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The first Black performer to win the Academy Award for best actor, for “Lilies of the Field,” he once said he felt “as if I were representing 15, 18 million people with every move I made.”Sidney Poitier, whose portrayal of resolute heroes in films like “To Sir With Love,” “In the Heat of the Night” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” established him as Hollywood’s first Black matinee idol and helped open the door for Black actors in the film industry, died on Thursday night at his home in Los Angeles. He was 94.His death was confirmed by Eugene Torchon-Newry, acting director general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Bahamas, where Mr. Poitier grew up. No cause was given.Sidney Poitier was the first Black actor to win the Academy Award for best actor, for “Lilies of the Field,” and helped open the door for Black actors in the film industry.Matt Sayles/Associated PressMr. Poitier, whose Academy Award for the 1963 film “Lilies of the Field” made him the first Black performer to win in the best-actor category, rose to prominence when the civil rights movement was beginning to make headway in the United States. His roles tended to reflect the peaceful integrationist goals of the struggle.Although often simmering with repressed anger, his characters responded to injustice with quiet determination. They met hatred with reason and forgiveness, sending a reassuring message to white audiences and exposing Mr. Poitier to attack as an Uncle Tom when the civil rights movement took a more militant turn in the late 1960s.Mr. Poitier with, from left, Katharine Houghton, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” (1967). He played a doctor whose race tests the liberal principles of his prospective in-laws.Columbia Pictures“It’s a choice, a clear choice,” Mr. Poitier said of his film parts in a 1967 interview. “If the fabric of the society were different, I would scream to high heaven to play villains and to deal with different images of Negro life that would be more dimensional. But I’ll be damned if I do that at this stage of the game.”At the time, Mr. Poitier was one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood and a top box-office draw, ranked fifth among male actors in Box Office magazine’s poll of theater owners and critics; he was behind only Richard Burton, Paul Newman, Lee Marvin and John Wayne. Yet racial squeamishness would not allow Hollywood to cast him as a romantic lead, despite his good looks.“To think of the American Negro male in romantic social-sexual circumstances is difficult, you know,” he told an interviewer. “And the reasons why are legion and too many to go into.”Mr. Poitier often found himself in limiting, saintly roles that nevertheless represented an important advance on the demeaning parts offered by Hollywood in the past. In “No Way Out” (1950), his first substantial film role, he played a doctor persecuted by a racist patient, and in “Cry, the Beloved Country” (1952), based on the Alan Paton novel about racism in South Africa, he appeared as a young priest. His character in “Blackboard Jungle” (1955), a troubled student at a tough New York City public school, sees the light and eventually sides with Glenn Ford, the teacher who tries to reach him. In “The Defiant Ones” (1958), a racial fable that established him as a star and earned him an Academy Award nomination for best actor, he was a prisoner on the run, handcuffed to a fellow convict (and virulent racist) played by Tony Curtis. The best-actor award came in 1964 for his performance in the low-budget “Lilies of the Field,” as an itinerant handyman helping a group of German nuns build a church in the Southwestern desert. Mr. Poitier and Lilia Skala in “Lilies of the Field” (1963), for which Mr. Poitier won an Oscar. United ArtistsIn 1967 Mr. Poitier appeared in three of Hollywood’s top-grossing films, elevating him to the peak of his popularity. “In the Heat of Night” placed him opposite Rod Steiger, as an indolent, bigoted sheriff, with whom Virgil Tibbs, the Philadelphia detective played by Mr. Poitier, must work on a murder investigation in Mississippi. (In an indelible line, the detective insists on the sheriff’s respect when he declares, “They call me Mr. Tibbs!”) In “To Sir, With Love” he was a concerned teacher in a tough London high school, and in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” a taboo-breaking film about an interracial couple, he played a doctor whose race tests the liberal principles of his prospective in-laws, played by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Throughout his career, a heavy weight of racial significance bore down on Mr. Poitier and the characters he played. “I felt very much as if I were representing 15, 18 million people with every move I made,” he once wrote.Mr. Poitier grew up in the Bahamas, but he was born on Feb. 20, 1927, in Miami, where his parents traveled regularly to sell their tomato crop. The youngest of nine children, he wore clothes made from flour sacks and never saw a car, looked in a mirror or tasted ice cream until his father, Reginald, moved the family from Cat Island to Nassau in 1937 after Florida banned the import of Bahamian tomatoes.When he was 12, Mr. Poitier quit school and became a water boy for a crew of pick-and-shovel laborers. He also began getting into mischief, and his parents, worried that he was becoming a juvenile delinquent, sent him to Miami when he was 14 to live with a married brother, Cyril.Mr. Poitier played a Philadelphia detective and Rod Steiger played a bigoted Mississippi sheriff in “In the Heat of Night,” one of three hit films in which Mr. Poitier appeared in 1967.Mirisch/United Artists, The Kobal CollectionMr. Poitier had known nothing of segregation growing up on Cat Island, so the rules governing American Black people in the South came as a shock. “It was all over