CAFE GEORGIO
I suppose the word is eclectic, but Café Georgio has the effect of having been decorated by several over-eager dabblers. One corner has an old Hoosier cabinet repainted in half-a-dozen colors. The walls are pink, purple and pale yellow with barn-wood wainscoting and hung with paintings of flowers and poultry. A large mirror is surrounded…
RUSSIAN ARK
At nearly the very end of the dream of history that is Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark, a gowned young woman departing an 18th-century ball trips on a marble staircase. She’s part of a flushed, happy throng of well-bred revelers, but though her stumble takes only a passing moment, it is hard to miss: It happens…
CONFIDENCE
“So I’m dead,” Jake Vig says when we meet him at night on a Los Angeles street (not Sunset Boulevard), and it certainly looks like he is: the blood, the gun, the arms and legs splayed just right, perfect for a chalk outline. But soon we learn he’s a confidence man, and a good one,…
BLACKBOARDS
Like virtually all works of Iranian cinema that we see in the West, Samira Makhmalbaf’s Blackboards is a story of isolation, suffering and despair. There is no “but” to follow that assertion. About 15 minutes from the end, when the itinerant tutor Said finally teaches a boy to write his own name, the achievement permits…
BETTER LUCK TOMORROW
It’s another day at another brutally sunny California high school, and Ben, an over-achieving senior with Harvard (or at least Yale) on his horizon, has a lot of stuff in his life to balance. He needs to study, of course. But that’s not easy, considering his lab partner is Stephanie Vandergosh, who’s just about the…
RIVERS AND TIDES
In Thomas Riedelsheimer’s Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working With Time, we see something that rarely appears in other arts documentaries: We see art. We don’t hear talking heads wax on about it, nor do we hear an artist speak in the abstract about it. Rather, we witness the act of improvisational art as it…
SPLICE: CUTTING-EDGE FILM FESTIVAL
The Splice: Cutting-Edge Film Festival, featuring experimental and independent films and videos, continues through Sun., April 27. Tickets are $1 for students and $3 for non-students; all-festival passes are $7 for students and $14 for non-students. All films screen in McConomy Auditorium, CMU campus, except where otherwise noted. Call 412-268-5097 or see www.cmufilmfestival.org for more…
KUROSAWA / MIFUNE SERIES
In the second half of the 20th century, Akira Kurosawa was one of world cinema’s most important and influential voices: a master craftsman with a painter’s eye for composition, a choreographer’s sense of bodies in motion, and something to say about the human condition. But Kurosawa began his film career under the wheels of Japan’s…
