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Film
Thank Heaven for Little Girls
By Tessa DeCarloGone Baby Gone kicks off with a familiar trope—a little girl’s smiling face on posters screaming “Missing!”, anguished relatives, TV news cameras circling like hyenas converging on a wounded wildebeest. The power of these images is only amplified by how often we’ve seen this story before.
Unoriginal Gangster
By Mark Asch“Pandering” hardly seems an adequate word for American Gangster, a biopic of 1960s Harlem heroin king Frank Lucas directed by middle-aged white millionaire Ridley Scott, written by middle-aged white millionaire Steve Zaillian, produced by middle-aged white millionaire Brian Grazer, and designed to soft-sell an African American audience on the proposition of the druglord as symbol of heroic honesty and self-determination in a racist society.
Outgrowing Promise
By Sarahjane BlumMuch like the girls it chronicles, seven episodes in, Gossip Girl continues to hold promise, teasingly. The CW television series—closely based upon the young adult novels created by Cecily von Ziegler—was promoted for teenagers but positioned to be a guilty pleasure for an older demographic.
It’s, Like, Canonical
By David N. Meyerhis was the best Film Festival in years. The schedulers showcased filmmakers that embody the Festival canon, a notion of undeniable art meeting viable commerce that the Festival helped create and codify.
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