The fourth and final season of Netflix’s “Dear White People” feels a bit like an afterparty. It’s not as sharp, profound, or consistent a season as the first three, but it’s loaded with empathetic goodwill, a season that seems designed as a celebratory goodbye for the people who love these characters, and a reminder that…

Maya Cade is the compiler and curator of Criterion’s new Black Film Archive, a treasure trove of films from 1915-1979, ranging from the notorious to the neglected. Most encouraging, all of the films she has collected are available for streaming, bringing audiences to a selection that includes and transcends every genre and extends from the…

“Intrusion” is the latest middling Netflix thriller to hit the streaming service, this one coming with the angle of being more about a marriage’s problems than a home invasion. Call it “Scenes from a Marriage in a Netflix Thriller,” but then again those are generous qualifiers. The scenes from this marriage run flat, the thrills even…

New York filmmaker Rebecca Huntt puts her all of life into the malleable form of documentary filmmaking in “Beba,” a gorgeous visual memoir laced with poetry, memory, and truth. Among its many fascinating components, it’s a great example of someone following the unbeatable advice of writing what they know. In this case, Huntt shares her life…

2021 marks my twenty-fifth year attending the Toronto International Film Festival as accredited press, and it most certainly was the strangest yet by far. Over this quarter century I’ve witnessed TIFF emerge as the leading fall festival and most important public film gathering in the world (sorry, Berlin). For at least two decades, it’s been…

Having earned countless millions of dollars for Blumhouse Productions and Universal Pictures with “The Purge” and its sequels, writer/director James DeMonaco has been given the chance to make a film that is presumably closer to him on a personal level and which does not center on people being torn apart like fresh bread. The only problem…