Iowa City Jazz Festival: Hot Tamale Louie Main Stage, Downtown Iowa City — Friday, June 29 at 9 p.m. “Over and over we forget what being American means,” Kathryn Schulz writes in a 2016 New Yorker essay about Zarif Khan, an immigrant to the U.S. in 1907 from the mountains of Afghanistan who built a […]
Articles by Scott Samuelson
After Birth: With Nate Parker’s ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ a page has decisively turned

The Birth of a Nation FilmScene — opens Friday, Oct. 7 at 1 p.m. A century after D.W. Griffith released The Birth of a Nation (1915), one of the most groundbreaking of all movies, as well as a classic of American racism, we now get Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation, an overwhelming, sympathetic […]
Talking Movies: ‘abUSed’ in the Heartland

Screening: abUSed: The Postville Raid Iowa City Public Library — Wednesday, Sep. 23 at 6:30 p.m. In a presidential election shaping up to be a personality contest, immigration has become one of the few real issues on which there’s substantive disagreement both between and within the major parties. The Guatemalan documentarian Luis Argueta’s abUSed: The […]
Talking Movies: Reel talk on film festivals

I’ve begun to have mixed emotions about film festivals. I used to love them without reservation. I still love them, but with a few reservations. Take the Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival, known as IC Docs, which is exclusively focused on short documentaries, at the Adler Journalism Building (Room 105) on April 10 and 11… […]
Talking Movies: Mockery and terror

“Do you know what’s even more destructive than a nuclear bomb?” Kim Jong-un (Randall Park) asks Dave Skylark (James Franco) as they bond over their disapproving fathers in The Interview. “Words.” It’s meant to be funny (much is meant to be funny in The Interview—the Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg movie that the real Kim […]
Talking Movies: Snowden documentary ‘Citizenfour’ raises uncomfortable questions
Talking Movies: Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan set out on another hilarious adventure in ‘The Trip to Italy’
Talking Movies: Finding America at Hardacre

17th Annual Hardacre Film Festival Tipton High School Auditorium — Saturday, Aug. 2 This year the Hardacre Film Festival will not be located in the lovely Hardacre Theater, which is currently undergoing renovation. Instead, three feature-length docs and various shorts will play on Aug. 2 at a one-day event in the newly renovated Tipton High […]