SLEEPWALK WITH ME (2012, directed by Mike Birbiglia and Seth Barrish, 90 minutes, U.S.) KEEP THE LIGHTS ON (2012, directed by Ira Sachs, 101 minutes, U.S.)   BY DAN BUSKIRK  FILM CRITIC Some of the most-captivating storytelling of the last decade from any medium has come from PRI’s This American Life, the public radio show hosted by Ira Glass. Although the first-person narrative stories the show produces can span the globe, it is a whimsical take on “everyday Americans” that dominates. Sleepwalk With Me is the first film produced directly by This American Life (Ira Glass contributed to the […]

LITTLE WHITE LIES (2010, directed by Guillaume Canet, 154 minutes, France) THE WORDS (2012, directed by Brian Klugman & Lee Sternthal, 96 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Taking four years to follow-up his international hit thriller Tell No One, director Guillaume Canet has brought us Little White Lies, a very French concoction that seems eager to make some concessions to an American audience. Dubbed “a French Big Chill” for its reliance on 1960s rock and soul oldies, the comparison favors the indestructible quality of the French film industry, which even with audience-friendly product like this, shows a sophistication […]

  BY DAVID CORBO In Beasts of the Southern Wild, first time director Benh Zeitlin transmutes Lucy Alabar’s one act play, Juicy and Delicious,  into a deeply humanist film that speaks to the urgent fact that we have disrespected the resources of our Mother Earth, perhaps irreparably disrupting the balance of nature that is so necessary to our survival.  This myopic view of an impoverished isolated community threatened by global warming won Zeitlin the Caméra d’Or award at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, the Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, and was designated a 2012 critics pick by the […]

  LAWLESS (2012, directed by John Hillcoat, 115 minutes, U.S./Australia) COSMOPOLIS (2012, directed by David Cronenberg, 109 minutes, U.S./Canada) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Although Lawless brings to life a violent little slice of U.S. history, detailing the Virginia moonshine wars of the last Depression, in many ways it is seeing the country through Australia’s eyes. Aussie directors have a long tradition of incorporating the landscape into their films, and Australian John Hillcoat, with the gory revisionist western The Proposition and the grim Cormac McCarthy adaptation The Road to his credit, fits easily into that mold. The film’s Australian roots […]

  BY BRANDON LAFVING ARTS CORRESPONDENT Bradley Cooper’s new film, The Words, is an artfully meta coming-of-age story that entertains just slightly more than it challenges. Its story pulls our attention through nested narratives of a writer, his book, his characters, the past, present, and every combination of the above, but the journey is rendered effortless by great storytelling. It opens on a book release press event, featuring critically acclaimed novelist Clay Hammond (Dennis Quaid), who reads the first two parts of his new piece, entitled The Words. As the audience of a film rather than a book release party, […]

  TIME OUT CHICAGO: From David Cronenberg, the director of Naked Lunch and Crash, comes something truly perverse: a vision of capitalism’s decline, as seen through the blinkered eyes—and tinted car windows—of a billionaire too coolly detached to mourn even the collapse of his own empire. True to its source, a spookily prophetic 2003 best-seller from Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis is rich with topicality: Protesters hoist rodent dolls, Occupy-style, as power players cause seismic ripples in the economic landscape. Yet that description makes the film sound like a leaden lecture about How We Live, when it’s closer in spirit, and texture, […]

  PARANORMAN (2012, directed by Chris Butler & Sam Fell, 96 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Not since the 1967 animated film Mad Monster Party (made by Rankin/Bass of Christmas special fame) has there been an animated film made to appeal to the pre-teen monster fiend in me.  With the success of The Nightmare Before Christmas there has been a line of spooky animated films for kids but ParaNorman is the first to have a horror-loving kid in the center of its story.  Made in the medium of true figure animation (which in our modern world is merged […]

  SEARCHING FOR SUGAR MAN (2012, directed by Malilk Bendjelloul, Sweden/U.K.) HOPE SPRINGS (2012, directed by David Frankel, 100 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC I remember the first time I heard “Sugar Man,” the signature song by 60’s missing link/Latino Donovan doppelganger Rodriguez. I was in a record store about five years ago, and Rodriguez’s plaintive, pleading voice singing the title over the Spanish guitar stopped me in my tracks. This song didn’t sound like a mere hit, it sounded like a classic, and the album it comes from, 1970’s Cold Fact shows a fully-developed artist in mid-flight. […]

CARNY (1980, dir. by Robert Kaylor, 107 minutes U.S.) GIRL ON THE RUN (1953, dir. by Arthur J. Beckhard & Joseph Lee, 64 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK Step Right Up! The summer is here and what better time to savor this duo of films, both taking us deep inside the American traveling carnival tradition. With their lurid theatricality, carnivals are such perfect cinematic settings it is surprising the “Carny Film” isn’t more of a full-blown genre (though let’s give a shout-out to such carny classics as the unmentionable Freaks, Nightmare Alley – Tyrone Power, forced to bite the head […]

  TOTAL RECALL (2012, directed by Len Wiseman, 118 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC It’s August, historically the time when Hollywood sends its most underachieving blockbusters into theaters. That would make 2012’s Total Recall perfectly suited for the season, a remake of the least impressive of the three dystopic sci-fi films directed in Hollywood by Dutch director Paul Verhoeven. Is it a good movie? Not in any conventional sense, the film doesn’t even scale the modest heights of the original. Yet in the easy-going nature August, the film does offer a handful of well-mounted action scenes, some fun […]

  NEIL YOUNG JOURNEYS (2011, directed by Jonathan Demme, 87 minutes, U.S.) POSSESSION (1981, directed by Andrzej ?u?awski, 123 minutes, France/West Germany) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC On paper, Jonathan Demme directing a new Neil Young music doc seemed predictable if not redundant —  another music documentary from the man who has chronicled The Talking Heads, Robyn Hitchcock, and Springsteen, no to mention his third film with Young, having previously lensed him during a string of Nashville concerts in the 2006 film, Neil Young: Heart of Gold and in 2009 with his rock band in Neil Young Trunk Show. Now […]

  THE DARK KNIGHT RISES (2012, directed by Christopher Nolan, 164 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC When word came that director Christopher Nolan was filming the latest installment of the Batman franchise amidst the Occupy protests outside of Wall Street last fall, the mind reeled. The best blockbusters, and that surely includes Nolan’s own entries into the genre, have found a way to divine the hopes and fears of our national id, because how else are you going to charm hundreds and millions of dollars from the public anyway? With the national narrative of the 2008 financial collapse still […]

  Savages (2012, Directed by Oliver Stone, 131 minutes, US) Any fan of Oliver Stone knows that he likes to juxtapose the dark side of human nature with the more altruistic side of our makeup.  His newest effort, Savages, harkens back to the stark violence of Natural Born Killers but this time the brutality is tempered with a touch of Buddhist philosophy (Stone is a Buddhist, FYI), and the addition of a small measure of morality into some of the characters’ dispositions.   Set in the idyllic California town of Laguna Beach, the plot focuses on drug entrepreneurs Ben (Aaron Johnson) […]