Portside

A new documentary film recounts how Hampshire College students and alumni rallied to save their renowned 60’s-era experimental college from its own scheming administration.

“Prayers for the Stolen” shines a much-needed light on the consequences of Mexico’s war on drugs, specifically highlighting the plight of the nation’s women and girls. The film is a contender for an Oscar for best International Film.

The scariest thing about Don’t Look Up is that absurd as it is, it barely exaggerates. Much of our political elite are just as greedy and foolish, our media just as vapid, and our response to impending disaster exactly as mind-bogglingly irrational.

Amid Cold War paranoia, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI set its sights on a potential source of communist subversion: Frank Capra’s Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life.

Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy introduced us to a working-class kid from Queens struggling to both save his city and pay the rent. Disney has wealthy new benefactors rewriting just what it means to be a superhero.

Looking for something other than sappy Christmas movies to watch over the holidays? There is no greater and more prescient skewering of the absurdity of the American national security state than Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butt-Head Do America.

This year could be different.  As the awards race heats up and smaller accolades roll in, there are multiple queer film contenders in almost every big category.

In 1981, Warren Beatty directed Reds, a retelling of John Reed’s classic firsthand account of the Russian Revolution. The film still stands up today as one of the greatest and most faithful depictions of revolutionary politics.

First Wave wants us to feel a sliver of the same fury and impotence and eventually, occasionally, mercifully, even the same catharsis that frontline workers were confronted with every day when this nightmare was at its worst.

Cool, elegant, and devastating, a film as tightly woven and plaintive as the source novel itself. It’s an artifact of its time, both 1929 and in 2021, when the questions around identity have morphed and shifted but are still relevant as ever.