Festivals & Awards
Spotlighting Ebertfest's Festival Director and Audience Members
An article compiling the memories of local Ebertfest Film Festival audience members, from those newly attending to those who have attended for twenty years.
An article compiling the memories of local Ebertfest Film Festival audience members, from those newly attending to those who have attended for twenty years.
Matt writes: Ebertfest 2017 is almost upon us, and Chaz Ebert has penned an in-depth preview of the screenings, guests and panels scheduled for this year's festival, running Wednesday, April 19th, through Sunday, April 23rd. "All in the Family" creator Norman Lear, Oscar-nominee Isabelle Huppert and trailblazing filmmaker Charles Burnett are among the artistic giants who will presenting their work in-person at the Virginia Theatre in Champaign, Illinois.
The transcript and video of Roger Ebert's onstage conversation with Donald O'Connor at Ebertfest 2003.
The 2011 edition of a movie critic's dream unreels again this week. In my own home town, I'll be able to show the films of my choice in a classic movie palace, flawlessly projected on a giant screen before a movie-loving audience. To paraphrase Orson Welles when he was given the run of RKO Radio Pictures to make his own movie, it's the biggest train set a boy could ever want.
Ebertfest 2011 runs April 27-May 1. The passes have been sold but we've always been able to find room for everyone in line inside the 1,600-seat Virginia Theater. Its long-term renovation continued this year with work on the lobby, the concession stand and the upstairs lobby. The marquee is a work in progress.
HOLLYWOOD -- There's joy in Middle-earth tonight. "Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" led the 76th annual Academy Awards with a record-tying 11 Oscars, including best picture and director. Vanquishing all opposition like the forces of Sauron, it won every category for which it was was nominated.
The man who performed the most sensational solo number in the history of musical comedy is dead. Donald O'Connor, whose "Make 'em Laugh" number in "Singin' in the Rain" (1952) was a show-stopper that delighted and astonished generations of audiences, died at 78 on Saturday.
Q. In your review of Jackie Chan's latest American release, "The Legend Of Drunken Master," you praised his athletic skills but wrote that computerized special effects have made them sort of obsolete: "When you see bodies whirling in air in 'The Matrix,' you don't think about computers, you simply accept them. But what Chan does, he is more or less, one way or another, actually doing."
Milton Berle made his acting debut in 1914, at the age of 6, as the little newsboy in Charles Chaplin's "Tillie's Punctured Romance." Since then, he has been in vaudeville, radio and the movies and in 1948 became television's first big star.
