Lisa Trifone

Every year, a couple dozen of our country’s best and brightest are recognized as MacArthur Fellows; colloquially, it’s known as the “Genius Grant,” a no-strings-attached gift of $625,000 (raised in 2013 from its previous $500,000) paid out over five years to the U.S. citizens doing the most to contr…

Sometimes film reviews are hard to write. Especially, at least for me, reviews for films I don’t have strong feelings about one way or another. Finding ways to say, “Meh, it’s fine,” can be harder than you think! Then there are films like Marry Me, a disaster of a romcom that makes my job relatively…

The Second City finds itself home to the country’s second-longest running LGBTQ+ film festival in the form of Reeling Film Festival, celebrating its 40th iteration September 22 through October 2 (in person; October 6 virtually). Presented by Chicago Filmmakers, the local non-profit that hosts classe…

Blonde, the new film by Andrew Dominik (Killing Them Softly, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford), is a torturous 2 hours and 46 minutes long, most of which is dedicated to convincing us that Marilyn Monroe was abused, assaulted and otherwise put-upon for the entirety of her life and career, that she was miserable and misunderstood, and that she only existed through and for the sake of the male gaze. The film is based on a novel (yes, fiction) by Joyce Carol Oates; no one…

There comes a time in everyone’s life when, sometimes out of the blue and sometimes through hard work from a therapist’s couch, each of us realizes that our parents are, actually, just people. That they had lives before we existed, that they make mistakes and bad decisions, that they, in fact, don’t know everything and might not actually be perfect. Above all, we realize that they have complicated emotional lives informed by their own traumas, insecurities and upbringings. It’s a jarring experie…

For all the theater I’ve attended in Chicago—since childhood, really—I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that this weekend marked my first visit to Michigan Avenue’s Lookingglass Theatre, the 35-year-old ensemble company that marks a lofty few accomplishments, including one Tony as Best Regional Theat…

It’s said that one key to an artist’s success is knowing when to put down the paintbrush. Any work of art could go on and on, could be revised again and again, could tolerate another layer of paint or another scene or another verse, but the question is: should it? At some point, the costs start to overwhelmingly outweigh the benefits and the work itself gets lost in everything that’s extra and unnecessary. Filmmaker Damien Chazelle could have used such sage advice in the making of Babylon, his f…

The themes and subject matter covered in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest drama, a moving, gentle story of chosen family, desperate connection and generational trauma, are not easily navigated. And in lesser hands, Broker would only succeed as a smarmy, mediocre gangster film that goes too dark for its own good, and that would be a very different movie indeed. Instead, Kore-eda, who also wrote the script, ably and beautifully guides us through a story about seemingly impossible choices, the unexpected…

As has been proven time and time again, making a contemporary rom-com that both entertains and endears itself onto its audiences is tricky business. All too often, recent entries into the genre come off flat and uninspired, and attempts to modernize or inject a bit of levity into the proceedings are more likely to fail than succeed. Such is the case with Netflix’s latest attempt, Your Place or Mine, an aimless, lifeless attempt at a romantic missed-connections story that ends in a happily ever a…

In order to qualify for the Academy Awards for short films (in the live action, animation or documentary categories), a film must meet two main criteria: one, it must play at a film festival specially sanctioned to qualify films for Oscars consideration; and two, it must not exceed a run time of 40 minutes. In the live action and animated categories, some of this year’s nominated films are barely 10 minutes long; in this year’s line-up of five nominated documentary films, however, each of the fi…