Join Queer Film Club at Best Video for a special surprise screening on Thursday April 2nd.

Please join us for Movie Trivia Night, hosted by Best Video member Michael Domangue, on Wednesday, April 1st at 7 pm. Entry is $5/person. Teams of up to 4 members will enjoy 5 rounds of movie-themed trivia questions. The winning team will receive a $25 Best Video Gift Card!

A word to the wise…this event has become very popular (yay!). RSVP’s are strongly encouraged!

Step right into Hamden’s very own monthly jazz club…

Please join BVFCC and host Allen Lowe for our Monthly Jazz Night with Allen Lowe & The All-Stars on Wednesday March 25th at 7pm. There will be a coterie of musical guests assembled by our host each month in a relaxed setting with tables and chairs to truly sit back, relax, and enjoy the great vibe. Of course, the BVCoffee Bar will be open for beer, wine, and café drinks. Cover charge is $10.

This isn’t just a concert y’all - it’s a community gathering with groovy tunes and smoked grub. Come get your groove on and support community connection, culture and care!

Tell your friends, your neighbors, your family–all our welcome!!

Pete Greco and the Groovers will be jamming originals and groovy classics guaranteed to get you swinging your hips, clapping your hands and stomping your feet. Let’s feel those good vibes as we welcome Spring!

J. Aaron Smokehouse will be there putting love and community into all he cooks up so come hungry cause this BBQ ain’t no joke!

It’s groovy to give back!

At the event we’ll have ways you can directly give to local organizations who are working to protect immigrant families and strengthen community safety.

The Sleeping Giant Reading Series brings writers and book lovers together on the third Thursday of the month. In the long shadow of Hamden’s Sleeping Giant, writers of every kind gather to hear professional readings, raise a glass, network, and support one another’s work. All are welcome, whether you’re a scribbler who hasn’t yet dared to call yourself a “writer” or an experienced published author.

Curated by local writers Alice Mattison, Sandi Shelton (aka Maddie Dawson), Kathy Czepiel, and Heather Jessen, the Sleeping Giant Reading Series happens every third Thursday from 7 to 9 p.m. at Best Video Film and Cultural Center in Hamden, Connecticut. The Sleeping Giant Reading Series is free to attend. Donations at the door for our guest readers are always appreciated. Our readers this month are Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk & Clifford Thompson.

Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk is Founder/Director Emerita (1995-2015) of Detroit’s InsideOut Literary Arts Project. Her nine poetry collections include Escape Artist, winner of the 2002 John Ciardi Prize, One Less River, a Kirkus Reviews “Top 2019 Indie Title,” and Maumee, Maumee (2022) memorializing her late-life love Toledo artist Neil Frankenhauser. Twice named Michigan Creative Writing Teacher of the Year, she has won the Pablo Neruda Prize; grants from Michigan Council for the Arts, the NEH, and Kresge Arts in Detroit; and the 2021 Horace Mann Award for Victories for Humanity from her alma mater, Antioch College. After retiring from InsideOut, Terry moved to Hamden to be near her son, Yale Professor Ned Blackhawk, and her grandchildren. A longtime Dickinson devotee, she has read her poetry for the Emily Dickinson Museum’s “Phosphorescence” series and served as a Humanities Advisor to “The Slave is Gone – The Podcast that Talks Back to AppleTV’s Dickinson.”

Clifford Thompson’s new book of essays, Jazz June, is a finalist for the 2026 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. As the Times Literary Supplement says, “rather than recount dramatic turning points” the book  “lingers in the ‘in-between times’: unrequited crushes, reflections on ageing, insomnia, quiet Sundays and trips to the cinema.” Cliff received a Whiting Writers’ Award and has written novels—including a graphic novel—as well as books of nonfiction and, currently, a comic strip serialized in Cleaver magazine, “Connecticus Diggs, Cultural Detective.” He’s also a painter and has a show coming up at Blue Mountain Gallery in New York.

Back for a fourth year, BVFCC member and trivia host Michael Domangue brings us a crazy film screening for a good cause.  Admission to this special event is FREE, but donations will be taken for NAMI: National Alliance on Mental Illness. The mystery movie starts at 7pm and admission is free.  The café will be open for beer, wine, and cafe drinks.  Free popcorn will be served. This film is rated G, but features two seconds of non-simulated violence.

Here’s a description of what you’re in store for and why. 

