Ernest Hardy

This year’s Pan African Film & Arts Festival concludes with films that muse on global hunger, the ironic consequences of South Africa’s rigidly enforced racial segregation, and the role the American North played in the U.S. slave trade. It’s a shame that the scripted voice-over for Philippe Diaz’s documentary The......

The biggest and best news about this year’s Pan African Film & Arts Festival is that it has new digs: the Culver Plaza Theatres in Culver City. After years of suffering shoddy sound and degraded screens at the Magic Johnson Theaters, audiences and filmmakers alike will finally have the opportunity......

Judging by the films made available for preview from the 12th Annual Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival, the lingua franca for the cinema of the modern Latin diaspora is a slick professionalism that binds together varied cultures, traditions, genres and politics. That’s not quite enough to save either the......

Hip-hop has celluloid in its blood, from the countless song lyrics that reference movies and iconic film characters to the widespread sampling and interpolation of movie dialogue, film scores and soundtracks. It stretches from rap-video homages (Busta Rhymes’ nods to Coming to America in his video for “Put Your Hands......

Although the subjects covered by the films in this year’s DocuWeek festival span myriad issues and topics, among the dominant threads are the urgent S.O.S...

One of this summer’s unexpected film-going pleasures has been the Don’t Knock the Rock Film and Music Festival, the weekly screening series of music-related films and panel discussions that has enjoyed raucous, sellout crowds since it kicked off in early August. Everything from L.A.’s underground but globally influential hip-hop scene......

"So fuckin’ delicate, people ... they die so easily,” says a supporting character to the titular Boy A, whose barely audible two-word reply — “She didn’t” — collapses his violent past into his remorseful present with offhand poignancy. Boy A knows that people don’t always die easily, but he’s haunted......

(Click to enlarge) Diamonds in the Rough While Los Angeles seems to host two or three film festivals a week, Dances With Films, now in its 11th year, stands out as one of the few with a committed ideological thrust (no “name” actors, directors, writers, etc. are allowed). The highlights......