Category Archives: Film

Hard rock fans know the name of Randy Rhoads, the exciting young guitarist who had shredded his way to center stage in Ozzy Osbourne’s first post-Black Sabbath solo band, a co-writer of “Crazy Train” and a standout on the two albums he blazed and helped co-write and co-produce, “Blizzard of Ozz” and “Diary of a […]

One of the great unsung stars of basketball — except maybe in Los Angeles — is Raymond Lewis, who became something of a high school legend, scoring as many as 80 points in a game, and drawing interest from 200 schools to recruit him. Yet he is also a basketball anomaly, as the only first […]

Dina Amer’s mesmerizing, elegiac film “You Resemble Me” begins with the lovely interactions of a couple of sisters, age seven and 9, tumbling through life and the outskirts of Paris in their gaily colored dresses that do, in fact, make them resemble each other.  That the dresses were lifted from somewhere (and the removal of […]

To everything there is a season. So say Ecclesiastes, Pete Seeger and the Byrds.  And so there is for love, as Paul Schwartz depicts in his modest little film “The Seasons — Four Love Stories.” As its title make clear, the film presents four slightly interlocked stories of love involving very different stages of life.  […]

When Warren Pereira began making a documentary film in his native India about a tiger reserve he readily admits, “I don’t know what I was doing.” Of the dominant male of the Ranthambhore Tiger Reserve he started to concentrate on, he says, “he had a cool beard.” What he didn’t know luckily didn’t kill him, […]

If you want to do a quick offhand comedy about a couple of guys competing in a frantic, slapstick cartoon style, you’d make a TikTok. If it got a smile, fine. If not, no harm done, scroll on. Back in the last century, to create such a work, you’d have make a short film, which […]

Before he died in 2019 at 68, the television writer Gordon Bressack left behind seven unproduced film scripts. As a dutiful son, the director James Cullen Bressack has decided not only to make one of them, but also fund most of its production himself. The younger Bressack’s previous films include one shot entirely on iPhone […]

Music is often an important component of film, elevating the action and visual settings while usually taking a back seat. As effective as it can be, it’s rarely central to a film’s story or central emotion. The exception is Martha Coolidge’s “I’ll Find You,” a solid romance set during World War II in which a […]

“Everybody Dance” is the motto of Bonnie Schlachte’s Center of Ballet for All Kids in Agoura Hills, Calif. where special-needs kids of a wide age and abilities can learn and enjoy the elements of classical dance. “Everybody Dance” is also the name of Dan Watt’s sensitive documentary about the enterprise, its enthusiastic participants and their […]

For people in Flint and many other communities, water impurities are no laughing matter. Millions are estimated to have to consume contaminated tap water.  But for “Love in Kilnerry,” a slight new film from a first-time filmmaker, it’s kind of cute. In the case of the tiny town of Kilnerry (once meant to be in […]