The cancellation of the 2020 San Francisco International Film Festival was one of the things that really let me know that COVID was happening and here to stay. Attending the longest-running festival in the Western hemisphere is one of the highlights of living in the Bay Area; it’s something I always look forward to and…
When he was about nine or 10 years old, Devadatta Rajadhyaksha read the book The Adventures of Dennis, by Victor Dragunsky. Rajadhyaksha was mesmerized by naughty little Dennis, who kept grass snakes, lizards, and frogs in his pockets, made funny faces in front of the mirror, and liked to hop and skip. The book was…
“This city chews ’em up, and it spits ’em out.” Saban Films + Paramount have released an official trailer for yet another small town football underdog sports story called Under the Stadium Lights, also known as Brother’s Keeper. The film tells the true story of the 2009 Abilene High School Football team. After a crushing…
Late night shows often burst out of the gate with all the celebrity firepower they can muster. For Chevy Chase, that meant corralling on-screen partner Goldie Hawn, along with fellow Oscar winner Whoopi Goldberg, for his anticipated 1993 debut. We all know what happened next. Suffice to say the Chevy Chase Theatre is known more…
The Nave de Motores de Pacífico (Pacifico Engine Shed) was designed by the Spanish architect Antonio Palacios. It is an outstanding example of clarity and functionality, and a perfect model of industrial building in the 1920s. The engine shed was built in 1922 and 1923 and started operating immediately, although it was not inaugurated until…
Like partners doing a tango, two rivers in Nunavut, Canada, become a single unit without losing their individual appearance as they move sinuously across the tundra. The darker Back River flows north toward the Arctic Ocean. Along the way, its tributary, the Hayes River, a light, milky blue, joins it but remains visually distinct for…
★★★★ Directed by: #AdamBailey Written by: #SophieDutton Starring: #EmillieThomasCurtis, #MarkLewisJones, #SharonMorgan Short Film Review by Taryll Baker Winter is fast approaching, and everyone is getting ready for a nice long sleep… but a certain Little Partridge can’t quite contain her excitement! What could possibly go wrong? It’s the winter season and Partridge’s family house is…
Why are we still doing this? Aren’t we past this? Hasn’t culture evolved to a point where autism is given better representation? We’ve come so far in trying to push back against homophobia, transphobia, racism, and sexism in film. But here we are again, once more saddled with another ableist film. So why are we…
The word Spelter means commercial or smelted zinc. Beginning in 1910, workers from Spain were brought to this company town in West Virginia to operate a new zinc smelter. Over the next 90 years, some four billion pounds of slab zinc were produced, along with 400 million pounds of zinc dust. Zinc ore was in…
The Moorten Family Botanical Gardens was created to share the beauty and extraordinary varieties of desert plants with everyone who visits. It was established in 1938 by Chester “Cactus Slim” Moorten and his wife, Patricia, and features desert trees, plants, and cacti come from around the world and range in size from miniature to giants. Before…
Until it was restored in 1994, this first century Roman theatre in Spain was a magnificent ruin visible on the hillside from a long distance. Though the restoration has made it functional once again, it has covered up much of this historic structure. The theatre was originally built on a hillside, making use of the…
Irish doctoral student Fionnan O’Connor has been chasing ghosts. He is not pursuing the spectres of deceased warriors or poets, but rather forgotten Irish drinks. In a personal quest that has taken him from quiet university libraries to modern distilleries, he is determined to revive rare spirits made using old-fashioned methods and ingredients, specifically pot-still…
There’s nothing to do but waste time in Limbo, the latest from writer/director Ben Sharrock. It’s never easy to wait, but it’s excruciating when you’re waiting to hear about something as life-altering as your asylum application. That’s exactly the situation Omar finds himself in, forced to wile away time in a strange but quiet part of…
Located in an unassuming suburb of Hof, Fernweh Park is an eclectic collection of thousands of city and street signs from all corners of the world. The park takes its name from the German word Fernweh (literally: “far away-pain”), which is the exact opposite of homesickness (Heimweh), and means “a painful longingness to travel”—proving again…
By their very nature, spy series require a certain amount of twists and turns. Secret motives, double crosses, and hidden identities are all necessary aspects of the genre, and “Spy City,” which premieres on AMC+ on April 15, rightly possesses them. As MI6 spy Fielding Scott, Dominic Cooper is in Daniel Craig-James Bond mode, all…
When the first royal palace of modern Greece was being designed, Queen Amalia assumed oversight of the design of the Royal Gardens. Upon seeing Amalia’s proposed design King Otto, a hunting enthusiast, noticed that the far end of the gardens were near an area he had hunted birds in the past. Based on this, Otto…
“Shhh, it’s okay,” the Father (Christopher Rygh) reassures his sleepy young Daughter (Cora Kaufman) in her makeshift tent of twigs, at the beginning of The Head Hunter. Something ferocious has invaded the perimeter of their snowy encampment, but the Father, a bearded hulk of a man, has just fought and slain it in an off-screen…
As with any artist, a great tofu maker relies on his instincts. And for Lin Yih-Cheng, those instincts kick in when the soy milk begins to curdle in the hot wok. He prods the half-liquid, half-solid mush gently with the tip of his spoon, and adds a bit more coagulant—a solution that looks just like…
