Watch This o
ffers movie recommendations inspired by new releases, premieres, current events, or occasionally just our own inscrutable whims. This week: February is Black History Month, so we’re looking back on great performances by Black actors that the Academy Awards ignored.
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Danny Glover, when he makes his entrance as Harry Mention in Charles Burnett’s
To Sleep With Anger, hat in hand, looks exactly like a visitor from the past. But which past, and whose? For Gideon (Paul Butler) and Suzie (Mary Alice), a middle-aged couple in Los Angeles, he is an old friend from back home, somewhere South and rural, who has reappeared after 30 years. His clothes are old-fashioned; he insists on sleeping on the floor. He becomes a houseguest, and out of his increasingly sinister presence come aphorisms, country remedies, corn liquor, cards, mysterious ailments.