Film
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Piper-Heidsieck Flows at Oscar Nominations
Lots Of Milestones
By: - Jan 22nd, 2019Each year, Piper-Heidsieck, the official Champagne of the Oscars, throws a party to celebrate the nominations. Attending the party is lots of fun. The highlight is always the Champagne.
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The Infinite Hotel at Prototype Festival
Michal McQuilken's Rollicking Celebration of Community
By: - Jan 10th, 2019The Prototype Festival rolls on with a big production at Irondale, a Brooklyn venue which offers a large space and unusual opportunities for audience viewing. The Infinite Hotel by Michael Joseph McQuilken is having its world premiere. This is a rollicking, joyful and often touching production. It is full of surprises.
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Strange Window at Next Wave, BAM
Marianne Weems Re-invents Henry James
By: - Dec 16th, 2018The Builder’s Association re-invented Henry James’ Turn of the Screw for today. Strange Window takes its title from a story James heard from the Archbishop of Canterbury. A woman was so fearful of strange figures who appeared in the windows of her home that she moved to protect her children.
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Phantom Limb Company at BAM
Next Wave Festival Presents A Different Wave
By: - Nov 10th, 2018The Phantom Limb Company presents Falling Out at BAM's Next Wave Festival. A decade after 9/11 in the US, an earthquake in Japan created a tsunami which swept over swept over Otsuchi, Japan. A terrorist attack and nature's own are comparable in the name dates by which they are remembered. The tsunami caused meltdowns at three nuclear reactors in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power plant. Hundreds of thousand of residents were affected in what came to be called 3/11.
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Space Odyssey 2001 at NY Philharmonic
Reprise of Classic
By: - Sep 18th, 2018Stanley Kubrick's seminal 1968 classic is now 50 years old, and remains as puzzling as ever. On Friday night, as part of this year's The Art of the Score festival, the New York Philharmonic performed the complete orchestral and choral music of 2001 as accompaniment to a large scale screening of the film at Lincoln Center.
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Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman
Exploring Blacks in America Post Civil War
By: - Aug 29th, 2018In his latest film, Lee explores the many aspects of the black experience in America since the Civil War. Lee has mellowed since his earlier “controversial, verbal, and incendiary rhetoric” days that some complained about in his movies. But there have never been stronger or more talented chroniclers of the black experience in America than Lee and the great black American playwright August Wilson.
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Ivo van Hove's The Damned
Hatred as Source of All Evil at Park Avenue Armory
By: - Jul 21st, 2018The Damned by Ivo van Hove, based on the screenplay of Luchino Visconti, tears through the Park Avenue Armory. The stage is in four parts, if you don’t include a scene which goes out onto the Park Avenue where a shocked dog walker sees the mad Sophie von Essenbeck running wildly in search of her son.
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Oscar Winner Sebastain Lelio Directs Disobedience
Jewish Life in England
By: - Jun 02nd, 2018“Disobedience” is a mesmerizing, interior, fascinating, and affecting screenplay that carefully structures the movie to squeeze maximum emotional impact from its two stars, which it does in spades. It’s a bold and daring film even by today’s standards.
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Nana and Hitler Versus Picasso and the Others
Two New Documentary Films
By: - May 10th, 2018Two 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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2018 AM-DOCS Film Festival
Annual Program in Palm Springs
By: - May 06th, 2018Seven 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.
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68th Berlinale, 2018
February 15-25, Germany
By: - Mar 01st, 2018In 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.
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Diane Kruger Star of In the Fade
Award Winning German Actress in Thriller
By: - Jan 22nd, 2018Germany 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.
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Prototype Festival New York
Diving into Black Inscriptions
By: - Jan 19th, 2018Black 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.
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Prototype Festival Two
The Echo Drift by Mikael Karlsson
By: - Jan 11th, 2018The 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.
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Oscar Bound Documentaries
Final Five to be Announded January 23
By: - Jan 11th, 2018If 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.
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Palm Springs International Film Festival
Third Largest American Film Festival
By: - Jan 11th, 2018On 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.
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Blank Out by Michel Van Der Aa
Miah Persson and Roderick Williams Excel
By: - Sep 26th, 2017Under 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.
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Brigsby Bear Directed by Dave McCary,
A Sweet Indie Film
By: - Aug 29th, 2017If 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.
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Step by Amanda Lipitz
Award Winning Documentary Film
By: - Aug 29th, 2017If 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.
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Ian Bostridge Reimagines Winterreise
Mostly Mozart Offers Hans Zender's Interpretation
By: - Aug 12th, 2017Netia 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.
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Epic British Film Dunkirk
Written and Directed by Christopher Nolan
By: - Jul 27th, 2017Currrently 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.
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Remembering Howard Frank Mosher
Screening at the Bennington Center for the Arts on July 28th
By: - Jul 14th, 2017Vermont 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.
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E.T Enchants at New York Philharmonic
Spielberg Classic Set to Music
By: - May 16th, 2017Delighting 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.
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Land of Mine
Dane Martin Zandvliet’s 2015 Film
By: - Apr 25th, 2017Danish 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.
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How to Watch a Movie
Salvation in a Darkened Room
By: - Apr 10th, 2017This 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."
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