Movie Intelligence
Following are the films currently showing in our region, listed in order of their Metacritic score.* For a synopsis of the film and excerpts from the reviews that led to the score, click on the Metascore next to the film title. For show times, click on the theater name in the Movie Theaters directory at right.
Metascore/film title/(theaters)
79 The Visitor (Images, Triplex, Upstate, Spectrum)
78 Control (Spectrum)
78 The Counterfeiters (Spectrum)
78 Iron Man (Cinerom, Fairview, Moviehouse, Regal Berkshire)
75 Terror’s Advocate (Upstate) trailer below
72 Priceless (Spectrum)
71 Young@Heart (Upstate, Spectrum)
68 Redbelt (Hudson Movieplex, Regal Berkshire, Spectrum)
67 In Bruges (Spectrum)
67 Forgetting Sarah Marshall (Canaan Colonial, Hudson Movieplex, Spectrum)
61 The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (Cinerom, Fairview, Moviehouse, Regal Berkshire)
57 Flawless (Spectrum)
56 Leatherheads (Hudson Movieplex)
56 Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (Hudson Movieplex, Regal Berkshire)
56 Then She Found Me (Triplex, Spectrum)
55 Baby Mama (Cinerom, Crandell, Hudson Movieplex, Regal Berkshire, Spectrum)
55 Nim’s Island (Canaan Colonial)
48 21 (Gilson, Hudson Movieplex)
44 What Happens In Vegas (Cinerom, Fairview, Regal Berkshire)
42 The Bucket List (Gilson)
40 Speed Racer (Cinerom, Hudson Movieplex, Moviehouse, Regal Berkshire)
37 Made of Honor (Cinerom, Hudson Movieplex, Regal Berkshire)
34 Prom Night (Hudson Movieplex)
*Metacritic is a site that weighs film reviews from dozens of sources, averaging the results to achieve a score—the closer to 100, the more positive the reviews.
Unscored:
Beauty and the Beast (Mahaiwe)
Berkshire International Film Festival (Mahaiwe, Triplex) trailer below for the documentary Crawford
Kids’ Film Club: Curious George; Mike Mulligan & His Steam Shovel; Flatland, The Movie (Images)
Metropolitan Opera: Donizetti’s La Fille du Regiment (TSL)
Blood Wedding (TSL)
Shoot the Piano Player (TSL)
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 05/15/08 at 08:23 PM
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Preview: The 3rd Annual Berkshire International Film Festival
If you play “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” with Kelley Vickery, it’s pretty certain she will win. As the founder and director of the 3rd annual Berkshire International Film Festival (BIFF), she’s watched almost every one of the actor’s 60 films to prepare the tribute to him that will take place at the Mahaiwe Theater in Great Barrington on Friday May 16. “He’s had such an amazing career when you think about it--beginning with Animal House and Diner through Apollo 13 and The Woodsman,” she says. “I really like the idea of honoring someone with a connection to our region.” (Bacon and his wife, actress Krya Sedgwicl [above] have long had a house in Sharon, CT, and his band, the Bacon Brothers, often gives benefit concerts in the region.)
Vickery has managed to organize a world-class festival with a hometown sensibility. For instance, she’s arranged for Douglas Trumbull of Southfield, MA, who created the special effects for the groundbreaking Blade Runner in 1982, to speak before a screening of the new digital edition (trailer below) of director Ridley Scott’s cult classic on Sunday May 18.
“He’s one of the legends in his field,” says Vickery. “He has a wonderful presentation that he’ll do.” She’s excited that BIFF’s finale will be Frozen River—the story of an upstate New York woman who smuggles illegal immigrants from Canada into the United States through a Mohawk Indian Reservation—which was written and directed by Courtney Hunt of Chatham, NY.
A film festival, she explains, is about celebrating films you might not normally get to see as well as schmoozing and networking. She has worked hard to make BIFF serious and fun, glamorous and accessible. “I just got permission to close down Railroad Street on opening night,” she says. “We’re going to have a free dance party on the street from 9 P.M. to midnight with a local Brazilian band, Berkshire Bateria. And if it rains, we’ll have it in Pearl’s." Other parties and dinners are only open to ticket-holders who’ve purchased the $250 or $500 passes, which are still available. BIFF has already sold out all of its $100 movies-only passes, which is why now is the time to buy tickets for individual films before they sell out, too. “We’re developing a reputation,” she says. “Seventy percent of our sales are to people from outside the Berkshires.”
