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Review: 'Inside Out' - The Pixar Theory of Labor: To Live is to Work

James Douglas The Awl
it's possible that Pixar’s obsessiveness about work and employment has somehow been effaced in the public eye by the imaginative diversity of their films’ settings: ant colonies, space, the ocean, a bizarre alternate-world inhabited by sentient vehicles, and so on. But in Inside Out, for the first time, the ground beneath Pixar’s ideological feet comes into view, and it’s the Bay Area, California.

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Film Review: 'The Wolfpack' and 'The Tribe' - Boys in the Cage

J. Hoberman New York Review of Books
'The Wolfpack' concerns a large family that, self-isolated for years in a New York City housing project, developed its own tribal culture largely based on Hollywood blockbusters. 'The Tribe', is a fiction film set mainly within the dog-eat-dog confines of a Kiev boarding school for hearing-impaired adolescents and played out entirely in sign language by amateur, similarly impaired actor.

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Review: ‘Listen to Me Marlon’ Explores Brando’s Life of Contention

Manohla Dargis New York Times
As his admirer James Dean probably knew all too well, Brando was a true rebel, partly because he thought being a star was absurd and partly because, as clip after clip in 'Listen to Me Marlon' shows, he always had a cause, whether it was civil rights, black power, Native American sovereignty or his own independence.

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'JIMMY'S HALL' - Ken Loach’s New Film About Irish Working Class Heroes

Ed Rampell Hollywood Progressive
Based on a true story, 'Jimmy’s Hall' is about Jimmy Gralton the only Irishman deported as an illegal alien from Ireland, the land of his birth – without so much as a trial! Of course Gralton’s true crime was to fight against the reactionary church, aristocratic landowners and narrow nationalism by setting up a hall where ordinary people could dance to jazz music, study art and pursue a more class conscious politics during the Depression.

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Film Review 'A Borrowed Identity' Shows Life in Israel from an Arab's View

Marcia Garcia Film Journal International
Directed by the popular Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis and written by Arab-Israeli journalist Sayed Kashua, 'A Borrowed Idenity' chronicles a young Arab-Israeli man’s painful coming of age--detailing Israel’s treatment of its Arab citizens. At its best, 'A Borrowed Identity' concerns itself with the malleability of self, with who we are and how society and culture can force identity choices on us.

Movie: What Happened, Miss Simone?

Using never-before-heard recordings, rare archival footage and her best-known songs, this is the story of legendary singer and activist Nina Simone.

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Film Review: ‘Amy,’ an Intimate Diary of Amy Winehouse’s Rise and Destruction

Manohla Dargis New York Times
This documentary lets nobody off the hook. Discomfort is crucial to the film's complexity and is why it works as somewhat of an ethical and intellectual provocation. Mr. Kapadia isn’t simply revisiting Ms. Winehouse’s life and death, but also — by pulling you in close to her, first pleasantly and then unpleasantly — telling the story of contemporary celebrity and, crucially, fandom’s cost.

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Review: ‘What Happened, Miss Simone?’ Documents Nina Simone’s Rise as Singer and Activist

Manohla Dargis New York Times
From 100 hours of recently unearthed audiotapes recorded over decades, the Liz Garbus film weaves together Nina’s narrative, told largely in her own words. Rare concert footage, archival interviews, along with diaries, letters, interviews with Nina’s daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, friends and collaborators, make this the most authentic, personal and unflinching telling of the extraordinary life of one of the 20th century’s greatest recording artists.
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