- Keep on Dreaming: Reverend Jesse Jackson (1941-2026) (February 17, 2026)
In the early hours of Tuesday, February 17, 2026, the Reverend Jesse Jackson left us at the age of 84. No one can claim shock at receiving the news, due to Jackson’s advanced years and the numerous health difficulties that beset him in the last decades of his life. And yet, his taking leave of us has an unusual reverberation. In my lifetime, America has had few spokespersons for progressive values as effective as Rev. Jackson. For those of us born after 1970, he was a vital and singular link to a bygone era. He served as a bridge between the Civil Rights Movement, which feels like a lost Age of Heroes to those of us born after, and the end of the American Century.
The photographs taken just seconds before the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968 at the Lorraine Motel depict King standing between the young Jackson and Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Sr. (1926-1990); the mise-en-scène of those photos would prove to be fateful. Jackson was famously one of King’s proteges, while Abernathy (two years older than King) was his trusted lieutenant. King’s assassination rudely ended his apprenticeship as a civil rights activist. Jackson, who was soon after ordained a Baptist minister, was the national director of Operation Breadbasket, an organization dedicated to economic empowerment of Black families, which was part of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
King’s death meant Rev. Abernathy was now in charge of the SCLC, and Jackson and Abernathy clashed. By the end of 1971, the Shakespearean power struggle between the ascendant Jackson and the waning Abernathy came to a head. Jackson left to start his own organization, Operation PUSH. And the stage was set for the young minister to come into his own.
Born in Greenville, South Carolina, to Helen Burns (18 years old when she gave birth) and Noah Robinson (he was Burns’ married neighbor, aged 33 when their child was born), Jackson took the name of his stepfather, Charles Jackson, who married Burns one year after she gave birth and adopted her child. There’s some evidence Jackson was teased by other kids regarding his parentage, but he later remarked that he felt he had a surplus of fathers, not a deficit, as he developed a relationship with his biological father.
Jackson was a child of the Jim Crow South who nevertheless became a formidable presence in his segregated schools. By high school, he was a popular athlete, earned good grades, and was elected student body president. And then came the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-1956, which served as a call to arms for many young people across the country. A new day had begun.
Taking a football scholarship at the University of Illinois after graduating from high school in 1959, Jackson returned home to Greenville and found himself unable to use the public library for a school project. So he enlisted the help of seven high school students and launched a sit-in, or “read-in,” strike in July of 1960. By September, the library was successfully desegregated. That fall, Jackson left the University of Illinois and transferred to North Carolina A&T, a historically Black university in Greensboro, North Carolina. He played football there, but unlike at Illinois, he also played quarterback, was elected student body president, and was involved in many local desegregation campaigns.
He earned a B.S. in Sociology in 1964, and then enrolled in the Chicago Theological Seminary, beginning his long relationship with the city, one that would last the rest of his life. He left the seminary in 1966, just a few credits shy of his Master of Divinity, to focus full-time on his activism. By then, he was in King’s orbit, having participated in the Selma to Montgomery marches.
After his relatively brief time at King’s side came to a close and he struck out on his own, Jackson attempted to fill the void created by King’s absence. But as a younger man, he knew he could appeal to the younger generation King had largely lost before his death. He grew out his hair into an impressive afro, and his signature oratory became omnipresent.
Jackson makes an appearance in two of the seminal documentaries of the early seventies: William Greaves’ “Nationtime” (1972), and Mel Stuart’s “Wattstax” (1973). In the latter film, Jackson’s inimitable voice provides the film’s coda. Stuart uses audio of Jackson’s signature “I Am Somebody” speech as we see the faces of all the Black folks who have offered commentary throughout the film about the state of the race. It shows the primacy Jackson occupied at this critical time.
“I Am Somebody” was a key turning point in the rhetoric of the time. Building on his predecessors’ important work, Jackson understood that hard-won opportunities in the workplace or academia would be hollow victories if the internalized racism of white supremacy wasn’t attacked head-on. He wanted Black people to know that degrees and good jobs wouldn’t make them important; he wanted them to know they were already important. When he said those words, millions believed him.
Throughout the 1970s, Operation PUSH racked up a string of wins through nationwide boycotts due to the racist policies of certain brands. Even the mere word that Jackson’s organization was scrutinizing a company could prompt preemptive changes. When the ’80s arrived, and the Reagan Revolution began to roll back many of the victories of the Civil Rights Movement, Jackson began to focus on coalition politics, making inroads into feminist causes and the Gay Rights movement at a time when few cishet Black male activists did.
