Wrapping Up the 2025 Chicago Film Festival
With this year’s 61st edition of the Chicago International Film Festival in the books, I’ve completed my screenings for 2025. Here’s what I screened and what I thought.
‘Flow’ urges us to intuit our way to success
Sometimes the simplest yet most profound messages come to us from the unlikeliest of sources. In many cases, those messengers deliver their insights metaphorically and unwittingly, with an almost “innocent” nature, as if to give license to the notion of “out of the mouths of babes.” So imagine how valuable that information can be when its impact is significant and inspired and comes at a time when the stakes are at their highest.
New Movies for February
Join yours truly and show host Frankie Picasso for looks at four new films and our Oscar predictions on the upcoming movie review edition of the Frankiesense & More video podcast, to begin airing Thursday February 27 at 1 pm ET on Facebook and YouTube.
The Worst of 2023
With 2023 now in the books, it’s time to look back on the year in movies. In this second of three blogs, I spotlight my Bottom 10 Films of 2023, followed by 10 Dishonorable Mentions and an open-ended list (in alphabetical order) of other releases that I found disappointing.
Wrapping Up the 2023 CEUFF Film Festival
If it’s March, it wouldn’t be complete without the Gene Siskel Film Center Chicago European Union Film Festival. After several years of adjustment, abbreviation and cancellation due to COVID-19 concerns, the festival finally returned to normal form this year for its 26th annual edition. I managed to screen 10 of the event’s 24 offerings
Wrapping up the Chicago Film Festival
One of the great joys of reviewing movies is the opportunity to attend film festivals. They offer moviegoers a chance to see multiple offerings in myriad genres from countries all over the globe, featuring everything from little-known independent productions to Hollywood blockbusters. And so it is with my hometown event, the Chicago International Film Festival, which just recently completed its 55th edition. The Chicago festival just keeps getting better and better every year. I’ve attended many of the festivals over the past 40 years (I started attending when I was 2…), and I’ve seen vast improvements in programming and staging in that time, efforts that have truly made this a world class event. Over 12 days, I screened 15 films, [...]
‘Meeting Gorbachev’ celebrates a pragmatic visionary
“Meeting Gorbachev” (2019). Cast: Interviews: Mikhail Gorbachev, Werner Herzog, Miklós Németh, George Shultz, James Baker, Lech Walesa, Horst Teltschik. Archive Footage: Raisa Gorbachev, Yuri Andropov, Leonid Brezhnev, Konstantin Chernenko, Vladimir Putin, Boris Yeltsin, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl, Andrei Gromyko. Directors: Werner Herzog and Andre Singer. Screenplay: Werner Herzog. Web site. Trailer. It’s one thing to be ever-practical when it comes to conducting our affairs, but this approach may sometimes limit our options, outcomes and effectiveness. By contrast, we could adopt a truly visionary view, one that surpasses these shortcomings but that also may be difficult to fulfill due to a lack of pragmatism. So it’s quite something when we’re able to fuse both qualities, making [...]