Film Critic

I still fear the Gray Man. Three out of five days, he invades my dreams. It's always the same. I'm running after him down the mausoleum-dark hallway of the fifth floor of The Sun building. He's solitary, his slumped spine signifying disappointment. "I'm sorry!" I'm yelling, "I'll never do it again!" But he disappears into the elevator and I am left without absolution. I first met the Gray Man in May, possibly June, of 1971. He was the editor of a curious journalistic entity known as The Sunday Sun , internally and culturally distinct from The Sun or The Evening Sun . He had a corner office in a newsroom that seemed staffed by corpses and ghosts.

I still fear the Gray Man. Three out of five days, he invades my dreams. It's always the same. I'm running after him down the mausoleum-dark hallway of the fifth floor of The Sun building. He's solitary, his slumped spine signifying disappointment. "I'm sorry!" I'm yelling, "I'll never do it again!" But he disappears into the elevator and I am left without absolution. I first met the Gray Man in May, possibly June, of 1971. He was the editor of a curious journalistic entity known as The Sunday Sun , internally and culturally distinct from The Sun or The Evening Sun . He had a corner office in a newsroom that seemed staffed by corpses and ghosts.

"What are you going to do with that collection of Playbills?" we ask Lou Cedrone, who's busily stacking and arranging them, just so. "They're going to the Enoch Pratt Free Library," he says with pride, satisfied that his years of carefully filing and protecting these programs wasn't for naught.This was just a few days before he wrote his final column as film and theater critic for The Evening Sun, a tenure that began at a quarter to Jayne Mansfield and ends at half past Madonna. After 40 years at the newspaper, 28 of them as its critic, Lou Cedrone bids adieu to Calvert and Centre streets, the crossroads where he wrote thousands of movie, stage and television reviews for Baltimore's afternoon newspaper.

Five short narrative films, on themes ranging from a modern-day urban cowboy to a scamming extraterrestrial, kicked off the 14th annual Maryland Film Festival at MICA's Brown Center Thursday night. Maryland's festival remains the only one of its kind to devote its opening night to short films — works the evening's host, salon.com film critic Andrew O'Hehir, praised as a way for filmmakers to hone their craft. The evening's fare kicked off with MFF alum Christina Choe's "I am John Wayne," a cryptic modern take on the cowboy tradition, complete with a horse, a laconic hero and a two-timing woman, all set against a Coney Island backdrop.

Michael Sragow has been a film critic for publications in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston and Seattle. He has written on movies for The New Yorker since 1989 and has been a film critic and editor for Rolling Stone. He came to the Sun in 2001 from Salon.com, where for two years he wrote a movie column on films and filmmakers. baltimoresun.com: Welcome. Thank you for joining us to talk about Sunday's Oscars ceremony. Michael Sragow: Good to be here again -- a month earlier than usual!

In 1981, the film critic of this newspaper wondered about a young director's apparent ignorance of the past as demonstrated in the glibly amusing "Raiders of the Lost Ark," with its cartoon Nazis: "The film, which is absolutely nailed into a certainIn 1981, the film critic of this newspaper wondered about a young director's apparent ignorance of the past as demonstrated in the glibly amusing "Raiders of the Lost Ark," with its cartoon Nazis: "The film, which...

Dear Film Critic;My problem is that I'm too smart. I see through everything. Everything bores me. The conversation of my colleagues is so banal that I grow hostile and have lost all my friends. My corporation is on an insane course of self-destruction, but I'm the only one bright enough to see it. The values of our society are transparent and debasing, but no one cares. I'm angry all the time. What should I do?--Restless in BaltimoreDear Restless; Bud, you've got to shave off some IQ points fast.

"Clint Eastwood: A Biography" by Richard Schickel. Knopf. 537 pages. $26.Eschewing the predictable Hollywood formulas of Spielberg or the avant-garde self-consciousness of Scorsese and Coppola, Clint Eastwood, in ""The Outlaw Josey Wales," ""Unforgiven" and ""Bridges of Madison County," has become a major film director. The actor who first was seen in Sergio Leone's ""spaghetti Westerns" and then as Dirty Harry, the rogue cop at war with the Constitution, has be come an auteur of grace and craft.

The Sun's senior film critic, Michael Sragow, can drive some readers to distraction with his challenging and uncompromising reviews. In 2005, he panned three of the five best-picture Oscar nominees: Munich, Brokeback Mountain and Crash, the last of which won best picture at the 78th annual Academy Awards last Sunday. In his analysis Monday of this drama about the racial and cultural divisions in contemporary Los Angeles, Sragow called Crash's co-producer's acceptance speech "high-flown spin on a movie about racism that was pretty much a two-hour hatefest.

In a world of cinema increasingly dominated by films long on high-budget special effects and short on artistic merit, Cinema Sundays at the Charles provides the rare opportunity to enjoy first-rate independent films and then discuss them with distinguished experts.This season's series begins Feb. 1 with "The Apostle," the story of a cunning and complicated preacher in Louisiana, starring and produced by Robert Duvall. Film critic and frequent guest speaker Eddie Cockrell will be the moderator.