1983 set the stage for the first of his two historic Democratic presidential campaigns. Harold Washington’s April victory to become the first Black mayor of Chicago no doubt stoked Jackson’s own ambitions. And in a move widely mocked when he first announced it, Jackson took it upon himself to negotiate with the Syrian government for the release of an African-American U.S. Navy pilot, Lt. Robert O. Goodman, who had been captured when he was shot down over Lebanon. Jackson secured his release and brought Goodman home to a White House welcome from President Reagan. Jackson’s critics were stunned into silence.
With his 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns, Jackson endured patronizing dismissal from much of the national media. And he did not get the backing of Coretta Scott King and much of the Civil Rights Movement Old Guard, who preferred tried-and-true candidates. But Jackson’s eloquence and his progressive vision were incredibly effective in the Reagan Era, when the very word “liberal” had become a pejorative.
Jackson’s campaign platform called for ratification of the ERA, a single-payer health care system, sanctions against South Africa, the creation of a Palestinian state, the end of corporate tax cuts, and a return to New Deal era spending. Senator Bernie Sanders has many times cited Jackson’s campaigns as being important and influential in helping him visualize the kind of presidential campaigns he would launch.
Neither of Jackson’s bids was successful in terms of securing the nomination, but the difference between 1984 (when he was perpetually in third place behind Sen. Gary Hart and former VP Walter Mondale, who would go on to be crushed by Reagan) and 1988 (when he gave Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis a run for his money as a close second) spoke volumes. Jackson’s vision spoke to many Americans, and the Democratic Party would ignore his ideas at its peril.
He made his missteps, to be sure. There was the time Jackson used an antisemitic slur to describe Jews and New York City in a conversation he thought was off-the-record. There were multiple credible accusations of sexual harassment brought by female staffers and journalists. And in 2008, a hot mic caught him suggesting that then-candidate Senator Barack Obama should be castrated for chastising Black men for neglecting their fatherly duties. Months later, Jackson was seen at the Hyde Park celebration of Obama’s victory, weeping with a small American flag in the hand that framed his face. It became an iconic image on a historic night.
The 2000s and 2010s saw Jackson on the wane. Reverend Al Sharpton had emerged as a fleet-footed competitor in the national arena as a spokesman for progressive politics. The younger man outstripped the elder, as often happens. Jackson no doubt counted himself lucky to live to see the first African-American President of the United States, and he has been widely and justly cited as an important forefather to that moment. Jackson’s critics from the old guard he came up under often were wary of his rapacious ambition. History will have the last say on that.
Reverend Jackson ends his long life in the public eye with very few ideological missteps to apologize for. He was on the right side of so many issues, even when being on the right side publicly was a risky proposition.
It is sadly ironic to lose him during Black History Month, during a dark time when so much he tried to stop is currently flourishing, but Jackson prepared us for this moment. If you go back and listen to his lauded 1988 Democratic National Convention speech, known for its refrain of “keep hope alive,” it is stirring and evergreen:
“You must never stop dreaming. Face reality, yes, but don’t stop with the way things are. Dream of things as they ought to be. Dream. Face pain, but love, hope, faith, and dreams will help you rise above the pain. Use hope and imagination as weapons of survival and progress, but you keep on dreaming, young America. Dream of peace. Peace is rational and reasonable. War is irrational in this age, and unwinnable.”
- Book Excerpt: The World of Black Film: A Journey Through Cinematic Blackness in 100 Films by Ashley Clark (February 17, 2026)
There are often projects whose complexity and importance I find difficult to fathom. How does one, for instance, distill the history of Black film into 100 titles? How does one define “Black” separately and in conjunction with “film”? Should a movie be helmed by a Black director to be considered a Black work? What about movies with majority Black casts but whose protagonist is white? What if the film hails from a part of the diaspora that doesn’t view itself as Black? With his latest book, The World of Black Film: A Journey Through Cinematic Blackness in 100 Films, programmer and author Ashley Clark has given himself the challenging task of answering those questions in a comprehensive, lovingly crafted survey that celebrates and illuminates the multifaceted rhythms, voices, and stories cinematically derived from Black life.
Clark’s book, designed by Alexander Boxill Design and published via the London-based Laurence King, is an aesthetically attractive work. The bright green cover, which features a black and white image of Mbissine Thérèse Diop in Ousmane Sembène’s landmark film “Black Girl” (1966) teases the temporal and geographic possibilities of an overview that begins with the American silent “Lime Kiln Field Day,” which was filmed 53 years before Sembène’s film in 1913, and concludes with the British period piece “Blitz,” which was released 58 years after “Black Girl” in 2024. The other works in between these trio of films inspire further narratives to be gleaned regarding the rare surviving examples of early Black filmmaking, the rise of Black stories out of Africa, and the seeming deluge, at least compared with cinema’s pre-classical era, of contemporary Black moviemaking.
