NEW YORK TIMES: The humor website Funny or Die on Wednesday began streaming a 50-minute comedy that finds Mr. Depp portraying the businessman turned politician, full-blown comb-over and all. Kept a secret for months — no  small task in Hollywood — “Funny or Die Presents Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal: The Movie” was released to coincide with Mr. Trump’s victory on Tuesday in the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary. “It was a crazy, completely nuts idea that somehow we pulled off,” said Adam McKay, a co-founder of Funny or Die, which also counts Will Ferrell and Judd […]

BY BEN LEHMAN My last experience with a Michael Moore documentary was in 2004 when Fahrenheit 9/11 was released. I remember watching the film as a 10 year old with my Republican family in the context of the early days of the Iraq War. My parents were quick to dismiss the controversial film; like many Americans in those days, they firmly stood behind President Bush and the invasion of Iraq. The film was provocative and controversial, which are terms one often associates with Moore. But for his latest creative endeavour, Moore chooses a less controversial and more lighthearted approach. The […]

  BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC It was a memorable year for big Hollywood blockbusters even if the best of them (Mad Max, Star Wars, Mission Impossible) were pieced together from ancient sources. But as someone who still shells out the premium to watch films in theaters, I don’t want to be catered to, I want to be shocked and thrilled by something I’ve never seen on screen before. Bemoaning the state of the U.S. film industry can seem like my default setting yet as I pieced together this year’s film list I was pleasantly surprised to find that almost […]

CONCUSSION (2015, directed by Peter Landesman, 123 minutes, USA) BY BEN LEHMAN Concussion tells the story of Dr. Bennet Omalu, a Nigerian immigrant, who first connected the dots between professional football and the epidemic of traumatic injuries it inflicts on players, and then stood up to the NFL when they tried to cover it up. While Omalu, portrayed by Will Smith, ultimately succeeds in blowing the whistle on the NFL’s suits, the film falls short of the goal line. When Dr. Omalu performs an autopsy on the body of “Iron” Mike Webster, a retired Pittsburgh Steeler, he discovers abnormalities in […]

  FRESH AIR FILM CRITIC DAVID EDELSTEIN: I don’t know how director Adam McKay pulled it off, but with “The Big Short,” he has made an exuberant comedy about the global financial apocalypse of 2008. It’s goofy, suspenseful, fast-moving and also manages to explain the labyrinthine fraud that led to the crisis. Because the more you understand, the more your mind is blown by the scope of the greed and illogic. Mckay is working from a terrific playbook, Michael Lewis’s book of the same name on the collapse of the subprime mortgage market. The film’s protagonists are traders, ex-traders, fund […]

  VULTURE: Director J.J. Abrams is so intuitively unoriginal that he’s almost mystical: He seems to be using the Force to get on the wavelength of other filmmakers. He aped Steven Spielberg’s signature moves in the sci-fi adventure Super 8. He rekindled Star Trek onscreen, delighting many fans — even if they couldn’t point to a single performance or scene that surpassed the old films or shows. Now, with Star Wars: The Force Awakens, he does a good imitation of George Lucas circa 1977. He and co-writers Michael Arndt and Lawrence Kasdan (who co-wrote by far the best of the […]

  LOS ANGELES TIMES: The really, really ridiculously good-looking days of Derek Zoolander are over — at least that’s what the “Zoolander 2” trailer would have us believe. The washed-up male supermodel played by Ben Stiller and his rival-turned-pal Hansel, played by Owen Wilson, returned to the runway on Paramount’s new trailer for the follow-up to the 2001 screwball comedy. Stiller and Wilson confirmed the start of “Zoolander 2” when they hijacked the Valentino runway in character at Paris Fashion Week in March and have dropped a few teasers since, and with the plot being revealed in the trailer the […]

  THE DANISH GIRL (2015, directed by Tom Hooper, 119 minutes, U.K.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Just to make sure people didn’t think it was a film about a girl who loved pastries, the studio has been leaking pictures of Eddie Redmayne in all his cross-dressing elegance as the title character in The Danish Girl, another lush period piece from Tom Hooper, director of 2010’s Oscar-winning The King’s Speech, for months prior to the film’s release. In this post-Caitlin Jenner moment, The Danish Girl hopes to ride its subject into the money this holiday season. Too bad its story […]

  THE DANISH GIRL (2015, directed by Tom Hooper, 119 minutes, U.K.) BY ELIZABETH MARIE WIEST Academy Award-winning director Tom Hooper’s (The King’s Speech, Les Miserables) thought-provoking new film The Danish Girl is the true story of Einar Wegener a failed Danish painter whose transition into Lili Erbe marks the first sexual reassignment surgical procedure ever attempted, and her story the first transgender biography ever recorded. The film depicts the evolving relationship of Einar (Eddie Redmayne) and his wife Gerda (Alicia Vikander), and how his gender identity crisis actually brings the couple closer together. The year is 1920. Einar and […]

  BY SHARNITA MIDGETT Like Killadelphia, Chiraq is a nickname no city would ever want. It was first coined in 2010 by then-Chicago Police superintendent Jody Weis. “We are not Chiraq,” he said. “We are Chicago.” He was bemoaning the fact that on a good day Chicago’s body count matches — and often exceeds — Iraq on it’s worse day. Little has changed in five years. As of November 23rd, there were 2703 shootings — an average of eight a day — and 440 gun deaths in Chicago in 2015. Spike Lee tackles the issue head-on with his latest film, […]