Email Author Ernest Hardy

2013 Stories by Ernest Hardy

• Unfinished Song Is Out for Your Tear Ducts

  published June 19, 2013

  Writer-director Paul Andrew Williams's Unfinished Song is a full-frontal attack on its audience's tear ducts. Shamelessly manipulative,... More >>

• Honing in on a Global Epicenter of LGBT Rights with Call Me Kuchu

  published June 12, 2013

  Equally gut-wrenching and inspiring, the documentary Call Me Kuchu beams right from Uganda, the global hypocenter in the ongoing and... More >>

• Twenty Feet from Stardom, Like All Powerful Movies, Sparks Contemplation of Our Own Lives

  published June 12, 2013

  Directed by Morgan Neville in fan-boy mode (that's high praise), Twenty Feet from Stardom is an exquisitely rendered look at the... More >>

• Dirty Wars Is Essential Viewing About How We Wage Wars

  published June 5, 2013

  It's not news that the American "war on terror" has helped create growing anti-American sentiment (in Iraq and Afghanistan, for starters)... More >>

• La Camioneta Tracks the Journey of School Buses to Guatemala

  published May 29, 2013

  It might take the viewer a moment to realize that the voiceover guiding us through director Mark Kendall's documentary La Camioneta is... More >>

• I Do Falls into the Usual LGBT Traps

  published May 29, 2013

  The chronic artistic (and, ironically, political) failure of much mainstream American queer cinema is its earnest, facile treatment of the... More >>

• Taut and Gorgeously Acted, Augustine Traces the Cruel Undertones of a Proto-psychologist's Method

  published May 15, 2013

  "You use big words to say simple things," says Augustine, an illiterate kitchen maid, to the esteemed doctor treating her for the distinctly... More >>

• Tracing America's Relationship to the Middle East in Valentino's Ghost

  published May 15, 2013

  Coming fast on the heels of revelations confirming that the CIA indeed had a hand in shaping the script for Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark... More >>

• Old Dog Gazes on Tibet's Fears for the Future

  published May 15, 2013

  There's a fantastic moment in Old Dog where writer-director Pema Tseden lets the camera roll beyond a scene's pivotal moment, in which... More >>

• Demystifying Venus and Serena

  published May 8, 2013

  A few weeks ago, the ginned-up controversy over Serena Williams's performance of the Crip Walk after defeating Maria Sharapova at the London... More >>

• Filipino Thriller Graceland Sketches Good and Evil, Broadly

  published April 24, 2013

  It's a trickier process than it might seem, creating a sympathetic character whose world is imploding, mapping his internal anguish while... More >>

• 

  An Oversimplification of Her Beauty is Simply Beautiful

  published April 24, 2013

  For a long, time the common lament among fans of contemporary black American film was that much of the most popular fare—that which had a... More >>

• Portrait of Jason (Holliday) Could Be Shirley Clarke's Masterpiece

  published April 17, 2013

  "I used to work [while wearing] sunglasses," laughs Jason Holliday (né Aron Payne) in the documentary Portrait of Jason. "That... More >>

• War on Whistleblowers Enunciates the Nation's Servility to Corporate Fat Cats

  published April 17, 2013

  You don't have to be a rightwing wacko or naive lefty to be chilled by some policies and practices of the Obama administration. Nothing... More >>

• Whether Truth or Fiction, This Ain't California Is Engrossing

  published April 10, 2013

  Martin Persiel's splendid "documentary" could well be subtitled "And It Ain't the Truth." After having swept awards on the film festival... More >>

• Humanzing Angela Davis in Free Angela and All Political Prisoners

  published April 3, 2013

  In the stirring, soulful Free Angela and All Political Prisoners, director Shola Lynch mixes original interview footage and archival... More >>

• Tattoo Nation Does Service to the History of SoCal's Black and Gray Style

  published April 3, 2013

  "Tattoos used to be a sign of rebellion; now they're just a sign that you went to the mall," says a smarmy reporter in a news clip that is... More >>

• Rescue in the Philippines Unveils Another Story of Holocaust Heroism Yet Untold

  published March 27, 2013

  It speaks to the vastness of the horrors of the 20th century Holocaust that, as exhaustively documented as that genocide is, there remain... More >>

• Epic if Uneven, Better Mus' Come Pulls You Into Jamaica's 1970s Turmoil

  published March 13, 2013

  'Why is it so easy to die for nothing?" asks a character in Better Mus' Come, a gorgeous (if at times overripe) melodrama set during... More >>

• The Price of Living a Fairy Tale in Don't Stop Believin': Everyman's Journey

  published March 6, 2013

  Long relegated to pop-culture punch line and music-critic whipping boy, Journey still stands among the most commercially successful American... More >>

• The Rom-Com Clichés Parade on Through Language of a Broken Heart

  published March 6, 2013

  Today’s romantic comedies may be the most dire product being rolled off American filmmaking assembly lines. Having devolved into rote... More >>

• Genius on Hold Scaldingly Critiques American Capitalism

  published February 27, 2013

  Corporate America's foulness—from its slave-trade foundation to its ransacking of public coffers before and after the most recent Wall... More >>

• An Ambiguously Monsterous Lead Powers Rubberneck

  published February 20, 2013

  It's not an easy thing to keep an audience suspended between sympathy and revulsion for a character, but writer-director Alex Karpovsky (best... More >>

• Brief Reunion: Facebook is a Portal to Hell

  published January 16, 2013

  For those who still haven't yet figured it out, Facebook is a portal to hell. That's the strongest takeaway from writer-director John... More >>