These narratives sprout organically and cohesively due to Clark’s impressive expertise as a programmer, researcher, and writer. Born in South London, Clark has curated film seasons at London’s BFI Southbank, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and Toronto’s TIFF Lightbox. He also served as the director of film programming at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), where his distinguished series Black 90s: A Turning Point in American Cinema re-introduced a bevy of underseen of Black films from around the world. He has also previously published the monograph Facing Blackness: Media and Minstrelsy in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled.
Clark is currently the Curatorial Director at the Criterion Collection. The latter’s library of films, which was once critiqued for lacking Black filmmakers, has, under Clark, expanded to include works ranging from festival favorites like “This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection” to Blaxploitation classics like “Buck and the Peacher” to rediscoveries, such as “Compensation” and “Drylongso.”
Those experiences are on incredible display here, particularly in how he chose what to highlight and why. As he writes in the book’s introduction, giving the project some rules was necessary. The author opted to restrict himself to a single entry per filmmaker, and included selections from films that center the Black experience but are by non-Black directors. He also doesn’t limit his project to feature films either, spotlighting shorts, hybrid movies, and even a web series to sit alongside narrative features and documentaries.
Moreover, Clark makes the daring decision to include works that are only available in archives. That last choice might strike some as odd: Why write about movies no one can see? Clark does so, one would guess, because to not write about them would constitute an erasure in itself, resulting in a grave subtraction from one’s understanding of the evolution of Black film. Also, oftentimes, writing about films allows them to be seen. Not just in a contemporary sense of recognition, but as well as putting them on a radar for future restoration, which could open the door for possible programming.
The reason all of these disparate films work as a larger fabric within this book is because of Clark’s relaxed yet detailed writing, which attends to “Nothing But a Man” and “Madea Goes to Jail” with equal thoughtfulness. His reflective words are matched with a vibrant array of stills, making each page turn feel like a sacred meeting between the reader and a crucial truth.
The World of Black Film: A Journey Through Cinematic Blackness in 100 Films was released in UK on February 12 and the US on February 17.
We thank Ashley Clark and copyright holder Laurence King for permission to print this excerpt.
- The Eye of a Camera: Frederick Wiseman (1930-2026) (February 17, 2026)
The great documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman lived 96 years, long enough to watch the world remake itself many times over. Most of his movies were studies of communities, subcultures, and pursuits, and were titled after the institutions, locations or jobs they depicted: “Hospital,” “Basic Training,” “Juvenile Court,” “Primate” (about animal testing”, “Canal Zone,” “La Comédie-Française ou l’Amour joué,” “Central Park,” “Boxing Gym,” “Jackson Heights” and “City Hall.” Wiseman’s filmography as a director kicked off with 1967’s “Titicut Follies,” about a state-run mental institution in Bridgeport, Massachusetts, and continued through 2023’s “Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros,” about the day-to-day operations of three family-owned restaurants in France. His work would be considered essential even if it did nothing more than capture specific places and people at specific points in history. But it’s much more than that. Taken as a whole, Wiseman’s features exemplify nonfiction filmmaking at peak originality and exactness.
Wiseman directed nearly 50 movies. All were made in accordance with rules and conditions devised by Wiseman, and were as uniquely specific as any in cinema history. First, Wiseman would get permission to film somewhere that didn’t normally tolerate film crews, at such length (anywhere from four weeks to three months) that the people who passed through his viewfinder forgot they were on camera and gave him material that seemed as close to authentic and natural as anybody could get. Wiseman would live in those spaces, often amassing hundreds of hours’ worth of material showing people and communities caught in the act of existing. Then he and his assistants would sift through the material, pick the most fascinating or informative bits, and assemble them into narrative mosaics of then-contemporary life.
The results were mesmerizing in their placid focus, despite or maybe because of how they ignored received wisdom about how to make a proper documentary. Wiseman had no interest in moving things along to prevent the audience from getting bored. Where most documentaries keep their running time between 90 and 105 minutes so they’ll fit in a two-hour time slot on TV, Wiseman’s routinely ran three to six hours with intermissions. There were no narrators or formal interviews. He didn’t use onscreen graphics or narration. He didn’t begin a film with a brisk summary of the work you were about to watch, or end it with a summation, or even a parting thought. His editing was precise and deliberate in its choices, but it was executed with such subtlety that you couldn’t be sure if Wiseman was consciously drawing connections between outwardly disparate people, facts, or events, or if you’d done that on your own.
