Portside

Making art in all its everyday glory: In their latest movie together, Michelle Williams and director Kelly Reichardt paint a portrait of an artist who’s a real and wonderful piece of work.

"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

The friend who urged me to see Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea told me it was the only film she’d been able to watch since the election, the only work of art that had, even briefly, distracted her from her worry about the future of our democracy. It might seem odd to describe a film about unendurable grief and sadness as a distraction—a word we more often associate with entertainment and escape. But after watching Lonergan’s astonishing film, I understood.