the place like barbed wire,” he later said of American racism. “And I kept running into it and lacerating myself.”In less than a year he fled Miami for New York, arriving with $3 and change in his pocket. He took jobs washing dishes and working as a ditch digger, waterfront laborer and delivery man in the garment district. Life was grim. During a race riot in Harlem, he was shot in the leg. He saved his nickels so that on cold nights he could sleep in pay toilets.In late 1943 Mr. Poitier lied about his age and enlisted in the Army, becoming an orderly with the 1267th Medical Detachment at a veterans hospital on Long Island. Feigning a mental disorder, he obtained a discharge in 1945 and returned to New York, where he read in The Amsterdam News that the American Negro Theater was looking for actors.His first audition was a flop. With only a few years of schooling, he read haltingly, in a heavy West Indian accent. Frederick O’Neal, a founder of the theater, showed him the door and advised him to get a job as a dishwasher.Undeterred, Mr. Poitier bought a radio and practiced speaking English as he heard it from a variety of staff announcers. A kindly fellow worker at the restaurant where he washed dishes helped him with his reading. Mr. Poitier finally won a place in the theater’s acting school, but only after he volunteered to work as a janitor without pay.His lucky break came when another actor at the theater, Harry Belafonte, did not show up for a rehearsal attended by a Broadway producer. Mr. Poitier took the stage instead and was given a part in an all-Black production of “Lysistrata” in 1946. Although panned by the critics, it led to a job with the road production of “Anna Lucasta.”“No Way Out” was followed by a sprinkling of film and television roles, but Mr. Poitier still bounced between acting jobs and menial work.In 1951 he married Juanita Marie Hardy, a dancer and model, whom he divorced in 1965. They had four daughters, Beverly, Pamela, Sherri and Gina. In 1976 he married Joanna Shimkus, his co-star in “The Lost Man” (1969), a film about a gang of Black militants plotting to rob a factory. They had two daughters, Anika and Sydney.Ms. Shimkus survives him. His daughter Gina Patrice Poitier Gouraige died in 2018. Complete information about his survivors was not immediately available. Mr. Poitier with Tony Curtis in “The Defiant Ones” (1958), which established him as a star and earned him an Academy Award nomination for best actor.United ArtistsAfter breakout movies like “Blackboard Jungle” and “The Defiant Ones,” Mr. Poitier’s fate was tied to Hollywood, his purpose to expand the boundaries of racial tolerance. “The explanation for my career was that I was instrumental for those few filmmakers who had a social conscience,” he later wrote.In “The Defiant Ones” and “In the Heat of the Night,” racial politics coincided with meaty roles. Just as often, however, Mr. Poitier found himself playing virtuous messengers of racial harmony in mawkish films like “A Patch of Blue” (1965) or taking race-neutral roles in less than memorable films, like a newspaper reporter in the Cold War naval drama “The Bedford Incident” (1965), Simon of Cyrene in “The Greatest Story Ever Told” (1965) or the former cavalry sergeant in “Duel at Diablo” (1966). “The Defiant Ones” remained one of Mr. Poitier’s favorite films, but to get the part he had to cross swords with Samuel Goldwyn, who was assembling a cast for “Porgy and Bess.” After Mr. Belafonte turned down the role of Porgy as demeaning, Mr. Goldwyn set his sights on Mr. Poitier, who also regarded the musical as an insult to Black people. As Mr. Poitier told it in his lively, unusually frank first memoir, “This Life” (1980), Mr. Goldwyn pulled strings to ensure that unless Mr. Poitier played Porgy, the director Stanley Kramer would not hire him for “The Defiant Ones.”Mr. Poitier, seething, bowed to the inevitable. “I didn’t enjoy doing it, and I have not yet completely forgiven myself,” he told The New York Times in 1967.The critics who would later accuse him of bowing and scraping before the white establishment seemed to dismiss Mr. Poitier’s longstanding, outspoken advocacy for racial justice and the civil rights movement, most visibly as part of a Hollywood contingent that took part in the 1963 March on Washington. Early in his career, his association with left-wing causes and his friendship with the radical singer and actor Paul Robeson made him a politically risky proposition for film and television producers.His style, however, remained low-key and nonconfrontational. “As for my part in all this,” he wrote, “all I can say is that there’s a place for people who are angry and defiant, and sometimes they serve a purpose, but that’s never been my role.”Mr. Poitier with Claudia McNeil in the 1959 Broadway production of “A Raisin in the Sun.” Reviewing his performance, Brooks Atkinson of The Times wrote, “Mr. Poitier is a remarkable actor with enormous power that is always under control.”Leo FriedmanIn 1959 Mr. Poitier made a triumphant return to Broadway in Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” winning ecstatic reviews. “Mr. Poitier is a remarkable actor with enormous power that is always under control,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times. “Cast as the restless son, he vividly communicates the tumult of a high-strung young man. He is as eloquent when he has nothing to say as when he has a pungent line to speak. He can convey devious processes of thought as graphically as he can clown and dance.” Mr. Poitier repeated the role in the 1961 film version of the play.With the rise of Black filmmakers like Gordon Parks and Melvin Van Peebles in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Mr. Poitier, now in his 40s, turned to directing and producing. He had proposed the idea for the romantic comedy “For Love of Ivy” (1968), in which he starred with Abbey Lincoln. After joining with