Portside

Get Out opens with a familiar horror-movie trope. Someone walking alone down a dark street stalked by a mysterious force. That the setting is an idyllic suburb, the someone is a young, increasingly panicked black man, and the predator is driving a white car gives the scenario an unmistakable reality. The scene grows disturbing. You may flash on Trayvon Martin. That the black youth is not shot but rather abducted is a dreamlike condensation of the movie to come.

Resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline and other extractive projects was a recurring theme in the NWIF festival, which highlights motion pictures by and about indigenous females. 'Standing Rock: A New Nation' encapsulates what the movement there is all about and kicked off the NWIF’s screenings. New Nation explores the heightened consciousness created by the radicalized village that sprang up to resist DAPL and the extraction industries that threaten Mother Earth.

Raol Peck's attention to historical detail characterizes the film as a whole, and testifies to the clearly loving amount of research that went into making it. The result is an entertaining and surprisingly funny portrait of the young Karl Marx as the film follows Marx and Friedrich Engels and their joint struggle against various other contemporary socialist leaders, culminating in their collaboration on the Communist Manifesto.

Barry Jenkins’s movie is a brave, brilliant work of art that also happens to be a black, gay story. What a shame if the announcement gaffe is what people remember about its victory. There were echoes of Hattie McDaniel, 76 years ago, who had to walk up to collect her Best Supporting Actress Oscar from a table way down the back of the hall and was seated separately from the rest of the Gone With The Wind stars. A moment of triumph tranished.

Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, who won an Oscar in 2012 for “A Separation” and whose second Oscar-nominated film, “The Salesman” is playing on more than 65 screens and could pass the $1 million mark this weekend, grabbed a lot of press when he canceled his plans to attend the February 26th Oscars ceremony following President Donald Trump’s 90-day visa ban for citizens from seven Muslim countries, including Iran.

Steve Bannon's 2009 film, 'Generation Zero', shows a hellishly bleak vision of our past, present, and future, driven by a magical belief in historical determinism.

The Progies premiered in The Progressive Magazine in 2007 to pay tribute to and highlight films and filmmakers of conscience and consciousness. With an eye on cinema history, the awards in a variety of categories are named after outstanding progressive pictures or artists.

Theodore Melfi’s film about black women mathematicians is now the biggest movie in America — just in time to teach us crucial lessons for a Trump presidency. So what’s to be done? Hidden Figures offers a crystal-clear answer: Resist.

The story behind the Wisconsin Uprising in 2011—the struggle of class forces--has been told in some detail in several books, but a new film, Divided We Fall, supplies the crucial elements of drama that few of us in the marching crowds understood at the time. It is also a wonderful re-enactment of the whole scene, bringing to life the drama and months’ long glory of a fightback that mirrored and mirrors so many anti-austerity struggles across the world.

Washington’s and Davis’ reprisals of their superb 2010 Broadway performances, do not disappoint. Washington takes us on an episodic journey through love, pain, betrayal and redemption, and with such heavy topics, the audience will struggle through it. With performances that will literally take your breath away, Fences is a must-see film offering a timeless critique of a family trying to determine who should be on each side of the fence, one fence post at a time.