Portside

Based on actual events and characters, Short focuses on the fall of the housing market, leavening what many might find extremely dry, complicated subject matter with humor. While the so-called business press completely missed the story until this 'shit' hit the fan, the film tells how a few investment outsiders stumbled upon the unfolding crisis and bet against it. ('Short' is Wall Street-ese for 'bet').

The movie is also a Hollywood rarity - a boxing movie with a black hero. It is bizarre, though hardly surprising, that a sport dominated for decades by African-American and Latino athletes looks more like ice hockey on screen. And Creed, embeds its drama in the perils and pleasures of black life in America. Adonis is a complex character with a complex fate. He is at once a rich kid and a street kid, the proud carrier of an illustrious heritage and an invisible man.

Chi-Raq begins with a devastating overture, Pray 4 My City, with the lyrics printed directly on the screen, impossible to ignore. 'I don’t live in Chicago, I live in Chi-Raq,' it concludes, using the controversial nickname given to the city where gun deaths outnumber those in America’s foreign wars. Narrator Dolmedes, Samuel L Jackson, explains that communities under siege aren’t a new phenomenon, and explains how previous authors wrote about such tales.

'So I’m not going to write a review about 'Suffragette', because I’m no longer going to legitimize films that refuse to acknowledge the existence of people of color. And neither should you'.

Prior to the Boston Globe’s investigation, the sexual abuse of minors by priests was one of the Catholic Church’s worst-kept secrets. Spotlight's telling of the Church’s sex abuses reminds viewers how good, honest journalism has the power to transform a community.

'This Changes Everything', which re-imagines the vast challenge of climate change, is directed by filmmaker Avi Lewis and inspired by journalist Naomi Klein’s international best-selling book by the same name. Over the course of four years, the pair traveled to nine countries on five continents to profile communities on the front lines of the climate justice movement.

The conversion-narrative approach that Suffragette is rooted in precludes a structure as savvy as what we saw in Ava DuVernay's exquisite Selma, a film of negotiation and confrontation — and one that presumed this was no viewer's first day in this world. Suffragette expends its energy selling us on what we already believe rather than examining the way these activists pressed the world into believing it

Director Jay Roach, known for lighter fare like the Austin Powers series and Meet The Fockers, has taken on a heady subject, no less than the most famous communist in Hollywood history – Dalton Trumbo.

With an ambitious new visual-journalism unit at The Intercept, the Citizenfour director, Laura Poitras, is planning to take non-fiction film-making into the unknown.

Sicario proceeds from one nail-biting scene to the next making it increasingly clear that this is a story about the merger of the tactics of the war on terror with the war on drugs, and it makes that merger look frankly terrifying -- a grisly bomb blast, bodies hung from a bridge in Juarez that seem intended to remind us of U.S. contractors in Fallujah and a secret mission to Mexico that is essentially an extraordinary rendition, with all the imagery to match.