Film Criticism in the Digital World is the name of the panel at 1:15 p.m. Sunday at the Maryland Film Festival (at the tent village across from the Charles Theatre). As a member of the panel, along with City Paper's Brett McCabe, Salon's Andrew O'Heir and the Village Voice's Aaron Hillis (who also edits GreenCine.com), I'll be prepared to discuss questions I've fielded at similar gatherings. Have blogs and Web sites democratized or debased the craft of movie reviewing? Is there any new model to support good criticism in print or at least make it easier to access amid the blizzard of opinion on the Internet?

Sydney Pollack, the Academy Award-winning director of Out of Africa who achieved acclaim making popular, mainstream movies with A-list stars, including The Way We Were and Tootsie, died yesterday. He was 73. Mr. Pollack, who was also a producer and actor, died of cancer at his home in Pacific Palisades, Calif., according to Leslee Dart, his publicist and friend. "Sydney Pollack has made some of the most influential and best-remembered films of the last three decades," film scholar Jeanine Basinger said recently.

For more than 20 years, Don Walls brought a wonderful sense of irreverence and provocative criticism to his movie reviews when he appeared regularly on Maryland Public Television's The Critics' Place from 1974 to 1984, and WBAL radio from 1971 to 1999. Walls, now 70 and retired, has always been a flashy dresser. Back in the 1970s, he sported a style of dress that has been described by fashion historians as "The Full Towson," when he dressed in polyester mint green or baby blue leisure suits that were worn with 5-inch-wide brocade ties and a white vinyl belts.

Forty years ago this weekend the Beatles released their epochal concept album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Nearly everyone can tell you exactly where and when they first heard it. A second pop-cultural event called Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band occurred 11 years later, in July. With its gloppy small-town-vs.-evil-city story line and Norman-Rockwell-on-acid imagery, it may be the worst rock film ever made. And almost no one remembers it. In 1977 and 1978, producer Robert Stigwood was riding high on the success of Saturday Night Fever.

The Supreme Court recently rendered a decision based on watching a video - and in so doing fell for a trick that has been seducing moviegoers for more than a century. The court's decision in Scott v. Harris holds that a Georgia police officer did not violate a fleeing suspect's Fourth Amendment rights when he caused the suspect's car to crash, rendering the suspect a quadriplegic. The court's decision relies almost entirely on the filmed version of the high-speed police chase. This is not the first time the Supreme Court has acted as film critic in determining the scope of constitutional protection (the justices once routinely viewed obscene films to determine whether they conflicted with "community standards of decency")

STANDING INSIDE THE SHOOTING gallery of On Target in Severn is like crouching inside the mouth of a mythical beast. The ceiling and walls are covered with jagged rocks resembling teeth, and the floor is littered with something that appears to be cracked seeds. On closer inspection, the "seeds" turn out to be spent shell casings, and they emit small, seductive flashes of gold. Stephen Hunter picks up a fresh cartridge and loads it into the magazine of his Glock 9 mm. "These put holes in things," he says.

Five short narrative films, on themes ranging from a modern-day urban cowboy to a scamming extraterrestrial, kicked off the 14th annual Maryland Film Festival at MICA's Brown Center Thursday night. Maryland's festival remains the only one of its kind to devote its opening night to short films — works the evening's host, salon.com film critic Andrew O'Hehir, praised as a way for filmmakers to hone their craft. The evening's fare kicked off with MFF alum Christina Choe's "I am John Wayne," a cryptic modern take on the cowboy tradition, complete with a horse, a laconic hero and a two-timing woman, all set against a Coney Island backdrop.

Sydney Pollack, the Academy Award-winning director of Out of Africa who achieved acclaim making popular, mainstream movies with A-list stars, including The Way We Were and Tootsie, died yesterday. He was 73. Mr. Pollack, who was also a producer and actor, died of cancer at his home in Pacific Palisades, Calif., according to Leslee Dart, his publicist and friend. "Sydney Pollack has made some of the most influential and best-remembered films of the last three decades," film scholar Jeanine Basinger said recently.

It was revolutionary, 30 years ago, to see a black woman not only lay waste to hoodlums in a movie but boss around every cop she came across. And yet, Tamara Dobson, the striking, statuesque Baltimore-born actress who died last week at 61, did just that as Cleopatra Jones, a groundbreaking female action hero and a leading figure in the "blaxploitation" cinema of the 1970s. In the first of two movies built around the character, titled simply Cleopatra Jones (1973), the imposing Dobson is a take-no-prisoners federal narcotics agent, a black Joan of Arc who mercilessly kicks drug-traffickers around while looking fabulous in a towering Afro, skintight duds and a black Corvette.

SCARFACE Platinum Edition -- Universal / 29.98 BODY DOUBLE Special Edition --Sony / 19.98 Tuesday's most heavily promoted DVD reissue is Brian De Palma's 1983 Scarface (Universal), which already received a special edition three years ago. That one came with extras such as a documentary about the movie's influence on hip-hop personalities who view Al Pacino's Cuban refugee and Miami drug lord Tony Montana as a street hero. This "platinum edition" contains all the old features and three new ones targeted at the same audience.