Comment on Days of Ebertfest: The 2013 schedule

PRESS RELEASE: CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Terrence Malick's 1978 film "Days of Heaven" won an Oscar for best cinematography, and Roger Ebert likely found that no surprise. It is "above all one of the most beautiful films ever made," Ebert said in a 1997 review. So it's only appropriate that the film will open the 15th annual Roger Ebert's Film Festival on April 17 in the big-screen, newly renovated Virginia Theater in downtown Champaign. Also among the 12 features and two shorts to be screened during the five-day "Ebertfest" -- running through April 21 at the Virginia and at the University of Illinois -- will be a kabuki-inspired drama from Japan; a recent silent film from Spain that deserved as much attention as "The Artist," according to Ebert; a sympathetic take on the "mad" painter Vincent Van Gogh, directed by frequent festival guest Paul Cox; and a documentary, which will close the festival, about veterans overcoming their wounds through fly-fishing on a Montana ranch. Oscar-winner Tilda Swinton was a guest for the 2011 Ebertfest and returns this year with the crime thriller "Julia," in which she plays the title role of an unlikable "tough broad who is in way over her head," according to Ebert.