Author: Peter Schilling

  • La Bohème

    What better way to spend your Valentine’s Day than taking in La Bohème, a silent, melodramatic classic at the beautiful and, dare we say, sexy Heights Theater. This 1926 film, based on the Puccini standard, has all the usual suspects: the tragic Mimi, a consumptive, and her jealous lover, the Bohemian poet Rodolfo. Their love…

  • Our Man in Havana

    Unavailable on DVD in the U.S., this 1959 British noir classic reunites director Carol Reed and writer Graham Greene, the sly duo who gave us The Third Man and The Fallen Idol, also classics. Here, Alec Guinness plays James Wormold, a British vacuum cleaner salesman stationed in Cuba who is enlisted as a spy for…

  • What Is It?

    What is it? Debuting for the first time in Minnesota and unavailable on DVD, What Is It? is Crispin Glover‘s 2005 directorial debut (lately he played Grendel in Beowulf). The movie is described by its director as "being the adventures of a young man whose principal interests are snails, salt, a pipe, and how to…

  • One Curmudgeon's Opinion: The Ten Best Films of 2007

    Ah, year’s end: the time to reflect on the bounty that was the 2007 movie year. There were many truly great films, one that I would actually call a classic, scores of excellent documentaries, and even a bunch of major studio flicks that are actually worth watching and only missed this collection by a hair…

  • Be Kind, Rewind

    Jack Black and Mos Def team with director Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Science of Sleep) to give us this oddball comedy about a man who becomes magnetized and erases the entire inventory of videotapes in his pal’s rental store. (The movie takes place in the ’80s.) They end up having to…

  • Big Hands in His Heart: An Interview with The Kite Runner's Homayoun Ershadi

    In The Kite Runner (opening Friday in area theaters), actor Homayoun Ershadi plays Baba, an Afghani intellectual and father of the child Amir, whose friendship and eventual betrayal from the servant boy Hassan forms the crux of the story. Ershadi is a graceful actor, whose intelligence and dignity shines in this movie. Originally an architecht,…