Tag Archives: entertainment

The Heartland International Film Festival 2025 Season Finale

October 20, 2025 By in Conventions & Events, Indiana, Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
balcony view of a movie screen down below. Onscreen is a pic of Emily Deschanel and two producers, encouraging viewers to become a Heartland member. Walls around screen are glowing green and have large icons of film reels.

Our Sunday night view from the balcony of the Tobias Theater at Newfields. The slideshow still is from last year’s world premiere of ReEntry.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! Since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity to see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Some participants stop in Indy on their grand tour of Hollywood’s festival circuit; some are local productions on shoestring budgets; and a wide spectrum of claims are staked in the innumerable niches between, projects with well-known actors screening alongside indies with enormous hearts.

This’ll be my third year diving in and seeing more than just a single entrant. Heartland’s 34th edition runs October 9-19, for which I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all (Lord willing) — maybe more if time permits…

Once again I took a week’s vacation from my day job and posted for eight consecutive days about the six films I saw at three theaters in nine days, one virtual screening we’ll get to in a moment, plus a few other entries that included still another movie, albeit more of an anti-Heartland studio product that opened the same weekend. I doubt anyone out there read every single word, but I’m not even done yet!

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Heartland Film Festival 2025: “Nuremberg”

October 20, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Russell Crowe faces off against Rami Malek while Leo Woodall stands in the background.

Zeus vs. Freddie Mercury! TWO GODS ENTER! ONE GOD LEAVES!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! Since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity to see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Some participants stop in Indy on their grand tour of Hollywood’s festival circuit; some are local productions on shoestring budgets; and a wide spectrum of claims are staked in the innumerable niches between, projects with well-known actors screening alongside indies with enormous hearts.

This’ll be my third year diving in and seeing more than just a single entrant. Heartland’s 34th edition runs October 9-19, for which I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all (Lord willing) — maybe more if time permits…

Our final theatrical screening of the festival, and their official Closing Night selection, was also the very first entrant I bought tickets for, based on a single selling point: Academy Award Winner Russell Crowe IS Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring IN Nuremberg! And that must be announced or imagined in the deepest possible Epic Voice Guy voice or else why bother.

Same as with the Academy Awards, World War II and the Holocaust are common subjects in Heartland selections, for reasons tragically obvious to anyone who’s seen enough of them and nevertheless supports the important, evergreen “Never Forget” message behind them. Nuremberg wasn’t the only such film on the docket, but it was certainly the highest-profile one. Its writer/director James Vanderbilt has worked on numerous big-budget crowd-pleasers (the last three Screams and both Amazing Spider-Mans, among others) and recruited a strong ensemble to tell this particular story, of which the indisputable highlight is — for those just joining us — Maximus himself as Göring, the bombastic narcissist and highest-ranking Nazi still alive after the war, the sort of boo-able real-life Kingpin in more ways than one, whose every move and every haughty gaze was like a steamroller through every room he entered.

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Heartland Film Festival 2025: “Blue Moon”

October 19, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Andrew Scott in a tuxedo, one foot taller than Ethan Hawke in a 1940s suit. Both stand in a bar, staring through us at an offscreen woman.

Super-Villain Team-Up presents Moriarty and The Grabber!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! Since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity to see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Some participants stop in Indy on their grand tour of Hollywood’s festival circuit; some are local productions on shoestring budgets; and a wide spectrum of claims are staked in the innumerable niches between, projects with well-known actors screening alongside indies with enormous hearts.

This’ll be my third year diving in and seeing more than just a single entrant. Heartland’s 34th edition runs October 9-19, for which I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all (Lord willing) — maybe more if time permits…

Next up is Blue Moon, the twelfth film I’ve seen by prolific director Richard Linklater. His last joint, the true-story dramedy Hit Man, was among my favorites last year. Though his subjects vary wildly from one to the next, his films and their ensembles always have their laid-back charms, so invitingly that you don’t feel time passing because you’re enjoying the conversations so much…even when the loudest guy in the room is blissfully unaware that everyone else is aware of his problems.

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Heartland Film Festival 2025: “It Was Just an Accident”

October 17, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
An Iranian auto mechanic sits in his van in the middle of the desert, smoking and thinking. Not far away are a body-sized hole he's dug and a discarded shovel.

CAUTION: Rated NC-45 for scenes of smoking.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! Since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity to see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Some participants stop in Indy on their grand tour of Hollywood’s festival circuit; some are local productions on shoestring budgets; and a wide spectrum of claims are staked in the innumerable niches between, projects with well-known actors screening alongside indies with enormous hearts.

This’ll be my third year diving in and seeing more than just a single entrant. Heartland’s 34th edition runs October 9-19, for which I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all (Lord willing) — maybe more if time permits…

Our next film is Heartland’s sold-out “International Centerpiece Screening” of It Was Just an Accident, which has been building buzz online among pro critics in the days leading up to its limited release in the largest U.S. markets this week. It’s rare for a small foreign film to open in Indy the same weekend as it does in NYC and L.A., so it’s nice that Heartland provides such occasions for us to feel like we count as a Major City by Hollywood distribution definitions.

