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Movie Reviews
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Bohemian Rhapsody
Katie Walsh, Chicago Tribune
At the center of the long-gestating Queen biopic "Bohemian Rhapsody" is the kind of performance that's less acting than it is the channeling of a spirit from another realm. Rami Malek takes to the role of Queen frontman Freddie Mercury with a studious intensity, making manifest the dueling relationship between the twin poles of Mercury's personality: his confidence and his insecurity. It's the centrifuge around which the rather uneven film whirls, and Malek keeps it going with his s... (read more)
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The Hate U Give
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
It's seriously satisfying to watch a screen version of a young-adult best-seller that knows what it's doing, and gets so much right. Just as Angie Thomas' debut novel "The Hate U Give" was good enough to transcend the conventional YA parameters, director George Tillman Jr.'s fully packed film version has the stuff to pull in all sorts of audiences. You never know how these things are going to translate, or sell, or if the timing's right. I hope it is. The movie works from a screenpl... (read more)
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Crazy Rich Asians
Justin Chang, Chicago Tribune
Los Angeles Times Before it whisks you off on the sunniest, most extravagant Singaporean holiday imaginable, "Crazy Rich Asians" begins on a curiously dark and stormy night. When Eleanor Young (a mesmerizing Michelle Yeoh) arrives dripping wet at an exclusive London hotel, the snob at the front desk declines her booking and advises her to stay elsewhere ("May I suggest Chinatown?"). He's hopelessly unaware that he's dealing with one of the world's wealthiest families, or t... (read more)
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Eighth Grade
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Tender, socially reticent, selectively assertive, Kayla is a middle-school student a few days away from graduation and the rest of her life. "Everything will work out," she tells her scant audience of YouTube channel followers in the video post opening Bo Burnham's new film "Eighth Grade," if "you're just being yourself." She's hoping for the best with that one. This kid knows it's not going to be so easy. But wishing (and then posting) might just make it so. Kay... (read more)
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Won't You Be My Neighbor?
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
"Won't You Be My Neighbor?" is a depressingly good documentary about a singularly empathetic television personality. Fred Rogers (1928-2003) knew what he was up against in a culture, and an economy, built on marketable aggression. Against long odds he prevailed. Now he belongs to another time. Can his spirit of gentle reassurance possibly be revived, in any form? I wish I were more optimistic. The "bombardment" Rogers once described as commercial children's programming, de... (read more)
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The Rider
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Subtle, elemental and powerfully beautiful, writer-director Chloe Zhao's "The Rider" is the Western of the new century, and the most enveloping film experience I've had this year. Even a hack director could make something of the southwestern South Dakota landscapes near Wounded Knee, lined by the Badlands, and foregrounded by the people who live, work, ride and risk their lives there. But with this, the second feature written and directed by Beijing-born and American-educated Zhao, ... (read more)
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Game Night
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
The modest but legitimate payoffs in the new action comedy "Game Night" owe everything to the comedy and not much to the action. Most of the truly great action pictures (this isn't trying to one of them) are spiced with wit. A lot of our best comedies (and "Game Night" is not trying to be one of those, either) move like crazy and take the pursuits and evasions seriously, or at least mock-seriously, so that the audience can, too. So where does this ensemble effort, led by t... (read more)
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The 15:17 to Paris
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
An oddly misguided act of generosity, director Clint Eastwood's "The 15:17 to Paris" may be the first film from Eastwood that lacks a storytelling compass and a baseline sense of direction. The docudrama follows a screenplay by first-timer Dorothy Blyskal, taken in turn from the nonfiction account (written with Jeffrey E. Stern) by the three young Americans, friends since childhood, who thwarted a 2015 terrorist attack on an Amsterdam train bound for Paris. Their story, and Eastwood... (read more)
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Call Me by Your Name
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Set in the summer of 1983, in a land of leisurely alfresco lunches and spontaneous all-day bike rides under the northern Italian sun, the romantic idyll "Call Me by Your Name" is enough to make you move to the town of Crema, even if your rational self realizes the director Luca Guadagnino trades in a heightened, miragelike state of mythic yearning. The swoony atmosphere is familiar from his earlier films, particularly "I Am Love" (2009), in which Tilda Swinton communed wit... (read more)
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Paddington 2
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Here's hoping the forthcoming film version of "Peter Rabbit" is less awful than its trailers suggest. Reformulating Beatrix Potter as a brutish "Home Alone"/"Straw Dogs" melee, full of grim electrocutions, really does seem like a mistake. Meantime, fortunately, there's "Paddington 2." The sequel to the 2014 picture turns out to be every bit as deft, witty and, yes, moving as the first one. It's a little over-packed, narratively. But the further adventur... (read more)
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Blade Runner 2049
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
In 1982, when replicants hadn't yet become a Hollywood business model, "Blade Runner" failed to do what Warner Brothers hoped it would: make a pile of money. It succeeded, however, in acquiring the reputation of a modern science fiction classic. Director Ridley Scott's 2019-set story (based on Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?") entered our popular culture sideways, influencing two generations of filmmakers with its menacing dystopian perspective. Now ... (read more)
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mother!
