This will be our third showing of Errol Morris' Gates of Heaven, but our first in a finished color-corrected release print. Errol Morris will attend in person, direct from the Los Angeles Film Exposition, where the film is showing following its previous Festival screenings at New York and London, and prior to its May screening at the Cannes Festival. On the basis of our screening in October, Michael Covino (writing in the East Bay Express) put Gates of Heaven in his Ten Best of the Year Column, noting:

“Errol Morris' documentary about dog cemeteries is not about dog cemeteries, nor is it a documentary so much as a document about mainstream America at the crossroads of the late '70s. It is the most original film I have seen in years, and also the most insidious, accomplishing something I would have thought impossible: it takes mediocre and vacuous middle-class Americans and makes them look mediocre and vacuous. I do not mean this in a facile sense. The film rejects the more obvious and tasteful alternative of falsely humanizing its characters, and in so doing gains in aesthetic force what it surrenders in phony warmth. Gates of Heaven is appallingly funny, and appalling.”