Tag: Coolidge Corner Theatre

  • Coolidge Corner Theatre dives deep with ‘A Life Illuminated’ for GlobeDocs opening night

    By Hazel Nystrom

    A stark blue hue illuminated a crowd of faces as the lights dimmed in Theatre 1 at Coolidge Corner Theatre.

    On the screen, waves crashed over a submersible bobbing on the ocean surface, ready to descend 3,000 feet. 

    For the next 90 minutes, “A Life Illuminated” unveiled the story of the trailblazing marine biologist Edith Widder, in her lifelong journey to understand the language of light found in the depths of the sea: bioluminescence. 

    “A Life Illuminated,” directed by Tasha Van Zandt, opened the 11th year of the GlobeDocs Film Festival  Wednesday night. Thirty films will screen through Sunday around Greater Boston and online as part of the festival hosted by Boston Globe Media.

    After Wednesday’s screening, Widder, Van Zandt, producer and cinematographer Sebastian Zeck, and Boston Globe Media’s CEO and co-owner, Linda Henry, stuck around to discuss the film and answer audience questions. 

    Widder, 74, who grew up in Arlington and graduated from Tufts University in 1973, first took to the deep sea in a diving suit called the WASP. In her first open ocean dive, Widder turned off the lights and was met with an explosion of bioluminescence akin to a Fourth of July fireworks display, she said. 

    “I was 800 feet down, turned out the lights, and I was just surrounded by this most astonishing light show you could ever imagine,” she said. “It was just breathtaking.”

    This bioluminescent display, known as the flashback phenomenon, has since led her research. “A Life Illuminated” explores Widder’s goal to film the phenomenon in the deep sea.

    Van Zandt said she chose the topic of the film after her first conversation with Widder.  

    “I learned all about the rest of her life and her journey, and learned about this language of light in our oceans,” Van Zandt said. “And I realized that she is the story.”

    Filming 3,000 feet below the surface was no easy feat, Zeck said. The process required Van Zandt and Zeck to travel in a second submersible alongside Widder’s, dedicated solely to filming.

    Systems engineer Sean Hogarty, 54, attended the screening to better understand the technology behind filming bioluminescence.

    “I just found it really motivating as an engineer, to see people understand what comes out of the years and years and years of investment and time,” Hogarty said. 

    For Van Zandt’s mother, Milena Gross, her daughter’s journey to the deep sea sparked a mix of nerves and excitement. 

    “I told Tash, ‘You got this,’ and as nervous as I was, I was also so very excited about this incredible film that she’s making,” Gross said. 

    After her fourth viewing, Gross’s favorite part is “more of a feeling,” she said. “It’s walking away thinking everything is possible.”

    UMass Boston students and friends Dee Brooks, Ora Kerr and Emma Van Zandt, Tasha’s sister, felt a similar sense of inspiration after watching the film. 

    “I really appreciated going through her younger years,” said Brooks, 21.. “It was really inspiring to see her kind of grow into the person that she is right now.”

    Widder’s excitement and love for discovery were “infectious,” Kerr said. “This was incredible. I was blown away.”

    For Emma, the experience was “super exciting,” having watched Tasha’s work take shape. 

    “I am so proud of her,” Emma said. “I think that it’s been a weird, wonderful journey watching her get to be able to do this.”

    Up next for Van Zandt and Zeck is an impact campaign they are launching alongside the Ocean Research & Conservation Association  (ORCA), Widder’s nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting and restoring aquatic ecosystems. 

    Widder hopes that after watching the film, people are inspired to bring back their sense of exploration, to “give them a sense of empowerment,” she said. 

    “I’d like the largest takeaway to be people tapping into the need for us to explore our own planet,” Widder said. “That sense of who we are as explorers. That is who we are.”

    This article is part of a partnership between Brookline.News and the Boston University Department of Journalism.

    This article was originally published on October 24, 2025.

  • Francis Ford Coppola comes to Brookline to screen his latest epic and talk about the future

    Director Francis Ford Coppola, right, speaks at the Coolidge Corner Theatre on April 29. Photo by Charlie Johnson

    Hundreds of moviegoers alternated between silence and laughter as they watched Francis Ford Coppola’s movie “Megalopolis” at the Coolidge Corner Theatre – and then listened to the director himself talk about the film and his vision for the future of society.

    Jack O’Hara of Roxbury said he and his roommate bought tickets as soon as they learned that the 86-year-old filmmaker – who has directed critically acclaimed movies such as “Apocalypse Now,” “The Conversation” and “The Godfather” trilogy – was coming to Coolidge Corner.

