Michael Phillips

The exquisite “Ash Is Purest White” owes some of its richness to the movies, particularly crime and gangster movies in various languages.The rest of it comes from the poetic eye...

The 21st edition of Ebertfest, running April 10-13 at the glorious single-screen anomaly known as the Virginia Theatre in Champaign marks the seventh festival since the April 4, 2013, death...

Between 1910 and 1924, in his fantastically eventful years as a Chicagoan, Ben Hecht wrote enough for an entire career. And he was just getting started.

Each year, our city presents a film festival of one kind or another roughly as often as the weather changes. Look! Another one! It’s wonderful, but frustrating. It’s frustrating, but...

Director Tim Burton’s live-action repurposing of the animated 1941 feature “Dumbo” offers more of many things: more mayhem, more angst, twice the unethical-treatment-of-animals pathos and five times the number of...

Moviemaking, a lot of it, comes down to crossed fingers and the question posed by Gene Kelly in a throwaway line from “Singin’ in the Rain”: “You think it’ll get...

Opening in Chicago March 28, the terrorism thriller “Hotel Mumbai” has already opened in various parts of the world, including New York and Los Angeles. For a while it was...

Opening Friday at the Music Box, the wry, environmentally friendly Icelandic eco-activist fairy tale “Woman at War” features the actress Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir in a dual role. This must be the...