LA FERIA
On the second floor above Pamela’s on Walnut Street is La Feria, Pittsburgh’s only Peruvian art-and-craft gallery and café. With only a couple dozen seats tucked into the back of the gallery, it’s cozy, cheerfully decorated with wares, and despite the lack of street-level signs, it’s one of Walnut Street’s worst-kept secrets. My companion began…
ALL OR NOTHING
Despite their realism, or maybe because of it, the films of Mike Leigh can be an acquired taste. It’s especially true of one like Leigh’s latest, All or Nothing. None of the characters are bad people, really, but some of them are so shut down by life that at first you might feel like checking…
FILM KITCHEN
In the hills of Appalachia, not far from towns named Jeremiah, Redfox, Eolia and Premium, sits Whitesburg, Kentucky. Growing up in the ’60s in that town of 1,500, Herb E. Smith was keenly aware of the era’s political turmoil — and also of how he and his neighbors, the small-town people of coal country, were…
NAQOYQATSI
When a movie introduces its grand themes as unabashedly as does Naqoyqatsi, prepare to settle in for an old-fashioned audiovisual lecture. Indeed, when that movie’s first frames depict Peter Bruegel the Elder’s forbidding Tower of Babel, you don’t even need to know ahead of time (for the film doesn’t tell you until afterward) that its…
