Irma P. Hall

Chicago has been involved in filmmaking since the technology's very beginnings in the early 1900s, when some of the world's first movie studios operated here. From those early days, when neighborhood kids would sneak onto the Selig Polyscope Co. lot at...

Friday September 26, 1997      "Soul food cooking is cooking that comes from the heart," says Mother Joe, matriarch of an African American family. So does "Soul Food," a warm and embracing family drama, written and directed by George Tillman Jr.      ...

Friday November 21, 1997      idnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" boasts 2 million hardback copies in print after spending three years on national bestseller lists, but unless you already knew those facts you'd never guess them from the uninvolving...

Since the release of their neo-noir "Blood Simple" in 1984, Joel and Ethan Coen have kept the flames of movie love burning. In one after another of their features, the brothers have revisited classic film genres and bygone eras, carving out a signature...

When writer-director Toni Kalem finally set upon making her dream project — a film adaptation of the 1970 Anne Tyler novel "A Slipping-Down Life" — six years ago, she made two fortuitous decisions. First, she added about a decade to the age...

The Palm d'Or awarded Saturday night to Michael Moore's controversial "Fahrenheit 9/11" was a massive triumph for the filmmaker and his movie and a victory that far overshadowed the other prizes presented at the close of the 2004 Cannes Film Festival....

Friday March 29, 1996      Earl Pilcher Jr. is not Mr. Excitement. The gruff owner of a tractor dealership in a small Arkansas town, Earl considers a trip to nearby Shreveport a big deal. Yet this prickly, hardscrabble man in his 60s, carefully played by...

Friday June 6, 1997      'Tis the season of special effects, almost all of which will be used to raze buildings and raise blood pressure. Like the cheese they are, they stand alone, with little incorporation into plot or purpose, because they are the...