Portside

Portman and her co-star Jennifer Jason Leigh say they only learned about the race of the characters in the film’s source material this week. When asked to comment on the controversy, Portman said, “Well, that does sound problematic, but I’m hearing it here first.” Leigh added, “It’s probably a valid criticism. I didn’t know that.”

The Young Karl Marx is a nuanced and surprisingly accurate portrait of the revolutionary as a young man.

Diane Kruger is superb portraying a tortured character with her own “Subterranean Homesick Blues” who is “thinking about the government.” Kruger won the Best Actress Award at 2017’s Cannes Film Festival for her depiction of the anguished Katja who decides to take direct action against the neo-nazi assassins of her husband and child.

The #TimesUp action was organized by and for women of color activists that reached millions. What’s wrong with that?

"I can’t think of a previous batch of statuette-season contenders so politically on point and of the moment, and I credit — although that’s not quite the right word — Donald Trump. His rise and presidency have brought so many of the cancers of American life to the surface, where we can no longer avoid them, and the movies reflect that. He’ll be at the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards not just as the butt of a gazillion jokes. He’ll be there as an inspiration."

"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force." The German Ideology, Karl Marx

Starring Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep as Ben Bradlee and Katharine Graham, this drama about the Washington Post is squarely aimed at our current moment. The movie, written by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer, sprouts from this rift between the true state of affairs and the alternative facts that are presented to the public. As is common knowledge, it was Ellsberg’s conscience about the rift that led him to steal—or, if you prefer, to liberate—a hulking stash of incriminating documents, which came to be called the Pentagon Papers.

'The Public' follows a group of homeless library patrons, who, after learning that emergency shelters are at capacity during a brutal Midwestern cold front, refuse to leave Cincinnati’s downtown public library at closing. What begins as a nonviolent Occupy sit-in and ragtag act of civil disobedience quickly escalates into a stand-off with local riot police, a no-nonsense crisis negotiator, and a savvy DA with lofty political ambitions.

The camera, just by its presence, altered human behavior. The motion picture camera changed the nature of acting. Among other things, it created that apparent oxymoron, the non-actor, the subject of an unusually rich and stimulating series now at the Film Society of Lincoln Center entitled "The Non-Actor".

"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.