Given his background in journalism, it’s little wonder that director Edward Zwick turned to an investigative reporter’s work as the basis for his latest film, “Trial by Fire.” The film is based on an article of the same name by David Grann published in the New Yorker in 2009 about a Texas man who was almost certainly wrongfully executed for the murder of his three children; DNA evidence exonerated him too late. Zwick and Grann had

Many a filmmaker has shot the inner city, the tough neighborhoods, in order to highlight the plight of the locals. In press documents for “Les Misérables” director Ladj Ly has said, “I hope the President [of France] watches the movie, so he can get a sense for what’s going on here.”Making movies is a personal project, innately, but not all stories are autobiographical. This one is. Ly has grown up in the same city of Montfermeil

CRITICS WEEK, Cannes - Amine, a man for whom life is a struggle of every instant (French-Moroccan actor Younes Bouab)—at least this is what his weary and beautiful gaze seems to say—is being pursued by the police somewhere in the Moroccan desert. He runs up to the top of a hill to bury his treasure before getting collared. A decade later, he comes out of jail and goes back to the hilltop to retrieve his treasure. Except that, during

Life sometimes requires us to swallow our ego, put out fires and resolve crises on a variety of fronts, family, work, children. How about if this were the case all the time? How do we confront these adversities, but more to the point, where do we find the gumption to do so?  In Franco Lolli’s very personal film “Litigante,” there’s something almost invasive about watching Silvia (Carolin Sanin) go through a life that seems to be getting

When planetary disaster strikes the planet, one turns to country-music for solace. The song in question was written by Grammy-nominated country music singer Sturgill Simpson and keeps making a comeback throughout “The Dead Don’t Die,” the new Jim Jarmusch film which opened the 2019 Cannes Film Festival. The song, which shows up repeatedly in dialogues, on a CD that changes hands, is a mantra, something for

Doris Day’s death at age 97 was announced today. A star in a league of her own, mainly between 1948 and 1968, she was one of those dainty American women living in a world of charming comedies where the most forward move possible in a couple would be a chaste kiss, where a housewife wearing high heels and an apron like those of a French maid busily put meatloaf or casserole in the oven, where blond hair were perfectly-coiffed

The documentary “Amazing Grace,” the filmed version of an Aretha Franklin concert in a black church, was originally filmed in 1972 by Sidney Pollack. The problem—lack of synchronization between image and sound—that prevented the project from being completed, has finally been fixed thanks to digital technology. That which gives us a superb and moving moment of music and film history and demonstrates