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...

Actress turned director Regina King’s One Night in Miami is a ‘what if’ fictional story about the night of Feb. 25, 1964 when 22-year-old Cassius Clay whups Sonny Liston for the Heavyweight championship of the world at the Convention Center in Miami. The film had its premiere at the Toronto film festival last September and has just...

Old Henry, Power of the Dog, The Harder They Fall : A fabulous trifecta of Westerns By Harlan Jacobson Old Henry, Power of the Dog and The Harder They Fall aren’t your great grandpa or grandma’s cowboy movies. They all have good guys and bad guys in tall hats, long guns, mountains, deserts, scrub brush, horses, sheriffs, saddlebags...

You don’t have to go to the movies—or pull them up online—to get a sense of the generational discontent that drove the election this week. Our film critic, Harlan Jacobson, goes to the movies to read what’s been on the kid’s minds. HJ: After all that has been said about Mssrs. Biden and Trump and...

R &B, ROCK & GOSPEL legend Little Richard left us this month.  You can spend some time listening to him or even looking at him on film. There’s a wonderful scene in Get On Up, director Tate Taylor’s 2014 biopic of James Brown, as played by Chadwick Boseman, when Brown crosses the orbit of this live...

After all that has been said about Mssrs. Biden and Trump and how they differ from soup to nuts, in that order, the one thing they shared as candidates and men was being old, part of a generation that is leaving the stage, gracefully or otherwise. And which is devoutly being anticipated by younger generations—as...

In all my years reporting on cinema,  I have never seen 8.5 minutes of footage that has sparked a global call to action, as we’ve witnessed  with the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota.   Read Full Review

What to watch in a pandemic is new territory for a film critic. Nothing as WBGO film critic I’m expected to deal with not now. Or Ever. But here we all are. I started with the conventional wisdom from the first time the world crashed in the age of movies, the Great Depression of the...

Our film critic Harlan Jacobson got the Blues this Christmas by dropping in on Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the new film based on an August Wilson play from 1984. The film is produced by Netflix, which is in the holiday audience and Oscar hunt.   HJ: Just the sound of the title, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, as it rolls...

In HG Wells’ original 1897 novel, The Invisible Man, the central character, Griffin, is a medical student turned optical scientist who’s successfully unlocked the key to how we see—and turned himself invisible. Irreversibly. When he arrives at a country inn wrapped in bandages, wearing a country hat and a fake pink nose, and toting a complete...