Silver Linings Playbook (movie)

NEW YORK — A man in a Manhattan rehearsal room asks a young boy a question: "No soccer game this week?" A look crosses the kid's face. You can read love, loneliness, contempt. "It's not soccer season anymore, Dad." Chastened, the man talks of...

The awards season has run its course. It's always a relief to see it in the rearview mirror. Even the winners feel that way. Many of the award-winners qualifying for very goodness and even greatness fed an ongoing debate about historical fiction on...

A couple of weeks ago at a Tribune-hosted cocktail party in the Loop, I found myself in a conversation with novelist Richard Ford. I was wearing the baseball hat I'm wearing in the photo that runs with this column, and from the corner of my eye I...

Los Angeles looks lush. But as often noted, it is actually an arid wasteland where nothing but artifice and self-interest sprouts naturally. That's the cynical, archetypal reading. For instance, two thirds of the way into Nathanael West's cynical,...

Predictability and the arts-and-entertainment world have an uneasy relationship. Predictability is a given — like the mouthfeel of a Big Mac — when it comes to, say, the punch lines on "Two and a Half Men" or the beats of your average...

HOLLYWOOD — The red carpet is in some ways a microcosm of the Oscar food chain. The first nominees arrive two and a half hours before the show is to begin. These are the people who worked on live-action shorts and documentary features and foreign-...

Hollywood movies, and even off-Hollywood independent films, have long encouraged us to empathize with unstable or psychologically troubled characters only if they're "kooky" for a little while, as a prelude to more palatable, normalized levels of...

Let's say there's a row of beautiful movie theaters, and the marquee of each one reads, "New film by (name of filmmaker here)." And let's say there's no other information about the film itself. Which one would you choose? We offered this dilemma to some...

Opening Nov. 21, "Silver Linings Playbook" is the latest teeming organism from writer and director David O. Russell, whose films include "Flirting With Disaster," "Three Kings" and, two years ago, "The Fighter," for which Christian Bale and Melissa Leo...

The biggest changes afoot in this year's Chicago International Film Festival (CIFF), the 48th edition, are on the screen, yet they're not part of the programming. As the worldwide cinema industries push actual film — meaning celluloid — into...

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — The persistent irony of the Film Independent Spirit Awards is that as much as they're positioned as the DIY antidote to the Academy Awards, the indie film with the most Oscars recognition almost invariably reaps the greatest...

Second City has been smart enough over the years to let its impressive roster of alumni speak for itself. Old photos of recognizable faces may line the lobby, but you'll never see one of the theater's shows advertised under a banner touting, "From the...