Posts in Column
SPECIAL: See “Roma” in 70mm this week at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre

Chicago’s 90-year-old premiere arthouse venue will be exclusively presenting Alfonso Cuaron’s highly regarded Oscar contender Roma in widescreen 70mm. The Spanish-language film from Mexico will play on their main screen over the course of five days and fifteen showings between Wednesday, January 9th and Sunday the 13th. Tickets for Roma are $15 ($12 for Music Box members) and available now at their box office or online.

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COLUMN: Who should win/will win the 2019 Golden Globe film awards?

The 76th annual Golden Globe Awards are this Sunday. This film critic has shuffled the cards and read the tea leaves to lay down some confident (or maybe sure-to-go-wrong) picks of who should win the movie award categories and who will actually be hearing their name and walking to the stage as the true winners. Enjoy and come back Sunday to keep score!

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COLUMN: New Year's Resolutions for the Movie Industry for 2019

Plenty of regular everyday people make New Year's Resolutions, but I think bigger entities, namely movie makers and movie moguls, need to make them too.  Annually, including this eighth edition, have fun taking the movie industry to task for things they need to change. As always, some resolutions come true while others get mentioned and reiterated every year. Enjoy this year’s hopes and dreams.

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20 YEAR RETROSPECTIVE: The best of the rest of 1998

Alright, I’ve spelled out my absolute “10 best” from 1998 in the previous post.  It’s time to take the press badge off and get casual.  Here are more categories of distinction and remembrance from 1998. Guess what? You still don’t see The Thin Red Line.  That’s too bad.  In the completely opposite direction, I was so very close to putting Wild Things in my Top 10 for 1998. Read on for more!

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20 YEAR RETROSPECTIVE: The 10 Best Films of 1998

In an annual series, Every Movie Has a Lesson is going to look back twenty years to revisit, relearn, and reexamine a year of cinema history to share favorites, lists, and experiences from the films of that year. When measuring back as far as twenty years or more, I feel like “favorites” that have stood the test of time have aged to become some level of “best.” I feel like a bunch of those populate my reflective look back at the best of 1998.

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INFOGRAPHIC: When will we see the futuristic cars from our favorite entertainment?

To work this out, the fine folks at Leasing Options looked at each futuristic aspect of these cars and found the best prediction as to when they will be commercially available. Obviously, not every feature of the fictional car will be practical, desirable or even legal. So, we’ve focused on the car’s most important features and figured out when they might be available.

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INFOGRAPHIC: The Biggest Movie Star Missteps

This series of infographics reveals the costliest decisions ever made by some of Hollywood's most famous film stars when it came to turning down iconic roles. Sometimes, the choices made by actors when deciding which roles to take up and which to turn down are based on no more than when picking red or black on one of the online blackjack tables at Betway Insider. They can't predict the future, after all. But, while all the people on the list below have continue to enjoy successful careers on the silver screen, they must surely still kick themselves at these costly calls. Here are the biggest financial missteps made by some of Hollywood's biggest stars:

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EDITORIAL: Clarifying "subjective" versus "objective" in film criticism

The duel between objective and subjective is a gray area of thinking that doesn’t have a black-and-white answer of right or wrong.  It is more of a sliding scale between prudent and careless presentation of facts and opinions.  Too often lately, I hear or read people, both professional and amateur in background mind you, put the -ly ending on either of those two terms to create what they think is an adverb of defense to strengthen some silly descriptive point of “good” or “bad” they are trying to make about a movie.

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EDITORIAL: Four modern movies begging for the MST3K treatment

Watching quality cinema is all well and good, but sometimes a bad movie is even better. Giving a movie the full Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment can be a blast. Now that actually good projectors cost under $500 and are affordable enough for anyone, you can even do it on a big screen right in your home (since heckling in the theater is generally frowned upon). Old movies make great fodder for mockery, but there are movies coming out all the time that strike that perfect balance of patently ridiculous and super fun.

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