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
A movie for the difficult domestic partner in all of us, "Mother!" will surely blow some people's minds while alienating a healthy share of moviegoers just for sport, the way the hit of the moment, "It," wouldn't be caught dead trying. Paramount Pictures can try to make "Mother!" look like a straight-up horror film all it likes. But at heart it's a wormy, increasingly outlandish portrait of a creative artist in torment, hard to live with when suffering from write... (read more)
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King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
"From nothing comes a king": So declares the poster for director Guy Ritchie's soccer hooligan edition of "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword." It stars Charlie Hunnam's muscle mass and, secondarily, Charlie Hunnam as the bare-knuckled, head-butting brawler and "bastard son of a prostitute," as he introduces himself at one point. He's also the rightful heir to the throne stolen by Jude Law's ruthless Vortigern, the fifth-century Alan Rickman. The way Law slouches i... (read more)
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Born in China
Katie Walsh, Chicago Tribune
"Born in China" is the latest installment in the "Disneynature" documentary series. It's "Planet Earth" aimed at younger audiences, but any nature lovers can find enjoyment here, especially in the stunning cinematography. While other installments have focused on specific species and eco-systems, "Born in China," directed by Lu Chuan, gets up close and personal with some of the unique species found in China -- pandas, snow leopards, cranes, Chiru antelop... (read more)
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The Boss Baby
Katie Walsh, Chicago Tribune
"The Boss Baby" derives its premise from the notion that when new babies show up in the household, they render parents into slavishly devoted employees with their demands and fits. Babies are like bosses, but more satirically, bosses are like babies, right? That metaphor is explored in Marla Frazee's children's book, with a boss baby outfitted in a suit, complete with buttoned bottom flap, and now that's been transported to the screen with Alec Baldwin voicing the titular boss. In t... (read more)
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T2 Trainspotting
Kenneth Turan, Chicago Tribune
Los Angeles Times Looked at logically, "T2 Trainspotting" should not work as well as it does. In fact, it shouldn't work at all. But up there on the screen, where it matters, the dark magic remains intact and logic be damned. When it was released in 1996, the original "Trainspotting" seemed the very definition of a one-shot phenomenon. Exuberant and pitiless, profane yet eloquent, flush with the ability to create laughter out of unspeakable situations, this look at the dea... (read more)
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Get Out
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
It's a point of pride with any horror film, or any thriller verging on horror: Used correctly, a perfectly innocent song suddenly sounds like the scariest bleep in the world. The opening sequence of "Get Out," one of the most bracing surprises of the new moviegoing year, finds a young man walking along a dark suburban street, looking for an address somewhere on Edgewood Lane. He is alone. A car, driver obscured by the streetlight shadows, slowly rolls up alongside him. The gently ma... (read more)
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A Dog's Purpose
Katie Walsh, Chicago Tribune
Screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky said there are two kinds of scenes in screenplays: "the Pet the Dog scene and the Kick the Dog scene." Canine love letter "A Dog's Purpose" manages to work in both. You might be surprised that this sappy, family-friendly tribute to man's best friend kills its main character within mere moments. A stray puppy is snapped up by an evil, net-wielding dog catcher, and soon he's off to that nice farm in the sky, before his rebirth. This serves as the... (read more)
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La La Land
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
How to write about "La La Land," the year's most seriously pleasurable entertainment, without making it sound like nostalgic goo? Let's give it a go. A five, six, seven, eight! This is a wonderful, imperfect but, as recently noted in this sentence's first adjective, wonderful new musical full of actual human feeling (something unlocatable in "Moulin Rouge," for example). The 31-year-old writer-director, Damien Chazelle, has made a throwback/shoutout to musicals of various ... (read more)
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Doctor Strange
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
"Doctor Strange," starring Benedict Cumberbatch as a neurosurgeon who learns to bend time, space and his workaholic, narcissistic ways, can't escape all its Marvel Universe corporate imperatives and generic third-act battles for control of the planet. If it could, it'd be like a new Olive Garden opening with some sort of crazy "no breadsticks" rule. Financially it behooves Marvel's superheroes to stick to the plan, and the plan, to borrow a line from the old musical "... (read more)
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Certain Women
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
"Certain Women" feels like a movie that just sort of ... happened. It's suffused with delicate but true magic, tying its three stories together with something akin to invisible string. This is writer-director Kelly Reichardt's sixth feature, and her third with one of the best cinematographers alive, Christopher Blauvelt. In "Meek's Cutoff" (2010), they collaborated to create a muted, unglamorous vision of mid-19th-century frontier life. In the more conventional "Night... (read more)
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Bad Moms
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
As surely as most mothers can't win, "Bad Moms" can't lose. Certainly it can't lose with moms who've endured, through gritted teeth, one too many R-rated guy comedies where the women on screen are either sidelined or humiliated or leaning down a lot, for the gratification of the male gaze. This movie represents a vacation from mean-spirited sexism like "The Hangover." Or does it? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. The "Hangover" writing team of Jon Lucas and Scott ... (read more)
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The Secret Life of Pets
Katie Walsh, Chicago Tribune
A movie about what pets do during the day is a winning premise. Of course we want to know what those adorable creatures with whom we share our lives are up to, and so "The Secret Life of Pets" is here to explore those possibilities. Turns out their days are much more dramatic and crazier than ours, with all sorts of underworld pet societies and warring animal factions. There's apparently a lot to keep secret in the lives of these pets. "The Secret Life of Pets" comes from ... (read more)
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Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Maybe I'm still recovering from the trauma of Netflixing the Adam Sandler movie "The Do-Over," but I honestly enjoyed a lot of "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping," a steadily funny mockumentary from the Lonely Island triad of Jorma Taccone (co-director, co-writer, co-star), Akiva Schaffer (same) and Andy Samberg (co-writer and star). Eleven years ago, the trio's digital short "Lazy Sunday" aired on "Saturday Night Live." It was a great moment, arriving... (read more)
