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What a triumphant win for Steve McQueen, last night, for his “12 Years a Slave.” Let us hope that more black filmmakers will advance in their craft and career and reach their place in the sun some day, too (Lee Daniels and Ryan Coogler of “Fruitvale Station” have been leading the charge). The international film industry is rather too homogeneous, color-wise, so last night’s mega-win for the adaptation of Solomon Northup’s

The world’s lost a great filmmaker, France an eminent and prodigious artist.

In his films Alain Resnais, a force of nature whose career spanned no fewer than seventy-seven years (his first documented film dates to 1936), was preoccupied with the themes of memory, history and time. He created works of staggering importance like, “Night and Fog,” “Last year

Hany Abu-Assad’s “Omar” is nominated for an Academy Award, as was the Palestinian director’s film “Paradise Now,” also about life in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The film again brings sharply into focus the indignities large and small suffered by Palestinians on a daily basis. With the intensity of youth, baker Omar and his friends learn to bear the unbearable but also find ways around strictures. A graffiti-covered wall stands as constant

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It’s never too late to change who you are—however difficult that may be. Such is the rallying cry of Jason Cohen’s short "Facing Fear" (this documentary has been nominated in the "Best Documentary Short" category at this year's Academy Awards). Tim Zaal savagely attacked, along with fourteen other punk rock Neo-Nazis, Matthew Boger, a boy recently thrown out of his house for being gay. Twenty-five years later, Matthew Boger, now manager at the Museum of Tolerance

Right after World War II Jimmy Picard (Benicio Del Toro), a Blackfoot Indian who fought in France, is admitted to a military hospital in Topeka, Kansas. The institution is specialized in brain diseases and Jimmy Picard suffers from many problems : dizziness, temporary blindness, and hearing loss (a case of post-traumatic stress disorder?). In the absence of physiological causes, he’s given a diagnosis of schizophrenia.