Michael Phillips

In early 1981, midway through the third season of ABC-TV's hit series "Mork & Mindy," an episode titled "Mork Meets Robin Williams" revealed its newly, drastically famous co-star's conflicted feelings...

Chicago International Film Festival founder Michael Kutza, who kept his often cash-strapped operation running through thick, thin and every consistency in between, will retire at the end of 2018. The...

"Strange" is a word that pops up frequently in "Claire's Camera," a lovely doodle and the latest from South Korean writer-director Hong Sang-soo. The strangeness extends to and suffuses most...

It's a no-brainer for Brian Tallerico, the editor of rogerebert.com and the co-producer of the Chicago Critics Film Festival. He and his fellow Chicago-based critic, Erik Childress, have been CCFF's...

There's no suspense like sexual suspense, which is another way of saying there's no business like show business. In "Disobedience," director Sebastian Lelio's coolly controlled film version of Naomi Alderman's...

We live many lives within the one we've got. When Chicago-born Diablo Cody wrote "Juno," she imagined a charmed teenage pregnancy, the story focusing on a young woman's anxieties and...

At one point in the editing of their documentary "RBG," directors Betsy West and Julie Cohen realized they had a problem: Too much praise. "People were slobbering praise on her!"...

Currently a Berlin resident, filmmaker Sebastian Lelio, 44, remembers the decision to "close the curtains," he says, and just start writing. It was 2013. He'd just finished making his film...

Summertime moviegoing, especially in a big city with a healthy appetite for both cinephilia and nostalgia, means more than simply waiting around for franchise blockbusters to take your money and...

Subtle, elemental and powerfully beautiful, writer-director Chloe Zhao's "The Rider" is the Western of the new century, and the most enveloping film experience I've had this year. Even a hack...