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PBS’ new two-part, four-hour Leonardo da Vinci probably won’t redefine the identity of Ken Burns, renowned as a documentary chronicler of all things Americana.

But it does find the director, working with frequent collaborators Sarah Burns and David McMahon, in markedly different terrain, both historically and culturally. More than that, Leonardo da Vinci (we’ll see how many times I write Leonardo DiCaprio as the title here) finds the team working with a very different visual and rhetorical approach, making a project that isn’t really enlightening about da Vinci as a person, but explores the polymath’s intellectual and artistic processes in a way that’s effectively cumulative and often fascinating.

It remains my consistent feeling that Burns and company are better the more primary source interview subjects they have. It’s why I love Baseball, why I think The Dust Bowl is underrated and why I prefer...

Photo Credit: Searchlight Pictures The trailer for Dust has recently been released on Hulu, and it is already evoking a sense of unease. Set against the backdrop of 1930s Oklahoma during the notorious Dust Bowl, the film narrates the journey of a woman who is determined to safeguard her family from an enigmatic threat. In the role of the mother, Sarah Paulson portrays a character who perceives a malevolent presence amid the relentless dust storms that envelop them. As her anxiety intensifies, she becomes increasingly isolated, resolutely focused on protecting her children. The trailer is replete with haunting visuals and highlights Paulson’s powerful performance, establishing a captivating atmosphere. Featuring a skilled supporting cast, including Amiah Miller and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, the film is poised to deliver an exhilarating experience. Dust explores the lengths to which a mother will go to defend her loved ones. With its unsettling setting and engaging narrative,...

On the brink of turning 70, Ken Burns will release his very first film, “Working in Rural New England,” which he made as an undergraduate at Hampshire College. The 28-minute docu will be released July 25 on Unum, Burn’s American history digital platform on PBS.

About Old Sturbridge Village, an outdoor history museum in Massachusetts that re-creates life in rural New England from 1790 through the 1830s, the docu was commissioned by the museum in 1973. The film served as Burns’ senior thesis at the liberal arts college in nearby Amherst, Mass. Accompanying the doc on Unum is a pre-recorded conversation between Burns and New York Times literary critic A.O. Scott.

“It in some ways does not look like a Ken Burns film,” Scott says during his conversation with Burns. “It’s moving images in the present day, in color. So, it doesn’t immediately say to a modern viewer, a film by Ken Burns.

Matthew Weiner was a novice showrunner when the “Mad Men” pilot was being shot with the legendary New York production designer Bob Shaw. When AMC picked up the pilot and production moved to Los Angeles, Weiner panicked: How was another production designer going to retroactively re-establish the 1961 Madison Avenue advertising world, which Shaw had crafted from real locations, in Los Angeles on a basic cable budget? Shaw gave Weiner a name: Dan Bishop. “[It was] the first time I saw everybody in the office,” recalled Weiner upon visiting Bishop’s fully dressed Sterling Cooper set. “I can’t explain it, to have this world brought to life and it exceeds your imagination.” Weiner knows how rare it is to have something exist perfectly on the screen of your imagination and for somehow it to become richer, more dynamic and meaningful in reality, but on “Mad Men,” it was an experience that became common.

Ken Burns was in Dallas some years ago visiting a good friend, philanthropist Cappy McGarr. The filmmaker was working on his 2012 Depression-era miniseries, The Dust Bowl, and as usual for a workaholic who often has six or seven films brewing, Burns was turning over ideas for his next project. When McGarr suggested tackling country music, “it just exploded in my brain — like, of course,” Burns says. “And as we got into it, we saw that it was as real, important, and emotionally compelling as any film we’ve made.”

Related:...

Elyse DuFour (The Walking Dead) sets her sights on wealthy homeowners, but gets more than she bargained for in The Night Sitter. The film will be released digitally and on DVD this August. Also in today's Horror Highlights: release details for The Mummy Rebirth and Black Sunday as well The Unspeakable Text Vol.1's Kickstarter.

The Night Sitter VOD and DVD Release Details: "John Rocco and Abiel Bruhn’s highly-anticipated horror feature The Night Sitter is set to spook summer, with a digital and DVD bow set for August via Uncork’d Entertainment.

Starring The Walking Dead’s Elyse DuFour, The Night Sitter fixes on a scheming con artist that poses as an innocent babysitter to steal from a wealthy occult enthusiast. Just as the thief arrives to clean out the house, the home owner’s reclusive son stumbles upon one of his father’s artifacts and unwittingly summons a...