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Carol
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
By now, the critical reception for director Todd Haynes' "Carol" has built a fortress of prestige around the film itself, much as the title character played by Cate Blanchett goes through her life protected by just the right clothes and makeup, a lacquered, tightly put-together look ever-so-slightly subverting the image of the quintessential wife and mother of her time and station. On the fortress wall there are signs declaring this adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel "T... (read more)
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Sicario
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
For a gripping documentary about the U.S./Mexico border, the drug trade and a hornet's nest of sociopolitical nightmares, watch Matthew Heineman's "Cartel Land." For a commercial thriller on related themes, "Sicario" will do. The first hour of this latest film from French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve is sleek, terrific pulp. The second half of "Sicario" (in Mexico, slang for "hitman") settles for more conventional bloodshed and storytelling. Such ... (read more)
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Inside Out
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Director Pete Docter's "Inside Out" springs from a single, terrific idea. What if a person's basic emotions were tiny humanoid sprites sharing a command center, a spacious variation on the one in the starship Enterprise but inside the human brain? While the idea isn't new (you may recall the late 20th-century sitcom "Herman's Head," or not), it is vastly adaptable. As the Pixar Animation folks learned a long time ago, before they coupled up with Disney: If your premise has... (read more)
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Heaven Knows What
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Mainstream audiences can only handle so much honesty in their portraits of addicts on screen. I have no doubt that the latest film from Josh and Benny Safdie, "Heaven Knows What," will not appeal to the majority of casual moviegoers. Likewise, I have no doubts regarding the film's remarkable achievement. Working on another film project, about Manhattan's diamond district, the Safdie brothers encountered a young woman they knew, instinctively, had a story to tell. Nineteen-year-old A... (read more)
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Mad Max: Fury Road
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
You remember "Happy Feet." This is George Miller's "Happy Wheels." The creator of the original "Mad Max" trilogy has whipped up a gargantuan grunge symphony of vehicular mayhem that makes "Furious 7" look like "Curious George." The full title of Miller's remake of "Mad Max" is "Mad Max: Fury Road." It stars Tom Hardy, who says very little, in the old Mel Gibson role of the post-apocalyptic road warrior. Here the character's... (read more)
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The Wrecking Crew
Kenneth Turan, Chicago Tribune
To Beach Boys guru Brian Wilson, "they were the ones with all the spirit and all the know-how." To Nancy Sinatra, they were "unsung heroes," to Herb Alpert, "an established groove machine." And to celebrated songwriter Jimmy Webb, they were simply "stone cold rock 'n' roll professionals." If the history of rock music means anything to you, you know the individuals in question could only be the Wrecking Crew, a legendary group of Los Angeles-based studio... (read more)
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Paddington
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Never judge by appearances. The poster image for "Paddington," already a hit in Britain, depicts the valiant little bear in the red hat and blue jacket careening down a flooded staircase in a bathtub, and the image (from the first of creator Michael Bond's 26 "Paddington" books) is rendered in such a way as to make the film look pushy and twee and eminently skippable. And yet the film isn't any of those things. It's witty and charming, with a considerable if sneaky emotion... (read more)
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Interstellar
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
A knockout one minute, a punch-drunk crazy film the next, "Interstellar" is a highly stimulating mess. Emotionally it's also a mess, and that's what makes it worth its 165 minutes -- minutes made possible by co-writer and director Christopher Nolan's prior global success with his brooding, increasingly nasty "Batman" films, and with the commercially viable head-trip that was "Inception." You can call "Interstellar" corny or reiterative or just plain dau... (read more)
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Dear White People
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
So many movies come out of the Sundance Film Festival, and others like it, laden with praise but oddly short on narrative invention, visual instincts and a story with something on its mind. Heartiest congratulations to "Dear White People," which is equipped with all three. It's a slyly provocative achievement and a serious calling card for its writer-director, Justin Simien. He sets his ensemble affair on the campus of the fictional Ivy League enclave Winchester University, where Af... (read more)
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The Guest
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
A pretty crafty genre pastiche until it stalls, director Adam Wingard's "The Guest" introduces its title character after he knocks on the front door of a small-town New Mexico family that recently lost their older son in the Iraq War. Door opens, a man's head is turned away from the camera ... .. And then, after a strange little two-second pause, he turns around and it's a dashing yet sinister Dan Stevens, of "Downton Abbey," here playing the role of a mysterious combat ve... (read more)
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Jersey Boys
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
"Jersey Boys" the movie is a different, more sedate animal than "Jersey Boys" the Broadway musical. Often this happens when a stage success comes to the screen, even with many of the same performers and artistic team members on board. Changes are made; ardent fans of the original are variously pleased or disappointed. And in this case, those who missed the theatrical edition of the tale of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons -- how they found their sound and wrestled with t... (read more)
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Edge of Tomorrow
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Insanely derivative, frenetically enjoyable, "Edge of Tomorrow" takes gaming to a new level of big-screen indulgence, sending Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt through the same alien-invasion scenario over and over until they learn how to win, put down the consoles and get off the couch for a little lunch and some fresh air, maybe. The film is based on a Japanese graphic novel "All You Need is Kill." It owes a tremendous amount of its structure, and appeal, to "Groundhog Day... (read more)
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Only Lovers Left Alive
Sheri Linden, Chicago Tribune
With the YA swoon of "Twilight" safely in the rearview mirror, movie vampires get their mojo back in the sensuous dreamscape of "Only Lovers Left Alive," one of the strongest films yet from Jim Jarmusch. A filmmaker with a deep affection for outsiders, Jarmusch sets his ode to the urbane undead -- and margin-dwelling artists -- in two ultra-poetic cities: Detroit, a vision of trampled grandeur on the cusp of rebirth, and worldly Tangier, its alleyways alive with the murmur... (read more)
