Kurt Brokaw joined The Independent in 2010 as Senior Film Critic, covering New York’s six major film festivals and reviewing individual features and shorts of merit. He was Associate Teaching Professor at The New School for 33 years, and has taught courses on film noir, early lesbian fiction and Jewish-themed cinema at The 92nd Street Y for 15 years. His memoir, The Paperback Guy, was published in 2020.
You’ll forgive your 81-year-old Manhattan moviegoer if his first three reviews below putter about, pausing to stare at the pleasure…
The nice curators at The Jewish Museum and Film at Lincoln Center have made their own special mitzvah to the…
America’s largest documentary film festival celebrates its 10th anniversary with 300 features, shorts and events, showing on 16 downtown Manhattan screens. Senior Film Critic Kurt Brokaw focuses on features and shorts set in and around New York City, selecting two shorts plus three features saluting The Apollo theater, rocker Lydia Lunch, and Cinema 5’s legendary exhibitor and distributor Donald Rugoff.
Could your screenplay one day be worth enough to display in Royal Books’ high-end collectors window in Baltimore? Owner/scholar Kevin Johnson’s new book, The Cellluloid Paper Trail, is the first definitive examination of movie scripts in the 20th century–their provenance and value from story scripts through the myriad drafts that follow. Senior film critic Kurt Brokaw deconstructs this landmark study.
Senior Film Critic Kurt Brokaw reviews the insightful documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, a chronicle of the author’s life and work told mainly from her perspective in eye-to-eye interviews.
Senior Film Critic Kurt Brokaw reviews his picks for short films from the 18th Annual Tribeca Film Festival—Carlito Leaves Forever directed by Quentin Lazzarotto; The Neighbors’ Window directed by Marshall Curry; The History of White People in America: These American Truths directed by Ed Bell, Clementine Briand, Pierce Freelon, Jon Halperin, Aaron Keane, and Drew Takahashi; and Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (if you’re a girl) directed by Carol Dysinger.
Senior Film Critic Kurt Brokaw reviews his picks for feature and documentary films from the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival—Gay Chorus Deep South directed by David Charles Rodriques; The Apollo directed by Roger Ross Williams; Georgetown directed by C.Waltz; and Other Music directed by Puloma Basu.