The latest from writer/director/producer Jafar Panahi isn’t the first time he’s shot a film in his native Iran entirely without the government’s permission. The same held true for previous films such as This Is Not a Film and No Bears, not to mention some of his earlier ones that were made “legally” only to be banned later. A suspended prison already hangs over his head, but he still has plenty more to say through his art.

Full disclosure: after seeing Accident but before sitting down to collect my own thoughts, I read Vulture.com’s new interview with him, which contained a wealth of fascinating information. Anything in this entry that resembles Fun Trivia comes from their article.

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Heartland Film Festival 2025: “Happy Birthday”

October 17, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
A middle-aged woman and a tiny girl at the counter of a brightly lit bakery, where the chef is icing a cake.

Last-minute birthday cake shopping: kind of a headache in every country.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! Since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity to see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Some participants stop in Indy on their grand tour of Hollywood’s festival circuit; some are local productions on shoestring budgets; and a wide spectrum of claims are staked in the innumerable niches between, projects with well-known actors screening alongside indies with enormous hearts.

This’ll be my third year diving in and seeing more than just a single entrant. Heartland’s 34th edition runs October 9-19, for which I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all (Lord willing) — maybe more if time permits…

As someone who watches every Marvel Cinematic Universe installment for better or worse, I’ve found it interesting to see what filmmakers do next after they’ve done their time in the machine. Sometimes they move on to equally gargantuan pop-culture universes (The Mandalorian, Superman). Sometimes they have a ball in their own sandboxes (Sinners, Wolfs). Sometimes they give the impression Marvel broke their brains (The Gray Man, Fast X). Sometimes they step back from Hollywood excess and find fulfillment in smaller works (Next Goal Wins, the upcoming Hamnet).

Case in point: our next film, Happy Birthday — Egypt’s official submission for Best International Feature at the next Academy Awards — comes to us from the talents of writer/director Sarah Goher, who was on the writing staff of Moon Knight, and her co-writer and longtime creative partner Mohamed Diab, who directed four of the show’s six episodes. (Two other writers receive a “Story By” credit, but as of today I can’t verify their names online for some reason.) Its total budget was probably less than what they paid the VFX team in charge of rendering Khonshu’s skull, but sometimes an indie film is just as capable, if not more so, of slipping through your jaded defenses with its sincerity right before it breaks your heart.

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Best CDs of 2024 According to an Old Guy Who Bought 11

October 16, 2025 By in Misc. Media Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
11 CDs on our kitchen table, capsule reviews to follow.

The nominees, alphabetically.

Hi, I’m Fat Casey Kasem and welcome to another music listicle, but not a Top Ten because I bought one too many!

As part of my annual series of year-in-review entries, I remain one of six people nationwide who still prefers compact discs to digital downloads. My hangups about vinyl would require a separate essay unto themselves. My new-album splurges are rare because: (a) it’s increasingly tougher for new music to catch my ear as I grow older and more finicky; and (b) my favorite yesteryear acts died, stopped recording, or swiveled in directions away from me. That usually means missing out on what majorities loves, thus further dropping me down the bottomless wishing well into total irrelevance as chronicled on this very website, thirteen years and counting.

In 2024 I bought brand new studio albums from eleven acts, omitting any pre-2024 finds or gifts, and not counting non-studio releases we’ll cover at the end. It can be fun to walk past the cool-collectors’ vinyl bins to the way-back by the T-shirt rack and pick through what passes for in-person CD sections today, though I’m seeing diminishing returns as those get smaller and dustier, sometimes not even alphabetized.

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Yes, There’s a Scene During the “Tron: Ares” End Credits

October 15, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Jared Leto in black and red CGI armor. The glass faceplate retracted partially to reveal his face. Everything around him is red lines.

In a better film we’d see Morbius evolve into Morpheus and leave the Grid for the Matrix.

When I was 10, the original Tron was one of the last films I saw at the Westlake Drive-In before it closed a month later. I remember being bored, my typical response to a lot of Disney live-action, and got more fun out of the 4-in-1 arcade game even though some malls charged double to play it (i.e., fifty whole cents, a ripoff at the time). My son was a teenager when we saw Tron: Legacy and quickly forgot most of it, though the action sequences were impressive enough that I noted fledgling director Joseph Kosinski’s name before he went on to bigger, better works. In between those wobbly goalposts, Nine Inch Nails’ 1989 debut Pretty Hate Machine was in heavy rotation in my various high school cassette players, so a young Trent Reznor’s industrial synth-metal assaults hold a certain place in my pop-culture heart even though I haven’t kept up with his later, lesser albums. (Fun trivia: Reznor and I share a birthday!)