A mother of three—Kaitlin, 14, Andrew, 12, and Jack, 10—Vickery enjoys taking her children to to Tanglewood and Jacob’s Pillow, but felt that there was a gap in their cultural education, which was one of the inspirations for the festival. “We have so much dance, theater and music in the Berkshires and I thought that movies deserved to be celebrated too,” she says, adding that the affordability of tickets ($10) makes BIFF family friendly. Indeed, BIFF reaches out to the community all year long and hosts a free 11 AM screening at The Triplex on the first Sunday of every month. (This Sunday’s film is the documentary Single about the 100 million unmarried adults in the U.S., and the filmmakers will host a Q&A after the screening.)
The weekend before Memorial Day has turned out to be ideal time for the event. “The summer crowds have not yet shown up so the restaurants and shops are happy for the extra business,” she says. “It’s really become the kick-off for the cultural season.”
Posted by Dan Shaw on 05/01/08 at 04:46 PM
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Behind the Scenes
A scene from “The Royal Tenenbaums”
Anyone who’s curious about the tricks of the set designer’s trade—how he uses color, light and illusion to help film and stage directors tell a story—will want to attend Carl Sprague‘s free illustrated lecture at the Berkshire Museum on Thursday, April 3, at 7 PM. The Stockbridge resident has impressive credits: He’s been the art director for films such as Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums and David Mamet’s State and Main; he’s designed sets locally for the Albany Berkshire Ballet and the Berkshire Theater Festival, and he’s worked with fine-art-star photographer Gregory Crewdson, who frequently shoots in and around Pittsfield.
Tell-a-FriendPosted by Dan Shaw on 04/03/08 at 09:24 PM
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40 Films in Four Days in Kent
You’d think that a town without a proper movie theater would have a tough time pulling off a serious film festival, but the arts community of Kent, CT, does not let that inconvenient detail get in its way. “It requires a lot of imagination,” says Frank Galterio, who founded the festival three years ago. “We’re still wondering how we’ve we done it. The first year we had two six-by-eight screens. Now, we have one that is nine-by-twelve and one that is ten-by-sixteen, plus three other screening rooms.”
Beginning on Thursday, March 27, Kent will show 40 films in four-days, and host panels and workshops for anyone who loves movies. The festival kicks off with a screening of Doughboy [trailer below], the story of two brothers and their family’s bakery in the Bronx, which was directed by Louis Lombardi, who played federal agent Skip Lipari on The Sopranos.
One of the festival’s highlights is a master class on Saturday afternoon with Albert Maysles, the dean of American documentarians, whose films include Grey Gardens and Gimme Shelter."There are only a few tickets left for that,” says Galterio. 
And on Friday night, the premier of A.D. Calvo’s The Other Side of the Tracks will be followed by a Q&A with Tony- and Emmy-award winning actress Shirley Knight, who is in the film. Saturday night’s big film is Josseph Merhi’s Oranges, a drama about five families who each have a ten-year-old son on the same soccer team; the cast of Oranges includes Heather Locklear, Jill Hennessy, Orson Bean and Tom Arnold.
Galterio, who had a film in the first festival, no longer has time to make movies himself. “This has become a full-time job for me,” he says. “As soon as this one is over, I have to start organizing next year’s.”
Tickets are $8 for individual films; a full-day pass for Saturday or Sunday is $35; for $195, you can purchase a pass that gets you into all screenings, workshops, panels, and parties. Click here for the complete lineup.
Tell-a-FriendPosted by Dan Shaw on 03/24/08 at 10:58 AM
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Mondays at the Mahaiwe
The Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center’s Monday Night at the Movies is one of those almost great ideas. The premise is promising: a weekly showing of a classic film on a big screen in the exquisitely restored 1904 theater on Castle Street in Great Barrington. The Mahaiwe, which has been used over the years for vaudeville, operas and movies, is a gem and you understand why theaters used to be known as movie palaces. For many of us, it’s the first time to see these movies in a theater and not on a TV, so the Mahaiwe is really performing a public service. Who wouldn’t want to see masterpieces like Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights or The Maltese Falconthe way our grandparents did?
Tell-a-FriendPosted by Dan Shaw on 12/30/07 at 09:51 AM
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