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The Artist Will Find a Way: In No Bears, Imprisoned Iranian Filmmaker Jafar Panahi Takes on Art, Life and Fundamentalism
The picture is an unmistakable critique of slavish devotion to small town articles of faith and the dangers of violating such credos, and a rebuke to small minded fears of the outside world.…
Corsage: As a Rebellious Empress, a Smart Vicky Krieps Intrigues as Woman Out of Time
Of Creepy Things to Come: Sci-Fi Thriller M3GAN is a frightening warning
With the End Nigh, Bill Nighy Keeps on Living in Affirming Character and Mortality Study
by Lee Shoquist
It was a terrific year in film, and while box office receipts for adult-oriented pictures took quite a hit this awards season with the majority of potential Oscar contenders grossing less than $10m each, the high bar quality of 2022 releases made creating a…
The notion of women punching their way through the predetermined confines of male orders and role restrictions has never, at any point in time, not seemed of its current moment. It's also an urgent theme in many a novel or film as women challenge…
The January movie landscape (often referred to as "the dumping ground") is typically not synonymous with intelligence and discernment, particularly amongst the usual crop of horror pictures that kick off each new year. Yet those qualities are exactly the drivers of the cautionary new…
I recently endured a milestone birthday which felt like a sort of dividing line—one of those everything before/after demarcations forcing, for perhaps the first time in my adult life, a realization of being "on the other side" of the proverbial hill. How to best…
2022: 5 Films to Avoid
I always hesitate to create a "worst" movies of the year list as films are generally so difficult to make that it is a wonder any ever get completed, and the achievements of artists who have, with passion, purpose and good intentions, poured everything…
Babylon Goes Big: Damien Chazelle's Exposé of Tinseltown in Transition is Pure Cinema
More is much more in Babylon, Damien Chazelle's mammoth period ode to a Hollywood in transition circa 1927 and plunge into gleeful debauchery, mad invention and wild excess. In a movie bound to divide audiences, adventurous cineastes will love Chazelle's go-for-broke, enfant terrible provocation…
James Cameron's Breathtaking Avatar: The Way of Water, is an Extraordinarily Realized Vision
A now-familiar skeptics' refrain tends to follow James Cameron during the run ups to his often game-changing pictures—they are too expensive and rife with cost overruns that will bankrupt their studios; their onset dynamics are ruled by "king of the world" megalomania; that he…
Disappointing The Whale Plumbs Perfomative Misery for Drama
It's been some time since filmmaker Darren Aronofsky has resembled the promise of his early auteur status, cemented by his striking 1998 debut puzzle Pi and peaking more than a decade later (and ago) with 2010's diabolical Black Swan. Say what you will, but…
Spielberg Comes of Age in The Fabelmans, a Good (Not Great) Tale of Artistic Birth
Could Steven Spielberg's semi-autobiographical The Fabelmans, about the artistic birth of and influences on perhaps the most populist American film director of all time, clinch the Best Picture Oscar come next March? Current thinking is that the picture, and its popular director, are well…
Lee Shoquist is a film critic and member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and leads over 20 monthly film discussion groups with more than three hundred, multi-generational attendees across the Chicago area and periodically in New York and Los Angeles. Learn more or contact Lee.
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