Hillbilly Elegy came a callin’ on Netflix in time for Thanksgiving to remind us about how complicated the notion of family really is. Our film critic, Harlan Jacobson, takes us to Kentucky for more. HJ: JD Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy memoir arrived in 2016 as part of a flotilla of non-fiction books, including Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With...

Greyhound is a WWII tale of American heroics in the North Atlantic , written by and starring Tom Hanks, who’s made a great career out of putting forward humble men who just want to get the job done and go home, in this case set on a naval Destroyer. The mission given to Tom Hanks as...

Spike Lee has made some 25 feature films and five documentaries in a career devoted to putting the black American experience onscreen. His latest film is Da 5 Bloods. I go back with Spike to his second film, She’s Gotta Have it in 1986, when I took an unknown Spike and the only slightly better known Jim Jarmusch...

While the rest of the world is focused on that piece of theatre going on in Washington, this is Sundance, 2020, the year we all hope to see clearly. The films seem to cover the usual topics: women, the middle east, visionaries versus cutthroats, black filmmakers and films, LGBQT films, immigrants, young white professionals and...

Ratings for the Oscars have fallen off a cliff in recent years, as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences has done everything but one to stop the slide: be first out of the gate. In the year of the plague when nothing was released in theaters, the Academy always after every other conceivable...

DD:  The Toronto International Film Festival has been the gateway for serious filmgoing since at least American Beauty started up north in September 1999 and went all the way to the Oscars in February the next year. This 45th edition, which ran for 10 days and closes this weekend, has been unlike any other in...

DD: Our film critic, Harlan Jacobson, doesn’t work on Labor Day has always graced us with his annual Labor Day Address to the Nation to explain why he doesn’t work on Labor Day. Things are different this year right Harlan? HJ: Lately, discipline about what I watch has broken down. The 9.5-hour Polish TV series, The...

DD: The NY Film Festival, which ended last weekend, was a miracle that it happened at all. The 58th festival, since its founding in 1962 by Richard Roud and Amos Vogel, faced challenges that the previous 57 never did. Like Toronto last month, it scrambled to go virtual. The good news is it turned up...

The Safdie Bros. last film, Good Time, written with writing partner Ron Bronstein, was a furious chase film with Robert Pattinson on a mad, upside down dash through criminal Queens, like its forebear, The French Connection. It was a favorite at Cannes 2018 and an arthouse hit in the US. No more Mr. Nice Guys with Uncut Gems, with...

DeNiro, Pesci, Keitel, Pacino. Old home week for the Mob in Martin Scorsese’s much awaited and acclaimed The Irishman, which had its debut at the NY Film Festival last month and is now in theatres.  Almost all of the great, old fashioned mafia men have reassembled for a reunion in Marty Scorsese’s The Irishman. It is the...