Portside

The film's creators may have the best of intentions, but their plea for greater understanding will likely fall on deaf ears since they’ve only inadvertently confirmed Madoff’s self-pitying defense by portraying members of the working class as collateral damage in the Bernie Madoff story. By normalizing Madoff’s behavior, 'The Wizard of Lies' thoughtlessly asks us to sympathize with a devil we don’t want to know.

The story of activists who opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including their lives, the tactics they used, and the historical context. ‘The Activists,’ explores lessons the anti-war movement has to offer people fighting Trump today.

Risk is an incredibly gripping work, one made with an unprecedented level of access to Assange, but for all its intimacy, it still struggles to nail down its target. Instead, it’s more a story of Poitras herself, and the evolution of the movie she set out to make about Assange, who founded Wikileaks in 2006.

In HBO's film The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, you learn about the miraculous clump of cells that changed medical science forever before really learning about the person who made and was killed by them. In 1951, a 31-year-old African American woman named Henrietta Lacks learned she was dying of cervical cancer. She sought treatment from a then-segregated Johns Hopkins Medical Center where a piece of her tumor was removed without her knowledge for ongoing research.

Gordon Shepherd’s compact Neuroenology is a straightforwardly didactic exercise, tightly focused on wine. It's a companion to his previous work, Neurogastronomy (2012), a well-received study of “how the brain creates flavor,” mostly about food. Lots of wine drinkers, and even wine writers, don’t know some of the facts about wine sensation that Shepherd wants us to learn.

The Zookeeper’s Wife shows the Holocaust was not an easy existential battle fought between a massive evil machine and good, tough men. It was also made up of unrecorded domestic crimes, often of sexual aggression and abuse. What Caro makes clear is that a society that overlooks these transgressions is in dangerous territory. In attempting to understand these crimes and how to counter them, Caro challenges us to look closer to home, into the finer grain of the horror.

Their lives crossed paths diagonally. Zola started off fatherless and poor, but through his writing eventually joined the very bourgeoisie he mocked in his early work. By contrast, Cézanne came from a wealthy banking family but rejected his privilege to focus entirely on his work, depending, often unwittingly, on the kindness of his more successful colleagues, such as Zola himself and the painter Edouard Manet.

Director Larraín has stated that the way Latin Americans think is shaped by poetry, by metaphor, and that his film is partly concerned with the power of poetry to move and influence. We are shown Neruda’s huge influence, as a communist poet, over his natural constituency: the ordinary working man... But what we do not see in the film is the immensely moving capacity of poetry to break down barriers between people of diametrically opposed political beliefs.

In 2012, California amended its "Three Strikes" law--one of the harshest criminal sentencing policies in the country. The passage of Prop. 36 marked the first time in U.S. history that citizens voted to shorten sentences of those currently incarcerated. Within days the reintegration of thousands of "lifers" was underway. The Return examines this unprecedented reform through the eyes of those on the front lines--prisoners suddenly freed.

Get Out opens with a familiar horror-movie trope. Someone walking alone down a dark street stalked by a mysterious force. That the setting is an idyllic suburb, the someone is a young, increasingly panicked black man, and the predator is driving a white car gives the scenario an unmistakable reality. The scene grows disturbing. You may flash on Trayvon Martin. That the black youth is not shot but rather abducted is a dreamlike condensation of the movie to come.