A weary Bart chats, but is excited about Cat Fest

Greetings all,

I have been traveling for a good chunk of July, and I am finally home, with no immediate travel planned. Last week, I had a great screening of my Maysles short at the Woods Hole Film Festival in Massachusetts. I attended the University Film and Video Association Conference at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, where I hosted several events, including a presentation on film festivals in support of my new book, which is mostly done. It will be called The Film Festival Book. I am toying with the italics. What do you all think?

This week we are sponsoring CatVideoFest 2026 at the Texas Theatre. There will be two screenings.

Thursday, August 6 at 7 pm and Saturday, August 8 at 2:30 pm. I hope you can come by to see one of these. If you have a cool cat video you want to show, get it to me asap (bart@videofest.org). As film programmers, we are always trying to connect with audiences; this event brings people from different worlds together to laugh and coo about the everyday lives of our purring friends. To people without cats, this compilation would seem absurd, but to us cat lovers it is inspiring and deeply meaningful.

If you have and love a cat, please come to this; I swear you will love it and come back every year.

And here is the trailer.

See you there!

There will be no column from Ed Bark this week; he is on vacation. However, last week’s column was so great that you should go back and read it again.

For regular readers, you will note that I will tell you about screenings at the Angelika, the Texas Theatre, and Spacey (which is celebrating its third anniversary next week). I don’t write about what is happening at the Alamo Drafthouse anymore. It was once a citadel of cinema, a place that revered the culture and experience of cinema. If someone had a phone on, they could be kicked out of the theater. They always had food and beverage that was mildly invasive, but now you need to order on the phone, so lit screens disturb your cinematic experience. This is yet one more example of what happens when companies get bought out and betray the goals that made them great. This is happening all over, and it is very sad. I am not sure what we can do about it. But they still have a great pre-show reel.

Until they change their policy, I will not promote films at their theaters.

By the time you read this, the 15th Oak Cliff Film Fest will be over. It has grown in great ways over the years. This year was later because of the soccer invasion, but the films and the audiences were great.

This week, the Texas Theatre is showing “Bottle Rocket” at 7:30pm on Wednesday, August 5 and “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” on Friday, August 7 at 7pm.

I want you to put this on your calendar. On Tuesday, August 11 at 7 pm, the Texas Theatre will show “American Pachuco: The Legend of Lous Valdez,” with filmmaker David Alvarado here for a Q&A. I have seen this film at two film festivals, and it is a must-see. I have followed David’s films for years; I love them all, but this is the best.

-Bart

Howdy,

The newest Spider-Man movie “Brand New Day,” a joint collaboration between Sony Pictures and Marvel Studios was the biggest movie at the box office over the weekend. Which was to be expected. Not only is Spider-Man the most popular superhero in the world (his annonomous costume and outsider personality make him more relatable than Batman and the others) but it stars two of the biggest celebrities in the world, Zendaya and Tom Holland, a real-life couple and stars of one of this summer’s other biggest films. The movie kept eeking out more cash, until today Sony announced that the number was $360 million in the US, making it the biggest domestic opening of all time. Worldwide it only made $932 million, well below “The Avengers”’ $1.2 billion.

Of course just a few weekends ago Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” opened to $124 million, which was his biggest opening since his own superhero film, “The Dark Knight” in 2012. I have to imagine that Spider-Man was aided by the fact that it was available one every format known to humankind: 2D, 3D, 4DX, ScreenX, Dolby Cinema, and even Nolan’s preferred venue IMAX. He’s committed so deeply to the format, that he is even a brand ambassador. He shot the entire movie on IMAX cameras for the first time ever.. One of the film’s popcorn buckets was a plastic model of an IMAX camera. He gave this deranged quote, ”IMAX is the best film format that was ever invented. It’s the gold standard and what any other technology has to match up to, but none have.”

But does IMAX even matter? So many people waited on seeing the film that opening weekend because there weren’t enough IMAX seats left. In Dallas, we have one of the 25 theaters where the film is available on 70mm film at the Cinemark on Webb Chapel. There were so many people online worried that they would be missing half the image by going to a standard movie theater. The scaricity is on purpose, though, with the Wall Street Journal discovering that IMAX is looking to be bought by either venture capital or a studio like Netflix.

When I went to see the film in Dolby at my local AMC, the image took up the full screen, and as the diagram shows, standard projection are reduced by about 25% each on the top and bottom. It doesn’t have to be this way. When “The Lighthouse” showed in theaters a few years ago, the film had a 1.19:1 ratio and shown in all its black and white glory with a simple fix, black letterboxing on the left and right. That’s not going to increase IMAX market cap though.

This weekend at The Modern we are showing a new film called “Cookie Queens” about the Girl Scouts. “This documentary explores the joys, pressures, and tensions of cookie season through the eyes of four young sellers as they pursue their goals and navigate ambition, friendship, and family support. “ Check out the trailer below and have a great week.

-Elijah