Cinema

Actor/director/writer Charles Mauk talks creative process, learning curve 

Local musician Charlie Mauk is best known for his hip-hop music, but he has recently taken on an entirely new project.

Mauk is serving as actor, director, writer and director of cinematography for his first full-length feature film “Aura.”With the help of his longtime friend Bjorn Pedersen, who also acts in a leading role, Mauk has been able to bring his own mob film to life. It has been seven months since…

Read more...

Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts are Josh and Cornelia, married New Yorkers rocketing through their 40s.

Childless and conflicted about it, the pressure from old friends/new parents Marina (Maria Dizzia) and Fletcher (Adam Horovitz) doesn’t exactly help. Josh is a documentary filmmaker whose current project has consumed nearly a decade of his life. And he’s still shooting footage while his editor Tim (Matthew Maher) toils away without a paycheck.

Cornelia’s father Leslie (Charles…

Read more...

The erroneous report that a Tokyo office worker died near Detroit Lakes, Minn., in 2001, looking for money buried in the snow in Joel and Ethan Coen’s “Fargo” forms the basis of David and Nathan Zellner’s haunting, original “Kumiko the Treasure Hunter.”

Starring Rinko Kikuchi as the title character, the Zellner brothers’ movie projects a heady metanarrative that is as much a consideration of our relationship to cinema as it is an elegy for its (presumably) doomed…

Read more...

On Saturday, April 25, the public is invited to attend either of two free screenings of “The Good Lie,” starring Reese Witherspoon, at the Fargo Theatre. The screenings will be held at 1 p.m. and again at 7 p.m. and will be followed by Q&As with co-star Kuoth Wiel and others.

In addition, local organization African Soul American Heart will feature other events that day that include opportunities to meet actress Kuoth Wiel, ASAH Ugandan director Aja Galuak, and others.

Visit

Read more...

By Suzanne Hanson

Spring is a time when we look forward to the future and plant the seeds for growth, which is no doubt why it seems a natural fit that we celebrate Earth Day every April 22.

According to Earth Day Network, Earth Day was founded by a group of students in New York in 1970 as a means to draw attention to pressing environmental concerns and the need for proactive public policy and change.

Nearly half a century later, we’re not doing so hot, or rather, quite the opposite. We…

Read more...

Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy engineers a jaw-dropping feature debut in “The Tribe,” a stylistic tour de force that juxtaposes the gorgeousness of cinematic execution against the horror of the narrative’s unrelentingly grim subject matter.

Set in a Ukrainian boarding school for the deaf, “The Tribe” follows new student Sergey (Grygoriy Fesenko) as he receives an education in the institution’s real subjects: theft, assault, prostitution, exploitation and murder. Unbroken,…

Read more...

Jean-Luc Godard, one of the pioneers of the French New Wave filmmaking movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s, is now in his 80s, but still making movies that are no less daring in “breaking the rules” of traditional cinematic techniques to express his ideas in new ways.

His “Adieu au langage” (“Goodbye to Language”) won him his first Jury Award at the Cannes Film Festival last year, and earlier this year it won the U.S. National Society of Film Critics Award for Best…

Read more...

Gabe Polsky’s “Red Army” skates by as swiftly and forcefully as the larger-than-life hockey personalities it closely examines.

Flipping the American “Miracle on Ice” narrative on its head, Polsky’s sharp, attentive documentary invites viewers to see the dominant Cold War rink soldiers of the Soviet Union’s national team not as Ivan Drago-esque automatons, but rather as hard-working young men just as proud of their country as the kids who played for Herb Brooks on Team USA.…

Read more...

A recently-restored version of a beloved science-fiction classic came out on Blu-ray last month from Twilight Time in a limited release of 5,000 units.

“First Men in the Moon” (1964) was a groundbreaking film based on a groundbreaking book by H. G. Wells written more than six decades before men finally did walk on the moon.

Historian-philosopher-author Herbert George Wells is best remembered for writing five sci-fi novels, or “scientific romances,” as they were called when…

Read more...

Gender, class, marriage and parenthood receive a good working over in Ruben Östlund’s hilarious “Force Majeure,” a gorgeously photographed dream/nightmare vacation travelogue that smartly deploys a human-versus-nature leitmotif to situate the First World problems of its protagonists within a conversation about control, self-control and our lack thereof. More preoccupied with the variety of ways in which males can come undone when their sense of masculinity is challenged than it…

Read more...