Film

Art School Doc Uncovers Cuba's Unfinished Spaces

by | Aug 7, 2023 8:27 am | Comments (0)

Eleanor Polak Photos

The Art School, flooded, as shown in Unfinished Spaces.

The Cuban Revolution ended in the year 1959, leaving Fidel Castro as the country’s prime minister and Cuba itself poised for a time of questioning the old ways, and opening up new avenues of living. 

In the spirit of change and innovation, Castro commissioned three architects — Ricardo Porro, Roberto Gottardi, and Vittorio Garatti — to build an art school on the location of an old golf course. 

Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray’s 2011 documentary, Unfinished Spaces, tells the story of that art school: its triumphs, its failures, and the ways in which it represents the triumphs and failures of Castro’s regime.

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Who Runs The World? Barbie Does

by | Jul 26, 2023 11:17 am | Comments (0)

barbiethemovie Instagram

Barbie promotional poster.

Greta Gerwig’s movie of the summer, Barbie, hit theaters this week in an explosion of pink, sparkles, and unexpected profundity. 

I walked into Bow Tie Cinemas at 86 Temple St. at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, proudly sporting the only pink top I own, and I thought I was ready for anything. Turns out, I wasn’t ready for Barbie.

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Best Video Film Series Leaves Audience "Breathless"

by | Jul 12, 2023 9:45 am | Comments (0)

Karen Ponzio Photos

Michel doing his best Bogey in a scene from "Breathless"

A swipe of a lip, a cigarette lighting another cigarette, a woman running in a striped dress: these iconic moments and more defined Breathless, the first feature of Best Video Film and Cultural Center’s July film series that spotlights essential French New Wave cinema.

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Lights, Camera ... Childcare! Previewed

by | Jun 7, 2023 8:56 am | Comments (1)

Lisa Reisman photos

In the ex-theater's, future childcare center's front lobby ...

... and refurbished screening room.

Voices lifted in exuberant song outside a movie theater overlooking Middletown Avenue?

Just a few years ago, a scene like that might have been unthinkable at the scruffy but beloved Cine 4 theater that closed last year after 51 years in operation.

The occasion was a sneak peek of Friends Center Flint Street — named for the pitted drive that leads up to the familiar flat-top white building where a local childcare nonprofit plans to build a new early education campus.

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Best Video Goes To Bat For "May"

by | May 24, 2023 8:34 am | Comments (2)

Nicky (John Cassavetes) is squirreled away in a seedy hotel. He’s sure that the mob has a contract out on his life. He calls Mikey (Peter Falk) his childhood friend and the only ally he thinks he has left in the world. Mikey arrives to tell Nicky that he’s just being paranoid; everything’s going to be fine. The problem is, Nicky’s right. And Mikey just might be in on it.

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Lounge Night Connects the Crowd

by | Apr 11, 2023 8:16 am | Comments (0)

Karen Ponzio Photos.

Townwide Tyler and DJ B to the T Jr. strike a pose.

Jazz floated in the air between whispers and animated conversations as people sipped wine and coffee and munched on pita chips and popcorn this past Thursday at Best Video. It was another installment of Lounge Night — a monthly event at the film and cultural center where, over the course of four hours, patrons are treated to movies, music, and conversations about both. On this night, the crowd was treated to three short films from the New Haven 48 Hour Film Project as well as music from DJs Townwide Tyler and B to the T Jr.

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Cinema-To-Childcare Campus Plan Detailed

by | Mar 23, 2023 2:08 pm | Comments (6)

Rendering of proposed new childcare campus at ex-Cine 4 site.

Allan Appel photo

David Symond, Jr., Allyx Schiavone, Margo Early, and Karin Patriquin on Wednesday.

The corn will keeping popping at the central ticketing-and-candy counter of the old Cine 4 movie theater — even as that entryway fixture is converted into a reception desk for a planned new early education campus now in the works on Middletown Avenue. 

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Film Series Brings Bergman To Best Video

by | Mar 22, 2023 8:56 am | Comments (0)

Karen Ponzio Photos.

