Two fans of Martin Scorsese‘s 1999 urban thriller talk about its relevance to the pandemic. Scout Tafoya: Grief has no fixed interval. It can last a few minutes, a few hours, years, your whole life. Every trauma has its own rhythm and pace, and without warning sometimes we can look back and see that we’ve…

Roots leader Questlove told the Philadelphia Inquirer that when he first heard about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival that brought performers like The Staples Family, Mahalia Jackson, Gladys Knight and the Pips, the Fifth Dimension, Sly and the Family Stone, and 19-year-old Stevie Wonder to what was then called Mount Morris Park, his reaction was,…

“Wolfgang” is pretty much what you’d expect from a Disney+ documentary. Like the DisneyNature films, it’s strikingly pretty, not just in its gorgeous views of the Austrian countryside, but also in the interiors populated by talking heads and delectable foodstuffs. It’s also startlingly tame, as if its subject, famous celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck, was a…

Well, what would you do if you had a close family member who suffered from a life-threatening illness and was almost totally dependent on you for their survival? Unless you’re a total monster, my guess is that you’d do everything in your power to help them in any way. Now, what if the illness in question…

No fewer than half a dozen times throughout “False Positive,” an urban tale about the horrors of pregnancy, you hear the grating phrase mommy brain. “It’s a real thing,” everyone says, claiming that your forthcoming motherhood means you no longer truly control your own mind and decision-making, but instead, operate under the intoxicating, logic-defying influence…

Meyer Lansky is perhaps the only iconic American gangster upon whom was bestowed the arguably dubious honor of being killed off in an American gangster movie before he himself actually died. I refer, of course, to Hyman Roth of Coppola’s “The Godfather Part II,” played by Lee Strasberg, who avers “I’m a retired investor living…