Page 17 - Rob Epstein News Today

This week we’re looking at documentaries. We know Michael Moore holds the record for the largest box offices in this rarely profitable film genre. Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” heads up the

Portrayals of homosexuality were frowned upon until the 1960s, by the movie industry's production code and such groups as the Legion of Decency. Yet gays were everywhere in the movies, right from the beginning--this documentary shows two men dancing together in a Thomas Edison short named “The Gay Brothers,” from 1895--and often they were hidden in plain view. Hollywood knew who was gay and who was not, and there were in-jokes like John Ireland's line to Montgomery Clift in “Red Ri...

LGBTQ Community Leaders Remember Sally Miller Gearhart Susan Leo, July 14, 2021: Sally slipped these earthly bonds last night after a long illness. In her last days she had been visited by many who loved her, both in the flesh and in spirit and she seemed ready to let go. Sally was remarkable: sharp in her thinking, clear in her politics, fiercely determined, warmly compassionate. She was an immense presence in San Francisco, arriving in 1970 and becoming the first openly lesbian professor at S...

‘Great Freedom’ (‘Grosse Freiheit’): Film Review | Cannes 2021 David Rooney Anyone familiar with Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s powerful 2000 documentary feature, Paragraph 175, will recognize that title as the provision of the German penal code that sanctioned horrific Nazi persecution of homosexuals, a law dating back to 1871. What’s more startling is that criminal prosecution continued in West Germany up until the late 1960s, destroying the lives of thousands...

What’s on TV This Week: ‘The People vs. Agent Orange’ and Macy’s Fireworks PBS airs a documentary about the enduring effects of Agent Orange. And the Macy’s annual fireworks display returns to New York in full force. A scene from “The People vs. Agent Orange,” a documentary about the defo.Credit...National Archives and Records Administration June 28, 2021, 1:00 a.m. ET Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some...

From Harvey Milk to the HIV/AIDS epidemic and more, these powerful LGBTQ documentaries can help you celebrate queer history during Pride Month 2021.

Next month, the Criterion Channel celebrates Pride Month with a host of extraordinary queer-themed films, including a new installment of our Queersighted series focusing on taboo-breaking artists, a trio of outré underground classics from John Waters, and a restrospective dedicated to the nonfiction trailblazers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, whose films have helped bring LGBTQ stories out of the closet and into the mainstream. There’s also a spotlight on screwball great Carole Lombard, ...

Ellen DeGeneres hypocritical legacy — and the dangers of performative respectability Marcie Bianco © Provided by NBC News The announcement that “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” will end in 2022, at the conclusion of 19 seasons and more than 3,000 shows, heralds the end of an era. Ellen’s legacy will be one largely emblematic of the particular culture that she both helped define and represented on her show — a culture of kindness not distinct from that of complicity. Inclus...

Ellen DeGeneres hypocritical legacy — and the dangers of performative respectability Marcie Bianco © Provided by NBC News The announcement that “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” will end in 2022, at the conclusion of 19 seasons and more than 3,000 shows, heralds the end of an era. Ellen’s legacy will be one largely emblematic of the particular culture that she both helped define and represented on her show — a culture of kindness not distinct from that of complicity. Inclus...

�� Good Tuesday morning! Nuclear talks begin in Vienna today, with diplomats from the U.K., France, Germany, Russia, China and Iran slated to hold a meeting chaired by the European Union. A U.S. delegation, headed by Special Envoy Rob Malley, will hold only indirect talks with Tehran.  Malley told NPR today that Iran has been “increasingly in noncompliance with their nuclear commitments,” and that Iran’s assertion that sanctions must be lifted before compliance is “not going to wor...