Cinema

By Brittney Goodman and Tom Bixby

The Fargo-Moorhead LGBT Film Festival, now in its ninth year, will be showing a variety of LGBT-themed films starting this weekend but with an expanded program this year, September 11-16 with five screenings, each with distinct content.

The Festival “seeks to celebrate lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender lived experience through the visions of innovative film and video makers. We seek films and videos that enrich, entertain, and encourage a sense of…

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On Wednesday, September 13, actor and filmmaker Sean Astin will visit the Fargo Theatre to share conversation about his life in the movie industry. Cinephile, film festival producer, and enthusiastic LaserDisc collector Brent Brandt will co-host the event. Brandt talked movies with HPR film editor Greg Carlson.

High Plains Reader: After co-founding the South Dakota Film Festival and living and working in Aberdeen for years, you recently returned to Fargo-Moorhead. What brought you…

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Joshua and Ben Safdie, the NYC brothers whose independent spirit draws from a wide range of cinematic sources, reach their widest audience yet with “Good Time,” a frantic thriller that aspires to 1970s-era Big Apple grit.

Martin Scorsese is the first name on the end credit thank-you list, and “Good Time” will remind some viewers of “Mean Streets” and “Taxi Driver.” Multiple comparisons have also been made to “Dog Day Afternoon,” and the Safdie’s love-it-or-leave-it…

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Just released to Blu-ray August 22 is one of the favorite films by noted director William Wellman, who had made the very first Best Picture Oscar-winner “Wings” (1927), the year before this more personal, intimate, and eerily prophetic character drama.

Wellman’s “Beggars of Life” was released to theatres in September 1928, more than a full year before the stock market crash and the beginnings of the Great Depression, yet it deals vividly with the homeless hobo culture trying to…

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Wednesday, August 23, marks the untimely death at age 31 of movie superstar and international sex symbol Rudolph Valentino. Sicilian-born Valentino had become the celebrity symbol representing the 1920s, the archetypal “latin lover” soon imitated by numerous other actors, within eight years after he emigrated to the United States at age 18.

After work as a dancer and some theatre roles, he played movie bit parts and villains until his casting in “The Four Horsemen of the…

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Steven Soderbergh’s “Logan Lucky” ends the filmmaker’s short-lived “retirement” from directing theatrically-released features, and his return to cinemas is a welcome one.

Extending his well-documented penchant for pseudonymous tomfoolery, “Logan Lucky” spreads the wealth to cinematographer Peter Andrews and editor Mary Ann Bernard, two of the director’s common disguises. The screenplay is attributed to newcomer Rebecca Blunt, and a recent “Hollywood Reporter”…

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Reteaming with his “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” leads Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara, filmmaker David Lowery has a very compelling tale to tell in “A Ghost Story.”

Somber yet funny, and comfortable with exclamations of profundity and absurdity, the movie is an invitation to reflect on a few great philosophical questions.

Beautifully conveyed in a squarish aspect ratio close to the approximate 1.37:1 dimensions of the classic “Academy” standard, Lowery’s instincts are…

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When I first caught wind that there was going to be a movie centered around emojis several months ago, I spent plenty of time ragging on it with friends (as did a lot of people I imagine, look at the like/dislike ratio on YouTube).

The trailers were almost physically painful to sit through and I joked that we had finally reached the nadir of American cinema by making a movie about something you put in text messages. That said, I’m going to say that I thought the critics overreacted…

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Kathryn Bigelow, to this day the only woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director, makes an admirable if flawed attempt to fictionalize key components of Detroit’s 1967 12th Street Riot.

Timed in part to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the incendiary actions that resulted in 43 deaths and more than 7000 arrests, Bigelow -- working for the third time with “The Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty” scripter Mark Boal -- concentrates on the so-called Algiers Motel Incident…

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Director John Boorman is probably best remembered for his intense and still-disturbing hit adaptation of James Dickey’s forest survival allegory “Deliverance” (1972), his eccentric King Arthur interpretation “Excalibur” (1981), and his first Hollywood film, the offbeat Lee Marvin-Angie Dickinson crime drama “Point Blank” (1967), later remade by Mel Gibson as “Payback” (1999). His bizarre sci-fi film “Zardoz” (1974) also has a cult following.

Boorman’s follow-up to…

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