My sixteenth and final movie of the 2014 Cleveland International Film Festival was a documentary/dance movie.

Born to Fly

Elizabeth Streb is a choreographer. She won a MacArthur Genius Grant, but even more impressively she's successfully run a dance troupe in the high intensity dance world of New York City since the late 1970s. However, you could ( Read more... )

I saw two more movies on the second Saturday of the Cleveland International Film Festival

Just About Famous

This full length documentary is based on a short that played Cleveland in 2011 which has since been expanded. The camera follows under a number of people who are professional celebrity impersonators. If, for instance, you've always wanted ( Read more... )

Friday night at the Cleveland International Film Festival featured my third and fourth documentaries in a row. These two were even thematically linked.

Sex(Ed) The MovieI don't recall much of the sex education classes I had in junior high and high school, except to remember that I had them. I suspect that they might well have been just as awkward ( Read more... )

The second Thursday of the Cleveland International Film Festival started a stretch of five consecutive documentaries over three days.

As I was writing this up, it occurred to me that when I was picking out my films I could have checked on IMDB to see how well they were rated. Adding this to my film picking tactics might have saved me the pain of ( Read more... )

Someone asked me how I know what movies to pick when I go to the Cleveland International Film Festival. The answer is that I read through the large program book, check all the movies that sound interesting, cross-link that list against my schedule, and buy tickets where my availability and my interest coincide. This is essentially the same system I ( Read more... )

I usually see a lot of documentaries at the Cleveland International Film Festival, and with nine on my schedule this year is no exception. The thing about documentaries is that a good filmmaker can take a topic that you have no interest in and make it utterly enthralling. For instance, who would have ever guessed that a film about video game high ( Read more... )

I didn't go to the Cleveland International Film Festival on Monday, so I saw Muppets Most Wanted instead. I'm sure that you know whether or not you're in the target audience for that film already, so let's talk about a Cleveland tourist attraction I hit on Saturday that I didn't even know was an option.

The CIFF takes place in Tower City, which ( Read more... )

Due to a lot of radio station meetings, I only saw one movie on the first Sunday of the CIFF.

The Sax Man

If you've been downtown in Cleveland after a ballgame or a concert, you have probably encountered The Sax Man. I just assumed he was an enterprising street musician. Certainly his off-key alto sax renditions of Take Me Out to the Ballgame or ( Read more... )

I was originally slated to see four movies at the Cleveland International Film Festival on Saturday, but I opted to sacrifice the sunk cost of my ticket for the late showing of Monsoon Shootout in favor of getting some much needed extra sleep. Yes, I'm getting old. Here's how the other three movies were:

Maryan

Maryan starts with titular ( Read more... )

Reviews from my Friday at the CIFF.

The Verdict

The Verdict is a Belgian film that mines the same territory as John Grisham's novel A Time to Kill. Luc's wife is killed by a robber and his young daughter is killed by a passing car when she runs into the street during the assault. The robber is released due to a procedural error. The Luc acquires ( Read more... )