Are Critics and Film Festivals Dinosaurs? ft. 'The Baltimorons' Review
We begin with the first film at the 2025 Chicago Critics Film Festival. [5/3/2025]
As I journeyed by foot, car, bus, and train to arrive at the first day of the Chicago Critics Film Festival, one question couldn’t leave my mind. Why am I doing this?
The trek to this week's festival is over an hour's drive from where I’m staying and almost two by public transportation. Whenever I decide to stay for the rowdy midnight horror movie screenings, my journey to home base prevents me from sleeping until at least four in the morning, if not later. Noon finds me awake and writing about what I saw, giving me no time to decompress before wandering back into Chicago’s maze of colorful train lines and bus occupants. I sometimes forget to eat anything all day. This is certainly professional work, yet between the CTA and the few meals I do scrounge up for myself, there’s a negative balance at the end of it all for me.
To be clear, I am NOT complaining.
Er… okay, maybe I’m complaining a little bit, but I’m making no attempt to garner pity. Rather, my protests set the stage for our conflict’s front lines. This battle that haunts film production and industry is, at its root, the two questions that something titled the Chicago Critics Film Festival provokes. In today’s world of unlimited, effortless, free entertainment, why should I leave my house for films I’m uncertain to like, and, in a similar vein, what purpose does a film critic’s recommendation fulfill for me, a layman who just wants to see a movie?
These are the questions I pondered as I entered the magical Music Box Theater on Day 1 of the Chicago Critics Film Festival. Even among the arriving talent, buzzing cinephiles, and bustling press, I was already wary of the journey I’d taken to get there as I was seated for the first film of the night. Even the organ tunes of the talented Dennis Scott didn’t cure my CTA blues, and as critics Brian Tallurico and Erik Childress introduced the festival as its producers, I settled in to do my job with gritted teeth and drooping eyes.
And then the curtain went up.
The Baltimorons (light comedy)
Kicking off the festival with The Baltimorons is a fascinating choice. The crowd-pleasing comedy is certainly not a punishing watch, but the comedy film style the indie darling evokes is from a bygone era of lighter Hollywood fare. The personal story of a former improv comedian and his dentist wandering the streets of Baltimore on Christmas Eve has all the makings of a sweet classic, drizzled with witty situational humor, sprinkled with a Vince Guaraldi-style jazzy score, and topped with a bitter bit of personal darkness. There are no gross-out gags, improvised and disconnected one-liner reactions, or out-of-the-way pop culture references. This is not a movie that will make you look up from your phone when you have Netflix on in the background of your browsing. Outside of, perhaps, the inciting incident that leaves our hero down a tooth, no moment in this movie would do well diced into TikTok-sized vertical cubes.
Far from continuing my melancholy, this endeared the comedy to me, though I find myself exceptional in my generation. The last time my teenage brother referenced a movie’s comedy to me was about as far from The Baltimorons as possible. “Steve’s lava chicken is GOATed for real for real,” he proclaimed, only slightly exaggerating his appreciation for the comedy of this year’s A Minecraft Movie by deeming an awkward song interlude from Jack Black’s caricature Steve one of the Greatest Of All Time. I doubt he would appreciate the slow burn of The Baltimorons, whose exact-size-as-life characters do not beckon some large importance that would bring crowds of his friends to a theater.
Yet these charms are those that gently shook my apprehension loose. The context of a critic’s film festival, in which I was surrounded by an audience that was like-minded in their openness to experience something new, let me relax into the nasal chuckle comedy of The Baltimorons rather than require an attention-grasping familiarity to which modern films can often aspire. Even stellar cinematic comedy experiences like last year’s status quo-shifting Hundreds of Beavers and bombastic blockbuster The Fall Guy depended on their loudest moments, even after the effort of lessening distractions by going to a theater. The festival granted my wish that the quieter fun of an evening lit by Christmas lights in The Baltimorons could also exist in the crowd-pleasing spaces.
Rating: 4/5
Thus, the Chicago Critics Film Festival, with a single step, won me over to watch another day. I will post more from Day 1 soon (including a press-line interview with the leads and director of The Baltimorons), but right now I have a bus to a train to another train to another movie to catch! If you have other friends interested in movie festivals or you’re following along from the Music Box Theater, please make sure to subscribe and share this publication with those in the know!