Portside

Looking for a decent, memorable biopic about a black woman is like waiting for Haley’s Comet. To find one, you’d have to jump all the way back to Halle Berry’s Emmy-winning turn in Introducing Dorothy Dandridge in 1999, and before that, Angela Bassett as Tina Turner in 1993’s What’s Love Got to Do With It, and before that, Diana Ross as Billie Holiday. Dee Rees’ feature about blues legend Bessie Smith on HBO joins the ranks of those aforementioned films.

Los Angeles poet Bonnie S Kaplan works with former prisoners and parolees, easing the transition back to the community. Her poem Our Aquarium hints at the difficulties of adjustment.

In defining a clear and comprehensive anti-capitalist politics and offering rational and compelling reasons for operating as anti-capitalists, highly readable Marxian scholar David Harvey goes beyond listing contradictions of capital to engage in a systematic account of the web of 17 relationships for what are usually treated as isolated aspects of crisis. Many of the contradictions are manageable, but some in combination also contain the seeds of systemic catastrophe.

Editors Clifton Ross and Marcy Rein offer a host of interviews with today's social change activists from Latin America. Staughton Lynd offers a review of this kaleidoscopic survey.

In Andrew Niccol's 'Good Kill', fresh from his Oscar-nominated role in Boyhood, Ethan Hawke portrays pilot Major Tom Egan, who, after repeat combat tours flying over the Iraq and Afghan theaters of conflict, is now stationed outside Las Vegas, where he is deeply conflicted by his role in the UAV liquidation-by-remote-control project.

In its second season, Halt tells the story of two women laboring to bring a new, better technology to consumers with an assist from a houseful of gamers. Lean In, Gamergate, and the ongoing under-representation of women in tech hang heavy over the episodes.

In a world of multiple crises and bad politics, Wisconsin poet Margaret Rozga celebrates the spirit of unyielding global resistance.

With its numerous religious awakenings and repeated instances of religiosity as political theater, it's easy to forget US civic life is secular. Author Kevin Kruse argues that the effort to ground political rights in spiritual authority and not in democratic discussion and decision-making originated with a coterie of corporate heads, right-wing politicians, reactionary pastors and cultural icons as a bulwark against progressive politics and New Deal legislation.

Scholars are producing increasingly detailed accounts of how the U.S. government utilized artists and culture in the Cold War anti-Communist crusade. According to former diplomat John H. Brown, this new study, by Greg Barnhisel, shows that an important factor in making modernism work for U.S. Cold War interests involved "defanging modernism of its radicalism and turning it into an international vehicle for whitebread all-American convictions."

Clouds of Sils Maria is a prolonged debate about the passage of time and the ceaseless rivalry of generations.