Screen
Despite cast, ‘Nine’ is a bore
How can a movie starring six Academy Award-winning actors be such a bore...
Film/STILL 1959
1959: fourteen years after the war ended and five years before The Beatles played The Ed Sullivan Show, the cinema started to go democratic. Cameras were smaller, weighed less and cheaper, thereby allowing independent directors to make movies they wanted to make ...
Too much violence — despicable
Despicable Me is a surprisingly violent animated movie that suffers from being released within a few weeks of Toy Story 3. Where Toy Story 3 has warm characters who seek to do well by each other, Despicable Me is populated by characters who constantly hurt each ...
Waltzing with the enemy
Since 1994, Pierre Dulaine, subject of the 2013 documentary Dancing in Jaffa, has run a program called Dancing Classrooms, which teaches fifth graders the fundamentals of ballroom dance. The program teaches more than just footwork, it teaches the students elegance, ...
Turn it on
When Kaily Smith Westbrook and Randi Kleiner first set out to create a festival celebrating the art of independent television in January 2015, they...
BIFF: God Loves Uganda
The documentary God Loves Uganda begins innocently enough, outlining evangelical outreach efforts by the Kansas City-based International House of Prayer (yes, they refer to it as IHOP) to Uganda...
You’re standing on my neck
The year was 1997. Hanson’s “MMMBop” was jostling with Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” for the top spot on the charts, Bill Clinton’s “sexual relations” with Monica Lewinsky were still private, and an MTV animated cult hit about two morons in high school called Beavis and ...
The Assistant
She lives in Astoria, but she works in the City. That means the company car picks her up long before the sun has a...
Guilty of misdirection
Conviction should have been a good film. After a woman’s beloved ne’erdo-well brother is convicted of murder in a tiny hick town, it’s up to her to exonerate him, first through the system and then by going to law school and becoming a one-client attorney. Better yet...
Streaming sports
It’s the third Thursday
in March, and under normal circumstances, we’d be steeped in March Madness
right now.
You’re probably reading
this at home. And not because you...
Beyond Batman
The Sie Film Center’s Programing Manager Ernie Quiroz is like a kid with an electric train set. With three screening rooms and a variety of projectors at his disposal, Quiroz decides what magic plays out on those screens and he is bringing some of his personal ...
