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The Wind Rises
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Here's a beautiful apparent contradiction: a gentle, supple picture about the man who designed the Zero fighter plane. "The Wind Rises" is being marketed as the "farewell masterpiece" of Japanese writer-director Hayao Miyazaki, who brought the world "Spirited Away," "Howl's Moving Castle" and "Ponyo," as well as oversaw and contributed to "From Up on Poppy Hill" most recently. There's a fascinating push/pull in Miyazaki's latest. The... (read more)
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Her
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
A delicate, droll masterwork, writer-director Spike Jonze's "Her" sticks its neck out, all the way out, asserting that what the world needs now and evermore is love, sweet love. Preferably between humans, but you can't have everything all the time. It tells a love story about a forlorn writer, whose firm --BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com -- provides busy, digitally preoccupied customers with personalized correspondence crafted by professionals like Theodore Twombly, played by refres... (read more)
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Gravity
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
``Gravity defies itself. Sandra Bullock and George Clooney play astronauts - a newbie scientist and a veteran cowboy - who dodge space debris and the usual narrative expectations while coping with a highly compressed series of crises 372 miles above the Earth's surface. It's a nerve-wracking visual experience of unusual and paradoxical delicacy. And if your stomach can take it, it's truly something to see. Director and co-writer Alfonso Cuaron, who wrote the script with his son, Jonas, has de... (read more)
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Despicable Me 2
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Older kids and their minion guardians could do worse than "Despicable Me 2," the sequel to the 2010 smash about a supervillain turned adoptive parent. On the other hand, reports of the movie's charm have been greatly exaggerated. It's a reasonably efficient baby sitter, done up in 3-D computer-generated animation of no special distinction. But the first one's weird mixture of James Bond bombast and hyperactive pill-shaped Minions (the protagonist Gru's goggle-clad helpers) had the e... (read more)
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Django Unchained
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
In "Django Unchained," which has its moments of devilish glee in and among dubious wallows in numbing slaughter, writer-director-trash compactor Quentin Tarantino delivers a mashup of several hundred of his favorite movies, all hanging, like barnacles, onto a story of a freed slave (Jamie Foxx) and his bounty-hunter savior (Christoph Waltz) out to rescue Django's wife (Kerry Washington) from a venal plantation owner (Leonardo DiCaprio). The plantation's "house slave" (Samu... (read more)
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The Central Park Five
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
"The Central Park Five" is an unusually good documentary about an outlandish miscarriage of justice. On an April night in 1989, Trisha Meili was beaten, raped and left for dead not far from a path in Manhattan's Central Park. Five boys between the ages of 14 and 16 signed confessions regarding the attack, which was the worst of several criminal incidents unfolding in the area that night. The boys were African-American and Latino: Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymon... (read more)
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Looper
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
For about an hour, "Looper" really cooks. Its second half is more of a medium boil, and less fun. But watching it, I realized how few commercial entertainments hold up straight through to the end-point. Even a clever and idiosyncratic filmmaker such as Rian Johnson, the writer-director of "Looper," must feel the pressure (especially with Bruce Willis and a lot of bullets involved) to deliver the body-count payoffs in a way that satisfies genre expectations. Still, and in w... (read more)
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Moonrise Kingdom
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
By Tribune Newspapers Critics, Tribune Media Services Film Clips Nothing in a Wes Anderson movie is quite like life. He creates odd, gorgeous miniature universes on screen, setting his characters in italics, so that they become characters playing themselves in a pageant inspired by their own lives. The storybook quality to his films is either coy or entrancing, depending on your receptiveness to Anderson's comic spark and his sharply angled, presentational arrangements of actors against some ... (read more)
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Take This Waltz
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Five years into their marriage, the freelance Toronto writers played by Michelle Williams and Seth Rogen in "Take This Waltz" have drifted, rudderless, into a harbor that is anything but safe. They're cute together, but the act has begun to curdle: The reflexive baby talk for laughs, the weirdly hostile banter ("I love you so much I'm gonna inject your face with a curious combination of swine flu and ebola") and a troubling lack of easy intimacy all spell trouble. In write... (read more)
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Dr. Seuss' the Lorax
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
The new animated feature "The Lorax," known in its entirety as "Dr. Seuss' The Lorax" to keep it straight from "John Grisham's The Lorax," does a few smaller things right but the bigger things not quite. I've come to fear these movies. I love Seuss so much, even his second-shelf works. Who doesn't feel protective of authors and illustrators they love? And not just because we were young when we made their acquaintance. As with "Horton Hears a Who!" four ... (read more)
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The Secret World of Arrietty
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Compared to so much American animation, which seems hellbent on putting a global audience of addled kids in a paradoxical manic stupor, the work of Japan's Studio Ghibli sets its own pace, establishes its own, meticulously observed realms of the fantastic and respects a moviegoer's senses -- any moviegoer's, of any age. "The Secret World of Arrietty" is the latest import from the collective responsible for "Princess Mononoke," "Spirited Away," "Howl's Moving... (read more)
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Hugo
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Rich and stimulating even when it wanders, director Martin Scorsese's first 3-D effort, "Hugo," takes place mostly within the confines of a railway station modeled on Montparnasse. The story, developed by screenwriter John Logan from Brian Selznick's graphic novel "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," ranges beyond the station. But every locale in Scorsese's vision of 1931 Paris looks and feels like another planet. The filmmaker embraces storybook artifice as wholeheartedly as h... (read more)
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Melancholia
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
