Portside

Steve Bannon's 2009 film, 'Generation Zero', shows a hellishly bleak vision of our past, present, and future, driven by a magical belief in historical determinism.

The Progies premiered in The Progressive Magazine in 2007 to pay tribute to and highlight films and filmmakers of conscience and consciousness. With an eye on cinema history, the awards in a variety of categories are named after outstanding progressive pictures or artists.

Theodore Melfi’s film about black women mathematicians is now the biggest movie in America — just in time to teach us crucial lessons for a Trump presidency. So what’s to be done? Hidden Figures offers a crystal-clear answer: Resist.

The story behind the Wisconsin Uprising in 2011—the struggle of class forces--has been told in some detail in several books, but a new film, Divided We Fall, supplies the crucial elements of drama that few of us in the marching crowds understood at the time. It is also a wonderful re-enactment of the whole scene, bringing to life the drama and months’ long glory of a fightback that mirrored and mirrors so many anti-austerity struggles across the world.

Washington’s and Davis’ reprisals of their superb 2010 Broadway performances, do not disappoint. Washington takes us on an episodic journey through love, pain, betrayal and redemption, and with such heavy topics, the audience will struggle through it. With performances that will literally take your breath away, Fences is a must-see film offering a timeless critique of a family trying to determine who should be on each side of the fence, one fence post at a time.

La La Land is not, in the end, so very different from Whiplash (an earlier Chazelle film) for all their tonal differences. Above all, the vision they paint of the artistic life is masculine. In Damien Chazelle’s movies, men have power, and they get (almost) everything they want... And women? All they get to do is listen.

It feels perfectly appropriate that in 2016, a mortifying examination of one man’s ego played a role in the election of America’s next president. Weiner is a depressing pile-up of the year’s governing impulses: the media’s veneration of scandal, the increasing shamelessness of the country’s politicians, and Weiner’s quiet, ashamed delight in his own continued relevance.

The friend who urged me to see Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea told me it was the only film she’d been able to watch since the election, the only work of art that had, even briefly, distracted her from her worry about the future of our democracy. It might seem odd to describe a film about unendurable grief and sadness as a distraction—a word we more often associate with entertainment and escape. But after watching Lonergan’s astonishing film, I understood.

Former vice president Al Gore says, “Now more than ever we must rededicate ourselves to solving the climate crisis."

Perhaps the Dump Star Wars story could be described as “silly.” But to deny the politics of Star Wars is to throw the franchise’s rich history under a bus the size of an Imperial cruiser. Star Wars may not overflow with civics metaphors in the fashion of “Star Trek,” but the sci-fi films did not exist in a political void.