Strawberry Mansion—writer-directors Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney’s wildly surreal, charmingly offbeat indie—is part dystopian sci-fi, part storybook fantasy, and part quirky horror, the sort of mishmash movie that calls to […]
Documentary film is a unique art form, in that it aims to harness the power of another genre––narrative cinema––to convey objective truths. At its best, documentary is akin to great […]
The “war on drugs” has been waged globally since the 1970s as a sort of never-ending campaign. Its combatants are many, and its casualties immeasurable. Its battlefields are city streets […]
Chris Porterfield sings with a kind of howl. On his songs, recorded with the folk-rock band Field Report, his words come out with a ferociousness that charges the poetry with […]
On 2016’s “Margo,” Haroula Rose mournfully sings: “Your daddy brought you to the ways of the wild / Your mother she left when you reached a certain height” The song […]
Jimmy (Twilight’s Jackson Rathbone) and Maggie (Narcos’ Andrea Londo) keep meeting. Not in real life, mind you, but in each other’s dreams. They’ll bump into one another in waking life […]
On “Decision Day,” the stellar opener to Field Report’s autumnal sophomore album Marigolden from 2014, Chris Porterfield, the Milwaukee-based songwriter, sings “Take your time and let the tide pull you […]
Playwright Philip Dawkins’ 2016 solo show, The Happiest Place on Earth, uses Disneyland as a means to investigate his family history. The park, which opened in 1955, became a crucial […]
Silk Road Rising, a Chicago theater company rooted in Asian, Middle Eastern and Muslim experiences, has re-released a 2012 film that is newly relevant during the coronavirus pandemic. Jamil Khoury, […]
The 2020 Oscar nominated animated shorts are an excellent example of the expressive potential of cinema, each of the 5 films offering visually dynamic and thought-provoking bits of emotional storytelling. […]
We Believe in Dinosaurs is the title of the handsomely made documentary feature directed by Clayton Brown and Monica Long Ross, but it’s also a statement repeated by several of […]
“According to a report from the United Nations, 71 per cent of all human trafficking victims are women and girls. Human trafficking earns profits of roughly $150 billion a year.” […]