Portside

Professor responsible for concept spotlighted in McDormand’s acceptance speech tells the Guardian how it can boost diversity.

Raoul Peck’s The Young Karl Marx is the best buddy movie since George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969. It’s also among the most important films in decades, bringing to a mass audience not just the revolutionary ideas of Marx and his friend and collaborator Frederick Engels in the early days of modern capitalism, but an approach to politics and history that still has no peer.

As Ava DuVernay prepares to release Disney’s eagerly anticipated A Wrinkle in Time adaptation, which has put her in the history books as the first woman of color to direct a film with a $100 million-plus budget, she cautions against thinking that Hollywood has finally solved its diversity problems.

Portman and her co-star Jennifer Jason Leigh say they only learned about the race of the characters in the film’s source material this week. When asked to comment on the controversy, Portman said, “Well, that does sound problematic, but I’m hearing it here first.” Leigh added, “It’s probably a valid criticism. I didn’t know that.”

Black Panther is a story we haven't seen told before in popular cinema — a story about black people completely untouched by colonialism, who exist entirely outside the global systems of institutionalized racism.

The Young Karl Marx is a nuanced and surprisingly accurate portrait of the revolutionary as a young man.

Diane Kruger is superb portraying a tortured character with her own “Subterranean Homesick Blues” who is “thinking about the government.” Kruger won the Best Actress Award at 2017’s Cannes Film Festival for her depiction of the anguished Katja who decides to take direct action against the neo-nazi assassins of her husband and child.

The redemption of a racist cop in the awards season favorite will surely tug at the heartstrings of industry voters. But it’s unearned, manipulative and altogether offensive.

The #TimesUp action was organized by and for women of color activists that reached millions. What’s wrong with that?

"I can’t think of a previous batch of statuette-season contenders so politically on point and of the moment, and I credit — although that’s not quite the right word — Donald Trump. His rise and presidency have brought so many of the cancers of American life to the surface, where we can no longer avoid them, and the movies reflect that. He’ll be at the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards not just as the butt of a gazillion jokes. He’ll be there as an inspiration."