Josh Gad

CHICAGO – “Strays” is a film that features a cast full of legitimately funny people, but this Hard-R-Rated talking dog movie poops out long before the final credits roll. The film tries to have heart, but is too busy making labored poo-poo jokes to give the schmaltz much gusto. 


CHICAGO – “Murder On The Orient Express” is a movie that is never quite as interesting as the main character’s mustache. Kenneth Branagh directs and stars as Agatha Christie’s most famous detective, Hercule Poirot. While it is a departure from the source novel, Branagh sports silver streak facial hair of audacious eccentricity.

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Chadwick Boseman portrays Thurgood Marshall in ‘Marshall.’

CHICAGO – On the night before the nationwide opening of the new film “Marshall,” the 53rd Chicago International Film Festival was alive with the premiere Red Carpet event – both for the start of the Festival and for the film and its stars. Chadwick Boseman, Sterling K. Brown, Jussie Smollett and John Marshall (the son of Thurgood Marshall, the subject of the film) all walked the carpet.

CHICAGO – The epitome of an idea that far outweighs its execution, “Pixels” is a bittersweet blunder that had all of the elements to be geeky great but ends up being cheesy mediocre. I could literally feel its potential for 105 minutes, but the $88 million film ultimately fails to realize it.

CHICAGO – In the latest HollywoodChicago.com Hookup: Film, we have 25 pairs of advance-screening movie passes up for grabs to the highly anticipated new film “Pixels” starring Adam Sandler and Kevin James!

CHICAGO – “The Wedding Ringer” is a Wedding Stinker. It’s a misogynistic trip through a barren land of hackneyed premises, stock characters, female stereotypes and strained physical gags that exemplifies everything that is wrong with big studio comedies today.

CHICAGO – Writer, director and lead actor Zach Braff has put it on the line for his latest feature, “Wish I Was Here.” He infamously used a crowd funding Kickstarter campaign to maintain creative control of the film, but he needn’t have bothered. The movie result is a sappy, high concept emotional manipulator with no basis in authenticity, and that might be the best thing that can be said about it.

CHICAGO – Zach Braff is an amiable personality, making his mark as “J.D.” on the TV sitcom “Scrubs” and the cult film “Garden State” (2004), which he wrote and directed. For his most recent project, he made show business headlines by using the website Kickstarter to “crowd fund” his latest film, “Wish I Was Here.”

Disney’s marvelous “Frozen” fits snugly in the lineage of princess stories that the studio has been crafting for decades while also looks forward to empower girls in ways that its predecessors never considered. It is a remarkably fun movie, especially in 3D, alive in ways that so many of its peers in this lackluster year for animation simply are not.

CHICAGO – The revolution in technology, that has allowed the world to change completely in just two generations, was led in part by dreamers in a garage. One of those “Edisons” was Steve Jobs – the creator of Apple Computers – portrayed with an inventor’s instinct by Ashton Kutcher.