Until fairly recently, Spike Lee was the only go-to African-American filmmaker. Over the last few decades he has given us important looks at racism and the African-American experience, in both narrative and documentary forms. His newest film, BlacKkKlansman, continues...
?Life is random, but when you finish a puzzle you know you?ve made all the right choices.? My wife enjoys jigsaw puzzles. I help a (very) little bit from time to time, but they aren?t really my thing. But in Marc Turtletaub?s film Puzzle, this pastime becomes a force...
In the California desert, near Joshua Tree and 29 Palms stands a strange domed building that is the focus of belief in UFOs, conspiracy theories, and a small part of the birth of the counter-culture and emergence of New Age ideas. Calling All Earthlings is a...
?I don?t know whether this will be great or terrible.? Sometimes we are fascinated by a story. But then there is the story that makes the story even more amazing. That is the case with Three Identical Strangers. It begins as a human interest story that captured a good...
Path of Blood is an opportunity to meet a few Islamic terrorists. Yeah, not the people I look forward to meeting either, but this documentary from Jonathan Hacker gives us a chance to meet some of those in Al Qaeda and we may be surprised at what we see. The film is...
Custody is a moving look at the pain that can come from a family disintegration?especially as that pain manifests in a child. Mariam (L?a Drucker) and Antoine (Denis M?nochet) are divorcing. The key issue to be decided is the custody arrangement for their son Julien...
?Love and survival are all I want.? ?You?re not exclusive in that notion.? In Damsel, the Zellner Brothers play with some typical movie genres. As a result, viewers are asked to wrap their minds around things that seem to not quite fit together, but in reality make...
Road trips movies are inevitably about the forces that pull us apart and/or draw us together. Boundaries, from writer-director Shana Feste, uses this vehicle to look at three generations of a family in need of both distance and reunion. Laura (Vera Farminga) has a...
When Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1454, it ushered in a new era for spreading knowledge. The basic idea of type, ink, and paper coming together to make books, newspapers, posters remained the same (with small variations and improvements) for...