Some movies will tell you where their story is going. There’s little surprise left when the viewer can predict a turn or even guess the dialogue. The other side of that is the movie that’s so unlike anything you’ve seen before, you can’t possibly fathom what’s next. Many good-to-fine movies exist within those two extremes,…

With full transparency, I should confess that I am new to “In Treatment.” Not to the highs and lows of a therapy session, and certainly not to the idea of characters only talking to each for 30 minutes straight, but to the HBO series that became a hit with Gabriel Byrne as a therapist sitting…

In “Hollywood Shuffle,” Robert Townsend’s Bobbie Taylor fantasizes about a boycott against his decision to appear in a Blaxploitation film called “Jivetime Jimmy’s Revenge.” One of the angry Black activists is the head of the NAACP, a distinguished looking man whose advice to Black actors is catchy, hilarious, and more than a little controversial. “They’ll…

When Aziz Ansari was accused of sexual misconduct back in 2018, it seemed like his award-winning Netflix series “Master of None” was likely over. After all, the series that Ansari co-created with Alan Yang was a loosely fictional version of his real life and that reality had the kind of narrative-shifting revelation that makes it…

Sometimes when life gives you lemons, you only have lemons. That bittersweet feeling pervades every minute of creators Kevin Iso and Dan Perlman’s ten-episode Showtime series “Flatbush Misdemeanors.” Adapted from Iso and Perlman’s digital series, the pair star in a show that takes place in the quickly gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood of Flatbush. Their characters dodge…

As the world gradually begins to reopen thanks to vaccinations and the new No-Mask guidelines from the CDC (Center for Disease Control), film festivals are starting to release their dates. But questions remain—will they or won’t they be in-person events, or will they become a selection of hybrid models with some films and programs presented…