Paul Newman and Barbra Streisand in 1969 to form a production company called First Artists, he directed the western “Buck and the Preacher” (1972), in which he acted opposite Mr. Belafonte, and a series of comedies, notably “Uptown Saturday Night” (1974) and “Let’s Do It Again” (1975), in which Mr. Poitier and Bill Cosby teamed up to play a pair of scheming ne’er-do-wells, and “Stir Crazy” (1980), with Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder.The critics thought little of Mr. Poitier’s directing talents, but enthusiastic audiences, Black and white, made all three films box-office hits. Neither audiences nor critics found much to like in subsequent directorial efforts, like the comedy “Hanky Panky” (1982), with Mr. Wilder and Gilda Radner, or “Ghost Dad” (1990), with Mr. Cosby as a dead father who refuses to leave his three children alone.President Barack Obama presented Mr. Poitier with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009.Jewel Samad/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn his later years, Mr. Poitier turned in solid performances in forgettable action films and thrillers like “Shoot to Kill” (1988), “Little Nikita” (1988) and “Sneakers” (1992). It was television that provided him with two of his grandest roles.In 1991 he appeared in the lead role in the ABC drama “Separate but Equal,” a dramatization of the life of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. In 1997 he delivered a widely praised performance as Nelson Mandela in “Mandela and de Klerk,” a television movie focusing on the final years of Mr. Mandela’s imprisonment by the white-minority government in South Africa, with Michael Caine in the role of President F.W. de Klerk.“Sidney Poitier and Nelson Mandela merge with astonishing ease, like a double-exposure photograph in which one image is laid over the other with perfect symmetry,” Caryn James wrote in a review in The New York Times.In 2002, Mr. Poitier was given an honorary Oscar for his career’s work in motion picture. (At that same Oscar ceremony, Denzel Washington became the first Black actor since Mr. Poitier to win the best-actor award, for “Training Day.”) He received a Kennedy Center Honor in 1995. And in 2009, President Barack Obama, citing his “relentless devotion to breaking down barriers,” awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.Mr. Poitier was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1974.Mr. Poitier’s memoir “This Life” was followed by a second, “The Measure of a Man,” in 2000. Subtitled “A Spiritual Autobiography,” it included Mr. Poitier’s thoughts on life, love, acting and racial politics. It generated a sequel, “Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter” (2008).Despite his role in changing American perceptions of race and opening the door to a new generation of Black actors, Mr. Poitier remained modest about his career. “History will pinpoint me as merely a minor element in an ongoing major event, a small if necessary energy,” he wrote. “But I am nonetheless gratified at having been chosen.” Neil Vigdor contributed reporting. More

The director loved the world of classic Hollywood so much that it’s as if he never left it. Here are nine of his film highlights.Peter Bogdanovich, who died Jan. 6 at 82, loved the world of classic Hollywood so much that it’s as if he never left it. He directed movies as if trying to bottle an ineffable essence or panache from the heydays of Orson Welles, John Ford and Howard Hawks, whose legacy he helped preserve in his first calling as a film historian.But Bogdanovich’s knowledge (and name-dropping) didn’t produce movies for a select few cinephiles. Even Francis Ford Coppola, a New Hollywood contemporary who would release “The Godfather” the next year, marveled at the rapt, packed audiences for Bogdanovich’s 1971 masterpiece “The Last Picture Show.” Writing and filming with flair, elegance, and the heart of an old romantic, Bogdanovich reimagined the storied past and played with genre, dialing up or down the noise of the plot. Having studied as an actor, he also brought a palpable affection for his stars that persisted even as his own star as a filmmaker faded after the 1970s. The joy of moviemaking, however, never left him.Here are nine highlights of Bogdanovich’s work, all available to stream.‘The Last Picture Show’ (1971)Stream it on Showtime. Rent it on Apple.After years of interviewing the masters, Bogdanovich directed his own canonical classic, adapting Larry McMurtry’s personal novel about a small Texas town in the 1950s. Bittersweet and funny, it’s a warm portrait of folks dealing with loneliness, tedium and, frankly, horniness in a tight-knit place where there’s little to do but see a picture show. Cybill Shepherd makes her screen debut as a high schooler tiring of her roughneck boyfriend (Jeff Bridges); her disillusioned mother (a wonderfully sly Ellen Burstyn) knows a dead end when she sees one. The heart of the movie might lie with Sonny (Timothy Bottoms), a well-meaning teenager with all the direction of a tumbleweed. Well-deserved Oscars went to two more standouts, Cloris Leachman and Ben Johnson. Shot in a lovely, dusty black-and-white, the movie sighs with the lived experience of a hundred memoirs.‘What’s Up, Doc?’ (1972)Rent or buy it on Amazon or YouTube.Ryan O’Neal and Barbra Streisand face off in probably the truest screwball comedy since the days of “His Girl Friday.” A nerdy musicologist (O’Neal) bumps into a gleeful troublemaker (Streisand, pure magic) while looking for aspirin in a store. Feature-length lunacy follows. Not a line or shot is wasted as the stars expertly carry out the clockwork chaos orchestrated by Bogdanovich in a San Francisco hotel through syncopated dialogue, comic bits of business and, of course, chases. Four identical suitcases fuel the madness, creating a sensation of absolute giddiness.