Wiseman was a Boston lawyer who switched to filmmaking after producing 1963’s “The Cool World,” a low-budget drama about a Harlem youth gang directed by Shirley Clarke, a rare Black female filmmaker. In 1966, Wiseman shot his debut “Titicut Follies,” after taking his law students there on a field trip. The movie’s images of inmates being neglected, taunted, improperly medicated, force-fed, and stripped naked were so horrifying that the state sought a court injunction to prevent it from premiering at the 1967 New York Film Festival on grounds that it violated inmates’ privacy. This was the opening salvo in an ongoing legal battle that seemed to end with a federal appeals court deciding that “Titicut Follies” could only be shown to people in jobs related to medicine and its institutions. (The US Supreme Court could have heard the case one more time, but declined.)
Then, two decades later, the families of seven inmates who had died at Bridgewater between 1967 and 1987 sued the state of Massachusetts. One of the plaintiff’s lawyers argued that if “Titicut Follies” had been given a proper release, the public would have been appalled enough to demand reforms that would have saved those inmates’ lives. In 1991, a Superior Court judge concluded that the movie was no longer a privacy violation because most of the inmates in the movie had died by then, and that the First Amendment right to free expression was more important anyway. The ruling allowed “Titicut Follies” to be shown publicly for the first time, 25 years after its completion. (It was unveiled on PBS, which would go on to become Wiseman’s most important patrons.)
Wiseman came up during the formative years of Direct Cinema, a movement originated by documentary filmmaker Robert Drew. Drew’s movies about John F. Kennedy’s presidency, “Primary” and “Crisis,” were works of exceptional frankness, made with the enthusiastic cooperation of the president, who agreed with Drew’s mission to record history as it happened, in an intimate, quietly observational style. Drew’s approach was only possible because of a recently invented advance in the nonfiction filmmaking toolkit: a battery-powered, handheld, shoulder-mounted 16mm film camera, outfitted with a shotgun microphone that could capture dialogue on the other side of a room or across a noisy street. The sound was recorded directly to the same spools of film unreeling within the camera, rather than being recorded separately by a boom operator and a sound engineer and merged in postproduction.
All of a sudden, work that once required separate picture and sound crews, lighting kits, and 35mm cameras too heavy to carry for hours on end could be done by one or two people. It could also enable what would later be called “fly on the wall” filmmaking, renamed “cinema verite” by French New Wave filmmakers who adopted it for fiction and added many innovative, energetic, low-budget films to the canon, including ”The 400 Blows” and “Breathless.” Documentaries made this way tended to adhere to a minimalistic, truth-oriented code. Events could be observed by the filmmakers, but not initiated or manipulated on location or through montage editing. Sound could not be dubbed after the fact, nor could events be shown out-of-sequence to make the movie more superficially dramatic or simplify a complicated chain of events.
An impressive group of US filmmakers emerged from this movement, including Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, the sibling duo of Albert and David Maysles, and their editor Charlotte Zwerin, who later segued into directing. But none practiced their trade with the monklike zeal of Wiseman. In a 2000 Star-Ledger interview to promote his two part, four hour, PBS-funded epic “Belfast, Maine,” about life in the eponymous fishing village, Wiseman told me he didn’t appreciate being lumped in with other filmmakers in the Direct Cinema movement because to one degree or another, all but Wiseman routinely broke the same rules they’d set for themselves, allowing themselves a bit of post-production dialogue replacement or a pop music-scored montage as a treat.
Which isn’t to say Wiseman saw himself as a heroic avatar of non-intervention. He often told interviewers that the location shoots for his movies were conducted under a non-interventionist policy, but that in the editing process, he’d avail himself of editing’s liberating powers, and create a work that was more of a subjective personal take than something in the vein of a reference book. Accepting an 2016 honorary Oscar for his unique contributions to cinema, Wiseman was self-deprecating about his process, which could seem to the uninitiated like no process. “I usually know nothing about the subject before I start, and I know there are those that feel I know nothing about it when it’s finished,” he told the audience.
In interviews with publications that cared about aesthetics, Wiseman admitted he was working mainly from instinct, on location as well as in the editing room, and did not consider any of his films to be definitive statements on their chosen topics, but glimpses of moments in time that accumulated power and suggested meanings when laid end-to-end on an editing timeline.
Wiseman’s movies recapture the original impulse that drove early cinema: to show things that viewers might not experience otherwise, be it a bare-knuckle boxing match, a train pulling into a French railway station, or the construction of the Panama Canal. And yet, in their meditative, hands-off way, these proto-documentaries were aesthetically radical, because they rejected every supposed norm of motion picture storytelling, including ones that had been explored by his colleagues in the Direct Cinema movement.
