GireWire

The Omnimax Theater at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry will premiere “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” in IMAX format with midnight screenings Wednesday, July 15 through Sunday, July 19. General admission is $15, plus regular admission to the museum. Go to msichicago.org or call (773) 684-1414 for details (including additional show times) and ticket information.

Genevieve (director/writer Nia Vardalos) dates a handsome entrepreneur (John Corbett) in “I Hate Valentine’s Day.”

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Ever since her 2002 sleeper romance “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” struck box office gold, screenwriter/actress Nia Vardalos has practically made a side career out of squandering a personal fortune in good will and popularity.

With the release of “I Hate Valentine’s Day,” her personal stocks haven’t just tanked. They’ve created their own Great Depression.

After “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” came the 2004 comedy “Connie and Carla” (written by Vardalos) where Vardalos and Toni Collette played Chicago singers who, while on the run from the mob, pose as drag queens.

Market alert: Nia stocks dropping fast! (Read more…)

If film critics were designed to be mere consumer advisers, then we really screwed up by kicking the lug nuts out of Michael Bay’s screechy, populist piece of pandering pablum “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.”

But we didn’t screw up, because we’re not consumer advisers. Our job is not to say if a movie will be a big box office hit and everyone should go see it because it’s a big box office hit.

Our job is simple and direct: to assess the quality of a motion picture.

Not just the quality of its entertainment value (i.e., the degree to which a movie doesn’t bore people).

But the quality of the writing. The performances. The direction. The art direction. The sound. Everything.

Rob Moore, vice chairman of Paramount Pictures, says that audiences “kind of roll their eyes at the critics and say, ‘You have no idea what you’re talking about.'”

Yes, we do. (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.

A one-eyed weasel named Buck (voiced by Simon Pegg), right, joins forces with possums Crash and Eddie in “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.”

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Even the comic escapades of Scrat, the ratty, nut-obsessed squirrel, are wearing thin, just like the ice in “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.”

“Dawn” brings back those lovable animated mammals from “Ice Age” (2002) and “Ice Age: The Meltdown” (2006). Now their adventures are in 3-D, and suffering from TV sitcom syndrome.

You can always tell when a TV sitcom loses ratings and becomes desperate, It invariably employs one of four measures to lure audiences back:

1. Someone gets married.
2. Someone gets pregnant.
3. The cast goes on a trip.
4. The cast starts experiencing strange dream sequences.

“Dawn of the Dinosaurs” opts for No. 2, when Ellie the woolly mammoth (voiced by Queen Latifah) becomes pregnant, turning woolly hubby Manny (voiced by Ray Romano) into a giddy daddy-to-be. The impending birth isn’t received with joy by all. (Read more…)

Johnny Depp stars as legendary Depression-era outlaw John Dillinger, in a scene from, “Public Enemies.”

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Raging machine-gun battles – explosions of flame and thunder followed by the gentle tinkle of falling brass cartridges – provide the excitement in “Public Enemies,” but the story belongs to the faces.

Marvelous, wonderful, perfectly cast faces.

From the pixie-like countenance of Baby Face Nelson to the rubbery expressions of Chicago beat cops, the faces of “Public Enemies,” captured in ultratight, revealing close-ups, carry as much of the narrative as the dialogue.

Chicago-born filmmaker Michael Mann directs “Public Enemies” as an aesthetically accomplished and painstakingly accessorized gangster film based on the exploits of infamous bank robber John Dillinger, gunned down in 1934 by the Feds as he exited Chicago’s Biograph Theater on Lincoln Avenue. (Read more…)

Aurora University employees Andrew and Amy Manion of Sugar Grove display their period garb on the set of the Chicago-shot crime drama “Public Enemies.”

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When you go to see Johnny Depp’s new gangster movie “Public Enemies” – and what Chicagoland filmgoer would miss it? – keep a sharp lookout for the news photographer at the Biograph Theater.

And the innocuous-looking passenger at Union Station.

And the guy dancing around the Aragon Ballroom.

They’re all played by the same extra, Andrew Manion of Sugar Grove.

“I spoke several times with Johnny Depp,” Manion said of his brush with celebrity. “He’s very gracious.”

What about Depp’s co-star, Christian Bale, the star of the Chicago-made super-hit thriller “The Dark Knight”?

“Bale was the most standoffish,” Manion reported. “But then, he has a reputation for that.” (Read more…)

Jame M. Cain’s classic novel “The Postman Always Rings Twice” gets a noirish update from German writer/director Christian Petzold. Cain’s twisted triangle now includes a dashing but broke ex-soldier Thomas (Benno Furmann) who gets a job helping Ali, a Turkish businessman (Hilmi Sozer), operate a chain of fast food venues. (Read more…) ( For mature audiences.)

Now playing at the Music Box in Chicago.

Sara (Cameron Diaz) experiences a moment of truth with her daughter Anna (Abigail Breslin) in “My Sister’s Keeper.”

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Moviegoers who enjoy a good cathartic release watching films about children afflicted with cancer will get their money’s worth in Nick Cassavetes’ glorified Lifetime Channel feature “My Sister’s Keeper.”

Young Sofia Vassilieva plays Kate, a bald cancer victim, with appropriately quivering lips, a wavering voice and huge dark pools of sympathetic pupils in her increasingly sunken eyes.

Caleb Deschanel’s empathetic cameras capture Kate in near-celestial settings while the soundtrack lines up an MP-3 supply of sensitive, tone-setting songs, all topped with Aaron Zigman’s appropriately downer score.

On the weepie rating scale, I’d award “My Sister’s Keeper” three and a half boxes of Kleenex. It would have earned five boxes, except that Cassavetes, who directed and cowrote the screenplay with Jeremy Leven, blunts the weep factor by hamstringing his cast and allowing a compelling courtroom story to get lost in a barrage of strained, happy-family montages and unpleasant bouts of vomiting, crying, shouting and bleeding. (Read more…)

Woody Allen surrogate Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David) explains life to Melodie (Evan Rachel Wood) in “Whatever Works.”

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Woody Allen’s main character in “Whatever Works” rants directly into the camera, breaking the “Fourth Wall” of theater, but not much new ground.

Still, the smart, breezy and intermittently engaging “Whatever Works” celebrates the return of two key staples in Allen’s cinematic canon: New York City (which has taken a back seat to Europe for his past few films), and Allen himself, or at least his alter-ego.

That character is supplied by comedian and writer Larry David, whose uncanny ability to capture Allen’s physical and vocal essence on screen borders on the supernatural. (Read more…)