I watched Kelly Reichardt’s 2020 film First Cow the other day. It was another excellent, quiet meditation that is her specialty. It’s really a very simple film. It’s an 1820s Oregon
The silent era was brilliant for movie comedy. By the late 30s, another great era of movie comedy was well underway. But the early talkies? That was kind of a rough era as people had to figure out wha
I showed this 1912 film in my Civil War class today. It’s a very normal Civil War film on the time, which means that it completely erases anything about slavery, it tells a story of a romantic w
Tonight starts the new David Simon HBO series, We Own this City, in which he returns to Baltimore to deal directly with police violence. Obviously everyone is going to compare this to The Wire and it
It’s not that I want to rehabilitate D.W. Griffith in the eyes of LGM readers exactly. I mean, what he did in The Birth of a Nation damns him to eternal hell as far as I’m concerned. But i
I happened to watch The Natural last night and I am reminded that this is a terrible, no good, awful movie. Almost everything about it is bad. First, it serves just as Robert Redford worship vehicle.
Isaac Hayes not in Shaft. But with plenty of guns and style. Plus Yaphet Kotto as a pimp. You know you want to watch. Not to mention bonus Scatman Carothers.
I’d seen quite a few of Les Blank’s documentaries, but I had missed his profile of Clifton Chenier and the Cajun culture around him, Hot Pepper. That it combines music, food, and local tra