Film Reviews
Alexander Payne’s digestible The Descendants; Steven Soderbergh at an impasse with Haywire
By Joanne Laurier, February 21, 2012
The Descendants, set in Hawaii and starring George Clooney, deals with the ancestral connections of a family confronting a painful tragedy. Haywire is a political spy thriller that gives a pass to the intelligence community.
British Agent (1934): Early Hollywood looks at the Bolsheviks
By Tony Williams, February 18, 2012
In Michael Curtiz’s 1934 British Agent, based on the memoirs of a British spy, the first days of the Russian Revolutionary government are treated with some degree of honesty. Leon Trotsky is one of the Bolsheviks portrayed.
An interview with Chad Freidrichs, director of The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
By Fred Mazelis, February 17, 2012
The director of The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, a documentary about public housing in the US, speaks to the WSWS.
Albert Nobbs: A model of repression
By David Walsh, February 15, 2012
The title character (played with gusto by Glenn Close) is a woman who has passed as a man for decades, working as a waiter in a Dublin hotel in the 1890s.
Polanski’s Carnage: Not a dispute about fundamentals
By Joanne Laurier, February 10, 2012
In New York City, cordiality turns to anger and chaos when two sets of parents meet to discuss an altercation between their 11-year-old sons.
A Dangerous Method: The Freud-Jung controversy, among other matters
By David Walsh, February 8, 2012
The new film by David Cronenberg treats the relationship between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, as well as their association with Sabina Spielrein, a young Russian woman, later one of the first female psychiatrists.
Surviving Progress: A dim view of humanity
By Lee Parsons, February 3, 2012
The documentary film Surviving Progress has attracted a good deal of media attention and accolades from both the official “left” and the right, if for rather different reasons.
The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: A serious look at public housing and the fate of US cities
By Fred Mazelis, February 1, 2012
A new documentary film examines the history of a St. Louis housing project.
The Adventures of Tintin: A generic boy scout travels a computer-generated world
By Alex Lantier, January 30, 2012
In The Adventures of Tintin, director Steven Spielberg sets out to render the Belgian comic strip Tintin in film using motion-capture animation technology.
The death of Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos
“I no longer deal with politics, with generalisations. I have stopped understanding them.”
By Stefan Steinberg, January 27, 2012
In many respects Angelopoulos expresses the artistic and political crisis of a generation of intellectuals who tragically failed to come to grips with the traumas of the past century and the extraordinary social and intellectual challenges of the new.
Petition: The Court of the Complainants—a potent Chinese documentary about injustice and state repression
By Richard Phillips, January 25, 2012
Petition explores the plight of poverty-stricken workers and farmers involved in stubborn and ultimately tragic appeals for “justice” from China’s Stalinist bureaucracy.
The 84th Academy Awards nominations—uneventful, for the most part
By Hiram Lee, January 25, 2012
The 84th annual Academy Awards nominations were announced Tuesday in Los Angeles. Few of the films have anything substantial to say about real life.
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