Since garnering an Oscar nomination in 1981 for his first documentary feature, “Brooklyn Bridge,” Ken Burns has chronicled events and influential figures in American history. His films seek to examine situations from all perspectives, and in doing so he has made American history a riveting narrative fit for all audiences.

After the success of 1990’s “The Civil War,” Burns became a PBS mainstay, making docu series “Jazz” (2001), “The War” (2007) and “The Dust Bowl” (2012). His latest project, “The Vietnam War” was released in 2017, and is an Emmy contender this year. The 10-part, 18-hour film, co-directed with Lynn Novick, is Burns’ second longest endeavor. (His 1994 series “Baseball” was 18½ hours.)

Burns received his first mention in Variety on May 10, 1976, when he was nominated for the American Society of Cinematographers’ student-film competition award, for his 27-minute film “Working in Rural New England,” which Burns made as an undergraduate at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass.

What...

Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, which recounts the evacuation of more than 300,000 Allied soldiers from a beach in Northern France in May and June of 1940, finds the director working in a different register. From Julien Allen at Reverse Shot:For one thing, the events being dramatized in Dunkirk are not a leap of a storyteller's imagination, but recorded facts. Nolan's challenge is constricted by history rather than by science; and it is complicated, morally and artistically, by the need to do justice to real life events. For another, Nolan's obsession with exposition—a painful burden for his films to carry, particularly his highest concept pictures such as Inception and Interstellar—is nowhere to be seen. The story of these stranded men, sitting ducks on the barren beaches, is stripped down to a bare exercise in survival, in which the denial of exposition is demonstrative almost to the point of abstraction. The...

Margot Robbie is in Dreamland.

Ever since the actress blew the socks off Martin Scorsese and the moviegoing masses in 2013’s The Wolf of Wall Street, the Aussie has starred in a number of Hollywood tentpoles, most notably The Legend of Tarzan and Suicide Squad, where Robbie slipped into the role of Gotham’s wicked villainess, Harley Quinn. And though David Ayer’s anti-hero pic bombed with critics, a box office haul of $745 million has been enough to warrant talk of not only a sequel, but a female-fronted spinoff in the form of Gotham City Sirens.

The latter is reportedly eyeing a theatrical release in 2019, when Ayer will once again be directing Margot Robbie from behind the lens, but The Hollywood Reporter today brings word of another project to add to the actress’ bustling slate. Its name? Dreamland, a taut thriller set during the height of The Dust Bowl (Aka...

2014 is the year documentaries began to take over. At least this seemed to be the case. The most acclaimed fiction film of the year, Boyhood, has primarily been praised for its nonfictional element of showing the actual 12-year growth of its cast. Another critical favorite is Under the Skin, a sci-fi/horror film that prominently features non-actors interacting with its protagonist, unknowingly captured with hidden cameras. Then there’s the footage from The Dust Bowl in Interstellar, the footage from Baraka and Samsara in Lucy and documentary material in Selma, Godzilla and Foxcatcher. Meanwhile, some of the best nonfiction films of 2014 veer into fiction film territory. Although this kind of blurring of real and scripted isn’t new, docs like Robert Greene‘s Actress and Roberto Minervini‘s Stop the Pounding Heart continue to find creative new ways of mixing up modes of storytelling as the most appropriate way of exploring and presenting certain subjects. More...

“Don’t do me down on the blowing shit up department,” Christopher Nolan says hilariously on "The Colbert Report." “I think you can have a film that makes people think and blow shit up.” It’s nice to see Nolan, who many think takes himself too seriously, having a good laugh, smiling it up, and thoroughly enjoying himself while being subjected to the host’s faux ignoramus routine. And there’s an interesting little reveal in the interview too. The “Interstellar” director has spoken often of how Ken Burns’ 2012 documentary “The Dust Bowl” was a source of inspiration for the early moments of the film on Earth, when massive dust storms threaten the protagonists. But it turns out some of the interviews conducted at the beginning of the film—people looking back on the blights that effected Earth’s crops—are actual real footage from Burns’ doc. “Those are real people,...

Interstellar is a 2014 science fiction film directed by Christopher Nolan. Starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, and Michael Caine, the film features a team of space travelers who travel through a wormhole in search of a new habitable planet. It was written by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan, Christopher combined his idea with an existing script by his brother that was developed in 2007. At a recent press conference in Los Angeles we had the opportunity to sit and speak with the filmmaker himself and Matthew McConaughey, this is what they had to say about their new film.

Jonathan Nolan wrote the original screenplay how did you finally get involved in the project? 

