If life is up and down with a few bumps along the way, what better representation is there than a cable car’s ride up and down a mountain? This particular cable car ride takes place in the riveting documentary Manakamana, a ride that brings passengers, both foreign and local, to the Manakamana Temple in the…
So it turns out that sixty years prior to Mel Brook’s epic 80s run of classics, Buster Keaton was busy beating him to the parodic punch. Keaton’s brand of physical gag comedy has always been wildly distinctive and brilliant, but his work is not generally so focused on the specific spoof. That brand of comedy…
The Girl on the Roof, Skeet Ulrich’s directorial debut, is perhaps better when viewed as such than as a short film overall. Telling the dark story of a young girl, Lila (Naiia Ulrich), who receives only negative attention from bullies at school and hardly any attention from her family at home, which consists of a…
“I wish.” These are the first words of Into the Woods, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s timeless 1987 musical production, and the last. Dangerous, familiar words that, in the real world, can strain our relationships with our dreams, our loved ones, and ourselves, and set us up for situations in which we can never truly…
Few documentaries are as touching as Alive Inside, a film that realizes at its core that people don’t just learn from true stories; we’re moved by them. This is undoubtedly assisted by the fact that the film’s two points of focus are concepts we can all relate to in one way or another: Music and…
In a world where idealism is a scarce commodity, Aaron Swartz stood out. A computer programmer and political and social activist, Aaron had a quaint goal — to make the world a better place, to help us live our lives so that they make a difference. Ultimately, however, though he tried to save the world,…
Actor James Newcomb said, “There are individuals who come along in certain periods of time who advance the human spirit to the next level.” Such an individual was Polish violinist Bronsilaw Huberman, recognized, alongside that of Heifetz, Szigetti, and Kreisler, as among the great violin virtuosos of the twentieth century. What is not widely known,…
