Portside

Among this month's offerings on Netflix: several feature debuts, including Spike Lee's "She's Gotta Have It" and Ryan Coogler's "Fruitvale Station, Mati Diop’s "Atlantics,” and Numa Perrier’s “Jezebel.”

Cinephiles and streaming fans can both claim victory. But as we better understand the new screen culture taking shape, it looks like we may all lose in the long run.

According to a 2018 study by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative that looked at the gender, race, and ethnicity of critics reviewing top domestic films, 82% were white, and nearly 78% were male. Nearly 90% of those condidered "top critics" were white.

The movie’s got Sly and the Family Stone and B.B. King and Ray Barretto and Gladys Knight & the Pips, in top, electric form. But no jolt compares to what happens in the middle of this thing— footage from the Harlem Cultural Festival.

American movies and TV are making major strides in LGBTQ representation, but storytellers abroad are in many ways ahead of the curve, exploring sexuality and relationships with groundbreaking technique, in ways often coded and ahead of their time.

The new film adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway show relegated its Black Latinx community to the background and sparked a debate about colorism.

Lizzie Borden’s restored and rereleased radical feminist movie is as scrappy and smart as it was in 1983. It's a fantasy about how 10 years after peaceful revolution a supposedly socialist state rules.

So exuberant and full of life that it would convince you movies were back even if they hadn’t gone anywhere, “In the Heights” is the kind of electrifying theatrical experience that people have been waxing nostalgic about since the pandemic began.

Filmed in the 1950s, Vittorio De Seta's luminous shorts depicting the hardscrabble lives of fishermen, shepherds, peasants, and miners in rural Italy turn documentary into art film.

'Pritty', a 20-minute animated short, reimagines the typical queer coming of age story by replacing Black trauma with Black joy and discovery through the lens of an intentional Black experience.