Christopher Nolan: Jonah (Nolan) was working on the script for Steven Spielberg at the time but we always go back and forth with each other on ideas and it just sounded  exciting. What it was that got me was that.

History class just got a little more interactive.

Ken Burns — the documentary filmmaker known for his style of using archival footage — partnered with digital agency Big Spaceship to create an app that curates his films into hour-long “mixtapes,” according to Wired.

The app, “Ken Burns,” allows users to surf a timeline year by year, seeing how clips from each film line up chronologically with each other. “Zoom in on 1869, for example, and a cloud of clips from The Civil War, The West, and The National Parks orbit in parallax formation around one another; swipe to 1930, and it’s clips from Jazz,...

"Veep" star Julia Louis-Dreyfus took home her fourth career win, and her second for her HBO comedy, at the 2013 Primetime Emmy Awards on Sunday (Sept. 22), while "Breaking Bad" actress Anna Gunn earned her first award ever for her final season as Skylar White.

The complete winners list below:

Outstanding DRAMABreaking BadDownton Abbey Game of Thrones Homeland House of Cards Mad Men

Outstanding Actress In A Drama Connie Britton, Nashville Claire Danes, Homeland Michelle Dockery, Downton Abbey Vera Farmiga, Bates Motel Elisabeth Moss, Mad Men Kerry Washington, Scandal Robin Wright, House of Cards

Outstanding Actor In A Drama Hugh Bonneville, Downton Abbey Bryan Cranston, Breaking Bad Jeff Daniels, The Newsroom Jon Hamm, Mad Men Damian Lewis, Homeland Kevin Spacey, House of Cards

Outstanding Supporting Actress In A Drama Anna Gunn, Breaking Bad Maggie Smith, Downton Abbey Emilia Clarke, Game of Thrones Christine Baranski, The Good Wife Morena Baccarin, Homeland Christina Hendricks,...

HBO dominated the Creative Arts Emmys on Sunday night, grabbing 20 awards, including eight for the Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra, the most-awarded program of the night. Other notable winners include Bob Newhart; the TV vet took home his first-ever Emmy for his guest-starring role on The Big Bang Theory.

See the complete list of winners below; an edited version of the nearly four-hour Creative Arts Emmys will air Saturday, Sept. 21, on Fxx.

Outstanding Host for a Reality or Reality-Competition Program

Ryan Seacrest, American Idol

Betty White, Betty White’s Off Their Rockers

Tom Bergeron, Dancing With the Stars

Winner: Heidi Klum and Tim Gunn,...

Here at EW, Fall TV Wish List is a new weekly series in which our TV critics Melissa Maerz and Jeff Jensen weigh in on what they hope the coming season will bring for some of their favorite shows. This week: Fox’s The Mindy Project, which premieres its second season on Sept. 17 at 9:30 p.m.

Where We Left Off

Mindy (Mindy Kaling) is moving to Haiti with her boyfriend Casey (Anders Holm)! Wait, no she isn’t. Wait, yes she is! At first, she was just having trouble convincing herself that “it’s a fun adventure for me...

If you are a foreign film fan, than you no doubt know the ballad of Harvey Scissorhands, the seemingly benevolent porducer who buys up the rights to intriguing international fare, and then slices it down into digestable patties for the masses. In the late 90’s to early ‘aughts, when a subtitled film being released into mainstream theaters was nearly unheard of, many film buffs had to endure Harvey’s handling of pictures like Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke, and Zhang Yimou’s Hero.

I still recall the random and unecessary subtitles at the start of the Masamouri Oshii’s Avalon, later realizing they were never meant to be there in the first place. Although this tactic for butchering films and making homogenized American cuts from their remains seems to have died down in recent years, Harvey is picking up the blades again for one of this year’s most lauded international projects,...

Related: 2013 Primetime Emmy Nominations (Live) Nomination Summary – 2013 Primetime Emmy Awards 17 Nominations American Horror Story: Asylum 16 Nominations Game Of Thrones 15 Nominations Behind The Candelabra Saturday Night Live 13 Nominations Breaking Bad 30 Rock 12 Nominations Downton Abbey Mad Men Modern Family 11 Nominations Homeland Phil Spector 10 Nominations Boardwalk Empire 9 Nominations Dancing With The Stars House Of Cards The Oscars 8 Nominations The Big Bang Theory Top Of The Lake 7 Nominations So You Think You Can Dance 6 Nominations The Borgias The Colbert Report The Daily Show With Jon Stewart The Girl Louie Survivor 5 Nominations The Amazing Race Ethel Girls The Good Wife London 2012 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In The House Of God Nurse Jackie Parade’s End Political Animals Project Runway 66th Annual Tony Awards Veep The Voice 4 Nominations Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown Crossfire Hurricane Deadliest Catch Glee How I Met Your Mother Jimmy Kimmel Live The Kennedy Center Honors Louis C.K.: Oh My God...

