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It’s hard to imagine an American comic book movie that’s as proudly naïve and nostalgic as the fizzy Bollywood musical “The Archies,” which relocates the happy stock characters of “Archie” comics to a fantasy version of mid-‘60s India. It’s harder still to imagine another achingly sincere and light-hearted comic book adaptation that doesn’t also slavishly…

A trio of films won over the Chicago Film Critics Association this year, all landing double digit nominations, the first time three movies have done that in the same year. The ‘Barbenheimer’ craze won over the critical establishment of the city, notching a combined 19 nominations, but it was “Killers of the Flower Moon,” “Oppenheimer,” and “Poor…

Folk singer Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) is auditioning for Bud Grossman (F. Murray Abraham) in a last-ditch effort to salvage his fading chances of making it as a folk singer. This single pivotal scene defines what the Coen Brothers superb “Inside Llewyn Davis” is all about. During his audition toward the end of the film,…

Yorgos Lanthimos seems delighted in depicting extreme behavior within pristine settings, whether it’s the quiet suburbia of “Dogtooth” or the clinical lab of “The Lobster” or the opulent grandeur of “The Favourite.” That glaring contrast between the expectations of decorum and the messy truth of humanity seems to fascinate him endlessly. Nowhere is this conflict…

Ava DuVernay is an inquisitive filmmaker, curious about social structures and collective grief. Her newest picture, the ambitious investigative film, “Origin,” has a scene that blends DuVernay’s interests with her rigor. Following a sold-out public talk for her book The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis) bumps into her persistent editor Amari (Blair…