Don't Delay -- Individual EBERTFEST Tickets On Sale Friday

The 18th annual Ebertfest, AKA Roger Ebert's Film Festival, has been selling festival passes since last November, but individual ticket sales begin on Friday, April 1. You may be thinking you have no chance if the big passes have been on sale that long, but never fear!

Festival organizers reserve 500 seats at the historic Virginia Theatre in Champaign for individual ticket buyers and sponsors. Even for sold-out performances, there's a rush ticket line, and they assure us that everybody who's waited in those rush lines since 2012 has managed to get in. That means your chances are good if there's something you really, really want to see, as long as you're flexible and determined. All the info on every possible way to get tickets is located here.

So what's on the schedule this year? It's the usual mix of intriguing, obscure and overlooked films, just the kind of thing Ebert himself chose when he was in charge. Chaz Ebert, the woman who was his wife and business partner, now acts as host of the festival.

The film Everybody Wants Some! opens Ebertfest on April 12, 2016 at 7 pm. This brand-new comedy, written and directed by Richard Linklater, who piled up a bunch of awards for Boyhood two years ago, is billed as something in the Dazed and Confused oeuvre. Executive producer Stephen Feder and actor Glen Powell will accompany the film to Champaign.

Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak is up next, with a screening on Wednesday, April 13, at 7 pm. It stars Mia Wasikowska, Jessica Chastain and Tom Hiddleston in a gothic horror story fueled by gorgeous, bombastic images and art direction. Del Toro himself will be in attendance as a special guest to discuss his 2015 film.

Thursday's lineup features Grandma from 2015, Northfork from 2004, and The Third Man, a classic from 1949, three very different pieces of filmmaking. Lily Tomlin is the title character in Grandma, a character study that mixes comedy and drama, directed by Paul Weitz, with fine supporting players like Sam Elliott and Marcia Gay Harden in the mix to keep it honest and real. Grandma will be screened at 1 pm on the 14th, with director Weitz and producer Andrew Miano on hand. After that, you'll have a chance to see Northfork, a movie directed by Michael Polish and starring his twin brother Mark at 4 pm. Others in the cast include Nick Nolte, James Woods, Peter Coyote and Darryl Hannah, telling a story set in 1955 Montana, with an orphan who has been abandoned, men in black trying to evacuate a town before a dam floods it, and a trio of angels who may or may not be imaginary.

The Third Man, at 8:30 pm, is a much better-known piece, a noiry post-World War II film that puts Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten in bombed-out Vienna where everybody is up to something and none of it is good. Carol Reed directed, with a screenplay by Graham Greene, Oscar-winning smoky cinematography by Robert Krasker, and a haunting title theme played on the zither. If you haven't seen The Third Man, you absolutely must. And what a coup to have script supervisor Angela Allen on hand. If my math is right and IMDB is to be trusted, Allen will be turning 87 years old this year.

On Friday, the films screened will be Disturbing the Peace, a new documentary about Palestinians pushing peace onto soldiers, at 1 pm; L'inhumaine, a silent film from 1924 that elevates style to the nth degree, at 4 pm; and Eve's Bayou, Kasi Lemmons' 1997 memory piece about an African-American family whose past holds murky secrets, at 8:30 pm. Director/producer Stephen Apkon, director/cinematographer Andrew Young, story consultant Marcina Hale and Chen Alon and Sulaiman Khatib, both subjects of Disturbing the Peace, will attend for that film, while the musical ensemble Alloy Orchestra will be there for L'inhumaine and Kasi Lemmons, who wrote and directed Eve's Bayou, appears to discuss her film.

Force of Destiny, an Australian drama written and directed by Paul Cox, described as "a journey of love on a transplant waiting list," will be screened on Saturday, April 15, at 11 am; followed by Radical Grace, a documentary about "Nuns on the Bus" who crusade for affordable health care, at 2; Love and Mercy, director Bill Pohlad's take on Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys that stars Paul Dano as young Wilson and John Cusack as the older version, at 4:30 pm; and Blow Out, the 1981 Brian de Palma film that tried to riff on Blow Up, a stylish, paranoid little Antonioni movie from 1966, at 9 pm. Force of Destiny director Cox, Rebecca Parrish, the director and cinematographer of Radical Grace, along with her producer Nicole Bernardi-Reis, composer Heather McIntosh and social activist Father Michael Pfleger, and actress Nancy Allen, who starred in Blow Out opposite John Travolta, will appear after their respective films.

All that leaves for Sunday, April 16, is a silent film from 1925 called Body and Soul. It stars Paul Robeson in a dual role as the evil Reverend Isaiah Jenkins and his brother Sylvester, who happens to be the better brother. It was directed by Oscar Micheaux, the first African-American to produce feature-length silent and sound films. This screening will feature a live orchestra performing a new jazz score by Renee Baker to accompany the movie, which will begin at noon.

The whole schedule is available here. Again, details on how to get tickets can be found here.

Very Late for May!

May has been happening all around me and I am egregiously late in giving you the 411. Or 5-11, since that is today's date. Let's get this May party started, tardy or not.

