Skip to main content

Happening Is an Abortion Story About Working-Class Women

Jess Cotton Jacobin
Audrey Diwan’s film adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s abortion memoir, Happening, captures the violence and drama of its source material. It depicts a time when sex, for young women — without the resources of contraception and abortion — carried unfathomable consequences.

The Image Machine of Alfredo C. - Serving Two Masters: Mussolini’s Moviemaker and His Red Reels of Albanian Agitprop

Ed Rampell Hollywood Progressive
For almost two decades before 1939, Alfredo Cecchetti worked as a cameraman documenting the rise of the Fascist Party in Italy and its leader Il Duce, Benito Mussolini. Alfredo C. helped to immortalize the great machine of the Italian Fascist Regime – both in Italy covering countless public appearances of Mussolini and after 1939, the Italian invasion of Albania, as he followed the Italian troops and then filmed the new Italian settlers. Embedded in the archive are many films that were part of the Italian Fascist propaganda machine.

Northman Is an Honorable Failure

Eileen Jones Jacobin
The Northman is about a glowering, muscle-bound man-mountain named Prince Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård, son of Stellan) who as a boy witnesses the killing of his father, King Aurvandill (Ethan Hawke), and the abduction of his mother, Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman), by the king’s betraying half-bastard brother Fjölnir (Claes Bang). Amleth vows revenge.

The Batman’s Privilege Problem

Joe George The Progressive
A departure from the Caped Crusader’s elitism, the latest adaptation of the DC comic addresses class disparities in Gotham.