GireWire

Anyone who loves electric guitars, anyone who’s played electric guitars, heck, anyone who’s even played electric air guitars will appreciate Davis Guggenheim’s fresh documentary about rock’s premiere instrument. Guggenheim interviews Jimmy Page, The Edge and Jack White, who eventually get around to making a slice of history with a jam session. Rated: PG. 98 minutes. (Read more…)

Now playing at the Century Centre in Chicago, Renaissance Place in Highland Park and CineArts 6 in Evanston.

Part biography, part concert movie, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s “Youssou N’Dour: I Bring What I Love” is a meandering, journalistically one-sided look at Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour, whose album “Egypt” was branded blasphemy by his countrymen for presenting the Islamic faith in pop music. Rated: PG. 102 minutes. (Read more…)

Starts Friday, Aug. 28 at the Music Box Theater in Chicago.

Join Dann for an evening of Northwest suburban teens armed with digital cameras as we present the winners in the third annual Teen Film Fest. Dann will be there to critique the works of budding Spielbergs and host a brief Q&A with the directors. For information go to http://www.ahml.info

Cost: Free

Friday, August 21, 7:00 p.m.
Hendrickson Room
Arlington Heights Memorial Library
500 N. Dunton Ave.
Arlington Heights

A Seattle TV weather girl (producer Tricia O’Kelley) freaks out on-camera about her co-host lover (a perfectly pompous Mark Harmon) cheating on her. She winds up in her little brother’s crowded apartment with no prospects for romance or employment. Rated R (language). 93 minutes. (Read more…)

Now playing at the Pipers Alley Theaters in Chicago.

Sophie Barthes’ clever capitalism satire never quite achieves the erudite flair of a Charlie Kaufman brain gouge, but Paul Giamatti’s comically agonized performance as himself keeps the dark humor immediate and funny. Giamatti pays to have his soul extracted so he can better perform Chekhov. PG-13 (nudity, language). 101 minutes. (Read more…)

Now playing at the Century Centre in Chicago and Renaissance Place in Highland Park.

Martin McGartland (Jim Sturgess) gets recruited by Fergus (Ben Kingsley) to spy on the IRA in “Fifty Dead Men Walking.”

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Kari Skogland’s fact-based thriller “Fifty Dead Men Walking” is a gritty, character-driven throwback to Sidney Lumet’s 1973 fact-based undercover cop drama “Serpico,” this time without the cop.

The unlikely undercover agent here is a street hustler in 1988 Belfast, Ireland, the center of violent political clashes between the Irish Republican Army and the British soldiers occupying the city.

Like “Serpico,” “Fifty Dead Men Walking” begins with the shooting of the main character, here, Martin McGartland, taking six bullets from a would-be assassin.

Appealing English actor Jim Sturgess plays Martin as a conflicted soul constantly drawn into suspenseful circumstances.

The IRA could discover his treachery at any moment! (Read more…)

In the comic “Post Grad,” Ryden Malby (Alexis Bledel) brushes off the affections of Adam Davies (Zach Gilford), but why?

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“Post Grad” is an innocuously pleasant romantic comedy lifted from the constraints of conventionality by the charismatic Alexis Bledel and a comical supporting cast of Michael Keaton, Jane Lynch and Carol Burnett.

Bledel, the young star of the late, great TV series “The Gilmore Girls,” plays a post-grad woman with the unlikely name of Ryden Malby. Ever since she was an overachieving girl, Ryden has carefully planned her future, right down to getting her first job at a prestigious L.A.-based publications firm.

Right away, post-grad life doesn’t go as expected.

A big truck plows into her car, leaving her stranded on the way to her big job interview.

When she arrives at the firm, all perky and peppered with proper personality, she discovers she’s competing with half the graduating classes of a zillion colleges.

Then, horror of horrors! She loses her dream job to that awful Jessica Bard (Catherine Reitman), the same self-absorbed woman who stole the valedictorianship from Ryden back in school. (Read more…)

Toe Thompson (Jimmy Bennett) has no stomach for fighting a giant booger monster in Robert Rodriguez’s comedy “Shorts.”

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Robert Rodriguez totally gets pre-adolescent boys.

So does “Shorts,” his daffy, witty and inventive new comedy crammed with booger monsters, belligerent bullies, magic stones, neglectful parents, evil bosses, insecure heroes and a girl appropriately named “Hel.”

Don’t let the Saturday morning cartoon subject matter fool you. This is one smart, subversive little comedy that has plenty to say about intrusive technology, basic family values and the dangers of ambiguous language.

“Shorts” celebrates Rodriguez’s return to the juvenile fun and strong moral values he employed in his “Spy Kids” movies before he ran into a cinematic ditch with his bizarre “The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D,” inspired by his 7-year-old son Racer Rodriguez.

“Shorts” is not about pants, as you might guess, but a compilation of five film shorts that tell a single narrative, albeit knocked out of chronological order. (Read more…)

When you think about it, a lot of places can tell filmmakers how to make movies: Columbia College. UCLA. USC. NYU.

• But how many of them can tell filmmakers ways to avoid bad reviews of their movies?
• I can.
• I offer 100 ways to warn filmmakers – beginners and veterans – on how they can avoid making simple errors that can cost them major critical points when their pictures go to market.
• Let’s face the ugly truth. Creative inbreeding in Hollywood has reached “Deliverance” proportions. I defy anyone to sit through three movies — any three of any genre – and not notice the same rusty lines of dialogue, the same arthritic visual devices, even the same lame props and set-ups.
• Except for a handful of filmmakers who actually think outside of the Cliché Box (Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme lead the very short list), many Hollywood storytellers seem content to let their movies become narrative viruses that simply replicate themselves as quickly as possible, with different casts, of course.

So, here come the next 10 of the 100 lamest, most unimaginative ways filmmakers can dare critics to dis their works. As for those filmmakers who continue to use the following elements of creative stagnation, I can only say on behalf of film critics everywhere, “Thank you. You’ve made our day.”

Read my 100 Ways To Get A Bad Review Page.

Henry (Eric Bana) shares a temporary, tender moment with Clare (Rachel McAdams) in “The Time Traveler’s Wife.”

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It occurred to me about halfway through “The Time Traveler’s Wife” that the whole ludicrously silly premise of this chronological jigsaw puzzle would have worked much better as a black comedy.

Or at least a comic indictment of women who fantasize about men who never show up when they’re supposed to, constantly disappear when you need them, pop in at the most inopportune moments, and make waiting a full-time occupation for their lovers.

Instead, director Robert Schwentke remains faithful to Audrey Niffenegger’s 2004 best-seller by recreating its achingly serious romance between a patient Chicago artist and a Newberry Library clerk with a genetic abnormality that drops him willy-nilly in and out of time periods like a handsome Billy Pilgrim from “Slaughterhouse Five.”

Aussie-born Eric Bana plays Henry, whose gene flaw causes him to disappear one moment, then reappear at another time in a different place around Chicago. Because his clothes stay behind, poor naked Henry must find new duds each time he skips through the time-space continuum. (Read more…)