Starring: Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte Director: Otto Preminger

Few actresses have captivated the camera as powerfully as Dorothy Dandridge in Carmen Jones. Her polished beauty plays in irresistible contrast to her title character's leonine sexuality and fluid emotions; a man can't decide from moment to moment if he wants to save her from doom, build her a castle, or never let her out of bed. Of course, that's the problem with the boys in this semi-experimental adaptation of Bizet's opera, Carmen. Straight-arrow Joe (a strapping Harry Belafonte), an obedient corporal on a Southern military base during World War II, is all set to go to flight school and marry his hometown sweetie, Cindy Lou (Olga James), when his troublemaking sergeant orders him to accompany Carmen to a civilian court. In short order, Joe is swept up in Carmen's carnal anarchy and her craving for release from lousy options in life. An impulsive act of violence ensures that Joe's future is gone forever, putting Carmen in the difficult position of destroying their relationship to save him. Oscar Hammerstein II took Bizet's music in 1943 and rewrote the book and lyrics. The result is largely a smashing success with a few missteps (the bullfighter in Bizet's piece becomes a heavyweight boxer here, which breaks up a certain grace in the story) and a couple of perfect stretches (the long prelude to Carmen and Joe's first embrace, set on Carmen's hoodoo-ish home turf). Despite the fact that both Dandridge and Belafonte were singers, their vocal performances were dubbed by LeVern Hutcherson and Marilyn Horne. (Yes, it is a little disconcerting to hear another voice come out of the more familiar Belafonte's mouth.) Otto Preminger directed with his usual eye on economy of action and production, as the numerous musical numbers tend to be shot in lengthy, single, carefully choreographed takes. The result can be a little visually static at times, but the passion behind the singing pulls everything through.

Starring: James Mason, Joan Fontaine Director: Robert Rossen

This race-relations film from 1957, based on a novel by Alec Waugh and set on a West Indies island, stars James Mason as a wealthy man who runs against a local union leader (Harry Belafonte). The rest of the players, one way or another, deal with the consequences of their rivalry. Mason and Belafonte leave a strong impression, but the film overall doesn't live up to its own sense of significance. Joan Collins is good as Mason's sister, who worries that the contest will cost her an engagement to the governor's son.

Starring: Harry Belafonte, Robert Ryan Director: Robert Wise

After seeing Odds Against Tomorrow, it's hard to understand why Harry Belafonte made so few movies. He's superb as Johnny Ingram, a nightclub singer with a bad gambling debt. To pay it off, he agrees to take part in a bank heist with an ex-cop (the great character actor Ed Begley) and a racist ex-con named Earl Slater, played with consummate bitterness by Robert Ryan. But this isn't a standard crime caper--the movie carefully explores the pressures each man is under. Ingram's debts have begun to threaten his ex-wife and child, while Slater's pride has been eaten away by age and failure; Slater finally has a relationship that matters to him (with Shelley Winters, in one of her wonderful, desperate performances), but not as much as proving himself. As the plan slowly falls into place, the tensions between the men get more extreme until everything falls apart. Gloria Grahame, one of the great B movie femme fatales, has a small but memorable role. Director Robert Wise's long and wildly varied career includes The Haunting, The Sound of Music, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but Odds Against Tomorrow is one of his best. This bleak, powerful movie is considered by many critics and film historians to be the last true film noir, and it's a fitting close to the genre.

Starring: Zero Mostel, Harry Belafonte Director: Ján Kadár

Morris Mishkin is a elderly religious Jew in New York. His wife Fanny is very ill. He's a tailor, but he can't work because his back has given out. He doesn't even have enough money for Fanny's medicine. Finally, a black fellow appears from nowhere in the Mishkin kitchen. He says he's an angel from God, sent to help Mishkin. The black angel is even Jewish, named Alex Levine? But will Morris believe in the angel? And can the angel perform the miracle that he promises?

Starring: Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte Director: Sidney Poitier

Sidney Poitier made his directing debut with this 1972 action comedy with an edge to it. Made at the height of the Black Power movement in America, the film has an unmistakable militancy in its story of a wagon-train guide and a con man who team up to throw a posse of white nightriders off the trail of escaped slaves. Poitier has never been a distinctive filmmaker, and Buck and the Preacher certainly doesn't indicate any early signs of raw talent that later went undeveloped. But the film's energy and sense of fun, hand in hand with the suggestively political zing, make it watchable.

Starring: Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby Director: Sidney Poitier

The first in a trio of very broad comedies from director Sidney Poitier features Poitier and Bill Cosby as two small-time hustlers always looking for an angle. During a robbery at a swanky nightclub, they are relieved of their wallets, only to find later that one of them had a lottery ticket that came up a winner. The chase is on as they scour the city to find their prize, along the way running up against Harry Belafonte as a sly and suave mob kingpin (with a nod to Don Corleone) with his eye on the ticket as well. Heavily influenced by the screwball comedies of the 1940s but with the thoroughly modern air of 1970s black culture, Uptown Saturday Night is a breezy affair with some old pros at the helm.