‘Targets’ (1968)Stream it on Fubo; rent or buy it on Apple.Born out of an assignment from the B-movie maestro Roger Corman, Bogdanovich’s ingenious and unusual directing debut taps into a late-1960s mood of upheaval and disorientation. Boris Karloff plays a retiring horror star who decides that no movie could match the fearsome violence of the real world. At the same time, a sniper is on the loose — a conceit inspired by the University of Texas tower shootings by Charles Whitman. The story lines converge at a drive-in to produce a genuine sense of shock, previewing the talents of the young director, who has a part as a filmmaker looking to cast Karloff.Remembering Peter BogdanovichThe filmmaker, who became one of Hollywood’s most celebrated directors in the ‘70s before a public fall from grace, died Jan. 6, 2022.Obituary: Mr. Bogdanovich was hailed for his ability to coax nuanced performances from actors, and for the bittersweet luminosity of movies that conjured a bygone past.Streaming Guide: The director loved the world of classic Hollywood so much that it’s as if he never left it. Here are nine of his film highlights.From the Archives: Read our original reviews of Mr. Bogdanovich’s most acclaimed films: “The Last Picture Show” and “Paper Moon.”‘Paper Moon’ (1973)Stream it on Amazon; rent or buy it on YouTube.Ryan O’Neal plays a con man who makes quick bucks by selling Bibles to widows, and his real-life daughter, Tatum O’Neal (an Oscar winner at age 10), is the orphan who falls under his care and keeps outwitting him. A number of directors in the 1970s looked back to the Depression era, but Bogdanovich’s comedy has a mischievous verve. Shooting again in black and white, he clearly delights in Tatum’s defiant streak, and gives Madeline Kahn an immortal monologue as Trixie Delight, a dancer seeking to ensnare the con man.‘Saint Jack’ (1979)Stream it on Tubi; rent or buy it on Amazon.Ben Gazzara brings his effortless charm, amused grin and gravelly baritone to this story of an expat pimp in Singapore running into trouble. You can almost feel the film’s rhythms being given over entirely to Gazzara, as he glides through rooms and streets, saying his hellos. It’s a site-specific view on the shifting sands of expatriate existence, with cinematography by Robby Müller. It also brings to a close the freewheeling, high-flying ’70s chapter of the director’s filmmaking career, as his fortunes shifted.‘The Thing Called Love’ (1993)Stream it on Hoopla; rent or buy it on Apple.A fondness for country music crops up throughout Bogdanovich’s work, and it blooms here in this overlooked, warmhearted story of an aspiring singer-songwriter in Nashville. While trying to land gigs, Miranda (Samantha Mathis) finds herself living a series of country songs: pining for one singer (River Phoenix), mooned over by another (Dermot Mulroney), wondering whether to pack up and go back home. Sandra Bullock co-stars, pre-“Speed,” as Miranda’s aimless roommate. The film’s gentle story provided Phoenix with his final role before his tragic death. Bogdanovich’s other musical interests later culminated in a four-hour-plus 2007 documentary about Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.‘The Cat’s Meow’ (2001)Stream it on Tubi; rent or buy it on YouTube.In 1924, the Hollywood producer Thomas H. Ince died under mysterious circumstances on William Randolph Hearst’s yacht, on a cruise to celebrate Ince’s birthday. The incident, which became the basis for a 1997 play by Steven Peros that he adapted for the screen, proves irresistible to Bogdanovich, who assembles a cast game for louche partying and meaningful glances. An effervescent Kirsten Dunst headlines as the actress and Hearst amour Marion Davies, with Eddie Izzard as Charlie Chaplin, Edward Herrmann as the ever-jealous Hearst, and Joanna Lumley and Jennifer Tilly to boot.‘The Great Buster: A Celebration’ (2018)Stream it on Kanopy; rent or buy it on Amazon.Some of Bogdanovich’s greatest work was done off screen as a film historian, interviewer (see, for example, “Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Filmmakers”) and curator, but his feature-length documentary on the great silent comedian gives a taste. Stirring clips of Buster Keaton’s work accompany admiration from fans ranging from Mel Brooks to Johnny Knoxville. In this vein it’s also worth tracking down Bogdanovich’s even better documentary “Directed by John Ford.”‘The Other Side of the Wind’ (2018)Stream it on Netflix.Bogdanovich stars in one of cinema’s great, lost works, begun in the early 1970s by Orson Welles and painstakingly reassembled in 2018. The main setting is the 70th birthday party of the raucous director Jake Hannaford (John Huston), with glimpses of a radical new film to come. Bogdanovich plays Hannaford’s young foil — fittingly, a hotshot director on the rise. The film’s cinematic phantasmagoria belongs to Welles’s legacy, but also captures Bogdanovich’s double life as filmmaker and film-chronicler. More

Sidney Poitier made history in 1964 as the first Black performer to win an Oscar in the best-actor category, for Ralph Nelson’s comedy-drama “Lilies of the Field,” in which Mr. Poitier played Homer Smith, an itinerant worker who helps a group of nuns build a chapel in rural Arizona.“Because it is a long journey to this moment, I am naturally indebted to countless numbers of people,” he said in his acceptance speech, in which he thanked the creative team behind the film, his agent, and the members of the Academy. “For all of them, all I can say is a very special thank you.”Anne Bancroft, who had won the best actress Oscar in 1963 for her role as Anne Sullivan in “The Miracle Worker,” presented Mr. Poitier with the award. He was competing against Albert Finney (“Tom Jones”), Richard Harris (“This Sporting Life”), Rex Harrison (“Cleopatra”) and Paul Newman (“Hud”).When Mr. Poitier accepted an honorary Academy Award in 2002, he took a similar tack, thanking the “handful of visionary American filmmakers, directors, writers and producers” he said made his career possible by going against the odds.“Without them, this most memorable moment would not have come to pass and the many excellent young actors who have followed in admirable fashion might not have come as they have to enrich the tradition of American filmmaking as they have,” Mr. Poitier said. More

