Meet the Critic: Erik Childress
In the Chicago Critics Film Festival’s new “Meet the Critic” series, we’re introducing our readers to some of the many talented members of our Chicago-area print, online and broadcast critics group, which celebrates the art of film and film criticism.
In today’s feature, meet Erik Childress, who has been a film critic in Chicago for over 25 years. Starting on the Jonathon Brandmeier show he then also did reviews with Nick Digilio on WGN Radio and co-hosted the Bad Mutha Film Show on WHPK Radio with Sergio Mims. He has written for eFilmCritic, Rotten Tomatoes, Magills Cinema Annual and many others. He contributes the weekly Movies & Money segment on the television show Business First AM and has appeared on NewsNation. He is a board member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and regularly hosts the Movie Madness podcast and co-hosts The Friendship Dilemma podcast along with producing and programming The Chicago Critics Film Festival since 2013.
Read his answers to our inaugural Meet the Critic Q&A below.
How has being based in Chicago informed your criticism?
Chicago to me has always felt like the perfect buffer zone when it comes to criticism. Great community for the arts, rich in history, plus that little big city feeling. You have all the courtship in L.A. so closely connected to Hollywood and New York is constantly reminding you that it’s New York. So we can just be, focus on the films themselves and reminding moviegoers and the industry what an important collective we are.
What’s a title from our line-up that you’re excited for people to see? (or a title that the festival has programmed in the past that you’ve loved)
I was so happy to show The Baltimorons which was my favorite film out of SXSW this year. But I’ve been waiting over two years for people to see A Little Prayer. Saw it back at Sundance in 2023 and it has been our most pursued and wanted title ever at this festival. Such a beautiful piece of storytelling in a time when families have been fractured for a variety of reasons and here is a film with a character navigating that rocky path; forced to acknowledge the flaws in his creation and being empathetic to those affected by that behavior the most. I just want to create a moving frame of the climactic scene between David Strathairn and Jane Levy. Their dialogue, their performances, the camera placement – its all such an exquisite and moving moment between two actors doing some of the finest work of their careers and will give attendees of our festival something wonderful to take home with them and reflect upon.
What’s a piece that you’ve written that you’re most proud of and why?
There was a piece I wrote last year that I was so happy to get a chance to write over at Pajiba called “How Silly Can You Get?: The ‘Top Secret’ Reference That Make The Movie.” I was hosting a screening of the film at Elk Grove Cinema as part of our Critic’s Classics series with my Friendship Dilemma podcast co-host, Morgan Gire, and I got the chance to do this deep dive on the Zucker/Abrahams classic and where the film picked up a number of its references. It wasn’t like Airplane that focused much of its story on a single movie (Zero Hour) and then threw in references to From Here to Eternity and others. Top Secret was chock full of obscure war, spy and Elvis films that did not exactly leap from memory. Just tracking down the movies itself was a blast and I rarely have been afforded the opportunity to do pieces like that recently. So it was great to create a record of it that I had surprisingly never quite seen in the 40 years since its debut. We doubled down on celebrating Kilmer with Real Genius right after that at Elk Grove and with his recent passing, the article feels very bittersweet and I hope it will pop up anytime someone discovers the movie for the first time.
Follow Erik at Letterboxd, X, and BlueSky.
