In four films Barry Jenkins has established himself as a high artist of the Black American experience. Gaining heft and budget from his success with Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, Jenkins signed up both Brad Pitt’s Plan B Pictures and Jeff Bezos’ Amazon to tackle one of the biggest projects on race in America, the adaptation...

Having just come through the Labor Day turn in the film festival world, which is still picking its way through the pandemic with a mix of in-person and virtual screenings, the industry that depends on festivals is plowing ahead this Fall with plans to release films in theatres and by streaming to a smart TV...

We are coming to the end, we hope, of a melancholy season. There are a number of films in theatres and streaming currently which deal with the slow winding down of a life and the effect it has on family. Include in that Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari, a memoir of a Korean family’s move to farm...

Steven Spielberg’s WEST SIDE STORY was calendared to open over a year ago, as was Lin Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights. The two productions had filmed simultaneously all over the metro area, often within blocks of each other, like two rival gangs fighting over the same turf. Then life, known as COVID 19, happened and pushed both openings...

Respect is the latest in the cascade of musical biopics. It follows the distant 1972 Lady Sings the Blues about Billie Holiday, through to the 2004 Ray, about Ray Charles, to  the great Get on Up in 2014, with Chadwick Boseman as the hardest working man in show business, James Brown, to last year’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, with Viola Davis showing who was boss first.  [Tune in here for the broadcast...

With the insanely popular and priced Hamilton, show creator Lin-Manuel Miranda built a Broadway bridge to the American Revolution for minority audiences to cross over and inhabit the story. His new film, In the Heights, after a year’s delay due to the pandemic, is both streaming on HBO Max and opened the Tribeca Film Festival that...

DD: Normally, Godzilla Vs. Kong is the sort of big screen special effects slugfest that draws all sorts of folks to the biggest screens they can find for Easter: kids, cretins, CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. But Warner Bros. has responded to the pandemic by collapsing the window between theaters — where open — and home screens on...

Having closed down in 2020, along with the rest of the world, the Tribeca Film Festival is the first American festival to come back, or most of the way back from all virtual to mostly theatrical. And come back it did, with 192 features, including 90 narrative and 102 documentaries, plus sections devoted to episodic...

Sony Pictures Classics releases the new documentary film JAZZFEST: A NEW ORLEANS STORY on May 13 in NYC and LA. The film’s director, 5-time Academy Awards nominee Frank Marshall, Quint Davis of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and the Soul Queen of New Orleans Irma Thomas join WBGO‘s Douglas Doyle and film critic Harlan Jacobson for a live conversation about the film. Read...