First, Laughter on the 23rd Floor, a Neil Simon comedy that hit Broadway in 1993, opened last weekend at Community Players. There's one more weekend of this Laughter left, with the show closing on May 17. It's set at a TV comedy show in the 50s, with a brilliant, erratic, funny man named Max Prince, inspired by Sid Caesar and his time on Your Show of Shows, as the centerpiece. We see the writers' room, a place a lot like the one the real Neil Simon got his start, and the motley crew of writers, all based on or inspired by the talented but crazy people Simon and his brother wrote with, from Carl Reiner to Mel Brooks and Larry Gelbart. There's even a woman in the bunch, hugely pregnant Carol, who fights for the right to be as funny as the boys. On Broadway, Nathan Lane played Max Prince, with Mad Men's John Slattery, recent Oscar winner J. K. Simmons and Mark Linn-Baker, TV's Cousin Larry from Perfect Strangers, in the cast. For Community Players, Marcia Weiss directs Brian Artman as Max Prince, along with Melissa Breeden, Drew German, Hannah Kerns, Joshua McCauley, Bruce Parrish, Mario Silva, Chris Terven and Andrew Werner. Get all the info here.

On television this week, we're seeing the season finales of Nashville on Wednesday, Grey's Anatomy, Scandal and Elementary on Thursday, and the last episode ever of Mad Men on Sunday night. Late Night with David Letterman finishes for good next week, with Dave's swan song on Thursday, May 20. If you're not weeping after Mad Men takes its final bow, maybe Letterman's will put you over the top.

Over on Turner Classic Movies, May spotlights the movies of Orson Welles every Friday night. We're coming up on a Friday full of Shakespeare by way of Welles, with Chimes at Midnight, also called Falstaff, with Welles playing Falstaff, before Othello and Macbeth. In a nice bit of companion programming, TCM will air a very different Macbeth, Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood immediately after Welles' version. They're both well worth watching for their treatment of Macbeth's witches alone. If you stick around for Kurosawa, it will take you well into the night on Friday May 15.

Since we're talking Shakespeare, it's a good time to remind you that season tickets for the Illinois Shakespeare Festival are now on sale. This summer we'll be seeing Love's Labour's Lost, Richard II and Q Gents, a hip-hop take on Two Gentlemen of Verona from the Q Brothers, along with a special presentation of Love's Labor's Won, Scott Kaiser's sequel to Love's Labour's Lost. Click here to get the details on reserving tickets.

Heartland Theatre's 2015-16 season packet should also be reaching you soon, highlighting five subscription shows -- the annual 10-Minute Play Festival, this time with nine brand-new, winning short plays on the theme "Class Reunion," coming up in June; Nina Raine's Tribes, directed by Sandra Zielinski, set for September; Intimate Apparel by Lynn Nottage, directed by Don LaCasse, in November; Bruce Norris' Pulitzer-winning Clybourne Park, directed by Heartland's new artistic director Rhys Lovell, next February; and Love Letters by A. R. Gurney, directed by Ron Emmons, in April 2016. Extras on the 15-16 schedule include one-acts dealing with "A Fork in the Road" under the New Plays from the Heartland banner in July and a reading of An Alliance of Brats, an adaptation of an Ibsen play, newly translated by Nigel O'Hearn and produced by ISU third-year MFA Joey Banks, in December. The lineup is listed here. Watch your mailbox for season subscription details. And get your reservation in now for the always-popular 10-Minute Play Festival, which opens with a special Pay What You Can preview performance on June 4.

CITIZEN KANE Tonight and Tomorrow at the Normal Theater

For 50 years, Citizen Kane, Orson Welles' first feature film, sat at the top of the Sight & Sound critics' list as the best movie ever made. Not because it featured glossy stars or exciting special effects, not because it broke box office records or started a cult. In fact, it did none of those thing. But, as Sight & Sound noted in 2002, the "Dazzlingly inventive" and "technically breathtaking" Citizen Kane "reinvented the way stories could be told in the cinema, and set a standard generations of filmmakers have since aspired to. An absorbing account of a newspaper tycoon’s rise to power, Orson Welles’ debut film feels as fresh as tomorrow's headlines. And he was only 26 when he made it."

And then came 2012. For the first time since the Sight & Sound poll started, Citizen Kane was not No. 1. Nope. As of 2012, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo was King of the Cinema Hill.

But I'm still firmly on the Citizen Kane team, and not just because my favorite professor from college, Robert Carringer, wrote the book on how Citizen Kane got made (and at one time, owned one of the copies of Rosebud, the sled that drives the movie.) So, yeah, a good portion of my film education was about Citizen Kane. But even so... Citizen Kane's advances in cinematography, music and cinematic storytelling are simply unmatched. Gregg Toland, the cinematographer, Herman J. Mankiewiecz, the screenwriter, and Bernard Herrmann, the composer, all shared in what's so special about Citizen Kane. Plus there's Welles himself, of course, along with Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, Everett Sloane, Dorothy Comingore, Erskine Sanford, George Coulouris, and All My Children's own Ruth Warrick, each turning in a terrific performance that adds a piece or two to the Kane puzzle.

Sorry, Vertigo. Yes, you're an interesting movie, even if you are kind of heavy on the misogyny thing. But you're no Citizen Kane.

The Normal Theater has two more showings of The Greatest Movie Ever Made, the one that pushed the industry and the art forward, that said, yeah, we can poke pointy sticks at the likes of media magnate William Randolph Hearst (the model for Charles Foster Kane) even when he tries to shut us down, yeah, we can examine what happens to the ideals of youth and how power and wealth can turn a man into something even he doesn't recognize, what any of it means when a man is old and alone in the empty mansion he built. Brash, arrogant, charismatic Orson Welles burst through the door with this movie with all the bravado of youth, at a time when movies were still young, too. .

So go see it on the big screen. See what Orson Welles meant to the world of movies in 1941 and what he still means.