Starring: Tim Robbins, Greta Scacchi Director: Robert Altman

A wicked satirical fable about corporate backstabbing--and actual murder--in the movie business, The Player benefits from director Robert Altman's long and bitter experience working within, and without, the Hollywood studio system. Rising young executive Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) is tormented by threats from an anonymous writer. The pressure and paranoia build until Griffin loses control one night and semi-accidentally kills screenwriter David Kahane (Vincent D'Onofrio), who may or may not be the source of the threats. From that point, Griffin's life and career begin to fall apart. In keeping with the ironic spirit of the film itself, Altman's scathingly funny attack on the moral bankruptcy of Hollywood was embraced by many of the same people it was intended to savage, and restored the director to commercial and critical favor. Michael Tolkin adapted the screenplay from his own novel, and the movie is studded with cameos by famous faces, many of whom appear as themselves. The digital video disc includes a commentary track with Altman and Tolkin, some deleted scenes, a documentary about Altman, and a key to help identify more than 50 of the picture's big-name cameos.

Starring: Marcello Mastroianni, Sophia Loren Director: Robert Altman

Robert Altman's much-anticipated broadside at the world of fashion is a disappointment. The film's crazy-quilt Nashville-like narrative structure and ensemble casting (Julia Roberts, Tim Robbins, Lauren Bacall, Marcello Mastroianni, Sophia Loren) are a thing to behold, but the story's many interlocking pieces lack overall depth and resonating emotion. There is a grand, satiric statement about fashion and society at the end of the film, and there are hints of an aging, nostalgic filmmaker's skepticism about our postmodern world of short-lived attachments and meanings. But watching this film is a long, long uphill climb, with a lot of thin air to endure before arriving at a destination.

Starring: John Travolta, Harry Belafonte Director: Desmond Nakano

The premise is interesting, but the execution fails to live up to any of its potential. White Man's Burden imagines an America where black people are the ruling class and whites are underprivileged minorities. John Travolta stars as a factory worker who is fired after making a delivery to the house of the factory owner (Harry Belafonte) and accidentally peeping the man's naked wife through a window. Now jobless and unable to support his family, his wife (Kelly Lynch) leaves him. In desperation he kidnaps Belafonte. The best part of the film is seeing African American actors filling the smaller, background roles that usually go to white actors (such as police officers and wealthy suburbanites), but the movie fails in its poorly thought-out ideas. Transposing the characters' skin color out of the thinly veiled metaphor, John Travolta's portrayal of the poor black man as violent and uneducated (but family oriented), combined with Belafonte's rich white man as just and compassionate (and also family oriented), borders on being truly offensive. The fact that it's helmed by an Asian American director, Desmond Nakano, only makes you wonder why Asian Americans are conspicuously absent (as are Hispanics) and where the heck they would fit into this world, anyway.

Starring: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Miranda Richardson Director: Robert Altman

Robert Altman wanted to captured a sense of what life was like in his hometown during the Depression, both in a story about the people who lived there and, more impressionistically, in the jazz that sprouted there before moving to New York. But his plot here is rambling and undramatic: A small-time hood double-crosses a vicious black gangster (Harry Belafonte) and is grabbed by him, marked for death. To save his life, the hood's dim blond wife (Jennifer Jason Leigh) kidnaps a rich politician's wife (Miranda Richardson) and spends the day driving around town with her, on the theory that the politician can convince the gangster to free her husband. Leigh is jittery, Richardson seems bored--and the lengthy jam sessions we see (involving contemporary musicians such as Joshua Redman) serve only to prolong an already slow-moving film. Possibly worth seeing for the silky menace of Belafonte, but there is little else to recommend it.

Starring: Gregory Abbott, Erik Barnouw Director: Alexandra Isles

Scandalize My Name: Stories from the Blacklist examines the way Red Scare politics was used to impede the emergence of African-Americans as full participants in the political, social and cultural aspects of post-war American life. Because television was born in this era, and adopted the political attitudes of the time, the story is told through the confrontation of African-American performers with blacklists, loyalty oaths and discrimination in casting. Hosted by three-time Academy Award® nominee Morgan Freeman, Scandalize My Name is brought to life by African-American directors, actors and scholars who used their talents to advocate for social and cultural equality.

Starring: Fidel Castro, Muhammad Ali Director: Estela Bravo

Fidel Castro is on of the most influential and controversial figures of our time. "Fidel" offers a unique opportunity to view the man through exclusive interviews with Castro himself. Historians, public figures and close friends, with footage from the Cuban State archives.

Alice Walker, Harry Belafonte, and Sydney Pollack discuss the personality of the man. Former and current US government figures including Arthur Schlesinger, Ramsey Clark, Wayne Smith, Congressman Charles Rangel and a former CIA agent offer political and historical perspectives on Castro and the long-standing US embargo against Cuba. Family members and close friends, including Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, offer a window into the personal life of Fidel. We see him swimming with bodyguards, visiting his childhood home and school, joking with Nelson Mandela, Ted Turner and Muhammad Ali, meeting Elian Gonzalez, and celebrating his birthday with members of the Buena Vista Social Club.

Juxtaposing the personal anecdotal with the history of Cuban revolution and fight to survive the post-Soviet period, "Fidel" tells a previously untold story and presents a new view of this powerful and compelling figure. END