Skip to main content

“For Sama”—A Letter to My Daughter

For Sama is the most searing  documentary about war that I have ever seen.  Nominated this year for an Academy Award for Best International Film, For Sama presents some of the most unflinching war coverage and remarkable and courageous footage.   A love letter to her infant daughter Sama,  born in Aleppo,   For Sama is a Syrian mother’s  first-person account of the bombing of her beloved homeland over a period of five years.  Aleppo, at the time, was one of the last strongholds resisting the Assad dictatorship. Waad Al-Khateab is the Syrian producer, cinematographer and  hero of this...

Continue reading

“Clemency”–No Mercy or Absolution

What’s the psychological and moral cost to a society that administers the death penalty?  That’s the question raised in Clemency, the winner of the Sundance drama award last year.  So much more than a “death-row drama” ,  Clemency shifts the lens to the impact of  bureaucratized human cruelty:  a scathing portrait of the toll the process of administering an execution has on prison staff. We see how they are not executioners but bureaucratic cogs in a horrible machine of death. Sixty-something Bernadine (the remarkable African American actor Alfre...

Continue reading

The Report—An Exposé for Us All

Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EIT)—is the focus of The Report, a provocative Amazon political thriller.  A Senate staff researcher, Daniel Jones (Adam Driver) is assigned by Sen. Diane Feinstein (Annette Bening) to investigate  detainees held by the CIA in “black sites”.  A shameful chapter of American history unfolds , where torture was re-introduced as a legitimate tool in pursuit of national security.  The Report  employs flashbacks of “enhanced interrogation techniques” that are frightening and harrowing. Flashing back to 2001 immediately after 9/11, the anxiety...

Continue reading

1917—This Great War Is Not So Great

The multiple award-winning 1917  is inspired by “American Beauty” writer-director Sam Mendes’s great grandfather’s experience during World War I.  Almost everything you’ve ever seen in a war film is here in 1917. There are  several homages to the classic Stanley Kubrick film, “Paths of Glory” (1957), including the technique of tracking a long take, seemingly a continuous single-shot with no cuts, of the brutal trench warfare that cost 9-12 million soldiers’ lives.  (The calculus for civilian deaths would double the total.) It is as if we’re in...

Continue reading

“Parasite” –Living Off Your Host

Parasite This Korean  multiple award-nominated, SAG Globe winning movie, Parasite, has captured the critics’ minds as it delves into the income gap, greed and class discrimination between the  “one-percenter” wealthy Park family and the destitute, marginally employed Kim clan.  The theme of the competitive, desperate search for wealth at one end of the income spectrum versus the  content, oblivious upper-class entitlement at the other end permeates South Korean director, Bong Joon-ho’s films  (“Snowpiercer” and “Mother” in particular.)  This difficult theme...

Continue reading

Godfather of Harlem—Partners in Crime

Inspired by a true story, Godfather of Harlem skillfully interweaves the combative and competing forces of the  mafia with the battle for civil rights in the mid-‘60s.  In the riveting Epix limited series, Godfather of Harlem, we see the character Bumpy Johnson (the exceptional Forest Whitaker) re-enter the world of organized crime after being released from Alcatraz.  Drugs have taken over many of New York’s poor communities, and the Italian mafia runs most of them, now including the crime syndicate of Harlem which had been Bumpy Johnson’s exclusive domain.  Not...

Continue reading

Subscribe to my Newsletter

* indicates required
Apr0 Posts
May0 Posts
Jun0 Posts
Jul0 Posts
Aug0 Posts
Sep0 Posts
Oct0 Posts
Nov0 Posts
Dec0 Posts
Jan0 Posts
Feb0 Posts
Mar0 Posts
Apr0 Posts
May0 Posts
Jun0 Posts
Jul0 Posts
Aug0 Posts
Sep0 Posts
Oct0 Posts