Exhibition on Screen: Frida Kahlo

A wilfully offensive band, The Mentors gained infamy for performing in black executioner hoods and spewing cartoonishly racist, homophobic and misogynistic lyrics in the 1980s and ‘90s—but was their use of shock meant to propagate hate or confront it?

The son of Emperor Franz Josef of Austria, Crown Prince Rudolf, is believed to have shot his female lover and himself in a tragic suicide pact in 1882 in Mayerling. Due to Imperial cover-ups, the full story may never be known. This story has been filmed several times, in French in 1935 and in English in 1968. Hungarian director Miklos Jancso recreates those events for his own purposes, continuing his favored theme of the rejection of paternal authority. In the film, which has very little dialog, Rudolf is a good-natured pan-sexual golden boy, who cavorts on his rural estate with a host of beautiful, aristocratic lovers and friends of both sexes. He refuses to leave his country idyll even though he has been ordered to by the Emperor, his father. Despite the fact that for a large part of the film, attractive young people go about unclothed and engaging in erotic encounters, the mood is one of melancholy rather than prurience.

A revolution is taking place in the art world and it isn’t happening in Paris, Berlin or Hong Kong—but in Grand Rapids, Michigan. ArtPrize is the most highly attended art show in the world, and it awards cash prizes larger than all other competitions combined. International critics and general crowds pack bars, galleries and abandoned buildings all over town, taking in over 1,500 works from cerebral conceptualists and weekend hobbyists. An acclaimed jury awards a winner $200,000 and the ballot-carrying public does the same. Nimble cameras follow four artists, each vying not only for critical recognition but for every public vote they can drum up. Part classy game show, part engaging art exploration, More Art Upstairs captures the debates ArtPrize has intentionally (or inadvertently?) triggered: Can culture be democratized? Do artists need or want to connect with audiences? And is the canonical art establishment on its way out? (Myrocia Watamaniuk)

The inimitable Danny Kaye stars as famed storyteller Hans Christian Andersen in this charming fictionalized biopic that blends music, romance, comedy and fantasy to trace the life of Denmark’s literary hero. A small-town shoemaker with a knack for spinning yarns, Hans encounters happiness and heartbreak on his road to becoming a full-fledged writer.

This is the story of the crew of a downed bomber, captured after a run over Tokyo, early in the war. Relates the hardships the men endure while in captivity, and their final humiliation: being tried and convicted as war criminals.

Lyndon B. Johnson’s amazing 11-month journey from taking office after JFK’s assassination, through the fight to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act and his own presidential campaign, culminating on the night LBJ is actually elected to the office – no longer the ‘accidental President.’

In 2009, Iranian Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari was covering Iran’s volatile elections for Newsweek. One of the few reporters living in the country with access to US media, he made an appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, in a taped interview with comedian Jason Jones. The interview was intended as satire, but if the Tehran authorities got the joke they didn’t like it – and it would quickly came back to haunt Bahari when he was rousted from his family home and thrown into prison. Making his directorial debut, Jon Stewart tells the tale of Bahari’s months-long imprisonment and interrogation in this powerful and affecting docudrama featuring a potent and performance by Gael García Bernal recounting Bahari’s efforts to maintain his hope and his sanity in the face of isolation and persecution-through memories of his family, recollections of the music he loves, and thoughts of his wife and unborn child.

Mary Surratt is the lone female charged as a co-conspirator in the assassination trial of Abraham Lincoln. As the whole nation turns against her, she is forced to rely on her reluctant lawyer to uncover the truth and save her life.

The retelling of June 6, 1944, from the perspectives of the Germans, US, British, Canadians, and the Free French. Marshall Erwin Rommel, touring the defenses being established as part of the Reich’s Atlantic Wall, notes to his officers that when the Allied invasion comes they must be stopped on the beach. “For the Allies as well as the Germans, it will be the longest day”

Long before Green Day and Blink 182 inflicted punk-rock’s puncture wound on the map of mainstream music, the Descendents were at home concocting the perfect mix of pop, angst, love, and coffee. FILMAGE: The Story of DESCENDENTS/ALL follows drummer/square-peg Bill Stevenson and his ‘caffeinated retardedness’ as he pushes his rotating door of bandmates to ‘achieve ALL,’ his philosophy of going for greatness at all costs. Stevenson is a force to be reckoned with–not even grapefruit-sized brain tumors can keep him down.

Two Jesuit priests travel to seventeenth century Japan which has, under the Tokugawa shogunate, banned Catholicism and almost all foreign contact.

Gemma’s childhood, a teenage troublemaker, turns into motherhood in Motherwell, a rusty Scottish steel town, a place where people either get knocked up or locked up, where innocent games can easily turn into serious crime.