As an actor and filmmaker, he strove to bring layered Black individuals to the screen at a time when that was rare.Sidney Poitier has died at age 94. A perennial Oscar nominee in the 1960s, Poitier became a movie star at a time when Hollywood tended to relegate Black actors to roles as servants, appearing for just a scene or two, often as comic relief. But he was rarely a supporting player, even at the start of his career. He took leads, specializing in a specific type: the educated, well-mannered, middle-class professional who had assimilated into the parts of white society willing to accept him.Throughout his first two decades in show business, Poitier’s films often promoted powerful messages about the ignorance of bigotry. His charisma and grace made him popular with white and Black audiences alike, and played no small part in easing some of the racial tensions in America — just by giving controversial issues an amiable advocate.These 11 Poitier movies span the ’50s to the ’90s, when he semiretired. They offer a good overview of not just the scope of his career, but of how the country changed during his 50-plus years in show business.1950‘No Way Out’After a relatively short stint as a New York stage actor, Poitier made an auspicious big-screen debut in 1950 with the writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s unusual hybrid of social drama and film noir. As a doctor struggling against the ingrained racism of his patients — including a career criminal played by Richard Widmark — Poitier allowed audiences to see what even accomplished Black Americans were facing every day, and how that kind of abuse could rattle a person’s psyche.Stream it on The Criterion Channel; rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube.1957‘Edge of the City’In Poitier’s best 1950s film, he plays a longshoreman who becomes fast friends with a co-worker (played by John Cassavetes) who’s secretly AWOL from the military. Though one’s an upstanding citizen and the other’s a deserter, they are treated differently by their cruel boss (Jack Warden), who doesn’t like seeing any of his people getting chummy — especially not when one’s white and one’s Black. Less preachy than many of Poitier’s pictures from this era, “Edge of the City” has a bracing naturalism, born of its roots in the adventurous, progressive New York theater and television scenes.Rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube.1961‘A Raisin in the Sun’In a sublime bit of cultural kismet, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry’s masterpiece arrived when Poitier was the right age to tackle one of theater’s great characters: the pragmatic, prickly Walter Younger. Unlike the softer-edged, friendlier men Poitier had been portraying up to then, Walter doesn’t have much faith in the great dream of integration. He argues with his more idealistic family members about whether they should use a financial windfall to move into a white neighborhood, and his cynicism brings to light arguments that were being had by Black families everywhere in the ’50s and ’60s — except on the big screen.Rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube.Poitier opposite Ruby Dee, a frequent co-star, in “A Raisin in the Sun.”Columbia Pictures/Alamy1965‘A Patch of Blue’Poitier won a best actor Oscar for “Lilies of the Field” (1963), which would become the first of a short string of films (including “To Sir, With Love” from 1967 and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”) in which he played handy, disarming individuals, helping white people improve their attitudes. Most of these movies are more interesting now for how they reveal the subtle racism of well-meaning left-leaning filmmakers, but “A Patch of Blue” is a refreshing exception, and the first movie to watch from this batch. As a kindly soul who helps a poor, abused blind teenager stand up for herself, Poitier is saintly but grounded. And the writer-director Guy Green’s adaptation of an Elizabeth Kata novel is unusually wise about how sometimes class matters as much as race in America.Rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube.1967‘In the Heat of the Night’In between his social-issue films, Poitier made plenty of genre pictures where race was a key element of the plot (as in the two-fisted 1958 adventure “The Defiant Ones,” and the 1966 western “Duel at Diablo”). The most popular of these is the best picture-winning “In the Heat of the Night,” in which the actor plays a brilliant Philadelphia homicide detective, Virgil Tibbs, who is drafted to help a small-town Mississippi police department crack a difficult case. Refusing to defer to his virulently prejudiced hosts, Tibbs carries himself as a truly free man, in ways that audiences back in 1967 found thrilling. He’d go on to play the character twice more: in “They Call Me Mister Tibbs!” (1970) and “The Organization” (1971).Rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube.1967‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’The critical reputation of this Oscar-winning blockbuster hit has diminished in recent years. It’s been held up as an example of Hollywood’s heavy-handed social messaging — rather than as a groundbreaking interrogation of some purportedly open-minded white and Black families’ conflicted feelings about interracial marriage. Nevertheless, Poitier gave one of his most memorable performances in the film, using his charisma and wit to peck away at the underlying prejudices of the older generation, represented here primarily by characters played by the venerable movie