It has been a long accepted article of faith that music can transcend time and space and jog the mind to realizations and awakenings. Music therapy has become one of tools used by professionals to treat those with memory loss due to disease, braiin tumors or simply old age. The power of music to heal is at the core of the new American indie film THE MUSIC NEVER STOPPED, the directorial debut of producer-turned-director Jim Kohlberg. The film made its local premiere last Thursday as a...

  The fine arts have always had a solemn embrace with the art of film since the days of silent movies. As the "art form of the 20th century" began to cement its reputation in the first two decades, artists (many with a surreal bent) experimented with the new form of moving image to give kinetic motion to their individual visions. Salvador Dali, Fernand Leger, El Lisitsky, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Strand and others collaborated with budding film artistes to expand the...

  When the center of your film is a person whose celebrated motor mouth is both the source of her fame and, sometimes, of her undoing, you definitely have a film that is about the marvels of talk, talk and more talk. That is certainly the case with the popular documentary JOAN RIVERS: A PIECE OF WORK, a disarmingly intimate portrait of the American comic legend. The documentary duo of Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg were on-stage guests at the special screening of the film at the Jacob...

  EYES WIDE OPEN (Israel)  After a mercilessly cold and snowy winter, spring has finally sprung in New York, with its explosion of flowers, smells and colors. Amidst the ruby reds, the dazzling yellows and the intoxicating shades of green, there is a distinct shade of lavender, as gay and lesbian films make their annual pilgrimage to the city and its environs in the run-up to the area's gay pride celebrations in June. First out of the starting gate is the Jacob Burns Film C...

  Link to video interview with director Lee Daniels of the American indie hit PRECIOUS, on stage at the Jacob Burns Film Center, New York on Monday, November 9: http://www.burnsfilmcenter.org/films/precious-moreinfo ...

  Oscar, meet Precious........the Academy Awards have just gotten their first blast of ghetto love with the rising tide surrounding the urban drama PRECIOUS: Based On The Novel Push By Sapphire by producer-turned-director Lee Daniels. The film, a major hit out of Sundance and screened to great acclaim in Cannes, Toronto and New York, opened theatrically in the United States this past weekend…..and broke box office records for its per-screen performance. Logging in an astonishing $100,00...

 Thursday, May 15-----The timing could not be more perfect. On the same day that the California Supreme Court issued a historic reversal against the ban on gay marriage, the Jacob Burns Film Center in New York's Westchester County is launching its annual Out At The Movie series, focusing on films made by and targed to the gay and lesbian community (and those who love and admire them).Whatever one's position on the subject of gay marriage, the civil rights of gay couples is an issue that goes be...

 Wednesday, December 12---------It's one of the frustrating feelings of the true buff......a film you were hoping to see in theaters that disappears about its first week's run. In this age of the rapid release, where specialty titles often don't have much staying power, unless you catch them in their first week of release, it's possible to miss out on them until them turn on pay television or DVD. This is true not only of the smallest indie titles but of some major releases as well that, for re...

 Wednesday, October 17---------In this busy theatrical film season, as many as a dozen films premiere every Friday at local multiplexes. Many films that would benefit from a slow build up and the essential qualities of  "word of mouth" fail to ignite fire on their intial weekend openings and often disappear without a trace in a scant week or two. In the ferocious environment of theatrical distribution, if one's opening weekend is below expectations, the results can be disasterous. Di...

Friday, July 13-----To celebrate Bastille Day (and the general love of all things French), the Jacob Burns Film Center, the prominent arthouse complex north of New York City, is hosting The French New Wave film series, reminding us all what it was about the French that we fell in love with in the first place. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the French "Nouvelle Vague" (New Wave) was the most dynamic cinema on the planet. It literally exploded when a group of young Cahiers du Cinema ...

Wednesday, July 4-------While Independence Day for most people is usually a day at the beach or a backyard barbeque extravaganza, the Jacob Burns Film Center has taken a different tack to celebrate the July 4th holidays by presenting a three film series called THE MEDITATIVE LIFE, which explores the inner realities of existence (which can be just as explosive as any fireworks display).The series begins today with a special one week run of the German film INTO GREAT SILENCE by Philip Groning (...

Wednesday, June 20---------Members of the Jacob Burns Film Center, Westchester's most adventurous arthouse complex, will be treated to a special advance preview of one of the summer's most provocative films, Michael Moore's SICKO. The film opens wide on June 29th in wide release and is sure to stimulate discussion and serve as a lightning rod, as much if not more than Moore's previous triumph FAHRENHEIT 911. Burns Film Center members can among the first audiences to see the film...

 Wednesday, May 16-----Broadway came to the Burns on Monday evening, as the Jacob Burns Film Center, Westchester's premiere arthouse cinema, presented a special screening of SHOW BUSINESS: The Road To Broadway, the new documentary that explores the triumph and tragedies of New York's Great White Way. The film, which opened in New York last week and is scheduled to open in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Boston next month, is an entertaining and informative look at the 2004 Broa...

Tuesday, April 10----One of Asia's biggest movIe stars, South Korean screen idol Joong-hoon Park, will attend a mini-retrospective of his career, starting tomorrow evening at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville (that's 30 minutes on Metro North, for Manhattan islanders). A household name in Asia, Park began his career in the 1980s in domestic dramas, but hit it big in comedy and action films as part of the South Korean film renaissance of the past decade. Park will present his n...

Thursday, February 15----While most Americans will spend Presidents' Day Monday either shopping, sleeping late or lounging at a pool, intrepid New Yorkers can bathe in the glorious spectacle of a silent film classic, with musical accompaniment, at the Jacob Burns Film Center.....Swedish director Victor Sjostrom's 1921 classic THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE. Sjostrom (later dubbed Victor Seastrom in Hollywood), who directed some early silent classics in both his native Sweden and eventually in Holl...

Tuesday, January 30----Coming on the heels of the Sundance Film Festival, the film world's annual love fest with American indie cinema, it was perfect timing for the Jacob Burns Film Center to invite veteran indie producer Christine Vachon to give a talk as part of the Center's Women Filmmakers series. Drawing on experiences from her recently published tell-all book on the inner workings of the indie film scene, A KILLER LIFE, the prolific Vachon was in fine form as she was interviewed on stage...

Thursday, January 18----The Jacob Burns Film Center, an oasis of film culture in the northern New York suburbs, is presenting a six-week series of some of the landmarks of world cinema, in a program entitled 50 Years of Janus Films. The series is a tribute to the pioneering arthouse distributor, who for 50 years, was at the forefront of bringing the works of Bergman, Fellini, Truffaut and other film greats to the attention of American audiences. The series, which originated as part of the New ...