Portside

"In the eyes of the Senate, it was about [Clarence Thomas'] gender. It was about male privilege. Who do you believe? You believe the guy who is a guy like you. Even the public -- 70 percent of the public when polled after the hearings, believed Clarence Thomas. They were willing to dismiss my experience as insignificant, both racially and in terms of gender... We've got to make the decision that we're going to reject people who behave badly, who are sexually abusive."

Does it matter that stretches of "Miles Ahead"— a gun-rattling, squealing-tire car chase included — came out of the filmmakers’ imagination rather than Davis’s life? Purists may howl, but they’ll also miss the pleasure and point of this playfully impressionistic movie.

There is something deeply shameful in the fact that even today a young Nina Simone would have a hard time being cast in her own biopic. ​The new film "Nina" proves that the world still isn’t ready to tell her story.

Brilliant, tedious and irredeemably evil, Leni Riefenstahl’s "Triumph of the Will" (1935) is one of the great conundrums of cinema history. Now released on DVD.

The Oscars aren’t just a competition for cultural value: They double as an assessment tool that helps pick the industry’s economic winners and losers.

"Son of Saul has already won the Grand Prix at Cannes and the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, and it’s a clear favorite at the Oscars. It is not—if my description has somehow failed to make clear—an easy film to watch. But it is a forceful and unsettling addition to the cinema of the Holocaust, a film that digs deeply into the gruesome workings of the death camps and ponders questions about duties to the living and duties to the dead." - Christopher Orr

The droll conceit of "Where to Invade Next" is that the Joint Chiefs of Staff “summon” Michael to the Pentagon and deploy him to “invade” countries around the world. But instead of looting them of their natural resources, such as oil, Moore brings their best ideas—including free university education, expanded leisure time, worker representation on boards of directors, school reform, punishment of bankers for recklessly wrecking economies, prison reform, back to the US.

The New York Times, which historically tends to ignore Chomsky, ran a prominent review in its Arts section, going so far as to praise the film and calling Requiem a "well-paced and cogent seminar." Reviewer Daniel Gold writes, "citing Aristotle, Adam Smith and James Madison, among others, he melds history, philosophy and ideology into a sobering vision of a society in an accelerating decline.

After premiering to prolonged standing ovations and plenty of critical acclaim, the slave revolt drama, Birth of a Nation, set off the fiercest bidding war Sundance has ever seen. Fox Searchlight has come out on top, landing the drama in a record-breaking $17.5 million deal, the biggest purchase in Sundance history.

Despite its flimsy historical underpinnings, The Revenant is actually a dream-film throughout. There are sequences—like the improbable dive over a cliff into the waiting arms of a huge tree, or the abandoned cathedral equipped with a Baroque crucifix and a silently swinging bell—where you aren’t quite sure, and you don’t much mind, if what you’re watching is meant to be “really” happening to Hugh Glass or just transpiring in his (or perhaps Iñárritu’s) head.