Leonard Quart is Professor Emeritus of Cinema — CUNY and COSI; Contributing Editor, Cineaste; Columnist for Berkshire Eagle; and co-author of American Film and Society Since 1945 —4th Edition (Praeger).
Sitting in this café, I notice that most of the other customers are in their 20s and 30s—NYU students, people who do tech work or have Wall Street jobs—and I both envy and feel some despair about the years that they have ahead of them.
What makes the film distinctive is less the interweaving of intellectual arguments for and against estate taxes than the personal story about Justin’s relationship to his difficult father, Harvey.
The observational documentary "Union," directed by Brett Story and Stephen Maing, depicts the organizing of a union in a vast, alienating Amazon fulfillment center on Staten Island.
After speaking to a handful of NYU students regarding the election, I continue trying to make some sense of why that beacon of cruelty and narcissism won relatively handily over a much more intelligent, articulate woman who, whatever her flaws, ran a smart, skillful campaign.
"Il Grido" has been restored by The Film Foundation, Cineteca di Bologna, and Compass Film and is receiving a theatrical release from Janus Films starting at Film Forum on November 8.
Red Hook, which had retained its working-class, waterfront ambiance for decades, has only in the last 25 years or so begun to feel the effects of gentrification.
The television series achieves something unique: sustaining the emotional complexity of the novels without diluting its intensity and psychological nuance.
Though Goldman’s volatile—and somewhat dangerous—personality provides the film with dramatic fireworks denouncing a France he sees as racist and antisemitic, Kahn’s film maintains a coolly neutral perspective about his innocence, though it is critical of the police and French society.
At the moment, there is little solace in the political world for liberals, especially with the November election so near, and a defensive, faltering Biden still obstinately holding on.
Labour won the election with the pragmatic, non-doctrinaire candidacy of Sir Keir Starmer, who repositioned the party away from the left and toward the center.
Though "West Side Story" was more a poetic fantasy than an attempt to capture the texture of Nuyorican (New Yorkers of Puerto Rican descent) life, it was the only widely disseminated American mass culture product of that time to conceive Puerto Ricans as a unique racial/ethnic group and culture.
The public world still interests me, as I watch MSNBC and critically obsess about all things Trumpian, including the Manhattan trial, filled with B-movie characters like Michael Cohen, David Pecker, and the indomitable Stormy Daniels.
Created by writer-directors Ali Asgari and Alireza Khatami, the film can be quietly devastating, if at times repetitive and humdrum. Still it successfully captures the absurdity, hypocrisy, and inhumanity of having to live under the Iranian regime.
