My Life as a Dog

Aug 10, 2023 — “You’re the company I waited so long for,” Dr. Rosetta Stone (Tilda Swinton) says to her three Self Replicating Automatons in Teknolust (2002), artist Lynn Hershman Leeson’s sci-fi farce about a scientist’s well-meaning pursuit of artificial life. Stone’s color-coded clones...

Aug 1, 2023 — “Do you want me to turn them loose?” This is what cowboy Perce asks a sad-eyed Roslyn in John Huston’s elegiac The Misfits (1961), and that one question about untying the mustangs he and fellow wranglers Gay (Clark Gable) and...

May 31, 2023 — It’s not every year that so many critics are pleased with the juries’ choices.

Dec 12, 2022 — The great but underrated Hollywood star Irene Dunne made her transition to screwball comedy by playing the scandal-courting author at the heart of Theodora Goes Wild.

Sep 9, 2022 — New films by Andrew Dominik, Paul Schrader, Rebecca Zlotowski, Alice Diop, and Florian Zeller premiere in Venice.

Dec 16, 2021 — Whether their lists run to ten or fifty films, critics argue their cases for the films they’ve put on top.

Nov 18, 2021 — Brief notes on films arriving from Mike Mills, Tatiana Huezo, Jane Campion, Robert Greene, and Radu Jude.

Nov 17, 2021 — Decades after Peter Lorre’s knife-toting creep Hans Beckert prowled the Berlin streets in search of little girls in Fritz Lang’s M (1931); after Robert Mitchum’s silver-tongued Harry Powell cut down all the “smooth and curly-haired things” he could get his...

Oct 18, 2021 — Panah Panahi’s debut feature expertly balances “knockabout humor and slowly tightening tension.”

Oct 13, 2021 — Several of the season’s best-reviewed films arrive in the Windy City.