Big-deal film fests are synonymous with location. Toronto, Telluride, Cannes, and Sundance evoke industry accolades and red-carpet credentials. Our own Virginia Film Festival has gotten pretty buzzy over the years, with marquee names, tentpole previews, and movie deals cut on the Downtown Mall. The VAFF has become “one of the nation’s leading regional film festivals […]
Big-deal film fests are synonymous with location. Toronto, Telluride, Cannes, and Sundance evoke industry accolades and red-carpet credentials. Our own Virginia Film Festival has gotten pretty buzzy over the years, with marquee names, tentpole previews, and movie deals cut on the Downtown Mall. The VAFF has become “one of the nation’s leading regional film festivals […]
As a Halloween warm-up, the Virginia Film Festival’s After Hours collection offers four monster movies, even though none are being screened particularly late at night. Curated by Igor Shteyrenberg of the Miami Jewish Film Festival and horror fest Popcorn Frights, this thematic group of what the VFF calls “films that walk on the wild side” […]
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere Every artist who hits it big faces an inevitable question: What do I do for a follow-up? Bruce Springsteen confronted it after his fifth album, The River, topped the charts in 1980. Instead of trying to create another commercial smash, he produced Nebraska, a deeply personal acoustic album that surprised […]
The University of Virginia is often described as Jeffersonian, as academically elite, as a public Ivy. Less often used: cool. The Virginia Pep Band, during its nearly three-decade heyday, was cool. Pep Banned, a documentary that premieres at the Virginia Film Festival, captures the joyful subversion of the student-run band that took to the football […]
The decision to use untrained actors can yield uncertain results. One possible outcome is the kind of ham-fisted, melodramatic overacting that renders a movie unwatchable. Another is cinematic gold. Such is the case with The President’s Cake. The sometimes humorous drama is a moving story set and shot in Iraq, during the 1990s under the […]
Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz returns to the Virginia Film Festival to discuss director Ang Lee’s 1997 drama The Ice Storm, and to introduce The Sting at a Robert Redford tribute screening. Set during the holiday season in 1973, The Ice Storm examines the tangled relationships of two generations of suburbanites grappling with everything […]
Peter Hujar’s Day A film adaptation of the book recounting a real-life conversation that took place between photographer Peter Hujar and writer Linda Rosenkrantz, this documentary stars Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall in an enthralling recreation of a single day in 1974 Manhattan. Hujar, who died of AIDS-related complications in 1987, was a leading figure […]
Filmmaker Adamu Chan sees the current fractured landscape of American life and says it doesn’t make sense to hope that his work will change anyone’s mind. Instead, Chan makes films for and about people that he has a shared experience with. What These Walls Won’t Hold—a documentary exploring Chan’s time at California’s San Quentin State […]
UPDATE 10/22/25: Less than a week after turning down the Trump administration’s Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, the University of Virginia signed an agreement with the U.S. Justice Department on October 22. Under the terms of the deal, the DOJ will suspend all ongoing investigations into civil rights violations at UVA, contingent on […]
The University of Virginia received a letter from the U.S. Department of Education October 1, calling on the school to sign an agreement in exchange for increased access to federal funds. The letter, and attached “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” was sent to nine universities, which, in addition to UVA, included Brown, Dartmouth, […]