"Argo" remains the Oscar-frontrunner! The Ben Affleck film was the big winner at the recently concluded 63rd Annual Ace Eddie Awards honoring outstanding editing in nine categories of film, television, and documentaries. "Argo" won the Dramatic category, "Silver Linings Playbook" for Comedy/Musical, "Brave" for Animated, and "Searching for Sugar Man" for Documentary.

Here are the complete list of nominees; for winners/nominees of other award-giving bodies, click here:

Best Edited Feature Film (Dramatic):

*** Argo

William Goldenberg, A.C.E.

Life of Pi

Tim Squyres, A.C.E.

Lincoln

Michael Kahn, A.C.E.

Skyfall

Stuart Baird, A.C.E.

Zero Dark Thirty

Dylan Tichenor, A.C.E. and William Goldenberg, A.C.E.

Best Edited Feature Film (Comedy Or Musical):

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Chris Gill

Les Misérables

Melanie Ann Oliver & Chris Dickens, A.C.E.

Moonrise Kingdom

Andrew Weisblum, A.C.E.

*** Silver Linings Playbook

Jay Cassidy,...

The Producers Guild of America announced the winners of its theatrical motion picture and TV nominations for the 2013 PGA Awards. Check out the full list of nominees and winners (marked in red) below. This year's big winner was Ben Affleck's "Argo," which means that the film will likely also go on to win the Oscar for Best Pictures since the PGA Awards predict the Academy Award winner almost 80% of the time, including last year when PGA and the Oscars both selected "The Artist." In the animation category, "Wreck-It Ralph" won, beating out Pixar's "Brave." On television, "Modern Family" was once again chosen as the best comedy and "Homeland" as the best drama. Theatrical Motion Picture Nominees: Theatrical Motion Pictures: * Argo * Beasts of the Southern Wild * Django Unchained * Les Miserables * Life of Pi * Lincoln * Moonrise Kingdom * Silver Linings Playbook * Skyfall * Zero Dark Thirty Animated Theatrical Motion Pictures: * Wreck-It Ralph * Brave...

The full list of television winners and nominees at the 2013 Producers Guild of America Awards is as follows: The David L. Wolper Award for Outstanding Producer of Long-Form Television

American Horror Story (Brad Buecker, Dante Di Loreto, Brad Falchuk, Ryan Murphy, Chip Vucelich, Alexis Martin Woodall)

The Dust Bowl (Ken Burns, Dayton Duncan, Julie Dunfey)

Game Change (Gary Goetzman, Tom Hanks, Jay Roach, Amy Sayres, Steven Shareshian, Danny Strong) - Winner

Hatfields & McCoys (Barry Berg, Kevin Costner, Darrell Fetty, Leslie Greif, Herb Nanas)

Sherlock (Mark Gatiss, Steven Moffat, Beryl Vertue, Sue Vertue) The Norman Felton Award for Outstanding Producer of Episodic Television, Drama

Breaking Bad (Melissa Bernstein, Sam Catlin, Bryan Cranston, Vince Gilligan, Peter Gould, Mark Johnson, Stewart (more)...

The American Cinema Editors (Ace) has announced the nominees of the 63rd Annual Ace Eddie Awards honoring outstanding editing in nine categories of film, television, and documentaries. We'll find out the winners on Saturday, February 16th.

Here are the complete list of nominees; for winners/nominees of other award-giving bodies, click here:

Best Edited Feature Film (Dramatic):

Argo

William Goldenberg, A.C.E.

Life of Pi

Tim Squyres, A.C.E.

Lincoln

Michael Kahn, A.C.E.

Skyfall

Stuart Baird, A.C.E.

Zero Dark Thirty

Dylan Tichenor, A.C.E. and William Goldenberg, A.C.E.

Best Edited Feature Film (Comedy Or Musical):

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Chris Gill

Les Misérables

Melanie Ann Oliver & Chris Dickens, A.C.E.

Moonrise Kingdom

Andrew Weisblum, A.C.E.

Silver Linings Playbook

Jay Cassidy, A.C.E. & Crispin Struthers

Ted

Jeff Freeman, A.C.E.