In a May 2011 interview during the Cannes Film Festival, a few days after he'd been declared persona non grata for making some criminally misjudged wisecracks about Jews, and the nascent Hitler lurking inside all of us, filmmaker Lars von Trier told me he considered his latest project, "Melancholia" -- in which an elaborate wedding party serves as prelude to the extinction of the planet -- to be "too beautiful," as well as "too easy." He may be an exasperating do... (read more)
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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
It has taken Harry Potter eight full-length films to really have it out with Lord Voldemort, the reptilian prince of darkness with the undeniable leadership qualities and a clear, can-do game plan. With an ordinary franchise, the audience -- even an audience pre-devoted to J.K. Rowling's books -- would've grown itchy long ago, renouncing its allegiance and moving on. But this is no ordinary franchise. As the 21st century has lurched, in the Muggle world, from terrorism to pervasive, political... (read more)
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Gnomeo & Juliet
Roger Moore, Chicago Tribune
"Two households, both alike in dignity / In fair Verona, where we lay our scene / From ancient grudge break to new mutiny. ..." And at about this point the gnome reciting the prologue to "Romeo and Juliet" is yanked off stage by a big Bugs Bunny hook. For this is no epic tale of woe, this romance of Juliet and her Gnomeo. Even if "the story you are about to see has been told before. A lot," you've never seen it told like this. "Gnomeo & Juliet" is a daf... (read more)
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Machete
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
I'm talkin' 'bout Machete! He's the federale who's a sex machine to all the chicks, and no friend of the racist white folk out to mess with all the murderous, blade-flashing attitude for which he stands. The character, played by the authentic tough guy and character actor Danny Trejo, was introduced in a fake trailer, part of the 2007 Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino double bill known as "Grindhouse." Now Rodriguez and Trejo have delivered the movie to go with the trailer. It's ou... (read more)
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Eat Pray Love
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
It is easy to watch "Eat Pray Love," the pretty, languid film adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert's best-selling journal of self-discovery. Sun-drenched close-ups of asparagus drizzled just so on a plate next to very good-looking bread in Rome: aaaaah. A Balinese beach, with Julia Roberts gazing out upon it: oooooh. Javier Bardem at the end of the protagonist's yearlong journey, waiting: tasty. Director and co-adapter Ryan Murphy's film will likely do the trick for a good percentage of ... (read more)
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Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
It's easy to make a movie in a style approximating that of a comic book or graphic novel. "Sin City" did it. "Road to Perdition" did it. "Watchmen" and "Kick-Ass" did it. As did "Ghost World." Except for that last one, the others fell short as movies because they mistook visual replication for authenticity. They were storyboards based on storyboards, not films. "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" is different, and not just because it's fun... (read more)
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Inception
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Sometimes the first adjective spoken in a movie speaks volumes. The first one you hear in the new thriller "Inception" is "delirious," describing the psychological state of a man, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who has washed up (or awakened) on a beach and is brought into the home of a wealthy man he has known in other circumstances, somewhere in time. "Delirious" describes the movie as well, which assuredly offers audiences sights heretofore unseen. Despite riffs... (read more)
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How to Train Your Dragon: An IMAX 3D Experience
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
The swoops and dives of the exuberant 3-D DreamWorks Animation feature "How to Train Your Dragon," in which the teenage hero breaks all the Viking rules and befriends the winged enemy, should prove as addicting to its target audience as similar scenes have in a little something called "Avatar." Freely adapted from the books by Cressida Cowell, "How to Train Your Dragon" exists to support its flying sequences, just as last year's animated DreamWorks offering, &quo... (read more)
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Diary of a Wimpy Kid
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Snot, I think, is funnier when it's animated. So is excessively moldy cheese. Also: If some kid's getting smacked around, it's likely to be less painful if you don't hear the punch or the slap; slapstick in general takes on a different, more clinical and humorless air when handled realistically, which is why "Home Alone" remains a low point in the history of hugely successful "family" comedies. So here we are with "Diary of a Wimpy Kid," "Hotel for Dogs"... (read more)
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The Wolfman
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
The new edition of the old Universal horror title "The Wolfman" constitutes a pleasant surprise, if "pleasant" can be used to describe a brooding $100 million-plus diversion with this many beheadings and eviscerations. Director Joe Johnston's reboot is devoted to the pleasures of meticulous and insinuating period re-creation (1891 Blackmoor, England, plus a side trip to London), shot in a mixture of studio interiors (at the famed Shepperton Studios) and open-air location w... (read more)
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Leap Year
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
We're told by the "Leap Year" production notes that writers Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont are "well-known as Hollywood 'script doctors.'" Yikes. Is there a doctor for the doctors in the house? Mid-January, and already there's another romantic comedy that makes you weep for the genre. Honestly. After "P.S. I Love You," "27 Dresses," "Bride Wars" and "The Ugly Truth," Beatrice and Benedick from "Much Ado About Nothing" are ... (read more)
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Fantastic Mr. Fox
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
So many careful and clever visual felicities dot the landscape of Wes Anderson's animated feature "Fantastic Mr. Fox," from the catastrophically inclined watercolors painted by Mrs. Fox to the autumn breezes ruffling various species of animals' fur just so, I'm flummoxed as to why the movie left me feeling up in the air, as opposed to over the moon. Partly, I think, it's a matter of how Anderson's sense of humor rubs up against that of the book's author, Roald Dahl. It's also a mat... (read more)
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Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: The IMAX 2D Experience
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
A small vial of "liquid luck" (lovely concept, one of many in J.K. Rowling's universe) plays a supporting role in "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," No. 6 in the franchise. (The two-film edition of " Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" will be released in 2010 and 2011, respectively.) But luck, really, has little to do with the way these films turn out. After getting my head caught in the blender that is "Transformers 2," I found it especially ... (read more)
