When I spoke with Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis on April 14, 2017, a certain soft drink commercial featuring a certain member of a family famous for being famous had just been pulled for being offensive. It’s emblematic of the culture that WHOSE STREETS?, their searing documentary about the aftermath of the Michael Brown shooting… Read More »
I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO — Raoul Peck Interview
As we were settling down to talk, Raoul Peck asked me about the name of my web site, KillerMovieReviews.com. When I told him it was a nod to the fact that I take no prisoners when it comes to bad movies, he laughed and said that was exactly the resolve with which he went into… Read More »
HOLLYWOOD BEFORE THE CODE: SEX! CRIME! HORROR! with Elliot Lavine, Tourguide
If you had to sum up what it’s like to talk with Elliot Lavine, cinema programmer extraordinaire, scholar of film history and engaging raconteur, it might be the moment when an emergency vehicle went by the room where I was interviewing him on February 17, 2106. While ruminating on studio policies about film restoration, he… Read More »
DOPE is Genius
DOPE is a provocative blend of gritty realism, gentle compassion, and piercing social satire that is so unlike anything that has come before that its maker, Rick Famuyima, may have just invented a new cinematic sub-genre in the spirit, and brilliance, of the Coen Brothers’ FARGO. Boldly venturing into issues of identity, class, gender, sexuality,… Read More »
A Choppy CHAPPIE
CHAPPIE is a cross between Pinicchio and ROBOCOP with a dash of DISTRICT 9. That last is unsurprising because CHAPPIE is the brainchild of Neill Blomkamp, and many of the elements at work in that earlier film about the meaning of humanity are at work in this one. The battleground is still South Africa, Blomkamp’s… Read More »
Going Beyond BLACK OR WHITE
Mike Binder has a particular genius for showing people brimming with good intentions, but flawed, stumbling through life without the operating instructions that would help them negotiate the bumps along the way. He has the gift of showing humor and pathos as elements that are not so much disparate, as entwined, manifesting at oddest moments… Read More »
DEAR WHITE PEOPLE says Justin Simien
To say that talking with Justin Simien was a master’s class in film and culture theory is understating it. Simien believes that film is the culmination of everything we do as a culture. This is why he invoked Spike Lee, Paddy Chayefsky, George Orwell, and Moliere in our conversation about DEAR WHITE PEOPLE, his bracing look… Read More »
TSOTSI
With TSOTSI, Gavin Hood has taken the liberty of updating the timeframe of South African writer Athol Fugard’s only novel. In doing so, the politics of apartheid that spurred the story in the book has given way to the tragedy of AIDS. Changing the circumstances of its title character’s orphaning, though, doesn’t affect the nature of… Read More »
TALK TO ME
“Wake up, God damn it!” is how TALK TO ME begins and that’s exactly what is going to happen to its lead characters, the people in their orbit, and the entire city of Washington D.C. The story may be formulaic, albeit based on actual events, but stars Don Cheadle and Chiwetel Ejiofor take charge of… Read More »
THE HELP
THE HELP, based on the novel of the same name by Kathryn Stockett, gently but firmly peels away they dry rot of racism that festered beneath the gracious, etiquette obsessed façade of southern gentility before the civil rights movement. What is remarkable, and a remarkably difficult line to walk, is that it does so while… Read More »