Zora Neale Hurston, a prominent novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, was also something of an amateur filmmaker, documenting everyday life and work in the American South as part of anthropological […]
The Introduction One of the true cinematic success stories of this decade, both popularly and critically, is Jordan Peele’s Get Out, an original movie in an age of franchises that managed […]
To single out the editing in the film Chariots of Fire is, of course, to fly past the two or three most famous and memorable aspects of it. That’s not to […]
Like Christmas morning, the announcement of a given year’s Oscar nominees is all about anticipation. The ultimate results will be uneven at best, but allowing oneself hope for a pleasant […]
The Introduction I first saw Ava DuVernay’s Selma in those pre-MoviePass days when going to a theater by myself was a rare occurrence. This was the weekend after the Oscar nominations […]
I always loved their names. To me, they matched each character and the actor playing him to perfection — maybe too well. This may have been a case in which the […]
The Introduction The first of three films in which Sidney Poitier starred in 1967, To Sir, With Love is a modest, workaday film that quickly withdrew before the trumpeted ambitions of In […]
In considering the merits of history-based movies, there are the rote facts and there’s the spirit that ties them together. Only pedants obsess over the former when the latter is […]
In his “Great Movie” review of D.W. Griffith’s 1919 film, Broken Blossoms, Roger Ebert called attention to a capsule written by Pauline Kael (included in the collection 5001 Nights at the Movies) […]
The later of these two films follows its predecessor’s blueprint so closely that comparisons have been and always will be inevitable. Two powerful and controversial entertainers at the height of […]
Geppetto's Clocks 