stars Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. The points that the director-producer Stanley Kramer and the screenwriter William Rose are making may be blunt, but Poitier delivers them in electrifying fashion.Rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube.1972‘Buck and the Preacher’After acting in films almost nonstop throughout the ’50s and ’60s, Poitier slowed his output from the mid-70s onward, in part because he began working more behind the camera. He made his directorial debut in 1972 with this offbeat western, which arrived toward the start of the blaxploitation era, when the movie industry began to realize the commercial potential of films about self-actualized Black protagonists. Joined by Harry Belafonte and Ruby Dee, a frequent co-star, Poitier cast himself in “Buck and the Preacher” as a skilled scout having lightly comic adventures on the frontier. While attuned to 19th-century racial strife, this film is more an amiable entertainment than a hard-hitting commentary. As such, it has held up better than some of the star’s more incendiary projects.Rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube.Poitier as a skilled scout in “Buck and the Preacher,” which he also directed.Columbia Pictures1974‘Uptown Saturday Night’Many of the Black-themed films that filled American theaters in the ’70s were raunchy and R-rated, but Poitier had hits in that era with three PG caper comedies, which he directed and starred in alongside Bill Cosby and a host of A-list African American entertainers. The first in this loose trilogy was “Uptown Saturday Night,” with Poitier and Cosby playing buddies who go on an all-night odyssey through their neighborhood — encountering colorful characters played by the likes of Belafonte, Flip Wilson and Richard Pryor — while searching for a stolen lottery ticket.Rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube.1975‘The Wilby Conspiracy’One of Poitier’s first feature films was a 1951 adaptation of Alan Paton’s best seller, “Cry, the Beloved Country,” an unusually forward-thinking exposé of the horrors of South African apartheid. Poitier returned to that theme 24 years later with “The Wilby Conspiracy,” a chase thriller in which he plays a revolutionary on the run from the authorities with a sympathetic white buddy (played by Michael Caine). Though essentially an action picture, the movie does a fine job of making injustice come alive. Poitier and Caine would later team up again for the 1997 TV movie “Mandela and de Klerk,” dramatizing apartheid’s last days.Stream it on Tubi; rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play or YouTube.1992‘Sneakers’Poitier made some baffling professional choices during the ’80s and ’90s, when he rarely acted, and directed more than his share of duds. But it’s hard to fault him for joining Robert Redford, Dan Aykroyd, David Strathairn and River Phoenix for the ensemble adventure-comedy “Sneakers.” As a former C.I.A. agent aiding a team of well-meaning super-hackers, Poitier makes good use of his iconic screen presence, representing one of the last sparks of ’60s idealism in an increasingly synthetic age.Rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube.1999‘The Simple Life of Noah Dearborn’One of Poitier’s last screen performances was in this 1999 TV movie, in which he plays an intensely private, self-sufficient, elderly Georgian whose mental competency is questioned when he refuses to sell his land. Noah Dearborn is the kind of character Poitier played throughout his career — skilled, stubborn and deeply decent — but it says something about how the culture changed during his lifetime that his race is no longer the defining element in his story. That’s a direct consequence of how Poitier spent his career defying stereotypes and fighting to bring layered Black individuals to the screen.Stream it on IMDbtv; rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube. More

Though the memoir this film is based on confronts the issue of addiction to alcohol, the adaptation skirts the topic and its deeper implications.There’s a moment near the end of J.R. Moehringer’s 2005 memoir, “The Tender Bar,” when the author realizes he’s circling the drain. The owner of his favorite bar, Steve, has died an alcoholic’s death, overserving himself, falling, hitting his head and lapsing into a coma. Seeking solace, the young Moehringer, fresh out of Yale, turns to his most seductive companion: booze.“I no longer made any pretense of drinking to bond with the men, or to blunt the cares of the day, or to participate in male rituals,” Moehringer writes. “I drank to get drunk. I drank because I couldn’t think what else to do. I drank the way Steve drank at the end, to achieve oblivion.”“The Tender Bar,” which has been adapted as an Amazon Prime movie, directed by George Clooney, isn’t strictly about alcoholism. It’s about community and family and the void left by an absent (alcoholic) father. But Moehringer’s words would make for a standard drunkalogue at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, of which I’ve attended many. “Oblivion” is a popular word there, and a popular destination among alcoholics. This is one of the smartest things about Moehringer’s memoir: It deftly captures that moment when the party comes to an end, when it’s just not fun anymore and it’s time to sink or swim. (Moehringer quit drinking when he was 25.)But that moment never comes in the movie, mostly because J.R., played by Tye Sheridan, drinks without consequences, as does everyone else at the Long Island watering hole where his bartender uncle, Charlie (Ben Affleck), dispenses words of wisdom with his dry martinis. The closest the movie comes to acknowledging alcoholism is when J.R.’s ne’er-do-well father (Max Martini) enters the picture. A classic deadbeat dad, he disappears for years at a time, shows up to announce his sobriety, but explains that he can actually have the occasional cocktail because he’s not really an alcoholic. Then he beats up his girlfriend. He’s the movie’s designated alcoholic and also its villain.