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Jim Sikora’s The Critics, which opens today at the Gene Siskel Film Center, could be the most exhaustively, some might say incestuously, documented movie in the history of the Reader. Back in 1996, when Adam Langer was still writing theater criticism for the paper, he published a profile of Sikora as the latter was making his movie Bullet on a Wire. Two years later, Langer wrote and directed the stage version of The Critics, which was loosely based on his experiences writing for the Reader. Shortly thereafter, Sikora adapted the play to the screen, casting the original players from the Chicago Dramatists production. Last year Ed M. Koziarski wrote a follow-up profile of Sikora, which noted that, after ten years, the filmmaker was finally editing The Critics for release, and this week Langer contributes a reminiscence prompted by the film’s premiere.
