On August 25, 2016, the National Parks Service turns 100. To celebrate the centenary of this great and necessary institution, I suggest checking out The National Parks: America’s Best Idea (2009) from America’s chronicler Ken Burns. This six-part, twelve-hour plus series explores not just the beauty and legacy of America’s National Parks, but the history […]
Underground: Season 1 (2016), produced for the cable channel WGN, is a historical drama about the culture of slavery in America and the creation of the Underground Railroad which helped escaped slaves get to freedom. It is also a sometimes difficult show to watch because it reminds us that the sanctioned medieval brutality presented in […]
Queen & Country (2014), John Boorman’s first film in eight years, is a sequel to his autobiographical 1987 Hope and Glory, which was inspired by his experiences as a child sent to the country during the London Blitz in World War II. Queen & Country picks up the story of his fictional stand-in Bill Rohan […]
The most expensive Netflix original series to date, The Get Down arrives from creator / co-writer / director Baz Luhrmann (collaborating with Nas, Grandmaster Flash, Nelson George and others) and tells the story of the birth of hip-hip, punk, and disco through the lives of kids in the South Bronx of the seventies. It is […]
The Little Prince (2016), an animated feature based on the beloved novel by Antoine de Saint-Exupery and directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Mark Osborne (Kung Fu Panda), is a big-budget American production from a major studio and played in theaters around the world (where it was a success) but Sony dumped it straight to Netflix in […]
In The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011), Mark Cousins takes an unconventional, expansive, and almost exhaustive approach to the history of cinema. I can’t imagine that anyone who is not already captivated by cinema would even begin this immersive, ambitious 15-hour documentary series that attempts to encapsulate cinema, from birth to the present, and […]
Pay-Per-View / Video-On-Demand Melissa McCarthy is The Boss, a disgraced financial titan who turns a youth cookie drive into a hardball sales campaign. The R-rated comedy is available in an unrated version. Also on DVD and Blu-ray and at Redbox. Sing Street, from filmmaker John Carney (Once), tells an age-old story: boy meets girl, boy […]
The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967) gave Roger Corman, the director-producer who earned the nickname “King of the Bs,” the biggest budget of his career to date. After more than 40 films, most of them for the budget-challenged AIP, he was hired by 20th Century Fox and given the resources of their studio, casting department, […]
Set in the Union-occupied city of Alexandria in the Confederate state of Virginia in the midst of the American Civil War, Mercy Street (2016) explores the conflicts between North and South through the uneasy interactions between the occupying Union forces and Northern doctors at a Union army hospital. Set up in what had been the […]
