indieWIRE - 10/03	Sixteenth Virginia Film Festival Shows the Money, and the Movies by Scott Mactavish “Autumn in Charlottesville, Va., is truly a site to behold and this year was no exception; the Blue Ridge Mountains painted a stunning backdrop for the 16th annual Virginia Film Festival and film lovers came out by the thousands to see good films." “This year's theme was "Money," with more than 70 films unspooling over the four-day non-competitive event, accompanied by panels, parties, exhibits and performances. Festival Director Richard Herskowitz designed this year's program ’to explore the extremes of having too much and too little money.’”
C-Ville Weekly - 10/03	The Reel Deal by Paul Henderson “...Charlottesville’s burgeoning filmmaking scene, an ever-growing group of artists, is using the City’s available resources, increasingly affordable technology and each other to make diverse, interesting films at an unprecedented rate. ...The most obvious (and, as it happens, most timely) of the factors leading to this state of affairs is the Virginia Film Festival, specifically the efforts of its director, Richard Herskowitz. Through the programs the festival offers, the people it brings to town and the tantalizing goal it provides--i.e., exhibition to a wider audience--the festival is the backbone of the City’s filmmaking infrastructure. [Alexandria] Searls for instance, an experimental filmmaker, considers the Virginia Film Festival’s contribution to her work invaluable.”
Washington Post - 12/03	Civil War, Take 2 by Bob Thompson “A movie theater seems an odd place to be seeking historical truth, and the three University of Virginia professors look just a shade uncomfortable with the enterprise. There they sit on this December night, holding microphones onstage in Newcomb Hall, facing an auditorium full of movie buffs who have come to check out the Virginia Film Festival’s preview screening of “Cold Mountain.” The security guards who patrolled the aisles to prevent illicit videotaping are gone by now. Their job was to safeguard the screen images of Nicole Kidman, Jude Law and Renee Zellweger, not the post-film analysis of Gary Gallagher, Edward Ayers and Stephen Cushman. The professors’ assignment is a harder one. They are to judge the historical accuracy of what they’ve just seen.”
Daily Progress - 10/03	Film’s Subject Sits up & Barks by Kate Andrews “The Dog made it known loud and clear that this was his night. Before the Thursday night screening of ‘Dog Day Afternoon,’ bank robber ‘Sir John’ Wojtowicz woofed his approval of screenwriter Frank Pierson and other speakers. The larger-than-life robber’s story was shown to an almost capacity audience at Culbreth Theatre on the opening night of the Virginia Film Festival. ‘Thank you, Ladies and gentleman - and Dog,’ Pierson said as he accepted his Virginia Film Award. ‘I don’t know that there’s anything more I can do but die.’ Although Pierson seemed thrilled with the award, he was equally please to finally have met Wojtowicz on Thursday, 30 years after the Brooklyn robbery.”