A piece on local filmmaker Jim Sikora’s The Critics, mostly worth reading for some film journalism doomsday language. Excerpt:
Adapted from a scathingly self-reflective stage play by novelist and former Chicago Reader staff writer Adam Langer, The Critics is an icily witty exercise in Windy City rancor. Structured petulantly around the proving of the titular characters’ static buffoonery, the multi-layered plot doesn’t so much burn Langer’s vocational bridges as intimately dismantle them. With the begrudging coverage the film has received from Langer’s prior employers especially, one expects the script to feel like an elaborate indulgence—an intricate, if ultimately masturbatory, pressure valve for a fed-up aesthete. But the extent to which Langer was exasperated with theater in the late 90′s (a period during which, not coincidentally, Broadway arguably underwent a corporate candy coating) facilitated a far more deliberate and introspective attack than that glossing would suggest….
Throughout our descent into the script’s reflexive fictional realities (we see an abridged version of Before Swine reenacted by the six central characters as the movie’s climax) the border between criticism and creativity is treated as a fickle, semi-permeable membrane. Most of the New Void‘s writers have no trouble unleashing 600 words of fetid hostility toward “an updated Major Barbara” or “some shitty improv thing,” but when it comes to inventing their own dialogue, they stare at blank pages for eons. Implicit in this scenario is a truism few of us want to admit—that the critical impulse, while deeply personal, is more reactive and adaptive than “creative,” per se. (Paul Schrader came close to a definitive statement on these “separate but equal” arts when he claimed that his critical voice often disapproves of the choices of his directorial one.)
Picking up roughly a decade after the bleak if preposterous Pacific War milieu of 
If Feo Aladag’s shrill, soapy When We Leave is able to repeat its festival-circuit success with the U.S. theatrical press and AMPAS (it’s Germany’s official Oscar submission), it’ll likely be due to the feisty, termitic performance at its center. Sibel Kekilli, playing the scrawny, battered, Turkish-German mother Umay, deserves attention primarily for resisting the plodding stateliness of Aladag’s neophyte directing. Even in the wordless opening, which blinks us from a vague flash forward of violence to a cool gray hospital room where Umay lies in anticipation, the film apes the anticlimactic mood fetishism of Blue while seemingly forgetting Krzysztof Kieslowski’s subtle emotional cues. What follows isn’t much more encouraging; the new director admirably avoids mirroring the storyline’s physical turbulence with the churning grit of handheld photography, but the meditative camera angles and vibrantly burnt colors palettes make When We Leave one of the few eastern European woman’s issues films to be shot like a designer catalogue.