Film

This Friday, April 19th, we’re handing our Instagram stories over to Sumer Hazeen of Roger Ebert’s Film Festival, aka Ebertfest. As you’ve seen on Smile Politely, the film festival is taking place this weekend, kicking …

On Thursday, April 18th WILL-TV’s Prairie Fire will air a segment from Deke Weaver’s CETACEAN (The Whale). The show opens with ten minutes of introduction to this unique interdisciplinary and multi-media performance, followed by 50 …

The Looney Tunes theme has been playing on a loop in my head for the last few days. Cue, Bugs Bunny: Overture, curtain, lights, this is it, the night of nights…oh what heights we’ll hit. …

This week ahead of the Roger Ebert Film Festival which runs Wednesday through Saturday, we get what may be one of my favorite features of Ebertfest week: the pre-festival symposium.  The 2024 Chaz and Roger …

Early in After Party, the new short film written and directed by Urbana native Jonah Koslofsky, we encounter Ben and Ellie preparing for a Halloween party in Chicago in 2021. The party invokes memories of …

Robert Browning famously opened his poem “Home thoughts, from Abroad” with the line “O to be in England/Now that April’s there.” England’s got nothing on April in Champaign-Urbana. From Boneyard, to Ebertfest, to the proliferation …

And just like that – April is nearly here and the full lineup for Ebertfest just dropped. With Bob Fosse’s Star 80 headlining opening night and Malcolm D. Lee’s The Best Man featured center stage, …

If you missed the Oscar-winning documentary 20 Days in Mariupol when it premiered on PBS’s hard-hitting series Frontline last November, now is your chance to watch it on the big screen at Spurlock’s Museum of …

In 2022, local filmmakers Luke Boyce, Brett Hays, and Jennifer Shelby of Shatterglass Films, Dustin Hoke of Dustin Hoke Services, and Rob Stern and Sarah Sharp of The Line Film Company came together to form …