“He’s somebody who’s making a big deal of his sobriety, and it’s like, ‘I’ve decided I can allow myself a cocktail,’” the “Tender Bar” screenwriter William Monahan said by phone. “Then that cocktail is like 10 million of them, resulting in domestic violence.”Aside from J.R.’s dad, however, no one in the movie seems to have a drinking problem, despite spending all of their free time at a bar.“George Clooney didn’t hammer on it,” Monahan said. “But the J.R. character does definitely have a point where he realizes he’s got to straighten up.”Well, yes and no. In the movie, J.R. comes to Charlie concerned that he’ll end up like his old man. Charlie’s advice: Cut back on the drinking. And that’s that. We don’t see J.R. slam cocktails at Penn Station and pick up a few Budweiser tallboys for the ride to the bar, as he does in the book. Instead, his uncle tells him to cool it a little. Does he heed this advice? We never really find out.“Flight,” with Denzel Washington, illustrates the ease with which alcoholics lie to themselves. Paramount PicturesMoehringer, who has gone on to write novels (“Sutton”) and other books (“Open,” with Andre Agassi), sees drinking as an inherently difficult subject to depict in film.“It’s woven so tightly into the social fabric, and it’s such a central part of many rites and rituals, holidays and special occasions,” he told me via email. “Alcohol can be wonderful, enriching, spirit-enhancing, so it’s hard to think — unpleasant to think — that it can also be dangerous, and sometimes deadly. It doesn’t seem fair, this thing that makes us feel so good can also make us feel so bad. The paradox makes it hard to discuss.”Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

A chance encounter with Thelonious Monk led to a 14-year stint as his manager. After seeing a young Michael Keaton at a stand-up club, he became his manager, too.Harry Colomby was a schoolteacher with a love of jazz when he stopped by the Cafe Bohemia in Greenwich Village in 1955 to remind the drummer Art Blakey that he and his band, the Jazz Messengers, were scheduled to perform in a few days at the school where Mr. Colomby taught.While waiting, Mr. Colomby greeted the celebrated composer and pianist Thelonious Monk; they had met once before. “Oh, Harry. Yeah, I remember you,” Mr. Colomby recalled him saying, as detailed in the liner notes to the live 1965 Monk album “Misterioso.” “Say, you got your car here? You can drive me uptown?”In the car, Monk asked if Mr. Colomby was ready to quit teaching. “So I drove Thelonious to his house at 2:30 in the morning and at 3 a.m., a half-hour later, became his personal manager,” he wrote. “I’m still not sure how it happened.”Mr. Colomby’s younger brother, Bobby, the original drummer with Blood, Sweat & Tears and later a record producer and an executive at several record companies, said in a phone interview that Monk viewed Harry as someone who was “bright, honest and would work hard,” adding, “Harry told him, ‘I can’t promise you you’ll be rich, but you’ll be appreciated as an artist.’”Thelonious Monk in 1961. “I realized that Monk was more than a jazz musician,” Mr. Colomby said. “He was potentially a symbol.”Erich Auerbach/Getty ImagesMr. Colomby died on Dec. 25 at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 92. His brother confirmed the death.When Mr. Colomby began working with Monk, he was little known beyond the jazz cognoscenti and his unorthodox approach divided critics. He was also rarely heard in New York City because he lacked a cabaret card, which in those days was needed to perform in bars and nightclubs there; he had not had one since 1951, when it was revoked because of a drug arrest. In 1957, Mr. Colomby helped Monk get his card back. His subsequent extended engagement at the Five Spot in the East Village was the beginning of his emergence as a jazz star.For most of the 14 years that he managed Monk from obscurity to renown, Mr. Colomby taught English and social studies at high schools in Brooklyn, Queens and Plainview, on Long Island. “I had no illusion about how much money there is in jazz,” Mr. Colomby told the historian Robin D.G. Kelley for his biography “Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original” (2009). “But I realized that Monk was more than a jazz musician. He was potentially a symbol. He was symbolic of strength, stick-to-it-iveness, purity, you know, beyond music, beyond jazz.”Harry Golombek was born on Aug. 20, 1929, in Berlin, and fled with his parents and his brother Jules to New York City in the spring of 1939 to escape Nazi persecution. Family members who had immigrated earlier to the United States changed their surname to Colomby. His father, Saul, who became Fred in the United States, started a watchmaking company in Manhattan. His mother, Elsie (Ries) Colomby, worked there.After graduating from New York University in 1950 with a bachelor’s degree in English, Harry began his teaching career.As a manager, Mr. Colomby had only four clients: Monk; the singer and pianist Mose Allison; the comedian and impressionist John Byner; and the actor Michael Keaton.Mr. Byner said that he met Mr. Colomby in the early 1960s at a John F. Kennedy impression contest. “He was fantastic,” he said in a phone interview. “He knew everybody.” But they parted in 1986 because Mr. Colomby became focused on his business with Mr. Keaton.“He left me for another guy,” Mr. Byner said.Mr. Colomby first encountered Mr. Keaton, then a stand-up comic, performing at the Comedy Store in Hollywood in the late 1970s.“What I saw in Michael was something original,” Mr. Colomby told The Los Angeles Times in 1988. “I also saw charisma onstage. Something about his look and timing was exquisite.”Mr. Colomby was also the producer or executive producer of starring vehicles for Mr. Keaton including the television series “Working Stiffs” (1979) and “Report to Murphy” (1982) and the films “Mr. Mom” (1983), “Johnny Dangerously” (1984) and “One Good Cop” (1991).In addition to his brother Bobby, Mr. Colomby is survived by his wife, Lee, and his son, the actor Scott Colomby. His brother Jules, who briefly ran a jazz record company, Signal, died in the 1990s.Mr. Keaton was Mr. Colomby’s client for about 25 years, and the two remained friends afterward.“What we shared was, we saw things in an offbeat way and we’d talk for hours and make each other laugh,” Mr. Keaton said in a phone interview. “I was probably the only stand-up whose manager was funnier than he was.” More

