Take a Giant Step
“The truth is the truth and should be spoken at all times,” proclaims Grandma Martin (Estelle Hemsley), from the top of a stairwell, no less. It’s a bold mandate, especially…
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Klute
Early in Klute, Bree Daniels (Jane Fonda) returns home from an afternoon appointment with a John, has a bath, lights some candles, pours a glass of wine and sits at…
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Black Girl
“Some boomerang, this story,” an inspector observes, in the novella Black Girl by Ousmane Sembéne, which he adapted for film. I won’t reveal the scene of the crime, but the…
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The Trouble with Angels
I wasn’t sure about writing this review until reading a back issue of Film Comment wherein Joan Rivers listed it as one of her guilty pleasures. Please don’t ask for…
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The Green Pastures
Whiteness in America, Michael Eric Dyson writes, is the result of “breaking down or, at least to a degree, breaking up ethnicity, and then building up an identity that was…
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Downhill Racer
In junior high, I was given the most fantastic textbook. That might seem an oxymoron to you and maybe I had low standards at the time, but it was an…
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Paris Blues
Paris Blues has many shades, but only one is visible to us: a whole crew wrote and rewrote the script, and in receiving the reports on these various drafts, there…
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The Miracle Woman
As an average American high school student, in addition to being tested on what I could remember, I was tested on what I would become. There were personality tests, aptitude…
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I Knew Her Well
I Knew Her Well opens with a landscape shot of a beach, steadily panning across the sand and continuing onto the body of Adriana Astarelli (Stefania Sandrelli). We are primed…
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The Landlord
“If you didn’t sweat so much nobody’d take you for a landlord,” Fanny (Diana Sands) tells Elgar (Beau Bridges). “You could pass for a human being.” Actually, The Landlord does…
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