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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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… […]
“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 […]
It’s no surprise that right-wing national-security types think that Edward Snowden is a traitor. But it’s been interesting to hear prominent mainstream… […]
At the risk of sounding daft, let me emphasize that Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip (2010) and The Trip to Italy, its hilarious sequel, are about trips. […]
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 […]
May has been christened by FilmScene as “May-azaki” in honor of Hayao Miyazaki, and they will screen four of his masterpieces: My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited… […]
A very long documentary that simply observes all facets of a complex institution is probably the most urgent movie that you can see this year. Frederick… […]
Lars von Trier has a flair for being provocative. Remember when he called himself a Nazi? His new movie, Nymphomaniac: Volume 1, which opens at FilmScene… […]
Let me take you on a quick tour of the first three scenes of The Broken Circle Breakdown, the Belgian melodrama nominated for the best foreign… […]