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Science Fiction’s Under-Appreciated Feminist Icon

Gabrielle Bellot The Atlantic
The French comic series Valérian and Laureline, newly adapted into a summer blockbuster, gave the genre one of its first protagonists to powerfully own her womanhood.

'Elian': Film Review

Frank Scheck The Hollywood Reporter
Most fascinatingly, the film's coda features footage of the now 23-year-old Elian who still lives in Cuba and reveres the late Castro. Articulate and self-assured, he seems none the worse for his childhood trauma. Talking about the current state of relations between the two countries, he comments that Barack Obama’s history-making trip to the island country was important, but that it also “left much to be desired.”

'The Wizard of Lies' – Robert De Niro's Bernie Madoff Drama is a Cheat

Simon Abrams The Guardian
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.

What Risk Says About Julian Assange

David Sims The Atlantic
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.

An Uneven Tribute to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Lenika Cruz The Atlantic
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.