Author: Peter Schilling

  • The Joy of Insignificance

    Poor Eran Kolirin. When I spoke with the director of The Band’s Visit a few weeks ago, he had been traveling so much that his jet lag kept him from even an hour’s sleep. Then, just minutes before this interview, he managed to whack his head against the door frame of the car that brought…

  • Fly Me To The Moon: Animation for All Ages

    Once again, the library’s very own cinema sprites, Deb Girdwood and Isabelle Harder, bring your lucky kids some of the finest animation in the world—and we’re not talking Saturday-morning corporate fare, either. Drag the offspring to the library for such inspired lunacy as “Petalocity,” a story of “a little girl who goes to extremes of…

  • Funny Games

    Word has it that controversial director Michael Haneke (The Piano Teacher, Caché) simply remade his original 1997 shockfest shot by shot. But who cares? The original Funny Games is hands-down one of the most disturbing films ever made; and if this one has Naomi Watts in the lead we’re, well, game. With the story of…

  • Arranged

    Here’s an interesting show for you and the kids: Arranged, a tale of two Brooklyn teachers—Rochel, an Orthodox Jew, and Nasira, a Syrian Muslim—both of whom are in the process of being set up in arranged marriages. Somehow they manage to become close friends. By setting the film in a public grade school and forcing…

  • The Counterfeiters

    Told in flashback, The Counterfeiters is the exciting true story of Salomon Sorowitsch, who, in the years before World War II, was the world’s greatest counterfeiter. Arrested in Berlin, Sorowitsch is sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp—as both Jew and habitual criminal he’s considered doubly threatening. But the Germans find a use for Sorowitsch, putting…

  • The Band's Visit

    "Once, not long ago, a small Egyptian police band arrived in Israel. Not many people remember this. It wasn’t that important." So begins The Band’s Visit, an understated little film from Israeli director Eran Kolirin. When no one is at the airport to meet the eponymous band, the musicians, dressed in baby blue police uniforms…