Portside

There were three exceptionable and rewarding Palestinian themed films at the Toronto Interrnational Film Festival this year, and Ziad Doueiri’s The Insult has been selected to represent his home country of Lebanon at the Oscars. A more timely film could not have been made and selected, seeing that this film addresses most every area of conflict possible.

"Mudbound" is about how things change—slowly, unevenly, painfully. It is also, as the title suggests, about how things don’t change, about the stubborn forces of custom, prejudice and power that lock people in place and impede social progress. Set mainly in the Mississippi Delta in the years just after World War II, when Jim Crow was still enshrined in law and practice, the film tests and complicates Faulkner’s much-quoted claim about the not-even-pastness of the past.

"My main objective was to track a woman's journey through a man's world where she's endlessly harassed, abused – and expected to remain silent." - Alias Graceproducer/writer Sarah Polley

Apparently, the victimization of young black girls is not newsworthy enough for the mass media or the court of public opinion to be engrossed or enraged at Weinstein levels. Both treat the sexual assault of black girls as if it were hardly news at all. The predatory sexualization of young black girls is so ubiquitous, it is damn near an accepted social and cultural norm.

Faces Places (Visages Villages in French) is an unexpected—and perhaps final—gift from the visionary eighty-nine-year-old director Agnès Varda. Varda had previously announced that her 2008 documentary self-portrait, The Beaches of Agnès, would be her last film, doubting that she had the physical strength to undertake another full-length feature. But chance, which Varda has often acknowledged as her best assistant, intervened; the making of Faces Places is the proof.

As much as the film taps into a venerable tradition of observational realism (witnessing, never editorializing), it’s not “objective.” An indisputable ally of the disenfranchised, Baker honors his subjects by telling their stories honestly, without Hollywood distortion or flattering embellishment, and through a gaggle of actors mainly plucked from the area, not central casting.

The film is a haunting and timeless American tragedy that feels ever prescient given the current administration’s foggy understanding of morality. It might prove to be a tough sell thanks to an awkward title and a strange plot trajectory, but Roman J. Israel, Esq. is a richly rewarding drama blessed with one of the best, most lived-in performances of the year. 

The best sci-fi films hold up a mirror to the age in which they are made. So what can we learn from the future – and what it means to be human – in Denis Villeneuve’s film?

To keep changing our country in the right direction we should learn the right lessons from that terrible war. Unfortunately, Burns and Novick have thrown up roadblocks to that happening which we will have to overcome.

Burns and Novick avoid confronting the question of imperialism – the notion that U.S. foreign policy is deliberately committed to the exploitation of peasants and workers around the world, that it is on the wrong side of the class struggle. Without the concepts of class struggle and imperialism, Burns and Novick will not be able to get at the roots of the political divide over Vietnam.