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The Hurt Locker
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
In varying states of reality and various levels of pulp, the films of Kathryn Bigelow wrestle with what it means to be a warrior. "I hate violence," says Patrick Swayze's murdering, surfing, skydiving, bank-robbing shaman in "Point Break." It's a punch line - the film is certifiably insane, as well as gloriously kinetic - but we can relate. We decry violence, yet millions of us pay good money to revel in it vicariously. In her grim thriller "Strange Days," far ha... (read more)
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I Love You, Man
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
A minor but enjoyable entry in the boy-man comedy genre, "I Love You, Man" stars Paul Rudd as a guyless guy - a heterosexual L.A. real estate agent engaged to be married but short on straight-up male companionship in general and a best man for his wedding in particular. Rudd has worked wonders in all sorts of comedies, from "Anchorman" (no one could turn to the camera, suddenly, with more phony intensity) to "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and "Knocked Up." Th... (read more)
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Under the Sea
Michael Esposito, Chicago Tribune
Jim Carrey narrates "Under the Sea 3D," a new installment in the underwater 3-D filmmaking that IMAX pretty much owns these days. Nothing compares to the images in these films, and director Howard Hall, whose previous offerings include the IMAX hits "Deep Sea 3D" and "Into the Deep 3D," knows his way around the underwater camera - all 1,300 pounds of it - and personally tallied 358 hours of the dive team's 2,073 hours under the sea (accomplished in 1,668 total di... (read more)
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The Tale of Despereaux
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
The chipper cynicism of the "Shrek" movies ($2.2 billion in grosses worldwide) is a popular commodity indeed because so many cultures share the same fairy tale tropes and enjoy seeing them shot at with a pea shooter. The success of those films makes it doubly hard for a more earnest, emotional number such as "The Tale of Despereaux" to gain traction with a mass audience, particularly a mass audience of preteens for whom DreamWorks and Nickelodeon-fed sarcasm is the default... (read more)
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Let the Right One In
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
I'm so sick of Swedish vampire movies, aren't you? Honestly, I've had it with those bloodsucking Svenskar. If you can stomach just one more, however, "Let the Right One In" is the Swedish vampire movie to see. The film is terrific. The upcoming screen version of "Twilight" (opening Nov. 21) may be the set of fangs everyone's waiting for, at least among certain demographics, but I can't imagine anyone older than 15, who cherishes vampire lore or not, failing to fall for thi... (read more)
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Juno
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
It takes "Juno" about 15 minutes to calm down and get its joke reflex in check. Screenwriter Diablo Cody, formerly Brook Busey-Hunt of Lemont, has everyone quipping like maniacs?it's dialogue you notice, every second?and for a while you wonder if this story of a pregnant teenager's coming of age will exhaust you with cleverness. Then, stealthily, everything about the movie starts working together more purposefully. And by the end you've fallen in love with the thing. Ellen Page is k... (read more)
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Lars and the Real Girl
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
"Lars and the Real Girl" peddles a brand of whimsy - kinky on the surface, enough to make Frank Capra gag underneath - that a lot of people enjoyed this year on the film festival circuit. I know people who cried, and who find it quirky and charming and a real treasure. And I am happy for these people, though I am not with them, because I find "Lars and the Real Girl" adorable in the worst way, bailed out only by most every member of its excellent cast. Note that "most... (read more)
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Across the Universe
Jessica Reaves, Chicago Tribune
It's the oldest story in the world: Boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, girl joins radical student organization hell-bent on ending the Vietnam War, boy's passion devolves into paranoia, boy returns to work in a Liverpool shipyard. Months pass before they simultaneously arrive at a wholly unoriginal yet heartwarming conclusion: All You Need, it turns out, Is Love. We've just given away the major plot points of "Across the Universe," Julie Taymor's uncharacteristically chipp... (read more)
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Hairspray
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
As mile-high-wig musicals go, the film version of "Hairspray" is less polished but more fun than "Dreamgirls." Both are drag revues at heart, one funny, the other serious. I prefer the funny one. Whether or not "Hairspray" finds a large international audience depends on the audience's interest in seeing an international star enlarged. You have probably heard that this latest stage-to-screen musical transfer, based on the 1988 John Waters film, stars John Travolta... (read more)
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Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
He's back, and he's hacked off. The most striking aspect of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" is its contrast between the hormonally and supernaturally tormented teenager at its center and the modestly well-made and easygoing picture unfolding all around him. No. 5 in the omnipresent global franchise, "Order of the Phoenix" lies at a no-nonsense halfway point between the best of the Potter films ("Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban") and the most ... (read more)
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Red Road
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
We have to tread very carefully here. The remarkable thriller "Red Road" plants tiny slivers of expository information just so, at precise and artful junctures in its story. Much (though hardly all) of the film's effectiveness depends on narrative surprise. Those surprises shouldn't be spoiled. But writer-director Andrea Arnold's film is far more than a contraption built for conventional thrills. It's a fully realized portrait of a city, Glasgow, its high-rise projects threatened by... (read more)
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Zodiac
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
In 1978, in one of many letters to the San Francisco Chronicle, the man known as Zodiac wrote: "I am waiting for a good movie about me." A generation later, David Fincher has made it. "Zodiac" is not the serial killer tale audiences expect in this torture-friendly, cold-cased era. To be sure, Fincher has been down this road before. In 1995, the director, trained in special effects and videos and the third "Alien" movie, broke through with "Se7en," the ... (read more)
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Children of Men
