THE BURIAL (MGM/Amazon – Oct. 13):  A yarn that’s also a true story.  Jeremiah O’Keefe (Tommy Lee Jones) was the owner of a family-run, regional Mississippi business that for decades had offered funeral services and burial insurance to its customers.  When Jeremiah’s finances took a turn, he made a deal with a conglomerate headed […]

  THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF MAGICAL NEGROES (Focus/Universal – March 15):  The title of Kobi Libii’s first feature refers to the unfortunately well-established movie trope where a noble Black character exists only as a catalyst to make the white protagonist a better person.  (Think of everything from Driving Miss Daisy to The Green Mile, The Legend of Bagger Vance to Green […]

  For this audience member, it was the day Toronto moved into high gear. MOONLIGHT (A24 – October 21):  Barry Jenkins’s second film, after his little-seen but much-praised Medicine For Melancholy, is a validation of film festival culture and a reminder of the power of film as personal expression.  (Although the source material is a […]

  DEAD MAN DOWN:  Watch It At Home – Effectively Moody Tale of Revenge Until its final reel, when it arrives pretty much where you thought it was going to go from the very start, and in a way even dumber than you expected, DEAD MAN DOWN is a surprisingly rich B-movie in a movie […]