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“Hillary”–Unmasked

Hillary,  an intimate and candid four-part series about  former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton– one of the most admired and vilified women in the world–features never-before-seen footage of her life from birth in a close-knit family in Chicago, Illinois.  The mission of this documentary is not only to interview Hillary Clinton (for a total of thirty-five hours) and several dozen colleagues and personal friends but also to try to analyze why people found Clinton so compelling—and so polarizing. Yet Hillary is so much more than a biopic....

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“Baptiste”–After The Missing

In this spinoff of the BBC popular series “The Missing”, detective  Baptiste is now retired and recovering from brain surgery. The six-part crime procedural, Baptiste, is  an intense crime thriller. Baptiste (Tchéky Karyo) is called in by Amsterdam’s Chief of Police and former lover to investigate the disappearance of Natalie, a young sex worker. He  meets her uncle Edward (Tom Hollander of “The Night Manager”) and soon Baptiste and Edward become involved in taking down a Romanian crime organization.   The Romanians are in the business...

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“Contagion”–Infects Us All

Contagion With the tagline: “Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t touch anyone”, this B-rated movie “Contagion” (2011), directed by Stephen Soderbergh, is eerily prescient nine years later. A pandemic–“a novel virus”– is about to create havoc, beginning with the opening scene where Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) is at the Hong Kong airport, waiting to catch a plane back to Chicago.  Her husband Mitch (Matt Damon) will soon discover that his wife is patient zero–the  original carrier of the deadly virus which begins to get...

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“Little Fires Everywhere”–Incendiary at Its Best

Set in Shaker Heights, Ohio during the late 1990s, Little Fires Everywhere is based on Celeste Ng’s best-selling novel by the same name. Reese Witherspoon (Elena)and Kerry Washington (Mia)  steal the show as mothers from vastly different socioeconomic backgrounds.  This is a suburban saga with a painfully close lens focused on the income gap, class, and racial divide we know only so well.  In the opening scene  a house in Shaker Heights is engulfed in an inferno.  Is it the target of arson?  We will find out.  The year is 1997. Shaker...

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“Blow the Man Down”–Maine Down Under

Premiering at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival, Blow the Man Down   is  a film debut by writer-directors Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy. It opens in Easter Cove, a small parochial fishing village along the coast of Maine, in a somewhat clichéd but contemporary riff on “Murder She Wrote”.  We see a history of covering up secrets by the small town’s residents.  And we listen to a chorus of fishermen sing “blow the man down” –referring to the shoving of a man to the bottom of a boat, either accidentally or on purpose. ...

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Last Days of Vietnam– The Best and Worst of Us

Last Days of Vietnam (2015), a PBS documentary in the American Experience television series, is produced and directed by Rory Kennedy, and was a 2015 Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary Feature. Forty-five years ago–on April 29, 1975-the US war ceased in South Vietnam. As North Vietnamese army tanks and troops moved into Saigon, the US ambassador fiercely resisted an evacuation.   But a large number of   U.S. diplomats and military operatives argued for an orderly withdrawal.  With no congressional support, the White House ordered American...

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