RECOMMENDED

Kevin Macdonald (“Touching The Void,” “One Day In September”) directs an intimate, detailed portrait of Jamaican reggae legend Bob Marley (1945-1981). Made with his family’s cooperation, this polished documentary lists his musician son Ziggy Marley as an executive producer, along with Chris Blackwell, who signed Bob Marley to Island Records in 1971. Marley recorded “Judge Not” in 1962 at age sixteen. His early days included overnighting in a cemetery to overcome stagefright, and covering “Teenager in Love.” The account of his family life looks at his absent white father and his own distance from his offspring with different mates. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

There’s a weave of wicked play in “The Cabin in the Woods” that makes it tough to describe without giving away the game. Although the most recent commercials do indicate some of what’s afoot, they’re more tease than giveaway. The studio’s synopsis reads: “Five friends go to a remote cabin in the woods. Bad things happen.”

Let’s see… Drew Goddard’s directorial debut, co-written with longtime colleague Joss Whedon, is about what’s under what’s in the basement and what goes on under that? Talking to the extremely affable and extremely tall Goddard recently, I suggested this comedy-horror-puzzle could honorably earn a three-word review from someone who didn’t want to give away too many particulars. “What. Th’. Fuck.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“Damsels in Distress” may be one of the most charming and memorable movies I’ve ever seen that also plays as if the filmmaker had no experience whatsoever in making feature films. Whit Stillman has littered the pages of an eager press with his tales of his time in the wilderness, writing ambitious scripts for films that were never made, set thousands of miles from the home turf of his first three films, “Metropolitan” (1990), “Barcelona” (1994) and “Last Days Of Disco,” which began his public silence as a filmmaker in 1998. Expatriate days. Failed romances. It’s a much more cleanly told story than “Damsels.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“Does this sound fucking PG-13 to you?”Joseph Kahn’s megameta nihilisploitation genre maelstrom, “Detention,” gets an A+ if only for its endearing ADDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD. Suspended from the armature of high-school movie memes, horror and otherwise, Kahn and co-writer Mark Palermo flaunt the entrails of movies from “Back to the Future” to “Breakfast Club,” from “Prom Night” to “Donnie Darko,” nurturing an intense kinship to “Heathers,” and lifting from “Freaky Friday,” all careening at tender velocity. Read the rest of this entry »

Ian Williams in "Parallax Sounds"

Of a dozen or so features I was able to sample from CIMMFest, the Fourth Chicago International Movies and Music Festival—playing this year at the sparklingly renovated Logan Theater as well as the Wicker Park Arts Center and Society for the Arts—Silvia Beck’s process doc, “Nyman in Progress” is a delight, following the composer puttering through his cluttered-to-collapsing studio as well as traipsing the world performing his music. “The energy comes in through my front door and my windows,” he says, saying he’s as content at home as on the road. But we also see Nyman combining his music with video images he’d collected randomly for years, for gallery consumption. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

In an early scene, the narrator of Mario Van Peebles’ energetic multicultural musical coming-of-age high school tale, “We The Party,” identifies one of his classroom fears, a fellow African-American teenager, shoulders hunched, cloaked in a dark hoodie, plugged into his music. “A wannabe rapper, ‘cept no one ever hears him rap, straight-up scary,” he says on the soundtrack. While that may be the film’s most timely image, the director of “New Jack City,” “Panther” and “Posse,” doesn’t show himself as a filmmaker in his fifties. Working in a busy style of multiple screens, changing frame rates, freeze frames and other play with the image, he matches the iPads, iPods and laptops of his Los Angeles protagonists with a sense of life lived at the speed of the moment, and an awareness of the clashes of race and class that shape our society every moment of the day. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo by Harold Chapman.

RECOMMENDED

I know some places in Chicago writers go—not the hatch or the dole—but chill-beer saloons and cafes where coffees are knocked back. (Tea when the weather’s changed or after all those cigarettes or too much shouting in agreement about the bad and the baddies in the world.) And they will write sometimes, unshielded from public view, often a glow dancing from laptops below onto their since-fourteen-years-of-age specs. It’s a commonplace. (I’m thinking of sleeves-up writers, published and publishing, not students, not grad students.) Still, no matter how you’d fantasize, it’s no Paris in the twenties, it’s not Tangiers or Marrakech in the 1950s and it’s not the nameless “Beat Hotel” on side street rue Git le Coeur in Paris’ Latin Quarter where any number of numinous word-pushers of note washed up until the sixties. In Alan Govenar’s diverting feature, a documentary rich with contemporary photography about the figures including Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Corso, Gysin and Burroughs, strong claims are made: “The Beat Hotel was a temple of the mind…” “The cheapest and most dirty hotel in Paris….” “One of the last of the great Bohemian hotels.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

RECOMMENDED

Andrew Davis began his career as a cameraman in Chicago in the 1960s, and before his largest success, “The Fugitive” (1993), Davis was a poet of the Chicago streets in action films like “Code of Silence” (1985) and “The Package” (1989). (A variation on the Oswald-was-a-patsy conspiracy theory, “The Package” used dozens of Chicago locations to economically suggest other cities and countries.) One of Davis’ most notable obsessions in his Chicago-set films was to make them as topographically accurate as possible—that is, his skillful, adroit camera placement and cutting could, in fact, take place in the real world, rather than being pieced together from disparate locations miles apart, which filmmakers most often do. Beyond its serviceable plot, his first feature “Stony Island” is most valuable, more to be treasured, as a lovely mash note to a passed version of the South Side and a music scene that has not stood still in the past thirty-five years. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The great British filmmaker Terence Davies returns with a Terence Rattigan adaptation that suggests the past is a pained place of desire, of regret and of tracking shots that are as spontaneous and unexpected as a dance number in a musical. It’s a few years after the War, and at the age of forty, Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz, fiery, tremulous) leaves her life of privilege with her lawyer husband, Sir William Collyer (Simon Russell Beale, warm, concerned, genteelly solicitous) for passion with Freddie, a younger man, a tempestuously alcoholic ex-RAF pilot (callow, bumptious Tom Hiddleston). Bleak wallpaper and crushing emotions follow. Read the rest of this entry »