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Kathryn Bigelow is one of my favorite filmmakers of all time. Period. I think her work is stunning. She’s an artist, a technician, a visual stylist, and a total badass who has worked in the kinetic, muscular, testosterone-heavy world of action and thriller cinema for most of her career, a genre long dominated by male directors, and she didn’t just step into it, she detonated it. This is not the kind of career you’d normally associate with a female filmmaker, which is of cour

A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of immersing myself—almost entirely—in what has become one of my favorite cinematic events of the year: The Chicago Critics Film Festival . This was its 12th edition, and yeah... I was there for six of the seven glorious days. I saw 13 feature films (some incredible, some not so much) and enjoyed two blocks of terrific shorts, all while soaking in the magic that only the Music Box Theatre  on Southport can provide. Now, for those of y