Portside

The latest feature from Jafar Panahi, who is currently imprisoned in Iran, explores the subversive power and the ethical limitations of filmmaking.

The Responsibility of Watching the video of Memphis police beating Tyre Nichols challenges public complacency — and complicity. What are our duties as citizens and as human beings?

Cinephiles and streaming fans can both claim victory. But as we better understand the new screen culture taking shape, it looks like we may all lose in the long run.

The poignant drama, “Capernaum,” follows a boy who runs away and winds up roaming the slums of Beirut shouldering a distressing responsibility. At its premiere at Cannes in May, the film received a 15-minute standing ovation.

“Boy Erased,” adapted from Garrard Conley’s memoir of the same title, tackles the subject of conversion therapy, a technique that is a mix of religious dogma and dubious science whose cruelty and ineffectiveness are amply documented.

BlacKkKlansman is a furious, funny, blunt and brilliant confrontation with the truth. It’s an alarm clock ringing in the midst of a historical nightmare, and also a symphony, the rare piece of political popular art that works in all three dimensions.

"Mudbound" is about how things change—slowly, unevenly, painfully. It is also, as the title suggests, about how things don’t change, about the stubborn forces of custom, prejudice and power that lock people in place and impede social progress. Set mainly in the Mississippi Delta in the years just after World War II, when Jim Crow was still enshrined in law and practice, the film tests and complicates Faulkner’s much-quoted claim about the not-even-pastness of the past.

Kathryn Bigelow's film about 1967 Detroit riots grapples with a harsh legacy of racism in America.

In the stellar documentary "Fire at Sea" Gianfranco Rosi contrasts the lives of the desperate thousands of migrants landing on the shores of a Sicilian island with the everyday existence of the locals.

“Equity” is bracing, witty and suspenseful, a feminist thriller sharply attuned to the nuances of its chosen milieu. In setting and mood, it bears some resemblance to J. C. Chandor’s “Margin Call,” which similarly infused sleek and sterile corporate spaces with danger and dread. But unlike that film or Adam McKay’s “The Big Short,” Ms. Menon’s movie is not about the system in crisis. It’s about business as usual. Which is to say about corruption, deceit and treachery.