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I WENT Friday morning to see “Selma” and found myself watching it in a theater full of black teenagers.Thanks to donations, D.C. public school kids got free tickets to the first Hollywood movie about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on his birthday weekend — an effort that was duplicated for students around the country. The kids did plenty of talking and texting, and plenty of fighting over whether there was too much talking and texting. Slowly but surely, though, the crowd was drawn in by the Scheherazade skills of the “Selma” director, Ava DuVernay. The horrific scene...

BEST: 1. American Sniper 2. Boyhood 3. Chef 4. Magic in the Moonlight 5. The Hobbit: Battle of Five Armies 6. Guardians of the Galaxy 7. Locke 8. The Lego Movie 9. Mr. Turner 10. Big Eyes WORST: 1. Snowpiercer 2. Sex Tape 3. Tammy 4. Transformers: Age of Extinction 5. The Other Woman 6. Tusk 7. Dumb and Dumber Too 8. Atlas Shrugged: Who Is John Galt? 9. Robocop 10. Inherent Vice

But Academy members seem to be paying attention to the criticism that Eastwood and star/producer Bradley Cooper shouldn’t be celebrating a man who wrote that killing hundreds of Iraqis was “fun.” “He seems like he may be a sociopath,” one Academy member told TheWrap, adding he had not yet seen the film but had read the article, which is being passed around. Neither distributor Warner Bros. nor the filmmakers have responded to TheWrap’s request for comment, though the studio said they intended to make someone available. A piece in The Guardian by author Lindy West was an early critic of...

Angry liberals have taken to social media to declare that if you like the movie American Sniper over the movie Selma, you are a racist. The comments have come on the heels of an extremely successful opening weekend for American Sniper, which has received favorable reviews from critics, and has gained considerable buzz for its tense trailer. Selma, which also has received favorable reviews from critics, but also criticism for inaccurately portraying major characters, is not doing nearly as well at the box office. Liberals on social media have decided that the trailer, controversy, and merit are not why American...

and i don't say that lightly. Patton, Gettysburgh, Das Boot, Run Silent Run Deep, Fury, and on and on. But Sniper is absolutely riveting in its portrayal of combat and the people in combat, i can't say more, except that when the movie ended in a packed theatre, a few people, me included, were drying eyes, but the theatre was absolutely silent and stayed that way. no one moved for a while then the whole theatre silently filed out.

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — A former substitute teacher who showed a movie featuring graphic sex and violence to a high school class has been convicted of disseminating matter harmful to juveniles. Sheila Kearns showed the film, "The ABCs of Death," during five periods of a Spanish class at East High School in Columbus in April 2013, prosecutors said. The movie consists of 26 chapters, each depicting some form of grisly death and representing a letter of the alphabet, such as "E is for Exterminate," ''O is for Orgasm" and "T is for Toilet." A jury convicted Kearns of four felony...

LOS ANGELES – In November, the Hollywood Reporter quoted an anonymous industry insider predicting that the “lefty crowd isn’t going to gather around a Navy SEAL best known for killing people” when it comes Oscar time. The insider was talking about "American Sniper," which walked away with six Academy Award nominations on Thursday, including Best Picture. Which means the insider was wrong. “Big surprise of #Oscarnoms was Clint Eastwood’s ‘American Sniper,’” wrote the Wall Street Journal. “I was very surprised and pleasantly so,” said James Williamson, retired U.S. Special Forces colonel and co-founder of OPSEC, a non-profit organization that seeks...

Clint Eastwood’s latest film “American Sniper,” based on the autobiography of Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle, is set to rake in more money in one day that any Eastwood-directed film. Late night industry estimates show the film bringing down $29.1 million in its first expanded release day on Friday, Deadline Hollywood reported Saturday.

The creative team behind the Oscar-nominated film will march in Selma on Monday, as an homage to the events depicted in the film.The filmmakers of “Selma" will celebrate civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. on his birthday by marching in his honor. The creative team behind the drama, which received an Oscar nod for best picture but was snubbed in other major categories, will march in Selma, Ala., on Monday to commemorate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

Oprah’s In Town For That White House Screening of ‘Selma’ By Emily Heil January 16 at 10:45 AM But you might need to breathe rarefied air to catch a glimpse: the TV mogul will be attending that screening of “Selma” (she’s the film’s producer) at the White House on Friday afternoon that we told you about. President Obama invited members of the cast and crew, along with some Washington dignitaries, to chow down on presidential popcorn and watch the civil-rights-era flick.

