My Courses

A surprise feature film is a bit of a contradiction in terms, but it does sometimes happen, with Beyoncé’s anthology film “Lemonade” constituting the richest and most fully realized example. Travis Scott‘s “Circus Maximus,” which showed in AMC Theaters as part of a special arrangement with the chain, isn’t in the same weight class. On the qualitative scale…

The newly formed XL Film Festival will run from Friday, August 18th, to Sunday, August 20th in Chicago. The festival, formerly known as the Chicago South Side Film Festival, was recently acquired by Troy Pryor’s entertainment company, Creative Cypher, and will host speakers including Robert Townsend, Lil Rel Howery, Jackie Taylor and many others. The festival is part of a larger DEI…

This year’s Fantasia International Film Festival is well underway, having kicked off on July 21 and lasting through August 9. The world-famous genre-driven gathering in Montreal has been running for 27 years, debuting future sci-fi, horror, action, and all-of-the-above favorites. Yours truly will be covering the fest’s major premieres this year remotely, though I can practically hear…

If it feels like ages since you’ve seen “The Expanse” on your screen, the absence of Telltale Games has likely felt like an eternity. The acclaimed game studio became prominent in the late aughts and early 2010s with its branching, narrative-focused games like “The Walking Dead” and “A Wolf Among Us.” Then, in 2018, the…

There’s something exhilarating and incredibly vulnerable about a woman driving alone on the open road. It’s this feeling that writer/director Morrisa Maltz taps into with her wonderfully impressionistic road-trip drama “The Unknown Country,” starring Lily Gladstone as a grieving young woman named Tana as she journeys from Minneapolis to South Dakota and down to the…