Portside

'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.

Two twenty-first century phenomena have changed the way moving pictures are made and perceived. The first is the accelerating use of digital technology and the inexorable rise of a cyborg cinema that, by combining animated and photographic images, compromises the direct relationship to reality that had long been the medium’s claim to truth. The second is the trauma of September 11, 2001, which for many provided the ultimate movie experience that was more than a movie.

After being evicted at the height of the recent foreclosure crisis, a construction worker tries to reclaim his family’s home by taking a new job with the evictor. Ramin Bahrani's '99 Homes', a relatively small, tough-minded drama about pitiless people doing unprincipled things, proves to be one of the most interesting, elegantly crafted and—paradoxically, given the dark subject matter—elating films to come along in recent memory.

Olvidados serves as powerful indictment of the military personnel who were responsible for thousands of deaths and disappearances of political dissidents in Latin America during Operation Condor, estimated at 30,000 forced disappearances, 50,000 deaths, and 400,000 arrests. Beginning in 1975 the political campaign of repression spanned across Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay—carried out by the right-wing military dictatorships, backed by the CIA.