Marya E. Gates

I don't remember a time in my life where I wasn't aware of who Richard Simmons was. As a child of the ‘80s and ‘90s, the flamboyant fitness guru, who

"What would you say if your daughter told you her boyfriend pushed her down the stairs but it's okay because really it was just an accident?"

The inspiring, heartfelt, and profound documentary " Daughters " swept this year's Sundance Film Festival, winning both the Audience Award for U.S.

The director and author talk about adapting the novel to the screen, bringing Earl’s diner to life, and what it takes to recreate the emotional chaos leading up to Y2K.

“Every human being is a universe within themselves floating about in eternal darkness, aimless, lonely . . so lonely. Or maybe it's just me”

In 2006 writer-director Dito Montiel broke out with the autobiographical “A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints,” ushering in a raw new voice.

In my final dispatch from this year's Toronto International Film Festival, I watched three films about families in crisis.

From the Congo to Harlem and back again, Johan Grimonprez’s kinetic, urgent documentary delivers post-colonial politics in jazz form, replete with virtuosic archival riffs, historical text in the form of Blue Note album covers, and musical performances by jazz legends (Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Nina Simone) who in the ‘60s doubled as cultural ambassadors to Africa. Their roles as unknowing decoys in the CIA’s plot to assassinate Congo’s prime minister Patrice Lumumba threads through this deeply researched, densely textured tapestry — which scrambles the simplistic good guys/bad guys narrative, foregrounds powerful women behind the revolution (Simone, Abbey Lincoln, and activist/chief advisor to Lumumba, Andrée Blouin), and sounds a call to clear-eyed interrogation of Western powers’ murderous collusions in the guise of liberal values.

It’s unusual for a movie to have inspired creations as diverse as Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Roland Emmerich's Independence Day, but a movie celebrating its 100th birthday today can claim just such an accomplishment. Loosely based on a 1923 novel by Alexei Tolstoy, Yakov Protazanov's 1924 silent film Aelita: Queen of Mars is, in fact, secretly one of the most influential sci-fi movies of all time.

A writer went to Iowa City for the Refocus Film Festival and Iowa City Book Festival, and reports back.