Reviews & News

Harlan Jacobson’s Reviews and Interviews

Reviews & News by Harlan Jacobson

Harlan Jacobson and guest contributors provide film reviews, festival and film industry coverage, along with interviews and which can regularly be heard on WBGO.org.

CANNES OVERVIEW 2025

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Film Critic Harlan Jacobson shines like the movies at the 78th Cannes Film Festival

Cannes edition #78 is a whole nuther kettle of soupe de poisson / fish soup from last year. it’s as if Thierry Fremaux, the delegue general, director of programming, compiled a list of films from Totalitarian Hell—all different angles on what happens when the bad...
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November 1, 2020

Harlan Jacobson’s Tribute to the Legendary Little Richard

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...
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November 1, 2020

Harlan Jacobson’s post-election reflections: The Queen’s Gambit and On The Rocks

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...
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October 1, 2020

Harlan Jacobson Reviews The Plot Against America

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...
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October 1, 2020

Harlan Jacobson reviews Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom directed by George C. Wolfe

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...
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October 1, 2020

Harlan Jacobson Reviews Invisible Man directed by Leigh Whannell

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...
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October 1, 2020

Harlan Jacobson reviews Hillbilly Elegy directed by Ron Howard

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...
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September 1, 2020

Harlan Jacobson Reviews Greyhound directed by Aaron Schneider

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...
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August 1, 2020

Harlan Jacobson Reviews Da 5 Bloods

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...
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June 28, 2020

Harlan Jacobson Reports from Sundance 2020

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...
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June 28, 2020

Harlan Jacobson Previews The Oscars 2020

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:...
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June 1, 2020

Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds by Werner Herzog

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...
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May 1, 2020

Chadwick Boseman Remembered

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...
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