The Strand to host two movies in one night

Last updated: August 19, 2026

VICKSBURG, Miss. (VDN) — Mark your calendars and make plans to attend a special event at The Strand Theatre in Vicksburg located at 717 Clay Street. Enjoy a double feature with friends Saturday, Aug. 22.

“Elvis Presley in Concert” directed by Baz Luhrmann is an exhilarating documentary-concert film which gives light to Elvis in his prime. The film will start at 7 p.m.

It’s an exceptional film that triumphs on an abundance of levels, the result of the combined work of director Baz Luhrmann and his longtime editor Jonathan Redmond. There’s the technical side, how separate visuals and sound are matched. And the exhilarating performance side — Elvis onstage and in rehearsals for his 1970 Las Vegas residency.

Luhrmann, a director of visual extravaganzas including Moulin Rouge! (2001) and The Great Gatsby (2013), inadvertently began working on EPiC when he was in the research phase for his 2022 biopic Elvis.

Embarking on an elaborate treasure hunt for source material, the director and his crew gained access to voluminous amounts of material sitting in Graceland’s archives, including private collections of both film — much of it without sound — and audio tapes, the latter featuring several portions of the Vegas shows, intimate rehearsal sessions for those performances, and a previously unheard 50-minute audio interview with Elvis. All of this stuff inspired the creation of an Elvis project after the narrative film was completed.

Luhrmann and Redmond — with an assist from director and technical wizard Peter Jackson — worked for more than two years digitizing, restoring, and syncing up the various sight and sound elements, then fashioning them into EPiC.

The resulting 90-minute film is a breathtaking, energy-filled, razzle-dazzle affair. EPiC really lifts off at about the 20-minute mark, and then it soars. (It’s) just an electrifying look at Elvis in action from his dazzling and energetic performances on the stage of the International Hotel to the relaxed but give-it-all-you’ve-got rehearsals, first with his core band, then adding his backup singers and other musicians.

Advance tickets will be $9 at Highway 61 Coffeehouse. Tickets will be $10 at the door.

Then for something different, beginning at 9 p.m. “The Ice Tower,” is a hypnotic meditation on the enchantment that develops between an impressionable teenage runaway and the imperious film actress (Marion Cotillard) whose set she stumbles first onto, then into.

Inspired in part by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, this glacially paced yet darkly dazzling fantasy—co-written with Geoff Cox—opens as orphaned Jeanne (Clara Pacini) flees her foster home and staggers through the snow toward a French alpine town. There, she finds shelter in the basement of what turns out to be a film studio mid-production on an adaptation of Andersen’s fairy tale—which, in grief and loneliness following the death of her mother, happens to have already embedded itself deeply in the young girl’s subconscious.

Drawing parallels between the allusive qualities of the fairy tale, the psychological projection that uneasily binds Jeanne and Cristina, and the metamorphic power of cinema itself, Hadž1ihalilovic evokes Méliès one moment and Cocteau the next. The ghosts of Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive” and Powell and Pressburger’s “Black Narcissus,” too, haunt the edges of the frame.

Hadžihalilovic suffuses this story with a languid menace, as if inducing hypnagogic near-slumber and still holding us under, even as the oxygen starts to run thin and what materializes from the ether begins to scare us. It’s a testament to the vividly expressive performance of newcomer Pacini—as well as a master class by Cotillard, whose immortal movie-star allure is charged here with almost vampiric malevolence at points—that “The Ice Tower” sustains its trance-like melodrama across a rigorously slow-burning 118 minutes.

The movie’s French title, “La Tour de glace,” is worth contemplating for how “glace” can be translated not simply as “ice” but also “glass” and “mirror,” all these words evoking a certain refraction of self through the proverbial looking glass.

Simultaneously transparent and opaque, Hadžihalilovic’s films have long adhered to a liquid dream logic, ethereal atmospheres either flowing freely or freezing solid around characters who struggle to come of age in cloistered, ritualized environments.

With this fourth feature, Hadžihalilovic has fashioned what might be her most accessible film to date. But in her oneiric film language, she still asks sidelong questions about the surreal process of self-perception.

Collapsing the uncanny enchanted realism of her film-within-the-film with Jeanne’s delirium in the face of such artifice, she shows us the dream within the fairy tale. This is not so much a film you watch as one you wake up from, shivering.

Advance tickets will be $9 at Highway 61 Coffeehouse. Tickets will be $10 at the door.

But as always, the popcorn is free.