Page 7 - Ed Rampell News Today

LOS ANGELES—My favorite film at AFI this year was The Real Charlie Chaplin, codirected by Peter Middleton and James Spinney, who co-wrote the almost 2-hour biopic with Oliver Kindeberg.

The AFI Fest returned to Hollywood for live, in-person screenings and events, with an additional virtual component. Here are some more quick reviews of some of the films I saw, which may soon be coming to screens both large and small.

The AFI Fest returned to Hollywood for live, in-person screenings and events, with an additional virtual component. Here are some more quick reviews of some of the films I saw, which may soon be coming to screens both large and small.

Well, for the first time since the COVID lockdown began, after about 15 months of streaming cinema online, your peripatetic film critic finally attended his first screening in person.

Small town news hits the big time in this absorbing look at an Iowa newspaper facing the crossroads.

Scene from "Stealing Chaplin." Fair use. British director Paul Tanter’s droll Stealing Chaplin may be a comedy that will keep audiences laughing from beginning to end. Still, the other movie it reminds me of is screenwriter Kemp Powers’s One Night in Miami. Although the latter is a heavy-hitting drama, the fanciful stories of both Miami and Stealing are loosely inspired by real-life events. In the case of the former, following his 1964 championship bout with Sonny Liston, Muhammad Ali r...

Help Save Peoples World The economic crisis has hit Peoples World hard. We need the support of all our friends and readers to continue publishing. ‘The envelope please’: Darnella Frazier deserved an Academy Award April 27, 2021 10:51 AM CDT By Ed Rampell In this image from police body camera video, Darnella Frazier films former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin outside Cup Foods in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020. |...

Help Save Peoples World The economic crisis has hit Peoples World hard. We need the support of all our friends and readers to continue publishing. A crowning achievement: Fairy tale vs. reality in ‘The Crown’ April 23, 2021 12:07 PM CDT By Ed Rampell Olivia Colman, center, as Queen Elizabeth II, flanked by Josh OConnor as Prince Charles, left, and Tobias Menzies as Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, right. | Netflix I write th...

Greta Thunberg’s Quest to ‘Listen to the Science’ This stirring series about the Swedish campaigner against global warming is guaranteed to raise your temperature. In Greta Thunberg: A Year To Change the World, the Scandinavian teenager whom this documentary dubs as the planet’s “best known climate activist” spends twelve months traversing the globe looking for ways to address the impending climate catastrophe. The three-part series begins airing on PBS on Earth D...

Tony Espinosa as Kajani Jefferson in “American Skin” The undaunted 29th Pan African Film Festival kicked off on the last day of Black History Month and runs through March 14. I am a big fan of the work by actor/director/writer Nate Parker, which powerfully expresses Black consciousness and militancy in movies such as 2012’s Red Tails about the heroic Tuskegee Airmen who were antifascists before Antifa; 2007’s fact-based The Great Debaters, where Denzel Washington played a suspected Co...