While still in community college in Pasadena, Mike and I were big fans of the Nazarene College basketball team which had won a couple of NAIA (small college) national championships. We started dating [...] Continue Reading
Film, dancing, animation, and more film mark our festival, April 27-29
Our various festival committees—for features, for shorts—have worked hard to bring you a weekend of varied cinematic fare. You won’t be able to see these films anywhere else in town. Nor in many other [...] Continue Reading
Great Humanist Film for March
Most reviewers of Le Havre, the Finnish film which Filmworks will show on March 9, call it something like sentimental, unreal, or impossibly optimistic, as if these are objectionable qualities in a [...] Continue Reading
20 Best Films of 2011
Here, from the prestigious film magazine Film Comment, is a ranked list of the 20 best films of 2011 as compiled by the magazine’s editors. Filmworks showed films marked √. Short summaries, most from [...] Continue Reading
Oscar-nominated short films 2012
On February 10, we are showing the 15 Oscar-nominated short films in three categories: live action, animation, and documentary. The films come from all over the world. Only one American film made it [...] Continue Reading
January’s film shows how planning can humanize once oppressive city living
Probably the city has been written about and filmed more often than any other topic of serious human endeavor—certainly more than war, science, and art, and probably religion, too. Go to Wikipedia and [...] Continue Reading
Mystery of the troubled soul exhibited in our December 9 film, Take Shelter
In a sense, all films are allegorical, and usually we are glad they are. After all, films are supposed to provide expanded meaning, and few methods accomplish this better than stories that rest on [...] Continue Reading
Irresistible Brendan Gleeson, in an Irish “bad” cop comedy
Normally, as viewers, we ought to be on the side of good cops, not bad. But are we really? Does anyone really prefer proper, buttoned-up, fedora-sporting Jack Webb as Sgt. Friday yes ma’am-ing through [...] Continue Reading