Strange things happen in this world, and the fact that the film Kandahar, by the Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, found a substantial international audience after it was released in late 2001 is a small but genuinely strange byproduct of recent history. A few years ago Kandahar would have been a footnote on the movie-release calendar, […]
Film – Chuck Koplinski
Posted inArts & Culture
Movie Review – Holes, Bulletproof Monk
Holes For adults with children who are either past or awaiting tweenhood, Louis Sacher’s novel Holes is probably unfamiliar. But for tweens it’s revered, a story with irresistible, high-interest hooks (an ancient curse, lost treasure, an intriguing mystery, and a happy ending) and a resonate message (put-upon kids find justice and redemption among cruel adults […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Movie Review- City of God
City of God Although overlooked by the Academy for a Best Foreign Picture nomination, Director Fernando Meirelles’ Brazilian slum epic City of God is a profound, stylistically expansive depiction of three decades of child gang warfare on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro with non-actors playing their poverty-ridden lives for the camera. The only other […]
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Overlooked and underappreciated
In a festival that celebrates recorded moments, the highlight may be a live performance. Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert’s fifth Overlooked Film Festival in Urbana-Champaign will feature a special benshi performance next week to accompany the Japanese silent film, I Was Born, But. . . A benshi, Ebert explains, was a performer who stood […]
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Movie Reviews- What a Girl Wants, Head of State
What a Girl Wants What seventeen-year-old Daphne Reynolds (Amanda Bynes) wants is to meet her long lost father, an English aristocrat named Lord Henry Dashwood (Colin Firth). Seems a freak accident threw him and pop singer Libby Reynolds (Kelly Preston) together. A whirlwind romance ensued and Daphne was the result. Evil machinations of a family […]
