Sony Pictures Releasing

CHICAGO – Tom Hanks finds himself – as the title character – stranded in a slough of artificiality in this clumsy manipulative attempt at a crowd pleaser. He plays a grump in “A Man Named Otto,” a remake of a 2015 Swedish film. The setting has been transferred to the grey rust belt of Pittsburgh, and Hanks is a widower with a lot of chips on his shoulder about the world today.

CHICAGO – Patrick McDonald of HollywoodChicago.com appears on The Eddie Volkman Show with Hannah B on WSSR-FM (Star 96.7 Joliet, Illinois) on December 23rd, reviewing the new Whitney Houston movie bio “I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” in theaters beginning December 23rd.

CHICAGO – Patrick McDonald of HollywoodChicago.com appears on “The Morning Mess” with Scott Thompson on WBGR-FM (Monroe, Wisconsin) on September 15th, 2022, reviewing “The Woman King,” about Woman Warriors in 19th Century Africa. In theaters on September 16th..

CHICAGO – Patrick McDonald of HollywoodChicago.com audio film review on “Where the Crawdads Sing,” the highly anticipated adaptation of the huge best selling novel by Della Owens, and featuring Daisy Edgar-Jones, in theater everywhere beginning July 15th.

CHICAGO – “Bad Boys For Life” shows that maybe Will Smith isn’t too old for this kind of sh*t, but Martin Lawrence certainly is. This third installment comes 17 years after “Bad Boys II,” and 25 years after the original film unleashed director Michael Bay on an unsuspecting public.

CHICAGO – The opening to the 1950s “Adventures of Superman” TV series includes the words “strange visitor from another planet.” But because Supes had used his subsequent powers for good, he eventually was found not so strange. What if, however, he had been evil, and used his powers destructively? The new film “Brightburn” speculates on such a phenomenon.

CHICAGO – Face it, fellow modernists, we live on our screens. It was inevitable that entire films would soon be set there, and the latest is “Searching.” Combining the nightmare of a missing teenager with the abilities of social media, cameras and devices, filmmakers Aneesh Chaganty and Sev Ohanian “screen it” to the max.

CHICAGO – In the latest HollywoodChicago.com Hookup: Film, we have 100 pairs of advance-screening IMAX movie passes up for grabs to the new film “Alpha” starring Kodi Smit-McPhee!

CHICAGO – We don’t really know what is going on at the Mexican border, nor if we’re lucky understand the desperation in crossing over. “Sicario: Day of the Soldado” is a cynical and sad film, but gives a bit of perspective on the this ongoing situation, especially as it deflates the current presidential administration.

CHICAGO – Rarely does a filmmaker have a long or influential enough career to revisit a story and characters that they’ve explored in a previous film. Oscar winner Danny Boyle has both qualifications, as he again takes on – 20 years after its 1996 release – his classic film “Trainspotting, which is elegantly titled “T2 Trainspotting.”