Portside

Dark Money is an air-raid siren of a documentary about the pernicious influence of corporate cash in American politics.

From his debut film about the ‘criminally insane’ to Ex Libris, his latest documentary on the New York Public Library, the award-winning octogenarian is as committed to fighting injustice as ever – especially in the era of Trump.

Leave No Trace is a film about living off the grid in America, but not as a political act or as a desperate struggle to survive. It’s a story of a family seeking harmony with the land, and with their country.

After decades of silence, survivors of Spain's 40-year dictatorship confront the perpetrators of brutal crimes in the new documentary film The Silence of others.

Lakeith Stanfield, Tessa Thompson, and Armie Hammer star in the exhilarating directorial debut from rapper Boots Riley.

An Irish-Canadian-Luxembourgish co-production, adapted from Deborah Ellis’s much-loved YA novel, it’s a tale of youthful fortitude in Taliban-era Afghanistan that has something of the defiant feminist spirit of the French-Iranian gem Persepolis.

In a culture that favors stories that revolve around men, women are too frequently treated as disposable asides who exist solely to further a male hero’s narrative arc. They are, literally in this description, things to be given to or taken away from male heroes.

Two films depicting a young person’s coming of age are showing on screens now: Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and Le Brio about a young Arab woman in Paris who achieves her dream of becoming a lawyer by overcoming the toxic racism of her law school professor.

“Before, I was my father’s Janie,” says this determined woman, who with grit and welfare checks is raising her six children alone in an abject corner of Newark. “And then I was Charlie’s Janie,” she says of her abusive husband. “Now I’m Janie’s Janie.”

Review of a bravura feature length documentary on the life and struggles of militant union leader, socialist orator, five-time presidential candidate against the two-party duopoly and class war prisoner for opposing America’s imperialist entry into World War 1.