Slamdance is designed to focus on new and emerging filmmakers. Over the last 25 years it has produced an impressive alumni list, including (with some of their more well known films): Christopher Nolan (Dunkirk, Batman Begins, Memento), Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamiite),...
Welcome to Slamdance. While most of the world is familiar with the Sundance Film Festival, they may not have heard of Slamdance, a renegade festival also held in Park City, Utah, the same week. Slamdance?s mantra is ?By Filmmakers, For Filmmakers?. It is celebrating...
In Hamlet, Polonius tells his son Laertes, ?This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as day the night, thou canst not be false to any man.? In The Hate U Give, a young African-American girl must struggle not just with being true to herself, but...
An optimist sees a glass as half full; a pessimist sees it as half empty. A nihilist will dump the water from the glass and marvel at the emptiness. Bruce Thierry Cheung?s Don?t Come Back from the Moon is a study of such emptiness. In a small desert community, after...
Jacques Rivette?s La Religieuse (The Nun) was the center of controversy in France. Banned for over a year by the Minister of Information in 1965, the film was a battleground of the culture wars of the day. The restored version of the film, made from the original...
?Courts ought not be affected by the weather of the day, but will be by the climate of the era.? Before she became a Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was one who fought against sex discrimination. One the Basis of Sex focuses on her life from the time she...
It?s time for Darrel?s Dozen (or so) favorite films from 2018. First let me say that this was a really good year to sit in the dark and let the light dance across the screen. The films I include in my year end list this time around are all astounding, but there were...
John Nance Garner (one of FDR?s Vice Presidents) observed that the Vice Presidency ?is not worth a bucket of warm spit.? But that was different when Dick Cheney became Vice President. Cheney seemed to many to be the real power during George W. Bush?s presidency (at...
This is the time of year when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences begins to winnow the fields of some of the Oscar categories, such as the short film categories. I?ve had the chance to see five of the films shortlisted in the Best Live Action Short...