Cinema

​A Reel of Tomorrow’s Filmmakers: MSUM’s Annual Senior Seminar Film Showcase

May 8th, 2019

The spring semester is coming to a close for college students across the FM area. For MSUM film production students, the semester culminated in a public screening of the short films they’ve spent the last several months creating.

MSUM’s annual senior seminar film showcase is one of the area’s premiere film screening events – and it’s full of original, locally produced work from promising young creatives. This year’s showcase opened last Friday, May 3rd, to a full house of…

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Crowdsourcing to completion on Jacob Wetterling documentary

May 8th, 2019

Design by Raul Gomez

If you’re from the Midwest, then you’ve probably heard about the tragic disappearance of 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling in the fall of 1989. An unsolved case for 26 years, the story of Jacob’s kidnapping during a routine bike ride with friends in St. Joseph, Minnesota was the nightmare of countless parents and a horrifying reality for Jacob and his parents, Jerry and Patty Wetterling.

The case remained a mystery until 2016, when Danny James Heinrich was arrested for possession of…

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Jennifer Gage’s fan-fiction adaptation ‘After’

May 8th, 2019

Jennifer Gage’s sudsy “After” offers run-of-the-mill college romance targeted to the PG-13 demographic. The result, a far cry from the lustier stories upon which it is based, misses the mark despite an appealing performance from Josephine Langford as the virginal heroine Tessa Young. Gage, who wrote the screenplay with Susan McMartin, Tamara Chestna, and Tom Betterton, sands the edges off the good-girl-meets-bad-boy narrative, and the tepid result never achieves the entertaining…

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​In her feature directorial debut, Clermont-Tonnerre tames ‘The Mustang’

May 1st, 2019

A true-to-life setting sparks interest in “The Mustang,” a solid man-and-his-horse story from first-time feature director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre.

Anchored by a livewire performance from the compelling Matthias Schoenaerts, the movie uses the Wild Horse Inmate Program, already the nonfiction subject of John Zaritsky’s “The Wild Horse Redemption” and Andrew Michael Ellis’ “The Wild Inside,” as a heartfelt and human endorsement of second chances.

Schoenaerts’…

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​Korine and McConaughey Introduce ‘The Beach Bum’

April 17th, 2019

Harmony Korine keeps a tight grip on his title as one of the most critic/critique-proof filmmakers of recent times with “The Beach Bum,” a sultry companion piece to 2012’s memorable “Spring Breakers.” Not without its own kind of middle-aged charm and a worldview to match, “The Beach Bum” is virtually unthinkable without Matthew McConaughey as priapic poet Moondog, a quintessential stoner icon whose consumption of marijuana is rivaled only by his quest for constant sexual…

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​Another Film Legend to Visit Fargo

April 17th, 2019

The 2019 Fargo Film Festival this February saw huge success, particularly with the appearance of Academy Award visual effects winner Richard Edlund, who received the festival’s Ted M. Larson award for his outstanding career. But Fargo’s wonderful accomplishment of hosting legendary filmmakers doesn’t end there.

Yet another legend will grace the stage of the Fargo Theatre this spring: Academy Award-winning documentarian Frederick Wiseman. Thanks to the efforts of The Fargo Theatre…

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​Artist Rashid Johnson Makes Feature Debut with ‘Native Son’

April 10th, 2019

Screenshot of Native Son

Following a world premiere as one of the opening night selections of the Sundance Film Festival in January, conceptual visual artist Rashid Johnson’s adaptation of Richard Wright’s venerable “Native Son” debuts April 6 on HBO. The third big screen version of the story of Bigger Thomas, Wright’s film retains many of the book’s central plot points and its ideological critique of institutional racism. The screenplay, by Pulitzer-winner Suzan-Lori Parks, updates sparingly and,…

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​Jordan Peele’s ‘Us’ Tethers Audience to Gut-Check Self-Examination

April 3rd, 2019

With enough mirrors, doublings, and doppelgangers to make Hitchcock, Kubrick and Welles proud, Jordan Peele’s “Us” cements the filmmaker’s reputation as a master craftsman and visual stylist. Creepy, funny, and wicked sharp, the film’s genre is horror, the ideas are expansive and the execution clean. An ominous text prologue alludes to the networks of unused and abandoned tunnels snaking underneath the streets and communities of the United States (shortly, a glimpse of the VHS…

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​In an Excellent Debut, Writer-Director Nia DaCosta Explores ‘Little Woods’

March 27th, 2019

Screen capture of Little Woods

Set in the fictional Little Woods, North Dakota -- a small town in the western oil patch not too far from the Canadian border -- Nia DaCosta’s first feature film as writer-director marks an auspicious and confident debut. Recalling some of the same issues explored in Courtney Hunt’s memorable “Frozen River,” “Little Woods” also shares its point of view through the harrowing day-to-day of two working-class women pushed to break the law to survive. While “Frozen River”…

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​Fargo Film Festival 2019: Hidatsa’s ‘trail of tears’ documentary

March 21st, 2019

We Are Still Here photograph during documentary

FARGO – Most people know the Trail of Tears that followed the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The U.S. government – under the direction of President Andrew Jackson – forcibly removed tens of thousands of Natives from their ancestral homes.

Thousands were murdered or died along the way west of the Mississippi River.

Less well known is that in 1869 the Xoshga Hidatsa People under the leadership of Crow Flies High and Bobtail Bull, fled persecution and lived along the Missouri River near…

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