You are about to experience one of the best movies of 2011 so far. "The Help" is an adaptation of Kathryn Stockett's novel about African-...
Fast, cheap and out of control, and set in glamorous Grand Rapids, Mich., director Ruben Fleischer's "30 Minutes or Less" doesn't even crack...
Haters, head for the door. Gleeks? Get your "Glee" on.
"The Help" has Viola Davis going for it, and she is more than enough. The actress deserves the Academy Award nomination (if not the Oscar...
When a movie is "inspired by true events," the ideal is that the real-story backdrop will lend an air of authenticity to the drama, but...
"Final Destination 5," starring a million shards of glass and several interchangeably dull young actors plus a couple of good ones,...
My nerves are still jangling from having seen "Point Blank" a few weeks ago, and that was before the shut-the-country-down!...
History has determined which race-relations film from 1989 — "Driving Miss Daisy" (based on Alfred Uhry's Pulitzer Prize-winning play)...
While working on a 2008 cover story for the New York Times Magazine about Chicago's CeaseFire program, Oak Park-based author and reporter...
Rachel Weisz, 41, digs into intense territory in her latest film, "The Whistleblower," opening Friday. Weisz, who recently married James...
Six months after walking the red carpet as a best actor Oscar nominee, Jesse Eisenberg and his new co-star Aziz Ansari were scrambling...
As the young, rising star, the breakout-poised veteran actress and the big-leap-making director enjoyed a lunch of oysters, salads and...
Three years older than his currently more famous brother, Martin, writer-director John Michael McDonagh shot his debut film feature, "The...
Swift and nimble, like the rising ape at its center, "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" is gratifyingly free of the usual big-budget...
The occasion was a bedroom farce, as they used to call them, from a more buttoned-up era. When the comedy "Any Wednesday" opened on Broadway...
"Now that this has happened, what are my options?" Sophie asks her new thrill, Marshall, in "The Future." Sophie's long-term boyfriend,...
For the f-word in heavy, conventional rotation, go see "The Change-Up." Which is another way of saying there's not much reason to go see...
There are more than 175 movies-under-the-stars screenings scheduled for Chicago's parks this summer. Most will feature standard Hollywood...
"Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" hit movie theaters in the fall of 1962 and defied preconceived notions of studio bosses who assumed...
Based on an autobiographical novel by Latif Yahia, an army lieutenant who was forced to become a body double for Saddam Hussein's...
What makes Johann run? There are no ready answers to that question, no cautionary back story or psychological conjecture in "The Robber,"...
Laurence Fishburne will edit Superman in “Man of Steel,” TheWrap has confirmed.
Don McGlynn's "Rejoice and Shout" is probably the first documentary ever to look comprehensively at the 200-year musical history of African-...
It's just a traffic circle.
Wait, cowboys and aliens? In the face of constant, competitive challenges the movie industry clings to a handful of truths, among...
In the aggravatingly punctuated romantic comedy "Crazy, Stupid, Love." (can you even believe that period?) does anyone ever discuss...
In the low-key black comedy "A Little Help" Jenna Fischer plays a Long Island dental hygienist who likes her Budweisers a little too much,...
"Another Earth" is quietly and movingly out of this world.
"Life in a Day" is like a man-(woman and child)-on-the-street interview gone insanely and inventively viral. Carved out of cyber-reality and...
"Sarah's Key" is more powerful than you expect, maybe even more powerful than it should be. An emotional detective story based on an...
A year ago, producer Ridley Scott and director Kevin Macdonald asked anyone with access to a video camera (or even a camera phone) to record...
For decades now, whenever one of my work colleagues put forth a dubious idea or exhibited irrational or violent behavior, I couldn't help...
The low-budget British aliens-invade-the-'hood thriller "Attack the Block" reminded me of Rick's famous line in "Casablanca," his reply when...
There's an image Jenna Fischer has cultivated as the shy, winsome Pam on the long-running TV series "The Office." And even as she breaks...
The good news about the big-screen 3-D version of "The Smurfs" is that it's not the insipid — and some say "socialist" —...
Though no contracts have been signed, buzz surrounding a possible "Sex and the City" prequel is running rampant on celebrity gossip and...
Backward reels the bad guy, pummeled and stunned. Round goes the good guy's granite fist, finishing its gorgeous orbit after connecting with...
In the summer of 1986, Kristin Scott Thomas was poised to make her feature-film debut in "Under the Cherry Moon" opposite Prince when she...
In an unhurried, unnamed California town, a teenage boy in pajamas walks to school. He wears pajamas all day, every day. He lives with his...
Patrick Dempsey sounds like a man coming off a transforming experience. Recently, while driving to the first table read for the...
Everything good about "Captain America: The First Avenger," which certainly is the most stylish comics-derived entertainment of the year,...
A master of mind games, humiliation and passive aggression, a French business exec played by Kristin Scott Thomas in the film "Love Crimes"...
Chris Sand, a resident of Dunn Center, N.D., northwest of Bismarck, where he lives in a house he bought for $1,000, goes by the handle...
A rare white horse bred in Illinois will leave home this week to star in a Hollywood picture.
Since American media sexualizes almost everything except sex, Hollywood romantic comedies about two people making hey-hey without any big...
People ask "What should I see at the movies?" and lately the most reliable answers to that question have come from the documentary genre....
Just when you thought there were no accomplishments left for Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, here's one:
The film version of "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan" proceeds as if willed into being by a particularly misguided "question for discussion,"...
The eighth and final movie in the "Harry Potter" series raked in a record $168.6 million at the domestic box office in three days, easily...