125 years after his birth, Paul Robeson, the civil rights titan, remains a role model for battling racism and fascism. The words written on his gravestone: “The artist must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.”
A new movie from the director Saim Sadiq, "Joyland", Pakisitan's 2023 Oscar entry, depicts queer love against the backdrop of a Pakistani household and feels as familiar as our families are to us here.The film follows a man who gets a job in a burlesque show and falls in love with a trans woman. Banned in Pakistan, “Joyland” earned accolades at the Cannes Film Festival.
Making art in all its everyday glory: In their latest movie together, Michelle Williams and director Kelly Reichardt paint a portrait of an artist who’s a real and wonderful piece of work.
Iranian American screen polymath Payman Maadi (who made such an impact in films such as Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation) is Samad, a cop waging an apparently unwinnable war on drugs in the Iranian capital. Having rounded up a vast community of addicts living and dying within a hellscape of giant concrete pipes, Samad and his deputy, Hamid (Houman Kiai), treat their captives like cattle, stripping and humiliating them, herding them from one overcrowded prison space to the next.
A new documentary by Alain Gomis turns footage from an interview with Thelonious Monk into a commentary on the submerged violence of the star-making process.
'Ithaka' the documentary produced by the WikiLeaks founder’s half brother offers a close-up look at one of the world’s most famous political prisoners. 'Ithaka' stresses that if Assange is extradited to America, supporters fear he’d face extremely harsh conditions. He would also become the first journalist ever convicted under the draconian Espionage Act, a blow against journalism, transparency, and democracy.
Sergei Prokofiev died 70 years ago today, overshadowed by the death of Joseph Stalin, who had banned much of his work. But Prokofiev’s brilliant musical compositions have outlived him and still sound fresh and exciting to modern listeners.
Doug Liman’s “Justice,” a breathtaking documentary about Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s silenced sexual assault accusers, goes a long way to proving the reality of the fears at the heart of this particular case. Mainly, that there was such a desire at several levels of government to see Kavanaugh on the bench that due diligence wasn’t followed, and barely even attempted. A compelling piece of journalism.
“RRR” -“Rise Roar Revolt”- turns history into legend by way of heightened visual rhetoric. It’s based very loosely on the real-life stories of two Indian revolutionaries of the early twentieth century, Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem, who joined forces and contested the oppression of British colonial power. The film is currently streaming on Netflix and will be theatrically released again in March 2023. The Oscar-Nominated Song "Naatu Naatu" from "RRR" will be performed at the Academy Awards.
Laura Poitras' "All the beauty and the Bloodshed" is a powerful documentary about Nan Goldin’s life and work against the Sackler family and their role in the opioid epidemic. The film has been nominated for an Academy Award as Best Documentary.
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