How SamJack stole Tarantino’s epithet orgy ‘Django Unchained’ Uncle Tom, the black overseer created by Harriet Beecher Stowe and despised ever after, reappears to spy on and punish other slaves in Django Unchained. It is the role Samuel L. Jackson was born to play. Here named Stephen, Jackson’s Uncle Tom-style shuck-and-jive is prototypical–even atavistic–climaxing the profane, 
High Information/Low Interpretation in Bigelow’s yellow journalism comic strip Zero Dark Thirty opens during the second age of yellow journalism which is the same as in the 1890s when the press shamelessly sought readership through sensation, innuendo and jingoism (its news pages were indistinguishable from the lurid, tinted pages of comic strips). This comic-strip account of 
‘Yelling to the Sky’ is a Notable Debut Victoria Mahoney’s debut feature, Yelling to the Sky, updates the literature of writers like Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, J. California Cooper and Nella Larsen, yet it isn’t at all literary. It is entirely cinematic, a presentation of emotion and social circumstance that communicates visually more 
Historical man-sharing in ‘Hyde Park on Hudson’ Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s deification–once the preoccupation of Depression and WWII survivors–comes to an end in Hyde Park on Hudson, a tell-all semi-bio-pic that is really about the women in FDR’s harem. Screenwriter Richard Nelson’s presumptuous aspersions present FDR’s wife Eleanor (Olivia Williams) as a lesbian, his secretary Missy (Elizabeth 
Mamet’s ‘The Anarchist’ explores our social divide Debra Winger in The Anarchist. Broadway’s newest drama, The Anarchist, proves that David Mamet has not just become a conservative; he’s become a poet. Taking as his inspiration the 1981 Brinks incident where subversives from the Weatherman Underground were convicted for killing a Nyack, N.J., policeman, Mamet examines the motives 
Armond White on how ‘Killing Them Softly’ amps political movie war Brad Pitt in ‘Killing Them Softly’ Killing Them Softly earns a footnote in cultural history for being the first dramatic film to question the Obama cult. It happens in a thrilling climactic moment that is part of director Andrew Dominik’s scheme examining America’s current financial 
‘Hitchcock’ shows the maestro without humor Sacha Gervasi’s Anvil: The Story of Anvil, the 2010 chronicle of the little-known rock band, was a rare excellent documentary; a film distinguished by its good-hearted recognition of what lies beneath artistic motive. Only a little of that beneficence is apparent in Gervasi’s dramatic debut Hitchcock, which takes a fanciful approach 
How Spielberg’s ‘Lincoln’ parlays the ‘great man’ notions of history “You begin your second term with semi-divine status,” the 16th president of the United States is told in Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln. The evidence of that status is in the film’s mythifying visual style that presents Abraham Lincoln as an icon—silhouetted, spectral, sculptural. The people around 
Agent 007 James Bond (Daniel Craig) returns to his roots in Skyfall, defending the MI6 agency to which he’s always had steadfast dedication, even while gallantly enjoying its bachelor benefits. On home turf, Bond restores all of us to our pop culture roots; Skyfall’s national security plot, combining an arch villain’s (Javier Bardem) threats to 
