TAKE A GIANT STEP Review – **½

Take a Giant Step had previously been on the fringes of my radar, mainly due to it being a Globe nominee for Supporting Actress (much more on that shortly), but after Johnny Nash passed away earlier this week, I decided to actively seek it out. Having done so, I can’t say you really need to…

The Weekly Gravy #8

Shanks (1974) – *** I’d known about Shanks for years, and had even owned it for years on Blu-Ray, but only tonight got around to watching it. But even knowing it exists is more than most viewers can claim, which is too bad, since it’s not only a rather fascinating little film, but one which…

QUEEN & SLIM Review – ***

I have yet to be personally told that a film I reviewed critically “wasn’t made for you,” and in fact I’ve enjoyed a great many films for which I wasn’t the target audience; as far as I’m concerned, a good film is a good film and a bad one is a bad one. A personal…

BLACKkKLANSMAN Review – ****

BlacKkKlansman is the kind of film whose trailer prepared me for a rather different film than I ended up getting. I expected a pulpy thrill ride—a blast, you might say—and it took me some time to adapt to the film’s true flavor; while certainly boasting its share of humor and excitement, it’s much more of a…

CHI-RAQ Review – ***

When I was in Chicago for Thanksgiving, the subject of Chi-Raq came up at dinner, and my uncle’s girlfriend dropped her voice to a whisper, noting that the city fathers of Chicago had condemned the film, starting with its title, a damning nickname for a city long infamous for violence and crime, which Spike Lee…

THE LEARNING TREE Review – ***½

(Apologies if this review is a little scattered. I meant it to be a journal entry and it ended up reaching the length of a full review.) Not many films have been made in the corner of America I grew up in. But one very talented man, Gordon Parks, was born and raised not half…

ALOHA Review – *½

I knew from the trailer that Aloha would be a pretty pathetic excuse for a film–any film that highlights one of its worst jokes (the hysterically dated Flava Flav reference) and then drops that joke from the final film doesn’t have its head in the right place, and neither did Cameron Crowe, whose writing and direction are…

SELMA Review – ****

The historical drama film carries a certain kind of baggage. There’s always the risk that history will be distorted, often for the sake of a more “dramatic” narrative, or that the historical figures will be depicted as more saintly–or demonic–than they truly were. Selma is the kind of film which manages to be both compelling…

BIRDMAN, or THE UNEXPECTED VIRTUE OF IGNORANCE Review – ****

To what degree can a few seconds impact an entire film? In his review of Thelma and Louise, Roger Ebert argues that the climactic shot ends a few seconds too soon, and as such robs the film as a whole of just enough power that it doesn’t get **** from him. And in the case of Birdman, there are a…

DEAR WHITE PEOPLE Review – ****

In the midst of a tense confrontation under the guise of an academic warning, President Hutchinson (Peter Syvertsen) tells campus firebrand Sam White (Tessa Thompson) that she longs for the days of lynchings and Jim Crow, because that would give her something to truly fight against. As ignorant and hateful as Hutchinson, he’s more right…