I fell down a Wikipedia rabbit hole a few months back and stumbled upon the page for the “‘My Way’ killings.” Apparently, in the ’00s, at least a half-dozen karaoke singers were killed while singing Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” at bars in the Philippines. Fighting is not uncommon at these bars, but for whatever reason, “My Way” seemed to be an especially […]
Stalin was one of the bloodiest tyrants of the 20th century, an era that had no shortage of bloody tyrants, so it’s only natural to wonder whether his final days, filled with murderous paranoia, and the bureaucratic struggle to seize power following his death are really fitting material for a comedy. The Death of Stalin follows the path cut by Mel Brooks, whose classic comedy The Producers, which revolves around a musical about Hitler, hit movie theaters just 22 years after the end of World War II. […]
FilmScene’s newest (and inevitably Oscar-nominated) featured film is full of Italian sunlight, adolescent longing and stellar chemistry. You’ll never look at peaches the same. […]
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 […]
The X-Men are back in their seventh film, X-Men: Days Of Future Past, and this time, they’ve got the biggest, baddest villain of all in their sights. Familiar faces from… […]
Pacific Rim (2013), Godzilla (2014), The Edge of Tomorrow (2014), Transformers 4 (2014): mechs, monsters, quasi-mechs who are monsters. Summer films have easily identifiable trends, and recently the trend has been a potentially pernicious (but sometimes enjoyable) kind of technological fetishism operating at all levels: Characters in films meld with machines while we the audience […]
Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel was released the first week of March, showed up in Iowa City in late April and is remarkably still showing twice daily at … […]
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… […]
Among other animated films of the moment — including the delightful The Lego Movie — the French-Belgian Ernest & Celestine is a breath of fresh air. It lasts… […]
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… […]
The erotic thriller, with its mix of illicit sex and anxieties about bodily harm, can often come off as rather morally conservative. The femme fatale lures the… […]
In a mid-career interview with Swedish television, Ingmar Bergman was asked about how a filmmaker should treat his or her audience. He responds by telling a sort of morality tale about a Chinese wood carver during the Middle Ages who is asked to sculpt a wooden bell stand for a local temple. The carver makes […]
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