film review

Yesterday the Oscars were announced, and once again they were notable for a lack of diversity. Popular entertainment helps shape how we view the world, and Hollywood shapes the world as a very white male place. While every year has exceptions, the Oscars often follow the trend of the rest of Hollywood, snubbing films like Selma for the awards last year, and giving its seal of approval to a whitewashed world. But the Oscars are also just reflecting the bleak reality of who is given the resources to make films that might qualify.

The Martian is a very expensive piece of Hollywood trash, in short an international blockbuster. But it has one revealing and interesting brief segment. For those fortunate enough to have missed the movie, it recounts the survival and rescue of an American astronaut abandoned by accident on a mission to Mars. It is an altogether predictable story of Yankee ingenuity and derring-do with nary a trace of the character development or the superb photography of its predecessor and inspiration, Gravity.

Poet Robert Bly, now 89 years old, is a radical, by which I mean he returns to the roots. Haydn Reiss has captured him in his new, moving film Robert Bly: A Thousand Years of Joy.

Bitcoin: The End of Money As We Know It is a 2015 film written by Torsten Hoffmann, starring Andreas M. Antonopolous, Roger Ver, Bernard v. NotHaus, Jeffrey A. Tucker, Michael J. Casey and more.

No-no-no more Bill McKibben, please. He is capitalism lite, loving each climate change bubble of CO2, nitrous oxide and toilets a flushing as part of COP 21. Can he stay home and teach? Do we need parading after parading of the usual suspects – Naomi Klein, Billy-boy, Prince Charles, Mark Ruffalo, Björk, David Bowie, Coldplay, Yoko Ono, Iggy Pop, Colin Firth , Emma Thompson  Julia Roberts, Cameron Diaz, Gwyneth Paltrow ou encore Nathalie Portman  Sean Penn, Leo Dicaprio.

I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.
— Jay Gould

By José Raúl Guzmán | NACLA | September 17, 2015 Forgotten / Olvidados is one of the most important Bolivian films to emerge recently, marking a high point of technical achievement for the country’s film industry. The film serves as powerful indictment of the military personnel who were responsible for thousands of deaths and disappearances […]

Gone With the River, or Dauna: Lo que lleva el río in Spanish, directed by Venezuelan-based Cuban filmmaker Mario Crespo. | Photo: Twitter | ‏@anagaly20 teleSUR | September 11, 2015 A Venezuelan movie spoken almost entirely in the Indigenous Warao language was selected last week to represent the country in the 2016 Oscars for Best […]

When news of the latest white racist gun horror came up from Charleston, South Carolina last month, I was teaching Michael Moore’s 2002 film Bowling for Columbine.  Once again, it seemed, Moore’s apocalyptic vision of an America armed-to-the-teeth and pushed-to-the-edge had proven prophetic.  Once more, contrary to war-mongering media and ‘counter-terrorist’ propaganda, we were reminded: America’s terror is mostly home-grown.

By Craig McKee | Truth and Shadows | August 2, 2015 Be afraid. Be very afraid. Of what may come. Of each other. If movies and television in the last few years are any indication, we have so much more to fear in this world than losing a job or a relationship or our health. Our “entertainment” is telling us that […]