Ernest Hardy

"Positive characterizations are complex characterizations," says writer-director Ava DuVernay, tucking into a serving of roasted potatoes. "That's all we need to know. They shouldn't be saccharine. They shouldn't feel like medicine. You know, often films that are deemed positive, nobody wants to see them." It's a recent Sunday afternoon, and......

Warhol, Live Onstage! Gob Squad's Kitchen (You've Never Had It So Good) originally was conceived as a film that would consume its audience. But the Berlin-based experimental theater troupe Gob Squad's critically acclaimed show — based loosely on Andy Warhol's 1965 film Kitchen starring Edie Sedgwick — is now a......

Most film festivals share a fairly generic, if admirable, goal: to showcase the best fare that falls under their banner/mission statement — be that indie, queer, experimental, diasporic African, etc. DocuWeeks' mission is simply to bring American audiences the best international documentaries — and to program films that, collectively, take......

We cannot tell a lie: There are some seriously terrible films playing at the 30th annual Outfest, the gay and lesbian film festival that runs July 12-22. Such is the nature of a festival that encourages young, do-it-yourself filmmaking (and which has 12 days to fill). Outfest veterans will forgive......

An unfortunate, unintended bit of favoritism often comes into play when discussing documentaries, and that is the tendency to overlook films that are more whimsical or playful, that aren't grappling with the most charged social issues of the day. One of the services film festivals perform is to balance the......

“Same Sex/Different Sex: Queer Identity and Culture” is one of the final installments in L.A. Filmforum’s nearly yearlong Alternative Projections screening series, part of Pacific Standard Time: Art in Los Angeles 1945-1980. Only a few of the shorts in this program were available for preview, but they alone make this......

This isn't one of Fusion's strongest years. The film festival, a subsidiary of Outfest whose programming focuses on work by and about LGBT people of color, seems to be in the doldrums. Between the two new features being offered (one of which, Patrick-Ian Polk's The Skinny, was not available for......