Author Archives: Dann Gire

TV producer Abby (Katherine Heigl) resorts to accepting romantic advice from chauvinist Mike (Gerard Butler) in “The Ugly Truth.” The ugly truth about “The Ugly Truth” is that this romantic comedy takes two popular actors and a clever, gimmicky idea – a chauvinistic TV commentator and a control-freak producer butt heads until they fall in […]

Adopted daughter Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman) turns out to be less innocent than anyone imagines in the thriller “Orphan.” “Orphan” wastes no time in letting us know that we’re in the hands of filmmakers who lack the skills and imagination to mount a well-constructed horror tale. Near the beginning, Kate Coleman (Vera Farmiga) stands in the […]

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…) […]