Best Edited Animated Feature Film:

Brave -- Nicolas C.

The nominees for the 63rd Annual Ace Eddie Awards was announced today. Ace, the American Cinema Editors, is an honorary society of motion picture editors founded in 1950. Film editors are voted into membership on the basis of their professional achievements, their dedication to the education of others and their commitment to the craft of editing. Best Edited Feature Film (Dramatic): Argo William Goldenberg, A.C.E Life of Pi Tim Squyres, A.C.E. Lincoln Michael Kahn, A.C.E. Skyfall Stuart Baird, A.C.E. Zero Dark Thirty Dylan Tichenor, A.C.E. & William Goldenberg, A.C.E. Best Edited Feature Film (Comedy Or Musical): The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel Chris Gill Les Misérables Melanie Ann Oliver & Chris Dickens, A.C.E. Moonrise Kingdom Andrew Weisblum, A.C.E. Silver Linings Playbook Jay Cassidy, A.C.E. & Crispin Struthers Ted Jeff Freeman, A.C.E. Best Edited...

Universal City, CA, Jan. 11 –American Cinema Editors (Ace) today announced nominations for the 63rd Annual Ace Eddie Awards recognizing outstanding editing in nine categories of film, television and documentaries. Winners will be revealed during Ace’s annual black-tie awards ceremony on Saturday, February 16, 2013 in the International Ballroom of the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Actor / Comedian David Cross (“Arrested Development”) will serve as the Master of Ceremonies that evening. Next week Ace will announce the Golden Eddie Filmmaker of the Year honoree and two Career Achievement honorees. The Ace Eddie Award nominees in nine categories are listed below. A tie in the Best Animated Feature Film category resulted in four nominees this year instead of three. Nominees For 63rd Annual Ace Eddie Awards Best Edited Feature Film (Dramatic) Argo William Goldenberg, A.C.E. Life of Pi Tim Squyres, A.C.E. Lincoln Michael Kahn, A.C.E. Skyfall Stuart Baird, A.

Earlier this week The Producers Guild of America (PGA) announced the nominations for their annual awards for theatrical motion picture, animated motion picture and long-form television nominations for the 2013 Producers Guild Awards.

This was an incredible year for films, and most of the movies nominated here deserve to be. Out of all the films listed here, I'd like to see Zero Dark Thirty or Silver Linings Playbook take the top prize for motion picture, Paranorman for animated film, Game of Thrones for TV drama, and Curb Your Enthusiasm for TV Comedy. In case you missed them, here they are! Look them over and let us know what films you'd like to see win!

Ten nominations in the theatrical motion picture category include:

Argo (Warner Bros.)

Beasts of the Southern Wild (Fox Searchlight)

Django Unchained (The Weinstein Company)

Life of Pi (20th Century Fox)

Lincoln (DreamWorks)

Les Misérables (Universal)

Moonrise Kingdom...

The Producers Guild of America (PGA) have announced the nominations for their annual Producers Guild Awards. The nominees in the six key categories are:

Theatrical Motion Picture

Argo, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Django Unchained, Life of Pi, Lincoln, Les Misérables, Moonrise Kingdom, Silver Linings Playbook, Skyfall, Zero Dark Thirty

Animated Feature

Brave, Frankenweenie, ParaNorman, Rise of the Guardians, Wreck-It Ralph

Documentary Feature

A People Uncounted, The Gatekeepers, The Island President, The Other Dream Team, Searching For Sugar Man

Episodic Television, Drama

Breaking Bad, Downton Abbey, Game of Thrones, Homeland, Mad Men

Episodic Television, Comedy

30 Rock, The Big Bang Theory, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Louie, Modern Family

Mini-Series of TV Movie

American Horror Story, The Dust Bowl, Game Change, Hatfields & McCoys, Sherlock

Source: Producersguild.org...

Sherlock, American Horror Story and Homeland are among the shows vying for prizes in the TV categories at the forthcoming Producers Guild of America (PGA) Awards. American Horror Story, which returned from its mid-season break tonight (January 2), will compete with Sherlock, Emmy award-winning political drama Game Change, The Dust Bowl and Hatfields & McCoys for the David L Wolper Award, which is presented to outstanding producers of long-form television. Homeland will face Breaking Bad, Downton Abbey, Game of Thrones and Mad Men for the Norman Felton Award, dedicated to outstanding episodic drama. Meanwhile, the Danny Thomas Award for episodic comedy will be contested by The Big Bang Theory, Curb Your Enthusiasm, 30 Rock, Louie and Modern Family. Other programmes (more)...

