ST. VINCENT

St. Vincent stars Bill Murray as the titular (if decidedly un-saintly) Vincent, a cranky, disheveled grump who may be the meanest man in Brooklyn, if not all of New York. He speaks in a honking regional dialect and guzzles brown liquor by the quart, and his only pals are a pair of fellow barflies and the local hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold. He's frequently seen chain-smoking in a porkpie hat with oversize sunglasses, and spends his days at the track making losing bets with his bookie. At his ramshackle home, he watches old Abbott & Costello movies on an ancient television and, when drunk, drives straight over his white picket fence. When a neighbor kid needs to use a pay phone, Vincent begrudgingly gives him a dime for the call. Given all this, in what year would you guess St. Vincent takes place? 1957? 1958?

MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN

The single most definitive shot in director/co-writer Jason Reitman's "Ee-e-eek! The Internet!" melodrama Men, Women & Children is one from the previews, in which Ansel Elgort trudges toward dozens of fellow high-schoolers, all of whom are so fixated on their phones that they can't see anything, or anyone, directly in front of them.

Friday, October 10, 10:05 a.m.-ish: My latest quartet of screenings starts with an adaptation of the beloved children's book Alexander & the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. It's a shame that the title has already eaten up about half my word count, because I now have far less space in which to rave about this surprisingly fantastic family comedy whose unforced cheerfulness is matched by its completely unexpected wit.

St. Ambrose University's educational initiative the Middle East Institute (MEI), which just began its first school-calendar year of programming, was designed to foster discussion and study of this frequently misunderstood and geopolitically critical region. And as institute director Ryan Dye says, when it came time to create an event schedule for the MEI's fall semester, "I consulted with our fine-arts department, and they were really excited about the idea of doing a film festival."

Through the art department's Clea Felien, Dye was put in contact with Ghen Zando-Dennis, a cinema-studies professor at Ramapo College in Mahwah, New Jersey. An Alaska native and occasional filmmaker herself, Zando-Dennis teaches a course in Middle Eastern films at Ramapo and was eager to curate the MEI's event. Zando-Dennis admits, however, that the curator position did come with a challenge for her.

"I didn't want to show work just because it's from this place we regard as 'the Middle East,'" she says. "I didn't want anyone to come away from it thinking it was a kind of survey, in any sense of the imagination, of Middle Eastern media art. And yet I'm programming a film festival that's called 'the Middle Eastern Film Festival.' So that's tricky."