Film

Quentin Tarantino’s incendiary film on slavery has garnered two Oscar nominations, including best picture, and it has sparked a lot of controversy. What happens when Tarantino, the director of Pulp Fiction and Inglorious Basterds, takes on the horrible institution of slavery with a paean to the spaghetti western?

Nominated for another Academy Award, this time for Lincoln, Steven Spielberg reigns as one of the most successful directors in the world. Our film critics Linda DeLibero and Christopher Llewellyn Reed discuss four decades of Spielberg's work and his mark on American cinema.

INTERVIEW EXCERPTS:

Low-doc, no-doc, and other risky loans helped cause the housing collapse. A new federal consumer agency has adopted a rule aimed at squeezing this kind of lending out of the market. Will it keep banks from making mortgage loans to people who can't afford them? We ask a University of Maryland business school teaching fellow with decades of experience working for lenders, assessing risk.

Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post joins Jed Dietz of the Maryland Film Festival to discuss the best--and worst--of winter cinema. It includes Quentin Tarantino's Django, Unchained, Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty, and Peter Jackson's The Hobbit. 

From "Anna Karenina" to "Hitchcock" to "Killing Them Softly," a look at the current cinema with Linda DeLibero, associate director of film studies at The Johns Hopkins University, and filmmaker Christopher Llewellyn Reed, chair and associate professor of the Department of Film and Video at Stevenson University.

From a small hobbit to an unfaithful Russian lady--there's a lot of movies to see this holiday season. Tom Hall talks to Jed Deitz and Mike Sragow about December's best flicks.

The Maryland Film Festival WYPR Spotlight Series features screenings of films, followed by interviews with people involved with the film, or related to the movie's subject matter. Previous screenings have included Which Way Is The Front Line From Here? The Life And Time Of Tim Hetherington, a tribute to photojournalist Tim Hetherington, who was killed in Libya in 2011. 

Steve James, director of The Interrupters

Lucy Alibar, screenwriter of Beasts of the Southern Wild

Kurt Schmoke, former mayor of Baltimore