The Producers Guild of America (PGA) announced today the motion picture and long-form television nominations for the 24th Annual Producers Guild Awards. The categories include: The Darryl F. Zanuck Award for Outstanding Producer of Theatrical Motion Pictures; The Award for Outstanding Producer of Animated Theatrical Motion Pictures; and The David L. Wolper Award for Outstanding Producer of Long-Form Television. The documentary film category and other television category nominations were already announced by the Guild in November 2012. All 2013 Producers Guild Award winners will be announced on January 26th at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. This year, the Producers Guild will also present special honors to Bob and Harvey Weinstein (Milestone Award), Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner (David O. Selznick Achievement Award in Theatrical Motion Pictures), J.J. Abrams (Norman Lear Achievement Award in Television), Russell Simmons (Visionary Award) and Bully (Stanley Kramer Award). The 2013 Producers Guild Awards Chair is Michael De Luca. The...

The Producers Guild of America has announced its nominations for best productions of the year, in what is often looked to as an indicator for how the Academy Awards may go.

The guild selected 10 films — most of them common guesses for the group that could make up the Oscar list of the best films of 2012: Argo, Lincoln, Les Misérables, among others.

The one surprise: Skyfall. No 007 film has ever cracked the Best Picture list, but if this nomination is any indication, that could change when the Oscar nods are revealed Jan. 10.

Check out the full list …

The Darryl F. Zanuck...

The top 10 films of 2012, according to AP Movie Critic Christy Lemire:

1. "Argo" – Directing just his third feature, Ben Affleck has come up with a seamless blend of detailed international drama and breathtaking suspense, with just the right amount of dry humor to provide context and levity. He shows a deft handling of tone, especially in making difficult transitions between scenes in Tehran, Washington and Hollywood, but also gives one of his strongest performances yet in front of the camera. The story of a rescue during the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis sounds like eat-your-vegetables cinema, and mixing it with an inside-Hollywood comedy sounds impossible, but Affleck and screenwriter Chris Terrio pull it all off.

2. "Beasts of the Southern Wild" – This is sheer poetry on screen: an explosion of joy in the midst of startling squalor and one of the most visceral, original films to come along in a while. The story...

The Central Park Five

Directed by Ken Burns, David McMahon, and Sarah Burns

Written by Sarah Burns, David McMahon, and Ken Burns

USA, 2012

From a very early age, we’re taught that when you do something wrong, you’ll get punished. Maybe you hit your sibling and you get grounded, or you cheat on a test and get detention in school. Once we leave the education system, the punishment for our crimes becomes more serious, depending on the severity of whatever we’ve done. But the idea remains: someone who does something bad has to be punished. In this respect, the modern criminal justice system has no gray area. We’re so fiercely committed to the notion that a suspected burglar or murderer or rapist has to be the real criminal, the true perpetrator of a heinous act, and that they deserve the harshest punishment possible, that we ignore the gray area.

Chicago – One of the greatest gifts that Ken Burns has as arguably our best working documentarian is his ability to take historical subjects and make them resonate to our lives today. “The Civil War” transports us back in time, making the lives of those people relate to our own. His amazing “The Central Park Five,” which opened last week in Chicago and was given 4-stars by Patrick McDonald, is playing in theaters and his PBS documentary “The Dust Bowl” was recently released on Blu-ray and DVD. Once again, Burns takes history and makes it present.

Rating: 4.0/5.0

The brilliance of “The Dust Bowl” is in how Burns and his team not only transport us back to one of the darkest chapters in our country’s history but how they make it so relevant to today. This is a saga of a government misleading its own people and climate controlling mankind’s fate.

Ken Burns tackles the wheat boom on the southern plains, as well as the ten years of drought that led to farmers struggling to survive. This is The Dust Bowl. Ken Burns, in his always-entertaining and thoughtful style brings this story to life.

This epic 2-part documentary clocks in at nearly four hours long and is truly something special. While some could argue that the film drags at points, those moments are necessary in telling the sweeping tale of such a visually-stunning, yet desolate area known as the southern great plains. Often loaded with beautiful visuals, there are plenty of true accounts of the history of the great plains on display, as well.

Read more...

In the wake of his magnificent PBS documentary The Dust Bowl, Ken Burns has a new film opening in theaters that couldn’t be more different yet also explores a dark chapter in recent American history. The Central Park Five is based on a book by the filmmaker’s daughter Sarah Burns, and was made in collaboration with her and David McMahon. It tells the story of a crime that shocked New York (and the nation) in 1989, when a female jogger was raped and brutalized one night in Central Park…and how the police department, and city prosecutors, railroaded five teenage boys who had nothing to do with the incident. Four of the five boys—now grown men—are...

