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...

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...

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...