The way he talked about them sometimes made it sound like as much a record of a roving mind as Kenneth Anger’s experimental films, Jean Luc-Godard’s essay movies, and David Lynch’s phantasmagoric explorations of his dreams and nightmares. In a 1994 interview with CINEASTE, Wiseman said, “This great glop of material which represents the externally recorded memory of my experience of making the film is of necessity incomplete. The memories not preserved on film float somewhat in my mind as fragments available for recall, unavailable for inclusion but of great importance in the mining and shifting process known as editing. This editorial process is sometimes deductive, sometimes associational, sometimes non-logical and sometimes a failure. The crucial element for me is to try and think through my own relationship to the material, by whatever combination of means is compatible. This involves a need to conduct a four-way conversation between myself, the sequence being worked on, my memory, and general values and experience.”
Wiseman’s films are as recognizably Wiseman’s as all the films of Hollywood directors routinely name-checked as masters of auteurist filmmaking. Once you’ve seen a couple of his movies, you can identify the rest from watching a couple of minutes of a scene on somebody else’s phone. His stated approach to capturing reality evoked the opening lines of Christopher Isherwood’s I Am a Camera: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.” But the reality was something else. The passivity ended once the editing began.
“I try to avoid imposing a preconceived view on the material,” he told The Paris Review in a 2018 interview. “Editing is a process that combines the rational and the nonrational. I have learned to pay as much attention to peripheral thoughts at the edge of my mind as to any formally logical approaches to the material. My associations are often as valuable as my attempts at deductive logic. It’s the old cliché—you find a solution to a problem because you dream it, or you’re walking down the street and it occurs to you, or you think of it in the shower. I’ve resolved editing problems many times that way, by trying to be alert to the way my mind—or what’s left of it—thinks about the material.”
- Remembering the Forgotten Movies of the 2026 Oscar Season (February 17, 2026)
Every year, the Oscars get it wrong. By “it,” I mean the nominations and, later, the winners—and by “wrong,” I mean that their choices fail to completely line up with your own personal favorites. Naturally, then, it’s inevitable that a degree of discontent is baked into the proceedings, leaving film fans complaining about the omissions and snubs. Although let’s be fair: Any Academy Awards that chooses to honor major films like “One Battle After Another,” “Sinners,” “Sirât,” and “Marty Supreme” is actually getting it right a lot of the time.
Nonetheless, once the Oscar nominations are announced, so many worthy films immediately get brushed aside because they didn’t earn a single nod. That narrowing of the race, which throws a huge spotlight on the nominated movies, means so many others are largely forgotten about. In the eyes of the media, it’s almost as if they never existed.
For the third straight year, I’m very happy to pay tribute to 10 great films from the past year whose titles you won’t hear mentioned during the Oscars on March 15. As always, narrowing it down to 10 was its own version of culling the field, and I’m sorry to leave off so many fine movies that might have been among your own highlights of 2025. But whether I snubbed them or the Academy did, those films have lost none of their luster. If anything, a personal beloved choice sometimes seems even more luminous because our love for the film isn’t widely shared—it becomes a treasure we get to keep close to our heart. In alphabetical order, here’s my salute to some such jewels.
“BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions”
Last year’s Sundance featured myriad exceptional nonfiction films. All five Oscar nominees for Best Documentary debuted at the Park City festival, alongside such other memorable documentaries as “Predators” and “Zodiac Killer Project.” Add to that list visual artist and music video director Kahlil Joseph’s stunning feature-length debut. Based on his own video installation, “BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions” opens with a consideration of Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience, a 1999 collection (since expanded) that sought to encompass the totality of Black history.
But that tome is merely the starting point for Joseph’s ambitious, dizzying work, which plays like a record album, each new vignette serving as a separate “track.” The film honors Black journalists, thinkers, and leaders who have fought to center the Black experience, but “BLKNWS” is not limited to the past. (Indeed, one of the movie’s key lines of dialogue is “Do you even remember the future?”) With its forward-looking mixture of sources and art forms—making room for dance, poetry, sculpture, social media, music, and more—Joseph blends autobiography with commentary, fiction with nonfiction. It’s a knockout.
“Caught by the Tides”
Is Zhao Tao the most acclaimed actress most American moviegoers have never heard of? Just recently turned 49, she has been the star of her husband, Jia Zhangke,’s films for roughly half of her life, starting with his 2000 breakthrough “Platform.” The Chinese writer-director has devoted his career to chronicling his homeland’s uneasy embrace of globalization, which has marginalized poorer communities and changed the nation’s very understanding of itself. Zhao’s expressive, melancholy face has often personified that societal tension, especially so in “Caught by the Tides,” one of Jia’s most radical films.
