John Amos was a pioneer in more ways than one. A tall, broad-shouldered man with a barrel chest, a winning smile, and an arsenal of “You’ve got to be kidding me” looks, he stood out in TV ensembles spanning four decades, from “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Good Times,” and “Roots” in the 1970s to

Armando Iannucci, the genius behind “The Thick of It,” “Veep,” and “The Death of Stalin,” feels like a perfect fit for a takedown of superhero movie culture. After all, he knows how to puncture the balloons of people who take themselves way too seriously, and the amount of pretension in the political pools in which

This month, we pay tribute not just to a movie that almost instantly fell out of the public consciousness but to a great writer as well. North America may have no finer, no more eloquent defender of the director Paul Verhoeven than Adam Nayman, whose book, It Doesn’t Suck, is the final word on “Showgirls.” I

Almost exactly forty-seven years ago, I saw Kris Kristofferson for the first time when my two primary interests as a four-year-old bled into each other. On the September 23, 1977 season three premiere of “The Donny and Marie Show.,” a variety show I watched with a ritualistic, almost religious dedication, I was favored with a

For Gotham cinephiles, the New York Film Festival has its annual launch on the last Friday of September (the 2024 edition runs Sept. 27-Oct. 13). For critics, journalists and certain industry folks, though, the event begins a couple of weeks earlier, when festival press screenings commence at Lincoln Center. Those screenings don’t display films in

Restorations are a notable portion of the Fantastic Fest program, giving movie lovers a chance to see a handful of films on the big screen for the first time in years, or ever. This year’s restoration titles were a remarkable bunch of flicks that really speak to the array of offerings at this event. It’s

In 1987’s “Fatal Attraction,” Glenn Close’s Alex Forrest, just awakened from what must have been a deep sleep, the kind that comes after intense psychic upheaval, doesn’t look into Michael Douglas’ Dan Gallagher’s eyes when she asks him if he will call her sometime. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” she says,

Set in 1964 and 1965, “The Featherweight” is a stylistically daring movie about an aging real-life boxer, Willie Pep (James Madio), who held the World Featherweight championship twice between 1942 and 1950 and invites a couple of documentary filmmakers modeled on the Maysles brothers to record his daily life as he attempts a comeback in

A year ago, I wrote about the real challenges the Toronto International Film Festival has faced in trying to reclaim its spot at the top of the fall festival events. With the ascendance of both Venice and Telluride over the last decade, as well as the one-two punch of the COVID lockdown and the WGA/SAG strikes that

The end of my movie road in Toronto this year resulted in a mixed bag of three films that can’t really be connected thematically, so consider this a randomly assembled trio of films that you should watch for if they ever appear on your cinematic radar. The best of the three is Karen Chapman’s tender