    “Coppola is definitely a generational talent,” O’Hara said. “I don’t want to miss the opportunity to see someone, who obviously is getting up there in age, present something that’s been divisive, that he’s really passionate about.”

    “Megalopolis,” released last September, is set in New Rome, an imagined modern America. Cesar Catilina, an idealistic artist played by Adam Driver, tries to create a utopian future, while Mayor Franklyn Cicero, played by Giancarlo Esposito, fights to maintain the status quo. Socialite Julia Cicero, played by Nathalie Emmanuel, is torn between them.

    The movie drew mixed reviews from critics and audiences, and has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 45%.

    Midway through the movie – in a planned moment – some of the lights in the theater came on and a man walked onto the stage. A scene in which Cesar talks to the camera played on the screen as the man, acting as a reporter, asked Cesar questions to mimic a press conference.

    Throughout the movie, audience members burst out laughing at chaotic scenes. Other times, the crowd fell silent, mesmerized by the combination of ethereal music and psychedelic visuals.

    “I don’t think it’s the type of movie that you watch one time and understand everything,” Justin Woelfel of Brookline said after the screening. “I think it was pretty good.”

    Katherine Tallman, executive director and CEO of Coolidge Corner Theatre, took Coppola’s visit as an opportunity to give him a Coolidge Award when he walked onstage to a standing ovation after the movie.

    “There was no way we were going to let him leave without a Coolidge Award,” she said. The award honors film artists who are unique and thought-provoking. Recent recipients include actors Julianne Moore and Michael Douglas.

    Juliet Schor, a Boston College sociologist and economist, and composer Osvaldo Golijov, who wrote the film’s score, joined Coppola on the stage – although Coppola did most of the talking.

    “It is time to talk about the future in this wreck of world that we’re living in now,” Coppola said.

    Director Francis Ford Coppola interacts with the crowd at the Coolidge Corner Theatre on April 29. Photo by Dawn Kingston

    He recruited a staff member to come onstage and write on a whiteboard 10 things that everyone cares about for the future. The first point he had her write was “Time.” He asked the audience to contribute ideas but ended up solely using his own.

    He had her use a red marker to write asterisks for each item once they can be turned into something “pleasurable.”

    “We humans decided to make it divided up into minutes, months and weeks,” he said. “But let’s reinvent time.” He added more items to the list – such as “education,” “work-play” and “celebration” – as he fielded questions about filmmaking from the audience.

    “If you don’t know how to make a movie, and you listen, the movie tells you how to make it,” he said.

    He talked about using acting exercises while making “Megalopolis” to help actors prepare for scenes.

    To demonstrate, Coppola asked if there were any actors in the audience. Six actors in the audience came onstage. He had one person pretend to be a ticket salesman while the others pretended to wait in line to get into a movie. Arguing with the ticket salesman, the first person dropped a hat and said, “Pick up my hat.” One by one, the others followed suit. The exercise is supposed to help with concentration.

    He ran another exercise in which people pretend to throw an imaginary ball in a circle while yelling out different noises. The exercise helps with identifying hierarchies that are prevalent in everyday life, he said.

    “There’s always someone who is the boss,” he said.

    Fans swarmed Coppola when he walked to the black Cadillac waiting for him outside. He signed movie posters.

    Woelfel got his “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” movie poster signed. He said Coppola is in his top-five movie directors of all time.

    “He’s an interesting guy,” Woffle said. “It’s interesting to hear how his brain works and how he views everything.”

    O’Hara works in sales for a company that adds subtitles to films for production companies and streaming services like Netflix. On the side, he gets involved with productions on his own. Last week he flew to Los Angeles to act in a short film.

    He said he is concerned about the current state of original filmmaking while production companies focus on profit over content and is inspired by Coppola using his fame to push the medium forward.

    “Something like this is obviously a huge risk,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what you put out there, it’s going to be appreciated by someone.”

  • How Boston-area cinemas snagged ‘No Other Land’

    A still from the documentary “No Other Land.” (Courtesy Antipode films)

    If you don’t want to see it, don’t come.

    That’s Katherine Tallman’s philosophy about “No Other Land,” the divisive, Oscar-winning documentary showing at Brookline’s Coolidge Corner Theatre, where she is executive director and CEO.

    “We didn’t go out and look for this film because it was controversial,” Tallman said. “It’s a good film. It aligns with our mission. It’s something we would do. So we showed it.” The opening-night screening — in the Coolidge’s largest, 440-seat cinema — sold out.