Here, he pulls from footage he’s shot for previous movies—including “Still Life” and “Ash Is Purest White”—to tell a decades-spanning tale of two lovers (Zhao Tao, Li Zhubin) that’s set against the country’s changing character. Drawing comparisons to films like “Boyhood,” “Caught by the Tides” captures its protagonists as they seemingly age in real time, leading to a newly shot final sequence that plays like a bittersweet summation of Jia and Zhao’s lifework. She’s never been so luminous.
“Familiar Touch”
Writer-director Sarah Friedland rightly describes her unsentimental feature debut, which won three prizes at the 2025 Venice Film Festival, as a political film. Other movies about the elderly treat their subjects as overly adorable, but “Familiar Touch” allows for not such cutesiness to intrude. The movie stars venerable stage actress Kathleen Chalfant as Ruth, who is sent to an assisted living center by her concerned, loving son (H. Jon Benjamin) once her dementia becomes more pronounced.
Friedland, who has experience as a care companion, shot Ruth’s awkward navigation of her new life at an actual Pasadena center, recruiting the residents to be part of the filmmaking process. What emerges is a touching meditation on aging that doesn’t shy away from the limits of medical care during our twilight years. Chalfant was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award, a deserving recognition for a performance that nimbly conveys Ruth’s fear and resignation as her mind starts slipping away. But kudos also go to Friedland for making an honest film about the American healthcare system and the ways we tend to marginalize and infantilize the aged in popular culture.
“A Little Prayer”
So few American films get small-town life right, which is why it’s always worth celebrating one that does. Not surprisingly, one of the best examples in recent years, “A Little Prayer,” comes from the writer of 2005’s “Junebug.” Filmmaker Angus MacLachlan once again sets the action in North Carolina, introducing us to a loving but troubled suburban family led by kindly patriarch Bill (David Strathairn).
Running a factory with his son David (Will Pullen), Bill starts to suspect that David is having an affair with a coworker, which especially displeases Bill because he has such fondness for David’s wife Tammy (Jane Levy). As Bill struggles with whether to say anything to Tammy or his wife, Venida (Celia Weston), he must also contend with the abrupt return home of his restless, irresponsible daughter, Patti (Anna Camp).
“A Little Prayer” captures all the gentle rhythms of domestic life far away from the big cities, and Strathairn does stellar work as a good man unsure of the right thing to do for either his daughter or his daughter-in-law. Few American films inspire comparisons to the quietly observant, subtly emotional approach of Yasujirō Ozu—this one does.
“The Mastermind”
Josh O’Connor’s career is just getting started, so one shouldn’t be shocked that he has yet to receive an Oscar nomination. But what about Kelly Reichardt? This singular filmmaker’s ninth feature is among her finest, starring O’Connor as J.B., a going-nowhere family man in 1970 who plots a heist at a local art museum. “The Mastermind” upends the conventions of the crime-thriller to deliver a seriocomic character study of a directionless, privileged middle-class American unaware of the tumultuous political climate swirling around him.
In the process, Reichardt also writes an astounding homage to the sort of revolutionary films that littered the landscape during Hollywood’s 1970s golden age, except with her own unique perspective on individuals’ wary relationship with society. She found the perfect rising talent for the job: O’Connor starred in four movies in 2025, but this was his high-water mark.
“My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow”
Winning Best Documentary from the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the National Society of Film Critics, Julia Loktev’s engrossing portrait of the embattled journalists working for TV Rain, Russia’s last independent news agency, was one of 2025’s most critically-acclaimed films. The Academy’s failure to nominate “My Undesirable Friends” will go down as one of that branch’s most questionable omissions, alongside “Hoop Dreams” and “The Thin Blue Line.” The documentary takes viewers inside the newsroom and into the apartments of these young, mostly female reporters, who are trying to expose the corruption running rampant within Vladimir Putin’s regime.
But the film’s power stems from its incredible timing: Loktev arrived in Moscow mere months before the country’s invasion of Ukraine, which had chilling effects inside Russia as the government cracked down even more forcefully on free speech and protest. Instantly establishing itself as one of the great movies about journalism, “My Undesirable Friends” is also a portrait of courage and friendship during impossible times. That its depiction of an authoritarian government feels increasingly relevant to American viewers is just another of the film’s gripping selling points.
“On Becoming a Guinea Fowl”
Like “It Was Just an Accident,” British-Zambian filmmaker Rungano Nyoni’s second feature opens with an upsetting incident behind the wheel in the middle of the night. Shula (Susan Chardy) drives home from a costume party to discover her uncle’s dead body in the road. That sets in motion preparations for a family gathering to mourn the man’s passing, except some of the women assembled have good reason to be glad he’s gone.
