Biography

Michael Phillips was born on March 11, 1961 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, USA.

Taxi Driver (1976), His Girl Friday (1940), The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), The Godfather Part II (1974), and The Band Wagon (1953) are some of his favorite films.

Was a film critic for the Chicago Tribune from 2006 to 2025.

He is a "musically unqualified but passionate aficionado" of film scoring, and contributes every week to the program "Soundtrack" on Classical WFMT-FM (wfmt). He sometimes cites his favorite version of his favorite theme as Bill Evans' solo piano treatment of David Raksin's "The Bad and the Beautiful.".

Top 10 favorite films of the 2000s: 1. There Will Be Blood (2007) 2. Ratatouille (2007) 3. Climates (2006) 4. Once (2006) 5. Y tu mamá también (2001) 6. Zodiac (2007) 7. United 93 (2006) 8. Mulholland Drive (2001) 9. Gosford Park (2001) 10. Minority Report (2002).

The problems here, I think, are weirdly simple. The movie takes our knowledge and our interest in the material for granted. It zips from one number to another, throwing a ton of frenetically edited eye candy at the screen, charmlessly. "Be Our Guest" is nothing but visual noise. Too often we're watching highly qualified performers, plus a few less conspicuously talented ones stuck doing karaoke, or motion-capture work of middling quality. The movie feels like a matinee of the second national tour of Disney's stage edition of "Beauty and the Beast," somewhere around the 300th performance.

The Kids Are All Right is the easiest film to love I've seen all year.

[Moonlight (2016)] I am worried that hype will really hurt this film.

Number one on my list is the small Irish film "Once." I selected this as the best film of the year because it's the one that left me feeling like a million bucks.