A gay painter in Pittsburgh, Devan Shimoyama (above), talks about the travails of finding a barber capable of cutting his Black hair. “We don’t cut hair with texture,” a stylist tells him. This leads Shimoyama to begin frequenting Black barbershops, … Continue reading Mimesis Documentary Festival — MANSCAPING
A lizard is photographed from 360 degrees. The lizard will soon become part of a computer archive that is recreating digital simulations of every animal on the planet, starting with the ones most likely to become extinct. For whom is … Continue reading Mimesis Documentary Festival — OUR ARK
Trinity, New Mexico. The site where the American military tested the atomic bomb before dropping two on Japan. Today the site is an army base and tourist attraction. Despite some green glass where the blast fused sand and rocks and … Continue reading Mimesis Documentary Festival — WHAT TRAVELERS ARE SAYING ABOUT JORNADA DEL MUERTO
I ask my grandmother whether she remembers her old house. She says: ‘It’s good that I never had a photograph of my childhood home. Because if I had a photo of it, I would have forgotten what it looked like. … Continue reading Mimesis Documentary Festival 2022
Most movies are a window you gaze through for two or so voyeuristic hours. Others are a door you walk through. Jewel Robbery, a 1932 pre-Code comedy, is like falling into a glass of champagne. The black and white photography by … Continue reading All Together Now: Dispatches from the 13th TCM Classic Film Festival
For the first time since COVID sank its spikey teeth into gatherings great and small, the TCM Classic Film Festival returns to Hollywood Boulevard for four days of essentials, discoveries, and anniversary screenings. The governing theme this year is, fittingly, … Continue reading All Together Now: Back to the Big Screen
Movies are most often windows to what is and what was. But sometimes, they’re windows to what could be. And it doesn’t have to be in a grand sense either. Take Cha Cha Real Smooth, writer/director/star Cooper Raiff’s sophomore effort, for starters. About … Continue reading Things to Come: Dispatches from the 2022 Sundance Film Festival
Trinitie Childs (Regina Hall) has that look in her eyes, a look that’s masking a lot of pain for the greater good. Or, at least, that’s what she tells herself. Her husband, Lee-Curtis Childs (Sterling K. Brown), is the pastor … Continue reading HONK FOR JESUS. SAVE YOUR SOUL.
You’ve probably heard a lot of things about TikTok. About how it’s the most downloaded app on the planet, has more users than Facebook, has better monetizing abilities than YouTube, is owned by a Chinese tech company mining users’ data, … Continue reading TIKTOK, BOOM.
Michael J. Cinema 
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