Portside

Taylor Sheridan has crafted an uneven, but potent, vengeance film rooted in the death of a young Native American woman.

A new documentary by Rewire chronicles the rising tide of harassment and violence against abortion providers and clinics under the Trump administration. Called "Care in Chaos," it features Calla Hales, director of A Preferred Women’s Health Center, one of the busiest abortion clinics in North Carolina. She faces a gauntlet of harassment, threats and physical violence just to do her job.

A year after racial discontent neared levels not seen since the Rodney King beating case, the country finds itself convulsed by controversies over neo-Nazis emboldened by Donald Trump’s rise to power. Now, a burst of new films, many of them documentaries, are taking a deep look beyond the headlines at the lasting impact that racial schisms and racism have on Americans’ everyday lives.

Like countless other black men, Colin Warner was ensnared in a system that was rigged against him in every way. The police, the prosecutors, the prison guards and some of his own lawyers cut corners, rush to judgment and ignored the clear evidence of his innocence... He spent 20 years in prison.

After Trump's election, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power feels like an elegy for a bygone era.

Food, housing, health—is what the revolution fought for. A drowsy old sugar island whose slaves’ descendants were now mostly farmers and fisher-folk became vibrant with people crowding revolutionary rallies to dance and chant slogans that sounded like reggae songs and were affixed to brightly colored signs around the island: “Forward Ever, Backward Never”; “It takes a revolution, to make a solution”; “Not a second, without the people.”

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

People seem to think that a movie or a television show or a book is "diverse" when there are "one or two black people or brown people, or one girl or a couple of girls," DuVernay says. "Inclusion is really half—half of the cast, half of the directors, half of the writers are women or girls, half of the room, more than half of the room is of color," she says. "I think we get really satisfied with less.

Wonder Woman doesn't just subvert superhero movie gender tropes, it does it in clever ways.

The film's creators may have the best of intentions, but their plea for greater understanding will likely fall on deaf ears since they’ve only inadvertently confirmed Madoff’s self-pitying defense by portraying members of the working class as collateral damage in the Bernie Madoff story. By normalizing Madoff’s behavior, 'The Wizard of Lies' thoughtlessly asks us to sympathize with a devil we don’t want to know.