentary filmmaker puts together a story that is personal, the resulting movie will touch us more deeply. And this is certainly the case for […]

Sometimes, it just comes down to laughs. A few years back, director Michael Dowse made one of the great sports comedies of the last 10 years, Goon, and he proved […]

As is detailed in the fantastic, illuminating and inspirational new documentary Maiden, Tracy Edwards is the British sailor who captained the first all-female crew in the Whitbread Round the World […]

Except for a brief period in my pre-teens when I thought it wasn’t “cool,” I’ve always been an avid reader. I was practically raised in the library, and to this […]