‘City Hall’ Film Review: Frederick Wiseman Celebrates the Power of Civic Engagement

The Brooklyn Dodgers, American neo-Nazis and Chicago-area Holocaust survivors all figure prominently in Mighty Ira, a film that pays tribute to a generation of free-speech advocates through one man's story. Now in his 80s, Ira Glasser served as executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1978 to 2001, and he took the reins expecting to spend most of his time addressing matters of racial justice.

Silly, overstuffed and as sweet as anything Adam Sandler has done, Hubie Halloween is a full jack-o'-lantern in which the chocolates you hoped for far outnumber the butterscotch tooth-breakers.

Tom Cruise and Hayley Atwell are getting into the action.

For many westerners who keep up with current events, Jamal Khashoggi is remembered mostly as a victim, a name from headlines two years back. The Saudi-born journalist, at the time of his death a columnist for The Washington Post and an American resident, walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018, to collect some documents related to his upcoming marriage.

Even without yet having seen all five of the original films in Steve McQueen's riveting Small Axe anthology for Amazon and BBC, which surveys two decades of West Indian experience in London, it seems appropriate that the series concludes with a story of Black resistance embodied in the determination of one idealistic man.

Todd McCarthy Red, White and Blue, the third and final installment of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe quintet of films about racial issues specific to Great Britain being world premiered at the New York Film Festival, zeroes in on the ordeal of a young black Londoner set on helping to definitively break the color barrier at London’s Metropolitan Police Force in the early 1980s.

In a Mexico City recording studio in 1999, the planets aligned. At the center of the jubilant cross-cultural, intergenerational music sessions was Francisco Fellove Valdés, stage name El Gran Fellove, who half a century earlier had combined Afro-Cuban rhythms with jazz to create a new style of scat singing.

Watch Video: 'The Glorias' Trailer: Julianne Moore and Alicia Vikander Are Both Gloria Steinem in First Look at Julie Taymor FilmUntil Moore takes over the role, “The Glorias” lurches back and forth through her early life, pinballing from memories of Steinem’s charming but unreliable father (Timothy Hutton) and emotionally fragile mother (Enid Graham, “The Sinner”) to post-college Steinem traveling through India and going undercover as a Playboy bunny to write the investigative piece that

Machetes, myths and murky storytelling all find their way into Tragic Jungle (Selva Trágica), the lushly made, if highly enigmatic, fifth feature from Mexican writer-director Yulene Olaizola (Fogo), which screened in the main slate of the New York Film Festival after premiering in the Horizons section in Venice.

Throughout his career writing for film, television and the stage, from The West Wing, Charlie Wilson's War and The Newsroom to A Few Good Men and To Kill a Mockingbird, Aaron Sorkin has shown a consuming fascination with the trembling institutions of American politics and justice.

trial of the Chicago 7. The first few minutes provide a whirlwind introduction to all the characters as activists make plans to head for Chicago for the convention — but before they get there, and before the city unleashes its heavily armed police force to stop the peaceful demonstrations, the film suddenly jumps forward to five months after the convention.

Despite studios moving films such as Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” remake out of the calendar year and questions about whether some films will actually hit theaters, there are still new Oscar contenders being revealed for critics and AMPAS members alike. Over the past 48 hours, Netflix virtually screened Aaron Sorkin’s “The Trial of the Chicago 7” for select media, and A24 and Apple debuted Sofia Coppola’s “On the Rocks” at the 2020 New York Film Festival.

In the pantheon of perfect Bill Murray roles — “Caddyshack,” “Groundhog Day,” “Lost In Translation” — his smooth-talking character in the new comedy “On The Rocks” ranks as one of the best.He plays Felix, a suave New York renaissance man and art dealer in Sofia Coppola’s wonderful movie — the pair’s first narrative feature collaboration since 2003’s “Lost In Translation” — which premiered Wednesday night in the New York Film Festival.Murray, bless him, brought me back to the New York we all miss

Mike Fleming Jr Co-Editor-in-Chief, FilmEXCLUSIVE: Keeping intact its long relationship with filmmaker Pedro Almodovar, Sony Pictures Classics has acquired The Human Voice, the 30 minute short film that stars Tilda Swinton and will be unveiled during the New York Film Festival.

Not since Jeff Goldblum stocked his penis in a jar or Bryan Cranston tore apart his meth lab has a fly played such a pivotal role on screen as in Mandibles (Mandibules), the latest comic whatchamacallit from French one-man-band Quentin Dupieux.

As the news media put it so dismissively in headlines after the Manson Family murders, actress Sharon Tate was murdered along with "four others." Those "others" were in fact Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, Steven Parent and Jay Sebring. The latter is the subject of the documentary Jay Sebring….Cutting to the Truth, directed by Anthony DiMaria.

Endless drunken sex in exotic locales is no kind of fun for the star of William Olsson's Lost Girls & Love Hotels, a sober adaptation of Catherine Hanrahan's novel of the same name. Running away from herself —assuming she has a coherent self to run from —a young American woman remains just employed enough to pay rent in Tokyo while spending the rest of her time drunk and/or in bed with strangers at the quirky pay-by-the-hour destinations that hold such appeal for tourists.

Veteran Hong Kong filmmaker Ann Hui, one of Venice’s two Career Golden Lion recipients this year alongside Tilda Swinton, brings prewar Hong Kong to exquisite if restrained life in her latest historical drama, Love After Love (Di Yu Lu Xiang).

“The people who work for the city work for you,” explains Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, to a room full of his constituents. “They’re there to service you.” That simplest of ideas, a real gimme in the not-too-distant past, stands at the center of “City Hall,” the latest of Frederick Wiseman’s documentary deep dives into the nuts and bolts of America’s institutions.

Guy Lodge Film CriticIt’s been seven years since the Boston Marathon bombing put the Massachusetts capital in the headlines for all the wrong reasons, and beyond the odd bright flash of #BostonStrong graffiti on a shabby streetscape, it’s not discussed directly in “City Hall.” It doesn’t need to be: Its community-wide burden of grief, caution and a shared responsibility to rebuild is felt throughout Frederick Wiseman’s typically sprawling, inquisitive and inclusive anatomy of the city’s inner