Best Film Festival

The Halfway 2 Hollywood Film Festival that debuted this June didn't just bring cinema in Kansas City up to par with regular film offerings in other cosmopolitan cities. It delivered a genuine extravaganza packed with celebrity appearances, small-budget films, old movies, genre movies, documentaries and experimental art films that turned Kansas City into a film lovers' haven for two weeks. The Halfway 2 Hollywood festival was one of the rare stops for the documentary Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, which provided a new perspective on one of modern cinema's most seminal influences just before the controversial release of AI. The sub-festival called Area (19)51 Film Fest brought eight genre favorites to the big screen, along with appearances by sci-fi and horror authority Forrest J. Ackerman, actor Billy Gray (who starred in The Day the Earth Stood Still) and Bruce Crawford, an expert on composers of science fiction film scores. And director Stan Brakhage brought his reels of painted film, sharing insights into his experimental aesthetic. Plaintive sighs about movies passing over our screens were replaced by remorse that there wasn't enough time to see everything.