A less familiar but immeasurably meaningful chapter of Civil War history, a sort of precursory case of affirmative action, to do with the formation of the first black fighting unit in the United States. The unprecedented and unrepeatable circumstances of this story are special enough, unique enough, to refreshen even …
An Oprah film (or anagrammatically, a Harpo Film) for Oprah's audience, with their insatiable appetite for uplift. The fact-based story of the debate team at little Wiley College, an all-black institution in segregationist Texas, and of their climactic showdown on the topic of Civil Disobedience against the national champs of …
David Ayer resumes his self-appointed role as police watchdog, this time as director in addition to screenwriter (Training Day, Dark Blue). The man he has his eye on, a very disturbed veteran of the action in Afghanistan, is not already a policeman but soon hopes to be. When, however, he …
Bigoted white cop receives the transplanted heart of a dapper black attorney, is haunted by the dead man's ghost -- you can bet the house there'll be a play on the word "spook" -- and together they delve into a Capitol Hill cover-up. It's sort of a Thorne Smith with …
Spike Lee would appear to have been watching too much television. Or anyway, to have not yet settled on which of its dizzying array of styles he wants to emulate: athletic-shoe ad, music video, ESPN highlight reel, or issues-oriented Afterschool Special. This fidgety channel surfing will not be stabilized simply …
Special pleading on behalf of the one-time prizefighter, Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, railroaded into jail by a Javert-like Philadelphia cop. The presentation is so lopsided that it arouses more mistrust than outrage. And the curious Toronto household (two men, one woman, and a black foster child from Brooklyn), credited with effectuating …
Unabashedly commercial enterprise from Spike Lee, a lightweight heist-and-hostage caper with a heavyweight cast: Clive Owen as the bank-job mastermind, Denzel Washington as the New York cop who catches the call, Jodie Foster as the smugly enigmatic free-lance troubleshooter with friends in high places ("My bite's much worse than my …
Director Nick (son of John) Cassavetes kicks around health-care issues and medical ethics in addition to the Little Man hero, whose last name is actually Archibald and not Public: a devoted family man, a regular churchgoer, a hard worker, although the factory has started farming out jobs to Mexico and …
From one man of integrity to another comes director Denzel Washington's adaptation of an essay penned by Charles Monroe King (Michael B. Jordan). 1st Sgt. King kept a journal for his son to be read in the event he didn't return from Baghdad. This is his story.
Joe ‘Deke’ Deacon (Denzel Washington), a Bakersfield cop with a spiritual side (hence the nickname) and a tainted past as an L.A. Detective, is assigned a return trip to his roots to pick up a pair of blood-stained boots. But rather than retrieving the evidentiary material, all Deke seems able …
The title is about one-seventh right: Denzel Washington, from the moment his black-clad form rides into view over a golden ridge, is pretty gosh-darn magnificent as Chisolm, a wide-ranging lawman possessed of a carefully cultivated calm, a deadly eye, and a crazy-quick draw. Unfortunately for Antoine Fuqua’s remake of the …
This three-hour-and-twenty-one-minute movie has no reason to be that long other than by the kind of thinking that equates size with significance. Director Spike Lee himself has suggested that his abecedarian "biopic" is in the vein of a David Lean epic, but the only similarity you are apt to be …
Jonathan Demme's ill-advised remake. The main point to be made about the 1962 original is that, with its historical co-ordinates of McCarthyism, the Cold War, and the Yellow Peril, it dates rather badly, and thus cries out for a major overhaul. But while the John Frankenheimer version — positing a …
Soft-boiled thriller about an alcohol-impaired bodyguard (Denzel Washington) who goes on a revenge rampage after his button-cute charge (Dakota Fanning) gets snatched by a Mexico City kidnapping ring. Long and lugubrious, the movie sets aside a full hour for the guard to bond with the body, dropping his defenses under …