Andrianna Campbell-LaFleur introduces "Through A Glass Darkly"

Best Video went big with its newest film series Tuesday night, bringing the first of three films by legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman to a welcoming crowd. The series opened with Through A Glass Darkly, the 1961 film that is considered the first in a trilogy of Bergman films that explore similar themes of God and spirituality. The next two films, The Silence and Winter Light, will be shown on March 28 and April 4, respectively. According to event coordinator Teo Hernandez, it was something he has wanted to do for a while.

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Doc Reveals The New Haven HBCU That Could Have Been

by | Feb 23, 2023 9:43 am | Comments (2)

Still from What Could Have Been: America's First HBCU.

On Wednesday night at the New Haven Museum, New Haveners had a chance to learn, together, about an uncomfortable truth: that, in 1831, New Haven’s white community leaders overwhelming rejected a serious proposal to found what would have been the first U.S. Black college, on the land where the interchange of I‑95 and I‑91 now exists.

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Carmen Jones Makes Library Sing

by | Feb 17, 2023 9:04 am | Comments (1)

It’s America in the 1940s, and World War II is still raging. Carmen Jones has started a fight in the parachute factory she works in, and it falls to Corporal Joe to escort her to jail, miles from the military base where both of them work. Joe is engaged to be married, and just wants to get his duty over with. Jones has other plans. She’s flirting with him — hard — as soon as they’re on the road away from the base. Then Joe makes a poor navigation choice and drives the Jeep into a stream, forcing them to walk from there. Little does he know that he doesn’t stand a chance against Jones’s seductive skills. Little does Jones know that it will prove her own undoing, too.

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Film Fest Brings Tri-State Talent To Audubon St.

by | Feb 6, 2023 11:37 am | Comments (2)

Clotilda was the name of the last known slave ship to bring African captives to the U.S. just over 160 years ago. 

It is also the title of Isaiah Providences newest film, which grapples with the underlying history that goes on in the Black community” — and which was recently screened as part of a short film festival at an Audubon Street arts hub.

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"Black Joy" Film Fest Bids Farewell To Former Stetson

by | Jan 27, 2023 3:52 pm | Comments (0)

Kimberly Wiplfer photos

Kolton Harris and film student Joaquín Morales.

At Thursday's BITE kickoff.

Who would have ever thought I’d be back in here watching a film?” asked Tracey Massey, in a hushed whisper, in the back row of a film screening at the former Stetson Branch library building in the soon-to-be-demolished Dixwell Plaza.

On the projector played Black Joy,” a musical short film by Kolton Harris, which tells the story of a group of Black students in detention who find pride and celebration in their Blackness through song and dance. 

I came to this library 40 years ago as a child growing up in this neighborhood. It is here where we learned the first stories of Black joy. Here’s where we read books about Martin Luther King Jr., where we heard the first Michael Jackson song, the first Nina Simone song. We learned about Malcolm X. All of those stories generated out of this library.”

It was joy. It was magic. [Harris] is reminding us of that. It was really just like it is in his film,” said Massey.

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Film Series Puts Women Directors In The Spotlight

by | Jan 11, 2023 8:47 am | Comments (0)

A scene from Merrily We Go to Hell.

Jerry and Joan meet over booze at a party, and Jerry steals a kiss. Joan muses as to why she let him do that, but she’s just charmed enough by him to go out on a date with him the next day. He learns that she’s the heir to a business fortune. She learns that he’s a drunken journalist who yearns to be a playwright. Perhaps she can get him to stop his drinking and turn his life around. But at what cost to her?

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Animation Celebration Dives Into Hungarian Folklore

by | Dec 20, 2022 8:34 am | Comments (0)

A mix of familiar and new faces dropped in on the latest installment of Animation Celebration,” the ongoing series from the New Haven Free Public Library hosted by Haley Grunloh, library technical assistant at Mitchell Library. Attendance may have been down slightly thanks to the holidays, but enthusiasm was as high as ever, thanks to the particularly bewitching choice for this month — the film János Vitéz, or Johnny Corncob, a 1973 film from Hungarian animator and director Marcell Jankovics.

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