Film Reviews & Previews
Actor-writer-activist Martin Sheen will participate in a Q&A at the Royal on Friday, December 15 after the 7 PM screening of KILLING FOR LOVE and signing copies of the book ‘A Far, Far Better Thing: Did a Fatal Attraction Lead to a Wrongful Conviction?,’ for which he wrote the foreword.
Special Q&A at the NoHo with THE BALLAD OF LEFTY BROWN star Bill Pullman and director Jared Moshe after 7:10 PM show Saturday, December 16!
THE RAPE OF RECY TAYLOR producer Beth Hubbard will participate in Q&A’s at the Monica Film Center after the 4:40 and 7:10 PM screenings on Friday, December 8. Producer Laurens Grant will join her for the second screening.
Special Q&A after the Saturday, December 9th, 4:30pm screening of THE DANCER (LA DANSEUSE) featuring French singer-songwriter and actress SoKo in person! Dance critic Debra Levine of Artsmeme.com will moderate.
The 7PM screenings of BILL FRISELL: A PORTRAIT at the NoHo will feature Q&A’s December 15-17:
Friday 15 – Singer-Songwriter Colin Hay. Before his solo career, Hay was front man of the band Men at Work. He has written many hits, including Land Down Under, Overkill and Who Can it Be Now.
Saturday 16 – Scott Goldman, Executive Director of the GRAMMY Museum. Goldman has moderated over 400 public programs at the GRAMMY Museum. From 2005-2016 he served as the Vice President of the GRAMMY Foundation and the MusiCares Foundation.
Sunday 17 – Singer-Songwriter-Guitarist-Producer Joe Henry. Joe Henry is an American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer. He has released 13 studio albums and produced multiple recordings for other artists, including three Grammy Award-winning albums.
THE TRIBES OF PALOS VERDES filmmaker Emmett Malloy will participate in Q&A’s at the Royal after the 7:10 PM screenings on Friday and Saturday, December 8 and 9. Ella Taylor of NPR will moderate.
Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 45th anniversary screening of the groundbreaking sci-fi movie, SILENT RUNNING, which marked the directorial debut of special effects wizard Douglas Trumbull. Trumbull and Producer Michael Gruskoff will participate in Q&A after the screening.
SILENT RUNNING screens Wednesday, December 13, at 7:30pm at the Ahrya Fine Arts Theatre in Beverly Hills. Click here for tickets.
Set 100 years in the future, the prophetic script written by Deric Washburn, Michael Cimino, and Steven Bochco stars two-time Oscar nominee Bruce Dern as an astronaut sent into space to preserve the last samples of plant life that are endangered on a dying Earth. His only companions are three drones named Huey, Dewey, and Louie.
The film’s ecological message was a daring one for the time, and its relevance has only grown over the subsequent decades.
Trumbull had made special effects films for NASA while he was still in his early twenties, and he was hired by Stanley Kubrick to execute many of the most challenging and innovative visual effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Reviewing Silent Running, Time’s Jay Cocks compared it to Kubrick’s masterpiece: “Silent Running displays the same kind of technical virtuosity, the same sense of the still, vast symmetry of the galaxies.” He added that the movie was “a quite captivating essay on futuristic ecology.” Life’s Richard Schickel declared that the film “provides a great, near-solo role for Bruce Dern.”
In addition to his work on 2001, Trumbull played a major role in creating the special effects for The Andromeda Strain, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: the Motion Picture, Blade Runner, and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life.
Trumbull directed Natalie Wood’s last film, Brainstorm. He is also known as an inventor and technical innovator in many other fields. He has received numerous awards over the years, including three Oscar nominations for his visual effects and The Gordon E. Sawyer Award for scientific and technical achievement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2012.
After working as a highly successful agent during the 1960s, Michael Gruskoff produced his first film, Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie, in 1971. His other films include Mel Brooks’ comedy smash, Young Frankenstein, Quest for Fire, and My Favorite Year, which we featured in a highly successful Anniversary screening earlier this year.
Presented digitally.
EXTRAORDINARY ORDINARY PEOPLE director Alan Govenar will participate in a Q&A after the 7:10 PM show at the Music Hall on Friday, December 1.