Jessica Chastain, Penélope Cruz, Lupita Nyong’o, Diane Kruger and Fan Bingbing star in an espionage thriller that’s slick but banal.Two centuries before James Bond 007, there was Agent 355, a lady spy on George Washington’s side during the American Revolutionary War who helped identify the turncoat Benedict Arnold. Her name was hidden from history, but her code number has been claimed by this slick and grim espionage flick that aspires to become an all-star, all-female franchise — the Spice Girls version of Bond. Jessica Chastain, a producer and star of the movie, even used Twitter to crowdsource casting suggestions for a “#BondBoy.”Why not? But we’re going to need a better plot than one built around a bunch of heroes and terrorists chasing after yet another doomsday gizmo. Chastain’s Mace Browne, a C.I.A. workaholic repulsed by romantic commitment, is hellbent on securing a one-of-a-kind cyber-whatsit able to hack into and hijack any computer-controlled device on the planet, from a power grid to a plane. This device could start World War III, Mace warns an MI6 computer whiz, Khadijah (Lupita Nyong’o), in a rusty clunker of a line that warns the audience that the only novelty in Simon Kinberg’s thriller is the cast. It doesn’t take a super sleuth to fill in the rest. There will be lectures on teamwork, confessions squeezed out “the easy way or the hard way” and speeches about the invisible front lines of modern warfare, all rote hubbub building toward a blowout gun battle that makes sure to set aside a bad boyfriend for a sequel.But what a cast. Chastain and Nyong’o rumble with Diane Kruger, peer pressure Penélope Cruz and are struck dumb by Fan Bingbing, who saunters in halfway through to shake things up. Individually, the women represent the differing national security interests of the United States, England, Germany, Colombia and China; their pitiful male colleagues, however — the lovesick partner (Sebastian Stan) who uses a sting operation to make Mace playact as his fiancée, the distrustful boss (Sylvester Groth) who diagnoses Kruger’s near-feral street fighter with daddy issues — make a case for the women to form a feminist Brawlers Without Borders.Kinberg and Theresa Rebeck’s screenplay races through five continents, and as many betrayals and switcheroos. (The cinematographer, Tim Maurice-Jones, seems most inspired by Shanghai’s iridescent neon blues.) The filmmaking deserves credit for refusing to leer as the ladies convincingly kick and punch — all focus is on the stunts, not on sex appeal.Yet there’s a sense that “The 355” felt forced to pick between being sincere or being fun. It chose solemnity. As a result, it’s flat-footed even when the setups yearn to be playful. Viewers are not invited to giggle when a pursuit detours into a men-only bathhouse, or at a surreal moment in an undercover sequence when Chastain rips off her red wig disguise to reveal … her own identical red hair. The drums thunder as though they’re dead-serious about proving that women can make an expensive adventure that’s every bit as banal as the ones that boys crank out every month with basically the same plot. At least Cruz is allowed to get a laugh in a scene where her married soccer mom learns to flirt with a patsy. The twinkle in her eyes looks just like Sean Connery’s seductive gleam.The 355Rated PG-13 for copious male corpses. Running time: 2 hours 4 minutes. In theaters. More

A young blind woman is menaced by a crew of robbers in this forgettable thriller.Ever since Audrey Hepburn tiptoed around three home-invading thugs in “Wait Until Dark” (1967), the blind-person-in-peril narrative has been something of an entertainment staple. And while Randall Okita’s “See For Me” offers the novelty of a disabled character who is rather less than morally upstanding, this uninvolving thriller is as lacking in tension as credibility.Consider, for instance, the police response time to the 911 call made by Sophie (Skyler Davenport), a young blind woman whose cushy house-sitting gig in upstate New York is interrupted by three robbers. By the time law enforcement shows up, most thieves could have cleaned out the property, staged it and put it on the market. Even if we forgive the movie’s pacing hiccups, we’re still left with a surprisingly unsympathetic main character — a snippy skiing champ turned petty crook in response to a degenerative eye disease — and a location so poorly lighted that its layout remains frustratingly unclear.The plot’s coolest trick is to have Sophie fight back by means of an app that connects the visually impaired with sighted volunteers. Guided by one of these assistants — an Army veteran (played by Jessica Parker Kennedy) who just happens to be a whiz at first-person-shooter video games — Sophie takes on the intruders in generic cat-and-mouse setups squintingly illuminated by her cellphone flashlight.Though Adam Yorke and Tommy Gushue’s script highlights the character’s — and the actor’s — exceptional capabilities (Davenport is legally blind), it lacks the imagination to explore Sophie’s scheming nature. Had it done so, I might still have disliked her, but I would have been more inclined to root for her.See for MeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More