Film
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Carnegie Celebrates Steve Reich's 80th Birthday
To Defy God or Not is the Big Question
By: - Nov 02nd, 2016The year long birthday celebration for Steve Reich, our country's foremost composer, continues. At Carnegie Hall, we heard a Quartet from 2013 and the world premier of Pulse with the International Contemporary Ensemble. The evening was capped by Three Tales, a collaboration between Reich and his wife, Beryl Korot, a video artist. While Reich appears to be fit as a fiddle, these tributes to his decades might better be annual for all the pleasure they offer.
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Babe at the New York Philharmonic
Nigel Westlake's Score Performed Live
By: - Dec 18th, 2016Babe is a tale about an unprejudiced soul and one we should surely take to heart. Children can learn to sing Jingle Bells with LaLaLa. Will one of the youngsters who was lucky enough to see the film with the NY Phil, one day fall in love with the Saint Saens Symphony and say, That’s Babe’s song?
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Palm Springs International Film Festival
Annual Event Since 1989
By: - Jan 19th, 2017In 1989, then celebrity Mayor Sonny Bono, decided that what his desert paradise city needed was a little more glitz, klieg-lights, and glamor. So he and a group of his show business pals put together a business plan, recruited a sponsor like Nortel to help pay the bills and the first Palm Springs International Film Festival (PSIFF) was born.
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Breakable You Directed by Andrew Wagner
Highlight of Film Festival
By: - Jan 19th, 2017“Breakable You”, co-written with Fred Parnes and smartly directed by Andrew Wagner, is a sophisticated and wryly funny film, at times, and is best described as a poignant ‘dramaedy’ that centers around the dynamic Weller family on New York’s Upper West Side.
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Scott Marshall Smith’s Potent Camera Store
Film a Cautionary Tale About American Business
By: - Jan 20th, 2017Writer/director Scott Marshall Smith’s potent Indie movie “Camera Store”, is a cautionary tale about American business and its practices toward its employees. Two of America’s finest character actors star as embittered employees and clerks: Ray LaPine, played by John Larroquette) and Pinky Stueben, played by (John Rhys-Davies).
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Newsies: The Broadway Musical in Movie Theaters
Filmed Performance of Tony-Award Winning Musical
By: - Feb 21st, 2017In the Disney musical hit “Newsies,” which is based on a true story, the hated man is newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, who jacked up the price for newsboys to buy the very papers they were to sell.
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67th Berlinale, 2017
Feb 9-19, Berlin, Germany
By: - Feb 21st, 2017This year's Berlinale from February 9 - 19, 2017, started with high expectations and ended in a lukewarm acceptance of choices the international jury of seven presented at the Berlinale Palace on February 18. Although the jury made their selections only from the 18 submissions for the big prizes - the Golden Bear and seven Silver Bears in the Competition - it is this section that counts. The Competition is the heart and center of this huge international film festival that also turns every year into a film-viewing orgy for around 4000 critics as well as for a huge number of highly motivated moviegoers.
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Jim Jarmusch and Paterson
Film's Quest for Poetry
By: - Feb 25th, 2017Jim Jarmusch’s new film “Paterson” – about a poet named Paterson who drives a bus for a living in Paterson, New Jersey – is concerned not simply with poetry and the craft of prosody, but with the very nature of language itself.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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