(in this series we present five short films slated for premiere at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival)

Co-writer/director Sophie Kargman’s "Query" was selected to world premiere at this year’s recently postponed Oscar-qualifying Tribeca Film Festival, which is due to be shown online in the coming months to select audiences. The film questions how heterosexuality is formed. It stars Justice

Kioumars Derambakhsh, the Iranian director, documentary maker and still photographer, died in Paris of COVID 19, on March 31st. During his long career, his many interests and wide culture caused him to direct a number of documentaries on a range of subjects, (including a thirteen-episode series on the drawings of Eugène Flandin, famed French 19th-century traveler to Iran, or ancient Armenian churches in Ispahan) feature films

A number of movie goers will surely identify with me when I say that, Swedish actor Max Von Sydow, who died on March 8th at the age ninety, has been part of my committed film-lover’s life for as far back as I can remember. His tall-as-a-tree lean—-later gnarled--body, his long face more and more gloomy as the years went by, were part of innumerable experiences, from the most esoteric Ingmar Bergman often indecipherable

Before Weinstein and before Epstein and a myriad lesser-known sexual predators, there was Roger Ailes. The story of the CEO of Fox News and others like him, much discussed in the last few years as illustrations of how the ugly and mighty fall is now brilliantly illustrated in “Bombshell.” Jay Roach gives us the tremendously entertaining story of a watershed moment at Fox, predating the #Metoo movement, portraying the stance of a number

We remember him as Vincent Van Gogh in “Lust for Life” (1957). In Stanley Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory,” (1957), he plays an officer during WWI who fights to overturn an unjust death sentence against three soldiers by his commanding officer; in “Spartacus,” (1960), again by Stanley Kubrick, he is the legendary slave who would not be cowed. (of the director, with whom he had differences, Douglas had this to say, "He'll be a fine director

Sam Mendes’s name for his film is right. It hits you in the face with the mud, blood and gloom that was there, heavily, relentlessly, during that terrible year following three years of horror and followed by an even worse one. Out of this war that Mendes described as “a chaos of mismanagement and tragedy,” he has made a war movie like none other. Eschewing regular scripts for war films, the storyline is about how to stop a battle

Introducing in a narrative flashbacks, fragments of dreams, partially remembered scenes has always been part and parcel of cinema. Examples abound. Look at classic films. The childhood sled scenes in “Citizen Kane” are indispensable. As is the famous flashback explaining the Gregory Peck character’s trauma in “Spellbound." The process works, when it is used within reasonable limits. When repeated endlessly