Joe Leydon –

‘I Still Believe’ review: Faith-based tearjerker based on Christian musician Jeremy Camp hits its mark

March 12, 2020 at 12:28 p.m.

Call it a faith-based tearjerker, and you won't be far off the mark. Still, that blunt-spoken description of "I Still Believe" should be taken as not so much a dismissal...

‘Screwball’ review: Entertaining doc about MLB steroid micro-doses doesn’t let anyone off easy

March 29, 2019 at 4:17 p.m.

The real-life misadventures of central figures in the 2013 Major League Baseball doping scandal play like outrageous twists and turns in the seriocomic crime fiction of Carl Hiassen or Elmore...

‘Sadie’ review: Budding sociopath will stop at nothing to thwart mother’s romance with neighbor

December 11, 2018 at 10:35 p.m.

The eponymous protagonist at the chilly heart of "Sadie" is a troubled 13-year-old girl who is driven to extremes by her unyielding notions about what constitutes loyalty. Of course, Sadie...

Nick Cave has been singing about mortality for decades, and he's really good at it. Whether the narratives are biblical or pulpy, the victims innocents or death row convicts, the circumstances comprehensible or cruelly random, Cave's songs are on intimate terms with the infinite ways a life can be extinguished. And yet, "Skeleton Tree", his latest album with his estimable band, the Bad Seeds, is a relatively concise song cycle shadowed by death that feels different than all the rest. <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/kot/sc-music-nick-cave-skeleton-tree-ent-0916-20160916-column.html" target="_blank">Read the full review.</a>

‘Werewolf’ review: Young addicts in love at rock bottom

December 14, 2018 at 1:52 p.m.

Ranging from 1971's "Dusty and Sweets McGee" to Collin Schiffli's more recent "Animals," downbeat dramas about young addicts in love have been sufficiently numerous to constitute an entire subgenre, one...

‘The Ballad of Lefty Brown’ review: Bill Pullman saddles up, gives one of his best performances

December 17, 2018 at 10:32 a.m.

Imagine a Western in which Walter Brennan goes gunning for the varmints who bushwhacked John Wayne. That's pretty much the logline for "The Ballad of Lefty Brown," writer-director Jared Moshé's...

"Bill Nye: Science Guy" is sympathetic toward its subject.

‘Bill Nye: Science Guy’ review: A happy warrior in the fight for science

December 17, 2018 at 3:28 p.m.

"Bill Nye: Science Guy" is an efficiently thought-provoking study of what it means to be a rational and analytical advocate for science in an age when deniers of evolution and...

‘Mayhem’ review: Hard day at the office for Steven Yeun

December 18, 2018 at 12:39 a.m.

If you can imagine a multi-movie-mashup of boardroom suspense thriller, "Die Hard" redux and zombie apocalypse — well, too bad, director Joe Lynch and writer Matias Caruso have already beat...

‘Silicon Cowboys’ review: The little computer company that could

June 12, 2018 at 6:30 a.m.

Tech geeks, entrepreneurial wannabes and anyone fond of David-vs.-Goliath dust-ups likely will enjoy interfacing with "Silicon Cowboys," a slick and streamlined documentary about the ambitious Houston mavericks who challenged the...

‘Jane Got a Gun’ review: Solid Western will please fans of the genre

June 11, 2018 at 7:20 a.m.

There are movies that can make you feel nostalgic for a more innocent time — i.e., the pre-Internet era — when audiences (and critics) could approach each new release unburdened...

‘The Keeping Room’ review: Brit Marling, Sam Worthington star in tense Civil War drama

June 16, 2018 at 10:00 a.m.

A potentially gripping story of empowerment through armed resistance is almost totally undermined by studied, self-conscious storytelling in "The Keeping Room," a handsomely mounted but frustratingly mannered period drama that,...

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