Hey folks, welcome back to Little Big Screen: On the Big, Big Screen, where film columnist Benjamin McElroy recommends five screenings happening at Iowa’s independent movie theaters. Keep scrolling for the full list of this month’s big screenings.
Arts & Entertainment
Posted inCommunity/News
A guide to Iowa nonprofits tackling the biggest issues of our time
“When Americans think of freedom, we usually imagine a contest between a lone individual and a powerful government,” writes Timothy Snyder in his treatise On Tyranny — an Antifa 101 reading assignment, if there ever was one. “This is all well and good. But one element of freedom is the choice of associates, and one […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Review: Des Moines Symphony performs its first work by an Indigenous composer, paired with Dvořák and Chopin
Des Moines Symphony offered another crowd-pleasing performance last month with the second installment of their Masterworks series, Wisdom – Dvořák 6 & Chopin. Their program once again featured a modern piece by a living composer as well as celebrated works from two titans of the Romantic era. Truly a refreshing balance of the old and […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Iowa Odyssey: Play LV’s board game and read the stories behind the spaces
Pick up a copy of the November issue and turn to page 40 (the centerfold). You can also download a PDF of the Iowa Odyssey game board, or play the game virtually with friends. Game design by Rodney Arthur. Space concepts by Little Village staff. Visual design by Kellan Doolittle. Play-tested by Nolan Petersen and […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Review: Private school parents clash over uncomfortably familiar issues in ‘Eureka Day’ at Riverside Theatre
Jonathan Spector’s 2025 Tony Award-winning Eureka Day, with its sharp humor and painfully familiar questions about privilege, progressivism and public health, has found a lively and incisive staging in Iowa City. Under the direction of Kathleen Johnson, Riverside Theatre’s production embraces the play’s contradictions with a mix of warmth and unease — a balance that, […]
Posted inBook Reviews
Book Review: ‘The Mean Ones’ by Tatiana Schlote-Bonne
Tatiana Schlote-Bonne’s sophomore novel The Mean Ones (Creature Publishing) sounds relatively straightforward from the summary: a young girl survives a ritual sacrifice in the woods at summer camp, from which she suffers intense PTSD, and upon finding herself in the woods as an adult she’s faced with familiar horrors. In reading the book, though, the […]
Posted inAlbum Reviews
Album Review: Anchoress — ‘Sugarsong’
Sugarsong by Anchoress. Iowa has been the birthplace of some incredible heavy music acts. Marshalltown’s Modern Life Is War are melodic hardcore royalty. Iowa City wrought Aseethe and their punishing doom metal and Dryad with their outstanding crusty black metal. Out of Dubuque, Telekinetic Yeti make stoned doom metal. Muscatine’s Closet Witch, by all rights, […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
This weekend in Iowa: darkness falls across the land with these spooky events
Established 2001 | Always free! Halloween falling on a Friday this year has the weekend feeling extra spooky. Consider some of these events for your frightful festivities. In Iowa City, the Dandelion Stompers are hosting a haunted hop at Wildwood on Halloween night. In Cedar Rapids, CSPS Hall opens up its space for a Día […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
An art writer with a true crime obsession, Rachel Corbett used her new book to delve into the dark history of criminal profiling
In her latest book The Monsters We Make, author and journalist (and Iowa native) Rachel Corbett dives deep into the dark history of criminal profiling as “a tool for social control,” our collective appetite for true crime entertainment and her own personal history with, as she puts it, “an early father-figure [who] committed an unconscionable act of violence.”
Posted inArts & Entertainment
‘There is no escapism here’: Cronenberg scholar Violet Lucca on the auteur’s enticing repulsiveness, and how his most ‘offensive’ films are being reevaluated
Cedar Rapidian and University of Iowa alum Violet Lucca’s new book David Cronenberg: Clinical Trials steps past the usual canned controversies, and uses Jungian theory to structure fresh analysis on identity, potentiality and art’s place in human experience. For films often marked as being cold, flagrant or unapproachable, Lucca’s book is like a good friend next to you in a theater…
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Little Big Screen: A Spooktober double feature of ‘Rear Window’ spoofs that (technically) take place in Iowa
The official Rear Window remake isn’t worth watching, even if you could see it for free through the floor-to-ceilings in a stranger’s living room. There’s a lesson in this, I think, considering the original is such an indulgence in unwanted glances. Alfred Hitchcock set his film in the big city, of course, where apartment buildings were closer than neighbors. But beginning in the 80s, amid the decade’s at times romantic, at times cynical, fascination with middle America, films that amounted to “Rear Window but with …”
Posted inArts & Entertainment
This weekend in Iowa: Bawdy Horror, Skalloween tunes and more
Established 2001 | Always free! Don’t let the chill in the air keep you from checking out the events in today’s Weekender. In Iowa City, Dubuque musician River Glen brings his brand of “poignant folk-pop” with his band and Calle Sur to the James Theater. Check out our review of his latest album before the […]
