Lizzie Borden’s restored and rereleased radical feminist movie is as scrappy and smart as it was in 1983. It's a fantasy about how 10 years after peaceful revolution a supposedly socialist state rules.
So exuberant and full of life that it would convince you movies were back even if they hadn’t gone anywhere, “In the Heights” is the kind of electrifying theatrical experience that people have been waxing nostalgic about since the pandemic began.
In 1978 body snatchers really did dig up and try to ransom the corpse of the legendary actor Charlie Chaplin shortly after his death. 'Stealing Chaplin' uses this fact-based bit of skullduggery as a mere launching pad for its fact-free comedy.
The Vietnam War ended, but the fight against the use of the chemical compound Agent Orange is far from over. Two women from opposite ends of the globe are united in their battle to hold the manufacturers of the toxic defoliant accountable.
In the face of impunity, there is a sacred role for the storyteller. We can tell stories which invite people to confront painful truths. To combat the lies of impunity, you are doing the task of the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes.
John Lewis declares that, during the 1960s, he was arrested “a few times.” Then the elder statesman and éminence grise of the civil rights movement pauses before correcting himself in front of the large Dallas crowd he’s addressing: “40 times…"
“Homemade,” a wondrous and mostly satisfying anthology of 17 short films made round the world over the past two months - reveal a scattershot collage of the world in 2020.
"I stand with Black Lives Matter but still, as I watched the obligatory scene of Vietnamese soldiers getting shot and killed for the thousandth time, I thought: Does it make any difference if politically conscious Black men kill us?"
Two recent documentaries, both now streaming, try to unpack the McCarthyite Trump-whisperer—progenitor of the postmodern political world we now inhabit.
Greg Tate explores the shifting struggles for black equality – and identity – presented in the Swedish television archives (filmed from 1967 - 1975) originally released as a film in 2011 and currently streaming on Amazon Prime and YouTube.
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