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Pick Of The Week: New The Dust Bowl (PBS) Released on DVD/Bd the same week it premiered over two nights on PBS, Ken Burns’ latest may not sound enticing, based on a documentary style that’s become much-parodied in the years since The Civil War and Baseball, but in his “A” review, The A.V. Club’s Todd VanDerWerff calls The Dust Bowl Burns’ best film in years. Over four hours, Burns explores this manmade catastrophe of the mid-’30s, when poor agricultural methods of Great Plains farmers combined with a severe drought to produce horrifying dust storms (or ...

It’s probably not unfair to make the claim that most people who choose to watch a Ken Burns documentary know exactly what to expect going in: Uniquely American subject, “How’d they find that?” archival footage, talking heads both academic and first-person witness, masterful photography and editing, all in service to a solid (if uncontroversial) thesis. The Dust Bowl, Burns’ unsurprisingly exceptional 22nd feature, doesn’t stray from his well-established model. But, really, why the hell should it?...

Sure, Sunday is incredibly overcrowded with high-end TV, including "Homeland," "The Walking Dead," "Boardwalk Empire," "The Good Wife," "Treme" and "Dexter," but what to watch the rest of the time? Every Monday, we bring you five noteworthy highlights from the other six days of the week. "The Dust Bowl": Reaping the Whirlwind Monday, November 19 at 8pm on PBS The second half of Ken Burns' excellent latest doc series about the 1930s ecological disaster that devasted the Great Plains, displacing hundreds of thousands of people who were forced to leave their homes in search of new means of survival. Burns combines archival footage with interviews from survivors of the era to create an wrenching portrait of the era. You can watch part one of the documentary online courtesy of PBS here. "American Masters": "Inventing David Geffen" Tuesday, November 20 at 8pm on...

On TV this Sunday: The Mentalist does the cell-block tango, Steve Carell spends some out-of-Office time with The Simpsons, MythBusters and the Food Network talk Turkey Day and the American Music Awards honors Dick Clark’s memory. Here are 10 programs to keep on your radar.

Noon Thanksgiving Live (Food Network) | Alton Brown, Giada De Laurentiis, Bobby Flay, Rachael Ray and other Food Network hosts answer viewer questions and offer Thanksgiving remedies in this interactive holiday special.

Related | Thanksgiving Feast: What Are You Grateful for This TV Season? Let Us Know!

8 pm The 40th Anniversary American Music Awards (ABC) | Justin Bieber,...

Tune in alert for PBS' 'The Dust Bowl,' the much-anticipated film by Ken Burns airing nationally on Sunday-Monday, November 18- 19, 2012, 8:00-10:00 p.m. Et on PBS (check local listings). This man-made disaster killed and injured thousands, as Burns chronicles the environmental catastrophe that, throughout the 1930s, destroyed the farmlands of the Great Plains. American prairies became deserts as nature -aided by man's mistakes- unleashed a pattern of massive, deadly dust storms that for many seemed to herald the end of the world. It was the worst manmade ecological disaster in American history. The Dust Bowl was caused by a perfect storm of factors that all happened at the same time. The reasons for this disaster...

This is in fact a classic story of human nature coming up against Mother Nature. And guess what, Mother Nature always wins. – Ken Burns

On October 17, 2012, I was offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to moderate the National Youth Summit on the Dust Bowl, presented by the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History and PBS. The guest of honor was Ken Burns, Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning documentarian. His newest film, The Dust Bowl, chronicles what he calls "the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history."

Joining us on stage was dust bowl survivor Cal Crabill, fifth generation farmer Roy Bardole, Usda research ecologist Deb Peters, and Anson Mills founder Glenn Roberts. With the help of students from around the country, we discussed how learning about the Dust Bowl can contribute to our current understanding of drought and agricultural sustainability. How might we prevent such a catastrophe from occurring in America today?

To learn more,...

They recall the days turning black, the winds whipping through towns, taking with them the family's livelihoods, the soil on which they farmed. In those natural disasters, thousands died, but no one is sure just how many.

Survivors of the dust storms of the 1930s tell their stories in Ken Burns' oral history documentary "The Dust Bowl" Sunday and Monday, Nov. 18 and 19, on PBS (check local listings).

"They used to say no one will watch; no one has the attention span," Burns says of films tackling history's tough subjects.

