Portside

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.

If you build an entire movie around MacGuffins, the material embodiment of wanting, insufficiency, and lack; if you fill every beat and narrative space with the problem of those MacGuffins, leaving no space for anything else; if you crush every story down to the problem of how it relates to those M

Duck Butter is a raw, funny, deeply intimate and utterly unique film, co-written by Shawkat and directed by Miguel Arteta, the man behind The Good Girl and last year’s Beatriz at Dinner. It was almost entirely improvised — and was originally written to star a heterosexual couple.

The German philosopher insisted on being the master of her own fate even as she inflamed the hearts and minds of some of the late 19th and earl 20th Century’s greatest thinkers. The real question posed by the film: what is freedom in a class-ridden society?

For viewers on the left, Pauline’s journey from proletarian champion to xenophobic mouthpiece constitutes a slow-motion horror movie.