Hoop Dreams (movie)

Luminaries from Chicago's television, advertising and filmmaking communities filled the ballroom at the Radisson Blu Aqua Hotel for the 49th Chicago International Film Festival Television Awards gala April 23. More than 300 people were on hand as...

NEW YORK--When a championship boxer like Muhammad Ali felt disrespected by another fighter, he might have been expected to do what most boxers would: knock his opponent's lights out. But the icon took a different route when faced with a rival he...

The first time I encountered Roger Ebert, I detested him. The second time I encountered him, I liked him even less. In later years, I learned that Ebert's relationship with Gene Siskel progressed the same way: animosity, then grudging respect, then love...

A number that jumps out from the coverage of Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert's death Thursday at age 70: 306. That's the number of movie reviews he wrote last year, according to what turned out to be the final entry on his blog Tuesday. "The most of...

Roger Ebert, the Pulitzer Prize-winning movie critic whose gladiatorial "thumbs-up, thumbs-down" assessments turned film reviewing into a television sport and whose passion for independent film helped introduce a new generation of filmmakers to...

In "Duke-Carolina: The Blue Blood Rivalry," writer-director Jason Rem explores the heated basketball feud that has simmered for 93 years.  The independent documentary from Rem's namesake REM Entertainment and Greatest Fan Films was released via video-...

Chicago's documentary film industry is getting its own high-profile Demo Day. Running concurrently with the Chicago International Film Festival, a group of corporate and nonprofit executives will showcase up to eight unfinished documentary films at a...

For an establishment called Madame ZuZu's, the host is pretty dressed down: no flowing silk robe or pointy painted fingernails. And even if Billy Corgan could qualify for madame-hood, he wouldn't be going for extravagance. At least not at 6 p.m. on a...

Though known primarily as an author, Ray Bradbury had a fixation with Hollywood. It was inevitable that his skills as a science fiction writer would eventually land him work in the movies. His first gig was with Universal Pictures in the early 1950s,...

Beastie Boys co-founder Adam Yauch has died of cancer at age 47. Yauch is best known for his music career, as the New York hip-hop trio's vocalist and bassist, MCA. But in the last years of his life, Yauch focused his artistic attention on the world of...

In its charting of a Chicago epidemic and belief in the power of street-level human empathy, the superb documentary "The Interrupters" comes to us at a time when the notion of conflict resolution has been sidelined utterly on the national political level....

Steve James and Alex Kotlowitz have made names for themselves by exploring the darker sides of the city they love, Chicago. James is the director of the critically acclaimed and iconic documentary “Hoop Dreams,” while Kotlowitz is the author...