By Charles Burns When Mia Lazar, a 17-year-old student at Blacksburg High School, first heard the news of Heather Heyer’s senseless murder at the hands of a white supremacist in Charlottesville, she was both rattled and ready to stand up for positive social change. Outraged by the rampant bigotry on display on August 12, 2017, […]
By Charles Burns When Mia Lazar, a 17-year-old student at Blacksburg High School, first heard the news of Heather Heyer’s senseless murder at the hands of a white supremacist in Charlottesville, she was both rattled and ready to stand up for positive social change. Outraged by the rampant bigotry on display on August 12, 2017, […]
Celluloid hero: In defining its summer film series Pure Formalism, The Bridge PAI states, “In the spirit of Stan Brakhage, we stand face-to-face with the image itself—and absorb.” Brakhage was a highly influential experimental filmmaker whose career spanned five decades beginning in the ’50s. His six-minute short The Dante Quartet, a silent film of images […]
Get the thrill of an outdoor adventure while staying warm and comfy at the BANFF Mountain Film Festival. Filmed in spectacular locations around the planet, BANFF’s lineup of impossible climbs, extreme bike rides, dramatic free falls, and environmental eye-openers, which range from five to 45 minutes in length, offers viewers a breathtaking journey from their […]
In Shoplifters, director Hirokazu Kore-eda explores the beauty and morality that forms within societal fractures. The characters live as any family ought: They are supportive, caring, loving, and do what they must to help each other survive. They uphold the epitome of family values, except they are criminals and none of them are related. Every […]
If you’ve ever listened to somebody tell a joke when they’ve clearly lost track of the punchline, you know the experience of watching The Upside. Full of good intentions and boundless charisma between the performers, every moment of real tension in the film is diffused before getting to the good stuff in this remake based […]
If you’re not going to get a good movie for your money, you may as well get a lot of one. So it goes with Mortal Engines, a YA fantasy novel adaptation that seems to have learned from the overlong Divergent series by packing the entire Mortal Engines trilogy into one movie. Or, perhaps producer […]
By its very nature, portraying the life of an artist of any medium on film while incorporating the substance of his work into the overall aesthetic is a risky endeavor. Perhaps it’s no coincidence, then, that visual artist and director Julian Schnabel has helmed two of the most resonant films about the lives and work […]
By Justin Humphreys arts@c-ville.com Decades ago, actor/writer/director/film historian Peter Bogdanovich promised his friend and colleague Orson Welles that, if Welles couldn’t finish his work-in-progress, The Other Side of the Wind, he would complete it for him. Now, Bogdanovich, at age 79, has beaten countless setbacks and fulfilled that promise. Academy Award-winning editor Bob Murawski and […]
When Lorenzo Dickerson was in fifth grade at Murray Elementary school, he had to write a book report. He went down to the school library and came across Extraordinary Black Americans, a book full of dozens of profiles on inventors, politicians, activists, artists, writers and more. It was a sizable read for the fifth-grader, who […]
At first, the biggest surprise move made by Marvel was placing fan favorite (yet far-fetched) Thor on equal footing with the iconic Iron Man and Captain America in its Cinematic Universe. Now we accept the character’s presence as a given. Then the studio defied expectations by establishing phase two of its master plan with new-to-film […]