All of Hollywood is nursing a hangover, so you know what that means: It’s the Monday after the Academy Awards! After a disappointing 2019 Oscars (including a Best Picture winner that was more than a little controversial) and a slate of 2020 nominees rife with snubs, cinephiles’ were tempered last night
FilmScene
Posted inArts & Entertainment
The Oscar-nominated Animated Shorts challenge viewers to face the many forms of grief
Perhaps more than any of the other 23 categories, the Oscar-nominated Animated Shorts come with the promise of fresh, risk-taking perspectives. The medium of animation is truly limitless, and for being so constrained within the mainstream, there is something liberating to view the artistic shorts explore, push and reinvent themselves for the betterment of their own narratives.
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Oscar-nominated Live Action Shorts call us to tap into our ability to care
The Oscar-nominated Live Action Shorts program as a whole, though the most uneven of the three Shorts categories, is a winner. A meditation on danger, safety and choices, it presents itself to the viewer only occasionally with judgement. The strongest argument for the short film format is right here in front of us within this programming.
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Oscar Documentary Shorts urge audiences to embrace hope
This year’s slate for Best Documentary Shorts provides insight into the world’s desperate need for justice and the hope it drags behind it. Is that too bleak? Too cynical? Would you prefer hope to be leading rather than limp and full of grass stains? So do the five films nominated this year. They urge us to embrace hope of any kind, even if it’s reactionary.
Posted inArts & Entertainment
‘Color Out of Space’ is a psychedelic horror trip you won’t want to end
Nathan rushes Theresa to the hospital, leaving their children at home to fend for themselves. But the television is all static. The cell phone signals are scrambled. Time is incongruous, no longer adhering to linearity or logic. Something sinister is brewing …
Posted inOpinion
Don’t bother reading this review, just go see ‘Parasite’ at FilmScene
I want to gush about Parasite, which opens at FilmScene—The Chauncey today, but it’s one of those movies where the less you know going in, the better. Still, while you’re here, I think there are a few things I can say about Bong Joon-ho’s latest masterpiece that will, hopefully, entice you to go see it without diminishing that experience for you.
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Q&A with Alex Gibney, Oscar-winning documentary director, after the Iowa premiere of ‘Citizen K’
Regarded as one of the most important documentarians of the last couple decades, Alex Gibney has focused his camera on con-artists and fallen heroes in films such as The Armstrong Lie, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief and The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley. His 2007 doc Taxi to the Dark Side
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Springtime for Hitler, Germany and Jojo: Taika Waititi’s quirky coming-of-age comedy opens at FilmScene
Nazis are bad, right? Right. Taiki Waititi assumes you already understand this if you’re sitting down to watch his latest film, Jojo Rabbit. If you know anything about this movie, it’s that it’s about a kid who has Adolf Hitler as an imaginary friend. Maybe you even heard that it’s directed by the Thor: Ragnarok guy. Oh, and it’s divisive as hell.
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Acclaimed filmmaker Charles Burnett to receive Cinema Savant award
On Saturday, Nov. 2 at the Chauncey, FilmScene will award renowned director and screenwriter Charles Burnett with the prestigious Iowa City 2019 Cinema Savant award. The event will be followed by a reception honoring Burnett and his oeuvre.
Posted inArts & Entertainment
November’s First Friday welcomes Cedar Rapids artist Jason Everett
Jason Everett will exhibit an incredibly timely photography series that originated in a project entitled “More Friends Than the Mountains.” He developed the project as a way to gather community members, national art suppliers, international non-profit organizations and Kurdish government entities together to conduct art
Posted inArts & Entertainment
‘Lucy in the Sky’ offers careful metaphor, slightly disjointed
‘Lucy in the Sky’ (dir. Noah Hawley) opens with astronaut Lucy Cola (Natalie Portman) looking from the outside to the world she left behind. It appears as a sphere strung with lights of connection. She’s told to come in, but she asks for another moment. The vast vista is exchanged for a view from earth, a fast-moving amalgam of cars and faces and
Posted inArts & Entertainment
‘Monos’ is unstuck in time — and sticks with you
In ‘Monos,’ the lack of a centralized, framing point of view, the young children who lack a fixed identity and the absence of much context make the film difficult to predict. Choices that lead to unexpected consequences are less revelations of character than witnesses to forces that alter our sense of what life and survival mean.
