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During a recent Gold Derby video interview, news and features editor Ray Richmond spoke in-depth with Ken Burns about the three-part, six-hour documentary film he co-produced and co-directed for PBS, “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” which is eligible at the 2023 Emmy Awards. Watch the full video above and read the complete interview transcript below.

“I will never work on a more important film than this one,” declares Burns of “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” the film documentary he co-produced and co-directed (with frequent collaborators Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein) and released last September. Coming from Burns, that’s a mouthful, considering he is perhaps the most celebrated documentarian of our time and the foremost chronicler of the American experience. He’s a filmmaker who is responsible for many of the most treasured nonfiction series and biographies ever put to film, among them “The Civil War,” “Baseball,” “Jazz,” “Jackie Robinson” and “The Vietnam War.

In 2011, cultural critic Daniel Mendelsohn penned a 4,000-word review laying out a case against Mad Men in The New York Review of Books. This was no unhinged rant but a calm, blow-by-blow critique of a show that had just wrapped its fourth and arguably most beloved season (the one with “The Suitcase”). Mendelsohn’s piece wasn’t a total takedown — it explored what he called Mad Men’s “irrational,” nostalgic appeal, which Mendelsohn himself found fascinating. But his words touched a nerve, leaving fans stunned by how broadly and unsentimentally he dismissed significant swaths of the show: The writing was “extremely weak,” he wrote, the acting “bland,” and the plotting “preposterous.”After seven seasons of nearly rhapsodic critical praise for Mad Men, which airs its series finale Sunday, Mendelsohn has been the strongest voice of the opposition to register, and most effective at getting others to come to the show's...

As Pedro Almodóvar turns 65, we revisit Kent Jones and Wes Anderson's conversation about the Spanish auteur, an assessment (and ranking) of the filmography by Slate's June Thomas, PopMatters' 2009 "Director Spotlight" and an excellent piece Daniel Mendelsohn wrote for the New York Review of Books in 2007 on Almodóvar's women. On October 17, the Grand Lyon Film Festival, Bertrand Tavernier, Thierry Frémaux and the Institut Lumière will present this year's Lumière Award, the sixth, to Almodóvar "for his intense passion for the cinema that nourishes his work, for the generosity, exuberance, tolerance, and audacious vitality he brings to the screen, and finally, for the fundamental place he holds in the culture and history of both Spain and Europe." » - David Hudson...

As Pedro Almodóvar turns 65, we revisit Kent Jones and Wes Anderson's conversation about the Spanish auteur, an assessment (and ranking) of the filmography by Slate's June Thomas, PopMatters' 2009 "Director Spotlight" and an excellent piece Daniel Mendelsohn wrote for the New York Review of Books in 2007 on Almodóvar's women. On October 17, the Grand Lyon Film Festival, Bertrand Tavernier, Thierry Frémaux and the Institut Lumière will present this year's Lumière Award, the sixth, to Almodóvar "for his intense passion for the cinema that nourishes his work, for the generosity, exuberance, tolerance, and audacious vitality he brings to the screen, and finally, for the fundamental place he holds in the culture and history of both Spain and Europe." » - David Hudson...

Lincoln and Django Unchained won welcome recognition in a ceremony that lifted no one film too high above the others

So Daniel Day-Lewis achieves his moment of Academy Award history – the gold-standard of his mystique and reputation intensified with the reports that he will now take a further five years off before accepting another movie role. Three best actor Oscars puts him in a one-man premier league of his own, the crowning moment of a remarkable career in movies that entered its glorious phase with his sensational, emotional withdrawal from the National Theatre's stage Hamlet in 1989. His Lincoln was and is a mighty achievement, inhabited with superb technique: this is a Shakespearian performance of passion and depth. It is just impossible to imagine anyone else taking the role on, and giving the blazingly powerful and eerily exact impersonation that had the effect of making the purely procedural aspects of this film so gripping and relevant.

"It may not be true that 'the three most written-about subjects of all time are Jesus, the Civil War, and the Titanic,' as one historian has put it, but it's not much of an exaggeration," writes Daniel Mendelsohn in this week's New Yorker. "Since the early morning of April 15, 1912, when the great liner went to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, taking with it five grand pianos, eight thousand dinner forks, an automobile, a fifty-line telephone switchboard, twenty-nine boilers, a jeweled copy of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, and more than fifteen hundred lives, the writing hasn't stopped."

What follows is an epic and irresistibly readable survey of 100 years' worth of Titanic lore. The disaster immediately inspired a "glut" of poems, "more than a hundred songs," countless histories, novels and plays and, of course, innumerable films, both narrative and documentary:

A scant month after the sinking, a one-reel movie...

Just when it seems like every single TV viewer over the legal drinking age loves Mad Men, author Daniel Mendelsohn is here to save us from boring conformity. In his essay for the upcoming issue of The New York Review of Books, he systematically goes through the aspects of Mad Men everybody loves (that '60s style! Jon Hamm's acting! Consequence-free all day smoking and drinking!) and, shockingly, explains why none of these things are actually that good or that interesting.   His main attack is on the show's poor handling of sexism and racism. Mendelsohn argues that racism is merely a device the writers use when the plot needs some sprucing up, but not dealt with seriously — rather, it's then dropped when other, more interesting plot points come up. He makes a great point about how the most effective depiction of pre-feminist America in the [...]...