Stars and stuff on the silver screen.
It may not be entirely fair to call French director Olivier Assayas, who has delivered some of the most thrilling as well as some of the most bewildering film of the past few decades, wildly inconsistent. There is always, at least, a baseline of artfulness in his work that suggests …
It is a false dichotomy to say that in this world there are cat people and there are dog people, and never the twain shall meet. There are many — myself included — who love the company of both animals, and have been lucky enough to have both dog and …
Who among us does not practically break a leg running to the box office when we hear those magical words “three-hour bittersweet German art dramedy”? The third film by the director Maren Ade, whose work I have never seen but which has been highly praised by those who have, seems like …
There is a moment, late in I am Not Your Negro, where the great writer and thinker James Baldwin is appearing on Dick Cavett’s talk show to discuss the one subject that consumed him like no other during his life: America’s compulsive reluctance to address the reality of its treatment of …
La La Land has, as I write this, been nominated for an astounding 14 Academy Awards, and it is very likely going to win most, or even all, of them. It has a chance of becoming the most decorated film in motion picture history, and if you follow the absurd …
When you get right down to it, for capitalists, slavery was a hell of a good deal. It opened up new markets, it was a self-reproducing form of labor, and best of all, it provided a very inexpensive and largely docile workforce. Its failure, if you remove morality from the …
Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight — his second feature film and a quantum leap from his first, the fascinating but slight Medicine for Melancholy — is a film that builds itself up by little moments. Very little happens in the movie itself; it is slow and deliberate, with many of its major events implied …
My origin story with hip-hop still burns in my brain like it happened yesterday. Run-D.M.C.’s Raising Hell had just been released, and for me — a white suburban kid who’d been raised an only child in a house full of outlaw country and ‘beautiful music’ — it seemed like something being …
Nina Simone was such a singular and remarkable talent that the story of her success seemed almost inevitable. The scientist Stephen Jay Gould once remarked that there was less to interest him in the folds of Einstein’s brain than there was in the near certainty that people just as brilliant …
Tampopo was a first for me in a lot of ways: not only the first movie I’d seen by Juzo Itami, but the first Japanese comedy I’d ever seen, and one of the first Japanese films I’d seen at all outside of Akira Kurosawa and a few samurai period pieces. …
One of those odd little quirks of timing that happens in the world of cinema took place this year when not one, but two films based on the life of Christine Chubbuck were filmed and released at almost exactly the same time. The first was Christine, a more or less straightforward …
Say, did you know that television has gotten really good now? You bet your ass you did, because you’re alive and reading the internet. You could no more be ignorant of the rise of Quality Television than you could of the existence of Pizza Rat, or of how Donald Trump is …
It wasn’t until the Siskel Center announced a new restoration of Daughters of the Dust that I’d even heard of Julie Dash’s stunning 1991 film, and that’s to my great regret and embarrassment. Released by the New York Film Forum in a beautiful new print to commemorate its 25th anniversary — though, …
As mentioned a few days back, before America was plunged into the depths of fascism and we cared about frivolous thinks like moving pictures, we recently took in a double feature at the Siskel Center of movies billed as “UK noir”. This isn’t entirely deceptive; the excellent Odd Man Out was on the …
This past weekend, we headed over to the Siskel Center for a double feature of what they were advertising as a program of British noir. Although both movies had their merits, calling them noir was more than a stretch; that was particularly true in the case of the first, 1963’s These …
