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  • Carnegie Celebrates Steve Reich's 80th Birthday

    To Defy God or Not is the Big Question

    By: Susan Hall - Nov 02nd, 2016

    The year long birthday celebration for Steve Reich, our country's foremost composer, continues. At Carnegie Hall, we heard a Quartet from 2013 and the world premier of Pulse with the International Contemporary Ensemble. The evening was capped by Three Tales, a collaboration between Reich and his wife, Beryl Korot, a video artist. While Reich appears to be fit as a fiddle, these tributes to his decades might better be annual for all the pleasure they offer.

  • Babe at the New York Philharmonic

    Nigel Westlake's Score Performed Live

    By: Susan Hall - Dec 18th, 2016

    Babe is a tale about an unprejudiced soul and one we should surely take to heart. Children can learn to sing Jingle Bells with LaLaLa. Will one of the youngsters who was lucky enough to see the film with the NY Phil, one day fall in love with the Saint Saens Symphony and say, That’s Babe’s song?

  • Palm Springs International Film Festival

    Annual Event Since 1989

    By: Jack Lyons - Jan 19th, 2017

    In 1989, then celebrity Mayor Sonny Bono, decided that what his desert paradise city needed was a little more glitz, klieg-lights, and glamor. So he and a group of his show business pals put together a business plan, recruited a sponsor like Nortel to help pay the bills and the first Palm Springs International Film Festival (PSIFF) was born.

  • Breakable You Directed by Andrew Wagner

    Highlight of Film Festival

    By: Jack Lyons - Jan 19th, 2017

    “Breakable You”, co-written with Fred Parnes and smartly directed by Andrew Wagner, is a sophisticated and wryly funny film, at times, and is best described as a poignant ‘dramaedy’ that centers around the dynamic Weller family on New York’s Upper West Side.

  • Scott Marshall Smith’s Potent Camera Store

    Film a Cautionary Tale About American Business

    By: Jack Lyons - Jan 20th, 2017

    Writer/director Scott Marshall Smith’s potent Indie movie “Camera Store”, is a cautionary tale about American business and its practices toward its employees. Two of America’s finest character actors star as embittered employees and clerks: Ray LaPine, played by John Larroquette) and Pinky Stueben, played by (John Rhys-Davies).

  • Newsies: The Broadway Musical in Movie Theaters

    Filmed Performance of Tony-Award Winning Musical

    By: Aaron Krause - Feb 21st, 2017

    In the Disney musical hit “Newsies,” which is based on a true story, the hated man is newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, who jacked up the price for newsboys to buy the very papers they were to sell.

  • 67th Berlinale, 2017

    Feb 9-19, Berlin, Germany

    By: Angelika Jansen - Feb 21st, 2017

    This year's Berlinale from February 9 - 19, 2017, started with high expectations and ended in a lukewarm acceptance of choices the international jury of seven presented at the Berlinale Palace on February 18. Although the jury made their selections only from the 18 submissions for the big prizes - the Golden Bear and seven Silver Bears in the Competition - it is this section that counts. The Competition is the heart and center of this huge international film festival that also turns every year into a film-viewing orgy for around 4000 critics as well as for a huge number of highly motivated moviegoers.

  • Jim Jarmusch and Paterson

    Film's Quest for Poetry

    By: Nancy Kempf - Feb 25th, 2017

    Jim Jarmusch’s new film “Paterson” – about a poet named Paterson who drives a bus for a living in Paterson, New Jersey – is concerned not simply with poetry and the craft of prosody, but with the very nature of language itself.

  • How to Watch a Movie

    Salvation in a Darkened Room

    By: Nancy Kempf - Apr 10th, 2017

    This think piece explores the difference between movies and cinema. In a compelling overview Kempf states that "I go to a lot of movies for a variety of reasons: to learn about other worlds/people/times through fictions and documentaries, to measure the zeitgeist, to ease a 100°+ summer day, but my primary desire is to experience the art of cinema, a remarkable art that, even more than stage, is collaborative and incorporates the entire constellation of the arts."

  • Land of Mine

    Dane Martin Zandvliet’s 2015 Film

    By: Nancy Kempf - Apr 25th, 2017

    Danish filmmaker Martin Zandvliet’s 2015 “Land of Mine,” was among the nominees for the 2017 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The film’s Danish title is “Under sandet,” and it is a shame distributors did not opt for the literal translation “Under the Sand,” which possesses a certain poetry the clumsy, double-meaning “Land of Mine” lacks.

  • E.T Enchants at New York Philharmonic

    Spielberg Classic Set to Music

    By: Arlene Judith Klotzko - May 16th, 2017

    Delighting fans of all ages a packed New York Philharmonic conducted the music of John Williams during a screening of the Stephen Spielberg film "E.T." A screening of the belived film accompanied by the Boston Pops will be presented at Tanglewood this summer.

  • Remembering Howard Frank Mosher

    Screening at the Bennington Center for the Arts on July 28th

    By: Jay Craven - Jul 14th, 2017

    Vermont novelist Howard Frank Mosher died on January 29th of this year. Filmmaker Jay Craven worked closely with the Northeast Kingdom writer since 1985, making five films based on his stories. Craven will be on tour this summer, screening his first Mosher feature film,“Where the Rivers Flow North,” and providing reflections on three decades of collaboration with the Northeast Kingdom writer.

