Awhile back here, I profiled Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied, the groundbreaking film about Black gay life that sent Jesse Helms through the roof. Last night, I watched Riggs’ UC-Berkeley the
The reason D.W. Griffith was a great filmmaker isn’t that he had a great moral message, though he most certainly thought of himself as a liberal. Being a pro-Confederate liberal wasn’t exa
I had never heard of the 1975 documentary on Charlie Chaplin, The Gentleman Tramp, until today. It seems no one else has either. Somehow, it only has 143 people who have rated it on IMDB, which is abo
I’ve been really into film essays lately and recently checked this prime example of both it and Black gay cinema of the 1980s with Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied. Riggs, who died of AIDS in
I watched Orson Welles’ 1968 adaptation of an Isak Dinesen story for French television. The story is about an old dying European capitalist in China who long ago heard this story about an old ma
Awhile back, I profiled The Onion Field in this series, noting how many 70s movies were failures but interesting failures. Well, that film withers on this point in comparison to the 1971 film Born to
I spent the last couple of nights watching Hoop Dreams for the first time in 25 years. It remains an absolutely astounding film, almost certainly the best sports documentary of all time and with an ar
The 1970s was an era of interesting film failures. There was so much going on in the movies during these years that even many of the less successful films had interesting ideas in them and sometimes r