Category Archives: Archive

Always Look on the Bright Side of Dystopia

October 29, 2026 – 11:31 pm

Imagine a world somewhere between a David Lynch fever dream and an industrial design nightmare. That’s Brazil (1985), Terry Gilliam’s bizarre, wonderfully inventive film about the superficiality of consumerism and the crushing weight of totalitarian control. In the film’s dystopian vision of the future, cavernous buildings are clogged with pneumatic tubes, mountains of paperwork, and […]

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Breaking par at Studio 804

May 22, 2026 – 10:51 pm

In what’s become an annual rite of spring, every Saturday in the middle of May the Lawrence community lines up to see a shiny new Studio 804 building, oohing and aahing like patrons at a PGA golf tournament. (The Masters tournament comes to mind.) At this year’s outing, the golf metaphor seems apt: following over […]

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Love the Bomb April 24th

April 5, 2026 – 4:00 pm

The absurdity of nuclear politics is dialed to an 11 in Dr. Strangelove (1964), Stanley Kubrick’s seriously funny film about dropping the H-bomb. Based on British writer Peter George’s novel Red Alert, which imagines rational and responsible responses to a nuclear accident between the United States and the Soviet Union, in Kubrick’s reimagining, lunacy and […]

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Mr. Hulot returns Nov. 14

October 18, 2025 – 6:17 pm

Back by popular demand—and perhaps by cosmic design—Jacques Tati’s PlayTime returns to the Lawrence Modern Film Series on Friday, November 14. After the laughs we shared over the summer with Mon Oncle, we couldn’t resist bringing Monsieur Hulot back for an encore. Our first attempt at a film series more than a decade ago began […]

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Lawrence should have a Haystack

October 10, 2025 – 9:46 pm

One afternoon in the summer of 2014, while visiting modernist architect Carol A. Wilson’s home studio in Falmouth, Maine, I mentioned that my wife and I were planning to take a trip up to Acadia National Park the next day. Knowing that I had an interest in modern architecture, Carol said, “You should go check […]

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