PICK: Oscar Shorts

Short your investment: Release dates and streaming access make it a challenge to see every movie nominated for a best picture Academy Award this year. But serious Oscar pool competitors know the short film category is a more easily achievable viewing list. Enter Violet Crown’s Oscar Shorts series, part of the theater’s RSVP Cinema program. […]

Movie review: The Insult imparts the complexities of conflict

A dialogue of national reconciliation takes the form of a courtroom drama in Ziad Doueiri’s The Insult, one of this year’s nominees for Best Foreign Language Film. It all begins as a minor conflict between a Lebanese Christian mechanic, Tony (Adel Karam), and a Palestinian engineer living in Beirut, Yasser (Kamel El Basha). Yasser is […]

Movie review: Stephen King’s IT balloons with big-screen scares

The film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel IT, long considered unfilmable, has finally reached the big screen, bringing new life and a modern sensibility to a story that is simultaneously nostalgic and damning of selective memory. The decades are swapped—our heroes are growing up in the late 1980s instead of King’s 1950s—but the coulrophobia has […]

In brief: Sex trafficking, how to scare politicians and more

Charges filed under new sex trafficking law Quincy Edwards, 33, was indicted on 10 counts June 6 related to human trafficking for threatening and intimidating a victim into prostitution at the Royal Inn Hotel, the first time those charges have been brought in Albemarle. He also was charged with extortion, abduction and use of a […]

Surprise resolution: City makes move to buy Water Street Garage

City Council unanimously passed a resolution June 6 authorizing City Manager Maurice Jones to make an offer to buy the parking spaces owned by Charlottesville Parking Center in the Water Street Garage. Both the city and CPC owner Mark Brown have said they are in talks to resolve issues that led to the entities suing […]

Parking petition: Violet Crown hires PR firm

The Downtown Business Association of Charlottesville said in April it wasn’t taking sides in the parking wars fueled by litigation between the city and Mark Brown, owner of the Charlottesville Parking Center. That course changed when Violet Crown hired public relations firm Payne Ross, also a DBAC member, which circulated a petition calling for the […]

Regal relents, shows Star Wars

A week ago, C-VILLE reported how Regal Stonefield Stadium 14 refused to show the highest grossing film ever, Star Wars, if it was shown at independent movie chain Violet Crown in downtown Charlottesville. In an abrupt change of heart, Regal lists Star Wars, The Revenant, Hail, Caesar! and Deadpool as screening February 19, even though they’re […]

Movie monopoly? Regal faces lawsuits around the country

In 2000, Charlottesville had seven movie theaters. For most of 2015, it had one—Regal Stonefield Stadium 14 and IMAX—until the Violet Crown Cinema opened downtown late last year. “That’s one theater too many for Regal,” says Adam Greenbaum, owner of the Visulite in Staunton and the beloved Vinegar Hill Theatre in Charlottesville, which closed in […]