Nyoni, who won best director in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section, casts a harsh light on Zambia’s patriarchal culture, using the deceased’s not-so-secret history of sexual abuse as a catalyst for a liberating, burn-it-all-down commentary. “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” opened nearly a year ago, when Academy members and critics weren’t necessarily thinking about award-worthy films. Their loss: Anyone who saw “Guinea Fowl” was bewitched by its gorgeous images, angry undercurrent, and unforgettable final moments.
“Resurrection”
It had been seven long years since Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan released “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” a seductive love story that featured an hour-long oner presented in 3D. He returned with another audacious enterprise in “Resurrection,” which traces China’s 20th century, as well as cinema’s, through an entrancing, episodic story of a strange creature (Jackson Yee) who escapes into movies so that he can still dream. (In the world of “Resurrection,” society has stopped dreaming so it can gain immortality.)
Bi works his way through silent cinema, noir, and genre flicks, and once again delivers an ambitious long take set at the close of the millennium. Hollywood is always preaching about the importance of the theatrical experience, but few studio movies were as sumptuous in their big-screen beauty as Bi’s intoxicating ode to the power of cinema. The jaw-dropping images never let up, and the score, provided by M83, is equally transporting. “Resurrection” reminds the viewer why the movie theater remains the optimal way to appreciate a filmmaker’s grand vision.
Eva Victor appears in Sorry, Baby by Eva Victor, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Mia Cioffy Henry.
“Sorry, Baby”
At a moment when #MeToo’s impact seems, sadly, to be waning in Hollywood, writer-director-star Eva Victor’s feature debut was a moving tribute to a survivor of sexual assault. But what was most remarkable about “Sorry, Baby” was how nuanced and even hysterically funny such a tribute could be. Victor plays Agnes, an aspiring-writer-turned-professor whose early artistic promise was demolished by an abusive teacher who sent her life on a different course.
Featuring spectacular supporting performances from Naomi Ackie and Lucas Hedges, this comedy-drama explores the lingering pain and confusion that survivors experience, while eschewing the well-meaning but melodramatic clichés usually associated with such subject matter. As a result, “Sorry, Baby” celebrates a life rather than focuses on just the tragedy, presenting Agnes as a hobbled but by no means broken person on the path to rediscovering herself.
“Sound of Falling”
Oscar shortlisted for Best International Film and Best Cinematography, German director Mascha Schilinski’s second feature won the Jury Prize at Cannes and entrances more with each subsequent viewing. “Sound of Falling” spans approximately 100 years, following four young women who live in the same house at different times in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Working with her cinematographer husband Fabian Gamper, Schilinski astutely observes the similar challenges these girls face, whether they live during the run-up to World War I or in modern Germany. Indeed, the movie weaves together disparate time frames so that the characters’ circumstances seem to speak to one another across generations. Haunted by the occasional use of Anna von Hausswolff’s ethereal “Stranger,” “Sound of Falling” turns the past into a ghost story while making history feel very much alive and unresolved. Many have yet to see this wonderful film, but just because the Academy overlooked it isn’t an excuse for the rest of us to do the same.
- Something Lasting and Unforgettable: Robert Duvall (1931-2026) (February 16, 2026)
“Duvall never plays the same character twice, and he makes other actors look good. He brings a quality to his listening, his reactions, that charges a scene even when he’s not talking.” – Roger Ebert on Robert Duvall
Another titan is gone. They seem to be falling with more frequency these days. Following in the footsteps of Gene Hackman, Diane Keaton, Robert Redford, and the many more we lost in 2025, today the news broke that one of the strongest pillars of one of the most important eras of film history is gone. Robert Duvall passed away yesterday “surrounded by love and comfort” at his Virginia ranch, according to his wife Luciana.
It’s hard to overstate the legacy of Robert Duvall. Just the breadth of his output alone makes him an essential name in any retelling of film history as he worked for seven consecutive decades starting in the 1960s. Over that span, he won an Oscar, four Golden Globe Awards, two Emmys, a SAG Award, a BAFTA Award, and more. He was nearly as essential to the stage as he was to film and TV, appearing in vital productions of Wait Until Dark and David Mamet’s powerful American Buffalo.