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Dsytopian nightmares are so yesterday. They're a dime a dozen in the movies; earlier this year, for example, "V for Vendetta" came up with exactly 10 cents' worth of cinematic interest in exchange for your $9.50. The latest hellish forecast for our planet, however, makes up for the sluggishness of "Vendetta" in spades. It is "Children of Men," based on a P.D. James novel, and as directed - dazzlingly - by Alfonso Cuaron, it is that rare futuristic thriller: grim ... (read more)
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Marie Antoinette
Jessica Reaves, Chicago Tribune
Marie Antoinette has, in popular history, been accused of frivolity, irreverence and disdain for historical precedent. Sofia Coppola's indulgent, frothy biopic will be charged with precisely these same offenses. What more could a filmmaker ask for? Coppola's third movie, reportedly in the works for many years, has finally landed in the U.S. after a rocky premiere at Cannes, where the French media reaction was, shall we say, mixed. Wags there accused the young filmmaker of taking certain liber... (read more)
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The Devil Wears Prada
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Every third movie or so, Meryl Streep does something swell - and effortless, which isn't one of her defining qualities - to renew her membership in the Great Actress pantheon. "The Devil Wears Prada," a surprisingly sharp adaptation of the Lauren Weisberger bestseller, features Streep as Miranda Priestly, monstrously self-centered editor of the Vogue-like Runway magazine. It's an occasion for Streep to play against a stereotype, and win. It's a rout, in fact. Lowering both her voice... (read more)
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Akeelah and the Bee
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
"Akeelah and the Bee" is predictable, corny and formulaic. Maybe we'll see it listed in some future edition of Webster's under the word "precornulaic." Yet this latest triumph of the spelling-bee spirit, like last year's earnest, flawed film version of "Bee Season," features a film-saving performance where it counts most: from the kid playing the kid with big brain and even bigger heart. Keke Palmer portrays Akeelah, fictional spelling ace of Los Angeles' Crensha... (read more)
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Slither
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
It's not Ernst Lubitsch, but the space-slug/mutant-zombie fiesta called "Slither" has an actual sense of humor to go with its voluminous alien ook. Director and screenwriter James Gunn wrote the "Dawn of the Dead" remake and, less fortunately but more profitably, the two "Scooby-Doo" pictures. This one is a blood relative of "Dawn of the Dead," which in this case is a fine thing. It's deer hunting season in Wheelsy, S.C. Little do its townsfolk realize... (read more)
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She's the Man
Allison Benedikt, Chicago Tribune
Falling somewhere between that ubiquitous community theater production of "Romeo and Juliet: A Hip-Hop Love Story" and Amy Heckerling's scrumptious, ohmigod take on Jane Austen in "Clueless" is "She's the Man," a veeeeery loose adaptation of Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" featuring the refreshing comic charm of teen starlet Amanda Bynes. Bynes, a five-time Kids' Choice Award winner and current star of the WB's "What I Like About You," plays Vio... (read more)
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Brokeback Mountain
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
The Western genre?s big skies and limitless visual capacity for loneliness have enveloped nearly a century?s worth of stories, all kinds, about flinty survivors learning that a man?s gotta do what a man?s gotta do. ?Brokeback Mountain,? a good and eloquent Wyoming-set love story with a great performance at its heart, is part of that classical filmmaking tradition. It is also prime Oscar bait. Already the film has won the best picture prize from the New York and Los Angeles film critics and sn... (read more)
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Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune
Unlike Peter Pan, that other magical airborne boy of British literature and film, J.K. Rowling?s Harry Potter just keeps growing up. So do the Potter movies, in size, in ambition and in visual splendor - and with increasingly stunning results. ?Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire? is the latest film adventure for the bespectacled student sorcerer of Rowling?s amazingly well-imagined Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. And it may be the best-filmed Potter of them all - though last year... (read more)
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Red Eye
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
The trailer for Wes Craven's "Red Eye" appears to be peddling a horror film, with a demon-eyed killer at 30,000 feet - flying coach, yet, to add to the unspeakable fright - preying on that toothsome "Wedding Crashers" squeeze of Owen Wilson's. The trailer is lying. Director Craven's brisk, efficient B movie has no supernatural element of any kind, unless you count the supernatural shade of white emanating from the pearlies of its star, Rachel McAdams. Any brighter, and her... (read more)
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Howl's Moving Castle
Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune
Hayao Miyazaki's "Howl's Moving Castle" is a great animated feature - and one made, obviously, as much for older audiences as very young ones. But this wondrous movie probably shouldn't be put in age brackets at all. It's perfect for anyone with a youthful heart and a rich imagination. Though highly reminiscent of the whimsical Japanese genius' last two films, 1997's "Princess Mononoke" and 2001's "Spirited Away," it's even more densely virtuosic. This new film t... (read more)
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Constantine
Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune
Keanu Reeves is caught between heaven and hell in "Constantine," his latest epic fantasy/science-fiction thriller. But though the story is potentially fascinating and the visuals sometimes spellbinding, the movie itself is stranded in the purgatory of the second-rate. A "Matrix" it isn't - though it's obviously intended to remind us at times of Reeves' wildly nightmarish and imaginative 1999 hit. But here the source is different. Reeves plays doomed Los Angeles exorcist/sl... (read more)
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Hard Candy
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Chat-room stalkers deserve everything the law can throw at them, including enforced viewings of "Hard Candy." High-minded sleaze, the film deceives you with its first 10 minutes, which are interestingly creepy. After a brisk online meeting in one of "those" chat rooms, a fashion photographer (Patrick Wilson, lately seen in HBO's "Angels in America" as the tormented bisexual Mormon) meets up in person with a bright, misunderstood teen (Ellen Page) at an L.A. coffe... (read more)
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The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune
Wes Anderson's "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou," in which Bill Murray plays a shaggy-dog American version of oceanographer-filmmaker Jacques-Yves Cousteau, is a comedy that seems to have most everything going for it but the ability to make us laugh. Despite its cast and director, it's an amazingly unfunny movie, drowned in its own conceits, half-strangled by the tongue so obtrusively in its cheek. Anderson, the writer-director of "Rushmore" and "The Royal Tenenbau... (read more)
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The Incredibles
