Portside

Classism, racism, and sexism in the age of (Ivanka) Trump are on full display in the film's clash of sage-burning touchy-feely types versus captains of industry.

Beyond a reliance on disproved claims about race and genetics, the Gadot controversy has quite simply lost sight of the fact that race is primarily a function of place.

Wonder Woman doesn't just subvert superhero movie gender tropes, it does it in clever ways.

"As a Jew, and even more as a human being, I feel morally comfortable and politically responsible in calling upon Israel to dismantle its apartheid regime." - Richard Falk

Most fascinatingly, the film's coda features footage of the now 23-year-old Elian who still lives in Cuba and reveres the late Castro. Articulate and self-assured, he seems none the worse for his childhood trauma. Talking about the current state of relations between the two countries, he comments that Barack Obama’s history-making trip to the island country was important, but that it also “left much to be desired.”

The film's creators may have the best of intentions, but their plea for greater understanding will likely fall on deaf ears since they’ve only inadvertently confirmed Madoff’s self-pitying defense by portraying members of the working class as collateral damage in the Bernie Madoff story. By normalizing Madoff’s behavior, 'The Wizard of Lies' thoughtlessly asks us to sympathize with a devil we don’t want to know.

The story of activists who opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including their lives, the tactics they used, and the historical context. ‘The Activists,’ explores lessons the anti-war movement has to offer people fighting Trump today.

Risk is an incredibly gripping work, one made with an unprecedented level of access to Assange, but for all its intimacy, it still struggles to nail down its target. Instead, it’s more a story of Poitras herself, and the evolution of the movie she set out to make about Assange, who founded Wikileaks in 2006.

In HBO's film The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, you learn about the miraculous clump of cells that changed medical science forever before really learning about the person who made and was killed by them. In 1951, a 31-year-old African American woman named Henrietta Lacks learned she was dying of cervical cancer. She sought treatment from a then-segregated Johns Hopkins Medical Center where a piece of her tumor was removed without her knowledge for ongoing research.

Gordon Shepherd’s compact Neuroenology is a straightforwardly didactic exercise, tightly focused on wine. It's a companion to his previous work, Neurogastronomy (2012), a well-received study of “how the brain creates flavor,” mostly about food. Lots of wine drinkers, and even wine writers, don’t know some of the facts about wine sensation that Shepherd wants us to learn.