From From A to B We’re close to the start of the unending stream of Halloween-related activities, but the rest of the world doesn’t stop in October. There are plenty of film happenings around DC this month, so let’s talk about one of the cooler ones, the twentieth anniversary of the Arabian Sights Film Festival. […]
Continue readingAlternative programming: How about a different holiday?
From The Native Americans We probably don’t need to recap the reasons why Columbus Day has lost favor in the past few years. Ask your favorite history professor or the ghost of Howard Zinn. But, if you’re looking for more material about the real history of Columbus’s expeditions and the lives of Native Americans we […]
Continue readingDC’s most genuinely spooky place becomes a landmark
If you’re an AU student who has made the trek to Georgetown, you’ve probably encountered the Exorcist steps, the legendary staircase famously used in a climactic scene from the bone-chillingly terrifying film The Exorcist. It’s in an unassuming spot – behind a gas station on M Street – but it has for decades served as […]
Continue readingSnag an armload of Criterion titles for half-off today!
Like an Arby’s selling piles of loose beef, the Criterion Collection has opened the floodgates on their store and is selling their entire DVD and Blu-ray stock for 50% off for the next 24 hours. This is a fantastic sale that every film buff should consider taking advantage of. The Criterion Collection sells the definitive […]
Continue readingNew Acquisitions – October 2015
Spooky season is here – and not just because of Halloween. A hurricane might be hitting us soon, and we’re not feeling a weekend of overcast, rain, and wind. As with nearly any other circumstance, we see this as a prime opportunity for movie-watching… at least until the power goes out. So we present to […]
Continue readingHelp fund an archive of weird, dangerous, rare films
In 1990, a film enthusiast named Mike Vraney founded Something Weird Video, a distributor of hard-to-find, sensationalist movies. This included everything from violent exploitation movies to budget Westerns and found footage. Something Weird became a touchstone for the rougher, risky side of film history, and filmmakers including Paul Thomas Anderson and Drive‘s Nicolas Winding Refn […]
Continue readingSee a documentary about Malala early – and for free!
We continue to get advance screening passes for upcoming films, and we’re very excited about this next one. We suspect the AU community will be interested in seeing He Named Me Malala, a documentary about Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani education activist and the youngest ever Nobel Prize laureate. Based on what we’ve seen in the […]
Continue readingClap in a circle to mourn the end (?) of fake birthday songs
After a court decision last night, movie and television characters might finally be able to sing “Happy Birthday to You.” The Summy Company contested for decades that it owned the copyright to the universally recognized birthday song and charged productions $10,000 to include its melody and lyrics. No one really wanted to pay all that […]
Continue readingRIP William Becker, the unsung hero of world cinema
A week and a half ago, film distributor William Becker died. His name is not a recognizable one, and his quiet work at Janus Films and the Criterion Collection left a massive imprint on how we consume visual media. As the co-owner of Janus Films starting in 1965, Becker oversaw the importation of many influential […]
Continue readingChinese cancer rom-com Go Away Mr. Tumor comes to America – for free!
In 2011, Xiong Dun started an irreverent webcomic about her cancer diagnosis that gained millions of followers before she died a year later. Her comic was adapted into a romantic comedy movie this year, and although it was a success when it was released in China last month, it hasn’t yet come out in the […]
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