From 2016-2020 Michael managed The Broad Theater, one of New Orleans’ best independently-owned movie theaters. Every year on his birthday he would book a single screen and invite people to join him for a special film screening. Nobody but he would know what movie they were watching that night until the opening credits rolled, and 100% of the tickets sold would go to charity.

Now, Michael brings his mystery movie screening to Best Video for the fourth time, and we still don't know what he’s going to play!

Previous entries in the Magical Mystery Movie series for reference:

2025: SLC Punk

2024: Times Square

2023: Nothing Lasts Forever

2021: Southland Tales

2020: Phantom of the Paradise

2019: Road House

2018: Edward Scissorhands

2017: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn

Join us at Best Video on March 9th at 7pm for a screening of Akira Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo” starring Toshiro Mifune.

Join Workers’ Voice for a Film Screening and Discussion on Friday March 6th, 2026 at 6pm. This event is free to the public (donations are welcomed).

Best Video Film & Cultural Center and Lyric Hall are pleased to present a new series entitled CAMERA OBSCURA to help bring MORE great cinema to New Haven!! On Tuesday, March 3rd, we will be screening John Carpenter’s 1988 sci-fi action horror film, THEY LIVE. Ticket prices are $10 (ticket only) or $20 (for popcorn and a drink). The show starts at 6:30 pm.

PURCHASE YOUR TICKETS HERE

Lyric Hall is located at 827 Whalley Avenue in New Haven. Worried about parking?? Don’t be! Here’s a great map with all kinds of parking for you.

They Live is a 1988 American science fiction action horror film written, directed, and scored by John Carpenter, and starring Roddy Piper, Keith David, and Meg Foster. It was based on the 1963 short story "Eight O'Clock in the Morning" by Ray Nelson. Set in Los Angeles, it follows a working class drifter (Piper) who discovers that the ruling class are camouflaged aliens, which drives him on a quest to expose them to the world.

Having acquired the film rights to the story prior to the production of They Live, Carpenter used the story as the basis for the screenplay's structure, which he wrote under the pseudonym "Frank Armitage". Carpenter has stated that the themes of They Live stemmed from his dissatisfaction with the economic policies of then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan, as well as what Carpenter saw as increasing commercialization in both popular culture and politics.

They Live was a minor success upon release, debuting at number 1 at the North American box office. It initially received negative reviews from critics, who lambasted its social commentary, writing, and acting; however, it later gained a cult following and experienced a significantly more favorable critical reception. It is now regarded by many as one of Carpenter's best films. The film has also entered the pop culture lexicon, notably having a lasting effect on street art (particularly that of Shepard Fairey).

It goes without saying that the state of reproductive rights in the U.S. is increasingly dire. Scathing and vital, Sarah Ruden’s REPRODUCTIVE WRONGS unearths the literary evolution of a right–wing radicalism that has delivered us to this moment, when half of the US population is losing access to basic human rights.

The dangerous belief that granting women reproductive freedom poses a threat to “traditional” values is a myth that has long prospered in American politics, playing an especially vicious role in the development of totalitarianism in the West. In REPRODUCTIVE WRONGS, acclaimed translator and cultural historian Ruden exposes how these oppressive myths took hold in our everyday lives through literature. Tearing through texts from Ovid to evangelical “abortion memoirs” with equal parts humor and searing focus, Ruden traces a sweeping history through her analysis of seven works that, she argues, marked key inflection points across two thousand years.

In making sense of this evolution of “reproductive wrongs”, we become better equipped to meet our current situation—or as Ruden so eloquently put it to me: "to sketch this whole circus can show women of today that they should not take seriously anything said against their freedom: we have been here before, we got through it, and we will again."

Advance praise for REPRODUCTIVE WRONGS:

“Expansive . . . the book’s greatest strength lies in Ruden’s wry criticism . . . a biting, revelatory overview of misogyny’s long literary history.”

—Publishers Weekly starred review 

“Vivid . . . Ruden successfully advocates for a world governed by saner reproductive health policies . . . A timeless treatise.”

—Kirkus Reviews 

“Well-researched . . . A fresh take on the long history of suppressing women’s reproductive freedoms.”

—Booklist 

Doug Hood will do a 60-slide presentation about a refugee daughter teenager sentenced to a CT prison for murder and the monumental effort for her clemency. His book, "Daughter of Song," was named in the NYT Book Review as a favorite book. He has discussed the story on NPR (Colin McEnroe), at UConn Law School and Yale departments of Medical Bioethics, History and Psychiatry. Doug has published numerous essays, short stories. He was a Lecturer in Neurology at Yale University. He lives in North Haven with his wife and two children.