Jackie Robinson and Hollywood make history again We are fortunate to have been spared Spike Lee’s take on the Jackie Robinson story, which surely would have been spiteful; emphatic about race grievance and loaded with other Spikey tangents. But Brian Helgeland has made a superb tale about Robinson’s groundbreaking desegregation of baseball through the machinations 
Room 237 lets nerds shine Following the IFC Center’s very canny “The Films of Stanley Kubrick” series, comes the documentary Room 237 which sums up the Stanley Kubrick cult. Comprised of theories spoken by five different Kubrick nerds over an assemblage of movie clips and diagrams by director Rodney Ascher, Room 237 pretends to dissect 
Celebrated indie film ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’ confuses pandering with empathy In answer to the above question, “pickaninny” would be a viable option. Nine-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis, from the film Beasts of the Southern Wild, has become the youngest person ever nominated for a lead-actor Academy Award but not because her untrained performance is extraordinary acting; it’s 
The artistic advance of Eytan Fox’s ‘Yossi’ Oz Zehavi in Yossi. In the new Yossi, Israeli filmmaker Eytan Fox revisits the protagonist from his 2004 military love story Yossi & Jagger. A slight narrative shift shows the former army medic (played by Ohad Knoller) in his mid-30s, now an overweight cardiologist still mourning his lover’s death more than 10 
Armond White takes stock of the past movie year in annual list In 2012, politics became personal fantasy. Movies weren’t just entertainment but were used to justify escapist (possibly even anti-social) points of view. Critics misread films to suit their politics, but they could do so only because filmmakers were similarly biased. The year’s movies 
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 
