Just in case you need a reminder that racism is not dead, James Baldwin, the intellectual, civil rights activist and renowned author, has left behind some biting and enlightening words about the subject.   Baldwin was born in Harlem in 1924. He moved to Paris around 1950, eventually taking up residence in the south […]

  Saroo Brierley, a five-year old boy from a small town in India, got lost on a train ride, wound up at the massive Howrah Junction railway station in Calcutta and became an orphaned street kid. An Australian couple adopted him, but years later at age 25, his yearning for his birth family took him […]

  Nearly 40 years ago Close Encounters of the Third Kind set the bar very high for sci-fi films that eschewed conventional all-out action sequences and garnered their strength from immense suspense, evocative visuals and mind-numbing mystery. Arrival is in that same elite category. Brainy. Intense. Scary. It joins a very exclusive club.   The […]

  In just his second feature film, writer/director Barry Jenkins tells a compelling story about sexual repression and ambiguity through the eyes of a vulnerable and confused little boy, who grows up to question his sexual identity as a teen and then finds a thin measure of serenity as a young man.   Based on […]