But he has proved naysayers wrong before. Viewers watched his very long films about the Civil War, jazz and baseball. Four hours, spread over two nights, is practically a short when it comes to Burns' signature films.

And there is a lot here, much of it terrifying, to sustain the four hours.

"It was a man-made catastrophe," Burns says. "It...

Ken Burns’s astounding documentary The Dust Bowl (PBS, November 18–19, 8 p.m.) is about disaster and survival, ruination and renewal. But mostly it’s about clouds and faces. The clouds are plumes of dust, hundreds of feet high. They roll across the Midwestern plains at a dreamlike speed: unhurried yet relentless. As seen in photographs and newsreel footage, they’re hypnotically beautiful — but only if you’re contemplating them from eight decades’ remove. If you were on the ground in the plains during the thirties, they were terrifying: Black blizzards rolling over towns and farms, burying the land. One witness said that the “Black Sunday” dust storm of 1935 looked like a funnel cloud lying on its side; in certain still photos, the cumulus tendrils jut from the rolling dirt cloud in ways that ironically echo the blades of the mechanical ploughs that destroyed the topsoil and helped make the Dust...

The iconic photos from the southern plains states during the Great Depression say it all: the haunted eyes of weary mothers, children with their faces wrapped against the choking dust and families piling their belongings into trucks and heading to California.

In the two-part documentary The Dust Bowl, filmmaker Ken Burns (The Civil War, Baseball, Prohibition) focuses on the nearly decade-long drought that, coupled with unsustainable farming techniques, destroyed millions of acres in Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico.

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By Allen Gardner

Pier Paolo Pasolini’S Trilogy Of Life (Criterion) Pier Paolo Pasolini was Italy’s last Neo-Realist, a product of post-ww II Europe who was fervently Catholic, openly gay, defiantly Marxist, and one of the most original voices of the 20th century’s second half. Before his brutal murder in 1975 (after the premiere of his still-controversial swan song, “Salo”), Pasolini directed a trilogy of films based on masterpieces of medieval literature: Boccaccio’s “The Decameron,” Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales,” and “The Thousand and One Nights (also known as “The Arabian Nights”). The three films celebrate the uninhibited, earthy, raw carnal nature of the original texts, leaving little to the imagination, but also offering Pasolini’s own very unique and pointed views on modern society, consumerism, religious and sexual mores (and hypocrisies), and an unexpurgated celebration of the human body, both male and female. Extraordinary production design by Dante Ferretti and another evocative,...

"The Dust Bowl," the new documentary series from king of archival footage assemblage Ken Burns, will premiere on PBS on Sunday, November 18th as part of an extreme weather night the public broadcast station is planning in the wake of Hurrican Sandy. The evening will kick off with "Inside the Megastorm," on original one-hour doc from "Nova" about Sandy that will premiere at 7pm and will explore whether super-storms are becoming more frequent and more dangerous while providing a scientific context for Sandy and the destruction it caused. Per Beth Hoppe, PBS's VP of Programming, "PBS presents two documentaries that showcase how fragile and interconnected our relationship is to the environment and how powerful weather events continue to impact our lives from past through the present. It's an informative and revealing night of television that viewers will not want to miss." "The Dust Bowl" will follow at 8pm, with the.

Filmmaker Ken Burns had harsh words for Mitt Romney, mocking the Republican presidential candidate and calling his proposal to cut funding for PBS "ridiculous" in a recent appearance on HuffPost Live.

"The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is one one-hundredth of one percent of our federal budget. This is a man, Mitt Romney, who knows what things cost but doesn't know their value," Burns told HuffPost Live host Jacob Soboroff. "This is an underfunded network...that stitches together red states as well as blue states. That's supported by red states as well as blue states. That's responsible for the best children's, the best science, the best nature, the best public affairs and the best history on the dial. And he wants to get rid of it?

"It's ridiculous," he added.

Burns made light of Romney's attack on Big Bird, saying that he and the "Sesame Street" character have "been in witness protection since the first debate.

By Jacqueline Cutler They recall the days turning black, the winds whipping through towns, taking with them their family’s livelihoods, the soil on which they farmed. In those natural disasters, thousands died but no one is sure just how many. Survivors of the dust storms of the 1930s tell their stories in Ken Burns’ oral history documentary The Dust Bowl, premiering on PBS Nov. 18-19. “They used to say no one will watch, no one has the attention span,” Burns says of films tackling history’s tough subjects. But he has proved naysayers wrong before with his award-winning long-form documentaries on [...]...