Chicago is young. Compared with the large cities of Africa, Asia, and Europe—hell, compared with the Native American metropolis that occupied the Cahokia Mounds—Chicago is a mere toddler of 189 […]
Writer/director Lena Dunham burst onto the independent film scene in 2010 with her feature film debut Tiny Furniture, a film that evoked an entire generation’s sense of stasis, an inability to […]
Did you ever have a friend who took one semester of Intro to Psychology and immediately started analyzing themselves and your lives like they wrote the damn textbook? So, that’s […]
After hoisting herself up as the new queen of angsty acting (with such films as Christine and The Night House) and equally impressive writing/directing (last year’s Sundance offering Passing) Rebecca Hall returns to hold […]
In her previous documentary, The Seer and the Unseen, director Sara Dosa adopted an almost magical-realism-like approach to telling the real-life story of an Icelandic woman who spoke on behalf […]
By guest author Aviv Hart Attempting to categorize British rock band IDLES into a genre is an exercise in semantics. Punk rock? Post-punk? No-wave? Noise rock? Take your pick, it […]
In his story collection Don’t Make Me Do Something We’ll Both Regret, Chicagoan Tim Jones-Yelvington zestfully recasts gay men and boys in the central roles of a surprisingly wide array […]
When I visited the Newberry Library Book Fair on Friday, I knew I had to come up with a strategy. It’s a locally famous sale, featuring tens of thousands of […]
In a week filled with oddities at the movie theater, few are stranger in my mind than the feature debut from writer/director Anna Gutto, Paradise Highway, which features two Academy […]
Brace yourself. We’re on the verge of being bombarded with higher-profile feature films about the perils of being a 20-something, raised on social media, with a skewed/warped definition of what […]
Although B.J. Novak is best known for playing Ryan Howard on “The Office” for eight seasons, he’s also been racking up TV writing and directing credits for a great deal […]
On certain rare occasions when a filmmaker adapts a book or play and essentially films everything in that source material, people will say that the director simply “shot the book/play.” […]