From the minute he appeared on screen in Boo Radley in the beloved adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, there was a presence to Robert Duvall that was undeniable. He won his Oscar for “Tender Mercies,” but he just as easily could have taken home Academy Awards for a dozen other films: “The Godfather,” “Apocalypse Now,” “The Great Santini,” “The Apostle,” “The Conversation,” “Network,” “The Natural,” “Sling Blade,” “Crazy Heart,” “The Natural,” “A Civil Action,” and “Rambling Rose.” Watching those 12 films alone would give one a solid marathon of American filmmaking from the ’70 to the ‘90s. Duvall was a support beam for the American film movement.
Born to a Rear Admiral and a woman reportedly related to General Robert E. Lee, Robert Selden Duvall always seemed to carry a bit of military authority in his on-screen presence. Everything changed for young Duvall when he enrolled in the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre under the legendary Sanford Meisner, where Duvall’s classmates included James Caan, Dustin Hoffman, and Gene Hackman.
Like a lot of actors of his era, Robert Duvall began his career on the stage, reportedly taking a role in a Long Island summer theater production in 1952. He worked consistently on the stage in the New York area in the ‘50s, and his most notable role off-Broadway in this period was in the original production of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge with Dustin Hoffman. He made his Broadway debut in Wait Until Dark in 1966 and played Teach in the first Broadway production of American Buffalo. It’s an incredible part that would be played in later productions by Al Pacino and William H. Macy.
Robert Duvall transitioned to television in the ‘60s, appearing in numerous hits of the day like “The Untouchables,” “The Outer Limits,” “The Fugitive,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” and a great episode of “The Twilight Zone” called “Miniature,” in which he plays a museum goer who discovers that a dollhouse has living residents. When he falls in love with the female of the dollhouse, things get even weirder. It doesn’t quite stick the landing, but it’s easy to see the way that Duvall holds a camera even this early in his career in 1963.
The story goes that none other than Horton Foote saw a young Duvall in a production of his The Midnight Caller in 1957, and he’s the one who recommended him for Boo Radley in 1962’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” (and would later write the part that would win Duvall his Oscar). The recluse in the town of Maycomb, Alabama, Radley is a character who reflects acceptance of outsiders in Lee’s book and the adaptation, a figure who represents the folly of judgment. Radley ultimately saves the lives of Jem and Scout Finch, and Duvall makes an impact in the film despite limited screen time.
There were small roles in big films in the ‘60s, including parts in “Bullitt” and “True Grit,” but Duvall’s prime came relatively late, in his forties, in the 1970s. There were few major American filmmakers of the era whose work wasn’t grounded by Duvall, including Robert Altman (“M*A*S*H”), George Lucas (“THX 1138”), John Sturges (“The Eagle Has Landed”), Sidney Lumet (“Network”), and, of course, Francis Ford Coppola, who cast Duvall as Tom Hagen in a little movie called “The Godfather,” which earned Duvall his first Oscar nomination. He would, of course, appear in the sequel, along with Coppola’s other ‘70s masterpieces “The Conversation” and “Apocalypse Now,” which won him BAFTA and Golden Globe awards.
Going into the ‘80s as one of the most acclaimed character actors in the world, Duvall would eventually get his Oscar for Bruce Beresford’s “Tender Mercies,” the story of an alcoholic country singer. Roger Ebert wrote in his Great Movies essay on the film, “It contains one of his most understated performances. It’s mostly done with his eyes. The actor who shouted, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning!” here plays a character who wants to be rid of shouting. The film itself never shouts. Its title evokes its mood, although this is not a story about happiness. “I don’t trust happiness. I never did, I never will,” Mac Sledge tells Rosa Lee, in a scene framed entirely in a medium-long shot that possibly won him the Oscar.”
The roles would literally never stop from here. In 1989, he appeared in what many still consider the best TV mini-series of all time, “Lonesome Dove,” which he told the Los Angeles Times was his favorite role. He won a Golden Globe for the part.
Robert Duvall maintained remarkable control over his career for the last four decades of his life, a model of how to use fame to be selective in his roles. He refused to return to “The Godfather Part III” because he wasn’t getting paid as much as Pacino. He wrote and directed himself to an Oscar nomination for his breathtaking work in “The Apostle.” Other highlights include “Days of Thunder,” “Rambling Rose,” “Falling Down,” “The Paper,” “Sling Blade,” “Deep Impact,” “A Civil Action,” “Gone in 60 Seconds,” “We Own the Night,” “Get Low,” “Jack Reacher,” “The Judge,” and “Widows.”
Robert Duvall wasn’t a typical Hollywood presence. When you think of him, it’s not on red carpets or late-night talk shows. It’s on screen. It’s the characters who you can see thinking, feeling, and reacting, often men who believe themselves impenetrable from the world, being proven otherwise.
As Roger said, “It’s mostly done with his eyes.”
