Portside

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. 

The film series “Roberto Gavaldón: Night Falls in Mexico” at the Museum of Modern Art (NY) showcases the rarely screened signature achievement of the Western hemisphere’s second-most-robust film industry in the decades surrounding World War II.

The film recounts the 1819 bloody massacre that left 15 peaceful working-class voting-rights demonstrators dead and hundreds more injured (coined "Peterloo" by journalists who reported the atrocity in contemporary papers as a play on Waterloo.

In post-industrial Ohio, a Chinese billionaire opens a factory in an abandoned General Motors plant, hiring two thousand Americans. Early days of hope and optimism give way to setbacks as high-tech China clashes with working-class Americans.

Carlo Levi’s memoir, “Christ Stopped at Eboli,” was a literary sensation in post-Fascist Italy. Three decades later Francesco Rosi's film enshrined the book's neorealist credo--giving voice to the voiceless.

French director Agnès Varda, who died Friday at her home in Paris, was the only woman associated with the new wave during that film movement’s peak. She made films for more than 60 years, and in the latter part of her career focused on documentaries.