7 years ago
Festivals (10 posts found)
Ebertfest 2014: Day 2
I woke up today after less than 4 hours of sleep, which would be par for the course if you choose to cover all of Ebertfest on a daily basis. Yesterday ended the same way it started, as Carol Iwata, Roger and Chaz Ebert's personal assistant for God knows how l...
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Ebertfest 2014: Day 1
The day began with me setting out to rent a car. Usually the festival assigns each guest a host to help them get around for screenings, but this time I wanted to explore Champaign-Urbana with as much freedom as possible; to get to know Roger Ebert's hometown m...
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“Vara: A Blessing” is a Beautiful Journey Through Traditional Indian Music and Dance
Earlier in the week at Tribeca, Beneath the Harvest Sky and Broken Hill Blues explored the coming of age stories of young men in isolated locations in America and Sweden, respectively. In Vara: A Blessing, the focus is on a young Indian female, and instead of ...
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The Eve Before Ebertfest 2014
It was four years ago when this journey started, when Roger Ebert called me up to be part of his family at Ebertfest. It seemed only yesterday when he gave me an embrace, patted his heart and smiled with his eyes. The sudden rush of familiar sights, scents and...
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Tribeca Reviews: “Loitering with Intent” and “Alex of Venice,” Two Problematic Dramedies
Try to imagine an appropriate scenario in which a woman takes a bath with her brother sitting three feet away from the tub. Not only her brother actually, but her brother's best friend as well, who has a rather obvious obsession with her. Then throw in a garde...
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Tribeca Review: “Ballet 422”
He doesn’t look special, just another face in the crowd of dancers onstage. If the camera wasn’t fixed squarely on Justin Peck, your eyes may wander over to the other ballerinas leaping around him, to the grandiose scenery behind, before pausing to take in the...
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Tribeca Review: Rory Culkin is Tender and Troubled in “Gabriel”
Rory Culkin has come a long way since playing a kid in a tinfoil hat in M. Night Shyamalan's Signs.
Culkin stars as the titular character in writer-director Lou Howe's first feature Gabriel, which poignantly explores a subdued yet dangerous case of living w...
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Tribeca Reviews: “Broken Hill Blues” and “Beneath the Harvest Sky”, Two Tales of Adolescent Turmoil
Surviving adolescence can often feel like a fight against collapsing forces. In Kiruna, the small Arctic town that is the setting for the Swedish Broken Hill Blues, the ground is literally crumbling beneath the characters' feet.
The entire village is succum...
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ATLFF Review: “Metalhead”
For a genre predicated on outlandish shows of hypermasculinity, heavy metal comes second only to goth as the form of music whose practitioners and fans most regularly air their feelings of sadness and isolation. From the Tolkien-cribbing lyrics of Led Zeppelin...
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Bradford International Film Festival Review: “Tracks”
John Curran's Tracks has a brethren in the director's third film, The Painted Veil, in that both could together be aptly termed 'cinema of the pleasant'; the images are pretty, while there's not much in the way of conflict or probing into character. A based-on...
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