“By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes” — Macbeth Act 4, Scene 1 Pronouncements telling us that fair is foul, good is bad, and dark is light are what you might expect to hear from the propaganda machine of an ambitious politician or a news organization seeking to sow confusion. In…
The 1960s. A time of new fashions, innovative music and escalating tensions. In both glamorous opera houses and drab subways, business opportunities intermingled with the Cold War. As world leaders like John F. Kennedy and Nikita Krushchev made grand speeches that could promise destruction or peace, depending on the mood of the time, the covert…
We are part of a fortunate and collective audience. Through films, we can go back in time and we be part of history by the recreation of our past, as dark and uncomfortable as it may be. I believe the exposure to our past — especially by younger audiences — is essential. By exploring the…
On June 6, 1982, exactly 38 years after D-Day, roughly 60,000 Israeli troops and more than 800 tanks, heavily supported by aircraft, attack helicopters, artillery, and missile boats invaded Southern Lebanon, a country already involved in a decades-long civil war. Israel’s publicly-stated objective was to push PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) forces back 40 kilometers (25…
The second of his 12 plays dramatizing the Black experience in America during the twentieth century, August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is a haunting and powerful experience that focuses on Gertrude “Ma Rainey” (Viola Davis, “Widows”), known as “The Mother of the Blues,” one of the first popular Black blues singers to gain acceptance…
Neil Marshall has had a patchy career. From his riotous debut “Dog Soldiers” (re-issued in 2020) to his claustrophobic caving classic “The Descent,” his filmography sunk (or descended) into the highly derivative and uneven “Centurion” and “Doomsday,” before he applied his talents to television with “Game of Thrones” and “Hannibal,” among others. After the disastrous…
The Democratic National Convention met in Chicago in August 1968 to choose their presidential candidate in a tumultuous year that saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Prague Spring, and growing protests in cities around the world against the escalation of the Vietnam War. Although…
