The uncanny confidence of Dick Gregory comes through from the opening minutes of “The One and Only Dick Gregory,” and he only becomes more formidable as the film unfolds.  As recounted by New York Times sports columnist Robert Lipsyte, who ghostwrote Gregory’s first book, Gregory, who had been hired in 1960 as a comic at the…

Many films have explored the anxiety, optimism and sometimes futility of first dates. It’s one of the great terrifying experiences many of us share with a stranger, who we may or may not ever see again. In Manuel Crosby and Darren Knapp’s film “First Date,” that hopeful feeling is put to the test of a…

Alternately eerie, frightening, coy and safe, the “Purge” films seem fated to stay trapped in an intellectual uncanny valley of sorts: too much and yet not enough. The series is about the thirst for violence embedded in the American character, and how ritualized and innate that tendency has always been. It’s a germ of a concept that can’t…

Chris Pratt took all the clout and popularity he amassed from starring in the “Jurassic World” and “Guardians of the Galaxy” franchises and used them to make … “The Tomorrow War,” a blandly derivative and overlong sci-fi thriller. Originally scheduled pre-pandemic to premiere in theaters, it’s now arriving on streaming through Amazon Prime Video, but…

Here’s the thing about talking baby movies (and adjacent television series): sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. Except they never really work. As much money as a stray franchise such as the (I shudder to even input these words) “Look Who’s Talking” movies might have made, none of the movies themselves are actually good.…

“It smelled like Afro Sheen and chicken,” says Musa Jackson of The Harlem Culture Festival, a weekly series of six concerts put on in Harlem’s Mt. Morris Park during the summer of 1969. Jackson attended when he was a kid, earning his first romantic crush in the process. I laughed at his amazing description, mentally…