Nostalgia isn’t an automatic drug of choice for me, but sometimes I’ll play along with its corporate pushers just to see what they think might get me high by injecting my own liquefied childhood into my eyeballs. Fifteen years later Disney has turned Tron‘s CPU off and back on again to install its latest IP expansion pack Tron: Ares, whose marketing tries awfully hard to target Gen-X as if anyone my age yearned for this to be a trilogy to save on our DVD shelves until we die and our beneficiaries give all our boxed sets to Goodwill. The thin dimensional boundaries between video games and the real world have been breached quite a bit since 1982 (Wreck-It Ralph! Pixels! Ready Player One!), to say nothing of invasions from their kid cousin Virtual Reality (from The Lawnmower Man on up), so really, what’s Tron have to offer besides grasping for an extended warranty on its own obsolescence?

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Heartland Film Festival 2025: “Christy” with Bonus Live Q&A!

October 14, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Female boxer with messy brown hair, red gloves, white mouthpiece and all-white outfit standing proudly in the ring and kinda roaring.

For anyone who was really hoping Spider-Woman would get to punch someone in Madame Web, have we got great news for you!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! Since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity to see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Some participants stop in Indy on their grand tour of Hollywood’s festival circuit; some are local productions on shoestring budgets; and a wide spectrum of claims are staked in the innumerable niches between, projects with well-known actors screening alongside indies with enormous hearts.

This’ll be my third year diving in and seeing more than just a single entrant. Heartland’s 34th edition runs October 9-19, for which I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all (Lord willing) — maybe more if time permits…

Next up on the list is Christy, a biopic based on the true story of welterweight champion Christy Martin, the first female boxer ever to grace the cover of Sports Illustrated. Longtime MCC readers know sports aren’t usually my thing (the Creed trilogy doesn’t count because, uh, reasons!), but when time permits I do keep an ear open whenever buzz builds for potential future Oscar nominees. Quite a few actresses have endured the ritual of severe deglamorization For Your Oscar Consideration — toughening up, radically altering their physique, shedding their Instagrammable hairstyles, letting costume designers embarrass them, and in a preponderance of cases wrangling a thick southern accent. Sydney Sweeney, best known for such TV series as Euphoria and the first season of The White Lotus, takes a break from playing rich women with beauty regimens to explore that transformational career option.

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Heartland Film Festival 2025: “The Invisible Half”

October 13, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Movie poster of a half-Japanese girl with a white baseball bat standing in front of a giant mummy head that has an earbud cord wrapped around it. The earbuds are bloodied.

Funny how wearing lots of bandages always means “scary monster” and not “victim receiving the care they sorely needed”.

It’s that time again! Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity to see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Some participants stop in Indy on their grand tour of Hollywood’s festival circuit; some are local productions on shoestring budgets; and a wide spectrum of claims are staked in the innumerable niches between, projects with well-known actors screening alongside indies with enormous hearts.

This’ll be my third year diving in and seeing more than just a single entrant. I enjoyed much of what I saw in 2024, though some of my picks have yet to find distribution to this day. Those few that did kinda came and went without much fanfare. The most “prestigious” film I saw, Small Things Like These, at least went well enough for its makers that star Cillian Murphy and director Tim Mielants reunited for Steve, which just hit Netflix earlier this month. (Highly recommended, by the way.) Numerous other Heartland entries showed up on Oscar ballots, but I failed to catch them at the festival proper. (Eventually I saw Heartland veterans Flow and The Seed of the Sacred Fig, to name a couple.) I’ll be curious to see what happens to this year’s alumni in the months ahead.

Heartland’s 34th edition runs October 9-19, for which I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all (Lord willing) — maybe more if time permits. Longtime MCC readers know the rule: every film I see in theaters gets its own entry, no matter how big or little. We kick things off with one of the only three horror films in the lineup (a genre HIFF has only opened up to within the past few years), and among this year’s few Asian ones: The Invisible Half, in which we learn Japanese teenagers are no more well-adjusted than ours are.

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Yes, There’s a Tribute After the “One Battle After Another” End Credits

October 5, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Benicio Del Toro hands a rifle in its storage bag to Leonardo DiCaprio, who looks like a frazzled mountain man with expensive sunglasses.

“Help yourself to a sniper rifle.”

“THE NEW PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON IS THE GREATEST FILM OF OUR TIMES AND CAPTURES THE ZEITGEIST LIKE EGON SPENGLER WITH A GHOST TRAP!” screams the internet consensus for One Battle After Another, as pro critics tend to every time they’ve seen a new Anderson film at least three times at festivals. I’ve only seen six of his films (counting this one) and responded to There Will Be Blood with that sort of awe. The rest varied for me — Phantom Thread was an intriguing battle of repressed wills, but I couldn’t connect with his California ode Licorice Pizza. His tenth feature, Battle is an effectively pulse-pounding thriller that’s exactly the sort of antihero conflict I do enjoy — call it “bad guys vs. worse guys” — but somehow I thought it’d be much more complicated than it actually is. Maybe that’s on me for declining to remain Extremely Online these days.

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