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).
Iranian Director Mohammad Rasoulof's "A Man of Integrity," which is banned in Iran, will play at the IFC Center in New York City from June 17 through June 23.
The Automat was the great equalizer, a democratic restaurant that provided good food for everybody, and a warm place where you could sit a whole day over a nickel cup of coffee.
For whatever the city’s many flaws, it still can offer institutional and quotidian experiences of which few other cities are capable. And for me, they are imperative.
"Reforming the police force is a necessity, but it won’t get public support without a sense the candidate believes in both being tough on crime and advocating reform."
Leonard Quart reviews the film that won big at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and is nominated for the 2021 Golden Globe Award for Best Picture – Foreign Language.
We see him over the course of 20 months, putting out a fire, getting doors and a television fixed in City Hall, dealing with a sewage spill, traveling the city meeting with constituents.
I can pick flaws in Sorkin’s film, but I remain moved by his resurrection of a time, somewhat parallel to our own, when a large constituency among the young struggled against an administration that wished to suppress their dissenting voices.
Though the numbers of deaths following police contact are thankfully not as bad in the UK as in the U.S., there is no reason for the British to be smug when it comes to their own structural problems with racism or policing.
“Flannery” uses the voices of contemporary writers like Hilton Als, Alice Walker, Mary Karr and Mary Gordon; actors like Tommy Lee Jones; her publisher Robert Giroux; and relatives and close friends, to perceptively comment on O’Connor’s art and life.
