Winner of the Best Feature Film prize at the Berlin International Film Festival, and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant," Cheryl Dunye's The Watermelon Woman enjoys a Bettendorf Public Library screening on July 21 in conjunction with the summertime "Find Your Voice" series, a program focused on works about people from marginalized communities that have been historically underrepresented in film.

“The movie that Hollywood didn't want you to see!” is an awfully enticing marketing ploy. It might also have been an obnoxious one if Alejandro Monteverde's film weren't so unexpectedly good.

From its introductory 20 minutes involving an impressively de-aged Harrison Ford to the joyously ludicrous finale that's capped by a quiet emotional whopper, I think I had more fun at this fourth followup that at any previous post-1981 Indy outing. While these may still be leftovers from a decadently delicious meal, they're intensely tasty ones re-heated to just the right temperature.

Not a half-hour after the end credits rolled on Wes Anderson's Asteroid City, I met friends for dinner, and immediately raved about the delightful, clever, moving entertainment I had just seen. They asked whether I was feeling antsy to write about the experience, and I didn't have to think about my answer before blurting it out: “No. Not at all.” Where, I figured, would I even begin in amassing – let alone publishing – thoughts on a work that's about nothing less than the meaning of existence, to say nothing of a film whose most gut-bustingly riotous sequence is also one that made me weep like a baby?

Charm counts for a lot, and in Pixar's Elemental, it counts for so much that it's easy to ignore the film's rather lazy stereotyping, strangely under-imagined social dynamic, and plot-goosing crisis that, I'm sorry to say, is all about plumbing issues.

The first Pakistani film ever to be selected for screening at Cannes Film Festival, where it was nominated for four major awards and won two, writer/director Saim Sadiq's Joyland enjoys a June 25 screening at Davenport's Figge Art Museum, this 2022 critical smash the last of four award-winning independent films to be shown throughout June in recognition and celebration of Gay Pride Month.

Over the course of four followups, Michael Bay set the bar for Transformers sequels so staggeringly low that it's almost sky-high praise to say that the series' two more recent prequels, neither of which Bay directed, aren't all that bad.

Launched by the Azubuike African American Council for the Arts and taking place in various area locales June 16 through 19, the inaugural Pulling Focus Film Festival has been designed as a celebration of local film and culture that focuses on enriching the lives of Quad Cities residents by presenting unique film-watching experiences framed through the lens of African American and Black Diasporic voices.

Lauded by The Atlantic as "brisk, precisely observed, and bracingly non-preachy in its examination of a very tricky subject," writer/director Céline Sciamma's French drama Tomboy enjoys a June 18 screening at Davenport's Figge Art Museum, this 2011 critical sensation the thirdof four award-winning independent films to be shown throughout June in recognition and celebration of Gay Pride Month.

See enough movies over enough decades – five-plus decades, in my case – and you may begin to wrongly think that cinema no longer has the ability to astonish you. But while I'm hardly going to make the case for the superhero adventure being on par with, say, Citizen Kane or the first two Godfathers, or even Richard Linklater's 2014 Boyhood, I'm not sure that any film released since that latter title has thrilled and awed me quite as profoundly as Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.

Pages