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The 97th Oscars: A Night of Big Wins, Big Speeches, & Big Conan Energy Award season is officially over, and the 2025 Academy Awards  are now in the books. As I do every year, I watched the telecast. This year I watched with my girlfriend, Julie, and we had a small Oscar party, which was a blast. But the real fun? The live interactive chat on my Patreon page , where we had a great crowd of subscribers discussing the ceremony in real-time. We talked about the pacing, debated th

The new Film Critics pants fit like a glove, so I am wearing them to review another week's worth of new film releases—and this week, there are a lot of new ones. We have a glut of movies this week as studios rush to get the leftover 2024 releases into theaters. Six new films are featured in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, January 10, 2025. 1) HARD TRUTHS The singular, brilliant, and prodigiously talented British writer/director Mike Leigh  ("Secrets and

Awards Season officially kicked off with the 82nd Annual Golden Globe Awards , which took place this past Sunday night. The Globes are widely considered a joke because the Hollywood Foreign Press  has such a moronic reputation, and the awards have been given to some questionable winners in the past. Because of past controversy, the HFP nearly disbanded a few years back, and the awards were almost completely canceled. But they made some huge alterations in the organization, an

Last Wednesday, December 11th, the Chicago Film Critics Association  kicked off the film awards season with its annual Awards Dinner at Budweiser Brickhouse Tavern  on Gallagher Way , right next to Wrigley Field (yeah, where the Yum Yum Donuts  used to be). I have been a member of the CFCA, on and off, since the organization began in 1989. I've presented awards, made phone calls, tallied votes, set up chairs, and even driven celebrity presenters and winners to and from the a