Robert K. Elder, Chicago Tribune
If "The Incredibles" did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them. It's amazing that this cartoon super-family wasn't created sooner, given the recent blockbuster status of both superheroes ("Spider-Man 2") and computer-animated movies ("Shrek 2," "Shark Tale"). With "The Incredibles," Pixar's first PG film, writer/director Brad Bird delivers the perfect parody of, and valentine to, the superhero genre. At its center, Mr. Incredible (vo... (read more)
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The Grudge
Robert K. Elder, Chicago Tribune
Almost all horror movies have a social agenda, or at least seek to redeem their heroes in some way. The villain in "Nightmare on Elm Street" was a child killer, "Friday the 13th" raged against teen sex, and even the "The Sixth Sense" encouraged a tortured soul to move on. "The Grudge" simply wants to make you wet your pants. Even if it doesn't, you'll still find yourself in the market for a nightlight. A master of atmosphere, Japanese director Takashi S... (read more)
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Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Mark Caro, Chicago Tribune
Just as J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" represents a step in maturity beyond the series' first two books, director Alfonso Cuaron's film version improves upon its predecessors. This third "Harry Potter" movie shakes the candy coating off of the franchise without violating its spirit. Chris Columbus, who directed the first two, is skilled at assembling the elements and moving a story along, but he doesn't leave behind ideas that haunt or images tha... (read more)
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The Notebook
Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune
"The Notebook," the movie version of Nicholas Sparks' 1996 best seller, may be corny, but it's also absorbing, sweet and powerfully acted. It's a film about falling in love and looking back on it, and it avoids many of the genre's syrupy dangers. This picture, beautifully shaped and shot, filled with fine actors doing moving work, is based on Sparks' debut novel, a "Bridges of Madison County" sort of piece that unfolds in both the past and the present. In the past, two you... (read more)
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Kill Bill: Vol. 2
Mark Caro, Chicago Tribune
"Kill Bill, Vol. 2" is the sound of a filmmaker in love with his own voice. For sure that voice is lively and distinct, which is what made "Kill Bill, Vol. 1" so watchable even as you suspected that it was more of a bravura exercise than an emotionally engaged piece of storytelling. But after spending an additional two-plus hours with "Vol. 2," you may be seeking a cure for cinematic verbal diarrhea. "Vol. 2" was supposed to provide the payoffs that &qu... (read more)
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Mean Girls
Robert K. Elder, Chicago Tribune
The biting teen comedy "Mean Girls" heralds the silver-screen big bang of two promising careers: actress Lindsay Lohan and comedy writer/actor Tina Fey. In one movie, Lohan ("Freaky Friday") goes from a Disney-sculpted actress to her own star, transported by "Saturday Night Live" head writer Fey's nervy comic script. Lohan stars as 15-year-old Cady Heron, whose childhood in Africa with her zoologist parents leaves her ill-equipped for the jungle politics of high ... (read more)
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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Mark Caro, Chicago Tribune
Charlie Kaufman writes heady movies about the heart. His resume - "Being John Malkovich," "Human Nature," "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," "Adaptation" and now "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" - offers a trick bag of off-kilter views into the disgruntled male soul. "Eternal Sunshine" features another one of Kaufman's muttering, self-critical protagonists, Joel Barish. Unreformed extrovert Jim Carrey has the role, though he m... (read more)
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Pride & Prejudice
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Austen, Shmausten. Do we really need another ?Pride & Prejudice,? one more dance of misperception performed by Fitzwilliam Darcy, whom the world knows always as Darcy and never as Fitzwilliam, and Lizzie Bennet, whom Jane Austen once called ?as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print?? Each new adaptation of Austen?s three-volume novel, titled ?First Impressions? in its original manuscript draft, carries with it this stern question of need. And while it may be a decade old, the prist... (read more)
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Kill Bill: Vol. 1
Mark Caro, Chicago Tribune
There's no question that Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill, Vol. 1" is a virtuoso piece of filmmaking. What's questionable is whether it's more than that. He's been much imitated since his one-two punch of "Reservoir Dogs" (1992) and "Pulp Fiction" (1994), yet as you watch "Kill Bill, Vol. 1" (the story's second half, "Vol. 2," comes out in February), you realize that no one combines tension and release, violence and humor, dialogue and action an... (read more)
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Mystic River
Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune
Clint Eastwood's powerful new movie, "Mystic River," his best since "Unforgiven," takes us on a voyage almost to the end of the night. It's a shattering journey into darkness, taken by three Boston boys pulled at age 11 into one awful act of transgression, climaxing 25 years later, when an even more terrible crime reunites them. Based on the 2001 crime novel by Dennis Lehane, "Mystic River" is classic Eastwood, classic noir. If there is still some doubt about whe... (read more)
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Lost in Translation
Mark Caro, Chicago Tribune
In her brief career, Sofia Coppola has established herself as a remarkably intuitive director. While most directors use structure, plot and dialogue as their storytelling building blocks, Coppola seems to work through her material by feel. Both of her movies, her 2000 adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides' "The Virgin Suicides" and now "Lost in Translation," zero in on emotions and moods, making them uncannily vivid. She was able to capture the tricky tragedy-turned-misty-memory... (read more)
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Whale Rider
Mark Caro, Chicago Tribune
"Whale Rider" is a far different film from "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" and "Bend It Like Beckham," but it proves a similar point: The more culturally specific a story is, the more universal it may turn out to be. Like "Wedding" and "Beckham," the superior "Whale Rider" depicts a headstrong young female character bumping up against the tradition in which she was raised. The heroine here is 12-year-old Pai (Keisha Castle-Hughes), a Maor... (read more)
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A Mighty Wind
Mark Caro, Chicago Tribune
First, a confession: I wasn't crazy about Christopher Guest's "Best in Show" or "Waiting for Guffman." Both had their inspired moments but mostly struck me as condescending gifted comedic actors posing as silly people. On the flip side, I loved Rob Reiner's "This Is Spinal Tap," the first of this string of mostly improvised "mockumentaries" starring Guest, Michael McKean and other actors who would become Guest regulars. These has-been rockers were just... (read more)
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