Monthly Archives: July 2009

Walter Cronkite at the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami. I met Walter Cronkite once, in 1972. Our meeting may not have changed my life, but our brief and exciting encounter certainly cemented it. I was a photojournalist covering the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach for the Eastern News, Eastern Illinois University’s campus newspaper. […]

Filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow sets up a scene for her Iraq war drama “The Hurt Locker,” actually shot in Amman, Jordan. Kathryn Bigelow probably loves many things, but the two I know about are westerns and adrenaline junkies. Westerns because she directed the great 1987 horror tale “Near Dark,” about vampires roaming the West as the […]

Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) falls for a pretty woman (Zooey Deschanel) who isn’t so sure in “(The 500) Days of Summer.” “(500) Days of Summer” traces a greeting card writer’s romance that lasts exactly 500 days from the moment that Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) lays eyes on the beguiling Summer (Zooey Deschanel) at his office. OK, I […]

A bigwig politician (Ercan Kesal) hits a pedestrian with his car, then lets his chauffeur (Yavuz Bingol) take the rap in exchange for money. This tragic domestic drama, from Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, is also about a cell phone ringtone that not only reveals the personality of its user, it ratchets up the tension […]

It was the shot seen ’round the world. Eddie Adams’ 1968 photo of a Saigon police chief executing a Viet Cong with a point-blank pistol took 1/500th of a second to snap. It took a little longer for its impact to begin the end of the Vietnam War. Susan Morgan Cooper’s excellent, dramatically gripping documentary […]

To raise awareness of the upcoming Geneva Film Festival (scheduled for next April), “Airplay,” a documentary on rock radio of the 1950s and ’60s, will be shown at dusk in a Ravinia-style setting on the bank of the Fox River. The screening is slated for 7:30 p.m. Thursday, July 23, at River Park, 75 N. […]

Wizard Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) discovers another form of magic with Ron Weasley’s sister Ginny (Bonnie Wright) in the dark and sinister “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.” Of the six Harry Potter films so far, David Yates’ “The Half-Blood Prince” comes the closest to a classic horror tale, not in terms of monsters, violence or […]

With bad acting, fake digital blood effects and blurry fight scenes, “Blood: The Last Vampire” is more of a video game than action film based on a 2001 cult anime. Korean star Gianna plays a 400-year-old Samurai warrior who hunts down demons in a Vietnam War-era Japan, apparently overrun by bad American actors. (Read more…) […]

Kathryn Bigelow’s tense, muscular Iraq war film, written by embedded journalist Mark Boal, is hardly fawning in its depiction of a U.S. soldier who uses the war as an excuse to abandon his family and avoid domestic life. It focuses on a military bomb disposal unit run by Sgt. James (an impressive Jeremy Renner), who […]

The After Hours Film Society presents Olivier Assayas’ bittersweet poem to growing up, growing old and making room for the next generation at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, July 12 at the Tivoli Theater in Downers Grove. Admission is $9. This film has not been rated. Running time is 102 minutes.