The film's portrayal of LBJ has the left up in arms. It’s always interesting to witness the sanctimony of liberals (usually Democrats) when their narratives of history are challenged by those they say they “helped.” Thus it has happened with the movie Selma, which has focused negative attention on President Lyndon Johnson ... in The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr., Garrow reported on the delight Johnson took in listening to the surveillance tapes of King (whom Garrow approvingly presented as a radical and socialist). Garrow wrote, “When one aide attempted to defend King’s sincerity on the issue of [opposition...

Bogie, Bette Davis, Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert, Errol Flynn, Claude Rains, Kay Francis, Edward G. Robinson, Jane Wyman, George Brent, Merle Oberon, Patricia Neal, Mickey Rooney, Jimmy Stewart

I’ve seen just about every film about the Iraq War ever made. I’ve produced and associate produced a few. I even appeared in one (for about a millisecond). And without a doubt, “American Sniper” is the single best work of film about the Iraq War ever made. Now, it’s not the most complex film. Not the deepest film. Not even the most provocative. But in terms of storytelling, action, emotion, production and performance, attention to detail and especially the frighteningly accurate soundscape, there’s been nothing else close that’s been made since my platoon entered the war in Iraq in 2003....

War movies often focus on battles over personalities. In great films like Lone Survivor (2013) and Saving Private Ryan (1998), some of the battle sequences are so real and devastating that it’s easy to get lost in them and lose focus on the individual soldiers trying to survive. Those films often attempt to show viewers what it must be like to be in the midst of an intense and devastating battle. American Sniper, which only yesterday was nominated for six Academy Awards,is different. It’s more of a character study than a war film with the main character being a Texan...

Which Movies Make Grown Men Cry? After an evening at Grassroots Tavern, some friends and I got into a heated argument about “Love Actually,” which I contend is a good movie. This eventually became a slightly less heated argument about which movies make people cry. The consensus was that everyone has at least one movie that gets them. The lone dissenter was my friend Alex Kaufman, who claimed he had never cried during a movie. After we listed approximately half the films on IMDb, he eventually recanted, saying that “Saving Private Ryan” had, at points, briefly broken his steely resolve....

Spouting off to an empty chair at the 2012 Republican National Convention, Clint Eastwood looked as if he were slipping into doddering dementia, but he’s shrewder and more focused than ever in his Iraq War picture American Sniper. It’s a cracker­jack piece of filmmaking, a declaration that he’s not yet ready to be classified as an Old Master, that he can out-Bigelow Kathryn Bigelow. Morally, though, he has regressed from the heights of Letters From Iwo Jima (2006). In more ways than one, the Iraq occupation is seen through the sight of a high-powered rifle. The movie is scandalously blinkered....

EXCLUSIVE: Snake Plissken is back! Fox has emerged from competitive bidding and closed a deal to remake the 1981 John Carpenter-directed cult classic Escape From New York. Andrew Rona and Alex Heineman’s The Picture Company will produce. The original was released by Avco Embassy, and the rights were owned by Studiocanal. Carpenter will be an executive producer and will exert creative influence over the project. Fox’s Mike Ireland brought it in and will steer. The hope is to reinvent the property with an eye toward launching a new franchise.

Okay so I recently hired a few recent college grads in technical roles and a conversation was struck up at the end of the day. The conversation was a result of a missed movie reference during another conversation earlier in the day. The type of thing where you assume some level of common culture so you don't have to explain in more detail. What follows in my comment was the result and follow-on question for my fellow Freepers.

Argument — much like karaoke and online shopping — is at its best when done with friends and a drink. And so, here’s “Bar Fights With Walt,” a column devoted to solving the only questions that truly matter: the dumb arguments about life and pop culture developed and hashed out in barroom rants. We’ll use data and research to take these arguments to their logical statistical conclusion. If you’d like to submit a question or conundrum, corner the author at one of his typical haunts and pick a fight.After an evening at Grassroots Tavern, some friends and I got...

Don’t buy the hype you might be reading at places like Grantland about “Selma’s” wide release debut at the box office this weekend. The news was not good. Far from it. Especially when compared to other apples, like “The Butler,” “J. Edgar,” and “W.” Box Office Mojo: In a distant second place, Selma expanded to nearly 2,200 locations and earned an estimated $11.2 million. Compare that to Lee Daniels’ The Butler, which dealt with similar issues during a similar time period in U.S. history and earned over twice as much in its first weekend ($24.6 million). Selma instead wound up...