  • Epic British Film Dunkirk

    Written and Directed by Christopher Nolan

    By: Jack Lyons - Jul 27th, 2017

    Currrently number one at the box office the epic British film Dunkirk, written and directed by Christopher Nolan, is the surprise hit of the summer season. This is the time of year for action adventure cartoon characters, like Wonder Woman, kids stuff and date movies. The film focuses on the British army, then defeated in France, about to be driven into the sea by Rommel and his Panzers. Miracuously that didn't as the British used every available vessel from yachts to fishing boats to ferry the troops across the channel. This was the moment and event when the fate of Europe was at a tipping point. It makes for a heck a movie.

  • Ian Bostridge Reimagines Winterreise

    Mostly Mozart Offers Hans Zender's Interpretation

    By: Susan Hall - Aug 12th, 2017

    Netia Jones has combined tenor Ian Bostridge's thirty year passion and a brilliant "compositional interpretation" of the piano music for orchestra into a hydra-headed tour de force with video, sets and the suggestion of cabaret. Bostridge has the perfect voice for the wanderer, a stranger at the start and at the end. The staging works well.

  • Brigsby Bear Directed by Dave McCary,

    A Sweet Indie Film

    By: Nancy Kempf - Aug 29th, 2017

    If you missed the movingly sweet indie film “Brigsby Bear,” you are not alone. My theater cancelled their scheduled weekend showings after a negligible audience for its opening Friday, though they did allow it a 4:00 p.m. showing the following Monday and Wednesday afternoons before sending it on its way.

  • Step by Amanda Lipitz

    Award Winning Documentary Film

    By: Nancy Kempf - Aug 29th, 2017

    If there are antidotes to Charlottesville, one may be “Step,” the new documentary from Amanda Lipitz that won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Inspirational Filmmaking at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival and the Audience Award for Best Feature at the 2017 AFI Docs festival. The film tells the remarkable story of the step team at the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women (BLSYW). The school opened its doors to sixth graders in 2009. In the spring of 2016, its inaugural class was preparing to graduate.

  • Blank Out by Michel Van Der Aa

    Miah Persson and Roderick Williams Excel

    By: Susan Hall - Sep 26th, 2017

    Under the canopy formed by the dome of the Drill Hall in the Park Avenue Armory, Michel Van der Aa’s brilliant chamber opera, Blank Out, unfolds. In this gargantuan space, we seemed small and so did elements of the opera.

  • Oscar Bound Documentaries

    Final Five to be Announded January 23

    By: Nancy Kempf - Jan 11th, 2018

    If there were one word to characterize this year’s selection of possible documentary Oscar nominees, it would have to be nihilism. In its preliminary round of voting, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences selected 15 films of the 170 submissions for Best Documentary Academy Award, many produced by Amazon Studios, Netflix, HBO, et al.

  • Palm Springs International Film Festival

    Third Largest American Film Festival

    By: Jack Lyons - Jan 11th, 2018

    On January 2nd, Palm Springs International Film Festival (PSIFF) officially launched its 29th Annual Film Festival and Gala. More than 2400 guests, attended, along with stars, celebrities, industry professionals, screenwriters, producers, directors, and actors to rub elbows at the Palm Springs Convention Center, as they accepted their Awards for their artistic accomplishments during 2017.

  • Prototype Festival Two

    The Echo Drift by Mikael Karlsson

    By: Susan Hall - Jan 11th, 2018

    The Echo Drift is the second opera staged by the Prototype Festival, a group of creative producers who are working to develop new opera using all the media available, as opera has done from its earliest beginnings.

  • Prototype Festival New York

    Diving into Black Inscriptions

    By: Susan Hall - Jan 19th, 2018

    Black Inscription, from Carla Kihlstedt, Matthias Bossi and Jeremy Flower, is a multimedia song cycle that follows a free deep sea diver on her journey to the ocean's embrace. This tone poem fills an open slot in the Prototype Festival for works that don't quite fit the opera category.

  • Diane Kruger Star of In the Fade

    Award Winning German Actress in Thriller

    By: Jack Lyons - Jan 22nd, 2018

    Germany has become a perennial contender for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Once again, its industry is competing for another win with the emotion-packed thriller “In the Fade”, starring Diane Kruger. She won as Best Actress at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival.

  • 68th Berlinale, 2018

    February 15-25, Germany

    By: Angelika Jansen - Mar 01st, 2018

    In general, the 68th Berlinale may be defined as a quest of women attempting to be heard and seen. Seven of twelve prizes went to women, an astounding conclusion, especially since most of the contributions were more on the quiet side and not on the ‘#me too’ loudness. 385 films were screened and 300,000 moviegoers were counted, cold weather or not.

  • 2018 AM-DOCS Film Festival

    Annual Program in Palm Springs

    By: Jack Lyons - May 06th, 2018

    Seven years ago, AM-DOCS Film Festival founder Teddy Grouya, felt that filmmakers of documentaries needed a proper festival of their own to display their diverse and wide-ranging, special subject-matter films. Accordinglt, the documentary film genre has been presented a festival format with all the trimmings.

  • Nana and Hitler Versus Picasso and the Others

    Two New Documentary Films

    By: Nancy Kempf - May 10th, 2018

    Two recent documentaries, both directorial feature film debuts, approach the memory and history of World War II from distinctly different and refreshing perspectives. Serena Dykman’s “Nana” is a eulogy, not only for her grandmother, Maryla Michalowski-Dyamant but for all victims of the Holocaust. Claudio Poli’s “Hitler versus Picasso and the Others” is a thorough history of the labyrinthine fate of European art during World War II.

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