As I type this essay, students across the country are encamped in university quads. Protesting American Imperialism, by way of protesting their universities’ investments in war profiteers. They are most vocal about the final obliterations of Gaza. As a longtime educator and chaplain in Chicago, I have current students in those encampments, as well as past students among the police officers sent to remove them. The university students are the same ages as the main characters of Shaka King’s “Judas and the Black Messiah” (2021), which follows Bill O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield) as he works as an FB ..read more

The Cannes Film Festival is underway, and Chaz Ebert is on the ground to report on every development. In this video, Canadian correspondent Jason Gorber briefly mentions the Canadian films highlighting the festival this year before discussing "Universal Language" and "Black Dog" in depth. Watch the video below ..read more

The memorial for film scholar David Bordwell was as funny, erudite, and thorough as the master’s own writing on cinema. Organized by his widow and regular writing partner Kristin Thompson, it was also an example of a type of storytelling that David coined a term to describe: the “network narrative.”  As David wrote in a 2006 post on his and Kristin’s blog Observations on Film Art:  “The central formal principle is that several protagonists are given more or less the same weight as they participate in intertwining plotlines. Usually these lines affect one another to some degree. The ..read more

It’s okay for stories to end, and when I rolled credits on 2017's “Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice,” I thought Ninja Theory, its developer, understood that as well. Senua, a woman who hears voices and was thought cursed by those around her, overcame the grief and trauma of losing loved ones and learned to accept herself—all of herself, including her psychosis. Only, that wasn’t the end. Ninja Theory decided to continue her tale in “Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2", except this time, there’s no purpose for Senua. Ninja Theory struggles to find a new path for her and spends much of "Hellblade 2" repeati ..read more

By-the-books biopics are a dime a dozen and often result in a shallow portrait of their subject. But every once in a while you'll get a filmmaker whose film's unconventional form perfectly aligns with the singular talent at its heart. Such is the case with co-writer and director Ethan Hawke's "Wildcat," starring his daughter Maya Hawke as writer Flannery O'Connor, whose sardonic Southern Gothic humor elevated the ordinary lives of the characters in her stories to otherworldly and grotesque heights.  Best known for her darkly comic novel Wise Blood and short stories like "A Good Man is Ha ..read more

Ali Abbasi's "The Apprentice," a portrait of the friendship between Donald Trump and Roy Cohn, leaves little doubt about who is top dog. The film is so thoroughly owned by Jeremy Strong, who plays Cohn, that the ostensibly headline-grabbing notion of having a Trump biopic compete at Cannes almost seems beside the point. With a screenplay by the reporter and author Gabriel Sherman, the movie makes the (often-made) case that Cohn, the notorious former aide to Joseph McCarthy, shaped Trump's transactional way of dealing with the world. And while the men's attack-dog strategies don't need to ..read more

In 1974, film producer Bert Schneider – the producer behind such industry shifting New Hollywood hits as "Easy Rider, "Five Easy Pieces, and "The Last Picture Show" – put together a fake film production in order to help Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, escape to Cuba after a warrant is issued for his arrest.  If this story sounds a bit like "Argo," that's because it's based on an article written by Joshuah Bearman, who also penned the article on which the Oscar-winning film was based. Bearman's retelling of this larger-than-life Hollywood meets activism story has be ..read more

I cannot think of a single reason for another Garfield movie, and apparently, the people who made this couldn't, either. It reminds me of the legendary comment about “Nancy,” which, like “Garfield,” was originally a comic strip known for the spareness of its design and the helium-weight lightness of its humor. When asked to explain “Nancy,” someone once said, “It takes less energy to read it than to skip it.” Those who have children pestering them to see “Garfield” will feel the same way about this film. It’s not awful. It may be too much to say that kids will enjoy it, but it is probabl ..read more

At this point in Cannes, exactly half the competition titles have premiered, which means that audiences are now primed to engage in a classic festival ritual. If you subject viewers to six days of some of the most demanding cinema on the planet, then suddenly confront them with a stylish and funny (yet sufficiently academic) horror film in which Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley are forced to share the resources of one body—and that film has a lot of clever framing, a pulsating electronic score, a fair amount of skin, and a special thanks in the credits to the many extras who got covered in blo ..read more

It takes a lot of courage to play a buffoon, and Dabney Coleman, who passed on May 16 at the age of 92,  had it in spades. Not many character actors of his constitution in 1980 -- white, male, middle-aged, thick mustache parting only to deliver his baleful bass of a voice -- would have dared make a fool of themselves as the “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot” boss Franklin Hart Jr., who'd push around his three female subordinates (played by Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton) only to find himself at their comic mercy in the now iconic girl-power wo ..read more