It was Spring Break of Freshman year, 1968. I don’t have to remind you how 1968 began and ended. The news from the outside world relentlessly bore down on everyone. This past year, 2020, may have surpassed it in weight, but that depends on how you tally. They are the two years in my life...

Anthony Hopkins on renouncing the Hollywood game and renewing his passion to create by Harlan Jacobson – Around the turn of the millennium, anthony hopkins started making bold moves. He ended his marriage of 30 years, met Stella Arroyave, a San Francisco antiques dealer, and ended up marry.ing her. He renounced his U.K. citizenship but...

When baseball returns this weekend, whichever team you look forward to seeing take the field, whatever players you hope make it through the season in one piece, whether it’s Judge and Soto or Alonso and whoever else they have over there, there’s also good reason to look back. Roberto Clemente, the legendary right fielder of the...

The 96th Academy Awards, the Oscars, will take place next Sunday, March 10 in Hollywood, and love them, hate them, or ignore them, there never seems to be a shortage of things to say about them. Given how the previous bellwether award groups have gone, Oppenheimer with the most Oscar nominations, 13, will likely dominate the night. Christopher...

This year I parachuted into Sundance remotely from the greater NY-NJ metroplex to take the pulse of a festival that kicks off the acquisition year for American film companies scouting for films to bring to theaters and streamers. 40-year old Jesse Eisenberg, who first came to Sundance in 2005 as part of the troubled Berkman...

Audiences have trickled back this year except for the torrent of those lined up to see big deal event films, when the mashup of Barbenheimer dominated the mediascape. Christopher Nolan’s OPPENHEIMER with Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer pulled back the cinema curtain on the Bomb of All Bombs It was actually thrilling to see NY indie...

American Fiction started under the radar at this year’s Toronto Film Festival but emerged as the festival’s People’s Choice award winner. Jeffrey Wright plays Thelonious “Monk” Ellison – how’s that for a mashup of references, from the offbeat jazzman to the Invisible Man author? — who gets furloughed from his university Modern American Lit teaching job...

The 37th SXSW Music, Film, Interactive Media festival and trade show Conferences wrapped up this past week in Austin, Tx. That’s after plowing through 110 feature films, including some 75 world premieres, a dozen or more new TV pilots and series episodes, XR—extended reality—experiences, and real film makers come to Texas. SXSW, or South By, which...

There’s an old maxim that you don’t go to the movies to learn history. British director Ridley Scott, who turns 86 this Nov. 30, has had a glorious career making spectacle films, the heir to the big canvas films of David Lean, who made Lawrence of Arabia and Bridge on the River Kwai that mined British history to examine...

The New York Film Festival has in recent years expanded since the years I worked there awhile back from 20 or so films to 32 in its Main Slate and nearly 60 films overall. That somewhat corrects a paucity of programming that was reframed at the time as a jewel box selection, a formulation that...