Movies

I came into this world eyes crossed, the small tip of my nose made bow. The moment my spine steadied and my words arrived, I took a seat on a low stool, cheeks squished by the chin rest, and looked right into the bowels of an iron machine. There, a small red boat floated across the sea, the sky…

A lo-fi heist film bolstered by dynamic and intimate camera work, director Steven Soderbergh’s “The Christophers” delights in simply seeing two people go to war. Sir Ian McKellan plays Julian Sklar, a master painter who is contemplating his legacy, having not completed a series of famed portraits (the titular Christophers). His opportunistic children, Barnaby (James…

Like boarding a flight for somewhere promising, only to be met with an emergency landing, Departures never quite reaches the emotional depth it sets out for. This collaboration between filmmaking duo Lloyd Eyre-Morgan and Neil Ely begins at the end, retelling its story in a way that is non-linear. As the film’s tagline reads, ​“They say the best…

On Truth & Movies this week, we discuss Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, Christian Petzold’s Miroirs No. 3, and Gabriel Mascaro’s The Blue Trail. Joining host Leila Latif are David Jenkins and Elena Lazic. Truth & Movies is the podcast from the film experts at Little White Lies, where along with selected colleagues and friends, they…

It makes total sense that filmmaker Lee Cronin was shuffled the keys to the big house following the critical and commercial success of his 2023 franchise remix, Evil Dead Rise. It’s sad to report, then, that his shot at a Cronin-coded blockbuster horror is as awkward as the clunky prefix on its title, as he attempts to…

The movie theatre has become a space fraught with controversy, and rarely because of the film being screened. It feels as if we rarely see out the month without someone complaining online about the flagrant disregard of cinema etiquette, be that attendees talking loudly, using their phones during the film or guffawing at inappropriate moments. This…

2023’s “Beef” was so good that a limited series turned into an anthology with creator Lee Sung Jin hoping to avoid the sophomore slump with another twisted, unpredictable tale of anger and class with entirely new characters. The multiple Emmy-winning original told the tale of a pair of fractured people whose chance encounter sent ripples…

Born and raised in Urbana-Champaign, Roger Ebert left his mark everywhere—as a sportswriter for The News-Gazette when he was 15, at Urbana High School as Senior Class President and co-editor of The Echo student newspaper, and, at the time of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, on to the University of Illinois and The…

“Do you have any idea of what you will do with this vaginodrome?” A film director is surrounded by at least 20 female actors in his backyard. This is Ferzan Özpetek, a prolific Turkish-Italian filmmaker little known to English audiences, and the occasion is a table read for his new film, Diamanti. ​“I would like to make a movie featuring…