Michael Phillips

2 weeks ago | chicagotribune.com | Michael Phillips

There’s enough nervous, life-and-death texting afoot in “Drop,” now in theaters, to make you swear off smartphones. Director Christopher Landon does everything under the sun to vary the visual depiction of these messages. As digitally dropped threats from an unknown predator grow increasingly sinister during the protagonist’s big date at a swank Chicago restaurant, the messages blast across the big screen in huge letters, or plaster an entire wall of the ladies’ restroom.

2 weeks ago | thederrick.com | Michael Phillips

CHICAGO — Temperamentally different as they are, the playwright, screenwriter and Northwestern University professor Brett Neveu, a peppy, zigzaggy thinker and talker, has a lot in common with the formidable actor, musician and first-time film director Michael Shannon. The commonalities begin with a propensity to juggle more projects, more or less simultaneously, than would seem humanly plausible. Their joint collaborations spring from the Chicago storefront theater mainstay A Red Orchid Theatre.

2 weeks ago | mahoningmatters.com | Michael Phillips

CHICAGO - Temperamentally different as they are, the playwright, screenwriter and Northwestern University professor Brett Neveu, a peppy, zigzaggy thinker and talker, has a lot in common with the formidable actor, musician and first-time film director Michael Shannon. The commonalities begin with a propensity to juggle more projects, more or less simultaneously, than would seem humanly plausible. Their joint collaborations spring from the Chicago storefront theater mainstay A Red Orchid Theatre.

3 weeks ago | chicagotribune.com | Michael Phillips

Under wraps or busting out all over, inconvenient yearning is everywhere in the films of Alain Guiraudie. And like most of his characters, the French writer-director likes to keep his options open. No one genre suits him.

1 month ago | thebrunswicknews.com | Michael Phillips

By Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune "Is this how it's gonna end?"By the time one of the small-town, middle-aged baseball players in director Carson Lund's disarming debut feature "Eephus" says that line, it's very late, very dark and, for the old baseball field - Soldier's Field by name, a little smaller than Chicago's Soldier Field - it's the final inning before the ballfield is to be razed to make way for a new middle school.