I may not have understood all the machinations involved in bringing our aquatic hero back safely, but I believed that Last Breath's helmer and cast knew what they were doing, and in the end, that was far more important.

This is an insane year for the Oscars.

No one could possibly argue that we need more horror movies these days. But I'd suggest that we could always stand to have more in which characters, at the moment of their passing, go splat.

Winner of the Best Environmental Documentary prize at the 2024 Arizona Film Festival and the Audience Award at the 2024 Maui Film Festival, Giants Rising serves as the sixth and final presentation in this year's QC Environmental Film Series hosted by River Action. Its March 2 screening in the Galvin Fine Arts Center of Davenport's St. Ambrose University invites audiences to journey into the heart of America's most iconic forests, the film revealing the secrets and the saga of the coast redwoods: the tallest and among the oldest living beings on Earth.

I don't necessarily mind that, more often than not, new Marvel Studios movies require me to do homework. What bothers me is how often they make me do homework twice.

Hailed by RogerEbert.com's Nick Allen as "an impassioned and unabashedly intellectual documentary" that "helps us stand back and remember just how essential science is to progress," The Hunt for Planet B serves as the fifth presentation in this year's QC Environmental Film Series hosted by River Action. Its February 23 presentation at Davenport's Figge Art Museum will treat viewers to what Science magazine called "a behind-the-scenes view of the technical complexities, personalities, and politics that go into building a multi-decade space mission."

A critically acclaimed 2023 release and Academy Award nominee for Best Picture and Original Screenplay, writer/director Celine Song's arresting, ravishingly emotional Past Lives enjoys a February 27 screening in the Figge Art Museum's “Free Film at the Figge” series, the semi-autobiographical work also included on Indiewire's list of the "Best American Independent Movies of the 21st Century."

Violets are blue, roses are red / Why not spend V Day with folks getting dead?

With the event hosted by Augustana College's Sierra Club and featuring reflection speakers in a sustainability lifestyle panel, The Shitthropocene serves as the fourth presentation in this year's QC Environmental Film Series hosted by River Action, its February 16 presentation at Davenport's Figge Art Museum treating viewers to a 46-minute documentary that shows us how we might begin to save ourselves from ourselves, complete with the participation of dancing cave people.

Appearing in a February 20 program in the Bettendorf Public Library's popular "Community Connections" series, local documentarians Kelly and Tammy Rundle will present two of their works that share an environmental theme, the Rundles' Fourth Wall Films a five-time regional Emmy Award-winning independent media production company formerly located in Los Angeles, California, and now based in Moline.

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