Contributions by:

Leonard Quart

Gentrifying Brooklyn: Two Documentaries

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There is little resemblance between the New York I grew up in, and the New York of 2013. My South Bronx neighborhood has over the decades gone through cataclysmic changes from a solid working-class area teeming with small stores and a vital street life, to a burned-out wasteland of empty lots filled with rubble and…

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Something in the Air: Assayas’ Portrait of Political and Personal Upheaval Post May ‘68 France

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In May 1968 France was roiling with mass demonstrations, student occupations, strikes, and riots. Initiated by a student revolt–more social and cultural (against convention and authority) than political–the students were then joined by workers in an assault on France’s most venerable institutions. Occurring during a time of relative economic prosperity, this upheaval turned into the…

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Aging in Films and Amour

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Hollywood in the past often depicted aging characters in stereotyped terms: the grumpy old codgers played by Walter Brennan; kindly grandmas played by Spring Byington; founts of aged wisdom played by actors like Sam Jaffe (today played by Hal Holbrook); or the idiosyncratic, freewheeling elderly women played by Ruth Gordon. And the films usually made…

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Inside Llewyn Davis: The Coens’ Melancholy and Luminous Ballad

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Wavy Gravy (aka Hugh Mooney), the Hog Farm activist and musician, once said, “if you can remember the sixties, you weren’t really there.” Wavy may have been on a lengthy acid trip, but the rest of us clearly remember the 60’s as an era of assassinations, civil rights and anti-war demonstrations, the beginnings of the…

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Boyhood

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Richard Linklater, the writer/director of the strikingly witty, verbal, and poignant Before Trilogy, shot his most recent film—the understated epic Boyhood —in 39 days, and in regular brief intervals over the course of 12 years. Boyhood’s prime focus is on the development of an ordinary-—bike riding, video game playing—dreamy six-year-old Texas boy, Mason Jr. (Ellar Coltrane) into an 18-year-old…

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Film Review: Selma, MLK, and Voting Rights: The Film Version

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It seems like an eternity has passed since the chants of “we shall overcome” to “I can’t breathe” and “hands up, don’t shoot.” In fact, a millennium seems to have gone by since that night in Grant Park on November 4th, 2008 when some Americans thought we were on the point of entering a post-racial…

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Hollywood Follows the Money: Films of the ‘Great Recession’

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In his Academy Award winning performance as the corporate raider Gordon Gekko in Wall Street (1987), Michael Douglas uttered his infamous credo that, “Greed is good.” However, a less widely remembered but an equally revealing Gekko comment was his statement that, “It’s all about the bucks, the rest is conversation.” Hollywood seems to have followed…

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Hollywood and the “Forever War.”

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In his book length journalistic accounts of the Iraq war (2003-2011) and the Afghanistan war (2001-the present) Dexter Filkins, who covered those conflicts for the New York Times and now writes for The New Yorker, referred to them in his title as the “Forever War (2008)” Clearly, that is how those wars must feel to…

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Hollywood’s African-American Films Since 2012

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It seems such a long time ago since the “Beer Summit,” of 2009. When President Obama sat down with Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates and Cambridge Police sergeant James Crowley. The Summit occurred after Crowley, had arrested Gates for breaking and entering his own home. Although it was a minor though toxic incident, it appeared…

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