John Patterson

A priceless cinematic time capsule of the African-American experience in post-Watts Los Angeles; a kaleidoscope of the multiple mindsets of a community in profound flux; a sustained rebuke and a consciously developed alternative to the plantation economics and racist narratives of the then-current "blaxploitation" boom; exemplary first steps along a......

The Los Angeles Film Festival’s annual “Films That Got Away” sidebar, co-presented by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the UCLA Film & Television Archive, this year features two directors who outwardly could not seem less alike: Robert Kramer, the radical socialist-activist and filmmaker who died in 1999; and......

The decades-long process of attrition, neglect and outright persecution by which Soviet authorities destroyed the career of one of Soviet Russia's greatest artists, the Georgian-Ukrainian-Armenian filmmaker Sergei Paradjanov (1924-1990), can be mapped out in the succession of spurious charges that were laid against him: "secretism," "decadent aestheticism," "ideological deviation," "bourgeois......

Writing in these pages a year ago, I speculated that the American Cinematheque’s annual Mods & Rockers festival of psychedelic-and-paisley-era movie classics, rockumentaries, 007 spoofs and assorted other ’60s-centric pop-culture detritus had begun to show its age. With its avalanche of movies reconstituted from previous editions, the 2006 program suggested......

Writing in these pages a year ago, I speculated that the American Cinematheque’s annual Mods & Rockers festival of psychedelic-and-paisley-era movie classics, rockumentaries, 007 spoofs and assorted other ’60s-centric pop-culture detritus had begun to show its age. With its avalanche of movies reconstituted from previous editions, the 2006 program suggested......

Forty-five years after Dr. No, James Bond is respectable once more, with nine BAFTA nominations accruing to the lean, whip-smart and surprisingly soulful Casino Royale. A fine time, then, for the Aero to re-examine the series’ high tide, the years 1963 to 1969, when the success of the Bond movies......