There comes a time in every person's life when you have to ask the question: Should I spend an evening in close proximity with a 6'7" comic working through their personal issues? The answer, is of course, a resounding yes! Now that we're all living in this space...
Olivier Assayas’ 1994 Cold Water succeeds in not only being a brief portal into the doomed romance of two French teenagers deep in the throes of love, but also a deeply personal representation of a specific time in the director’s own adolescence. Originally conceived as a 50-minute made-for-television episode, Cold Water, or L’eau Froide, is...
Any holiday season, religious or otherwise, is a special time -- especially for TV networks. From the ringing of holiday bells to a 17-hour marathon of a killer in a goalie mask hacking people to death, it evokes a rush of nostalgia in viewers, and brings corresponding high ratings to networks. It's a reciprocal tradition that pop culture shares...
Before striking it big with the 1985 comedy-drama “Desperately Seeking Susan,” director Susan Seidelman made her independent feature debut with “Smithereens,” an entrancingly small tale with enough veracity and character that it was the first American indie to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival and eventually would live on in the punk film...
With his flair for visual storytelling, director Wong Hu helped redefine the martial arts genre of 1960s Chinese cinema, weaving together refined storytelling with dynamic action sequences. During the period, in a bid for more creative freedom from the political strife at the time and to fulfill his inner ambitions, Hu moved his production over...
Welcome to Virginia, motherland of presidents, a craft beer mecca, and in recent years, a burgeoning home for major motion pictures and television series. Virginia has always been a low key place for the film industry to come knocking when it needed a location. Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" was shot right here in the River City, along with the...
Jeff Goldblum is life; the air we breathe, the water we drink. His genre-defining performance in "Jurassic Park" as mathematician-turned-American hero Ian Malcolm, introduced a generation of teenagers in the 1990s to concepts like chaos theory, and the art of lounging casually with your shirt open; bringing sexy back when Justin Timberlake was...
It’s easy to forget that safety is a luxury, but Richmond filmmaker Jen Lawhorne is prepared to compel us to remember. Her new documentary, “Fata Morgana,” made in partnership with two African refugees, is meant to reveal and examine the hardships and transition process of the African refugee, the global refugee crisis, and what Lawhorne...
"Stand-up is survival. For me that's jazz, that's what I have to do." It is hard to overstate the impact that Robin Williams had on just about every aspect of comedy since he broke the scene in the mid-1970s. His sheer energy, razor-sharp wit, ability to morph his persona into characters both known and unknown, and genre-defining stand-up shaped...
Anger, frustration, sadness, heartbreak. The air in the theater felt heavy. It was as if you could feel the emotions of the audience dance around you from one side of the room to the other. These were the powerful reactions from the crowd following the Institute for Contemporary Art's recent screening of Say Her Name: The Life and Death of Sandra...
