Michael Phillips

A few weeks after the fabulously awful film version of "Cats" opened on Dec. 20, Universal Pictures' box office disaster was granted a miraculous new life as so-called "rowdy" screenings....

On the froth-to-grit Jane Austen spectrum, the new "Emma" in theaters this week falls very pleasantly in the region of the 1996 film version starring Gwyneth Paltrow. The latest "Emma,"...

I'm 100 percent head-over-heels in love, in the bag, in the tank and in a state of perpetual cinematic gratitude for "I Know Where I'm Going!" The singular 1945 wartime...

A memorable love story can reflect interior emotions in every frame of the filmmaking, messy and alive. Other films set the torment and tumult of what the characters are feeling...

They have it coming, over and over and forever, and there's always money to be made in the "killin'-Nazi business," as Brad Pitt's avenging hillbilly angel put it in "Inglourious...

Retooling the late '70s/early '80s ABC prime-time staple "Fantasy Island" as a sinister gotcha! outing isn't a bad idea. That's the wheel. The spokes are everything else, and most everything...

The Japanese filmmaker and recent Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or winner Hirokazu Kore-eda goes back a long way with the Chicago International Film Festival. Kore-eda's first feature, "Maborosi," won the...

A flask of bootleg hooch, worn at the hip. Cigarette smoke so thick, only the hottest jazz could cut it. Turned-down hose, revealing more than the girl who married dear...