Portside

Six black filmmakers discuss a 1990s boom that went bust. They talk about racism, misogyny, of being marginalized by executives who feigned interest in their work, of lacking a safety net that buoyed white peers, of 'director's jail'.

This moving and profound portrait serves as a fitting biographical tribute as well as a piercing, often painful recount of African American history from slavery and the Civil War to the Jim Crow era, the Civil Rights movement and beyond.

Jennie Livingston's 1991 documentary is the story of the queer, working-class, black and brown subculture that then revolved around the fierce and fabulous ballroom competitions in New York City.

Martin Scorsese blends fact and fiction for a playfully experimental film about the most freewheeling tour Bob Dylan ever did. The true shock of Rolling Thunder Revue is in how good, how alive, Dylan is on stage.

The Last Black Man In San Francisco doesn’t follow an established playbook. It tries to write a new one, earnestly to life as it’s lived and dreamed.

Friday also brings a movie on another musical icon, albeit one largely unfamiliar to the American masses: Viktor Tsoi, frontman of perhaps the most popular and influential of Soviet rock bands, Kino.

Bong Joon-ho's brilliant family saga Parasite captured modern anxieties at Cannes, but it wasn't alone.

The movie is as good (or as bad, if you feel that way) as recent Hollywood CGI-ridden blockbusters like 2012 or San Andreas but is significant from a geopolitical and cultural point of view.

In 2014 "She's Beautiful When She's Angry", Mary Dore's powerful documentary about the early women's movement, screened around the world. If you missed it, her film now streams on Amazon Prime and Kanopy. "Yes, we have come a long way baby, BUT..."

The big draw of the exuberant documentary “Knock Down the House” — about four women who ran for Congress in 2018 — is Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York.