Portside

When arriving at a film festival like Tribeca, it’s pretty much a crap shoot when you scour the large catalog and read the brief descriptions of the films. Among the many choices, there were at least three narratives that passed the test and went on to win awards from the jury and the audience.

The new documentary film Solitary goes inside a supermax prison to discover what it’s like being in solitary confinement—a practice experts now describe as unnecessary and prisoners say is torture.

The new Mapplethorpe film begins with the voice of Senator Jesse Helms exhorting everyone to, "Look at the pictures!" He was protesting an exhibit of Mapplethorpe's work that he viewed as pornographic, and we see the conservative politician waving what he viewed as smut, seeking to inflame the culture wars, despite the fact that Mapplethorpe had died just a few months prior at the age of 42 of AIDS. That protest turned out to solidify the artist's legend.

Udi Aloni's Junction 48 is a melodic drama set Isreal in the town of Lydd (Lod) with a nearly all-Palestinian cast that forcefully confronts anti-Arab racism in Israel by shining a light on the oft-forgotten Palestinian citizens of Israel (PCIs). (The title Junction 48 presumably refers to Lydd’s historic transit-point between Palestine and Egypt and the designation often applied to PCIs as “’48 Palestinians.”)

"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.