    “No Other Land” pulled off the unusual feat of winning the Oscar for best documentary this month despite having no U.S. distributor. The independent film, about Israel’s destruction of villages in the West Bank, was directed by a team of Palestinians and Israelis and has been met with controversy. No major U.S. distributor would touch it, presumably because of its criticism of Israel.

    As a result, the film has shown in few theaters around the United States. So it is perhaps a surprise that it is now playing at two Boston-area cinemas: Coolidge Corner Theatre and West Newton Cinema. It also screened at the Regent Theatre in Arlington in October.

    The Coolidge Corner Theatre on Harvard Street in Brookline. (Robin Lubbock/WBUR)

    To make “No Other Land,” a collective of four directors — Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, who are Palestinian, and Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor, who are Israeli — captured nearly 2,000 hours of footage from 2019 to October 2023. The film bears witness to the Israeli military’s destruction of Adra’s homeland, Masafer Yatta, a collection of hamlets in the south of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, by claiming the land as military training grounds.

    Abraham said in January that distributors’ reluctance to take on the film was “something that’s completely political.”

    “We’re obviously talking about the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, and it’s very ugly,” Abraham told Variety. “The conversation in the United States appears to be far less nuanced — there is much less space for this kind of criticism, even when it comes in the form of a film.”

    Small independent theaters, like the Coolidge Corner Theatre and West Newton Cinema, stepped up to screen the film.

    Tallman said the film has had great audience reception so far, and that the theater will keep showing it as long as people want to see it — or until they have to make room for new films. She said she received one “really unpleasant” email from a patron who questioned why the Coolidge would screen the film, declaring they would never come again.

    Connie White, the theater’s longtime booker and the former owner of the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, is also the programming director for the Middleburg Film Festival in Virginia. White saw an advance screening of the “No Other Land,” which she featured in the October festival, and knew the Coolidge Corner Theatre would be interested.

    “No Other Land” premiered at the West Newton Cinema last Friday and was the second-best performer over the weekend, behind Sean Baker’s Oscar-sweeping “Anora.” Elizabeth Heilig, president of the West Newton Cinema Foundation, said theater staff have been thanked on the way out by patrons for showing the film. Some said the film was difficult to watch but important for people to see.

    “We’re very happy to be showing the film,” Heilig said. “There’s certainly a great diversity of opinions about the Israel-Gaza conflict, and that diversity exists in Newton and in the Greater Boston community, for sure. We want to provide people who want to see the film an opportunity to see it, and we want people to be able to make up their own minds about it.”

    West Newton will screen the film until at least next week.

    Kim Kronenberg and Allen Taylor of Brookline are co-directors of the nonprofit Science Training Encouraging Peace, which pairs health and computer science graduates — one from either Gaza or West Bank, and one from Israel — to partner in research. They saw “No Other Land” at the Coolidge, and Kronenberg said it was a disturbing film but one that should be seen.

    “Especially this moment in time where America is encouraging or endorsing the most right-wing elements in Israel to do whatever they want in the West Bank, I think it’s a cautionary tale in that it allows people to see what really happens when you take other people’s land and how well received you are or you aren’t,” Taylor said. “The film forces you to think about, what’s the problem there? Why is there constant conflict?”

    “No Other Land” had its world premiere at the 2024 Berlinale, or Berlin International Film Festival, and won the Berlinale Documentary Award as well as the Panorama Audience Award. The film found distribution in 24 countries outside the U.S., including France and Britain.

    To reach U.S. screens, the ‘No Other Land’ team worked with Cinetic Media, a film financing and distribution company, alongside independent distributor Michael Tuckman, who books individual theaters and has worked with the Coolidge for years. White booked the film through Tuckman.

    So far, “No Other Land” is the Coolidge Corner Theatre’s seventh highest grossing film of 2025, a fiscal year that began November 1, 2024. The two leaders are “The Brutalist” and “Nosferatu.”

    “We’ve grossed like over $200,000 on ‘The Brutalist’ and ‘Nosferatu’, and we’ve grossed close to $50,000 on [‘No Other Land’],” Tallman said, “but in a short period of time, and at a time, pre-Oscars, when not that many people really knew about it.”

    After the film’s premiere at the Coolidge in early February, panelists hosted a discussion about it.

    “And so if there was going to be any kind of, like, big showdown controversy, it would have happened there,” Tallman said, “and there wasn’t, I think, because our audiences in general are — they’re curious. They’re balanced. They know what they don’t know.”

    This story is part of a partnership between WBUR and the Boston University Department of Journalism.

    This story has been updated to include that “No Other Land” also screened at the Regent Theatre in Arlington in October.