Chicago Tribune: Kenneth Turan
"Tyson" is not a conventional film biography. There is no variety of viewpoints, no back and forth about episodes in his life, and, except for interview footage from the past, no other voices heard. more
Chicago Tribune: Kenneth Turan
It would be Pollyannish to pretend that the documentary "Earth" is without its problems, but the bottom line is, difficulties be damned, it shouldn't be missed. What it does well is so remarkable that by the time the credits roll you likely won't want it to end. more
Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
Zac Efron, looking cool, is movie enough for the makers of "17 Again," a halfhearted fantasy that stars Efron in a role cryogenically frozen around the time of C. Thomas Howell's '80s heyday. He plays a high school basketball star who has everything going for him. His college sports career gets derailed by his girlfriend's unplanned pregnancy. This 1989 prologue doesn't last long, but the Boy George and Vanilla Ice references are intense. more
Chicago Tribune: Betsy Sharkey
We tend to think of the U.S. justice system as the best in the world. Then along comes a film like "American Violet," a disquieting drama based on the true story of a young single mother victimized by what turned out to be a tainted, race-based drug arrest and the crusade of a conviction-hungry district attorney in a small Texas town. more
Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
"A Chorus Line" celebrates the itch to perform and the exquisite, control-freaky showmanship that is the Broadway musical at its greatest. more
Chicago Tribune: Betsy Sharkey
It is a trembly and vulnerable Michael Caine we see in "Is Anybody There?" - a finely drawn and gentle British drama propelled by another of the star's unforgettable screen portraits. more
Chicago Tribune: Robert Abele
A tale of encroachment and entrenchment - and, perhaps, the perils of undernourishment - the drama "Lemon Tree" from Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis pits Salma, a lonely Palestinian widow (Hiam Abbass) tending a family lemon grove in her West Bank village, against a slick Israeli defense minister (Doron Tavory) building his new house on the Green Line border that abuts her property. more
Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
Like Steven Soderbergh's "Traffic," "State of Play" compresses a British television miniseries into a stand-alone American thriller and does a pretty good job of it. It's best to see the remake first and catch up with the 2003 BBC miniseries afterward. That way you can enjoy the new version for what it is - a sleek, reliable Hollywood package, wrapped in a mournful last hurrah for print investigative journalism - instead of experiencing it through the prism of its superb predecessor, which came from a different era, one in which movie characters didn't go out of their way to remind audiences that "nobody reads the papers anymore." more
Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
And in this film, fame is not very funny! Millions of kids will disagree, and that's OK. This is their film, not mine. But they deserve better. I'm not saying this character's a lousy role model, but it's too bad the film isn't more interested in ... well, things other than Miley catfighting with Tyra Banks over a pair of shoes, or coping with her publicist, played by Vanessa Williams, or negotiating the demands of family and fans with the help of her dad, Robby Ray (Billy Ray Cyrus, the Robert Cummings of country). Early on, her sometime-Vanity Fair-photo-shoot partner calls her "baby doll," which is troubling for anyone who has seen Elia Kazan's "Baby Doll" lately. more
Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
Seth Rogen is likely to get blamed for everything wrong with "Observe and Report," because he's overexposed at the moment and the film doesn't really work, even with its flashes of rude invention. But the fault lies with writer-director Jody Hill, whose microbudget comedy "The Foot Fist Way" got a strange amount of attention from the sleep-deprived regulars at the Sundance Film Festival, and whose new outing is a puny black-comic riff on "Taxi Driver," casting Rogen as Ronnie Barnhardt, delusional sociopathic mall cop. more
