debut — Happy Place — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

The Legendary Gordon Parks Sr's Career Began and Ended Strongly With the Seminal Coming of Age Movie The Learning Tree and Powerful Biopic Leadbelly

Like his son, Gordon Parks Sr. only directed a handful of movies, but that’s all it took to change movies forever with classics like his 1969 debut The Learning Tree, the first studio film directed by a black man, 1972’s Shaft and his powerful final film, the 1976 biopic Leadbelly.

First and Last 2.0 Nora Ephron: This Is My Life (1992) and Julie & Julia (2009)

Nora Ephron Month kicks off with a look at 1992’s This is My Life, her charming directorial debut and final film, 2010’s Julie & Julia, which is half great, half terrible.

Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #228 Class (1983)

My reader-funded exploration of the films of Virginia Madsen begins on a low note with the dire 1983 The Graduate knock-off Class, which subjects the future Oscar-nominee to all manner of humiliations.