Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
Two years ago may as well be 200 in this economy, a fact that gives the easygoing, entertaining court documentary "The September Issue" a certain poignancy. It's about the run-up to a late-boom-era capitalistic war, a triumph of advertising and frippery over rational thinking: the September 2007 issue of Vogue, hundreds of pages long, and fraught with backstage machinations and editorial mishaps. more
Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
"Whiteout" comes from a graphic novel by Greg Rucka and Steve Lieber, about a U.S. Marshal stationed in Antarctica, which we're told straight off is "the most isolated landmass on Earth." Oh, that Antarctica. A corpse is found on the ice, but it's not just another case of severe frostbite: It's murder, and the murderer (whom we see in action soon enough, with a pickax) has a motive that relates in some way (no spoilers here) to the Cold War-era prologue, in which we see an ill-fated planeful of Soviets guarding a mysterious crate containing ... what? more
Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
The new animated feature "9" delivers audiences into a blasted, desolate landscape reminiscent of Warsaw or Dresden after World War II. We're thrown headlong into a post-apocalyptic universe. Humanity is no more. Life, or something like it, has come down to the vicious combat between two species: machines resembling metallic dinosaurs, voracious and relentless, and a tiny band of brothers and sisters akin to burlap-sack hand puppets, with big goggle eyes and an instinct for survival. more
Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
There's nothing wrong with "All About Steve" that a rewrite couldn't fix, as long as the rewrite involved a different writer, a different character and a different story. The wanly conceived and persistently misjudged borderline stalker played by Sandra Bullock is a kissing cousin to Patton Oswalt's borderline-stalker character in the coming "Big Fan" (no rom-com, but a lot more interesting). The narrative aims of these two portraits are similar: The filmmakers want to creep us out and troll for our sympathy as the protagonists take their obsessions to the limit of acceptable behavior and beyond. more
Chicago Tribune: Roger Moore
Life, marked by two-hour border checkpoints in an occupied land, has grown harsh in the West Bank for Palestinian single mother Muna (Nisreen Faour) and her teenaged son Fadi (Melkar Muallem). When they're allowed the chance to relocate to a town near Chicago, where relatives live, they take it. The result is "Amreeka," Arab-American writer-director Cherien Dabis' disarming, lightly comic story of cultural dislocation, full of the sort of detail and observational wisdom that announces the arrival of a most promising talent. more
Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
The box office has already declared "The Hangover" the winner, but for my money, writer-director Mike Judge's "Extract" - modest, no big deal but very savvy - is the funniest American comedy of the summer. more
Chicago Tribune: Kenneth Turan
Films without end have been made about the heroes of sport, but who speaks for the fans? Who especially speaks for the fanatic, the zealot who devotes an entire life to a team with the single-minded intensity of a monk meditating in a cave? "Big Fan" does, exceptionally well. more
Chicago Tribune: Robert Abele
Just like a kiddie flick that talks down to children while boring the parents in tow, the comedy "Play the Game" - about the twin romantic complications of retirement home widower Joe (Andy Griffith) and his ladies' man grandson David (Paul Campbell) - panders to elderly moviegoers, while being unlikely to engage date-movie lovers of any age. more
Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
As varied as his films have been - from "The Wedding Banquet" to "The Ice Storm" to "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" to "Brokeback Mountain" - director Ang Lee has never made a bad one, and the genial comedy "Taking Woodstock" certainly doesn't break his streak. Expectations must be set appropriately, however. This is very light material, and, unusually for a Lee picture, not everybody in the ensemble appears to be acting in the same universe, let alone the same story. more
Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
A queasy historical do-over, Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" has been described as a grindhouse version of "Valkyrie"; a rhapsody dedicated to the cinema's powers of persuasion; and a showcase for a 52-year-old Austrian-born character actor named Christoph Waltz, who waltzes off with the performance honors as a suavely vicious Nazi colonel known as "the Jew hunter." more
