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 Throughout the history of film, there are few directors who have the right to the title as king of their genre. John Ford dominated westerns, Mel Brooks ran away with comedies, and John Carpenter claimed the crown as the king of horror. The man has directed twenty-one feature films, eleven of which are horror (or at least horror adjacent). He didn’t invent the genre, but he certainly popularized the slasher craze that took the world by storm for decades with the release of 1978’s Halloween. From there, he would go on to make other horror films like The Fog, In the Mouth of Madness, and The Thing, his masterpiece. Throughout a prolific career, the director did not only direct horror films. Carpenter would leave his mark on many genres - sci-fi, comedy, thriller, and action. Behind Halloween and The Thing, what is probably seen as Carpenter’s most beloved film is Escape from New York. The 1981 dystopian sci-fi action classic doesn’t exactly have the most thrilling sequences ever put to

 “I believe that my life has had more than a few wonderful, indescribable turns,” the legendary Sidney Poitier states at the beginning of Reginald Hudlin’s documentary on his life, career, and accomplishments, Sidney. For anyone who knows of Poitier’s work, this seems like an understatement, and a fact that one probably knows if they’re familiar with Poitier. For such a groundbreaking actor, Sidney is a fairly by the book documentary, exploring Poitier’s history chronologically, hitting on every major landmark that any good Poitier documentary should explore. Yet despite this straightforward structure, Sidney succeeds simply because Poitier has such a captivating history—especially when his story is directly told from the late actor. Poitier begins his own story by explaining that he wasn’t supposed to live, that he was born two months premature, and his father was planning on burying his son soon after he came into the world. While Poitier never directly says this, Sidney shows a life