Ernest Hardy

It’s both fitting and troubling that on the same day Tyler Perry, currently Hollywood’s most powerful African-American film director, drops his latest production (I Can Do Bad All By Myself) in theaters, the UCLA Film and Television Archive kicks off its monthlong series African American Film Pioneers. Perry — a......

Film fans in withdrawal for the screen presence of complex women, particularly older women, should line up to see Megan Doneman’s riveting Yes Madam, Sir, one of 17 nonfiction features screening in the International Documentary Association’s 13th annual DocuWeeks showcase. In chronicling the life and groundbreaking achievements of Kiran Bedi,......

Trying economic times calls for innovative bed buddies, and L.A.–based Maya Entertainment has teamed with Blockbuster for the Maya Independent Film Series, a national touring series kicking off this weekend in Los Angeles. The festival’s goal is to give a platform to Latino films that might otherwise fall through the......

“When you bad,” boasts the young and beautiful, piss-and-vinegar-filled Muhammad Ali early in the documentary Soul Power, “you can do what you wanna do.” The film, which takes too long to get to the meat of its matter but captivates once it does, is an addendum to Leon Gast’s Oscar-winning......

As the music industry wheezes on life support, musicians (particularly indie artists across different genres) draw inspiration from the rough-scrabble early days of MTV, when music videos were: (a) actually programmed; and (b) an aesthetic hodgepodge drawn from DIY necessity, the self-conscious referencing of freshly minted art- and film-school educations......

It’s fitting that Cheryl Dunye is discussing her new burst of creative energy between sips of iced tea at Mornings Nights. The low-key but bustling Silver Lake café nearly burned down a few years ago, then sat boarded up for a long time before its owner recently reopened it to......

Ava Duvernay’s documentary This Is the Life is so immediately and fully engrossing that it meets its ambitious goals for the viewer — to illuminate a brief, paradoxically undervalued but globally influential L.A.-based music scene while broadening the accepted parameters of hip-hop — and without feeling lectured to. It’s rare......

“How do you define yourself?” It’s not until its third act that Medicine forMelancholy’slead male character explicitly asks the question that’s at this film’s heart. But throughout its nearly 90-minute running time, writer-director Barry Jenkins’ tender, smart, soulful movie gracefully places the emphasizing weight of inflection on each word in......