The Polish veteran director Agnieszka Holland’s The Green Border plants itself in a forest where Belarus meets her native Poland, and follows a small cast of disparate people from Afghanistan, Muslim North Africa and Syria used as political footballs in a torturous ground game run back and forth, over, under and through coils of razor wire that...

During the pre-internet days of peace and love of my hippie youth, it seemed like we had reached the end of days: social upheaval, anti-war rebellion, race riots, Richard Nixon’s stealth attacks on the election of 1972 and the constitution, on values, on race, and his perversion of law that collectively manifested in Watergate. There...

After a decades long run at being the dominant fall film launchpad in North America, Toronto or TIFF as it’s known, has been increasingly challenged by a reinvigorated Venice, the world’s oldest film festival – it was started by Benito Mussolini in 1936 – to launch new work around the world and most especially into...

I have checked out not just one Mission Impossible, but two, the latest Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One with Tom Cruise returning as agent Ethan Hunt in the 7th installment in the series, and Oppenheimer, with Cillian Murphy in Christopher Nolan’s large-screen epic about the race to beat Germany to the atomic bomb in WWII.  Tune in here to...

We’re in the final hours of Oscar chatter which began about a year ago and ends with the 95th Academy Awards this Sunday night. Oscar handicapping usually starts just after the last one ends, but last year, we were consumed for weeks afterwards by The Slap. I see a cosmic battle for control of the culture...

The most anticipated film this year at the 76th Cannes Film Festival was Killers of the Flower Moon directed by one of just about every cinema lover’s modern heroes, Martin Scorsese, adapted from New Yorker writer David Grann’s 2017 historical account. I don’t begrudge Marty another Mob movie, it’s what he does and what often needs being...

AIR had its premiere at SXSW, where I recently reported on the beefed-up selection of films. The new Ben Affleck directed film, in which he stars with his Boston buddy Matt Damon, was a three pointer from center court in Austin.  To listen to the broadcast of this review, link to The WBGO JOURNAL on WBGO Public...

It’s Sundance film festival time, and this year’s edition, which closes this weekend by announcing winners in both feature and documentary competitions in the US and internationally, showed better than 100 feature length films from 23 countries, of which nearly 95% are world premieres. 32 films are by first time directors, and 17 were developed...

The 94th Academy Awards, which concluded last Sunday night, confounded just about everyone who watched it—whether they were in the elite crowd inside the Academy’s return to the Dolby Theatre or like the rest of us, flopped out on the couch. Whatever else it was, Oscar night this year will be known forevermore as Not the...

Festival is misleading or even a misnomer. The important A-list fests are really conventions, a cross between sales conventions to introduce the new line — in the garment industry parlance of my salesman father — and marketing launchpads for the coming season of film debuts. We’re in the festival year’s far turn with Venice and...