Abel Turner (Samuel L. Jackson) has very definite ideas about how things should be. His children, an adolescent daughter and a son a bit younger, must use proper grammar at all times, and there are rules about who and who can’t be a role model. His new neighbors, she’s black, he’s white, do not fit… Read More »
NGHT CATCHES US
There is in every frame of NIGHT CATCHES US the vivid, demanding presence of the past that is more than just being set in the Philadelphia of 1976. Writer/director Tanya Hamilton uses close-ups of her stellar cast as they pause in conversation with one another and, as they gaze at one another, or into an… Read More »
A THOUSAND WORDS
There is something almost poignant in the way Eddie Murphy so palpably desires to make a meaningful film about enlightenment. The almost comes from the difference between that aspiration and the painfully ill-conceived follow-through in A THOUSAND WORD. This is not Murphy’s first attempt to explore the spiritual side of the human experience. There was… Read More »
RAY
Taylor Hackford’s RAY does what the best of biopics should do, tell not just who someone is, or what someone has done, but the why behind it all, in this case Ray Charles. Based on his decades of knowing the man himself, Hackford takes facts and mixes them with a healthy dose of poetic license… Read More »
RAY — DVD
Taylor Hackford is not originally from the south, but he has the soul of a southerner when it comes to storytelling. In RAY, he uses it to blend past and present in ways that don’t just show how the former affects the latter, but how in the emotional landscape of the title character, the legendary… Read More »