Lou Simon, who is making a name for herself in the indie horror film world as The Mistress of Suspense, has had a long battle with getting her film Agoraphobia released in the United States but it has finally made its way to streaming services. She gave us an inside scoop on the nightmare that…
It was a sweltering summer afternoon when photographer Taha Ahmad first walked into Feroz Shah Kotla, a sprawling 14th century citadel in New Delhi. At the gate, the guard warned him to take care of his camera. Cheels, birds of prey also known as black kites, circled above his head, trying to catch pieces of…
Daniel Harmon got lucky growing up. The entrepreneur came from a “freedom-loving family” where even his Uncle sat him down to share key principles behind American capitalism. When Harmon became a parent himself, he realized “how few people get that kind of a foundation.” “Not everyone has an uncle who will take them under their…
“I’m just a guy who says… ‘I can do some good here.’” Discovery+ has released the first official trailer for a documentary called Citizen Penn, indeed about the actor Sean Penn. But this is about the time in 2010 he decided to gather aid workers and fly down to the Caribbean nation of Haiti to…
Starting from the from the highlands of Guinea, the Moa River flows southwest toward the Atlantic Ocean. Along its path, the wide river hosts a cluster of islands. One of those is Tiwai Island, a 12-square kilometer piece of land in the southwestern region of Sierra Leone (about 30 kilometers from the Liberian border). In…
★★★ Directed by: Christopher Smith Written by: David Beton, Dean Lines, Ray Bogdanovich Starring: Jessica Brown Findlay, John Heffernan, Anya McKenna-Bruce, Sean Harris, John Lynch, Shudder Film Review by: Chris Olson The Banishing review A 1930s haunted house tale from writers David Beton, Dean Lines, and Ray Bogdanovich, in which a woman (Jessica Brown Findlay),…
I have yet to meet someone who loves a Monday. The start of the work week, the signifier of the end of the weekend, Mondays are literally the worst. While Monday, from director and writer Argyris Papadimitropoulos, is not the worst dramatic romance, it definitely resonates with the feeling of that dreaded day of the…
In St. Thomas’s churchyard, Stanhope, stands an unusual piece of history. What appears to be an old, dead tree trunk standing in front of a missing section of church wall just along from the war memorial is actually a large fossil. The tree would have grown some 320 million years ago during the Carboniferous Period, long…
In 2017, Anoop Babani, Goa-based former journalist, was recuperating from a cycling accident when he encountered a book from 1931, With Cyclists Around the World, written by three Indians who, in the days before widespread paved roads and satellite communications, had biked around the world. “A new China has been born in the world,” they…
Going along Memorial Drive into Montpelier, the capital of Vermont, it may easy to overlook a small black-and-grey stone sitting next to an intersection. But a closer look yields something unexpected: an image of the space shuttle Challenger, located in a state with few connections to NASA or the space industry. The monument is part of…
In the early 12th-century, Norse settlers of Greenland established the first bishop seat on the island in the southern village of Garðar. There, a cathedral dedicated to Saint Nicholas, patron saint of sailors, was founded by Greenland’s first bishop Arnaldur in 1126. The church was composed of red sandstone and is the only known cruciform religious…
The animated shorts are a wealth of emotions wrapped within the artistic caress of animation. With COVID-19 gripping the world this past year, the viewing experience of the 2020 animated shorts has been interesting, to say the least. Thankfully, my local theater, Fairfield Theater Company in Fairfield, CT, embraced the easing of restrictions and my…
Altogether, Joseph Stalin maintained about 20 different summer cottages or dachas, mostly around the Black Sea coast. He had health issues that included poor joints and lungs, so the weather of this warmer region was often comforting. He used this large building complex in Sochi rarely. However, it was always staffed and running just in…
Altogether, Joseph Stalin maintained about 20 different summer cottages or dachas, mostly around the Black Sea coast. He had health issues that included poor joints and lungs, so the weather of this warmer region was often comforting. He used this large building complex in Sochi rarely. However, it was always staffed and running just in…
Whether praising Miley Cyrus’ bona-fides and Andie MacDowell’s hair or extoling the virtues of the #16 taco special at Santa Barbara taqueria La Super Rica, Bill Murray was at his Bill Murray-est in accepting the Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s Maltin Modern Master Award, the festival’s highest honor. Murray was arguably the festival’s biggest “get”…
Located in the famous Gangnam District of Seoul, Seonjeongneung is a large park that stands out in the middle of the bustling and crowded capital of South Korea. This site is the burial ground of two kings and a queen of the Joseon Dynasty. The westernmost area of the park is occupied by Seolleung, the…
California’s deadly, damaging wildfires worsen by the year. The state’s naturally dry landscapes, parched by a changing climate, have turned into tinderboxes. A stray match or lightning strike has the capacity to incinerate forests, fields, and neighborhoods. Last year saw a summer and fall of choking smoke and blood-red skies over huge portions of the…
When it comes to the carryover effect between America’s social dilemmas and its dependence on artificial intelligence, the command, unfortunately, is not “delete,” it’s “copy and paste.” That is the basis of Shalini Kantayya‘s frightening and informative documentary Coded Bias. The film, which premiered at Sundance 2020, has been the source of much-needed attention and much-deserved praise….